Screenwriters in French Cinema 9780719088421

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Charles Spaak: dramaturge and mauvais esprit
Jacques Prévert: from reluctant author to screenwriter as myth
Henri Jeanson: spectacular dialogue
Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost: writing the ‘tradition of quality’
The screenwriter sacrificed? The ‘screenplays’ of the New Wave auteurs
Le cinéma du samedi soir: Michel Audiard’s screenplays and cult dialogue
Screenwriting trends in popular comedy
Dialogue writing in multicultural France since 2000: exploring the words of young people
Réalisa(c)trices screenwriting the self: Noémie Lvovsky, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Maïwenn
Conclusion
References
Index

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Screenwriters in French cinema

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Screenwriters in French cinema Sarah Leahy and Isabelle Vanderschelden

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Sarah Leahy and Isabelle Vanderschelden 2021 The right of Sarah Leahy and Isabelle Vanderschelden to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7190 8842 1 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Excerpt from working copy of screenplay of Les Estivants. © Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Agnès de Sacy, reproduced by permission.

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For Sam and Imogen For Mado and Jean

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Contents

List of figures List of tables Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

page viii x xi xiii xv

Introduction 1 Charles Spaak: dramaturge and mauvais esprit 2 Jacques Prévert: from reluctant author to screenwriter as myth 3 Henri Jeanson: spectacular dialogue 4 Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost: writing the ‘tradition of quality’ 5 The screenwriter sacrificed? The ‘screenplays’ of the New Wave auteurs 6 Le cinéma du samedi soir: Michel Audiard’s screenplays and cult dialogue 7 Screenwriting trends in popular comedy 8 Dialogue writing in multicultural France since 2000: exploring the words of young people 9 Réalisa(c)trices screenwriting the self: Noémie Lvovsky, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Maïwenn Conclusion

1 28 62 94 124

References Index

333 360

156 193 227 263 296 328

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Figures

0.1 Screenwriting roles: proportion of films written by director, screenwriter or both. Reproduced from Pierre Kopp (Kopp 2013: 5). page 9 1.1 Poster for La Bandera (dir. Julien Duvivier, 1935). Public domain. 47 1.2 Poster for Le Ciel est à vous (dir. Jean Grémillon, 1943). Public domain. 51 2.1 Jacques Prévert’s illustrated scénario for Les Enfants du paradis (dir. Marcel Carné, 1945). © ADAGP Paris, DACS London, 2020. 86 3.1 ‘Atmosphère! Est-​ce que j’ai une gueule d’atmosphère?’ Louis Jouvet and Arletty in Hôtel du nord (dir. Marcel Carné, 1938). 111 3.2 Poster for Entrée des artistes (dir. Marc Allégret, 1938). Public domain. 114 4.1 Extract from the ‘adaptation cinématographique’ of Le Diable au corps (dir. Claude Autant-​Lara, 1947), 8 July 1946, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. Cinémathèque suisse, Lausanne, Claude Autant-​Lara archive 87/​3 A4.1. Courtesy of Suzy Aurenche, Igor Lafaurie and Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques. 145 4.2 Extract from the ‘découpage technique’ of Le Diable au corps (dir. Claude Autant-​Lara, 1947), 7 August 1946. Cinémathèque suisse, Lausanne, Claude Autant-​Lara archive 87/​3 A4.1. Courtesy of Suzy Aurenche, Igor Lafaurie and Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques. 146 4.3 Micheline Presle in Le Diable au corps (dir. Claude Autant-​Lara, 1947). 147 5.1 Poster for Les Quatre Cents Coups (dir. François Truffaut, 1959). Public domain. 163

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Figures 5.2 The Avant Scène Cinéma version of the screenplay for La Collectionneuse (dir. Eric Rohmer, 1967). 6.1 Poster for Le Cave se rebiffe (dir. Gilles Grangier, 1961). 6.2 Publicity for Les Tontons flingueurs (dir. Georges Lautner, 1963) featuring a glossary of slang used in the film. Tangopaso /​Wikimedia (CC BY-​SA). 7.1 Jacques Villeret and Thierry Lhermitte in Le Dîner de cons (dir. Francis Veber, 1998). 8.1 François Bégaudeau in Entre les murs (dir: Laurent Cantet, 2009). 9.1 Excerpt from working copy of screenplay of Les Estivants (dir. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, 2018). © Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Agnès de Sacy, reproduced by permission.

ix

179 200

209 243 281

313

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Tables

1.1 Selected films by genre, with source of screenplay page 36 1.2 Selected films by character type 39 1.3 Recurring location types 39 4.1 Aurenche and Bost’s collaborations that were made into films between 1945 and 1958 131 6.1 Lexical field: money 215 7.1 Functions of screenwriters in the development of comedy films 234

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Preface

When we set out to write this book in 2011, colleagues with far more experience than us warned us that it would be very difficult to get to grips with the slippery, often hidden, subject of screenwriting. Archives are incomplete –​documents (especially screenplays) more often than not lack useful details such as dates, names or attributions, handwriting can be almost impossible to decipher. Credits are unreliable, screenplays are not systematically preserved, and what about all those screenplays that never make it to the screen? We encountered all of these difficulties and many more in the researching and writing of this book. However, we also discovered a rich and underused resource that required us to think differently about cinema. If our previous work on stars and popular film had already taught us the importance of looking beyond the idea of the film as the text and the director as its author, this work on screenwriters emphasised this still further, by requiring us to think about the development phase, a moment when many films are still possible. During the development phase of this study, we quickly became aware that many books on screenwriters were also possible, and we were faced with many difficult decisions. This book, then, offers one possible approach to French screenwriters; the first written in English. We hope it will be the first of many.

A note on translations Translations from the French are our own unless otherwise attributed. For economy of space, we have not provided the original French for quotations from secondary sources unless we felt it was essential to do so. All quotations from screenplays, including film dialogue, are given in French and an English translation is provided in brackets or in a note. Given the so-​called ‘untranslatable’ nature of many of the films we address (especially comedies), we have given priority to conveying the general sense, indicating any puns or double meanings in a note or in our analysis.

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Preface

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References and filmographies Page numbers or weblinks are provided where possible for French newspaper and magazine articles, but for those consulted in the Cinémathèque française press review collections and in some other archives, these are not available. We provide selective filmographies at the end of each chapter including information about directors, writers and adaptation sources if applicable. Dates given for films are for the year of release in France unless otherwise indicated. English (UK followed by US) titles are provided when they are available; we have not translated French titles where the film did not have a release in English-​speaking countries. We have not been able to include a full filmography  –​let  alone a full list of screenplays  –​for many of our writers given the extensive nature of their outputs. We refer readers to useful databases such as IMDb (Internet Movie Database:  www.imdb. com), the research website of the Cinémathèque française, Ciné-​ressources (www.cineressources.net), and the CNC website (www.cnc.fr) for further information.

Useful sites The following organisations and websites offer extremely useful sources of information on screenwriters and screenwriting in the French film industry: • Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC). Website: www. cnc.fr • Cinémathèque française. Website: www.cinematheque.fr • Cinémathèque suisse. Website: www.cinematheque.ch • Guilde française des scénaristes. Website: www.guildedesscenaristes.org • Société des Auteurs Audiovisuels. Website: www.SAA-​auteurs.eu • Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques (SACD). Website: www. sacd.fr

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Acknowledgements

Our thanks are due to many people who have supported us throughout the writing of this book. First and foremost, we are grateful to Matthew Frost and Manchester University Press for their confidence and patience during the writing and editing process. Laura Ripper and Helen Stevens (Saltedit) were attentive and sensitive proofreaders and, if we didn’t always meet their deadlines, they certainly helped to keep things on track. Screenwriters Agnès de Sacy and Isabelle Wolgust gave invaluable professional insights and encouraged us in this project. For archival support, we would like to express our gratitude to Caroline Neeser and her colleagues at the Cinémathèque suisse in Lausanne; to Jérôme and Catherine Bost, for their warm welcome to their home and for allowing access to Pierre Bost’s personal archive; to Corinne Lebel at the archive of the Société des Auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques; and to staff at the library and archives of the Cinémathèque française in Paris. Suzy Aurenche, Igor Lafaurie, Eugénie Bachelet-​Prévert, Agnès de Sacy and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi kindly authorised our use of images. For help in accessing documents, archives and films, we owe thanks to Camille Beaujeault, Delphine Chedaleux, Gwénaëlle Le Gras, Mani Sharpe, Jacqueline Van Nypelseer and the Université Européenne de l’Ecriture, Geneviève Sellier, Ginette Vincendeau, and students Anna Rodway and Mandy Williams. Jean Montarnal and Claudine Bonvin shared the fruits of their research. Members of the Discours du scénario research group at the Université de Lausanne –​especially Alain Boillat, Adrien Gaillard and Laure Cordonier  –​gave insightful input into various drafts, generously shared ideas, documents and films, and offered a warm welcome on visits to Lausanne. They also facilitated access to the Autant-​Lara archives at the Cinémathèque suisse, including during a period of closure. Members of the Screenwriting Research Network, especially Jill Nelmes and Steven Price, encouraged us in the early stages of this research and helped shape the direction of chapters, as did Phil Powrie, Valérie Orpen, Geoff Medland, Anne

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xiv

Acknowledgements

Barlow and Gordon Eccleston with their constructive comments on early drafts. Our thanks also go to current and former colleagues:  at Manchester Metropolitan University, to the staff and students of the Department of Languages, Information and Communication for their support with research time; to the Centre for Language and Linguistics (CELL) research group who believed in and supported our project from its early stages. They made it possible to present some of the work at conferences. At Newcastle University, to Guy Austin for suggesting this collaboration in the first place, and for his perceptive reading of chapter drafts, to Nigel Harkness, Shirley Jordan, Richard Waltereit for their support with research time, and to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences for funding that enabled archive visits. Early versions of some sections have appeared in Abecassis, Michaël, with Marcelline Block, Gudrun Ledegen and Maribel Peñalver Vicea (eds) (2019), Le Grain de la voix dans le monde anglophone et francophone, Oxford:  Peter Lang (­Boillat, Alain and Gilles Philippe (eds) (2018), L’Adaptation. Des livres aux scénarios. Approche interdisciplinaire des archives du cinéma français (1930–​1960), Brussels:  Les Impressions nouvelles (­Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2012), ‘Réalisa(c)trices staging the self in their films: Bruni Tedeschi and Maïwenn’, Studies in French Cinema, 12/​3, pp. 241–​55 (­ Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of the illustrative material in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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Abbreviations

AAF CAL CDCF CGT CLCF CNC

CSL Fémis

IDHEC MPF MUF SACD

Association des auteurs de films (Association of film authors) Claude Autant-​Lara archive, Cinémathèque suisse Lausanne Comité pour la défense du cinéma français (Committee for the defence of French cinema) Confédération générale des travailleurs (General workers’ confederation) Comité pour la libération du cinéma français (Committee for the liberation of French cinema) Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, formerly Centre national pour la cinématographie (National centre of cinema and the animated image, formerly National centre of cinematography) Cinémathèque suisse Lausanne Fondation Européenne pour les métiers de l’image et du son (European Foundation of audiovisual arts), formerly the IDHEC. Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (Higher Institute of cinematic studies) Multicultural Parisian French Multicultural Urban French Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques (Society for dramatic authors and composers)

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Introduction

In Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989–​99), Jean-​Luc Godard remarked that producing stories (‘histoires’) for the screen is ‘neither an art nor a technique, but a mystery’. This conception of screenwriting is remarkably similar to that of Charles Spaak, an unlikely ally for Godard, who believed that ‘scriptwriting is an art whose laws may be rigid but are unknowable; creativity is and must remain a mystery’ (Crisp 2002: 206). One of the central aims of this book is to clarify and demystify the place and power of the screenwriter within film production, in creative and artistic terms, but also in the context of film criticism and film discourse more generally, whether that be in mainstream, popular or auteur cinema. In studies of French cinema, words have long been considered to be of secondary importance to the image. Given the primacy of the moving image for the definition of cinema, this is perhaps unsurprising, especially in light of film’s battle to be recognised as the ‘seventh art’. Isabelle Raynauld (1990: 24) begins her study of screenwriting in France by pointing out that the different professionals involved disagree about how to define the concept. She refers to a ‘battlefield for debates’ between cinema and literature, and between theoreticians and practitioners. Alison Smith (2004:  204) describes a ‘hysterical relation with the concept of the screenwriter’ in French cinema where, critically speaking, the role is seen as either dominant or completely eclipsed, while the reality is, of course, that screenwriting has remained an fundamental part of the industry since the coming of sound. What these studies show is the polemical focus on screenwriters and screenwriting throughout French film history; screenwriting tends to feature either as a rather vague, ill-​defined indicator of ‘quality’ (a ‘good’ film is a ‘well-​ written’ film), or as a trigger for anxiety around the status of cinema as an art form in its own right. Words, even when they are an integral part of cinema, as they have been certainly since the conversion era in the late 1920s, have been perceived as

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Screenwriters in French cinema

belonging principally to other art forms (literature and theatre). They are thus seen as ‘polluting’ the purity of the cinematic art form, which derives essentially from images and how they are put together: mise en scene, cinematography and editing. Examples of how this perception has manifested itself can be seen in two of the best-​known controversies concerning the word/​image relation in French cinema history. The first of these is the ‘filmed theatre’ debates of the early 1930s and the second, the attack on the screenwriters of the post-​war tradition of quality by the future directors of the New Wave in the 1950s. In both of these examples, the involvement of screenwriters in the filmmaking process was criticised because they were seen first and foremost as dealing in words, not images: ‘men of letters, [who] look down on cinema because they undervalue it’ (Truffaut 2009: 48).1 René Clair had already articulated similar concerns in 1929, declaring that the ‘cinema must remain visual at all costs’ (Abel 1988: 39). A third word/​image debate that arose in the 1980s around the cinéma du look takes a rather different approach, criticising screenwriters for the insubstantial plots and feeble dialogue of films that privileged style over substance in an attempt to compete with Hollywood blockbusters (Frodon 1995: 575–​7; Austin 2008: 150–​2). It is notable that all these debates, which entail a fundamental mise en cause of the screenwriter, erupted at moments in French film history when the industry was arguably under particular threat in national terms: the coming of sound was a commercial disaster for the French film industry, which lost out to US-​and German-​patented technologies; in the post-​war period, cheap and highly popular US imports threatened to swamp a fragile French industry rebuilding itself after the Occupation; and in the 1980s, once again, Hollywood competition drew audiences away from domestic productions. Thus, in the French context at least, debates around screenwriting appear to be bound up with those relating to the survival of the national cinema. We would argue that this is linked to the central role that screenwriters have played in the evolution and development of French cinema since the coming of sound, if not before. They have held a central role in determining the images it has shown, the stories it has told and the ways in which it has told them, as well as the language it has used to do so.2 Within the French film industry, the role of the screenwriter has traditionally been divided into three key areas of practice: adaptation (by the adaptateur), screenplay construction (by the scénariste) and dialogue writing (by the dialoguiste). In this book, we will use the English terms adaptor, screenwriter and dialogue writer to refer to these three roles. In practice, of course, the boundaries between these three areas are often blurred and individual writers are frequently involved in more than one area. However, given the industry emphasis on these three areas of practice, they have proved useful for us in our investigation of screenwriters and their contributions to

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Introduction

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the collective practice of filmmaking. Our study thus touches on questions linked to adaptation, such as approaches to source texts and the status of literary and theatrical adaptations; to narrative structures, such as what stories are told, how they are told and how characters are constructed; to the emergence and evolution of dominant genres, recurring themes or mythologies; and to dialogue and the role of words in what is frequently considered to be an essentially visual medium.

Historical background Both the role of screenwriters and these areas of practice have evolved considerably over the ninety years covered in this volume. Production practices, including screenwriting, have been influenced by technology, economic imperatives, political regimes, as well as aesthetic preoccupations throughout this period, which has seen several key moments of change. The first of these is the coming of sound in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the resulting emphasis placed on dialogue. The impact of sound on the development of classic realist cinema in France has been outlined by Colin Crisp (1997: 110), who highlights the role that popular theatre played in providing tried-​and-​tested scripts for wary producers in an industry where scriptwriters were lacking. We do not have space here to rehearse the well-​known debates surrounding the talkie and the critically derided yet extremely popular ‘filmed theatre’ that came to dominate French screens in the early 1930s and that has influenced the tradition of French comedy throughout the whole period covered in this book.3 What is notable in the context of our interest in dialogue, though, is the anxiety that the spoken word provoked among certain directors and critics, as creating a hybrid that was neither theatre nor cinema. Again and again we see evidence of a ‘split conception of sound’ (Devereux cited in Price 2010:  135), where speech is hived off from any other sounds. Complaints abound regarding the verbal incontinence of the film parlant, regarded by many critics as vastly inferior to the film sonore, which tested the aesthetic possibilities of the new technology through a wide range of innovative sound effects (O’Brien 2005: 68–​9). The debates raged on, with filmmakers such as René Clair and Charlie Chaplin positing the ideal of ‘a wordless cinema, not a soundless one’, while the possibilities of filmed theatre were defended by figures such as playwrights Marcel Pagnol and Sacha Guitry, who recognised the opportunities cinema offered them to reach wider audiences.4 Whatever the critical response, the popular success of French films parlants suggests that French audiences found a pleasure in hearing their own language spoken on the screen that extended well beyond an

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Screenwriters in French cinema

appreciation of the technological feat of lip-​synching. Martin Barnier’s work on multiple-​language versions of films in the early 1930s recognises that there were ‘push’ as well as ‘pull’ factors that stimulated audiences’ desire to hear their own language spoken on screen, a desire that was not limited to Francophones. For many Europeans, this desire was, at least in part, driven by the anxieties provoked by hearing an unknown language, most usually English, or rather, American (Barnier 2013). Studies of the conversion era demonstrate the popularity with audiences of the ‘new French talkies’, a popularity that was maintained throughout the decade as the market share for French films –​driven by audience demand –​grew from approximately 10 per cent throughout the 1920s to around 30 per cent during the 1930s (Crisp 1997: 9–​10).5 This hunger on the part of audiences to hear their own language on screen fuelled a demand for writers who specialised in dialogue. In France, many of those who stepped into this role already had established writing pedigrees as journalists or playwrights. While some would go on to successful careers as film directors (Pagnol, Guitry), others (for example, Marcel Achard, Henri Jeanson, Jacques Prévert) preferred to remain primarily on the writing side. One of the first training grounds for these new recruits to the production process was the Paramount-​Paris studio in St-​Maurice Joinville. The only studio that was purposely rebuilt for sound recording in the transition period, this was also the production outfit most responsible for the wave of filmed theatre that broke upon French screens in the early part of the 1930s, thus gaining a reputation for churning out large numbers of poor-​quality films. As Jeanson (1971: 164–​5) puts it in typical fashion in his memoirs: Watching a Paramount film, you would think that this company is open to all and buys any scripts on offer, from anyone. You would be wrong. […] Before crossing the threshold, you have to undertake a twenty-​minute training course in the porter’s lodge … After this, a secretary fills in a form […] that’s how I made my appearance at the Paramount court, a naturalised American.

Following the Hollywood studio model, Paramount-​Paris employed a stable of screenwriters under contract:  Jeanne Witta-​Montrobert (1980:  34), one of the most ubiquitous script ‘girls’ of the classical period, claims that there were no writers in Paris who did not at some point work for the company, which, in the early 1930s, rivalled the two major French studios, Pathé-​ Nathan and Gaumont-​Franco-​Film-​Aubert. However, by the mid-​1930s the effects of the worldwide depression led to the withdrawal of Paramount from France. Combined with the financial collapse of Gaumont and Pathé, this led to the extreme fragmentation of the French film industry during the latter part of the 1930s.6 The producer-​led system that came to dominate already existed in the early 1930s alongside these major studios, providing a pattern

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Introduction

5

for the stages of film production outside of a large studio context. Crisp (1997: 301) identifies the model outlined in manuals of the period for such small-​scale production companies, with five typical stages for the development of a script –​the synopsis, the traitement, the continuité, the continuité dialoguée and the découpage technique –​terms that are also foregrounded in a recent re-​edition of Francis Vanoye’s Scénarios modèles, modèles de scénarios (2008: 6). According to these manuals, the first three stages would concentrate on elaborating the narrative structures and characters, while the dialogue would be fully developed in the fourth stage, which would bring together the dialogue text and the scene text (Price 2010:  112 and 135). However, as Crisp (1997: 302) acknowledges, other accounts of film production in this period show that this five-​stage process was not always adhered to, and that dialogue writing, for example, might begin as early as the traitement and continue as an ‘ongoing procedure’ throughout the process ‘till shooting began (or even after)’.7 What also emerges from many of these accounts is the blurring of roles, however clearly designated they may be in the film’s credits. The simile ‘menteur comme un générique de film’ (‘as untruthful as film credits’), attributed to Prévert (d’Hugues 1994b:  445), sums up perfectly how these frequently bore little relation to the reality of who did what. Individual contributions are especially difficult to discern in terms of screenwriting, where collaborative writing and rewriting, sometimes at the behest of a producer, are common practices. Thus, many writers’ contributions  –​ especially those with no official role (often wives or partners) or those who had yet to establish a reputation –​go unacknowledged. Even in the case of certain influential writers, such as Prévert and Jeanson from the 1930s to the 1950s, and Michel Audiard from the 1950s to the early 1980s, the full extent of their roles, which frequently extended beyond their credited contributions, often remains obscure. For example, star screenwriters were often involved from the initial pitch through the very earliest stages of script development, including casting decisions. Anecdotal accounts of directors (Marcel Carné, Henri Decoin), actors (Odette Joyeux, Arletty) and screenwriters (Jean Aurenche, Audiard) highlight the extent of the roles such writers played and their close links with the actors who would perform their lines. All of this underlines the role that certain writers played in shaping the overall production of the film; small wonder they were referred to as auteurs.8 Given the public demand for French-​language talkies on the one hand, and the critical contempt for ‘filmed theatre’ on the other, it was perhaps inevitable that when the role of screenwriter began to develop as a specialist category from around 1930, it did so in an atmosphere of increasing authorial antagonism with (at least some) directors. At the heart of this conflict, which continued throughout the classical period and beyond, is the conception of the role of words –​dialogue, and thus the dialogue writer –​in

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Screenwriters in French cinema

cinema, a subject debated at length by both directors and writers. For example, Crisp (1997: 291) cites Achard, one of Jeanson’s closest friends, who enjoyed great success in the theatre as well as in screenwriting, and who wrote in 1947:

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For me, film dialogue should be like the caption on a cartoon … you should aim at brevity, use short incisive phrases … The cinema has a realist vocation. You should get characters to speak as real people do, or as we believe they do.9

Crisp (1997: 292) highlights the emphatic concern with brevity that occurs repeatedly in these debates:  ‘those collaborating with dialoguists [are advised] to cut and cut again, as if one could castrate filmed theatre’. He goes on to cite Pierre Bost who, in a 1944 lecture to the IDHEC (Institut des hautes études cinématographiques), put his finger on the nub of the issue, the question of film authorship: ‘Films talk nowadays, and basically they [directors] regret it. They regret the silent days when they were masters of the ship’ (Crisp 1997: 292).10 This sense of nostalgia for silent cinema would re-​emerge, notably during the New Wave period. Another recurring critical issue is that of film’s relationship to the world it represents –​in both image and sound. Bost (Crisp 1997: 292), like Achard above, recognises the essential unreality of cinematic realism, a ‘transposition’ rather than a reproduction of the world, highlighting the need to stylise film dialogue ‘if it is to seem plausible, convincingly real’. The aim is not to record reality, but to fabricate a convincing illusion of it. The quest for ‘authenticity’ in dialogue would remain a major preoccupation of directors who wrote their own scripts after the New Wave (for example, Abdellatif Kechiche and Laurent Cantet), albeit with a very different understanding of what constituted authentic speech in film. Much of the anxiety surrounding ‘excessive’ wordiness derives from a desire to differentiate cinema from theatre. However, throughout the period covered by this volume, French film, especially comedy, has owed a considerable debt to theatre, drawing on the boulevard tradition, vaudeville and music hall (the caf’conc’), post-​1968 café-​théâtre, but also classical marivaudage, a linguistic comedy associated with many of Eric Rohmer’s films as well as more recent auteur screenplays, such as those of Kechiche. Further influences on screenwriters are revealed when we consider other genres that have featured in both mainstream and auteur French cinema. Melodrama, for example, also derived from theatre, can be seen from 1930s Poetic Realism to the later films of François Truffaut or Rohmer. Equally popular were historical dramas adapted from historical or contemporary fiction by, for example, Aurenche and Bost for Claude Autant-​Lara or René Clément or Jacques Natanson for Max Ophüls. The crime film, frequently adapted from popular literature in the post-​war period, inspired

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Introduction

7

screenwriters and directors of the mainstream, notably Audiard for Gilles Grangier in the late 1950s and for Georges Lautner in the 1960s, as well as cinephile New Wave directors such as Claude Chabrol, Godard and Truffaut. These genres reveal themes, tropes and figures that are both central to and challenged by French cinema from the classic to the contemporary period, namely an obsession with fatalism, the ‘ordinary’ hero and questions of (mistaken) identity. What this also shows is the complexity of film authorship in relation to influences but also, more fundamentally, in terms of who is involved in writing the screenplay. As we shall now see, this question has major implications on several levels, notably artistic recognition, legal entitlements and remuneration.

The author of the film: definitions The development of the screenwriters’ role throughout the 1930s led to questions around legal rights and remuneration (droits d’auteur). Screenwriters had enjoyed some protection since the establishment in 1917 of the Société d’auteurs, which included both screenwriters (scénaristes) and directors (metteurs en scène), and this increased further in 1918 when the names of both the screenwriter and the director started to be included in film credits. However, as we have seen, one of the constants found in all the periods covered is that credits frequently did not accurately reflect contributions:  it was common for writers, and indeed directors, to find themselves in dispute with producers over questions of authorship. This issue erupted with a vengeance in the post-​war years. Among the considerable challenges facing the French film industry at this time  –​post-​war reconstruction, the return of US competition, the Blum-​Byrnes agreements –​ the author question was flagged as a priority by both the newly formed Centre national pour la cinématographie (CNC) in 1944 and the equally new screenwriters’ trade union, the Syndicat des scénaristes, whose first president was Jeanson.11 And yet, it would take over a decade of wrangling before a law was passed, in March 1957, that attempted to clarify the legal status of film authors. This law listed those with a claim to co-​ authorship as follows: first, the author of the scénario; second, the author of the adaptation; third, the author of the spoken text; fourth, the author of musical compositions with or without words composed especially for the work; and fifth, the director (Jeancolas et al. 1996: 148). The strength of the screenwriters’ lobby can be seen here, with three of the five categories given to aspects of writing, while the director is named only in fifth position, after even the composer of the music. It is perhaps surprising that, in spite of the impact of the politique des auteurs and the overwhelming critical influence

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of auteurism in the years immediately following the passing of this law, it was not until 1985 that Jack Lang as Minister for Culture reviewed the situation to the benefit of the director as part of a set of protectionist laws (Prédal 2001:  46).12 And while it could appear that this law reversed the 1950s situation by neglecting screenwriters, we must not forget that since the New Wave, many more directors have also been credited as screenwriters of their films, giving them income from multiple roles, a trend that has been even more marked since 2000.13 A number of reports commissioned by institutions such as the CNC, the Guilde des scénaristes and even the Council of Europe over the last twenty years have addressed the development stage and the writing process and have raised the alarm about the chronic underfunding of screenwriting. In 2001, the producer Charles Gassot wrote a report for the CNC on feature film development that acknowledged the underscoring of screenwriters and made thirteen recommendations for supporting screenwriting (Gassot 2001). This report was followed by another, Le droit des auteurs dans le domaine cinématographique: coûts, recettes et transparence, commissioned by the CNC from producer René Bonnell in 2008, which looked more specifically at the rights of screenwriters as authors (Bonnell 2008). Simultaneously, public debates on the inadequate financial support for film development and protection of screenwriters’ rights were revived when the Club des 13, a group of film professionals including directors, producers and screenwriters, led by independent director Pascale Ferran, published their pamphlet, Le Cinéma du milieu n’est plus un pont mais une faille (Club des 13 2008). They identified a number of practices endangering the survival in France of mid-​ budget independent quality films, sometimes called ‘films du milieu’, and reviewed the main factors that undermine the work of screenwriters: underestimation of time needed for development; chronic underfunding; increased formatting of screenplays (2008: 43–​57).14 They also called for urgent institutional reforms of support-​ funding mechanisms for screenwriting and of the legal rights of screenwriters (2008:  291–​7). Their concerns were reinforced by other reports addressing funding for development, notably that of producer Pierre Chevalier (Chevalier et al. 2011) on the challenges of fiction screenwriting, that of Pierre Kopp (2013) on screenwriter remuneration, both commissioned by the Guilde des scénaristes, and the publication by the collective Scénaristes de cinéma associés, Scénaristes de cinéma: un autoportrait (SCA 2019).15 Kopp’s report also illustrates current screenwriting trends. Using a sample of 141 fiction films produced in France in 2010–​11, he shows that 59 per cent of these films are the product of writing partnerships between directors and screenwriters, while 32 per cent are written by the director alone and only 9 per cent by screenwriters working on their own (see Figure 0.1).

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Figure 0.1  Screenwriting roles: proportion of films written by director, screenwriter or both (Kopp 2013: 5).

Examples of directors who normally write their films alone include Arnaud Desplechin, Olivier Assayas, Laetitia Masson, Maïwenn and Lucile Hadzihalilovic. Several chapters of this volume also refer to recent writing partnerships, such as those of Kechiche with Ghalia Lacroix, Noémie Lvovsky with Florence Seyvos, Jacques Audiard with Thomas Bidegain, Cantet with Robin Campillo, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi with Lvovsky and Agnès de Sacy. These high-​profile auteur–​screenwriter partnerships have sometimes helped to give screenwriters more visibility, as did the development after 1990 of specific screenwriting pathways in the Fémis (Fondation Européenne pour les métiers de l’image et du son, successor of the IDHEC), which reaffirmed the distinction between screenwriting and directing as separate activities. Of course, film production and distribution has been radically transformed since 2000 by digital technology. Bonnell’s widely quoted report of 2013, Le Financement de la production et de la distribution cinématographiques à l’heure du numérique, was commissioned by the Minister of Culture and makes fifty precise recommendations for reforms required to adapt to the digital era, some of which relate directly to supporting screenwriting and authors’ remuneration and have led to some changes.16 If the post-​war period has been crucial for legally defining film authorship, the issue has also been central in critical debates. The emergence of the auteur-​director and the questioning of the screenwriter’s work developed throughout the 1950s as part of a clear editorial line of the Cahiers du

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cinéma in the writing of critics such as Chabrol, Godard, Jacques Rivette, Rohmer (signing as Maurice Schérer) and Truffaut. Their influence was felt not just in their writings for other cinema reviews such as Arts and L’Ecran français, but also in the adoption of a similarly auteurist line by rival publications, notably Positif. This frequently antagonistic and aggressive critical discourse gradually fashioned the politique des auteurs, according to which films were valued according to the director’s stylistic signature.17 This strategic editorial line –​these critics had ambitions to break into an industry that was in many ways a closed shop at this time –​relied on a cumulative process of promoting certain directors as film auteurs (Roberto Rossellini, Jean Renoir, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock). At the same time, these critics systematically attacked the tradition of quality, a type of filmmaking in which, they claimed, screenwriting, decors and stars prevailed over style (Mary 2006: 15). The new generation of critics put the blame for this firmly on established screenwriters of the post-​war period, citing a deficit of inventiveness in screenplays. They targeted above all Aurenche and Bost, Jeanson, and Jacques Sigurd, screenwriters who worked with a handful of high-​profile directors such as Yves Allégret, Autant-​Lara, Clément and Jean Delannoy, and to produce lavish mainstream literary adaptations dismissed by Truffaut (2009: 40–​1) in 1954 as ‘essentially scriptwriters’ films’. The founding article of this politique is generally agreed to be Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 evocation of the ‘caméra-​stylo’ [camera-​pen], in which he accuses screenwriters of ‘making idiotic transformations’ when adapting literary works, ‘lacking imagination’ and showing ‘laziness’. For Astruc (2009: 32–​3), cinema was being reduced to a show of images for their own sake or at the service of a narrative, when it should be seen as a means of expression ‘as flexible and as subtle as written language’. He identifies the main challenge for cinema as being ‘how to express thoughts’, and sees the medium’s potential to produce ‘the most philosophical meditations on human production’. To achieve this potential, the screenwriter and the director should be the same person, or rather, the former should cease to exist as a separate category if film direction is to be ‘seen as a true act of writing’: After having been successfully a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or a means of preserving the images of an era, [cinema] is gradually becoming a language […] a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of the caméra-​stylo. (Astruc 2009: 31–​2)

The notion of the caméra-​stylo was a first step towards merging the writing and the directing roles into one. Truffaut further develops Astruc’s ideas on

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the role of screenwriting in ‘A certain tendency in French cinema’, published in Cahiers du cinéma in January 1954, a scathing personal attack on a few screenwriters, most prominently Aurenche and Bost.18 This assault on the canon of psychological realism and its star screenwriters does not so much reject the screenplay as urge the profession to redefine its function, namely as a tool for the director in the preparation of mise en scene. Truffaut’s complaint centres on what he regards as overly influential screenwriters: I referred earlier to ‘scriptwriters’ films’ and Aurenche and Bost would certainly not contradict me. When they hand in their script, the film has already been made: in their view the metteur-​en-​scène is the person who decides on the framing … and unfortunately that is true. (Truffaut 2009: 54)

As we see when we examine the practice of Aurenche and Bost and other screenwriters dismissed in this way by Truffaut, the picture painted by the critic is far from the whole truth.19 In fact, the archives reveal a writing process involving screenwriters, the director, occasionally assistant directors, and frequently also the producer in a collaboration that is not always harmonious, sometimes beginning many years before a film eventually goes into production, and often lasting right through to the editing stage. And yet, the romantic ideal of the auteur-​director, developed and refined in numerous articles, discussions and reviews throughout this period, and further fed by the myth of the New Wave throughout the 1960s, fired the critical imagination such that its influence would be widespread and long-​lasting. This influence can be seen in the general press as well as in scholarly trends. Prior to the 1960s, film reviews in the general press systematically included a paragraph addressing the quality of the screenplay and the dialogue as well as the acting, and the mise en scene. Gradually, though, screenplays and screenwriters were overlooked in favour of greater emphasis on the director. The overwhelming critical focus on directors as auteurs not only had a devastating effect on the reputation of screenwriters, making them more vulnerable, especially when it came to the remuneration of their work as professional writers, it also undermined the critical recognition of other key contributors to film production: set designers, cinematographers, costume designers, producers and even actors. Screenwriters, then, have certainly suffered in terms of their prestige from the New Wave orthodoxy of the auteur-​director, but they did not disappear from the film industry –​far from it. As recent histories have emphasised, mainstream –​and popular –​film production continued alongside the New Wave and beyond. This not only ensured that established screenwriters, including Aurenche and Bost, Jeanson and Spaak, could continue writing well into the 1960s, but also that new writers could emerge. The new star of le cinéma du samedi soir, Michel Audiard, was unrivalled in the

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profession in the 1960s and 1970s. Other screenwriters, mostly of comedies and escapist adventure entertainment, were also arriving on the scene, such as Gérard Oury, who wrote and directed the successful Louis de Funès-​ Bourvil comedies (for example, Le Corniaud/​The Sucker, 1965; La Grande Vadrouille/​Don’t Look Back … We’re Being Shot At!, 1966), and Francis Veber, who enjoyed repeated success on stage and screen with his recurring character François Pignon. This established a co-​existence of mainstream, genre-driven screenwriting trends producing record box-​office hits and popular classics on the one hand, and critically visible but less profitable auteur films on the other. Screenwriters flourished in both auteur and popular cinema. Jean Gruault, Suzanne Schiffman, Paul Gégauff and many others emerged and thrived in collaborative partnerships, in many cases with New Wave directors (Alain Resnais, Rivette, Truffaut, Chabrol). In the meantime, Oury and Veber paved the way for a new generation of comedy writers coming from the world of café-​théâtre and live performance in the late 1970s, for example Bertrand Blier, Coline Serreau, Jean-​Marie Poiré, Josiane Balasko and Michel Blanc, who would become prolific screenwriting directors of the 1980s. This decade is frequently characterised on the one hand by a spectacular cinema exemplified by the youth-​oriented films of Luc Besson and lavish heritage productions of Claude Berri, and on the other by the more personal films of a new generation of auteur-​directors such as Claire Denis, Léos Carax, André Téchiné and Assayas. Such accounts tend to identify the period with increased differentiation between auteur and mainstream cinema, but do not often foreground screenwriting, unless in terms of its shortcomings in the films associated with the cinéma du look. However, the 1980s also marked the confirmation of the popular auteur, a category that emerged in the 1970s, at least in part in reaction to the New Wave, and that includes auteur-​directors as well as screenwriter–​director partnerships. Examples include Claude Sautet working with Jean-​Loup Dabadie, Bertrand Tavernier with Aurenche or Colo Tavernier, and Patrice Leconte with Rémy Waterhouse, Jérôme Tonnerre or Gilles Taurand. These directors placed a great emphasis on screenwriting and screenwriters, returning to a more traditional-​style partnership, and arguably rehabilitating the specialist role of screenwriter. And this role is not confined to mainstream films:  major figures of auteur cinema since the 1980s are also known for long-​term collaborations with writing partners, for example Denis with Jean-​ Pol Fargeau, and François Ozon with Marina de Van or Emmanuelle Bernheim. So, if one enduring legacy of the New Wave has been to establish a separation between auteur and mainstream cinemas, leading to a polarisation that has consequences for screenwriting practices (Club des 13 2008: 12), what this brief account shows is that, in fact, the distinctions between these

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categories are far from hermetic. The boundaries between popular and auteur cinema are blurred, but so are those between the functions of acting, writing and directing, with individuals moving between different roles and cinematic styles. Resnais, Chabrol and Truffaut, for example, may have laid the foundations for the politique des auteurs, but their later careers in particular are characterised by ‘quality’ films made in collaboration with screenwriters (Agnès Jaoui and Jean-​ Pierre Bacri for Resnais; Caroline Eliacheff and Odile Barski for Chabrol; Schiffman, Gruault and Jean Aurel for Truffaut). And prominent actors-​ turned-​ screenwriter-​ directors are prominent in mainstream film (the Splendid troupe, for example) as well as in low-​budget independent auteur films (Kechiche, Cantet, Bruni Tedeschi, Lvovsky and Maïwenn), often collaborating with other writers. There are also anomalous figures who established their reputation primarily as screenwriters as part of their eclectic artistic careers, including high-​profile writers who defy any categorisation, partly due to their prolific and versatile output. The most obvious example is Jean-​Claude Carrière –​ a transnational screenwriting giant with around 150 film credits to his name across French, German and US cinema, whose career has straddled both auteur and mainstream cinema –​but we could also cite Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras or Jorge Semprún, writers and cineastes whose artistic practice refuses to recognise boundaries between cinema and literature.20 Another noticeable shift since the New Wave is the perception of screenwriting as a stepping stone to directing. During the classical period, few screenwriters made the move to directing (notable exceptions are Henri-​ Georges Clouzot, Pagnol and André Cayatte); the more usual route was via an assistant director role. The weakening of the trade unions and the establishment of funding structures that enable successful writers to access support for directing have opened up the industry, and screenwriting has become a major route into directing. Pascal Bonitzer, Jaoui, Ferran, Campillo and Bidegain are just a few of those who have followed this career path. Screenwriters’ roles and their profile, then, have varied considerably in the French context (as elsewhere) according to the period and to the industrial and aesthetic contexts; unsurprisingly, given the contingent nature of filmmaking, they are still not clearly defined today. There are a number of underlying patterns in this variation that we highlight in the various chapters. Perhaps the clearest of these is how screenwriters move between a position of authorial power and one of a lack of visibility. As Carrière put it when accepting his honorary Oscar in 2014, ‘very often screenwriters are forgotten, or ignored. They are like shadows passing through the history of cinema. Their names do not appear in the reviews; very seldom. But still, they are filmmakers’.21 This issue of (in)visibility also presents a major challenge for research into screenwriters and screenwriting, and especially

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for a project that covers such a long period of time. This challenge is bound up with shifting roles, discourses and even terminology around writing for the cinema and, indeed, with the status of the screenplay as an object. We have therefore drawn on a number of key studies in the field to help define our terms and identify central discourses and debates, which we now outline.

Screenwriting: definitions and discourses Pier Paolo Pasolini (2005:  187) famously articulated the screenplay as ‘a structure that wants to be another structure’. Drawing on this, Vanoye (2008:  11) highlights the transitional nature of the screenplay:  neither literature nor cinema, it has an essentially practical function and is created not to last, but to become something else.22 For Vanoye (2008: 5–​6 and 11), this transitional nature is what prevents the screenplay from being seen as a worthy object of critical attention: ‘unstable and floating’, ‘a bad object due to its transitory nature, its lack of future’. Smith (2004: 204) suggests that –​ at least as far as critical discourse is concerned –​the transitional nature of the screenplay extends to its authors, and she identifies this as a key problem for recognition of the profession. Gabrielle Tremblay (2015: 12–​15) also focuses on the problem of institutional recognition of both writers and screenplays. She argues that the reluctance to recognise the latter as literary texts is grounded in the view that they are primarily utilitarian, and proposes moving away from this focus on the screenplay as an essentially unstable and transitory object, in order to focus on screenwriting as a process of constant development (2015: 46–​7). Other recent studies (for example, Maras 2009; Price 2010; Nelmes 2011) embrace this transitional status in order to theorise the screenplay both as an object and in terms of its function. This emphasis on the transitional, functional nature of the screenplay designates it as belonging to the realm of film practice, separated –​indeed, excluded –​from a parallel realm of discourse to which film criticism and film theory belongs. However, some scholars and practitioners (Chion 2007; Maras 2009: vii) argue that screenwriting belongs to both practice and discourse, and thus potentially offers a unique perspective on the filmmaking process. For example, Steven Maras (2009: 12) argues that ‘screenwriting is a practice of writing, but it is also a discourse that constructs or imagines the process of writing in particular ways’. He calls for a wider understanding of screenwriting that would break down the binary understanding of ‘proper’ (screenplay-​based) and ‘alternative’ approaches that has arguably fed the polemic around screenwriting and authorship (Maras 2009: 5–​6). He frames the screenplay’s transitional

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nature positively, considering it as an ‘intermediate entity […] destined to vanish into the film … transitional and transformational’ (Maras 2009: 6). Thus, ‘the screenplay’ is a term that encompasses a process of multiple iterations, revisions and amendments, and that facilitates the transformation from initial idea to film. Maras (2009: 42–​3) rightly emphasises that the ‘writing’ process involves conversations, collaborations and the elaboration of a whole variety of written screenplays, but also rehearsals and performance, mise en scene, filming and editing. He thus acknowledges and challenges the dominant idea of the screenplay as a ‘blueprint’ that somehow stands above the production process, rather than evolving as an integral part of it. Our study considers a range of screenwriting practices that lie at the heart of the filmmaking process, some of which emerge from individual approaches (Prévert’s ‘illuminated’ character plans and on-​set improvisation of dialogue; Spaak’s establishment of the milieu and characters preliminary to the narrative; Audiard’s use of overheard phrases; Kechiche’s intensive rehearsals with actors), while others are imposed by industrial or political structures (for example, the preparation of a continuity script for submission to the pre-​censorship committee or to a funding body). Maras’s study is very useful for conceptualising different screenwriting practices and how these have evolved over time. Likewise, Steven Price (2010) examines the screenplay in terms of its possible functions within the filmmaking process, addressing various different types and stages of writing, as well as specific conventions of the (Hollywood) screenplay (for example, at the most basic level, the separation of scene text, presented on the left of the page, and the dialogue text on the right). Vanoye’s French perspective (1979), on the other hand, approaches screenwriting from a more narratological angle, analysing different modes of narration in both film and written texts. In a later consideration of the screenplay first published in 1991, Vanoye (2008) builds on these modes to establish the idea of a screenplay dispositif, which could be defined as a set of principles for organising screenwriting strategies and a pragmatic modus operandum that allows the deconstruction of screenwriting devices. It involves narrative features, dramatic elements orchestrating audience emotions and sequential features organising the scene order (Vanoye 2008: 63), which are relevant to our discussion of innovative screenwriting strategies set up by several screenwriters featured in this volume for engaging with dialogue creation and authenticity.23 Dialogue is, of course, a key part of the screenwriter’s role; we have seen how the French industry very quickly separated off the function of dialogue writing and how those who specialised in this area quickly became the best-​ known writers, thanks to the direct impact of their work on audiences.

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Numerous studies address film dialogue from different perspectives. Jean Samouillan (2004) analyses dialogue in terms of both function and style, as does Sarah Kozloff (2000), who also theorises cinematic language in relation to cultural expectations around performance, genre and cinematic style, as well as broader issues such as gender and ethnicity. In addition, Kozloff considers the psychoanalytic dimension of screen dialogue, and the connection it establishes between screen and audience. This connection is also addressed by Michel Chion (1999) in his analysis of the voice in cinema, which we draw on in our considerations of the performance of dialogue. In Le Complexe de Cyrano, Chion (2008) focuses on dialogue in French cinema, examining the dialogue of specific films in relation to linguistic, social and cultural peculiarities. He also addresses the parallel but opposing tendencies of French cinema’s relationship to language:  on the one hand, minimalist to the point of terseness; on the other, excessively verbose. These studies all argue strongly for a need to pay attention to this neglected aspect of film writing. In this volume, we make the case for considering dialogue as an integral part of the cinematic experience, from the verbal panache of Jeanson and Audiard to the muted speech of Spaak and Jean Grémillon’s early sound collaborations, and from the quasi-​literary scripted dialogue of Rohmer to the experimental dialogue dispositifs of Cantet or Kechiche. As scholarship on screenwriting has demonstrated, one of the main challenges in researching this field is to define the terminology so as to avoid confusion between the wide range of roles and concepts involved. These might range from pitching an idea to dialogue writing, from elaborating an original idea to adapting an existing text, from ‘writing in the camera’ or on the screen (Maras 2009: 2) to detailed plotting and storyboarding, and from initiating a film to trouble-​shooting on set.24 The terms used by film professionals and in the critical media are often ambiguous or imprecise. Furthermore, as Price (2013: 10–​17) points out, both the terms and their meanings have evolved since the days of early cinema, from the early ‘photoplay’ via ‘scenario’ or ‘treatment’ to today’s ‘screenplay’ or ‘shooting script’. Indeed the term ‘screenplay’ has shifted its meaning from referring to the films themselves in the 1910s and 1920s (screen plays) to the written text, from the 1940s onwards.25 The abundance of terms and their arbitrary use have required us to make choices for the sake of consistency. In this book, we use ‘screenplay’ as the general term, while ‘script’ is reserved for specific contexts, for example in compound words such as continuity script or shooting script. The very general French term ‘scénario’ is avoided in this book (unless we are referring to specific archive nomenclature) to avoid ambiguity with English, in which ‘scenario’ more usually refers to a situation. With regard to the writers themselves, we use the general term ‘screenwriter’ to refer to those involved at any stage or in any aspect of the writing process. More specific activities are

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identified appropriately: ‘adaptor’, ‘dialogue writer’, ‘screenplay consultant’ and so on. We have tried throughout to distinguish between the potentially slippery terms author, auteur, writer-​director and screenwriter. The question of film authorship was a vexed one long before the debates occasioned by the politique des auteurs, as Jean-​Pierre Jeancolas et al. (1996) have outlined. Generally speaking, though, before the mid-​1950s, ‘les auteurs’ –​usually in the plural –​was used to refer to the screenwriters, and would occasionally include a director who had taken a hand in the writing. We recognise the contentiousness of this terminology, but in order to avoid confusion we use ‘auteur’ in the post-​New Wave sense of directors who may or may not work with screenwriters, but are regarded as stamping their worldview on their œuvre, while we refer specifically to filmmakers who both write and direct their films as auteur-​directors or writing directors. We employ the English term ‘author’ to refer to writers; those whose work is adapted for the screen as well as screenwriters or dialogue writers. This existing scholarship has been fundamental for us in setting out our approach, but also in defining and affirming our object of study. Following studies such as those of Andrew Spicer (2007) and Jill Nelmes (2014) on British screenwriters, Anubha Yadav (2010) on the history of screenwriting practices in Hindi cinema, and Lizzie Francke (1994) and Marsha Macreadie (1994) on women writers in Hollywood, this book traces the evolution of screenwriting in France by looking at major figures and their work. While there have been some publications in France on the subject of French screenwriters, these have tended to offer reminiscences and anecdotal accounts from those involved in the industry (SACD 1994; Ferrari 2006). A small number of historical analyses have focused on screenwriting in the French context (Raynauld 1990; 1997; Prédal 1994a), and there is also a growing body of work addressing individual writers, such as René Prédal (1994b) on Carrière, Jacqueline Van Nypelseer (1991; 1993) on Spaak, and André Heinrich (Prévert 1990; 1995), Arnaud Laster and Daniele Gasiglia-​ Laster (Prévert 1992) and Carole Aurouet (2003; 2012a; 2017), for example, on Prévert. Most recently, Brangé and Jeannelle (2019) have addressed the question of why screenplays –​these transitional objects –​have nonetheless attracted readers since the earliest days of cinema. However, there are, to our knowledge, no major studies in English addressing French screenwriters and their practice. We aim to complement studies such as, on the one hand, Price’s historical study of the screenplay (2013), which is largely Hollywood-​ based, with only two chapters addressing European screenwriting in the silent and sound eras, and on the other, Raynauld’s analysis of screenwriting in France (1990), which focuses on two key moments, the 1910s and the 1960s. We draw on both the French and the Anglo-​American traditions of film studies in order to contextualise these screenwriters and their place in

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the professional sphere in relation to their own periods and also, by placing them in relation to one another, to consider their role in the development of the practice of writing for cinema.

