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Essays (book reviews) |
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Positif 50 Years: Selections from the French Film Journal L'amour du cinema: 50 ans de la revue Positif |
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Proof Positive
It
is too generous, in a way, to say that the reason why the French film journal Positif is far less known than its oft-rival Cahiers du cinéma is because of the famous critics-turned-filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague.
Actually, I think the real reason is brutally obvious: intellectual laziness,
coupled with an all-too-eager willingness to accept, without question, what is
served up as culturally fashionable. It’s like those moments in film culture
when, to outsiders, Iranian cinema suddenly ‘becomes’ purely Abbas Kiarostami,
or Italian cinema is only (these days) Nanni Moretti, or Egyptian cinema only
(ditto) Youssef Chahine. We take the pre-digested package in order to save us
from having to do any work on our own. So, to many, now and forever, hip French
film culture ‘is’ Cahiers, from André
Bazin to Jean-Luc Godard to Olivier Assayas.
It’s
impossible to dodge, in a review of these two books built to celebrate fifty
fine years of Positif’s achievement,
the issue of the on-again, off-again feud between it and Cahiers – mainly because what we essentially know of the former
comes to us (at least in English-speaking film cultures, but it could well be
the same in Japan or Spain) from the caricatures offered by the latter. Michel
Chion once commented – in a droll review of Michel Ciment’s book on Positif darling John Boorman – that
while the magazine that began in Lyon upheld the old-fashioned, safe, classical
values of “talent, rhythm, vitality … content, meaning, eloquence”, Cahiers was on the side of romantic
things like “creation as rupture, excess, risk, disequilibrium, error,
dynamism”. (1) But isn’t he the same guy who ‘defected’ to Positif sometime in the mid ‘90s, and now emulates the best aspects
of the magazine’s critical practice in his books on Stanley Kubrick (his Eyes Wide Shut book [London: British
Film Institute, 2002] in fact profusely thanking Ciment)? More dug-in is the Cahiers stalwart Jean Douchet who, in
his role as the official ‘insider’ historian of the Nouvelle Vague, likes to
put it about that – no matter what was cattily said by Positif against François Truffaut’s suspicious sympathies for
extreme-right figures in the ‘50s, or Godard’s “bourgeois anarchism” in the
‘60s – it is today clear that Cahiers was always, in its heart, progressive (because ultra-modernist), while Positif has always been conservative, if
not reactionary. Positif’s warriors
(such as the respected cinema historian Jean-Pierre Jeancolas) have never
ceased calling this appallingly distorted caricature of the comparative history
of the two magazines into question, whenever and wherever it appears – as it
often did when Cahiers celebrated its
own fiftieth anniversary in 2001.
Positif has, of
course, changed a lot in its first five decades, and these two books give us a
good sense of certain aspects of that evolution. Or do they? The MoMA
collection presents a not-exactly-unchanging but fundamentally stable image of
the journal: from first to last page, the essays chosen as representative exude
the enthusiasm of discovery backed up with acute, analytical logic and a
partisan sense of social context. The French rendition allows us a glimpse of
the journal’s excesses, in the best sense of that word: the zany Surrealist
passions of the ‘50s, the political bunfights of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the explosions of multi-cultural modernism across the globe
in the ‘80s. In both books, the ‘90s and beyond seem to indicate a cooling-down
in Positif’s temperature (and
temperament) – the work is solid and agreeable, sometimes essential, always
serious, but the excess has gone with the winds of time. The magazine’s tenor
may yet change again; the story is far from over.
Is
there any significant difference between Positif
50 Years and the rather more boldly titled L’amour du cinema? The huge discrepancy in their respective number
of pages (580 in the latter as opposed to 288 in the former) is misleading;
where the French volume (which has a smaller page format) selects fifty-five
texts, the American publication selects forty-four, which is not such a large
gap. There is much common terrain across both books – beginning with Michel
Ciment’s introductory essay, “For your pleasure”/”Pour le plaisir”. And yet
their differences in emphasis are very telling.
