The Cinema of Louis Malle

Transatlantic Auteur

Philippe Met

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231851268
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Arguably a pioneer of the French New Wave (with Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, 1957) Louis Malle went on to enjoy an acclaimed yet provocative and versatile transatlantic career. This collection of original essays proposes to reassess his richly eclectic and boldly subversive oeuvre and redress the surprising critical neglect it has suffered over the years. It does so through a combination of transversal and monographic analyses that use a variety of critical lenses and theoretical tools in order to examine Malle's documentaries as well as his fiction features (and, more importantly, the constant shuttling and uniquely persistent cross-pollination between those two cinematic approaches), illuminate the profound, lasting dialogue his films entertained with literature and theater, bring to the fore their sustained, albeit often oblique autobiographical thrust along with their scathing sociopolitical critique, and scrutinize the alternating use of stars and non-professional actors.

In addition, the volume features an exclusive interview with the acclaimed playwright John Guare (a close friend and collaborator of Louis Malle's who scripted Atlantic City ) and is bookended by a foreword by Volker Schlöndorff and an afterword by Wes Anderson, two renowned filmmakers who articulate their admiration for, and the seminal influence of, their predecessor.

TRANSVERSAL STUDIES

CHAPTER ONE

Malle Before Malle

Guillaume Soulez

The scene of vibrantly coloured torches descending into the sea that opens Le Monde du silence (The Silent World, 1956) has been compared, most notably by Cousteau himself, to a Promethean gesture.¹ Man brings light and colour to the dark, opaque underwater space, displaying his ability to expand the limits of his knowledge and his mastery of the planet. The sea is a new area of ‘conquest’ for Man, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle emphasise the human adventure embodied by the Calypso’s expeditions early in the film with the introduction of the ship and its crew – from the divers and the first mate to the galley (Reflets de Cannes, 1956). Station 307 (1955), Malle’s ‘first short film’,² opens in a similar way, with a diver wielding a jackhammer on the floor of the Red Sea. Cousteau, narrating, states that there is no reason why Man, who has explored and discovered oil on the ground onshore, should not use the same techniques under the sea; this is the scientific and technical challenge at the heart of Station 307.³ These two striking opening sequences lend a synoptic and generative form to their films, with Station 307 constituting a sort of rough draft of The Silent World. However, notable differences can be detected early on between Malle’s more understated style and Cousteau’s grandiloquence. This is evidenced, for example, by Cousteau’s narration in the opening credits of Station 307: ‘The Calypso, our underwater expedition ship, is tasked with an extraordinary mission…’, a point to which I will later return.

Indeed, Malle’s formal solutions progressively emerge in alignment with Cousteau and the established genre forms of the scientific, adventure, live-televised or underwater iconography film, while keeping a distance from Cousteau’s formal choices (see Machu 2011: 21).⁴ My ‘morphological’ hypothesis is based on the idea that unique forms can be born from a project’s friction with pre-existing genres and formats by playing with the different ‘formal regimes’ available as well as intermedial relations – namely, photography, cinema and television (see Soulez 2005). I will thus compare The Silent World with Cousteau and Frédéric Dumas’ photograph-rich book of the same title, along with various films and sequences filmed by Malle during his Cousteau period. These include the short documentary films Station 307 (19’; filmed in the spring of 1954) and La Fontaine de Vaucluse, (14’; filmed in the summer of 1955), underwater images shot by Malle for the fiction film Port du désir (House on the Water Front, E.T. Gréville, 1955), as well as a live television programme in 1955 in which Malle may have participated.⁵ Malle was not only at sea during his Cousteau period, however. His two tours aboard the Calypso (January–July 1954; March–June 1955) allowed him the time to take part in film projects apart from The Silent World, both with Cousteau (La Fontaine de Vaucluse) and without (Port du désir).⁶

