a

?i

Masculine
Singular
French New Wave Cinema

Genevive Sellier
Translated by Kristin Ross

Duke Unlversity Press

Durham and London 2008

Contents

vii Acknowledgments

i
2008 Duke University Press
AU rights reservcd
Printed in the United States of
America on acid-free paper oo
Designed by Jennifer HU
Typeset in Crter and Cone Galliard by
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Introduction
The Aesthetic Doxa on the New Wave

11 Chapter One
A New Generation Marked by the Emetgence of Women
22 Chapter Ttoo
Cinephia in the 1950S
34 Chapter Three

Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data appear on the last

printed page of this book.

Auteur Cinema: An Aff air of State

41 Chapter Four
Contrasting Receptions

ChapterNine

filmmaker managed to make her express both the most extroverted joy as
well as the most internalized seriousness.
Beginning with Ascenseur pour l'chafaud, the image of the modern
woman emanating from the "character" of Moreau has in common with
that of Brigitte Bardot (from whom she is otherwise very distinct) the fact
that emancipation is situated exclusively on the terrain of amorous relations. Moreau also shares with the Brigitte Bardot oEtDieu crea lafemme
the liberry of her "real life" ways, but in a more discreet manner.

196

And yet, at the moment that she became an nternational star of auteur
cinema she was dethroned in the eyes of the French popular public by
Anne Girardot, who was crowned "best French actress" in 1962. This turn
of events is a good iliustration of the schsm then operating in French
cinema. Further, the fact that Annie Girardot has been unfairly forgotten
today, while Moreau has become an nternational symbol of the radiance of
French culture, confirms that auteur cinema definitively relegated the popular traditions of the national cinema to the background in terms of image
ifnotnumberofviewers.
Undoubtedly, then, the New Wave created a new Jeanne Moreau, whose
image would be henceforth inseparable from "modern" cinema and auteur
cinema that is, films that direcdy transgress traditional conventions of
drama and photogeneiry. But despite the impression of authenticity and
liberry created by Moreau's acting and her physical appearance, the image
of the woman constructed in these films seems to be located at a great
distance from any social modernity, in order that the feminine be associated
entirely with amorous passion, out of space and time. The figure of the
modern woman chosen by the cultivated classes, Moreau at the beginning
of the 1960S, embodies an image of the feminine that associates sexual
freedom with death, to borrow Vincendeau's remark (2000, 127), and is .
henee part of a very ancient cultural tradition (Coquillat 1982). The masculine, on the other hand, is defined as the human in all of its social and
cultural potentialities, and as the embodiment of the immortality brought
about by artistic creation.

Chapter Ten

Brigitte Bardot and the New Wave:

An Ambivalent Reiationship

Brigitte Bardot's status in relation to the New Wave is paradoxical. The film
that launched her career in late 1956 (after fifteen roles of varying importance since 1952), EtDieu crea lafemme, Vadim's first film, would be vigorously defended by the Cahiers du cinema critics against all members of the
"serious" press. The film's depiction of the "natural" and sexually emancipated woman broke with traditional 1950S French cinema, as much with the
popular genres as with the "cinema of quality." Francois Truffaut (Arts,
December 12,1956) saw in it "a documentary film about a woman of her
generation," and it indeed anticipated in many ways the female figures of the
New Wave. And yet, the film was made with proven commercial revenue
and shamelessly catered to male voyeurism. Ginette Vincendeau (1993) has
shown all of the ambiguity of afilmthat hovers "between the ancient and the
new." Then, afterward, while Vadim was busy producing a modern and
enticing eroticism, Brigitte Bardot became a star thanks to films made according to proven commercial formulas and traditional aesthetics by non-

