Cahiers du cinéma & the Art of Loving

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Editor's note, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 765 – April 2020

The Art of Loving the Art of Loving

by Stéphane Delorme

This issue almost didn’t see the light of day, due to the confinement decided on in response to coronavirus, but we had announced one final issue with the current editorial staff, and we wanted to go through to the end of the job. Against all working rules of drafting and production (illustration, design), which ask to be together, the issue had to be made remotely from March 18 to 27, and, at the time these lines are written, we don’t know exactly how it will be distributed. This special issue, almost without cahier critique[1] because the films have been postponed, is the opportunity to ask ourselves about our action and to speak of what we facilitate, criticism.

We do it naturally from the place whence we speak. If there’s a Cahiers particularity, it’s that “the art of loving”, which for Jean Douchet denotes criticism, actually has two senses. Criticism is the art of loving because cinema is the art of loving. There’s a continuity between the two gestures. It’s the same thing. And when we hate it’s because we wish to love, it’s in the name of ideas we love, of principles we defend, of the cause we espouse. In the moving text that François Truffaut wrote in Arts on the death of André Bazin at 40 in November 1958, he described a type of saint, a good and generous person believing in the indestructible power of dialogue: for the teigne[2] Truffaut, who joined Cahiers at 20 in accordance with what has become the magnificent tradition of the magazine, the founder is like the St. Francis of Rossellini’s Flowers. We never say it so bluntly, but it’s upon love that Cahiers sprouted. Bazinian realism is another name for love. To film the real because one loves it. To film the actors because one loves them. To film the trees, the sea, the wind, because one loves them. The cinema is a love song to life. This is what Cahiers teaches. It’s why the criticism thought here doesn’t resemeble many other forms of criticism, which judge whether films are well made. It’s also why it is virulent and impertinent: to defend and protect what is cherished. When you love life, you go to the cinema,[3] and to love the cinema, is to defend it. Against the assaults of the industry, of the market; against the clichés, the complacencies; against everything that damages our sensitivity. Godard, always: it’s because he loves and knows how to love that he is so hard. As Philippe Katerine so beautifully sings it, “you are hard because you are sensitive, you are sensitive because you are hard.” All the directors defended by Cahiers know how to love. The fatal argument, is to say of a director that they don’t love their characters, their actors, that they don’t know how to love: that they just want to make themselves look good, that they want to show off, that they play the little clever one, or worse, the bastard. All the directors who want to humiliate (there have been many in recent years) are OUT. Bazin had said it once and for all: the cinema is a transitive art, it only makes sense if you forget yourelf to film the other.

Realism is paradoxically the greatest romanticism. It’s the great bridge operated by Bazin. Realism is not the naturalism of small real-life details, fact-checking and dirty little secrets. Realism is the romanticism of the cinema. Cahiers, it’s the resurrection of the Athenaeum of the Schlegel brothers founded in 1798.[4] In 1951 it’s the affirmation that cinema is an art because it films the real and it loves; and not because it tries to imitate the other arts to make amends for recording. But in “art of loving”, there is “art”: it’s the gesture that counts, and the critical mission is to judge the gestures: how does one film a body? How does one set up two planes, an image and a sound? The whole spectrum of cinema unfolds to animate life, to magnetize it and love it. Lynch goes into a rapture in front of whatever he films (“it’s so beautiful, it’s so beautiful”) and shows us life as he sees it and as we can see it too. Of course, unceasing romanticism, the charogne[5] is beautiful. And a bouquet of flowers, and an herbarium, and a blue or dark sky. Beauty, ardent beauty. What is the extent of seeing? Can we see to the stars? To create beauty by cinema, not just to see it, because beauty inspires and calls upon us to be worthy (Renoir as much as Bresson). There is beauty seized on the fly, the opportune moment, but let it last too long and it will be burned, hold onto it poorly and it will be ruined. All the powers of cinema can and must unfold from this heart that is love. These are the successive circles of love that make you love a film. The feeling put into everything, the attention to everything, to every detail, to the dialectic of the whole, such a love of the work that some die on the job (Kubrick). The art of loving what one makes and whom one makes it with and whom one makes it for.

