Balzac Reframed

The Classical and Modern Faces of Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette

Zahra Tavassoli Zea

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030306151
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book examines the theoretical affiliations between the most notable proponent of literary realism, Honoré de Balzac, and two understated but key representatives of the French New Wave, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. It argues that their film criticism, which gradually led to the establishment of a common aesthetic vision of cinema (the "politique des auteurs"), owes more to Balzac and the nineteenth-century novel than to any intellectual trend of the immediate post-war period. By considering the films of Rohmer and Rivette as an extension of their writings (essays, film reviews, scriptwriting, novels and interviews), this volume analyses the changing and sometimes opposed ways in which they applied Balzacian principles and themes to their cinematic practice. Essentially, it understands the exchange between art forms, past traditions and contemporaneous currents as the overlooked yet common thread that links these three authors, through their own re-appropriations of classical and romantic aesthetics in their explorations of modern French society. In doing so, this study provides further nuance to the "conservative" versus "progressist" rupture that is generally assumed between the two directors, and offers an innovative reading of The Human Comedy in the light of post-war ideas on authorship, film adaptation, classicism and modernism.

© The Author(s) 2019

Z. Tavassoli ZeaBalzac ReframedPalgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30615-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Zahra Tavassoli Zea¹

(1)

Independent Researcher, London, UK

Zahra Tavassoli Zea

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

RohmerRivetteBalzacAcademicismClassicism

End Abstract

This book is not planned as a guide to Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette’s textual and cinematic references to Honoré de Balzac. I should be happy if it facilitates more extensive research on this filiation, for like every student and scholar who has immersed his or herself in the worlds of Rohmer and Rivette, I find this relationship increasingly evident and captivating. This book is the result of a gamble; that of a failed khâgneuse who rediscovered something of Balzac through these directors’ writings and mise-en-scènes. My aim consists in proving that the author of Lost Illusions (Illusions perdues, 1837) can teach us new perspectives on the Nouvelle Vague, and more specifically on Rohmer and Rivette, just as the latter two can help us gain a critical insight into the legacy of The Human Comedy (La comédie humaine). My methodological approach to Balzac, however, does not solely revolve around a series of case studies highlighting the differences and similarities between the novels and the films. It goes without saying that Rohmer, the most fervent Balzacian of the two, never felt the need to adapt Balzac’s stories. Instead, Balzac Reframed: The Classical and Modern Faces of Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette starts from the premise that the study of the Nouvelle Vague is not exclusively concerned with the medium of cinema. In fact, this book insists upon the Nouvelle Vague’s most basic principle: between cinema and the other arts, there is only a difference of “degree”, not in nature (Rohmer 1956, 5).

A while ago, scholarship on the French New Wave dispelled the myth of the Nouvelle Vague as a group of directors interested in the concept of “genius” and “absolute innovation”, for an indeterminate number of scholars and film critics have started scrutinising their “adaptations”, “borrowings”, “appropriations”, “transpositions” of extra-cinematic material. Disciplines, such as philosophy, sociology, politics and literature, which are believed to be at the crossways, if not on the periphery, of cinema, take centre stage in Nouvelle Vague studies. No longer needing to demonstrate the significance of the Nouvelle Vague in French film history and post-war European culture, scholars are currently addressing the plurality (in number and style) of its directors, the aesthetic legacy and the theoretical relevancy of the auteur theory in contemporary French cinema. Thank to these refining processes, challenging research on the interdisciplinary and intercultural workings of the Nouvelle Vague are becoming more visible and persevering (Dalle Vacche 1996; Vincendeau 2000; Neupert 2007; Sellier 2008; Andrew and Gillain 2013; Dosi 2013; Grosoli 2018; Sharpe, forthcoming).¹ This book is addressed to scholars, who contributed to and called for more sustained research into the Nouvelle Vague’s relationship with social, artistic realities and philosophical realms, be they from major currents of thoughts from the classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early modern period or the long nineteenth century.² It is also designed for Modern Language students with joint degrees in Film studies or Art History, as well as graduate students concerned with key aspects of post-war French cinema such as film and TV adaptations, André Bazin’s film theory, “auteur” cinema, Cahiers du cinéma’s film criticism, “Rive Droite” Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, May 1968, the Nouvelle Vague legacy, and so on.