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Methodology As what precedes suggests, those who attempt to conduct research into screenwriters or screenwriting will soon find themselves confronted with a number of methodological challenges  –​which at times can seem insurmountable  –​posed by the nature of the writing process. First, this process, which is far from uniform, is difficult to pin down even in relation to individual film projects, because it is cumulative, progressing through many stages; contingent, influenced by many outside factors; and, in most cases, collective, involving more than one contributor. All stages of writing, from initial concept to adaptation, plot construction and dialogue writing, can be complicated by further multiple stages of rewriting by different people (for example, script doctors or consultants, as testified by Spaak, Audiard and Veber).26 This vagueness can work in both directions, with screenwriters often working uncredited as part of a team or to revise an existing screenplay, but also at times refusing to acknowledge their work. Screen credits, as we have seen, cannot be relied upon to provide the full picture of the production process. This problem of uncredited contributors is a serious one for screenwriting research, especially since it clearly affects certain groups more than others. For example, our research has uncovered many references to women who clearly contributed to screenplays although they were rarely, if ever, credited. These include Claude Marcy, a writer, actor and singer who was married first to Spaak and later to Jeanson, Ghislaine Autant-​Lara (née Auboin), assistant director, writer and occasional actor, and numerous other women with official or unofficial roles in the production process (script ‘girls’ such as Witta-​Montrobert, Suzanne Durrenberger and Françoise Giroud; wives and partners of directors or screenwriters).27 While this volume makes reference to a range of landmark women screenwriters from the New Wave onwards –​Agnès Varda, Schiffman, Serreau, Balasko, Lvovsky, Bruni Tedeschi, Maïwenn –​we have not been able to devote much space to women’s crucial role in the French film industry (see Vanderschelden 2012b, 2015b, 2016d; Nelmes and Selbo 2015). Had we had more space and time, we would have wished to include a chapter on the largely overlooked contribution of women to screenwriting in the classical period: those such as Colette, Solange Busso/Térac, Giroud, Colette Audry, Louise de Vilmorin and Annette Wademant who were recorded in the credits, as well as those who collaborated in less officially recognised ways. However, given the

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challenges outlined above, this is a major project in itself, requiring painstaking archival research and triangulation of sources that need to be read between the lines. We hope that this can be rectified in future research; in the meantime, we would point readers to the groundbreaking Women Screenwriters:  An International Guide (Nelmes and Selbo 2015), which includes many of the women listed in this introduction. Turning to the archives is one way in which we can explore further the collaborative relationships involved in film production and in the screenwriting process. Unfortunately, while archives are often available for classic and canonical films, they are usually much more difficult to find for mainstream films and, in particular, comedies. What do tend to be available for such productions are published screenplays  –​often associated with the marketing of the films –​but these do not, of course, provide evidence of the process of development.28 Even when archives are available, such research is beset with its own methodological difficulties and challenges. In her consideration of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, Carolyn Steedman (2001: 1175) reflects on the nature of the archive and of archival research, pointing out that ‘[a]‌rchives hold no origins […] Rather they hold everything in medias res, the account caught halfway through, most of it missing with no end ever in sight’. This is emphatically the case for screenwriting archives, which are always selective, even in the case of a remarkably complete collection such as that of Autant-​Lara, held at the Cinémathèque suisse in Lausanne. In spite of this selectivity, as Steedman (2001:  1176) argues, the archive confers authority on the historian in two ways: first, through the ‘fiction’ that ‘the authority comes from the documents themselves, as well as the historian’s obeisance to the limits they impose on any account that employs them’; but second, and ‘really’, ‘it comes from having been there’. This is doubly problematic:  first, because of the object fetishisation that implies an idea of ‘truth’ or ‘origin’, even though we know that such objects are in need of contextualisation; and second, because it is a rare researcher who can claim to have seen and analysed every relevant document, given time and financial constraints. Hence, there is always a certain arbitrariness to what can be taken into account, and this book has been no exception. We have therefore deployed our archival research selectively. Where extensive consultation of archives has already been made by other researchers (e.g. Gasiglia-​Laster and Aurouet for Prévert; Carole Le Berre for Truffaut; Kelly Conway and Rebecca DeRoo for Varda), we have not repeated this. In other cases (Jeanson, Aurenche and Bost) we have drawn on selected archival material –​correspondence as well as screenplays –​while recognising that a genetic approach is not the only one possible for evaluating the overall contribution of screenwriters. We adopt a range of methodologies across our different case studies to permit us to analyse writers’ contributions both

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textually and contextually, with a view to situating them within an industrial as well as an artistic framework. Perhaps the most fundamental difficulty we encountered, though, given the scope of this study, was in choosing which screenwriters to include. Inevitably, there are major –​even monumental –​figures of French screenwriting whom we have not been able to discuss, such as Bonitzer, Carrière, Jacques and Nina Companéez, Dabadie, Duras, Nicole Garcia, Giroud, Pierre Laroche, Serreau, Danièle Thompson, René Wheeler and many, many others. Although, inevitably, there has been some level of arbitrariness in our choices, resulting from the accessibility of archives and other sources and also, no doubt, personal preferences, we have made our selection according to three main criteria. First, given our focus on French specificities, we have prioritised screenwriters who have principally made their career within the French film industry, and predominantly in mainstream narrative fiction. Second, all of our chosen authors have been particularly influential in shaping practices or discourses around screenwriting, and in establishing or questioning canons. Each of them allows us to explore a particular facet of screenwriting practice. Finally, we wanted to ensure our case studies included examples of those whose primary contribution remained in the domain of screenwriting throughout their career, while recognising that –​especially since the 1970s –​screenwriting is a major route to directing, including for many who might not be obviously regarded as auteurs-​directors. Of course, focusing on individual writers is just one way of looking into screenwriting practices. We could have chosen to structure this volume around particular films, historical moments or key debates. By focusing on the writers, we are not attempting to follow an auteurist approach, substituting the screenwriter for the director as sole creative force in the development of a film. However, we do wish to acknowledge the influence of individuals who have tended to be sidelined in critical discussion. The writers we focus on in this volume are also influential within the film industry, as journalists, trade unionists, directors, critics, producers or actors, in addition to their writing. Investigating their activities, personalities, polemics and key contributions has offered us a different perspective from which to approach the importance of the relationships –​collaborations, but also confrontations  –​that shape films just as much as writing, mise en scene, cinematography or editing do.

Research questions and chapter outline Our research questions have grown out of observations made during previous research projects into stars, film production and financing, genres,

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critical reception and analysis of the film press.29 These studies, which focus mainly on the contemporary period and the post-​war years, reveal very different critical attitudes to screenwriters in the immediate post-​war years and the contemporary period, suggesting a major change in the critical conception of the screenwriting role. Our first research question, therefore, asks what the various roles of screenwriters have been in the filmmaking process as adaptors, scénaristes (screenwriters) and dialogue writers, and how this has changed from the conversion to sound to the contemporary period. Second, we examine screenwriting practices that have emerged at different periods, and how they have shaped and been shaped by genre conventions, narrative preoccupations and aesthetics of French cinema. Third, we consider the role of dialogue and language, largely ignored in critical discourse on French cinema, with a couple of notable exceptions (Chion 2008; Vincendeau 2011). We reflect on the tension between word and image –​or, as André Gaudreault (2008) puts it, between ‘telling and showing’ –​that emerges in the very early days of sound film with the opposition not just between the film muet and the critically despised film parlant, but also in the distinction drawn between the latter and the more positively regarded film sonore. As Chion (2008: 7) points out, this tension persists in two parallel ‘traditions’ of French cinema; on the one hand, foregrounding spectacular dialogue, and on the other, featuring laconic, even tight-​lipped performances rooted in physicality. Fourth, we ask how screenwriting practices have evolved within a shifting industrial context since the coming of sound, with important institutional and technological changes (subsidies, authors’ rights, technical advances allowing more freedom and independence, from the introduction of lightweight cameras and fast film stock in the late 1950s to the digital revolution of the 1990s–​2000s). Throughout the study, certain fils rouges have guided us: the question of the screenwriter’s craft or method, and the way in which this may have shaped production practices; and the issue of the screenwriters’ visibility, which goes hand in hand with their legal and financial status, but also with their critical demise and rehabilitation. In addition, in our research we have encountered certain well-​known mythologies that have developed around the French film industry, largely in an effort to distinguish it from the ‘factories’ of Hollywood. France has thus developed its own cinematic mythologies, which operate on two levels:  those that are established within the fictions, thanks to recurring characters, themes and preoccupations, many of which are developed by the screenwriters discussed in this volume; and those that exist around the making of those fictions, around the stars who come to embody those characters, certain directors canonised as auteurs, but also the mode of film production. In contrast to the streamlined production of the United States, French cinema

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Screenwriters in French cinema

is characterised as artisanal, ad hoc, a cinema of pals, almost always in crisis, and managing to produce films in spite of the ‘system’ (producers, censorship, the CNC, funding structures) rather than because of it. In this volume, we address and question the myths that have emerged around certain writers in critical discourses, as well as the narrative mythologies that the writers helped to shape in their films: from fatalism and the working-​ class (anti)hero to the small-​minded petit bourgeois; from the neurotic protagonist to the naive fool of comedy. We have arranged our chapters in largely chronological order to enable the reader to trace the evolution of the screenwriting role across the period covered (though there are, inevitably, some overlaps). The first chapter focuses on Spaak, described as the ‘dramaturge’ of classic French cinema, and considers the connection between screenwriting, genre and myth. We explore the narrative myths that are put in place at this moment when the classic French cinema is establishing itself and the role of this Belgian writer in developing them. The second chapter turns to Prévert, the ‘poet’ to Spaak’s dramaturge (Billard 1995: 256). Prévert is possibly the best-​known French screenwriter, and although his cinematic career was briefer than those of some of his contemporaries (Spaak, Jeanson, Aurenche), his association with Carné and the Poetic Realist classics of the 1930s is very well documented. He has frequently been characterised as the auteur of his films, but he was reluctant to assume this role, emphasising the importance of collaborations (with directors, actors, designers and composers). Prévert offers a rare example of a screenwriter-​myth, one who has been somewhat recuperated into the mainstream thanks to the success of his films and his poetry, in spite of the fact that his popular stance was always an oppositional one. The third chapter, which looks at Jeanson, shifts the focus to dialogue, and considers the relationship between screenwriter and actor. Jeanson is generally associated by critics with the bon mot, the witticism that bears the mark of its author much more than the character who delivers the line. And yet his dialogue is indelibly associated with some of the major stars of this period: Arletty, Jean Gabin, Martine Carol and, of course, Louis Jouvet. In this chapter, therefore, we focus on the mise en scene of dialogue, arguing that, in performance, language is an integral part of the cinematic experience, one that establishes a relation between the audience, actors and writer. The fourth chapter turns to questions of adaptation, especially literary adaptation. Taking as our focus the duo Aurenche and Bost, the most notorious screenwriters of the so-​called tradition of quality, we draw on archival material to consider their most fruitful professional relationship, with the director Autant-​Lara, and, in particular, their post-​war hit Le Diable au corps/​The Devil in the Flesh (1947). We look in detail at questions of adaptation, narrative structure and focalisation, key points of

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attack for the young critics of the Cahiers du cinéma in their denunciation of the cinéma de papa. Chapter  5, which covers the rejection of the tradition of quality of the 1950s and the development of the politique des auteurs, especially in the Cahiers du cinéma, acts as a transition between the ‘golden age’ of screenwriters and the emergence of the director-​as-​auteur and the New Wave. We consider three emblematic examples of auteur-​ directors who reclaimed authority over the writing stages as a way of staking their claim to the authorship of their early films: Truffaut with Les Quatre Cents Coups/​ The 400 Blows (1959), Varda with La Pointe courte (1954) and Cléo de 5 à 7/​Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), and Rohmer with Six contes moraux/​Six Moral Tales (1963–​72). We revisit this overt takeover of the development process and the explicitly declared demise of post-​war screenwriters to reassess the extent to which the auteurist trends of the 1960s broke away from previous screenwriting practices to reposition the director at the centre of a writing process focused on mise en scene. Chapter 6 looks at the career of Michel Audiard, whose filmography as screenwriter and dialogue writer spans over thirty years, and whose practice stands in opposition to the Cahiers critics and New Wave films as evidence of the continued popularity of mainstream cinéma du samedi soir. It focuses more specifically on questions around screenwriting collaboration and Audiard’s role within recurrent production teams consisting of producer, director and the actor(s) for whom he claimed to tailor his dialogue (Gabin, Lino Ventura, Bernard Blier, Jean-​Paul Belmondo). In the 1950s, Audiard formed a productive trio with Grangier and Gabin, followed in the 1960s by an even more successful partnership with producer Alain Poiré, director Lautner, and his favourite actors. This chapter thus demonstrates that, contrary to frequent assumptions, the 1960s did not see off the author-​ screenwriter as a major contributor to film production; in fact, in Audiard, the decade witnessed perhaps the most successful screenwriter ever seen in France. The dialogue that he signed for classics such as Les Tontons flingueurs/​Crooks in Clover (Lautner, 1963) has greatly contributed to these films’ cult status. The final three chapters address more recent screenwriting practices, namely tradition and innovation in comedy writing, the foregrounding of ‘nonstandard’ dialogue in realist films featuring nonprofessional actors after 2000, and the autofictional narratives of ‘réalisa(c)trices’, women directors writing and staging themselves. Focusing on comedy screenwriting, Chapter 7 discusses how, from the 1960s, popular comedy writing continued to provide carefully crafted dialogue-​driven entertainment. On the one hand, we consider the comedies influenced by the French popular theatrical tradition, written single-​handedly (and increasingly directed) by Veber from the

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mid-​1970s into the new millennium, such as Le Dîner de cons/​The Dinner Game (1997). On the other hand, we examine the more subversive cult comedies that emerged in the late 1970s from the café-​théâtre revival, which experimented with truly collegial writing practices and opened the way for a new generation of actors who wrote for themselves and sometimes moved to directing their own screenplays. We look at two films written for the stage and adapted for the screen by the Splendid café-​théâtre troupe, Les Bronzés/​French Fried Vacation (Leconte, 1978) and Le Père Noël est une ordure/​Father Christmas is a Jerk (Poiré, 1981) as well as Gazon maudit/​ French Twist (1995), written and directed by Balasko, who also stars in a key role. The screenwriting of both Veber and the Splendid favours situation comedy and physical performance, but in both cases dialogue also plays an important role in renewing comedy modes. Like language, film dialogue is marked historically as well as geographically. Producing dialogue that sounds realistic has been a preoccupation of certain screenwriters since the coming of sound, as we have seen above. However, shifting definitions of realism in film have led to new understandings of what constitutes credible, authentic dialogue. Since 2000, one major consideration of certain writer-​ directors has been to use language to foreground social and geographical variation. Chapter  8 looks at the projects of two independent screenwriting directors, Abdellatif Kechiche and Laurent Cantet. They both implement screenwriting (and filming) dispositifs (Vanoye 2008) that combine auteur-​director control and collaboration with nonprofessional actors in order to film young people from multicultural urban France. Finally, Chapter  9 looks at practices of writing the self, considering three women screenwriting directors who often screen themselves as the female protagonist in their films, with varying degrees of personal narrative. Among other considerations, this final chapter investigates how Noémie Lvovsky and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi have forged close collaborative writing practices, sometimes casting each other in their respective films. Their screenwriting practices also share features with Maïwenn’s more solitary approach to writing. All three women have redefined film authorship by intentionally linking screenwriting, directing and performance. We began this introduction with a quotation from Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma. We conclude with a reference to Le Mépris/​Contempt (Godard, 1963), which offers a depiction of a screenwriter, Paul (Michel Piccoli), employed to rewrite a screenplay of Homer’s Odyssey. Paul finds himself caught in the middle of a battle between auteur film (represented by Fritz Lang) and popular cinema (embodied by Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance). It is doubtless no coincidence that Godard presents the screenwriter as the weak link, willing to compromise and facilitate the corruption of art in the

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service of profit. Our study of selected screenwriters and their work acknowledges the challenges, negotiations and compromises at the heart of the filmmaking process, but in doing so aims to shed light on a role that, as Carrière said, has for too long remained in the shadows.

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Notes 1 Truffaut is referring specifically to Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost here, but it is worth noting that in these debates the masculine gender dominates, in line with a general sidelining of women writers. 2 Raynauld (1997) has shown the importance of the script in the development of early silent cinema, but by the 1920s, screenwriters were no longer an important part of the film industry (see also Török 1986). 3 See Abel (1988) and Icart (1988) for a detailed account of these debates, and O’Brien (2005) for a very useful critical and comparative study of the conversion of French and US cinema to sound technology. 4 René Clair is almost invariably credited as sole writer for his own films, but he too worked with numerous collaborators, including André Cerf (Gilles 2000: 51). 5 See also Lagny et al. (1986: 19) and O’Brien (2005). 6 See Crisp (1997) and Hayward (2005) for a more detailed account of the economic and industrial structures of 1930s French cinema. 7 For example, Prévert’s illustrated character and scene outlines contain dialogue suggestions, and Aurenche and Bost’s traitements for Autant-​Lara also include indications of dialogue, some of which remain in the finished films. 8 See, for example, Carné (1989:  92–​ 3), Decoin (undated letter to Jeanson c.  1946, Correspondence 42, SACD archive), Aurenche (1993:  85), Jeanson (2000: 83–​5) and Joyeux cited in Chedaleux (2016: 127). Audiard’s input in terms of selecting books to adapt and imposing his team of actors is discussed in Chapter 6. 9 Achard’s greatest theatrical success, Jean de la lune, was adapted for cinema in 1931 by Jean Choux and Michel Simon, and again in 1949 by Achard himself. 10 See Jean-​Pierre Jeancolas et  al. (1996) for a detailed account of the debates surrounding this issue. Sarah Kozloff (2000: 8) shows that this conception of dialogue is not confined to France, nor to this period; she cites, for example, David Mamet’s notion that the perfect film should have no dialogue. She also highlights the gender bias that underpins this discourse, according to which masculinity is associated with taciturn strength, while unnecessary verbiage is a feminine characteristic (2000: 11–​13). 11 The Syndicat des scénaristes, founded in 1944 by Bost, Nino Frank, and Claude Vermorel and affiliated to the powerful Conféderation générale du travail (CGT), was the first trade union in France specifically for screenwriters (Jeancolas et  al. 1996:  129; 168–​9). Prior to this, screenwriters belonged to the same union as directors and technicians, but were also protected by the

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Screenwriters in French cinema

successor of the Société d’auteurs, the Association des Auteurs de Films (AAF), whose function was primarily to protect the rights of authors, and whose membership included film writers, directors and composers. In 1948–​49, the AAF was more or less subsumed by the Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques (SACD), which had been set up in 1829 to protect the rights of theatrical authors and composers. See Jeancolas et  al. (1996:  126–​39) on the difficult relations between the AAF, the SACD and the various film trade unions, due to their varying definitions of the term ‘auteur’. Today, the Guilde des scénaristes, established in 2010 from a merger of the Club des auteurs and the Union générale des scénaristes, is the only trade union representing screenwriters in France. 12 Olivier Alexandre (2015: 132–​3) highlights the power of the director as auteur, with the producer as ‘talent support’, in his essay on the ecology of French cinema. 13 This is not just true for independent filmmakers and auteur films but also for more commercial cinema. For example, Luc Besson received in excess of 500  million euros in 2015, including his director’s salary for that year, but also mainly his screenwriting royalties (Le Guilcher 2016: 291). For comedy, Dany Boon and Nakache and Toledano also exemplify this lucrative cumulation of roles. 14 See Vanderschelden (2009: 245–​7) for a discussion of specific points raised by Club des 13 on the undervalued writing stage and the prospects for film du milieu production. 15 Kopp’s survey covering 561 screenwriting contracts for 242 films produced between 2010 and 2011 (half the number of films produced in France in these two years) shows that, on average, the writing accounts for 3.3 per cent (about €230,000) of the total budget. For 50 per cent of films, it falls under 2.5 per cent (about €125,000) (Kopp 2013: 7). 16 Proposals 4 and 5 address the funding of the writing stages (Bonnell 2013: 168), while 48 to 50 suggest that authors should receive fair royalties through more transparent procedures (2013:  174). See Vanderschelden (2016b:  120–​8) for more information on the issues raised and recommendations made. 17 See de Baecque and Toubiana (2000: 97–​102) for a full definition, including the notion of ‘deliberate love [of a director] and desire to follow the body of work in the making’ and of ‘closeness and intimacy with the author’. 18 See, for example, de Baecque (1991:  99–​105) and Mary (2006:  94–​102) for full critical accounts of this key essay in French; and Hess (1974) and Caughie (1981) for critical discussions in English. 19 Indeed, Truffaut himself acknowledges this in private correspondence. See for example SACD archive, Jeanson correspondence (44), letter from Truffaut to Jeanson dated 11 April [1957] regarding the death of Max Ophüls, his film on Modigliani (that would be finished by Becker as Montparnasse 19), and the lack of obituary in the Canard enchaîné. Truffaut signs off:  ‘Je suis très heureux d’avoir fait votre connaissance, d’autant que je vous sousestimais comme toujours lorsqu’on s’observe de trop loin; et puis Ophüls, qui entrait si

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bien dans l’esprit de chacun, n’avait pas son pareil pour réconcilier de vrais ou faux ennemis’ (I am very happy to have made your acquaintance, especially as I underestimated you as it is so easy to do from a distance, and of course, there is no one like Ophüls, who was so good at understanding everyone, for reconciling enemies, real or false). 20 See Prédal (1994b) on Carrière’s career, Bergomano (1985), Brossard (1985) and Günther (2002) on Duras, and Williams (2006) on Cocteau. 21 See ‘Jean-​Claude Carrière receives an honorary award at the 2014 Governor’s awards’. YouTube:  www.youtube.com/​watch?v=3dOafuHB97U. Accessed 20 March 2019. 22 See also Carrière and Bonitzer (1990). 23 The writers in question are Truffaut, Varda, Rohmer, Cantet, Kechiche and Maïwenn. 24 See, for example, Jean-​ Paul Török (1986), Raynauld (1990; 2012), Chion (2007), Vanoye (2008) and Tremblay (2015) in French; Maras (2009), Price (2010; 2013) and Nelmes (2014) in English. 25 See also Maras (2009: 90–​6). 26 See, for example, Spaak (1977:  62–​ 4). Likewise, Audiard was not always credited for rewrites (Durant 2001:  425). Veber (2010:  83) was called in to rewrite the script of La Cage aux folles/​Birds of a Feather (Molinaro, 1978) and also worked on Le Grand Bleu/​The Big Blue (Besson, 1987). In addition, he appears to have rewritten Le Professionnel/​The Professional (Lautner, 1981), though only Michel and Jacques Audiard are credited alongside Lautner (Veber 2010: 150–​1). 27 Marcy helped out Jeanson during the war by lending her name to his clandestinely produced screenplays, but, as Billard (1995: 77) points out, most of her cinematic contributions were made in the wings and without credit. Ghislaine Auboin/​Autant-​Lara, wife and long-​term collaborator of Claude Autant-​Lara, received writing credits for Le Bon Dieu sans confession (1953) and Marguerite de la nuit (1955), but contracts and correspondence show she also contributed to several other films, including Le Blé en herbe (1954). When Aurenche (1993: 172) dismisses the ‘embêtant’ interference of Clément’s wife, he is referring to the journalist and screenwriter Johanna Harwood. Witta-​Montrobert’s memoirs (1980) show clearly how the role of the ‘script’ (continuity supervisor) could involve making screenplay decisions, frequently for pragmatic reasons. 28 For example, the screenplays of the Splendid comedies are packaged with the Collector edition of the DVD, while glossy illustrated screenplays of Besson’s films have been published through Intervista, a subsidiary of Besson’s production company, EuropaCorp. 29 Leahy (2002; 2007b; 2015a); Vanderschelden (2009; 2013; 2015a; 2016a; 2016b; 2016d).

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Charles Spaak: dramaturge and mauvais esprit

Charles Spaak (1903–​75) is one of the earliest major screenwriters in French sound cinema, alongside Marcel Pagnol, Jacques Prévert and Henri Jeanson, and the first to start out by writing for the movies. He collaborated as writer on around 100 feature films in a career that spanned more than forty years, beginning in 1928 and ending in 1974, just a few months before his death in March 1975.1 Born into an eminent Brussels family, Spaak was destined to fail at the traditional family occupation of lawyer. In fact, as Janine Spaak (1977: 20) points out in her biography of her husband, few of the Spaaks went on from their studies to practise law, preferring careers in politics or literature. The former was the case for Spaak’s mother, Marie, who was Belgium’s first female senator, and elder brother, Paul-​Henri, one of Belgium’s most eminent post-​war politicians, who also served as the first president of the European Common Assembly (forerunner of the European Parliament) and secretary general of NATO. It was Spaak’s father, Paul, a lawyer by profession but a poet by vocation, who encouraged his son to pursue a career in the cinema. A ‘giant’ of French screenwriting, Spaak’s contribution is somehow less flamboyant than those of the dialogue writers Jacques Prévert and Henri Jeanson, whose bon mots uttered by the stars have entered popular cultural memory, or even of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, authors of many of the high-​profile literary adaptations that characterised French quality cinema in the post-​war years. And yet, Spaak was one of the most sought after screenwriters of the classical period, described by Pierre Billard (1995: 256) as the ‘dramaturge’ of French cinema (in contrast to Prévert, the poet). He played a major role in shaping the classic French cinema, influencing the stories that were told and their recurring preoccupations. These include themes that are indelibly associated with 1930s French cinema, such as social class, fatalism, exile and nostalgia, and the construction of masculinity. In this chapter, we argue that Spaak is, in many ways, the most characteristic writer of the classic French cinema due to the extent and range of

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his output. Like many screenwriters, his contributions ranged from last-​ minute script doctoring for Aux portes de Paris (Baroncelli and Barrois, 1935)  for example, to adaptations of literary classics, such as Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo/​The Count of Monte Cristo (Vernay, 1943) or Thérèse Raquin (Carné, 1952), and from rehashing cinematic clichés for formulaic productions, such as Le Récif de corail/​Coral Reefs (Gleize, 1939), La Revanche de Roger la Honte/​The Revenge of Roger (Cayatte, 1946) or Une belle garce (Daroy, 1947), to crafting original screenplays for enduring classics, for example Le Grand Jeu/​The Great Game (Feyder, 1934), La Grande Illusion/​The Great Illusion (Renoir, 1937) and Le Ciel est à vous/​ The Woman who Dared (Grémillon, 1943). Given this variety, it could be difficult to identify Spaak’s signature style, apart from the recurrence of certain character names (most frequently Noblet and Michaud). However there are certain features that recur throughout his work: a liberty of expression, free from political, religious and social constraints; a desire to challenge injustices; a fascination with what makes a hero; a pitilessly satirical depiction of ‘right thinking’ moralisers; and a bleakly misogynist view of women, old or young, occasionally punctuated by remarkable female characters. Spaak’s career, then, is one that embraces popular cinema with its genres and myths –​films adapted from boulevard theatre, comedies and historical melodramas –​just as much as it aims to ‘transcend’ the commonplace. He may be best known today for Le Grand Jeu, La Belle Equipe/​They were Five (Duvivier, 1936) and La Grande Illusion, but we argue that it is thanks to his contribution across the full range of production that Spaak, perhaps more than any other writer, established and developed the myths that would dominate the classic French cinema (see Tables  1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, below). This is why he was so sought after, and no doubt also why Truffaut called him ‘the most compromised of French screenwriters’ (Spaak 1977:  247; Mérigeau 1994: 337). We look here at key moments in Spaak’s career, focusing on what we might describe, following Billard (1995: 76), as the ‘inauguration of classicism’, starting with his first sound film, La Petite Lise/​Little Lise (Grémillon, 1930), up to La Bandera/​Escape from Yesterday (Duvivier, 1935) and addressing some of the myths that are established or developed in these films. Through a discussion of maternal and paternal figures across a range of films from melodrama to comedy, we then consider Spaak’s contribution to certain mythologies around family and gender. Finally, we look at an exceptional film of the Occupation, Le Ciel est à vous, in order to explore how it undoes these myths and, in doing so, undermines Pétainist ideals of femininity and motherhood. First, though, we will briefly outline Spaak’s approach and attitude to screenwriting, and the role of genre in French cinema.

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Defining the métier Spaak cut his cinematic teeth as a member of Jacques Feyder’s creative team from the mid-​1920s (alongside Marcel Carné, among others). A  fellow-​ Belgian, Feyder had acquired the status of maître during the silent period in France and Hollywood. Spaak swiftly graduated from tasks such as attaching false tails to horses for Carmen (Feyder, 1926) (Spaak 1977: 50), to co-​authoring numerous screenplays with his mentor, including seven that would go on to be filmed. The first of these was the silent Les Nouveaux Messieurs/​The Temporary Gentlemen (Feyder, 1929) –​voted by critics best European film in 1930 (Billard 1995:  30)  –​and their final collaboration came ten years later with La Loi du nord/​The Law of the North (Feyder, 1939). The high point of their collaboration is generally regarded as marking the pinnacle of Feyder’s directorial career with Le Grand Jeu (1934), Pension Mimosas (1934) and La Kermesse héroïque/​Carnival in Flanders (1935).2 During the same period, Spaak was also co-​writing films with Jean Grémillon –​ La Petite Lise, Daïnah la métisse (1932) –​and Duvivier –​La Bandera, La Belle Equipe. The writer saw these partnerships as formative ones; this was how he learnt his art of screenwriting. Spaak (1949:  105) offered a satirical evaluation of the theoretical training offered by André Berthomieu and Marcel L’Herbier –​somewhat less renowned directors –​at the newly founded IDHEC: I didn’t have the luck to benefit from the teaching of such learned men. As circumstances allowed, I simply got to know Feyder, Renoir, Duvivier. They all have different ideas, there’s only one thing they have in common: they don’t have any theory of directing or writing. They work by instinct.

Here, screenwriting is presented as a mysterious art; an instinct that comes from talent, experience and collaboration. This is rather typical of attitudes among this generation of screenwriters: a mystification of the creative process combined with a refusal to acknowledge any rules of screenwriting or filmmaking, or indeed any theoretical approach to film practice. This is somewhat suggestive of a deliberate attempt to create a mystique around the creative practice in order to maintain exclusivity. However, it is also comprehensible that writers, who in many cases adapted their art from other fields (journalism, theatre, literature), should place experience and instinct above theory. Spaak’s early career was marked by the major shift in cinematic production –​and an increased emphasis on screenwriting –​brought about by the conversion to sound. Isabelle Raynauld (1997) has shown that the turn to theatrical sources in the conversion era was in large part due to the neglect of screenwriting during the 1920s; films tended to be improvised during

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shooting, from a rather basic outline. As Spaak himself notes (1949: 101) ‘there were no writers’, and if there were scripts, they were hastily written by the director, and it was ‘no drama if it was left in a taxi’. However, the screenplay –​and its writer –​took on a new importance with the increased technical complexity of synchronised sound films and the demand for extensive dialogue. This was the moment when screenwriting began to develop as a profession in France. Spaak was one of the most vigorous defenders of this screenwriting profession; a stalwart of the Screenwriters’ Union (established at the Liberation), of which he was president in the early 1950s, he repeatedly called for full recognition of the creative input of those of his profession, and argued that the screenplay should be regarded as a literary work in its own right (Van Nypelseer 1991:  83–​4). For Spaak, French screenwriters had a special role that went beyond the writing of specific screenplays. He argued that the most talented screenwriters –​Prévert, Aurenche and Bost, Jeanson, Jean Ferry, René Wheeler, Pierre Laroche and, of course, himself –​ were motivated by a kind of mauvais esprit (rebelliousness, refusal to co-​ operate) that also animated their films, ensuring a constant challenge to the established order (Spaak 1977: 233).3 Spaak regarded this mauvais esprit –​ a passionate defence of freedom of expression –​as specific to screenwriters, who retained a much greater degree of liberty than directors, for example, who were necessarily compromised by financial and technical concerns and by negotiations with producers or censors. He also blamed directors and especially critics for what he saw as the sidelining of screenwriters in the profession, though he did not go so far as Henri Jeanson, for example, who used the platform of the Screenwriters’ Union to promote the idea of the screenwriter as the sole author of a film. Spaak took a more nuanced view, regarding the screenwriter’s contribution as fundamental in shaping the subject, the characters, the story and the spirit of the film-​to-​be. At the same time, though, he recognised the fundamentally collaborative nature of the filmmaking process, and famously described his own partnerships with directors as marriages (Spaak 1945).4 Spaak used this term to distinguish between long-​term relationships with directors with whom he produced several films (which he designated as offspring, extending the metaphor), and more fleeting encounters. The most celebrated of Spaak’s cinematic unions were with Julien Duvivier (eight films), Feyder (five films), Grémillon (six films) and Jean Renoir (three films), but he also had very fruitful alliances with André Cayatte (eight films), Christian-​Jaque (seven films) and Albert Valentin (four films as director and a further four as co-​writer) (Figures 1.1 and 1.2 offer examples of Spaak’s shared screenwriting credits, on posters for La Bandera and Le Ciel est à vous).

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Etienne Périer (1991:  27), who worked with Spaak on a number of films in the late 1950s, describes the writing method the older screenwriter outlined at the beginning of their collaboration. Beginning with a new exercise book for each film, he would write the title (if it existed) on the first page, the description of scene one on the second page, and so on. Each scene of the film is thus elaborated on its own page (and only one page). In this way, the outline of the story is constructed. Périer (1991:  27) goes on to elaborate further on Spaak’s ‘method’, which is worth citing here at length: 1 Decide what you want to talk about, the story you want to tell. 2 Decide on the characters necessary for the story. 3 Understand the lives, the qualities, the milieu, the relationships, the strengths and weaknesses of these characters, before the story begins. 4 Decide where to start. 5 Decide where you want to get to. 6 Open the exercise book at the first page and … 7 Wait, discuss, explore all the possibilities and let the ideas come, catch them in mid-​air, dissect them, reject or keep them. Do nothing. Talk about the weather. Go and eat a nice meal as consolation for lack of inspiration. Above all, do not get annoyed when the ideas don’t come. Explore every dimension of the situations and characters. Finally, don’t be afraid of saying something stupid, because it’s often the most banal, crazy or silly ideas that bring solutions. No false modesty between collaborators –​you must say everything that comes into your head. As the last point makes clear, writing for Spaak was an essentially collaborative activity, at least in this ‘architectural’ phase, which lasted approximately one month (Périer 1991: 28). What we also see from this list is a strong emphasis on milieu –​as the writer declared ‘un scénario, c’est la peinture d’un milieu’ (a screenplay is the portrait of a milieu) –​and on situating the characters in their world, aiming for ‘as specific as possible a décor’, while the characters’ emotions should be ‘as general as possible’ (Spaak 1949: 109; see also Van Nypelseer 1991: 83). Thus, his screenplays aimed at a recognisable realism which would be accessible to the greatest number of spectators through situations and feelings they could identify with, even if the world depicted (from the Foreign Legion to amateur aviation; from a First World War prison camp to a home for retired actors) was not familiar.5 One of the ways in which Spaak achieved a realist style was through his dialogue, which he wrote alone (Périer 1991:  27). This is noticeably character-​focused, with a particular emphasis on suiting the register to the social class of the individual (Sellier 1991: 210). His dialogue was invented –​ unlike Michel Audiard, for example, he did not directly use phrases overheard in cafes or on the street –​but with the aim of verisimilitude: ‘to make

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the characters speak a slightly stylised language but which is recognisably their own’ (Spaak cited in Van Nypelseer 1991: 81) In this regard, Spaak’s dialogue writing is similar to Aurenche and Bost, but quite different from his other contemporaries Prévert and Jeanson, whose writing tends to foreground spectacular linguistic virtuosity. This difference is also no doubt due to a difference of approach. Spaak disliked actors (Hammond 1991:  47) and refused to write for individuals who might not appear in the film in the end anyway. Prévert, Jeanson and Audiard, on the other hand, wrote their best lines with specific actors in mind; their linguistic panache is designed to foreground the stars’ performance of the lines along with the verve of the writer, as we shall see in Chapters 2, 3 and 6. This realist approach, rooted in both the general and the specific –​the revelation of the myths latent in ordinary lives –​is arguably what established Spaak as a pioneering screenwriter able to reach such wide audiences. Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier (2014: 60) put their finger on this in their reflection on Le Grand Jeu, which, they argue, is a masterpiece not as a work of art, but as a film that engaged fully with the themes that lay at the heart of the popular cinema … warlike and tragic virility, the wealthy ‘slut’, the prostitute with the heart of gold […] transcend[ing] those themes but without ever losing sight of either their primacy or their popular following.

We will return to Le Grand Jeu and its themes below, but for now, we will just highlight it as an example of how Spaak’s screenwriting helped to establish a popular genre cinema characterised by mythical characters and milieux.

French cinema and genre Colin Crisp (2002:  xii) points out that the vast majority of historical studies of French cinema focus on canonical films, foregrounding a ‘mythic commitment to individual creativity’. As a result, there are few studies that are able to situate these canonical works in relation to the systems (industrial and textual) within which they are created.6 Following the canonisation of certain directors as auteurs (Grémillon, Renoir), or even as master technicians of classic French cinema (Christian-​Jaque, Duvivier), it is easy to forget that their films were produced and distributed within the same industrial and textual systems as those of less acclaimed directors, such as André Berthomieu, Léo Joannon, Georges Lacombe and Jean-​Paul Paulin. As Gwénaëlle Le Gras and Delphine Chedaleux (2012) point out, the distinction between auteur and popular cinema did not exist in the 1930s or

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1940s, and was only starting to become established in the late 1940s and 1950s thanks to critical discourses emerging in publications such as Cahiers du cinéma, Arts and Positif. Of course, this is not to say that all films were equally good, or that collaborating with Grémillon or Cayatte on the development of an original screenplay over several weeks or months was the same experience as adapting a boulevard farce for Lacombe or Paulin, or, for that matter, making last-​minute adjustments to a script to allow for cast changes or financial restrictions. However, in Spaak’s case, these experiences were all part and parcel of writing for the cinema, frequently simultaneously (Billard 1995: 257). And what it does mean is that all of these films were part of the mainstream production, targeted at the general public.7 For the purposes of our study of Spaak’s career, therefore, chefs d’œuvre such as La Grande Illusion and lesser-​known films such as the (until recently) all but forgotten Le Récif de corail are considered as emerging from the same production context and therefore as equally indicative of prevailing themes and preoccupations of both filmmakers and film audiences.8 The question of whether we can or should study French cinema through its genres has been addressed by Crisp (2002), Raphaëlle Moine (2005) and Le Gras and Chedaleux (2012), among others.9 While all of these studies acknowledge that generic codification is less clearly defined in classic French cinema than in Hollywood production of the same period, they also recognise that cinematic genres did emerge in France and, furthermore, that specifically French subgenres also evolved, notably boulevard cinema, the comique troupier (barracks comedies), crime films, costume films, political satire, the ‘Southern’ film.10 Drawing on 1930s’ and 1940s’ film criticism, Crisp (2002: 231–​9) highlights additionally musical comedy, colonial and exotic films, and realist dramas. Crisp also makes an important connection between genre and myth, arguing that in the fragmented French production context, where generic categorisation is looser than in Hollywood, a cinematic mythology nonetheless emerges through recurring ‘narratives, characters and settings’ and standardised ‘technical practices’ (2002: xxviii). He shows that, while critics tended to reject of the idea of genre as a structuring system in French film, they nonetheless recognised the possibilities of cinema as a myth-​making (and myth-​reinforcing) medium. In spite of the fact that most films were produced in the same industrial and textual systems, often featuring the same personnel, both in front of the camera (actors and stars) and behind it (writers, directors, producers, composers, cinematographers and so on), debates reveal deep-​seated class-​based anxieties around the popular appeal of cinema. Critics distinguish between a ‘noble’ and timeless mythology drawn on by films they designate as ‘art’, and a different order of ‘inauthentic’ myth drawn on by popular, Saturday night entertainment,

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which they frequently dismiss as ‘genre’ pictures, unworthy of critical attention (Crisp 2002: 212–​17).11 We should also note here the slipperiness of the term ‘myth’ used in many of these critical accounts; almost all the texts that Crisp draws on were written before the publication of Roland Barthes’s famous essay (1957) which analyses how myths depoliticise their object by rendering the constructed as natural. Of course, many of the genres we have cited are not solely French, but their Gallic iterations reveal national specificities in terms of themes, style and performers. For Billard (1995: 267), films such as La Belle Equipe, La Grande Illusion and Le Ciel est à vous offer a ‘grand narrative’ of French society, thanks to the ‘myths’ and ‘archetypes’ they present, which, he argues, express ‘the whole imaginary of a country and a period’. We argue that these cinematic national ‘myths’ are also found in less celebrated films, in the iconography that helps to identify genres and imbue them with their ideological dimension. As Moine (2005:  11) argues, ‘reflecting on genres cannot be separated from an interrogation of national identity, that is, both of the representations of identities and nationality that such cinema vehicles, and of the potential of such cinema in terms of identity’. Spaak contributed to numerous screenplays that feature or even help to establish just such ‘mythical’ narratives, characters and settings. An examination of his cinematic output from the perspective of character, theme and setting (milieu) can therefore help us not just to understand more about his writing, but also to reflect on these national preoccupations. Our corpus –​somewhat limited by difficulties of accessing some of the earlier or lesser-​known films –​includes comedies, theatrical and literary adaptations, colonial films, realist films, canonical or otherwise, historical films, ‘quality’ or otherwise, family (melo)dramas and films noirs (see Table 1.1). As Tables 1.2 and 1.3 show, Spaak’s screenplays abound with character archetypes and mythical milieux. We find popular yet flawed heroes, frequently trying to escape the past, characters in exile (un)justly accused or condemned, susceptible or masochistic women (young and old), overbearing mother figures and manipulative bitches. These characters ‘live out’ their stories in neighbourhoods defined by class, or in enclosed spaces, whose atmosphere is conjured as much by their inhabitants as by the mise en scene. The group is therefore often almost as important as the individuals defined in relation to it. The films tell stories of exile, the desire to escape, scapegoating, revenge, masquerade, false memories and mistaken identities, and, in the dramatic or realist vein, are marked by fatalism. In spite of what, thus represented, might seem like a penchant for repetition and recourse to clichés, Spaak knowingly mocked cinema’s dependence on generic formulas and mechanistic screenwriting on more than one occasion. Here, he describes a machine that Feyder had brought back from

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Table 1.1  Selected films by genre, with source of screenplay Film title, director, year

Screenplay source

Les Nouveaux Messieurs (Feyder, 1929) L’Abbé Constantin (Paulin, 1933) La Kermesse héroïque (Feyder, 1935) Les Gaités de la finance (Forrester, 1936) Une femme sans importance (Choux, 1937) La Maison des sept jeunes filles (Valentin, 1942) Adorables créatures (Christian-​Jaque, 1952) La Française et l’amour: Le Divorce (Christian-​Jaque, 1960)

Play –​de Croisset and de Flers Play –​Cremieux and Decourcelle /​Novel –​ Halévy Original story –​ Spaak Play –​ Guitton Play –​  Wilde Novel –​ Simenon Original story –​ Spaak Original story –​Spaak

Adventure/​ colonial films

Le Grand Jeu (Feyder, 1934) La Maison dans la Dune (Billon, 1934) La Bandera (Duvivier, 1935) Le Récif de corail (Gleize, 1939) La Loi du nord (Feyder, 1939)

Original story –​Feyder and Spaak Novel –​van der Meersch Novel –​Mac  Orlan Novel –​  Martet Novel –​ Constantin-​Weyer

War/​justice

La Bandera (Duvivier, 1935) La Grande Illusion (Renoir, 1937) Jéricho (Calef, 1946) Patrie (Daquin, 1946) D’Homme à Hommes (Christian-​Jaque, 1948) Justice est faite (Cayatte, 1950) Nous sommes tous des assassins (Cayatte, 1952) Avant le déluge (Cayatte, 1954) Crime et châtiment (Lampin, 1956) Le Glaive et la balance (Cayatte, 1963)

Novel –​Mac  Orlan Original story –​Renoir and Spaak Original story –​Heymann Play –​  Sardou Biography of Henri Dunant Original story –​Cayatte and Spaak Original story –​Cayatte and Spaak Original story –​Cayatte and Spaak Novel –​ Dostoevsky Original story –​Cayatte

Comedy

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Genre

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La Belle Equipe (Duvivier, 1936) La Grande Illusion (Renoir, 1937) Les Bas-​Fonds (Renoir, 1936)

Original story –​Duvivier and Spaak Original story –​Renoir and Spaak Novel –​ Gorky

Historical films

La Kermesse héroïque La Grande Illusion (Renoir, 1937) Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo (Vernay, 1943) Patrie L’Affaire du collier de la reine (L’Herbier, 1946) D’Homme à Hommes (Christian-​Jaque, 1948) La Revanche de Roger la Honte (Cayatte, 1946) Crime et châtiment (Lampin, 1956) Germinal (Y. Allegret, 1963)

Original story –​ Spaak Original story –​Renoir and Spaak Novel –​  Dumas Play –​  Sardou Novel –​  Dumas Biography of Henri Dunant Novel –​Jules Mary Novel –​ Dostoevsky Novel –​ Zola

(Family) (melo) dramas

La Petite Lise (Grémillon, 1930) Pension Mimosas (Feyder, 1935) La Terre qui meurt (Vallée, 1936) Le Ciel est à vous La Revanche de Roger la Honte Avant le déluge Thérèse Raquin/​The Adulteress (Carné, 1953)

Original story –​Grémillon and Spaak Original story –​Feyder and Spaak Novel –​René Bazin Original story –​Grémillon, Spaak and Valentin Novel –​Jules Mary Original story –​Cayatte and Spaak Novel –​ Zola

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Realist films

(continued)

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Table 1.1 (Cont.)

Films noirs

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Genre

Film title, director, year

Screenplay source

La Petite Lise Daïnah la métisse (Grémillon, 1932) La Belle Equipe Gueule d’amour (Grémillon, 1937) La Fin du jour (Duvivier, 1939) L’Entraineuse (Valentin, 1939) Le Dernier tournant (Chenal, 1939) L’Assassinat du Père Noel (Christian-​Jaque, 1941) Panique (Duvivier, 1945) Thérèse Raquin

Original story –​Grémillon and Spaak Short story –​ Daye Original story –​Duvivier and Spaak Novel –​ Beucler Original story –​Duvivier and Spaak Original story –​Spaak and Valentin Novel –​Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice) Novel –​  Véry Novel –​ Simenon Novel –​ Zola

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Table 1.2  Selected films by character type Popular yet flawed heroes

La Petite Lise; La Belle Equipe; La Grande Illusion; Les Bas-​Fonds; Le Ciel est à vous

Trying to escape the past

La Petite Lise; Le Grand Jeu; La Bandera; Les Bas-​Fonds; Le Récif de corail

Characters in exile

Le Grand Jeu; La Bandera; D’Homme à Hommes; La Revanche de Roger la Honte

(Un)justly accused or condemned

Daïnah la métisse; Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo; Panique; Jéricho; La Revanche de Roger la Honte; Justice est faite; Nous sommes tous des assassins/​Are We All Murderers?; Thérèse Raquin; Avant le déluge; Le Glaive et la balance

Susceptible or La Petite Lise; Le Grand Jeu; Pension Mimosas; masochistic women La Fin du jour (young and old) Overbearing mother figures

L’Abbé Constantin; Pension Mimosas; La Revanche de Roger la Honte; Thérèse Raquin; Avant le déluge

Manipulative bitches

Le Grand Jeu; Pension Mimosas; La Belle Equipe; Les Bas-​Fonds; Gueule d’amour/​Lady Killer; Panique

Table 1.3  Recurring location types Neighbour-​ Working-​class hoods or run-​down neighbourhoods defined by class Small towns, suburban or ‘ordinary’ neighbourhoods

Enclosed spaces

La Petite Lise; La Belle Equipe; Les Bas-​Fonds

Pension Mimosas; La Kermesse héroïque; Le Récif de corail; Le Ciel est à vous; Jéricho; Panique; Justice est faite; Thérèse Raquin; Avant le déluge

Bourgeois or aristocratic houses

L’Abbé Constantin; La Revanche de Roger la Honte; La Kermesse héroïque; D’Homme à Hommes; Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo

Boats, barracks, prisons, etc.

La Petite Lise; Daïnah la métisse; Le Grand Jeu; La Bandera; La Grande Illusion; Gueule d’amour; Le Récif de corail; La Fin du jour; Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo; Jéricho

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Hollywood, which enabled the ‘writer’ to select and combine a number of possible characters, situations and settings:

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The anonymous inventor of this singular instrument had … perfectly understood that most films are produced according to the same formula […] Apprentice scriptwriters, acquire such a machine, or fabricate one yourselves. It will provide you with as much imagination as many professional authors have. (Cited in Crisp 2002: 206)

Elsewhere, Spaak describes the method Jacques Companéez used to enable his immense output of screenplays: a set of thirty-​two cards, each bearing a character of the screenwriter’s design which, ‘constantly shuffled and redealt, provide new surprises and entertain fans […] These characters are inscribed on the civil register of cinema […] subject to […] the cinematic code’ (Spaak 1977: 243–​4).12 Let us now turn to an exploration of some of these mythical figures and places, as a way of considering Spaak’s contribution to the development of a classic French cinema.

Mythical figures of Poetic Realism We have seen how, at the transition to sound, filmmakers turned more than ever for their sources to boulevard theatre. The bourgeois père de famille, his wife, the maid, the young man too shy to express his feelings, civil servants, tramps and young lovers crossed by their parents were recurring characters, while plots revolved around bourgeois family concerns such as adultery, inheritances and anxieties about what the neighbours would think, frequently delivering biting social satire.13 It is unsurprising, then, that Spaak’s early credits feature a number of theatrical adaptations (see Table 1.1). However, Spaak’s filmography also reveals other major influences on the development of cinematic stories. Producers looked to the boulevard theatre for comic sources, but realist and naturalist literature was also an important inspiration for writers and directors at this time. Spaak himself (cited in Garcia 1990:  122) noted his admiration for Émile Zola, whom he considered to be a cinematic writer, and after whom he was named (his middle name was Emile). Although Spaak did not turn to Zola until late in his career, with adaptations that elicited mixed critical responses (Thérèse Raquin for Carné in 1953; Germinal for Yves Allégret in 1963), naturalist concerns with social class, heredity and fatalism can be seen in many of his 1930s screenplays; indeed this is clearly one of the major influences on Poetic Realism more generally (Christensen 1987–​88:  13; Andrew 1995:  50). Spaak’s early adaptations include Ce cochon de Morin (Lacombe, 1932), based on the Guy de Maupassant short story (1882), La Maison dans la

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dune/​The House on the Dune (Billon, 1934), based on the 1932 novel by Maxence van der Meersch, and, of course, La Bandera, adapted from Pierre Mac Orlan’s 1931 novel. The preoccupations of naturalist and realist fiction can also be seen in a number of Spaak’s early original screenplays: La Petite Lise and Daïnah la métisse, both co-​written with Grémillon, and Le Grand Jeu, co-​authored with Feyder.14 La Petite Lise was Spaak’s first sound screenplay and Grémillon’s first sound film, and the beginning of a long collaboration.15 As Dudley Andrew (1995: 106) points out, the film proved to be prophetic of the Poetic Realist style that came to be emblematic of the 1930s. The project mattered enough to both writer and director for them to risk their jobs at Pathé-​Natan, taking advantage of a brief absence of Bernard Natan, who had refused the screenplay, to clandestinely film under Natan’s more sympathetic deputy, Louis d’Hée (Spaak 1977: 60; Andrew 1995: 106). When he found out, a furious Natan fired Spaak and Grémillon and sabotaged the release of the film.16

La Petite Lise A convict, Victor Berthier (Pierre Alcover), who has been pardoned for good behaviour, returns from the penal colony to France and finds his beloved daughter Lise (Nadia Sibirskaïa) ‘engaged’ to André (Julien Bertheau), who dreams of owning a garage. Berthier gives Lise his watch. We discover that he was jailed for killing his unfaithful wife in a fit of jealousy. Lise and André, who is also her pimp, take the watch to an elderly Jewish pawnbroker (Alexandre Mihalesco), a ruse to enable them to rob the old man. The robbery goes wrong and Lise accidentally kills the pawnbroker. Berthier, who has succeeded in getting a job and is making good, discovers that his daughter is prostituting herself and also what has happened. To protect her, he gives himself up to the police for the murder and is sent back to the penal colony in Cayenne. The story of La Petite Lise develops a number of ‘myths’ in terms of characters and situations that recur in 1930s French cinema and beyond. Thus we meet the self-​sacrificing father who tries to make good but cannot escape his past, the vulnerable and exploited young woman who turns to prostitution and her good-​looking but no-​good boyfriend, but also the underlying incestuous desire that links father and daughter, the threat of violence motivated by sexual jealousy, and a pipe dream (the garage) that leads to actual violence. In the figure of the pawnbroker, M. Shalom, described

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only as ‘l’Usurier’ in the credits, the film also draws on a well-​worn stereotype of the Jewish moneylender, another recurring figure in 1930s French film.17 Sellier (1989:  86) emphasises the contrast between the film’s grim, spare depiction of private space and individual efforts (the moneylender’s enterprise, Lise’s prostitution) which are doomed to failure, and its rich vibrant visual and audial depiction of collective space (the penal colony, the joinery workshop where Berthier goes to get a job, the Bal Nègre). No doubt partly due to its bleak narrative, La Petite Lise met with a lack of comprehension from audiences and critics. However, as Sellier and Andrew have argued, another reason for this was the inherently cinematic style of the film, quite different from norms of filmed theatre that audiences were becoming used to. For Sellier (1989: 89–​90), La Petite Lise is essentially a descriptive film concerned with revealing to its audiences a state (of mind) rather than an event. As such, it looks forward to the Poetic Realist films of the late 1930s, many of which, as Andrew points out (1995: 107), were also written by Spaak. Given the simple structure, with only four characters and a similar number of locations, Grémillon and Spaak could easily have opted for a theatrical style. Instead, the film uses sound and image to create a sense of ambience and environment. The story is revealed obliquely, with camera angles that conceal as well as reveal and –​perhaps most disconcerting for audiences –​with the often muffled dialogue no more privileged than any other ambient sounds. Andrew (1995: 107) underlines the remarkable sequences that bookend the narrative, of daily routine in the prison in Cayenne and the casual eroticism of the black nightclub in Paris, focusing on how they establish the repressed sexual energy that pervades the entire film, animating Berthier’s relationship with Lise, provoking his jealousy and eventually his self-​sacrifice. We have already highlighted how Spaak’s screenwriting method explicitly foregrounded the establishment of milieu. La Petite Lise shows how the resulting screenplays allow space (and time) for the establishment of a social environment that both frames and defines the characters, often in the portrayal of the group and rituals of behaviour. This can also be seen in what remains of Spaak and Grémillon’s next film, Daïnah la métisse, in the portrayal of the upper-​class passengers exchanging commentaries and flirtatious banter in the lounge bar of the luxury cruise liner on which the action takes place, in a brief sequence depicting the celebrations of the crew and steerage passengers upon the crossing of the equator, and in the portrayal of the machinists and engineers at work in the engine room. The most remarkable sequence in terms of establishing the atmosphere of this film, though, is that of the masked ball, at which all the characters except for Daïnah and her husband, Mr Smith, wear grotesquely distorting papier mâché masks.