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[1] The regular section in each month’s issue discussing newly released films.

[2] An informal French word denoting a mean, acrimonious, spiteful person.

[3] A riff on a famous French advertising slogan, “When you love life, you go to the movies.”

[4] The magazine considered to be the founding publication of German Romanticism.

[5] Informal and derogatory French word denoting a filthy or immoral individual.

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Adieu, Cahiers du cinéma…

Has the time come for criticism to become purely a work of love? The recent sale of Cahiers du cinéma and the editorial team’s subsequent decision to abandon ship seems to suggest as much. Faced with a conflict of interests and the likelihood of the magazine veering towards commercialism and advertising, the editors took the brave and honorable step of keeping criticism in the realm of love. For love has nothing to do with making money; it is focused soley on the object of its love. In this case, cinema. That it has become all but impossible for print magazines of film criticism to retain this true love while staying economically viable is a sad sight ineeed; but it is not something to despair over—for love remains. Love doesn’t need a print magazine to keep being love; love doesn’t need economic viability to keep being love; love is love, and as long as cinema exists so will the love that loves it.

The near impossibility of making a career out of writing film criticism, while often bemoaned, is in one sense a very good thing: it forces criticism to be a labor of love, and it prevents it from being anything other than a labor of love. Let’s not pretend that some of the most damaging trends in the history of film haven’t come from critics who were paid to show off their personal styles more than to love cinema, or from critics who acted as cogs in the advertising machine more than they acted as lovers of cinema. And anyway, cinephilia was always an amateur sport to begin with—so why don’t we keep it that way? Let love guide the passionate amateur instead of letting market forces guide the indifferent professional. This is what originally made Cahiers so great: the people that were hired to write for it were the people who loved movies the most. So much the better if they were barely in their twenties, for this only meant that they weren’t hardened and cynical professionals, but exuberant and wild amateurs. And that passion had no trouble manifesting itself. They didn’t just like or admire movies—they loved them.

Since there’s no other place to begin than with love, there’s no other place to begin than with the criticism of early Cahiers. The love leaps off the page, and we are reminded that what we imagine as “film criticism” today is so far from what is possible.

- Godard on Godard
- Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave
- Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood
- 12 volumes of Cahiers du Cinéma in English

What we should be after is an all-consuming love that finds in cinema a source of endless edification—a kind of love that reaches for something more, in every way. A kind of love that watches a film and refuses to settle for anything less than maximum edification. A kind of love that searches every film for a glimpse of beauty or a shudder of thought. A kind of love that looks at a film and finds poetry even where there is said to be none. Because without this love, what’s the point? Why watch films? Why write criticism? As we hear in Gray’s The Lost City of Z, “To search for what is beautiful is its own reward.” So few have practiced this criticism of love, this “art of loving,” and so few have reaped it’s rewards. I aim to be one of them. And though Cahiers may never return, the love it practiced is not lost—it’s right here, in the hearts and minds of all who love cinema with the love that never dies.

Love never dies

Love will continue

Love keeps on beating

When you’re gone

Love never dies

Once it is in you

Love may be fleeting

Love lives on

Love is enduring

Love lives on

                –  "Love Never Dies"

Paul Vecchiali on Godard's "Les carabiniers" (1963)

This is a translation of "La guerre tout court," Paul Vecchiali's review of Jean-Luc Godard's Les carabiniers (1963) originally published in Cahiers du cinéma no. 145, July 1963. Forgive me for any errors, for I have no previous legitimate experience with the French language; I learned as I went and tried my best (and the first draft of this translation was much worse than what is below, I assure you). Original French article can be viewed here.

