Improvising Cinema

FILM
CULTURE
IN TRANSITION
IMPROVISING
CINEMA
GILLES MOUËLLIC
Amsterdam University Press

Improvising Cinema
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Improvising Cinema
Gilles Mouëllic
Originally published as Improviser le cinema () by Éditions Yellow Now (Crisnée, Bel-
gique, dir.: Guy Jungblut).
Translated from the French by Caroline Taylor Bouché.
The translation and publication of this book have been made possible by a grant from the
programme ‘Filmer la creation artistique’ (/) of l’Agence Nationale de la Re-
cherche (ANR) and by a subsidy from l’équipe d’accueil ‘Arts, pratiques et poétiques’
(EA , Université Rennes ).
Excerpts of this work have already appeared in different versions in the following pub-
lications:
– ‘Improvised tangents…’, in Carnets du Bal, no. , Jean-Pierre Criqui (ed.), Le Bal-Images
en manœuvre éditions, ;
– ‘Improvising/sculpting: Un couple parfait, by Nobuhiro Suwa’, in ‘Le cinéma surpris par
les arts’, Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, no. - (summer-fall );
– ‘Rohmer and directing actors…’, in Positif, no.  (January ), article commissioned
by Vincent Amiel;
– ‘City rhythms: modern jazz in films noirs’, in Le siècle du jazz, exhibition catalogue, Da-
niel Soutif (ed.), Skira-Flammarion, ;
– ‘An experiment in collective improvisation: Quatre Jours à Ocoee (), by Pascale
Ferran’, in Filmer l’acte de création, a collective work, Pierre-Henry Frangne, Gilles
Mouëllic and Christophe Viart (eds.), Presses universitaires de Rennes, .
The texts were revised and expanded for the present edition.
Cover illustration (front): Scene from À Nos Amours, Maurice Pialat, .
Cover illustration (back): Ben Gazzara, Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes (starring in
John Cassavetes’ Opening Night).
Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam
Lay-out: JAPES, Amsterdam
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Contents
Acknowledgements 
Introduction 
1. Writing and improvisation 
A selection of models… and their limitations 
Emptiness or overflow 
Writing the unpredictable 
The script as matter 
2. Creation in action 
A collective adventure 
Renoir and the actor, Rossellini and the world 
On the fringes of the New Wave 
3. The influence of Jean Rouch 
Godard as improviser? 
Fabulation and improvisation 
Ritual and overflow in the cinema of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche 
Improvised tangents: from documentary to fiction 
4. Acting cinema 
The body filmed, the body filming 
Disinhibition in focus (): play 
Disinhibition in focus (): dance 
Improvising/sculpting: Un couple parfait (), by Nobuhiro Suwa 
5. The temptation of theatre 
A seminal stalemate 
Theatricalities 
Montages 
6. The rules of the game 
Directing from the inside (): the director and actor 
Directing from the inside (): delegations 
Rohmer and directing actors: a model of improvisation? 
6 Improvising Cinema
7. Filming jazz 

City rhythms: modern jazz in films noirs 
More pointers from the small screen… 
John Coltrane, in the frame 
An experiment in collective improvisation: Quatre Jours à Ocooe
(), by Pascale Ferran 
Conclusion 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index of names 
Index of films 
Acknowledgements
This work was published with the support of the Agence nationale de la re-
cherche (ANR) within the framework of the programme Filmer la création artisti-
que (FILCREA, /), under the aegis of Arts, pratiques et poétiques (Univer-
sity of Rennes ) and its team.
I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the following people for their
invaluable contribution: Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Vincent Amiel, Emmanuelle
André, Jacques Aumont, Nicolas Bancilhon, Jean-Pierre Berthomé, Sylvie Cha-
laye, Hugues Charbonneau, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Antoine de Baecque, Jacques
Déniel, Antony Fiant, Pierre-Henry Frangne, Loïc Gourvennec, Abel Jafri, Koffi
Kwahulé, Jean-François Laureux, Laurent Le Forestier, Chantal Le Sauze, Ré-
gine Rioult, Julien Roig, Daniel Soutif, Eric Thouvenel, Mathieu Vadepied,
Agnès Varda, Vincent Verdoux, Sarah Sobol, Charles Tatum Jr, Bruno Todeschi-
ni.
The quality of the suggestions made by the year - and year -
students on the Masters Programme in Cinema Studies at the University of Ren-
nes  was also much appreciated: Jérôme Allain, Antonin Allogio, Marie Beau-
temps, Anouk Bellanger, Simon Berthelot, Louis Blanchot, Leslie Dagneaux, Si-
mon Daniellou, Guillaume David, Maxime Derrien, Emilie Doveze, Erwan
Floch’lay, Marie Habert, Jérémy Houillère, Kevin Jaglin, Lenaïg Le Faou, Auré-
lien Le Gallou, Caroline Le Ruyet, Céline Le Tréquesser, Robin Louvet.
This project would not have been possible without the warm and loyal support
of Alain Bergala and the confidence placed in me by Andrée Blavier and Guy
Jungblut.
As always, Laurence and Juliette.
In memory of my father
Introduction
Long before it fired the enthusiasm of twentieth-century creators, improvisation

had held its own in popular forms of theatrical entertainment such as medieval
‘games’ or ‘mystery plays’, precursors of Commedia dell’arte. It went on to be-
come associated with music, the seventeenth-century definition of the verb ‘to
improvise’ being ‘to create and perform spontaneously and without prepara-
tion’. This musical grounding helped to establish improvisation as an ‘absolute
poetic fact’, as the philosopher Christian Béthune put it, an assertion that tied
in with Western beliefs, progressively based on notions of the artist and his
work. The nineteenth century may have glorified Romantic genius but it also
marked the decisive split between composer and performer, a way of proclaim-
ing the written word’s superiority over invention in the moment, with the musi-
cian losing any prerogative over the composition by becoming the mouthpiece
of a pre-existing work. At that time, improvisation was assimilated to the vir-
tuoso tours de force that so enthralled Salon gatherings – leading composers
could sometimes turn out to be consummate improvisers but it was through
their scores that they joined the ranks of creators.
In one of the rare essays to be devoted to improvisation, Jean-François de
Raymond claims that ‘Everything marginalises improvisation, the seemingly
unaccomplished acts, the sketches. Lacking ancestors, genealogy or archives, it
does not transmit, perpetuate or explain anything.’ This did not prevent it,
however, from attracting a remarkable amount of attention across a broad artis-
tic spectrum throughout the twentieth century, with varying degrees of success.
The untapped potential of the body was explored through dance and theatre,
while painting and sculpture inspired a fascination with gesture, the sponta-
neous nature of the Surrealists’ highly-prized ‘automatic’ writing was ap-
plauded and the unpredictable happenings in the realm of the visual arts
gained in popularity. This diversity also harboured a certain confusion, along
with a legitimate wariness regarding the less convincing spontaneous creative
experiments. Only jazz, which preceded and inspired many of these ventures,
seems to have been unaffected by such doubts. With no other motive but to play
together, musicians imbued with the black folklore of New Orleans imposed
their ‘immediate inventive practices’ on every Western stage, brilliantly imple-
menting the creative potential of improvisation. Having graduated in the space
of only a few years from exotic artefact to the epitome of artistic revolution, jazz
gave credence to other forms of expression in which writing played second fid-
dle to inventions in the moment.
In a variety of ways, performance arts such as music, dance and theatre,
which were particularly receptive to alternative improvised expression, all
acted as possible models. Although performance plays a key role in the cinema
– it goes without saying that improvisation goes hand in hand with filming,
unexpected hiccups being part and parcel of every film shoot – no one at that
stage associated the cinema with improvisation. Our brief, however, does not
cover these episodes of forced improvisation; the aim here is twofold: to con-
firm the existence of improvisational practices that can be specifically attributed
to the cinema and to determine their powers of expression. In other words, we
are not concerned with gauging the reactions to the random mishaps that may
have occurred in the course of the shoot, but rather with revealing the practices
that deliberately cast the spotlight on improvisation as the instigator of unpre-
cedented forms of expression. To a certain extent, the cinema gives the lie to
Jean-François de Raymond’s claim. The technical recording process that under-
pins it actually makes it possible to keep track of past events and build them
into potential archives:
Filming an interview, capturing a stage in a work-in-progress, recording a gesture, a
word, a moment of hesitation or on the contrary a consummate moment of virtuosity,
all these things are rendered and preserved by the cinema, and made even more valu-
able by the fact that a completed work tends to absorb the traces of all the effort that
went into creating it. The preservation of the transitory, fleeting, ephemeral aspect of
an artist’s work or the lengthy process of implementation or effectuation required for
a specific creation […] is made possible by cinematographic recording, in turn re-
mote, cold and objective and close, empathetic and profoundly visceral.
Preservation becomes even more invaluable in the case of improvisation, as the

creative act exists within the time span of the performance and only in that time
span. In their respective ways, film and jazz both manage to freeze frame these
living moments for eternity. They are patently different, of course: although the
rapid success of jazz and its consecration as an art form were undeniably due to
recording, the latter was only the tangible expression of an event epitomised by
performance. Filmmaking, despite being based on a succession of stages that
can span several months, actually depends ontologically far more on the record-
ing process. In both cases, however, there is a moment at which a machine re-
cords the ‘sheer present’, and it is from these temporal imprints that one can
begin to envisage a phenomenology of improvisation in a cinematic context, a
phenomenology whose founding principles are in part inspired by the theory
and history of jazz. The huge variety of improvisational manifestations in jazz
has triggered a great deal of rewarding research, making it possible to grasp the
Introduction 11
diverse approaches of improvisers such as Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker,

or Jean Rouch and John Cassavetes. ‘The meeting of two disciplines,’ wrote
Gilles Deleuze, ‘does not occur when one of them begins to reflect on the other
but when one of them realises that it needs to solve, for its own end and by its
own means, a problem that resembles a problem posed in another.’ This fa-
mous, even slightly hackneyed, quote nevertheless conveys the state of mind
that informed our project, built on a rich breeding-ground of exchanges be-
tween the cinema and the other arts, and not simply jazz.
The historical dimension will also play a significant role, as a number of as-
pects can only be put into perspective if their background is taken into account.
The feasibility of film improvisation, for instance, depends on the development
of sound and shooting techniques. For instance, the emergence of increasingly
lightweight equipment, originally from the world of television and reportage,
contributed in no small degree to the invention of devices that were to give the
actor greater freedom. Although the temptation to improvise comes across quite
clearly in, for example, Toni (), Jean Renoir is not in the same reactive ball-
park as, say, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche over seventy years later, when in Bled
Number One () the cameraman, using a hand-held camera, literally steps
into the frame so that each shot features his own movements. Taking this inter-
est in the history of techniques as a starting point, considerable attention will be
paid to the genesis of the works. Determining the degree of improvisation in
filmmaking would indeed prove difficult if one omitted the complexity of its
various stages, from the first draft of the script to the choice of montage. The
prerequisite in analysing cinema improvisation, therefore, is to take into ac-
count not only the finished product, but also all the processes that led up to it.
The improvising filmmaker is not seeking the perfection of a completed work,
but the demonstration of a work-in-progress, and he views the creative process
as a journey, or even a sketch or a draft. An improvised film retains the trace of
a collective experiment that is perpetuated in the presence of a spectator, who
finds himself invited into a workshop in which the participants, whatever their
role, readily acknowledge their doubts and uncertainties. The study of improvi-
sation, then, becomes a matter of theorising from the premise of these practices;
relying, if necessary, on the accounts of the crew members involved.
In improvised filmmaking, each decision reached in the course of the creative
process seems designed to release unpredictable forces on set and to turn each
shot into an event in itself and not the representation of an event. This relation-
ship to the present implies singular temporalities and original attitudes to living
time, the challenge of the improviser, in front of or behind the camera, spanning
‘a labile temporality in which the instant prevails.’ These complex images have
given rise to new forms of montage, somewhere between the documentary and
a partially predetermined composition constantly open to question. These im-
provisers want to spark new rhythms, new movements, new energies, all of
which stem from their unmitigated faith in the little-known and often un-
controllable forces of the body. To discover what the body can do within the crea-
tive act might indeed be an accurate definition of improvisation, with its atten-
dant phenomena of excess and proliferation. The cinema drew on this with a
view to bringing about a renaissance that could well represent the other facet of
a ‘modernity’, analysed from the angle of those deserted spaces that Michel-
angelo Antonioni in particular so prized.
The films under review all belong to a narrative form of cinema, which raises
the ongoing question of the human body and its impulses, a cinema ‘whose
movement is still plummeted, fettered by the corporeity of forms, in which the
grain is not obscured by high-speed action or the matter by narrative.’ Impro-
visation is a way of moving into the real world by allowing potentialities to
develop, each one an unexpected starting point for fiction, with the improviser
relentlessly hunting down the ghosts of history as they rise from the chaos of a
reality that is unstable by nature. With this in mind, only documentary or fic-
tional works whose motivation is to tackle the raw reality of the world will be
included here. Other acts of improvisation obviously exist in the history of the
moving image, and particularly in a number of radical examples of ‘experimen-
tal’ cinema, or in the more daring forms of animated film. These raise different
issues, however, and warrant a study in their own right, an approach that has
been partially attempted in a few works examining the frontiers between the
cinema and the visual arts. Silent films have no place here either: in the approx-
imation and emulation that marked the first decades of the cinematograph, im-
provisation sprang from necessity rather than choice. This in no way detracts
from the talent of those magical inventors, the early filmmakers, and Petr Král
is absolutely right in referring to slapstick cinema as ‘jazzist’, in the light of its
significant contribution to improvised expression. Improvisation as a creative
method – in the films of Jacques Rivette, Jacques Rozier, Johan van der Keuken
or Nobuhiro Suwa – is of a different nature, although this does not preclude
slapstick from rearing its head in many of their films. Despite these restrictions,
however, the body of work covered by this survey is considerable, and it
seemed both futile and unnecessary to pile on examples in a vain attempt to
achieve a totally illusory exhaustiveness. A choice had to be made and the rela-
tively limited number of works under review were all selected for their suitabil-
ity in stimulating across-the-board debate, according to the diverse or comple-
mentary nature of the issues raised, each film being an appropriate candidate
for a transversal model. As Jean Renoir put it:
It is obvious that the ideas that spring to mind when you need to improvise strike you
with tremendous force. The feeling is so sharp that it is like needles pricking your
Introduction 13
skin. I don’t know if they are any better than the ideas one comes up with in the
silence of the study. But either way they are different, and produce different works.
And it is precisely this difference that is under discussion here.

1. Writing and improvisation
A selection of models… and their limitations
The works highlighted in this study share a number of specificities that might
tempt analysts to group their respective directors into a single fictional family –
indeed, innumerable works and treatises have already linked the names of Re-
noir, Rivette, Rouch, Rozier, Pialat, Cassavetes, Ameur-Zaïmeche and Faucon. It
would be difficult, however, to interpret this as a trend spanning the history of
the cinema, except in its questioning of the dominance of traditional scriptwrit-
ing. The refusal to overemphasise the value of the written word may take a
variety of forms, but it is always an expression of the desire to turn the shoot
into a moment of experimentation. Filmmakers may consequently be divided
into two camps: those who defend preliminary structure and the immutability
of the written word versus those who are determined to view the shoot as a
performance. This approach brings two stages in the cinematic process to the
fore: on the one hand, the writing (the screenplay, shooting script and some-
times the storyboard) with its controlled, rational dimension; and, on the other,
the shoot, which is seen as a forum for improvisation. The analogy with music
is revelatory here: the desire of the art music composer to work through writ-
ing and the layout of preordained signs finds its counterpoint in the approach of
the jazz composer, to whom writing is merely a starting point, a framework that
will enable the performers to express themselves freely and together. It would
be risky, however, to claim an incontrovertible duality between determination
and indetermination – in the cinema, as in music, reality is less cut and dried.
The proportion and nature of the written word can vary tremendously and even
in the most faithful renditions of preparatory composition, the performance re-
tains an inevitably random dimension. Despite the aspirations of Adorno, it is
impossible to ‘protect’ an art of performance from the unpredictable vicissitudes
of the human body, unless it is put in the hands of a robot… which extinguishes
its life. In the cinema, filmmakers who pride themselves on their power and
expertise know that something has to elude them if they want to produce the
gesture, look or intonation that will lend the images their most profound mean-
ing. The preparatory work then gives way to the mise-en-scène, which focuses
on bringing about this creative surge as the ultimate achievement. With impro-
visation, however, the creative surge is not viewed as a culmination, but as a

launch pad, the implementation of another type of creation in which invention
in the moment acts as the driving force.
While the supremacy of the written word in art music went from strength to
strength during the twentieth century, a new lease of life in so-called ‘creative
improvisation’ was provided by another kind of music, this time belonging to
the oral tradition. Jazz, which had first appeared in the Deep South at the begin-
ning of the century in the guise of New Orleans folklore, went on to become a
key artistic discipline in the Western world, restoring the status that had gradu-
ally been lost to improvisation with the advent of written musical composition.
Consummate musicians, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Par-
ker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, based their whole musical technique on
their mastery of improvisation, defined somewhat idealistically (as we shall see
later) by Jean-François de Raymond as ‘the act that contracts in the moment the
usual time frame from conception (or composition) to external performance, the
hiatus being eliminated by the immediacy of this act.’ Jazz – and this is pre-
cisely its strength – is not set against art music or against the written form; it is
elsewhere, and it is from this elsewhere that jazzmen can invent new creative
expressions and discover new potential in the creative gesture.
As jazz took hold, artists from across the board joined the improvisation
bandwagon to invent new and original forms according to their own particular
field. Stage directors proved to be the most determined, finding in these techni-
ques new ways of involving the actor in a creative act underpinned by collective
ambition. Each line of research became an exploration of the powers of impro-
visation, based on the body’s willingness and on lived time, as shown in Jacques
Copeau and Jacques Lecoq’s experiments with collective creation, the impro-
vised exercises and productions of Peter Brook and the improvised sequences
of Jerzy Grotowski. In the second half of the twentieth century, choreographers
also turned to individual or collective improvisation in a bid to discover the
untapped potential of the body, released from the narrative depictions required
by classical ballet in particular. A number of s musical experiments, largely
from the United States, could also be cited here, as composers devised ‘open’
works – mobile or containing an indeterminate element – in which a ‘tendency
towards improvisation’ could be perceived. The musician’s free hand, however,
was circumscribed by the composer, and it is difficult to assimilate this indeter-
minate element into improvisation in the sense applied here. Finally, one cannot
exclude manifestations in the visual arts such as happenings, although the issue
of improvisation could surely be tackled just as viably in the work of Jackson
Pollock or Auguste Rodin.
Of all the arts, the one that has delved most deeply into improvisation and
seems most akin to the cinema is theatre. With few exceptions, improvisation
1. Writing and improvisation 17
features as a form of preparatory exercise for the actors, a process that has been
explained in detail in a plethora of manuals. These productions seldom run the
risk of improvising in front of an audience; however, at the pre-production
stage, this is a collective approach, which is designed to pave the way for a
closeness between the actors and their characters, characters they have them-
selves helped to ‘invent’. The period of improvisation and the period of perfor-
mance therefore remain quite separate, improvisation representing a mere stage
in the creation of a fixed entity that can be iterated with every performance.
These multiple performances do not exist in the cinema, in which the camera
records a specific instant on film or on some digital medium and then modifies
it if necessary at the editing stage, before reproducing it technically. The differ-
ence between theatre and cinema, therefore, is self-evident. And yet all, or al-
most all, improvised films betray a close link with theatrical performance.
In a theatrical vein, some filmmakers work, or even invent, scripts from the
starting point of improvisations with the actors, either during rehearsals or, in
the more radical cases, during the shoot itself. The script and dialogues of John
Cassavetes’ Shadows () were written this way, as were a number of se-
quences in Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour fou (). Both directors were also af-
fected by theatrical improvisation at another level. In their own way, they both
highlighted the ‘theatrical exercise’ in a number of films, demonstrating in a
fictional context the element of invention sparked by the actors at the moment
of performance. In L’Amour fou, Rivette films (or, as we shall see, ‘films by
proxy’) the rehearsals of Andromaque directed by the main character, while the
heroine of Opening Night (John Cassavetes, ), a renowned theatre actress,
finds herself incapable of performing on stage a role specially written for her.
One should add that Cassavetes had an opportunity to prepare another of his
films (Love Streams, ) by putting on an apparently largely improvised
play in  in Los Angeles. In a less direct manner, Nobuhiro Suwa featured a
number of strikingly theatrical locations in Un couple parfait (), in which
improvisation also plays a significant role. Theatrical venues of a different kind
crop up again with filmmakers as diverse as Maurice Pialat (in some sequences
from À nos amours, for example) and Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, particularly in
Dernier Maquis (), in which the courtyard of a small pallet manufacturing
business is filmed as though it were a stage, with the actors largely improvising
their roles. These few examples, which raise the question of collective creation
(in its ‘theatre company’ sense), are adequate proof of the importance of theatre
in a study of this nature. Other names will also be making their valuable contri-
bution to this work. Indeed, the links between theatrical improvisation and film
can no doubt be ascribed to the ‘boss’ Jean Renoir, who acknowledged the thea-
tre as a source of inspiration and improvisation as a working method.
The relationship between cinema and dance is not that different. Improvisa-
tion plays a significant role in contemporary dance, but this also serves to create
‘a fixed entity from something that only exists through a time of enactment.’
Here, again, are the two stages of theatrical composition, from conception in-
spired by improvisation through to public performances from which improvisa-
tion has disappeared. The difference lies perhaps in a form of radicalism that
characterises dance improvisations as the initial moment of creation. As Anne
Boissière puts it, ‘The danced gesture, in its freedom, no longer seems to require
a model, it is self-motivated, its impetus and inner energy having shaken off all
props and exteriority.’ In fact, such unmitigated emancipation is as improbable
as absolute improvisation released from any predetermined agenda. Neverthe-
less, one should put forward the hypothesis that the improvised gesture in
dance is an extreme case, the one that most closely resembles improvisation as
an act of freedom. ‘Once the true signifier of dance can only be transmitted
through the body, it becomes inconceivable to impose psychological antece-
dents on this body, which are liable to ruin the pertinence of a decision that
would, for its part, no longer belong to the body’, writes Laurence Louppe,
who has entitled her article ‘L’Utopie du corps indéterminé’ [The Utopia of the
Indeterminate Body]. The title shows the illusory nature of a ‘zero level’ of im-
provisation, although this does not detract from the experiments of Merce Cun-
ningham or Trisha Brown, who strived for the total absence of intention. If this
‘fantasy of radical autonomy’, as Catherine Kintzler phrases it, means little in
the narrative cinema, it does allow one to reflect on the presence of dance
among improvisatory filmmakers. The many ‘danced’ episodes are moments of
physical exertion experienced as times of exultation, explosion or liberation,
moments when the body seems to take over from ineffectual speech. The night-
club dance in Faces (Cassavetes, ) or the one that concludes Beau travail
(Claire Denis, ), the dance of the young lead in the cowshed in L’Apprenti
(Samuel Collardey, ), the numerous recurring dance scenes in the works of
Johan van der Keuken and Jean Rouch: the questions of the body’s freedom and
gestural invention are crucial and these reflections on improvisation in dance
have proved extremely valuable in analysing improvisation in the cinema.
Finally, music, which is not far removed from dance, will be making a vital
contribution. Jazz is the only artistic practice in which improvisation, even if it is
not a prerequisite, certainly plays a decisive role. All the great jazzmen were
great improvisers and the amazingly swift development of jazz in the twentieth
century can be ascribed to the extraordinary way in which these musicians were
able to constantly renew their improvisation techniques. The quintessential dif-
ference between jazz and experiments in theatre and dance is that here we no
longer have two succeeding stages – improvisation and performance – but a
merging of the two, the public performance of the jazzman being a performance
in improvisation. While art music was honing its command of an increasingly

complex written form, jazz was inventing other models in which the performer
was the creator and the score (when there was one) merely the raw material
through which the musician could express his own personality. In jazz, creation
only exists in that moment of play and performance and the only way to pre-
serve that moment is through recording. The remarkable influence of Louis
Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and others on twentieth-century ar-
tistic practices can be attributed to their natural interpretation of a revolutionary
idea: improvisation is neither a rough draft nor a rehearsal exercise, it is not the
first stage in a composition rooted in the written. Improvisation is creation in
the moment, it has its own rules and requires different models of analysis. It
must not be judged by the yardstick of writing; its place is elsewhere and im-
poses unprecedented creative practices.
Experiments with improvisation in the cinema had at least one thing in com-
mon with jazz: filmmakers were aware that improvisation could trigger emo-
tions, gestures and exchanges that were impossible to predict or put in writing.
As they only occurred once, the only way of fixing them for posterity was to
record them with a camera. This faith in the moment altered the habits of film-
makers. Broadly speaking, we will be studying two approaches to filming here:
the first, which is akin to art music, is illustrated by the hierarchy on set and a
reliance on the predetermined nature of composition – in this case the screen-
play and shooting script – with the actor being the interpreter of a minutely
written ‘score’; the second is similar to jazz, in which the script is simply a mat-
ter that enables the actor to contribute toward the invention of his character. A
contrast has often been drawn between the ‘script’ filmmakers, who view the
shoot as the implementation of a work whose core is already contained in the
written word, and the ‘shoot’ filmmakers, who believe in on-set team work and
are prepared to leave much to collective invention. This over-systematic and
somewhat fruitless dichotomy does at least show one thing, however: by mak-
ing a conscious decision to opt for improvisation, the filmmaker is accepting the
unpredictable nature of the task ahead. Theoretically, he therefore belongs to the
second category, but this does not mean he is against the existence of a script,
which may even be meticulously detailed. The difference lies far more in the
nature of the writing and the way it is used during the shoot.
If jazz can help in the first instance to dispel this sterile comparison, it is
through the refusal of its musicians to see their art as anti writing. Jazz always
contains an element of the written, in its orchestral compositions, in its themes
that pave the way for improvisation, in its chord charts enabling boppers to per-
form together, or in the admittedly minimal rules that foreshadow perfor-
mances of free jazz, although these can also be invented during the actual per-
formance. The only thing at stake during the performance is the free expression
of the musicians, and it is the quality of this expression, rather than the fact that
it conforms to a pre-existing written form, that will ultimately weigh in the bal-
ance. This attitude to the written word is therefore far removed from that of art
music performers. Over and above the performer’s independence in relation to
the written, jazz is also instructive in terms of its wide variety of forms of im-
provisation. From the honed paraphrases of Louis Armstrong, the orchestral
explorations of Duke Ellington or Charles Mingus, the ability of Charlie Parker
or John Coltrane to rethink their music individually or the apparent chaos of
free jazz experiments, every stage in the history of jazz is underpinned by the
invention of new forms of improvisation, new balances within the collective
experience, new ways of devising chord sequences, dissonance, tension. Impro-
visation filmmakers such as Jean Rouch, John van der Keuken, John Cassavetes,
Claire Denis or Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche have stressed their tangible interest in
jazz as a creative act. Although this striking interest in jazz will certainly be a
topic for discussion, this will not be the only frame of reference. Indeed, in Le
Jazz et l’Occident Christian Béthune rightly refutes an over-implicit analogy be-
tween the filmmakers’ art and the art of jazz musicians: ‘Whether or not it is
implemented,’ he writes, ‘improvisation is somehow immanent to jazz. In film,
on the other hand, the use of improvisation can only be transcendent.’ The
‘creative heterogeneity of jazz and the cinema’ therefore, stems from a differ-
ence in the nature of the two disciplines, improvisation being a prerequisite in
the jazzman’s expression, whereas in the case of filmmakers it is the result of a
deliberate choice. This is borne out by fact: in the cinema, these practices, how-
ever diverse, are in the minority and should be regarded as such. Furthermore,
the act of improvisation is less direct, less immediate than in jazz, which re-
quires minimum props: just a musician and his instrument. In the cinema, im-
provisation is only one of many factors, a stage in the filming process. It is there-
fore difficult to talk about ‘improvised cinema’, whereas it is possible, even if
this is a slight misnomer, to refer to jazz as ‘improvised’ music. Improvising
filmmakers, however, even if they cannot claim the creative immediacy of jazz-
men, tend to turn the shoot into an event, the take being a time of density akin
to that of jazz improvisation, with the same unpredictability and invention in
the moment. Jazzmen and filmmakers become united in a common desire, con-
sidering the creative act as a moment of experimentation, of collective research.
In the cinema, this commitment does not only apply to the actors; it extends to
the whole crew, whose aim is to capture the unexpected, the word, gesture or
look that will launch that moment of truth. This conception of the cinema im-
plies a certain number of choices that will determine every stage in the filmmak-
ing process, with the ultimate consequence being the invention of unprece-
dented forms.
Emptiness or overflow
Improvisation depends on original, or ‘open’, forms of writing. The philosopher

Michel Guérin claims, however, that one ‘senses writing as a hardening, a ten-
sing-up of meaning. Because it engraves, it is seen as a stop.’ In order to under-
stand improvisation, however, it is surely indispensable to come up with a form
of writing that does not serve as a stop, but as a start. Numerous studies have
pointed out two types of improvisation: one, enclosed in a pre-existing format,
is considered merely as a form of variation; whereas the other, released from all
the formats reckoned to hinder authentic invention, emerges as the only creative
improvisation. In her remarkable analysis on the subject of dance, Catherine
Kintzler takes up this contradiction between what she terms ‘the improvisation
of proliferation’ and ‘constituent improvisation’. According to her,
improvisation, in its initial sense, can be understood as a renewal of models, of motifs.
It is rooted in a powerful matrix from which it radiates and extrapolates. This is a
sheltered form of improvisation, which assumes the constituted moment of an art,
depending on it to proliferate to the point of saturation. There is nothing more tradi-
tional than this kind of improvisation, which perpetuates a model of oral culture.
Kintzler goes on to argue in favour of the second type of improvisation, in her

view the only one to engender true invention: ‘When we talk about improvi-
sation, we are referring particularly to the second meaning, the one that in-
volves open improvisation, which, seeking a constituent moment, proceeds not
through proliferation but by unlocking.’ She concludes that in the first per-
spective,
the same grids, the same polarizations symmetrically nourish, guide and magnetize
the action of the improviser and the expectations of his audience: although virtuosity
and fluidity engender pleasure linked to this freedom of performance, they are by defini-
tion bound to produce an effect of recognition and not an effect of unfamiliarity or
rediscovery. They cannot give rise to the slightest reform.
Improvised creation therefore requires one to ‘create a blank slate in order to

begin’ and, quite logically, Kintzler distances herself from any form of writing:
‘As a general rule, the global nature of any mode of fixation tends to perpetuate
the oral model and bring about an attitude that is closer to recognition than to
reform.’
In view of the stumbling block formed by the widespread notion that impro-
visation can only stem from a tabula rasa, this is a crucial debate. It would be
easy to contest Kintzler’s demonstration on the basis of a single example, jazz,
that she appears, like Adorno, to brand as ‘stereotypical and sterile’. Without
going into the Adornian theory of jazz, which is itself a subject of debate, it is
probably sufficient to recall how a number of ‘reformers’ like Charlie Parker,
Kenny Clarke, Dizzy Gillespie or Thelonious Monk managed to develop their
music extensively, without challenging earlier practices based on improvisation
within pre-existing chord charts. The same could be said of the precursors or
inventors of free jazz, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman,
whose radicalism also stemmed from the jazz tradition. The appalled reac-
tions of fans who refused to consider bebop and free jazz as real jazz, proved,
though this was hardly necessary, that their comfort zone had given way to a
cauldron of new practices, in which invention was conditioned by an entirely
familiar context that only existed in order to be challenged, overtaken and end-
lessly reinvented. Unlike Kintzler, for whom ‘proliferation’ and ‘unlocking’ are
antonymic, proliferation seems to us to be the path always chosen by the impro-
viser to reach – if he is lucky – that final unlocking. He is not satisfied with
using his freedom to weave a comfortable web within a set framework. On the
contrary, his position encourages him to step beyond it and use the clues pro-
vided by a few notes, a gesture or a phrase to attain the unforeseeable, the reve-
lation of a form of truth. Miles Davis endlessly repeating the opening notes of
The Man I Love, Coltrane who seems to be abandoning his soul to the theme of
My Favorite Things, Cassavetes on the set of Husbands forcing an extra on the
verge of tears to sing before a group of drunken men, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
accusing her husband in Un couple parfait of being a ‘socialite’ and then
building the whole sequence around this accusation. All these moments of im-
provisation are heartbreaking in the chasms formed by a few notes of Gershwin
or Richard Rodgers, an end-of-dinner song or a seemingly innocuous remark.
Invention through improvisation is therefore only possible in both jazz and
the cinema from the starting point of writing, of a pre-existing idea. Musicians
and actors work from a common base and through impromptu exchanges gra-
dually build up conditions for creative overflow. This is where we agree with
Kintzler, who claims that ‘A kind of real is indeed banished here, the real of
evidence, immediacy and transparency, but this is only in order to call in more
effectively the real of insistence and resistence.’ In the cinema, in order to
reach the real that resists, one first needs to address the appearances, the evi-
dence of the real; this is the only way to ‘banish the real’ and reveal the complex-
ity and ambiguity of the world. This is the goal shared by Rossellini, Cassavetes,
Rouch, van der Keuken and Ameur-Zaïmeche. All of them turned to improvisa-
tion in order to invent new forms but they never built on sand. Resisting the
sirens of abstraction or ‘experimental’ cinema, they favoured a cinema of experi-
ence, relying on the body’s energies and the inexhaustible potential of the narra-
tive. For an actor, improvisation only means something when the situation has
been set, however tenuously, and this situation cannot be confused with a mere
pretext, given the amount of preparation involved. The most intense moments
in the films of Cassavetes were reached after innumerable takes, only some of
which survived the cutting-room, and the exhausted bodies remain the only
clue to the colossal effort that went into them; the famous scene of the impro-
vised meal in Pialat’s À nos amours represents the culmination of weeks of a
gruelling shoot, with the conflicts between Pialat and some of his actors actually
adding grist to the mill in some of the scenes; the sequence featuring the song in
the asylum in Constantine, in Bled Number One, was the result of the mutual
trust gradually built up between staff and patients. Improvisation in the cinema
cannot always be satisfied with emptiness because it so often stems from an
overflow: an overflow of longing and exhaustion in Cassavetes, an overflow of
tension in Pialat, and an overflow of suffering in Ameur-Zaïmeche.
Writing the unpredictable
The appeal of the cinema, but also its complexity, resides in the multiplicity of
operations that go into the creative process, from the first draft of the synopsis
to the final cut. These successive stages shed light on the way the director im-
plements his choices and determine the nature of the work to come. In other
words, every technical decision, in the broad sense of the term, is also an aes-
thetic one. If one stays with the notion of writing as fixing on paper, improvis-
ing filmmakers display a number of common characteristics. First and foremost,
they are themselves authors or co-authors of the script and, with very few ex-
ceptions, this script is an original work or at the very least one vaguely inspired
by a pre-existing text. The only two adaptations that will feature here are both
different and unique and both demonstrate the quintessential freedom of the
director. The Connection () is a film by Shirley Clarke, adapted from Jack
Gelber’s famous play, created in New York in  by Julian Beck and Judith
Malina’s Living Theatre. The film, like the play, tackles improvisation by depict-
ing a group of people in one venue simulating improvisation, while a jazz quar-
tet pepper the performance with their own authentic improvisations. Clarke
was not attempting to improvise from a text she had not written, her aim was
to juxtapose the actors’ simulated improvisation and the musicians’ free impro-
visation. In Entre les murs (), François Bégaudeau’s book served as the
basis for a script that was then reinvented from the perspective of situations
improvised by the young actors. The approach adopted by Bégaudeau and
Laurent Cantet during the weekly preparatory workshops, and during the
shoot itself, involved ‘keeping the book at a distance’ to allow the students/ac-
tors to appropriate the subject matter for themselves. Bégaudeau’s involvement
as author, co-scriptwriter and lead actor acted as a kind of guarantee of freedom

for the director: the film was structured in the shape of a year-long workshop
from the matter of the book itself.
Being the author of an original screenplay enables the filmmaker to stand
back if necessary and even introduce a radical new slant according to circum-
stances and the inspiration of the crew. Despite the carefully written script of
Bled Number One, for instance, Ameur-Zaïmeche’s violent confrontation with
his mother country on the first few days of the shoot quickly convinced him that
he should only retain the dramatic template (Kamel returning to his birthplace
following his deportation and his rediscovery of a country he hardly knows)
and use the work-in-progress to forge new sequences. Each situation was there-
fore reinvented in accordance with unexpected events and meetings, the direc-
tor’s intuitions and the crew’s suggestions. The extreme example of Rivette’s
Out One: Noli me tangere () is another case in point, with Rivette taking
the pretext of an adaptation of Balzac’s L’Histoire des Treize, which only takes up
a few pages, to produce a twelve and a half hour film. This is an exception,
however, and fictional films rarely emerge from such tenuous precepts. Even
the most improvisation-friendly filmmakers rely on frequently elaborate scripts,
out of a sense of necessity rather than for production purposes (the putative
financial backers being little inclined to throw themselves into a project of a few
lines on the director’s say-so). Writing does not simply (or necessarily) mean
forecasting, organising, planning and controlling: it also implies thinking, imple-
menting the creative process, a process that will nourish the choices that will
need to be made during shooting. To leave the improvised channels open at the
writing stage implies an acute awareness of the project, even if the filmmaker
only gradually discovers the sinuous paths that will lead to a conceivable form.
The films in which the improvisation aspect is of paramount importance are all
by unclassifiable filmmakers whose work is innately consistent (Cassavetes,
Pialat, Rozier, Rouch). In opting for improvisation, the role of the director is not
only unchallenged but reinforced. Whatever the degree of unpredictability and
collective creation, the director remains the author of the film, the one responsi-
ble for its ‘composition’ and ‘direction’. Jacques Rivette is unequivocally the
author of Out One: Noli me tangere, in the same way as Charles Mingus is
the composer of every work to which he put his name, even if his instructions to
his musicians were limited to a few pointers on harmony and (or) structure.
‘This is where the paradox or conjuring trick occurs’, comments Hélène Frappat
in her essay devoted to Rivette, ‘because he plays on his authority, his responsi-
bility, the director, in his own dialectical way, is also the author; and he reveals
himself, discreetly (or deviously), as the master.’ But it is only paradoxical on
the surface; if one opts for improvisation and draws on its potential, the prere-
quisite must be to define a creative world that is not only homogenous but firm.
Reading the script before the shoot provides insight into the amount of free-
dom that will prevail on set. In the vast majority of films with a partial or total
emphasis on improvisation, the choices of mise-en-scène are not explicit. The
only pointers relate to the situations or to broad outlines for development, along
with a few clues on the dialogue, location or set. Most of the technical decisions
– movements, gestures, frames, scale of shot and so on – are made during the
shoot. The crux of the mise-en-scène will therefore be invented on set, possibly
after rehearsals. Such open scripts are incompatible with the shooting script, the
locus of the programmed and mastered. Improvising filmmakers consequently
avoid them and prefer to improvise the shot breakdown [découpage] on the
spot, the script thereby becoming a work-in-progress. Defined by Vincent Amiel
as ‘a preliminary intellectual process for breaking down reality, with the narra-
tive in view,’ découpage is the element that brings the filmmakers closest to
art music composers, who with the advent of the written score continually ex-
panded their indications for performance (sounds, movements, nuances, at-
tacks, phrasing…), in an attempt to protect themselves from any untoward de-
viation. Découpage no doubt involves other constraints, technical and economic
in particular (the need to rationalize the shooting process, for example), but it
also serves to underline the director’s intentions through the choice of frame,
movement or gesture; in short, everything that composes each shot. It is tempting
to interpret, as Amiel does, a lack of découpage as a refusal – but it is really more
accurate to see it as a conception of the script, which excludes this process: what
would be the point, after all, in using découpage to cancel out the inherent po-
tential of the script? Amiel goes on to say that ‘découpage entails predicting the
limitations of each shot and ordering them – in both senses of the term.’ The
improvisers’ desire for creative disorder is incompatible with this need for or-
der.
A number of scripts among the films under discussion here serve to illustrate
this point, while also highlighting the diversity of the ‘writing strategies’. The
script of Adieu Philippine, for instance, comprised a series of situations that
were to evolve considerably during the shoot, with Rozier unhesitatingly delet-
ing scenes and coming up with others according to his inspiration and chance
encounters, the personalities of the cast members nourishing the writing day by
day. Rivette was often satisfied with just a few pages of synopsis: the script of
L’Amour fou ‘is a tale which unfolds over about thirty pages, […] compiled in
the wake of his conversations with Marilù Parolini.’ The sequences were liable
to be written each evening by one or more of his accomplice scriptwriters or
even by the actresses, as in Céline et Julie vont en bateau (). Suzanne
Schiffman, who co-directed Out One, gave a detailed account of Rivette’s meth-
od:
During the pre-production stage, we wrote down the meeting points of the characters
on a large sheet of squared paper, and then I drew up a kind of chart, which more or
less collated the narrative continuity […]. We followed that chart—we planned the
shoot around it and used it to prepare the actors, to tell them when they were going
to meet whoever.
Ameur-Zaïmeche’s scripts represent a serious sounding board for reflection be-

fore shooting begins but on set little (or no) reference is made to them, although
this does not mean they have been cast aside. His method involves a writing
stage, which allows him to pinpoint the possible trajectories, sketch out some of
the leads and imagine what the different phases of the shoot will be; he then
resumes oral communication with the participants as a whole. In each of his
films, Ameur-Zaïmeche evokes very concrete worlds (the high-rise housing
project outside Paris where he lives, his family’s home village, a few African
workers from a pallet manufacturing business a few miles from Paris) in which
the relationship to the written word, often with poor command of the language,
is an uphill struggle. The lack of the script-object during the shoot is a prerequi-
site for establishing the dialogue that is essential to collective creation. Any in-
volvement with the written word would be seen as a way of introducing a bal-
ance of power with the actors, many of whom are playing their own characters.
It is hardly surprising that Ameur-Zaïmeche will only acknowledge Jean Rouch
as an influence, as the latter’s method was founded on dialogue, on the leitmo-
tiv of free speech, with no room for the immutable authority of the written
word. Nobuhiro Suwa’s project for Un couple parfait, however, was of a to-
tally different nature. From the starting point of a brief script, the successive
sequences were mapped out with a series of drawings to indicate the frame and
scale of the shots, the atmosphere being expressed in a variety of colours. These
drawings, known as the ‘score’, illustrate the extent to which the methods of
improvisation or, more accurately, the ways of writing the unpredictable vary
from project to project. In Ameur-Zaïmeche’s stories of small communities, as
in the intimate exchange between Suwa’s couple, the dialogues are invented by
the actors and the movements are unplanned. These remarkably similar choices,
however, produced works that are unlike each other in every other way: impro-
visation is the only common ground between the two films.
In ‘open’ scripts, dialogues, if they already exist at this stage, are just drafts or
frameworks, subject to major change. ‘We would have lunch together and
everyone would invent his own dialogues’ recalls André S. Labarthe on the
topic of L’Amour fou. The broad outline was drawn but the words themselves
were invented during exchanges with the cast in rehearsals or even – and this is
not an exceptional case – during the actual takes of Un couple parfait or, to
quote another totally different example, L’Apprenti (), the strange fiction/
documentary directed by Samuel Collardey. The intimate exchanges between

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Bruno Todeschini are as improvised as the dialo-
gues between all the ‘amateurs’ in Collardey’s film. Again, the only common
aspect of Suwa’s urban fiction and Collardey’s rural experiment is the use of
improvisation. The choice of improvised dialogue is not alien, however, to the
impression of reality that emanates from both films. The fact that actors are
using their own words to express an idea enables them to experience the situa-
tion from the same standpoint as musicians working from an ‘oral’ score by
Ellington or Mingus: they have become far more than interpreters of the written
word; they are now ‘filmmakers’ in their own right, sharing the fiction that is
being played out with the director. The latter needs to call on all his skills to
ensure that the words do not move away from what is really at stake in the
scene, while allowing – or even encouraging – discord and excess, which lend
an unprecedented weight of truth to this viewpoint. Allowing the characters to
‘fabulate’ is one of the major challenges of improvisation in the cinema and
filmmakers have invented a plethora of more or less deliberate strategies to con-
tain the limits of this fabulation from within.
There is a striking contrast between the quiet self-confidence of Suwa, Collar-
dey or Ameur-Zaïmeche and the wariness of the previous generation of impro-
visers. Jacques Rozier, for example, is cautious, not to say reticent, when he re-
fers to the improvisatory element in his films. One should not forget, too, that
even Cassavetes, who had probably been put off by the negative connotation of
improvisation (despite the fact that his first film, Shadows, ends with the
words: ‘The film you have just seen was an improvisation’), would respond
when any allusion was made to this subject that the script of Faces, the most
improvised of his films, actually comprised over two hundred pages, an argu-
ment designed to dispel any ‘suspicion’ of improvisation. The most contempo-
rary examples – far removed from Suwa, Collardey or Ameur-Zaïmeche – illus-
trate perhaps a change of mood: by openly acknowledging the importance of
improvisation in their films, they are recognising that the choice is of para-
mount importance in the process of cinematic creation. Other equally serene
improvisers will also be featured here, such as Philippe Faucon with Samia and
Maurice Pialat with À nos amours, summed up by chief cameraman Jacques
Loiseleux: ‘We try to do things without formulating them, based on the princi-
ple that once they are formulated they are dead, whereas we want them to
emerge alive from the actors and from the characters in the film.’ These few
words show the importance of what we have called ‘open writing’, which tire-
lessly strives to find a balance between reflection, inevitable planning and an
unwavering belief in the shoot as the cradle of creation and invention, and
maybe even of improvisation. In improvised cinema, the film certainly ema-
nates from a written text but it is not an ‘application’ or ‘execution’, more a

praxis.
The script as matter
Although there is certainly a time for writing and a time for shooting in the
cinema, they interweave in a completely different way when improvisation is
on the menu. In order to write while knowing that a degree of invention will
intervene on the set, one needs to take into account the actor’s potential for in-
vention. This form of writing, which does not aim to limit or restrain, but rather
to encourage emergence and revelation, harks back once again to the position of
the jazz composer. Making no concessions to the strictures of composition while
being prepared to share the creation not only with the performers or actors but
with the entire crew; welcoming the other into the composition with enough
generosity to enable him to reveal something in turn: all this goes to show that
writing and improvisation are not in contradiction, as is so often claimed, but
can both come into their own through the invention of ongoing forms of ex-
change.
From this standpoint, one can attempt to reach a definition of these open
scripts. Their underlying dual dimension of openness and control is best termed
a device, and this device implies a global approach, a modus operandi capable of
achieving its target, explicit or not. Ten, by Abbas Kiarostami, is a striking ex-
ample of such a device, with each of the ten sequences taking place in a car,
with two small digital cameras on the dashboard filming the passengers. The
director, seated behind the actress, cues her during the take through a headset.
There is no written dialogue; Kiarostami intervenes in real time and directs the
actors from the inside, thereby becoming the only improviser on the set. Rabah
Ameur-Zaïmeche’s (many) devices are less sophisticated and less cunning. In
Dernier Maquis for example, a sequence is improvised in a room being used
as a place of worship for a small community of Muslim workers. Ameur-Zaï-
meche uses the rules of the religious ritual as a device, smattering them with
embryos of fiction, which he uses as a basis for improvisation. The bedroom in
Un couple parfait is equally conceived as a device. The hotel room, discov-
ered by Suwa and his chief camerawoman Caroline Champetier, is divided by a
door into two distinct parts. The two actors, playing a couple on the verge of
breaking up, use these two spaces to enact the strains in their relationship. The
wide-angle, static shots contribute to the impression of the room as a dramatic
space in which the characters are free to do their own thing. In Quatre Jours à
Ocoee, a remarkable documentary depicting the preparation of a jazz album,
Pascale Ferran uses the two separate rooms of the recording studio in Ocoee as
though they were two communicating dramatic spaces, one occupied by the
technical crew and the music producer and the other by the two musicians, the
two cameramen and a sound engineer.
Although perfectly at home with these kinds of devices, improvisation can
also be applied to more light-hearted contexts. For instance, the two young wo-
men who take up the attractive sailing instructor’s invitation to spend time on
his dinghy, in Rozier’s Du côté d’Orouët (), seem to be just out for a good
time. They agree to act on camera as though they are (genuinely?) afraid, an
improvised sequence that turns into one of the most powerful in the entire film.
Fun and improvisation crop up again on the beach in Bled Number One, with
the women rediscovering sensuous pleasure in the waves of the Mediterranean,
and in the extraordinary sequence of Wesh Wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe?
(), Ameur-Zaïmeche’s first film, in which a group of youths find an outlet
for their boredom by improvising a game of golf on the lawn of a suburban
housing project. The game may require rules, as in many of Rivette’s films, but
these are kept more or less under wraps and can change as the game progresses,
according to the inspiration of the players. ‘The child becomes himself by for-
getting who he is – the game – and the actor finds his place by taking over
someone else’s – the role,’ writes Hélène Frappat. Rivette reinvents this form
of entertainment through a multiplicity of plots and mysteries that require
solving together, a pleasure and challenge to the actor and a sometimes gruel-
ling path towards the truth of a person and character: the improvised adventure
of the shoot becomes a way of playing out one’s own life.
Over and above these devices or games without rules, however, scripts repre-
sent matter. ‘One no longer writes a phrase but matter,’ writes Frédéric Pouillaude
on the topic of improvisation in dance.
Composing a phrase usually means fixing the physical trajectory of a gesture and
turning it into abstract ideality, which can be endlessly renewed. Writing matter is
restricted to determining the general parameters of the identity of the gesture (which
kinesthetic theme, rhythmical structure or accompaniment for the imaginary[…])
without actually fixing its form.
In the cinema, these ‘general parameters’ are basically very dissimilar but share
a receptivity to improvisation or to the unexpected. This is another facet of writ-
ing, which dismisses its fixed, predetermined aspect, its command over the
events on set. It is no coincidence that such a script, or matter, is often trans-
mitted by word of mouth, with no reference to the authority of a written docu-
ment. Speech, as opposed to discourse, means exchange, the possibility of dis-
cussion and argument; in short, the onset of improvisation.
At this point, scriptwriting involves providing actors with the wherewithal to

invent their own itinerary, ensuring they are open to a given situation or to un-
expected solicitations. Creating the conditions for improvisation implies giving
everyone the means to accept a degree of responsibility in the development of
each situation and proposing a singular interpretation, a personal response.
This does not mean that matter should be reduced to a mere succession of
events with no one pulling the strings, even if the aims are expressed to a cer-
tain extent in the flow of the shoot. On the contrary, the project contained in this
script-matter should be particularly firm, so that a form can gradually emerge
during shooting (when the composition actually takes form) and be finally inte-
grated at the editing stage. Although the script-matter may not impose any pre-
determined form – unlike most film projects – it does require virtual forms, one
of which will materialise in the cutting-room. This reversal, with each stage of
the shoot playing a part in engendering form rather than applying the form
created during the writing phase, enables us to understand the influence of im-
provisation on these films, which revealed other cinematic strengths. The forms
taken by Faces, L’Amour fou and Maine-Océan were not established by an
all-powerful script, they were triggered by improvisation. Cinematic improvisa-
tion entails putting one’s faith in the power of the events that are about to un-
fold in the heat of the action in order to bring about other representational
forms of the real. Form, therefore, stems both from the potential of the script-
matter and from the creative process set up during the duration of the shoot,
which is a lived experience. The forms of improvised cinema are invented be-
tween open composition and improvisation, between script-matter and inven-
tion in the moment, before being fixed at the editing stage.
It is clear that what is being questioned here are the functions of writing, as we
saw earlier with jazz, whose composers were not setting themselves against the
authority of art music writing but elsewhere. The written word does not establish
the norm, an ‘indelible witness that precludes any wandering’; but, on the
contrary, enables speech to come alive thanks to a form of writing whose ‘throat
has been widened’, as Frédéric Pouillaude so aptly puts it. Cinema improvisa-
tion always goes through a writing phase – this is a way of keeping alive and
refreshing writing’s potential for invention – but the writing preserves the treas-
ures that have been revealed through improvisation. The borderlines of compo-
sition and improvisation may be challenged but they do not disappear. Film-
makers have succeeded in bringing the two together in a common aim, already
formulated by Alain Bergala in relation to Roberto Rossellini: to make the cin-
ema ‘the instrument of revelation and capture of a truth that he merely needs to
bring to light.’ Improvisation is one of the ways of quenching that Rossellinian
quest.
This ‘capture of truth’ does not simply depend on the scriptwriting. Improvi-
sation is just as reliant on other choices, which can be summed up in a single
founding principle: to allow actors greater freedom, which to a large extent –
although not exclusively – implies limiting the constraints of the cumbersome
technical apparatus. If improvisation has become such a vital and truly signifi-
cant benchmark in modern-day cinema, it is because filmmakers now aspire to
another kind of cinema, freer and more in touch with the real world. This quest
for another truth stems from a reversal of priorities, highlighted on numerous
occasions by Renoir and Rossellini. Although in the context of classical cinema
actors were forced to bow before technical constraints, something that was
further exacerbated by the arrival of the talkies, it became vital to release the
actor from such hindrances; in other words, to make the technical constraints
bow before the actor. In the wake of Renoir and Rossellini, this reversal of roles
naturally put the spotlight on the New Waves, but also, and perhaps most of all,
on those quintessentially inventive mavericks Jean Rouch, Agnès Varda, Jac-
ques Rozier, Jacques Rivette, John Cassavetes, Maurice Pialat, Johan van der
Keuken, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche and Philippe Faucon. For these filmmakers,
the first step was to free themselves from the over-obvious clichés of classical
drama, thanks to what we have termed the ‘script-matter’. The second was to
implement, on set, the conditions that would enable improvisation to exist as a
possible pathway to truth.
2. Creation in action
A collective adventure
The reluctance of many filmmakers to be branded as improvisers results from