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Daïnah’s mask, a sort of cage with holes for her eyes, leaves her face visible, while her husband’s is rendered monstrous by expressionistic underlighting during his magic act. Though the film as it exists is incomplete –​according to Sellier (1989: 91), Gaumont-​Franco-​Film-​Aubert cut approximately forty minutes so that it could be distributed anonymously as an accompaniment to a main feature –​the forty-​eight minutes that remain reveal a continuity with several themes explored in La Petite Lise, including repressed sexuality, jealousy and fatalism. This time, though, they are set against divisions of class and race on board a ship. Daïnah la métisse A luxury liner is sailing through the tropics. On board are Daïnah (Laurence Clavius), a flirtatious woman, and her husband, Mr Smith (Habib Benglia). One night, Daïnah goes on deck to take the air and encounters Michaux (Charles Vanel), a mechanic who has just come off duty. He attempts to rape her. She defends herself, giving him a savage bite on the shoulder, and when she disappears soon afterwards, it seems he has repaid this act by throwing her overboard. Daïnah’s husband sets an investigation in train, during which Michaux is exonerated by the ship’s captain (Gaston Dubosc). It will be up to Smith to avenge Daïnah, pushing Michaux over the engine room barrier to his death. However a brief, enigmatic flashback, in which we see Daïnah’s billowing scarf disappearing over the rail into the ocean, reveals that both Smith and Michaux were on deck at that moment, casting doubt on the machinist’s guilt. NB: The film exists only in a truncated version; we do not know what the full story might have been. The flirtatious behaviour of Daïnah arouses the interest of many men on board, as well as the jealousy of her husband, Mr Smith. These urges, apparently contained by the upper-​class passengers, are given full expression by the working-​class mechanic, Michaux. The film could be seen to censure the flirtatious mixed-​race woman, the tease who refuses to follow through, as Michaux puts it just before attempting to rape her, who is punished for her behaviour by death.18 However, the Greek chorus-​style commentary of Berthe and Alice (Gabrielle Fontan and Maryanne), two older women who gossip about Daïnah’s flirting in between reading bodice-​ rippers and fantasising about the male passengers, casts a different light on

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Daïnah. Her battling against feelings of claustrophobia and suffocation and her vehemently expressed desire to experience new sensations offer release to repressed desires. The co-​existence of the imperative to conform and the desire to rebel are perfectly encapsulated in the masked ball sequence, expressed in Daïnah’s declaration, ‘Tout est possible à l’abri du masque!’ (‘The mask makes everything possible!’). This sense of ‘space’ in the screenplay is also evident in both Le Grand Jeu and La Bandera, both of which ‘suspend’ their narratives in order to evoke the North Africa of the Foreign Legion and the cafard of the legionnaires.19 Both films feature a protagonist who joins the Foreign Legion in Morocco in order to escape his past. Pierre Martel is forced to leave Paris when his embezzling is exposed, while La Bandera’s Pierre Gilieth is running away after committing a murder.

Le Grand Jeu Pierre Martel (Pierre Richard-​Willm), a playboy and embezzler, is banished by his family and dropped by Florence (Marie Bell), the woman who prompted his profligacy. He joins the Legion. When on leave in Sidi Bel Abbès, he lives in a hotel/​brothel run by Blanche (Françoise Rosay) and her husband, the lecherous Clément (Charles Vanel). Blanche reads the cards for him, ‘le grand jeu’, predicting that he will see Florence again, kill a dark-​haired man and come into money. At a nightclub, Pierre meets Irma (Marie Bell), a prostitute who resembles Florence, but whose voice is different (Irma is dubbed by Claude Marcy).20 Pierre, who wants to believe that the amnesiac Irma is Florence fallen on hard times, brings her to live and work at the hotel. When he discovers Clément taking advantage of her, the men fight and Clément falls to his death. Blanche covers it up as an accident, and Pierre leaves on a mission during which his friend Nicolas (Georges Pitoëff) is killed. Pierre learns he has inherited a fortune and plans to take Irma back to France. However, on his way back from buying the tickets he is accosted by Florence. He arranges to see her again, sending Irma ahead on the boat with the story that he will join her in a few days. When he finally realises that Florence is an unworthy object of his devotion, he re-​enlists. Blanche reads the cards again; this time, she foresees his death. Pierre leaves as the call to arms sounds, but the final shot is of a despairing Blanche.

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La Bandera Pierre Gilieth (Jean Gabin) commits a murder in the rue St-​Vincent in Montmartre. His escape is witnessed by a couple returning from a night out. Gilieth’s flight from Paris takes him to Barcelona. Robbed of his papers and money and sensing a net closing in around him, he enlists in the Spanish Foreign Legion, and finds himself in Morocco during the Rif War, pursued by an undercover cop, Lucas (Robert Le Vigan), who has also enlisted. Gilieth falls in love with a Berber dancer/​prostitute, Aïcha la Slaoui (Annabella), who is also exiled from her home (in French Morocco) owing to rumours that she poisoned a man. The two ‘marry’ in a ceremony that draws on legionnaire rituals (tattoos and blood-​oaths). Gilieth’s company is sent on a mission to retake a defensive position that had been attacked by Riffian fighters. They successfully retake the blockhouse, but the water is poisoned and all the men die except for Lucas, who is left to read out the names of the fallen, including Gilieth, who was promoted to corporal on the champ d’honneur. Lucas also fulfils his promises to Gilieth by telling Aïcha of his death, and to the captain of their brigade by dropping his police quest. He re-​enlists in the Legion for a further five years. If both films show legionnaires as hard-​drinking, womanising and looking for a way of leaving their pasts behind them, the Legion itself is presented differently in each.21 In Le Grand Jeu its principal function is road-​building, and although it inspires loyalty and devotion in some –​notably the ageing Gustin (Pierre Larquey), who demands to be useful –​the general attitude to rules and orders is one of cynicism and flexibility. The limited military action referred to in the narrative takes place off-​screen –​the only fighting we witness is some drunken brawling –​though men die in the ‘devouring chasm that occupies the off-​screen image’ (Lagny et al. 1986: 142). Feyder was not granted access to film the Foreign Legion, so spectacular footage of parades and manoeuvres is limited to one sequence in which he spliced in shots of Pierre and Nicolas (Slavin 2001: 156–​7). In contrast, filming for La Bandera was welcomed in Spanish Morocco. Duvivier notoriously dedicated his film to General Franco who, as commander of the first Bandera of the Spanish Legion, was looking for opportunities to glorify the colonial mission. Thus, the spectacular aspect is privileged on several occasions, including the arrival of Gilieth, Mulot (Aimos) and Lucas at the barracks. Capitaine Weller

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(Pierre Renoir) is a figure of commanding authority who bends even the most recalcitrant, rebellious legionnaire to his will.22 The men are seen in their barracks engaged in rituals of tattooing (one tattoos his face, as a way of killing his desire to return home), at the bar and in the brothel, and on manoeuvres. In La Bandera these also include road-​building, but given the setting during the Rif War, military action, albeit with an unseen enemy, is more frequent than in Feyder’s film. In the climactic sequence the men are picked off one by one, either by enemy fire or by the raging thirst that drives them to drink the poisoned water, leaving only Lucas to pay homage to the dead.23 Thanks to this, and to Gilieth’s hot temper and quick fists, La Bandera conforms more closely to an action film than Le Grand Jeu, yet its focus on the Legion as spectacle and the development of the milieu of the legionnaires ensures that it is still far from the rapid, cause-​and-​effect-​driven screenplay favoured in Hollywood for this genre.24 Andrew (1995:  242) reports that critics reproached Feyder because Le Grand Jeu ‘did not correspond to the “well-​made drama in the theatrical mode” ’. He was seen as ‘working like a novelist … unduly protracting nondramatic moments’ (Victor Bachy, cited in Andrew 1995: 242). Again, we see how a Spaak-​scripted film can be seen to privilege milieu over a tightly plotted cause-​and-​effect narrative. In his discussion of Le Grand Jeu, Peter Christensen (1987–​88: 7) argues that environment and events should not be seen as in opposition to each other in Poetic Realist cinema, but rather as interdependent; events bring about the fate to which the characters submit. In Le Grand Jeu, the claustrophobic setting in Sidi bel Abbès, the hotel/​brothel and the cabaret, the alcohol in which all the characters except Blanche desperately seek oblivion, the cards that reveal their fate, and even the flypapers that Irma attaches to the ceiling, in the process revealing her legs and inflaming the desire of the lecherous Clément, are all essential in provoking the events of the narrative. And in La Bandera, as we have seen, the legionnaires’ rituals (tattooing, blood-​ oaths), the military spectacle, the friendships and loyalties that constitute the male group, and the North African landscape are an essential context for the jealous rivalries that lead to the fatalistic dénouement. Christensen (1987–​88: 16) argues that Le Grand Jeu privileges Pierre’s story, ‘because the entire film has been constructed to make the sufferings of the hero matter to us’. This reading appears to have bought into the ‘myth’, not of the legionnaire, but of the masochistic male (willing?) victim of female perfidy, another recurring trope of classic French cinema, as seen, for example, in Pépé le Moko (Duvivier, 1937), Gueule d’amour and Le Jour se lève/​Daybreak (Carné, 1939). This reading is also seen in Christensen’s argument (1987–​88: 11) that Pierre’s violent attack on Clément is the act of ‘a man who is in love with a woman’, an interpretation that too easily

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Figure 1.1  Poster for La Bandera: Duvivier and Spaak share the screenwriting credit.

dismisses the sado-​masochistic nature of Pierre’s relationship with Irma, a woman he ‘loves’ only because of her resemblance to another. However, Spaak’s screenplay allows the audience a more critical purchase on Pierre’s story, one that has been explored by feminist critics such as Burch, Sellier

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and Ginette Vincendeau. They suggest that once Blanche enters the film she becomes the centre of interest, and that the most important relationship in the film is in fact between her and Pierre (Vincendeau 2010b:  10). As reader of the cards and a mother-​figure to Pierre, Blanche functions as the voice of fate and of the film; as Burch and Sellier (2014: 56–​7) argue, this is also due to the special status of Rosay, the director’s wife, in relation to the screenplay. She is both a part of the fiction and a commentator on it, diagnosing Pierre’s cafard, induced by his desire for Florence, as ‘all in his head’. Though we see only glimpses of her story as the wife of the lecherous alcoholic Clément, confidante and perhaps lover of Nicolas and mentor to Irma, there are numerous moments when we share Blanche’s perspective of the world and the men that surround her, notably just after the death of Clément, which she helps to cover up as an accident, telling the policeman who consoles her ‘Est-​ce qu’on sait pourquoi on pleure?’ (‘Do we even know why we cry?’). The choice to end the film not on the departing legionnaires but on a despairing Blanche further reinforces the centrality of her character, tying the viewer into her point of view, one that looks outwards, in contrast to that of the self-​centred, sado-​masochistic Pierre.

Mythical mothers and fathers This maternal character, once again embodied by Rosay, would be developed and transformed in Spaak and Feyder’s next collaboration, Pension Mimosas, a family melodrama in which the masochistic, devouring mother figure is the central figure and the tragedy is provoked by the weakness of the ‘son’, in thrall to gambling and a gold-​digging girlfriend.

Pension Mimosas Louise Noblet (Rosay) runs a guest house in Nice while her husband, Gaston (André Alerme), is employed at the casino. Their guests are gamblers, generally down on their luck and behind with the rent as, when they win, they move to the more luxurious Palace Hotel. The Noblets take in their young godson, Pierre Brabant (Bernard Optal), while his father is in prison. On his release, Pierre’s father comes to claim his son, to Louise’s despair. Years later, we learn that the now adult Pierre (Paul Bernard) has been keeping in touch with Louise, frequently asking her for money. She guesses he is in trouble and goes to Paris to find him. He agrees to come and live with the Noblets, but

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only if he can bring his fiancée, Nelly (Lise Delamare). Tensions soon arise between Nelly and Louise, rivals for Pierre’s attention. Nelly is increasingly bored and when her former gangster boyfriend turns up, she agrees to leave with him. Pierre, who has been making good with a job as a car salesman, embezzles money to persuade Nelly to stay. Louise turns to gambling to save him, and wins, but she is too late; he has committed suicide. As he is dying, he mistakes her for Nelly and asks her to kiss him.

Like Pierre Martel in Le Grand Jeu, Pierre Brabant ruins himself, stealing and losing everything at the casino in an attempt to satisfy his mistress. But in Pension Mimosas, it is the older woman who is blinded by her masochistic desire as to the true nature of her love-​object. The darker side of Louise’s possessive love for her godson is revealed by her rivalry with Nelly. It is noteworthy that in both Pension Mimosas and Le Grand Jeu, Rosay’s character eventually gives up a crucial part of her self-​control; in Le Grand Jeu, although Blanche never drinks alcohol, she is completely drunk when she reads the cards for Pierre a second time and foresees his death, while in Pension Mimosas, Louise, who never gambles, risks all at roulette in order to save her godson from ruin. However, her win comes too late to save his life. The end of the film, when the dying Pierre calls out for Nelly, who has left him, and Louise kisses him instead, gives full expression to the incestuous subtext, as well as to Louise’s self-​abnegation. As Vincendeau (1989) and Burch and Sellier (2014:  18–​19) point out, 1930s French cinematic incest is more frequently of the father–​daughter variety (as seen in La Petite Lise), so Pension Mimosas may appear unusual in its portrayal of the devouring mother figure as the bearer of this transgressive desire. It is also unusual in retaining some sympathy for this figure, who is a tragic, Phèdre-​like character, even if Pierre lacks the heroic qualities of Hippolyte. However, the stifling maternal figure whose love hampers her ‘son’ in his goal to achieve adult masculinity is a recurring figure in Spaak’s screenplays, from comedies to melodramas, in which the underlying misogyny of this maternal representation is frequently less nuanced. In L’Abbé Constantin, the monstrous Comtesse de Laverdens (Rosay, once again) tries to secure the future of her feckless playboy son, Paul (Claude Dauphin), by setting him up with Bettina, an American heiress (Josseline Gaël) who has just bought the local château that she covets. However, her meddling leads Paul towards the heiress’s married sister, Mme Scott (Betty Stockfield), while Bettina becomes enamoured of the Abbé’s godson, Jean (Jean Martinelli), an impoverished soldier. This being a comedy, all works out well and, at

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Bettina and Jean’s wedding, the very understanding Mr Scott, newly arrived from America, offers Paul a sinecure in one of his companies, at his wife’s request. This is not quite what his snobbish mother had in mind when she pictured herself as châtelaine, but is certainly more than the rather useless young man deserves. In Les Bas-​Fonds, the flophouse landlady, Vassilyssa (Suzy Prim), takes on this role, enslaving her younger sister Natasha (Junie Astor) and doing all she can to prevent her from leaving with Pépel (Gabin). Such figures persist into the post-​war years too. In La Revanche de Roger la Honte, the suffocating maternal ambition of Mme de Terrenoire (Maria Casarès) and her desperation to protect her son’s name lead her to cover up the conspiracy that saw her former lover, Roger Laroque (Lucien Coëdel), wrongly convicted of murder. This exposes her to blackmail and prevents her son, Raymond (Jean Desailly), from marrying the woman he loves, Suzanne Laroque (Simone Valère), at least until the unmasking of the true murderer at the end of the film. Adorables créatures offers a different version of this ‘maternal’ figure in its merciless depiction of Denise (Edwige Feuillère), a society philanthropist, who constantly reminds her secretary, Alice (Renée Faure), a former thief she has ‘rescued’ and taken under her protection, of her debt. Denise is repaid when Alice shows her employer’s passport to her younger lover, André (Daniel Gélin), revealing the true age difference between them. In Avant le déluge, in which a group of teenagers are on trial for murder after a robbery goes wrong, leading to the death of a night watchman and one of their group, maternal monstrosity takes the form of self-​satisfied martyrdom. Jean Arnaud (Jacques Chabassol), the young man who pulls the trigger, fatally wounding the night watchman, is burdened with a suffocating mother (Line Noro, another actor who specialised in such roles), presented in the film as the root of her son’s timidity, his homosexuality, and his moral and physical cowardice. Her disapproval of their neighbour Josette (Delia Scala), who exhibits a ‘healthy’ (hetero)sexuality (from which Jean flees), shows how this mother’s ‘love’ traps her son in an arrested development where his relationships with her and his friends are characterised by jealousy and hysteria. Avant le déluge lays the blame for the youngsters’ predicament firmly on an older generation that has warped or neglected them, but the women bear the brunt of this. Out of all the blameworthy parents, Mme Arnaud and Mme Boussard (Isa Miranda), the adulterous wife of a war profiteer who would sacrifice her son for a chance at ‘happiness’, are the ones who are portrayed without mercy. Such screenplays are representative, rather than exceptional, in classic French cinema, where, as Burch and Sellier (2014) note, the older woman –​ mother, sister or frustrated lover  –​is frequently dealt a very poor hand. Father figures tend to be treated with more generosity; in La Petite Lise and Le Ciel est à vous, their sacrifices turn them into heroes.25 In La Petite Lise,

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Figure 1.2  Poster for Le Ciel est à vous: screenwriting credits are split between Albert Valentin (scénario) and Charles Spaak (adaptation and dialogue).

Berthier’s actions evoke what Burch and Sellier (2014: 81) describe as ‘the incestuous pathos of the sacrificial father’. In Le Ciel est à vous, meanwhile, Pierre (Charles Vanel) stands aside in favour of his wife, Thérèse (Madeleine Renaud), who proves to be a more talented aviator, supporting her from the ground instead with his mechanical expertise as he had done for the flying ace Georges Guynemer during the First World War. However, not all fathers are so useful or effective. In Pension Mimosas, the kindly, self-​important

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Gaston Noblet is an ineffectual father figure and asexual husband, a role the actor reprised the following year in period costume in La Kermesse héroïque, again with Rosay as his wife. In this comedy, he finds himself playing dead while she is wooed by the handsome Duke d’Olivares (Jean Murat), head of the visiting delegation of the occupying Spanish army. In L’Abbé Constantin, it is the Abbé (Léon Bélières) who takes on the paternal role, as kindly priest bestowing treats on the local children, as benevolent godfather to Jean, the impoverished young officer, and as bemused observer of the Comtesse de Laverdens’s shenanigans. In the same genre, La Maison des sept jeunes filles elicits our sympathy for the gentle father. Monsieur Adelin (André Brunot), widower and headmaster of a school for girls, is no match for his own daughters. They run rings round both him and his creditor, Rorive (Jean Tissier), a particularly ambivalent embodiment of masculinity (Burch and Sellier 2014: 167), who is unable to decide which of the seven daughters he wishes to marry. More tragically, in Avant le déluge, the kindly Monsieur Noblet (Bernard Blier), is too distracted by his humanitarian activism to notice the trouble his daughter (Marina Vlady) is in.

Undoing myths: Le Ciel est à vous By focusing on these recurring maternal and paternal figures, we have shown how Spaak’s screenplays were frequently representative of dominant themes, featuring and developing characters and situations that took on the status of myth in French cinema. As we saw in the outline of Spaak’s method cited above (Périer 1991: 27), the construction of characters and their environment was central to his art. However, as our discussion of La Petite Lise, Daïnah la métisse and Le Grand Jeu has shown, a number of his screenplays can be seen as complicating or critiquing these archetypes or myths, creating space for readings that challenge the dominant one. One notable example is what would turn out to be the final film made from a Spaak/​Grémillon screenplay, Le Ciel est à vous.

Le Ciel est à vous The Gauthier family, Thérèse (Madeleine Renaud), Pierre (Charles Vanel), their children Jacqueline (Anne-​Marie Labaye) and Claude (Michel François) and Thérèse’s mother, Mme Brissard (Raymonde Vernay), are moving house. The land on which their garage and home stands is being used to create an airfield. They take over the Central

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Garage, in the town square. Thérèse is offered a job in Limoges by a customer; she accepts in order to put money aside for the children. While she is away, Pierre takes up his old passion of flying (he was the mechanic for the First World War flying ace, Georges Guynemer). She returns to find chaos in the house and Pierre out flying. He promises to give it up if she returns home. She comes back to help run the garage. In turn, Thérèse becomes enamoured of flying. The couple buy a second-​hand plane. She decides to go for the female distance record. They sacrifice everything for this, including Jacqueline’s piano (she is a very talented pianist). Thérèse takes off in their plane with no radio. There is no word; everyone thinks she is lost. A desperate Pierre returns home and is vilified by his mother-​in-​law and the town ‘notables’. Only Jacqueline’s piano teacher, Monsieur Larchet (Jean Debucourt), who understands the need to follow a passion, stands up for him. Word comes through that Thérèse has been successful. The whole town celebrates her return. One of the most remarkable films of the Occupation, this proto-​feminist narrative features a mother who is able to achieve her dreams outside of her domestic family duties, becoming a national aviation heroine in the process. Thérèse Gauthier is certainly a breath of fresh air compared to the suffocating, masochistic mother figures described above. A loving wife and mother, she nonetheless seeks fulfilment outside her home, first by managing an automobile business for an entrepreneur in Limoges, which takes her away from her family home in Villeneuve, and then as a pioneering aviatrix. The film presents us with three generations of women in this family: Thérèse; her mother, Mme Brissard, the perfect example of a woman who has sacrificed everything in the service of patriarchal values who spends her life complaining, no doubt as a result of frustrated desires; and her daughter, Jacqueline, whose musical talent and ambitions mirror her mother’s in the domain of aviation. However, Thérèse also has the potential to suffocate her offspring. Instead of encouraging Jacqueline to pursue her dreams, she refuses to allow her to try out for the Conservatoire, preferring a safe career for her as a pharmacist. She does not think twice about selling Jacqueline’s piano to fund her attempt at the female flight distance record. As Burch and Sellier (2014:  154) argue, Le Ciel est à vous is remarkable because it does not shy away from the compromises, challenges and dilemmas that face a family who reject the traditional gendered division of labour. By focusing on those on the ground rather than any heroics in the air, the screenplay highlights practical concerns and safety anxieties,

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rather than exalting the jouissance that flying offers Thérèse even more than Pierre. When Thérèse returns from Limoges unannounced to her family, she discovers a house in chaos, a son who has injured himself sliding down the bannisters, a mother who does nothing but complain and a husband who is taking tourists up on flights rather than looking after the family and the business. As she later tells the colonial officer who receives her in the desert outpost following her successful record attempt, ‘Dès que je suis plus là, c’est la pagaille’ (‘As soon as I’m not there, it’s a mess’). Burch and Sellier (2014: 214) point out that Thérèse’s first contact with flying is due to a double ‘feminine’ impulse: jealousy (Pierre has previously fixed up the plane of a very attractive female flying ace) and suspicion (when he is late home, in fact as a result of a breakdown he is dealing with, she imagines he has broken his promise and gone flying). However, it is the questioning of her courage that finally persuades her into the plane. Pierre’s ‘typically’ masculine reaction when he discovers that she has taken to the sky is not all that different to the reproaches Thérèse made to him on her return from Limoges: Extract 1 (Le Ciel est à vous): PIERRE:  S’il arrive un malheur? Elle a des enfants … et quand on a des enfants … on ne peut pas … comme ça … pour rien … pour s’amuser. MECHANIC:  Y a pas de danger. PIERRE:  Pas de danger? Une femme comme elle, ça ne se remplace pas. Et  vous me voyez, tout seul, avec les enfants? (Spaak and Valentin 1991: 144–​5)26 It is this repetition of the anxiety of the one left on the ground that shows up the attitudes to gender roles for what they are, and this is intensified when Thérèse takes on the role of pilot. The compromises are not solely hers, but also those of her family, her husband and her children; the screenplay shows that they would be seen as completely normal if it was the man flying the plane. Thérèse’s response to her mother’s attempts to shame her for neglecting her family is a matter-​of-​fact refusal to feel guilty. Her excitement and ambition continue to astound Pierre, for whom these are masculine qualities. When she tells him she is considering attempting the record, his response reveals the division between ‘acceptable’ feminine and masculine activities, but also presents a new ‘model’ of a heterosexual partnership based on camaraderie, friendship and mutual trust as well as ‘love’: Extract 2 (Le Ciel est à vous): PIERRE:  Tu pensais à ça en faisant ta lessive … THÉRÉSE:  Est-​ce que c’est mal? […]

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PIERRE: 

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Non, mais je crois rêver. […] Pendant la guerre […] avec Guynemer, j’avais fait des projets […] Je me souviens comment je réparais son zingue, comment on cherchait ensemble le moyen de faire mieux … comme je le voyais partir sur la machine où tout dépendait de mon boulot … Alors, Thérèse, l’idée qu’il y aurait entre nous, en plus de notre amour, une amitié comme ça … Je ne peux pas t’expliquer […] Je t’aime encore plus que le jour où Claude est né. (Spaak and Valentin 1991: 154–​5)27

Thérèse’s ‘Est-​ce que c’est mal?’ here is a repetition of the question asked by Jacqueline of her music teacher Monsieur Larchet, when she asks to be allowed to play sometimes (her mother has banned the piano so she can concentrate on her studies). The parallel passions of mother and daughter lend a further depth to the screenplay, which both celebrates and questions their heroic ideals. Le Ciel est à vous, then, overturns myths of the classic French cinema, including that of the aviator as popular hero, the ‘modern knight’ and ‘romantic adventurer’ identified by Crisp (2002: xxi) as a key recurring cinematic figure, by casting a woman in this role. In doing so, it also sets itself against the Pétainist ideals of motherhood and family by celebrating the courage of the Gauthiers, who dare to risk their happiness (marriage, small business, two children, one boy and one girl) for ‘fun’, who refuse to ‘rester tranquille’ (live quietly) with their ‘bonheur simple’ (simple happiness), looking instead for something else ‘pour s’exalter ensemble’ (to get carried away together), as Larchet puts it, defending Pierre against the accusations of his mother-​in-​law. Mme Brissard and her small-​ minded friends (one of the most vocal is actually called Petit) fully espouse the Vichyite doctrine on family and marriage, as can be seen at the meeting of the town council following the death (in a plane crash) of Dr Maulette (Léonce Corne), leader of the council, president of the flying club and supporter of the Gauthiers. Following a tribute to Maulette’s generosity of spirit, the councillors immediately go against his wish to help finance the aviation venture, declaring that ‘la place des femmes est au foyer. Il y a de mauvaises exemples qu’il ne faut pas donner, au lieu d’encourager des extravagances, notre devoir est plutôt de les empêcher’ (Women’s place is in the home. They should not be setting bad examples; rather than encouraging such extravagances, our duty is to prevent them). The satirical presentation of such pronouncements, set against declarations such as Larchet’s encouragement of Jacqueline –​‘Il faut des petites filles comme toi en province, Jacqueline. Pour que la vie continue dans ce qu’elle a de mieux’ (France needs little provincial girls like you, Jacqueline, so the best kind of life can continue) –​are all the more extraordinary given that the film was subject to Vichy and Occupation censorship. A reading of

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the screenplay shows that other lines were cut, notably Pierre’s patriotic declaration during his speech welcoming and congratulating Thérèse:  ‘Vous, Madame, vous avez gagné dans un appareil arrangé avec de la vieille ferraille … de la ficelle … […] Et bien, pour concevoir un avion pareil, pour monter dedans, il faut être Français!’ (Spaak and Valentin 1991: 200).28 In part because of his Belgian nationality, but also because he never took up the Communist cause, Spaak has on occasion been described as an apolitical author. His stance on working for La Continental during the Occupation could be said to back this up; however the character development and the dialogue of Le Ciel est à vous –​including these explicitly patriotic lines that verge on pro-​French propaganda –​suggest otherwise.29 Spaak’s ability to both develop and challenge cultural and national myths in his screenplays is what makes him such a central figure in the development of French cinema. This continued after the war, as Sylvie Lindeperg (2014: 221) points out in her discussion of Jéricho (Calef, 1946), a film that offers a fictionalised account of the RAF raid on Amiens prison. She singles out the film among those that dealt with the recent Occupation because of how it combines the emerging myth of a resistant France with the depiction of an attentiste population in a defeated country. This duality took on the troubling aspect of post-​war misogyny in Panique, in which Viviane Romance and Paul Bernard up the ante on their pre-​war garce and mauvais garçon roles. Panique is another of Spaak’s emblematic screenplays, this time of the virulent post-​war attack on femininity that reflected male anxieties about female betrayal (Leahy 2007a). How can we explain, then, this apparent reversal, from the ‘feminist’ Le Ciel est à vous? Is Spaak correct in his self-​assessment, in which he declares himself to be a ‘chameleon screenwriter, taking on the hue of the directors he works with, without doctrine, lacking the courage to take the road he guesses to be right all the way to the end’ (cited in Mérigeau 1994: 337)? To some extent, this is true, and is arguably why he was able to serve French cinema in the way that he did, tailoring his work to the strengths (and occasionally the weaknesses) of the particular ‘marriage’ he was engaged in at the time, of which there were many. But Panique, in which the cowardly, grasping opportunistic actions of Alice (Romance) and Alfred (Bernard) lead to the lynching of the elderly Jew, Monsieur Hire (Michel Simon), reflects its time in more than one way, just like Jéricho and Le Ciel est à vous. It surely made very uncomfortable viewing for a French population that was not without responsibility in the rounding up and mass deportation of Jews. As Crisp puts it (2015: 140), ‘[o]‌nly a Belgian scriptwriter and a French director who had been absent from France during those recent events could have dared to make a film so powerfully (if implicitly) critical of the French people’s role in them’.

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Spaak’s œuvre (of which we have only been able to consider a small sample here), then, is characterised by the mauvais esprit he identified as the peculiar strength of the French screenwriter. We have deliberately avoided focusing in depth on well-​known films such as La Grande Illusion and La Belle Equipe, as they have been discussed elsewhere; our aim here has been to shed light on some lesser known films, especially for English-​ speaking readers. One area that we would like to signal for further research into Spaak’s contribution to French cinema is the series of post-​war films he wrote with Cayatte. The legal dramas of these two lawyer-​cineastes, denunciations of the death penalty (Nous sommes tous des assassins), the youth justice system (Avant le déluge) and the judicial process (Justice est faite; Le Glaive et la balance) are also condemnations of a society that seeks to attribute guilt to individuals while failing to face up to any collective responsibility. In this, these screenplays again take an unflinching look at their time, highlighting, as Sylvie Lindeperg (2014: 358) suggests, continuities of violence from the Occupation, Liberation and épuration, to the Cold War. Once again, Spaak’s mauvais esprit is at work, challenging temporal boundaries and post-​war repressions by making explicit connections between Occupation and post-​war France. It is this constant desire to challenge the status quo by simultaneously establishing and questioning national myths that makes Spaak both a characteristic and exceptional screenwriter of the classic period. We will continue to explore this mauvais esprit in our next chapter on Jacques Prévert.

Films mentioned written in whole or in part by Spaak in date order Les Nouveaux Messieurs/​The Temporary Gentlemen (Feyder, 1929; scr. Feyder and Spaak; adapted from de Croisset and de Flers) La Petite Lise/​Little Lise (Grémillon, 1930; scr. Spaak) Daïnah la métisse (Grémillon, 1932; scr. Grémillon and Spaak; adapted from Pierre Daye) Ce cochon de Morin (Lacombe, 1932; scr. Dianville and Spaak; adapted from Maupassant) L’Abbé Constantin (Paulin, 1933; scr. Spaak; adapted from Halévy [novel] and Crémieux and Decourcelle [play]) Le Grand Jeu/​The Great Game (Feyder, 1934; scr. Feyder and Spaak) La Maison dans la dune/​The House on the Dune (Billon, 1934; scr. Spaak; adapted from Maxence van der Meersch) Pension Mimosas (Feyder, 1935; scr. Feyder and Spaak; dial. Spaak) Aux portes de Paris (Baroncelli and Barrois, 1935; scr. and dial. Chabrié and Spaak [uncredited]; adapted from Dupuy-​Mazuel)

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La Bandera/​ Escape from Yesterday (Duvivier, 1935; scr. Duvivier and Spaak; adapted from Mac Orlan) La Kermesse héroïque (Feyder, 1935; scr. Spaak; dial. Bernard Zimmer) La Belle Equipe/​They were Five (Duvivier, 1936; scr. Duvivier and Spaak) Les Bas-​Fonds/​The Lower Depths (Renoir, 1936; scr. J. Companéez, Renoir, Spaak and Zamyatin; dial. Renoir and Spaak; adapted from Gorky) La Grande Illusion/​The Great Illusion (Renoir, 1937; scr. and dial. Renoir and  Spaak) Gueule d’amour/​Lady Killer (Grémillon, 1937; scr. and dial. Spaak; adapted from Beucler) Le Récif de corail/​Coral Reefs (Gleize, 1939; scr. and dial. Spaak; adapted from Jean Martet) La Fin du jour/​The End of the Day (Duvivier, 1939; scr. Duvivier and Spaak) La Loi du nord/​The Law of the North (Feyder, 1939; scr. Arnoux and Feyder [Spaak uncredited]; dial. Arnoux; adapted from Constantin-​Weyer) Remorques/​Stormy Waters (Grémillon, 1941; scr. Prévert and Cayatte [uncredited: Spaak, Vercel and Combot]; dial. Prévert; adapted from Roger Vercel) La Maison des sept jeunes filles (Valentin, 1942; scr. Blondeau and Viot; dial. Spaak; adapted from Simenon) Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo:  Première Époque (Vernay, 1943; scr. Spaak; adapted from Alexandre Dumas [père]) Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo: Deuxième Époque: Le Châtiment/​Part 2: Retribution (Vernay, 1943; scr. Spaak; adapted from Alexandre Dumas [père]) Le Ciel est à vous/​The Woman who Dared (Grémillon, 1943; scr. Grémillon, Spaak and Valentin; dial. Spaak) Jéricho/​Behind These Walls (Calef, 1946; scr. Calef, Heymann and Spaak) Panique (Duvivier, 1945; scr. and dial. Duvivier and Spaak; adapted from Simenon) La Revanche de Roger la Honte/​The Revenge of Roger (Cayatte, 1946; scr. Cayatte; dial. Spaak; adapted from Jules Mary) Une belle garce (Daroy, 1947; scr. Spaak; adapted from Charles-​Henry Hirsch) D’Homme à Hommes/​Man to Men (Christian-​Jaque, 1948; scr. Christian-​Jaque and Spaak; dial. Spaak) Justice est faite/​Justice is Done (Cayatte, 1950; scr. Cayatte and Spaak; dial. Spaak) Nous sommes tous des assassins/​Are We All Murderers? (Cayatte, 1952; scr. Cayatte and Spaak; dial. Spaak) Adorables créatures/​Adorable Creatures (Christian-​ Jaque, 1952; scr. Jacques Companéez and Spaak; dial. Spaak [Michel Audiard uncredited]) Thérèse Raquin (Carné, 1952; scr. Carne and Spaak; dial. Spaak; adapted from Zola) Avant le déluge/​Before the Deluge (Cayatte, 1954; scr. Cayatte and Spaak) La Française et l’amour: Le Divorce/​Love and the Frenchwoman: Divorce (segment) (Christian-​Jaque, 1960; scr. and dial. Spaak) Le Glaive et la balance/​The Sword and the Balance/​Two are Guilty (Cayatte, 1963; scr. Cayatte, adapt. Spaak; dial. Jeanson) Germinal (Yves Allégret, 1963; scr. and dial. Spaak; adapted from Zola)

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Other films mentioned

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Carmen (Feyder, 1926; scr. Feyder; adapted from Mérimée) Pépé le Moko (Duvivier, 1937; scr. Duvivier and Henri La Barthe; adapt. Constant; dial. Jeanson; adapted from Henri La Barthe, aka Ashelbé) Le Jour se lève/​Daybreak (Carné, 1939; scr. Prévert and Viot; dial. Prévert)

Notes 1 The IMDb lists ninety-​nine feature films in which Spaak participated in some way as writer (including adaptation, dialogue writing, scriptwriter and the general term ‘writer’). The Ciné-​ressources site of the Cinémathèque française credits him with sixty-​two feature films as scriptwriter (scénariste), thirty-​three as adaptor (adaptateur) and eighty-​one as dialogue writer (dialoguiste), with some considerable overlap between these. In total, he is credited with working on 101 films. He also worked on many more screenplays that were not filmed, including several with Jean Grémillon (Spaak 1977: 65–​72). 2 Le Grand Jeu was remade in 1954 by Robert Siodmak, with Gina Lollobrigida and Jean-​Claude Pascal, and Arletty in the role of Blanche. Spaak is credited as adaptor of the original story he co-​wrote with Feyder. 3 See also Van Nypelseer (1991: 85), who cites an unpublished text by Spaak, ‘Les Confrères scénaristes’, where he identifies an ‘école française originale … du mauvais esprit’ (the French School of mauvais esprit). 4 Bost (c. 1950a: 8) developed Spaak’s metaphor in a consideration of cinema as a métier. 5 Spaak (1949: 108–​9) suggests that La Grande Illusion began with the prisoners’ memoirs that he and Renoir had gathered together, while La Fin du jour began as he drove through the village of Pont-​aux-​Dames, site of the actors’ retirement home set up by Constant Coquelin. 6 Some exceptions include Lagny et al. (1986); Andrew (1995); Billard (1995); Crisp (1997); Vincendeau (2000); Hayward (2005); Burch and Sellier (2014). 7 Of course, some of Renoir’s films, such as La Vie est à nous and La Marseillaise, which were funded, or intended to be funded, by the Communist Party and its members, can be regarded as belonging to a different production system. 8 Maurice Gleize’s 1938 film was considered lost until a copy was found by Serge Bromberg in a Serbian film archive (Carrière and Broussard 2009). 9 Studies focused on French genres, such as Susan Hayward’s work on costume drama (2010), Thomas Pillard’s analysis of film noir (2014b) and Sébastien Layerle and Raphaëlle Moine’s edited collection on the musical film (2014), are evidence of the fruitfulness of this approach. 10 See Moine (2005), Sorlin (2005) and Le Gras and Chedaleux (2012) for more on French generic specificities. 11 Crisp is drawing in particular on Raymond Barkan here, but he also cites the critics Claude Mauriac and Louis Chauvet, as well as Georges Altman, André Boll, Pierre Duvillars and André Malraux.

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12 Companéez clocked up over eighty credits, in spite of his premature death aged fifty in 1956. He was renowned as a brilliant inventor of screenplay ideas and as an ‘artisan idéal’ who was frequently called upon to help out colleagues in need of inspiration (SACD 1994: 106). 13 See Brigitte Brunet (2004) on boulevard theatre, and especially its evolution away from popular origins towards bourgeois concerns. 14 Peter Christensen (1987–​88:  13) highlights the influence of Balzac on Poetic Realism, via writers such as Mac Orlan and screenwriters such as Spaak, Jeanson, Marcel Aymé and Prévert. 15 Spaak contributed to over one-​third of Grémillon’s feature-​length sound films, though his screenplay for Remorques (1941) was almost entirely rewritten by Cayatte and Prévert. Berthomé’s (1997) account of the ‘tormented’ genesis of this film examines possible reasons for Spaak’s withdrawal. In addition, the two men worked on several screenplays that were never filmed including Les Baladins/​Commedia dell’arte, the story of a troupe of actors set during the massacre of Saint-​Bartholomew’s eve and Le Massacre des innocents/​Le Soleil se lévera demain, the story of a metalworker (Gérard Philipe) who spends the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War blowing up bridges which he then rebuilds following the Liberation of France (Spaak 1977: 66–​7; Weber 1997). 16 As we shall see in Chapter 2, Natan regularly exercised this kind of censorship on films of which he disapproved. 17 This representation of an elderly male Jewish character as vicious and exploitative was, perhaps, one reason the film was so disliked by Natan, a Romanian Jew. Anti-​ Semitic representations are common in 1930s French cinema, targeting especially male Jews, but also characters whose Jewishness is ambiguously signaled. See Sorlin (1981) and Garçon (1984). 18 Spaak adapted the screenplay from a novella by Pierre Daye, a Belgian writer and journalist who wrote for the collaborationist press during the Second World War and was instrumental in aiding Nazi war criminals to escape to Argentina after the war. We have not been able to access the source text, but it is likely that the film attenuates its racism. 19 Slavin (2001: 169) identifies le cafard (homesickness) as a staple of the French colonial film, eliciting audience sympathy with those affected and conveniently excusing excessive behaviour. 20 See Nevin (2019) on sound in Le Grand Jeu. Marcy was an actor and singer who had dubbed Greta Garbo for the French releases of several films. At this time, she was married to Spaak but she later married Henri Jeanson. René Wheeler humorously recounts how the two men played out their rivalry in public using their newspaper columns and magazines as mouthpieces (Wheeler 1994: 250). 21 Both films feature homosexual legionnaires –​openly so in La Bandera –​ any more general homoeroticism is disavowed by excessive whoring for the many and by a specific woman for the protagonist.

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22 According to Lagny et al. (1986: 140), the character is based on an amalgamation of Franco and José Millán-​Astray, founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion (the Tercio) and a key figure during the Rif War. 23 Slavin (2001: 165–​6) points out the ‘inverted history’ of La Bandera, in which the colonial invader is seen as the rightful defender while the indigenous people, referred to invariably as salopards (bastards), attempting to reclaim their land are seen as the aggressors. 24 Hollywood also produced exceptions to this, of course, notably Morocco (von Sternberg, 1930), which dwells not so much on milieu but on the ambiguous attraction between Amy Jolly (Marlene Dietrich) and Tom Brown (Gary Cooper). The masochism of this film, analysed by Gaylyn Studlar (1988), also makes it an interesting point of comparison for Le Grand Jeu, whose narrative logic also reposes on the masochistic drives of both Pierre and Irma, as Christensen points out (1987–​88: 10–​11). 25 Another example of this paternalistic noble self-​sacrifice can be seen in the character of de Boeldieu in La Grande Illusion. 26 PIERRE:  What if something happens? She’s got children and when you’ve got children, you don’t … like that … for fun. /​MECHANIC: There’s no danger … /​ PIERRE: No danger? A woman like that can’t just be replaced you know. And what about me, can you see me on my own with the children? 27 PIERRE: You were thinking about that while doing the washing? /​THéRèSE: Is that bad? /​PIERRE: No, but I feel like I’m dreaming […] During the war with Guynemer, we had plans. I remember repairing his plane, how we tried together to do better. And how he would set off on this machine, where everything depended on my work … So, Thérèse, the idea that between us, there could be –​as well as our love –​a friendship like that … I can’t explain it. I love you more than the day Claude was born. 28 But you, you succeeded in a machine built out of any old iron […] held together with string […] Well, even to think of a plane like that let alone fly in it, you’d have to be French! 29 Spaak wrote four screenplays that were filmed by the German-​owned Continental studios, including for the first and last films they produced, L’Assassinat du Père Noël and Les Caves du Majestic. He completed the screenplay for the latter while imprisoned in Fresnes by the Nazis, who wanted information about the resistance activities of his younger brother, Claude, and especially Claude’s wife Suzanne, a leading member of the Red Orchestra network which helped Jewish children to safety. Suzanne was arrested and imprisoned around the same time as Charles; she was executed on 12 August 1944. Spaak’s pregnant partner, Alice Périer, was also imprisoned at the same time; Spaak agreed to complete work on Les Caves du Majestic in exchange for her transfer to a Red Cross centre. While in prison, he also wrote the screenplay for Le Collier de la reine (L’Herbier, 1946). See Leteux (2017:  332–​3) on Spaak’s imprisonment, and generally on the dilemmas film personnel faced in relation to Continental.

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Jacques Prévert: from reluctant author to screenwriter as myth

Jacques Prévert (1900–​ 77) is perhaps the best known of all French screenwriters. Poet, songwriter, surrealist, creator of collages and animator of the Groupe Octobre, the best-​known agit-​prop theatre troupe of the 1930s, this anti-​conformist figure was also the inventor of many of the most memorable characters and lines of 1930s and 1940s French cinema. Compared with some of the other writers featured in this volume, such as Charles Spaak, Henri Jeanson and Michel Audiard, Prévert is relatively well known outside of the French-​speaking world, thanks largely to his songs, but also the number of his films that feature regularly in critics’ lists of all-​time ‘greats’; ‘classics’ of the ‘golden age’ of French cinema, such as Le Crime de Monsieur Lange/​The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Renoir, 1936), Le Quai des brumes/​Port of Shadows (Carné, 1938), Le Jour se lève/​Daybreak (Carné, 1939), Remorques/​Stormy Waters (Grémillon, 1941) and, most especially, Les Enfants du paradis/​ Children of Paradise (Carné, 1945). However, Prévert also has a unique status within French popular culture. Unlike many of his contemporary screenwriters, he is a celebrity who continues to attract interest forty years after his death with a legacy that extends well beyond cinema. His poems are taught in schools, some of which are named after him, and a heritage industry surrounds the memory of the man and his work:  innumerable biographies, re-​editions of his poetry and songs, and homages continue to appear, often clustered around major anniversaries.1 Prévert’s is a contested memory, as shown by the polemic occasioned by the objection of his granddaughter and sole heir, Eugénie Bachelot-​Prévert, to a statue of her grandfather and Alexandre Trauner erected by the town hall of Omonville in 2016; she claimed it offered a false representation of these dynamic and combative figures as ‘des petits vieux’ (little old men) and accused the commune of attempting to transform the area around their graves into a picnic site (Cresci 2016; Mendes 2016). The fait divers is indicative of the commodification of the poet and attempts to resist this, underlining the impossibility of retaining control over the memory of such

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a public figure, and, indeed, questioning the desirability of attempting to do so. Prévert’s public image arguably goes beyond what Michel Chion (2008:  69) has described as the ‘starification’ of certain screenwriters, such as Michel Audiard. It is based not just on prominent billing and an ability to sell movies, but also on an intertextual persona that encompasses a prolific and wide-​ranging artistic output, accounts of his personal life, and connections to places, cultural and political movements, and figures of the twentieth century: Surrealism, the Groupe Octobre and the Left, Poetic Realism, Miró, Picasso. If Audiard and Jeanson are screenwriting stars, Prévert has attained the status of myth. Roland Barthes (1957) has described the function of myth:  to render a constructed entity natural, thus emptying it of its political signification. The mythologising of such a deeply political figure as Prévert performs a function of recuperation into the mainstream that goes hand in hand with the commodification described above. The sale in 2010 of items from Bachelot-​Prévert’s private collection can be seen as evidence of this process. This auction surpassed all expectations, raising 2.3 million euros, over three times the estimate, including over 500,000 euros for the original manuscript draft screenplay of Le Quai des brumes (Leménager 2010).2 Many of the items for sale were acquired by public archives and museums, demonstrating that Prévert’s work is perceived to be part of the national heritage worthy of preservation, a status that he would have regarded with ambivalence, if not horror.3 Alongside public bodies such as the Cinémathèque française, the Archives du Film, the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits and the Bibliothèque nationale de France which hold some of Prévert’s work, the organisation Fatras was created by Bachelot-​Prévert in 1997 to curate her grandfather’s œuvre, archive and intellectual property. Fatras maintains a dedicated website and a physical base in the Montmartre flat where Jacques and Janine Prévert lived from 1955 to 1975.4 This balance between commodification, preservation and curation that is part of the myth-​making process is, of course, a fine one. In the case of Prévert, it has ensured that his contestatory positions have frequently been played down in favour of a consensual, hagiographic image, favouring the idealistic children’s poet over the left-​wing anarchist fond of provocation. However, even if the dominant mode is hagiographic, Prévert continues to arouse detractors too. For example, Michel Houellebecq looked forward to the twentieth anniversary of the poet’s death by publishing an essay entitled, with characteristically provocative vulgarity, ‘Jacques Prévert est un con’.5 Houellebecq (2005) takes issue with what he sees as a naively optimistic worldview  –​‘flat, superficial and false’  –​and with the ‘repugnant’ Poetic Realism of which Prévert is the ‘principal artisan’. But the picture that

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Houellebecq paints of Prévert is drawn from the same consensual and nostalgic image that feeds the hagiography. Danièle Gasiglia-​Laster (1994: 14) argues that this myth of a sentimental poet is a betrayal of Prévert’s œuvre, which is marked by a violence that does not spare those who profit by the exploitation of others. In spite of his pacifism, Prévert was not afraid to engage in fist fights in defence of friends or to stand up against racist or anti-​Semitic views. Even in middle age, he was capable of violent reaction when confronted with such views, reputedly stubbing out a cigarette on the arm of a woman who expressed doubts about the existence of Nazi concentration camps (Gasiglia-​Laster 1994: 228). As a child, Prévert experienced poverty, both as a witness on visits with his father, who worked temporarily for the Service des pauvres, and directly in his own home, where food was frequently scarce and accommodation cramped; the family had to move home many times owing to their straitened circumstances. Prévert was a serial skipper of school, and frequently declared that he studied humanities in the street, a harsh and occasionally violent education, which, in his teenage years, turned towards more delinquent activities (Courrière 2000: 66). All this no doubt contributed to the formation of his intransigent worldview and the ferocity of its expression (Witta-​Montrobert 1980: 111; Aurenche 1993: 78). This ferocious intransigence was intensified during his involvement with the Surrealist group from his mid-​twenties. The house in the rue du Chateau that Prévert shared with his first wife, Simone, and his friends Yves Tanguy and Marcel Duhamel and their partners became a kind of second home for the Surrealist group, alongside André Breton’s flat in Montmartre.6 Although Prévert did not publish any work during this period, Surrealism offered him an outlet for his anti-​clerical, anti-​bourgeois, anti-​capitalist and pacifist ideals, as well as allowing him to develop a kind of anti-​literary style rooted in grotesque images, absurd lists, word play and the hijacking of linguistic formulae to reveal their emptiness. A reasonably central figure in the Surrealist group for several years, Prévert broke away abruptly in 1930, contributing the article ‘La Mort d’un monsieur’ (Death of a gentleman) to the pamphlet ‘Un cadavre’ (A corpse), which attacked Breton for his unacceptably dictatorial attitude. Although the two men were later reconciled and remained friends until Breton’s death in 1961, Prévert’s attitude was indicative of his fiercely libertarian ideals. The clarity of Prévert’s worldview and the recognisable style with which he expressed it, not just in his screenplays but also in his theatre, poetry, songs and collages, is surely the key reason why, even though he never took on the role of director, he is regarded as a film auteur by commentators as diverse as Jean Aurenche (1993:  238) and François Truffaut, who, in spite of many reservations, declared Prévert to be ‘the only great French

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screenwriter’ (Courrière 2000: 539). Pierre Billard (1995: 101) lists the key elements of Prévert’s signature style, highlighting both stylistic and thematic coherence in his cinematic œuvre: ‘outsider characters who bring a strange atmosphere; verbal collisions revealing the emptiness of clichés; relentless mockery of the powerful; a focus on love and friendship; and a taste for animal metaphors’. Prévert is often identified as a dialogue writer above all, and his attention to the spoken word is certainly a key part of his screenwriting contribution. But as we can see from this list, his signature is also embedded in the architecture of the plot, in the way the characters look and how they behave towards each other, as well as in what they say. Jean-​Paul Török (1986: 56) reinforces this, highlighting the ‘for and against dialectic’ that structures Prévert’s films, but also the way in which this is tempered. For Török, Prévert’s principal innovation is the way in which he simultaneously constructs and undermines a Manichean world, frequently allowing the ‘bad guys’, the ‘persecutors’ of the innocent heroes and loving couples, to emerge as the most exciting characters, ‘to the point of making us believe that he secretly prefers them’. Jean-​Louis Barrault as Dromadaire, the misanthropic hunchback in Jenny (Carné, 1936), or William Kramps, the killer of butchers in Drôle de drame/​Bizarre, Bizarre (Carné, 1937); Jules Berry as Batala in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, Valentin in Le Jour se lève or the Devil in Les Visiteurs du soir/​The Devil’s Envoys (Carné, 1942); Marcel Herrand as the assassin-​poet Lacenaire in Les Enfants du paradis: Prévert’s villains are characterised by a seductive charisma that blurs these ‘for and against’ lines, inviting audiences to root for them at least a little bit. Given his upbringing and education, it is small wonder that so much of Prévert’s writing for film, theatre, songs and poetry adopts the point of view of the poor, the weak and the exploited. And if the Surrealist movement played a major role in shaping his artistic engagement in this respect, so did his youthful reading, in particular the novels of Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo.7 Yet he is an author who was not only initially reluctant to put pen to paper –​it was not until his late twenties that he began to write things down –​but who also hesitated to sign his name to his work.8 Gasiglia-​Laster notes this hesitation to accept the status, the condition of auteur/​author, which some have put down to a natural laziness (see Courrière 2000: 686), but which she attributes to a sense of solidarity: ‘Remaining anonymous, is to remain a man in the crowd, with the crowd’ (1994: 122). In this chapter, we explore the paradox of this author who rejected the term. We turn first to Prévert’s beginnings in cinema and the development of certain elements of his cinematic signature, as seen across a number of early collaborative partnerships. In the second part, we explore his most famous partnership –​ with the director Marcel Carné –​as an example of collaborative creativity. Finally, we examine Prévert’s screenwriting methods in more detail and, in

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particular, his privileging of the visual from the earliest stages of conception and his refusal to separate the different functions of writing; he was a writer of dialogue who rejected the idea of a dialoguiste. Prévert’s extensive output and the thematic and stylistic coherence across his œuvre are evidence of his authorial creativity, but examining his screenwriting in particular shows that this creativity was driven not only by individual inspiration but also by collaborative exchange.