It
is worth providing a comparative overview of their respective contents. An
important point should be noted at the outset: the two books are not the fruit
of the same editorial project, nor of course the same editors; one is not the
cut-down version of the other. Yet there is significant overlap – thirteen
texts – and one imagines they were conceived around the same time, with
collective discussions shaping the respective contents of both. (More than most
magazines, Positif is an extremely
collective enterprise.) As with the various Cahiers anniversary publications down the decades, one can safely assume that one
thrust of the general, editorial strategy is to allow an accompaniment or spur
to the programming of retrospective film screenings (as was the case at MoMA).
Both
books begin with substantially similar statements about what, from the enormous
mass of possible choices, has been excluded: interviews (which are routinely of
a high standard in Positif),
diary-type pieces devoted to ‘the month in film’ (fascinating for anyone seeking
a fine-grain insight into the workings of French film culture), international
film festival reports, editorials. Inevitably – as in the English-language
British Film Institute volumes devoted to Cahiers
du cinéma – one loses something of the flavour or tone of the journal in
this reduction. French-reading audiences, at least, have the bonus of a
complementary volume from the same publisher issued at the same time: the
splendid Positif, revue de cinéma: Alain
Resnais (Paris: Folio, 2002), which mingles critical texts and in-depth
interviews. But any of these three celebrations of Positif offers another reminder, at this level, of the simple but
powerful truth noted by Mark Peranson in his interesting review of the MoMA
publication: “to get a true portrait of what a magazine is all about, you’ve
got to pick up an issue”. (2) Even if (I would add) you cannot read French, an
experience of Positif’s layout, its
iconographical choices, its evident editorial rigour and seriousness of tone –
and, above all, the changes in its design since the ‘50s – is an important
supplement to the more refined and mediated, purely ‘literary’ (i.e., solely
text-based) information offered in Positif
50 Years.
One
major editing decision common to both books seems to me, however, to give a
distorted picture of the journal: the exclusion of all the retrospective
studies of past cinema that Positif treats in its ongoing coverage of re-released films, and in its high quality
monthly dossiers. Naturally, this disadvantages those auteurs whose career had
essentially ended or was on its last legs in the early years of Positif, but whose legacy became so
central, down ensuing decades, to its cultural and intellectual ethos: Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Raoul Walsh … and where the heck did Hitchcock
go?
Be
that as it may, these books pro-actively opt for a record of the journal that
gives an unfolding record of its engagement with what is (or was)
present-tense, new and challenging in cinema: the reputations it helped make,
the positions it staked, the particular taste-culture it forged. In tune with a
curious, contemporary trend back towards auteur studies, both books are firmly
anchored around names rather than, say, genres, trends, or critical-theoretical
issues. (With the key exception, in both books, of a slice of Jean-Paul Török’s
valuable early work on horror cinema.) Goudet’s book has, however, the edge
here: he does at least include an appreciation of an actor (Michel Cieutat on
Jack Lemmon), a general essay on the musical-ising tendency in recent French
cinema (by the talented Claire Vassé) – and even an exasperated review by Éric
Derobert of an apparently very ordinary movie (Sur un air d’autoroute [France 2000]) under the guise of a jokey
song lyric.
So,
in these predominantly auteur-driven selections, Positif’s passion for Stanley Kubrick, Francesco Rosi, Martin
Scorsese, Claude Sautet, Boorman, Robert Altman and Jane Campion (among others)
is writ large: often the names – even though this is not always spelt out in
the editorial apparatus of the books – which Cahiers still polemically disparages, abandoned mid-career after a
dramatic disillusionment (as in Campion’s case, from ‘director to watch’ in
1991 to the fabricator of dreaded ‘poster-films’ by 1996), or came around to
liking only a long time after Positif’s
discovery of them (which is the Scorsese story).
Take
the case of Raúl Ruiz: although Cahiers just beat Positif to the punch of acclaiming this Chilean expatriate in his great, French period
of the early 1980s (because of the personal relationship that Pascal Bonitzer
and Serge Daney had formed with him by that time), the latter magazine saw fit
to remind us then (and again now) that it was Ado Kyrou, way back in 1968, who
greeted Los trés tristes tigres (Three sad tigers, Chile 1968) with such
enthusiasm at its Locarno Film Festival screening. And despite whatever
periodic waves and tides of fashionability and unfashionability beset the Ruiz
cult – the sort of fickle currents that tend to underwrite much of the politique of Cahiers – it is Positif which has kept faith with virtually every major film of the director since the
‘80s.