the confusion that surrounds any attempt to define improvisation, wavering
between the mystical consecration of a quasi-divine source of inspiration and a
damning indictment linked to its supposedly unprepared nature, denoting a
lack of creative thought. By claiming it not only as a choice but as a practice, we
hope to dispel a romantic and supposedly facile reputation that has been sys-
tematically belied. Every act of improvisation, in whatever discipline, is based
on working knowledge, on mastering techniques that first have to be learned.
The improviser is not satisfied with turning his technical know-how into a vir-
tuoso performance, he needs to go beyond it. Every improvising actor is, first
and foremost, a skilled professional, prepared to set aside his honed technique –
as John Cassavetes required Peter Falk or Ben Gazzara to do – because he
knows this is the only way he can take risks and allow something to escape in
the course of the take. This is the subtext of Jean Renoir’s description of his
teaching methods: ‘I wanted to convince these young people that they needed
to despise technique […]. There was a risk they might then deduce that it was
unnecessary to have any knowledge of the profession, which isn’t true; on the
contrary one needs to know it really well, one needs to know it inside out so
that one can forget it.’ From Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon in L’Amour
fou () to Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Bruno Todeschini in Un couple par-
fait () – but Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu in the works of Maur-
ice Pialat also spring to mind – improvisation stems from a consummate mas-
tery of the actor’s art. In more documentary-style films (such as L’Apprenti or
Dernier Maquis), the actor’s technique may be of a different nature but it
nevertheless calls upon genuine talent: ‘There are only actors in this film’, says
Ameur-Zaïmeche about Dernier Maquis, ‘and yet only the mechanics and I
had ever acted before.’ The requirements are different here, as the actors are
improvising their own characters on camera, in everyday situations that have
been reinvented for the purposes of the film. ‘Playing oneself’ may not involve
as much experience but that does not mean it does not require a great deal of
work. The same applies to the technical crew, the sound technicians and cam-
eramen in particular, who are forced to react in the moment to a situation that
will only occur once, in the knowledge that the quality and speed of this reac-
tion will determine the ultimate viability of the shot.
The actors’ talent and the crew’s reactivity apart, improvising filmmakers
know that improvisation cannot be achieved on set without some degree of pre-
paration, long or short. Many improvisations take root without the film crew, in
the course of workshops that resemble theatre rehearsals. Shadows came out of
an experiment with student actors in the Variety Arts Workshop, a small school
that Cassavetes and Bert Lane launched in New York in . The work contin-
ued on set, with Cassavetes taking shot after shot, as he was to do even more
radically a few years later with Faces (). The system set up in rehearsals
and followed up during the shoot makes it possible to re-appropriate the script
and breathe life into it; but when improvisation occurs the appropriation be-
comes different. In acquiring the freedom to invent new proposals and delve
beyond the writing, the process exceeds the performance by abolishing the gap
between writing and acting: to the improviser, acting is writing. It is not a case
of acting against the script; improvisation takes the writing one step further and
relies on an element of exchange and collective inspiration that conjures up Re-
noir’s definition of the script: ‘When you write your script, when you prepare
your film, you are setting up the pier of your future bridge. If the overall idea
has been properly conceived, you know that your bridge will fit in with this
idea, but there is no way of knowing beforehand how it will actually turn out.’
To improvise is to build the apron of the bridge together.
Fifty years on, in Entre les murs, Laurent Cantet’s approach seemed to hark
back to Shadows. François Bégaudeau’s book, as we have said, was the starting
point for the film, which was built around a year-long weekly improvisation
workshop led by Cantet and Bégaudeau and located in a high school in Paris.
The experiment continued into the shoot itself, its open-ended format allowing
the sequences to be developed in accordance with the participants’ inspiration.
Rivette was also paving the way for improvisation when he viewed the entire
shoot as a workshop in which a common project could be implemented thanks
to the infallible commitment of all its members, rehearsal after rehearsal, take
after take, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s aim,
particularly in Bled Number One, when he chose to make the takes last as long
as possible, was in the same vein. Thanks to video, he was able to make a se-
quence continue for minutes on end with no interruptions, in an attempt, once
again, to grasp the unexpected. Joint participation through communal work-
shops is a recurring aspect in the work of filmmakers for whom the cinematic
process is an act of collective creation, guaranteeing the commitment of every
member to a project, its originality depending to a large extent on this very
commitment. Contrary to popular belief, this conception of the collective is ex-
2. Creation in action 35
tremely rare, as the undeniable hierarchy on set makes shared work far more
common than collective work.
Improvisation for the filmmaker means being prepared not to know every-
thing prior to the shoot and putting his faith in unforeseen events in order to
reach an elusive truth. By counting on the commitment and contribution of
each crew member in helping him invent the prerequisites for improvisation,
the director is refusing to brandish some superior knowledge in the face of his
team’s supposed ignorance, their role being merely to carry out orders. Al-
though this may appear innocuous, one only needs to follow a ‘classic’ shoot in
order to see just how impossible it is for the director’s authority to be ques-
tioned without arousing anxiety, the slightest doubt being interpreted as a sign
of weakness. Viewing the set as a forum in which everyone, whatever his status,
is a proactive force, a forum which calls for a critical mind and in which initia-
tive is obviously encouraged, is something numerous improvisational experi-
ments have in common, however many differences there may be in the actual
mechanics of the mise-en-scène. This collective approach is implemented in a
different way by the director’s physical involvement at the hub of the collective.
Jacques Rozier tried his hand at almost every technical job on the set: camera-
man, electrician, sound technician and set designer, depending on the urgency
of the situation. There are innumerable photos of Cassavetes behind the camera,
and the same applies to Johan van der Keuken and Jean Rouch, documentary
directors who also claimed links with improvisation. Playing one of the charac-
ters, as did Cassavetes, but also Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche and Jean-François Sté-
venin, is another way of intervening physically in the film. These approaches do
not only apply to improvised cinema, but they certainly appear to be prerequi-
sites for the emergence of collective improvisation, whose watchword is: to be
on hand from the first to the last day of shooting, and to work together in action
and doing. It does not seem excessive to see this joint commitment in political
terms, given the often precarious conditions in which these films are made, but
that is the price to pay for freedom in the context of the cinema, where stagger-
ing amounts of money are often involved, generating endless constraints. To-
day more than ever, opting for the freedom of improvisation on a film set im-
plies resisting a system in which filmmaking is reduced to a faithful adaptation
of a script rewritten as the result of a compromise with the backers. The highly
flexible set-ups that are the rule, and hardly ever the exception, can only exist in
the context of small crews over which the ‘heavy industry’ of the cinema has no
hold. Indeed in some cases, such experiences are almost clandestine.
To turn the shoot into a collective adventure, improvising filmmakers tend to
surround themselves time after time with the same cast and crew, and some-
times even build up a whole troupe on the basis of complicity and trust. One
only needs to read the credits on the films of Cassavetes, Rivette, Rouch, Rozier,
Ameur-Zaïmeche and Stévenin to see the same names cropping up again and
again, interspersed with the occasional new recruit, who proves to be equally
loyal. They are fully aware of the demands that will be put on them, with every-
one being expected to tackle several jobs, whatever their ‘official’ skills may be,
but they also know just how unique these experiences can be. The famous photo
of the little troupe on the set of Shadows looking as if they are ready to storm
the streets of New York, is a case in point. Cassavetes gradually formed a clan
in which the producer (Al Ruban) was just as likely to act as chief cameraman or
editor. The same spirit pervades the works of Stévenin or Rabah Ameur-Zaï-
meche today, the latter being the director, actor and producer of his films, while
his editor, Nicolas Bancilhon, is equally floor manager and assistant director
(Bled Number One). The production manager of that same film, Sarah Sobol,
also features in the credits as assistant director. This is undoubtedly a novel
approach to filmmaking, the collective cinema challenging the established hier-
archy between the director and his traditional ‘creative team’, i.e. the set de-
signers or chief cameraman. This team spirit may not only exist in improvised
films but it is nevertheless their sine qua non, in view of the degree of spontane-
ity and reactivity such films demand.
This desire to see filmmaking as a collective adventure is mirrored almost
naturally in the films’ content, each one becoming, at least in part, a reflection
in situ on the prerequisites for improvised cinema. All Rozier’s works depend
on a small group of characters who are, willingly or unwillingly, about to ex-
perience a collective adventure in the most unlikely venues, where they will be
required to face unprecedented situations. The most radical example is that of
the Naufragés de l’île de la Tortue (), in which some of the staff mem-
bers in a travel agency offer tourists an opportunity to find themselves on a
desert island in the same situation as Robinson Crusoe, where they have to get
by as best they can. Rozier’s other films are structured along the same lines:
Michel, the young Parisian in Adieu Philippine (), decides to give up
work and spend a few weeks in Corsica before going off to fight in Algeria; the
three young women in Du côté d’Orouët () also go off on vacation, to a
villa on the Atlantic coast, while the heroes of Maine-Océan () find them-
selves spending a weekend on the Île d’Yeu, against their better judgment. Ro-
zier is not simply concerned with isolating small communities in unlikely places
and putting them through unexpected situations, however. His ‘delocalized’
shoots also force the team to abandon their everyday lives and the comfort of
their Parisian routines. By choosing a small island in the West Indies, the Île
d’Yeu or the deserted Atlantic coast (Du côté d’Orouët was filmed in October,
long after the end of the tourist season), the whole cast and crew find them-
selves having to spend several weeks together, forming a troupe in which
everyone is swept up in the same adventure, which leads to some fairly predict-
able encounters. Rozier elaborates on the ideas expressed by Renoir regarding

La Règle du jeu, the clearest example of the latter’s predilection for improvisa-
tion:
I allowed myself to become completely absorbed by the subject; and also, of course,
by everything that went into it, like the actors, who were quite extraordinary, comple-
tely at home in the guest house we were staying in. There we all were, a long way
from Paris – it’s vital to be a long way from Paris in a case like that, in order to get
away from the trivia of everyday. Other trivial things cropped up in the troupe but
that was a good thing, it was tremendous. We were cut off from the rest of the world
and the whole atmosphere – the actors and the landscape, and also the subject, as I
said earlier – really spurred me on and drove me to do masses of things that were not
initially planned.
Equally significant are the films of Jean-François Stévenin, originally Rivette’s

assistant and also one of his actors. From Passe Montagne (), set in a small
village in the Jura, to Double Messieurs (), located in the Grenoble region,
and finally the incredible road movie Mischka (), all his films are the result
of a collective experience. Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s trilogy, the first in the Bos-
quets housing project, the second in an Algerian village and the third in a small
firm in the Paris suburbs, also revolve around the collective experience, through
communities that have invented other ways of living together. The presence of
the small film crew is only accepted after a long period of adaptation by every
member of the community and the Ameur-Zaïmeche ‘method’ is based on the
breaking down of barriers between that community and the crew. It therefore
turns into a truly shared experience, and the director’s subtle approach succeeds
in convincing all the participants that the film will be a joint creative effort that
will unfold during the few weeks of shooting, weeks that also imply living to-
gether as a community.
Jacques Rivette formulated this idea of the cinema as a shared experience,
explaining that in L’Amour fou, for instance, he
wanted to make a film, not inspired by Renoir, but trying to conform to the idea of a
cinema incarnated by Renoir, a cinema which does not impose anything, where one
tries to suggest things, to let them happen, where it is mainly a dialogue at every lev-
el, with the actors, with the situation, with the people you meet, where the act of filming
is part of the film itself. 
During the period spanning L’Amour fou and Pont du Nord (), Rivette
constantly reiterated that the film in its future form should simply stand as the
trace of the adventure that went into making it:
What was exciting [in L’Amour fou] was creating a reality which began to have an
existence of its own, independently of whether it was being filmed or not; and then to
treat it as though it were a documentary feature, keeping only certain aspects, certain
points of view, according to chance or to one’s ideas, because, by definition, the event
always exceeds from every possible angle the story or the report one makes of it. 
Every improvisational experiment in the cinema can be gauged by Rivette’s hy-

pothesis, itself a perpetuation of the practices of Renoir and Rouch. Their differ-
ences provide rich pickings too, of course, ranging from Rivette’s imaginary ad-
ventures, the African fictions of Rouch the ethnologist, Rozier’s Robinsonian
capers, Ameur-Zaïmeche’s political agenda and Pialat’s bitterness. If these film-
makers have brought about multiple, and frequently highly dissimilar, ex-
changes between reality and fiction, however, their common conception of the
shoot as a collective adventure in which each event is liable to trigger funda-
mental changes in the forthcoming work nevertheless sheds a different light on
Rivette’s idea of the film as a ‘documentary’ of its own shoot. Improvisation in
the cinema, in its quintessentially unpredictable nature, becomes the most con-
crete and prominent trace of the film-in-progress, of the immediacy of the event.
Once again, and not for the last time, it must be stressed that this does not pre-
clude preparation, or a requisite amount of premeditation – something that var-
ies widely according to the filmmaker. But each one of them remains convinced
that the vital essence of the cinema is played out through excess, through the
unforeseen and through the use of improvisation as an opportunity for diver-
gence.
Renoir and the actor, Rossellini and the world
If Jean Renoir’s name has cropped up so often, it is because he was the only one
of his generation to keep harking back to the issue of improvisation as the most
accurate way of getting under the skin of life. Although he refrains from idealis-
ing his own manifestations of improvisation, his reflections, particularly in
Écrits (-) and in the compilation Jean Renoir. Entretiens et propos, help
one to understand what kind of cinematic vision triggered this desire for impro-
visation, in a period (the interviews took place between  and ) when a
great many directors (Rouch, Rozier, Cassavetes…) were imposing new modal-
ities of cinema from the starting point of improvisation. An exchange in 
between Renoir and Rivette reveals the cornerstone of the former’s thinking,
soon to be taken up and radicalised by the latter. In response to a question on
shooting with several cameras, Renoir explains: ‘[…] I will try, even in a film
that was not designed for that purpose, to use several cameras in scenes in
which I feel the action, from start to finish, needs to be led by the actor.’ Rivette
gets him to take this idea further: ‘This technique is actually only the final phase
in a process you have been researching for a long time, really since the advent of
the talkies, in an attempt to achieve maximum continuity through the actor.’
‘That’s right’, agrees Renoir, ‘you try to obtain in the film, or at least in some of
its scenes, a continuity that stems from the development of the actor’s expres-
sion, his inner development, instead of a continuity that is generally manufac-
tured artificially in the cutting-room.’
This desire to allow the expression of the actor to take precedence over any
other consideration is one of Renoir’s hallmarks. As Rivette remarks, Renoir did
not wait for the s to expound his theory: several sequences from La Chi-
enne (), Toni (), La Grande Illusion () or La Règle du Jeu
() were structured with the same determination to give the actors time, and
indeed the actors were sometimes filmed simultaneously with two or three
cameras in order to allow for flexibility during the montage. Renoir’s aim was
to do everything in his power to nurture an uninterrupted flow of dialogue as
the mouthpiece for a certain truth. This of course explains his aversion to dub-
bing: ‘If one accepts dubbing,’ he said, ‘then one accepts that the dialogue is not
real dialogue, one refutes that kind of mysterious connection between a trem-
bling voice, an expression […]. In short, it means one has ceased to believe in
the unity of the individual.’ Defending the continuity of the actor’s perfor-
mance, believing in the voice as a sound inextricably linked to the body, to these
two pillars of the Renoir style one must add a third, and one which makes him a
precursor of the improvisational experiments of the s and s: the impor-
tance granted to the collective and to the role of the individual within that col-
lective. Renoir’s mises-en-scène in Toni, Le Crime de M. Lange and most radi-
cally in La Règle du jeu involved creating an atmosphere that would generate
a feeling of confusion, of unpredictability, but without losing sight of the gener-
al unity or the hierarchy between the characters. ‘I was resolutely determined to
highlight the main characters and keep them away from this chaotic ambi-
ence’ explained Renoir on the topic of La Règle du jeu. This insistence on
background movement, with one or two of the main characters standing out
from the crowd, conjures up the orchestral compositions of Duke Ellington in
which the brass stands are arranged to create a particular type of sound, de-
signed both to guide the soloist and to accentuate his phrasing. Each musician
retains an element of freedom, particularly as regards the appropriation of
sound, and Ellington succeeds in taking a new slant on aural combinations
thanks to the inspiration of the powerful personalities who make up the band
and a composition that takes each of their specificities into account. This is what
Renoir is referring to when he states, again in connection with La Règle du jeu:
‘In a film like that, fifty per cent is improvised, but the improvisation corre-
sponds to something deep-rooted within me. In other words, the general atmo-
sphere is not improvised but the ways of expressing it are frequently impro-
vised.’ Renoir’s orchestral talent is just as striking when he brings an improvi-
ser like Michel Simon centre stage, in La Chienne () or Boudu sauvé des
eaux (), by placing him against an ‘orchestral background’ designed not
only to bring the soloist to the fore and provide him with an element of freedom
but to fix the limits of this freedom and apply directorial control over the impro-
visation within the scene itself.
Many analysts have tried to reduce the improvisational element in Renoir’s
work to the decisions made on set, thereby excluding the actors and the here
and now aspect of the shot. It is true that he sometimes wrote the dialogues at
the last moment, made equally last-minute directorial choices and was always
ready to invent new sequences – even when shooting had begun. Despite the
hurdles, however, which were largely due to the cumbersome nature of the cin-
ematographic machine, Renoir managed to give his actors a degree of freedom
of movement, and La Règle du jeu is a shining example of this. From the basic
exchange of dialogue, in which he focuses on the way the bodies interact, rather
than on static close-ups, to the sequences in which he plays on the multiplicity
of events going on in the depth of field, and the chases in which the characters
seem to be inventing the trajectories as they go along, his mise-en-scène gives a
strong impression of a work-in-progress, created in the heat of the moment,
with no prior planning. Renoir counters the technical inertia with a highly mo-
bile mise-en-scène, its vibrant energy reminiscent of Commedia dell’arte. He suc-
ceeds in making up for the camera’s slow reactions by devising tricks that make
it look as though the camera is not preceding the action and movements but
simply following them, in long, fluid shots. This became one of the tenets of
Rossellini’s cinema, although it was later adopted by everyone who claimed to
be part of the improvisational canon.
Another principle which has already been mentioned, and to which we shall
return at length, involves filming the sequence from the inside. The work Renoir
undertook with Michel Simon in Boudu or La Chienne shows that he was per-
fectly ready to hand over the reins to his lead actors in a particular scene, but he
also made his own presence felt as an actor, in La Règle du jeu for instance.
The character of Oscar oscillates constantly between the world of the masters,
who see him as a friend and confidante, and that of the servants, theoretically
closer to his social origins. His undefined status not only enables him to act as
go-between among the various characters but justifies his appearance in a large
number of scenes. Renoir, therefore, hones his directing skills in the midst of the
actors, deflecting one actor’s inspiration and encouraging the ‘excesses’ of an-
other. Although it cannot be termed a method, the filmmaker certainly bor-
rowed a principle here, which can be attributed just as much to jazz as to his
acknowledged musical source, the Baroque:
The evening was spent listening to records and finished off with a film. I cannot actu-
ally claim that Baroque music inspired La Règle du jeu but it did make me want to
film people moving to the spirit of this music […]. Little by little my idea took shape
and the subject was pared down. After a few days, which I continued to experience in
the form of Baroque rhythms, the subject became clearer and clearer.
Renoir no doubt knew that improvisation existed in seventeenth-century art

music and that Baroque composers conducted their own music. In La Règle du
jeu, he struck a balance between the contrapuntal compositions of the Baroque
masters and the orchestral world of Duke Ellington, who, despite the centuries
that divided them, shared a taste for the musician as performer and improviser.
Through improvisation, Rozier, Rouch and Rivette perpetuated Renoir’s work
by giving precedence to the collective and to unity of speech and body as a
source of human revelation.
Apart from their determination to allow the actor time, these filmmakers had
another ambition, this time more akin to Rossellini than to Renoir. In response
to the gradual simplification of the subject as advocated by Renoir, Alain Berga-
la has shown how vital it was for the Italian director to start from the most
rudimentary reality, the one least fabricated by the cinema:
Rossellini discovered from the outset that if truth in the cinema was a question of
ontology and not of language, he would need to start from the most literal, least re-
elaborated reality. Rossellini never reneged on this conviction. His comments were
always underpinned by the need to start from ‘things in their reality’, ‘things as they
really are’, the ‘true sense of things’.
This confrontation with brute reality sheds a radical new light on a cinema that
is no longer concerned with the balance and beauty of the shot, but with the
expression of truth in the chaos of the world: ‘It doesn’t even matter about the
objective proportions of the structure,’ writes Bergala, ‘everything happens in
the underlying, adjoining movements of the protagonist’s soul and that of his
audience.’ Rossellini gets his characters to face the most bitter realities, either
against the backdrop of ‘History’, as in Rome, ville ouverte, Païsa or Alle-
magne année zéro or in intimate dramas such as Stromboli, Europe  and
Voyage en Italie.
Earlier filmmakers, however, were already well used to shooting fictional
films on location, and many of them had deliberately moved away from the
comfort and artificiality of the studios to fit in with their project. Their experi-
ments were already in part a reflection of their wish to bestow another truth on
the characters, through the reality of the outside world. ‘The broad, musical
tempo of many of the scenes and the actors’ natural spontaneity, together with
a form of documentary realism in the atmosphere and detail, often give the im-
pression of watching an improvisation,’ wrote Jacques Lourcelles on the sub-

ject of King Vidor’s Hallelujah (), in which many sequences were shot on
the banks of the Mississippi. Other filmmakers, as diverse as John Ford in
Steamboat Round the Bend (), Jean Vigo in L’Atalante () or Jean
Renoir in Toni (), were also determined to give their characters a ‘docu-
mentary depth’, triggered by the presence of nature.
This mere presence takes on another dimension with Rossellini, whose aim is
no longer to place fiction within the reality of the world, but to be where life is
at its most vibrant, in order to ‘convey reality in a pitilessly concrete manner’.
In Rome, ville ouverte (), Païsa () and Allemagne année zéro
(), all shot while the embers of the war were still burning, Rossellini rein-
vented the fictional character, stripping him of all heroic trappings to become a
simple human being in the face of History, and the fictional story, which
adopted a documentary slant on the world, unfolding in unpredictable twists
and turns, with no predetermined script. The strength and consistency of Ros-
sellini’s work, which go far beyond the later definition (or caricature) of Neo-
Realism, lie in his interest in the human being and his unwavering observation
of the complexity of his relationship to the other and to the world. The most
revolutionary aspect of his films stems from ‘his desire to capture the present,
nothing but the present, in the heat of the moment,’ the present of History in
the making and the present of the characters’ intimate journeys into the reality
of a world they can no longer comprehend. The determination to reveal this
present without masking its brutality and cruelty made Rossellini a precursor
among filmmakers for whom improvisation provided a way of pursuing the
same concerns. Cassavetes opted unhesitatingly for the intimate, taking a scal-
pel to depict his characters’ frustrations and the unleashing of repressed desires
in Faces, A Woman Under the Influence or Love Streams. Rivette followed
the same course with the couple in L’Amour fou, Pialat tracked the intimate
downward spiral of a family in À nos amours and Suwa was directly inspired
by Voyage en Italie in the inner journey portrayed in Un couple parfait.
Others, like Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, are closer to the immediately postwar
Rossellini, and place their characters in a clear-cut political context, flanked by
an ethnological dimension inherited from Jean Rouch. But, however diverse
their creative worlds may be, they nevertheless all take human beings as their
starting point, and all allow the adventures and digressions of their characters
(and the shoot) to determine the narrative structure and move the goalposts
between fiction and documentary.
This awareness of the complexity and heterogeneity of the world produced
films in the form of imprints or sketches, films in which the raw truth of emo-
tion, however cruel, was infinitely more important than faultless composition.
Bergala rightly points out that Rossellini’s modernity overlapped with the mod-
ernity of painting, as described by Gombrich in the following terms:
For Monet’s idea that all painting of nature must actually be finished ‘on the spot’ not
only demanded a change of habits and a disregard of comfort. It was bound to result
in new technical methods. […] The painter who hopes to catch a characteristic aspect
has no leisure to mix and match his colours, let alone to apply them in layers on a
brown foundation as the old masters had done. He must fix them straight on to his
canvas in rapid strokes caring less for detail than for the general effect of the whole. It
was this lack of finish, this apparently slapdash approach which literally enraged the
critics.
Gombrich naturally assimilated Rodin to these artists who ‘scorned the finished
impression’ – Rodin, whose works form the heart of Suwa’s Un couple par-
fait.
Rouch, Cassavetes, Rozier or the Godard of À bout de souffle were also to
exasperate the critics by their lack of respect towards a possible ‘grammar of
cinema’. Improvising, as has been said, means accepting to film the work-in-
progress, the moments of trial and error, the approximations, accepting the un-
known, and then turning this uncertainty into a gateway leading to another
form of truth. Take Thelonious Monk, whose finger seems to have slipped on
an unforeseen note and who then finds his inspiration for the rest of the phrase
by repeating that same note: if it has crept into the movement of the hand by
chance, it will find its place in the continuum of the improvisation. To Monk,
the ‘false note’ is a strictly transitory state, and not only will this same note
become the right note, it will add relief to the rest of the solo. Monk was initially
accused of lacking piano technique, but it soon became clear that his apparent
lack of virtuosity was actually vital to his style, to his individual musical expres-
sion. The montage of Shadows or À bout de souffle was to lead adepts of
orthodox classical cinema to tax the new filmmakers with a similar ignorance
of cinematographic technique, but the ‘jump cuts’ of Cassavetes and Godard are
just like Monk’s ‘false notes’. In their logical rejection of the seamless match cut,
Rouch, Cassavetes, Godard and Rozier were confirming that in their conception
of the cinema rhythm, beat and movement were paramount: ‘I always capture
things in motion.’Rossellini had said, ‘and I couldn’t care less whether I get to
the end of the movement before matching it with the next shot’. The biases
shown in improvised cinema, such as the continuity in relation to the actor, the
links with the chaos of the world and a belief in the unpredictable as a possible
source for revealing truth, engendered other types of work, other forms of mon-
tage. Once again, it was not a case of being against the classical preparatory
approach, it was a way of bringing new creative processes to the fore, in which
the priorities had been altered: the emphasis on mastery and completion had
given way to the work-in-progress concept of collective improvisation, with all

that it implied in terms of concentration on the present, openness, reactivity and
a degree of incompleteness. In this context, judging the work of Jacques Rozier
by the yardstick of Alain Resnais thereby becomes as irrelevant as comparing
Ellington’s compositions to those of Stravinsky. Improvising filmmakers have
taken to extremes the idea that an element of cinematic truth can only be at-
tained through loss of control, and can only spring from what escapes, in a here-
after of composition and in the mastery of detail. One of the ways of reaching
what Bergala calls the ‘point of truth’ or ‘confession’ is to welcome the overflow,
the moment when what is planned is superseded by a subconscious element,
which leads the characters along other paths. This transition from interpretation
to improvisation must not be viewed as a culmination, but rather as an alterna-
tive, a possible sequel of prepared composition. This kind of cinema must be
centred on the actors, on their bodies and voices, on the exchanges that can sur-
face within the duration of the take, rather than on the constant interruptions
that prevail in the course of traditional shoots. The necessary time span is ac-
companied by another, equally important, prerequisite: freedom of physical
movement, which is inherent in the desire to abandon the confined space of the
studio and step into the real world. Improvisation may entail shooting on loca-
tion, using live sound and giving the actors freedom of movement, but it also
implies other filming techniques that are far less restrictive, or at least in which
the restrictions are of a completely different nature.
On the fringes of the New Wave
Although the actual concept of improvisation goes back as far as filmmaking

itself, its implementation was essentially linked to the aspirations of a new
‘modern’ era of cinema, in the wake of World War II. This research into a renew-
al of forms, a fertile experimental ground in the s, coincided with major
technical innovations. It is hard to say whether the desire for a different kind of
cinema stemmed from these technical developments or whether it was the other
way round. To quote a famous example, Bergala has shown that the role of
such developments in the aesthetic approaches of the New Wave directors has
been greatly exaggerated: the determination of Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and
others to pit themselves against the ‘professionals of the profession’, bitterly
criticised in the columns of the Cahiers du cinéma, soon convinced them to shoot
their first feature films in  mm, the regular format for movie theatres, and the
only one to be recognised by the movie industry. In order to avoid being mar-
ginalised, they resisted  mm, even though by  it already matched what
they were looking for in terms of weight, performance and sync sound. This
realisation led Bergala to claim that,
what has sometimes been overlooked, in rewriting the history of the advent of the
New Wave, is that there was no synchronization between the desire for esthetic, sty-
listic change, represented by the young team of the Cahiers du cinéma, and the reality
of technical developments in the s and s. One can even claim, in this particu-
lar historic context, that the idea of a new form of esthetics preceded, and in part
determined, the cinema’s technical innovations throughout the s.
The increase in image-based reportage of war zones, together with the advent of
television, made more portable cameras, such as the Arriflex, launched in ,
and the even lighter Caméflex or Camerette, created by Éclair in , a neces-
sity. These two  mm models, termed combat cameras by the Americans, did
have one substantial drawback however – their noise. Filmmakers had to wait a
long time for the industry to come up with an answer. The handy, and at long
last silent, Arri BL , the first  mm camera to permit shooting with live
sound, was only produced in , although it was soon followed by other
models. Alain Cavalier, who, like Renoir, never came round to the idea of dub-
bing, that moment when, as he put it: ‘sound finally meets the body, but too
late: it is impossible to separate what nature has united’ was thrilled to have
the opportunity of shooting Plein de super, a semi-improvised film shot in
, with the new Panavision camera:
Compact, silent and can be hand-held. Image and sound, same quick performance.
Shooting flexible and sharp. It feels as though the eye of the cameraman and the ear
of the sound engineer are my own. Impression that I’ve unearthed, for a long time to
come, the ultimate machine for seizing life before it either evaporates, freezes or
strikes me down.
If one shares Cavalier’s view that improvisation by actors requires live record-
ing of spontaneous speech to be effective, it has to be assumed that the New
Wave directors were not attracted to this kind of improvisation. Things were
not that simple, however. Whereas Chabrol, a dyed-in-the-wool Hitchcockian,
was never drawn, Rivette, as we know, came round to the idea in , with
L’Amour fou and Out One, and Rohmer experimented with it much later, in
Le Rayon vert. Although Truffaut enjoyed last-minute, on-set scriptwriting, he
hardly ever actually used improvisation. The case of Godard is more ambigu-
ous, as we shall see later. Although he demonstrated his longstanding interest
in the technical aspect of filmmaking by choosing the lightweight, quick-acting
Camerette to shoot À bout de souffle, this did not mean that the actors were
free to improvise; as on some of Orson Welles’ films, improvisation was re-
served for his own in situ choices of mise-en-scène. The improvisations that
really affected the actors actually occurred on the fringes of the New Wave, with
Jean Rouch and Jacques Rozier in particular monitoring the rapid development
of film equipment.
Jacques Rozier’s first feature film, Adieu Philippine, came out in . The
opening sequence, which unfolds as the credits are rolling, was shot in a televi-
sion studio during a live recording of Jean-Christophe Averty’s th programme
of Jazz Memories, featuring the clarinetist Maxim Saury. Against the black back-
ground that precedes the first image, the audience hears a voice giving the tem-
po for the opening jazz number and for the film itself. As Saury’s vibrant ‘…
…   …’ fades away, the opening shot merges precisely into the rhythm, with
the band striking up in time to the first beat of the measure. A sideways track-
ing shot focuses on a television camera and its cameraman, his eye on the view-
finder, and goes on to take in most of the set, showing the concentration of both
technicians and musicians, the trailing cables, the microphones, the dollies, the
lens turrets and control screens; in short, everything that constitutes a live re-
cording. Averty’s commanding tones ring out from time to time, before he actu-
ally appears on camera, sitting in a small studio, his eyes riveted on the moni-
tors showing shots from all the different cameras, from which he not only has to
choose the images he wants to broadcast but anticipate the next movements by
communicating with each of the cameramen. There is a clear analogy between
the band’s New Orleans polyphony and the apparently chaotic set, directed by
Averty. Rozier is comparing a live recording to a performance of New Orleans
jazz. The brilliant canvas composed by overlying harmonious and rhythmical
lines is countered by the pan shots, the whirling turrets, the ballet of cameramen
swiftly replacing the cameras, followed by the technicians freeing the cables.
This plethora of seemingly random operations demonstrates an extraordinary
impetus, directed towards a common end, its success depending on each per-
son’s commitment, encapsulated by all the band members during the live per-
formance.
This introduction to Adieu Philippine, in which Rozier pays tribute to the
techniques launched by television, conjures up the opening sequence of La Rè-
gle du jeu. Here there is no cameraman but a sound technician with a headset,
busy adjusting the potentiometers. A track out reveals a huge roll of cable being
uncoiled by another technician. The camera seems to be fleetingly drawn in by
the movement of the cable, before panning swiftly from left to right to frame a
close-up shot of a Radio-Cité reporter with a microphone. It then makes it way,
with difficulty, through the throng that has gathered to welcome the aviator
André Jurieu at Le Bourget airport, following his transatlantic flight. The repor-
ter, played by Lise Elina, comments live from the chaotic, bustling scene before
being granted a brief interview with the hero of the hour. The leitmotiv of this
sequence is the microphone cable, which enables Jurieu’s voice to be heard by
the interested party, as he expresses his disappointment at not seeing Christine,

the young woman to whom he dedicated this exploit. Renoir makes the link in a
dissolve between Jurieu and a close-up of the back of a radio, a close-up that
tilts up to reveal Christine standing next to her bed with her maid Lisette, both
of them listening anxiously to the live broadcast.
These two sequences, by highlighting the latest technical developments, went
some way towards meeting the cinematic ambitions of Renoir and Rozier. For
the former, the flexibility and accuracy of live sound and the rapid broadcasting
of news through the medium of radio. For the latter, the speed and reactivity of
shooting with several cameras, thanks to television. Two ways of broaching a
film with a gleeful demonstration of how technology makes it possible to seize
the moment, to capture the present. Twenty-three years elapsed between the
two, however, and while Renoir’s depiction of radio broadcasting is a reconsti-
tution, a simulated live recording, Rozier was actually shooting a live pro-
gramme. Rozier, who had been a television assistant, admitted much later that
he wanted ‘to draw on both Renoir and live television’. He went on, ‘So I shot
Adieu Philippine like that, with two cameras. This allowed me to avoid inter-
ruptions when shooting a sequence, to opt for continuity and therefore give the
actors plenty of freedom to improvise.’ The appeal of the live was just as in-
grained with Jean Rouch, and it is well known that he joined forces with camera
manufacturers to hone lightweight equipment that would provide optimum
conditions for shooting in Africa. In , in Abidjan, he directed La Pyramide
humaine, his first film with a modicum of live sound (which created its own
problems at the post-sync stage), celebrating its user-friendly technology in the
very first shots. After an announcement regarding the improvised nature of the
film, Rouch closed the pre-credits with a shot of two of the main characters
looking through the window of a camera shop, featuring a tripod camera no
bigger than a stills camera. Rozier and Rouch, both pioneers of improvisation,
were thereby acknowledging their debt to the technicians who had turned their
dream of the cinema into reality, a cinema which re-appropriated television re-
porting techniques to invent new forms of fiction. A few years later, in L’Amour
fou, Rivette was to use the backdrop of improvisation to examine the relation-
ship between television coverage and shooting in the more traditional  mm
format.
The links between television and improvised filmmaking in the late s
were not limited to reportage. ‘Intimacy is television’s style of predilection’
wrote André Bazin in . He went on: ‘In practical terms, the director has to
convey this by emphasizing the actor rather than the set; if one takes that to
extremes, the whole thing could actually be shot in close-up.’ To Bazin, televi-
sion was inextricably linked to the notion of the ‘live’, which creates a specific
rapport to intimacy. ‘It is obvious,’ he writes,
that [this intimacy] is linked as much to a temporal presence as it is to a spatial one

[…]. The recordings must retain the spontaneity of live broadcasts, because much of
the charm of the televised image would disappear if one got the impression that this
was a mere transmission of a film. Thanks to montage, a film can play tricks with
time. The esthetic moral of television, on the other hand, is one of honesty and risk.
The ensuing development of television only partially met Bazin’s expectations,

but the new relationship with intimacy that stemmed from the ‘spontaneity of
live broadcasts’ shed invaluable light on the aspirations of some of the film-
makers who were familiar with this new medium. The aims of Rozier or Rouch,
but also those of Cassavetes, who experienced television at first hand in his role
as actor, were basically the same: to use the techniques of live recording that
had originated with television programmes and reportage to create a cinema
that would be more receptive to the complexity of emotions. By simulating live
radio in order to broadcast, from the middle of a crowd, a message from André
Jurieu to his mistress, Renoir was already juxtaposing technological innovations
and intimacy. His followers, Rouch, Rozier and Rivette, relentlessly pursued
this path when lighter cameras, having finally mastered live sound, made it
possible to record emotions at human level. Showing the equipment on screen
is a serene acknowledgment of other methods and not some kind of mise en
abyme, their often precarious conditions guaranteeing genuine exchange be-
tween a small film crew and a few actors. By evoking the ‘honesty and risk’ of
television in the mid-s, Bazin was heralding the later experiments of impro-
vised cinema.
The desire to ‘[seize] life before it evaporates’, as Cavalier put it, did not only
require live sound; it also justified the desire to shoot outdoors without the need
for over-invasive lighting. The emergence of sensitive film also made a signifi-
cant contribution in making the equipment less cumbersome and intimidating,
particularly for non-professional actors, who brought their own truth to impro-
vised filmmaking. Mastering these new techniques implied unprecedented ‘re-
gimes of images’, less dependent on formal perfection in its classic sense than
on the instantaneous capture of the disharmony of the world, its movements
and its energies. Technical progress often stems from a need to ensure absolute
control, to refute the unpredictable. With improvisation it tends to be the re-
verse: technical fine-tuning finally allowed filmmakers to cater for the unfore-
seen, to be where the action was and to produce new kinds of relationship to
reality and to the artistic gesture.
3. The influence of Jean Rouch
Godard as improviser?
Motivated by his determination to depict life in the villages of sub-Saharan Afri-

ca with optimum independence and spontaneity, Jean Rouch played a key role
in the implementation of new cinematographic techniques. His extraordinary
empathy with human complexity and his initial lack of interest in the so-called
‘grammar’ of film stemmed from his ethnological background. His aim was to
record the truth of a ritual, a gesture, a situation, an attitude, an exchange, and
he was not particularly bothered by stability of frame, consistency of focus or
seamless match cuts. Rouch was first and foremost an ethnologist and it was
only in the late s that he fulfilled his writing ambition and became an ‘eth-
nocineast’, as René Prédal so aptly put it. Around a dozen films preceded Les
Maîtres fous, which was shot in  but only screened in Venice in , and
this was followed a year later by Moi, un Noir (), and then by Chronique
d’un été () and La Pyramide humaine (). Throughout this period, he
used lightweight cameras to experiment with a form of improvisation, which
was to reach its apotheosis, but no doubt also its limits, a decade later, with
Petit à petit () and above all Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet ().
In a well-known text entitled ‘La Caméra et les hommes’, first published in
, Rouch defended his position as ethnographer, cameraman and director:
‘[…] in today’s manner of shooting sync-sound direct cinema, the director can
only be the cameraman. It is the ethnographer alone, to my mind, who really
knows when, where, and how to film, in other words to ‘direct’.’ Thanks to his
lightweight  mm hand-held cameras, he was able to get up close to his sub-
jects: ‘For me,’ he continued, ‘the only way to film is to walk with the camera,
taking it where it is most effective, and improvising another type of ballet, try-
ing to make it as alive as the people it is filming.’ In March , Godard ac-
knowledged the importance of Rouch in two articles devoted to Moi, un Noir,
to which À bout de souffle, shot in August that same year, owes much of its
audacity. Godard noted first of all that it was feasible to improvise in the course
of shooting, much like a reporter, without relinquishing one’s creative ambi-
tions: ‘[Rouch] has grasped that reportage today has earned its badge of honor
by becoming a kind of quest for the holy grail we term mise-en-scène’, he wrote
in Arts. Although Godard did not actually carry the camera himself in À bout
de souffle, numerous photos of the shoot show Raoul Coutard with his hand-
held Camerette following the cast like a television reporter, with Godard by his
side, physically living the take. Director, cameraman and actor: the crew on
Godard’s first film was as small, and consequently as reactive, as Rouch’s Afri-
can crew, and neither film was shot in sync sound. The second aspect that di-
rectly inspired Godard was the montage of Moi, un Noir, in which Rouch dis-
missed all the rules of continuity editing in favour of new rhythms linked to
physical movement, to an inner beat, elements that would also be found in Sha-
dows, Cassavetes’ first film, at that time in its finishing stages on the other side
of the Atlantic.
In Moi, un Noir the jump cuts, as they came to be called, were caused by a
mechanical camera which Rouch had to wind up manually every twenty-five
seconds – in mid-take! This drawback was the reason behind the fantastic side-
ways tracking shot in which ‘Edward G. Robinson’ tells Petit Jules about his
experiences in the Indochinese War. It was therefore really by chance that
Rouch discovered this new technique. Over and above these technical con-
straints, however, Rouch also invented new figures and jumps, and unprece-
dented forms of splicing, designed to lend an air of vitality without the shackles
of narrative continuity. This impression of confusion and even lack of control is
particularly noticeable in the dance contest sequence, in which the bodies seem
to be freewheeling, multiplying, repeatedly escaping from the frame, to the
driving rhythm of the drums. In the end, however, it is all a question of editing
prowess: the regular beat of the drums to the unsynchronised movements of the
musicians, the incredible parade of dancers’ bodies to the regular flow of the
music, the bodies that seem to be taunting those relentless jump cuts in move-
ment, expression or light. Rouch, probably working on intuition, was compos-
ing a polyrhythmic montage designed to draw the audience into this impro-
vised surge of energy. One needs to qualify, however, his innumerable
assertions concerning the simultaneity of the shooting and montage processes,
particularly in his feature films: ‘All [of his] bodily improvisations (camera
movement, framing, shot lengths) finally results in editing through shooting’,
he wrote in ‘The Camera and Man’. In fact, although the orientations of the
montage undoubtedly sprang from the plethora of on-set improvisations, the
amount of footage printed for each of his films necessitated a huge amount of
editing work, as has been confirmed by Danièle Tessier, Rouch’s editor for a
number of years.
The mechanical camera may have limited the length of the shots in Moi, un
Noir, but it was another kind of constraint that dictated the montage of À bout
de souffle. It was too long, and so Godard and his editor Cécile Decugis
decided to edit each shot, but only by making cuts that did not interfere with
3. The influence of Jean Rouch 51
the internal rhythm of the sequences. It was probably the widespread use of
jump cuts in Rouch’s film, which Godard could not fail to have noticed, that
persuaded him to challenge so dramatically, in his very first feature film, one of
the most sacred rules in the cinematic ‘lexicon’. Taking this liberty had another,
more decisive consequence, however: by freeing the montage from the con-
straints of the match cut, it was suddenly possible to improvise during the mon-
tage. The director and editor were no longer committed to a predetermined con-
tinuity. They could invent unplanned chords and discords between shots: ‘It is a
whole new system of rhythm, and a serial or atonal cinema, a new conception of
montage’, wrote Gilles Deleuze in The Time-Image.
This reference to serial music takes us away from improvisation, however, by
stripping the montage of spontaneity. His ensuing films were to illustrate their
lack of improvisation, first in the montage and then in the mixing, most notably
in their exploration of the relationship between the cinema’s sound components
and its images. In composer mode, Godard was harking back to the research
into serial music carried out by the Viennese musicians and their heirs. Follow-
ing his rhythmical explorations in À bout de souffle, the acknowledged ideal
of Godard the artist shifted from jazz improvisation to the balance and determi-
nation of art music. À bout de souffle, which conveys a distinct feel of impro-
visation, highlighted by the presence of Martial Solal’s jazz music, stands alone
in its highly intuitive recourse to a montage inspired by a rhythmical beat remi-
niscent of swing. Godard did not give up the idea of improvisation during
shooting, however, a hypothesis borne out by Bergala’s studies in Godard au
travail. In relation to the ‘freestanding sequences, allowing for improvisation
of details and adaptability within the overall economy of the script’, he writes:
‘It is when he is shooting these sequences, these ‘free figures’, that Godard de-
monstrates his talent for on-the-spot invention with the greatest pleasure and
ease, when there is no narrative agenda to obliterate the freedom of filming the
here and now of the shoot.’ Unlike Rozier or Rivette, however, this ‘brio in the
moment’, as Coutard put it, was not intended to give the actors or technicians
a turn at improvisation. The last-minute dialogues, sometimes even prompted
in mid-take, show Godard’s talent for improvisation but also his determination
not to allow the actor time for any improvisation of his own. By preventing any
‘interpretation’ in the classic sense of the term, something he abhorred, he did
obtain a degree of spontaneity, but an ephemeral spontaneity, without any fixed
plan, far removed from the form of improvisation that implies awareness of a
possible future. Godard’s admiration for the Rouch of Moi, un Noir can there-
fore be explained by the fact that it contains minimal improvisation by the char-
acters, who are often simply living out their lives on camera. Rouch with his
hand-held camera is the only one improvising here; the continuity would be
devised at the editing stage. The pervasive impression of a happening stems
from the improvised commentary of Oumarou Ganda, who reinvented his story
long after the shoot had ended, reliving his character’s wanderings as the film
was being screened. In the two articles he devoted to Moi, un Noir, Godard did
not even mention this commentary, giving the impression that it was a dialogue
that had been recorded live. While he admired the daring of Rouch the film-
maker and Rouch the editor and was inspired by Rouch the inventor of forms,
Godard was impervious to his characters’ fabulations; fabulations that were to
become one of Jean Rouch’s driving forces. And it is here that the serial compo-
sitions of the former and the free experimentations of the latter part company.
Fabulation and improvisation
A classic documentary cannot be envisaged as an improvisation, except by the

filmmaker himself, who constantly needs to address the unforeseen. In the cin-
ema, as in the other arts, improvisation cannot occur without the desire to im-
provise, without consciously committing a creative act through improvisation.
When a director films characters going about their daily lives, he is filming them
living, not improvising. If Rouch is so significant in the cinema’s conception of
improvisation it is because he invented improvisational strategies in order to
rekindle the documentary brief of ethnographical cinema – with Les Maîtres
fous and particularly Moi, un Noir – but this did not turn him into a fiction
filmmaker. It was Gilles Deleuze who really grasped the importance of the ‘in-
between’ nature of Rouch’s cinéma vérité. Referring to his films he wrote,
The break is not between fiction and reality, but in the new mode of story which
affects both of them. […] What is opposed to fiction is not the real; it is not the truth
which is always that of the masters or colonizers; it is the story-telling function of the
poor, in so far as it gives the false the power which makes it into a memory, a legend,
a monster. […] What cinema must grasp is not the identity of a character, whether
real or fictional, through his objective and subjective aspects. It is the becoming of the
real character when he himself starts to ‘make fiction’ […] and so contributes to the
invention of his people. The character is inseparable from a before and an after, but he
reunites these in the passage from one state to the other. He himself becomes another,
when he begins to tell stories without ever being fictional.
This lengthy quotation helps define the role of improvisation in a ‘modern’ as-
pect of the cinema: while fabulation may be considered as a specific form of
improvisation, any form of improvisation must contain a degree of fabulation.
In many of his films, Rouch highlights this fabulation from the starting point
of an array of existing modes of improvisation. The transition from real charac-
ters to ‘fictionising’ characters emerges clearly from the collective possession

rites of the Hauka sect, played out by Nigerian emigrants in the suburbs of
Accra in Les Maîtres fous. In Moi, un Noir, a far less ritualised transition
takes place in the way identification is constantly played out between the ‘real’
characters and their cinema heroes, Edward G. Robinson, Lemmy Caution and
Dorothy Lamour. It was in his next film, La Pyramide humaine (), how-
ever, that improvisation – duly acknowledged as such – really came into its
own. In the prologue, Rouch outlined the challenges and methods at stake. He
can be seen in Abidjan, explaining his project – to explore ‘what friendship
would be like if you got rid of any racial complex’ – first to a group of white
high school students and then to a group of black students, who never mix out-
side school, even though they are all in the same class. The two groups are to
experience this adventure together, inventing the characters and situations
themselves, under the watchful eye of the small crew. Rouch’s voice completes
the prologue as the images show a friendly exchange between two students, one
white and one black. ‘The film we have produced, instead of reflecting reality,
creates another reality. The story never happened, it grew out of the shoot, with
the actors inventing their reactions and dialogues as they went along; improvi-
sation was the only name of the game.’
The original brief (to overcome the divisions caused by skin colour) acted as
the trigger and the students therefore made their contributions to the script with
this in mind. The opportunity for fabulation stemmed from the live recording of
their words. This improvised dialogue became their benchmark, determining
the development of the characters’ relationships, which, in turn, influenced the
sequences to be filmed, thereby negating any need for a shooting schedule. La
Pyramide humaine demonstrated that the success, but also the difficulties, of
any form of genuine improvisation were linked to the adventure of speech. As he
says in his prologue, the aim of improvisation is indeed to create another reality,
without the intermediary of a script or written dialogues, which always provide
the director with a means of controlling speech. In an extreme case such as this,
improvisation contaminates every stage of the directorial process and all the
facets of the shooting itself. The storyline is conceived within the work-in-pro-
gress, the options chosen for the mise-en-scène depend on the exchanges be-
tween the characters and the same applies to the venues and times of the shoot.
Rouch shoots long improvised debates between the students, on racism or, ac-
cording to the context, on the art of seduction. The powerful presence of the
dialogues clearly demonstrates one of the limitations of improvisation. Tongues
are not truly untied in the symbolic subtext of the conversations on racism; the
young actors, probably out of a sense of caution, hide behind clichés. In the
flirtation scenes, the uneasiness stems from the ambiguous interplay between
the chat-up lines that really took place during the shoot and those that were
scripted specifically for the film. The conversations are inhibited by this uncer-
tainty and the dialogue often appears very artificial. These relative failures illus-
trate the difficulty for non-professional actors to improvise on a given theme
without slipping into banality or confusion. In the context of the dialogue alone,
the very first sequences of the film, in which Rouch experiences the feedback to
his proposal from the students (who are not improvising in this case, but are
genuinely living the scene on camera) are far more true to life than the ‘fictional’
sequences, as are the equally improvised dances, games and beach scenes, in
which two different attitudes to the body are also revealed. The laid-back hu-
morous attitude of the young Africans, who have turned desire into a favourite
game, is dramatically juxtaposed with the self-conscious awkwardness of their
European classmates – no scripted scene would ever have achieved such verac-
ity.
In Jaguar, shot in  with commentary added in  and again in  on
its release, Lam, Illo and Damouré leave their village in Niger to make their
fortune in Accra, Ghana. As the adventures of these three friends unfold, each
episode of their journey provides an opportunity to depict everyday life in Afri-
ca, with its markets, harbours and celebrations, but also the contrast between
the swarming cities and the vast expanses of virgin land. The actors play them-
selves, improvising the commentary and dialogues on the final cut, like Oumara
Ganda in Moi, un Noir. It was in Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet that Rouch
really explored fabulation as a principle of cinematic composition. The credits
feature a ‘collective’ director under the name of Dalarou, which stands for Da-
mouré Zika, Lam Ibrahim Dia and Jean Rouch. In La Pyramide humaine, each
student was consciously playing a role that was more or less akin to his true
identity. Those who played the ‘nasty racists’, for example, if only as a defensive
reflex, needed to be more acutely aware that they were acting than the lovesick
admirers of the gorgeous Nadine. In Jaguar, the characters seem to be go-be-
tweens linking Rouch the anthropologist to the reality of Africa. In Cocorico,
Monsieur Poulet, Rouch dismisses the overemphatic symbolic dimension of
La Pyramide humaine, and by overstepping the documentary aspects of Ja-
guar accepts the constant blurring of the frontiers between documentary and
fiction. His initial intention had been to make a documentary on the young Afri-
cans of Niger, who comb the length and breadth of the bush to buy chickens to
sell in Niamey’s large market. The film turned into an adventure featuring three
friends, played by Damouré Zika, Lam Ibrahim Dia and Tallou Mouzourane, as
they travel from village to village in an incongruous CV car. Things soon start
to get complicated, and a host of unforeseen twists and turns develop following
their roadside encounter with a she-devil who casts a spell on them. The classic
documentary gives way to comedy but it never loses sight of its ethnographical
brief, thanks to the overlap between the actors and their role. Rouch is no longer
the key player of La Pyramide humaine or the narrator of Jaguar; here every-
one joins in the narrative, inventing the story during the course of the shoot. But
to Damouré, Lam and Tallou this invention has become a way of playing their
own image, allowing their imagination a free rein from the starting point of
their own existence, as though Oumara Ganda’s improvisation to the images of
Moi, un Noir had ‘contaminated’ the entire film. Although Rouch and his ac-
complices are naturally directing operations, it becomes impossible to distin-
guish between the true experiences of the crew facing the ups and downs of life
in the bush and the events springing from the team efforts of the various ‘script-
writers’. The strength of the film, which provides an insight into another side of
the real Africa, its fears and shadows, and not just its vitality and freedom, lies
precisely in this uncertainty. Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet represents the acme
of cinema improvisation, thanks not only to Rouch’s directorial decisions and
the reactivity of the filming techniques but also to a culture in which the uncer-
tainty of everyday life turns each day into a series of possible adventures and
each character into a potential improviser.
Theoretically a long way from Rouch’s Africa, this fabulation takes different
forms under improvising filmmakers such as van der Keuken, Rozier, Cassa-
vates, Rivette, Ameur-Zaïmeche and Faucon. For them, the exploits of the body
are as powerful as those of speech and their choices are less theoretical than
those of La Pyramide humaine. The life force of their films, however, often
depends on their characters’ ability to inject their improvisational skills into the
dialogues. The collective dialogue-writing that takes place during rehearsals is a
way of encouraging overflow during the actual performance. In Samia ()
for instance, which shows the conflict between tradition and modernity in a
family of Algerian immigrants living in Marseilles, Philippe Faucon chose non-
professional actors from the North African community, who created their char-
acters from the reality of their own lives. Samia’s personality is very similar to
that of the young Lynda Benahouda and, although the film is entirely fictional,
this resemblance engenders authenticity. On several occasions, the dialogue,
much of it written with the actors, springs from words invented in the heat of
the moment, words that can trigger a series of spontaneous exchanges. In a par-
ticularly striking sequence, the mother points to her own life of sacrifice and
relinquishment, castigating her daughters for their desire for emancipation,
symbolised by their wish to go out with their girlfriends. During their exchange,
in Arabic, Samia wants to tell her mother that this resignation has driven her to
forego her own happiness but a particular word escapes her. She therefore asks
her sister Farida, in French, how to say ‘happiness’ in Arabic. By improvising her
question during the take, Samia (and consequently the actress herself) displays
her ignorance of the word ‘happiness’ in Arabic, although she knows it per-
fectly in French. This is an unpredictable offshoot of the truth stemming from
the element of fabulation that went into building each of these characters, and
no preordained dialogue could have produced this degree of symbolic force.
Faucon’s whole film reflects this apparently banal conversation between a
mother and her daughters in its succession of concrete situations, which enable
each character to act within a hair’s breadth of real life. There is no looming
agenda here, none of those conveniently simplistic archetypes on ‘the suburbs’,
just a desire, already formulated by Renoir (to whom Faucon often refers) to
favour the performer rather than the role, the concrete rather than the abstract,
to film life rather than an idea of life.
It is certainly no coincidence that the films that have contributed to changing
the image of second or third generation immigrant communities all share a di-
rect link with a method that plays on the dividing line between fiction and doc-
umentary. This is the case not only with Faucon’s Samia but with Wesh Wesh,
qu’est-ce qui se passe? and Dernier Maquis, both directed by Rabah Ameur-
Zaïmeche, not to mention L’Esquive () and La Graine et le Mulet ()
by Abdelatif Kechiche. All these films, which take a new slant on ordinary
events from everyday life, are mainly played by non-professionals with affi-
nities to their roles, making it possible for them to appropriate the situations
and create an often indefinable reciprocity between actor and character. In the
sequence with the mother, the personality of the actress Lynda Benahouda spills
over into the character of Samia for a split second, before the role takes prece-
dence once again. But this overflow as a means of attaining another form of
reality is also a clue to understanding the work of Cassavetes, who declared
that ‘the main difference between Shadows and [my] other films is that Sha-
dows stems from the characters, whereas in the other films it is the characters
who stem from the script’; or, that of Jacques Rozier, who responded to a
question relating to the three girls in Du côté d’Orouët by saying: ‘Something
had been written but it wasn’t difficult to improvise because the three girls were
so close to their characters. You just had to open the floodgates and let the
scenes flow in as you went along. It was that movement that determined the
movement of the film.’ Before tackling the specificities of improvisation as
seen by Cassavetes or Rozier, however, it is worth showing the repercussions of
Rouch’s bold approach on contemporary cinema by studying the work of one of
his most fascinating ‘heirs’, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, a director who manages to
tread clear-sightedly in Rouch’s footsteps while assimilating the complexity of a
political agenda.
Ritual and overflow in the cinema of Rabah Ameur-