Beginnings in cinema Prévert’s early experiences of screenwriting laid the foundations for his later, more famous work. His screenwriting career took off more or less simultaneously with his association with the Groupe Octobre. This left-​wing theatre group was born in April 1932, when Raymond Bussières and Lazare Fuchsmann of the Groupe Prémices came to Prévert in search of a more imaginative way to denounce press complicity in capitalist interests and the industries of war. Thanks to his association with the Surrealist group, Prévert had begun to acquire a reputation among left-​wing intellectuals for his way with words, even though his aversion to writing them down meant he had published only one poem, ‘Tentative de description d’un dîner de têtes à Paris, France’, in the review Commerces in the summer of 1931. Although this introductory meeting did not go well (Prévert had just discovered the suicide of his close friend, the actor and Surrealist Pierre Batcheff), the association would prove propitious for both actors and the writer. Their first collaboration, the spoken chorus Vive la presse, was performed on 25 April 1932 in front of a group of striking builders in the Paris suburbs. Over the next four years, Prévert would produce over forty poems, sketches and plays for the group (Prévert 2007). He clearly found inspiration through contact with these committed and talented individuals, as he had with the Surrealists, but the addition of regular public performances provided the necessary impetus to write.9 Dudley Andrew (1995: 78) describes the mutual benefit derived through this association of Prévert and the theatre group, an ‘intersection of improvisatory talent with the workers’ theatre movement’ that ‘gave Prévert an audience and, quickly, an unprecedented fame’. At the same time, Prévert’s screenwriting career began to develop, no doubt helped by his Groupe Octobre reputation and newfound productivity. An avid cinemagoer since childhood, he was naturally attracted to the medium in which his younger brother and several friends were already trying their hands. The Prévert brothers and Duhamel had experimented with filmmaking in 1928 with the documentary Paris-​Express, and in 1929 Jacques began ‘seriously’ working on his first full screenplay, Emile Emile, ou le

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trèfle à quatre feuilles, alongside his brother Pierre, Jacques Bernard Brunius and Batcheff, who was planning to direct and act in the film (P. Prévert 1965: 54).10 The script, submitted in 1930, was refused by the Pathé boss, Emile Natan, who considered the humour dangerously subversive and took the title as a personal insult (Tual 1987: 115; Courrière 2000: 169; 179–​ 80). Emile Emile, put on hold following this rejection, would be definitively abandoned in 1932 after Batcheff’s suicide. Meanwhile, Prévert continued to write for the cinema, producing or reworking scripts that Duhamel did his best to sell to producers (Duhamel 1972: 281–​2; Courrière 2000: 179–​80). In addition to Emile Emile, Heinrich cites a further two screenplays that were never filmed:  Le Guichet 14, written for Batcheff, and Attention au fakir!, that was to be directed by Pierre Prévert (Prévert 1995: 19). Indeed, like most of his contemporaries, Prévert would work on many screenplays throughout his career that, for various reasons including censorship, the war or personal circumstances, were never filmed (Aurouet 2003; Prévert 2017).11 It was in the early 1930s that Prévert’s screenplays began to appear regularly on the screen, even if they were not always acknowledged as his. His first, Baleydier (Mamy, 1932), a comedy starring Michel Simon, appears to have been lost, but his second effort, directed by his brother Pierre, was a chance to develop an original idea. L’Affaire est dans le sac/​It’s in the Bag came about thanks to their friendship with Charles David, Head of Studios at Pathé-​Natan, who, following the Hollywood B-​movie practice, offered them the opportunity to shoot a film on a set that was about to be demolished (Duhamel 1972: 319–​20; Gasiglia-​Laster 1994: 80).

L’Affaire est dans le sac American millionaire Hollister (Antony Gildès), the ‘blotting paper king’, has a daughter, Gloria (Lora Hays), whose hand is sought by a roomful of grotesque suitors, each more eccentric than the other. Gloria prefers the impecunious and rather insipid Jean-​Paul Dutilleul (Jean-​Paul Dreyfus/​Le Chanois). Meanwhile, on the other side of the square, a mad hatter, Benjamin Déboisé (Etienne Decroux), runs a hat shop with the help of his assistant, Clovis (Julien Carette), who systematically rips off his customers, including one in search of a ‘béret français’ (Brunius). Déboisé, Clovis and Jean-​Paul plan to kidnap the millionaire’s son so that Jean-​Paul can ingratiate himself by returning Gloria’s brother to the family home, while Déboisé can make off with the ransom. The millionaire is captured by mistake. Hollister, bored stupid in

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Screenwriters in French cinema his everyday life, is delighted by the kidnapping, especially when his guard –​Clovis –​proves far more entertaining than his servant. The end of the film sees Hollister find happiness with Clovis, while Déboisé disappears with the ransom in the style of a pantomime villain. The insipid Jean-​Paul marries Gloria, even though he was never actually seeking her hand (or her fortune). An epilogue shows Gloria and Jean-​ Paul, hardly an example of l’amour fou to begin with, living a life of privileged boredom, complete with footman, nurse and offspring: the couple utter platitudes to each other as they promenade around the square where they first met. Meanwhile, the customer in search of a beret, who has been locked up in the shop for several years, emerges, bearded like Rip Van Winkle but finally wearing his coveted headgear, shrugging and muttering ‘Un béret! J’avais demandé un béret. Rien qu’un tout petit béret de rien du tout …’ (A beret! I only asked for a beret. Just a little beret, nothing at all really …).

The film subverts one of the staple themes of French bourgeois theatre –​ the father’s dilemma when faced with a choice of suitors for his daughter. The suitors, whose eccentricities provide an ironic commentary on the bourgeois, capitalist institution of marriage as a financial transaction, are subjected to various forms of humiliation, often involving slapstick-​style violence (usually a kick in the backside or a cosh on the head). Following Groupe Octobre-​ style characterisation, they are designated by a single overriding characteristic: in addition to the pastor (Guy Decomble) and the Captain of the Dragoons (Duhamel)  –​standard representatives of reviled institutions –​the screenplay designates ‘l’homme abruti’ (the stupid man), ‘le monsieur ignoble’ (the man with the horrible face), ‘le monsieur aux vernis’ (the man with the shiny shoes) and so on. Clovis’s clientele is hardly any more developed. He sells a parson’s hat to a shortsighted customer (Lucien Raimbourg), tricks a customer in a hurry (Duhamel) into buying his own hat, reshaped from a bowler into a trilby, and fobs off the customer in search of a beret (headgear of choice for the right-​ wing paramilitary Croix de feu) with a cap (emblem of the working class) by putting it on his head back to front. A scene where a policeman helps himself to a brand new kepi without paying had to be cut (Aurouet 2012a: 124). On top of all this, Déboisé drives around stealing hats from people’s heads, thus providing himself with stock to sell and simultaneously creating a demand, offering a perfect illustration of the excesses of the capitalist system. Neither Baleydier nor L’Affaire est dans le sac proved particularly successful at the box office. Indeed, the latter, just like Emile two years

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previously, incurred the wrath of Emile Natan, who this time saw scenes in which characters imitate a cockerel as an attack on the Pathé emblem and did all he could to prevent the distribution of the film.12 In spite of Natan’s apparent aversion to his work, Prévert continued to write for the cinema, collaborating on a mixed bag of shorts and mainstream comedies, some of which, like Ciboulette (Autant-​Lara, 1933)  and L’Hôtel du libre échange (M. Allégret, 1934), allowed his verbal inventiveness and anarchic sensibility to emerge.13 Ciboulette was the film on which Prévert first encountered Trauner, the set designer who would become one of his closest friends and who, by coincidence, had been responsible for the set on which L’Affaire est dans le sac was filmed. Both Ciboulette and L’Hôtel du libre échange were adapted from pre-​existing works (respectively, a 1923 operetta by Robert de Flers and Francis de Croisset, and an 1894 farce by Georges Feydeau). Prévert peppered the originals with gags of his own invention in order to spice up the social critique and introduce a surreal tone. L’Hôtel begins with an opening sequence entirely of Prévert’s invention, in which the hotel is presented as a surrealist space where both time and space are elastic. The work-​shy bellboy, ironically named Boulot (Fernandel), proceeds from room to room calling a different time to each client, thus economising on his own time but still ensuring that they all get their morning call. His distribution of clean shoes, accompanied by a little song, ‘Moralité, braves gens’ (Morality, good people), indicates a considerable amount of bed-​hopping and –​along with his friendly encounters with a young woman in her nightgown who has no time for sleep and with a young couple, apparently a prostitute and a petty criminal –​establishes the hotel as a licentious space, but also functions to create a sense of community that crosses the usual social boundaries.14 While numerous critics appreciated the surrealist atmosphere of these two films, both fell foul of the censor. A key scene involving a fight at the police station was cut from L’Hôtel du libre échange, while Ciboulette was ‘re-​ edited’ for release by a risk-​averse producer (Courrière 2000: 283–​4). Prévert dabbled frequently in mainstream cinema during this period as a way of paying the bills and ensuring the continued existence of the Groupe Octobre. The commercial cinema was an extremely useful source of revenue for the poet and his impecunious friends, who were able to get by thanks to small parts, often added to screenplays by Prévert. Various brief encounters with the advertising industry also helped alleviate a precarious financial situation. For a short while in the mid-​1930s, Prévert supplied gags for innovative sketch-​style publicity films imagined and co-​written by Aurenche, while the camerawork, mise en scene and acting was assured by a group of friends (Courrière 2000: 285–​6). These included The Throne of France, in which various different kings sit in turn upon a chair that eventually collapses under the weight of Louis XVI, leading to the exhortation

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that the throne would have lasted longer had it been purchased at Meubles Lévitan. This film elicited protests from right-​wing groups, leading to its withdrawal from several cinemas (Aurenche 1993: 54). Other notable examples of mainstream comedies that bear Prévert’s mark include Si j’étais le patron (Pottier, 1934), for which he rewrote the dialogue without credit, and Un oiseau rare/​A Rare Bird (Pottier, 1935), on which he is credited for both adaptation and dialogue.15 The latter was heralded by Roger Leenhardt, who named it best comic film of the year and singled out Prévert as a new talent to watch (Courrière 2000: 283). Both films are role-​swapping social satires: the first has a worker (Fernand Gravey) taking on his boss’s job, while in the second, a millionaire’s decision to trade places with his valet has several unintended consequences. These films have clear resonances with contemporary Groupe Octobre performances and with the earlier L’Affaire est dans le sac in their grotesque portrayal of the sycophantic underlings who seek to ingratiate themselves with money. They also look forward to Le Crime de Monsieur Lange in their celebration of the ingenuity and good-​heartedness of ordinary workers, and in their celebration of playfulness. Like Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, Pottier’s first two features depict the working class with sympathy, yet are far from celebrating work itself: in all these films the ideal is to work less, in better conditions, to have the time and the means for more pleasurable activities (making love, music, dancing, drinking, telling stories, appreciating nature). Both films feature Max Dearly, a popular comic actor, as wealthy désœuvrés, characters who anticipate Meunier (Henri Guisol), the benevolent playboy in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. Like Meunier, they first appear as ignorant and parasitical, but swiftly display an anarchic contempt for conventions that presents the discontented workers with the opportunity for change. In Si j’étais le patron, this provides a bright and ambitious worker, Henri (Fernand Gravey), with the chance to become the boss, an opportunity that in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is extended to all the workers by Meunier’s agreement to fund the cooperative. Both Christopher Faulkner (1986: 65) and Keith Reader (2000: 292) have pointed to this aspect of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange as diluting the socialist principle of the cooperative, implying that what is needed is not so much a revolution as the ‘right kind of capitalist’. Certainly, in Si j’étais le patron, the millionaire’s decision to put Henri in charge is motivated primarily by a desire to save his investment, a goal that is achieved when Henri sells his invention of an engine silencer to an American investor. These films undermine realism through their convoluted plots and resolutions, in some ways reminiscent of the Marx brothers’ comedies that Prévert admired, but are far from offering any realistic solution to the social inequalities they highlight. Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, however, once again offered Prévert the opportunity to draw together his cinematic,

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political and theatrical activities, this time with a more concrete political message delivered in the run-​up to the elections that the Popular Front would win in a landslide victory. A film that celebrates collectivity above all else, Lange is the result of a collaboration between Prévert and Jean Renoir that also involved Jacques Becker and Jean Castanyer (developers of the original idea), André Halley des Fontaines (the producer who brought both Renoir and Prévert on board) and, indeed, the actors who brought their own personality to the roles by improvising around the screenplay.16 The film also occasioned Prévert’s first collaboration with Joseph Kosma, who set to music the words of ‘A la Belle étoile’, the song with which Valentine evokes her past and the daily reality of so many ordinary people. Along with Trauner, Kosma would become one of Prévert’s closest friends and collaborators. It will be clear when we come to look at Les Enfants du paradis how such collaborations fed into the screenwriting process.

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange A man and a woman arrive at a cafe near the Belgian border wanting a room for the night. He is Amédée Lange (René Lefèvre), wanted for murder. The woman, Valentine (Florelle), recounts to those in the bar how he came to commit the crime. Lange is employed by a publishing company of popular magazines and comics, owned by the crooked Batala (Jules Berry), who systematically rips off his investors, workers and customers. Batala’s financial situation reaches a crisis: he absconds, leaving workers and creditors unpaid. With the agreement of the chief creditor’s son, Meunier (Henri Guisol), the workers form a cooperative. Thanks to their solidarity and Lange’s stories about Arizona Jim, they make a great success of the business. This working-​class solidarity and romantic ties reach across the courtyard to the laundry that is run by Valentine. All seems well, until, one night when everyone is at a party celebrating the success of the cooperative, Batala returns, lured by the success of Arizona Jim. Lange shoots him. Meunier takes Lange and Valentine to the border. The improvised jury in the cafe decide that Lange’s crime was justified and take him and Valentine to the border. Renoir himself describes Le Crime de Monsieur Lange as a collaboration with his ‘friend’ Prévert, who joined the project relatively late in the writing process, transforming the screenplay on which Renoir had worked

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with Castanyer into something ‘quite different’, and orchestrating on-​set improvisations, following Renoir’s invitation to be present during filming (Durgnat 1974: 108; Billard 1995: 254). Influential critical responses, such as that of André Bazin, reinforce this myth of a harmonious ‘perfect’ collaboration. For Bazin, the ‘delightful’ dialogue, ‘one of the best, if not the best … of French prewar cinema’, is evidence of this harmony, displaying Prévert’s ‘qualities … without any of his excesses, these having been tempered by Renoir’s unflagging efforts to ensure that none of his actors would be asked to say anything out of keeping with his character’ (Bazin 1974: 43). This comment is indicative of the prevailing attitude to film dialogue in the post-​ war years when Bazin was writing. Like his contemporary Jeanson and, later, Audiard, Prévert is frequently accused by critics of abusing the function of dialogue writer by drawing attention to the spoken words through puns, bons mots and verbal images at the expense of diegetic verisimilitude. It is doubtful, however, especially in this early part of his career, whether realism would have been the primary goal of a screenwriter whose signature is so clearly marked by a desire to overturn the linguistic clichés that underpin social hierarchies and prejudices.17 Perhaps this was one reason why the partnership with Renoir was never repeated:  the screenwriter’s sensibility did not match the realist intentions of the director. An examination of early versions of screenplays held in the archives, alongside Renoir’s accounts of the film’s genesis, pinpoints Prévert’s involvement in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange as beginning at the end of July 1935 at the latest (Heinrich 1990: 17). The most fully developed version of the screenplay held in the archives of the Cinémathèque française is dated 8 June 1935 and clearly pre-​dates this involvement, thus providing useful information about the key transformations Prévert brought to the project, several of which are listed by André Heinrich (Prévert 1990: 15–​16). What is, perhaps, more surprising looking at these versions –​to the point that Heinrich wonders whether Prévert had been consulted informally before officially taking on the writing role (Prévert 1990: 16) –​is the number of typically Prévertian details that existed prior to the poet’s involvement. Some of these were not retained, such as some of the references to contemporary figures in the news.18 Others found their way into the film: the fact that Batala disguises himself as a priest; the advertising hoarding that blocks the invalid’s window (Charles suffers from tuberculosis and needs fresh air); and the Arizona Jim stories.19 These details were certainly fleshed out after Prévert’s arrival, whether in the writing (Charles becomes bed-​bound as a result of a broken leg, suffered on his bike while out delivering comics; Arizona Jim is a Western hero who saves black men from the lynch mob and workers’ pay from gangsters) or in improvisation with the actors (for example, when Lange asks Batala who would miss him if he were dead, Jules

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Berry, clad in a soutane, retorts, ‘Mais les femmes, mon cher!’ (Women, of course!), before flouncing out of the office).20 A comparison of the 8 June screenplay and the published script (Prévert 1990) reveals a tightening up both of plot, especially around Batala’s financial situation and his disappearance, and of spatial focus:  several scenes of lavish dinners set in restaurants and nightclubs are eliminated, as is a children’s party that was to serve as the backdrop for the murder, in a counterpoint typical of Renoir.21 The action is now centred firmly on the courtyard and building (Bazin 1974: 159–​71).22 On the other hand, we can also see the multiplication and fleshing out of secondary roles, which develops the sense of a community. Prévert proved true to his custom of ensuring parts for his friends, and many of these roles were taken by members or collaborators of the Groupe Octobre. These include not just members of the cooperative, such as Louis the foreman (Duhamel), Dig the illustrator (Jean Dasté) and the women employed in Valentine’s laundry (who include Germaine Duhamel and Margot Capelier from the Groupe Octobre and Janine Loris, the future Janine Prévert), but also Edith (Sylvia Bataille, who would go on to illuminate Renoir’s next film, Une partie de campagne/​A Day in the Country), Baigneur, the creditor with the dog named Daisy (Brunius), the man who picks up Edith on the station platform after Batala’s departure (Max Morise), and Inspector Juliani, Batala’s cousin, a former policeman (sacked) who inherits only debts and is the sole mourner of Batala’s unborn child when Estelle miscarries (Sylvain Itkine). Juliani’s pompous reaction, ‘Hélas, c’était tout de même un parent’ (He was a relative, after all), is greeted with general hilarity.23 This casting once again emphasises the idea of Lange as a ‘film de copains’ (mates’ film) prepared in advance but delivered on the hoof, an account that fits perfectly not only with the Popular Front ideal of solidarity, but also with the concept of filmmaking espoused by Renoir, who rejected studios and script-​bound formulae in favour of improvisatory freedom, and with the Prévertian myth of a writer who proceeded by flashes of inspiration. This is no doubt one reason for critics’ surprise at the fact that this collaboration between Renoir and Prévert, who were apparently so well matched, was never repeated. Yet tensions were evident from the beginning, suggesting that Renoir’s account of a group of ‘copains’ working in perfect harmony does not quite tell the full story. Even leaving aside the way Becker was sidelined from the project in the early stages of writing, there are accounts of how Prévert had to be locked in an office to ensure his productivity, suggesting that the poet was not always fully committed to the screenplay (Courrière 2000:  355).24 And Carole Aurouet (2012a: 89) reports that when the producer Pierre Braunberger approached Prévert a year later to complete the unfinished Une partie de

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campagne, Renoir’s reaction was to declare that after the experience of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, he had no intention of working on another Prévert screenplay.25 Aurouet’s source is Maurice Baquet, a member of the Groupe Octobre and friend of both Prévert and Renoir who played Charles in Lange. Baquet suggests that the director may have been reluctant to share star billing with a writer as distinctive as Prévert, though others have interpreted Renoir’s declaration more positively as a recognition that any attempt to recreate the extraordinary spontaneity of Lange would be bound to fail.26 Prévert, however, would soon find a new cinematic collaborator, with whom he would form one of the most celebrated partnerships in film history.

Carné–​Prévert Much has been written about the Carné–​Prévert relationship, frequently suggesting that the director was saved from a rather mediocre career by the genius of his screenwriter.27 We do not intend here to revisit such debates, couched as they are in auteurist desire to attribute films to an individual talent that runs contrary to what our investigation of screenwriters has largely shown. We prefer to place the emphasis on the collective effort and to note that this collaboration did not just involve the screenwriter and director, but also the set designer Trauner, who worked on all of the Carné–​Prévert films except Jenny, and the composers Maurice Jaubert and Joseph Kosma. Prévert’s close friendship with Trauner and Kosma (Jaubert was killed in action in 1940 before France surrendered to the Germans) meant that they frequently worked in concert to develop a film. For example, during the preparation of Les Enfants du paradis, Prévert lived in the vicinity of Saint-​Paul-​de-​Vence and Tourettes sur Loup with Kosma and Trauner who, as Jews, were clandestinely employed on the film. The remote inn La Prieuré des Valettes was convenient not just as a place to work, but also as a hideout. The costume designer Mayo was also nearby, and Carné paid frequent visits in between trips to Paris and Nice. Aurouet (2012b: 9) paints a vivid picture of the creative exchange in her account of the genesis of the film: Prévert can visualise his protagonists in Mayo’s sketches. Thanks to Trauner’s paintings, he can observe the creation of their environment. He develops the roles as a consequence of what he sees. Not far away, Kosma is composing at the piano. Prévert can hear from time to time an air that changes the course of the story. The exchange is constant, without separation or hierarchy. The creative dynamic is optimised.

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Carné’s account of this partnership also puts the emphasis on collaboration, no doubt partly in response to critics who saw Prévert as the creative driving force for their films (Carné 1989: 56–​7). He emphasises that decisions on subjects, casting and crew were made collectively, but also that Prévert involved him in the writing process, and deferred to him as the director in any rare cases of disagreement.28 From initial discussions of ideas or storylines, to modifications of dialogue or additions of characters, all evolutions in the screenplay were discussed and if the director did not approve, Prévert did not attempt to impose his point of view (Rouleau 1979). We have seen from Prévert’s involvement with the Surrealists and the Groupe Octobre how collaboration was central to his creativity, and his later partnerships, for example with Pierre Laroche and Jean Grémillon, and with Paul Grimault, support this view. However, as Aurouet points out (2007: 129), screenwriters who collaborated with Prévert tended to attribute the greater part of creativity –​and work –​to him. Aurenche, for example, who as we shall see in Chapter 4 was generally the more ‘inventive’ partner in his collaborations with Pierre Bost, suggests that Prévert alone wrote the screenplay for Notre Dame de Paris (Delannoy, 1956) (Aurenche 1993: 79). By the time Prévert was sought out by Carné, who was looking for a writer to help make something of the rather unexceptional melodrama he had been offered for his first feature, the poet was already experienced in producing original screenplays and adapting others’ work, and was beginning to establish a considerable reputation. Carné (1989: 55) recounts how he had been captivated by a Groupe Octobre performance of La Bataille de Fontenoy, and especially the line that so perfectly encapsulated the wartime exploitation of the working class:  ‘Soldats! Vous n’êtes pas tombés dans l’oreille d’un sourd!’ (Soldiers! You have not fallen on deaf ears!), and so turned to its author. The director notes that Prévert immediately began to augment the central story of a young woman who falls for her mother’s lover with a number of ‘strikingly original and picturesque’ secondary characters. We have already seen this method in practice in L’Affaire est dans le sac, where the suitors, the hat shop customers and the policeman pursuing the street musician add to the anarchic atmosphere and contribute to the undermining of bourgeois institutions, and in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, where the multiplication of second roles helps to ensure that the crime of the ordinary, rather bland ‘hero’ takes on a collective aspect. In Jenny, the extraordinary secondary characters function to eclipse the conventionality of a narrative that draws on many of the archetypes of melodrama: the pure young woman, the tragic sacrificial single mother, the gigolo and the pimp/​ gangster.

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London: A young couple are breaking up, because his parents do not approve of her. Paris: Jenny (Françoise Rosay) receives a telegram from her daughter, Danielle (Lisette Lanvin), who has been abroad at school and then working as a concert pianist. She is returning from London to France to stay with her mother. Danielle thinks her mother is a successful business woman; in fact she runs a nightclub/​brothel, financed by her former pimp, Benoit (Charles Vanel). She is very much in love with the younger Lucien (Albert Préjean), who is clearly more interested in her money than in her. Danielle discovers the truth about her mother’s business activities. Lucien and Danielle meet and fall in love; without knowing who she is, he leaves Jenny for her daughter. They plan to move to England where she will work as a pianist and he will resume his career as a racing car driver. As they are about to leave, Lucien is attacked by Benoit. He survives, and is visited by Jenny in hospital. She discovers the identity of her rival. Heartbroken, she steps aside for her daughter who is still unaware of her mother’s relationship with Lucien.

To the central cast of mother, daughter, gigolo and gangster, Prévert adds or develops Dromadaire (Jean-​ Louis Barrault), a twisted sidekick for Benoit, Xavier (Roland Toutain), a feckless aristocrat who sponges off Lucien, Florence (Sylvia Bataille), an ambitious singer in love with Lucien, and numerous grotesque clients of Jenny’s including L’Albinos (Robert Le Vigan), an arms dealer who only likes flowers, birds and inappropriately young women. This aspect of Prévert’s style had perhaps started out with a motivation to find work for his pals, but by the time of Jenny it had become part of his hallmark, one that distinguished him from other writers such as Charles Spaak, whose 1930s films did much to establish the archetypal characters of classic French film: the virile tragic hero, the sacrificial older woman, the garce (see Chapter  1). In Jenny, these archetypes are somewhat destabilised by the supporting cast, who stick in the mind more than the lovers Danielle and Lucien, or even Jenny herself, the tragic mother figure that Rosay is reprising here from the Spaak-​scripted films Le Grand Jeu and Pension Mimosas (Feyder, 1934 and 1935, respectively), on which Carné worked as assistant director. It is these secondary characters who flesh out the film’s atmosphere of menace and unpredictability, rejecting

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the conventions even of their own dubious occupations (pimp, gangster, arms dealer). In addition, they are granted many of the most memorable lines. A jealous Florence, for instance, justly accuses Lucien of loving only money: ‘Vous avez les poches pleines et le cœur vide’ (You’ve got full pockets and an empty heart), while Dromadaire, who despises this pretty boy who lives off women mainly because his own physical deformity prevents him from doing the same, taunts Lucien, likening him to a creature of the depths: J’étais à la pêche au congre. Le congre, quand il sort de la flotte, il a beau se débattre, respirer, il finit toujours par crever. Moralité: dans le fond, quand on est dans le fond, il vaut mieux rester dans le fond.29

This is typical of the way in which Prévert’s dialogue uses repetition to draw attention to multiple meanings of words and expressions (‘dans le fond’  =  ‘at the end of the day’, ‘in essence’ and ‘in the depths, at rock bottom’). Sometimes the multiple meaning is simultaneous, creating deliberate ambiguity (e.g. the ‘armoire’ in Le Jour se lève calls to mind not only the wardrobe it refers to, but also the near homophones amour [love] and armure [armour]), while at other times, phrases change meaning in the same sentence or exchange, revealing the potential slipperiness of words. Here, Dromadaire’s sneeringly emphatic repetition of ‘fond’, his gaze fixed on Lucien, the target of his misanthropic violence, is an implicit threat. Later in the scene, in an exchange between Dromadaire and Jenny’s business partner, Benoit (Charles Vanel), this becomes explicit: DROMADAIRE: 

Qu’est-​ce que tu veux, elle l’aime. S’il avait une bosse, elle l’aimerait pas. Il la débecqueterait même, que je dis … Ah, tu vois Lucien, Monsieur Lucien, avec une bosse? Ah, quel beau Quasimodo, il faudrait lui en faire une’ […] BENOIT:  T’es jaloux. Tu l’aimes, Jenny? DROMADAIRE [playing with a collar and lead]:  Non. J’aime mon chien. BENOIT:  Ton chien. T’as un chien toi? DROMADAIRE:  Non. J’aime ce que j’ai pas.

Once again, emphatic repetition (‘aime’, ‘aimerait’; ‘bosse’) not only provides a rhythm to the dialogue but also functions as the ironic expression of Dromadaire’s menacing misanthropy. Dromadaire’s ‘love’ for his imaginary dog would be developed in Carné and Prévert’s next collaboration, Drôle de drame, in which Barrault takes on the role of William Kramps, whose love for animals has led him to become an assassin of butchers. In Jenny, though, we also see how Prévert develops the central characters of this melodrama. If Jenny herself retains something of the clichéd tragic mother figure, both Lucien and Danielle are recognisable as recurring character types in Prévert’s films. The straightforward young woman –​whose

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innocence is not a weakness or bound up with prudish ideas about virginity, but functions instead as the source of her strength, giving her a clarity of vision that dramatically exposes the corruption that surrounds her –​is found again as Nelly in Le Quai des brumes, Anne in Les Visiteurs du soir, Garance in Les Enfants du paradis and Malou in Les Portes de la nuit/​Gates of the Night (Carné, 1946), as well as in several Prévert-​scripted films not directed by Carné: Catherine in Remorques, Michèle in Lumière d’été (Grémillon, 1943), Giorgia in Les Amants de Vérone/​The Lovers of Verona (Cayatte, 1949), the shepherdess in Le Roi et l’oiseau/​The King and the Mockingbird (Grimault, 1980). Lucien is a prototype for the damaged working-​class man embodied by Jean Gabin in later films.30 His childhood experiences in a young person’s prison and his past as a working man and sporting hero are all evoked, as is his desire to escape from the ‘sale vie’ (dirty life) he now leads as a kept man. He talks of taking a train or a boat to get away, and in this film, it seems that the couple might actually make it. The end of the film sees the couple making plans to leave for London where they will work, he as a racing car driver and she as a pianist, while Jenny, the only person who knows that Lucien has fallen for her daughter, observes them from afar. These traits are developed in later characters but with a more tragic outcome: the working man, damaged by conflict (Le Quai des brumes; Les Portes de la nuit) or by a childhood without affection and a hard working life (Le Jour se lève), whose hopes of escape are embodied by a woman and the idea of elsewhere (a boat ticket, a timetable, a plan). Thus, Jenny offers a foretaste of future Carné–​Prévert collaborations. Both Le Quai des brumes and Le Jour se lève draw on the working-​class ‘atmosphere’ that is featured in the canal bridge scenes in Jenny. This ‘n’importe où’ (anywhere) where Danielle and Lucien get to know each other is echoed in the port of Le Havre, the urban periphery of Le Jour se lève and the city limits where Baptiste wanders at night in Les Enfants du paradis. The port that would feature so strongly in Le Quai des brumes and which is evoked in Le Jour se lève as a besieged François (Gabin) consults ship timetables is where Lucien would like to take Danielle, to start afresh. The poor fisherman (René Génin) who reads the palms of Danielle and Lucien in the cafe by the canal de l’Ourcq is later developed as the tramp (Jean Vilar) who embodies fate in Les Portes de la nuit. The opening scenes of Jenny prefigure the cardboard city of London created for Drôle de drame, while the ending, where Jenny, shrouded in steam, walks along the rue de Lafayette that runs over the train tracks of the Gare de l’Est, anticipates Pierre’s attempted suicide in Hôtel du nord, the only one of Carné’s films made between 1936 and 1946 that was not scripted by Prévert.31 The dialogue, too, hints at collective preoccupations. The film begins with Danielle’s English boyfriend breaking up with her because his family do not approve of the liaison, thus

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introducing the recurring denunciation of sexual relationships as financial transactions, whether it be bourgeois marriage as in this case, prostitution as in the establishment run by Jenny, or Lucien’s situation as a kept man. We have already encountered this in L’Affaire est dans le sac and will again in Les Visiteurs du soir and Les Portes de la nuit. Later on, Lucien obliquely reveals to Danielle that his childhood was spent in the detention centre on Belle-​Île-​en-​Mer that inspired Prévert to write the poem ‘La Chasse à l’enfant’ and about which he and Carné tried unsuccessfully to make a film (L’Île des enfants perdus, which later became La Fleur de l’âge). This recycling and development of ideas is a key element of Prévert’s style, grounded in the collage approach that he would later adopt as a visual artist (‘with scissors and glue’), but which had fascinated him since his childhood (Heitz 1997: 73–​4). It is evident in the way ideas recur from film to film, frequently crossing over between dialogue and mise en scene. So, for example, when Jean (Gabin) describes violent death at the beginning of Le Quai des brumes, apparently remembering the experience that prompted his flight, he could have in mind the performance of Jules Berry as Batala in Lange or Valentin in Le Jour se lève: ‘On tire et puis, un bonhomme pousse un cri, met ses mains a son ventre avec des grimaces marrantes comme un môme qui aurait trop bouffé. Puis ses mains deviennent rouge, puis il tombe.’32 If Jules Berry as Batala tries to soften up a dog-​loving creditor by posing (unsuccessfully) as a canine expert –​‘je m’y connais’ –​as Valentin he impresses the crowds with his dog trainer act in Le Jour se lève. François’s declaration to Clara (Arletty) as she steps naked out of the shower in Le Jour se lève –​‘On dirait la vérité qui sort du puits’ (You’re like truth emerging from the well) –​is both an expression of his desire and a comment on Clara’s transparent, straightforward nature. The reference recurs in Lumière d’été, when Roland (Pierre Brasseur) breaks up with Michèle (Madeleine Robinson), brutally revealing his artistic crisis: ‘J’y peux rien! La vérité est sortie du puits, elle se secoue, elle nous éclabousse, nous sommes trempés, perdus tous les deux’ (There’s nothing I can do. Truth has come out of her well, she’s shaking herself, splashing us, we’re soaked, both of us are lost). However, it is in the opening sequence of Les Enfants du paradis that it is fully developed, in our first encounter with Garance (Arletty again) posing as ‘truth’ in a barrel of water for the somewhat disappointed patrons of the sideshow. As she later explains to Lacenaire, ‘Le puits, oh, n’en parlons plus. C’est fini, et la vérité aussi […] La clientèle devenait trop difficile. Vous comprenez, la vérité seulement jusqu’aux épaules. Ils étaient déçus’ (The well? Oh, I’m finished with that, and with truth too. The customers were getting difficult. You know, truth, but only down to the shoulders. They were disappointed). This is more than the mise en scene of a verbal image, though, as the scene heralds many of the key themes of the film: once again,

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the straightforwardness of the female character that contrasts with the gulf between appearance and reality that exists for most of the other characters; performance as illusion or revelation of truth; desire and objectification (especially of Garance). In other cases, we see the recurrence of particular preoccupations expressed in similar terms. The seducer dressed as a priest first encountered with Batala in Lange recurs in Les Amants de Vérone, in the form of Ricardo (Yves Deniaud), who is playing the monk that marries Romeo and Juliet. Laetitia (Marianne Oswald), the ‘nurse’ figure, declares to her lover, Giorgia/​Juliet’s father Ettore (Louis Salou), that she has cheated on him with a monk. Elsewhere, ideas cut from certain scripts resurface in others. The published screenplay of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange has Meunier narrowly avoiding an accident when Lange grabs the wheel to avoid running over a dog (Prévert 1990: 25). This incident does not appear in the film but features instead in the opening sequence of Le Quai des brumes, where Jean runs the lorry into a ditch to avoid the dog that will attach itself to him for the rest of the film. Like Aurenche, as we shall see in Chapter 4, Prévert drew on personal experience in his writing, and the origin of many of these preoccupations can be found in his own life. As a child he saw a dog run over by a tram, while as a young man he was known to torment priests, accusing them of molesting young women of his acquaintance who were in on the joke (Courrière 2000: 204). In Jenny, when the owner of the canalside cafe refuses to serve a poor fisherman, Lucien buys him a drink, recalling anecdotes about Prévert and his friends, who ended up spending a night in the cells after insisting on buying a drink for a homeless man in spite of the waiter’s refusal to serve him (Franck 1997: 18).33 Xavier’s invitation to a young woman on the street to visit Chartres Cathedral in the same film recalls the impromptu escapades of Prévert, Batcheff and friends (Tual 1987: 111–​14). More generally, memories of the itinerant buskers and pedlars of the popular neighbourhoods he visited with his father inspired many of the characters that would populate his screenplays (Courrière 2000: 39). Let us now turn to a closer examination of his screenwriting methods.

Screenwriting methods A significant body of scholarly work exists around Prévert’s poetry, screenwriting and other works (for example, his writings for the Groupe Octobre).34 Heinrich (Prévert 1990; 1995; 2007), Danièle Gasiglia-​Laster and Arnaud Laster (Prévert 1992), and especially Aurouet (2003; 2007; 2012a; 2017; Prévert 2012) have delved into the archives showing what they can reveal about Prévert’s working practices. Their work has demonstrated

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that the myth of a slapdash genius who would scribble a poem or an idea for a screenplay on a paper napkin while holding court in Saint Germain-​ des-​Prés at the Deux Magots or the Café de Flore is greatly exaggerated. As we shall see, film ideas emerged and developed through conversation and the exchange of ideas, and usually involved some element of chance. Prévert would then continue to work in collaboration with the director, set designer and composer, as well as any other screenwriters involved. There were several stages of development, elaborating characters and plot, noting ideas of dialogue, mise en scene and casting from the start, before producing a full continuity script, often written by hand. We are very far here from the conception of a separate ‘dialogue writer’ whose role was to ‘add words’ to an otherwise ready-​to-​film screenplay. Prévert firmly rejected the artificial division of labour put in place by the film industry, with separate roles for adaptor, screenwriter and dialogue writer, let alone set or costume designer or composer, for example. For all that he is known first and foremost as a dialogue writer, he refused to take on this role (or at least to be credited for it) if he was not also involved in conceptualising the characters and, indeed, the film, claiming that this was as absurd as requiring painters to specialise, for example, as arbristes who would only paint trees (Arnault and Haudiquet 1965; Aurenche 1993: 92). Ideas for films emerged in different ways, sometimes from a pre-​existing text that a director, writer or actor was keen to see adapted from the screen, and on other occasions inspired more indirectly by encounters with stories, images or historical figures that were discussed and developed collectively. The initial motivation for Le Quai des brumes came from Gabin’s desire to work with Carné. Accounts differ as to who proposed Mac Orlan’s novel (both Carné and Gabin claim credit) and Prévert was hired to adapt it (Brunelin 1987: 232; Carné 1989: 71). The idea to move the setting from 1910 Montmartre to a contemporary Le Havre appears to have been a collective one inspired by the novel’s title, anxieties about how the German style of set design would cope with recreating Paris streets, and a sense of what Trauner could make of a foggy port (Courrière 2000: 376). Le Jour se lève also started life with a contract between Gabin and Carné, for which the actor proposed the idea of adapting Martin Roumagnac. Prévert and Carné, however, were less than keen on this idea.35 Prévert proposed a vague story of gangsters and a murder site transformed into a museum, into which he was planning to insert roles for Arletty and Jules Berry. It was a chance encounter with Carné’s neighbour Jacques Viot that would eventually provide the source of the film. Viot proposed a brief synopsis that captivated Carné, who persuaded Gabin and Prévert to take it on. Carné gives mixed signals as to whether it was Viot or Prévert who came up with the flashback structure of this screenplay (Brunelin 1987: 259).

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Les Visiteurs du soir, on the other hand, began with a discussion between Prévert, Carné, whose project Juliette ou la clef des songes had run into trouble with German censors, and Laroche, who was collaborating with Prévert on Lumière d’été. For Juliette, Carné had wanted to work with the actor Alain Cuny, whose performance as Orpheus in Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice at the Théâtre de l’Atelier had impressed the director (Carné 1989: 135). Carné and Prévert had earlier developed a version of Le Chat botté/​Puss in Boots with Maurice Baquet, for which Trauner had produced some sketches, but again, the project had been put on hold as a result of the war. For the new project, all agreed that a setting in the past would allow greater freedom with regard to Vichy and Occupation censorship, and no doubt the work done for Le Chat botté, along with a familiarity with the illuminated miniatures of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, led them to the Middle Ages.36 Prévert then drew on various medieval tropes and sources to develop the tale, as he would later for Notre Dame de Paris (Delannoy, 1958) and ‘Agnès Bernauer’, his sketch for Les Amours célèbres/​ Famous Love Affairs (Boisrond, 1961) (Aurouet 2007: 131). The next Carné–​Prévert collaboration, Les Enfants du paradis, was born out of another fortuitous meeting, this time with Barrault on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. The screenwriter and director were having trouble with La Lanterne magique, a project that involved sequences in different time periods, which they envisaged for Arletty, Pierre Brasseur and Louis Salou (Prévert 2017: 223). Barrault told them about the famous mime, Deburau, and how, when he was on trial for manslaughter, all of Paris flocked to the courtroom in order to hear his voice. Prévert saw an opportunity to develop his long-​standing interest in the assassin-​poet and anarchist anti-​hero, Lacenaire, a contemporary of Deburau, while Carné saw the possibilities that the Boulevard du Crime and the nineteenth-​century theatre offered.37 These accounts highlight that while the initial conception of a film may not always have followed the same pattern, it almost always involved a collective effort. As we have highlighted throughout this chapter so far, that was maintained throughout the production process, and was even facilitated by Prévert’s idiosyncratic approach to screenwriting. Claude Autant-​Lara (1992:  168), who was close to Prévert from the early 1930s and worked with him on several occasions, acknowledged the common misconception of Prévert as a farfelu [crazy guy] incapable of methodical thought. He outlines the screenwriter’s approach that permitted both organisation and flexibility: [Prévert] pinned to the wall an enormous sheet of paper […] on which he would write, one by one in order, the sequences of the film. In this way, he constantly had the whole outline of the film in view. This enormous plan would then be embellished by a number of small drawings in the margin. (1992: 170)

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Carné (Rouleau 1979)  also describes this process for Les Enfants du paradis: ‘Prévert worked first on several characters, then made a table. He illustrated it with cabalistic signs to show the relationships between the characters.’ Once again, the emphasis is on the way the plans permit a visual conception of the eventual film, not only by sketching out specific elements of mise en scene, but also by establishing the whole structure of the film and relationships between characters in a visual way.

Les Enfants du paradis Part 1: On the Boulevard du crime, Garance (Arletty) is accosted by Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), an ambitious young actor. She rebuffs his advances, because she has an appointment with Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), a public letter writer, playwright, thief and would-​ be murderer. Lacenaire and Garance find themselves in front of the Funambules theatre, where Baptiste Deburau (Jean-​Louis Barrault), a mime, has been left to entertain the crowd. Lacenaire steals a watch; Garance is accused. Baptiste performs what he witnessed, exonerating her, and she throws him a rose. He falls in love with her, much to the chagrin of Nathalie (Maria Casarès), who loves him. However, when Garance offers herself to him, he is unable to sleep with her; she has become an idol for him. Frédérick has no such qualms and takes the opportunity Garance offers him. Baptiste and Frédérick pursue their careers. Frédérick and Garance perform at the Funambules in Baptiste’s pantomime; then Frédérick finds success in dramatic theatre. Garance is propositioned by the arrogant Edouard, Comte de Montray (Louis Salou). Lacenaire pursues his nefarious activities; Garance is suspected of involvement in a robbery and murder. She is obliged to seek the protection of the Comte. Part 2: Baptiste, now married to Nathalie with a young son, is known and loved by the people who flock to see his pantomime each night. Frédérick has become a great actor of the dramatic stage, but the role of Othello eludes him; he cannot comprehend jealousy. A mysterious woman visits the Funambules each night; Frédérick discovers that she is Garance, who has become Edouard’s mistress. Understanding her love for Baptiste, Frédérick finally feels jealousy and is able to play Othello. Meanwhile, Lacenaire visits Garance, provoking the jealous, cruel Edouard, who challenges him to a duel. Lacenaire refuses to fight. He also visits Frédérick who gives him money. After a performance

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of Othello, Edouard provokes Frédérick, whom he suspects of being Garance’s lover. Meanwhile, Baptiste who has also been in the audience, encounters Garance, a reunion witnessed by Lacenaire, who reveals the truth to Edouard, publicly humiliating him. Garance and Baptiste spend the night together. Lacenaire murders Edouard. Nathalie comes to see Baptiste and finds him with Garance. Garance leaves and Baptiste follows her but they are separated by the crowd. Aurouet (2012a) has reproduced all the ‘illuminated’ plans that were found in Prévert’s archive as examples of what she calls ‘an enunciation in progress’, bearing the traces of ‘the efforts of creation’ (2012a: 51). We can certainly see this from the character list for Les Enfants du paradis referred to above (Figure 2.1). For reasons of space we focus on this as an example, but we would refer readers to Aurouet’s collection Le cinéma dessiné de Jacques Prévert (2012a) for further examples and analysis. The top left-​hand corner consists mainly of words and neatly written phrases (descriptions of characters, snatches of dialogue, casting suggestions), while the right-​hand side of the page is a jumble of images, doodles and sketches –​a veritable palimpsest of creative inspiration where images overlay the words and, in certain places, also each other. There are seventeen characters or groups of characters listed in Prévert’s characteristic small writing in blue ink down the left-​hand side of the page, starting from the top with the four main characters, Baptiste (in capitals), Frédéric (sic), Garance and Lacenaire/​Mécenaire.38 These are followed by le père Tabureau, the director of the Funambules Theatre, Madame Ernestin (the concierge), the director of the dramatic theatre, Fabien (who would become Edouard, the man who keeps Garance), the three authors (of the play L’Auberge des Adrets), Avril, Thérèse (followed by ‘or Nathalie’ in black ink, with Nathalie underlined three times), the marchand d’habits/​clothes pedlar, with the final section devoted to the troupe of mimes.39 The centre of the page is occupied by two small figures wearing yellow robes, labelled ‘les frères Lumière’, perhaps indicating the role of cinema in this film about theatre, as well as the references in the film to the silent era, through the figure of Baptiste and his mime. These initial character outlines are annotated occasionally with a sketch of a prop or element of costume, some brief description of personality and attitude, key locations and perhaps some indicative lines of dialogue or of actors intended for the roles. Baptiste and Frédéric are differentiated by the respective notes (underlined in red), ‘les gestes’ (gestures) and ‘les mots’ (words), while Garance is represented by a hand-​held mirror with a

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question mark in the centre, and the director of the Funambules is summed up with the note ‘Napoléon Bonaparte’. Next to Fabien we see various notes, including some which are illegible, overlaid with sketches of a flower or acrobats on a (flying?) carpet. However, we can read ‘l’homme qui entretient Garance’ (the man who keeps Garance), ‘Othello’, ‘un riche collectionneur’ (a rich collector) ‘s’intéresse à la pègre’ (interested in the criminal underworld), ‘blasé, prétentieux, cultivé, amer’ (blasé, pretentious, cultured … bitter), ‘killed by Mécenaire’ as well as an indication of casting ‘voir pour Salou’ (consider Salou). The clothes pedlar is described as a ‘moraliste’ (one of Prévert’s least favourite characteristics) and ‘un emmerdeur’ (troublemaker); these notes are marked with a TB; très bien (very good).40 The page is littered with little sketches of acrobats, tight-​rope walkers, theatre stages and so on, including several which obscure some of the notes. As Aurouet points out (2012a: 110–​13), many of these indicate ideas of mise en scene that would be used in the film. She cites the mysterious crocodile that is sketched across the lines devoted to Garance, Lacenaire and le père Tabureau, and that appears fleetingly in the film, glimpsed in the wings at the Funambules Theatre, but we could also mention the owl, depicted here sitting on a cage, that features in the screenplay accompanying the not-​so-​ blind beggar Fil de soie but which, in the film, becomes a parrot (Prévert 2012: 49). There are many more examples, including several outlined with a rectangle that appears to indicate a proscenium arch. A hanged man in a tree against a backdrop of a huge red setting sun is translated in the film in the pantomime where Pierrot (Baptiste) is frustrated in his desire to hang himself when his rope is commandeered first by a little girl for skipping and then by a woman for her washing. A man holding a bloody dagger over the bleeding corpse of a woman has a speech bubble emerging from his mouth declaring ‘Supprimée par la censure’, alluding to the numerous references to censorship in the film, from Garance’s first appearance in the well of ‘truth’ to the fines visited upon the Funambules actors for speaking on stage, or from the response of the authors to Frédérick’s ‘improvements’ to the melodrama L’Auberge des Adrets to that of Edouard’s snobbish friends to Shakespearean tragedy.41 Lacenaire’s murder of Edouard in the Turkish bath is figured in more graphic terms here than in the film; an arm dangles over the edge of a bath tub overflowing with blood, while a curtain represents the décor of the Turkish bath, but also links this ‘real’ death to the theatrical world. The plan also provides several casting indications, including many names that would feature in the film; not only Salou for Fabien/​Edouard, as we have seen, but also Loris for Avril, Maria Casarès for Thérèse/​ Nathalie and Etienne Decroux for le père Tabureau. (Decroux had trained Barrault in the art of mime.) Prévert’s habit of employing his friends is once again in evidence here: his suggestions for the mime troupe include many

Figure 2.1  Jacques Prévert’s illustrated scénario for Les Enfants du paradis.