Merely War

I see several reasons for the commercial failure of Godard’s latest: no doubt the provocation, the absence of stars in the credits, the release too close to that Little Soldier[1] who had already “annoyed”… but the main reason for the divorce with the public seems to me to be, in truth, the abundance of content along with too much purity of expression. If the mind is constantly full, it’s never excited. All the reflections being included, the film becomes obligatory passage and refuses escape.

What the spectator demands at the cinema, is to make him believe, on returning from the “voyage into the blue”, that it has made everything up for him. However, not only is Les carabiniers only made of observations and actual findings but also, at the same time discordant and melodic like the best Bartok, the whole thing is never reassuring. A spectator rarely accepts a universe in which he cannot recognize himself in anyone and that, at the end of the day, does not reassure him.

Impassioned and dazzled by this new equilibrium achieved by Godard, surprised to find in this oeuvre, not the opposite, but the complement of Le petit soldat, I was preparing to make this article a series of scathing jokes more directly (and hypocritically) addressed to two or three of my friends who I am tempted to despise for having, this time, refused dialogue; when I realized that this would disservice Godard and his film and, what’s more, would be to fall into the trap, a bit later, but in the same way as the film’s detractors. For, if it [the article] first has to go beyond the provocation, pure reflex of timidity, it still has to go beyond the premise, pretext to variations, to lead to a very personal morality of which Godard finally lays the foundations.

I have talked of the provocation as if it was just modesty. It is certainly also a reaction to a certain cinema called leftist, where the courage of expression consists in removing the weeds in the way of the brave socialist non-violent and inexperienced (Le combat dans l’île)[2], or to ennoble the cinéma-vérité without depriving itself however of an honorable contempt towards idiots, since ultimately poetry gains the victory (Le joli mai)[3].

What discomforts in Les carabiniers, is that people speak of the war, without proposing any solution for neutralizing it, neither general or particular, long or short term. Yes, what must discomfort, is that here people speak of the war as if one could not prevent it, as if it were inevitable, but finding it atrocious all the same. And one finds it atrocious because it’s a source of ugliness and injustice; because the blood gets in the mud and it has a dirty color when it dries; because there’s nothing more despicable than obligatory hatred (albeit addressed to the stranglehold of the capitalist world); because it’s constantly the occasion of an excess of feelings and such overflows are useless; precisely, because it’s useless like death.

But no doubt, to reassure, it has to make of the war a spectacle with the good guys who fight against the bad guys for the Noble Humanitarian Cause… If the former win, we explain why they necessarily had to win; otherwise we will demonstrate how these are the martyrs. In this universe then, a death is revolting or just. For Godard, I repeat, it is simply useless.

I know everything that one can think of the “encore”s which distill Michel-Ange when the director completes the young Leninophile. In the third[4], we are revolted by this taste apparently free of the atrocious; furthermore, we smile in asking ourselves when he will have the courage to go too far and, at the whispering of the last “encore”, the emotion will have gripped us. It arises from the atrocious, perhaps, but mainly due to the fact that we were able to smile, just like we laughed in Lubitsch’s work when the German pilots would throw themselves through the hatch on the order of the fake Führer.[5] With the difference that, for Lubitsch, everything would still seem reassuring since we would still be able to choose our side.

Here, the exploiters and the exploited, the vanquishers and the vanquished, the living and the dead all have the same face, and this face is not sympathetic.

The objective sympathy than an author can grant to his characters is very quickly transformed into subjective sympathy by the spectator who, recognizing his own, then accuses the author of demagoguery towards others… The only honest way would be to make them equal in antipathy. But, and we’ll see later why, Godard has not emphasized this antipathy as did Autant-Lara in La traversée de Paris[6], or even, with more honesty, Mocky in Les vierges[7]. Rather he compensates it, he attenuates it by the scenes of admirable repose where the heroes discover unattainable beauty and discover themselves in it (deeply moving sequences of postcards, or the caresses of the screen that Michel-Ange-Juross finishes by tearing without altering the image.)