Among
the best essays included in both books are Jean-Louis Thirard’s ‘hoax’ article
on the imaginary auteur Maurice Burnan – which, although written in 1955, still
works as a parody of certain, widespread affectations in highbrow film
reviewing; Bertrand (who becomes Bernard on the contents page of Positif 50 Years) Tavernier on Joseph Losey’s Time Without
Pity (UK 1956); Robert Benayoun’s rapturous ode
to “Jerry Lewis: Man of the Year”; novelist Emmanuel Carrère on Andrei
Tarkovsky’s Stalker (USSR 1979), and
Goudet’s typically thoughtful and astute piece on Kiarostami. Also shared, but
not quite surviving the translation into English, is Gérard Legrand’s review of
Welles’ F for Fake (USA, 1973) – this
author is by any reckoning a pillar of Positif’s
history, but his style has an erudite and highly literary inwardness that
presents a formidable challenge to even the finest translator (and, generally,
one must commend the valiant efforts of Kenneth Larose and his team).
Goudet
and Ciment/Kardish often elect alternative accounts of the same director – but,
no matter the choice, the Positif position rings loud and clear. For example, Terrence Malick: Ciment includes
his own study of Days of Heaven (US
1978), one of his best pieces, while Goudet opts for Christian Viviani’s 1999
overview (“L’harmonie de la disharmonie”) of themes and motifs uniting the
director’s three films. The books sometimes spotlight a director in one decade
or another: Peter Greenaway appears in the ‘80s section of Positif 50 Years (Alain Masson on Drowning by numbers [UK 1987]), and in the ‘90s section of L’amour du cinema (art critic Guy
Scarpetta on The Pillow Book [1996]).
As
with directors – Wim Wenders, Robert Aldrich, Agnès Varda, Luis Buñuel,
Michelangelo Antonioni, Maurice Pialat, Kryzsztof Kieslowski and Tim Burton
figure among the touchstones highlighted in both selections – so, too, certain
highly honoured writers in Positif history are well canvassed in these books: from the heroic period of the ‘50s,
arch-surrealist Kyrou and founder Bernard Chardère (here MoMA has the better
pick, with his editorial from the first issue); those who arrived in the late
‘60s and early ‘70s, like Masson and Petr Král; and newer high-calibre
contributors such as Noël Herpe and Vincent Amiel. Positif 50 Years, sadly, does not manage to include the important
historian of women’s cinema, Françoise Audé, or soundtrack specialist François
Thomas.
But
perhaps there is one retrospective tribute which is keener for those of us set
to discover it in English: the two texts by Roger Tailleur, on Robert Aldrich,
and Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 (France
1962). For me the undoubted highlight of the MoMA collection, these essays
fairly jump off the page with their crackling energy and remarkable insight.
They sent me immediately to the posthumous anthology of Tailleur’s two decades
of movie journalism edited by Ciment and Seguin, Viv(r)e le cinéma (Arles: Institut
Lumière/Actes Sud, 1997) – meaning both ‘long live cinema!’ and ‘to live the
cinema’ – which I have quickly come to regard as a more extraordinary and
important object in the history of film criticism than even Manny Farber’s Negative Space. That’s high praise
indeed, but Tailleur – criminally unknown within English-language film cultures
– deserves it.
It
is not at this level of choice – of directors, films or critics – that the
difference between the books becomes evident. Rather, it is in the treatment of Positif’s political provocations and
polemics. L’amour du cinéma gives us
some pulse-quickening highlights of Positif at its most abrasive, and not only in its fighting relation to Cahiers: Marcel Oms’ brilliant 1958
attack on Roberto Rossellini in his flip-flop from Fascism to Christianity;
Benayoun taking aim at the Nouvelle Vague in 1962; and Ciment and Louis
Seguin’s acidic attack on the trendy post-1968 leftism of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (a position which Seguin, in his post-Positif path, would recant). One should also turn, in this regard,
to the Resnais volume for a lively, round-table discussion (titled “Quoi de neuf?” or “What’s new?”) on Hiroshima, mon amour (France 1959) that gamely tries to rescue the
magazine’s beloved rive gauche (left
bank) compatriot from the encroaching, high-bourgeois obfuscations of
Marguerite Duras or the nouveau roman (‘new novel’).