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former members and associates of the Groupe Octobre such as Decroux, Guy Decomble, Roger Blin, Bussières, Deniaud, Lucien Raimbourg, Paul Francœur, Gilles Margaritis and Duhamel, though of these, only Francœur and Decroux would appear in the film, and in quite different roles (respectively, as a police inspector and as Anselme Deburau). This method, then, indicates that Prévert had a hand in many aspects of the production process: elaborating the characters, structuring the narrative, developing the dialogue, proposing names for the casting (indeed, often writing characters with specific actors in mind) and envisaging elements of mise en scene, including décor and costume. No wonder he is so frequently regarded as the ‘auteur’ –​the creative driving force –​of his films. Yet our account shows that none of this was achieved in isolation. We have been able to explore only a very small part of Prévert’s output here, but what has emerged is a picture of artistic exchange between director, designers, writers, composers and actors. Once again, an investigation of screenwriting opens a window onto the collective dynamics of film production. Our next chapter, on Henri Jeanson, will explore another aspect of this collective creation, considering in more detail the relationship between writers and actors.

Films mentioned written in whole or in part by Prévert, in date order Baleydier (Mamy, 1932; scr. Prévert; adapted from André Girard) L’Affaire est dans le sac/​It’s in the Bag (P. Prévert, 1932; scr. and dial. J. Prévert) Ciboulette (Autant-​Lara, 1933; scr. Autant-​Lara and Prévert; dial. Prévert) L’Hôtel du libre échange (M. Allégret, 1934; scr. J. Prévert [M. Allégret and P. Prévert uncredited]; dial. J. Prévert; adapted from Feydeau and Desvallières) Si j’étais le patron (Pottier, 1934; scr. Cerf and Pujol; dial. Prévert [uncredited]) Un oiseau rare/​A Rare Bird (Pottier, 1935; scr. and dial. Prévert) Le Crime de Monsieur Lange/​The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Renoir, 1936; scr. Becker [uncredited], Castanyer, Renoir and Prévert; dial. Prévert) Jenny (Carné, 1936; scr. and dial. Constant and Prévert; adapted from screenplay by Pierre Rocher) Drôle de drame/​Bizarre, Bizarre (Carné, 1937; scr. Carné and Prévert; adapted from J. Storer Clouston) Le Quai des brumes/​Port of Shadows (Carné, 1938; scr. Prévert; adapted from Mac Orlan) Le Jour se lève/​Daybreak (Carné, 1939; scr. Prévert and Viot; dial. Prévert) Remorques/​Stormy Waters (Grémillon, 1941; scr. Prévert and Cayatte [uncredited: Spaak, Vercel and Combot]; dial. Prévert; adapted from Roger Vercel) Les Visiteurs du soir/​The Devil’s Envoys (Carné, 1942; scr. Laroche and Prévert) Lumière d’été (Grémillon, 1943; scr. and dial. Laroche and Prévert) Les Enfants du paradis/​Children of Paradise (Carné, 1945; scr. and dial. Prévert) Les Portes de la nuit/​Gates of the Night (Carné, 1946; scr. and dial. Prévert)

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La Fleur de l’âge (Carné, 1947; scr. Prévert) Unfinished. Les Amants de Vérone/​The Lovers of Verona (Cayatte, 1949; scr. Cayatte and Prévert) Notre Dame de Paris/​ The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Delannoy, 1956; scr. Aurenche and Prévert; adapted from Hugo) Le Roi et l’oiseau/​The King and the Mockingbird (Grimault, 1980; scr. Grimault and Prévert; dial. Prévert; adapted from Andersen) Famous Love Affairs:  segment Agnès Bernauer (Boisrond, Les Amours célèbres/​ 1961; scr. Prévert)

Other films mentioned La Chienne (Renoir, 1931; scr. Renoir; adapted from de la Fourchardière) Le Grand Jeu/​The Great Game (Feyder, 1934; scr. Feyder and Spaak) Pension Mimosas (Feyder, 1935; scr. Feyder and Spaak; dial. Spaak) La Belle Equipe/​They were Five (Duvivier, 1936; scr. Duvivier and Spaak) Une partie de campagne/​A Day in the Country (Renoir, 1936; scr. Renoir; adapted from Maupassant) Hôtel du nord (Carné, 1938; scr. Aurenche and Jeanson; dial. Jeanson; adapted from Eugène Dabit) La Bête humaine/​The Human Beast (Renoir, 1938; scr. Renoir; adapted from Zola) Tosca/​The Story of Tosca (Koch [Renoir uncredited]; scr. Alessandro De Stefani and Carmine Gallone [Luchino Visconti uncredited]; adapt. by Koch and De Stefani from Sardou [play] and Giacosa and Illica [libretto]) Martin Roumagnac/​The Room Upstairs (Lacombe 1946; scr. Lacombe and Véry; dial. Véry; adapted from Pierre-​René Wolf) Juliette ou la clef des songes/​Juliette or the Key of Dreams (Carné, 1951; scr. Carné and Viot; dial. Neveux; adapted from Neveux)

Notes 1 A selection includes carefully documented biographies such as Danièle Gasiglia-​ Laster’s account, which links Prévert’s life and work (1994), Yves Courrière’s extremely detailed if somewhat salacious volume (2000), bande dessinée ‘biopics’ (Bourhis and Cailleaux 2014 and 2017), works aimed at children, such as the Quelle Histoire series (Baron et al. 2016), nostalgic photobooks of Paris (Caracalla 2004), self-​published poetic homages (Lepoittevin 2018) and political biographies (Szac 2017). 2 Morisson (2010) discusses some of the significant differences between the film and the screenplay, including the famous line ‘T’as de beaux yeux, tu sais’, originally written as ‘Tu as de jolies jambes, tu sais’. See also Ader, Nordmann and Dominique (2010).

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3 It would appear that not all popular screenwriters are regarded in this way. According to the L’Oeil du Mercure bookseller, Michel Audiard’s annotated screenplays were turned down by various libraries when offered for sale. A copy of the Les Tontons flingueurs continuity screenplay is held in the Bibliothèque nationale, donated as part of the Albert Simonin archive. 4 6 bis cité Véron, 75018 Paris. The 2010 sale was partly motivated by a need to secure funds for the upkeep of the cité Véron premises (Fatras Succession Jacques Prevert). 5 The insult ‘con’ is impossible to render in English but is frequently translated by the phrase ‘bloody idiot’ to convey both the meaning of stupidity and the vulgarity of the register. In this article, Houellebecq appears to be arguing for a more visceral approach to depicting the world, suggesting that in Poetic Realism the poetry functions only to prettify the reality it is claiming to portray. 6 For more on Prévert’s membership of the Surrealist group see Gasiglia-​Laster (1994: 52–​68), Blakeway (1990) and Courrière (2000: 115–​61). 7 He would adapt Notre Dame de Paris for the screen (Delannoy, 1958), with Anthony Quinn as Quasimodo and Gina Lollobrigida as Esmerelda. Jean Aurenche (1993: 79), also credited for the adaptation and dialogue, claimed that the entire screenplay was in fact written by Prévert. 8 Early texts are signed with pseudonyms (e.g. Lacoudem 6)  or performed in ‘complete anonymity’, e.g. by the Groupe Octobre (Pascaud 1997: 35; Prévert 2007: 23). The Lacoudem –​‘ceux qui se reconnaissent en se frottant le coude’ (those who recognise each other by rubbing elbows) –​belonged to a close circle of friends grouped around the flat in rue du Chateau where Prévert lived with Marcel Duhamel and Yves Tanguy in the 1920s. 9 Over the four years of its existence (1932–​36), the Groupe Octobre drew on the talents of a number of individuals who would go on to have long careers as actors (Maurice Baquet, Sylvia Bataille, Raymond Bussières, Jean Dasté, Guy Decomble, Fabien Loris), composers (Louis Bessières), directors (Jean-​ Paul Dreyfus/​Le Chanois, Pierre Prévert, Paul Grimault), designers and casting directors (Lou Bonin/​ T chimoukov, Margot Capelier), publishers (Marcel Duhamel) and critics (Brunius). Some others associated with the Groupe, such as Sylvain Itkine and Maurice Jaubert, did not survive the war. 10 Duhamel (1972: 289) refers to an earlier arrangement he brokered for Prévert to produce a screenplay for a famous Italian baritone. In spite of his initial interest, the singer refused the script, unable to see himself playing a humble plasterer. 11 Most famous among these is La Fleur de l’âge with Carné, for which some scenes at least were filmed as shown by Emile Savitry’s photographs (Savitry 2013), but we could also mention Le Grand Matinal, La Lanterne magique and Au diable vert (Prévert 2017), as well as Train d’enfer or Hécatombe (see also Jacob 1960). 12 Natan did not succeed in destroying all copies, and the film was resurrected in post-​war cineclubs, where it became cult viewing (Courrière 2000: 230).

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13 We have, unfortunately, been unable to view Ciboulette; a visit to the French Film archives ended in disappointment when their copy proved to be unwatchable. 14 For more on this film, see Leahy (2010). 15 Un oiseau rare features Prévert’s pals Lou Bonin/​T chimoukov as a hotel employee and Marcel Duhamel as Baron Tourtau, whose new bride (Madeleine Suffel) exhibits an unseemly interest in Jean, at least as long as she believes him to be a millionaire. 16 Jacques Becker, Renoir’s assistant during the 1930s, developed an early version of the screenplay with Castanyer, in the hope of directing it for his friend Halley des Fontaines, but the latter was not ready to take a risk on Becker, who had only a couple of short films to his name at this point and offered it to Renoir instead. Becker’s name is conspicuous by its absence from the credits. Castanyer (also written ‘Castagnier’ and ‘Castanier’) was a Catalan designer and a regular member of Renoir’s team in the early 1930s. 17 The prime conduit for this is the concierge, Monsieur Baisenard, who expresses his reactionary views and racism at every opportunity, in spite of the fact that no one listens to him. 18 For example, one of the early names for the Batala character was Carbuccia (script dated 18 April 1935, Cinémathèque française, Renoir 8-​B2), after the Corsican deputy and son-​in-​law of the Paris Prefect Jean Chiappe. Carbuccia also owned the right-​ wing newspaper Gringoire, ‘champion de la bonne pensée’ (champion of right-​thinking people) (Anon. 1936: 47). The naming of a character after a political adversary is typical of Groupe Octobre plays, which drew extensively on both historical and contemporary individuals: Chiappe is a recurring target, as are Edouard Herriot, leading figure of the Radical Left regarded as betraying the pacifist cause he once espoused, Joseph Paul-​Boncour, minister in successive administrations of the early 1930s, Paul Déroulède, politician, poet and founder of the Patriotic League, and Maréchal Weygand, head of the army and Croix de feu sympathiser. 19 Heinrich’s examination of early versions of the screenplay held in the Cinémathèque française archives shows that certain flourishes that have been attributed to improvisatory flair, notably the famous panning shot of the courtyard that immediately precedes Lange’s crime, were envisaged from the early stages. The second version of the screenplay, dated 18 April (prior to Prévert’s involvement), opens in a courtroom where Lange is on trial, with a ‘single circular travelling’ (Prévert 1990: 15). 20 In the published screenplay, the line gives quite a different emphasis: BATALA: Les femmes. Allez, joue pas avec ça imbécile, tu vas casser des carreaux (BATALA:  Women. Put that away, you fool, before you break a window). He eventually leaves Lange with a taunt about Valentine. 21 See, for example, La Chienne (1931) and La Bête humaine/​The Human Beast (1938), where this contrast is provided by musical performances. 22 We can see this from the earlier versions of the screenplay held in the Renoir and Pierre Prévert archives; for example, Cinémathèque française Renoir 8-​B2

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and 9-​B4; Cinémathèque française Prévert-​P37-​B8. The published version of the screenplay (Prévert 1990) is established from various archive versions, and so still bears some significant differences from the film. 23 A clearer case for abortion on demand could hardly have been made without incurring the wrath of the censor. 24 Such accounts are not limited to Prévert’s work on this film. 25 After the reading of the script that Braunberger commissioned from Prévert for Une partie de campagne, Renoir is reported as saying: ‘Tu es vraiment le roi des cons. Tu crois qu’après Lange je vais retourner un scénario de Prévert?’ (You’re the king of idiots. Do you really think that after Lange, I’m going to film another Prévert script?) (Aurouet 2012a: 89). Heinrich (1990: 20), however, points out that Renoir showed an interest in at least three further projects that involved Prévert, none of which were completed. 26 Noël Simsolo makes this point in the documentary Une auréole pour Lange (Viry-​Babel, 2003). Future relations were not always cordial, though, in particular when Renoir described Le Quai des brumes as a fascist film. Prévert threatened to punch him if he didn’t retract, and was forthright in expressing his contempt when, in 1940, the former cineaste of the Popular Front set off to Mussolini’s Italy to make Tosca (completed by Carl Koch in 1941). 27 See, for example, Jacob (1960). 28 Carné is doubtless also making a comparison here with Henri Jeanson, who replaced Prévert on Hôtel du nord (1938). Jeanson’s screenplay, which also developed secondary characters that would be played by his pals Louis Jouvet and Arletty, was less heartily welcomed by the director (see Chapter 3). Rather than introducing a multitude of secondary characters in order to establish the atmosphere of the film, Jeanson’s screenplay transforms secondary characters into primary ones, thus sidelining the original stars (Annabella and Jean-​Pierre Aumont). 29 ‘I was eel fishing. Well, when the eel’s out of the water, it can fight and breathe all it likes, it always ends up croaking. Moral of the story: at the end of the day, when you’re in the depths, you’d better stay in the depths.’ 30 Carné (1989: 70) suggests he had wanted Gabin to play the role, but the actor, who was filming La Belle Equipe with Julien Duvivier, was not available. 31 Prévert had accompanied his partner, Jacqueline Laurent, to Hollywood, so Carné turned to Aurenche and Jeanson for this film. See Chapter 3. 32 ‘You shoot and then the guy cries out, puts his hands on his stomach and pulls funny faces like a kid who’s eaten too much. Then his hands turn red, and he falls.’ 33 Courrière (2000: 204–​5) recounts other stories in a similar vein. 34 On the Groupe Octobre, see, for example, Fauré (1977), Spitzer (1977) and Dalmas (2016); on the connections between Prévert’s theatre and cinema see Blakeway (1990) and Leahy (2010). 35 The novel was eventually adapted in 1946 by Pierre Véry and Georges Lacombe, who also directed it, with Gabin and Dietrich.

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36 This became an important source for the film, though who discovered it is a matter of debate (Carné 1989: 137; Aurouet 2007: 131). 37 Key sources on the Théâtre des Funambules and Frédérick Lemaître were Jules Janin’s accounts of the theatre of the time and Théophile Gauthier’s review of Deburau’s famous creation, Chand d’Habits. Marcel Herrand, who would play Lacenaire, pointed the director to the Carnavalet Museum (Carné 1989: 159–​ 60; Gasiglia-​Laster 1994: 162; Courrière 2000: 502–​3). 38 The original script (2012) shows that Prévert initially thought of changing the names of the characters inspired by historical figures: Tabureau for Deburau, Leprince for Lemaître and Mécenaire for Lacenaire. 39 Prévert’s writing on these charts is difficult to read, in part owing to its unformed letters, but also to the faded ink and the fact that some of it is obscured by the sketches. 40 Aurouet (2007: 140) has shown that Prévert had a habit of evaluating his own work in this way. 41 This scene draws on Jules Janin’s and Lemaître’s accounts of how the actor transformed the play and his character, Robert Macaire. (See also Wikipedia entry ‘Robert Macaire’: https://​fr.wikipedia.org.wiki/​Robert_​Macaire. Accessed 12 January 2019.)

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Henri Jeanson: spectacular dialogue

Dialogue is photogenic. Who will free us from the shackles, the gratuitous chattiness of the image? Sometimes, you just want to close your eyes and shout ‘When will you have finished showing without saying anything? Ah! The digressions of the tracking shot …’ (Jeanson, cited in Moussé 1997: 17)

The opening credits of La Fête à Henriette (Duvivier, 1952) present a series of question marks, blanks and dots where we would normally expect to see the names of the director, writers and actors, accompanied by the discordant sounds of an orchestra tuning up. A voice intervenes as the camera begins to pan across a riverside terrace set with tables, to bring us inside a country hotel where we see one man gesticulating in a phone booth, while another, followed by several women, is coming downstairs with his suitcase: Extract 1 (La Fête à Henriette): VOICE-​OVER:  Mais non, mais non! Arrêtez la musique! On ne peut pas jouer une musique qui n’est pas encore composée. D’ailleurs le scénario non plus, n’est pas encore écrit. C’est dire que le film n’est pas encore tourné. Tout reste à faire, tout! Scénario, dialogues, mise en scène, décors, musique, distribution! Vous ne verrez donc pas ce film avant un an. Et tout cela pourquoi? Tout simplement parce que … SCREENWRITER 1:  La censure! A refusé notre scénario! A l’unanimité!1 Written by Henri Jeanson and Julien Duvivier, La Fête à Henriette offers a mise en scene of screenwriting in France in this period that is both tongue-​in-​ cheek and rooted in experience. A pair of screenwriters (Louis Seigner and Henri Crémieux), sequestered in a country hotel with a script ‘girl’, Nicole (Micheline Francey), are engaged in writing a film which gradually takes shape, played out in intervening sequences, with the increasing momentum towards a happy ending disturbed by various interruptions along the way. In many ways, this comedy offers a representation of screenwriting practice at this time: as Pierre Billard (1995: 614) puts it, ‘a veritable concentration of all the conventions of French cinema […] a lucid flash of intelligent,

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relaxed self-​critique in a cinema grown too pleased with itself’. The collaborative writing process that we have already highlighted in Chapters 1 and 2, and that we will see described by Pierre Bost in Chapter 4, the retreat from the city to a countryside location in order to work free from distractions, and the intervention of the producer or the censor are all central. Even more than this, though, it presents an idea of screenwriting as the origin of the film; the images emerge seamlessly, without need of intervention from a metteur en scène, set or costume designer, director of photography, camera operator or composer, from the conversations of the screenwriters or from the words typed by Nicole.2 Jeanson, as the first president of the Screenwriters’ Union established at the Liberation, was a major figure in the debates surrounding the legal status of film authorship at this time, debates that would lead to the 1957 law which established the director for the first time as one of the authors of a film (Jeancolas et al. 1996). As we have seen in the introduction, though, this law also placed great emphasis on screenwriters, listing the separate functions of screenwriter, dialogue writer, adaptor, highlighting the importance and influence of screenwriters in the film industry at this time. Jeanson, with his trade union role and prolific journalistic career, writing in Le Canard enchaîné, Cinémonde, Le Crapouillot, L’Aurore and Combat among other publications, was one of the most influential. He made full use of the various avenues open to him to express his vehement support for the screenwriter as the primary author of a film and to proclaim dialogue an integral part of the cinematic experience and a source of pleasure.3 With over eighty films to his credit between 1933 and 1970 (and unofficial input into many more), Jeanson (1900–​70) is one of the foremost writers of classic French cinema, described by Bertrand Tavernier as the Ben Hecht of French cinema (Wheeler 1994: 248). Numerous accounts of historians and collaborators, as well as personal letters held in the archive of the SACD, reveal that Jeanson’s influence extended well beyond providing dialogue. He originated several film projects with directors including Marc Allégret, Henri Decoin, Duvivier and Christian-​Jaque, and was frequently involved in casting decisions.4 However, he remains best known for his dialogue, an example of what Michel Chion (2008:  69) refers to as the ‘starification’ of certain practitioners of this aspect of screenwriting (alongside Jacques Prévert and Michel Audiard). This fame is largely attributed to Jeanson’s talent for the mot d’auteur, the scene-​stealing line which leaps off the screen and threatens to undermine the narrative illusion. Indeed, Jeanson is responsible for hundreds of the best-​known lines in French film history, including perhaps the most notorious, Arletty’s ‘Atmosphère, atmosphère? Est-​ ce-​ que j’ai une gueule d’atmosphère?’ (Atmosphere, atmosphere? Do I look like an atmosphere?), which turns Hôtel du nord (Carné, 1938) into an ironic comment on –​as well as an example of –​Poetic Realism. Indeed, in his examination of French film

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dialogue, Chion (2008: 26) describes this as ‘the most famous line in French cinema’. Jeanson vigorously defended –​in his newspaper columns as well as in his role as head of the French screenwriters’ union –​the idea that dialogue should not pass unnoticed, reacting violently against critics who complained of dialogue that was ‘too brilliant, too witty, too written’, and showing contempt for the idea that lines should ‘discreetly cross the screen on tiptoe so as not to excite the spectator in his boredom’ (Jeanson 2000: 9). In her groundbreaking book, Overhearing Film Dialogue, Sarah Kozloff (2000: 14) argues that ‘film history has been deformed by our lack of respect for dialogue’, and that this anti-​dialogue bias had led to misconceptions in our understanding of how films actually work, including an overestimation of what can be communicated through images alone. Kozloff (2000:  14) highlights that cinemagoers are not only voyeurs but also eavesdroppers, listening in on conversations that are purportedly taking place within a diegetic framework but which are, in fact, crafted primarily for the audience. In this chapter, we focus on Jeanson as a writer of film dialogue, the art for which he remains most celebrated, but also condemned, as a pedlar of the bon mot, theatrical one-​liners that threaten to steal the show, placing the emphasis on language rather than the image. Here, we provide a consideration of his career, sketching out his unique position among French dialogue writers, his preferred themes and screenwriting style, and the connections between his journalism and his writing for the cinema. In the second part of the chapter, we focus on Jeanson’s collaborations with actors in order to analyse their role in performing ‘spectacular’ dialogue. In addition to his published memoirs (Jeanson 1971) and a comprehensive posthumous collection of texts by and about the writer (Jeanson 2000), a small but very useful body of academic work recognises Jeanson’s contribution to French cinema. In terms of the wide-​ranging histories of this period, two in particular (Billard 1995; Crisp 1997) take into account the key role of screenwriters in the development of the classic French cinema, including Jeanson –​‘an effective dialogue writer who, with four particularly well-​crafted lines, could save a film from banality’ (Billard 1995: 257). Two publications from the SACD also gather first-​hand accounts and critiques of screenwriting practice in this period, including that of Jeanson (SACD 1994; Ferrari 2006). Christophe Moussé (1997) pioneers the field in terms of more in-​depth studies specific to Jeanson with a study that offers an extended bibliography, a timeline of Jeanson’s activities accompanied by a collection of first-​hand accounts from many who worked with the writer, and a perceptive yet brief analysis of his œuvre which takes into account his three main areas of activity, namely film dialogue, theatre and, especially, journalism. In connection with his research on Le Canard enchaîné, Laurent Martin (2005) investigates Jeanson’s wartime activities. The most detailed analysis

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of Jeanson’s film dialogue, however, can be found in Maxime Cornette’s doctoral thesis (2004). Drawing on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Cornette identifies a marked tension between what he terms monologism and dialogism in Jeanson’s films, dual levels of address that rest on the audience’s complicity in the fiction. We develop this concept in relation to the performance of dialogue –​its mise en scene and mise en corps –​as a way of analysing the three-​way relationship between writer, actor and audience. Screenwriters in French cinema are frequently discussed as one half of a partnership with a director, most famously, as we have seen in Chapter 2, Carné–​Prévert.5 However, we argue here that in the case of those writers specialising in dialogue, and particularly Jeanson, it may be just as fruitful to consider the screenwriter’s partnership with the actors who are performing the words. Therefore, our goal in this chapter is not to develop a taxonomy of Jeanson’s dialogue according to its various functions, but rather to consider the role of dialogue in the development of star persona:  that of the writer of the lines, but also those of the actors who speak them.

Career outline Born in 1900, Jeanson began his professional writing career in his teens, producing anti-​war articles for La Bataille syndicale, organ of the CGT during the First World War. His long relationship with Le Canard enchaîné began in 1919 (Moussé 1997: 143). This was to be his principal journalistic association  –​‘the pride of my life’ (Jeanson 1971:  149)  –​though he contributed to many and various publications throughout his career. His journalism, even more than his screenwriting, is marked by a fierce independence and a desire to claim and protect freedom of expression. Indeed, this led at times to ruptures in long-​standing collaborations; he broke with Le Canard enchaîné at least twice owing to what he perceived as censorship of his own or others’ work (Martin 2005: 93; Leahy 2015b: 53). More seriously, it also led to imprisonment: Jeanson went to jail three times between 1939 and 1942. The first time, he was condemned to five years in jail by Daladier’s authorities for expressing pacifist and anti-​colonialist views in print and inciting soldiers to disobey orders, though he was released in September 1940 (Martin 2005: 95). The second and third times, it was the occupying Nazi forces who did not appreciate his refusal to toe the line.6 Jeanson’s relentless criticism of anything and anyone that he regarded as imposing restrictions on this freedom made him enemies from across the political spectrum. He used his pen to perpetrate vicious attacks on individuals and organisations, from totalitarian regimes to political parties of all hues, from religious organisations and those claiming to protect public

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morals to international corporations, and, of course, any state body he saw as interfering with cinema or theatre, especially those connected with censorship. As Moussé points out (1997: 141), the only ‘ideological line’ that can be traced through his career is the one he started out on: ‘anarchism, pacifism and anti-​everything’.7 In asserting his independence, he exhibited the ‘unreconstructed individualism’ that Keith Reader (2001: 66–​7) associates with right-​wing anarchism, a stance with which Michel Audiard has also been associated (see Chapter 6). And although one can discern a political trajectory from the Left in the 1920s and 1930s towards the Right in the late 1950s and 1960s, it is extremely difficult to pin Jeanson down to any particular political position even at specific points in his career, owing to his capacity for self-​contradiction, as Moussé describes (1997:  143). The fact that he was apparently capable of writing dialogue for a film which he would then excoriate in his role as a reviewer is further testament to his slipperiness, contrariness and ubiquity (Carné 1989: 91).8 This ubiquity stemmed largely from Jeanson’s multiple interconnected roles as journalist, playwright, film dialogue writer and trade unionist. A lover of theatre and of actors above all, his childhood ambition was to go on the stage, and he played small parts in many plays and revues during the 1920s (Jeanson 1971: 102–​3). Legend has it that he turned to writing for the theatre because his first wife, Marion Delbo, told him she could only consider marrying a playwright (Bessy 1977: 244; Moussé 1997: 20). Though he produced several plays that ran for over 100 performances during the 1920s and 1930s, Jeanson’s theatrical career remained mediocre by the standards set by his friends and comrades in the ‘groupe des moins de trente ans’ (the under thirty group), which included Steve Passeur, Marcel Achard and Marcel Pagnol. Philippe d’Hugues (1994a: 235) suggests that this was a continual source of frustration for Jeanson, for whom cinema only ever represented ‘une gloire de compensation’. When we look back over Jeanson’s filmography –​even if we confine ourselves to the official version –​the centrality of words to his art is apparent. According to Maurice Bessy (1977: 241–​2), a teenage Jeanson proposed his first –​silent –​film script to the actor-​director and future producer Fernand Rivers sometime around 1917. It was an episode for the ‘Plouf’ series of comic shorts, a series in which Jeanson also appeared in Le Duel de Plouf (Rivers, 1918).9 However, it was principally in the domains of journalism and theatre that Jeanson established himself before the early 1930s, when the talkies offered him a new outlet for his linguistic verve. He began at Paramount-​ Paris, working on Côte d’azur (Capellani, 1931)  –​the first of many uncredited dialogues in his career (the credited author is Benno Vigny)  –​and also contributed to Le Jugement de minuit (Charlot and Esway, 1933), an Edgar Wallace adaptation featuring Raymond Rouleau

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and Fernandel. He made a more notable –​and credited –​contribution as screenwriter and dialogue writer in the same year for Alexander Korda’s adaptation of George Feydeau’s La Dame de chez Maxim’s, a highly appropriate choice for a writer with such close ties to boulevard theatre as both author and critic, who was also a friend and passionate admirer of Feydeau (Jeanson 1971:  244–​54). He followed this up by providing dialogue for French versions of several multiple-​language productions, but it was in the mid-​1930s, with Mister Flow (Siodmak, 1936) –​his first cinematic collaboration with Jouvet –​and Pépé le Moko, that his cinematic reputation began to rival that of his journalism. He would maintain both roles throughout his career, even continuing to write clandestinely during the Occupation when he was banned from both professions following his release from jail. Though he never returned to writing for the theatre, he continued to demonstrate his passion for the stage both in his cinema, most notably in Lady Paname (Jeanson, 1950), the only film he directed, and in his journalism, for example in moving homages to actors such as Marguerite Moréno and Jouvet (Jeanson 2000: 353–​4, 362–​5). His film dialogue continued to enjoy considerable success in the immediate post-​war period, especially through fruitful collaborations with Christian-​Jaque, with whom he collaborated on Boule de suif/​Angel and Sinner (1945), Un revenant/​A Lover Returns (1946), Barbe-​bleue/​Bluebeard (1951) and Fanfan la tulipe (1952), and with Henri Decoin, on Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde/​Monelle (1948) and Entre onze heures et minuit/​Between Eleven and Midnight (1949). The 1950s, however, saw a decline in the quality of Jeanson’s already rather erratic output and a refusal to adapt to changing fashions. For example, several films in which Martine Carol’s more visual charms were augmented by a verbal panache provided by Jeanson’s lines –​Madame du Barry (1954), Nana (1955) and Nathalie/​The Foxiest Girl in Paris (1957), all directed by Christian-​ Jaque, and Nathalie, agent secret/​ Atomic Agent (Decoin, 1959) –​failed to make the box-​office top twenty. Jeanson’s career was in decline from the late 1950s onwards, as he himself recognised, blaming the pressurised working conditions that prevented close collaboration between writer and director, with ‘catastrophic results’ (Jeanson 2000: 76). Received wisdom has it that audience tastes in film dialogue were shifting towards Brigitte Bardot’s lazy intonations, or the terse style of Eddie Constantine, and that, at the advent of the New Wave, Jeanson, more so than many of his contemporaries whose dialogue was less mannered, found himself out of favour, the embodiment of a theatrical cinema despised by the young critics of the Cahiers du cinéma, Arts or Positif. And yet, the picture is more complicated, for, as we shall see in Chapter 6, it was precisely at this moment that Jeanson’s most direct heir, Michel Audiard, was establishing his career.

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In terms of style and subject matter, there is considerable crossover between Jeanson’s journalism and his writing for the cinema:  rhetorical figures; the recycling of puns and phrases; and recurring themes (censorship and freedom of speech, theatre and the dramatic illusion, the bureaucratic stifling of artistic creativity). As Moussé points out, Jeanson’s film dialogue is marked by the same staccato style that characterises his newspaper columns: choppy, short sentences and one-​line paragraphs; a range of rhetorical figures which exploit the possibilities of repetition and variation; and extended metaphors and word play. Such elements are brought together to create dialogue which at its best is rhythmic, poetic and memorable, but which at its worst can be stilted, cloying, overly mannered or gratuitously vulgar. Jeanson’s dialogue is full of recurring patterns and rhetorical devices that render it spectacular. His taste for unusual syntax is remarked upon by René Wheeler, a screenwriter who worked on several films with Jeanson, most notably Fanfan la tulipe. Wheeler (1994: 248) refers specifically to a line spoken by Fanfan (Gérard Philipe) about a training exercise led by his superior officer (Noël Roquevert):  ‘Imbécile et emmerdant, je trouve, cet exercice’ (Idiotic and boring, I find this exercise). Wheeler explains that he wrote the line –​presumably ‘Je trouve cet exercice imbécile et emmerdant’ –​ but Jeanson changed the word order, establishing a rhythm and pattern of emphasis that is both semantic (the words ‘imbécile’ and ‘emmerdant’ are highlighted) and rhythmic. Placing the adjectival complement at the front of the sentence breaks the line up into two hemistiches of seven and six syllables, separated by a caesura. Another example occurs in Hôtel du nord, when Raymonde (Arletty) says ‘A la gare, qu’il a été, pour chercher les billets et ret’nir nos coins’ (To the station, he’s gone, to get our tickets and reserve our seats), her elongated pronunciation of ‘gare’ further accentuated by the unusual word order. This somewhat contrived phrasing draws attention to the sonority of the language, exploiting the possibilities of oral expression and foregrounding the voices of the actors who are performing the dialogue.

Writing for actors For Jeanson, an ability to ‘hear’ an actor speaking his words as he writes them is key to the success of the dialogue: ‘If, when he’s writing, the author can hear the actor dictating the lines as they come into his mind and flow out of his pen, there is a very good chance that the dialogue will work’ (Jeanson 2000: 93). In his book analysing film dialogue, Jean Samouillan (2004: 30) emphasises this need for the dialogue writer to ‘penser oral’ –​ to think in terms of what will be said and heard  –​citing, among others,

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screenwriter Jean-​Claude Carrière, theatre director and actor Louis Jouvet and academics Anne Roche and Marie-​Claude Taranger, who all urge dialogue writers to speak their lines aloud in order to avoid the inevitable ‘death of the living words in their spoken form’ that occurs when they are written. For Jeanson, this ‘oral thinking’ is quite specific, since he conceived the words with particular voices in mind: I can hear certain actors very well […] I  think I  hear well, Jouvet, Arletty, Michèle Morgan, Fernand Gravey, Pierre Renoir, Marcel Dalio, Gérard Philipe, Gaby Morlay and Madeleine Renaud. But I’ve never been able to hear Raimu’s voice, even though I’ve got a good ear. (Jeanson 2000: 93)

The intervention of the actor is an aspect that is frequently ignored in critical reviews of Jeanson’s work, which focus on mots d’auteur rather than on the crafting of dialogue for actors. And yet, as Moussé (1997: 23) points out, Jeanson’s texts frequently shaped star personas beyond the cinema: ‘He created or reinforced certain actors’ images. His spoken literary style is placed at the service of actors’ personalities, of the timbre of their voice, their way of speaking, of behaving.’ In a study of the very particular relationship that existed between Jeanson and Jouvet, we argue that in the best of Jeanson’s films, the charisma of the word is matched by the actor’s delivery in such a way that the performance of the dialogue becomes the main focus of the mise en scene (Leahy 2019: 73). In these cases, it is no longer a question only of mots d’auteur, but of mots de star, lines whose performance becomes integral to the star persona of the actor delivering them. Chion (2008:  26) reports that French airwaves resonated with Arletty’s famous lines from Hôtel du nord following her death in 1992, surely because her pronunciation of ‘Atmosphère’ offers a perfect distillation of her star persona, phonetically capturing her Parisian-​accented gouaille while at the same time semantically encapsulating her contribution to Poetic Realist films of the 1930s.10 A growing body of work exists on the voice in film (Doane 1980; Silverman 1988; Chion 1999; Whittaker and Wright 2017), and in particular on star voices (Perriam 2005; Shingler 2006; Vincendeau 2010a; 2011). Many of these works point to the primacy of the audial over the visual in linking self and other; the sounds produced by one body are received by another, thus creating a physical bond. This sensory perception is anterior to the visual in terms of the child’s development, since perception of sound –​and especially the voice –​is developed in the womb, as Chion’s (1999) concept of the acousmêtre (the voice we hear without seeing who speaks) reminds us. As Mary Ann Doane notes (1980: 44–​5), this is one reason why the voice ‘traces the forms of unity and separation between bodies’. Voice, then, is a primary vector of identification between audience and star. Furthermore, in

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its individuality and instant recognisability, it is a marker of the authenticity of the star, a quality that Richard Dyer (1990) identifies as rooted in the body of the star. For Dyer (1990: 137), this both underpins the phenomenon of stardom and guarantees the specific values embodied by a particular star, allowing audiences to accept the star as being what s/​he appears to be. In the case of Jean Gabin, this concept of the authenticity of the star is further strengthened because it is also a value –​indeed the value –​that marks out his star image as unique. If Gabin’s star image has attained the status of myth (Gauteur and Vincendeau 1993), this is built on an idea of authenticity rooted in proletarian values expressed through language and gesture. Indeed, this was summed up by Prévert in his poem ‘La Voix de Jean Gabin’: ‘La voix de Jean Gabin est vraie/​c’est la voix de son regard/​ la voix de ses gestes de ses mains./​Tout marche ensemble/​Jean Gabin est synchrone de la tête aux pieds’ (Génin 1997: 28; Vincendeau 2010a).11 Ginette Vincendeau (2010a) analyses Gabin’s voice as a marker of three interlinked elements:  performance and stardom; temporality; and space, specifically, class and nation. She also points to aspects of Gabin’s voice that reinforce his authenticity: his softly spoken, naturalistic delivery that goes with his naturalistic, minimalist acting style (especially when compared with other more theatrical performers who surround him and act as foils) which is punctuated by moments of explosive anger; and a relatively neutral register and accent, but one which nonetheless clearly expresses his proletarian origins (especially with elongated vowels, e.g. in ‘mé-​e-​e-​tro’ and ‘ga-​a-​a-​re’, and the /​a/​halfway to an /​o/​of ‘pas’).12

Pépé le Moko Pépé (Jean Gabin) is a jewel thief hiding out in the Casbah in Algiers. The police are unable to arrest him, protected as he is by his gang and the indigenous population, especially women; his current partner is a gypsy called Inès (Line Noro). Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), an Algerian working for the French police, is the only one who can get close to Pépé, and understands how to take him alive. During a police raid, Pépé meets Gaby (Mireille Balin), a glamorous demi-​mondaine visiting the Casbah, and falls for her, attracted by her jewels. Her Parisian air intensifies his homesickness. A police attempt to lure Pépé out of the Casbah by arresting his protégé, Pierrot (Gilbert-​Gil), goes wrong as Pierrot is shot, and Pépé and his gang take revenge, executing the informer, Régis (Fernand Charpin). Pépé meets Gaby again and they make love. However, she fails to keep their next rendezvous,

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as Slimane tells her Pépé has been killed. Distraught, Pépé discovers that Gaby is about to sail for Paris, and heads to the port, where he is arrested by Slimane. Allowed to watch her ship sail off, Pépé draws out a knife and stabs himself. Gaby, on deck, looks back at the Casbah.

We see these aspects clearly in Pépé le Moko, where Gabin is surrounded by more ‘theatrical’ actors, notably Saturnin Fabre, a well-​known character actor who also had a considerable career on the stage, especially in boulevard theatre. In the role of the fence, Grandpère, Fabre acts as a foil for Gabin, repeating many of his lines but transforming the mode of address from the familiar ‘tu’ to the formal ‘vous’, and reformulating the straightforward address as more complex sentences, as we see in this exchange where Pépé is admonishing one of his gang, Carlos (Gabriel Gabrio), for his aggressive, disrespectful attitude: Extract 2 (Pépé le Moko): PÉPÉ  [to Carlos]:  Tiens, tu me fais mal. CARLOS  [aggressive, loud]:  J’te fais mal? Répète-​le. PÉPÉ  [laughing, higher pitched, but without raising his voice]:  Tu me fais mal. GRANDPÉRE  [slightly raised voice, as if repeating for someone hard of hearing]: Puisqu’il vous dit que vous lui faites mal.13 It is repetition that creates the ‘Jeansonian’ aspect of this exchange; indeed, the whole exchange is repeated almost word for word later in the film during a card game, when Carlos is berating Pépé for tolerating Slimane and being too soft on Pierrot, lending it a performative aspect. Gabin delivers the ‘neutral’ direct insult, twice, varying it through intonation and a slight emphasis on ‘tu’, though his voice remains soft. Carlos sends the line back first, but transforms it, running together the ‘je te’, raising his voice, and adding ‘Répète-​le’ –​a threatening imperative that fails to intimidate Pépé. The line is then repeated by Grandpère, who takes it to a more formal register, removing the directness of the insult by adding ‘puisque’ (since), turning it into reported speech ‘il vous dit’ (he’s telling you) and, of course, replacing ‘tu’ with ‘vous’, all delivered by Fabre in exaggeratedly dramatic style. At other points in the film, Grandpère draws attention to the theatrical nature of his speech, referring to ‘le style shakespearien’ and identifying one of his own phrases as a ‘néologisme’. As we might expect from a dialogue writer who crafts his lines with the actors à l’oreille, Pépé’s dialogue features many ‘Gabinisms’: to Slimane, ‘Qu’est-​ce tu veux qu’ça m’foute?’ (What do I  care?); to Gaby, ‘Tu me plais, tu sais? T’es

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belle’ (I like you, you know? You’re beautiful); and, associated with his moments of rage, to his gang members: ‘Débinez-​vous, vous autres, j’vous ai assez vus’ (Get out, all of you, I’ve seen enough of you), ‘Fous le camp […] Foutez-​moi le camp!’ (Get the hell out of here!) and, to Inès, ‘Tu vas te taire, oui? […] Moi je vais te faire taire tu vas voir’ (Are you going to shut up? I’ll shut your mouth, you’ll see’). Redolent of familiar or even vulgar linguistic registers, these are, nonetheless, stock phrases that could feature in almost any Gabin film, and if they are spectacular it is because they are ‘typical’ of the star’s performance style, especially in moments of seduction or outbursts of rage. However, there are other moments in the film (including some cited in the previous section) when Jeanson’s inventiveness coincides more spectacularly with Gabin’s star image. The following extract highlights the economy with which both star and writer are able to express Pépé’s longing to return home: Extract 3 (Pépé le Moko): INÉS:  Ça te donne pas le mal de mer de regarder les bateaux après déjeuner? PÉPÉ:  Et toi, ça te donne pas mal à la tête de me poser des questions pareilles? INÉS:  Non. Pourquoi, t’as mal à la tête? PÉPÉ:  Non, j’ai mal au bateau, va.14 The structure of the exchange is typical of Jeanson: the use of a question to answer a question, sending back the same phrasing, and then the recycling of a word uttered earlier in the conversation to create not just a punchline but a verbal image that matches the visual one. The homesick Pépé is watching the boats on which he cannot embark to return to France. His ‘mal au bateau’ is thus both comical and poignant, encapsulating perfectly his nostalgia for Paris. As Henri Verneuil (cited in Moussé 1997: 24) points out, ‘Henri’s mots are like a shortcut, they summarise twenty pages’. Like the ‘atmosphère’ of Hôtel du nord, this line now appears retrospectively to be a comment on Poetic Realism; Pépé, like Edmond in Hôtel du nord and Jean in Le Quai des brumes (Carné, 1938), is one of many Poetic Realist protagonists to suffer from this complaint. As Lagny et al. (1986: 6) put it, the fatalism of the genre is encapsulated time and again by a ship that does not sail, or rather, that sails leaving the protagonist on the shore. Pépé’s longing for Paris is intensified when he meets Gaby. Vincendeau (1998: 22) analyses perhaps the most famous passage of dialogue in the film, when the characters call to mind specific locations along Line 2 of the Paris metro, meeting up at Place Blanche, the site of the Moulin Rouge, where the wealthy bourgeoisie and the populist, working classes come together. As she points out, these place names are evocative not just of their characters but also of their star images: Mireille Balin was known for playing femmes de

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luxe, while Gabin embodied the working-​class hero. Later, after they have made love, Pépé puts his attraction for Gaby into words that are semantically and sonorously redolent of his city, especially through Gabin’s pronunciation of ‘métro’ with its elongated /​e/​, repeated three times: Extract 4 (Pépé le Moko): PÉPÉ:  [A]‌ vec toi, c’est comme si j’étais à Paris. Avec toi, je m’évade, tu saisis? Tu me changes le paysage. Tiens, tout à l’heure je faisais semblant de dormir, on ne dormait pas, hein, et je me laissais glisser, et sais-​tu ce que j’entendais? Le métro. Tu te rends compte? Le métro. T’as des bijoux que c’en est d’la provocation […] t’es pleine d’or, et tu me fais penser au métro, à des cornets de frites et à des cafés crème à la terrasse. Voilà comme tu es.15 This speech also picks up on a recurring metaphor in Jeanson’s dialogue, in which a woman comes to stand in for a place or ambience. We have already seen this in Pépé le Moko, as Pépé describes Inès as ‘une Casbah portative’ (‘a portable Casbah’). This pattern is replicated in Hôtel du nord, where, if Raymonde is the ‘Atmosphère’ Edmond seeks to escape, Renée embodies an imaginary Paris, even in the streets of Marseille en route for Port-​Saïd: Extract 5 (Hôtel du nord): RENÉE:  Notre dernière balade en France. EDMOND:  Avec toi, on sera toujours à Paris.16 One of the most famous ‘Jeansonisms’ in the film is Pépé’s line to Slimane, ‘Tu portes ta carte d’inspecteur sur la figure. Avoir l’air d’un faux j’ton à ce point-​là, j’te jure qu’c’est vraiment d’la franchise’ (You wear your police ID on your face! I swear, you look so much like a bad penny, it’s a declaration of honesty). However, this line also foregrounds Gabin’s delivery and accent, emphasising certain vowels, as in ‘carte’, ‘inspecteur’ and ‘figure’, and eliminating others (‘j’te’ rather than ‘je te’, ‘j’ton’ rather than ‘jeton’, ‘qu’c’est’ for ‘que c’est’ and ‘d’la’ for ‘de la’), and softening certain consonants (/​j/​ becomes /​sh/​). Here again the dialogue works in concert with the mise en scene; the words may refer to Slimane’s face but they also call attention to the straightforwardness –​authenticity –​of Gabin’s, featured in the medium two-​shot in three-​quarters profile, strongly lit and looking down at the policeman, while Slimane’s face is turned away from us, looking up at Pépé. As Vincendeau points out (Gauteur and Vincendeau 1993; Vincendeau 1998), Gabin frequently features as the object of the desiring gaze in his films, embodying both masculine and feminine characteristics. This is taken to the extreme in Pépé le Moko. Our next extract encapsulates this erotic charisma, a defining characteristic of both Gabin and Pépé:

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Extract 6 (Pépé le Moko): SLIMANE:  On t’aime trop, Pépé, les femmes te perdront. PÉPÉ:  Oh, rassure-​toi, va, je leur donne mon corps mais j’garde ma tête. On sait jamais, j’peux en avoir besoin un jour, pas vrai? SLIMANE:  En tout cas, quand on te dit ‘je t’aime’ on n’y met pas de discrétion. PÉPÉ:  Qu’est-​ce que tu veux? J’ai du sex-​appeal.17 Pépé’s ‘J’ai du sex-​appeal’, delivered with a performative gesture as he blows smoke in Slimane’s face, is another example of dialogue that functions on multiple levels. Ostensibly about women (‘the hundred thousand widows’ who will attend his funeral), the line becomes ambiguous when placed in the context of the relationship that exists between Pépé and Slimane, characterised from their first encounter in the film by flirtatious bantering: Extract 7 (Pépé le Moko): PÉPÉ:  T’aime pas beaucoup la bagarre, hein, mon petit poulet? SLIMANE:  Non, mon petit faisan.18 Pépé/​ Gabin is desired not only by women. The ambiguous nature of Slimane’s interest in him as a criminal he wants to arrest, but also as the embodiment of charismatic masculinity and object of desire, is reflected in the dialogue’s multiple levels of address and reference. The dialogue here, then, with its sous-​entendus and double entendres, reflects the complex networks of desire that surround Gabin; his ‘sex appeal’ surely refers also to his own stardom. This positioning is also established in the mise en scene, especially in the play of looks. To cite just one example, when Pépé enters the room where he will encounter Gaby, who is seeking refuge during a police raid, he first locks eyes with Slimane as the two men and the camera size each other up. While the two women present remain seated, Slimane’s face moves into shadow as he stands up to greet Pépé. The reverse shot reveals Pépé’s face bathed in light as he returns the policeman’s gaze. These shots are a precursor to the more spectacular series of alternate close-​ups of Pépé and Gaby, showing his awakening interest in both her and her jewels, but we should note that Slimane’s curious, observing (jealous?) gaze intervenes here again, trained on Pépé, out of focus in the foreground of the shot. Emphasising the necessity of considering dialogue and mise en scene as part of a whole, rather than as two separate and competing elements, Kozloff (2000: 122) points out that ‘film dialogue is not solely the province of screenwriters. Screenwriters (although shamefully underappreciated) are only partially responsible; casting directors, actors, directors, cameramen, composers, sound recordists, mixers and editors are all involved in shaping dialogue’. These scenes from Pépé le Moko show how lighting, framing, editing, performance and star image all play a role in the way that dialogue

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is understood. Jeanson may be regarded as a ‘star’ in his own right, someone whose contribution, brought in late in the day, could make or break a film. Yet in these examples, the dialogue becomes spectacular in performance, through the collective efforts of writer, director, set designer, cinematographer, composer and star. We should note that compared with Prévert or Spaak, Jeanson wrote only rarely for Gabin. If Spaak, as we have seen, was not concerned with who would deliver the dialogue he wrote, Prévert, like Jeanson, was very aware of what actors brought to the performance of the lines he wrote for them, as we can see from his poem cited above, ‘La Voix de Jean Gabin’. For Jeanson and Gabin, Pépé le Moko remains by far the best known of their collaborations, the only one that really could be said to have contributed to Gabin’s star persona.19 Perhaps surprisingly, Jeanson’s cinematic collaborations with Arletty were even more infrequent. She was, nonetheless, a friend and favourite of the writer; he baptised her ‘Lady Paname’, a nickname that encapsulates her embodiment of popular Paris through her gouaille (witty repartee) and especially her voice.20 In a letter of support she wrote for Jeanson when he was in prison, she signed herself ‘votre fidèle interprète’ (your faithful performer), recognising the impact on her career of their collaboration on Hôtel du nord.21 In this film, Jeanson provided her with one of her most memorable roles as she acknowledged: ‘my real career began with Hôtel du nord, at the age of forty’ (Jeanson 2000: 553). Hôtel du nord A young couple, Renée (Annabella) and Pierre (Jean-​Pierre Aumont), seek a place to carry out a suicide pact. They happen upon the Hôtel du nord on the bank of the Canal Saint-​Martin, home to a cast of ordinary working folk as well as Raymonde (Arletty), a colourful prostitute, and her pimp, Edmond (Louis Jouvet), who is hiding from some former associates he helped to convict, who are now due for release. Pierre shoots Renée, but fails to turn the gun on himself. Edmond, hearing the shot, goes to the room and realises what has happened. He allows Pierre to flee, but the young man turns himself in the next day. Renée pulls through and returns to the Hôtel du nord to work. Edmond, on seeing that she has returned, changes his plan to leave Paris for Toulon with Raymonde, preferring to stay near Renée. Jealous, Raymonde eventually breaks up with Edmond, who sets off to the South with Renée. Their plans to leave France for Port-​Saïd come to nothing when she realises she is unable to leave Pierre and returns to Paris, where he is about to be released. Edmond follows her back and faces his former accomplices, who shoot him as a traitor.