Chapter Ten
"NewWave dkcttotv. En cas de malheurbv \\itant-\wMa t,i95*>i ,Babette en
va-t-en-,0CTTebyChristian-3acque (1959), and La VritbyC\ouzot (1960).
In the early 1960S, Vadim himself returned to his usual ways to make La
Bridesurlecou (1961) 2nLeReposduuerrier (1962) withBardot.Afterthe
enthusiasm provoked in the cinephilic young crides by Et Die crea la
femme, Bardot, having reached the status of a star of popular cinema, became
a bad object for auteur cinema.
Only Poft/continued to defend her as a figure of female emancipation,
including in its political dimensin. To this end, die journal published a
vibrant statement on her behalf. Tided "Pour Brigitte" (n. 45, May 1962),
its author, Jos Pierre, stated:
The French press in its totality, from L'Auron to L'Huminit, [is] the expression of a profoundly reactionary society that does not accept that its delicate
conformism be revealed by attacks on its vital prejudices
But here we have
Brigitte Bardot, who, all alone, is enough to trouble the quietude of French
society.... At a moment when forty million French were trembling with fear
in their beds at the thought of a visit from the terrorist bombers, a young
woman of twenty-seven hadand she alone a virile reaction. Such an adjective will bring a smile, and viriliry, here, is a relative thing. But from one day
to the next, this won't prevent forty million French twenty million of whom
are maleto feel ridiculed. Especially the males, who don't forgive this kind
of afront: to appear less virile than a woman who is extremely "feminine" in
every regard... [there follows here several examples of ironic or condescending reactions from the left-leaning press]. So, let's accept die obvious: the
French "progressive" shares with his political adversaries the nave and invetrate conviction of an absolute masculine superiority in everything that has to
do with social organization and the exercise of thinking. The French progressive has contempt for women. . . . He's quite happy to concede a few sexual
liberties to her which he's counting on taking advantage of later.... The real
enemy is Her: the woman who doesn't limit herself to doing the dishes, the
kid, and the back yard
And so, a woman who pushes the logic of her being
to the point of attacking the moral taboos of her era and her country, simply
because she has the taste for and the sense of her personal liberty, is something
other than a scandal, she is the Scandal of Scandals, a rebellion against patriarchal imperatives.1
The radical nature of diis text writtea by a man is, of course, die exception
that proves the rule. But its polittal analysis of die media image of B.B.

Brigitte Bardot

(and not of her cinema roles) luminates the reasons for the hostility directed against hera hostility on the part of the totality of the "cultivated
cJasses," whether on the right or the Jeft.
At the same time, Bardot became a model for middle-class girls, as the
critic Francoise Aud (1981), for example, shows. Aud sees in the actress
the crystallizaton of the experience of a whole generation of women, at
once an idealized reflection and a stimulating model of someone actively
trying to acquire independence, and the sign of a global revolt against the
hypocrisy of bourgeois morality. Between 1955 and 1960, Bardot oceupied
a terrain that had up until then been forbidden to women: the terrain of
sexual and moral autonomy. While a Jeanne Moreau or an Arma Karina
function in films by Malle, Godard, or Truffaut as the "creature" of the
auteur and his own eroticized projection in the text, Brigitte Bardot, the
first star of the era of mass media in France, is an "object" alien to auteur
cinema. In this she is like all of the "stars" of popular cinema who are prone
to disturbing the creative liberty of the young filmmakers.

Vleprive: A Film about "the B.B. Phenomenon"

When Louis Malle accepted the producer Christine Gouze-Rnal's proposition to make a film with Bardot,2 the star had just experienced her first
box office disappointments, and her popularity from that point on would
have dissonant overtones due to the hostility directed against her because
of the freedom of her lifestyle. In fact, VUprive was not intended to be an
homage to a star, but rather a denuncation of the alienating character of
that popularity, shown to be typical of the forms taken by modern mass
culture: a tabloid press fed by the paparazzi, a "commercial" cinema dependent on the all new (and relative) liberation of sexual behavior, the overflow of the prvate life of stars into their professional life, and so forth.
Malle and his screenwriter, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, stated that they wrote
their screenplay based on documentation of the "B.B. phenomenon," and
on autobiographical information furnished by the star herself. But a comparison of the screenplay with different biographical and autobiographical
sources (Rihoit, 1986; Bardot, 1997) makes a whole labor of reconstruction appear in the film built around the opposition between a passive and
alienated mass culture on the one hand, to which the character played by
Bardot is for the most part reduced, and an lite culture on the other,
embodied by the art editor played by her costar, Marcello Mastroianni. If