One
of the reasons that explains the difference between
the two central Positif anthologies –
beyond the personal sensibilities we may be tempted to attribute to Goudet as a
lively and scholarly cinephile who joined the magazine in 1993, as distinct
from Ciment’s status as its slightly forbidding éminence grise (grey eminence) – is the target audiences they respectively
assume. Curating his texts for a local audience,
Goudet can assume a fair amount of background knowledge, as well as easy access
to other books by major Positif writers. The MoMA selection is more cautious, gearing itself to films and
filmmakers that are known – or, one could add, still known, still in some kind of currency and circulation –
within American film culture. So – and I personally think this is a pity –
Miklós Jancsó, Satyajit Ray, Laetitia Masson and Ruy Guerra all disappear.
(Theo Angelopoulos, Tsai Ming-liang and Takeshi Kitano also get shuffled out,
but in their cases one gets the sense that others – like Hou Hsiao-hsien or
Kiarostami – stand in for them. And Positif
50 Years does manage to include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Roman Polanski
and Marcel Ophuls where L’amour du cinéma does not.) But there is also a blunting of the journal’s intellectual edge:
texts as rigorous as Barthélemy Amengual’s “D’un réalisme ‘épique’” (“On an
‘Epic’ Realism”), or as historically crucial as Michèle Firk’s programmatic
1960 reflection “Cinéma et politique” (“Cinema and Politics”), have no
equivalent in the MoMA collection.
And
perhaps there is also, in this, a reluctance to let us English-readers in on
the juicier details of Positif’s
colourful history: it’s easier by far to sweepingly sketch a fifty-year canon
of great directors than to explain to a foreign (and sometimes frankly
indifferent) audience the intricate divisions between factions of the French
Left in the ‘50s, or the evolution of Surrealism as a cultural movement beyond
the arty, glory days to which it is too often reduced. Goudet’s book is
generally better at providing snapshots of such historic context than the
clipped Ciment/Kardish presentation; even the introductory section is heartier
in French, with Goudet’s engaged explication of the editorial process in place
of Kardish’s more bureaucratic gloss, and an added meditation from 1992 by
Masson on “Une critique sans classicisme” (“Criticism Without Classicism”).
There
are a few sloppy details which betray a haste in the
production of Positif 50 Years. It
could have been more helpful, for example, in guiding us to those few pieces
from the journal already translated and available in English, such as in Peter
Graham’s invaluable anthology The New Wave (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968 [updated and expanded in 2009]), the
various Edinburgh Film Festival publications of the ‘70s, and Ian Cameron’s
collection Second Wave (London:
Studio Vista, 1970), not to mention Australia’s sterling contribution in Continuum and Screening the Past. Or to the infrequent work of some Positif writers in English: Jean-Loup
Bourget in the 1970s journal Monogram,
various contributors to Jean-Pierre Coursodon’s two-volume American Directors (New York: McGraw Hill, 1983), and Michael Henry
Wilson in Film Comment today. Some
less direct but no less valuable signposts to the Positif sensibility – and its fragmentary influence on
English-language criticism – could equally have been indicated: in the work of
Raymond Durgnat (who once described himself as “close to Positif, especially in its 1960-‘67 period”), the surrealist expert
Paul Hammond, and Thomas Elsaesser (evident, for
instance, in his writing on Losey).
Positif, after
all, not only drew writers and critics from many centres – long before such
cosmopolitanism became de rigueur –
but also scattered its progeny into pedagogical and institutional film culture
posts around the world. As Goudet remarks in his introduction, “no anthology
can replace a history of Positif comparable to that which Antoine de Baecque devoted to Cahiers du cinéma” – and that takes us right back to the annoying
injustice with which this review began.
1.
Michel Chion, “Un coup d’epée dans l’eau”, Le journal 57 in Cahiers du cinéma 378 (December 1985), XIII (my translation).
2.
Mark Peranson, “Positif 50 Years:
Selections from the French Film Journal”, Cineaste Vol XXVII No 2 (2003), 56.
© Adrian Martin April 2003 |