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In a discussion of Hôtel du nord, Edward Baron Turk (1989:  142–​3) evokes the physical impact of Arletty’s voice, highlighting the corporeal nature of the audial relation between star and viewer:

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If the personality of a film star depends as much on the ‘phonogenic’ ‘grain of the voice’ as on the ‘photogenic configuration of body and face’, Arletty had extraordinary ‘phonogeneity’. Her shrill, angular sound … crackles, granulates, grates, and cuts.

Chion (1999:  53) refers to this as ‘corporeal implication […] when the voice makes us feel in our body the vibration of the body of the other’ (original emphasis). In this case, it is the dialogue that provides the vector for this physical connection, one that is doubly located in space since it also evokes through accent and vocabulary (especially slang) the site of the film’s action –​popular Paris in the 1930s. Elsewhere, Chion (2008: 26) notes key features of Arletty’s voice, including, of course, her pronunciation of certain words –​‘atmosphère’, ‘fatalitaire’, ‘air’, ‘mer’ –​featured repeatedly in Hôtel du nord, with the ‘ère’/​‘air’ sound characteristic of the faubourgs, the outer, working-​class districts of Eastern and Northern Paris.22 But as Chion also notes, there is more to Arletty’s interpretation of Jeanson’s words than her accent. The long extract below, which places the famous ‘Atmosphère’ in its context, reveals markers of style that we have already seen, such as repetition (‘Non’, ‘Oui’, ‘vie’), use of questions to answer a question, often sending it back in an echo (‘T’aimes pas not’vie?’/​‘Tu l’aimes, toi, not’vie?’), the creation of neologisms (notably, ‘fatalitaire’ for ‘fataliste’, which has the dual merit of foregrounding Arletty’s accent and the role of fate in Poetic Realist films), malapropisms (she uses ‘manchote’ –​one-​armed –​rather than ‘borgne’  –​one-​eyed) and alliteration, especially of harsh sounds (the /​k/​ of ‘crotte’, ‘crâne’, ‘croquer’, picked up again in ‘incruste’, ‘caille’ –​slang for stomach –​and cocard). Arletty’s performance of many of these aspects creates a comic aspect to the exchange, and yet, as we shall see, her character is more complex than just a provider of comic relief to the heavy melodrama of Renée and Pierre. In this scene, we infer that Raymonde, disappointed not to be going to Toulon, has received a black eye for accusing Edmond of wanting to stay on account of Renée: Extract 8 (Hôtel du nord): EDMOND:  Tu prétendras encore que j’ai le béguin pour Renée? RAYMONDE:  Non! EDMOND:  Non oui ou non non? RAYMONDE:  Non non. Regarde-​moi ça. Je ne vois plus de l’œil gauche. J’ai l’impression que je suis manchote. EDMOND:  T’es prête, oui?

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RAYMONDE: 

Oui. Oui oui ou oui non? RAYMONDE:  Oui crotte, et encore c’est parce que c’est dimanche, sans ça. EDMOND:  Je peux très bien y aller tout seul à La Varenne. RAYMONDE:  T’en fais des chichis parce que tu vas à la pêche. Moi je vais à la chasse tous les soirs et je ne crâne pas. D’abord, aller à la Varenne quand on d’vait en croquer à Toulon …23

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EDMOND: 

Raymonde’s final lines in this part of the exchange, which takes place in their room in the hotel, show this tendency to move between short, sharp exchanges and longer speeches. While the ‘Non’/​‘Oui’ lines are delivered with a kind of childish emphasis, highlighted by a medium close shot on her first ‘Non!’ as she bends towards Edmond as if throwing the word at him, her whining tone gives way to impatience, indicated with a much more rapid delivery when she raises the matter of the cancelled trip. The argument continues into the next scene, where we find the couple in the street and then on the lock gate. Edmond’s brief, laconic responses show a lack of willingness to engage in the conversation, while Raymonde resumes her whining –​at times rather wheedling –​tone, as she attempts to persuade him that they should go away together after all, highlighted especially in the elongated vowels of her accent on words such as ‘incru-​u-​ustes’, ‘vila-​a-​in’, ‘fatalita-​a-​ire’. Extract 9 (Hôtel du nord): RAYMONDE:  Pourquoi qu’on part pas pour Toulon? Tu t’incrustes, tu t’incrustes, ça finira par faire du vilain. EDMOND:  Et après? RAYMONDE:  Oh t’as pas toujours été aussi fatalitaire. EDMOND:  Fataliste. RAYMONDE:  Si tu veux, le résultat est le même. Pourquoi que tu l’as à la caille? On n’est pas heureux, tous les deux? EDMOND:  Non. RAYMONDE:  T’en es sûr? EDMOND:  Oui. RAYMONDE:  T’aimes pas not’vie? EDMOND:  Tu l’aimes toi, not’vie? RAYMONDE:  Faut bien, je m’y suis habituée. Cocard mis à part, t’es plutôt beau mec. Par terre on s’dispute mais au lit on s’explique, et sur l’oreiller on s’comprend. Alors?24 At this point, Raymonde’s tone changes noticeably from the whining questions  –​‘On n’est pas heureux, tous les deux/​T’en es sûr?’ (Aren’t we happy together?/​Are you sure?)  –​to a more good-​humoured, persuasive,

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even seductive tone  –​‘t’es plutôt beau mec … au lit on s’explique et sur l’oreiller on s’comprend’ (you’re a good looking guy … but we make it up in bed and on the pillow, we understand each other) –​building up to her suggestion that they should go away together to the ‘colonies’. However, the questions  –​‘T’en es sûr?’ (Are you sure?); ‘Alors?’ (Well?)  –​show a rather desperate clutching at straws in her determination not to be brushed off easily. During the sequence immediately preceding this one, Raymonde suddenly realises why Edmond cancelled their trip, as she comforts the cuckolded Trimault (Bernard Blier). Her use of ‘reniflé’ (sniffed it out) here already suggests there is something ‘in the air’. Trimault says he can date his wife’s cheating back to when she cancelled a holiday at the last minute: Extract 10 (Hôtel du nord): TRIMAULT:  Je lui tends les billets comme un bouquet de violettes. Vous savez pas c’qu’elle m’dit? RAYMONDE:  On ne part plus. TRIMAULT:  Vous le saviez? RAYMONDE:  Non, je l’ai reniflé.25 Whatever Edmond says about his feelings for Renée, Raymonde’s black eye surely confirms her suspicions. What we see in this famous sequence, then, is Raymonde performing certain ideas of femininity –​as with the clients she picks up at the metro station –​in a bid to keep her man. She continues these attempts at persuasion as the exchange continues, picking up on his need for air by reminding him that there is fresh air at the coast: Extract 11 (Hôtel du nord): EDMOND:  Alors rien. J’en ai assez, tu saisis. Je m’asphyxie. Tu saisis? Je m’asphyxie. RAYMONDE:  A Toulon, il y de l’air puisqu’il y a la mer, tu respireras mieux. EDMOND:  Partout où on ira ça sentira le pourri. RAYMONDE:  Allons à l’étranger, aux colonies. EDMOND:  Avec toi? RAYMONDE:  C’t’idée. EDMOND:  Alors ça sera partout pareil. J’ai besoin de changer d’atmosphère, et moi l’atmosphère, c’est toi […] RAYMONDE:  C’est la première fois qu’on me traite d’atmosphère. Si je suis une atmosphère t’es un drôle de bled. Ah là là! Des types qui sont du milieu sans en être et qui crânent à cause de ce qu’ils ont été, on devrait les vider. Atmosphère, atmosphère! Est-​ce que j’ai une gueule d’atmosphère? Puisque c’est ça vas-​y tout seul à la Varenne. Bonne pêche et bonne atmosphère!26

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Figure 3.1  ‘Atmosphère! Est-​ce que j’ai une gueule d’atmosphère?’: Louis Jouvet and Arletty in Hôtel du nord.

Raymonde’s final attack in this verbal joust has been much commented on –​ the final fortissimo passage of the slowly building crescendo in which she displays her knowledge and bitterness about Edmond’s past and the airs he gives himself. Her ‘t’es un drôle de bled’ (you’re a funny sort of place) takes up this Jeansonian idea expressed so often by men of women as representing a place or an ambience and turns it back to him, at the same time refusing to be reduced to his ‘atmosphere’ (Figure 3.1). In Hôtel du nord, Raymonde is a victim: of prostitution, domestic abuse and infidelity. And yet, she does not behave like one. Chion (2008: 31) disagrees with the frequent interpretation of Raymonde as very stupid and unaware of what is happening to her. In fact, there are several indications that, on the contrary, she knows very well what her situation is, but also realises that the best way of dealing with it is to perform her allotted role. Chion (2008: 31) cites her line to Renée later in the film –​‘Ah vous, vous êtes une atmosphère pas ordinaire’ (Well, you’re a funny sort of atmosphere) –​as evidence that ‘in the mind of the dialogue-​writer, she knows very well’ the meaning of the word atmosphere, and is thus fully aware of her own wit. For Chion, what is interesting here is

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the ambiguity, the fact that both readings are possible, something he sees as having disappeared in later dialogue writers’ work (especially that of Michel Audiard). Of course, this ambiguity brings us back to the idea of multiple address; it is perfectly possible here to read Raymonde’s lines on one diegetic level, while appreciating Arletty’s performance of them on another level, as referring to her star image and her association with working-​class Paris. Jeanson fleshed out the characters of Edmond and Raymonde, originally conceived as secondary roles to provide light relief in this drama, to the point where they stole the vedette from Renée and Pierre. In Raymonde’s case, this is thanks to the way she reveals the ‘dumb broad’ cliché to be a performance, through little glimpses of her understanding. We can see this very clearly in an exchange that takes place earlier in the film with Jeanne, a maid at the hotel. Excited about leaving for the South, Raymonde tells Jeanne all about Edmond as she packs her suitcase: Extract 12 (Hôtel du nord): RAYMONDE:  Voyager avec lui, c’est un rêve. Cet homme-​là dans une gare c’est un autr’homme. Il est aux petits soins et tout avec vous. Il vous achète des oranges, il vous les pèle. Il vous allume vot’cigarette avant de vous l’offrir. Ah, il est imbattable question délicatesse […] Et plus qu’on descend vers la mer, plus il devient tendre … Avec lui on prend des troisième, on a l’impression d’être en première. JEANNE:  Vous avez souvent voyagé ensemble? RAYMONDE:  C’est la première fois.27 Raymonde’s voice takes on a softer, almost romantic tone as she describes this tender, thoughtful individual, ‘un autre homme’ (a different man), and she is framed in a medium shot that places us in the position of her interlocutor, Jeanne. Although it could be considered that the punchline, ‘C’est la première fois’ (It’s the first time), is delivered at her own expense, her falling intonation and the hardening of her voice suggests a different reading, that in fact, far from being entirely taken in by an exploitative pimp, she understands exactly who she is involved with, and prefers to invent herself an ideal man as a way of escaping her reality. Of course, the presence of Louis Jouvet as Edmond also contributes to Arletty’s performance as Raymonde, frequently functioning as a foil for her more spectacular linguistic moments. Jouvet was undoubtedly Jeanson’s acteur fétiche as well as one of his closest friends and most frequent collaborators. If Arletty’s and Gabin’s star images were marked by Jeanson, thanks to remarkable roles in one or two key films, the collaboration between Jeanson and Jouvet is of a different nature; the two worked on ten films together between 1936 and Jouvet’s death in 1951.28 Other writers also provided Jouvet with memorable roles and lines –​Charles Spaak and

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Bernard Zimmer in La Kermesse héroïque/​Carnival in Flanders (Feyder, 1935); Prévert in Drôle de drame/​Bizarre Bizarre (Carné, 1937); Henri-​ George Clouzot and Jean Ferry in Quai des Orfèvres (Clouzot, 1947) –​but Jeanson was the actor’s favourite screen dialogue writer. In his preface to the published screenplay of Entrée des artistes, Jouvet (1946: 12) discusses the experience of working with his friend:  ‘During our collaborations … I discovered a new relationship between creator and interpreter. I experienced the revelation of a dramatic world that was different from any I knew.’ We have explored elsewhere the ‘perfect coincidence’ between the actor’s way of speaking and the writer’s style (Leahy 2019). Jouvet’s staccato delivery and his idiosyncratic emphases and cadences –​reputedly developed to overcome a stammer –​make him the perfect interpreter of Jeanson’s lines, as Jean-​Paul Lacroix (Jeanson 2000:  7), journalist and Jeanson’s protégé at Le Canard enchaîné, remarks, commenting that Jouvet ‘spoke as Jeanson wrote, starting a new paragraph every four words’. Similarly, critics Olivier Barrot and Raymond Chirat (1994: 88) note the interdependence of Jouvet’s diction and Jeanson’s pen: ‘the famous cadence, peppered with irony, seeded with suspension points’. No doubt due to their close friendship and this happy linguistic coincidence, Jouvet frequently functions as a kind of porte-​ parole for Jeanson, expressing their shared view of the theatrical –​and cinematic –​illusion.

Entrée des artistes François (Claude Dauphin), Cœcilia (Odette Joyeux) and Isabelle (Janine Darcey) are among the pupils of Professor Lambertin (Louis Jouvet) at the Conservatoire of Dramatic Arts in Paris. François and Cœcilia used to go out together; now François, a notorious womaniser, is interested in Isabelle. Cœcilia lays a bet with her classmates that she can win him back. Isabelle’s guardians run a laundry and are opposed to her stage ambitions. Lambertin visits them and tells them what he thinks of them. Isabelle leaves home. François takes a job as an escort for rich women in order to support Isabelle financially; he has finally fallen in love. Cœcilia’s plans to win back François are unsuccessful so she decides to commit suicide, which she does by taking poison on stage, implicating François as her murderer. He is cleared of the charge. The film ends with Lambertin addressing his class on the inextricable connections between performing and being, between life and art.

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Figure 3.2  Poster for Entrée des artistes: Jeanson gets a prominent credit for dialogue.

We can see this in Entrée des artistes (Figure 3.2), in which Jouvet plays a lightly fictionalised version of himself, a professor at the Conservatoire of Dramatic Arts in Paris. The very question of the illusory nature of theatrical (or cinematic) realism, and the nature of the audience’s participation in the illusion, is made explicit, in what could be considered as a kind of manifesto

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for screenwriting as well as performance. Jouvet/​Lambertin declares to his pupils: Extract 13 (Entrée des artistes): LAMBERTIN:  Dans le théâtre, il faut transposer. Le naturel doit être un naturel de théâtre. N’oublie pas qu’il y a une rampe, un souffleur, des herses et du public. Hein? Il faut que les personnages que tu incarnes sentent le théâtre, la toile peinte et le fard. Le spectateur paie pour avoir l’illusion qu’il est au théâtre; si tu lui enlèves cette illusion, tu commets une erreur. Tu fausses le jeu.29 Again here we see Jeansonisms, such as repetition of key words (‘théâtre’, ‘naturel’, ‘illusion’), lists which bring a rhythm to the lines as well as emphasising the point, and the final chute, delivered in a pithy sentence which here plays on the dual meaning of the word ‘jeu’ (game/​performance). But this speech of Lambertin also brings us back to Kozloff’s point (2000: 14), cited earlier, in which she reminds us that cinema audiences are eavesdroppers who are yet fully conscious of the ‘film-​going suspension of disbelief’. In fiction films, cinematic language –​and its performance –​is not ‘natural’ language; even if it is improvised, it is still only ever a representation of the real because of its duality, its simultaneous levels of address between characters at the diegetic level and between writer/​ actor and spectator. We have already noted this duality of address in our discussions of Gabin and Arletty, but with Jouvet, arguably this reaches an apotheosis. According to Cornette (2004), this duality –​‘double enunciation’  –​is a particular feature of Jeanson’s film dialogue. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism and the carnivalesque, Cornette (2004: 15–​16) elaborates on the different modes of address he identifies in Jeanson’s films: In the monologic mode, the author defines his heroes, ‘finishes’ them with linguistic and personality traits. These traits are stable and objective, defined according to socioprofessional or regional criteria. The characters are, in fact, merely objects, correlating only with their author’s consciousness. In the dialogic mode, the characters are first and foremost defined by their conception of themselves […] They move from the status of objects to subjects, real voices embodying a discourse. From one monologic voice, then, the film moves to several voices chatting amongst themselves; the work is polyphonic.

We have seen how both Gabin’s and Arletty’s performances shift between the monologic and dialogic modes, between their performance of their own star image and their inhabiting of their character. The emphasis on theatricality and performance in almost all of Jouvet’s roles written by Jeanson means that his parts have a strong monologic tendency, following Cornette’s

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definitions above; indeed, Cornette (2004: 77) identifies Entrée des artistes as one of the most monologic of Jeanson’s films. And yet, Jouvet is far from a mere puppet inhabiting the ‘author’s consciousness’; many of these roles are demonstrative of a meeting of minds (coincidence) between ‘creator and interpreter’ that Jouvet describes above. Cornette describes this interrogation of the line between performance and existence, ‘between art and life’, in Bakhtinian terms as carnivalesque, as deriving from the ‘other life’ of the carnival that is a reaction and a resource for the first. Jeanson’s dialogue consistently calls into question which of these corresponds to art and which to life, most explicitly in Jouvet’s address to his pupils at the end of Entrée des artistes. Following Cœcilia’s suicide  –​‘elle a rendu son rôle’ (she has given up her part) –​he turns on its head the usual commonplace that life begins where performance ends: Extract 14 (Entrée des artistes): LAMBERTIN:  Tu disais qu’à force de jouer la comédie on finit par s’imaginer que la vie est une farce; c’est vrai mais il faut y croire. Mettre un peu d’art dans sa vie et un peu de vie dans son art […] Rien n’est faux … Il suffit d’avoir un peu de foi et tout devient réel […] vous vivrez plusieurs existences passionnantes et compliquées, pathétiques et cocasses, mais ne l’oubliez pas, c’est quand le rideau se lève que votre vie commence … Il ne tient qu’à vous qu’elle continue le rideau une fois baissé. Pour cela il suffit après avoir cru en vos personnages, de croire un peu en vous …30 It is most clearly in these collaborations with Jouvet that Jeanson was able to give full rein to his rhetorical art. It is certainly the case that he frequently gave in to the temptation of providing Jouvet with bons mots to deliver for the pleasure of hearing the actor’s voice pronounce them. Certain scenes in Lady Paname, for example, are evidently built on these, most notably when Monsieur Chacaton, the representative of the League of Morality, interrupts a music hall performance and is heckled in turn by Jouvet’s character, Bagnolet, an anarchist photographer. Extract 15 puns on the meanings of ‘claque’ (a slap in the face, but also referring to the theatrical institution of professional applauders or hecklers), as well as playing on the homophony of ‘mère de’ (mother of) and ‘merde’ (shit): Extract 15 (Lady Paname): CHACATON:  Silence la claque! BAGNOLET:  Je suis la claque mais vous êtes la joue […] CHACATON:  Il y a ici des femmes qui sont des mères de famille […] Respect pour elles. BAGNOLET:  Les mères de famille vous disent ‘Merde, famille’!31

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Although word play is a major part of Jeanson’s rhetoric and a key source of pleasure for many audiences, this is not the end of the story.32 The foregrounding of performance we identify above as central to the collaboration between Jeanson and Jouvet permits a more reflexive consideration of the relationship between writer, actor and audience, on whose willing participation the theatrical illusion depends. Jouvet’s roles written by Jeanson acknowledge this: four are set in a theatrical milieu (Entrée des artistes, Un revenant, Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde, Lady Paname), while a further five (Mister Flow, Un carnet de bal, Hôtel du nord, Copie conforme, Entre onze heures et minuit) feature the actor in the role of someone  –​ frequently a criminal –​who is adopting a new identity, becoming ‘un autre homme’ as Raymonde puts it in Hôtel du nord, a phrase that recurs in many of these films. Vincendeau (2010a: 2) identifies Jouvet with a class of French performers known as acteurs à voix, whom she also associates with Chion’s concept of the voix-​je: ‘a domineering, hyperbolic, almost narcissistic voice … that relentlessly calls attention to itself’. Chion (1999: 51) identifies the voix-​je as one that functions ‘as a pivot of identification, resonating in us as if it were our own voice’ (original emphasis), thanks to specific sound qualities that establish a proximity with the audience. Chion argues that the disembodied nature of this voice (visually detached because absent from the image; audially detached by the sound quality) is what permits this special relationship. However, he also points to ways in which these qualities can be manipulated, allowing cinematic voices to oscillate between subject and object positions, either through the addition of reverb in the sound mix, or visually, ‘when the [off-​screen] voice and the image dance in a dynamic relationship’ (Chion 1999: 50–​1). We would argue that in Jouvet’s roles written by Jeanson, this dynamic relationship can be seen as Jeanson’s off-​screen voice embodied on-​screen by Jouvet, thanks to the ‘perfect coincidence’ between the two, and the constant shifting between dialogic and monologic modes of address. The voix-​je thus offers a kind of extension of the monologic voice identified by Cornette with the author of the dialogue, by projecting it onward to its hearer, the audience. The central point in this three-​way relationship is the actor’s voice performing the words. In her consideration of film dialogue, Claire Vassé (2003: 37) argues that ‘filming dialogue is also filming bodies’ and that the challenge for the dialogue writer is not only to ‘let the dialogue be heard, but to render it as embodied matter. Brought to the screen, the word becomes flesh, the dialogue becomes voice and takes its place in a sound universe’. Through a consideration of a small sample of Jeanson’s extensive œuvre and his collaboration with three major stars of French cinema, we have highlighted in this chapter that cinematic pleasures are aural as well as

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visual, and that star voices performing spectacular dialogue provide a direct channel for the viewers’ emotional connection. We have also seen that film dialogue –​especially in the early days of sound film –​is a potent conveyor of national identity. As Vincendeau (2010a: 8) has argued, ‘speech is one of the most emotionally powerful ways in which Gabin is “French” ’. This is equally true of Arletty and Jouvet, but also of the numerous other actors with whom Jeanson collaborated and whom we have not had space to consider here; stars such as Fernandel, Gérard Philipe, Martine Carol and Suzy Delair, but also character actors with a theatrical pedigree, such as Marguerite Moréno, Saturnin Fabre and Louis Seigner.33 In many ways, Jeanson was one of the least patriotic of French public figures of his time, ruthlessly attacking the establishment and declaring his body ‘propriété privé’ and therefore ineligible for conscription in the notorious article that led to his imprisonment on the eve of the Second World War (Jeanson 1971: 39–​40). But his mastery and love of his language can be seen clearly in the words he put in the mouths of some of France’s greatest stars.

Films mentioned written in whole or part by Jeanson Côte d’azur (Capellani, 1932; scr. Vigny; adapted from the play by André Birabeau and Georges Dolley) Le Jugement de minuit (Charlot and Esway, 1933; scr. and dial. Alley; adapted from Edgar Wallace) La Dame de chez Maxim’s (Korda, 1933; scr. and dial Jeanson; adapted from the play by Georges Feydeau) Mister Flow (Siodmak, 1936; scr. Jeanson; adapted from Gaston Leroux) Pépé le Moko (Duvivier, 1937; scr. Duvivier and Henri La Barthe; adapt. Constant; dial. Jeanson; adapted from Henri La Barthe, aka Ashelbé) Un carnet de bal/​ Christine (Duvivier, 1937; scr. Duvivier, Jeanson, Mirande, Sarment, Wolff and Zimmer) Entrée des artistes/​The Curtain Rises (M. Allégret; scr. Cayatte, Cavin and Jeanson; dial. Jeanson) Hôtel du nord (Carné, 1938; adapt. Aurenche and Jeanson; dial. Jeanson; adapted from Eugène Dabit) Le Drame de Shanghaï/​Shanghai Drama (Pabst, 1938; adapt. Jeanson; scr. Arnoux and Lania; adapted from Oscar Paul Gilbert) Boule de suif/​Angel and Sinner (Christian-​Jaque, 1945; adapt. Christian-​Jaque and d’Hee; scr. d’Hee and Jeanson; dial. Jeanson; adapted from Maupassant Boule de suif and Mademoiselle Fifi) Un revenant/​A Lover Returns (Christian-​Jaque, 1946; adapt. Chavance, Christian-​ Jaque and Jeanson; scr. and dial. Jeanson) Copie conforme (Dréville, 1947; scr. J.  Companeez, Franck and Imbert; dial. Jeanson)

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Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde/​Monelle (Decoin, 1948; adapt., scr. and dial. Jeanson) Entre onze heures et minuit/​Between Eleven and Midnight (Decoin, 1949; adapt. Jeanson and Rivet; dial. Jeanson; adapted from Claude Luxel) È più facile che un cammello …/​Twelve Hours to Live (Zampa, 1950; scr. Cecchi d’Amico, Brancati, Fabbri, Moser, Jeanson and Zavattini) Lady Paname (Jeanson, 1950; scr. Jeanson) Barbe-​bleue/​Bluebeard (Christian-​Jaque, 1951; adapt. Christian Jaque and Luc; scr. A.-​P. Antoine; dial. Jeanson) La Minute de vérité/​The Moment of Truth (Delannoy, 1952; scr. and dial. Delannoy, Jeanson, Laudenbach) La Fête à Henriette/​Henriette (Duvivier, 1952; scr. Duvivier and Jeanson; dial. Jeanson) Fanfan la tulipe (Christian-​Jaque, 1952; adapt. Christian-​Jaque, Jeanson, Wheeler; scr. Wheeler and Fallet; dial. Jeanson) Jaque, 1954; adapt. Christian-​ Jaque, Jeanson, Madame du Barry (Christian-​ Valentin; dial. Jeanson) Nana (Christian-​Jaque, 1955; adapt. Christian-​Jaque, Ferry, Jeanson, Valentin; dial. Jeanson; adapted from Zola, L’Assommoir) Nathalie/​The Foxiest Girl in Paris (Christian-​Jaque, 1957; adapt. Christian-​Jaque, Ferry, Emmanuel; scr. Apestéguy; dial. Jeanson; adapted from Franck Marchal, Nathalie Princesse) Maxime (Verneuil, 1958; scr. Jeanson, Valentin, Verneuil; adapted from Henri Duvernois) Nathalie, agent secret/​Atomic Agent (Decoin, 1959; scr. Apestéguy; dial. Jeanson; adapted from Franck Marchal)

Other films mentioned Le Coupable (Antoine, 1917; scr. François Coppée) Le Duel de Plouf (Rivers, 1918; scr. Rivers) La Kermesse héroïque/​Carnival in Flanders (Feyder, 1935; scr. Feyder and Spaak; dial. Zimmer) Drôle de drame/​Bizarre, Bizarre (Carné, 1936; scr. J. Prévert; dial. J. Prévert; adapted from J. S. Clouston, His First Offence) Quai des orfèvres (Clouzot, 1947; scr. and dial. Clouzot and Ferry; adapted from Stanislas-​André Steeman, Légitime défense)

Notes 1 VOICE-​OVER: No, no, no! Stop the music! You can’t play music that hasn’t been composed yet! And, by the way, the script isn’t written yet either. Which means that the film hasn’t been shot. Everything remains to be done, everything!

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Script, dialogue, mise en scene, set design, music, casting! You won’t see this film for at least a year. And why? Quite simply because … /​SCREENWRITER 1: The censorship committee! Turned down our script! Unanimously! 2 The role of script, invariably held by a woman, was a central one at all stages of the production process. Frequently functioning as secretary to the screenwriters, with the key role of recording discussions and producing synopses, treatments and eventually a script out of the conversations and debates of screenwriters, this individual was also responsible for maintaining the integrity of the production during filming, from ensuring continuity to working with actors on pronunciation or gesture (Witta-​Montrobert 1980). Nicole plays a key part in keeping the film on track in La Fête à Henriette. 3 See Moussé (1997), Martin (2005) and Leahy (2015b) for more on Jeanson’s career as a journalist. 4 See, for example, SACD archive, Jeanson correspondence (42), letter from Duvivier, 21 April (1938), and letter from Decoin (c. 1948)  re:  Entre onze heures et minuit. See also Lindeperg (2014: 237, note 5) regarding Boule de suif and Chedaleux (2016: 127) on Entrée des artistes. 5 There are many other pairings we could add here –​Charles Spaak’s ‘marriages’ discussed in Chapter  1; Jeanson with Christian-​ Jaque, Duvivier or Henri Decoin; Pierre Laroche with Jacqueline Audry; Annette Wademant or Maurice Griffe with Jacques Becker –​just to give a few examples. 6 Jeanson (1971) outlines his arrests, imprisonments and releases at length in his autobiography. Jeanne Witta-​Montrobert (1980: 123–​33), a friend and colleague in cinema and journalism, recounts in her memoires the events surrounding his first incarceration and release. Martin (2005) also gives a detailed account of Jeanson’s wartime activities –​incarceration, the circumstances of his release from prison, and his role as editor in chief for the collaborationist daily Aujourd’hui from September to November 1940 –​in the context of a wider question about what constitutes collaboration, especially among those working in the press. 7 In her doctoral thesis, Isabelle Marinone (2004: 199–​210) traces Jeanson’s anarchist engagement. 8 Maurice Bessy (1977:  243) recounts how Jeanson  –​who cherished theatrical ambitions as both performer and writer in his early career  –​appeared in a leading role in Pomarol a du cran at the Scala theatre at the same time as criticising its author, André Mouëzy-​Éon, in La Bataille syndicale. 9 Among several other bit parts that helped him to make ends meet at this time was a role as a child in André Antoine’s Le Coupable, 1917 (Jeanson 1971: 102–​5). 10 Arletty attributed to Jeanson the notorious (and apocryphal?) ‘mot’ with which she faced those who accused her of collaboration: ‘Si mon cœur est français, mon cul, lui, est international’ (Alliot 2016: 11). 11 ‘Jean Gabin’s voice is true/​it’s the voice of his look/​the voice of his gestures and his hands./​Everything works together/​Jean Gabin is synchronous from head to toe.’ First published in the collection Solstice de Mars in 1954. See also Andreu (2006).

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12 As we discuss in the introduction to this volume, Chion (2008: 7) argues that French cinema does not possess a neutral register; the dialogue is almost always marked as familiar or formal. Gabin, especially in the 1930s, is firmly located on the familiar side (strong preference for ‘tu’ over ‘vous’; emphatic use of onomatopœic punctuations such as ‘Bah!’, ‘Ben’, ‘Hein’; some use of popular expressions and slang; slightly elongated vowels). 13 PÉPÉ: [to Carlos]: Well, you make me sick. /​CARLOS [aggressive, loud]: I make ya sick? Say that again. /​PÉPÉ: [laughing, higher pitched, but without raising his voice]: You make me sick! /​GRANDPÈRE [slightly raised voice, as if repeating for someone hard of hearing]: Since he’s telling you you make him sick … 14 INÈS: Don’t you get seasick watching the boats after lunch? /​PÉPÉ:  And you, don’t you get a headache from asking me questions like that? /​INÈS: No. Why, have you got a headache? /​PÉPÉ: No, I’ve got boat-​ache. 15 [W]‌ith you, it’s like being in Paris. With you, I escape, y’know? You’re a breath of fresh air. Just now, I was pretending to sleep, we weren’t sleeping, and I let my mind wander, and d’you know what I heard? The metro. Can you believe it? The metro. You’ve got jewels to the point of temptation, you’re loaded with gold, and you make me think of the metro, a bag of chips and pavement cafes. That’s what you’re like. 16 RENÉE: Our last stroll in France. /​EDMOND: With you, we’ll always be in Paris. 17 SLIMANE:  They love you too much, Pépé; women will be your downfall. /​ PÉPÉ: Oh, don’t you worry; I give them my body but I keep my head. You never know, I might need it one day, don’t you think? /​SLIMANE: Well in any case, when they say, ‘I love you’, they’re not shy about it. /​PÉPÉ: What do you expect? I’ve got sex appeal! 18 PÉPÉ:  You don’t much like the rough stuff, do you, ducky? [literally, ‘my little chicken’] /​SLIMANE: No, my little pigeon [literally, ‘pheasant’]. The bird references pick up on Pépé’s first line in this scene in which he addresses a woman as ‘ma colombe’ [my dove]. 19 The other films featuring Gabin that Jeanson was involved in writing are La Minute de vérité/​The Moment of Truth (Delannoy, 1952), and the Franco-​ Italian co-​production, È più facile che un cammello…/​Twelve Hours to Live (Zampa, 1950). 20 The film bearing that name –​directed by Jeanson in 1949 with Suzy Delair, Henri Guisol and Louis Jouvet in the role of an anarchist with a politician brother –​was conceived in 1938 for Arletty and Maurice Chevalier, but interrupted by the war (Witta-​Montrobert 1980: 125). 21 ‘Paname’ is a slang term for Paris. SACD archive, Jeanson correspondence (41), letter from Arletty to Jeanson, no date. Arletty and Jeanson are credited on only one other film together, Maxime (Verneuil, 1958), with Michèle Morgan and Charles Boyer, but they had many projects together, including Lady Paname, which was interrupted by the war (Witta-​Montrobert 1980: 124). 22 Jeanson’s dialogue plays on this elsewhere, too. Carette, another actor known for his Parisian accent, plays on the word ‘secrétaire’ in Entrée des artistes, and we have seen how Gabin’s elongated vowels become features of his speech

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in Pépé le Moko. In Lady Paname, Jeanson brings to life the Faubourg Saint-​ Martin of the 1920s, a district associated with music hall and popular theatre (one of its theatres would be adopted as home by the Splendid troupe in 1974), only a stone’s throw away from the Canal Saint-​Martin and the Hôtel du nord. In this film, Suzy Delair is a stand-​in for Arletty, building on her singing career and her role as a music hall artiste in Quai des Orfèvres (Clouzot, 1947), which also features Jouvet. 23 EDMOND: Do you still say I’ve got a thing for Renée? /​RAYMONDE: No. /​EDMOND: No yes, or no no? /​RAYMONDE: No no. Look at that. I  can’t see out of the left eye. It’s as if I  had one arm. /​EDMOND: You ready? /​RAYMONDE: Yes. /​ EDMOND: Yes yes, or yes no? /​RAYMONDE: Yes crap, and that’s just because it’s Sunday, otherwise … /​EDMOND: I can very well go to La Varenne on my own. /​ RAYMONDE: You’re making a right fuss about going fishing. I go hunting every night, and I don’t show off about it. So, going to catch fish in La Varenne, when we should be eating it in Toulon … 24 RAYMONDE: Why aren’t we going to Toulon? You’re digging in, you’re digging in, it’s going to turn ugly. /​EDMOND: So? /​RAYMONDE: Oh you didn’t used to be so fatalish. /​EDMOND: Fatalistic. /​RAYMONDE: If you like, it all comes to the same. Why are you upset? Aren’t we happy together? /​EDMOND: No. /​ RAYMONDE: Are you sure? /​EDMOND: Yes. /​RAYMONDE: Don’t you like our life? /​ EDMOND: And you, do you like our life? /​RAYMONDE: Got to, I’ve got used to it. Black eye apart, you’re a good-​looking guy. Feet on the ground, we argue, but we make it up in bed, and on the pillow, we understand each other. So? 25 TRIMAULT:  I hold out the tickets to her like a bunch of flowers. Guess what she says? /​RAYMONDE: We’re not going any more. /​TRIMAULT: Did you already know? /​ RAYMONDE: No, I figured [sniffed] it out. 26 EDMOND: So nothing. I’ve had enough, understand? I’m suffocating. Understand? Suffocating. /​ RAYMONDE: Toulon has fresh air because of the sea; you’ll be able to breathe. /​EDMOND: Wherever we go, it’ll smell rotten. /​RAYMONDE: Let’s go abroad, to the colonies. /​EDMOND: With you? /​RAYMONDE: How about it? /​ EDMOND: Well it’ll be the same everywhere. I need a change of atmosphere, and my atmosphere is you. /​RAYMONDE: That’s the first time I’ve been called an atmosphere. If I’m an atmosphere, you’re a funny sort of place. Ah! Gangsters who aren’t really and who show off because of what they once were, they need to be got rid of. Atmosphere, atmosphere! Do I look like an atmosphere? Since it’s like that, go on your own to La Varenne. Happy fishing and happy atmosphere! 27 RAYMONDE: Travelling with him is a dream. That man, in a station, is completely different. He’s all attention, even down to the details. He buys you oranges, and peels them for you. He lights your cigarette before offering it to you. Oh, he’s a real gentleman […] And the closer you get to the sea, the more tender he gets. With him, you’ve got third-​class tickets but you feel like you’re in first class. /​ JEANNE: Have you travelled together often? /​RAYMONDE: It’s the first time. 28 The films are Mister Flow; Un carnet de bal/​Christine (Duvivier, 1937); Entrée des artistes/​The Curtain Rises (M. Allégret, 1938); Le Drame de Shanghaï/​

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Shanghai Drama (Pabst, 1938); Hôtel du nord; Un revenant; Copie conforme (Dréville, 1947); Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde; Entre onze heures et minuit; Lady Paname. 29 In any case, theatre [cinema] relies on transposition. The natural should always be a theatrical natural. Don’t forget there’s a stage, lights, a prompt, and an audience. The characters you embody must smell of the theatre, painted backdrops and greasepaint. The spectator pays for the illusion of the theatre; if you take this away then you make a mistake … You rig the game … 30 You said that the result of acting out comedies is that you end up believing life is a farce; that’s true, but you have to believe in it. Put a bit of art in your life and a bit of life in your art […] Nothing is false … A bit of faith is enough to make everything real […] You’ll live several existences, passionate, complicated, pathetic and funny, but don’t forget, it’s when the curtain rises that your life begins … It’s up to you whether it continues when the curtain’s lowered … For that, after believing a bit in your characters, you need to believe in yourselves … 31 CHACATON: Silence in the claque! /​BAGNOLET: I’m the claque/​slap, but you’re the cheek (‘joue’) […] /​CHACATON: There are women here who are mothers with families […] Respect them! /​BAGNOLET: The mothers with families say ‘Shit!’ to you! (NB: ‘joue’ in French does not have the second meaning of cheek in English). 32 We should note that not all audiences found pleasure in these dialogues. For example, René Prédal (cited in Jeanson 2000:  587) wrote of Hôtel du nord, ‘Louis Jouvet declaims with outrageous theatricality a vulgar dialogue by Henri Jeanson, specialist of the dreary pun’, while for Turk (1989: 135), clearly in Carné’s camp, the ‘atmosphere’ scene in the same film ‘attests to the capacity of two great performers –​Arletty and Louis Jouvet –​to rise above trivial dialogue’. 33 See Pillard (2014a) on Fernandel’s voice and national identity.

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Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost: writing the ‘tradition of quality’

In ‘A certain tendency in French cinema’, François Truffaut’s infamous diatribe against the cinéma de papa published in January 1954 in the Cahiers du cinéma, the critic lambasts Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, foremost screenwriters of the French ‘tradition of quality’, bemoaning the ‘psychological realism’ of their films and claiming that they looked down on cinema by underestimating its possibilities (Truffaut 2009:  48). This chapter will look again at the cinema of Aurenche and Bost in order to put the spotlight on their writing. We will argue that their critical underestimation as writers is in no small part due to the dominance of the New Wave auteurist orthodoxy. This has resulted in a critical and academic failure to acknowledge the peculiarities and context of the so-​called tradition of quality, not to mention a neglect of the diverse production that existed in 1950s France, which saw, alongside ‘quality’ cinema, a resurgence in popular genres such as the crime film, operettas, musicals and comedies, as we shall see in Chapter 6. Aurenche (1904–​92) and Bost (1901–​75) collaborated on thirty feature films between 1940 and 1976 (see filmography), as well as pursuing their own individual careers within and beyond screenwriting. They remain best known for their post-​war collaborations, which cemented their partnership and earned them the nickname ‘Aurenchébost’. These films, directed by Yves Allégret, Jean Delannoy, René Clément and, most frequently, Claude Autant-​Lara, are held up as exemplifying the tradition of quality, a type of film which has –​erroneously –​come to represent French film production of the 1950s. Jean-​Pierre Esquenazi (2008: 72) points out how, under the critical influence of the politique des auteurs, these films were designated as an ‘arrière-​garde cinématographique’, a view which has stuck thanks to the continued dominance of the auteurist position. As Esquenazi shows, many key historians of French cinema have followed this line, dismissing the post-​ war period as one of stagnation and restrictive structures and identifying French films of the 1950s with the ‘academic’ style of the tradition of quality (see, for example, Prédal and Marie 1996; Jeancolas 1999).

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However, since the 1990s, some key studies have examined the period in more nuanced ways. Two major studies of French cinema of the classic period by Pierre Billard (1995) and Colin Crisp (1997) take into account a wide range of film production practices and call into question the notion that the auteur model of production automatically leads to greater artistic freedom and variety (Crisp 1997: 283). The ground-​breaking study of gender representations in classic French cinema by Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier (2014; first published in French in 1996)  focuses predominantly on mainstream, popular films, while in French National Cinema, Susan Hayward (2005:  163) queries the critical rejection of mainstream post-​ war cinema and highlights the restrictive censorship in place at this time. In French Costume Drama of the 1950s (2010), Hayward focuses on an overlooked popular genre, situating it within its socio-​political and wider cultural contexts. She systematically addresses Truffaut’s bones of contention with the tradition of quality, revealing the selectivity of his arguments and demonstrating that his conclusions are not borne out by the figures (2010:  22–​5). An increasing recognition of the value of studying popular cinema has led to a much wider understanding of the cinema of the post-​war years, and this has been addressed through multiple approaches, including genre, stars, industrial structures and economic practices, and reception.1 French screenwriters of this period have also benefited from an increased critical investigation into this period. Again, the approaches are multiple, from the study by Jean-​Pierre Jeancolas et  al. (1996) on the battle for authorial status to genetic studies of adaptation and script development (Boillat 2011; 2016; Gaillard and Meyer 2015).2 In this chapter, we will contribute to this growing body of work, concentrating on Aurenche and Bost, the most notorious (thanks to Truffaut) of the writers associated with the tradition of quality. We will consider their writing practice in relation to questions of adaptation, and in the context of the post-​war reconstruction of the French film industry. Our analysis draws on correspondence and scripts found in the archives of Bost and of Autant-​Lara, the director with whom Aurenche and Bost collaborated most frequently, to provide an insight into production practices, censorship and questions of adaptation. Most of all, these documents help us to understand filmmaking as a collective activity, subject to often unpredictable external factors (Gaillard and Meyer 2015:  91). First, though, we will briefly examine the landscape of post-​war filmmaking and the situation of screenwriters more generally, in order to contextualise these accounts.

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Post-​war French cinema From the point of view of film production in France, the post-​war period posed considerable challenges. Perhaps the most immediate of these was the return of US competition to French screens after the war. Cheap Hollywood imports, in demand from audiences who had been deprived of them for four years, threatened to overwhelm a domestic industry in need of considerable investment and rebuilding following the German Occupation. The Blum-​ Byrnes Agreements of 1946  –​trade agreements between France and the United States linked to the Marshall Plan –​exacerbated this situation from a French perspective by lifting restrictions on the number of US imports. Many in the profession regarded these accords as sacrificing French cinema in return for aid in other areas, while guaranteeing American cultural dominance in a France that was potentially vulnerable to Communist influence at the beginning of the Cold War. The Communist-​backed Comité de défense du cinéma français (Committee for the Defence of French Cinema, CDCF) militated vigorously against the agreements, which were duly revised in July 1948 in favour of French interests (Gimello-​Mesplomb 2003: 96–​9).3 The year 1947 was a key one in other respects, too; if it marked a post-​ war low in terms of domestic production, with only seventy-​one French films released, it also saw an all-​time audience peak, with 424 million entries (Billard 1995:  647; Simsi 2012). Only 1957 came close again, with 411  million (Crisp 1997:  67); the 1950s was the last decade in which cinema-​going was the primary leisure activity for ordinary French people, most of whom did not yet possess a television. We should also mention that the end of the war did not mark the end of censorship in France; on the contrary, post-​war cinema was subject to rigorous state control (Crisp 1997:  253; Hervé 2015:  31). In July 1945, responsibility for censorship passed from the military to the state, and the Commission de contrôle des films (Censorship Commission) was established under the presidency of Georges Huisman, with membership divided equally between politicians and industry professionals. However, it was film professionals, including filmmakers, producers and critics, who exercised most influence in this area via the pre-​censorship subcommittee whose role was to consider scripts for authorisation to film (see, for example, Vernet (2011), on André Bazin’s participation in this organisation). Films were regulated in terms of their political, religious and sexual content during this period, either by cuts imposed by the censorship commission to completed films, or during the production process, by ‘requests’ from the pre-​censorship committee for changes to scripts. As Frédéric Hervé notes, if relatively few films were censored in the immediate post-​war years, that is thanks not to a liberal regime, but to

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an internalisation by producers, writers and directors of the expectations of this committee (Hervé 2015: 31–​2 and 77; see also Barrot 1953). Self-​ censorship is, of course, extremely difficult to chart; however, the archives do provide us with some illustrations of this, for example in correspondence between Claude Autant-​Lara and producer Paul Graetz on the film project that would become Le Diable au corps/​The Devil in the Flesh (Autant-​Lara, 1947). Graetz, in a clear example of self-​censorship, refuses to countenance financing a film based on a Barbey d’Aurevilly story, ‘Le bonheur dans le crime’, claiming that its immorality would bring down upon them not just the censorship commission but also the Catholic Church, which plays a key role in film censorship ‘everywhere’: ‘My dear Autant-​Lara, do you want the Catholic Church to burn us all alive?’4 Going on to suggest that this subject would harm the Franco-​American cinematic alliance that this production represents, Graetz evokes high-​minded notions of national prestige, international cooperation and morality. However, his concerns no doubt stretched equally to box office returns, which would potentially be jeopardised by any cuts, restrictions or delays imposed by the censors. Autant-​Lara’s reply is equally revealing, in this case of the pragmatism with which he and his co-​ writer, Aurenche, approached screen adaptation, tactfully rendering source material that risked falling foul of the censor. He reminds Graetz how much he had enjoyed one of their earlier collaborations: Anything can be presented or said as long as you find the right tone. Douce was the height of immorality on every page … And it passed the censorship committee. All our efforts went into telling the same story but with a certain discretion in terms of construction, dialogue and acting which –​if you’ll allow us to blow our own trumpet –​is perhaps our foremost quality.5

This passage is indicative of the crucial and complex role of screenwriting in film production. Writers needed to hook the producers, to show how their script would compete with Hollywood films to bring in the audiences, and at the same time, obtain the censors’ seal of approval. The role of writers within the film industry became a major issue of debate at this time, since one of the first priorities of the Comité de libération du cinéma français (Committee for the Liberation of French Cinema, CLCF) was the ‘immediate reform of the status of film author, and a review of royalty rates’ (cited in Jeancolas 1996: 126). In the ensuing debates around authorship –​both legal and cinephile –​screenwriters once again took centre stage at a time of upheaval for the French film industry. The legal battle over cinematic authorship, given renewed vigour by the CLCF’s declaration, rumbled on for over ten years, culminating (at least for this period) in the law of 11 March 1957. This law is the first to acknowledge the role of the director in the creation of a cinematic work, but it also highlights the importance of the

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screenwriters, whose functions are enumerated as scriptwriter, adaptor and dialogue writer (Jeancolas 1996: 126–​50; Prédal 2001: 43–​4; see also Smith 2004:  204). Jeancolas meticulously documents the prolonged and robust negotiations that led to this law, including the power struggles within the numerous organisations representing screenwriters, the newest of which was the Syndicat des scénaristes (Screenwriters’ Union), established in 1944 at the Liberation by founder-​members Pierre Bost, Claude Vermorel and Nino Frank, with Henri Jeanson as president. The content and tone of these debates offers an indication of the entrenched position of screenwriter-​ authors, determined to protect and reinforce their status in the face of competition from directors, whom they regarded principally as technicians, and as authors only if they had significantly contributed to the elaboration of the written script. A remark from Marcel Pagnol –​whose tenure as president of the SACD from 1944 to 1946 did much to heat up the debates –​to Jacques Prévert from April 1945 is typical: ‘Think of this: without them [directors] our films wouldn’t be so good. Without us, their films wouldn’t be’ (cited in Jeancolas 1996: 132). As Jeancolas (1996: 143) reminds us, 1944–​54 was also the decade when cinema became culturally established through the cine-​ club movement, which nurtured a new, young audience with different and more demanding expectations of cinema. For Jeancolas (1996: 145) among others, this cinephile culture is associated with certain specialist publications (Cahiers du cinéma, Arts, Positif), and inextricably linked to the development of the politique des auteurs and the elevation of at least some metteurs en scène to the level of star as well as auteur (see also Prédal 2001: 43; de Baecque 2003). More recent research, however, has emphasised that cinephilia took many different forms, and extended also to viewers of popular films and readers of the popular film press.6 As the correspondence pages of publications such as Cinémonde, L’Ecran français and Le Film complet show, for many film-​goers, the politique des auteurs ranked well below their interest in stars –​both foreign and home-​grown –​genres and subject matter. Scripts are frequently evoked in these pages, for example in relation to a film’s subject or dialogue, or the (mis)casting of the correspondent’s favourite star. Many such letters show that screenwriting is seen by movie fans as one of the most accessible aspects of the profession; Jean Talky, the readers’ editor of Cinémonde, is frequently asked for advice on how to get a film script to a producer (Leahy 2015a: 23). The creative input of screenwriters is also evaluated by professional critics, of course, with film columns in the general press and reviews in popular film magazines generally devoting at least a paragraph to the script or screenwriters. Reviews also frequently contain some (moral or ideological) evaluation of a film’s subject matter, remarks on the tone and

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verisimilitude of the script and dialogue, and comments on the quality of adaptation, if relevant, often measured in terms of its fidelity to the source text. Typical of this are Régis Bergeron (1954) on Le Blé en herbe/​The Game of Love (Autant-​Lara, 1954), who remarks in L’Humanité on the film’s ‘scabrous theme’, ‘treated with extreme tact, great delicacy, even poetry’; the Spectateur review (Anon 1947) of Le Diable au corps, which points out to any sensitive souls who may be offended by the subject matter and characters that these are faithfully transposed from Radiguet’s novel; Jean d’Yvoire’s (1955) consideration in Radio-​Cinéma of Nana (Christian-​ Jaque, 1955), in which he remarks on how Jeanson’s dialogue, ‘as direct and vulgar as one could wish’, contributes to Martine Carol’s performance; and Claude Mauriac (1954) in Le Figaro littéraire, who regrets some cuts and modifications in the otherwise faithful transcription of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir (Autant-​Lara, 1954). We will return to some of these concerns in our consideration of Aurenche and Bost’s reputation as adaptors first and foremost. One further key term that features in debates of this time is ‘quality’. The rather nebulous phrases cinéma de qualité and qualité française are used in the general and film press long before a ‘tradition’ of quality is denounced by Truffaut et al. One of the first to identify a French tradition of quality cinema is Jean-​Pierre Barrot (1953: 37), who cites the directors’ values as the defining characteristic of this style, values he identifies as love for their work which translates into a desire to do their best; a need to express their beliefs in a vaguely humanistic worldview. But the idea of quality also features in considerations about funding, and most notably with regard to the overhaul of state subsidies from 1948 onwards with the introduction of the fonds de soutien in response to the crisis in the industry (Vernet 2014). The idea of a state responsibility to encourage quality cinema was promoted from the Liberation by directors such as Marcel L’Herbier and Marcel Carné, who called for tax exemption for such films, but without defining what quality meant, while a similar scheme proposed in early 1946 by André Malraux, Minister of Information (then responsible for cinema), also left the criteria unspecified (Vernet 2014: 76). By the mid-​1950s, the notion had taken shape: the so-​called prime à la qualité (quality subsidy) was awarded to French films that were seen to ‘serve the cause of French cinema’, ‘raise awareness of the major themes and problems of the French Union’ or ‘open up new perspectives for film as an art form’ (Gimello-​Mesplomb 2003: 104; Vernet 2014:  73). Quality, then, was considered to be thematic and stylistic, but above all, national. The writers of quality films were thus under pressure to tell stories that were deemed appropriate (by the censor and the press) to represent France on both national and international stages. There is something of a paradox, then, in the fact that those writers most readily

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associated with this type of cinema, Aurenche and Bost, espoused not a nationalistic establishment outlook, but rather an antibourgeois, anticlerical and antimilitaristic worldview, which they expressed in films that frequently became the subject of controversy.