Zaïmeche
The primary aim of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s trilogy is to bring the cinema face
to face with immigration-linked communities in the France of today. Wesh
Wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe? () features a few weeks in the life of Kamel,
played by Ameur-Zaïmeche himself, a young Algerian who following his double
peine or double sentence returns secretly to the housing project in which he
grew up, the cité des Bosquets in the Seine-Saint-Denis. The same Kamel crops
up again in Bled Number One (), this time in his home country, Algeria,
probably because of a second deportation or maybe as a prequel to Wesh Wesh.
Once back in his family’s small village, he is struck, on the one hand, by his
warm welcome after so many years away, but also by the archaisms of Algeria,
where the embers of civil war are still glowing. Finally, in Dernier Maquis
(), Mao, played once again by Ameur-Zaïmeche, the boss of a small pallet
manufacturing business on the outskirts of Paris, where illegal immigrant work-
ers from sub-Saharan Africa rub shoulders with the North African employees,
provides his staff with a small mosque for Friday prayers. Everything revolves
around the idea of borders, whether real or symbolic: the border between the
outside world and the cité des Bosquets, made to look like a tiny sanctuary for
the unemployed and aimless North African diaspora; the border between
France and Algeria experienced by Kamel, who now sees the gulf that separates
him from his Algerian background; the border between a small businessman,
also of Algerian origin, his North African workers and the Malians who have
entered France illegally to look for work. Ameur-Zaïmeche is determined to
portray the way these myriad borders can be overcome and his approach is
reminiscent of Jean Rouch in many ways, particularly in his highly skilful use
of improvisational strategies.
Ameur-Zaïmeche has had no formal training and his love of the cinema
seems to have been triggered by the anthropological studies that first intro-
duced him to Rouch’s work. He shot Wesh Wesh without any financial backing
apart from a modest inheritance, with a small Sony camera normally used for
television reporting. Nicolas Bancilhon, a young audiovisual graduate, joined
forces with him on the editing, which was carried out on hired equipment. Fol-
lowing the critical success of Wesh Wesh, Bled Number One was made under
relatively comfortable financial conditions and shot with two DSR  cameras,
undoubtedly more up-market than the small Sony but still basically designed
for television reporting. Whereas these first two films called for a reactive crew
and a great deal of hand-held camera work, the virtual unity of place of Der-
nier Maquis enabled Ameur-Zaïmeche to try his hand at another approach,
this time with a chief camerawoman (Irina Lubtchansky) who was more con-
cerned with the architecture of the frame and had a preference for tripod shoot-
ing, both of which fitted perfectly into the highly geometric set formed by the
huge columns of pallets. All these technical choices were linked to his determi-
nation to work with a small crew, who were all hugely committed to the proj-
ects, despite their complexity and economic vulnerability. All three films were
self-produced, this being the only way to guarantee the independence and free-
dom so prized by Ameur-Zaïmeche. All this goes to show that the adventures
of Jean Rouch are still viable today, at a cost, on the vibrant fringes of contempo-
rary cinema.
The concrete options shared by Rouch and Ameur-Zaïmeche would have lit-
tle impact without the avowedly anthropological dimension of the latter, imple-
mented by a mise-en-scène that seems to pursue the former’s explorations.
Ameur-Zaïmeche is also aware that in order to bring about a connivance that
will be propitious for exchange and consequently for collective improvisation,
he needs to focus on shared stories. His three films tell the story of the on-screen
characters and, although a script does exist, its purpose is to define the project
and provide the orientations that will give the films meaning. During the shoot,
Ameur-Zaïmeche refers to this script as little as possible, as adapting to circum-
stances is a prerequisite for the successful appropriation of the situations by the
crew. The small collective, released from the authority of a written script, there-
fore, immerses itself wholeheartedly in the shoot, which is conducive to a great
deal of improvisation. This proves to be no easy task however, thanks to the
innumerable ups and downs and the way some shots can actually challenge the
existence of the following sequence and sometimes even of the whole project.
The reality of each situation, therefore, has to be gauged by means of the
characters, who are almost always non-professional actors playing themselves.
This is the case with Wesh Wesh, which stemmed from the urban anthropology
research carried out by Ameur-Zaïmeche and his fellow scriptwriter Madjid Be-
naroudj. The actors were members of the director’s own family and friends liv-
ing in the cité des Bosquets, and the month prior to shooting was devoted to
fine-tuning each role to fit its performer. Bled Number One was shot in the
village where another part of Ameur-Zaïmeche’s family still lives, and the fa-
mily members naturally took over most of the roles. Finally, the unskilled Afri-
can workers who appear in Dernier Maquis are genuine workers from a firm
not far from the film location, which suffered a slight ‘delocalisation’ for the
benefit of the film.
These films, however, are not documentaries about a suburban housing proj-
ect, an isolated village in the Algerian countryside or a small firm on the out-
skirts of Paris. We are back in Deleuze’s ‘in-between’, with fictional scripts that
seem to give new impetus to fabulation as a form of improvisation and as a way
of crossing the boundaries of documentary and fiction in either direction. A

sequence from Wesh Wesh provides a perfect example of this: three ‘dudes’,
having bought a patently stolen golf bag from a fourth guy, improvise a game
of golf on the expanse of greenery that surrounds their housing project. The
scene in which, helpless with laughter, they imitate the gestures of the golfers
they have seen on television is worthy of Rouch in its quirky self-evidence, with
all it implies in terms of playfulness, dreams and fabulation. The game may
have been written into the script as a fictional situation but no one could have
foreseen its development, with the protagonists, having been given a free rein,
transforming it into a highly ironic ‘scene from suburban life’.
Ameur-Zaïmeche not only succeeds in introducing a symbolic dimension into
the banality of the everyday, he manages to bring improvisation into play from
the standpoint of his anthropological interest in social and religious rites. In
Bled Number One, the most ‘Rouchian’ sequence is the one depicting the Zer-
da, a ritual in which the community slaughters an ox and the families all share
out the meat. There was no preparatory mise-en-scène here: Ameur-Zaïmeche
replaced the wedding scene written into the initial script with this ritual, held in
honour of the crew, and the scene turned into one of the lynchpins of the film.
Although he paid great attention to each stage of the ceremony, from the killing
of the beast to the sharing of the meat, he had no hesitation in incorporating his
fictional characters into the ritual. When the men tell Kamel that it is forbidden
to mix with women during the Zerda, Kamel replies that there is no harm in
saying hello; in the following sequence he can therefore be seen, in his signature
orange cap, in the midst of the procession of women making their way to the
ceremony, in the beautiful Algerian light. By overstepping the territorial limits
between men and women, he is blurring once again the border between fiction
and documentary and questioning the immutable nature of the ritual itself.
Improvisation, therefore, makes it possible to challenge the archaism of some
traditions without dismissing them, by allowing them to overflow into mo-
ments of freedom in the form of an unexpected interjection or an unforeseen
act, which ideally emerge as the camera starts rolling. In the same film, Kamel’s
cousin Louisa is beaten by her brother Bouzid because she stood up to her hus-
band, who is determined to quell her passion for singing. A Taleb, who has
been called in by the family to ‘cure’ Louisa of her longing for emancipation,
prescribes seven turns around the mosque and a swim in the sea, during which
seven waves will lash her face. Ameur-Zaïmeche films the two rituals but strips
them of their initial raison d’être – their sacred dimension – giving them a whole
new meaning. The swim, shot near a freighter that has run aground on the
beach, in a very similar décor to that of the end of La Pyramide humaine, is an
ode to freedom and the beauty of the female body. The obvious pleasure these
three women are getting from their improvised swim, in front of a cameraman
who is doing his best to capture the bodies being buffeted by the waves, intro-
duces an erotic dimension that is clearly at odds with the initial religious intent.
Similarly, following the seven turns around the mosque, which she treats like a
child’s game under the amused eye of Kamel, Louisa starts singing to him That’s
the way it will be; this magnificent song takes the act of ‘penitence’ further,
turning it into a peaceful protest against a ritual aimed at ‘curing’ her of her
passion, and once again sidetracks the initial meaning. Improvisation intro-
duces the unexpected and the profane into a sacred ritual, but does not repudi-
ate it. By prolonging the ritual by this moment of life and longing, Ameur-Zaï-
meche is raising the possibility, if not the necessity, of moving traditions
forward; but he refrains from challenging them, only too aware of the impor-
tance of collective rites in maintaining social links in modest communities.
In a sequence from Dernier Maquis, his third film, the blend of sacred and
profane, and consequently of documentary and fiction, reaches a kind of culmi-
nation. Mao, the boss of the small pallet manufacturing business, is inaugurat-
ing the place of worship he has just created for his Muslim workers. Inside the
mosque, the sequence begins with the removal of shoes, greetings and a brief
welcoming speech by Mao, who introduces the Imam to the mechanics and
workers. At the Imam’s invitation, a man gets up and makes the call to prayer.
Ameur-Zaïmeche shows obvious respect when shooting the ensuing prayer
scenes and the ballet formed by the hands of the faithful as they greet each
other, a symbol of the fraternity uniting them as they complete their prayers. It
is at this point that one of the mechanics takes the floor to complain about the
fact that the Imam was chosen by the boss. He feels this should have been a
collective decision and he calls for a mashoura, a consultation. A number of his
workmates join him in criticising what they see as Mao’s abuse of power and
accuse the Imam of being the boss’s representative. They even explicitly suspect
Mao of placing the mosque at their disposal in order to quell social unrest, as he
owes them money. The sequence ends with the group separating: the mechanics
walk off complaining about the legitimacy of the Imam, who finds his support
among the unskilled workers, most of them illegal immigrants, who remain be-
hind in the mosque.
This extraordinary sequence once again blends documentary (the prayer ri-
tual) and fiction (the protest, with its obviously political undercurrent). Ameur-
Zaïmeche takes the ritual as his source but carries the mise-en-scène further,
spilling over into the social and religious domain. In fact, although it had been
prepared, the second part of this sequence was not actually scripted. Only a few
of the protagonists were given advance warning of the protest, so that they
could trigger the improvisation. The general framework was, therefore, prede-
termined, but the sequence of events was improvised, without the safety net of
a second take – the truth that might or might not spring forth had to depend on
the immediate reactions of the rest of the cast. The attitude of the African work-
ers, who defend the Imam (and therefore the boss), versus that of the North
African employees, who lucidly express their doubts about Mao’s true motiva-
tions, creates a rift that takes on its true dimension later, when the mechanics
find themselves threatened with dismissal. Ameur-Zaïmeche manages to com-
bine, in a single sequence, the beauty of the ceremony and the solidarity that
seems to unite the faithful, the possible connivance between socio-political
power and religious power, and finally the potential for resistance and freedom
at the heart of a highly regimented and therefore predictable ritual. Improvisa-
tion once again serves to make the profane intrude on the sacred and thereby
reveal another truth about the Muslim faith and its believers, far from Western
clichés.
Ameur-Zaïmeche also maximises the potential of improvisation when he de-
picts social rituals. At the end of Bled Number One, Louisa, who has fled her
village, is interned in the women’s unit of the psychiatric hospital in Constan-
tine following her attempted suicide. She defends once again her right to sing
by organising a concert for the male and female patients. This creates great ex-
citement in the hospital, where hosting a film crew is an unprecedented event.
When Louisa/Meriem Serbah, a jazz singer, performs a song by Billie Holiday,
the emotion in the room is tangible. Suddenly one of the women patients, fol-
lowed by another, and then another, make their way to the stage and start sing-
ing too, before a spellbound and delighted audience. The cameraman captures
as best he can the joy and sense of relief experienced by these patients as they
perform before their fellow inmates and nursing staff, the complicity of the pia-
nist and double bass player as they launch into an improvised reggae accompa-
niment, and the pleasure shared by the audience. The unpolished effects,
caused by the cameraman having to improvise in the face of an event that was
itself improvised – and that yet again could not be repeated – only add to the
emotion triggered by this moment of truth. Although the character of Louisa is
fictional, the concert is genuine and the immediacy of the audience reaction
makes it feel as though the fictional is spilling into the documentary.
These few examples underline the way in which Ameur-Zaïmeche has perpe-
tuated the work of Jean Rouch, whom he readily acknowledges as the only di-
rector to have influenced both his love of the cinema and his own work as film-
maker. They share the same desire for a collective cinema, an approachable
cinema that respects human sensitivity and builds a dialogue between visions
of the world that can often appear remote, not to mention contradictory, but
which come together on screen in their thirst for reciprocal exchange and under-
standing. The other aspect they have in common is, of course, their method,
based on that prerequisite time of encounter and on the opportunity for each
character to ‘fabulate’, to play himself, appropriating the fictions created by the
filmmaker to invent new ones, that then turn into realities. Fabulation becomes
a form of improvisation in its own right, involving just as much the ‘actors’ as
the director or film crew. Ameur-Zaïmeche, however, is not satisfied with sim-
ply applying the principles that underpinned the modernity of Rouch’s work.
He renews their impact, acknowledging his films as works of fiction but adding
more and more crossovers between the realms of fiction and documentary,
which counter one another in a kind of irresolute shot-reverse shot. His mise-
en-scène bases this new slant on largely unprecedented improvisational techni-
ques that find an ideal outlet, as we have seen, in the unpredictable overflow of
social or religious rituals. However, in losing their natural, almost everyday di-
mension to become mere traces of a page that has been turned, these have lost
the therapeutic function that is such an integral part of Rouch’s films. To
Ameur-Zaïmeche these collective rituals, which can be viewed as ready-made
mises-en-scène, remain the guarantors of social intercourse. Yet, these are also
static repositories, perpetuating immutable orders. By intervening directly in
these rituals, Ameur-Zaïmeche shows himself to be a far more political film-
maker than Rouch, displaying greater affinity to tangible situations such as the
North-South divide. The communities he films are those of cosmopolitan sub-
urbs or small businesses exploiting a new sub-proletariat of immigrant workers.
When he chooses a small North African village as his fictional location, he does
so in order to uncover the tension between a legitimate desire for modernity
and archaisms stemming from cultural as well as religious traditions. The time
for Rouch’s wonderful fables has passed, even if they also allowed glimpses of
the uncertainty of the world. Rouch, as he put it himself, created films ‘the way
Armstrong played the trumpet’. Ameur-Zaïmeche takes up the tune but intro-
duces the strident notes of John Coltrane, redolent with free jazz and blues.
Coltrane, whose gut-wrenching Naima suddenly wells up from the concrete jun-
gle of the cité des Bosquets in Wesh Wesh and meets the lush vegetation in
which Kamel, still persona non grata, seems to find some semblance of tranqui-
lity.
Improvised tangents: from documentary to fiction
Improvising filmmakers, whether they are closer to fiction or to documentary,

have two ambitions to contend with: the first, which could be termed ‘formal’,
provides a way of highlighting their creative mastery and the originality of their
outlook on the world, while the other, which is perhaps more concrete, involves
a direct confrontation with the elements, with the freedom of the body, with the
stuff of the world. Improvisation may come across as a way of eluding formal
mastery, allowing a moment of truth that cannot exist in scripted form or

through rehearsals to enter a particular shot or sequence. This manifestation of
the unforeseeable would, therefore, appear to represent the documentary di-
mension of any fiction. The first problem with this, however, is that this is not
the way the creative act of improvisation emerges. Improvisation is not chance
in itself but what chance activates, in the form of an unexpected phrase or un-
planned gesture. To improvise is to adapt in real time to the unexpected. Such
improvisation will only bear fruit if it is welcomed by the actors and crew – a
prerequisite if ‘documentary truth’, as Jean-Louis Comolli put it, is to find its
way into fiction.
By throwing himself into the water at the end of Boudu sauvé des eaux, Bou-
du (Michel Simon) regains his freedom and reneges on a destiny mapped out
through the hastily-arranged marriage with the Lestingois’ maid. Renoir ex-
tends the fictional story not through improvisation but by juxtaposing Boudu’s
body with nature, in this case the wilful current of the river, which Michel Si-
mon has to master in order to bring it into play. Although the situation itself is
not improvised, the actor needs to call on improvisation in his movements in
the river. Some time later, on the bank, he has to improvise yet again when a
goat, apparently frightened by the whistle of a train, tries to escape, thereby
negating the presumably ‘scripted’ idea of a game between man and animal.
The cameraman moves the frame slightly to the right to get rid of the goat and
then tracks Michel Simon as he improvises a gesture in order to shift the empha-
sis of the scene. This is a basic example of ‘documentary’ elements interfering,
on purpose or by accident, with the outcome of a sequence. Renoir did not sim-
ply place his film in a natural setting: by abandoning Michel Simon’s body to
the vagaries of the current and the whims of the animal, he is showing his de-
termination to bring the outside world into his shots as tangibly as possible,
despite the cumbersome technical constraints. Renoir’s affection for noises off
always brought him up against these confrontations with the forces of nature.
This could be viewed as the first stepping-stone from fiction to documentary,
which would later be taken up and radicalised by Rossellini, with the ruins of
postwar Berlin crushing, with their ghastly presence, the body of little Edmund
in Allemagne, année zéro. In Renoir’s welcoming natural setting or through Ros-
sellini’s documentary brutality, what matters, however, is to bring the shoot up
sharp with the randomness and reality of the world, in the hopes that a truth
will seep into the bodies of the actors so that the décor can transcend the bound-
aries of its physical space and become a second skin.
This determination to make fiction segue into documentary resurfaced much
later in the work of Renoir and Rossellini’s more or less direct descendants. In
many of his films, Jacques Rozier also drove his actors to improvise by thrusting
‘documentary’ nature into his shots. In his very first short feature, Rentrée des
classes, which was shot in , he filmed a mischievous schoolboy in a river,

drifting along with the current like Boudu. The boy then turns up in class and
creates pandemonium by releasing a grass snake he caught by the river. Rozier
took up this idea again in Du côté d’Orouët (), in which three girls holi-
daying on the Atlantic coast throw a young man into confusion, as he tries un-
successfully to seduce each of them in turn. The ‘method’ comes across clearly
in the sequence in which Gilbert (Bernard Menez) attempts to gather a few eels
in a bucket, triggering panic among the girls as the eels slither across the floor.
Rozier uses the eels to introduce an unpredictable element: the fiction develops
a documentary slant, thanks to the girls’ genuine reactions and to the camera-
man with his hand-held camera, who captures the chaos of the sequence as he
follows their movements in the confined space. The fictional aspect does not
disappear altogether, however: the eels represent the girls, escaping from the
clutches of an awkward suitor, and their apprehension tinged with amusement
at the sight of the reptilian fish is a metaphor for their wary attraction to the
male body. Rozier relies on the documentary to achieve a level of truth that
would be difficult to obtain by fictional means. These three inexperienced ac-
tresses are able to live what they cannot perform, but without overlooking the
presence of the camera, which reacts to every insinuation of their liberated
bodies. And, maybe an improvising actor is simply that: an actor who lives a
situation to the full but never entirely forgets the element of performance. To
Rozier, amateur actors had the advantage of being unable to rely on a proven
technique that was liable to convey an illusion of reality. The secret of a good
director lies in nurturing an atmosphere of trust that can pave the way for that
ultimate ‘letting go’. The pre-existing element of fiction guarantees the possibil-
ity of collective creation. Rozier’s ambition was not to bring a faithful rendition
of the script to the screen as though it were cast in stone, but to plan situations
that would encourage the actors to improvise and the fiction to drift towards a
documentary truth, with the calculated risk that this tangent might never occur.
In the eel sequence, the absence of written or prepared dialogue contributes to
this tangent and overflow. Through a series of improvisations representing so
many collective experiments, Rozier ‘documents’ the bodies of these young wo-
men from , although despite the period ‘sexual liberation’ seems to be the
last thing on their minds. To Rozier’s girls, young men and films – and young
men in films – are merely pretexts for the enduringly childlike pleasures of play.
Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche also uses improvisation to produce a new take on
the crossover between fiction and documentary. He does not rely on a few se-
quences to trigger a truth that finds it origins not only in predetermined fic-
tional elements but in a kind of documentary surge – his aim is to apply a new
kind of connection between the two to the œuvre as a whole. While he is basi-
cally a director of fiction who has invented new pathways to the documentary,
his method once again recalls that of Jean Rouch, described by Jean-André
Fieschi in the following terms: ‘The filmmaker’s desire is the desire to fall in
with (to organise) the desire of his characters. To follow them step by step, in
the fundamental Neo-Realist (Zavattinian) tradition as it were, but as much on
the cusp of their words (in what they reveal) as on the cusp of their beha-
viour.’ This is another possible definition of cinema improvisation and the
concert sequence at the end of Bled Number One is a prime example of
Ameur-Zaïmeche’s desire to fall in with that of his characters; a fictional charac-
ter in the case of Louisa, whom he follows as her desire to sing leads her to the
only stage on offer, the one in the psychiatric hospital; and documentary char-
acters when the irrepressible desire of the other patients to sing in front of the
delighted but bewildered audience wells up and is caught on camera, lending a
whole new dimension to this moment of release. Addressing themselves di-
rectly to the crew, two women exclaim ‘They’re really the mad ones’ and ‘The
lunatics are on the outside, the lunatics are on the outside’. In the wake of Moi,
un Noir, writes Fieschi, the camera reveals a whole new function; it is no longer
merely a recording instrument but a device that provokes, simulates, sets off
events, conflicts and journeys which would never otherwise have occurred, at
least in that form.’ Like Rouch, Ameur-Zaïmeche relies on the camera to create
situations that cannot be foreseen and the overlap between these situations and
documentary reality enables all the protagonists to improvise a new trajectory
for the sequence. In his own way, he is meeting the challenge of La Pyramide
humaine, when Rouch got black and white students to improvise on situations
that were to develop according to their inspiration. It is by fully acknowledging
this fiction, whose viability is underlined by hardened actors running the im-
provisational moves from the inside, that Ameur-Zaïmeche, in what only ap-
pears to be a paradox, attains another reality, going through the documentary
to reach untapped realms of the imaginary. The – fundamental – difference is
that he never asks the actors to improvise. Rather, he relies on his characters to
grasp the fiction and, in a partially involuntary gesture motivated by their de-
sire, glide it gradually towards an elsewhere that defies all rationalisation,
thereby allowing a glimpse of that subconscious element he so often seems to
be pursuing on the borderline between fiction and documentary.
While Ameur-Zaïmeche claims to be a fiction filmmaker, others see them-
selves as documentary-oriented, although they are prepared to use the stepping
stones of improvisation to venture into the realms of fiction. L’Apprenti (),
Samuel Collardey’s highly-praised first feature film, bears all the hallmarks of
the documentary. Mathieu (Mathieu Bulle), a student at agricultural college,
spends a few days a month gaining practical experience on Paul (Paul Barbier)’s
farm. Collardey, acting as both director and chief cameraman, assisted by
Charles Wilhelem on camera and Vincent Verdoux on sound, followed the teen-
ager for a week or two every month over a ten-month period. Apart from a few
sequences shot in Mathieu’s college, during weekend outings or in his mother’s
apartment, Collardey focused on the time he spent on the farm, in order to
monitor his gradually burgeoning relationship with Paul, and the ultimate part-
ing of the ways at the end of the school year.
Although the documentary bias is clear, several factors place L’Apprenti in
the fictional camp. The two ‘actors’ were chosen by the director; first Paul, fol-
lowing several visits to the farms of the Haut-Doubs region, then Mathieu, who
took part in a casting call in a nearby agricultural college. Thus, it was the film
that brought the two together. Collardey makes no secret of the fact that there
was a script:
[…] in a classical fictional format, given substance by things that Paul and Mathieu
would tell me about themselves. And also by interviews with Paul’s former appren-
tices. I needed to write in order to formulate my longing to direct. I felt it was impor-
tant to put my intentions down on paper before coming face to face with reality. But
in the very first week of shooting, I put the script to one side and starting inventing
the film as I went along, suggesting an action or a subject of conversation to the pro-
tagonists as we went through the scenes.
Collardey did not grab a hand-held camera to capture scenes in the flow of
everyday life, he saw the shoot as a daily ritual, which gave it a very special
role. The crew spent all day on the farm. Lighting was installed in the interiors,
particularly the kitchen and the cowshed, in order to allow for impromptu
shooting without having to rig up technical paraphernalia every time. Collar-
dey opted ‘to shoot in  mm, despite the technical constraints, the demands in
terms of lighting and location and the solemnity it imposes on those who are
being filmed, while attempting to grasp reality, its surprises and the nature of
people’. This shows his determination to achieve a documentary reality by
fictional means, bringing into play the border separating the two.
Although the situations are very close to their own everyday lives, to Paul
and Mathieu they are essentially linked to performance, in which, as with
Rouch, they are required to play themselves. The dialogues are entirely impro-
vised and the thick regional accents sometimes make it difficult to grasp certain
words or expressions, although this does not detract from the clarity of the
scenes in which the outcome depends on the inspiration and commitment of
the actors. The director’s expectations are often precise but this is never explicit.
The montage takes the form of a lengthy work-in-progress, which takes place
after each visit, and the structure of the film therefore evolves month by month:
‘Every time we returned from a shoot,’ explains Collardey, ‘we would watch the
rushes and reflect on which scenes to shoot next; “what should we film in the
next episode?”’ This respect for time, which has to take its course so that
things can emerge, makes it possible to follow the progress of the complex rela-
tionship between Mathieu and Paul. Their exchanges begin to take on a more
intimate, deeper significance, as seen in the counterpoint between the two heart-
rending sequences at the end of the film. Sitting on the grass in a magnificent
landscape, Mathieu confides in Paul, telling him how much he has suffered
from his parents’ separation. Shortly afterwards, Paul talks about the joys of
having a son and the grief that followed his little boy’s illness and premature
death. No written dialogue could have given these two moments as much im-
pact and yet they give the impression of having been prepared like a fictional
film, recalling – and the reference is far from innocuous – the veracity of Maur-
ice Pialat’s L’Enfance nue () and the serenity of La Maison des bois, a
television series in seven episodes shot in  by the same director. The
strength of L’Apprenti is derived in large part from this method, in which time
plays a paramount role. The passing of the seasons, a key element in farming
life, with the effect it implies on bodies that are at one with nature, provides a
powerful temporal gauge, enhanced by the natural light. On a different level,
throughout the film Collardey follows the teenager’s painstaking attempts to
fulfill his dream of playing one of Johnny Hallyday’s songs on the guitar. The
mise-en-scène is openly acknowledged here, with Mathieu playing out the
scenes on camera. It is also, however, a reflection of all the apprenticeships that
make up the actual subject of the film: learning to be a man, to run a farm, to
play the guitar. Collardey’s recognition of this fictional element allows us to
accept the sequence in which Mathieu puts on his earphones and sings Hally-
day’s hit at the top of his voice, in the cowshed, with the cows as his only audi-
ence. He is clearly ‘playing’ the actor, but the situation still retains its fundamen-
tal truthfulness; by miming the singer he is in a fantasy land of entertainment
where hamming it up is the name of the game, as it was for the characters in-
vented by the heroes of Moi, un Noir.
In choosing the series of ‘episodes’ relating the story of Mathieu and Paul,
Collardey is imposing a fiction, even if the episodes seem familiar to the actors.
In another sequence, they are supposed to perform in the snow. They do up an
old sled and are then left free to slide around as they please – but no one could
possibly have foreseen that the teenager would choose to lie down on Paul’s
back. This moment of play is perhaps the most crucial in the depiction of the
pair’s growing closeness. To release their speech, they first needed to release
their bodies, and it is through this physical intimacy that they are able to con-
fide in each other in the closing sequences of the film. This is the strength of the
fiction in L’Apprenti; it seems likely that without it, without the simple but al-
ways meaningful suggestions of the director, this documentary truth would
never have existed. Collardey’s documentary bias leads him to blur the frontiers
between the two genres, without ever denying their existence, and this deliber-
ate play on the in-between makes it possible to scratch the surface and discover
unprecedented forms of reality. In a different context, the Canadian animation
filmmaker and improviser Pierre Hébert came up with the following explana-
tion:
The model that interests me in the connection between various disciplines is that of
conversation rather than fusion. I am too attached to border zones to want to eradi-
cate borders. On the contrary, this is a way of deliberately taking them into account,
neither granting absolute value to the borders nor to their eradication. They have to
be tackled in their historic context, in other words from the angle which threatens to
destabilize them. Borders, after all, are places of contraband, illegal immigration and
war.
In this increasingly indecisive toing and froing, Ameur-Zaïmeche and Collardey

seem to be corroborating John van der Keuken’s remarks: ‘I am a filmmaker
who improvises. Improvising also applies to images. To me, improvising and
not improvising are infinitely more contradictory than documentary and fiction,
for instance. This second kind of contradiction doesn’t work, as far as I’m con-
cerned. But improvising—now there’s a real category.’ Van der Keuken, who
was branded as a documentary filmmaker himself, never hesitated to intervene
during a sequence, either to direct it or to get it ‘replayed’ by the characters-
turned-actors. To the same degree as Rouch, and with similar techniques to
Ameur-Zaïmeche, he did not view filmmaking as simply going along with his
characters’ desires, but as a way of giving them a defining impetus. In Amster-
dam Global Village, for example, he decides to make a number of dreams
come true, and these form the backbone of the film: the dream of a return to
Bolivia for an immigrant folk musician working as a cleaner in an Amsterdam
supermarket; the dream of a Chechen refugee he accompanies back to his war-
torn country; the dream of an elderly Jewish singer looking for the apartment in
which she hid with her son to avoid deportation; the dream of a young messen-
ger boy with a moped who longs to own his own car so that he can join the
‘aristocracy’ of the profession. Van der Keuken starts out from the situation of
his characters and together with them builds adventures that are both the im-
plementation of their true wishes and a succession of events that bear all the
hallmarks of fiction – but a fiction entirely improvised in a constant confronta-
tion with reality. These characters, improvising in the real world the adventures
of an unforeseen fiction, could be seen as a new reincarnation of Rouchian fabu-
lation. But improvisation is also, as with Rouch, a modus operandi for camera-
man van der Keuken, who breaks in with his hand-held camera, violently
zooming in or misframing and making spur-of-the-moment decisions, and
these impromptu tangents act as assertions of his presence in the space of the
shot. An element of fiction, then, creeps into these real-time decisions, such as
introducing someone into the field, scrutinising a face, capturing a facial expres-
sion, tracking a gesture, all of which have the potential to change the whole
course of the film.
For van der Keuken as for Rozier, Ameur-Zaïmeche or Collardey – although
one really needs to mention every improvising filmmaker – improvisation is not
an end but a means of transgressing the visible, with the purpose of reaching
another reality in which the realms of imagination and dreams are no longer
obstacles to a requisite rationality, but open doors leading to uncharted terri-
tories of human complexity. The exploration of this unknown world by impro-
visation does not imply a reliance on chance or accident, even if these may play
a role, but is a way of accepting not to know, of being overtaken by elusive
forces and reacting to them so that they can be followed and mastered, so that
the film is also ready to take them in. When van der Keuken defends his status
as an improvising filmmaker rather than a documentary or fictional one, he is
not implying that these categories do not exist, but that in his case the dichotomy
does not work. Improvising to him means making the fictional and documen-
tary elements indiscernible, so that other cinematic forms and other connections
between the cinema and the world, in which the powers of truth and falsehood
alternate constantly, can be invented. He is consequently far closer to fictional
filmmakers than to directors such as Frederick Wiseman or Raymond Depar-
don, whose utopian desire for ‘neutrality’ in the face of an event seems to be a
principle that brooks no contradiction. From Renoir to Rozier, from Rouch to
Ameur-Zaïmeche, from Rossellini to van der Keuken, beyond genres and cate-
gories, another history of cinematic modernity is being played out; not so much
attracted to fruitless attempts to control the world as fascinated by the mysteries
of Man brought face to face with his complexity: and what if improvising were
simply ‘revealing the romantic dimension of reality’?
4. Acting cinema
The body filmed, the body filming
In a two-part text devoted to Hans Namuth’s renowned Pollock (), Hu-

bert Damisch, considering the hypothesis of a cinematic equivalent of Jackson
Pollock’s art, said: ‘I will only retain one of the many suggestions, the one that
bases its argument on the narrative processes that characterize the work of John
Cassavetes to identify a kind of acting cinema, in the sense in which we refer to
Jackson Pollock’s action painting.’ Damisch himself draws on a passage from
Ray Carney’s book on the films of John Cassavetes, in which the author claims
that the latter:
refuses to straighten out narrative loops and twists so that individual scenes will
smoothly advance the plot. The acting releases energies that the story can’t control.
The fidelity to impulse makes Cassavetes’ films the Jackson Pollocks of cinema. He
would rather be true to the scribble of his characters’ inchoate expressions and to their
undefined swirls of feeling than to the straight line of the story.
Damisch goes on to develop this idea briefly, taking an example from the end of
Faces (), in which Cassavetes appears to be letting the impetus of the char-
acters’ desire take sole command of the sequence, so that the movement of the
film becomes entirely reliant on the movements of the bodies. By recognising
the importance of these bodies’ remarkable presence, one is able to show that
improvisational cinema is, at least in part, defined by a deployment of the hy-
pothesis of acting cinema that extends far beyond a possible rejection of linear
narrative. Acting must be understood in both senses of the word. The ‘energies
that the story can’t control’, as Carney put it, rely on the actors’ performance and
on the reactivity of the entire film crew, who have to act on unforeseen demands.
Hans Namuth gives his undivided attention to Pollock’s body, whose gestures
he cannot predict, the painter’s performance allowing no room for a re-take to
hone the framing or focus. The improvised performance of Pollock the artist is
countered in real time by the improvised performance of Namuth the camera-
man, whose acute grasp of image composition owes much to his photo report-
ing background. On the face of it, this short feature is far more a precursor of
television recording, which was later to give a starring role to jazz musicians,
than of the work of Cassavetes. And yet Namuth’s documentary project is not
that far removed from the dual ambition of a filmmaker whose own television
experience was far from cursory: to lead the actors towards the same kind of
creation in the moment as Pollock and to achieve the same reactivity in a fic-
tional film as Namuth had demonstrated by means of his camera. This is the
crux of Cassavetes’ art: to lead his actors to that instant of performance in
which, within the confines of a precise project, creation in the moment takes
over from a predetermination whose only purpose is to facilitate what could
once again be termed a form of overflow.
To achieve this, Cassavetes needed to make choices, as demonstrated early on
with Faces. He allowed the sequences to run on in order to lure his actors to-
wards a state of abandon in which meaning could only be transmitted through
physical complicity: when the relinquishment of the narrative safety net means
that acts must exist in their own right, actors need time. The time required for
collective improvisation is a long one, during which each of the protagonists
needs to remain constantly on the alert in order to respond to any unexpected
solicitation. Cassavetes obtained the requisite collective concentration by shoot-
ing with two hand-held cameras, leaving his cameramen, who, like Namuth,
were dependent on the actors’ impromptu movements, free to make their own
choices. This freedom of movement, with the actor creating the space that was
to pervade him, conditioned the improvisation and called for uniform ambient
lighting rather than the lighting of classic cinema, which chiselled the features
and space. The collective dimension of improvisation, therefore, depended not
only on the theoretically pivotal actors in a particular shot or scene but on all the
‘passive’ actors too. By filming actors listening and not just speaking, reacting
and not just acting, Cassavetes certainly captured the flow of emotions, but this
also demanded unremitting vigilance from all the actors. One can see how the
technical choices were determined by aesthetic goals, but also how the physical
energies stemming from improvisation within the uninterrupted flow of the
shot served to counter the narrative and transcend it without negating it.
Many Cassavetes scholars have highlighted the importance of this freedom of
the bodies’ movements in space. ‘The greatness of Cassavetes’ work is to have
undone the story, plot or action, but also space, in order to get to attitudes as to
categories which put time into the body, as well as thought into life’, wrote
Gilles Deleuze, perpetuating the analysis of Jean-Louis Comolli, for whom ‘[the
characters in Faces] are built up gesture by gesture and word by word as the
film progresses. This means that they actually create themselves, with the shoot
acting as a moment of truth and each stage of the film developing a new pattern
of behavior, its length coinciding precisely with that of the film.’ Vincent
Amiel, in turn, wrote about how ‘in the extraordinary final sequence of Faces,
Cassavetes throws his characters into a desperate hand to hand combat in
4. Acting cinema 73
which urgency alone prevails, with no time for reflection, pose or choice.’ One
can sense behind these words how crucial it is for an element to elude the mas-
tery of the actor if it is to become the character’s expression of truth; this is the
ultimate goal of many of Cassavetes’ sequences. To achieve this, he invented a
highly complex method, based on the close, not to say intimate, relationship he
had with his actors. Among fiction filmmakers, Cassavetes is undoubtedly the
one who explored most consistently the porous border between the actor and
his role. As far back as Faces, he started writing for actors who were also
friends; little by little, he then built up a troupe, not to say a clan, around him.
Each character was written with an actor in mind and reflected his personality
and relationship to the world. During the invaluable rehearsal period, the dia-
logue was prepared jointly, paving the way for the second stage in the process
of interpenetration between actor and character. Cassavetes’ idea was to imbue
the characters with the social inhibitions of the actors, although the latter inevi-
tably protected themselves when it came to writing it down – a defensive reflex
that the director naturally anticipated. This explains the highly unusual but de-
cisive role played by the written word in his work and the virtual lack of any
improvisation of dialogue during the shots. For it was on set that the trap closed
in: by insisting that they use the dialogues that had been written jointly in re-
hearsal, Cassavetes was preventing his actors from hiding behind their words –
words that were soon to reveal their limitations in the face of the emotions at
stake. The multiplicity of shots forced the actor to express his feelings in other
ways, driving him towards what Cassavetes called the truth of the body. In
other words, no flexibility in the dialogues could be allowed if the actors were
to succeed in creating and improvising with their bodies. This collaborative
writing process was not, as has so often been claimed, proof of a lack of impro-
visation in his work; on the contrary, it was the cornerstone of creative improvi-
sation itself.
The point of the time spent together prior to the shoot was not, therefore, to
pin things down so that they could be reproduced at a later stage. Speech only
featured as a way of conveying the social straitjacket from which both the actors
and characters were trying to break free. Speech was merely a means of reach-
ing the body, of forcing the actor to react physically to these shackles. This is
what Peter Falk was referring to when talking about Husbands ():
He would leave you completely in the dark because he was afraid that if he explained
things the actor would turn them into clichés. What he wanted from you was your-
self. He wanted that bit of your feelings and emotions that is too complex and multi-
layered to be reduced to words for the actor to chew on.
The actors had to tackle a variety of situations in which the narrative continuity
was so self-evident that it did not provide the slightest clue to the characters.
From Faces on, all Cassavetes’ plots could be summed up in a few words. The
narrative and dialogues served the same purpose as the melody and chord
grids in a modern jazz standard, opening up a vast field of investigation for the
improviser, who needed all his skills to reinvent in the most personal and spon-
taneous way the common elements underpinning the collective experience –
much like Thelonious Monk shattering the familiar melody of Tea for Two or
Albert Ayler’s frenzied performance of Gershwin’s Summertime. Faces played a
similar role in Cassavetes’ work as My Favorite Things did for John Coltrane,
who performed and recorded the hit from the musical dozens of times, as
though he could never exhaust its potential. The theme of Faces, and indeed of
the director’s entire opus, is given in the final scene by Chet (Seymour Cassel):
We protect ourselves. So when you talk values and ethics and honesty and I’m a nice
guy and you’re a nice guy and this and that it just doesn’t matter. Nobody cares. No-
body has the time to be vulnerable to each other. So we just go on. I mean right away
our armour comes out like a shield and goes around us and we become like mechan-
ical men.
Speech is effectively determined by defensive reflexes and in Faces it is Chet’s

youthful body that triggers trouble and chaos among the middle-class suburban
housewives. Away from their husbands, the women spend a perfectly respect-
able evening in a club, drinking and watching an unfamiliar young man dan-
cing, and then invite him to one of their houses for a nightcap. This sequence
perfectly encapsulates the Cassavetes method. Sitting round the drawing room
as they did in the dance hall, they try to conceal the boredom and failure of their
married lives with awkward phrases. They take it in turns to dance with Chet to
prove that they can still give in to desire, but their bodies, which have lost the
ability to move, cruelly reveal what their words attempted to hide. Cassavetes
shoots the sequence as a succession of improvisations by the women as they rise
to the highly provocative appeal of Chet’s body. When they get up to dance,
they fall headlong into the trap set by Cassavetes and his acolyte Seymour Cas-
sel. In order to reveal their inner distress, the filmmaker simply needed to show
the total incompatibility of rhythm between the freedom of Chet’s body and the
tense bodies of the housewives.
Husbands, Cassavetes’ subsequent film, opens with Harry, Archie and Gus,
played by Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk and Cassavetes himself, attending the fun-
eral of their friend Stuart. After the ceremony we find them huddled together
despondently on the back seat of a taxi, aggrieved that the minister’s sermon
failed to do justice to Stuart’s exceptional personality. In the subway they ex-
change a few platitudes about the premature ageing of sportsmen, which en-
courages Gus to talk about his passion for basketball. Archie follows this up by
saying ‘I want to play’ and this acts as a springboard for a succession of se-
4. Acting cinema 75
quences in which the dialogue is reduced to a few sentences, with the three
friends finding themselves powerless to express their grief through speech.
They compensate by channelling their energy into moments of shared physical
effort that become the only way of facing up to their loss. Harry, Archie and Gus
improvise a race in the street, which leads directly into a basketball game in a
gymnasium and ends with a visit to the swimming pool. During this seven-
minute chain of events, the occasional dialogues avoid any direct reference to
the deceased but, as Archie says, as he gets his breath back, ‘It’s good for you.
Sweat it all out.’ Everything is contained in the physical proximity of the char-
acters; speech seems to have been drained out of them and it is their bodies that
have taken over. There are innumerable shots of the three friends hugging or
playfully punching one another, culminating in a remarkable drinking sequence
which sees them collapsing into a formless, pathetic heap of drunken bodies.
Having driven their bodies to the brink of physical exhaustion, they now purge
them by spewing out endless pints of beer. In these opening sequences of Hus-
bands, improvisation has allowed the movements of the body to take prece-
dence over ordered speech.
This idea of the eloquence of the body transcending the eloquence of speech
was not new. Indeed, Cassavetes used it in Shadows, most notably in the se-
quence depicting Lelia walking in the park with Tony, a young man she had
met the day before, and David, her older lover. When David stops to greet a
friend, Lelia and Tony suddenly flee, hand in hand, in a purely intuitive ges-
ture. Cassavetes films their improvised escape at length, as though their sudden
impulse, an expression of their joy at being together and their mutual desire,
had come as a surprise to him too. Although this escapade undoubtedly formed
part of the initial script, the attendant body language was entirely down to the
actors. In his very first film, Cassavetes was already demonstrating his interest
in the inventive potential of the body and in rhythm, the inner beat of the shot
that emerges from the movement of the bodies alone. After Faces, however,
what had started out as mere intuition was to become his sole raison d’être. All
his orientations were dictated by a single obsession: how to get his actors to ‘let
go’ and transcend their technical prowess to achieve an emotional truth. As Pe-
ter Falk put it,
It’s harder to act in John’s movies […] because he imposes a mode of reality or imme-
diacy or spontaneity that you don’t find in other movies. In other movies, you can get
away with putting on a really good performance – with subtle, clever acting – but if
you tried that on John he’d just throw it back at you.
If it is difficult to perceive the improvisational element in Cassavetes’ work, this

is because he never actually asked his actors to improvise. Instead, he gradually
encouraged them to get rid of their performance techniques and mastery, en-
couraging them to act in the moment for its own sake. He turned the cinema
into an art of performance, not an ‘actor’s performance’ in the film festival and
navel-gazing sense of the term, but as an improvisational process which blends
predetermined writing and ‘a physical act whose material characteristics cannot
be completely recorded.’ His cinema is, above all, a cinema of the body, mainly
because he is one of the only filmmakers to have encouraged his actors to speak
with their body. Each has their own distinctive body language, as recognisable as
the sound of a voice or the tone of a jazz musician, often described as an exten-
sion of their own voice or even as the ‘sound of their body’. In the transition
between the spoken word and the body in the work of Cassavetes, sound also
has a vital role to play. The sudden bursts of unexplained laughter, cries and
flashes of anger belong far more to the physical than to the spoken register and
are often the first signs of the ‘letting go’ mentioned earlier, intense moments
when the body takes over, no longer guided by a specific decision or intention.
‘[…] believing is no longer believing in another world, or in a transformed
world. It is only, it is simply believing in the body,’ wrote Gilles Deleuze, who
went on, ‘it is giving discourse to the body and, for that purpose, reaching the
body before discourses, before words, before things are named.’ Cassavetes’
approach does not involve placing the body before speech as much as using
words to improvise the body, but it is much the same. He rapidly understood
that the potential of gesture could not be pigeon-holed by classic ‘directing’. By
releasing the body, he was reiterating the idea of gesture as a force to be reck-
oned with, ‘a powerful pointer of personalities, interests and passions.’ Cassa-
vetes’ films, just like experiments with free jazz, were a way of exploring the
powers of the body, pushing back the limits by striving, to the point of exhaus-
tion, for ‘that immemorial intensity of the body, which cannot be reduced to its
narrative nature any more than to the social convention which underpins that
narrative’, as Christiane Vollaire put it, when referring to the break between
classical dance and its contemporary counterpart.
To tackle improvisation in the cinema it is necessary to concentrate on the
actors but also on the diverse strategies that have been set up to allow an ele-
ment of freedom to filter into the performance. There is another area of physical
freedom, however, which undoubtedly depends on the actor’s improvisation
but is specific to the cinema: this is the cameramen’s physical involvement dur-
ing the shot. The importance of Hans Namuth’s reactivity in capturing the ges-
tures of Pollock at work has already been stressed, and this reactivity proved
equally invaluable in many sequences from Faces or Husbands. There was
nothing coincidental about this toing and froing between documentary and fic-
tion; there is something of the documentary reportage in the improvised se-
quences of Cassavetes’ films, whose only purpose, perhaps, was to ‘document
the body’. It is tempting here to hark back to a particular kind of documentary
4. Acting cinema 77
in which the cameraman’s role as improviser is put forward as a way of show-