The Silent World is doubly scripted, around its subject and the subject of the filming itself. Cousteau recruited Malle in the summer of 1953, and after his summer apprenticeship proved successful, Cousteau hired him for his colour film project on the Calypso, slated for 1954 thanks to unexpected funding from British Petroleum. The first version, Calypso cap au Sud. Requins bleus et corail noir (Calypso Southerly Course: Blue Sharks and Black Coral) was shot in 1954 in 16mm Kodachrome colour and edited as a film conference in two parts. It was broadcast in 1955 as a part of the ‘Connaissance du monde’ (‘Knowledge of the World’) series with live commentary by Cousteau (see Machu 2011: 82–3). Malle was the assistant director, but Cousteau had already entrusted him, as noted above, with the responsibility of the short film Station 307. In light of the film conference’s great success, Cousteau decided to do a remake in 35mm Eastmancolor, following the same route as before. For the first time, the aim of one of the Calypso’s excursions was to make a film. Malle and Cousteau wrote the first script in 1955, building from Calypso cap au Sud. This script served as the basic outline for the daily directing work carried out by Malle, who was responsible for production, but also contributed numerous shots and took part in editing.⁷ In 1955, the various animal species expected all showed up, some of the refilmed sequences were not kept in the final edit, a black-and-white sequence from 1954 was blown up in 35mm, and another was added, but generally speaking, the characters in the film replayed their roles, while the Calypso navigated the same route, encountered the same marine life and found the same ocean spaces (see Machu 2011: 88–9).

In 1955, we are still far from the vogue – and the practice – of direct cinema, despite the already present interest in ‘live’ televised broadcasts of the ocean depths. Indeed, even beyond the readers of adventure or popular science magazines (such as Neige et Glace, which sponsored Calypso cap au Sud; or Science et Vie, which covered the filming in 1955),⁸ viewers of the period were accustomed to the type of documentary reconstructions or reenactments found in the Actualités filmées (newsreels)⁹ and on television. They were also capable of sizing up the novel nature of the colour images, and it was this never-before-seen aspect, in combination with the beauty that surged from the colour images, which was the main focus of the film’s glowing reviews.¹⁰ Viewers appreciated the humanistic, and often informal, style that was commonly seen in television reports or documentaries of the time.¹¹ Although the film equipment was ‘heavy’ and the teams burdened with cables and floodlights, it was nevertheless possible to operate cameras in the water, or put them on – or in – underwater scooters. We are also far from the loaded-down scuba divers of times past (known in the jargon as ‘les pieds lourds’, ‘heavy feet’) as demonstrated early in the film by the confrontation with sponge fishermen who use the old technique. The television-inspired ‘direct style’ (as opposed to the often thick use of voice-overs in the actualités filmées), mixing complicity and technical exploit without necessarily being en direct or live (see Bringuier 1961; Soulez 2005), found a fresh ground of expression, enriched by the pleasure of discovery and the prospect of adventure.¹² It was as though the film’s subject, and the filming environment, had ‘lightened’ the film even before the development of light techniques: ‘Until now we have stumbled under the weight of this material, yet it is this material that will free us of our weight. Our mountain packs contained provisions of food; now we shoulder provisions of air.’¹³

Cousteau and Malle thus invented a new art of filming the sea that remains a reference today¹⁴ by clearing a path between the different documentary and reporting genres and sub-genres of their era.¹⁵ Tracing the various sources of The Silent World, we can attempt to see how Malle’s specific documentary style was forged. This three-year span was seminal for Malle, as he has indicated on a number of occasions (see Billard 2003: 140–1). It was this experience that would repeatedly push him to return to documentary on a more authentic footing than with The Silent World, as if he had put his finger on the possibilities offered by the films du réel. Station 307 contains about a dozen sequences,¹⁶ and we can see how each of them is inspired by and departs from an existing format. In sum, we can distinguish three movements: (i) how the adventure film is based on a desire for risk and performance, but raises the question of the limits of the spectacular for Malle; (ii) how the scientific exploration film exposes Malle to different techniques and leads him to refine several filmic forms; (iii) how Malle, in the end, faced with the imagery of didactic photography and film, moved away from it and nurtured an interest in human and social relations.