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Aurenche and Bost: writers of quality A look at the box office top twenty from the Liberation up to the end of the 1950s shows that Aurenche and Bost were towering figures in the post-​war cinematic landscape. The young Turks may have denounced their style as academic and literary –​even anti-​cinematic (Truffaut, 1954; 2009) –​but the box office figures reveal that people nonetheless went to see these films in large numbers. The pair worked together on numerous projects, including fifteen scripts that were produced as feature films between 1944 and 1958, ten of which were top-​twenty hits (see Table 4.1). Aurenche and Bost’s partnership began in the late 1930s when they first collaborated by phone and post on the Fernandel vehicle, L’Héritier des Mondésir/​The Mondésir Heir (Valentin, 1940). As Aurenche tells it (1993: 90 and 125), it was this positive experience that led him to turn to Bost for help when he found himself in difficulties with the adaptation of Douce/​Love Story (Autant-​Lara, 1943). This film marked the beginning of the pair’s extremely fruitful relationship with the director Autant-​Lara, with whom they collaborated on eighteen projects, including fourteen feature films, three shorts and one television mini-​series (Lucien Leuwen, shown in 1974, just before Bost’s death).7 The two writers came to cinema via very different routes. Aurenche moved in circles connected with the Surrealists, Jean Cocteau, the Prévert brothers and other figures associated with the world of art and cinema from his adolescence. Following initial experiences as a gag-​man and filmmaker for advertising company Maison Damour, Aurenche set up his own agency in the early 1930s, employing, among others, Jean Anouilh, Paul Grimault, Marcel Carné, Jacques Prévert, Pierre Chenal and Yves Allégret and producing advertising films influenced by Surrealism and American slapstick comedy, many of which provoked protests from ultra-​right-​wing groups such as the Camelots du roi (Aurenche 1993:  47–​8; Hilaire and Badday, 2010).8 These early days also offered Aurenche his only experiences of directing, including La Séance de spiritisme est terminée/​The Séance is Over (1931, with Grimault), an advertising short in which a haunted table pursues a couple through the streets (if only they had got it from Meubles Lévitan), and Les Pirates du Rhône/​Pirates of the Rhône (1933, with Pierre Charbonnier), a documentary about poachers in the Rhône valley, described

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Table 4.1  Aurenche and Bost’s collaborations that were made into films between 1945 and 1958

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Title

Director and date

Top twenty position

Audience figures (millions of entries)

Adaptation? Type of source text, author and date

Delannoy, La Symphonie 1946 pastorale/​ The Pastoral Symphony

4th

6.4

Novel, André Gide (1919)

Le Diable au corps/​ The Devil in the Flesh

Autant-​Lara, 1947

8th

4.8

Novel, Raymond Radiguet (1923)

La Septième porte/​ The Seventh Door

Zwoboda, –​ filmed 1946, released 1948

–​

Traditional North African tale

Au-​delà des grilles/​ The Walls of Malapaga

Clément, 1949

–​

–​

Screenplay, Zavattini, Cecchi d’Amico and Guarini (date unknown)

Occupe-​toi d’Amélie/​ Autant-​Lara, Oh Amelia! 1949

–​

–​

Play, Georges Feydeau (1908)

Dieu a besoin des hommes/​God Needs Men

18th

2.8

Novel, Henri Queffélec, Un recteur de Île de Sein (1945)

L’Auberge rouge/​The Autant-​Lara, Red Inn 1951

15th

2.7

Original idea, Jean Aurenche

Jeux interdits/​ Forbidden Games

Clément, 1952

8th

4.9

Novel, François Boyer (1947)

Les Orgueilleux/​ The Proud and the Beautiful

Y. Allégret, 1953

–​

–​

Scénario, Jean-​Paul Sartre, Typhus (1943–​44)

Le Blé en herbe/​The Game of Love

Autant-​Lara, 1954

–​

–​

Novel, Colette (1923)

Le Rouge et le noir/​ The Red and the Black

Autant-​Lara, 1954

6th

4.3

Novel, Stendhal (1830)

Delannoy, 1950

(continued)

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Table 4.1 (Cont.) Title

Director and date

Top twenty position

Audience figures (millions of entries)

Adaptation? Type of source text, author and date

Chiens perdus sans collier/​The Little Rebels

Delannoy, 1955

12th

3.9

Novel, Gilbert Cesbron (1954)

La Traversée de Paris/​Pig across Paris

Autant-​Lara, 1956

5th

4.9

Short story, Marcel Aymé, Traversée de Paris (1947)

Gervaise

Clément, 1956

10th

4.1

Novel, Émile Zola, L’Assommoir (1877)

En cas de malheur/​ Love Is My Profession

Autant-​Lara, 1958

14th

3.1

Novel, Georges Simenon (1956)

Le Joueur/​The Gambler

Autant-​Lara, 1958

–​

–​

Novel, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1867)

by Paul Vecchiali  –​remarkably, given Aurenche’s later reputation  –​as offering a sort of link between Jean Vigo and the New Wave (Hilaire and Badday, 2010). Aurenche (1993:  227) himself described his advertising films as ‘screenwriter’s films’ built around a gag, perhaps indicating why he was not tempted to try his hand at directing a feature, as some of his contemporaries were (notably Jeanson and Charles Spaak). Gradually, Aurenche extended his range beyond gags to drama and crime films, where he took on a more substantial writing role, turning his hand to adaptation, screenplay elaboration and dialogue for films including L’Affaire du courrier de Lyon/​Courier of Lyons (Autant-​Lara for Lehmann, 1937) with Autant-​Lara and Prévert; Hôtel du nord (Carné, 1938), though his script was largely reworked by Jeanson; La Tradition de minuit/​Midnight Tradition (Richebé, 1939)  with Roger Richebé and René Jolivet; Défense d’aimer/​No Love Allowed (Pottier, 1942) with Michel Duran; Huit hommes dans un chateau/​Eight Men in a Castle (Pottier, 1942)  with Jean-​Paul Le Chanois; and Le Mariage de Chiffon/​The Marriage of Chiffon (Autant-​Lara, 1942) with Maurice Blondeau. Bost took a different path to screenwriting. A  prolific novelist first published in 1924 (Homicide par imprudence), he was soon recognised as

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‘one of the most promising and original writers of his generation’ (Ouellet 2005: 45). Throughout the 1920s, he published essays, short stories, novels and comic plays, works which demonstrated a particular gift for writing dialogue (Ouellet 2003–​4: 41). In 1931, his sixth novel, Le Scandale, won the Prix Interallié. Bost definitively turned away from literature to devote himself to film writing in 1945, following the publication of his last novel, Monsieur Ladmiral va bientôt mourir. This would be adapted for cinema by Bertrand Tavernier as Un dimanche à la campagne/​A Sunday in the Country (1984). By the 1930s, Bost had also established a reputation as a reader for Gallimard and the Nouvelle Revue Française, among others, contributing notably to the publication of Marcel Aymé and Raymond Queneau and fighting the corner for Jean-​Paul Sartre’s La Nausée.9 He was editor in chief of the left-​leaning literary magazine Marianne from 1933 to 1935 and literary editor of Marie-​Claire from 1937 to 1940, and also regularly supplied film and theatre reviews for the weekly publication Vendredi (Bost 1981: 271). Bost signalled an acute critical interest in cinema from early in his career, publishing a study of Dreyer’s Joan of Arc (Bost 1928) and contributing reviews to various publications, including the Annales politiques et littéraires. His article of 1 June 1931 prompted a response from Vigo, who wrote to thank Bost for his appreciation of La Natation (‘your words make me blush and give me courage, since I’m not very proud of this little film’) and to commend his review of Le Million (Clair, 1931).10 That Bost should turn his hand to writing for the screen is not so surprising, then. Following his first screenwriting credit on L’Héritier des Mondésir, he worked on a further six films during the Occupation as adaptor or dialogue writer, including Croisières sidérales/​Sideral Cruises (Zwoboda, 1942)  and L’Homme qui joue avec le feu/​The Man Who Played with Fire (de Limur, 1942), both with Pierre Guerlais, future producer of Douce, and Jacques Becker’s début feature, Dernier atout/​The Last Trump (1942), with Maurice Aubergé and Louis Chavance. Reunited on Douce, Aurenche and Bost followed up with La Symphonie pastorale/​Pastoral Symphony (Delannoy, 1946), a major post-​war  hit. In a consideration of post-​war French cinema presented in Warsaw in 1957, Bazin (1983: 22) evokes Aurenche and Bost, whom he considers to be at least as influential at this time as Prévert before the war. Highlighting their contribution to the ‘psychological realist’ tendency (to which we will return), he speaks of them in terms of their ‘personality’, which is suggestive of a single unit rather than a pair of writers working together. Truffaut (2009: 42), too, refers to ‘Aurenche and Bost’ as a single authorial identity, even if he also acknowledges their individual pasts. Certainly, although both men continued to work occasionally with others after the war, they are best known for their partnership, which was cemented at this time. However,

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this evocation of a single entity masks not only the differences between the two men described by many of those who collaborated with the pair, but also the input of those collaborators to the writing process. Many of these commentators comment on the differences –​physical and temperamental –​ between Jesuit-​educated, expansive Aurenche and Protestant, ascetic Bost. Tavernier (1994:  43), for example, highlights the complementarity of a brilliant, mercurial Aurenche, kept on the straight and narrow (at least in terms of writing) by a meticulous, organised, deadline-​conscious Bost. The writers themselves also put the success of their partnership down to their differences, to which they attributed their working method and their approach to the subjects they addressed in their scripts. Aurenche is generally regarded as the main source of ideas, the one who would come up with the basis for a script or adaptation, frequently drawing on his own life and experience for characters, scenes or images, while Bost’s strength lay in dialogue writing. In this, the pair can be seen as corresponding to the industry designation of screenwriting roles: adaptor, scriptwriter and dialogue writer. However, as we have already seen, the realities of collaboration mean that the division of labour is rarely so straightforward. This is confirmed by the writers’ own accounts of their partnership; theirs was a flexible and integrated practice that played to their individual strengths while allowing both to contribute at all stages and in all aspects of writing (Aurenche 1993: 90–​1; Hilaire and Badday 2010). In a draft of a lecture on cinema as a métier, Bost (1950a) highlights the collaborative nature of screenwriting. He divides the writing process into three main stages, the first of which sees the writers –​auteurs, as Bost refers to them –​sequestered in a country hotel in order to devote themselves to developing an idea into a story. Bost (1950a: 10) insists on a ‘travail d’équipe’ conducted through conversations, and, at times, confrontations; this, indeed, is the very approach we have seen portrayed on screen by Jeanson and Julien Duvivier in La Fête à Henriette (see Chapter 3). As Adrien Gaillard and Julien Meyer (2015: 100–​101) note in their study of the genesis of Douce, this aspect of screenwriting practice makes it virtually impossible to ascribe ideas or lines to individuals –​any notion of authorship becomes blurred in this collective practice, which is oral as well as written. Even if we can trace with difficulty the written part of this process in the palimpsests that fill the script archives –​pages covered with several layers of annotations written at different times and by different hands –​the origin of an idea that may have been batted back and forth and shaped in conversation is untraceable. Rather, what emerges is the need for the other. Thus, far from pinpointing origins, enabling us to ascribe an idea to an individual author, our archival research has instead demonstrated the essentially collaborative nature of Aurenche and Bost’s screenwriting practice, both between themselves and with their other interlocutors (especially

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Autant-​Lara and Tavernier). This chimes with the accounts of the duo’s partnership that highlight a mutual admiration grounded in critical reading as well as writing: the need to impress the other on which their truly collaborative partnership was founded (Tavernier 1994; Hilaire and Badday 2010).11 Aurenche and Bost were also unusual among screenwriters of their generation in their willingness to discuss their writing practices with critics. Indeed, they both gave lectures to IDHEC and various cine-​clubs on subjects ranging from cinematic creation to a definition of the French cinematic style (see Bost 1950a; 1950b; Crisp 1997:  460). Compared with practitioners such as Prévert or Jeanson, who simultaneously play down and reinforce the myth of artistic creation by rejecting any critical examination of their art, insisting on the necessity of experience alongside the je ne sais quoi of ‘talent’, Aurenche and Bost regularly entered into debate with critics about their approach to writing. In this way, they can be seen as forming a bridge between the pre-​war generation and the New Wave, even if it was one that the young Turks were determined to burn.

Adaptation and equivalences: the mise en scene of literature One of the main aspects of the tradition of quality attacked by Truffaut is its reliance on literary adaptations. The so-​called querelle de l’adaptation has been rehearsed in detail elsewhere (Stam 2006), so we will limit ourselves here to considering the centrality of Aurenche and Bost in these debates, a centrality indicated by the choice of a photo of Aurenche to illustrate the title page of Truffaut’s ‘A certain tendency in French cinema’.12 As Robert Stam (2006: 10–​12) points out, Truffaut casts Aurenche and Bost as the primary practitioners of a style of adaptation characterised by infidelity to their source texts and an approach based on ‘equivalences’ that underestimates the possibilities of cinema. Truffaut complains that the same anticlerical, antimilitaristic, antibourgeois agenda underpins their films whether they be adapted from Colette, Raymond Radiguet, André Gide or Henri Queffélec, and in a later article reviewing their adaptation of Le Rouge et le noir/​The Red and the Black, he adds Stendhal to that list (Truffaut 1954). However, in a footnote, Truffaut (2009: 62) acknowledges that it is not Aurenche and Bost themselves, but rather film critics who have labelled their adaptations as ‘faithful’. So, what did Aurenche and Bost claim about their work? Why did fidelity feature as an issue in considerations of adaptation at this time? How can we contextualise the reliance of the tradition of quality on literary sources and the adaptation practices of Aurenche and Bost? In this section we will address these questions, bearing in mind what we know about the

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French film industry of the 1950s with regard to structures and production practices, censorship and the role of quality cinema in relation to national reconstruction. To quote Dudley Andrew (1984: 104), ‘It is time for adaptation studies to take a sociological turn’. In a lecture on cinema as a métier (given to a cine-​club identified only as A.O.F.), Bost (1950a: 11) considers the challenges of the early stages of the writing process, highlighting not the need for fidelity, but rather the need for a new structure and the endless possibilities open to the adaptors: The difficulty is that on the one hand, you can’t follow the novel’s structure, and on the other, almost any presentation is possible. You can begin with the main character. Or with the situation that will set the story in motion. Or with a depiction of the setting. Or with the end. Or with a completely invented episode. Or with a completely new character. The first discussions are all about those problems.

Aurenche (1993: 121–​2), reflecting on his own practice much later, describes the adaptor as bringing something personal to the encounter: When you adapt something, you bring a lot of yourself to it … you make a mess as you settle in. There’s a discussion between the author and the adaptor. Sometimes, you make yourself a bit too comfortable, and break the furniture.

This question of the role of the adaptor recurs several times in Aurenche’s memoirs, La Suite à l’écran, revealing his sense of a complex relationship between adaptor and source, based on reciprocity and negotiation for space, rather than fidelity: Adding things that belong to you is a token of love for a book, not to improve on it, but because you feel good with it … On the other hand, there are authors who don’t allow this approach: you can’t offer anything to Céline, to Proust. That’s why they are unadaptable. (Aurenche 1993: 146–​7)

For Aurenche, then, adaptation depends on a particular kind of affinity for an author or book that allows him space and invites him to put his own stamp on the work, frequently by importing an experience of his own. Indeed, Aurenche and Bost’s scripts are littered with such references brought by Aurenche. In Le Diable au corps, the lycée-​hospital is based on Aurenche’s own school at Coutances, M. Jaubert’s profession is borrowed from Aurenche’s father, while gestures such as François gulping down water in the moment after he opens the door (to a soldier he took to be Marthe’s husband arriving home, but who turns out to be merely a messenger) are based on personal associations of fear giving way to extreme thirst. In Le Rouge et le noir, the sermon where Abbé Pirard extinguishes candles one by one to represent God’s power over the lives of the seminarists is one that Aurenche remembered from his time at a Jesuit school in Jersey. And in

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L’Horloger de Saint-​Paul/​The Watchmaker of Saint Paul (Tavernier, 1974), the watchmaker (Philippe Noiret) tells the policeman (Jean Rochefort) how he felt moved by an encounter with a young boy who took the trouble to cross the street to tell him that he had changed (Aurenche 1993:  159, 145 and 91). These ­examples  –​moments of affective expression which often occur at crisis points: François’s extreme relief that he has not had to confront Jacques after all; Julien’s triumphant ambition dampened by the extinguishing of ‘his’ candle just as he learns he is to leave the hated seminary for Paris and the protection of the Marquis de la Mole; the watchmaker’s sense of connection to the boy at a moment of isolation following his son’s accusation for murder –​suggest that adaptation is a matter as much of sensibility as of meaning. Critical discussion of such additions tend to place more or less emphasis on the issue of fidelity according to the stature of the source text, and never more than when Stendhal is ‘at stake’. In 1946, Aurenche refused to adapt the unfinished novel Lamiel, wary of how ‘fanatical’ Stendhal supporters might react to an ending that may not correspond to their own idea.13 And yet, as we have just seen, by 1954 he was able to find space in the monumental Le Rouge et le noir to import a ‘Stendhalian’ experience of his own (1993:  159). In an interview published in November 1954 regarding this adaptation, and in particular this sequence of Pirard’s sermon, Aurenche and Bost are directly confronted with the accusation that their ‘equivalences’ are, in fact, liberties taken with the source text (Favalelli et al. 1954). Aurenche explains that for him, this sequence elicits the same emotion as the moment in the novel when Sorel comes upon a newspaper report of the execution of a certain Jenrel, whose name recalls his own, giving an intimation of his own fate. This is a clear example of what the pair set out as their measure of a successful adaptation in a later interview; that is ‘if you have the same feeling that you had when you read the book. If a writer was sitting next to me, and was just as moved as I was when I read the book’ (Hilaire and Badday, 2010). Once again, for them, it is less a question of fidelity than one of emotional response. The prominence of Aurenche and Bost in the post-​war cinematic landscape and the importance of literary adaptations in their œuvre –​ twenty-​four out of the thirty feature films on which they collaborated are adaptations of literary or theatrical sources, and Pierre Bost’s private archive holds a further ten unfilmed scripts and projects14 –​led them to be connected with an increased attention to questions of adapting literature for the screen. The duo’s reputation as adaptateurs extraordinaires was established thanks largely to the success of La Symphonie pastorale, winner of the Grand Prix at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival and the fourth most popular film of the year at the French box office, with audience figures of 6.4 million. Adapted

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from André Gide’s 1919 novel, which explores the nature of spiritual and earthly love through the relationship between a pastor and his blind adopted daughter, the film is indicative of Aurenche and Bost’s preoccupation with themes of organised religion, self-​delusion or hypocrisy and illicit (adulterous) love.

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La Symphonie pastorale While carrying out his duties in his remote Alpine parish, pastor Jean Martens (Pierre Blanchar) discovers a young blind girl living in semi-​ feral circumstances. He takes her home and he and his wife bring her up with their own children. Gertrude (Michèle Morgan) grows into a beautiful and talented young woman. Her growing love for Jacques (Jean Desailly), the pastor’s son, and her decision to undergo an operation to recover her sight reveal to the pastor and his wife, Amélie (Line Noro), the true nature of his feelings for Gertrude. Her sight restored, Gertrude also becomes aware of the pastor’s feelings and runs away. She dies after falling into an icy stream.

However, the choice of such a well-​known source text, written by one of the towering figures of French literature of the first half of the twentieth century, ensured that much of the critical attention focused not on the themes but on the process of adapting literary works for the screen.15 Bazin (1967: 52–​3), for example, sees Gide’s novel as an example of those favoured by post-​war filmmakers –​‘a locus of subtle interactions between style, psychology, morals, or metaphysics’  –​literature which demands a different kind of treatment than the traditional ‘ransacking’ seen in classical theatre, or, indeed, in earlier screen adaptations of, say, works by Alexandre Dumas or Victor Hugo. Bazin’s discussion of Aurenche and Bost’s work, written in 1952, enables him to reflect on why fidelity has become such an issue in the post-​war years. Considering Le Diable au corps, he argues that films and audiences benefit from the challenge that such a source text poses. So, for Bazin (1967: 67), it is faithfulness to Radiguet that has forced the screenwriters to offer us interesting and relatively complex characters […] incited them to flout some of the moral conventions of the cinema, to take certain risks […] with public prejudices. It has widened the intellectual and moral horizons of the audience and prepared the way for other films of quality.

Bazin (1967:  66) might regret that Vigo never adapted Radiguet’s novel, but he recognises the audacities of Autant-​Lara’s film, and sees ‘the hopes

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for the future of cinema’ in ‘the filmmakers [who] honestly attempt an integral equivalent [of the novel], they try … to translate it for the screen as instanced in La Symphonie pastorale, Le Diable au corps, The Fallen Idol, or Le Journal d’un curé de campagne’. Let us now turn to some examples to see how this relationship between literature and cinema played out in practice. In their study of the historical development of adaptation, Jeanne-​Marie Clerc and Monique Carcaud-​Macaire (2004: 34) conclude that a consideration of Aurenche and Bost’s ‘meticulous and systematic’ transpositions brings an understanding of the nature of the novel’s ‘untranslatable’ aspects, which are not to do with the inadequacy of cinema, but rather with the different ways that words and images represent the world. In La Symphonie pastorale, one of the main challenges of Gide’s prose for adaptors is the interiority of narrative, expressed in the pastor’s diary. As we will see, this challenge of interiority was one that Aurenche and Bost would address in various ways in different films, seeking ‘equivalences’ for aspects of style or scenes considered to be unfilmable. Truffaut (2009:  41) attacks this practice, disputing the premise that some scenes are ‘unfilmable’, and doubting Aurenche and Bost’s intentions of fidelity. To illustrate his point, Truffaut singles out an example from Le Diable au corps: the first meeting between Marthe and François. The critic regards the encounter in the novel, where the protagonist watches Marthe jumping from a train that has not yet come to a halt, as ‘an idea of mise en scene’. He argues that the solution proposed by Aurenche and Bost, in which the two young people meet at the temporary hospital in the lycée grounds where Marthe is volunteering, is one of literature because it highlights the film’s anti-​war theme. Truffaut objects to the fact that the film dismisses the image conjured by the novel (of the male protagonist gazing at an unsuspecting young woman) in favour of an idea; moreover, it is an idea that is not found in the novel, and which therefore calls into question the idea of ‘equivalence’. This criticism is grounded in an idea of adaptation in which the ‘sanctity’ of the source text emanates from a certain idea of authorship, the romantic ideal of the artist upon which this manifesto for the politique des auteurs is founded: ‘Surely it is going a bit far to rewrite Gide, Bernanos, Radiguet in this way?’ (Truffaut 2009: 16). But, as Stam (2000:  64) argues  –​and as we have seen above in Aurenche and Bost’s reflections on their own practice  –​the relationship between adaptation and source text can be more fruitfully seen as a dialogic one:  ‘an adaptation … is less an attempted resuscitation of an originary word than a turn in an ongoing dialogical process’. Stam’s (2000: 64) concept of intertextual dialogism, ‘the infinite and open-​ended possibilities generated by

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all the discursive practices of a culture’, reminds us of Bost’s (1950a) point about ‘all the possible presentations’. Following Andrew’s (1984: 104) exhortation, cited above, to consider the context, however, we would like to highlight the role of culture here, to suggest that the ‘infinite possibilities’ are hypothetical rather than actual, and that in fact the intertextual –​or hypertextual, to use Gérard Genette’s term (1997: 5) –​relation between the texts is characterised by culturally framed negotiation, played out in the collaborative writing process and, indeed, in those initial dialogues referred to by Bost, where the screenwriters can establish their own position in the process, their own space in the scenario. For Aurenche and Bost, this negotiated space offers one possibility of portraying on screen the ‘secret life’, the preserve of the novel (Forster 1974). This focus on the characters’ interior world is one reason Aurenche and Bost’s scripts are considered emblematic of ‘psychological realist’ cinema. This term is frequently applied to post-​war French cinema to compare it unfavourably with the Poetic Realism of the 1930s or with Italian neorealism of the same period. It is arguably because of its relationship to literature that psychological realism is viewed as inferior to those other modes of filmmaking regarded in elite cinephile circles as developing a peculiarly ‘cinematic’ aesthetic (Bazin 1972). Psychological realist films, on the contrary, were seen as looking to literature for techniques that enabled them to communicate the inner life of characters, devices such as voice-​over and flashback, which certainly were used by Aurenche and Bost and their contemporaries to translate subjective narratives to the screen. These framing techniques offer another example of textual negotiation, especially where they are absent in the source text, highlighting a certain reading of (a dialogue with?) the source (Stam 2000:  76). In the rest of this chapter we will develop three interconnected aspects that are characteristic of Aurenche and Bost’s adaptations: first, the foregrounding of the literary source; second, the use of flashback structures and focalisation; and finally, the question of ideological transformation that is bound up with the collective practice of filmmaking, where the contributions of not only screenwriters but also director, producer, actors and censor must be taken into account. If certain critics regarded Aurenche and Bost’s films as overly dependent on literature, for producers, exhibitors and much of the film-​going public, the literary source of these films was a valuable commodity. Producers, who paid for the adaptation rights, were keen to exploit the literary source to the full, and this is no doubt one reason for its frequent foregrounding on screen. In La Symphonie pastorale, for example, the first-​person narration of Gide’s text is conveyed through the depiction on screen of the pastor’s

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handwriting in his journal. Clerc and Carcaud-​Macaire (2004:  29–​30) point to the convenience of a device which shows the passing of time (a hand closes a notebook entitled ‘Cahier de Gertrude’, then a number of identical notebooks are placed on top of it one by one), offers an insight into the pastor’s thoughts through the sentences and the action of writing (the hand forms the words ‘Elle devine tout. Très vite elle a dépassé Charlotte en intelligence’, before crossing out the final word and substituting ‘application’),16 and calls to mind the literary source of the film through the mise en scene of writing. The opening credits of Jeux interdits/​Forbidden Games (Clément, 1952)  show a hand opening a book and turning the pages to reveal each new credit, arguably placing the authors of the film and the author of the novel on the same footing. This device is even more developed in the credits of Le Rouge et le noir (Autant-​Lara, 1954), which show a red leather-​bound book (Stendhal’s novel) opening and its pages turning to reveal all the usual film credits, before opening the film with the most famous of the aphorisms that Stendhal places at the head of each chapter, the quotation attributed to Saint-​Réal on the mimetic aspect of the novel: ‘Un roman: c’est un miroir qu’on promène le long d’un chemin’ (A novel is a mirror we hold up along our way) (Stendhal 1830: chapter XIX). For Alain Boillat (2016:  139), this device also permits a slippage from Stendhal, author of the novel, to Autant-​Lara, author of the film, while Aurenche and Bost are credited on the next ‘page’ for the adaptation and dialogue. The film returns to these quotations throughout, introducing each new ‘chapter’ in Sorel’s life with a suitable epigram; some are derived from those placed by Stendhal at the beginning of each chapter, while others, taken from Julien’s thoughts, offer a way into the hero’s inner world. This foregrounding of sources can also be seen in different ways in other adaptations by Aurenche and Bost. Occupe-​toi d’Amélie (Autant-​Lara, 1949) offers a mise en abyme of Feydeau’s play through a framing narrative featuring a group of spectators who visit the actors in their dressing rooms and become embroiled in certain scenes, including the false-​real wedding between Amélie and Marcel. The play is further highlighted as a performance by the introduction of intervals, including the projection of adverts, some of which are shown upside down, eliciting a contemptuous response from the diegetic audience. Le Diable au corps evokes its source text when François and Marthe, having agreed that they must separate, ‘narrate’ their first meeting to each other and imagine various endings for their story, in what Boillat (2018: 169) refers to as a ‘diegeticisation’ of the writing project. This emphasis on their sources offers some explanation of why Aurenche and Bost’s films were characterised as ‘literary’. However, the ‘literary’ device

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most associated with them is the flashback; indeed, Boillat (2018:  191) describes them as being ‘obsessively attached’ to it.17 As we shall see from the discussion below, there is nothing inherently literary about the flashback –​in fact, its popularity at this time may well derive from cinematic influences –​yet it is frequently held up as emblematic of a cinema defined as script-​ led and therefore based in words rather than images (Billard 1995: 545; Truffaut 2009). One reason for the popularity of the flashback at this time, suggests Boillat (2018:  191), is the influence of Hollywood cinema  –​film noir in particular –​returning with a vengeance to French screens at this time. Far from seeing this device as inherently literary, he argues that the proliferation of analeptic narrative structures in film noir imposed the idea of the flashback as a peculiarly cinematic device, in spite of the fact that the structure is widely used in novels. The attraction of the flashback (or flashforward) is clear for adaptors who want to represent past and future in a medium that is ‘written in the present tense’ (Bost 1950a: 13). It delivers temporal flexibility, but this is not its only advantage for screenwriters; it is also a key tool for introducing subjectivity, potentially invaluable for adaptors who need to convey the interiority of a first-​person narrative.18 This is perhaps why cinematic flashbacks have gained a ‘literary’ reputation and are regarded by critics with suspicion, at least in relation to the tradition of quality. Billard (1995:  545) sums up this view, identifying this often-​copied signature of Aurenche and Bost as ‘one of the conventions that many ambitious (or pretentious) films exploited to give themselves the illusion of accessing the elite territory of the socio-​psychological novel’. However, recent scholars suggest that this preference for flashbacks is indicative of a more complex ideological underpinning. Jean Montarnal (2016) analyses the function of the flashback in a corpus of fifteen quality films made between 1947 and 1956. Like Boillat, he recognises the influence of American film noir but goes further, arguing that the predilection for this device indicates a preoccupation with the recent –​ unacknowledged  –​past. For Montarnal (2016:  481), flashbacks offer ‘a mise en scene of the memory-​work of characters and spectators. They show the viewers’ often difficult and painful efforts to remember and to find a truth that is buried in a more or less distant past’. Seen in this way, and in concert with Aurenche’s and Autant-​Lara’s assertions about censorship and the impossibility of contemporary subjects,19 the flashback becomes an ideological tool for exploring the relationship between past and present, memory and forgetting.20 A closer look at Le Diable au corps, the film that inaugurates the flashback in post-​war French quality cinema, can help us to see these elements at play.21

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Le Diable au corps Set during the First World War, the story is that of an affair between an adolescent, François (Gérard Philipe), and Marthe (Micheline Presle), a very young woman whose husband, Jacques (Jean Varas), is away fighting at the Front. When they first meet, Marthe is not yet married, but her mother (Denise Grey), sensing the danger posed by this new acquaintance, hastens the wedding in an attempt to put her daughter beyond temptation. Her plan backfires, though, as Marthe’s relative independence as the wife of an absent husband only makes it easier for her to conduct an affair. This relationship scandalises the neighbourhood and ends with Marthe dying after giving birth to François’s son.

Adapted from the semi-​autobiographical novel by Radiguet that had caused a furore on its publication in 1923 in the wake of the First World War, Aurenche, Bost and Autant-​Lara’s film was the succès de scandale of the immediate post-​war years. The choice of Radiguet’s novel as source text was far from neutral in 1947; as Burch and Sellier (2014:  249–​50) point out, it raised the spectre of female infidelity that haunted prisoners of war and conscript labourers in the Second World War as it did the poilus of the First.22 The film courted additional controversy by reframing Radiguet’s tale of adolescent adultery as a virulent denunciation of war and hypocritical bourgeois moral values. This was achieved largely through the narrative structure: a series of flashbacks from François’s perspective are framed by a sequence that brings together the Armistice and Marthe’s funeral –​events separated by several weeks in the novel. For Freddy Buache (1982: 41), this potentially crass juxtaposition of public joy and private grief is transformed into an accusation of the joyous crowd, who appear to have already forgotten the horrors of war, by the subjective flashbacks which form the main subject of the film (see also Boillat 2018: 169). Correspondence shows how attached the film’s writers were to this structure as a way of foregrounding their antiwar sentiments, and how they fought  –​only partially successfully –​the producer’s efforts to tone down this aspect of the script (Leahy 2018:  151).23 However, this ideological shift is not the only effect of the analeptic structure: it also functions in terms of focalisation, and, as we shall see, in spite of the framing sequences featuring François looking back on their relationship, this is not always limited to François’s perspective. Radiguet’s novel was confirmed as the source text in early May 1946. Early synopses (June 1946) show that the decision to centre the narrative

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on the relationship between François and Marthe, omitting the first part of the novel dealing with François’s school career and early seduction attempts had already been taken.24 They also reveal that a flashback structure was intended from these very earliest stages of adaptation.25 These flashbacks and framing sequences are retained and developed throughout the writing process. Burch and Sellier (2014: 249) and Carrie Tarr (1995: 112) argue that these inscribe Le Diable au corps within a tendency that emerges in the French cinema of the immediate post-​war years in which male ‘voices’ dominate. Yet, as we shall see, throughout the writing process the strength of that male voice is attenuated as increasing attention is given to Marthe’s perspective. Tarr (1995: 112) acknowledges that Le Diable au corps grants Marthe ‘a limited independent existence outside the scope of François’s focalization, allowing her to make choices which propel the narrative forward’. Certain of these key moments coincide with the beginning or end of a flashback; although all three analepses are motivated by a close-​up of François’s face (reflected in a mirror, or singled out in the church), the perspective then shifts beyond his point of view, to that of Marthe. The first flashback begins as François’s reflection gives way to a blurred image of a female figure walking towards us, gradually coming into focus. She is alone, walking with an assured step, and as she stops and turns to look at the archway into the grounds of the lycée-​hospital, we share her point of view before she passes beneath the sign. Thus, we experience her enquiries about the location of the hospital, and the interested gaze of the young men who are digging in the courtyard from her slightly embarrassed perspective. This is intensified as she is put to work helping an injured soldier into the hospital (François takes his other arm). A  series of close-​ups alternating between Marthe’s face and the bandaged face of the injured man shows her horror as she is confronted with the consequences of war, culminating in her fainting. We share her humiliation as she comes to, changes back into her civilian clothes and prepares to leave, having spectacularly failed in her attempt to support the ‘war effort’ as her mother does. And we return to her point of view at several points throughout the film. At the end of the first flashback, François decides not to keep his appointment with Marthe, having seen that she has not only turned up but waited over an hour for him. However, the final shot of this sequence features not François and his father walking off home together, but Marthe, alone on the jetty (Figure 4.3). And she is no longer framed from François’s point of view in a high-​angled shot from the bridge; a crane shot brings us to her level, focusing first on her lonely figure marked by the reflection of the ripples in the water, before tilting down to show her reflection in the dark water, which is then blurred by drops on its surface (her tears). This moment is indicated in the ‘literary

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script’ (traitement), dated 8 July 1946 (Figure  4.1), which represents the next step in the script development after the early synopses, and is further developed in the third stage of writing, the ‘technical script’, dated 7 August 1946 (Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.1  Extract from the ‘adaptation cinématographique’ of Le Diable au corps, 8 July 1946, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. Dialogue and shot indications are present, but not shot numbers.

146

Screenwriters in French cinema Les deux hommes s’éloignent dans la nuit.

182.

CS de Marthe, sur le ponton. Elle attend toujours. Elle regarde fixement, en se penchant un peu … l’eau noire.

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ENCHAINÉ.26

Figure 4.2  Extract from the ‘découpage technique’, of Le Diable au corps, 7 August 1946, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. Note shot numbers are now present in a traditional screenplay format, scene indications on the left and dialogue on the right. Annotations refer to editing and look like Autant-​Lara’s handwriting.

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Figure 4.3  Micheline Presle in Le Diable au corps: Marthe (Micheline Presle), left alone on the jetty, looks into the water.

A similar process can be traced through the writing of the end of the second flashback, when Marthe takes the boat to visit Jacques and ensure his paternity of her unborn child, while the feckless François waves at her from the jetty.27 In the 8 July version, the perspectives are already in place, though the scene ends with a disconcerted Marthe wondering what she is going to do. By 7 August, however, she is taking the initiative: Au moment où ils vont être séparés, [François] crie: FRANÇOIS: Marthe,

qu’est-​ce que tu lui diras …?

Marthe est debout sur le bateau, regardant François qui la suit. MARTHE: Je

n’y vais pas pour lui parler.

PAN. Sur Marthe seule, sur le bateau qui s’éloigne rapidement. Elle est immobile et très calme. 356.

RS sur François, dont on s’éloigne rapidement (pris du bateau) Quand il est un peu loin, il crie, très fort: FRANÇOIS: Tu

m’aimes …?

ENCHAINÉ.28

These occasional glimpses that we are afforded of Marthe as an individual with her own story (in relation to her mother, but also to François) blur

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the male protagonist’s subjectivity and convey his weakness; his inability to assume an adult, responsible masculinity ultimately leads to Marthe’s death.29 The film thus calls into question the masculine perspective of the story in a way that the novel, entirely bound up in the first-​person narration, does not. In her study of the flashback in film, Maureen Turim (1989: 117) considers how such subjective memories can open a breach in the ideological underpinning of the narrative by a ‘symbolic encoding of oppositions between genders and classes [which] places the viewing subject in a relationship to power’. Allowing ‘the viewing subject’ access to Marthe’s perspective is precisely what opens a breach in the phallocentric narrative, cutting François’s desire down to size, and undercutting the (prevailing?) misogynistic view articulated by the sacristan (Albert Rémy) at the end of the film:  ‘Maintenant c’est les femmes qui vont mourir’ (Now it’s women’s turn to die). Given the proximity of this story to the recent war  –​the widespread public humiliation of women accused of horizontal collaboration at the Liberation (Brossat 1992; Laurens 1995), and the emergence of narratives of female perfidy corresponding to the anxieties of absent and returning French men (whether prisoners of war, conscripted workers, deportees or resistance fighters) about their wives (Burch and Sellier 2014:  239–​41)  –​the flashback structure can also be said to call into question certain versions of recent history, ‘the object of repression, distortion and falsified and idealised official reconstructions’ (Montarnal 2016: 481). The scandal of Le Diable au corps was to present the unfaithful and unpatriotic with sympathy and understanding, through a framing sequence which undoubtedly encourages the viewers’ identification with François in his grief, and a series of flashbacks that exonerate the unfaithful wife, blaming instead bourgeois values of duty, respectability and patriotism. This close analysis of the use of analepsis and focalisation in Le Diable au corps reveals how –​in this film at least –​the flashback structure enables the writers to introduce issues of contemporary relevance, not only the antimilitarist agenda –​highly controversial in 1947 –​but also a questioning of gender roles. Whether the device became banal through overuse, as Billard and others have argued –​in subsequent quality films is a question beyond the scope of this study. However, we would like to end this chapter by remarking on an equally notorious adaptation by Aurenche, Bost and Autant-​Lara, Le Rouge et le noir, in which the flashback is one of two ‘additions’ that allow access to the inner thoughts of the protagonist, Julien Sorel, the other being the voice-​over.

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Le Rouge et le noir

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Part 1 Julien Sorel (Gérard Philipe), is on trial accused of attempting to murder his former mistress, Mme de Rênal (Danielle Darrieux). Awaiting the verdict, he recalls the circumstances that have led him to this situation. The son of a carpenter, Julien is training for the priesthood as a way of bettering himself. His social ascension begins when he is employed by the local mayor, M. de Rênal (Jean Martinelli), as tutor for his children. Julien seduces Louise de Rênal, initially as a bet with himself. A  jealous maid, Elisa (Anna Maria Sandri) denounces the adultery in anonymous letters to M. de Rênal. Although Louise manages to convince her husband that the accusation is untrue, Julien decides it is better for him to leave the house. He takes up a place at a Besançon seminary run by Abbé Pirard (Antoine Balpêtré), a strict priest whose Jansenist sympathies have made him many enemies but whom Julien manages to win over. When he is forced out of the seminary, he takes Julien with him to Paris, and secures for him the protection of the powerful Marquis de la Mole (Jean Mercure). Part 2 Julien is taken on as a secretary by the Marquis de la Mole and proves very successful. The proud daughter of the Marquis, Mathilde (Antonella Lualdi), is Julien’s new challenge, and he succeeds in seducing her too. The Marquis discovers the situation, which he plans to resolve by buying a commission and a title for Julien and ensuring he marries Mathilde. However, he receives a letter from Louise de Rênal, dictated by her confessor, denouncing Julien as a seducer. When Mathilde brings this news to Julien, he sets out to take revenge on Louise, shooting at her during Mass. Imprisoned and awaiting trial, he realises that he loves Louise, who has survived the attack. When the death sentence is announced, she abandons her family and husband to be with Julien for the remainder of his life in prison. The film ends, as does the novel, with the news that Mme de Rênal survived Julien by only three days, and died embracing her children.

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The film, like the novel, is structured in two parts which correspond to Julien’s two female conquests –​Louise de Rênal and Mathilde de la Mole –​ as well as to the two powers symbolised by the colours of the title –​the red of the army and the black of the church. However, the film complicates the novel’s temporal structure by positioning Julien’s trial and punishment as a frame. Typical of the courtroom drama genre, where the flashback (or series of flashbacks) serves to establish the truth, in Le Rouge et le noir this structure also serves to provide both a limit for the narrative (which has necessarily been curtailed from Stendhal’s 800-​page novel) and a perspective through which to view the events. In this case, by placing Julien’s famous attack on the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie right at the beginning, the adaptors announce the ideological thrust of their film, which intensifies Stendhal’s political message through the arrogance and insolence of Julien’s gestures as well as his words: ‘Mon vrai crime pour vous c’est d’être né dans une classe inférieure et surtout d’avoir voulu en sortir’ (My real crime for you is to have been born into an inferior class, and, even more, to have wanted to leave it). Questions such as who has the authority to dispense justice, the relationship of the church to power, and the issue of social mobility are raw ones in a France engaged in rapid economic modernisation but which has still not faced up to its past. These examples of contemporary concerns that emerge in Le Diable au corps and Le Rouge et le noir evoke Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the artistic utterance as a ‘hybrid construction’ (Stam 2006: 4) and reveal some of the fruits of the dialogue between adaptors and source text. Taking a contextual approach to these films and their genesis allows us to read them as successful not in terms of whether they render their source texts to the letter but rather in terms of what they offered their contemporary audiences, thematically and stylistically. What we have in the work of Aurenche and Bost, then, is what we might term a necessary step in the ‘evolution of adaptation’, to borrow the title of a lecture given by Andrew (2014) on Bazin’s writing on this subject –​or, as Stam puts it, ‘a turn in an ongoing dialogical process’ –​ even if that process was rapidly becoming a dialogue of the deaf with the entrenched positions taken up by both New Wave and quality filmmakers. In this chapter, we have focused on this issue of adaptation as it is a key element of Aurenche and Bost’s screenwriting practice, the element that they are perhaps best known for today, thanks to the polemical nature of the debate in the 1950s. We have shown here that there is more to this practice, though, than the serving up of novels on the screen with the addition of an anticlerical, antibourgeois sauce. An examination of Aurenche and Bost’s contribution to French cinema opens many possible facets for further research: the ways in which both screenwriters and screenplays circulated as desirable properties within the industry, questions of adaptation rights,

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and of course, the essentially collective nature of filmmaking practice. Even though we have only been able to briefly touch on these elements, and have offered a very partial consideration of Aurenche and Bost’s considerable œuvre, we have aimed in this chapter to reinstate the voices of these major screenwriters in the dialogue and recontextualise both their legacy and that of the tradition of quality.

Films written by Aurenche and Bost in date order L’Héritier des Mondésir/​The Mondésir Heir (Valentin, 1940; scr. Aurenche; dial. Bost) Douce/​Love story (Autant-​Lara, 1943; adapt. and dial. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Michel Davet) La Symphonie pastorale/​The Pastoral Symphony (Delannoy, 1946; adapt. Aurenche and Delannoy; dial. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from André Gide) Le Diable au corps/​The Devil in the Flesh (Autant-​Lara, 1947; adapt. and dial. Aurenche and Bost, Autant-​Lara [uncredited]; adapt. from Raymond Radiguet) La Septième porte/​The Seventh Door (Zwoboda, 1948; scr. Aurenche and Bost) Au-​delà des grilles/​The Walls of Malapaga (Clément, 1949; scr. Zavattini, Cecchi d’Amico and Guarini; adapt. Aurenche and Bost) Occupe-​toi d’Amélie/​Oh Amelia! (Autant-​Lara, 1949; adapt. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Georges Feydeau) Dieu a besoin des hommes/​God Needs Men (Delannoy, 1950; scr. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Henri Queffélec, Le Recteur de l’Île de Sein) L’Auberge rouge/​ The Red Inn (Autant-​ Lara, 1951; scr. Aurenche, Bost and Autant-​Lara) Les Sept péchés capitaux/​The Seven Deadly Sins (1952):  segment L’Orgueil/​Pride (Autant-​Lara; scr. and dial. Aurenche, Bost and Autant-​Lara); segment La Luxure/​ Lust (Y. Allégret; scr. and dial. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly); segment Le Huitième péché/​The Eighth Sin (Lacombe; scr. and dial. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. Wheeler; adapt. from idea of Léo Joannon) Jeux interdits/​ Forbidden Games (Clément, 1952; scr. and dial. Aurenche, Bost, Boyer and Clément; adapt. from François Boyer) Les Orgueilleux/​The Proud and the Beautiful (Y. Allégret, 1953; scr. Aurenche; adapt. Y. Allégret; dial. Aurenche, J. Clouzot and Bost [uncredited]; adapt. from Jean-​Paul Sartre, Typhus) Le Blé en herbe/​The Game of Love (Autant-​Lara, 1954; adapt. and dial. Aurenche, Bost and Autant-​Lara; adapt. from Colette) Destinées/​Daughters of Destiny (1954):  segment Jeanne (Delannoy; scr. Aurenche and Bost) Le Rouge et le noir/​The Red and the Black (Autant-​Lara, 1954; scr. Autant-​Lara, Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Stendhal) Chiens perdus sans collier/​The Little Rebels (Delannoy, 1955; scr. Delannoy [uncredited]; adapt. Aurenche, Bost and Boyer; adapt. from Gilbert Cesbron)

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La Traversée de Paris/​Four Bags Full (Autant-​Lara, 1956; scr. and dial. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Marcel Aymé) Gervaise (Clément, 1956; scr. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Émile Zola, L’Assommoir) En cas de malheur/​Love Is My Profession (Autant-​Lara, 1958; scr. Aurenche and Bost, Autant-​Lara [uncredited]; adapt. from Georges Simenon) Le Joueur/​The Gambler (Autant-​Lara, 1958; scr. Aurenche, Bost and Boyer; dial. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Fyodor Dostoevsky) Le Chemin des écoliers/​Way of Youth (Boisrond, 1959; adapt. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Marcel Aymé) La Jument verte/​The Green Mare (Autant-​Lara, 1959; scr. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Marcel Aymé) Les Régates de San Francisco/​The Regattas of San Francisco (Autant-​Lara, 1960; scr. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini, L’Onda dell’incrociatore) Tu ne tueras point/​Thou Shalt Not Kill (Autant-​Lara, 1961; scr. Aurenche and Bost) Le Rendez-​vous/​Rendezvous (Delannoy, 1961; adapt. Aurenche, Bost and Delannoy; dial. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Patrick Quentin (also known as Richard Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler), The Man with Two Wives) Le Crime ne paie pas/​Crime Doesn’t Pay (Oury, 1962):  segment Le masque (scr. Aurenche and Bost) Le Meurtrier/​Enough Rope (Autant-​Lara, 1963; scr. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Patricia Highsmith, The Blunderer) Le Magot de Josefa/​Josefa’s Loot (Autant-​Lara, 1963; scr. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. Lara [uncredited]; adapt. from Catherine Aurenche and Dimey; dial. Autant-​ Claude) Les Amitiés particulières (Delannoy, 1964; scr. Aurenche; dial. Bost; adapt. from Roger Peyrefitte) Umorismo in nero (1965):  segment La Bestiole (Autant-​Lara; scr. Aurenche and Bost; dial. Aurenche; adapt. from Guy de Maupassant, La Bête à Mait’Belhomme) Paris brûle-​t-​il?/​Is Paris Burning? (Clément, 1966; scr. G. Vidal and F. F. Coppola; additional material (French) M. Moussy (German) Beate von Molo; adapt. from Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Uncredited: Aurenche, Y. Boisset, Bost, C. Brulé) Le Franciscain de Bourges (Autant-​Lara, 1968; adapt. and dial. Aurenche and Bost; adapt. from Marc Toledano) Lucien Leuwen (Autant-​Lara, 1973; scr. Aurenche, Bost and Autant-​Lara; adapt. from Stendhal) Molière pour rire et pour pleurer (Marcel Camus, 1973; scr. Aurenche, Bost, C. Brulé and G. Neveux) L’Horloger de Saint-​ Paul/​ The Watchmaker of Saint Paul (Tavernier, 1974; scr. Aurenche, Bost and Tavernier; adapt. from Georges Simenon L’Horloger d’Everton) Le Juge et l’assassin/​The Judge and the Assassin (Tavernier, 1976; scr. Aurenche and Tavernier; adapt. from story by Aurenche and Bost)

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Other films referred to in the text The Fallen Idol (Carol Reed, 1948; scr. Graham Greene; dial. Lesley Storm and William Templeton; adapted from Greene short story)

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Notes 1 See, for example:  on genre, Pillard (2014b), Layerle and Moine (2014); on stars, Chedaleux (2016), Le Gras and Chedaleux (2012), Vincendeau (2000 and 2013); on industrial structures and economic practices, Vezyroglou (2014), Hervé (2015), Vernet (2017); and on reception, Le Gras and Sellier (2015), Jullier and Leveratto (2010). 2 Other notable studies include Török (1986), Prédal (1994a) and Vanoye (2008) on screenwriters and Samouillan (2004) on dialogue. More recently, two influential scholars have pointed to the neglect of language in the study of French cinema (Chion 2008; Vincendeau 2010a). 3 The revised agreements set aside more screens for French films and, more importantly, limited the number of dubbed US imports to 121 films per year (Gimello-​Mesplomb 2003: 99). 4 Cinémathèque suisse, Lausanne (hereafter CSL), Claude Autant-​Lara (CAL) Archive (005), 92/​3 A7, p.  1. Letter from Graetz to Autant-​Lara, 15 March 1946. All translations are our own unless otherwise stated. 5 CSL, CAL 005 92/​1 A7. Letter from Autant-​Lara to Graetz, 24 March 1946, p. 1. Of course, Douce (1943), made during the Occupation, was subject to a different censorship regime. 6 See, for example, Jullier and Leveratto (2010), Layerle and Moine (2014), Le Gras and Sellier (2015), Sellier (2015) and Pillard (2015). 7 Prior to Douce, Aurenche had already collaborated with Autant-​Lara on several films including L’Affaire du courrier de Lyon, which Autant-​Lara ghosted for Maurice Lehmann (1937), Le Mariage de Chiffon and Lettres d’amour (both 1942). 8 Some of these films can be seen in the documentary Jean Aurenche: écrivain de cinéma (Hilaire and Badday, 2010). 9 A letter from Sartre confirms this:  ‘Gallimard has accepted my manuscript, thanks in large part to you’. Bost private archive, L’Haÿ les Roses, correspondence. Letter from Sartre to Bost, 28 May 1937. 10 Bost private archive, L’Haÿ les Roses, correspondence. Letter from Vigo to Bost, 6 June 1931. 11 Tavernier chooses to highlight this aspect of the writing partnership between Aurenche and Bost in Laissez Passer (2002), his homage to the French film industry during the Occupation, partly based on Aurenche’s memories. 12 The article ends with an image of a horse drawn hearse taken from Miracolo a Milano/​Miracle in Milan (de Sica, 1951), no doubt illustrating the longed-​for demise of the tradition of quality.