ing constant receptivity to an elusive reality, with acting cinema shifting from
the unpredictable movements of the actor’s body to the equally unpredictable
movements of the cameraman(men)’s body.
Johan van der Keuken is probably the only filmmaker to have openly ac-
knowledged his status as improviser. On several occasions he stressed how im-
portant it was for him to be aware of the improvisational potential in his work:
Film only became my means of expression once I had removed the camera from its
tripod and found the courage to shoot at eye level and arm’s length, when I began to
include in the flow of images what was actually in front of me at every moment,
incorporating it into my initial ideas: when I began to improvise […].
One must first recall that in the case of ‘reality cinema’ improvisation does not
obviously emerge on the side of the filmed but conceivably on that of the filmer.
This does not mean one should dismiss the element of improvisation that crops
up every day in the lives of every living creature; but one should recognise that
if improvisation is to be considered as a creative act, it must be deliberately
generated, consciously perceived as an act of improvisation. Van der Keuken also
recalls, in his own way, the importance of technical developments in the emer-
gence of new, more manageable cinematic forms; in his case, for instance, the
‘crew’ was limited to two people, a cameraman – himself – and a sound techni-
cian, almost always his partner Noshka van der Lely. He also believed that it
was vital for him to act as cameraman, in order to ensure his physical involve-
ment in events. Improvisation was a way of reacting to the whims of chance
while summoning in the moment all previously acquired information. In other
words, to improvise was to ‘recognise the gestural element in the gradual con-
struction of thought’, to make on-the-spot decisions, in the heat of the perfor-
mance, while being acutely aware of a work-in-progress being formulated in
real time. This was not simply another way of doing things; it called into ques-
tion all the guiding principles of classic cinema, founded on an initial script,
with a director imposing his own outlook on the world. Van der Keuken, a
tremendous jazz fan, took his cue from music to define his approach to impro-
visation as
a need for instability, which is also a way of taking things further. Like in improvised
music. The unstable is also a form of movement. It is a form of rage. One cannot be
satisfied with something just being the way it is. So one destroys that moment of
stability in order to shake things up again and release something different. 
Van der Keuken never hesitated to reframe in order to capture a fleeting gesture
or expression, zoom in to draw attention to an unexpected detail or respond
with rapid camera movements to a sudden off-screen diversion, before swiftly
returning to his initial shot. In his quest for polyphony, he refused to impose a
single view of a world, bringing its complex nature to the fore by a relentless
destabilisation of the eye. His work is underpinned by his own body’s reactions
to given situations and the body of the cameraman at work is woven into the
images, contributing to the inner rhythmical beat of the shots. Improvisation
allowed him to evoke the presence of a body filming, a body participating in
the movement of the world, at once player and witness. Being an improvising
filmmaker means intervening physically in the flow of events and trying to re-
spond, like a jazz musician, to the myriad calls to strike the right note or the
right chord at the right moment. It is not enough to record, one needs to solicit,
orient, elicit. Van der Keuken never denied that his mere presence affected
events and his awareness of this influence was a way of acknowledging an ob-
vious ‘documentary mise-en-scène’. This was a gruelling commitment, both in-
tellectually and physically, and van der Keuken admitted that he always
stopped shooting when his energy gave out, because the body knows its limita-
tions. Being prepared to put one’s own body on the line, surrounded by others,
creates a link between the person carrying the camera and those in front of the
lens, making it possible for the latter to interrupt the shoot by intervening di-
rectly on camera or moving out of field. Van der Keuken, like Rouch, was deter-
mined to film in close proximity to his subjects, in permanent physical contact,
and it is no coincidence that they both clear-sightedly chose the hand-held cam-
era as the only way to film the world.
The main drawback of this method lay in avoiding the slightest interruption
in movement, so that the situation would have time to decant and thereby trig-
ger complicity and spark exchange. In jazz, the improvisational repercussions
created by the seminal advent of LPs are well-known – at long last musicians
had more or less unlimited time to let go during a recording. In the late s,
Miles Davis made use of this new flexibility to invent a style in which silence
was to play a crucial role. John Coltrane, on the other hand, in the wake of Orn-
ette Coleman and the advocates of free jazz, delved into sound saturation. It
was hardly surprising, therefore, that when the cinema was given the same tem-
poral opportunities, through the emergence of new cameras and live sound, a
number of filmmakers decided to rely on them as a way of inventing new
images. While the LP met the expectations triggered by the boppers’ virtuoso
improvisations, particularly Charlie Parker’s, the  mm camera with live
sound was the perfect answer to Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini’s ambition
to give actors complete freedom of expression in space and time. Thanks to
technical developments, ‘documentary filmmakers’ such as Jean Rouch, Pierre
Brault or Johan van der Keuken were able to give form to a cinema largely
based on improvisation, but they realised that these innovations would also
provide directors of fiction with new ways of filming. Richard Leacock, who
4. Acting cinema 79
co-directed with Robert Drew the famous Primary (), a depiction of the elec-
tion campaign between Kennedy and Humphrey during the Wisconsin pri-
maries, concludes his UNESCO report, entitled ‘The Birth of the Living Camera’
in the following terms:
The possible applications of our research for the great romantic film are immense. It
will finally be possible, as Jean Renoir had hoped, to capture the same person from
every angle, in his dramatic continuity. I want to establish a distinction between what
I call ‘the theatre’, which includes almost all the films shot under control, and our
own films, which offer a perception of reality in progress.
By the time he wrote these lines, the movement was already well under way,
with the living camera featuring in many fictional shoots. Several renowned
directors with claims to the Renoir lineage tried their hand at improvisation,
choosing the hand-held camera either for specific sequences or for entire films.
Although they were not as persevering as van der Keuken or Rouch, these fic-
tion filmmakers were always ready to shoulder the camera, as can be seen in the
many photos depicting John Cassavetes or Jacques Rozier on set, their eye on
the viewfinder, often precariously balanced, the bodies of the filmed and film-
ing often entwined in a curious ballet. Although theoretically it is the actors
who are improvising here, the temptation for the director to join in once again
illustrates the need for physical commitment and shared risk-taking. When Pas-
cale Ferran rose to the challenge of shooting two great jazzmen at work on Qua-
tre Jours à Ocoee (), she decided, on the second day of shooting, to use a
second, hand-held camera herself. After one day spent directing from the out-
side, she felt a compunction to become physically involved in the creative act so
that she could improvise in turn. And this is precisely what acting cinema de-
monstrates: improvisation is often a question of exchange and always a ques-
tion of the body.
Disinhibition in focus (1): play
The advent of live television in the s and s lent an unprecedented di-
mension of performance to recording, the creation time and reception time now
being the same. In the very first sequence of Adieu Philippine (), Jacques
Rozier paid a clear tribute to these television-inspired techniques, by filming the
multi-camera recording of Jazz Memories, a musical programme directed by
Jean-Christophe Averty. The opening sequence of this first feature film heralded
his cinematic approach. The spontaneity that increasingly lightweight cameras
and reliable live sound allowed him often influenced his choices of mise-en-
scène. In Du côté d’Orouët (), for instance, during the girls’ vacation on
the Atlantic coast, a day is devoted to a boat trip organised by Patrick (Patrick
Verde), a young man they have just met by chance on the beach. Rozier alter-
nates between the actors’ dinghy, filming with a small hand-held camera, and a
second dinghy, which he shares with the cameraman and another camera, with
the sound being recorded live on a modest tape recorder. Despite its length
(ten minutes), the sequence seems to have no scripted reality or foreseeable con-
tinuity. If it were not there, the film would lose some of its beauty but not its
consistency. It therefore owes its existence to an inspiration of the moment,
somewhat arduously recorded by two cameras and a tape recorder. Rozier is
challenging all the stages of cinematic creation and radicalising this new
plethora of improvisational possibilities. In doing so, he has an ambitious pur-
pose in mind: to discover new forms of cinema, forms that will no longer be
predetermined but will be invented in the course of the shoot and ‘fixed’ during
the montage. This decision to move away from the cumbersome techniques of
classic cinema in order to explore new avenues is reminiscent of the young jazz
musicians of the early s, who, tired of the big bands that were preventing
them from improvising at will, reverted to smaller ensembles, inventing a new
way of playing based on freedom for the soloists and impromptu exchanges.
The aim of these young boppers, shared some years later by Jacques Rozier,
was to draw on collective performance as a means of releasing new individual
modes of expression.
In this sequence, as in the aforementioned one with the eels, but far more
boldly, Rozier aimed to bring about a situation of disinhibition by releasing the
actors’ bodies from all the strictures of the shoot. Faced with an unpredictable
ocean, on a makeshift vessel and with no help from the director, the actresses
found themselves with only one solution: to go with the tide – in every sense of
the term – and allow improvisation to take the lead. The surrender to the mo-
ment by these scantily dressed girls made a graphic contribution to Rozier’s
purpose, although, like his friend Pialat, he was careful not to reveal its under-
lying significance. Their squeals of delight, their fear of falling in the water and
the expressions of pleasure on their faces inevitably conjure up a first time that
is not merely that of a maiden voyage on a choppy sea. Without ever evoking
the erotic subtext, Rozier manages to create a remarkable portrayal of the body’s
surrender to love, that mixture of apprehension and pleasure that is so charac-
teristic of the moment when physical expression brings the course of love, per-
haps for the first time, to its conclusion. Rozier was not striking an attitude with
his improvisation, he saw it as a necessity. For him, it was the only way of show-
ing this surrender without conveying the ‘already there’ impression that so of-
ten prevails in this kind of scene. This made it impossible to opt for an on-set
reconstitution of some prior improvisational work; Rozier the improviser be-
4. Acting cinema 81
lieved in the ‘live’ expression of feeling in the time span of the take, in a present
experienced with maximum intensity, a time without narrative. As Jacques
Lourcelles wrote:
Only the present, the ‘sheer’ present interests Rozier, severed as far as possible from
its links with the past and future. The present, in other words the instant, the impalp-
able and elusive instant that the camera nevertheless manages to seize, is then dilated,
dissected by the author. Through the miracle of his shooting technique, this present
immediately turns into a magical, recomposed present, the present of memory and
poetry.
The narrative only emerges during the montage, stemming from the unforeseen
incidents of the shoot. The crucial time is that of performance, in this case im-
provisation, which involves everyone equally. In improvising, cameramen and
actors are exposing themselves to a common danger and this collective impro-
visation requires the total commitment of all the crew members, whose role
therefore alters significantly. All the anticipatory phases of the shoot having
been reduced to the bare minimum, it is not simply another way of filming but
another cinema itself that emerges, a cinema in which the watchword might
well be wanting the involuntary.
Through this incongruous device, Rozier was challenging the whole concept
of the film shot, with its sirens of mastery and balance. In a text devoted to
experiments with improvisation in the field of contemporary dance, the philo-
sopher Christiane Vollaire notes how,
[…] the hesitations of the body, its withdrawals, its procrastinations, its oscillations,
somehow recreate that first forgotten risk, experienced by us all when we take our
first steps; the permanent danger of falling, the uncertainty of the body’s position in
the world, the dizzying relationship of consciousness to space, the difficulty of find-
ing one’s center of gravity.
In the sequence from Du côté d’Orouët, everything conspires to engender an

imbalance stemming from a ‘game’ that does indeed hark back to childhood,
but also to a more adolescent awareness of the pleasure that comes from shared
danger and physical intimacy. Rozier’s aim is indeed to take these bodies to the
edge, and even invent different cinematic bodies, first by countering predeter-
mined speech, seen as an obstacle to the manifestation of the body, and then by
placing this body under pressure, on the precipice. The sequence with the din-
ghy, like the one with the eels, is not so much concerned with the result of im-
provisation as with the intensity of its genesis during the actual performance,
that possible surrender to the moment. These moments of ‘letting go’ already
featured in Rozier’s first short film, which we mentioned earlier. Rentrée des
classes () could serve as a manifesto for improvising filmmakers aiming,
like Rozier, to build their films around these moments of disinhibition – mo-
ments that, far from threatening their project, only serve to crown it in glory. In
this film, Rozier pays tribute to the Renoir of Boudu sauvé des eaux and the
Vigo of Zéro de conduite () in his portrayal of the little boy from a village
in the South of France who decides to play truant on the first day of term fol-
lowing the summer vacation. The mischievous kid leaves his classmates and
makes for the river below, where he lets himself drift along with the current, still
fully-dressed, while playing with a grass snake who acts as an impromptu
guide. Back at school, he throws the class into disarray by slipping the animal
into his neighbour’s exercise book. The film, which lasts twenty minutes, high-
lights three recurring themes in Rozier’s work: childhood, water and the pres-
ence of animals as possible triggers for improvisation. The snake heralds the
eels in Du côté d’Orouët but also, in the same film, a wonderful riding scene
in which the three girls, accompanied by Patrick and Gilbert, leave the forest
track to gallop along the beach. The erratic shots of the horses succeed one an-
other, with Rozier simply concentrating on their movement; it was during the
montage that he included the final shot of Gilbert, alone with his horse and
unable to catch up with the girls, who have got away from him yet again. Al-
though this lends meaning to the sequence, Rozier is fascinated above all by the
way the bodies give into the momentum of the horses, as he was when the same
bodies were buffeted by the dinghy or when panic grabbed hold of the girls in
Adieu Philippine, as a horde of bees disturbed their picnic on a Corsican
beach. On each occasion, he kick-starts the situation so that the actors genuinely
lose their inhibition during the take, their unforeseen gestures revealing some-
thing that has far more to do with an unprecedented rapport with the world
than a simple performance technique. The forces of nature and irrepressible
presence of the animals contribute to this Bazinian view of the cinema, equally
defended by Renoir, which consists of ‘doing with “documentary” actors what
one would do “in nature with an animal”.’ By bringing actors and animals
face to face in the same shot, Rozier wants the bodies of the actors to hark back
to a form of animal spontaneity; but while its erotic dimension does not escape
him, he goes further, turning the improvised sequences into a documentary por-
trayal of young people’s behaviour at a given period in twentieth-century his-
tory.
Rentrée des classes also highlights the importance of play for a number of
improvising filmmakers. This starts out with the presence of children, who are
required, as far as possible, to play themselves and not to act out a role, one of
the ways of achieving this being to distract them from the camera and turn the
situation into a game. In La Maison des bois, Pialat multiplies the sequences
depicting the little pupils in the boarding school run by Jeanne (Jacqueline Du-
franne), as they make the most of being out in the open by joining in team
4. Acting cinema 83
games. Living in the moment is also a way of forgetting, if only for a moment,
the horrors of war. Cassavetes, in A Woman Under the Influence in particu-
lar, constantly lures his child actors into play but does not direct them. In one of
the film’s most impressive sequences, Mabel (Gena Rowlands) holds a party for
her children and three of their friends. Cassavetes’ intention is to show the
boundless energy Mabel channels into organising the games to prove that she
is a ‘good mother’; but the games are also a way of getting the children to forget
about the camera while integrating them into Mabel/Rowland’s improvisation,
which contains an element of madness not unconnected with the innocence of
childhood. One could also cite Le Rayon vert, the only film in which Éric Roh-
mer responds to the chaotic presence of several children, left to do as they
please on camera, and also the only film in which he seems to have faith in the
virtues of real improvisation. In these examples, the children are totally ab-
sorbed in their games and are not improvising, but they contribute towards
creating an atmosphere conducive to improvisation, which forces the actors to
adapt to their frequently unexpected reactions; this is the point of Pialat and
Cassavetes’ mises-en-scène when they bring adults and children together in the
same games. So when improvising filmmakers sought to reproduce the same
childlike, of-the-moment disinhibition, but with adults this time, they also natu-
rally turned to games: ‘What we have been waiting for since childhood is to
upset the order that is stifling us’ wrote Georges Bataille. This applies to Rozier,
of course, but also Jacques Rivette, in Céline et Julie vont en bateau (), in
which the young women repeatedly seek, explicitly in this case, to recall the
emotions of childhood through play. Ameur-Zaïmeche began his first film with
a football match involving young men from each community in the cité des
Bosquets; a few sequences later, he got his amateur actors to improvise a game
of golf on a piece of wasteland surrounded by high-rise buildings, making the
childlike pleasure of play a cornerstone of fabulation.
The desire to depict disinhibition crops up again, unsurprisingly, in the sled
sequence of L’Apprenti. In his script, Collardey had planned to stage a moment
of interplay in the snow between Paul and Mathieu. Faithful to his guiding
principles, he chose the situation but left it open, so that the protagonists could
be free to move as they pleased. Paul’s descent, face down on the sled with
Mathieu on his back, a descent that takes place body-to-body, amid laughter
and shouting, and culminates in a glorious snowball fight, reveals without a
single word being spoken the relationship that has burgeoned between Paul
and Mathieu, in the wake of the first weeks of apprenticeship (and shooting).
Collardey, with his hand-held camera, tries to capture what he can of this mo-
ment of complicity, in which the body’s potential to reveal inner feelings is ec-
statically portrayed. The trick was to lead man and boy toward a situation of
play that would be familiar to any child who enjoyed snow. Nothing could
have prepared Collardey, however, for the physical closeness that springs out of
that first shot. The whole beauty of the sequence stems from the improvisation,
which perpetuates the director’s masterful mise-en-scène. In order to turn chaos
and disinhibition into methods of creation, it is necessary to plot a course but
allow time for those moments when the course gets sidetracked, leading impro-
visation to reveal a basic truth, like the sled, with its two bodies on board, hug-
ging the curves of the hill before Mathieu suddenly lets himself fall into the
snow.
Disinhibition in focus (2): dance
One of the most successful strategies in achieving this ‘letting go’, apart from
play, is dance. The word is used here in its most general sense, far removed
from ‘programme’ dancing, the conventions of ballroom dancing, the codified
discourse of classical dance or experiments in contemporary dance. The figures
in limbo in the films of Claire Denis, a filmmaker who is highly attuned to mu-
sic and the sensuality of the body, lend themselves perfectly to sudden displays
of emotion conveyed by expressive forms linked to dance. In S’en fout la mort
(), Dah (Isaach de Bankolé) and Jocelyn (Alex Descas), the first from Benin
and the second from the West Indies, team up with a restaurant owner in Run-
gis, a vast wholesale market outside Paris, to organise clandestine cock fights in
the restaurant. The somber, taciturn and wary Jocelyn is put in charge of train-
ing the cocks, with whom he has a strange relationship. The most mysterious
and probably the most powerful sequence is when Agnès Godard films with a
hand-held camera an improvised choreography between Jocelyn and one of the
cocks to the strains of Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier. Claire Denis takes up the
story:
Alex Descas spent two months on a cock fighting farm in Martinique. He got to know
the fifty cocks that the farmer rented out for the shoot. He was covered in scars. None
of us could get near the cocks but with Alex they were like cats. His relationship with
them, therefore, was not improvised; this sequence only exists because of what he
achieved during those two months. Very early on, Alex, Isaach and I chose the music
they listen to in the film. Marley’s Buffalo Soldier became the tune of the whole crew.
The scene [of the dance with the cock] could be seen as improvisation, and yet we’d
all been expecting that scene. It reminds me of a great document that shows Coltrane
improvising in a recording studio. He is so involved in his music that he doesn’t see
the sound engineer gesticulating and calling him. And yet he isn’t actually alone: the
musicians around him have trodden the same path by his side. Something has al-
ready been built up between them. This solo is the culmination. Like in the sequence
4. Acting cinema 85
with Alex and the cock, these are unbelievable moments, the accomplishment of a
process. All of a sudden, an actor begins to carry the whole film – and all we need to
do is to pluck it.
The few minutes of sensual communion between trainer and animal, to the
sound of Marley’s reggae, form a moment of crystallisation that is not there to
resolve a situation. On the contrary, the scene underlines Jocelyn’s opacity and
lends an obscure, albeit poetic, intensity to the invisible and insurmountable
barrier that separates Jocelyn and Dah from the other characters. Claire Denis is
confirming here the groundwork behind an improvisational outburst of this
kind; that ‘accomplishment of a process’ whose hypothetical success may en-
able an actor to ‘carry the whole film’.
In Beau travail (), in which warrant officer Galoup (Denis Lavant) re-
calls his years in the Foreign Legion in the Gulf of Djibouti, Claire Denis tackles
dance in a more concrete manner by getting Bernardo Montet to choreograph
the collective training exercises for the actors playing the legionnaires. These
perfectly mastered choreographies, filmed in static shots in the open spaces of
the desert, seem to act as a pendant for the final sequence, in which Galoup,
surrounded by mirrors in a nightclub setting, dances alone to the The Rhythm of
the Night, a disco hit by Corona. The previous scene, which shows Galoup’s
motionless body stretched out on a bed, a revolver poised on his abdomen,
ended with a close-up of biceps in which a vein throbbed to the regular rhythm
of a heartbeat. This inner vibration permeates the entire body in the nightclub
sequence, encapsulating an improvisation that seems to spill over from the film
itself, given its unexpectedness and lack of narrative credibility. The geometric
figures of the soldiers at work give way to an improvised explosion of gestures
by Lavant, in the guise of a tap dancer. Yet again, in this final shot, nothing has
been resolved, there is just ‘a body overcome by grief or pain, thrashing about in
search of who knows what; maybe an oasis of freedom in which the pain he has
suffered can be ‘released’ or transferred, or can simply exist; for in the everyday
arena, it is not welcome.’ Daniel Sibony was not actually writing about Claire
Denis’ film here, but about transcendence and excess in dance [‘Trans-en-danse
ou la danse comme excès’]. He goes on: ‘The dance space is a place to which the
play of a being is transferred when it goes beyond what-we-are, what we are
permitted to be.’ Sibony is not talking about improvisation here, yet one of
the strengths of such improvised moments of dance lies in their physical com-
munication of excess, and the release of overflowing energies, which cannot be
expressed in the corseted framework of everyday life. In dance choreography,
however improvised it may be in preparation, the dancer needs to master his
body and tame its incessant energy flows through his technical virtuosity. Non-
programmed dance improvisation enables the actor’s body to be far more radi-
cally ‘attuned to the shapeless’, as Christiane Vollaire so aptly phrases it.

Galoup’s improvisation must be taken in this sense, concluding the choreo-
graphed gestures of Beau travail to provide a possible means of expression
for zones of desire that will remain mysterious and hazy, unstable and contra-
dictory. This sequence, like a Coltrane solo on the same theme, perpetuates the
improvisation carried out by the young Alain (Grégoire Colin) to Eric Burdon
and The Animals’ Hey Gyp, in US Go Home, a film made by Claire Denis for the
television channel Arte in . This body only just emerging from adolescence
seems to be overtaken by forces that are both vital and uncontrollable. While it
does not make as blatant a reference to the powers of desire, the same intention
comes into play in the sequence from L’Apprenti in which Mathieu sings Je te
promets at the top of his voice as he cleans out the cowshed. If this ‘excess of
joy’ does not conjure up the same imaginary powers as Jocelyn’s dance with
the cock or the solos of Galoup and Alain, its brief is, nevertheless, to let the
body tell its own story by surrendering to sheer in-the-moment improvisation.
What interests John Cassavetes, Jean Rouch and Johan van der Keuken, how-
ever, is not so much this introspective dimension of dance improvisation as its
potential to propel us toward the other. As the opening credits of Shadows roll,
a small party is under way in a narrow apartment filled with a huge gathering
of young people dancing to a frenetic blues number. Ben (Ben Carruthers), the
main character, who cannot identify with the flow, is doing his best to make his
way through the crowd and seek refuge in a corner. Cassavetes takes up this
idea again in a sequence from Faces, when Maria, Florence, Billy Mae and
Louise, middle-class housewives who have come to a crowded nightclub to see
how the other half live, genteelly sip their drinks as they watch the young Chet
uninhibitedly showing off his talents on the dance floor. ‘Cassavetes’ gestural
art reaches its peak in its immediate, savage grasp of the bodies dancing and,
simultaneously, in its way of making the space vacillate to restore it to its primal
movement, revealing the primary turbulence of things and beings that the cin-
ema tries with all its might to conceal’, writes Thierry Jousse. Ben’s problem is
the same as that of Maria and her friends: how to free up one’s body, how to get
caught up in the improvisation of the other(s). Rouch features a similar kind of
embarrassment in La Pyramide humaine, when he asks the young black and
white students to find ways of living together more harmoniously. The dance
sequence to the frenzied beat of drums and African voices is far more evocative
than any of the speeches that precede it. The young Europeans have the greatest
difficulty keeping up with their new-found African friends in this communal
invention of free, gleeful gestures, in this celebration of the body in which desire
is experienced without guilt, and even with a sardonic smile. When they finally
agree, without enthusiasm, to move onto the earthen dance floor, they only
manage to reproduce a few awkward rock and roll or ballroom dance steps, in
4. Acting cinema 87
twosomes, in stark contrast to the relaxed vivacity of their comrades. The whole
issue of the film is summed up in the difficulty of getting these black and white
bodies to come together in movement, in finding a common beat in the midst of
this polyrhythm.
The problem of collective rhythm is also addressed by Johan van der Keuken
in Brass Unbound, when he takes himself to Jean Rouch’s old stamping
ground of the Gold Coast in Ghana to film musicians in their daily work, in
which each follows his own rhythm, and then accompanies them in the evening
to their rehearsal venue. It takes hardly any time for the brass and drums to
strike up a collective rhythm, and once the movement has found its ‘unstable
balance’ all digressions and improvisations become feasible, the imperturbable
rhythmic continuity guaranteeing overall balance. Just a few feet away from the
musicians, a woman is cooking with her small children; little by little they are
all drawn irresistibly into the rhythm and start dancing, as does van der Keuken
himself, with his hand-held camera. ‘As I almost always carry the camera my-
self,’ he writes,
I think the image you see is conveying a physical reaction to circumstances […].
When there are lots of things going on all around, one gets caught up in the move-
ment, and when it’s silent, there is a tendency to be more reflective. These different
attitudes are immediately expressed in the physical reaction with the camera.
Van der Keuken’s improvisational approach lends an unusual movement to the

images, stemming from the sound of the brass, the gestures of the dancers and
the beat of the drummers. This impression of an improvised event, of the truth
of the body – van der Keuken’s own and those of the dancers and musicians – is
intensified by the montage, also improvised on the basis of existing images, to
the regular beat of the music. As he gradually concentrates on fragments of the
body, feet skirting the ground, faces with their eyes closed, a swaying brass
instrument or a strangely interwoven couple, van der Keuken makes us forget
space, and it is the images in their entirety that abandon themselves to the mu-
sic. However astute the montage, though, it cannot do otherwise but show what
was being played out on that particular day between the bodies of the musi-
cians, those of the dancers and that of the filmmaker; to portray the instability
of the flow of improvised gestures that convey both the presence of a commu-
nity and the existence of each of the individuals that comprise it. ‘The frame
does not exist because it is a purely conventional limit, which can be trans-
gressed at any moment’, writes Thierry Jousse about Cassavetes, before conti-
nuing:
On the one hand, the frame, which is rarely frozen, is seeking itself and its subject; on
the other, one can move in and out of the frame, take it over completely, walk in front
of the camera, without affecting the film, in fact quite the reverse. It looks as though
the camera is moving around the bodies and faces but is constantly preventing itself
from enclosing them in a prison-frame. The indefinite is what remains in the shadows
and yet cannot be dissociated from the bodies.
In the dance filmed by Rouch or van der Keuken, this centrifugal frame is em-
phasised by music, which also spills over, always slipping out of the frame like
the bodies which have become music-bodies in turn, in a space opened up by
dance.
Releasing the body through improvised dance is also Philippe Faucon’s aim
in Samia, when he depicts the reactions of the young women to the abusive
authority of an older brother baffled by their longing for emancipation. Mon-
tage comes into play again when he follows a dinner in the small family apart-
ment with an evening at a concert attended by Samia and her sisters. Faucon
depicts liberated bodies from the very first sequence: the young women, sitting
at the kitchen table while the men take over the living room to watch television,
burst out laughing at one of Samia’s jokes. Their loud peals of laughter trigger
an angry reaction from their brother Yacine (‘What kind of an idiot do you take
me for?’), who is less bothered by the noise than by the connotations of inde-
pendence and free thinking. The following sequence begins with a conversation
between Samia and her mother, who is ineffectually criticising her daughter’s
clothes for their insufficient ‘Arabness’. As she leaves the building, Samia leaps
over a railing with a yell of freedom, and is then seen with her sisters and
friends on the benches of an outdoor amphitheatre where the concert is to be
held. As the first drum beats of the Moroccan group Dar Gwana ring out, the
girls leave their seats to join the dancers, in front of the musicians. Jacques Loi-
seleux, filming with his hand-held camera from the middle of the dance floor,
spontaneously records the awkwardness of their gestures, reminiscent of the
Oriental dances that feature in family gatherings; gestures accompanied by
shouting and laughter, which express the simple pleasure of moving as one.
The body’s singularity and need to belong to the world come together in these
improvised dances, which are never shot as a reaction to Yacine’s attitude. Fau-
con’s only intention, and in this he resembles Claire Denis and van der Keuken,
is to seize the evidence of the body’s presence.
Each of these examples illustrates the longing to escape conscience and causal
links through improvisation. The montage can be a way of ‘rationalising’ these
sequences of disinhibition by harking back to earlier events, but the strength of
the images stems from a conviction that only a lack of intention can conceivably
turn these improvisations, not into scattered, disintegrating moments, and even
less into moments of dramatic continuity, but into moments of crystallisation
from which unforeseen, unexpected and ineffable worlds may emerge. The acts
then only exist in themselves, in the present of an improvisation experienced as
4. Acting cinema 89
an ‘attempt at dispossession, in the hopes that this will pave the way for some-
thing that can never be produced within the framework of the intention and
project.’ So that the enigma of dance as the ‘turbulent transition between
thought and the act of the body’ may suddenly, in the space of a few shots,
take possession of the entire film.
Improvising/sculpting: U   (), by

Nobuhiro Suwa
The gestures of the painter in Namuth’s Pollock and the dancers in van der
Keuken’s and Rouch’s films find an echo in the gestures of the sculptor who
haunts Nobuhiro Suwa’s improvised film, Un couple parfait. In her essay Cin-
éma et sculpture. Un aspect de la modernité des années , Suzanne Liandrat-Gui-
gues bases a number of her hypotheses on texts by André Bazin, compiled in
the four volumes of the first edition of Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? She highlights the
term ‘cameraman-sculpture’ to describe ‘the deployment composed by a set of
expressions in which the mummy, the petrifaction or crystallisation, the statue
and the mould all overlap’. The statue motif underpins a number of analyses,
featuring among others Voyage en Italie (Roberto Rossellini, ), Le Mépris
(Jean-Luc Godard, ), L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais,
), Méditerranée (Jean-Daniel Pollet, ) and Shadows (John Cassa-
vetes, ) and the author concludes her stimulating comments in the follow-
ing terms:
The cinematic modernity expressed through these films harks back to an idea of the
cinema conceived as a set of properties that enable it to overcome the limits of the
representation and resemblance of things, to delve beyond the ontological realism of
the cinematic image to pave the way for a purely thought image.
In , it was the turn of Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiro Suwa to tackle this
modernity by directing, in Paris, what could be seen as a variation on Voyage
en Italie: Un couple parfait. Alain Bergala has highlighted the brief pages
that represent the only written element in Rossellini’s film. Although they
hardly qualify as a script, they do show the importance given to Katherine Joyce
(Ingrid Bergman)’s visits to museums and historical sites. Each place is referred
to by name, and briefly described by means of authentic city guides: the sculp-
ture department in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, the cave of
the Cumaean Sybil, the Pozzuoli solfatara, the ossuary of the Fontanelle ceme-
tery and the excavations at Pompeii, where Katherine and her husband Alexan-
der (George Sanders) see a petrified couple emerging from the ashes. Even
though Rossellini seems to have planned Katherine’s ‘cultural’ tour, however, he

did no such thing with the rest of the film. Each scene was invented during the
shoot, and the dialogues were written at the last moment or even left to the
inspiration of the actors, who often found themselves bewildered by their direc-
tor’s unorthodox methods.
Suwa and Rossellini’s films start out from the same pretexts, their banality
only matched by their depiction of the tried and tested modernity of Antonioni
and his contemporaries. In Un couple parfait, a married couple, for purely
practical reasons, undertake one last journey before separating. This film and
Voyage en Italie have two elements in common: a lack of traditional script and
an emphasis placed on museum visits. Suwa, in the wake of Rossellini, studies
the viability of improvisation as a creative method by juxtaposing its movement
with the immobility of sculptures, replacing the antiquities of the museum in
Naples with the works of the Rodin Museum. In Voyage en Italie, however,
the only improviser was Rossellini himself who, like Godard from À bout de
souffle on, left his actors totally in the dark as far as the development of their
characters or the story was concerned, forcing them to live the situations with
no prepared agenda. Although Suwa relies on the shoot to the same extent, as a
trigger for unpredictability, he expects far more active participation from his
actors in defining their roles and developing each scene. This bears out the film’s
collective approach and a device conducive to a particular type of improvisation,
one that leads Suwa to concentrate the shoot into a handful of days and places.
The single week of shooting was split in two: first of all, two days for the two
sequences in the Rodin Museum, and then four others to record all the scenes
that unfold during the brief visit to Paris made by Marie (Valeria Bruni Te-
deschi) and Nicolas (Bruno Todeschini). A significant number of shots feature
the couple’s hotel room and the Rodin Museum, and these are completed by a
dinner sequence in a restaurant, the night wedding sequence, a sequence in a
bar, a few street shots and the final sequence on a station platform, a fairly mea-
gre offering for a film that lasts one and a half hours. This economy of time and
place was mirrored by an economy of crew: Suwa, his interpreter, two people
on the images and two on sound. Although there was no script as such, the film
was prepared well ahead of time through regular exchanges between Suwa and
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi on the one hand, which inspired the narrative thread,
and Suwa and his chief camerawoman Caroline Champetier on the other. In the
latter’s view, ‘The spine of the film is formed by the six pages that Suwa wrote
in lieu of a script. The way they structure the project with such incredible sim-
plicity is really impressive and this gives the technical crew huge leeway.’
Jean-Claude Laureux, the sound engineer, confirms this in greater detail:
Suwa gave us a score, a kind of chart in which each of the different-sized boxes repre-
sented a sequence. Each one was coloured in accordance with the intensity of the
4. Acting cinema 91
scenes and he had drawn little characters to show the scale of the diagrams. He also
pointed out where the emphasis lay in each scene in terms of the characters. This
worksheet helped me right through to the editing stage.
These indications, which were fairly restrictive on the surface, were far more
akin to a device than to traditional découpage and acted as the requisite frame-
work for the actors’ improvisation as envisaged by Suwa. The bedroom and the
museum were spaces in which the actors would be able to move freely, while
the static long shots kept the technicians at bay, except in those rare moments
when the camera suddenly became highly mobile, moving in very close to the
faces. The actors needed to work within this framework to mirror the disinte-
grating relationship of the couple, the film’s outcome depending on how the
shoot panned out. It was only during the dinner on the penultimate day of
shooting that Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Bruno Todeschini decided upon the
provisional conclusion to Marie and Nicolas’ short stay in Paris. In order to re-
flect with honesty the relational uncertainty, the sequences obviously had to be
shot in continuity, particularly the long heart-to-heart discussions in the hotel
room, which alternate with the other sequences set up by Suwa (the dinner, the
wedding evening, Nicolas’ wanderings round Paris). These dark moments,
when Marie’s attempts to obtain an explanation are met with Nicolas’ wall of
silence and resignation, find their counter-shots in the luminous sequences situ-
ated in the Rodin Museum.
The choice of a single museum corresponds to Suwa’s desire to hone in on the
couple, whereas Rossellini preferred to track Katherine’s meanderings through
the spectrum of places haunted by the past, places she visits conscientiously
with the help of guides or friends, mediators who contribute to her obstinate
refusal to face the reality of the world. But the protective walls gradually crack
in the face of the sculptures’ sensuality and the emotional subtext emanating
from these traces of a time ‘that is no longer rooted in conceivable lineage or
causality on the scale of human life’, as Alain Bergala puts it. There is a certain
coincidence between this inner turmoil and awareness of eternity and the dis-
covery of the entwined couple in Pompeii, which provokes unbearable emotion
in Katherine. In Un couple parfait, Marie is no longer the grande bourgeoise in
tailored suits. The character built up by Suwa owes far more to Antonioni than
to Rossellini. Marie has no tour schedule to follow and her motivations in visit-
ing the Rodin Museum twice in three days are never elucidated. The exclusive
emphasis laid on Rodin’s works underlines the shift toward the intimate orche-
strated by Suwa, who can thereby throw off the signs that characterised Voyage
en Italie, a film still tormented by the recent chaos of the war. By starting off
the shoot with the two museum sequences, Suwa was choosing to make the
relationship between Marie and the statues the theme of the film, which like a
jazz theme, shaped all the ensuing improvisations.
In the first sequence, Marie walks through the trees and stops for a few sec-
onds in the garden, opposite L’Homme qui marche, before continuing her
walk. The following shot is a very geometric close shot of La Cathédrale, with
Marie entering from the right, revolving slowly around the work before moving
out of frame, once more leaving the statue’s two hands centre shot. One can
hear the voice of a female guide describing L’Éternelle idole, which is revealed a
few seconds later in front of a pane of glass in which the reflection of a group of
visitors can be made out, then Marie slowly approaches the sculpture just as the
voice, still out of field, is quoting Rilke’s famous lines: ‘Something of the mood
of a purgatory lives in this work. A heaven is near, but not yet attained; a hell is
near, and not yet forgotten. And here too, all this radiance comes from the con-
tact of two bodies, and from the contact of the woman with herself.’ The third
shot begins with the long corridor leading to Ève, just visible at the far end, in
front of a large window. At the beginning of the corridor, on the right, the im-
posing Torse de la Muse Whistler, a  bronze, recalls the mutilated antique
sculptures filling the Naples museum, which so fascinated Rodin. It is at this
point that the camera changes over: the three highly contrived static shots are
succeeded by a very mobile close-up on Marie’s eyes, who then sits down in
front of the window, just below Ève, to wipe away a few tears. The final shot,
which is once again stable, is a slow tilt-up spanning the impressive statue in its
entirety, as a few notes on a piano accompany a match-cut with the hotel room
in which Marie is getting ready for the wedding.
The couple’s journey is reflected in the succession of works, from the first en-
counter with L’Homme qui marche to the unfinished Ève, her arms hugging
her body, a posture described by Rilke as ‘lean[ing] forward as if to listen to her
own body’. But above all, Suwa leaves Marie, alone in front of the statues, to
face these confrontations in the moment, with no other words but those of Rilke
evoking the uncertain nature of this purgatory, while the instability and vulner-
ability of feelings and desire are expressed in the way the fingers of the two
hands of La Cathédrale brush against one another, in the precarious equilibrium
of L’Eternelle idole or in the body of Ève, a sculpture Rodin found particularly
difficult to work on because of the ever-changing forms of his model, whose
condition had not been revealed to him. Suwa is careful to avoid any reference
to the couple’s own childlessness, as this would give far too explicit a signifi-
cance to the pregnant Ève. Although his choice guides Marie’s steps through
the sculptures, he does not pre-empt the emotions that will be unleashed as she
comes face to face with them. It is in this sequence that the acumen of actress
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi most tangibly informs her character. The aim is not to
meld the actors with their roles, but to place them in the situation of living in
4. Acting cinema 93
the moment a course meticulously mapped out by the director. It takes only
four shots to convey the mood, just as a few simple chords were all Duke Elling-
ton and Miles Davis needed to create the mood of their compositions. The ensu-
ing improvisations, therefore, all depend on a preordained atmosphere, deter-
mined as much by Rodin’s sculptures as by the actress’ ability to find her
conscious or unconscious inspiration in them. Her role is all the more important
as she has to take the lead in the exchanges with Bruno Todeschini, who plays
Nicolas. From the very beginning of the film he seems resigned to the separa-
tion, whereas Marie is determined to understand, tries to find explanations and
wears her partner down with questions. This battle of wills, which is specified
in the stage directions, forces her to take the initiative and set the rhythm of the
scenes.
The nature of the improvisations is shaped by the tension between Marie’s
apparent calm and her inner turmoil, and this tension is echoed in the contrast
between the statues’ impassibility and what Leo Steinberg termed Rodin’s
‘hasty, over-eager output.’ This tension brings about a singular relationship
with time, crystallised in the endless moments of silence that give the exchanges
in the hotel bedroom so much impact. The space, using minimal lighting effects
and filmed in one static shot, its time limit entirely dependent on the actors’
inspiration, also plays a part in emphasising this temporality. Rejecting impro-
visation’s almost systematic recourse to the hand-held camera, here the camera
never comes between the protagonists. For Caroline Champetier, it would have
been:
impossible to introduce this ‘supplementary body’ into the hotel scenes, for instance,
in which everything is played out in the space between the two bodies as they move
apart, come together, knock into one another and move apart once more. The camera
has to stand back, choosing a precise spot that will span most of the space, showing
the actors entering, leaving or staying in the field, and the takes have to be long en-
ough to capture something of the characters’ mood.
The device that allows this time span to be implemented can only operate if the
actors themselves take the time to appropriate it. This certainly happens when
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi returns from the museum, but is most consummately
portrayed by Bruno Todeschini, who astutely refuses to rise to the bait of his
partner’s demands, not only by allowing the waiting and silence to build up
but by avoiding any physical intervention in the shot. Such economy is almost
unheard of in an improvisational context and once again recalls, in the way it
underlines each detail, each breath, each gesture, the style of Miles Davis during
his Kind of Blue period (), when his phrases, pared down to the extreme in
their harmonic structure, were gradually condensed into a few isolated notes,
played in a myriad different ways as though he was trying to sculpt them in
space. Light years away from the boppers’ over-exuberance or the exaggera-
tions of the early free jazz musicians, Davis takes his time, relying on incanta-
tion and silence to convey the whole tragic dimension of this ‘endlessly con-
sumed present’, as Michel-Claude Jalard so magnificently described
improvisation. And how can one not recall here Davis’ trumpet solo in Ascen-
seur pour l’échafaud, echoing Florence (Jeanne Moreau)’s distraught face as
she wanders through the streets of Paris.
In the exchanges that take place between Marie and Nicolas, therefore, one
can detect a condensed approach that evokes not only Miles Davis but Rodin’s
work on the fragment. A single word improvised by Bruni Tedeschi can actu-
ally determine the intrigue of an entire sequence – take the one nine-minute
static shot that comprises the scene of extreme tension, when they return to their
room on the first evening following a dinner with friends. Sitting on her bed,
facing the camera, she suddenly exclaims: ‘You’ve turned into a socialite!’ To-
deschini, clearly taken aback by this unexpected accusation, reacts awkwardly,
while his partner, although apparently just as surprised by the notion, continues
to drive it home. There is no obvious violence, no harshness, no shouting.
Everything is summed up in that one word, ‘socialite’, which defines all too
well the routine the couple have settled into. Marie’s husky voice and the long
silences, only broken by a few desperate bursts of laughter, lend every word
and nuance its own particular significance. The void that fills the room finds its
ultimate expression in the equally improvised gesture that Marie makes when
she suddenly closes the door that divides the room into two separate areas,
where each one now sleeps alone. Suwa allows the take to last several minutes,
only showing the closed door, as her voice is heard expressing some unspecified
regret. All the sequences that put into play the improvisations between the two
main characters are therefore built on motifs that crystallise the essence of the
emotions: a word, a phrase, a gesture or a material detail such as the red nail
varnish that will not dry quickly enough; or, in the sequence that follows the
first visit to the museum, a lost shoe.
These figures of condensation in improvisation techniques are juxtaposed
with others that are more akin to phenomena of proliferation, particularly be-
tween the sculptures and the body of the young woman, and these mark a de-
liberate attempt to show the influence of the statues on the couple’s story. One of
the differences between Voyage en Italie and Un couple parfait lies in the
emphasis placed on the bodies as objects of desire. In Rossellini’s film, Katherine
does everything in her power to resist physical temptation and is protected
from the lure of the flesh by her idealisation of the platonic love she once had
for a young poet. This determination is weakened, however, by her visit to the
museum in Naples: by means of a series of match cuts, Rossellini depicts
Katherine entering into a strange relationship with a young discobolus, and
4. Acting cinema 95
plays on the agitation provoked by the statue, which becomes a presence in its
own right. Although Katherine’s embarrassment betrays the cause of her agita-
tion, Rossellini gives it an entirely different significance a few seconds later
when, in a superb crane movement over the Hercules Farnese, he features in the
same shot what Bergala terms ‘the tip over between the human point of view of
this ‘being which finds itself free in the world, with no expectations of any kind’
and the point of view of ‘something dominating it’, lying in wait for the right
opportunity to bestow misery or grace upon it.’ The same overhanging cam-
era movement reoccurs as we know in the final sequence, known as ‘the mira-
cle’, when Katherine and Alex rediscover one another in the hope, perhaps, that
love may still prove possible.
In Un couple parfait, no superior force tears the heroine away from terres-
trial contingencies. Here, everything is transmitted through the body, or more
precisely through a form of contamination between the statues and Marie’s atti-
tudes, which in turn condition those of Nicolas. In focusing on the link between
Rodin’s statues and the rekindling of desire, Suwa is responding, perhaps un-
consciously, to Godard’s request to his actors and crew, when he asked them to
go and see these same sculptures before shooting the love scenes in Prénom
Carmen. Furthermore, by opting for dialogue improvisation in a language he
does not master himself, Suwa is able to concentrate all his attention on the
bodies, bearers of a truth that words find great difficulty expressing. The impro-
visation that follows the museum visit is a first attempt to obtain a physical
manifestation of the feelings experienced in front of the works. Sitting by the
window in her underwear, Marie asks Nicolas to listen to her reading a brief
passage from Rilke’s Rodin: ‘Here was life, a thousand-fold in every minute, in
longing and sorrow, in madness and fear.’ But Nicolas does not hear the words
that evoke lost passion, any more than he sees Marie’s sculptural body, implor-
ing him just afterwards to ‘Look at me, look at me.’ A few scattered piano notes,
already heard in the final shot in the museum, ring out once more, as though
Marie has remained in this other space, in this other time, in the emotion she is
clumsily trying to share with Nicolas. The second museum scene goes some
way towards reducing the gulf between the two characters. This time Marie is
no longer alone with the statues. It is not the unfinished Ève that overwhelms
her, but a meeting with a long-lost friend, visiting the museum with his young
son. The improvised exchange between Marie and Patrick (Alex Descas) seems
to make the statues revert to their immobility and bring out the apparent trivi-
ality of life. As they fondly remember the past, with its dramas (the death of
Patrick’s wife) and joys (the son playing at their feet), Marie is able to link the
violence of the emotions she experienced in the midst of Rodin’s timeless works
and the uncertainty of her relationship with Nicolas. This unexpected meeting
in front of Le Secret, another of Rodin’s variations on two right hands, like La
Cathédrale, conditions the final sequence in the hotel when, in the middle of an
ordinary conversation, Nicolas and Marie touch one another at last, and ap-
proach the bed kissing, the young woman appearing to be gently guiding her
partner towards a position that recalls L’Eternelle idole. They do not make love,
but remain in Rilke’s ‘purgatory’ before separating for the night, Marie having
announced her decision to leave the following morning. On the station plat-
form, she puts her case on the train before saying goodbye to Nicolas. But in a
long, uncertain and fragile sequence shot, in which the secret aspirations of the
bodies seem to be refusing to follow the injunctions of the will, the train departs
without her, leaving Marie and Nicolas face-to-face on the platform, lost for
words, like two statues.
By letting the actors decide on the outcome of the film, Suwa was taking his
faith in their improvisation skills to the extreme. Improvisation implies a quest:
each shot represents a communal search for unexpected events that may crop
up at any moment. Following the second visit to the museum, Todeschini for-
gets to switch a lamp on, although it represents the only source of light apart
from the window, through which one can just glimpse the fading daylight. The
actor only realises his omission once he is in mid-take but carries on performing
– and Suwa chose this dark take to accentuate the contrast with the solar bright-
ness of the museum. At the editing stage, he had no hesitation in introducing
two inserts from the same sequence, with no cut-away shot, in order to illustrate
the research process and render the creative work more visible. Improvisation
requires time, together with an acute awareness that the truth stems from the
actor’s ability to integrate blunders or hesitation within the discourse: ‘Improvi-
sation is a series of mistakes that have turned into a declaration or a poem’ said
the multiple instrumentalist William Parker. How many incredible phrases by
Thelonious Monk came about in just this way, by insisting on a discord that the
trained ear would simply have qualified as a ‘wrong note’? The takes in Un
couple parfait, which can sometimes last up to twenty minutes, include nu-
merous examples of tentative gestures or hesitant words betraying both the ac-
tors’ exhaustion and the uncertainty of the situation. But it is precisely these
uncertainties that confer such density to the characters’ relationship. Suwa and
his crew, both actors and technicians, join forces almost naturally with the mod-
ernity of Rodin, who was ‘the first whose sculpture deliberately harnessed the
forces of accident’, as Steinberg put it; Rodin, to whom ‘what [is] more beauti-
ful than a beautiful thing [is] the ruin of that beautiful thing.’
The absence of any predetermined written dialogue or meticulous shot-by-
shot shooting script paves the way for another cinema, defined by Suwa as ‘an
empty circle that can be filled by each one of us’, another kind of work in
which the upstrokes and downstrokes are perceptible, and the scenes are not
‘summaries of scenes.’ This can lead Suwa to alter the filming regime in mid-
4. Acting cinema 97
sequence, going from a static long shot to a mobile close shot, underlined by the
image’s change in texture. This was the case in both museum sequences, with
Caroline Champetier improvising an enormous close-up of Marie with her
hand-held camera to reveal the intimate recesses of the face. This should not to
be read as a conclusion or judgement, merely as a desire to accompany a move-
ment. The real subject of improvisation is the process itself, with all its vicissi-
tudes, but it is also its unfinished nature, which conveys according to Steinberg
‘an outpouring of effort so identified with the act of living that it hates to turn
itself off’, like the two motionless figures, indifferent to the bustle of the sta-
tion, refusing to sever the tenuous tie that still binds them together. Valeria Bru-
ni Tedeschi and Bruno Todeschini have gradually overcome, through improvi-
sation, the instant of freedom that emerges from a succession of moments in
which different strata of time overlap. The memory of the emotions felt in each
scene, the memory of events experienced by the characters, the intimate mem-
ory of the actors, the memory of Rodin’s gestures. All these memories erupt into
the present in an improvisation that always simultaneously involves old and
new, far removed from the myths of immediacy and emancipation that have so
often overdefined it. Improvisation to Suwa provides a contemporary means
of mobilising a mechanism that in its very fixity recalls the ‘views’ of early cin-
ema, while revisiting the modernity of an art that has cast aside any pretention
at utopian synthesis, in order to draw, quite consciously, on practices that ap-
pear on the surface to be entirely alien. After all, was not Rodin, as a contempo-
rary of the Lumière brothers, the first to reconcile improvising and sculpting?
5. The temptation of theatre
A seminal stalemate
The Connection is a play by Jack Gelber, which was launched on  July 
in New York by the Living Theatre, a famous underground company led by
Julian Beck and Judith Malina. American director Shirley Clarke adapted it for
the screen in  in her first feature film, from a script written by Gelber him-
self, shooting it in nineteen days and editing it over a period of four months.
The Connection was one of the many radical and exciting experiments to
come out of New York in the late s, in theatre through The Living Theatre,
in cinema with Jonas Mekas, in jazz with the release of Ornette Coleman’s semi-
nal Free Jazz, in contemporary music with the experimentation of John Cage, in
dance with Merce Cunningham and in the visual arts through performances.
All these artists were determined to challenge the idea of the arts as a safe haven
by breaking with established codes of performance and introducing new forms
that were as much concerned with the creative act itself as with the mise-en-
scène or the relationship with the audience.
The interest sparked by the play stemmed initially from the boldness of its
subject matter and staging. In a rather down-at-heel apartment, a group of
drug addicts are waiting for their ‘connection’; in other words, their dealer,
Cowboy. In Gelber’s play, the group, including four jazz musicians, was made
up of drug addicts brought together by a television producer who wanted to
film their wait with two cameras, one on a tripod and the other much more
mobile and often hand-held by the director. The producer, who is on stage, oc-
casionally addresses the theatre audience, who are following the scene, while
the musicians intermittently pass the time by playing. During the interval, the
actors communicate directly with the audience, but stay in character, even ask-
ing for money to buy a shot of heroin. Reality and fiction are blurred to such an
extent that many of the spectators become convinced that they have really been
party to a day in the life of a group of junkies, and later ask after their health, in
particular that of the addict who appears to have narrowly missed dying from
an overdose – a scene that caused a number of fainting fits during perfor-
mances. For the purposes of the film, Shirley Clarke chose a different device.
She respected the unity of time and place, but on several occasions allowed the
protagonists to talk to camera, in other words to the spectators in the cinema, as

opposed to the theatre audience. The theatrical dimension had, therefore, partly
disappeared and it is a film shoot in action that is being followed by the cinema
audience. The Connection, which Jonas Melkas described as ‘the Waiting for
Godot of drugs’ is a cocktail of avant-garde artistic obsessions. These included
challenging the traditional approach to fiction by giving it a ‘documentary’
slant, uncompromisingly tackling the problems of society, which most artistic
disciplines had always studiously avoided, involving the public in a radical ex-
tension of Brecht’s ‘distancing effect’, reflecting on the interdisciplinary poten-
tial of the creative act, highlighting collective ambition and focusing on ‘perfor-
mance’ and particularly improvisation to ensure the total implication of the
actor, who was to live the experience and no longer simply enact it.
Gérard Genette describes performance works as ‘objects whose temporality is
different and […] more intimately linked to their manifestation’. He naturally
considers improvisation to be performance, although he points out that,
improvisation is not a purer expression of the performance arts, but on the contrary a
more complex expression, in which two theoretically distinct works are combined, of-
ten inextricably as it turns out: a text (poetic, musical or other) – which may be subse-
quently notated and multiplied into infinity – forming the allographic, or ideal, side
and a physical (autographical) act whose material characteristics cannot all be noted
although they can be imitated or even counterfeited.
The Connection, in its theatrical version first of all, brilliantly highlighted the
indiscernible transition between the predetermined element of performance,
any kind of performance, and the element of possible improvisation, implying
unpredictability. By juxtaposing two performance arts, both of them collective –
theatre, which precludes improvisation outside the rehearsal or preparation pe-
riod, and jazz, in which ‘improvisation is established as a prerequisite for per-
formance’ as Christian Béthune put it – author Jack Gelber enabled Julian Beck
and Judith Malina to implement an idea that had been apparently haunting
them for several years: how to turn each performance of the play into a unique,
one-off event.
A few years earlier, in , Beck and Malina had put on Pirandello’s Tonight
We Improvise, a play in which all the ‘improvisations’ were introduced in order
to give the audience the impression that everything was improvised. In a sense,
there was a certain continuity between Tonight We Improvise and The Connec-
tion, although the former had been written back in . By ridding his play of
any dramatic agenda, the only ‘plot’ being the wait for the dealer and the ensu-
ing fix, Gelber was emphasising the perception of a lived experience, both from
the point of view of the characters and from the point of view of the audience.
The dramatic device multiplies the effects designed to enhance the credibility of
5. The temptation of theatre 101
the improvisation: a succession of monologues aimed at the audience, argu-

ments between the crew and the addicts, the agonising symptoms of withdra-
wal and the ensuing ravages caused by the fix itself. Everything is simulated,
however, and the audience let themselves fall into the trap, which raises ques-
tions regarding the honesty of the relationship with the audience.
The problem is exacerbated by the four musicians, all brilliant improvisers of
hard bop: saxophonist Jackie McLean, pianist Freddie Redd, bass player Mi-
chael Mattos and drummer Larry Ritchie. Unlike the other cast members, they
actually play their own characters and in both the play and the film keep their
own names. Some were not unfamiliar with the drug scene themselves: before
being hired for the play, Jackie McLean’s drug habit had led to the confiscation
of his cabaret card, and in  he was given a prison sentence, before kicking
the habit for good. Naturally, on stage they only simulated the withdrawal
symptoms and effects of the heroin, but there is no doubt that their familiarity
with the drug scene added still more realism to The Connection. But this did
not impress Beck and Malina as much as the ‘true improvisation’ of these musi-
cians, who frequently improvised in the course of the play, leading the members
of the Living Theatre to drastically reassess the ‘simulated improvisation’ per-
formed by the actors. These jazz interludes came across as the only moments of
freedom, the only times when the edges became blurred between actor and
character. During performances, this impression was underlined by the attitude
of the musicians in the interval: unlike the other actors, they were being them-
selves when they addressed the audience – the line between role playing and
life had disappeared. Beck and Malina could see all too clearly that the com-
pany’s work on simulated improvisation counted for nothing on stage, com-
pared to the improvised performances of the jazzmen. ‘Jazz is the hero,’ wrote
Beck on the subject of The Connection, ‘jazz which made an early break into
actual improvisation.’ Talking about Charlie Parker, he went on: ‘He inspired
us, he showed us that by becoming really engaged and then letting go the great
flight of the bird could happen.’ Judith Malina confirmed the significance of
this play, and of jazz in particular, in the work of the Living Theatre:
When a jazz musician plays his music, he enters into personal contact with the public;
when he goes home after he has played, one who talks to him knows that there is no
difference between the way he is now and the way he was on the stage. This type of
relationship with the audience creates in him a great relaxation. The Connection
represented a very important advance for us in this respect: from then on, the actors
began to play themselves.
In The Connection, the jazzmen therefore highlighted two almost antagonistic

ways of improvising. The first, when they played together, was the consecration
of a vast amount of work and demonstrated consummate mastery of an artistic
discipline based in large part on collective improvisation. The second, when

they addressed the audience during the interval, showed on the contrary that
the difference between their identity and their performance as actor was mini-
mal. It would appear, therefore, that there is a form of improvisation that is
consciously perceived as a creative act, and an unconscious form of improvisa-
tion that seems almost (but not quite) to correspond to an episode in the musi-
cians’ lives. This ‘not quite’ is crucial: it is what separates the creative act from
life, a prerequisite for the emergence of the artistic gesture. This is also what
Malina means when she says that the actors of the Living Theatre ‘started to
play themselves’ and not to ‘be themselves’. By placing in the same space and
limited time span a group of actors whose only perspective is to carry on wait-
ing, and inside that group a jazz quartet that whiles away the time by playing
music, Gelber’s play addresses the tenuous borderline between life and the crea-
tive act, the musicians striking up almost naturally within the movement of the
play.
This questioning finds a new expression in its perception of temporality. Jazz
provides the means for the four jazz musician characters to remove themselves
from the constraints of the wait and break free. The music is not intended as an
accompaniment, but represents one of the play’s polarities, the other being the
wait itself. It is not Freddie Redd’s quartet that first introduces jazz into the play,
however, but a man who comes on stage carrying a mysterious box. Before
‘connecting’ it, he places it on the table and we realise it is a record player. With-
out a single word being spoken, he then plays an extract from an improvisation
by Charlie Parker (who had died a few years earlier from an overdose). But after
only seconds of reverential attention, the needle gets stuck and Parker’s stutter-
ing repetition of the same phrase leads the intruder to leave the stage for good,
after having carefully put away his equipment. This first irruption of genuine
improvisation in the play (and in Shirley Clarke’s film) creates a hiatus in the
waiting game, the manifestation of a musical interlude that is resolutely in the
moment, despite its connections to the past (encapsulated by the scratched re-
cord) and creates the impetus for the quartet to improvise in turn.
Two ‘liberating forces’ were now at loggerheads. The heroin fix first of all,
which freed up the characters’ speech through a series of monologues addressed
to the audience or to camera. But these monologues were the expression of the
characters’ inner isolation and their apparent freedom is only an illusion: the
alienating aspect of heroin, even if it is presented here as just one of the many
forms of alienation in a society with no future, is never in any doubt. The sec-
ond liberating power, jazz improvisation, does not isolate the characters, but
raises the possibility of collective action, of an emancipating creative act. Instead
of isolating the individual, making him a stranger to himself, collective impro-
visation makes it possible to live time, and master it, together: ‘The improviser
experiences duration without losing or forgetting himself in it’, writes Jean-