This study argues that, in contexts as different as the immediate post-war period, the events of May 1968 and its aftermath, up until the new millennium, Balzac’s literature has functioned as Rohmer and Rivette’s most opulent repository of ideas. Even before they moved towards filmmaking, both film critics were influenced by the narrative and aesthetic workings of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Therefore, to understand the relationship these directors established between literature and filmmaking one cannot simply proceed with a case-by-case assessment of the Balzacian inspiration in the cinemas of Rohmer and Rivette. The mission of this introduction is to lay out the cultural and social context against which these directors started to think about mise-en-scène and, at the same time, to dust off popular misconceptions and clichés on the “politique des auteurs” and, more globally, on the Nouvelle Vague. For instance, the association of the “politique des auteurs” with a reconciliation of the status of the director and that of the novelist—image that was reinforced with Alexandre Astruc’s expression “camera-pen” (caméra-stylo)—is one that needs careful clarification, as it cannot be reduced simply to cinema as a means to express a director’s thought.³ Hence, this book will delve into the surprisingly overlooked question of literature’s rightful place in the realm of filmmaking. To this end, it is necessary to examine the reason why such foundational relationship, which drives the aesthetic principles of the “politique des auteurs”, has been rather seldomly developed. In my opinion, this significant gap in Nouvelle Vague scholarship may be due to the conflict upon which the heart of the “politique des auteurs” and subsequent Nouvelle Vague filmmaking sits.

On the one hand, the association of the “French New Wave” to a “rebellious” youth, which made the local newspapers headlines in the mid-1950s through articles such as “youth in despair” (“mal de jeunesse”), “the J-3 generation conquer Paris” (“la génération des J-3 à la conquête de Paris”) or social surveys like “the French youth speaks” (“la jeunesse de France parle”), has given way to a popular misconception (Jobs 2007, 213; Huguenin and Matignon 1957). Naturally, there is a historical correlation between the journalistic investigations, which witnessed the new cultural practices, fashion codes, set of values and changing sexual attitudes of the French youth, and the emergence of the “new” French cinema, embodied by filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, François Truffaut, Louis Malle and Alain Resnais. However, this social phenomenon cannot be sketched as a group of adolescents and young adults rejecting the authority and social mores carried by older generations. The collective mind-set was more complex than the “adolescents vs. adults” paradigm. Parallel to this, the prevalence of non-adapted, “originally” scripted “New Wave” films in the early 1960s cannot be considered as a sign of the “revolutionary” and “modernist” nature of Nouvelle Vague cinema. For Henri Lefebvre, the Nouvelle Vague generation is linked to the idea of a returning romanticism, which he describes as plural and at the root of different artistic movements and philosophical thinking (Lefebvre 2011). For example, the sense of discontentment and boredom led artists and writers to reflect on the “spiritual void” left by the Second World War, through a wide range of romantic variants that encompassed the revolutionary aesthetics of post-war avant-garde developments such as Lettrism and, later, Situationism. Alternatively, Lefebvre warns that these new ramifications of romanticism can also be characterised by an “unblinkered aestheticism and an extreme individualism” as well as a “quietist withdrawal from political engagement” (Gardiner 2012, 60). This chapter will soon demonstrate that, while Maurice Schérer, Rivette, Godard and Truffaut did not specify their political position in the 1950s, their writings were essentially humanist, reactionary and highly critical of their contemporaries’ political self-righteousness.

On the other hand, just as it would be wrong to assume that the cinema of Rohmer has little ties with literature only because the majority of his films originate from his own manuscripts, it would be a hasty judgement to refer to his works as “literary cinema”. In fact, many people are today aware of the different routes Rohmer, Rivette, Truffaut and Godard have borro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Two Distinguished Provincials at Paris
• 3. A Rohmerian Study of Manners
• 4. Rivettean Cinema as the Acquisition of Hidden Knowledge
• 5. Modern Mythographers
• 6. All Roads Lead to Balzac…
• Back Matter