20Z

Bardot at that time undoubtedly incarnated an emancipatcd female figure

for middle-class young women and women of the popular classes, the characters she is made to play in films (with the exception of Et Dieu crea la
jemme) are much less autonomous than the one she "plays" in real life, if we
refer to Catherine Rihoit's biography or to the star's autobiography. Bardot establishes a relation between equals with some of the most brilliant
young artists of her generation (Trintignant, Sami Frey, Gainsbourg); after her amicable separation from Vadim, she claims her right to a free love
life, outside of marriage and maternity (the disastrous episode of the forced
pregnancy and marriage with Charrier, however, confirms this by other
means); and finally, she reveis an undeniable political courage by refusing
to allow herself to be manipulated by the OAS at the end of 1961. All this
confirms that at the beginning of the 1960S, she incarnates a powerful figure of female emancipation, and not only at the level of sexuality all of
which Vie prive completely denies. In fact, the female character is constructed in the film as an object and not as the subject of her own story, a
narratve structure reinforced by the omnipresent male voice-over (the
voice of the sujet-suppos-savoir) that comments on her deeds and gestures and gives us access to her thoughts in the manner of a Balzacian
omniscient narrator.
When a filmmaker (or rather, a camera without an identifiable auteur)
registers the photogenic aspect of this young girl from a good family, her
career is launched, but in a totally passive mode: she is an instrument in the
hands of able merchants who fabrcate her fame. The entire first part of the
film, characterized by a rapid montage of elliptical scenes that prevent any
identification between viewer and heroine, revisits without the slightest
nuance all of the stereotypes about mass culture as a fabrication by the
dominant classes to take advantage of the dominated classes. The young
woman is simply merchandise; she is never conscious of her beauty or of
her eventual talent (which the film tries carefully to deny), or of the manipulations of which she is the object. Her only expression of liberty in the first
part of the film is the use she makes of young men whom she changes as
often as she changes her shirtas sexual objects.3 Here, another stereotype
comes into play: the association of femininity with sexuality as principal
identity (while the male characters in the film have a social and professional
identity, if not artistic talent, similar to Mastroianni's). The story speeds
through thc ascendant phase of the star's career and changes rhythm at the

moment when her scandalous celebrity provokes hostile reactions against

her: we see her then as a hunted animal who tries to rebel against her lot in
life in a purely instinctual and completely ineffective way. Finally, we see
her "crack," and her governess carries her off like a package (she is hidden in
the back of the car under blankets) to the family house in Switzerland.
The second part of the film begins with the encounter with Mastroianni,
whose portrait was given to us in the prologue as an inaccessible genius
with whom the little shopgirl of the past had been secredy in love. Meeting
up again, now that she has become a starand what is more, a hunted
starobviously changes things: now the artist pays attention to her, but
more out of compassion than out of desire or love; the film never suggests
that he is truly in love with her, precisely because art is the center of his
existence. For her, on the other hand, the discovery of love means dependency: she can no longer do without him and attempts suicide as soon as he
leaves her to work on his "masterpiece," From the outset of their relationship, then, she is prtrayed in the romantic traditon, as the objective obstaele to his accomplishment as a creator. The last part of the film is constructed on the opposition between the male creator's autonomy and the
woman's affective dependence, a dependence associated with mass culture:
Mastroianni, the alter ego of the filmmakers (Malle, but also Fellini: Mastroianni, in 1961, is fresh from La Dolce vita's success), is staging Kleisr's
Katherine de Heilbronn, which refers both to lite culture and to traditon.
Bardot, reduced to the role of idle spectator, ends up killing herself on the
pla/s opening night by falling from the roof where she had gone in an
attempt to watch the event without being seen by the paparazzi who were
following her. Her fall into the depths is filmed in slow motion, accompanied by Verdi's Bxquiem, and the film ends with this suspensin of time
and narratve, as though the filmmaker could only accord her a poetic
dimensin at the moment she dies.
The film had a certain box office success, but less than the producers had
hoped for, and the critical reception was mixed. Following a ritual well
established by the young filmmakers, Louis Malle, in an interview with
Yvonne Baby in Le Monde, took care to explain his project in severa! interviews when the film was released: "I thought I had to avoid making a new
film with Brigitte Bardot, but that she could, on the contrary, be the subject
of the film. . . . We tried to demystify B.B.'s character, to make of her a
heroine . . . la Corneille, in the sense that she appears above all as she