François de Raymond. The contrast between the isolation brought about by
drugs and the sharing of a creative time span comes across all the more vio-
lently because The Connection is a succession of monologues that seem impro-
vised and collective interventions through music that are genuinely improvised.
This contrast is never accentuated by the mise-en-scène, however. Judith Malina
trusts the power of jazz to release the idea of freedom itself, a form of resistance
to widespread disillusionment, a resistance that is not rooted in a flight toward
some kind of ersatz but in another form of flight. As Gilles Deleuze put it, ‘to
flee is not to renounce action: nothing is more active than a flight. It is the oppo-
site of the imaginary. It is also to put to flight – not necessarily others, but to put
something to flight, to put a system to flight as one bursts a tube.’ A process
aptly summed up by the term ‘extemporisation’, this flight could be seen as a
possible definition of collective improvisation, beyond time constraints.
The experience of The Connection convinced Julian Beck and Judith Malina
that they needed to persevere in their work on the innermost human identity of
the actor and audience, using jazz as a possible means of achieving this. And yet
in June , less than a year after The Connection opened, it was not jazz, but
the theories of John Cage that inspired their new show, The Theatre of Chance,
comprising two plays, one written by Jackson MacLow and entitled The Marry-
ing Maiden. The actors were directed in part by a dice thrower, so that the vol-
ume and tempo of their speech and the gaiety or sorrow of certain passages
were influenced to a certain extent by the randomness of the dice, although the
whole text was written down and followed word for word. The music of John
Cage, which was in fact the text of the play recorded on tape with some of the
sounds distorted, was only played if the dice decreed it. Some analysts, such as
Pierre Biner, came to the conclusion that ‘the opportunities for improvisation
were far greater in this play than in The Connection’, which would seem to
indicate that improvisation and chance can be confused with one another. But
how much freedom do the actors in The Marrying Maiden actually have? Clearly
none. Beck and Malina have given up improvisation in favour of randomness,
proof yet again, if proof were needed, that the theatre is much closer to art mu-
sic and, therefore, to composition and performance than to improvisation. That
is one of the conclusions that can be drawn from the presence of the Freddie
Redd quartet on the set or screen of The Connection.
Shirley Clarke’s screen adaptation posed other problems, particularly in the
simulation of improvisation in the images themselves, rendered by abrupt mis-
framing, jamming and off the cuff reactions by the cameramen to the events on
set. She blended simulated and genuine improvisation as in the theatrical ver-
sion but also added a dimension that could not really be perceived by the thea-
tre audience, using two cameras to record the improvisation. This was  and
her techniques were derived from experiments in live television, which had cap-
tured the imagination of filmmakers anxious to get closer to reality. As well as
the simulations of improvisation relating to the on-set mise-en-scène, Clarke
came up with other effects, such as quick, sweeping camera movements. The
cinema spectator had now replaced the theatre audience as the possible ‘victim’
of The Connection’s so-called reality. And yet it is impossible for us to believe
for one second in the event supposedly unfolding before our eyes – the frame is
far too polished and the effects are unconvincing. The cameraman, far from giv-
ing the impression of recording an improvisation, always seems to be one step
ahead of the action. In several interviews Shirley Clarke expressed her regret
that the renowned cameraman Arthur J. Ornitz, who insisted on being given
plenty of time to adjust the frame and lighting, had refused to produce a ‘dirty’
image to make it look like a recording caught on the fly. But this would only
have added to the illusion of a ‘false’ improvisational performance, highlighting
even more sharply the authenticity of the jazzmen’s improvisation. This (rela-
tive) failure sheds light on what is really at stake in cinema improvisation: a
genuine acceptance of risk and the invention of images in the flow of the shoot
and montage – a long way, in other words, from the posturing of The Connec-
tion.
Theatricalities
Although The Connection revealed the limitations of simulated improvisa-

tion, the fascination jazz exerted on Julian Beck and Judith Malina, and later on
Shirley Clarke, illustrated their common aim: to perform or (and) record the
‘sheer present’ of creation. The experimental dimension shown here by Shirley
Clarke, who was to demonstrate her familiarity with jazz again in her next
films, proved to be a watershed. Many filmmakers had already explored the
links between theatre and cinema, but none had so radically exposed the ac-
tor’s performance to the ordeal of both stage and screen. The Connection was
soon to become a rich source of inspiration for improvising filmmakers, headed
by John Cassavetes and Jacques Rivette. Like Clarke, who dismissed any
notion of ‘footlights’ in her mise-en-scène, they were not so much interested in
‘the theatre’ as in a common determination to ‘integrate the theatrical into the
cinema, without ever losing sight of the latter’s specificity.’ When L’Amour
fou was released in , Rivette defined the distinction between the two ap-
proaches as follows:
I feel I have learned one or two things about the inherent contradiction between thea-
tre and cinema, insofar as what one is primarily aiming to achieve, to capture in a film
is what the actor does just once, what only occurs once. The theatrical approach, on
the other hand, partly entails providing the actor with an automatism, a mechanism
he can resume every evening; with the stage director, the whole technique of his rela-
tionship to the actors is different; with the filmmaker, the problems all have to be
addressed from the opposite angle.
Rivette is referring far more to the Renoir tradition, to which he adhered, than
to the cinema as a whole, but in this context it does not really matter. But if this
basic contradiction is true, given that he was himself at a stage in his career
when he would stop at nothing to unearth ‘what only occurs once’, what could
he have been seeking in the theatre?
In L’Amour fou, Sébastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), a young theatre director, is
planning to stage Andromaque with his wife Claire (Bulle Ogier) in the role of
Hermione. Claire gives up the role, however, following a row, and is replaced
by Sébastien’s former wife Maria. Sébastien is so tied up in his work that he fails
to notice his young wife gradually sinking into depression. During the shoot,
Rivette did not get involved in the rehearsal sequences, which were held in a
gymnasium, but handed over the reins to Jean-Pierre Kalfon to direct the trage-
dy and ‘delegated’ the filming to a television crew led by André S. Labarthe.
During these lengthy rehearsal episodes, filmed in reportage mode, one can
see the actors, text in hand, working on the phrasing and intonation and doing
their utmost, by trial and error, to convey the true meaning of each line. Rivette
is implementing here the premise of André Bazin, who wrote in  in ‘Théâtre
et Cinéma’:
In the past, the main concern of the filmmaker seemed to be to cover up the model’s
theatrical origin, to adapt it, to dissolve it in the cinema. Not only does he now appear
to be giving this up, on occasion he even systematically underscores its theatrical
dimension. But if the text in essence is respected, how can things be otherwise? For
the text, which is conceived in accordance with theatrical virtualities, already carries
these within it. It determines the modes and style of performance, it is already theatre
in the making. One cannot decide both to follow it and to divert it from the expres-
sion towards which it is hankering.
Rivette seems almost to take Bazin at his word, by filming actors who are prin-
cipally concerned with the text, acknowledges the theatrical convention and
even accentuates the distinction between theatre and cinema by opting for a 
mm hand-held camera in the scenes that take place during rehearsals and in the
wings and keeping  mm for the location sequences. The montage often alter-
nated shots in both formats and at no point did he attempt to eradicate this
strict dividing line. By removing Claire very early on from rehearsals, Rivette
was underlining his determination to keep the drama of the couple quite sepa-
rate from Racine’s tragedy, thereby negating any simplistic attempt to find
echoes between the intrigue of the play and the private life of the young couple.
The filmmaker, therefore, asked Labarthe’s crew to focus on the theatrical
work-in-progress as it gradually gelled into a performance that was to be repro-
duced every evening, like a musician in an orchestra learning to breathe life into
one of Mozart’s melodies. By placing the truly improvised element of L’Amour
fou, in other words the relationship between Claire and Sébastien, outside the
theatrical framework, Rivette had clearly learned from Bazin’s far-sighted hy-
potheses and the relative failures of Shirley Clarke’s film. In order to record the
experience of performance itself, it was necessary to move away from the text
and the constraints linked to filming requirements and allow the actors to tap
into their creativity in the moment, allowing them the same kind of flexibility as
the jazzmen in The Connection. The improvisational episodes in the couple’s
apartment played the same role as the performances of the Freddie Redd quar-
tet, triggering unforeseen forces that perpetuated earlier trajectories by releasing
undreamed of emotions. This is the premise for understanding Rivette’s claim
that the filmmaker’s task is to address all the problems ‘from the opposite an-
gle’. In the many interviews he gave to coincide with the release of L’Amour
fou, he reiterated that his purpose had been to invent the film, with the actors,
from a pre-existing framework, convinced that his legitimate desire to grasp the
unpredictable, a desire he felt should be the guiding principle of any filmmaker,
could be accomplished in an improvisation that was indeed the reverse of the
theatrical approach: not relying on a text that one repeats endlessly to uncover
the essence of a line through a single gesture or intonation, but to set up the
prerequisites for a spontaneous surge that will be captured on camera. This ap-
proach requires, as we have said, a singular, open-ended form of writing, a
script-matter that will guarantee the irrevocability of the decisions made day
after day and the project’s viability and yet pave the way for improvised crea-
tion. The musicians in The Connection knew what theme they were going to
play before they sat down in front of their instruments, the melody, chord struc-
ture and harmonic sequences. In short, all the preliminary requirements for im-
provisation. In L’Amour fou, the improvisation depends on the meticulous pre-
paration of scenes whose outcome is determined in conjunction with the actors
themselves, as they live through the gradual disintegration of the relationship
between Sébastien and Claire. At the end of each day’s shooting, Rivette, Kalfon
and Bulle Ogier would get together for a debriefing session and would then
prepare the following day’s scenes together. The words and gestures were al-
most always left to the actors’ powers of invention and response, a method
used in many other improvised films and achieved with consummate success
in Suwa’s Un couple parfait.
Rivette knew that if he wanted to obtain unmitigated commitment from the

rest of the crew he needed to build up a close-knit community, along the lines of
a theatre company. This theatre company atmosphere, although it tended to-
wards idealisation, came very much to the fore in the sequences directed by
Labarthe, which emphasised the impression of a totally dedicated ‘theatrical’
community – a rare quality on film sets – by means of images featuring conver-
sations between the actors during rehearsals, life in the wings, an overall belief
in collective creation, shared meals, tension, conflict and the tenuous dividing
line between work and private life. Rivette used this ‘documentary’ approach to
the theatre to highlight his own cinematic approach, designed to inspire impro-
visation from his actors. By keeping the apartment sequences for the end, he
was able to take full advantage of the bonds that had been forged during re-
hearsals and in the sequences shot in the wings and over meals, and use them
to nourish the moments of improvisation that lend such impact to the closing
sequences. In this second phase he was not so much shooting a fictional story as
making another reportage, not on the theatre this time but on a fictional work-
in-progress stemming from collective improvisation. Making the most of the
strong ties that the group work had generated, Rivette turned once again to the
simple theatrical device of unity of time and place. The actors performed in a
circumscribed area in which their inspiration was not limited by complex cam-
era movements or staging constraints, conjuring up the early s RKO musi-
cals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, a favourite reference of Rivette’s.
Unlike the extravagant geometric figures of Busby Berkeley, which turned
bodies into objects, Astaire and Rogers remained faithful to a face-on presenta-
tion à l’italienne, the camera’s only objective being to record the fluidity of the
dancing and the unfettered movements of the body. In similar vein, Rivette
opted for a mise-en-scène that despite being intellectually elaborate freed the
actors from the cumbersome constraints of the cinematic device. This patently
brings us back to the tradition of Renoir, who never stopped delving into the
specificities of the theatre to reinvent his own cinema and longed for a techni-
que that would be the actor’s sole prerogative. As Jouvet put it,
in the theatre you are performing; in the cinema you have already performed. This is
Rivette in a nutshell. The cinema brings the security of a finished product, the record
of what has already gone, it is a world of ghosts […]. Theatre is the opposite, it is the
peril of the moment, the here and now of gesture and speech, the physical presence of
bodies. This is why Rivette has always used theatre to produce cinema. To put the
‘once upon a time’ in the present tense.
Although this quote may be excessive, it does highlight the way Rivette deliber-
ately built the links between his cinema and the theatre on two utopias. The first
relates to a conception of the theatre as a necessary ‘peril of the moment’, which
finds itself challenged at every performance. No such thing applies to a disci-

pline in which the work carried out with the actors demonstrates the evidence
of rehearsal: accidents are as rare as in a concert of art music, in which the per-
fectly assimilated theatrical or musical text guarantees the continuity of the per-
formance. The second utopia illustrates the desire to make the film actor some-
thing other than a ghost, a genuine, impossible ‘presence’. As Bazin said, ‘the
cinema can accept all the realities [of the theatre] apart from presence. It is
perhaps this unattainable reality of presence that improvising filmmakers are
looking for in the idealised ritual of a theatre that is merely an experience en-
capsulated in the frailty of the instant, heralding truth. It is not a case of filming
theatre, but of transposing theatrical effects beyond the stage, in the case of L’A-
mour fou the couple’s apartment, a performance venue that has turned into a
theatrical set, filmed by a camera that captures the actors’ every gesture and
every suggestion. Improvisation to Rivette, Cassavetes or Rozier is the theatri-
calisation of everyday life, which pervades, for instance, the sequences featuring
the intimate exchanges between Sébastien and Claire. Two types of improvisa-
tion coexist here, one of which focuses on the impulsive body, while the other,
less spectacular but more perilous, highlights the dialogue. The excesses of the
body are the only thing at stake in the scenes in which Sébastien lacerates his
clothes with a razor blade and then takes a hammer to the door, with Claire’s
help. These extravagant performances, which were all the rage in the s, are
juxtaposed here with the sequences in which their increasingly strained rela-
tionship finds its expression in an exchange of words and gestures, such as the
scene in which they are lying on the bed playing with a roly-poly toy, or the one
in which Sébastien, oblivious to Claire’s desire for change, listens obstinately to
the same long-playing record. Inventing gestures and words enables, or even
forces, the actors to get so involved in the situation that the spectator, who is
almost physically involved in this unique and unpredictable event, has the im-
pression that the bodies have real presence. If theatre is an ‘actualisation’ of
cinema, as Alain Ménil puts it, then improvisation is a radical manifestation
of this ‘actualisation of possibles that [the cinema] can only explore and demon-
strate with accuracy by theatrical means.’
These theatrical means came into play once again in  in Cassavetes’
Opening Night, a film which has much in common with L’Amour fou. Here
we witness the rehearsals of The Second Woman, featuring Myrtle Gordon
(Gena Rowlands) in the title role, a famous actress who is going through severe
depression following the death of Nancy Stein, a young fan who was involved
in an accident as she left the theatre. Myrtle’s relationship with those around her
becomes increasingly difficult following hallucinations featuring Nancy’s ghost,
which render her incapable of giving an accurate portrayal of the ageing wo-
man in The Second Woman. Opening Night and L’Amour fou therefore
share the same basic premise: to show how the outcome of a theatrical project
can be endangered by the existential torments of an actress. Whereas Rivette,
however, was satisfied with using Sébastien’s role to suggest the repercussions
of Claire’s malaise on rehearsals, Cassavetes focused far more radically on the
lack of dividing line between life and theatre. Myrtle becomes increasingly dis-
turbed, her brittle performance exacerbated by her dependence on alcohol. She
modifies her role constantly during the rehearsals and performances preceding
the New York première of The Second Woman, forcing the rest of the cast to
adapt to unforeseen situations. The new rehearsals set up in order to get back to
the original brief (although this is never clearly identified) only add to the prob-
lems, culminating in Myrtle’s disappearance before the Opening Night of the
title.
During their working sessions, the actors never refer to a pre-existing text and
the audience is unable to identify the actual plot of The Second Woman, a play
which seems to rely on a number of situations specially written for the film,
with no dialogue as such. Unlike Rivette in L’Amour fou, Cassavetes repudi-
ates the distinction between classical theatre and a cinematic theatricality, which
comes into its own off the set. Rivette believed that theatre stemmed from an
established work that the director should follow, whereas film, as a recorded
performance, could throw off this dependence. He therefore saw the original
play in terms of a musical score ‘that one could only “adapt” by abandoning
the original work and replacing it with another’, to quote Bazin’s comments
on theatrical texts, whereas writing for the cinema came far closer to a chord
sequence in a jazz theme, methodically structured but designed to encourage
improvised contributions. Cassavetes punctured this dichotomy, in a brilliant
consecration of our intuition regarding L’Amour fou. It was not theatre itself
that interested him, but the creative process it generated while breaking away
from what constituted its identity: the gradual structuring of a performance de-
signed for reiteration. The constantly shifting dialogue not only affects the text
but the staging of The Second Woman, which has to comply with Myrtle’s un-
bridled imagination. The play no longer represents an accomplished work by an
omnipotent director but a work-in-progress, at the mercy of the uncertainties of
a constantly shifting present. In Opening Night there is no original work im-
posing its words on the actor but a creative process built on quicksand, which
constantly relies on the invention of a ‘being for whom it is impossible to per-
form without bringing along an element of its vital energy’ as Thierry Jousse
put it. This porous frontier between life and performance reveals much about
the way Cassavetes’ cinematic approach feeds on improvisation without ever
acknowledging it as a creative method. Improvisation here is a cornerstone of a
particular concept of cinema.
Cassavetes’ determination to show the stage actors evolving in a single place

and venue is underlined by numerous shots of the rapt, delighted audience,
blissfully ignorant of the torments and uncertainties affecting Myrtle. But the
amalgamation between this fictional audience and the cinema audience is just
an illusion. All that matters is the impression of ‘sheer present’, nourished by a
given theatrical situation, but most of all by the chaotic inner turmoil of an ac-
tress, depicted in the highly cinematic oscillation between the stage and the pri-
vate world of Myrtle and her entourage. The unusual slant on this confusion
between life and art turns Opening Night into a ‘documentary’ on a working
method designed to lead the actors towards a truth rooted in theatrical perfor-
mance, but a theatrical performance that no longer depends on the stage. As
Thierry Jousse says, ‘What Cassavetes essentially retains from the theatre is its
theatricality, in other words the hyper-expressivity of the body, the gesture, the
word, the work on posture and its implementation through performance, the
essence of theatre in a sense, but theatre imbued with the everyday.’ This thea-
tricality, far removed from naturalism, from the slightest connivance with ‘hys-
terical’ bodies or with the famous method of the Actors Studio, uncompromis-
ingly defined by Louis Marcorelles as the ‘intoxication of the actor by his role’,
must allow the actor to be overtaken by his own body. To Cassavetes, improvi-
sation was one of the ways to achieve this, by freeing the actor from a ‘composi-
tion’ of predetermined gestures imposed by the director or springing from a
tried and tested technique. This is what Opening Night posits in its portrayal
of the simulated improvisations caused by Myrtle’s erratic behaviour but also in
its reliance on moments of genuine improvisation. In the theatrical arena, Myr-
tle’s unmanageable excesses underline the spur of the moment aspect of crea-
tion that underpins the character’s own discovery of its true nature, a revelation
that can only spring from the apparent overlap between actor and role, accord-
ing to Cassavetes. The method is laid out without the slightest taboo before the
cinema audience, who literally get a ringside view of the agitation and chaos
created by Myrtle’s outbursts.
Jousse’s definition of ‘theatricality’ provides a possible clue to deciphering
these moments of improvisation, the theater stage accentuating the theatricality
of other spaces such as the wings, Myrtle’s vast empty apartment or the bed-
room of Manny Victor (Ben Gazzara), the director of The Second Woman. In a
magnificent sequence, Manny’s wife Dorothy (Zohra Lampert) expresses her
anguish following a phone conversation in which her husband and the despe-
rate Myrtle seem to be involved in an amorous exchange. Zorah Lampert im-
provises a series of gestures simulating the physical impact of a succession of
imaginary blows, drawing on choreography reminiscent of experiments in con-
temporary dance. Many years later, in a filmed conversation with Gena Row-
lands, Gazzara confirmed the shot’s improvised nature: whereas he was only
expecting his partner to express her emotions facially, he suddenly found him-
self forced to react to the unforeseen convulsions of her contorted body. This
was a way of theatricalising the character’s feelings in an initially banal se-
quence depicting the tension between the couple, theatrically staged in an en-
closed space, with its entrances and exits. The most arresting improvisation,
however, took place on the real set, when Myrtle, drunk out of her mind on the
dreaded opening night in New York, reinvented an exchange between her stage
partner Cassavetes (in the role of her ex-husband), and Cassavetes the film di-
rector (her husband in real life). This long sequence, shot before an audience
and improvised with no preparation, springs from the complicity linking the
two actors. Excess is the watchword here: the shouts, laughter, leaps, expres-
sions and gestures, as well as the games directed ‘live’ by Cassavetes. This
‘theatricalisation of theatre’, in which feelings seem to burst from the eloquence
of the bodies, sums up the essence of what is being played out by these ageing
characters, increasingly riddled by self-doubt. Physical energy is a desperate
but unflinching reaction to the lucidity of the words, which express exhaustion
and relinquishment. Gena Rowlands revealed her surprise and emotion when
Cassavetes suddenly admitted in mid-take his fear of the passing years: ‘I’m
getting old’ he says and then, after a long silence, ‘What do we do about that?’
The scene ends a few minutes later with an incredible gestural composition, an
awkward choreography that brings out the physical closeness of the two prota-
gonists. There is nothing improper about it, everything is transmitted through
performance and it is on stage that Myrtle manages to rebuild herself, in the
dizzying blurring of reality and fiction that characterises the Cassavetes ap-
proach to improvisation. The closing shots of Opening Night show the little
party given on stage to celebrate the première, in front of the cameras and in
the presence of the couple’s friends, including Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel and
Peter Bogdanovich: theatre, cinema and life have come together in a single shot.
By revealing a few elements of his ‘method’ in Opening Night, from the
starting point of the links between theatre and cinema creation, Cassavetes not
only unveils the improvisational aspect of each of his films but equally the na-
ture of this improvisation, based on a theatricality that highlights the underlying
forces at work in everyday life. One can analyse several improvised sequences
from Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, Husbands and The
Killing of a Chinese Bookie in the light of the excesses, theatricality and
powers of simulation shown in Opening Night. One can also observe the sig-
nificance of the basic devices used to create conditions of unity of time and
place, such as those that prevail in the theatre. In fact, this applies to most of
the filmmakers studied here and not merely to the dance sequences mentioned
earlier: Nobuhiro Suwa in the hotel bedroom in Un couple parfait or in the
apartment in M/Other; Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche in the mosque sequence of
Dernier Maquis or in the more obvious example of Bled Number One, but
also Maurice Pialat in the family apartment in À nos amours; or, Jacques Rozier
in the holiday let in Du côté d’Orouët, not to mention Jean Rouch, whose
cinematic ambitions may well have grown out of the discovery of the ritual of
the Haouka sect in Les Maîtres fous, a ritual whose theatricality and improvi-
sational dimension is obvious to all.
But, ultimately, the way the actors are directed in improvised cinema dis-
tances us from theatrical performance. In Opening Night, Cassavetes manages
to reach a form of truth by making Myrtle a disruptive influence. We are leav-
ing the theatre performance, with its connotations of predictability, and moving
to the one-off, recorded event: we are leaving the theatre for the cinema.
Through improvisation, Myrtle introduces chaos and anarchy as creative forces,
forcing the rest of the cast to improvise in turn and react on the spot to unprece-
dented solicitations. On the surface, this attentiveness to the performance of
one’s fellow actors takes us back to the theatre. We know that the stage requires
the active presence of the actors, unlike the ‘classic’ cinema, in which actors can
perform without ever actually communicating, particularly through the age-old
angle/reverse angle technique. But improvisation requires a particular degree
of concentration given the unpredictability of one’s partner’s performance,
which, in turn, demands an appropriate response. Opening Night obviously
springs to mind here but also the mosque scene in Dernier Maquis: however
theatrical its device, it slips away from the performance – the religious ritual –
when one of the workers gets up to protest against the boss’ possible abuse of
power. The strength of the sequence springs from the initial surprise and then
the reaction of the other protagonists, who have been given no prior warning. In
improvisation, the purpose of the cinematic mise-en-scène is therefore to upset
the quasi-theatrical device so that it acquires the status of an event. ‘The real
comes when reality breaks away from the rules’ said André S. Labarthe: and
here improvisation provides the means to attain the real by breaking away from
the rules of the theatre.
Montages
Theoretically, montage is the decisive fork in the road between the cinematic act
of creation and its theatrical counterpart. The various ramifications we have just
seen, however, lead one to evoke the possibility of a concept of montage that is
specific to improvised film, reflecting the culmination of choices made at each
stage of the process, from the first draft of the script to the shoot itself. Writing
in ‘Théâtre et Cinéma’ about Jean Cocteau’s own screen adaptation of his play
Les Parents terribles (), Bazin refers to the découpage in the following
terms:
The notion of ‘shot’ finally dissolves all together. Only the ‘framing’ is left, the ephem-
eral crystallisation of a constant, pervasive reality. Cocteau is fond of repeating that he
conceived his film in ‘ mm’, ‘conceived’ being the apposite word, because he would
certainly have had difficulty producing it in such a reduced format. The spectator is
supposed to feel totally involved in the event, not by means of the depth of field as
with Welles (or Renoir) but by virtue of the eye’s diabolical swiftness, which seems for
the first time to be at one with the rhythm of our attention.
Bazin attributes the shot’s possible dissolution to the unity of time and place
and, therefore, to the film’s theatrical origin, and he goes on to examine its im-
pact:
Although he respected the traditional découpage at a technical level […], Cocteau
gave it an original slant by only using third category shots; in other words, the
spectator’s viewpoint and his alone; but an extraordinarily perspicacious spectator,
who has been granted an all-seeing omnipotence. The logical and descriptive analy-
sis, along with the character’s point of view, are practically eliminated and only that
of the witness remains. The ‘subjective camera’ is finally a reality but it is back to
front, not because of some puerile identification of the spectator with the character
through the intermediary of the camera, as in La Dame du lac, but on the contrary
through the witness’ pitiless exteriority. The camera is finally the spectator and noth-

ing but the spectator.
Bazin suggests rethinking the montage from the angle of what appears to be a
recording of a play; but a recording that appears, on the one hand, to respect the
unity of time and place (the theatre) and, on the other, to guarantee through its
specific characteristics the ‘cinematic outcome’ of Cocteau’s project. He stresses
the most notable of these specific characteristics as being the presence of a point
of view, which is external to the action and assimilated to that of an attentive
spectator constantly surprised by events.
This text is important for two reasons: the first relates to the link drawn by
Bazin between the film’s theatrical origin and an external viewpoint, which he
associates with the ‘subjective camera’; the second, which is an offshoot of the
first, concerns the reassessment of the rules of montage. In improvised cinema,
one finds both the ‘temptation of theatre’ and the cinematic freedom that ema-
nates from this subjective camera, even if the dramatic role that Bazin confers
upon it is lacking. Filming improvisation precludes the slightest revelation
without the characters’ knowledge, because the cameraman’s aim is never to be
‘ahead’ of the events he is shooting. Thus, the present hypothesis takes Bazin’s
one step further, giving it a slightly ‘leftist’ flavour: cinema improvisation de-
pends upon filmic choices that dictate new methods of montage through their
concrete links with the theatre. But the spectator called upon by improvisation
does not have ‘an all-seeing omnipotence’ as Bazin claims. On the contrary, he
needs to relinquish his expectations in order to fully experience the work-in-
progress, and be constantly prepared for ‘the authenticity of the lived experi-
ence to burst forth in the moment.’ This quest for a new spectator is simply
the ultimate culmination of the improvised project, the purpose of the montage
being to create and maintain the requisite openness on this journey toward the
unforeseeable.
All the studies devoted to Pialat, Cassavetes or Rozier stress the liberties they
took with the rules of continuity editing that had been imposed in classic cin-
ema, which had already been challenged by Rossellini among others. This was
not done in a spirit of rebellion or disavowal, but out of sheer necessity. The
norms relating to match cuts or scales of shot in the context of the constraints of
narrative continuity could no longer apply in cases where filming imperatives
had rendered such a lexicon totally obsolete. Improvisation radicalised and gen-
eralised Bazin’s posit: it was not only the whole notion of the shot that was
challenged but the notions of framing, time, space and dialogue. By acknowl-
edging filming as the recording of a one-off event by an external spectator,
whose ‘eye’s diabolical swiftness seems for the first time to be at one with the
rhythm of our attention,’ new, rewarding possibilities are opened up. If the
montage process often seems long and complex in improvised cinema, it is be-
cause it condenses to a large extent the choices that in classic cinema would
already have been made at the writing stage, not to mention in the shooting-
script or in the storyboard if it existed. To improvisers, the potential of filming
was often considerable because the shot sequences did not depend on an inflex-
ible continuity. But although the approach of these improvising filmmakers var-
ied, it was always determined, at least in part, by the ‘subjective camera’ as
defined by Bazin, an exteriority that many fundamentally different filmmakers
were to share.
In Faces Cassavetes’ primary aim was certainly to shoot the sequences in con-
tinuity, his sole priority being to record the erratic ballet of bodies that seemed
to be unfolding before his eyes. The spontaneity afforded by the lightweight
equipment allowed him to tailor the movements of the camera to those of the
actors; this did away with the traditional frame, each image existing purely in
the flow of the shot, with no pretence at autonomy. The theatrical space was
annihilated in turn by the plethora of close-ups of faces. Bazin seems to have
predicted their role in another analysis of the relationship between theatre and
cinema, this time encapsulated by Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc ():
‘The systematic use of close-ups and unusual angles,’ he wrote,
is effectively aimed at abolishing the space once and for all […]. It is through this
intermediary that Dreyer ceases to have nothing in common with the theatre and one
might even say with Man. The more Dreyer drew exclusively on human expression,
the more he needed to convert it into nature. Let us make no mistake, however, this
prodigious fresco of heads is the exact opposite of an actors’ film: it is a documentary
of faces.
This astute analysis could just as well be applied to the aptly named Faces, in
which Cassavetes, mesmerised by the changing expressions on his actors’ faces,
seems to have been driven by a ‘recording frenzy’. The dialogues, whose im-
plicitly regimented exchanges structure the rhythm of the montage, were
powerless here to resist the paroxysm of the bodies, and lost their dramatic and
narrative driving force. In Faces, Cassavetes, therefore, managed to condense
into a single film all the new expressive avenues offered by improvisation on
both sides of the camera.
All the films mentioned up to now show affinities with a form of documen-
tary writing that is as demanding as that of Jean Rouch or Johan van der Keu-
ken. The subjective outlook, which Bazin compares to that of a witness, under-
lines once more the common ground between improvised and documentary
film. It is not surprising, therefore, that the keys to montage provided by van
der Keuken are equally instructive in both cases:
Yet again it is all about defining the film, not in terms of what we were aiming to do
but in terms of what is actually in our hands, the filmic material […]. And almost all
my montage work takes this autonomy of the filmed image into account. I think this
is where I differ from many other filmmakers: ultimately, the form of the film, or the
way it comes across, is never the implementation of a plan; it is a process, and each
stage takes it back to the beginning of that process.
Although it may not always be applied so radically, this first-hand account

helps us to understand why all improvising filmmakers take such an active
part in the montage: ‘The more freedom we allow the image, the more space
we have to create complex links between the images’, van der Keuken con-
tinues. Montage does not mean choosing between the paths opened up by these
images and imposing just one. On the contrary, trajectories have to be found
that will leave the multiple potential avenues of interpretation wide open. There
is an element of ‘incompleteness’ in these films; an element of uncertainty that is
the cornerstone of improvised creation: allowing actors to improvise is to ac-
knowledge a relationship with the world in which astonishment is a driving
force. The montage must, then, be done in such a way as to astonish the specta-
tor too, letting him find his own way through this living matter, these move-
ments of images that attest to a project that ‘despite becoming an entirely auton-
omous entity, completely different from the initial idea, nevertheless answers all
the criteria that existed latently from the beginning.’ An improvised film is
structured, at least in part, like one of van der Keuken’s documentaries, with
the creation of a coherent work only stemming from the moment the filmic mat-
ter actually reaches the editing bench. Unlike classic cinema, the improvising
filmmaker therefore structures his film after the event, gradually finding his way
through the maze of rushes resulting from the prerequisite plethora of shots and
lengthy decantation that characterise what is really more of a life experience
than a shoot.
This does not imply, however, that only blanket editing options exist. Film-
makers have succeeded in adapting the nature of Bazin’s external witness to
their own aesthetic universe. In Un couple parfait, whose treatment of con-
finement is very close to that of Les Parents terribles, Suwa rigorously ap-
plies the principle of the external witness, paying great attention to the capital
question of his position. Suwa’s single, fixed viewpoint, from which he very sel-
dom wavers, is countered by Cassavetes’ multitudinous outlooks in each se-
quence of Faces, external outlooks that convey a desperate awareness of a re-
lentless passing of time that the dizzying shots are trying in vain to retain. These
two conceptions of montage, which represent two poles, coexist in most impro-
vised films. In Un couple parfait once again, a small, highly mobile camera
takes over from Suwa’s normal static camera on a number of occasions, delving
suddenly into the innermost facets of the characters through close-ups and ex-
cessively grainy images. These faces recall those in Cassavetes’  mm Faces
but they are also reminiscent of the final shot of Jean Seberg in À bout de souf-
fle, which is itself a reference to Harriet Andersson’s nod to the spectator in
Monika (Ingmar Bergman, ). Through these brutal incursions, caused by
bringing the camera as close as possible to the bodies in sequences that focus
on distance and duration, one can clearly perceive the two conceptions of time
at play: on the one hand, dilation, conveyed by the hotel bedroom in Un couple
parfait, immobile and suspended in time; and, on the other, consumption, ex-
pressed in the relentless movements of the bodies in Faces.
Between these two ultimately classic poles, the desire to lend shape to the
succession of improvised episodes without betraying their impetuosity was to
give rise to a number of partly unprecedented forms of montage. Although it
would be futile to catalogue these into some kind of illusory inventory, a com-
mon bias, or perhaps even a necessity, associated with a kind of ‘modernity’,
appears to guide these filmmakers: to show the work-in-progress and willingly
reveal to the spectator the traces of the creative process on the completed work.
As Rivette put it, ‘you can only hope that the completed film still bears in a
corner the traces of its dangerous crossing, its uncertainties, its illuminations –
even if, at the end of the journey, you come to realise that you have been going
round in circles.’ One of the distinctive aspects of improvisation, which tends

to contract composition and execution in the moment, is to entertain the notion
of hesitations, accidents, loss of control or even failures as components of a crea-
tive act for whom completion is not the be-all and end-all. Much to the disgust
of musical purists, jazz recordings actually featured the snap of the keys of the
wind instruments, throats being cleared and the soloists’ heavy breathing, all
intolerable manifestations of the body in action. Rather than exclude these
traces of the work-in-progress, improvising filmmakers, like jazz musicians,
chose to integrate them into their language, recognising them as cornerstones
of their artistic expression. Thus, every improvised film has some connection
with the workshop, the ‘dream of the film’s perfect adherence to its shoot’, as
Emmanuel Burdeau said with reference to Rozier’s cinema.
The nature of these traces varied according to the world, background and
technical conditions of the shoot. Cassavetes, like Rouch, Rozier and Pialat, pre-
ferred to highlight the overall effect to the detriment of details they considered
trivial, which could range from an involuntary look to camera to a blurred im-
age, a microphone in the field or a second attempt at a speech by an actor strug-
gling with his lines. All that mattered was the movement of the sequence and
the truth that emerged from the images, which carried far more impact than the
technical imperfections. Some had no hesitation in inserting two versions of the
same sequence, one after the other, on the grounds that it was impossible to
choose between two improvised variations of a single theme. Pialat’s La Mai-
son des bois was a case in point, as were the films of Cassavetes, who regarded
montage as an adventure. He edited three versions of Husbands, for instance,
each featuring one of the protagonists in the leading role, before going on to
compile a more polyphonic version, the only available version in circulation to-
day. Suwa used strikingly obvious cuts with no change of angle to emphasise, in
a single sequence, the montage of fragments chosen from different shots, in or-
der to show the work-in-progress. And Ameur-Zaïmeche, in Bled Number
One, shot a performance by singer Rodolphe Burger at dawn on an Algerian
hillock with the microphone and amplifier clearly in field. This sequence, which
has no narrative justification, was improvised without the slightest premedita-
tion during the shoot, but it was rapidly inserted into the montage and played a
decisive role in the structure of the film.
The ability of improvising filmmakers to innovate during the montage
reached its apotheosis in what appears to be a radical inversion of the priority
given to images as opposed to sound in the classic cinema. For the sequence
with the sailing boat in Du côté d’Orouët, Rozier had to condense a whole
day’s improvised shooting into ten minutes. He collated the images with total
disregard for the temporal sequence, the light consequently varying from one
shot to the next. The only guiding thread turned out to be a realisation – that no
doubt corresponded to Rozier’s underlying purpose – which gradually mani-

fested itself in the sight but particularly in the sound of the rushes. The aural
coincidence between the laughter, the childlike alarm of the young women and
the sexual act; the fear and pleasure, nervousness and joy, filmed together in a
kind of self-abandon that thanks to improvisation was not simulated but genu-
inely experienced. For the montage, Rozier therefore took the highly evocative
live sound as his starting point, and it was the sound that determined the con-
tinuity. The filmic matter took shape through sound, and the images merely
served as an accompaniment, showing obvious disregard for the ‘accuracy’ of
the match cuts. The second example of a montage ‘by ear’ is Quatre Jours à
Ocoee, a documentary by Pascale Ferran depicting a jazz recording. From the
very beginning, Ferran rejected the idea of voice-overs or on-screen conversa-
tions with the musicians or technicians; she structured Quatre Jours à Ocoee
around the music and exchanges that were contained in the thirty hours of
rushes (over seven hours shooting a day on average). It took her four and a half
months and eight hours a day to reduce those thirty hours to a two-hour film.
She applied Rozier’s ‘method’ to the entire film, creating the first montage with-
out the images, simply with the soundtrack. Without betraying the chronology,
she built her film by ear, interweaving a complex network of morning set-ups,
discussions, rehearsals, musical performances and collective listening sessions
in which, like the screening of rushes at the end of the day’s shoot, the modest
crew hears the record gradually coming together from the chaos of the shots. As
in Rozier’s fiction, listening was the first step in rendering the dimension of a
‘sheer present’. This highly physical perception of the rhythmic beat revealed
the existence of a ‘musicality’ rooted in the upturning of the hierarchy between
sight and sound.
One could find innumerable other examples to show how improvised cinema
has paved the way for a new kind of interplay between continuity and disconti-
nuity, and explored other rhythms of montage based on blocks of autonomous
sequences, fragments and surges, elongation and condensation, and on new
channels of transmission between the eye and the ear. During the montage, the
director is less concerned with the completed composition than with the possi-
bility of returning to his improvisation, so that he can make intuitive choices,
eliminate endlessly and react spontaneously. These figures also mark the break
from the formal perfection of classicism, in favour of a conception of creation in
which the traces of the painter’s gesture, the marks of the sculptor’s tool and the
‘dirty’ sounds of the musicians create physical imprints that then become an
integral part of the work. The composers of free jazz were the first to blaze a
trail, creating their groundswell in black musical history by drawing on the
blues, and consequently on song, to bring about their melodic, harmonic and
rhythmical revolution. Returning to the theatrical source – the blues of the cin-
ema – may well have had the same effect on improvising filmmakers, guaran-
teeing the primary presence of Man in putting the art of cinema to the test.
6. The rules of the game
Directing from the inside (1): the director and actor
The analyses of improvised sequences have brought to light a number of de-

vices, including that of ‘directing from the inside’, with the director as actor of
his own film. The most radical example is that of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, who
so far has played the lead in all his feature films. Although his presence in Wesh
Wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe? Can be justified by a perfectly legitimate com-
mitment to a cast of amateurs, his status as both director and actor is actually an
offshoot of a method in which there is an inherent possibility of improvisation.
The first manifestation lies in the construction of his future roles. Although
these represent the main characters, they are only rarely at the heart of the ac-
tion and always maintain a certain distance, tinged with a degree of opacity.
This presence/absence bolsters the apparent passivity and provides an ideal
vantage point from which to orient the scenes-in-progress and make directorial
choices without having to outline his underlying intentions. The movement that
gravitates around the character played by Ameur-Zaïmeche allows him to be
actor and director at the same time, within the movement of the performance
itself, a strategy that has been implemented in a variety of ways throughout his
films.
In Wesh Wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe?, Ameur-Zaïmeche makes Kamel a
character who intervenes only sporadically in the action. He is older than the
others and following his clandestine return to France after serving a dual sen-
tence he tries unsuccessfully to find a proper job, steering clear of the small-time
dealing that characterises everyday life in the housing project. In a number of
improvised sequences depicting endless hours of stultifying boredom, all shot
on location, Ameur-Zaïmeche tries out his actor/director position for the first
time, before going on to acknowledge it explicitly in Bled Number One. The
scene in which he chats to three ten-year-old boys on the steps of one of the
buildings is particularly striking in this respect. Despite their age, the boys have
clearly grasped Ameur-Zaïmeche’s position as director but also the complicated
situation of his character Kamel. The scene unfolds in a volley of questions and
answers until they are persuaded by the incredulous Kamel to perform a de-
monstration of kung fu, which leads the camera to focus all the attention on
them. Kamel/Ameur-Zaïmeche, having directed the sequence towards this un-

expected permutation, in which the children’s idleness gives way to the exuber-
ance of a martial art that encourages discipline and self-control, finds himself
the spectator of their choreographic display. Several moments in the film under-
line this position, the other protagonists showing remarkable attentiveness to
Kamel’s initiatives. Although the aim was not to introduce this hounded, often
silent character into every sequence of collective improvisation, in Wesh Wesh
Ameur-Zaïmeche was already sowing the seeds of a contemporary alternative
to all the dual director/actor experiences disseminated in the films under discus-
sion here.
In his second film, Bled Number One, he fine tunes the character, lending
him a more rounded dimension. Kamel receives a warm welcome from his vil-
lage community, who are intrigued when he returns home after several years
away. This situation, which reflects that of Ameur-Zaïmeche himself – he left
his native Algeria when he was very young – is the starting point for a plethora
of collective sequences in which Kamel acts as a magnet, a curiosity. But his
pleasure at being among family and friends cannot hide his discomfort at the
archaic social and religious practices that still paralyse Algerian society. This
malaise once again turns Kamel into both a central and an off-centre figure, as
though he is gradually slipping away from a world in which he cannot find his
place. The actor/director interplay has a far more prevalent role here and there
is no shortage of moments in which Ameur-Zaïmeche orients his mise-en-scène
to fit in with Kamel’s performance. In the sequence in which Louisa goes down
to the beach to comply with the Taleb’s edict, she is accompanied by other wo-
men from the family and, more surprisingly, by Kamel, who transforms the
sacred bathing ritual into an improvised moment of shared erotic pleasure. Ka-
mel/Ameur-Zaïmeche takes the women down to the sea and then joins them in
the water. The stable, tight shot of the conversation between Louisa and the
Taleb is countered by the open expanse of beach and the cameraman’s stalwart
efforts, with his hand-held camera, to capture the bodies being tossed by the
waves. The improvisation directed by Kamel/Ameur-Zaïmeche takes on a
clearly political slant: the reassuring platitudes of the Taleb on the role of wo-
men in Algerian society are forgotten in this moment of physical harmony, in
which freedom is expressed just as much by the bodies brushing against one
another as by the laughter and shrieks that run through this improvised se-
quence.
One need look no further to understand that improvisation is far more than
an aesthetic consideration. These directorial choices, in their dismissal of any
preformatted attempt at political correctness, are effectively targeted at provid-
ing Algerian women with the means to improvise their lives: not a single word
is exchanged in this sequence, which appears to be a sensuous response to the
6. The rules of the game 123
exhortations of religious dogma. The presence of Ameur-Zaïmeche at the core

of the film enables him to avoid peremptory dialogue in favour of gestures that
may be open to interpretation but are, nevertheless, imbued with powerful po-
litical significance. When the men from the village remind Kamel about the tra-
ditional separation between men and women during the ritual of Zerda,
Ameur-Zaïmeche opts for a long shot in which Kamel can be spotted in his
orange cap, in the middle of the women and children gathering for the cere-
mony. Once again this is a physical reaction to the spoken word, but it is also a
play on Kamel’s ambivalent status as both character and director, an ambiva-
lence taken to its extreme in the two sequences in which the guitarist Rodolphe
Burger sings alone at dawn, on a hill, with Kamel/Ameur-Zaïmeche just in front
of him, looking into the distance, lost in thought. These two sequences, al-
though they were actually improvised during the shoot, turned out to be the
film’s balancing poles when it came to the montage, an example of how unusual
directorial approaches can pave the way for unprecedented cinematic forms.
But when the director/actor ‘directs’ a sequence from the inside, he does not
simply give it a gentle push in the right direction. This method does not pre-
clude an element of cruelty, one that already existed in Rossellini’s cinema, for
instance. In Bled Number One again, Ameur-Zaïmeche takes advantage of his
dual status by encouraging his amateur cast to reveal a number of somber re-
flections on camera. When in the fictional story, after beating his sister Louisa
because of her disobedience to her husband, Bouzid joins the night barrage
organised by a group of men from the village, its anachronistic brutality triggers
Kamel’s anger. The sequence is highly confused and once again largely impro-
vised. The men rapidly take sides against Kamel – ‘[Kamel] doesn’t understand
but don’t worry, we’ll teach him, we’ll take him in hand’ – thereby tacitly con-
doning Bouzid’s violence towards his sister and condemning the attitude of Ka-
mel. By igniting the hostility of the little community, Kamel/Ameur-Zaïmeche is
setting a trap and one of the protagonists falls right into it when he alludes to
the ‘natural’ domination of a brother over a sister. Another example: the only
guests at the little party held to celebrate the return of Kamel (and no doubt of
Ameur-Zaïmeche himself) are the men, who after a few glasses of beer start to
dance with self-conscious exuberance. Kamel/Ameur-Zaïmeche gradually re-
tires from the scene in order to replace this fictional episode with a documen-
tary approach that brutally highlights the absence of the women and the pa-
thetic nature of the men’s drunken gesticulations. In both sequences he allows a
truth to filter through by leaving the camera running; nevertheless, it is the
weight of his presence at the heart of the mise-en-scène that releases it with
such force. In our last example, Dernier Maquis, Ameur-Zaïmeche’s role is still
more unequivocally that of a director at the core of the film. The authoritarian
stance of Mao, the boss of the small pallet manufacturing business that forms
practically the only backdrop for the film, leads him to abandon the no man’s
land between the centre and the margin that was occupied by Kamel. The na-
ture of his presence changes and his direct impact on the course of events be-
comes far less decisive, with the concomitant risk of amalgamating the role of
the boss with that of director. Ameur-Zaïmeche is aware of the danger and
therefore remains within his role, handing over the direction of the improvised
sequences to experienced actors such as Abel Jaffri. We will be returning to this
strategy later, which involves giving specific instructions to one or several ac-
tors in order to orient a sequence in a particular way.
Although Ameur-Zaïmeche has renewed the forms of what we have termed
the director/actor’s ‘directing from the inside’, he is, nevertheless, emulating a
number of improvising filmmakers who relied on a similar method to avoid
adhering to a neatly mapped-out script. This principle can be traced back to the
character played by Jean Renoir in La Règle du jeu [The Rules of the Game].
Octave has a pivotal role in the cynical, cruel games being played out between
the masters and their servants: the series of sequences in which he tries ineffec-
tually to restore order in the Château de la Colinière, draped in an incongruous
bearskin, is a classic. Throughout the film, however, Renoir, as actor-cum-direc-
tor, takes tremendous liberties with the shots; Octave’s performance, during
Christine (Nora Gregor)’s speech in the Colinière hall for instance, comes across
as entirely improvised. Christine’s conventional attitude is countered by an in
situ, purely gestural banter set up by Renoir between his own Octave character
and his friend La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), and this shifts the centre of gravity
of the scene. Only Renoir, in his dual role of director and actor, could have
rocked the boat to this extent, in a sequence that in the original script was
merely intended to depict Christine’s monologue. Pialat, in a further nod to
Renoir, experimented in turn with directing from the inside, to great effect. The
earliest manifestations can be seen in La Maison des bois (-), in which
he takes on the role of the village schoolteacher, an ideal front that enabled him
to direct without revealing his ultimate purpose, while responding in real time
to the children’s input. To Pialat, the director’s presence in front of the camera
was a way of creating a certain confusion between what was happening behind
and on camera, and he astutely exploited the problems this could engender,
particularly during episodes of improvisation. This is the case in two of the
most outstanding sequences in À nos amours, which reflect the devices dis-
cussed earlier in relation to the films of Ameur-Zaïmeche and in which Pialat
plays the father of Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire). The scene known as ‘the dim-
ple scene’ is indicative of an understated approach that involves guiding one or
two of the actors in a particular direction, whereas the scene depicting the fa-
mily meal, interrupted by the unexpected arrival of the father, expresses a more
brutal approach, intended to provoke reactions leading to exasperation.
In the first sequence, Pialat gradually encourages his young actress Sandrine
Bonnaire – who was making her first film appearance – to distance herself from
her character Suzanne in order to identify more closely, on camera, with her
special relationship with the director. Each screening of this scene reinforces the
tenuous nature of those few moments when the fictional father/daughter rela-
tionship spills over into the relationship between director/actress, revealing the
tender attraction of the almost sixty-year-old man for the sixteen-year-old girl.
Pialat, as director and actor, directs Bonnaire from the inside, playing on the
ambiguity of his dual role to seal off their exchange from prying outside eyes –
everything in this scene hinges on the complicity between the two protagonists.
This rare tour de force stems from Bonnaire’s ability to respond within the flow
of the shot to Pialat’s improvisation, drawing on improvised responses of her
own, which in turn open up new avenues. Dialogue is the most challenging
aspect of improvisation and Bonnaire succeeds not only because she is a great
actress but because the improvisation is rooted in emotions that despite their
association with ‘documentary truth’ find their ideal expression in the fictional
À nos amours.
In the second equally famous sequence, Pialat calls on his dual role once
again to nourish his fictional relationship with the cast. Although in the script
the father was supposed to have disappeared (he had either abandoned his fa-
mily or died), Pialat, having only allowed the chief cameraman into his confi-
dence, decided to make him resurface at the end of the film, when all the family
gather together. It is patently Pialat just as much as his character who sits down
at the head of the table to spell out a few cruel truths targeted both at the fic-
tional characters and at the actors, without ever losing sight of the fact that this
sequence is designed to become an integral part of the film. The confrontation
carries all the violence of the fictional family’s relationship but in order to
achieve this degree of violence or repressed hatred, Pialat had to tap straight
into the jealousy, resentment and frustration that had built up during the shoot.
Collective improvisation is the only way to achieve such a concentration of con-
tradictory emotions and having Pialat the director acting within the core of the
sequence was once again a prerequisite in the success of the one and only take.
Improvisation here is not simply a way of extending fiction through documen-
tary but serves as an instrument for a reassessment of the film as a whole. This
improvised sequence from À nos amours transcends the family saga to become
a complex study on the power of money, the corruption of art through cupidity,
the ambiguity of filial and amorous feelings and the onset of age and death.
A number of analysts have, quite rightly, compared the films of Pialat and
Cassavetes, highlighting a number of similar improvisational methods. Pialat’s
role in À nos amours recalls Cassavetes’ numerous performances in his own
films, which chief cameraman, editor and producer Al Ruban summed up in