The message (if he has a message there; I mean if Godard has put it there, or if we want to cram it there at all costs) remains entirely in watermark. Therefore, the film presents itself as a parable, which isn’t novel, but on the other hand, the great, the admirable novelty is that it doesn’t contain some symbol, like in the world where we live, like in our human affairs, without this being completely our own, without them being completely ours… And what differentiates us from Michel-Ange, Cléopâtre, Ulysse, Vénus and the Carabiniers, is their total absence of lucidity.

This universe of deaf-mutes where no one’s problems really interest their fellow man, engenders a comic heaviness which saves the film from “weightlessness” and prevents it from becoming one of those fireballs such as Antonioni creates.

Thus it exposes itself, without formal vertigo, the non-communication, like a primary truth and not as an arrived-at conclusion. It only has force coming from itself; none can achieve this if it isn’t first embedded, swallowed and digested before being reflected.

In Les carabiniers, like in all the great works of inspiration, the cinema becomes atonal. It no longer indicates the events but the actions, no longer the feelings but the motives. Don’t look for who loves who, or who regrets what, but look at some characters live, suffer their charm, and taste all the riches of the world in a suitcase. The essential phases of the plot are located in the ellipses.

Was it possible to make an entire film with neither interior movement nor actual physical presence? Undoubtably not, since it retains here a few allusions to the body and the soul, such as the crunching of sugar and the salute of the artist. But, outside of these weak indications, nothing is tangible, nothing is rational, and nevertheless nothing is abstract because, if nothing is plausible, everything is true.

The time of four or five zooms in homage to Rossellini, the space of two or three “merdre” in a context à la Feuillade (but he also had to demonstrate that Jarry[8] + Feuillade equaled Vigo), and here we are brought back to earth by a pun very thick, very dense. The situation repeats itself enough to avoid the unnoticed and to overcome the lassitude. And I claim that, if Les carabiniers had not possessed this kind of weight, this visible heaviness, it would have been a film without humanity, thus a film contrary to its ambitions, instead of simply being what it is: a film contrary to its form. (And it’s why I prefer it to Papatakis’ beautiful film, Les abysses[9], too intelligent and measured to excess).

Everything that the film hides, with more or less opacity: that stupidity, envy, rapacity, and pride are the feelings engendered or increased by the war, is not the most important; nor even the absurdity of political parties; nor even that Communism and Christianity are obsolete, anachronistic things; nor even, still, that only the artist is entitled to respect; the important thing about this film, is the immense love of life, once again demonstrated by the absurd. The important thing, is that perspective of Venus, her quiet appetite for beauty, which makes us monstrosities appear less monstrous, the errors less serious, the criminals less responsible, the victims less innocent. The important thing about this film is thus to make us reach for a morality more just, more lucid, one of total benevolence: a morality of Mercy.

I would like to end on that serious note. I have described what I have felt at the sight of a closed nut… But when it’s open, as is approximately said by Trenet[10] in a song which must please Godard, when it’s open, one doesn’t have the time to see; we bite it and then good evening.

                                                                                         Paul VECCHIALI

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[1] Godard’s Le petit soldat [The Little Soldier] (1963), here personified, had been filmed in 1960 but due to censors wasn’t released in France until 25 January 1963; Les carabiniers was released just four months later on 31 May 1963.

[2] Alain Cavalier’s Le combat dans l’île (1962).

[3] Chris Maker’s Le joli mai (1963).

[4] The third arrondissement of Paris.

[5] A reference to Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942).

[6] Claude Autant-Lara’s La traversée de Paris (1956), known in English as Four Bags Full.

[7] Jean-Pierre Mocky’s Les vierges [The Virgins] (1963).

[8] Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), a French symbolist writer best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896) and for coining the term/concept pataphysics, which Wikipedia says “uses absurd irony to portray symbolic truths (and playfully vice versa).”

[9] Nikos Papatakis’ Les abysses (1963).

[10] Charles Trenet (1913-2001), a French singer-songwriter. The song referenced is “Une noix” [“A Nut”] (1951).