Chapter Ten

204

should be. . . . Over and above an exceptional fate, this film conveys a
dimate of absurdity, a process of disorder, and shows in what an anguishing way vales come to deterirate. . . . Brigitte Bardot is an exemplary
character, both a victim and the tragic heroine of our society, the symbol
of the maladjustment of our uves." Certain critics, like Francois Maurin
(L'Humanit), supported him: "The film allows us to better approach and
to better understand someone who is the victim of a myth she has engendered without wanting to"; for Pierre Macabru (Combat), "Louis Malle is
intelligent. He has looked at B.B. as a phenomenon. His film is a succession
of glances, based on curiosity but also on reflective observation. While
Vadim watched B.B. live as a graceful animal, Louis Malle, on the contrary,
tries to explain the inexplicable." But most critics are reserved: Baroncelli
(Le Monde) writes: "At no point in the film was I touched, moved, or
even really interested in the 'myth' that Louis Malle wanted to crate about
the 'sublimated' life of Brigitte Bardot. Besides, I saw nothing mythical, or
tragic, in this story. . . . Jill remains for us a pretty, capricious monster,
egotisrical, sulking, without any conneaion to real life, and whose ultmate
fate leaves us completely indifferent. . . . An excessive simplification of the
character that does not correspond to B.B.'s profound nature." Jean Carta's
reproaches (Tmoignqge chrtien) are undergirded by a solid contempt, typical of the "cultivated" milieus, for the star:
They have invented a charaaer some of whose adventures are incompatible
with Bardot: the most important of these false notes is obviously her relationship with Mastroianni, the intellectual.. .. To explain the mutual attraction,
Malle invokes the example of Swann and Odette, . . . but Swann is a dilettante, while Mastroianni in VUprive is entirely given over to his task.... It's
impossible to conceive of him envisioning a continuing relationship with
someone not interested in his work. It's a primary idea, reactionary.... So, an
ambiguous character who exists neither as Bardot, or as Jill,... a character
that elsewhere is presented to us as a victim, without alluding to her own
complicities, her own responsibilities. . . . By erasing Bardot's complicity in
the elaboration of her myth, MaUe removes any meaning from his film.
As for Michel Duran (Le Canard enchaini), he seems to sympadiize with
Bardot the better to deride her:
Dear Brigitte, you are a worldwide star, a very nice girl with plenty of pluck;
. . . La Bride sur le cou was already a mistake. Here you are possessed again. By

Brigitte Bardot

a Louis Malle. You should have watched out for that guy. . . . Now he's put
you in an anti-Bardot film. Admit that it's a dirty trick. . . . You are not an
idiot. Far from it. But if wc believe Louis Malle and hisfilm,your glory is due
to chance, you have nothing but a tiny pinhead and you are concerned oniy
with making love.... Louis Malle has given us only a luxurious and brilliant
sketch for the film that should be made about the prvate life of a screen
giant. . . . There were other tasty episodes that could have been induded . . .
For example . . . you are in love with Jean-Louis Trintignant who is being
taken away from you by military duty. You are left pouting and abandoned. A
small-time producer, but who is the sister-in-law of an important minister in
the Fourth Republic, made sure the young soldier was stationed not far from
you. The only thing she asked in return was a signature at the bottom of a
contract for several films. And this is how the small-time producer became
big-time.4
Jean-Louis Bory (Arts) is less perfidious toward the star and addresses
his criticisms to the filmmaker: "It's a kind of documentary: look at what
she was, look at what people did to her, look at what she became. Conclusin: the wretch.... From the first images on, the documentary bifurcated
into a morality tale. The Bardot we see is such as she has been changed into
by France-Dimanche and Ici Pars.... Louis Malle has side-stepped the real
film: 'Bardot and the Crowd.'" The filmmaker complained about this very
disappointing critical reception in an interview with Tmoignage chrtien
(which had torn the film to pieces), two weeks after Vieprive was released:
Fm disappointed. The press understood nothing. . . . I have the impression
that people were expecting me to uncover some "secret" of Bardot's. . . .
There was absolutely nothing to discover. . . . I wanted to show as much as
possible that B.B. was an ordinary person. . . . What I attempted was an
approach va romanticism. My charaaer was supposed to escape from the
naturalism of the social case. . . . Maybe I gave the public something too
complex
In any case, the main thing is to be able to continu. And success
with the audience if not with the criticsproves to me that I can do it.
The "misunderstanding," in part shared by the audience, despite what the
filmmaker said, reveis the divorce berween what Bardot at that time signifiedthe sexual and amorous emancipation of women and the ambiguous, to say the least, attitude of male New Wave filmmakers toward that
aspiration.