the following terms:
He was responsible for carrying the narrative. This didn’t necessarily mean playing
the lead, just enabling the story to unfold so that the other characters could go on
acting […]. In the films he appeared in, he always had a pivotal role. So even as an
actor he would continue directing operations at a structural level.
These comments reveal Cassavetes’ ability to improvise his mise-en-scène dur-

ing the shoot in order to fall in with the actors’ performances. Ruban continues:
‘His mind never stops spinning, no matter what side of the camera he’s on.’
Husbands (), which followed Faces, is the film in which his directing from
the inside is at its most creative, as though it were an experiment pushing his
dual role to the limit. All his cinema is built around an invention of gestures and
figures, a test of the body’s aptitudes. Already in Faces, in the highly mobile
sequence in which three of the characters drunkenly invent a series of pathetic
sketches, Gena Rowlands revealed how Cassavetes’ directing veered towards
physical movement and exhaustion. Although the shoot began with clear mar-
kers on the ground, these were soon abandoned in order to give the body more
freedom and allow the actors to take over the space, and this forced the camera-
man to improvise his movements in turn. In Husbands, a number of sequences
put the actors’ bodies to the test and Cassavetes, from the inside, held the
strings, orienting the improvisations, channelling the suggestions of the rest of
the crew and fuelling energy into moments of total exhaustion.
To recap briefly, the story concerns four well-established forty-somethings,
Harry (Ben Gazzara), Archie (Peter Falk) and Gus (Cassavetes), who are attend-
ing their best friend’s funeral. They try to cheer themselves up by wandering
around the streets of New York, playing basketball, swimming and finally in-
dulging in a memorable drinking binge. The following day, unable to readapt to
everyday life, they decide to spend the weekend in London, where they play
around, drink and end up spending the night with some girls they have picked
up. The balance between the three protagonists illustrates the nature of the role
held by the directors/actors in films with an improvisational element. From the
very first sequences, a hierarchy emerges between Harry, Archie and Gus: the
first is the most abrasive and instinctive; the second, the one who keeps asking
himself questions without ever finding the answers; and the third, both the
most sensible and the most tormented. Gus is actually the ringleader, the one
the others constantly turn to, the one who makes the decisions for them all. In
the many improvised sequences, it goes without saying that the impetus pro-
vided by Gus reflects the orientations imposed by Cassavetes the director with-
in the flow of the performance. Husbands is one of the rare films in which an
attentive observation of the actors’ performances reveals such a concrete form of
hierarchy, and this allows the audience to discover how a director can guide
two actors, who themselves orient the ensuing course of events by reacting in
the moment to his proposals. In all these sequences, Cassavetes acts as both
guide and benchmark, but he is also prepared to accompany his partners for a
while. At that stage, Husbands becomes a remarkable documentary on collec-
tive improvisation, as rich and complex as a recording of free jazz, which was as
misunderstood when it was first launched in  (with the album Free Jazz: A
Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet) as most of Cassa-
vetes’ films on their release. In Husbands and Faces, as in Coleman’s record,
there was the same belief in the collective, the same need to act as one, the same
attraction to risk-taking, the same time requirements, the same semblance of
chaos, the same tolerance for excesses that were liable to trigger the unpredict-
able. But also the same acute awareness of the need for a director, a role that
both Coleman and Cassavetes took on with quietly confident authority. The
filmmaker’s presence in almost all the sequences of Husbands is of a similar ilk
to that of the saxophonist throughout the thirty-five minutes of Free Jazz: the
choice of collective improvisation as creative method implies physical involve-
ment in the act itself, and this is the only way to guarantee both the consistency
of the work and the freedom of each participant.
One of the sequences in Husbands, like the improvised sequence with the
family meal in À nos amours, comes across as a test of Cassavetes’ method.
The evening following the funeral, we find Harry, Archie and Gus in the back-
room of a bar, surrounded by a dozen other people. The beer is flowing freely
and the three men, who are without question genuinely drunk, decide to launch
a singing contest greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm by the partici-
pants. This interminable sequence reaches its paroxysm when a young woman
takes her turn and, despite trying her best, finds herself viciously criticised by
the three men, who accuse her of not singing ‘from the heart’. This insistence on
sincerity harks back to Cassavetes’ strictures as director, the attitudes of Harry,
Archie and Gus with regard to the bewildered woman reflecting those of a di-
rector with his actors. This sequence borders on the unbearable because Cassa-
vetes, who is just as drunk as the two others, is no longer capable of directing it:
by losing his control over the improvisation, he becomes just another man tak-
ing advantage of the power given him by the shoot in order to torment an extra.
It is inconceivable that Cassavetes did not realise this when he saw the rushes.
Although this scene can justifiably be seen as a tacit demonstration of the neces-
sity to control improvisation and the dangers it can hold when the director loses
his grip, Cassavetes’ main aim here is to show the clumsiness and ensuing stu-
pidity and cruelty of these three drifters as they gradually become aware of the
mediocrity of their lives. If he retained the sequence in the final cut, this was
mainly because the vulgarity and brutality of this method actually served the
film’s purpose: ‘I believe this is a film that shows men as they really are, and
that’s good enough’, he said. This pathetic episode, a self-portrait of a group
that does not attempt to hide its ‘documentary’ dimension, reveals a kind of
masculine truth which he shares. Many years later, he was to produce a far
more serene image of his work in his dealings with an inexperienced actress. In
the opening minutes of Love Streams (), one sees him asking a young wo-
man questions in a face-to-face encounter that has all the hallmarks of an audi-
tion. The almost sadistic obstinacy of Husbands is replaced here by patience
and tenderness. Thierry Jousse ascribes this to maturity, but the numerous
comments by people who worked with Cassavetes at various stages of his ca-
reer tend to underline it as a typical example of his relationship to his actors, far
removed from the cruelty of the trio in Husbands.
The work of Cassavetes also teaches us that being both director and actor is
not the only viable method of directing from the inside. Although this is never
specified in the credits, he always shot a number of sequences in his films him-
self, using a hand-held camera, as shown in the many photographs taken on
location. This was another way for him to be more than the mere spectator of
his own mise-en-scène. As Thierry Jousse put it, ‘He takes an active role, placing
the camera in the eye of the storm so that the flesh can surge forth with its
power of truth.’ Initially, he was probably just trying to adapt to the move-
ments of the actors, but his presence was also a way of orienting the overall
movement of the sequence, of directing once again from the inside. Al Ruban,
in the bonus to the DVD version of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, recalls
that Cassavetes used to follow the rehearsals with his hand-held camera, as
though the mise-en-scène would grow out of this through-the-lens perspective
of space and bodies. On the same DVD, Ben Gazzara points to the sequence in
which Cosmo Vitelli, who has been shot in the stomach, is staying with his girl-
friend’s mother:
When [Cassavetes] picked up the hand-held camera he joined you in the scene […]. In
the scene with the mother, she lays me on the bed. John picked up the hand-held
camera and he was in bed with me, and down my body with me, and over me, and
lying with me, like another actor. Like a love affair between the director and the actor.
And of course nobody used the hand-held camera as well as he did. Like he was
making love to you in good moments. He came up to your face and stayed there,
how long he stayed there, waiting for you to do something to surprise yourself.
Gazzara’s words sum up perfectly the way Cassavetes became both actor and
director when he was improvising, even physically stepping into the shot: actor
through the bond linking him to the actors on camera and director in the way
he used this proximity to bring about an element of the unforeseen in the faces
or gestures of those same actors.
Cassavetes was not the only director to try to abolish the dividing line be-
tween technique and actor. Jacques Rozier also turned to the hand-held camera
whenever he felt it was appropriate, particularly in several sequences of Du
côté d’Orouët. In L’Amour fou it was not Rivette himself who did the hand-
held shooting; to film Andromaque, the play being put on by one of the charac-
ters, he handed over the reins to director and cameraman André S. Labarthe.
More infrequent improvisers, such as Jean-Daniel Pollet, found other methods,
as in some of the dance sequences in L’Acrobate (), in which Alain Levent,
the chief cameraman, sits in a wheelchair in the middle of the dancers, in a
totally unscripted sequence: ‘Jean-Daniel pushed Levent around in his invalid’s
chair according to the whims of his emotions and intuitions’ recalls an obser-
ver. Thinking on the job: that could well have been the main motivation be-
hind the specific directorial strategies of these actor directors or cameramen di-
rectors. This did not preclude delegation, but it did involve reducing the
intermediaries and achieving optimum creative autonomy as a prerequisite for
a kind of improvisation that brought the cinematic gesture closer to that of the
improvising musician, alone with his instrument, finding his inspiration from
and within the heat of the moment. One inevitably thinks of documentary film-
makers, notably Rouch and van der Keuken, who also filmed with hand-held
cameras, accompanied by a one-man sound crew. Jean Rouch claimed that
hand-held filming meant directing live, and Johan van der Keuken, wrote Serge
Daney in relation to Vers le sud,
filmed as Charlie Parker or Bud Powell are said to have played, undeniably using all
the notes but at an incredible speed. Lost in the crowd in Cairo, van der Keuken plays
the cinema as one plays the saxophone. He plays all the frames, at top speed. The
pans act as the storyline, with the tense misframes as riffs and the reframes as
choruses.
These choices do not stem from financial considerations, as is often claimed,

particularly in the case of fictional films; they stem from a desire to balance the
means and the end, which is always the same: to appropriate things in real time
in order to elaborate one’s own inventions and in turn trigger other movements,
giving improvisation a chance in the face of tyrannical premeditation.
Directing from the inside (2): delegations
Other strategies involve orienting the sequences in such a way as to make cer-
tain actors the director’s ‘intermediaries’. Before we return to Cassavetes, how-
ever, other less eloquent examples, at least on the surface, deserve our attention.
In both Un couple parfait, Nobuhiro Suwa’s fictional film, and L’Apprenti,

the documentary-cum-fictional film by Samuel Collardey, it is possible to detect
examples of what one could call directorial ‘delegation’. Un couple parfait is
composed, as we have said, of several sequences featuring improvised ex-
changes between Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Bruno Todeschini in the confined
space of a hotel bedroom. Although the dialogues and movements are left to the
inspiration of the actors, however, the roles within the scenes themselves have
clearly been prepared. Marie is trying to find an explanation for their imminent
separation and asks endless questions, driving Nicolas into a corner. Nicolas
dodges the issue and refuses head-on conflict – the actor, in order to convey
this relinquishment, seeks refuge on the edge of the frame or even moves out of
frame all together. The initiative is left to Marie: she is constantly in motion,
endlessly soliciting the attention of Nicolas and becoming exasperated at his
passivity. In Suwa’s preparatory drawings, this battle of wills is expressed
through the size of the characters; each sequence picks up this established hier-
archy, which is liable to evolve in the course of the take according to the direc-
tor’s instructions. This is an initial form of delegation: the director gives the
creation of his characters a particular slant that will enable him to attribute a
directorial role in one of the sequences to an actor. While he grants greater
power to the actor who is supposed to be taking on the director’s role (Marie
flounders in vain for a long time and Nicolas gets the upper hand by his seem-
ing indifference), the main purpose is to invent two-way situations in which
each character can make suggestions within a framework whose underlying
determination is belied by its seeming flexibility. This is where the consummate
mastery of Suwa’s writing comes in, already tried and tested in M/Other, re-
leased a few years earlier. Last but not least, to place so much trust in the
actors’ shared initiatives it was vital to have two experienced actors such as Bru-
ni Tedeschi and Todeschini, who had already struck up a bond in the theatre,
long before their performance in Un couple parfait. The quality of the impro-
visation owes much to the lack of escalation, preventing any ‘saturation of the
shot by the performance’, the major danger of any improvisation. In his next
film, Yuki and Nina (), Suwa continued to invent new avenues of improvi-
sation, this time sharing the director’s role with actor Hippolyte Girardot, who
defined his presence on both sides of the camera in the following terms: ‘It
makes it possible to direct from inside the field. The actor is able to orient to an
extent the mise-en-scène, he monitors the rhythms, the looks. It’s incredibly use-
ful to be doing that from inside the field while Suwa is doing the same thing
from the outside.’
In L’Apprenti, Samuel Collardey finds himself in a similar situation but with
one major difference: the two actors are both amateurs playing their own role,
in a real situation. Technically, the approach is the same as that of Suwa, featur-
ing static long shots to give Mathieu and Paul, the two protagonists, plenty of
freedom. Like Suwa, Collardey relies a great deal on lengthy takes to bring out
the true nature of the characters’ relationship and refuses to make use of the
possibilities of montage in order to give them a new slant. Unlike Suwa’s film,
in which the hierarchy between the characters depended on the script and the
preliminary drawings, L’Apprenti approached it from a more documentary an-
gle. Mathieu, as the title indicates, is a teenage apprentice on Paul’s farm; it was,
therefore, quite natural for Collardey to delegate part of the mise-en-scène to the
latter, relying on him to guide the boy, much as Pialat had done with the teen-
ager in À nos amours. Paul turned out to be an excellent actor, displaying a
deep-rooted understanding of what was being played out in the situations cho-
sen by Collardey to fuel his film. The success of L’Apprenti relies almost en-
tirely on the relay set up between the director (who is once again also the cam-
eraman) and Paul, particularly in the dialogues, which despite being entirely
improvised have an impact that had been carefully foreseen by Collardey. The
bond between the two men was similar to the one that was gradually formed
between the farmer and his apprentice, and this mutual trust generated the
powerful sequence in which Paul reveals to Mathieu his grief at having lost his
little boy some years previously. This deeply moving episode occurs just after
Mathieu has tearfully confessed how upset he was at his parents’ separation.
This is improvisation at its most magnificent. The flame is passed on and the
protagonists become truly attuned to one another – the ultimate proof that im-
provisation entails first and foremost the ability to listen.
These two duos, the first between two experienced actors and the second be-
tween two newcomers, lead us to explore an avenue that has been tried and
tested by numerous improvising filmmakers: the mix of professional actors and
‘amateurs’. Rozier, Cassavetes, Pialat and Ameur-Zaïmeche have always ta-
ken this approach and there is no doubt that it is part of the appeal of impro-
vised filmmaking.
Of all the films John [Cassavetes] did, there was always a mixture of professional and
amateur […]. I think it’s an ingredient that once you get past the first day the profes-
sional actors feed on that. Not knowing quite what to expect from the other actors,
and it makes them sharper, makes them pay attention more. And you have the ama-
teur people – that’s a difficult word for me to even say – but the other actors, and
there’s a great sense of wanting to be a part of something and to play these characters.
So after they get over their initial excitement and settle into the role they really are
playing themselves, and I mean playing wonderfully well. If you have the patience to
go along with it. But at some point not far into each of the films there is really no
difference, there is no distinction. They’re all professional.’
Once again it is Al Ruban who provides these precious clues, which are
picked up by Ben Gazzara:
The way he [Cassavetes] worked with amateurs was really a lesson for anyone. If
anybody on the crew or anybody in the cast would try to direct one of the amateurs,
to help them get better, John would get livid. He wanted them to be as innocent and
‘unprofessional’ (a word he hated by the way) as they could be. And they got looser
and looser and they got better and better.
He takes as his example a sequence from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in

which everything, including the dialogues, is improvised: Cosmo, played by
Gazzara himself, is having a heart-to-heart conversation with Betty, his girl-
friend’s mother, played by Virginia Carrington, an amateur actress. This new
duo illustrates the complexity of the rapport established by Cassavetes between
experienced actors and first-timers. Al Ruban refers to the insecurity of the for-
mer, who, unable to predict their partner’s reaction, are therefore forced to
adapt to the in-your-face performance of these amateur actors. Ruban, however,
has overlooked the fact that the professional actor is capable of orienting the
sequence and guiding his partner in a direction that matches that of the entire
film.
When the wounded Cosmo arrives at Betty’s for the last time in search of
some tender loving care, the status of the two protagonists leads them to behave
in totally different ways. Gazzara talks all the time, jumps from one topic to
another, creates constant changes in atmosphere, comes to a stop in mid-sen-
tence: it looks as though he has no idea how to cope with the freedom provided
by Cassavetes in a film which relies so little on improvisation. This uncertainty
is very helpful to his character, physically diminished and aware of impending
death. When he runs out of ideas following a brief but violent exchange, he
drinks a cup of coffee that has been left on the table only to spit it out immedi-
ately, his brief glance to camera betraying his bewilderment. But Gazzara imme-
diately picks up the thread again, turning with a laugh to his partner to say: ‘I
don’t know what to do with my hands… How long’s that coffee been there?’ It
is the actor far more than the character who is behind this comment but it gives
tremendous impact to the scene, showing once again how improvisation toys
with the borders between fiction and documentary. When Betty intervenes as
though to come to his aid, it is actually to admit that she does not want him
around any longer, that he is putting her and her daughter in too much danger.
The density of this scene stems from its unpredictability, both as a subject for
fiction (what is Betty going to do with the ailing Cosmo?) and as a working
method (allowing the actors to improvise their dialogue). Cassavetes was by
now a past master at directing actors by using the inexperience of amateurs to
rekindle the performance of an actor as experienced as Ben Gazzara, whose in-
spiration here actually highlighted the talent of his less seasoned partner. This
method, based on a great deal of preliminary work to build up trust and com-
plicity between crew members, had already been used in Faces, particularly in
the sequences between Seymour Cassel and Lynn Carlin, but most strikingly in
Husbands. The end of the London trip is shot in three hotel bedrooms, in which
each of the men is trying to score with the girl he has picked up. The three girls,
who had no acting experience, had been spotted in the street. The long face-to-
face encounters seem to be staged as seminal moments of improvisation be-
tween the actors and the amateurs, the actors throwing themselves into ex-
changes sparked first and foremost by the bodies, gestures and laughter. Cassa-
vetes knew better than anyone how difficult it was to improvise dialogue in a
fictional framework, without lengthy rehearsals, with non-professionals who
had only joined the cast in mid-shoot. He therefore deliberately confronted their
bodies with those of the experienced actors and their mutual embarrassment
illustrates, to a degree rarely seen in the cinema, just how difficult it is to launch
into an intimate relationship with someone one has only just met. It needs all
the talent of Cassavetes, Falk and Gazzara to accompany the three young wo-
men, another example of their contribution to this exercise in directing from the
inside.
The last case study of directorial ‘delegation’ concerns a mix of professionals
and amateurs once again, but this time in the context of collective improvisa-
tion. This is no doubt the most perilous situation for a director, as the sequence
can so easily slip out of control. Jean Rouch found out the hard way in several
sequences of La Pyramide humaine, when he asked a group of teenagers to
invent collective discussions on camera on a number of broad themes intended
to underpin the fictional storyline. This triggered an unstoppable flow of inter-
jections that made a significant impact within the framework of the film but
also demonstrated the difficulties faced by collective improvisation when the
basic rules, whether explicit or not, are missing. Many years later, Rabah
Ameur-Zaïmeche also experimented with this, mixing professional actors and
amateurs playing their own role. In both Bled Number One and Dernier Ma-
quis, Abel Jaffri, a highly experienced actor with a theatrical background in im-
provisation, is given the task of orienting the sequences in accordance with
guidelines previously set up by Ameur-Zaïmeche. These guidelines are con-
cealed from the other actors for the most part, in order to ensure maximum
spontaneity. This is the case in Bled Number One, when the small community,
grouped around a table, tries to find a way of tackling the ‘fundamentalists’
who are threatening their village. Jaffri, as the only experienced actor in these
long takes – which often exceed ten minutes – is responsible for orienting and
stimulating the most apposite comments so as to fit in with the director’s brief,
but he also needs to be capable of detecting the unexpected lead that will gen-
erate an unforeseen moment of truth. An even more revelatory example of the

potential inherent in these encounters is the scene in which, on the outskirts of
the village, a group of young men threaten to kill Jaffri’s character Bouzid be-
cause he has been drinking beer. The situation is purely fictional to the actor but
only too real to the villagers playing their own roles, who only a few months
previously were not the executioners but the victims of men pretending to de-
fend the Muslim cause simply in order to terrorise the local villages. The impact
of this single take stems from Jaffri’s ability to get into his role, guided in turn by
the other protagonists, who are finding this violent ordeal incredibly difficult to
cope with. A final example is that of the mosque in Dernier Maquis, when an
uprising is launched by Jaffri and two other actors who all share responsibility
for this ‘fictional dimension’ of a scene whose initial ambition was of a docu-
mentary nature: to show the ritual of prayer in a mosque.
There are other equally pertinent examples of the ‘strategies’ of mise-en-scène
at play in this confrontation of experienced and amateur actors: several se-
quences in Pialat’s La Maison des bois, or the magnificent collective improvisa-
tions of Du côté d’Orouët by Rozier, with Bernard Menez acting alongside
complete newcomers to the cinema, but also some scenes in Laurent Cantet’s
film Entre les murs, in which François Bégaudeau plays his own teaching role
in front of a class of high-school students who have never been in front of a
camera before. Here, Bégaudeau’s dual status as French teacher and director’s
delegate is in a class of its own, so to speak, and is so ambiguous that one could
almost refer to him as ‘the director’s authorised representative’. Cantet later
gave some pointers on his method: the direction of the sequences was deter-
mined jointly during rehearsals, but Bégaudeau was entitled to orient the takes
in the course of the shoot or even trigger unexpected incidents, with or without
the help of a few ‘pupils’ in the know. The device devised by Cantet, therefore,
made it possible for Bégaudeau to direct from the inside within a class created
for the purposes of the film by volunteers from the same high school.
This rather obvious depiction of Bégaudeau’s role as ‘director’s delegate’ calls
for a few comments on the characters played by the actors whose role was also
to orient sequences that involve partial or total improvisation. These characters,
often defined with the perspective of improvisation, had to be prepared to fol-
low it through: ‘The director’s role is often interwoven with the fiction and me-
taphorised in a number of sequences that directly hark back to the method’,
writes Thierry Jousse. In The Killing of a Chinese Bookie Cosmo is the boss
of a strip club and also directs the acts; in Faces Chet is the butt of the women’s
clumsy advances but appears to be directing operations in the long living-room
sequence, while in other sequences it is the prostitute Jeannie (Gena Rowlands)
who takes over, channelling the desire of the three men. The nature of the char-
acters played by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Bernard Menez in Du côté
d’Orouët or even Lynda Benahouda (Philippe Faucon’s Samia) is different, but

their pivotal roles give them the power, if improvisation is called for, to make
the world revolve around them according to the director’s instructions. They
intervene like some foreign body, challenging unmitigated certitudes and upset-
ting the established order. These characters hark back to Renoir’s Boudu or to
the women played by Ingrid Bergman in the films of Rossellini, most strikingly
in Stromboli (), but also in Voyage en Italie. Obviously the appearance of
this ‘foreign body’ cannot be limited to improvised films (it is after all one of the
cornerstones of fiction), but it does pave the way for the creation of chaotic
situations conducive to improvisation. Its presence is then applied in original,
not to say unprecedented ways, mainly because this foreign body also ‘carries
the fiction’ in films in which the juxtaposition of professional and amateur ac-
tors gives form to the desire to rekindle exchanges between fiction and docu-
mentary.
Rohmer and directing actors: a model of improvisation?
Directing an actor by giving him more freedom is also the driving force behind
Éric Rohmer’s work, particularly his series showcasing characters confronting
the contemporary world. For a long time, Rohmer was extremely wary of the
word improvisation, its negative connotations implying that the director had no
hold or control over the work. For a filmmaker who was fascinated by composi-
tion and the mastery and erudition of musicians such as Mozart and Beetho-
ven, a concept that was linked to jazz could only trigger suspicion. It was not
until , at the age of , in Le Rayon vert and the following year in Quatre
aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle that Rohmer finally acknowledged im-
provisation as a creative process. Better late than never, one might say, given the
fact that Rohmer’s atypical method had always drawn on a particular kind of
improvisation. It therefore came as no surprise that Rohmer not only turned to
actors (and particularly actresses) with no cinematic experience but that the cor-
nerstone of a whole facet of his work involved setting fictional situations within
a documentary reality, an approach that frequently triggers improvisation, as
we have seen.
Rohmer’s actresses have often commented on his approach. Prior to shoot-
ing he would arrange frequent meetings on a one-to-one basis, spanning
months or even a whole year, so that he could get to know the actress and build
up a friendship without ever revealing the role that might (possibly) show off
her talents. The character would emerge from these exchanges and what they
revealed about her personality: her delivery, language, tastes and habits; in
other words, her own special relationship to the world. In a series of fine brush-
strokes, like a painter with his canvas or a sculptor with his clay, Rohmer would
gradually hone a fictional character with whom the actress could only feel at
one. There was no shooting script – the script focused on the situations and
dialogues, and the movements were determined during rehearsals, in the actual
space and with the actors: ‘To begin with,’ Rohmer explained when talking
about Conte d’hiver, ‘I give virtually no indications to the actors […]. The re-
hearsal of the scene as a whole always comes first. I would be really bothered if
I had to put a shooting script down on paper and then tell the actor to get into
position without his knowing why and without his having felt it instinctively.’
His actresses bear this out by claiming that they were granted total freedom of
movement during the takes, in which Rohmer always opted for continuity. His
determination to shoot with live sound and in the order dictated by the script,
with a skeleton crew, reveals affinities with the other improvising filmmakers
we have been studying. His admiration for Renoir and Rossellini, whose impro-
visational tendencies appealed to him, fitted in almost naturally with his am-
bition: to direct a film that would be improvised from start to finish, script and
dialogues included. This film was Le Rayon vert.
In his other films, the improvisational element is limited to movements and
gestures, and although these are given a free rein, the space is perfectly circum-
scribed by firm framing and precise dialogues which contribute to his talent as
director. The actors have no difficulty identifying with the characters, who are
closely based on their own personalities, with the same delivery, intonation and
gestures. Arielle Dombasle sums this up brilliantly:
Rohmer’s strength, which is uncompromisingly modern, lies in creating films that are
precise to the nearest comma while managing at the same time, within the scenes
themselves, to keep the characters alive, to leave room for accidents and to bestow a
touch of grace on the actors. This makes it look as though the actors are inventing
their text. Rohmer keeps reality on a lead, but the performance is held in a quaver
that may release the unexpected.
Can one say, therefore, that this physical appropriation of the role counts as
improvisation? No, if one considers that improvisation requires a conscious ef-
fort on the part of the actress, which is not the case here. But yes, if one consid-
ers that Rohmer allows the actress to invent her own movements without any
indications from him. But in the end only one thing really matters: does Rohmer
rely on improvisation as a conceivable overflow, a way for the actress to deviate
the scene in an unexpected direction? Patently not. He knows exactly how each
of them will tackle the situation and dialogues. There may be two or three pos-
sible outcomes but they have all been foreseen by Rohmer, who will, if neces-
sary, eliminate the ones that do not fit in with his plan. He has a perfect grasp of
the ‘performance [that] is held in a quaver that may release the unexpected’, to
quote Arielle Dombasle, and every fortuitous gesture, every unplanned incident
blends into the preliminary composition. The actress is free to improvise as long
as her extraordinary proximity to the character is used to round off the scene as
Rohmer had planned, fuelling it with the life force that irrigates every moment
of La Collectionneuse, Pauline à la plage and Conte d’été. Here, improvi-
sation no longer denotes a possible opening but a closure.
In directing Le Rayon vert, Rohmer appeared to be relinquishing his erudite
mastery of dialogue. The lack of script and the fact that he chose the flexible 
mm format and his own Compagnie Éric Rohmer as producer underlined his
desire to make a film that could be invented as it went along and to interweave
as far as possible the writing and shooting stages, calling on the inspiration of
Marie Rivière, who was acknowledged in the credits for her ‘collaboration with
the text and performance’. Once again, the story is straightforward: a few days
before her summer vacation, a young Parisian secretary, Delphine (Marie Riv-
ière), discovers that her plans have fallen through. The alternatives all turn out
to be equally disappointing. She quickly gets bored in her friend’s family home
in Cherbourg, feels uncomfortable in La Plagne, which reminds her of the
break-up of a recent love affair, and cannot come to terms with the lighthearted
happiness of Lena, a young Swedish tourist she meets on the beach in Biarritz.
On the station concourse, as she is about to board her train back to Paris, she
meets Vincent, and together the two of them wait for sunset and the brief flash
of the ‘rayon vert’ [green ray], which could well signal a new romance. Rohmer
shoots each stage of her journey, as Delphine finds herself having to cope with
vacation set-ups that inevitably bring her back to her own solitude and her in-
ability to go with the flow of the world. The script may not be written down but
it is, nonetheless, very Rohmerian: the heroine has to take a long and circuitous
path before she finds, almost miraculously, what she has been searching for all
along. The carefree nature of this project reveals a new side to Rohmer, de-
scribed in the following terms by Fabrice Revault d’Allonnes:
Now that the Rohmerian mastery has been honed to perfection, he enjoys playing
with it even more, taking new risks. This is the true significance of the transition from
the Contes to the Comédies. It is also, by his own admission, the raison d’être of Le
Rayon vert and Quatre Aventures (shot in  mm, with no written scripts), in which
he wanted to break away from the ‘polished’ films his Comédie et Proverbes audience
was anticipating.
New horizons were certainly opening up with this risk-taking, which should be
seen from the perspective of the opening reference to Rohmer’s mastery as
being ‘honed to perfection’.
His mastery applied first of all to his choice of actresses: unusually, Rohmer
turned here to actresses who were already familiar with his world. Marie Riv-
ière, Rosette and Béatrice Romand had already acted in several of his films and
he chose them both for their unique personalities and for their acting talent.
They all spoke in their own words, but Rohmer was well used to their way of
talking and the dialogue situations, which are an integral part of the mise-en-
scène, were structured around what he anticipated from the encounters be-
tween these young women. In the garden sequence that precedes the departure
for Cherbourg, he knew, for example, that the contradiction between the falter-
ing Delphine and the voluble Béatrice (Béatrice Romand) would spark an
exchange that was likely to destabilise the former. Without writing any actual
dialogue, Rohmer played on the personality of Béatrice Romand, who unsur-
prisingly lent her own name to the character. He knew that the actress would
overplay the role of the know-all friend and her hamming-up of the improvisa-
tion is for the benefit of the scene. The numerous exchanges between Marie
Rivière and Rosette are based on the same principle: the latter’s carefree attitude
counteracts the uncertainties of the former, as does Lena’s in-your-face light-
heartedness. These examples illustrate an important element of the method. Al-
though Rohmer relies on the actresses’ improvisation to give his film impetus,
he nevertheless maintains total control over the course of each scene, because he
can foresee what kind of reaction each actress will have to these mundane situa-
tions. Marie Rivière, not without a certain naivety, later outlined the role of im-
provisation in Le Rayon vert: ‘He wanted to prove that no one would be able
to tell the difference between an improvised film and a film that he had written.
And that turned out to be the case.’ Rohmer’s response can be found in the
following comments regarding Le Rayon vert and Quatre aventures de Re-
inette et Mirabelle: ‘[I had] the impression of controlling the text just as
though [I] had written it’. Apart from the choice of actresses and situations,
the rehearsal period with Marie Rivière was another way of preparing the im-
provisations, giving the actress a leading role akin to directing from the inside
but with one difference: the orientations were clearly indicated by Rohmer him-
self and Marie Rivière had no decision-making role to play during the takes.
Her only mission was to ensure that everything went smoothly.
But part of the beauty of Le Rayon vert nevertheless emanates from the free-
dom provided by its improvisational dimension, even if this is minimal, and
this is particularly noticeable in the discrepancy between the discourse that
Rohmer normally places in his actresses’ mouths and the free speech that pre-
vails here. As Serge Daney wrote, ‘Rohmer enjoys language, not speech (which
is supposed to spring forth, unfettered and authentic) but discourse (which im-
mediately “lines” the sincerity with a false air of “déjà vu”).’ Le Rayon vert is
an exception: here the filmmaker does allows the speech ‘to spring forth, unfet-
tered and authentic’. Although it has been prepared, this speech that has never
been fixed in a written form and never learned, this speech full of hesitations,
precipitations and abrupt silences, is different from his usual chiselled dis-
course: Rohmer cannot control its rhythm. This comes down to saying that the
timeframe is partly imposed upon him from the outside, placing him in an un-
precedented waiting situation. The gestures, which are probably as free as in his
previous films, also take on another meaning. They are no longer there, as Roh-
mer planned, to accompany a discourse, they complete the speech, take over,
help out if there is an unexpected hiatus, express their own truth. The element
of fabulation, and thereby improvisation, lies in these details, in this elusive
speech and in these indecisive gestures that escape the actresses as much as
they do Rohmer himself. Even more strikingly, it is the ‘quaver’ that reveals the
truth of the characters who, to Rohmer’s great surprise, suddenly ‘overflow’
from their role, like Marie Rivière, for example, when she genuinely begins to
cry on camera (in other scenes the tears were planned). He therefore accepts,
without necessarily expecting, that something may escape him as it escapes the
character, and the banal nature of the successive situations of Le Rayon vert
pave the way for these minor overflows, giving this film a special place in his
cinematic portfolio.
To prove the point, one only needs to compare it to his next film, Quatre
aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle, which also claims to be an improvised
film. The everyday situations of Le Rayon vert give way here to four sketches
in which fiction plays a starring role. Joëlle Miquel and Jessica Forde, two new-
comers to Rohmer’s world, contributed to the writing of their respective title
roles but the little fictions chosen by Rohmer precluded any appropriation of
the situations by inexperienced actresses. Although the dialogues were not writ-
ten down they generated far more restrictive rehearsals than Le Rayon vert
and it is likely that he had already largely decided on the texts by the time they
were performed: the fragility and uncertainty of Delphine’s speech had once
more given way to the director’s own discourse. Le Rayon vert is, therefore, in
its own league among Rohmer’s films, but this does not imply that it was an
isolated or marginal experiment. On the contrary, it reveals that the filmmaker
was prepared to hand over to his actresses a minute but crucial element of im-
provisation to round off each sequence and to bring the final touch. It does not
matter, therefore, whether the gesture or movement is perpetuating a clearly
defined project that in no way interferes with his consummate talent, improvi-
sation is definitely a component of Éric Rohmer’s creative approach. The fact
that Le Rayon vert, the most improvised of his films, is so ‘Rohmerian’, bears
this out.
Improvisation can take many forms, which are often impossible to spot on
first viewing. There are doubtless improvised moments in films that are other-
wise meticulously executed by a perfectionist director, but no one is ever pre-

pared to reveal this momentary loss of control. Actors who work regularly with
‘improvisers’, however, are far more likely to let us into their confidence. In the
bonus to Gaumont’s boxed set of Maurice Pialat’s films, Isabelle Huppert de-
scribes in great detail a sequence from Loulou (). When Nelly (Isabelle
Huppert) allows herself to be seduced by Loulou (Gérard Depardieu) in a dis-
cothèque, this sparks the anger of her husband André (Guy Marchand), who
drags her away from the dance floor. The ensuing stormy exchange appears
largely unprepared although it is likely that André’s slap, triggered by Nelly’s
arrogance, was planned. This slap, however, sent Huppert into a totally unex-
pected fit of giggles and the rest of the sequence had to be improvised by the
two actors, who showed masterful command over their performances. The
laughter and ensuing improvisation gave this episode a powerful driving force
that no written dialogue could ever have produced and it is easy to understand
Pialat’s satisfaction. ‘My ideal’, he confessed some years earlier, ‘is the single
shot which expresses a point of view on something that is being produced in
the moment. As soon as it is broken down, fragmented, rewound, the truth slips
away, because one is renewing something that by definition only happens
once.’ In the sequence that follows the one in the discothèque, we find Loulou
and Nelly in a (genuine) hotel bedroom. Suddenly, the bed accidentally breaks
under the weight of the two lovers. The actors, who find the situation both hi-
larious and disturbing, turn to Pialat, who was probably standing inscrutably
next to the camera. They pick up the thread, showing their amusement at this
unexpected interlude, which is exacerbated by the voluble irritation of another
hotel guest in a nearby room. Depardieu’s awkwardness as he kneels by the bed
(he utters a sheepish ‘dunno what to do’ to both his partner and to the director)
reveals the vulnerability of Loulou’s character, beneath his veneer of roguish
insolence. When Isabelle Huppert entices Depardieu back to bed, their laughter
provides an obvious clue to the characters’ physical harmony, their relationship
patently stemming, first and foremost, from the pleasures of the flesh. These
examples show how great actors, in their potential for improvisation, can trans-
form an ordinary scene into a moment of truth, providing the context is right.
To complete this chapter, we should also mention the sequence in Love
Streams (Cassavetes, ), in which Gena Rowlands is next to a pool trying
desperately to make her daughter and ex-husband laugh. In a documentary on
the shoot directed by Michael Ventura, one sees Cassavetes persuading her to
overcome her apprehension and improvise the scene from start to finish, dia-
logue included, with no rehearsal. Whereas Huppert and Depardieu were im-
provising in response to a mishap on set, Rowlands was forced to improvise at
the request of the director. The performance, filmed in a single take with two
cameras, one of them held by Cassavetes himself, is the most mysterious in the
entire film, but also one of the most important. It is Gena Rowlands’ talent yet
again that gives her this courage to work without a safety net, like the best jazz
musicians.
7. Filming jazz
City rhythms: modern jazz in films noirs
Jazz was to make a spectacular entrance in the form of filmed music with the
early talkies.  proved to be a seminal year for filmmakers inspired by black
music, ranging from Black and Tan, Dudley Murphy’s recreation of the stage
at the Cotton Club, featuring the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Bessie Smith’s love-
lorn Honky Tonk in Murphy’s Saint-Louis Blues to the numerous musical se-
quences in King Vidor’s Hallelujah, with its famous all-black cast. Apart
from the kaleidoscope in which Murphy tried to find a visual equivalent to El-
lington’s polyrhythmic orchestrations, however, filmmakers were far more fas-
cinated by the photogenic aspect of jazz than by the soloists’ individual perfor-
mances. In the wake of the Harlem Renaissance Movement, the Jazz Age and
Broadway’s black musicals, the cinema was attracted by jazz as collective enter-
tainment, the highly individual gesturality of the band leaders (such as Elling-
ton’s Jungle Band) and the virtuosity of the artists in their eccentric new dances
proving secondary to the carefree eroticism that characterised the Cotton Club
and the Revues Nègres. Hollywood soon latched on to the creative potential of
this new musical form as big bands featuring white musicians made the musi-
cals go with a swing and Fred Astaire popularised and revitalised the steps of
Bill Robinson’s tap dance invention. Meanwhile, black artists (notably Louis
Armstrong) were relegated to a few quasi-exotic appearances in major studio
productions, to shorts designed for coloureds-only theatres and from the early
s, to soundies, screened in bars, restaurants and hotels. There was one no-
table exception, however: Jammin’ the Blues (), a short feature by photo-
grapher Gjon Mili, shot by the remarkable chief cameraman Robert Burks, who
went on to work with Alfred Hitchcock. Mili and Burks immortalised the poise
of the postures and the elegance of each musician’s gestures, focusing particu-
larly on saxophone soloists Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet and singer Mary
Bryant. While it is perfectly true, as has often been said, that Jammin’ the Blues
represented a landmark, offsetting the obvious photogenic qualities of jazz by
the extraordinary harmony and boldness of its musical staging, Mila also suc-
ceeded in highlighting the nature of jazz as a form of individual expression by
breaking down the shots and capturing the facial expressions of each musician.
Jammin’ the Blues coincided with the beginnings of bebop, a movement that
marked a return to small musical formations following a decade in which in-
creasingly imposing dance bands had reached a peak. The status of jazz musi-
cians as creative entities was now recognised for the first time in cinema, just as
the musicians’ own awareness was kicking in with a vengeance: jazz was now
hailed as a black and American art form, in a society in which segregation still
featured in the Constitution and in Hollywood’s own censorship codes. While
the major studios continued to ensure the success of jazz-entertainment, the
discords and bitterness of the bebop improvisers were gradually finding their
place in films noirs that explored the other side of the coin, ‘the cursed side of the
American Dream’, as Jean-Louis Comolli put it.
From the early s, one could detect the influence of bebop in the composi-
tion of the images, through the musicians’ brief on-screen appearances. The fa-
mous collective sequence in Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, ) is a case in
point, when jazz drummer Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook Jr) invites the bewitching
Carol Richman (Ella Raines) to attend a jam session in a gloomy cellar. As Cliff
listlessly accompanies a troupe of showgirls whose nebulous presence hovers
out of frame, his attention is soon caught by Carol, who has been sent as a de-
coy, winking at him. After the show, Cliff and Carol join his fellow jazz musi-
cians in a poky basement. This transition from the footlights to the disquieting
entrails of the city reflects the life of the young black musicians finishing their
daily dance band sessions and getting together in smoky Harlem clubs to invent
new, free forms of jazz. There is a striking parallel here with the end of the big
band decade and the birth of bebop.
Siodmak takes a new slant on jazz imagery, portrayed through its seductively
photogenic bands, succeeding in only a few minutes in associating it with the
disturbing world of cinéma noir. As soon as she enters the cellar, Carol is en-
gulfed by the music, cornered by the close-up of a trombone that seems to be
swallowing her up, as Cliff’s threatening hand around her neck steers her to-
ward the middle of the room. The physical energy of the music is magnified by
an expressionist light effect and the confined atmosphere of the room is exacer-
bated by the bodies emerging from the shadows. The young woman’s fear is
soon overcome by the orgiastic intoxication that pervades the entire sequence,
with jump cuts between aggressive high- and low-angle shots, close-ups of the
faces and the musicians’ quick-fire gestures and lecherous glances as they down
endless drinks. Carol forgets her mission (to trick Cliff) as she is enticed into the
powerful clutches of the jazz music, finally succumbing to an unambiguous si-
mulation of the sexual act during Cliff’s drum solo.
In a film epitomised by emptiness, the emptiness of deserted spaces and the
existential emptiness of the characters, this underground sequence, which con-
centrates exclusively on overflow, is an additional menace, the sole justification
7. Filming jazz 145
for this physical release being the erotic charge. In the underbelly of the city
other powers are at work, and they are far more mysterious than the crime
whose unexpected perpetrator is caught thanks to Carol’s perspicacity and the
integrity of a police officer. Bebop, with an energy that seems to permeate the
bodies and spaces, becomes a perfect incarnation of these obscure forces. Siod-
mak, like Dudley Murphy fourteen years earlier in the final sequence of Black
and Tan, finds visual equivalents to black music. The serene polyphony of the
Duke Ellington Orchestra gives way to the rhythmic vivacity and unexpected,
sharp phrasing of the young bebop improvisers. It only takes Phantom Lady a
few minutes to show that jazz is not simply there as a dance accompaniment or
a picturesque backdrop for musicals. It has become, like the film noir, a symbol
of an America that is somber and apprehensive. Improvising means acknowl-
edging one’s individual freedom in the collective whole but also opening the
door to the unforeseeable, to a loss of control, encapsulated in that moment
when the body of the lovely Carol seems to steal a march on her reason.
In Sweet Smell of Success (), a late film noir by Alexander Mackendrick,
the threat has spiralled into the terminal stage. America is now extenuated by
widespread corruption. The media, show business, politics and police have
been completely taken over by manipulation and blackmail, their only watch-
words being ambition, sex, power and money. The vehemence and exasperation
of the boppers reflect once again this decomposing world. Here, the influence of
modern jazz is no longer limited to a few sequences. Bebop was now inspiring
film composers and to write the score of Sweet Smell of Success, Elmer Bern-
stein followed on from his work on Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Gold-
en Arm (), in which the piercing discords of the trumpet solo mirrored the
torments of Frankie (Frank Sinatra) as he went cold turkey. By associating Pre-
minger’s grey city with the strident sound of the brass instruments, Bernstein
had invented an urban music in which the suave sound of the strings had been
abandoned in favour of a tenser, more rugged aural atmosphere and where the
physical commitment of the musicians was as tangible as an improvisation by
Charlie Parker.
In the New York streets of Sweet Smell of Success, Bernstein’s music,
played on screen by the Chico Hamilton Quintet, carries even greater impact
than on the studio set of The Man with the Golden Arm. Jazz haunts every
shot in Mackendrick’s film, particularly in the night sequences, lit by the re-
nowned chief cameraman James Wong Howe. The luminous, vertical, conquer-
ing city is now a thing of the past. Only the horizontality of the streets remains,
its perspective soon swallowed up in the shadows of a city where the future is
reduced to a choice between the despairing lucidity of the blues and the vio-
lence of bebop. The vibrancy of Parker’s implacable phrasing, Gillespie’s shrill
trumpet sounds, Monk’s piano discords and Kenny Clarke’s razor-sharp solos
sum up the sound of an America where it is up to every individual to survive in

the jungle of dealers, gangs and revenge killings. Bebop is the vibration of the
city, the beat of the world. When the drummer Chico Hamilton’s quintet first
appears in Mackendrick’s film, a musician’s arm crosses the screen in the fore-
ground and launches the tempo with a click of the fingers. The flow of the lively
introductory motif, which goes from bass to drums and from cello to guitar
before melding into a polyphonic ensemble, encapsulates the swarming city, in
which each twinkling neon is a blind alley, the ultimate victory of appearance
and illusion.
It is in another sequence of the film, however, that jazz inspires just as much
the mise-en-scène and shooting process as the shot-by-shot breakdown and
montage. As the guitarist leaves the club, unaware that a reception committee
is standing outside waiting to beat him up, we see Chico Hamilton, alone on the
drums, launching into a dizzying hard bop number, which is then picked up by
the trumpet and trombone. The scene shifts to the young man, outside in the
dark, glimmering street, where threatening shadows spring out in a series of
fleeting shots, followed by headlights and finally the massive bulk of the cor-
rupt police officer chosen to carry out the dirty work. The sound of the jazz
band had gradually merged into the noises of the city but it resurfaces again
just as the blows are about to rain down. The blows themselves are not shown
but the full-screen drum solo, along with Hamilton’s gestural choreography, is
sufficient to conjure up the violence of the altercation. In under a minute, Mack-
endrick manages to combine the incantatory force of modern jazz with the brit-
tleness of the best films noirs. This blend of cinema and jazz, united in the same
clear-sighted yet disenchanted poetic vision of the world, takes Sweet Smell of
Success into the realms of the ‘bop movie’. A similar vision crops up again in
many other films, the most striking being perhaps Deux hommes dans Man-
hattan, shot in New York the following year by Jean-Pierre Melville. In the
final sequence of Melville’s film, in the small hours of the morning, four musi-
cians are improvising in an almost deserted café. No one is listening to them.
They are playing for their own pleasure, and perhaps for ours, in a kind of melt-
down of all the jazz sequences that encapsulated the beauty of the films noirs
Melville so loved. By the s, jazz had already become the music of America,
but Melville was to turn it into the music of the American cinema, or to be pre-
cise his American cinema. In these enclosed, deserted spaces, jazz is an intimate
musical expression, an inner music, a circuitous way of bringing moments of
beauty into the gloom, cynicism and inhumanity of the city. In , once again,
another equally inveterate admirer of America was to play his part in mythisis-
ing this encounter between jazz soloists and films noirs: the sound of Miles Da-
vis’ trumpet in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud epitomises the despair of Florence
(Jeanne Moreau) as she wanders round the black-and-white streets of a pre-
7. Filming jazz 147
New Wave Paris and lends overwhelming intensity to Louis Malle’s film. Much
later, Francis Ford Coppola in Cotton Club () and Spike Lee in Mo’Better
Blues () took a spirited new slant at the parallel between the rhythmical
invention of jazz musicians and physical violence, discovering new plastic links
between music and the moving image.
In the late s, it was the turn of a black-and-white TV series, Johnny Stacca-
to, to inject new life and expression into this overlapping history of jazz and
films noirs. Staccato, an alluring jazz pianist-cum-detective, was played by John
Cassavetes, who had just completed Shadows, with a score by Charlie Mingus
and Shafi Hadi. Cassavetes did not just have an acting role, he also directed five
episodes and hosted the series. Elmer Bernstein wrote the music but it was Stac-
cato’s brilliant combo of Westcoasters at Waldo’s, a smoky jazz club hung with
reproductions by uncompromisingly modern artists, dominated by Soutine and
Picasso’s Cubist paintings, that really stole the show. This modernity, spanning
film, jazz and painting, was echoed in the new approach to filming shown by
television, then on the up and up. The plots, interweaving small-time crooks
and drug dealing with an improbable beat generation of aimless artists, moved
at an incredible pace, with no downtime or room for sophisticated storylines,
the quick-fire performances and jump cuts providing a vibrantly dynamic beat.
Only the twenty-minute jazz interludes in each episode give breathing space to
Staccato’s wanderings through the streets of New York, accompanied by Bern-
stein’s music and the taut voice-over of Cassavetes.
Whereas in Sweet Smell of Success the figures seemed to be lost in the dis-
turbing depths of New York, in Johnny Staccato they (and particularly Cassa-
vetes) herald a new conquest of the city, which is often filmed in the small
hours, in sheer white light, to the sound of the Westcoast soloists. The postwar
generation has taken over. The end of the s and beginning of the s was
to bring cinema and jazz together once again, but with a desire for new forms of
expression, carried by a different generation of directors and by young un-
known actors in a juxtaposition of the cinema and the modern world. Through
the New Waves in film, the resounding success of television, the fashion for
happenings and the photographic revolution, art was now tackling a world in
which speed was of the essence. But by that time jazz had already moved on –
 was also the year of a providential manifesto of anger and exasperation:
Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet.
More pointers from the small screen…
Television in the late s was not merely defined by series in which each epi-
sode reflected a new economy that had little to do with Hollywood movies. It
also branched out into location shooting and the first recordings of events such
as the Newport Jazz Festival, which Bert Stern made into a remarkable film
celebrating the innovative talent of musicians from every generation, who had
gathered together in this famous bay south of Rhode Island. The opening shot
features a pontoon in Newport harbour, its painted stilts forming luminous col-
umns, with pleasure craft in the foreground. As the opening credits of Jazz on a
Summer’s Day start to roll, a tilt-down shot turns these geometric, coloured
shapes into shifting, unreal reflections in the water. Several months before the
release of Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quar-
tet, featuring Jackson Pollock’s White Light on the sleeve, photographer Bert
Stern was already heralding the improvisational interplay between light and
shade on the waves and the sinuous lines of The Train and the River, played by
Jimmy Giuffre, Bob Brookmeyer and Jim Hall. The cuts chosen by Stern for Jazz
on a Summer’s Day seemed simple enough on the surface. Making the most of
the fact that the festival coincided with the America’s Cup, he invented endless
tenuous links between the sailboats gliding across the bay in the sunshine and
the images of Anita O’Day, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Stitt and Louis Armstrong
on stage at the Newport Jazz Festival. Deliberately distancing himself from the
contrasting black-and-white effects used in detective films or the mythical Jam-
min’ the Blues, Stern posited unprecedented affinities which in their form her-
alded the advent of free jazz, marking the start of a new era in the relationship
between jazz and cinema, or even between jazz and contemporary art.
Nevertheless, the subtext of Jazz on a Summer’s Day is ambiguous. When
the director alternates between shots of Thelonious Monk playing a particularly
discordant version of Blue Monk and images of the regatta that look more like
commercials, it is not clear whether he is setting out to illustrate the gulf be-
tween the two worlds or if he is simply fascinated by two forms of beauty that
are themselves ‘discordant’. These uncertainties gradually fade, however, and
the jazz begins to impress its own movement on the film: Stern then overcomes
the facile temptations of impressionism and allows himself to get caught up in
the music and the swaying bodies – those of the musicians and those of the
young audience dancing – that are recorded by an increasingly alert hand-held
camera. When, in the final sequence, the voice of Mahalia Jackson rings out a
cappella in the still of the Newport night, before a rapt audience, the whole pain-
ful history of America suddenly flood back. The tragic beauty of her voice un-
derlines the political implications of Jazz on a Summer’s Day, which was made
7. Filming jazz 149
at a time when racial tension was threatening to trigger riots in the major indus-
trial cities of the United States.
Over and above this identity dimension, however, jazz in the early s, and
particularly free jazz, contributed in far more radical ways than Stern’s film to
the expression of artistic practices that were ‘closer to what constitutes life and
its aspirations for change’, as Alexandre Pierrepont put it. The jazzistic field, to
coin his phrase, began to gain new ground and provide concrete inspiration for
visual artists, filmmakers, writers and choreographers, who also became drawn
to improvisation. Live television ensured far more widespread coverage of jazz
performances. Other experiments grew out of increasingly lightweight repor-
tage techniques, which made it possible for the cameraman and sound techni-
cian to follow the musicians on a daily basis. When Christian Blackwood
decided in  to accompany Thelonious Monk and his musicians on tour,
with his hand-held camera, he never expected his footage to be edited twenty
years later by Charlotte Zwerin in Straight, no Chaser (), a film which
revealed with great perception, for the first time, the physical commitment of
these jazz musicians, their everyday work, their incessant and unpredictable
conversations and the original balance between on-the-spot invention and com-
position.
The very first shot shows Monk in concert, standing next to his piano and
spinning round as he listens to an improvisation by saxophonist Charlie Rouse.
Blackwood is on the edge of the stage, riveted by the musician. He starts impro-
vising in turn, trying to fix an expression, zooming in and out on the body in
motion, which seems to be capturing the energy of Rouse’s solo, before sud-
denly veering toward the piano so as not to lose track of the music, in a conti-
nuation of the number that has just been played. Straight, no Chaser shows
how vulnerable improvisation can be, how improvising means running the risk
of nothing happening, of the music never materialising. In a recording studio
sequence for producer Teo Macero, Monk criticises the sound engineer, who
failed to record what seemed to be no more than a first contact with the piano.
When someone retorts that they thought this was only a rehearsal, Monk replies
with equanimity: ‘You rehearse every time you play’, which is a way of saying
that in jazz you can never know when and if inspiration will strike. Each perfor-
mance forms part of a work-in-progress, which will only end with the musi-
cian’s death or, in Monk’s case, the decision never to go near a piano again. To
him, jazz was based on the unforeseeable and on the ability of each player to be
at one with him in the music, and speeches or preparation were superfluous.
The others needed to react with their own music and if they failed to under-
stand, or sometimes made mistakes, the end result was no less beautiful. The
point of rehearsals was not to set things in stone prior to the concert but to pave
the way for improvisation, to agree on a few basic principles without laying
down a predetermined programme. Just a few chords jotted down on paper

and the music would emerge, in a ‘hereafter’ of writing. ‘When you think it’s
nice to go in, blow. Pick it.’ says Monk to one of his musicians who is worrying
about when to step in with his solo. In the film, Charlie Rouse explains why
there are still a few flaws in the studio recordings:
Usually we’d take the first take. Sometimes we’d take the second but never the third.
[Monk] would say once you’ve played it the first time that’s where the feeling and
everything is, and after that you start going downhill. […]. It’s more of a challenge to
do that. You know that you’ve got to play it correctly the first or second take or that’s
it. He would take it anyhow. If you mess up then that’s it. That’s your problem. You
have to hear that all the rest of your life.
The beauty stems precisely from these uncertainties, from this indispensable
concentration, from this conviction that the technical perfection of the fifth take
will never replace the freshness of the first. Filmmaker Philippe Garrel spent
many years doing just that, never shooting more than one take, whatever its
faults. The impression of precarious balance and vulnerability that permeates
his films owes much to this leap in the dark.
Straight, no Chaser is a document on collective creation, but it is also the
portrait of an improviser whose whole life strives towards that moment when
his fingers touch the piano. Without television, we would only be left with the
sound of the dialogue between Monk’s body and his instrument. Yet everything
is in that performing body, those springing leaps from his stool, that concentra-
tion, that perspiration, the breathing during the silences, the contorting arms,
the hands that defy technique, the foot beating time on the floor, the eyes
riveted on the keyboard. Watching Monk play, seeing Coltrane on the rare
images that have survived or observing the Sam Rivers/Tony Hymas duo in
Pascale Ferran’s Quatre Jours à Ocoee () gives us greater insight into
how their music is born, lives and dies within the instant: this quest for the
ephemeral is engraved on their bodies. The piano solos in which Blackwood
uses the half-light of the stage to single out Monk’s body are a brilliant encapsu-
lation of the effort that goes into improvised creation and of the physical com-
mitment it involves. The beauty of these images does not lie in the framing, the
light or the attention to detail; as with Cassavetes and Rozier, it comes from this
living body, from the sound of this body and from the mutual trust between the
person filming and the person being filmed. Straight, no Chaser is yet an-
other demonstration of the importance of shared time in creating an impact on
screen between those bodies. Christian Blackwood films Monk in hotel bed-
rooms with the loyal and discreet Nelly, Monk eating an apple in the street,
Monk admiring a musician’s new clothes, Monk fabulating, humorously acting
out the role of a harmless loony for the benefit of his bemused and fascinated
7. Filming jazz 151
fellow passengers in stations and airports. By cutting seamlessly from these

everyday incidents to the stage performance, Charlotte Zwerin showed a clear
understanding of how moments from life could spill into moments of music.
Monk’s rhythm as he walks says as much about his relationship to the world as
it does about his exceptional sense of imbalance when he is improvising a blues
number.
Modern and unpredictable though he was, Monk held back from free jazz, a
radical movement that has left few traces on film. Few filmmakers have been
brave enough to hand over the reins to the music, opting for a mix of unbridled
collective improvisation and moving images. The artist Michael Snow discov-
ered the creative collective energy of free jazz as soon as he set foot in New
York in the early s, an energy he instinctively associated with his own in-
volvement with the free polyphonies of New Orleans music. In , this fasci-
nation led to the film New York Eye and Ear Control, for which he commis-
sioned a musical performance from Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, John Tchicai,
Roswell Rudd, Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray, recorded in New York on 
July . ‘Expression. Expressionism. Moving material, leaving marks. Hand.
Tends towards Actions, Events, Music. Especially very Vocal, spontaneous mu-
sic. Afro-American music’ Snow wrote about his film. Once again, it is a ques-
tion of the connection between sight and sound seen through the spectrum of
free jazz, but with an underlying scrutiny of America and its history.
Snow’s vision found an unexpected ally in a filmmaker who was theoretically
a million miles from the New York underground scene. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
Notes Towards an African Oresties (-), is, according to the words
that accompany the opening shots, ‘a film about a film that was never made.’
Pasolini’s idea was to transpose Aeschylus’ Oresties to the Africa of the late
s. Featuring location shots in Africa as he searches for faces and places,
documentary shots of unknown origin and sequences that show him outlining
his project to black students at Rome University, the film is a free-ranging mon-
tage, interrupted by a lengthy performance in which Pasolini introduces a free
jazz rendition of Cassandra’s scene at the beginning of Aeschylus’ tragedy. The
instrumental trio, Gato Barbieri on saxophone, Don Moye on drums and Mar-
cello Melio on bass, launches into an incantatory number inspired by John Col-
trane’s Spiritual before moving into a free accompaniment of the singing duo
Yvonne Murray and Archie Savage. This astonishing ‘graft’ is probably the
most effective example of the importance of free jazz on the s creative art
scene. By including it in his African Oresties, Pasolini was showing how this
music, imbued with the tragedy of the African people, was also the newest,
most inspired, most human and most committed artistic expression of the dec-
ade. This clearly political reading of free jazz is reflected in Pasolini’s decision to
show a facet of the creative process, the inspiration that can spring from a mere
facial expression, the beauty of a look, an unexpected gesture, a windswept tree.