1. Filming Danger: The Adventure Film and the Limits of the Spectacular

Cousteau had no qualms about making a spectacle of his explorations, in the tradition of Jules Verne and in an effort to reach the general public. The 1955 box office results proved him right, as it were, with the success of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Fourth in the box office in France, it featured a giant squid fight scene that made quite the splash. While Malle was enthusiastic about the images shot during his first encounter with sperm whales in 1954 (see Machu 2011: 80), he wished to avoid a Disney-like aesthetic and instead curated his interest in documentary as a discovery of the unknown, an experience of immersion, even a loss of bearings.¹⁷ A steel cage designed to protect the divers from sharks appears in Station 307 (min. 10) and is indeed used to shield divers from two lurking sharks between minutes 14 and 15. Shots of a shark filmed from the interior of the cage are used to anchor a series of alternating shots of sharks and a distressed diver signaling to his partner to go to safety before he joins him in the cage. This dramatic sequence, without commentary, is itself preceded by a sequence at minute 12, where we watch the divers as they face a sea serpent ‘whose bite would be lethal’ (commentary) while a cross-cutting shot on the ship is accompanied by the commentary, ‘without suspecting what was happening underneath the hull, the hydrographer uses his sextant to find the station’s position (min. 13). There is, as we can see, a mounting tension built into the construction of the documentary story, as though the scene aboard the ship were a harbinger. Contact between the ship and the action underwater, moreover, is reestablished when one of the divers tugs on a rope to ask that the cage be hoisted up. Although the sequence involves staging – there is no indication that all scenes were filmed at the same location, or on the same day; the second diver who swims to the cage is filmed from the exterior, as if Malle, who is holding the camera, did not think of his own safety – the risk is real and tragedy a possibility. There is certainly a thrill of pleasure resulting from the brush with danger and the disorientation possible under the water (and related to the off-screen), but the scene is not ‘manufactured’ as a fictional film sequence would be. In Station 307, it is a question of starting from a lived experience to dramatise it, or rather to restore its dramatic force by filmic means. Malle would also be the one to film shots of the shark cage in The Silent World alongside Falco, who, having left the cage at one point, narrowly escapes a shark at his heels (see Billard 2003: 140).

In The Silent World, it is a baby whale injured by the ship’s propeller that bears the brunt of the sharks’ voracity, introducing a sacrificial third party between the men excited by danger and the sharks by blood. The sharks in this film have a more threatening profile, filmed in close-up along the side of the cage. The dramatisation is thus intensified from one film to the next, particularly as we now know that the second accident with the whale pup was deliberate, in contrast to the random nature of the first (see Machu 2011: 79–81; 95–6).¹⁸ Cousteau had the final say on The Silent World, contractually,¹⁹ and agreed with the editor Georges Alépée’s suggestion to edit the sequences in the style of ‘a line-up of circus acts’ (see Grégoire 2006: 44; Machu 2011: 98).²⁰ ‘This is a scripted film’, asserted Cousteau.²¹ The commentary styles of the two directors were also very different, Cousteau having created his own style, that of a smooth-talking conference speaker, post-war (see Machu 2011: 50), whereas Malle’s voice was much more interior and understated, as we will see in La Fontaine de Vaucluse. Starting from the same basic mold, that of the underwater adventure film, Cousteau and Malle make their distinctive, and diverging, marks.²²

2. Filming/Swimming

In The Silent World there is a general move to reconcile the gesture of the filmmaker with that of the athlete/explorer. Cousteau, ‘the underwater mountaineer’,²³ regularly worked with Marcel Ichac, founder of mountain film as a school of energy and endurance. Ichac directed the first film-explorations of the Himalayas in the 1930s, and Cousteau and Ichac shared the same cameraman, Jacques Ertaud, whom Malle replaced for The Silent World after his apprenticeship in the summer of 1953. It was a combined effort and a test of techniques and bodies that preceded direct cinema as light cinema, with its focus on portability and miniaturisation of equipment, exposure of material and bodies to extreme conditions, and coordination of technical and athletic movements while filming an exploit. One of the main difficulties of underwater filming was stability and coordination between the filmed diver, the lighting, and the camera. Jérôme Salle’s biopic L’Odyssée (The Odyssey, 2016) reproduces well the initial 16mm underwater camera shootings and the first public screenings of films by the three ‘Mousquemers’, Philippe Taillez, Frédéric Dumas and Cousteau. In The Silent World it is Cousteau who films Dumas during the shipwreck sequence, but Malle soon takes the ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Transversal Studies
• Monographic Essays
• Interview: Truth and Poetry: An Interview with John Guare
• Varia (Previously Unpublished Material)
• Afterword
• Filmography
• Index