Chapter Ten
It secms to me that the film suffers especially from the contradictory
charaaer of its projea: the main female character is constandy shown to be
uninteresting, lacking autonomy, without a project, and with no understanding of her situation (another cinematic Emma Bovary), Mastroianni,
on the other hand, the auteur's alter ego, is strongly valorized by thefilm
but it is not his story being told to us. The "popular" audience is thus just
as frustrated in its desire to identify with the heroine as is die "cultivated"
audience frustrated in its desire to identify with the auteur and his fictional
representative.

Le Mpris; or, Godard's Contradictions

Godard, who had already directed six feature-length films that had made of
him the quintessence of "modern cinema," also had an encounter with
Bardot by directing her in Le Mpris in 1963, which was based on Alberto
Moravia's novelIIDisprezzo (published in 1954, and translated into French
the following year). The film, like the novel, recounts the disintegration of
acouple Camille (Bardot) and Paul (Michel Piccoli) against the background of the Italian cinematic milieu. Paul is working on a commission
for an American producer named Jeremy Prokosh (Jack Palance): a new
adaptation of the Odyssey, direaed by Fritz Lang (who plays himself). The
"contempt" Camille feels for Paul, ostensibly due to his decisin to work
for Prokosh, precipitates the crisis in the couple, which is notably recounted in a very long and very beautiful scene in their apartment in Rome.
At Capri, where the whole cast goes to finish Lang's Odyssey, Camille begins
an affair with Prokosh. They leave together for Rome and die in a car
accident. Paul goes back to writing for the theater, while Lang finishes
his film.
The artist that Mastroianni played in Vie prive is represented here by
both Paul and Lang, who figure, as Piccoli put it, as "a kind of two-headed
monster, Godard's double" (cited in Viment 1991, 104). Godard himself
makes a fugitive appearance as Lang's assistant in the scenes set at Capri. In
the face of this mltiple figuration of the great male artist, Camille is doubly associated with "commercial" cinema and femininity: by the fatt that
she is played by Bardot, and through her affair with Prokosh. Le Mpris
thus reproduces the same dichotomy between a masculine lite culture and
a feminine mass culture as Vie prive. And yet Godard complicares this
scenario in several ways.