For Pasolini, the filmmaker of preparation and mastery, this moment of free jazz
when he allows the musicians all the time they need is also a kind of tribute to
other ways of creating together, with even more freedom than in his African
notebooks.
John Coltrane, in the frame
In order to get a precise idea of the role of television in preserving the most
valuable traces of modern jazz’ greatest improvisers, we need to move away
from these films, which have already achieved a certain recognition, and ven-
ture into the less ‘noble’ images of daily TV. The first television programmes
radically wrong-footed the whole Hollywood imagery of jazz, opting for ‘a re-
storation of listening powers to the detriment of the attractions of the visible’,
as Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli put it. The most representative of
these was The Sound of Jazz, created in  for CBS by producer Robert Her-
ridge, in association with jazz critic Nat Hentoff. The Sound of Jazz served as a
model for a number of other programmes, such as Jazz Scene USA by Steve Al-
len, Jazz Casual by Ralph J. Gleason a few years later and the BBC programme
Jazz , hosted in front of an audience by Humphrey Lyttelton. The staging
was always the same: in front of a handful of spectators scattered around the
set, against a sober backdrop featuring the cameras, projectors and sound re-
cording equipment, the host would briefly introduce the group and musical
numbers. All that counted here was the music – musicians were no longer enter-
tainers but artists in their own right.
This solemn, almost austere format not only depicted a radical change in the
image of jazz, it brought out the concentration required by the musicians – the
programmes were broadcast live for the most part, and there was no possibility
of doing a retake if the first one went wrong. For Dan Morgenstern, jazz was the
perfect medium, with its obvious improvisation, risk-taking and performance
aspects: ‘[Television] is a medium made for events, and every jazz performance
is an event […]. The secret is the music’s spontaneity, which, when combined
with high artistic quality, conveys the feeling of being present in a unique mo-
ment of creation.’ The impression of a work-in-progress was accentuated by
the inventiveness of the cameramen and directors, who found the new televi-
sion medium an ideal stamping ground for experimentation, so much more
flexible than the  mm film format. Franco Minganti, talking about The Sound
of Jazz, remarked that,
7. Filming jazz 153
the improvised nature of jazz comes across even more forcefully because of the pro-
ducer’s habit of asking the cameramen to ‘improvise’ their mise en scène and find
original ways of framing; meanwhile Jack Smight – who later became a remarkable
director – would edit live from the control room, introducing innovations of his
own.
This comment conjures up the credit sequence in Rozier’s Adieu Philippine.

Two excerpts from programmes devoted to the saxophonist John Coltrane
and his quartet illustrate how live recordings of musicians, focusing exclusively
on the music itself, enabled jazz musicians to convey on screen, for the first
time, the full measure of their talent for on-the-spot invention. The first is taken
from the programme Jazz Casual, broadcast on  December , and the sec-
ond from a concert recorded by Belgian television on  August  at Com-
blain-la-Tour. The circumstances were very different and go some way to ex-
plaining the striking gulf between them. But this contrast also highlights the
extraordinarily rapid metamorphosis of Coltrane’s music: in the space of eigh-
teen months, the apparent stability of the quartet was thrown into disarray by a
paroxysmal form of music that seemed to be constantly taking it to breaking
point. The understated décor of Jazz Casual shows, first and foremost, a desire
to show not only the work of the musicians but that of the technicians: a record-
ing studio more akin to a workshop or rehearsal room, a few chairs stacked up
behind the piano, a pile of instrument cases in the back left-hand corner and the
recording equipment in full view, with a camera and its cameraman full field.
The contrasts between the blacks and whites are accentuated by the searing
light of the projectors, its heat rapidly producing visible traces of perspiration
on the faces of drummer Elvin Jones and bass player Jimmy Garrisson, while its
effect on Coltrane and pianist McCoy Tyner is far less obvious. Unlike public
performances, these programmes allowed a certain leeway in the layout of the
musicians. It is worth noting, for instance, that while Coltrane has understand-
ably placed himself in the center, Elvin Jones’ position opposite him is far less
orthodox. Coltrane’s decision makes perfect sense, however, as his solo on Im-
pressions turns rapidly into a duet with Jones lasting over three minutes, during
which time McCoy Tyner and Garrisson remain silent. By occupying the terrain,
with Coltrane in the middle of the semicircle formed by the three other musi-
cians, the intense concentration of all the protagonists becomes apparent, even
when they are reduced to silence. At that particular stage in his career, the im-
pressive physical presence of Coltrane, wrapped up in his music and imper-
vious to any outside solicitation, was all that was needed to engender an atmo-
sphere of reflection, even of meditation.
Coltrane was free to choose the numbers and even their length; the pro-
gramme featured Afro Blue (seven minutes), Alabama (five and a half minutes)
and Impressions (fourteen minutes on screen but the music continued to the clos-
ing credit roll). Impressions was undoubtedly the star of this small-scale concert,
which was recorded in continuity. This was naturally due to its length but also
to its structure. Following a brief introduction by Coltrane, McCoy Tyner
launches into a solo lasting four minutes and twenty seconds, with the bass and
drums, Garrisson takes over with his own almost four-minute solo and Col-
trane wraps it up in a four and a half minute piece, three of which feature a
duet with Jones, before picking up the theme once again. Everything appears
smooth and serene, the equivalent length of the successive solos giving each
musician an opportunity to express himself. The director and cameramen have
no difficulty matching the shots to the music. Despite a somewhat cumbersome
set-up (several tripod cameras, including dollies) the choice of images is often
inspired, capturing Garrisson’s attentive involvement during Tyner’s solo and
highlighting the exchange between Coltrane and Jones with particular effect.
The camera positioned behind the drummer makes it possible to see how his
whole body is reacting to every phrase, as he responds to each of Coltrane’s
rhythmic suggestions by picking up the phrasing and carrying it through to the
following phrase. Thanks to these images, we soon grasp that this is not a tenor
solo with drum accompaniment but a quick-fire demonstration of call and re-
sponse at which both men are past masters.
There is another possible interpretation of this face-to-face encounter, which
views its simultaneity as a challenge to the classical succession of solos by
McCoy Tyner and Garrisson. Unlike the music, which permeates the sound
space, the image tends to localise the sound, and it is obvious that by focusing
on the tenor saxophonist and drummer the shot inevitably excludes the pianist
and bass player. This exclusion is exacerbated by the layout of the musicians,
which stresses the proximity of Coltrane and Jones. Some were to see this as the
first sign of the quartet’s impending break-up but it is difficult to go along with
this retrospective interpretation. It would be more accurate to see these images
as a record of one of the rare periods in which Coltrane appears, at least fleet-
ingly, to have found what he was looking for, and this is borne out by the two
other numbers featured in the programme, Afro Blue and the ballad Alabama,
both performed with consummate mastery and skill. However, as we know,
Coltrane’s quest was far from over, and while Jazz Casual represents a moment
of serenity, the same cannot be said of the concert that took place on  August
.
These images were filmed a long way from the comfort of the recording stu-
dio, during a festival which has since gone down in history, held from  to
 in the little Belgian town of Comblain-la-Tour, in the fields surrounding
the football pitch. The technical set-up was much the same (several mobile tri-
pod cameras) but the constraints of live public performance made the recording
7. Filming jazz 155
more complicated, as the crews of the period were on unfamiliar ground. The
appalling quality of the film accentuates the precarious nature of the recording,
giving its impression of urgency particular potency. Jazz Casual’s essentially se-
quential solos are countered here by simultaneity and collective improvisation,
and this introduces an element of uncertainty in the choices of the director and
cameramen. For anyone who is remotely familiar with jazz, it is easy to under-
stand what is going on when the musicians perform one after the other. But
how should one film a collective experience? How can the jazz be conveyed
when it is impossible to separate the musicians? How can one acknowledge
‘the legitimacy of everything’, in Coltrane’s  music, as Michel-Claude Ja-
lard put it? In the face of these relentless questions, the director was forced to
improvise, to respond on the spot to unforeseen calls. His disorientation can be
deduced from his insistence on filming Coltrane’s face in close-up, as though all
the music was concentrated on that one face, before he finally decides to portray
the second part of the number through a static shot of the whole quartet (or
should it be trio, given McCoy Tyner’s relegation to the left-hand corner of the
frame?). One can readily imagine how bewildered the audience must also
have felt by the tension that pervades this musical moment. But the regular
beat can still be discerned and the audience seems more than attentive, indeed
fascinated by the musicians’ total physical commitment, by the intensity of the
collective performance.
The economy of shots, their slow succession producing a feeling of petrifac-
tion in the face of the all-powerful music, makes it possible to concentrate on the
incredible density of the web of sound. The lull of a comfortable chain of events
gives way to the necessity of living the moment, living to the full what Gilles
Deleuze was to call ‘purely optical and sound’ situations. Movement has giv-
en way to lived time, and horizontality to verticality, ‘resulting in a certain stasis
within the dynamism itself, which further reinforces the cyclical character of the
music’, as Jalard put it. The music seems to be doomed to excess, to the inevi-
table exploration of the limits heartrendingly portrayed in these searing images
of the concert in Comblain-la-Tour. The grainy images are redolent with the
threat of loss and the bodies of Jimmy Garrisson and Elvin Jones, in the halo of
condensation which encircles each of their gestures, seem to be literally con-
sumed, like the music itself. Coltrane’s body shows no trace of exhaustion, as
though it were not his body playing but an all-devouring inner flame. Many
years later, Johan van der Keuken, recalling these images, was to write:
I’m still fascinated by the incomplete, blurred information […]. I can remember the
intense emotion that took hold of us whenever we heard or saw a copy of a film,
videotape or television program featuring John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, Jimmy Garris-
son and McCoy Tyner: a vague image, almost swallowed up by the interference. It’s
the most direct experience of the quartet we have left and by extension the most direct
experience one can imagine. One needs a myth for the blurring to take effect: what we
were witnessing could not be conveyed in images, it was too grandiose, too intense.
We’ll never be able to get any closer. It’s like those shrill notes of Coltrane’s in later
years, which almost sound as if he couldn’t manage them: self-pitying, strident,
hoarse, broken – because they couldn’t be played.
These extraordinary moments, these rare traces of Coltrane in concert, convey

the impression today that we are witnessing an exceptionally intense act of col-
lective creation.
When at the end of My Favorite Things Coltrane turns his back on the audi-
ence and fades into the shadows, he is already elsewhere, concentrating on the
next stage. Although he was gradually abandoned by McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones
and Jimmy Garrisson, and later by many of his fans, he never deviated from his
course or his ultimate purpose. On  July , at the Newport Jazz Festival in
Rhode Island, an amateur photographer took a few awkward shots of him with
his silent camera. When one sees these last moving images, when one sees Col-
trane blowing with the same energy into his soprano saxophone and then into
his tenor saxophone, it is like ‘hearing’ for the last time the cry of the man who
wanted to play those notes that ‘could not be played’, the man who wanted to
play the unplayable.
An experiment in collective improvisation: Q J à

O (), by Pascale Ferran
We will end with a film that addresses every one of the questions raised in the
preceding pages. In Quatre Jours à Ocoee, Pascale Ferran, in Coltranian
mode, set herself the task of filming the unfilmable. In her case, however, the
idea was not to play the unplayable, but rather to shed light on the process of
collective creation in jazz, from the first exchange of notes to the album itself,
ready to be ‘consumed’ in the music stores. When music producer Jean Rochard
first suggested she film a recording by saxophonist Sam Rivers and pianist Tony
Hymas, a duo created specially for the occasion, she politely turned him down.
She felt that her limited knowledge of this kind of music did not entitle her to
benefit from a project that would certainly fire the enthusiasm of her more mu-
sical peers. It was only after much hesitation, therefore, that she agreed to visit
the Ocoee studio in Florida, on ,  and  December . The originality of
the challenge finally won her over: the two musicians were given four days,
with no prior rehearsal, to record an album, ensuring it was ready for release
by the fourth day. To quote Ferran herself, the confined context resembled ‘the
7. Filming jazz 157
process of collective creation in fast motion, an exceptional opportunity to con-

vey a part of this collective exercise, human relations, the experience lived by
each one, the atmosphere on set, the technique.’ Through these words, one
senses that filming jazz was to her a way of filming something of the cinema
itself.
There was a standard recording set-up, featuring two areas, one in which the
musicians could improvise, which from the opening sequence of the film was
regarded as a stage, and another for the sound engineers and producer Jean
Rochard. Ferran quickly decided not to shoot anything outside the four walls of
the studio (we only see daylight once, when the musicians are leaving the stu-
dio at the end of the fourth day) and to keep the crew to a minimum: one sound
technician (her brother Jean-Jacques Ferran), a boom operator (Éric Thomas), a
camera operator (Katell Djian – Ferran did not want to be the only woman
among all these men) and herself. Four days and theoretically four people, al-
though the spatial layout was admittedly off kilter, with three of the film crew
(Ferran, the boom operator and the camera operator) in the performance venue
with the two musicians.
The first day was marked by bitter tension between Hymas and Rivers and
Ferran restricted herself to directing the camera operator. By the following day,
however, she too was carrying a camera: two women filming two men with two
hand-held cameras. This was a way of relinquishing a degree of control – the
director was no longer simply someone giving instructions with which her col-
leagues had to comply – and physically tackling the work, attenuating the hier-
archy in relation to the jazz duo. By taking hold of a camera herself, she was
creating a situation of proximity and exchange with the musicians, in a set-up
that she could experience from the inside. The spontaneous aesthetic of small
cameras is something that leaves Ferran cold and she opted for sturdy digital
Beta cameras, each weighing over twenty pounds. The two camerawomen were
to carry these cameras up to seven hours a day and the visible exhaustion of
Sam Rivers and Tony Hymas was soon mirrored by the similar exhaustion of
Katell Djian and Pascale Ferran. The last takes of the day, in which the framing
was less polished and the focusing more erratic, betrayed a physical weariness
that was encapsulated by the faces of the musicians: these were tired images for
tired bodies.
Ferran’s lack of English made her even more attuned to the music and the
physical attitudes of the musicians. The main problem throughout the shoot
was to find the right distance between the film crew and the musicians: the idea
was not to disturb them, and yet it was obvious that the presence of cameras
would affect the outcome. ‘When one plays music, there is a kind of abandon to
physical pleasure which can sometimes be uncomfortable to watch’, says Pas-
cale Ferran:
When I was filming Tony Hymas, I felt a deep-rooted empathy with him. There are
shots that I decided not to include in the film because I felt I had overstepped the
mark, I felt I was getting into intimate territory. The fact that I could not understand
the language no doubt contributed to my awareness of the bodies. It’s incredible how
the essential can be conveyed by the body language. Speech can easily remain on the
surface, come to some arrangement with reality, but the body goes straight to the
essential.’
This perfectly sums up what is going on in Quatre Jours à Ocoee: the feasible
or unfeasible ‘togetherness’ of two bodies, which will bring the music to life
(take the bodies of Hymas and Rivers on that draining first day), but also the
feasible or unfeasible ‘togetherness’ of four bodies (Hymas, Rivers, Ferran and
Djian) to bring a film to fruition. Everyone needs to find his place in this com-
mon space. If Ferran only ever talks about her relationship with Hymas in her
interviews, and never about her relationship with Rivers, it is because a choice
had to be made, which she discreetly attributes to the realm of desire. When the
two women filming and the two men performing finally come together in har-
mony, the music may possibly emerge. ‘There were moments,’ says Ferran,
‘when both the film crew and the musicians were inspired at the same time,
moments when they would play divinely well; we felt then as though we were
in the right place.’
Until the remarkable musical sequences in the second part of the film, how-
ever, the music finds it difficult to make its mark. On several occasions, ‘on
moral grounds’, Ferran acknowledges the presence of the film crew in the con-
fined space of the studio – the hub of the creative process – and recognises her
own responsibility for the early failures. In the montage, she retained the ‘good
mornings’ addressed to the crew by the musicians, the revealing remark by
Tony Hymas at the end of the first day (‘It’s quite terrible to be filmed!’) and the
few sentences uttered to camera by a strained and falsely relaxed Rivers on his
arrival at the studio the second day (‘This is the studio where we want to create
this wonderful music. I don’t know what we want to create […]. I don’t have
any idea and this is interesting to me.’). These tangible signs of tension were
also linked to the uncertainties of improvisation. There was no set programme,
just a list of musical numbers, many of them technically arduous, played in ran-
dom order and complemented by free improvisation. Following a joint reading
of the theme – when there was one – and a few pointers relating to the improvi-
sation techniques, the shots succeeded one another, and as they were all re-
corded, the music was as likely to be in the first shot as in the tenth. The musi-
cians might suddenly interrupt an improvisation and immediately pick up the
number again. The film crew had to be on constant alert: if they missed the
7. Filming jazz 159
opening of a phrase, an exchange of glances or a gesture the take would end up

on the cutting-room floor.
At this stage, Ferran needed to enter into another relationship with time. In
the jazz of Rivers and Hymas, there was no first time, a time for preparation,
research and rehearsal, followed by a second time of performance and imple-
mentation. In jazz, music can be there at any moment, as we saw in Straight,
no Chaser, in another studio sequence. Ferran therefore needed to record
everything that was going on and adapt to a timeframe that was different from
that of film, a timeframe over which she had no command. Ferran’s choice of
two cameras was particularly useful in coping with the length imposed by jazz,
as this was the only way of avoiding a split in time while keeping a constant
watch on the two musicians.
Having been obliged to improvise throughout the shoot, in other words to
relentlessly eliminate possibilities, while the action was in full flow – improvis-
ing entails making choices that, by definition, eliminate others – Ferran was able
to let go during the montage. Contrary to popular belief, musicians, even im-
provising musicians, also rely on montage. Hymas refers to this twice during
the film, the first time when the musicians find it impossible to play Jennifer,
one of the pianist’s own compositions, all the way through, and the second
when he points out to the producer that one of the numbers is too long and will
have to be cut. The example of Jennifer is significant: to the musicians, montage
was the ultimate solution, a way of circumventing a problem when it became
impossible to play a single number in continuity. It never, therefore, implied
writing. On the topic of montage as a possible form of writing, musical and
cinematic improvisation differ. Whereas the element of composition in the sense
of fixing through the written, when it exists, precedes improvisation in music (the
theme, the chord chart), in film improvisation it is on the contrary the ultimate
phase in the creative process.
When it came to editing, Ferran did not choose the ‘right shots’ in an attempt
to idealise an encounter between two leading musicians who needed to over-
come the antagonisms of origin and culture before they could play. In Quatre
Jours à Ocoee, the conflicts always arose when it came to reading the score and
this was due to the two men’s diametrically opposed attitudes to the written.
Like a lot of black jazzmen of his generation, Rivers suffered from the com-
monly-held notion that ‘naturally talented’ Afro-Americans were incapable of
approaching music through composition. This explains his almost sacred atti-
tude to the written form, which comes across very clearly in the film. Hymas,
who knows how sensitive the topic is, remains very patient but does not always
succeed in masking his exasperation. Ferran does not attempt to cover up what
she refers to as ‘scenes from married life’. By preserving the raw nature of the
situation, she gives as honest an account as she can of what really went on: the
work, the repetitive gestures, the suspense, the waiting, the exhaustion, the dis-
couragement, the anxiety that gradually spread to each of the protagonists, but
also the joy when the music burst forth. The continuity that underpins any jazz
improvisation finds itself challenged and unravelled by interruptions on every
front. At the beginning of the last day, right up to the visible liberation that
follows Rivers’ recording of Everafter, it is patently obvious to everyone, includ-
ing the audience, that this album may never materialise, and that consequently
the film may never materialise either. This is where Quatre Jours à Ocoee is so
successful: it shows the degree to which vulnerability and uncertainty are inher-
ent in the collective creative process whenever one takes the risk of improvising,
the risk of living cinema and music to the full, as a common experience.
Quatre Jours à Ocoee is both a film on jazz and a film on a particular notion
of cinema: two types of creation attempting to coexist, two types of creation that
have much in common but are also quite different. Music and cinema, therefore,
but perhaps more accurately jazz and documentary, or better still, musical im-
provisation and cinematic improvisation. In both cases, perfect mastery of the
technique is a must. Great improvisers are, first and foremost, great technicians
and this applies just as much to Hymas and Rivers as to Pascale Ferran and her
crew. But one must also stop striving for perfection and accept the trembling
hand, the less accomplished phrasings, the poorly framed or blurred shots and
even the bitterly ironic absence of a sequence. As the two musicians fell into
each other’s arms at the end of the fourth day, entering into physical contact for
the first time, the batteries of both cameras simultaneously ran out. Initially,
Ferran was tempted to give up the whole film but she later accepted it as a sign
of fate: Quatre Jours à Ocoee did not need this sequence.
‘Music,’ says Pascale Ferran,
is a quest, something I feel I don’t understand. But to me it is the art form that most
resembles the cinema. Cinema has nothing to do with painting and very little to do
with literature. You can shoot a film with your feet but if a time takes shape, if the
rhythm is right, then it may turn out to be a good film. Since Petits arrangements
avec les morts [], it has been clear to me that cinema is music.
By her own admission, when making her first film she had in mind the perfect
written mastery of art music. Since Quatre Jours à Ocoee, she has been con-
vinced that the cinema can also sometimes mean jazz improvisation. Filming
the creative act has altered her relationship to the cinema: ‘I hope I’m moving
toward a greater receptivity to the present’, she commented on its release,
referring to her future work. In a statement of intent on Lady Chatterley
(), her next film, Pascale Ferran wrote:
I am considering shooting with a skeleton crew, in Super , sometimes with two
cameras. To be honest, I might almost consider shooting the film in video but I’m
7. Filming jazz 161
holding back on account of the light, the effect of light on the bodies and landscapes;
apart from that, I wouldn’t see it as an aberration. I don’t think I would have dared to
throw myself into this project if I hadn’t already made a documentary. I feel it is vi-
tally important to achieve a cinematic rendition of the extraordinary impression of a
first time that emanates from the book.
Between Petits arrangements avec les morts, her first film, and the sensual-
ity of Lady Chatterley, she had lived through the adventure with the Stras-
bourg National Theatre acting school in L’Âge des possibles () – but above
all, improvisation had intervened.
Conclusion
The fruitful exchange between Pascale Ferran’s small film crew and the Tony
Hymas/Sam Rivers duo brings to an end, for the time being at least, a study in
which music has played an invaluable role in examining the diversity of the
modes of existence of improvisation in an art of the image that seems at first
glance to be fairly indifferent to such practices. The determined incursions of
jazz, theatre and dance, and the equally stimulating but rarer manifestations in
painting and sculpture, have highlighted the singular nature of film and the
consequent need for a specific approach. Although the desire for improvisation
seems to have been a constant for some filmmakers, the cumbersome nature of
the ‘cinematographic machine’ did not allow them the requisite freedom for true
in the moment invention. The cinema, however, which owes its existence to the
discovery of a mechanical system for recording images, was quite naturally
open to technical developments leading to the gradual introduction of lighter
equipment. Handier cameras, reliable live sound and sensitive film proved to
be tremendous assets for directors aspiring to close in on the realities of the
world. Technical progress gave these filmmakers the concrete means to achieve
their ambitions, although some, such as Jean Rouch, André Coutant and Jean-
Pierre Beauviala, actually pre-empted the engineers’ research.
Theoretical hypotheses, deduced from analyses based not only on frequent
descriptions of specific sequences but on scrupulous attention to the genesis of
the films themselves, contributed towards defining the works in question. The
aim was not to hail improvisation as the panacea for praxis but to show that by
opting for improvisation, unprecedented forms could come to light, in which
new figures, rhythms and gestures would be revealed. However different their
worlds, improvising filmmakers all share a desire to be surprised and to fleet-
ingly lose control. Although they never lose sight of the guiding principle that
guarantees the consistency of their œuvre, their readiness to explore an unusual
idea, follow an unexpected path or take up an unforeseen initiative demon-
strates a conviction that the uncertainties of the journey are just as important as
the ultimate destination. Improvisation has proved to be a means of exploring
the singularity of the individual and his place as a member of a collective whole.
All the films under review feature encounters within human communities and
the difficulties of expressing feelings and fulfilling desires. This focus on the
complexity of the human being formed a bond between such disparate film-
makers as Jean Rouch, whose ethnological ambitions once stimulated Johan
van der Keuken and went on to inspire Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Philippe Fau-
con and his films devoted to immigrant communities, Samuel Collardey and his
face-to-face portrait of a teenager and farmer in L’Apprenti, John Cassavetes
and his singular encounters in Faces and Husbands, Jacques Rivette and No-
buhiro Suwa and their painful delving into disintegrating couples in L’Amour
fou and Un couple parfait, and Jacques Rozier and the crazy odysseys of his
everyday heroes. ‘All improvisation,’ writes Christian Béthune, ‘stems from
shared story/ies […]. It is never a turning-in on oneself but a transcendence into
otherness.’ It found its ultimate expression in the tensions between Tony Hy-
mas and Sam Rivers, which found their outlet through virtuoso jousts of impro-
visation, captured for posterity by the intrigued but apprehensive cameras of
Pascale Ferran and Katell Djian.
Although a common preoccupation with human beings is not enough to
make improvising filmmakers part of the same imaginary family, the elements
that have been developed here all point to a continuity, an unwavering obsti-
nacy in the search for a cinema that is no longer constrained by technical con-
siderations, a cinema that is attentive to the world around it, at one with life.
There is not a single improvising filmmaker who does not cite Renoir as a
source of inspiration, or even as a model – Renoir who was the first to proclaim
with clear-sightedness and lucidity his belief in a cinema that had the capacity
to express the truth of people and things, even if this meant sacrificing the seam-
less fluidity of movement, the reassuringly linear quality of the storyline and the
perfectly controlled equilibrium of the shot. The refusal to submit to the ideal of
formal perfection is a prerequisite for exploring ‘this phenomenon of the body
[which] from an intellectual point of view is as superior to our conscience and
spirit, to our ways of thinking, feeling and wanting, as algebra is superior to
multiplication tables.’ By releasing the actor from the inhibiting determination
to control that characterised the disciples of ‘conceptual’ cinema, these film-
makers released undreamed of physical powers, ranging from the invention of
gestures or figures to an outburst of far more devastating Dionysian energies. It
seems conceivable in this context to use the starting point of a shared taste for
improvisation and refer to a ‘Renoir filiation’ spanning the entire history of the
talkies, with Rossellini acting as first ‘relay’, followed by Rouch, Rozier and Riv-
ette, who in turn handed the flame over to a vibrant contemporary cinema in
which the most creative protagonists are Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche and Nobu-
hiro Suwa. By launching new creative gestures, improvisation has also contri-
buted to the emergence of a new audience, whose involvement in the moving
images has changed form. A witness to events that are apparently being in-
vented before its eyes, it has forged a relationship with film based henceforth
on an encounter, a possible exchange, a relay that harks back to the audience
reactions to jazz, peppering the soloist’s phrase with a gesture or an onomato-
Conclusion 165
poeia. By refusing to be permanently one step ahead of their audience, and in

stark contrast to the hypnotic surrender inherent in classic cinema, improvising
filmmakers are offering an alternative to the jubilatory manipulation of Alfred
Hitchcock or the occasionally perverse games of Abbas Kiarostami, an alterna-
tive whose watchword could well be shared astonishment.
The choice of improvisation is linked to a principle of uncertainty, outlined by
Johan van der Keuken:
The traditional narrative starts out from the assumption that we are already familiar
with the reality we are about to depict, that we know the people we are going to show
in the film. But for me and some others it’s the reverse: we start out by feeling that we
don’t know anything, and finally the moving images are what we retain as knowable
of reality. They are moments of contact, of knowledge, the only ones that we have
been able to retain from the reality which faces us. In general, my films do not com-
prise a series of images that form part of a presupposed whole but are instants from
which the audience can form an image.
All improvising filmmakers, to a greater or lesser degree, have shared the con-
viction that the sensible is a springboard for the idea – knowledge stems from a
confrontation with the unknown and the film itself is merely the trace of a shoot
that was a lived experience in its own right. Unsurprisingly this raises the ques-
tion of the distinction between fiction and documentary filmmakers. It does not
matter what strategies are called upon by the improvisers, they are all struc-
tured around the conviction that the possibility of improvisation depends on a
number of methods derived from the documentary. Rozier’s eels, the actors di-
recting a scene from the inside, Pialat springing up in the middle of a sequence:
the aim is always to destabilise the fiction and produce unforeseen effects of
reality. The improvisation option, even if it is only partial, pervades every aspect
of the shoot, the written moments having to appear with the same spontaneity
as the least premeditated ones. One could see this as a form of ‘contamination’,
the writing inevitably taking account of each actor’s individual qualities in or-
der to allow for the appropriation of a situation or dialogue. Out of this possible
appropriation, a guarantee of freedom for all the protagonists, a collective spon-
taneity will emerge, transcending the filmmaker’s fantasy to become a strategy
of mise-en-scène. All kinds of elements come together to implement this strat-
egy, turning it into a method: open-ended writing, a lack of shooting script, the
creation of companies, the isolation of the shoot, a mix of professional and inex-
perienced actors, the tricks involving actors ‘directing from the inside’ and a
unity of time and space that conjures up the theatre.
For both fictional and documentary filmmakers, the next step is to invent a
new fiction from the montage, using the material that has been recorded and
thereby making improvisation the matter of composition. The diversity of the
resulting forms is related to a necessary adaptation to a composite matter that

only occasionally meets the traditional demands of montage, in terms of inserts,
rhythm or narrative logic. Formal inventiveness, a hallmark of filmmakers such
as Rouch, Cassavetes, Rozier or Ameur-Zaïmeche, is, therefore, a consequence
of the initial decision to choose improvisation as a method. By translating im-
provised proliferation into the montage, structures emerged that shook up – at
times violently – the somewhat fossilised rules of classic cinema. Improvisation
is undoubtedly a method, but by introducing an element of the unknown it is a
method that never aspires toward completion, as each moment is potentially
a new beginning: improvising means trying and ’trying is trying again. It
means experimenting through other paths, other links, other montages’, writes
Georges Didi-Huberman. The position of tireless investigator that defines all
improvisers can be seen in the editor’s gestures, and in the end the forms that
arise from the accumulation of imperfect images can only be impure in turn.
Acknowledging that approximation or detours, even a brief loss of direction,
are inherent in achieving their aim, however, in no way implies relinquishing all
formal ambition. The boldest montage experiments, which notably include
Moi, un Noir, Faces, L’Amour fou, À nos amours, Amsterdam Global Vil-
lage and Un couple parfait, represent unprecedented sources for decoding
reality. Other types of beauty then take hold and emotion is no longer simply a
reaction to architectural balance or harmony of line; it can be triggered by dis-
cord, an inopportune movement, a juxtaposition of rhythms or atmospheres, an
unfinished image. Improvising in the cinema means acknowledging the power
of the forces of disorder experienced by Jackson Pollock in Watery Paths (),
by Robert Frank in his series of photographs entitled The Americans (), and
of course by the jazzmen, from the first manifestations of New Orleans music to
the salutary outrageousness of free jazz a few decades later. Each of these un-
ique endeavours provides a key to understanding one’s epoch and unveiling its
richness and complexity. These artists are not attempting to innovate or be part
of their time at all costs: ‘Contemporariness,’, said Giorgio Agamben,
[…] is a peculiar relation with one’s own time, which adheres to it and at once dis-
tances itself from it; it is in other words a relationship to time which clings to it through a
disjunction and an anachronism. Those who fully coincide with the epoch are not con-

temporary because they cannot see. They cannot fix their eyes on it.
There is undoubtedly an anachronistic element in a practice that disregards the

demands of a world increasingly dependent on speed and machines. To live the
present to the full without overlooking the degree of contestation and resistance
that accompanies any desire for freedom is the ambition of these artists who
played a major role in the aesthetic mutations of their century without ever giv-
ing into the sirens of postmodernism: irony, self-deprecation, pastiche or cita-
Conclusion 167
tion. Improvising means continuing, despite everything, to believe in the power

of the cinema and the beauty of the world.
Notes
Introduction
. Le Jazz et l’Occident, coll. D’Esthétique, Paris, Klincksieck, , p. .

. There is little significant documentation relating to the links between art music and
improvisation, but the reader may refer to Umberto Eco’s essay The Open Work
(trans. Anna Cancogni), Harvard University Press, , originally published in
, Denis Levaillant’s L’improvisation musicale: essai sur la puissance du jeu, Paris,
Lattès, , a work as rich as it is polemical, and the less controversial but equally
interesting publication by Jean-François de Raymond, soberly entitled L’Improvisa-
tion, Paris, Vrin, .
. Jean-François de Raymond, L’Improvisation, op. cit., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Pierre-Henry Frangne, ‘Entre captation et fiction: tensions et inventions du cinéma
face à l’acte de création’, in Pierre-Henry Frangne, Gilles Mouëllic, Christophe Viart
(eds.), Filmer l’acte de création, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, , p. .
. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Le cerveau, c’est l’écran’, Cahiers du cinéma, no. , Feb. , pp.
-, reprinted in Deux regimes de fou. Textes et entretiens, -, Paris, Minuit,
, p. . (This was published in English as Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and
Interviews, -, revised edition, David Lapoujade (ed.), Ames Hodges and
Mike Taormina (trans.), Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, , but the present
quotations were translated for the purposes of this book and were not taken from
this edition). He continues. ‘One can conceive of similar problems, at different
times, on different occasions and under different conditions, jolting diverse sciences,
and painting, and music and philosophy, and literature, and cinema. The tremors
are the same but each of the terrains is different.’
. Christian Béthune, Adorno et le jazz, coll. D’Esthétique, Paris, Klincksieck, , p.
.
. Vincent Amiel, Le Corps au cinéma, Keaton, Bresson, Cassavetes, Paris, PUF, , p. .
. Norman McLaren’s extraordinary Begone Dull Care () immediately springs
to mind.
. Petr Král, Le Burlesque, ou morale de la tarte à la crème, Paris, Stock, , p..
. ‘Entretien avec Jean Renoir’ by Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut, Cahiers du
cinéma, special issue devoted to Jean Renoir, no. , Christmas , reprinted in
Jean Renoir, Entretiens et propos, coll. Petite bibliothèque des Cahiers du cinéma,
, p. .
1. Writing and improvisation
. By opposition to ‘popular music’, ‘art music’ is a term used to describe a musical

score that has been written down by a composer, who thereby becomes the sole
author of the work.
. Jean-François de Raymond, L’Improvisation, Paris, Vrin, , p. .
. In addition to the biographies or monographs that have been devoted to the
aforementioned directors, a useful source of reference can be found in the issue
entitled ‘Improviser’ in the magazine Théâtre S (no. , nd semester , Presses
universitaires de Rennes).
. Improvisation contests are a case apart and have little bearing on the topic under
discussion.
. Anne Boissière, foreword to Approche philosophique du geste dansé. De l’improvisation à
la performance, Anne Boissière and Catherine Kintzler (eds.), Presses universitaires
du Septentrion, Université de Lille , , p. .
. Ibid.
. Laurence Louppe, ‘L’utopie du corps indéterminé, Etats-Unis, années ’, in Le
Corps en jeu, Paris, CNRS éditions, , pp. -.
. ‘L’improvisation ou les paradoxes du vide’, in Approche philosophique du geste dansé,
op. cit., p. .
. Le Jazz et l’Occident, Paris, Klincksieck, coll. D’Esthétique, , p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. The two requisite, self-sufficient qualities that are cornerstones of jazz are a specific
appropriation of musical time known as swing, and a specific appropriation of
sound. These two characteristics may not include improvisation in its primary sense
but both are determined by the musician’s desire to assert his personality, a facet
that finds its ultimate expression in improvisation.
. Philosophie du geste, Arles, Actes Sud, , p.  [emphasis added by Michel
Guérin].
. ‘L’improvisation et les paradoxes du vide’, in Approche philosophique du geste dansé,
op. cit., pp. -.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid..
. See, in particular, Christian Béthune, Adorno et le jazz: analyse d’un déni esthétique,
Paris, Klincksieck, coll. D’Esthétique, .
. See Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, Free Jazz Black Power, st edition:
Champ Libre, . Reprinted: Gallimard, coll. Folio, .
. Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants, Prestige, Original Jazz Classics, .
. ‘L’improvisation et les paradoxes du vide’, op. cit, p. .
. This idea is developed at length in Jean-Louis Comolli’s summa Voir et pouvoir.
L’innocence perdue: cinéma, télévision, fiction, documentaire, Lagrasse, Verdier, .
. Jacques Rivette, secret compris, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, coll. Auteurs, , p. .
Notes 171
. It is important to have access to the script before shooting: the published texts are
usually limited to a shot-by-shot breakdown of the completed film, which sheds no
light on the creative process.
. Le corps au cinéma: Keaton, Bresson, Cassavetes, Paris, PUF, , p. .
. Ibid.
. Hélène Frappat, Jacques Rivette, secret compris, op. cit., pp. -. Marilù Parolini
was co-scriptwriter on L’Amour fou.
. Suzanne Schiffman: ‘On a suivi le graphique’, in Jacques Rivette, secret compris, op.
cit., p. . This chart is very similar in principle to the chord charts used as a basis
for improvisation by jazz musicians.
. ‘Comme la terre autour du soleil’, in Hélène Frappat, Jacques Rivette, secret compris,
op.cit., p. .
. Interview with Jacques Loiseleux by Alain Philippon, in Alain Philippon, À nos
amours de Maurice Pialat, Yellow Now, coll. Long Métrage, , p. .
. Jacques Rivette, secret compris, op. cit. p. .
. As we have already stated, improvisation made its first appearance in the guise of
medieval ‘games’ and ‘mystery plays’, devised for public entertainment. Rivette is
therefore harking back here to the distant origins of improvisation.
. ‘Vouloir l’involontaire et répéter l’irrépétable’, in Approche philosophique du geste
dansé, op. cit., p.  [emphasis added].
. Jean-François de Raymond, op.cit., p. .
. ‘Vouloir l’involontaire et répéter l’irrépétable’, in Approche philosophique du geste
dansé, op. cit., p. .
. Preface to Roberto Rossellini: le cinéma révélé, Cahiers du cinéma, coll. Petite
bibliothèque, , p. (st edition: ).
2. Creation in action
. ‘Mes prochains films’, interview with Jean Renoir by Michel Delahaye and Jean-
André Fieschi, Cahiers du cinéma, no. , July . Reprinted in Jean Renoir.
Entretiens et Propos, Jean Narboni (ed.), Paris, Cahiers du cinema, coll. Petite
Bibliothèque,  (st edition ), pp. -.
. Interview with Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche by Jean-Philippe Tessé, press release for
Dernier Maquis, , Sophie Dulac Productions.
. ‘La marche et l’idée’, interview with Jean Renoir by Michel Delahaye and Jean
Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma, no. . Reprinted in Jean Renoir. Entretiens et Propos, op.
cit., p. .
. Despite appearances, this has nothing in common with certain reality TV shows,
which conform to a precisely-determined script, making them totally alien to the
freedom that characterised Rozier’s shoots.
. Jean Renoir, le Patron. Reprinted in Jean Renoir. Entretiens et Propos, op. cit., pp. -
.
. ‘Le temps déborde’, interview with Jacques Rivette by Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis
Comolli, Jean Narboni and Sylvie Pierre, Cahiers du cinéma, no. , September ,
p.  [emphasis added]. Published in English under the title ‘Time Overflowing’,

Amy Gateff (trans.), in Jacques Rivette: Texts and Interviews, British Film Institute,
, n. pag.
. Ibid.
. Paris, Ramsay Poche Cinéma,  (st edition Belfond, ).
. Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, coll. Petite Bibliothèque,  (st edition ). This
refers to interviews given to the Cahiers du cinéma and to comments made on
television programmes, particularly the two-part Jean Renoir, le Patron, directed by
Jacques Rivette for the series ‘Cinéastes de notre temps’ by Janine Bazin and André
S. Labarthe.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid.
. Jean Renoir, le Patron. Reprinted in Jean Renoir. Entretiens et Propos, op. cit., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Jean Renoir, Ma vie et mes films, Flammarion, coll. Champs contre-champs, , p.
.
. ‘Roberto Rossellini et l’invention du cinéma moderne’, introduction to Roberto
Rossellini. Le cinéma révélé, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, coll. Petite Bibliothèque, ,
p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma. Les films, Paris, Robert Laffont, coll.
Bouquins, .
. Comments by Roberto Rossellini, published in Bianco e nero in February  and
reprinted in Mario Verdone, Roberto Rossellini, Paris, Seghers, coll. Cinéma
d’aujourd’hui, , p. .
. Jacques Lourcelles, ‘Voyage en ’talie', Dictionnaire du cinéma. Les films, Paris, Robert
Laffont.
. E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, New York, Phaidon,  (st edition ), p. .
. Interview with Rossellini by Fereydoun Hoveyda and Jacques Rivette, Cahiers du
cinéma, no. , April . Reprinted in Roberto Rossellini. Le cinema révélé, op. cit., p.
.
. ‘Techniques de la Nouvelle Vague’, Cahiers du cinéma, special issue ‘Nouvelle
Vague: une légende en question’, , pp. -.
. Ibid., p. .
. Libération,  June .
. Ibid.
. ‘Le jazz à l’œuvre’, interview with Jacques Rozier, in Gilles Mouëllic, Jazz et Cinéma.
Paroles de cinéastes, Paris, Séguier-Archimbaud, , pp. -. The irony is that
Rozier had only used a simple guide track when shooting Adieu Philippine. Given
the confused sound, it took him a long time to recapture the voices, particularly as
the dialogues were largely improvised.
. The sound engineer was Michel Fano.
. ‘L’avenir esthétique de la télévision. La TV est le plus humain des arts mécaniques’,
Réforme, no. ,  September , reprinted in Cahiers du cinéma, no. ,
February , pp. -.
. He also foresaw the excesses of reality TV.
Notes 173
3. The influence of Jean Rouch
. This text was reprinted in the review CinémAction, no.  (th quarter ), under
the title ‘Jean Rouch ou le ciné-plaisir’, pp. -. It has been translated into English
on the Official Jean Rouch Tribute Site http://der.org/jean-rouch/content/index.php
under the title ‘The Camera and Man’ and it is this translation that we have used
here.
. ‘La Caméra et les hommes’, CinémAction, no. , op. cit., p. . ‘The Camera and
Man’, op. cit., p..
. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .
. ‘Étonnant: Jean Rouch, Moi, un Noir’, Arts, no. ,  March , and ‘L’Afrique
vous parle de la fin et des moyens’, Cahiers du cinéma, no. , April . These two
articles were reprinted in Alain Bergala (ed.), Godard par Godard, vol. , Paris,
Éditions de l’Étoile-Cahiers du cinéma, , pp. - and -.
. See in particular Alain Bergala, Godard au travail, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, pp. -
.
. Each of the heroes in Moi, un Noir chose an ‘American’ name that they had either
seen in movie theatres or on hoardings in Abidjan: Edward G. Robinson, Lemmy
Caution and Dorothy Lamour.
. Op. cit., p. .
. ‘Le montage: concerto à deux regards et quatre mains’, in Jean Rouch et le ciné-plaisir,
op. cit., pp. -.
. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, , p. . Deleuze is referring here
to the serial dodecaphonism invented by ‘the Viennese’, Arnold Schoenberg and
his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Distancing themselves from the
codifications of a tonal system that was already on its way out, the composers drew
up new rules based on series of sounds whose only connections were to each other.
In Godard’s case, the links between the series of images and sounds were given a
new lease of life, with no reference to the usual rules of classical cinema. Seriality
not only allowed tremendous freedom in composition, it acknowledged, through
the written form, the all-powerful role of the author. This parallel between music
and cinema, which is worth expanding upon at length, should nevertheless be put
into perspective: whereas the material used by musical composers is immutable,
that of the filmmakers is a source of endless reinvention.
. Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, .
. Godard au travail, op. cit., p. .
. Le Nouvel Observateur,  September .
. In this sense, Godard resembles filmmakers such as Orson Welles, whose talent for
invention in the moment is equally remarkable. Unlike Welles, however, Godard is
always aware of the strictures of filming, both in terms of budget and in terms of
length.
. ‘You need to take truth literally when it comes from the mouth of Lemmy Caution,
American federal agent and unemployed person in Treichville, when he hangs
outside the church waiting for girls or explains to Petit Jules why France lost in
Indochina, in a speech that is a mixture of Céline, Audiberti and ultimately nothing
at all, for the speeches of Jean Rouch and his characters (whose resemblance to real
persons, living or dead, is absolutely not coincidental), are as fresh and pure as
Botticelli’s Venus or the Noir emerging from the waves in Les statues meurent
aussi.’ (Excerpt from ‘Étonnant: Jean Rouch, Moi, un Noir’, op. cit., p. ).
. In his demonstration, Deleuze associates the ‘cinema of experience’ approach of
Canadian Pierre Perrault with Rouch’s cinéma vérité.
. The Time-Image, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, , p. .
. The film was released in April . It conjures up Rendez-vous de juillet ()
by Jacques Becker, who had been Renoir’s assistant. Jacques Becker, who gave Jean
Rouch his first lesson in cinema on the plane that was taking them both to Africa.
. Van der Keuken makes a subtle allusion to Rouchian ‘fabulation’ in his comments
on the film The Eye above the Well (): ‘There are a number of situations in
this film which are mises-en-scène. This involves playing with what I would call
‘the approximate’. These are genuine mises-en-scène, but directed in an approxi-
mate manner. They resemble a simulation of a fictional film, because one is perfectly
aware of the camera’s presence, and this provides an extra layer: these people are
acting but we know that they are depicting their own lives, this is a documentary
account of the way they cope in a situation which calls on them to act. It is both real
and a form of amateur dramatics.’ (in Johan van der Keuken, Aventures d’un regard,
Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, , p. ).
. Pierre Perrault’s trilogy on the Isle-aux-Coudres also comes to mind, as a model for
the fictional rendition of reality stemming from an improvised remark. In Pour la
suite du monde (), Le Règne du jour () and Les Voitures d’eau (),
Perrault recorded the mutation of communities through the spectrum of age-old
rituals, recreated for the purposes of the film, perpetuating the ancient language as
preserved in these remote areas. The adventure of living, creative speech takes
precedence over the images that only appear to be there in order to accompany the
words.
. The fact that these same films represent the most vibrant aspect of French cinema
today is a further example of the role of improvisation as an expression of
contemporary creation.
. John Cassavetes. Autoportraits, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, , p. .
. ‘Le jazz à l’œuvre: entretien avec Jacques Rozier’, in Gilles Mouëllic, Jazz et Cinéma.
Paroles de cinéastes, Paris, Seguier-Archimbaud, , p. .
. Ameur-Zaïmeche directed his fourth film in , Les Chants de Mandrin (Prix
Louis Delluc), using working methods that were very akin to those of the trilogy.
. The double peine refers to immigrants who are sentenced to imprisonment in France
and then deported to their native country.
. A Taleb (plural: Taliban) is a student in a Koranic school. In the context of the Shiite
clergy, his studies are to prepare him for the role of Mullah.
. The song was composed by Meriem Serbah.
. Although the crew did not discover the magnificent voice of this man, who was
accustomed to calling to prayer, until the actual day of shooting, this was to become
one of the most memorable moments of the film.
. Yet again this is a way of directing improvisation ‘from the inside’.
. ‘Comme Armstrong jouait de la trompette’, in Jazz et Cinéma. Paroles de cinéastes, op.
cit., p. .
Notes 175
. This blurring of fiction and documentary gave Ameur-Zaïmeche the opportunity to
integrate two remarkable sequences into Bled Number One, in which singer and
guitarist Rodolphe Burger, flanked by Kamel/Rabah gazing peacefully into the
distance, improvises, as dawn is rising, a heart-rending number based on a poem by
William Blake, with microphone and amplifier in full view.
. ‘Dérives de la fiction: notes sur le cinéma de Jean Rouch’, in Dominique Noguez
(ed.), Cinéma: théories, lectures, special issue of Revue d’esthétique, nd edition,
updated and expanded, , pp. -. The ideas developed here should be seen
as a tribute to Fieschi’s outstanding article.
. Ibid., p. .
. www.tfmdistribution.com/film/lapprenti_, interview conducted by Claire Vassé
(consulted on  February ).
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
. Pierre Hébert, L’Ange et l’Automate, Montreal, Les  coups, , p. .
. Johan van der Keuken, Aventures d’un regard, op. cit., p.  [emphasis added by van
der Keuken].
. One of Ameur-Zaïmeche’s plans is to fulfil the dream of the immigrant workers in
Dernier Maquis, who want to buy a truck and take it to Africa so that they can
make a living from transportation. This trip would represent both the men’s actual
journey and the fictional arena invented by the filmmaker.
. In his autobiography Nous ne sommes pas d’ici (Grasset, ), Michel Le Bris
attributes this expression to the writer Bruce Chatwin (p. ).
4. Acting cinema
. ‘L’écran Pollock : à point nommé’ and ‘L’écran Pollock : dans l’après-coup’,

excerpts from a conference given by Hubert Damisch on  February  at the
Centre Pompidou within the framework of the series by La Revue parlée, ‘Comme
une histoire de l’art’. The texts were published in Les Cahiers du musée national d’art
moderne, no. , winter -, pp. - and reprinted in Hubert Damisch, Ciné
fil, Paris, Seuil, coll. La librairie du XIXe siècle, , pp. -.
. Ciné fil, op. cit., p. .
. Ray Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes. Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, , p. , cited in Hubert Damisch, Ciné
fil, op. cit., p. .
. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema . The Time-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(trans.), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, , p. .
. Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Dos-à-dos’, Cahiers du cinéma, no. , October , pp. -.
. Vincent Amiel, Le Corps au cinéma, Keaton, Bresson, Cassavetes, Paris, PUF, , p.
.
. John Cassavetes, Autoportraits, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, , p. .
. Idem.
. Gérard Genette, L’œuvre de l’art : immanence et transcendance, Paris, Seuil, , p.

.
. The Time-Image, op. cit., p. .
. Michel Guérin, Philosophie du geste, Arles, Actes Sud, , p. .
. ‘Danse contemporaine: les formes de la radicalité’, in Approche philosophique du geste
dansé: de l’improvisation à la performance, Anne Boissière and Catherine Kintzler
(eds.), Presses universitaires du Septentrion, Université de Lille , , p ..
. Johan van der Keuken, Aventures d’un regard, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, , p. .
. The work of Noshka van der Lely is outstanding, and her ability to follow van der
Keuken’s unpredictable movements, boom in hand, while simultaneously checking
through her headset the sound quality of the shot, are quite exceptional. In
collective improvisation, it is vital to ensure the complicity and complementarity of
all the protagonists.
. Michel Guérin, Philosophie du geste, op. cit., p. .
. Johan van der Keuken, Aventures d’un regard, op. cit., p. .
. The fact that van der Keuken was a photographer obviously contributed to his
quick-fire reactions and ability to understand in the moment the wealth of composi-
tion of an image. Hans Namuth and Bert Stern, to whom we shall be returning,
were also renowned photographers and the sharpness of their documentary percep-
tion owes much to this early training.
. Report written by Leacock on  June  for the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization. Leacock had a rather old-fashioned view of
the relationship between cinema and theatre, as we shall see, as the latter played a
crucial role in the new mechanics of improvisation.
. See the photographs by Sam and Larry Shaw in John Cassavetes, Autoportraits, op.
cit.
. A similar device to that used by Rouch in Les Maîtres fous and Moi, un Noir.
. See chapter , note .
. Jacques Lourcelles, article entitled ‘Du côté d’Orouët’, in Dictionnaire du cinéma,
Paris, Robert Laffon, , p. .
. Frédéric Pouillaude entitled his contribution to Approche philosophique du geste dansé
(op. cit.) ‘Vouloir l’involontaire, répéter l’irrépétable’, p. .
. Christiane Vollaire, ‘Danse contemporaine: les formes de la radicalité’, in Approche
philosophique du geste dansé, op. cit., p. .
. This inevitably conjures up the famous sequence in Love Streams (John Cassa-
vetes, ) in which Sarah (Gena Rowlands) gives her brother Robert (John Cassa-
vetes) what amounts to a zoo: the animals create havoc by rapidly taking over not
only the garden but the house, to the accompaniment of a huge storm.
. Cited by Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma. Émotions, hypnoses, animalités, Paris,
P.O.L/Trafic, , p. .
. To illustrate this documentary dimension in Rozier’s work, one only needs to
compare his second short feature, Blue Jeans () with a film such as Marcel
Carné’s Les Tricheurs, released that same year, a film theoretically ‘about youth’,
in which the jazz acts as a guarantee for a totally factitious ‘modernity’.
. Collardey creates a number of other situations of play: the board game in Paul’s
kitchen, the pillow fight in the boarding school, Matthieu’s arduous guitar practice.
Notes 177
. One should recall that the shoot had to be organised around Mathieu’s internship
on Paul’s farm: one week a month for an entire school year.
. To Claire Denis, this concrete relationship with music was of seminal importance:
‘The films start out with a music that I do my best to communicate to the actors
with whom I am working but also to Agnès Godard behind the camera. Whenever
possible, we use playback. Or else we listen to the music before shooting […]. I try
to ensure that we share a music, a sound, and not simply ideas. When everything
goes well, we come together physically in the music. The film grows out of that and
its physical dimension stems to a great extent from the music’, ‘Le jazz, pour penser
le cinéma: entretien avec Claire Denis’, Jazz Magazine, no. , December ,
reprinted in Gilles Mouëllic, Jazz et Cinéma. Paroles de cinéastes, Paris, Seguier-
Archimbaud, , p. .
. ‘Le jazz, pour penser le cinéma: entretien avec Claire Denis’, ibid., pp. -.
. A dancer and choreographer, Bernard Montet has been director of the Centre
choréographique de Tours since .
. Daniel Sibony, ‘Trans-en-danse ou la danse comme excès’, in La Part de l’Œil, no. ,
, under the section ‘Ce qui fait danse: de la plasticité à la performance’, p. .
. Idem.
. Christiane Vollaire, ‘Danse contemporaine: les formes de la radicalité’, in Approches
philosophiques du geste dansé, op. cit., p. .
. Daniel Sibony, ‘Trans-en-danse…’, op. cit., p. .
. John Cassavetes, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, , p. .
. Aventures d’un regard, op. cit, p. .
. John Cassavetes, op. cit, p. .
. Frédéric Pouillaude, ‘Vouloir l’involontaire, répéter l’irrépétable’, Approche philoso-
phique du geste dansé (op. cit.), p. .
. Daniel Sibony, op. cit., p. .
. L’Harmattan, coll. L’art en bref, .
. Cinéma et sculpture. Un aspect de la modernité des années , L’Harmattan, coll. L’art en
bref, , p. .
. Ibid., pp. -.
. Voyage en Italie de Roberto Rossellini, Crisnée, Yellow Now, coll. Long Métrage, .
. The comments of George Sanders and Maria Mauban, the French actress who plays
Marie Castelli, are edifying in this respect (see Alain Bergala, Voyage en Italie, op.
cit.).
. In Voyage en Italie, Katherine and Alex go to Naples to sell a family home. In Un
couple parfait, Marie and Nicolas return to Paris to attend their friends’ wedding.
. This device could be considered a radicalisation of the experiment carried out in
Suwa’s second film, M / Other (), in which the director used a large number of
meticulously composed static shots with the two actors improvising both dialogue
and movement.
. ‘Son et lumière: entretien avec Caroline Champetier and Jean-Claude Laureux’,
Cahiers du cinéma, no. , February , p. .
. Idem.
. The HD Varicam camera used for the long shots was then replaced by a DVX ,
which allowed for mobility while also changing the nature of the image.
. The shoot therefore followed the events in sequence, a very rare occurrence when
the crew are due to return to the same location, as is the case here.
. Voyage en Italie, op. cit., p. .
. Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, Daniel Slager (trans.), New York, Archipelago
Books, , p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ève was executed in  with Anna Abruzzezzi acting as model. Rodin was to
admit later in his conversations with Dujardin-Beaumetz: ‘I could see the changes
in my model but did not grasp the reason. I modified my profiles, naively following
the successive transformations in her expanding shape. One day I learned that she
was pregnant; everything became clear. Her stomach had only changed impercept-
ibly in profile, but one can see my faithful rendition of nature in the muscles of her
loins and sides […]. It had never crossed my mind that in order to portray Ève I
would need to call on a pregnant woman; it was most fortuitous and contributed a
great deal toward forging the figure’s character. Soon, however, my model, who had
grown more sensitive, found the studio too cold; she started coming less regularly
and finally stopped all together. This explains why my Ève is not finished’ (Auguste
Rodin, Éclairs de penseé. Écrits et entretiens, Paris, Éditions du Sandre, , p. ).
. Leo Steinberg, ‘Rodin’, Other Criteria. Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art,
New York, Oxford University Press, , p. .
. Caroline Champetier, ‘Sur le filmage, notes et propositions avant tournage’, Cahiers
du cinéma, no. , op. cit., p. .
. Boppers and fans of free jazz also inspired another improvising filmmaker: John
Cassavetes, particularly in Faces ().
. Michel-Claude Jalard, Le jazz est-il encore possible?, Marseille, Parenthèses, , p.
.
. Alain Bergala, Voyage en Italie, op. cit., pp. -.
. Once again one is reminded of Godard, who breathed life into these hands by
Rodin in the encounter between the man (Alain Delon) and the woman (Domiziana
Giordano) in Nouvelle Vague ().
. L’Improvisation. Ordres et désordres, texts compiled by Alexandre Pierrepont and
Yannick Séité, Textuel, no. , p. .
. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria, op. cit., p. .
. This sentence, cited by Léonce Bénédicte in the preface to the  edition (Armand
Colin) of Rodin’s work Les Cathédrales de France, irresistibly conjures up Thelonious
Monk’s improvisation on The Man I Love (Gershwin), recorded in  for the album
Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants. Monk keeps stressing the opening notes of
the theme, as though he wanted to ‘wear them out’ before being swallowed up into
the chord chart. It is only thanks to the (belated) help of Miles Davis, following long
seconds of trial and error, that he manages to find his way back onto his harmonic
path. Nevertheless, this was the version chosen by both men to feature on the
album: the “ruin” of The Man I Love turns out to be even more beautiful than The
Man I Love itself.
. Caroline Champetier (http://sites.radiofrance.fr/chaines/franceculture/dossiers/
couple_parfait/), consulted on  February . Charles Mingus also uses the
circle figure to define ‘rotary perception’, in other words the layout of the
instrumentalists in collective improvisation: ‘If you get a mental picture of the beat
Notes 179
existing within a circle you're more free to improvise. […] each guy can play his
notes anywhere in that circle and it gives him a feeling he has more space. The notes
fall anywhere inside the circle but the original feeling for the beat isn't changed. If
one in the group loses confidence, somebody hits the beat again. The pulse is inside
you. When you're playing with musicians who think this way you can do anything.
Anybody can stop and let the others go on. It's called strolling’ (Charles Mingus,
Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus, Vintage Books, paperback
edition, , pp. -, st edition Alfred A. Knopf, ).
. Jacques Doillon in Le cinéma de Nobuhiro Suwa, a series of interviews with the
Japanese director’s cast and crew. The series, directed and edited by Yannis
Polonacci, forms part of the DVD bonuses of Un couple parfait, released in 
by CTV International. Incidentally, Doillon himself makes a brief appearance in Un
couple parfait.
. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria, op. cit., p. .
. The cellist Didier Petit goes as far as to claim that ‘Improvisation invents nothing,
and invention has never been its founding principle, its raison d’être or its aim, if one
can put it that way. It is more a case of transposing, transforming, transfiguring our
memory in real time’ (‘Inflexion’, in In Situ, no. , cited by Alexandre Pierrepont,
‘Jeux d’improvisation, jeux de construction’, in Textuel, no. , op. cit., p. ).
5. The temptation of theatre
. Gérard Genette, L’Œuvre de l’art . Immanence et transcendance, Paris, Seuil, , p.

.
. Ibid., p. .
. Christian Béthune, Le Jazz et l’Occident, Paris, Klincksieck, coll. D’Esthétique, ,
p. .
. Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre, San Francisco, City Lights Books, , no. , n.
pag.
. Judith Malina, cited in Pierre Biner, The Living Theatre, New York, Horizon Press,
 (author’s translation), p. .
. ‘For Judith (Malina), the play moves like a pendulum between two liberating forces
– jazz and drugs’ wrote Pierre Biner in The Life of the Theatre, op. cit., p. .
. L’Improvisation, Paris, Vrin, , p. .
. Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet, Dialogues, New York, Columbia University Press,
 (revised edition), Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (trans.), p. . First
English edition © The Athlone Press, .
. For more details on this production, see Pierre Biner, The Living Theatre, op. cit., pp.
-.
. Ibid., p. .
. In , she directed The Cool World, with music by pianist Mal Waldron. Much
later she devoted two films to saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman: Ornette
Coleman, A Jazz Video Game () and Ornette: Made in America ().
. A useful source for understanding the convergences between these two art forms
are the texts contained in Conférences du collège d’histoire de l’art cinématographique,
no. , ‘Le théâtre dans le cinéma’, Paris, Cinémathèque française-Musée du cinéma,
winter -.
. Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke were part of the same group of young New York
filmmakers, who were at their most active at the dawn of the s. The  mm
camera Cassavetes used on Shadows was lent to him by Clarke.
. In ‘Rome is Burning’ (), the episode devoted to Shirley Clarke in Cinéma, de
notre temps by André S. Labarthe and Janine Bazin, one sees Rivette sitting in a
corner of the poky room that was being used for the shoot. Much later Labarthe, on
the subject of L’Amour fou, would talk about ‘an illumination that like any flash of
lightning had been prepared by a host of experiences, readings, visits to exhibitions,
theaters, concerts, films, Antonioni, Rouch, Shirley Clarke’ (in Hélène Frappat,
Jacques Rivette, secret compris, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, coll. Auteurs, , p. ).
. Jacques Aumont, ‘Renoir le patron, Rivette le passeur’, in Conférences du collège
d’histoire de l’art cinématographique, no. , op. cit., p. .
. Bernard Cohn, ‘Entretien sur L’Amour fou, avec Jacques Rivette’, Positif, no. ,
April , p. .
. Labarthe holds a string of interviews, for instance, with the actresses and with
Kalfon, who is directing the play.
. ‘Théâtre et Cinéma’, text published in Esprit, in June and July-August ,
reprinted in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? II. Le cinéma et les autres arts, Paris, Éditions du
Cerf, , and again in , with some of the main texts from the original four-
volume edition. The page references are those of the  edition, p.  in this case.
. This does not mean it was a simple recording: the role of the montage remained
paramount, as we shall be seeing shortly.
. Marc Chevrie, ‘Mais le lendemain matin…’, in Jacques Rivette. La règle du jeu, Sergio
Toffetti and Jean Esselinck (eds.), Centre culturel français de Turin-Museo nazionale
del cinema di Torino, undated, p. .
. ‘Théâtre et Cinéma’, op. cit., p. .
. ‘Mesure pour mesure: théâtre et cinéma chez Jacques Rivette’, in Études
cinématographiques, vol. , ‘Jacques Rivette, critique et cinéaste’, Suzanne
Liandrat-Guigues (ed.), , p. .
. During the . hours of his next film, Out One: Noli me tangere (), Rivette
experimented with the limits of filmed theatrical improvisation: he abandoned the
initial text in favour of a storyline inspired by Honoré de Balzac’s Histoire des Treize,
and left the theatre company completely free to improvise, particularly in the
context of their theatrical exercises, which he filmed with a hand-held camera.
. ‘Théâtre et Cinéma’, op. cit., p. .
. John Cassavetes, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, , p. .
. Ibid ., p. .
. ‘L’expérience Shadows’, Cahiers du cinéma, no. , May , p. , cited by Thierry
Jousse, op. cit., p. .
. See the DVD bonus of Opening Night, from the John Cassavetes boxed set, Orly
Films-DD productions, Paradis Distribution, .
. The actors’ comments from the DVD bonus of Opening Night once again provide
great insight.
Notes 181
. Ibid.
. Indeed, several of his films feature actual stages, which play a vital dramaturgical
role. Apart from Opening Night, one could mention the striptease joint in The
Killing of a Chinese Bookie and the jazz clubs in Too Late Blues ().
. The courtyard of the small palette manufacturing business in Dernier Maquis is
also laid out like a theatre set, with a camera positioned on the surrounding hillocks
in order to record the events during the shoot.
. Although the Actors Studio did not call on improvisation in the sense defended
here, it did put a new slant on the actors’ film performance by insisting on genuine
collective commitment, modeled on the method of Stanislavski.
. ‘Entretien avec André S. Labarthe’ by Nicolas Azalbert, Cahiers du cinéma, no. ,
May , p. .
. ‘Théâtre et Cinéma’, op. cit., p. .
. Bazin defined découpage as ‘a compromise between three possible analyses of
reality: ° a purely logical descriptive analysis (the murder weapon next to the
corpse); ° a psychological analysis within the film, in other words one that matches
the point of view of one of the characters in the given situation (the possibly
poisoned glass of milk that Ingrid Bergman has to drink in Notorious);
° lastly, a psychological analysis corresponding to interest of the audience; an
interest that may be either spontaneous or triggered by the director, precisely
thanks to this analysis: the doorknob turning without the knowledge of the
criminal, who thinks he is alone […]’ (‘Théâtre et Cinéma’, op. cit., pp. -).
. ‘Théâtre et Cinéma’, op. cit., p. . Lady in the Lake () is a film by Robert
Montgomery in which everything is seen through the eyes of the detective
Marlowe, except the prologue and epilogue.
. L’Improvisation, op. cit., p. .
. ‘Théâtre et Cinéma’, op. cit., p. .
. Jean-Louis Comolli, Voir et Pouvoir. L’innocence perdue: cinéma, télévision, fiction,
documentaire, Lagrasse, Verdier, , p. .
. Aventures d’un regard, op. cit., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. ‘Une partie de colin-maillard’, Cahiers du cinéma, no. , April , p. .
. ‘Rozier à son rythme’, in Emmanuel Burdeau (ed.), Jacques Rozier, le funambule, Paris,
Cahiers du cinéma, coll. Auteurs, p. .
6. The rules of the game
. Allow me to draw attention here to my article entitled ‘La guitare seule’, which
appeared in the th issue (spring ) of the review Trafic.
. Faced with the threat from desperados claiming to be members of Radical Islam in
order to attack villages, the local population organised nightly barricades. In the
film the community is simply reproducing situations experienced first-hand only
months earlier. The danger had still not completely disappeared by the time of the
shoot, which was consequently quite stressful.
. See La Règle du jeu. Scénario original de Jean Renoir, a critical edition devised,
introduced and annotated by Olivier Curchod and Christopher Faulkner, Paris,
Nathan Cinéma, , pp. -. In the scene described here, only the dialogues
were provided, with no indications as to the mise-en-scène.
. This could be seen as a further example of Jacques Rivette’s famous maxim, which
claims that every film is a documentary of its own shoot.
. ‘Entretien avec Al Ruban’, in Thierry Jousse, John Cassavetes, Paris, Cahiers du
cinéma, , p. . We have already referred to the final sequence in Opening
Night, in which Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands improvise at length on the theatre
set and in which Cassavetes can be seen several times quite obviously directing his
partner.
. Idem.
. John Cassavetes, Autoportraits, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, , p. .
. John Cassavetes, op. cit., p. .
. Among the filmmakers claiming to have been directly inspired by Cassavetes is
Jean-François Stévenin, who took on the role of director and lynchpin actor in his
own three films. In Passe Montagne (), Double Messieurs () and
Mischka (), Stévenin invented the mise-en-scène on set, constantly orienting
the improvisations by his almost uninterrupted and crucial presence in each
sequence.
. John Cassavetes, op. cit., p. .
. This refers to the boxed set edition by Orly Films-DD productions and its bonus,
‘Conversation with Ben Gazzara and Al Ruban’.
. Comment by Pierre-André Boutang, in the documentary Souvenirs autour de Jean-
Daniel Pollet, directed by Noël Simsolo in  for the DVD bonus of L’Acrobate.
. ‘Vers le sud, de Johan van der Keuken’, article published in Libération on  March
 and reprinted in Serge Daney, Cinéjournal, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, , p.
.
. In an interview devoted to his film Tournée, Mathieu Amalric also talked about the
possibilities for improvisation opened up by the dual actor/director role: ‘In the end
I played the role myself, although the decision was only made three weeks before
the shoot. This turned out to be my saving grace, because in the train scenes for
instance, I would say to myself, there’s no point, there’s nothing worth acting here,
no scene, just the pleasure of filming languorous women. I wanted action, some
kind of problem. So I grabbed my phone and started yelling down it like a producer
who’s just lost a theatre. The girls, who’d had no warning, got straight into the part,
like actresses. That impulse ultimately determined the whole shoot’, ‘Tourner
Tournée: entretien avec Mathieu Amalric’ by Jean-Philippe Tessé, Cahiers du
cinéma, no. , June , p. .
. At the end of M/Other, Tomokazu Miura and Makiko Watanabe are credited as
lead actors but also with writing the dialogue; they then reappear, with Nobuhiro
Suwa this time, as scriptwriters. The way Suwa hands over these attributions to his
actors is unprecedented and gives us an insight into his method.
. As François Bégaudeau so aptly put it in ‘Todeschini monté en puissance’, Cahiers
du cinéma, no. , February , p. .
. The wedding sequence, particularly the part when all the protagonists start looking
for their car keys, provides a perfect example of this ‘saturation of the shot by the
Notes 183
performance’: the rather futile agitation that suddenly runs through the little
community shows the limits of collective improvisation when it lacks any ‘inside’
direction.
. ‘Comme des ruisseaux vers le fleuve’, interview with Nobuhiro Suwa and
Hippolyte Girardot by Jean-Michel Frodon and Charlotte Garson, Cahiers du
cinéma, no. , June , p. .
. This is used, for want of a better term, in the sense of non professional, in conjunction
with its other meaning, which attenuates its pejorative connotation: someone who
loves, seeks or cultivates certain things.
. ‘Conversation with Ben Gazzara and Al Ruban’, bonus to the DVD edition of The
Killing of a Chinese Bookie, op. cit.
. Idem.
. Who is also her mother in real life.
. Cassavetes expressed this in his own words: ‘There’s no such thing as a ‘good actor’.
What does exist, on the other hand, is a continuation of life’ (Autoportraits, op. cit., p.
). By making inexperienced and professional actors perform together, Cassavetes
was trying in a way to contaminate the performance of the latter by the life of the
former.
. The comments of the black and white students, which often seem awkward in the
context of collective improvisation, offer great insight into the complex relationship
between the two communities, and form the cornerstone of Rouch’s whole project.
. John Cassavetes, op. cit., p. .
. The special case of the director-cum-actor bears out this idea: in a performance
context, he remains the director, and as such is not only involved in the scene, acting
as an objective observer, but is also a ‘foreign body’.
. See his work De Mozart à Beethoven: essai sur la notion de profondeur en musique, Arles,
Actes Sud, .
. Rohmer never hesitates either in juxtaposing highly experienced actors and
debutants; a special study could be made in Le Genou de Claire, for example,
in which Jean-Claude Brialy plays the lead opposite beginners Béatrice Romand
and Laurence de Monaghan. The director succeeds brilliantly in making the most of
this encounter, on which most of the script is based.
. We will only take the example of the actresses here, as they play such a dominant
role in Rohmer’s cinema, and particularly in Le Rayon vert and Quatre
aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle.
. Rohmer often used a small tape recorder to capture snippets of conversation,
readings or brief improvisations, so that he could get as near to reality as possible
when the time came to devise the characters.
. ‘De la façon la plus simple. Entretien avec Éric Rohmer’ by Alain Bergala and Laure
Gardette, in Éric Rohmer: “Tout est fortuit sauf le hasard”, Studio -MJC de
Dunkerque, , p.  [emphasis added].
. ‘Although Rossellini liked science, in no way was he a scientist, he enjoyed
improvising too. It was that side of him that we liked’, ‘Entretien avec Éric Rohmer’
by Aldo Tassone, in Éric Rohmer, Milan, Fabbri Editori, , p. .
. ‘Entretien avec Arielle Dombasle’ by Stéphane Delorme et Jean-Philippe Tessé,
Cahiers du cinéma, no. , February , p. .
. ‘Qui vivra verra: jalons épars pour une petite histoire du cinéma rohmérien’, in Éric
Rohmer: “Tout est fortuit sauf le hasard”, op. cit., p. .
. ‘Entretien avec Marie Rivière’ by Jean-Sébastien Chauvin, Cahiers du cinéma, no. ,
February , p. .
. ‘Entretien avec Éric Rohmer’ by Aldo Tassone, op. cit., p. .
. Serge Daney, ‘Actualité de Rohmer’, in Éric Rohmer, op. cit., p. .
. Stéphane Lévy-Klein and Olivier Eyquem, ‘Trois rencontres avec Maurice Pialat’
(III), Positif, no. , May , p. .
. I’m Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes, the Man and His Work, ,  mn.
7. Filming jazz
. This came about as a result of racial segregation.

. The director drew his inspiration from formal research, already tried and tested in
Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique (), to which he had actively contributed.
. See the text by Daniel Soutif in particular, ‘Harlem-Paris et retour: le Jazz Age de
l’Amérique à l’Europe’, in the exhibition catalogue Le Siècle du jazz, Paris, Musée du
Quai Branly-Skira-Flammarion, , pp. -.
. The soundies, which reached the height of their popularity between  and ,
were the forerunners of today’s clips, featuring musical or comedy acts, sometimes
including boy and girl dancers, alongside a large number of jazz musicians:
‘Soundies was the term given to those short three-minute films and the playback
system was called Panoram. For only ten cents, the public could watch a three-
minute sequence from a  mm film, projected onto a mirror, which relayed the
images onto a glass screen measuring forty-four by fifty-five centimeters. Each reel
contained eight soundies, so consequently the public never knew what they were
going to get, unless they inserted enough coins into the machine to see the whole
film’ (Krin Gabbard, ‘Dix cents le film: le jazz dans les soundies’, in Le Siècle du jazz,
op. cit., p. .
. No fewer than twelve musicians filled the screen in the ten-minute Jammin’ the
Blues: Harry Edison (trumpet), Lester Young (tenor saxophone), Illinois Jacquet
(tenor saxophone), Barney Kessel (guitar), Marlowe Morris (piano), Garland Finney
(piano), John Simmons (bass), Red Callender (bass), Sidney Catlett (drums), Jo Jones
(drums), Mary Bryant (vocals) and dancer Archie Savage (who would turn up again
much later as a singer in Pasolini’s African notebooks). They performed The
Midnight Symphony, On the Sunny Side of the Street and Jammin’ the Blues.
. Over the following decades, the cinema would pay tribute to its own jazzmen,
notably in the form of technicolor biographies devoted to the Dorsey brothers (The
Fabulous Dorseys, Alfred E. Green, ), Glenn Miller (The Glenn Miller
Story, Anthony Mann, ), Benny Goodman (The Benny Goodman Story,
Valentine Davies, ) and drummer Gene Krupa (The Gene Krupa Story, Don
Weiss, ). These flattering portrayals were far more inspired by a rose-tinted
Hollywood vision of jazz than by the grittier reality of Afro-American music.
Notes 185
. ‘Musiques noires pour films noirs’, Cahiers du cinéma, special issue ‘Musiques au
cinéma’, , p. .
.  mins, colour. The film was released in  and is now available on DVD.
. In Le Champ jazzistique, Marseille, Parenthèses, coll. Eupalines, , p. .
. ‘Around about New York Eye and Ear Control’ (), in The Michael Snow Project, The
Collected Writings of Michael Snow, Ontario, Wilfrid Laurier United Press, , p. .
. Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘The eye keeps watch, the body listens
(Filming free jazz)’, in Franco La Polla (ed.), All that Jazz: from New Orleans to
Hollywood and Beyond, Milano, Edizioni Olivares-Locarno International Film
Festival, , p. .
. Dan Morgenstern, ‘Jazz and Television: A Historical Survey’, in Jazz on Television,
New York, The Museum of Broadcasting, , p. .
. Franco Minganti , 'Documenting Jazz', in All that Jazz: from New Orleans to Hollywood
and Beyond, op. cit., p. .
. The programme is included in the DVD ‘John Coltrane, Impressions’, coll. Salt
Peanuts, Modern Jazz on DVD.
. Le Jazz est-il encore possible?, Marseille, Parenthèses, , p. .
. This virtual banishment from the shot is an involuntary mise-en-scène showing
McCoy Tyner’s reservations at that time in relation to the way Coltrane’s music was
evolving and his difficulty in finding his own place within the quartet.
. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema . The Time-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(trans.), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, , p. .
. Le Jazz est-il encore possible?, op.cit., p. .
. A few months later, following a concert at the Village (on  November), Ravi
Shankar gave his personal take on this disquiet: ‘The music was fantastic. I was
much impressed, but one thing distressed me. There was a turbulence in the music
that gave me a negative feeling at times, but I could not quite put my finger on the
trouble […]. Here was a creative person who had become a vegetarian, who was
studying yoga and reading the Bhagawad-Gita, yet in whose music I still heard much
turmoil. I could not understand it.’ ( interview by Robert Palmer, reprinted in
Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: his life and music, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan
Press, , p. ).
. Johan van der Keuken, Aventures d’un regard, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, , p. .
. ‘Quatre jours à Ocoee; interview with Pascale Ferran by the author’, Jazz Magazine,
no. , March , reprinted in Gilles Mouëllic, Jazz et Cinéma. Paroles de cinéastes,
Paris, Séguier-Archimbaud, , p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. In Winter Garden, the CD that was released a few months later, five out of thirteen
numbers were entirely improvised. Their titles simply referred to the order in which
they were recorded: Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve. The titles confirm that the eight
improvisations recorded over the first few days came to nothing.
. A few notable exceptions do exist, however: on his double album Bitches Brew
(), Miles Davis recorded several hours of improvisation with his musicians and
then reinvented the numbers alone during the montage. This process is very similar
to the relationship between performance and montage in the cinema, as analysed in

the previous pages.
. ‘Quatre jours à Ocoee’, interview with Pascale Ferran by the author, op. cit., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. ‘Note d’intention. En forme de lettre au future coscénariste du film’, in Carnet d’un
cinéaste, supplement to Cahiers du cinéma, no. , March , pp. -.
Conclusion
. Le Jazz et l’Occident, Paris, Klincksieck, coll. D’Esthétique, , p. .

. Friedrich Nietzsche, Fragments posthumes, -, fragment , ‘Morale et
physiologie’, June-July , in Œuvres complètes, G. Colli and M. Montinari edition.
The present quotation was translated from the French.
. Interview with Vincent Nordon, Ça cinéma, no. , , p. .
. Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Harun Farocki ou la dialectique des Lumières’, in Les
Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, nos. -, special issue ‘Le cinéma surpris
par les arts’, summer-fall , p. .
. On Contemporaneity, video lecture, The European Graduate School, www.egs.edu,
 [emphasis added].
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Index of names
Abruzzezzi, Anna  Bergman, Ingmar 

Adorno, Theodor W. ,  Bergman, Ingrid , , 
Agamben, Giorgio ,  Bernstein, Elmer , 
Allen, Steve  Berkeley, Busby 
Amalric, Mathieu  Béthune, Christian , , , , ,
Ameur-Zaïmeche, Rabah , , , , , , 
, -, -, , -, , -, Biner, Pierre , , 
, , , , , , , -, Blackwood, Christian , 
, , , , , , ,  Bogdanovich, Peter 
Amiel, Vincent , , , , ,  Boissière, Anne , , , 
Andersson, Harriet  Bonnaire, Sandrine , 
Antonioni, Michelangelo , , ,  Boutang, Pierre-André 
Armstrong, Louis , , , , , , Brault, Pierre 
 Brialy, Jean-Claude 
Astaire, Fred ,  Brook, Peter 
Aumont, Jacques , , , , , Brookmeyer, Bob 
 Brown, Trisha 
Averty, Jean-Christophe ,  Bruni Tedeschi, Valeria , , , -,
Ayler, Albert ,  , 
Bryant, Marie , 
Bancilhon, Nicolas , ,  Bulle, Mathieu 
Barbier, Paul  Burdeau, Emmanuel , , 
Barbieri, Gato  Burdon, Éric 
Bataille, Georges  Burger, Rodolphe , , 
Bazin, André , , , , , , Burks, Robert 
, -, , 
Bazin, Janine, ,  Cage, John , 
Beauviala, Jean-Pierre  Callender, Red 
Beck, Julian , -, , , ,  Cantet, Laurent , , 
Becker, Jacques  Carles, Philippe , , , 
Beethoven, Ludwig von ,  Carlin, Lynn 
Bégaudeau, François , , ,  Carné, Marcel 
Bellour, Raymond ,  Carney, Ray , , 
Benahouda, Lynda , ,  Carrington, Virginia 
Benaroudj, Madjid  Carruthers, Ben 
Bénédicte, Léonce  Cassavetes, John , , , , , -,
Berg, Alban  , , -, , , , , , , -
Bergala, Alain , , , -, , , , , , , , , , , -, -
, , , , , , ,  , -, -, , , ,
, , , , -, , - Depardon, Raymond 

, ,  De Monaghan, Laurence 
Cassel, Seymour , ,  De Raymond, Jean-François , , ,
Catlett, Sidney  , -, 
Cavalier, Alain ,  Descas, Alex , 
Chabrol, Claude ,  Dia, Lam Ibrahim 
Champetier, Caroline , , , , , Didi-Huberman, Georges , , 
, ,  Djian, Katell , , 
Chatwin, Bruce  Doillon, Jacques 
Cherry, Don  Dombasle, Arielle , , 
Chevrie, Marc  Drew, Robert 
Clarke, Kenny ,  Dreyer, Carl Theodor , 
Clarke, Shirley , , -, ,  Dufranne, Jacqueline 
Cocteau, Jean , 
Cohn, Bernard ,  Eco, Umberto 
Coleman, Ornette , , , , , Elina, Lise 
,  Ellington, Duke , , , , , , ,
Colin, Grégoire  , , , 
Collardey, Samuel , , -, , ,
, , ,  Falk, Peter , -, , , 
Coltrane,John ,, , , , ,, , Fano, Michel 
-, ,  Faucon, Philippe , , , , , ,
Comolli, Jean-Louis , , , , , , 
, , , , - Ferran, Jean-Jacques 
Cook Jr, Elisha  Ferran, Pascale , , , , -,
Copeau, Jacques  , , , 
Coppola, Francis Ford  Fieschi, Jean-André , , , 
Coutant, André  Finney, Garland 
Coutard, Raoul ,  Ford, John 
Cunningham, Merce ,  Forde, Jessica 
Frangne, Pierre-Henry , , 
Dalio, Marcel  Frank, Robert 
Damisch, Hubert , ,  Frappat, Hélène , , , , 
Daney, Serge , , , 
Davies, Valentine  Gabbard, Krin 
Davis, Miles , , , , , , , Ganda, Oumarou , , 
,  Garrel, Philippe 
De Bankolé, Isaach  Garrisson, Jimmy -
Decugis, Cécile  Gazzara, Ben , , , , , ,
Delahaye, Michel  , , 
Deleuze, Gilles , , , , , , , Gelber, Jack , , , 
, , -, , ,  Genette, Gérard , , , 
Delon, Alain  Gershwin, George , , 
Denis, Claire , , -, ,  Giordano, Domiziana 
Depardieu, Gérard ,  Girardot, Hippolyte , 
Index of names 193
Giuffre, Jimmy  Labarthe, André S. , -, , ,

Gleason, Ralph J.  , , 
Gombrich, Ernst , ,  Lamour, Dorothy , 
Godard, Agnès ,  Lampert, Zohra 
Godard, Jean-Luc -, -, -, , Lane, Bert 
, , ,  Laureux, Jean-Claude , , 
Goodman, Benny  Lavant, Denis 
Green, Alfred E.  Leacock, Richard , 
Gregor, Nora  Le Bris, Michel 
Grotowski, Jerzy  Lecoq, Jacques 
Guérin, Michel , , ,  Léger, Fernand 
Gillespie, Dizzy ,  Lee, Spike 
Levaillant, Denis , 
Hadi, Shafi  Levent, Alain 
Hall, Jim  Liandrat-Guigues, Suzanne , , ,
Hallyday, Johnny  
Hamilton, Chico ,  Loiseleux, Jacques , , 
Hébert, Pierre ,  Louppe, Laurence , , 
Hentoff, Nat  Lourcelles, Jacques , , , 
Herridge, Robert  Lubtchansky, Irina 
Hitchcock, Alfred ,  Lyttelton, Humphrey 
Holiday, Billie 
Humphrey, Hubert ,  Macero, Teo 
Huppert, Isabelle ,  Mackendrick, Alexander , 
Hymas, Tony , -, ,  MacLow, Jackson 
Malina, Judith , -, 
Jaffri, Abel , ,  Malle, Louis 
Jackson, Mahalia  Mann, Anthony 
Jacquet, Illinois ,  Marchand, Guy 
Jalard, Michel-Claude , , ,  Marcorelles, Louis 
Jones, Elvin - Marley, Bob , 
Jones, Jo  Morris, Marlowe 
Jousse, Thierry , , , , , , Mattos, Michael 
, ,  Mauban, Maria 
Jouvet, Louis  McLaren, Norman 
McLean, Jackie 
Kalfon, Jean-Pierre , , ,  Mekas, Jonas 
Kechiche, Abdelatif  Melio, Marcello 
Kennedy, John  Melville, Jean-Pierre 
Kessel, Barney  Menez, Bernard , 
Kiarostami, Abbas ,  Ménil, Alain 
Kintzler, Catherine , , , , , Miquel, Joëlle 
 Mili, Gjon 
Král, Petr , ,  Miller, Glenn 
Krupa, Gene  Minganti, Franco , 
Mingus, Charles , , , , , , Prédal, René 

Miura, Tomokazu  Racine, Jean 
Monet, Claude  Raines, Ella 
Monk, Thelonious , , , , , Redd, Freddy -, 
-,  Renoir, Jean , , , , , , , -
Montet, Bernardo ,  , , , , , , , , , , ,
Moreau, Jeanne ,  , , , , , , , ,
Mouzourane, Tallou  , , , 
Morgenstern, Dan , ,  Resnais, Alain , 
Moye, Don  Revault d’Alonnes, Fabrice 
Mozart, W. A. ,  Rilke, Rainer-Maria , , , 
Murphy, Dudley ,  Ritchie, Larry 
Murray, Sunny  Rivers, Sam , -, , 
Murray, Yvonne  Rivette, Jacques , , , , , , ,
, , -, , , , , , , ,
Namuth, Hans , , , ,  , -, , , , -,
Nietzsche, Friedrich  , , -
Noguez, Dominique ,  Rivière, Marie -, , 
Robinson, Bill 
O’Day, Anita  Robinson, Edward G. , , 
Ogier, Bulle , ,  Rochard, Jean , 
Ornitz, Arthur J.  Rodgers, Richard 
Rodin, Auguste , , -, , 
Palmer, Robert  Rogers, Ginger 
Parker, Charlie , , , , , , , Rohmer, Eric , , -, 
, ,  Romand, Béatrice , 
Parker, William  Rosette 
Parolini, Marilù ,  Rossellini, Roberto , , , , -,
Pasolini, Pier Paolo , ,  , , , -, , , , , ,
Peacock, Gary  , , , , 
Perrault, Pierre  Rouch, Jean , , , , , , , ,
Petit, Didier  , , -, -, , , -, ,
Philippon, Alain ,  , -, , , , , , ,
Pialat, Maurice , , , , , , , , , -, , , 
, , , , , , , , , , Rouse, Charlie , 
, , , , ,  Rowlands, Gena , , , , ,
Picasso, Pablo  , , , , 
Pierrepont, Alexandre , , , , Rozier, Jacques , , , , , , ,
 -, , , , -, , , , ,
Pirandello, Luigi  , , -, , , , , ,
Pollet, Jean-Daniel , ,  , , , , , -, ,
Pollock, Jackson , , , , ,  , , 
Pouillaude, Frédéric , , ,  Rudd, Roswell 
Powell, Bud 
Index of names 195
Sanders, George ,  Tessier, Danièle 

Saury, Maxim  Thomas, Éric 
Savage, Archie ,  Todeschini, Bruno , , , , , , ,
Schiffman, Suzanne ,  , , 
Schoenberg, Arnold  Truffaut, François , , 
Seberg, Jean  Tyner, McCoy -, 
Séité, Yannick , 
Serbah, Meriem ,  Van der Keuken, Johan , , , , ,
Shankar, Ravi  , , , , -, -, , ,
Shaw, Larry  , , , , -, , ,
Shaw, Sam  
Sibony, Daniel , ,  Van der Lely, Noshka , 
Simmons, John  Varda, Agnès , 
Simon, Michel ,  Vassé, Claire 
Sinatra, Frank  Verde, Patrick 
Siodmak, Robert ,  Verdoux, Vincent , 
Smight, Jack  Vidor, King , 
Smith, Bessie  Vigo, Jean , 
Snow, Michael , ,  Vollaire, Christiane , , , , 
Sobol, Sarah , 
Solal, Martial  Waldron, Mal 
Soutine, Chaïm  Watanabe, Makiko 
Steinberg, Leo , , , , ,  Weiss, Don 
Stern, Bert , ,  Welles, Orson , , 
Stévenin, Jean-François -,  Wilhelem, Charles 
Stitt, Sonny  Wiseman, Frederick 
Stravinsky, Igor  Wong Howe, James 
Suwa, Nobuhiro , , -, , , -
, -, , , , , , , Young, Lester , 
, , , 
Zika, Damouré 
Tchicai, John  Zwerin, Charlotte , 
Tessé, Jean-Philippe , , , 
Index of films
À bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, ) , , -, , 
À nos amours (Maurice Pialat, ) , , , , , , , , , , , 
Acrobate (L’) (Jean-Daniel Pollet, ) , 
Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier, ) , , , , , , , 
Âge des possibles (L’) (Pascale Ferran, ) 
Allemagne année zéro (Roberto Rossellini, ) , , 
Amour fou (L’) (Jacques Rivette, ) , , , , , , , , , -, , ,
, , , , , 
Amsterdam Global Village (Johan van der Keuken, ) , 
Année dernière à Marienbad (L’) (Alain Resnais, ) 
Apprenti (L’) (Samuel Collardey, ) , , , -, , , , 
Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Louis Malle, ) , 
Atalante (L’) (Jean Vigo, ) 
Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger, ) 

Beau travail (Claire Denis, ) , , 
Benny Goodman Story (the) (Valentine Davies, ) 
Black and Tan (Dudley Murphy, ) , 
Bled Number One (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, ) , , , , , , -, , ,
, , -, , 
Boudu sauvé des eaux (Jean Renoir, ) , , 
Brass Unbound (Johan van der Keuken, ) 
Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Jacques Rivette, ) , 

Chants de Mandrin (Les) (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, ) 
Chienne (La) (Jean Renoir, ) , 
Chronique d’un été (Jean Rouch, ) 
Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet (Jean Rouch, ) , , 
Collectionneuse (La) (Éric Rohmer, ) 
Connection (The) (Shirley Clarke, ) , , -, 
Conte d’été (Éric Rohmer, ) 
Conte d’hiver (Éric Rohmer, ) 
Cotton Club (The) (Francis Ford Coppola, ) 
Crime de M. Lange (Le) (Jean Renoir, ) 
Dernier Maquis (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, ) , , , -, , , , ,
, , , 
Deux hommes dans Manhattan (Jean-Pierre Melville, ) 
Double Messieurs (Jean-François Stévenin, ) , 
Du côté d’Orouët (Jacques Rozier, ) , , , , -, , , , , 
Enfance nue (L’) (Maurice Pialat, ) 

Entre les murs (Laurent Cantet, ) , , 
Esquive (L’) (Abdelatif Kechiche, ) 
Europe  (Roberto Rossellini, ) 
Eye above the Well (The) (Johan van der Keuken, ) 
Fabulous Dorsey (The) (Alfred E. Green, ) 

Faces (John Cassavetes, ) , , , , , -, , , -, , , , ,
, , 
Gene Krupa Story (The) (Don Weiss, ) 

Genou de Claire (Le) (Éric Rohmer, ) 
Glenn Miller Story (The) (Antony Mann,) 
Graine et le mulet (La) (Abdelatif Kechiche, ) 
Hallelujah (King Vidor, ) , 

Husbands (John Cassavetes, ) , -, , , -, , 
Jaguar (Jean Rouch, ) , 

Jammin’ the Blues (Gjon Mili, ) , , , 
Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Bert Stern, ) 
Killing of a Chinese Bookie (The) (John Cassavetes, ) , , , , , 
Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran, ) , 

Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, ) 
Loulou (Maurice Pialat, ) 
Love Streams (John Cassavetes, ) , , , , 
M/Other (Nobuhiro Suwa, ) , , 

Maine-Océan (Jacques Rozier, ) , 
Maison des bois (La) (Maurice Pialat, ) , , , , 
Maîtres fous (Les) (Jean Rouch, ) , , , , 
Man With the Golden Arm (The) (Otto Preminger, ) 
Méditerranée (Jean-Daniel Pollet, ) 
Mépris (Le) (Jean-Luc Godard, ) 
Mischka (Jean-François Stévenin, ) , 
Mo’Better Blues (Spike Lee, ) 
Moi, un Noir (Jean Rouch, ) -, , , , , 
Monika (Ingmar Bergman, ) 
Naufragés de l’île de la Tortue (Jacques Rozier, ) 

New York Eye and Ear Control (Michael Snow, ) , 
Index of films 199
Notes Towards an African Oresties (Pier Paolo Pasolini, -) 

Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard, ) 
Opening Night (John Cassavetes, ) , -, -

Out One: Noli me tangere (Jacques Rivette, ) , , , 
Païsa (Roberto Rossellini, ) , 

Parents terribles (Les) (Jean Cocteau, ) , 
Passe Montagne (Jean-François Stévenin, ) , 
Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (La) (Carl Theodor Dreyer, ) 
Pauline à la plage (Éric Rohmer, ) 
Petit à petit (Jean Rouch, ) 
Petits arrangements avec les morts (Pascale Ferran, ) , 
Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, ) , 
Plein de super (Le) (Alain Cavalier, ) 
Pollock (Hans Namuth, ) , 
Pont du Nord (Le) (Jacques Rivette, ) 
Pour la suite du monde (Pierre Perrault, ) 
Prénom Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard, ) 
Pyramide humaine (La) (Jean Rouch, ) , , -, , , , 
Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle (Éric Rohmer, ) , , , 
Quatre Jours à Ocoee (Pascale Ferran, ) , , , , , -, , 
Rayon vert (Le) (Éric Rohmer, ) , , -, 
Règle du jeu (La) (Jean Renoir, ) , -, , , , , 
Règne du jour (Le) (Pierre Perrault, ) 
Rendez-vous de juillet (Jacques Becker, ) 
Rentrée des classes (Jacques Rozier, ) , , 
Rome, ville ouverte (Roberto Rossellini, ) , 
Saint-Louis Blues (Dudley Murphy, ) 

Samia (Philippe Faucon, ) , , , , 
Shadows (John Cassavetes, ) , , , , , , , , , , , , 
Statues meurent aussi (Les) (Alain Resnais, -) 
Steamboat Round the Bend (John Ford, ) 
Straight, no Chaser (Charlotte Zwerin, ) , , 
Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, ) , 
Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, ) -
Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, ) 

Toni (Jean Renoir, ) , , 
Tournée (Mathieu Amalric, ) 
Tricheurs (Les) (Marcel Carné, ) 
Un couple parfait (Nobuhiro Suwa, ) , , , , , , , -, -, ,
, , , , , , , 
US Go Home (Claire Denis, ) 
Voitures d’eau (Les) (Pierre Perrault, ) 

Voyage en Italie (Roberto Rossellini, ) , , -, , , , , 
Wesh Wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe? (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, ) , , , , ,
, 
Woman Under the Influence (A) (John Cassavetes, ) , , 
Yuki et Nina (Nobuhiro Suwa, Hippolyte Girardot, ) 
Zéro de conduite (Jean Vigo, ) 

Film Culture in Transition
General Editor: Thomas Elsaesser
Thomas Elsaesser, Robert Kievit and Jan Simons (eds.)

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City of Darkness, City of Light: Émigré Filmmakers in Paris -, 
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Improvising Cinema

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FILM

Amsterdam University Press

OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative in-

isbn      (paperback)

Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND

c G. Mouëllic / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 

7. Filming jazz 

As always, Laurence and Juliette.

Long before it fired the enthusiasm of twentieth-century creators, improvisation

Preservation becomes even more invaluable in the case of improvisation, as the

diverse approaches of improvisers such as Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker,

And it is precisely this difference that is under discussion here.

A selection of models… and their limitations

visation, however, the creative surge is not viewed as a culmination, but as a

in improvisation. While art music was honing its command of an increasingly

Improvisation depends on original, or ‘open’, forms of writing. The philosopher

Kintzler goes on to argue in favour of the second type of improvisation, in her

Improvised creation therefore requires one to ‘create a blank slate in order to

Writing the unpredictable

as author, co-scriptwriter and lead actor acted as a kind of guarantee of freedom

Ameur-Zaïmeche’s scripts represent a serious sounding board for reflection be-

documentary directed by Samuel Collardey. The intimate exchanges between

nates from a written text but it is not an ‘application’ or ‘execution’, more a

The script as matter

At this point, scriptwriting involves providing actors with the wherewithal to

The reluctance of many filmmakers to be branded as improvisers results from

able encounters. Rozier elaborates on the ideas expressed by Renoir regarding

Equally significant are the films of Jean-François Stévenin, originally Rivette’s

Every improvisational experiment in the cinema can be gauged by Rivette’s hy-

Renoir and the actor, Rossellini and the world

Renoir no doubt knew that improvisation existed in seventeenth-century art

pression of watching an improvisation,’ wrote Jacques Lourcelles on the sub-

given way to the work-in-progress concept of collective improvisation, with all

On the fringes of the New Wave

Although the actual concept of improvisation goes back as far as filmmaking

the interested party, as he expresses his disappointment at not seeing Christine,

that [this intimacy] is linked as much to a temporal presence as it is to a spatial one

The ensuing development of television only partially met Bazin’s expectations,

Motivated by his determination to depict life in the villages of sub-Saharan Afri-

Fabulation and improvisation

A classic documentary cannot be envisaged as an improvisation, except by the

ters to ‘fictionising’ characters emerges clearly from the collective possession

Ritual and overflow in the cinema of Rabah Ameur-

of crossing the boundaries of documentary and fiction in either direction. A

Improvised tangents: from documentary to fiction

Improvising filmmakers, whether they are closer to fiction or to documentary,

mastery, allowing a moment of truth that cannot exist in scripted form or

classes, which was shot in , he filmed a mischievous schoolboy in a river,

In this increasingly indecisive toing and froing, Ameur-Zaïmeche and Collardey

The body filmed, the body filming

In a two-part text devoted to Hans Namuth’s renowned Pollock (), Hu-

Speech is effectively determined by defensive reflexes and in Faces it is Chet’s

If it is difficult to perceive the improvisational element in Cassavetes’ work, this

in which the cameraman’s role as improviser is put forward as a way of show-

Disinhibition in focus (1): play

In the sequence from Du côté d’Orouët, everything conspires to engender an

Disinhibition in focus (2): dance

cally ‘attuned to the shapeless’, as Christiane Vollaire so aptly phrases it.

Van der Keuken’s improvisational approach lends an unusual movement to the

Improvising/sculpting: U   (), by