Brigitte Bardot

First of all, he modifies the educated culture of the Odyssey and the great
writers cited by Lang (Dante, Holderlin, Brecht) by adding to it a "noble"
versin of popular culture: Rancho Notorious, Rio Bravo, "the cinema of
Griffith and Chaplin," and Rosselini. Lang represents the ultmate cultivated man and, as Michel Marie notes: "auteur politics in flesh and blood"
(1990, 57), thereby allowing Godard to sitate his own film in the sphere
ofart. Paul and Lang hold lengthy discussions about literature, myth, and
cinema. Camille, on the other hand, is ignorant of learned culture (The
Odyssey is "the story of a guy who travels") and of cinema according to the
Cahiers du cinema. When Paul suggests going to see Rio Bravo she is completely uninterested. Lang's joke about the "two B.B.s" (Brigitte Bardot
and Bertold Brecht) during the scene in the music hall in which Italian
popular music is represented as inauthentic and vulgar (it's a bad playback,
"just good enough for southern Australia," says Lang) underlines for the
viewerand not without ronythe distance separating them.
In Le Mpris as in Vie prive, femininity and the society of consumption
stifle masculine creation. The desire Camille feels for her beautiful apartment is the reason why Paul "prostitutes himself" with Prokosh. Camille
must die for Paul to return to his true art, the theater, and both Camille and
Prokosh must die for the "true" film to continu. But unlike the charismatic Fabio (Mastroianni) of Vie prive, Paul is a mediocrity, torn between
two universes: he has neither the aura of the great artist Lang, or the
vitality of the vulgar but powerful Prokosh. or is the ending oLeMepris a
triumphalist affirmation of great (masculine) creation such as we saw in
Vie prive: it constitutes, plainly, a commentary on "the end of cinema" and
the end of Western civilization (the impossibility of reviving the myth of
Odysseus) that extends beyond the characters: the last shot of Lang's film
shows us a blue sky but an empty one, while Godard's voice pronounces
the word "silence." It is, though, nonetheless true that Godard's pessimistic
metadiscourse is conveyed by a gendered notion of creativity, according to
which the creator can only be male. The cinema mourned by Le Mpris is
Fritz Lang's cinema, not Brigitte Bardot's.
Godard's atritude toward Bardot is more dialectical than Malle's. Le
Mpris is structured around a gap between the charaaer (Camille) and the
star (Bardot), while in Vie prive there is confusin between the two. For
example, in the characters' logic, Camille's decisin to go off with Prokosh
(whom she holds in as much contempt as she does Paul) seems inexplicable; on the other hand, within the star-system optic, the Bardot/Prokosh

207

Chapter Ten

Brigitte Bardot in Le Mpris.

206

couple is coherent. Camille is an opaque character, stripped of psychology,

while Bardot brings her a visual, oral, and semantic depth. As Jacques
Aumont (2000 [1990]) remarks, Bardos mythical aura associates her
symbolically to the other "gods" in thefilm.The dichotomy between character and star is particularly clear in what concerns the representation of
Bardot's body. Godard, as always complicitous with and critical of the
dominant modes of representation of women (Mulvey and MacCabe
1980) analyzes Bardot's iconic dimensin, but refers it constandy back
to her body, her sexuality. Bardot's body becomes the battleground for a
struggle between lite culture (which includes herc auteur cinema) and
mass culture.
Godard's refusal to show Bardot's body naked, and the producer Joe
Levine's demand that Godard add scenes unveiling the star's body, is one of
the causes clebres of French cinema. Godard's retort to the producer's
demand was to add a prologue (situated immediately after the famous
spoken credits) in which Bardot specifies the different parts of her body,
shot through violendy colored red and blue filters that altrnate with
frames shot in natural light. By transgressing in such an insolent way the
codes of erotic representation, Godard remains faithful to his distanced
aesthetics, and thus is assured thefidelityof his cultivated audience, who
recognize and appreciate his signature (and get Bardot nude in the bargain), at the same time that he alienates the popular audience (it is not

Brigitte Bardot

surprising to learn atLeMpris, which scored well in Godard's career, was

one of the worst in Bardot's).
In Vie priva as in Le Mpris, the characters played by Bardot, reduced to
femininity, are excluded from the circuit of masculine creativity. The two
films distance and marginalize the popular into what are its two most
threatening aspects for auteur cinema as lite culture: a French movie goddess and an American producer. As Andreas Huyssen notes, "Modernism
hides its jealousy of the popularity of mass culture behind a screen of condescension and contempt" (1986,17). It is mus no surprise that in the two
films Bardot dies at the end, as though the popular star could oniy be die
victim of her image (Vie prive). In fact, Bardot would throughout the
1960S project the image of a woman claiming her economic, professional,
and amorous independence, an image that had an important impact on the
young girls of that generation.

2C