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13 CSL, CAL 005, 86/​2 A2.1. Letter from Autant-​Lara to Paul Graetz, 5 March 1946, p. 4; see also Leahy (2018: 143). Aurenche would again collaborate with Bost and Lara on the adaptation of the posthumous Lucien Leuwen (1974). 14 These include adaptations of Adolphe (Constant), War and Peace (Tolstoy), Vanina Vanini (Stendhal), and the notorious version of Un journal d’un curé de campagne (Bernanos), excoriated by Truffaut (2009), and analysed more productively by Gilles Philippe (2018) and Vincent Verselle (2018). 15 Other adaptations of literary classics released around this time include Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Bresson, 1944), adapted by Jean Cocteau from Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste; Boule de suif (Christian-​Jaque, 1945), adapted by Louis d’Hée and Henri Jeanson from Maupassant’s short stories Boule de suif and Mademoiselle Fifi; Naïs (Pagnol and Leboursier, 1945) adapted by Marcel Pagnol from a short story by Zola; L’Idiot (Lampin, 1946), adapted by Spaak and Georges Raevsky from Dostoevsky’s novel. A number of films made during or before the war were also released at this time, including Une partie de campagne (Renoir, filmed in 1936), adapted from Maupassant, and Félicie Nanteuil (M. Allégret, filmed in 1942, released in 1944), adapted by Curt Alexander and Charles de Peyret-​Chappuis from Anatole France’s novel. However, we should note that there is no marked trend following the Liberation for adaptations of ‘great’ novels. 16 ‘She intuits everything. Very soon, she overtakes Charlotte in intelligence application.’ 17 Flashbacks are introduced in Le Diable au corps and Le Rouge et le noir, and in certain script versions of Le Blé en herbe (Autant-​Lara, 1954), for example. However, they are not used in the final film versions of La Symphonie pastorale, La Traversée de Paris or En cas de malheur (Autant-​Lara, 1958), even though the device is present in these source texts. Gide’s own adaptation of La Symphonie, rejected for technical incompetence, envisaged a flashback structure for dealing with Gertrude’s education, though it did not indicate how this was to be executed (Boillat 2018; Mathieu 2018). 18 This was noted by critics in relation to Le Diable au corps (Boillat 2018: 203; note 69). 19 See Aurenche (1993: 126) regarding Douce: ‘We laid it on thick, thinking that the historical setting would disguise the meaning of the scene.’ This is backed up in correspondence of the time: ‘Here are living, valid, interesting things to talk about –​indirectly of course –​which give a “historical” film resonance for a “modern” audience. And we can only say these things in this type of film which offers freedom of expression that in a modern setting would not be allowed.’ CSL, CAL 005, 86/​2 A2.1. Letter from Autant-​Lara to Paul Graetz, 24 March 1946, p. 2. 20 This can also be seen very clearly in films such as Manèges (Allégret, 1950; written by Jacques Sigurd), La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (Decoin, 1952; adapted by Maurice Aubergé from the novel by Simenon), and Le Bon Dieu sans confession (Autant-​Lara, 1953; written by Claude and Ghislaine Autant-​Lara with Roland Laudenbach), where the use of perspective in flashbacks serves to construct various different ‘truths’.

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21 The flashback exists in French cinema before this, both in adaptations such as L’Auberge rouge (Epstein, 1923; from Balzac) and Les Deux timides (Clair, 1928; from Labiche) and in original screenplays such as Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Renoir, 1936), Le Jour se lève (Carné, 1939)  and Marie-​Martine (Valentin, 1943). 22 A number of other source texts were considered before Le Diable au corps was agreed, including Manon Lescaut (Abbé Prévost), Nez de cuir, gentilhomme d’amour (Jean de la Varende) and Le Bonheur dans le crime (Barbey d’Aurevilly). See Leahy (2018) on the genesis of the film. 23 CSL, CAL 005, 92/​3 A7, contains, for example, a letter from Autant-​Lara to Jean Grémillon (as head of the technicians’ union), 17 September 1946; a letter from Aurenche to Autant-​Lara, 9 October 1946; a letter from Paul Graetz to Autant-​Lara, 23 October 1946. 24 Sellier (2019) points out that this decision gives greater importance to Marthe, likening her character’s attempts at emancipation to those of other Autant-​Lara heroines scripted by Aurenche, Douce and Chiffon. 25 CSL, CAL 005, 86/​14 A4.1. Adaptation cinématographique, 10 June 1946; CSL, CAL 005, 86/​16 A4.1. Adaptation cinématographique, undated. 26 The two men head off into the night. /​182. Close up on Marthe, on the jetty. She’s still waiting. She’s staring, leaning slightly forward … /​… into the black water. /​DISSOLVE. (Fade out?) (CSL, CAL 005, 87/​3 A4.1. Scénario technique, 7 August 1946, p. 83.) 27 Indeed, as Sellier (2019: 192) points out, the second flashback also starts from Marthe’s point of view, with an image of her hands as she washes them and replaces her wedding ring. 28 At the moment they are about to be separated [François] shouts:  /​ FRANÇOIS: Marthe, what will you say to him? /​Marthe is standing on the boat, watching François who is following. /​MARTHE: I’m not going there to talk to him. /​PAN. on Marthe alone on the boat that’s rapidly gaining distance. She’s still and very calm. /​RS on François, getting quickly left behind (from the boat). When he’s quite far away, he shouts, very loud: /​FRANÇOIS: Do you love me …? FADE. (CSL, CAL 005, 87/​3 A4.1. Scénario technique, 7 August 1946, p. 194). 29 Sellier (2019:  183) argues that the naive François of Autant-​ Lara’s film whose ‘efforts to appear older don’t take in Marthe or the viewer’, differs from Radiguet’s protagonist who displays a ‘disabused cynicism tainted with misogyny’.

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The screenwriter sacrificed? The ‘screenplays’ of the New Wave auteurs

The French New Wave and its critical legacy have had a fundamental impact on the way screenwriting practices have developed since the 1960s, and not just in French cinema. Because of the overwhelming influence of the auteurist position that privileges the director’s role, they have also affected the way screenwriting and the screenwriter have been conceptualised in film studies. We have seen in the introduction and Chapter  4 how the development of the politique des auteurs in the 1950s had a profound effect on contemporary cinema, redefining the forces of power in filmmaking and the criteria for appreciating a film. More importantly for our study of screenwriting practice, this politique had a direct impact on the image and status of screenwriters in French cinema, as its exponents explicitly attacked some of the star screenwriters and dialogue writers of the past in order to redefine the role for those to come. As we have seen in our introduction and in Chapter 4, the politique des auteurs was developed in a series of polemical reviews and essays that were fiercely critical of the tradition of quality. They were published in various cinema journals by the ‘young Turks’: François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Jean-​Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, recruited to write for the Cahiers du cinema from 1951 and mentored by editors André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-​Valcroze. In articles such as Truffaut’s ‘A certain tendency of French cinema’, they denounced the post-​war film industry as a closed shop, dominated by ‘a screenwriters’ cinema’ (Truffaut 2009:  41). They called for an end to this screenwriter-​led cinema, and its replacement by a cinema made by auteurs who would write and direct their own films, retaining artistic control from conception to release (de Baecque 2003: 136–​ 9). Hindsight has revealed the partisan, subjective nature of these critical stances: the ‘young Turks’ had a vested interest in weakening the dominant, highly regulated profession in order to make space for the freer models of filmmaking that they aspired to. We will keep this in mind while we consider the practices of the three auteurs considered in this chapter.

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One of the many persistent myths associated with New Wave cinema as a movement is that it did away with the screenplay and thus with screenwriters. What we see here is a mythologising of both the cinéma de papa and that of the new generation. With regard to the former, this establishes an idea of the traditional screenplay as a sacrosanct pre-​written shooting script, fully prepared prior to shooting and followed to the letter during the filming and editing stages of production. Of course, as we have seen in ­chapters 1–​4, this is far from a true reflection of the function of the screenplay in classic French cinema, in which writers and directors took a wide range of approaches. It was common for changes to be made to the screenplay throughout the shooting and editing stages, prompted by directors, actors, producers, writers, or by a combination of circumstances. With regard to the latter, there is an enduring notion that the directors of the New Wave literally tore up the script, jettisoning written screenplays in favour of a fully improvisatory mode of filmmaking.1 This too is misleading, as we shall see. And yet, it is certainly true that the innovations of the New Wave included new approaches to screenwriting, as attested to by numerous sources. Many New Wave directors made their archives more available than had ever been the case before, often leading to intense scholarly activity around the development of their films and their written versions. In addition, many screenplays of New Wave films have been published (often very soon after the film’s release).2 Such sources are evidence not just of the existence of a screenplay or written text for the film, but also of the fact that audiences  –​and scholars  –​value the screenplay as an object worthy of attention. And it is worth noting that most of the monograph studies of individual films mentioned in this chapter include a section on its genesis.3 In this chapter, we will consider the varying approaches of three writer-​ directors associated with the New Wave  –​Truffaut, Agnès Varda and Rohmer  –​to consider how their authorial practice extended the remit of screenwriting. We will address three sets of questions as a way of challenging these enduring myths regarding the New Wave and screenwriters, and of critically engaging with film authorship and the auteur from a screenwriting perspective. First, we consider the impact of the politique des auteurs on the idea of the screenwriter as a major stakeholder in film production. Why were screenwriters scapegoated in order to speed up the transition to auteur cinema, promoting mise en scene over screenwriting and facilitating the introduction of new filming practices in the industry to free the creative process from industrial structures and regulations (censorship and unions)? Second, we ask how screenplays were used, if at all, to facilitate the production processes of certain films associated with the New Wave. We will explore the flexible methods embraced by independent filmmakers and consider how they were facilitated by the technical innovations that made

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it possible to change the established models of film development. Finally, in our case studies, we will explore a number of innovative writing methods developed for the screen by Truffaut, Varda and Rohmer and consider how these affected the traditionally collaborative nature of film development and the writing process. In addition to identifying writing processes, we will consider the respective roles of director, screenwriter and dialogue writer, which frequently overlapped, and how they worked during pre-​production, filming and post-​production in order to redefine what writing for cinema actually meant. The examples chosen also allow us to address the central aim of this book, which is to consider the place of screenwriters and screenwriting practices in relation to the powerful New Wave mythologies and auteurist rhetoric of the 1960s. This chapter does not attempt to provide comprehensive accounts of the very eclectic screenwriting practices of the New Wave directors. Its aim is to ascertain to what extent the New Wave marks a turning point for the evolution of our historical account of French screenwriters. This is why the three case studies developed in this chapter fulfil very specific functions. Our discussion of Truffaut sheds light on his practice of collaborative screenwriting in the 1960s, which seems to contradict his critical stance of the 1950s. Our consideration of Varda’s writing practice illustrates her personal take on auteurist creation with cinécriture, a method that broadens the scope of screenwriting to allow maximum director control. For the last case study, we approach Rohmer’s unique writing practice to elicit whether he is the one who has remained closest to the principles of the politique des auteurs.

New Wave auteurs as screenwriting directors If the politique des auteurs sacralised the director as sole creator of the film, doing so brought into the limelight the Hollywood masters who wrote or co-​wrote their films (Hitchcock, Lang and Hawks) and directors working in France who had also been screenwriters before the New Wave, such as Jean Renoir, Max Ophüls and Jacques Becker. This brought about a lasting critical shift that placed directors at the centre of the critical and scholarly discourse at the expense of screenwriters. This may have led to a de-​sacralisation of screenwriting over the next decade, but, as we show throughout this volume, this did not so much put screenwriters out of work as make them less visible, at least in the context of independent cinema.4 There were, of course, certain exceptions to this, as we shall see in Chapter  6 with the case of Michel Audiard. While different models of production continued to co-​exist and thrive throughout the 1960s and onwards, certain structural

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and technical changes coincided with the New Wave, which influenced writing, filming and editing practices as substantially as did the concurrent intellectual and critical movements. Some of the leading auteur-​directors, especially Godard, Rohmer, Truffaut and Varda, developed a level of production autonomy that would have been difficult to imagine only ten years earlier. They were the originators of their film concept, providing the idea or the existing literary work that they wanted to adapt, and they produced their films independently, starting their own companies to do so. They usually wrote or co-​wrote the film and supervised the screenplay development, and while a full continuity script was not always produced, they were actively involved at all stages of the development. In short, they prepared and orchestrated the mise en scene and the production until the filming started, and they had the final cut when editing the rushes. However, they did not do away with the  written text  –​quite the opposite, in fact. As auteurs, they all wrote before filming, albeit not conventional shooting scripts (e.g. very detailed notes for Truffaut; hybrid documents sometimes including storyboards for Varda; novelised stories for Rohmer). We refer to these as (pre)texts, a notion also used in translation studies, because some, especially Rohmer’s, are literary texts; they exist prior to the screenplay or shooting script, and sometimes they replace it completely. While New Wave directors experimented with screenwriting methods, they also desperately wanted to use more flexible filming practices than the dominant studio-​based production allowed. This required rethinking the established format and coded presentation of the screenplay and redefining shooting scripts as transient and versatile tools. The auteur-​director not only intervened during the screenwriting process but also played an increasingly active part in the editing –​transforming the rushes into the final film –​which amounted to an additional writing stage during post-​production. To understand this shift in working methods, we draw on the distinction made by Francis Vanoye (2008:  11) between the scénario-​programme (screenplay programme), a skeleton dramatic structure ready for production, and a scénario-​dispositif (screenplay-​modus operandi), providing loose guidelines and allowing an open mind about what might happen during filming. As Marie (2003: 77) puts it, the scénario-​dispositif is an ‘ideal the New Wave filmmaking often attempts to achieve’, but as we shall see, in practice, this distinction does not fully elucidate the flexible screenwriting practices, let alone the career evolutions of the New Wave directors after the 1960s. Godard, Rivette, Varda, and sometimes Truffaut, use scénario-​dispositifs more than Chabrol and Rohmer, who plan the filming and use scénario-​ programmes. The ideal of a dispositif encapsulates the mythology of an auteur who controls all the stages of creation and production, but the fact

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that it is achieved only in certain circumstances confirms that filmmaking inherently remains a collective practice subject to contingencies. Thus, if New Wave auteurs have often been compared to storytellers who use the resources of film language to express their vision of the world, they adopt their own strategies when it comes to the writing stage, each following their own creative approach. For example, Claire Vassé (2003: 41–​2), when accounting for several experiments in dialogue improvisation, argues that ‘the New Wave promotes lively dialogue driven by character authenticity […] not the talent of the person who wrote it [… Filmmakers] have learned to listen to daily conversations, which has changed the dialogue writing process’. Significantly, it is often for dialogue writing that New Wave auteurs have sought out collaborators. On the subject of collaboration, Marie (2003: 75) points out that of the early films made by the New Wave Cahiers critics, Le Beau Serge (Chabrol, 1958) is the only screenplay that corresponds faithfully to the label ‘written by the director’. However, from the 1960s on, Rohmer, Varda and Godard are credited as the sole authors of nearly all their films. When it comes to screenplays, Marie adds that ‘the configuration hoped for by Astruc and Truffaut in their programmatic articles was far from dominant’ in their own filmmaking practice. With the exceptions of Le Beau Serge and Le Boucher (Chabrol, 1970) that he wrote on his own, Chabrol’s screenplays were co-​ written. Until the 1970s, Paul Gégauff was often credited for the dialogue as is the case for Les Cousins (1958) and Les Bonnes Femmes/​Good Time Girls (1960).5 For Les Biches/​Girlfriends (1968) and Que la bête meure/​ This Man Must Die (1969), Chabrol and Gégauff teamed up for screenplay and dialogue without role separation. As for Truffaut, if he wrote his first screenplay for the short film Les Mistons/​The Brats (1958) alone, he then developed a pool of screenwriting collaborators, including Marcel Moussy, Jean-​Louis Richard and Jean Gruault. He would choose one of them as collaborator for each film, depending on the type of project. Increasingly, Suzanne Schiffman also started to collaborate on the original screenplays. Both Truffaut and Chabrol also wrote screenplays for other directors in the early 1960s, and sometimes helped to find funding for the films.6 On the other hand, Rohmer’s films could be said to epitomise the purest form of auteurism, with the director having full control over his written screenplays and films, and they tend to remain close to the established screenplay during filming. Varda, too, prepares and writes her films alone, but as her career developed she moved away from the more literary style of her early screenplays towards what she terms cinécriture, a creative process that redefines writing in the cinematic context. The objective of the following sections, therefore, is to identify various writing models –​collaborative and

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autonomous –​which transformed the development stage, producing specific alternative screenwriting practices.

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François Truffaut: maturing the screenplay As a prolific writer and a lover of literature, Truffaut (1932–​82) embraced screenwriting as an integral part of his filmmaking practice through his career. He also developed an archive, filing all the annotated drafts and documents used during the writing process, including his correspondence with collaborators and friends.7 Many scholars, such as Anne Gillain (1988), Annette Insdorf (1994), Carole Le Berre (1993; 2005)8 and Truffaut’s biographers Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana (2000), have accessed the various manuscripts and draft scripts and researched his filmmaking processes. Their explicit references to the writing stages facilitate our attempt to elicit Truffaut’s working methods as screenwriter and his collaborative practice. Le Berre’s work in particular provides insight into how Truffaut transformed the function of screenwriting to fit with his own idea of filmmaking. Some of Truffaut’s early films stemmed from original ideas, such as Les Quatre Cents Coups/​The 400 Blows (1959) and La Peau douce/​Soft Skin (1964); others began from literary adaptations, such as Tirez sur le pianiste/​ Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Jules et Jim/​Jules and Jim (1962). In both cases, the preparation could involve a slow process of collecting and classifying, during which time concurrent projects (and different collaborators) were kept separate. For each project, he sent an annotated written text (a dossier) that contained underlined passages, lines to be retained and ideas about what he would like to film and pointers on mise en scene. Each film has its own development history. L’Enfant sauvage/​The Wild Child (1970) remained in pre-​production for four or five years during the 1960s.9 Truffaut needed a period of gestation, ‘le murissement’ (a maturing process) (Toubiana 2014: 135). Some scenes are crossed out, others are annotated, and successive drafts testify to the evolution of characters and stories prior to shooting, providing evidence of Truffaut’s authorial control over them. This practice was not new, however; as we have seen in ­chapters 1–​4, directors such as Jean Renoir, Jean Grémillon, Marcel Carné and Claude Autant-​Lara all exerted control over the writing stage of development, which, in certain cases, was extremely protracted. In Truffaut’s case though, because his films were self-​produced, he was able to control the period of gestation, and if he often worked on several projects simultaneously (like Renoir), he remained in control of the timing of development (see Schiffman 1985: 78; Toubiana 2014: 108).

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Unlike Rohmer and Varda, Truffaut admitted that he was incapable of developing complex crime plots himself. Occasionally, he developed an original idea from fait divers press cuttings, as for La Peau douce;10 but mostly, he adapted authors he admired. He worked closely with established screenwriters who appear in the credits, often with no specific role attached to their name (see detailed filmography), suggesting that they contributed to the whole screenplay following a system of correspondence with Truffaut.

Les Quatre Cents Coups Antoine Doinel (Jean-​Pierre Léaud) is twelve. He lives in Paris with his mother (Claire Maurier) and stepfather (Albert Rémy). He has various troubles at school, where he is viewed as a troublemaker by the teacher, and at home, where he never seems to be welcome and is neglected. Eventually, his mischief (including covering his truancy by telling his teacher that his mother has died) leads him to run away from home and find shelter at the house of his friend René (Patrick Auffay). He steals a typewriter from his stepfather’s office and is arrested as he tries to return it, having failed to sell it. On his mother’s request, he is sent to a centre for young delinquents. His unhappy childhood is fully revealed in the honest answers that he gives in an interview with a psychologist: he knows he is an unwanted child and this is the main reason behind his wild behaviour. Soon after, he escapes from the centre and runs away into the countryside. He eventually arrives at the seaside and the film closes with him on the beach, facing the audience and an uncertain future …

For his first feature, Les Quatre Cents Coups, Truffaut started with a short treatment entitled ‘La Fugue d’Antoine’, which he expanded into a feature-​film screenplay. He began with a series of worksheets, each outlining a sequence of sketches around a central protagonist  –​Antoine at school, Antoine at home, Antoine in the street –​and inspired by episodes in his own life (Toubiana 2004: 3–​4). Once he had developed this autobiographical backbone, he called in an ex-​teacher and writer Marcel Moussy, after seeing his television show about difficult parent–​child relationships, to help with plot construction and dialogue (Figure 5.1).11 Moussy was new to screenwriting, which suited Truffaut who wanted to remain in control of the screenplay while receiving help to give his story a more universal appeal but without resorting to a conventional screenwriting expert (see Le Berre 1993:  22). The loosely developed treatment and the mass of details that

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Figure 5.1  Poster for Les Quatre Cents Coups, prominently featuring Marcel Moussy as dialogue writer.

Truffaut had in mind fed into a more structured shooting script, leaving a number of ellipses and several unwritten scenes with only contextual indications. Truffaut’s published correspondence (2000:  120–​9) discloses

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the nature of his collaboration with Moussy between June and November 1958. Moussy was asked to comment on the existing drafts and develop certain scenes, but he had no input during the shooting. Of course, the actor Jean-​Pierre Léaud also played a major role in defining the vitality of the protagonist and the tenor of some of the dialogue. An example of this is the scene with the psychologist, which was improvised as an interview and edited with fade-​outs. The camera is fixed on Antoine, leaving the psychologist off-​screen. A short extract is reproduced here as an example of largely improvised dialogue under the director’s guidance. The spontaneous colloquial expressions and orality markers give the scene a documentary feel and fully foreground the power of spoken language, here by offering the actor the conditions for his natural idiolect to come to life through improvisation: Extract 1 (Les Quatre Cents Coups): LA PSYCHOLOGUE:  Tes parents disent que tu mens tout le temps. ANTOINE:  Ben, je mens, je mens, de temps en temps quoi, des fois, ils … je leur dirais des choses qui seraient la vérité, ils ne me croiraient pas, alors je préfère dire des mensonges. LA PSYCHOLOGUE:  Pourquoi n’aimes-​tu pas ta mère? ANTOINE:  Ben, parce que d’abord j’ai été en nourrice et puis, quand ils ont plus eu d’argent, ils m’ont mis chez ma grand-​mère … ma grand-​mère elle a vieilli et tout ça, elle pouvait plus me garder. Puis je suis venu chez mes parents, à ce moment-​là j’avais déjà huit ans et tout, et, et puis, je me suis aperçu que ma mère, elle m’aimait pas tellement, elle me disputait toujours, et puis pour rien, des petites affaires insignifiantes. Alors aussi j’ai entendu, quand il y avait des scènes à la maison, j’ai entendu que … que … ma mère … elle m’avait eu quand elle était … elle m’avait eu fille-​mère quoi! et puis avec ma grand-​mère elle s’est disputée une fois et c’est là que j’ai su qu’elle avait voulu se faire avorter, et puis si je suis né, c’était grâce à ma grand-​mère.12 This rich interview, with its coy, raw honesty contrasts with other uses of language in the screenplay, in the heterogeneous use of dialogue in Antoine’s chat with his friend René, his reserve at home with his parents or at school, and also in more covert use of Balzac’s language, in the text of the dictation at school. Truffaut’s control over, and direct input into, the screenwriting process is also documented by his collaborators. Schiffman (1985:  80) confirms that he put as much of himself into his adaptations as into his original screenplays:  hiding behind the literary text allowed him to develop his personal agenda more easily. The adaptation of Henri-​Pierre Roché’s novel Jules et Jim is a case in point.

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Jules et Jim Before the First World War, Jules (Oskar Werner), a shy Austrian writer, forges a friendship with Jim (Henri Serre), an extroverted Frenchman. After encounters with several women, they meet the free-​ spirited Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) who reminds them of a statue of a Greek goddess. As the trio hang out together, she and Jules begin a relationship, while Jim sees Gilberte (Vanna Urbino). Just before the war starts, Jules and Catherine move to Austria and get married. Both men serve in the war on opposing sides. After the war, Jim visits, and later stays with, Jules and Catherine in the Black Forest. Jules and Catherine have a young daughter, Sabine. Jules confides that there are tensions in their marriage. He tells Jim that Catherine torments him and has had numerous affairs; she even left for six months. Catherine attempts to seduce Jim. Jules, desperate that she might leave him forever, lets Jim marry Catherine so that he can visit them and see her. For a while, the three adults live happily together, until tensions between Jim and Catherine arise because of their inability to have a child. Jim leaves Catherine and returns to Paris. After an exchange of letters, they resolve to reunite when she becomes pregnant. The reunion falls through once Jules tells Jim she suffered a miscarriage. After a time, Jim meets Jules in Paris; he and Catherine now live in France. Catherine tries to win Jim back, but he announces that he is marrying Gilberte. She tries to shoot him but he escapes. He later encounters Jules and Catherine in a cinema and they go to a cafe. Catherine asks Jim to get into her car, and as Jules watches, she drives the car off a bridge into the river, killing herself and Jim.

Truffaut asked Gruault13 whom he knew from the Cahiers years to adapt the novel with him, in a process later described by Gruault as ‘a cut and paste job of chunks of text on a large board’ (Salé 1981: 96). He produced a first draft of 200 pages, then refocused the plot around the character of Catherine on Truffaut’s request in a second draft (Gruault 1985:  86; Le Berre 1995). The pair later added invented pastiche scenes in the spirit of Roché’s style (Gruault in Salé 1981:  96). Truffaut insisted that Gruault limited the plot’s dramatisation whenever there was a risk of the narrative shifting towards filmed drama, and that he kept some flexibility for changes made during filming. They thus added the bicycle scenes with Gilberte and a comic interlude of Jules’s former girlfriend Thérèse (Marie Dubois) smoking and making the sound of a locomotive just before the filming.14

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The inclusion of a voice-​over commentary added some literariness to the screenplay ‘whenever the text seemed impossible to adapt into dialogue or too beautiful to be cut’ (Truffaut in Gillain 1988:  128), as Extract 2 illustrates: Extract 2 (Jules et Jim): VOIX OFF:  Catherine, la Française avait le sourire de la statue de l’île. Son nez, sa bouche son menton, son front étaient la fierté d’une province qu’elle avait incarnée enfant lors d’une fête religieuse. Cela commençait comme un rêve. (Truffaut 1962: 14)15 With this, Truffaut did not so much acknowledge the idea of unfilmable elements in the novel as highlight its ‘cinematic’ qualities. Nor was the voice-​ over commentary seen as ‘an excuse to produce a literary film’ (Gillain 1988: 128). By alternating dialogue and commentary (read aloud by Michel Subor), he created an intermediate narrative mode differing from the voice-​over used by Aurenche and Bost to offer a character’s viewpoint (see Chapter 4).16 Truffaut also chose this option over forcing the adaptation into film of Roché’s text. He reused voice-​over narratives in many of his subsequent films, making it an integral part of his authorial signature. From Jules et Jim onwards, the Arts critic Jean Aurel was ever present as an informal collaborator and sometimes as co-​writer for some later films. Truffaut asked him to comment on decisions taken at the editing stage and he played a crucial role (Aurel 1985:  92–​4; Le Berre 1993:  31). Another key collaborator, Jean-​Louis Richard, took on projects requiring complex narrative structures, starting with La Peau douce, for which he and Truffaut produced a screenplay in twenty-​two days. Le Berre’s (2005: 68–​76) close study of the successive drafts shows that the screenplay differs substantially from the filmed version after editing, notably including in the small visual and mise en scene details autobiographical touches and motifs found in other parts of Truffaut’s filmography. His personal archives reveal several successive writing stages for this film, with crossed-​out words, editing and collage, which confirms late changes in scene order and deletions of entire scenes. Significantly, the way in which the text is gradually refined to obtain the shooting script signals that, from the first draft onward, he paid more attention to describing shots and details of mise en scene. Le Berre (2005:  68) also provides examples of scenes that were written and then partly deleted before filming, or even abandoned in the final cut. For example, Truffaut deleted scenes in La Peau douce that he considered too frivolous.17 He justified these cuts by the need to preserve the integrity of the characters and to improve the unity of the tone, dismissing any picturesque effects. Close examination of successive screenplay drafts (Gillain 1988; Le Berre 1993; 2005) shows that Truffaut as a rule chose to suggest rather

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than show events, opening up the viewer’s interpretations (especially for love scenes).18 It also reveals a range of practices that define his auteurship, his focus on characterisation and close attention to dialogue which often sounds like his own way of speaking (Gruault 1985:87). These strategies contradict some of the dismissive views on screenwriting that he once held as a critic in the 1950s, views which paradoxically have remained attached to his signature, but that do not always reflect his writing practice, especially in the second half of his career with Schiffman as his closest collaborator. Schiffman is a key witness to Truffaut’s film development practice, even if she became more involved in co-​writing after the New Wave period. She began as script supervisor on Tirez sur le pianiste at Truffaut’s production company Les Films du Carrosse in 1960 and, following a number of short contracts, she was promoted to first assistant for L’Enfant sauvage. After 1970, she became a regular, if unofficial, co-​ writer, increasingly 19 entrusted with dialogue writing. Her first formal writing credit is for La Nuit américaine/​Day for Night (1973), on which she worked closely with Richard and Truffaut; from then on, she appears as co-​author on all his films. Schiffman recalls that, to provide a graphic view of La Nuit américaine, the initial treatment was mapped out on a large chart, satellite style. This mainly consisted of Truffaut’s notes and personal anecdotes about his professional life and a fait divers about a young bride who elopes with her father-​in-​ law.20 The narrative became relatively complex, because the story of the intradiegetic film, Pamela, is embedded within the main narrative of this film’s production. One recurring concern was therefore to distinguish between these two levels of narration, illustrating Truffaut’s complex method for assembling stories like the pieces in a jigsaw. This practice is not dissimilar to the strategy he adopted with Gruault for the literary adaptations. In both cases, it exposes the volatility of the narrative development, and of written (pre)texts:  rather than setting up a scénario-​programme Truffaut follows a scénario-​dispositif in the sense that he feeds ideas and anecdotes into a tentative skeleton structure, which leads to changes in the initial programme. As such, his writing practice differs from Rohmer’s more controlled writing method which consists of working from his own idea, narrative plan and characters, that he has enriched with detail and dialogue inspired by his actors, but always prior to filming. As Le Berre’s archival work (2005: 187–​ 90) confirms, scenes that Truffaut had written for other projects or previous films were recycled for La Nuit américaine. Other scenes were cut (sometimes after the shooting) or transferred from one character to another during the filming stage. Certain guiding principles emerge from this seemingly disorganised construction method: Truffaut is keen to achieve authenticity and always very wary of ensuring that the audience understand easily

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what he wants to convey. He also insists on drawing their attention, not only to the protagonists, but also to all the minor characters, recalling in this the practices of Prévert and Renoir. Despite careful attention and successive drafts of the screenplay, many changes occurred while shooting a film and sometimes during the editing. Truffaut, especially in his early films, was well aware of the cost of filming a scene that may subsequently be deleted, nevertheless, certain circumstances necessitated late changes to the screenplay. Among the examples Truffaut gives are the need to be less explicit, in other words to show rather than tell, the need to accelerate the narrative pace, or for the sake of unity of tone. So, if the rough cut made for the rushes was too long, Truffaut would cut entire scenes at the editing stage, regardless of their quality. What this demonstrates is the way in which editing constitutes another stage of the screenwriting process; one that is generally controlled solely by the auteur-​ director and in which the writing collaborators have little say. Truffaut had the final cut in the strictest sense of the term, as filmed scenes could be cut, edited, displaced and relocated at any stage. Schiffman, however, unlike the other co-​writers, followed the production at all stages and fully endorsed decisions to cut scenes that had seemed crucial at the writing stage. Moreover, she confirms that ‘nothing was set in stone regarding the dialogue writing:  for some screenplays, dialogue was fully written before the shooting, for others, a few days prior to shooting or it could even be completed on set’ (1985: 80–​2). From this brief consideration, then, we can see that Truffaut’s screenwriting practice is ambivalent on several counts. He completely controls the writing stages but never writes alone; he blurs the traditional distinctions between the processes of adaptation, dialogue writing and editing. Eschewing the distinction between scénario dispositif and scénario programme, Truffaut’s screenwriting requires the expansion of Vanoye’s classification with the notion of ‘open screenplay’ proposed by Olivier Assayas (1985: 6) to define a ‘scénario toujours ouvert, toujours modifiable’ (an open screenplay, which can at all times be modified) until the editing stage is complete. This method differs from improvisation, because it implies that Truffaut wrote and thought out every scene while keeping in mind its place in the film’s grand narrative. He was wary of not displacing the focal point and he knew how to transform his raw material –​a plot outline or a press article –​ into ‘what should be shown on screen’, to quote his friend and co-​author Claude de Givray (1985: 84). Truffaut epitomises the screenwriting auteur as artist who blends written text and film grammar to engage in purely cinematic quests and a virtual dialogue with the audience. His approach to cinema as primarily a scenario of mise en scene choices has some common

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ground with Agnès Varda’s very personal (and often experimental) way of approaching the conception of her films.

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Agnès Varda: cinécriture as alternative to screenwriting From her first film, La Pointe courte (1954), the screenwriting practice of Agnès Varda (1928–​2019) broke away from the cinematic traditions of the post-​war period. She moved from photography to filmmaking, directing her film on a shoestring budget and without obtaining the CNC’s authorisation. She was completely unaware of the commotion that the politique des auteurs was causing in cinematic circles at the time, and of how her filming methods –​location shooting with a reduced team, and a mixture of planning and improvisation –​presaged the New Wave (Orpen 2007: 11–​ 12). Because it had been filmed outside of industry structures, La Pointe courte did not receive a general cinema release. Nevertheless, its screening at Cannes and projection in a few Paris cinemas ensured that it was remarked on by a few influential critics, including Truffaut who reviewed it in Arts in 1956, praising its ‘ambitious experimental feel and integrity’. La Pointe courte was shot in the Mediterranean port town of Sète. The publicity (cited in Truffaut 1956) introduced it as ‘un essai de film à lire’ (an essay of a film to be read), immediately foregrounding its literary texture. The narrative structure, inspired by a 1939 William Faulkner novel, The Wild Palms, interweaves two stories: one featuring the economic problems of a community of local fishermen, and the other focusing on the changing relationship of a young couple visiting from Paris (unnamed in the script and played by Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort). It thus superposes a private level onto a more collective one.21 Kelley Conway (2015b: 327), who had access to the archives of Varda’s production company Ciné-​Tamaris, notes that the first draft screenplay was already ‘precise and complete’.22 Varda confirms that early drafts formed a carefully designed scene-​by-​scene treatment, later turned into a complete shooting script, with shot scales and dialogue (in Kline 2014:  24). The performance of the dialogue therefore sounds rather theatrical, even though the screenplay captures the language of both the professional actors and the fishermen. Varda’s familiarity with the spaces and people she was filming is a feature that came to define New Wave cinema (as we will also find in Rohmer’s case). Cléo de 5 à 7/​Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda’s second feature, was shot in May 1961 and released in 1962. It was developed after two shorts made in 1958, Du côté de la côte/​Along the Coast and L’Opéra-​Mouffe/​The Mouffetard Opera, a documentary labelled as a ‘film-​notebook of the Rue Mouffetard by a pregnant woman in 1958’.23

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Cléo de 5 à 7 A young Parisian pop singer, Cléo (Corinne Marchand), has to wait two hours for the results of a biopsy that will confirm whether she has cancer. After an ominous tarot card reading, she walks to a cafe to meet her housekeeper Angèle (Dominique Davray) and they go to a hatter’s shop. Back home, she receives a brief visit from her lover José (José Luis de Villalonga) then from her composer Bob (Michel Legrand) and songwriter Plumitif (Serge Korber). She rehearses a new song ‘Cri d’amour’, breaks down and they have an argument. Her friends fail to give her the emotional support that she needs. Wandering around Paris alone, she decides to visit her friend Dorothée (Dorothée Blank) and her partner Raoul (Raymond Cauchetier), a projectionist who shows them a short burlesque film. She then visits the Parc Montsouris where she finds comfort talking to Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), a soldier on leave about to return to Algeria. As they talk and walk, Cléo comes to terms with her self-​centred attitude, finding some peace before the results come back.

Cléo de 5 à 7 is fundamentally literary in its conception: it is arranged in thirteen chapters with headings and has an unusual narrative structure, including a short embedded film that serves as a playful interlude and which features Varda’s friends, Jean-​Luc Godard and Anna Karina. The screenplay is designed to be filmed in real time and on location in different areas of Paris.24 The use of language is also a distinctive feature, which Varda developed as her career progressed, often including in the scripts reflections on idiomatic phrases or fixed expressions, illustrated cinematically and frequently with voice-​over commentaries. In Cléo de 5 à 7, she deploys interior monologue to emphasise the evolution of the protagonist and to represent her as an object looking at herself: Extract 3 (Cléo de 5 à 7): CLÉO:  Minute, beau papillon: être laide, c’est ça la mort. Tant que je suis belle, je suis vivante et dix fois plus que les autres. (Wait, beautiful butterfly: ugliness is death. As long as I look beautiful, I am alive, ten times more than the others.) This voice-​over disappears in the second half of the film, when Cléo starts living her life as a subject in action despite her health worries. Varda also gives diegetic access to Cléo’s world through the lyrics of the various songs that the viewer hears in the cafe on the jukebox or that she

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performs diegetically. In particular, ‘Un cri d’amour’ that she rehearses with her composer, starkly reveals the emptiness of her inner world, with its existential motifs of emptiness and death: Extract 4 (Cléo de 5 à 7): CLÉO:  En plein courant d’air Je suis une maison vide Sans toi, sans toi Comme une ile déserte Que recouvre la mer Mes plages se dévident Sans toi, sans toi Belle en pure perte Nue au cœur de l’hiver Je suis un corps à vide Sans toi, sans toi Non je n’ai pas le cafard Morte au cercueil de verre Je me couvre de rire Sans toi, sans toi Et si tu viens trop tard On m’aura mise en terre Seule, laide et livide Sans toi, sans toi, sans toi.25 This song, also known as ‘Sans toi’, marks a turning point in the narrative perspective. As Cléo breaks down after singing it, she leaves her friends to go out alone and is no longer filmed as an object: she starts observing the world around her. Varda has written all her films; none have been adapted from pre-​existing literary sources. She has always led the pre-​production process, including scouting for actors and locations, and supervised the editing, insisting on the final cut. Other auteurs, such as Godard and Alain Resnais, influenced her approach to editing (Bénézet 2014: 51–​8); she regards postproduction as a fully integrated stage in her auteurist project. Her company, Tamaris, established in 1954 (renamed Ciné-​Tamaris from 1975), has produced all her films, ensuring her full artistic freedom. Even in the highly restrictive 1950s, this allowed her to operate outside industry norms, notably the requirement to submit a screenplay to the Commission de contrôle (Censorship Commission) in order to obtain authorisation to film. Varda’s early feature films borrow certain practices from documentary filmmaking, especially when researching her subjects. Her starting point for an idea is often a location: Sète, Paris, Cuba, Noirmoutier or Los Angeles.

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She places people in this space:  actors and friends in the early films, but increasingly a mixture of professional and nonprofessional actors, such as Jean-​Claude Drouot and his family in Le Bonheur/​Happiness (1965). Varda’s distinctive signature as an auteur has attracted critical attention from art historians, film scholars and feminists (Flitterman-​Lewis 1996; Smith 1998; Conway 2015a; 2015b; DeRoo 2018). She disucusses her working methods in interviews (see Varda 1994; Kline 2014) and in more reflexive recent films Les Plages d’Agnès/​Beaches of Agnès and Varda par Agnès/​Varda by Agnès (2019). As her career developed, she gradually became the overt narrator of her films, staging herself as central protagonist in the last ones. During filming, the screenplays are often altered and digressions added. Varda also uses the editing stage as a late writing stage; for example, to focus on the commentary and voice-​over text (1994:  16). The role of editing became even greater when she started filming with digital cameras from 2000, as it opened new possibilities for improvising and chance encounters. Varda’s urge to write for cinema was more intuitive than Truffaut’s, whose cinephilia fed his screenplays, and also than Rohmer’s, who intellectualised the writing process with principles of creation as we will see below. Varda does not really recognise her authorship and development practice in terms of establishing conventional textual screenplays; rather, she thinks of film preparation more radically as multimedial cinematic language. Her notes are shaped by text but also by images, sounds and places to express initial ideas and themes. She then chooses a point of view to develop a ‘personal line of narration […] in order to compose her choices as narrator’ (Kline 2014: 61). As Sandy Flitterman-​Lewis (1996: 218) suggests, her films work on a textual level, in the sense that she often subverts dominant narratives, for example, in the case of Cléo, by representing female protagonists with agency (see also Sellier 2005:  188–​90). In 1985, she even confessed her dislike of screenplays, ‘these big technico-​literary books’ (Carbonnier and Revault d’Allones 1985). Later, in a masterclass, she confirmed her preference for the notion of synopsis over that of screenplay: The screenplay is a literary genre which is quite dissociated from a film. I admit that I cannot read a screenplay and that maybe I don’t know how to write one which really announces the film I want to make, and yet, I have written all my films including the dialogue. I prefer to talk about cinécriture. (Varda in Marvier 2000: 46)

In 1981, Varda had introduced this notion of cinécriture (or cinewriting), a term recalling Astruc’s statement on the ‘camera-​stylo’ (Astruc 2009), to describe her method of filmmaking while making Ulysses, a short film that started out from a still photograph (Kline 1992: 107). She later elaborated on this principle, in opposition to the notion of scenario/​screenplay:

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I launched the phrase [cinécriture] and now I use it to describe the work of the filmmaker. It sends back home to their boxes the screenwriter who writes without filming and the director who does the mise en scene. They might be the same person, but the confusion still often remains. I am so tired of hearing ‘it’s a well-​written film’, knowing that the compliment is meant for the script and the dialogue. A well-​written film is also a well-​shot film, with well-​chosen actors and locations too. The scenes, the movements, the points of view, the rhythm of the filming and the editing have been felt and thought out as a writer would, with compact sentences or not, types of words, frequency of adverbs, indents, parentheses, chapters that continue or disturb the story’s direction, etc. In literature, this is style; in cinema, style is cinécriture. (Varda 1994: 14)

The integrated creation process associated with cinécriture starts with careful planning in order to extract the greatest possible resonance from the juxtaposition of image and sound, and from the overall rhythm of the film as defined by its editing. For Varda, ‘writing’ a film is a long process of creation and reflection; it is not limited to pre-​production but extends to the filming stage and the post-​production work. Her practice does not recognise the idea of screenwriting and the screenplay as (pre)text: After thirty years making films, I do not want to write screenplays any more. They block the imagination and use energy unnecessarily […] This is why I insist on the expression of ‘cinécrit by Agnès Varda’, even if it seems pretentious. A film is not ‘written’. For a painting there is the term ‘painted’. ‘Written and directed by …’ is not right either as there was no written script. This type of writing which takes place during the film is cinécriture […] To be the author of a film is film-​writing, cinewriting. (Varda in Carbonnier and Revault d’Allonnes 1985)

Cinécriture has come to define Varda’s inclusive, innovative and hybrid cinematic creation.26 It draws on a wide range of sources, including painting and photography and, in her later films, the physical installation of other visual art forms. Conway (2015b: 328) identifies three guiding principles of Varda’s writing practice in her films: imposing the structure from the outset; relying heavily on her own location scouting; and leaving the door open for opportunities arising during the shooting, including digressions. These summarise her signature and apply to her entire filmography, not only to her early films.27 This brief presentation of Varda’s approach to writing for cinema in the 1950s and 1960s shows that her filmmaking was grounded in experimental approaches to storytelling and a unique working method. Even if she explicitly formulated her concept of cinécriture in the 1980s, the approach is already incipient from the personal artistic freedom of the earliest films. A discussion of her complete filmography would further exemplify her constant quest for innovative filmmaking through an uncompromising, experimental

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approach to cinematic storytelling and narrative construction outside the mainstream modes of production. As a filmmaker, she has expanded the notion of screenwriting, embracing filmmaking (film-​writing) as a comprehensive, visual practice. This has earned her considerable international critical attention and artistic recognition of her cinema, but she would claim that this has not always helped her produce the films she would have liked to make. More than any other filmmaker mentioned in this chapter, Varda has constantly had to fight to find funding for her projects; this has led to many ideas, outlined and sometimes written out in different ways, which never became films for lack of financial support from the industry.28

Eric Rohmer: reinventing the dialogue-​writing process Like Varda, Rohmer (1920–​2010) is the sole author of his films’ screenplays, except for his first feature, Le Signe du lion/​ Leo’s Sign (1962).29 He developed a highly controlled writing method, marked throughout his career by strict economy and discipline. Rohmer was self-​produced  –​he founded Les Films du Losange in 1962 with Barbet Schroeder –​he worked with tight budgets and small teams, another feature linking him to Varda’s independent approach. Although he also often drew inspiration from his actors, Rohmer’s writing method left very limited scope for improvisation while shooting. Two main features prevail in terms of the development and the elaboration of the (pre)texts used to prepare the actual filming:  first, the fully assumed literary texture of the screenplays (Rohmer 1980:  v); and, second, the polished wordiness of conversations that are paramount in shaping most of the scenes. Rohmer’s films therefore rest less on actions than upon linguistic interaction between characters. In terms of his positioning within the New Wave, Rohmer is both a central and a marginalised figure. He started writing and making short films before any of the other critics turned directors that he met through Paris cineclubs and at Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s. From the late 1940s, while working as a teacher, he wrote literary prose texts which later formed the basis of the Six contes moraux/​Six Moral Tales shot between 1962 to 1972.30 In the preface to the literary texts that he has not adapted from the films but which pre-​dated them, Rohmer (1980: v) explains: ‘If I eventually turned them into films, it was because I had not succeeded in writing them.’ This suggests that he may have found additional resources in the grammar of cinema that enabled him to tell a fuller story by enhancing the language and narrative elements offered by the written text alone. Embracing the auteurist approach, Rohmer (1980: vi) confirms that he ‘dreamed of being the sole creator of his work’. He redefined the function of screenwriting,

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by using these pre-​existing prose texts as the basis for films, proposing an alternative to the notion of ‘original screenplay’ and regarding film direction as paramount, a view he shares with Truffaut. For Rohmer, then, the role of the camera, its placement, the point of view and so on, are essential elements in narrative construction, as he makes clear with regard to the Six contes moraux: There are very few original scenarios […] In film […] direction is king, the text subservient. A film script is in itself of little or no consequence […] It is only on the screen that the form of these Moral Tales is fully realised, if only because a new point of view is added –​that of the camera –​that no longer coincides with that of the narrator. (Rohmer 1980: ix)

Dismissing the conventional ‘film script’ does not mean that Rohmer bypassed the development stage:  the Six contes moraux were carefully prepared prior to filming. For each film project, he set aside several months for scouting locations and planning the décor. This work informed the découpage and provided all the information needed for filming, often allowing Rohmer to shoot only one take of each scene. The six films of the series were outlined clearly before the first episode –​a twenty-​two-​minute short film, La Boulangère de Monceau/​The Bakery Girl of Monceau –​ was shot in 1962, and their (pre)texts went through several stages of development. These stages can be traced: like Truffaut, Rohmer kept and carefully filed all his pre-​production documents, which helps to establish the full geneses of his films. Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe’s critical biography (2014) documents and evaluates Rohmer’s practice, drawing on archival material held in the Cinémathèque française, interviews with Rohmer and analysis of his critical essays to deconstruct his unusual process of creation. We have chosen to illustrate the ways in which Rohmer transformed conventional screenwriting practice by focusing on dialogue, examining extracts from two of the Contes moraux; La Collectionneuse/​The Collector (1967) and Ma nuit chez Maud/​My Night at Maud’s (1969). Writing for cinema, Rohmer becomes a conteur:  he tells tales from an external observer perspective, placing the focus on his characters, which is also Truffaut’s main concern in his screenplays. Unlike Varda, Rohmer never intervenes as narrator, his protagonists are the narrators or provide subjective voice-​over; however they all come from his imagination (Rohmer 1989: 81). Literariness is a central feature of Rohmer’s screenwriting identity. He first translates ideas into a literary text, which he reworks as a transitory (pre)text and then a utilitarian shooting script. This partly explains a sense of detachment in his writing and a distance from his subject matter, which distinguishes him from other auteurs of New Wave cinema. His approach is less autobiographical than, for example, Truffaut’s, and less

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personal than Varda’s. The films, organised in series, propose variations on a theme, extracting one idea and an underlying structure, then coherently reworking these variations from film to film through each narrative, character construction and dialogue. For the six Contes moraux, the overarching structure and theme could be schematically summarised as follows:  two male protagonists consider the temptation of a false love while waiting for a true one. The six films feature non-​spontaneous, constructed characters invented by Rohmer in literary form prior to filming. The male protagonists also act as first-​person narrators, all sharing the same dilemma:  a choice between two women. Rohmer’s screenplays retain only essential elements of the story; they reject traditional plot-​based narratives and rely on solid mise en scene mechanisms, often inspired by a Hitchcockian model, such as the use of clues and the control of space and time (see Prédal 1985: 21–​2). Rohmer’s characters come alive through their use of language rather than their physical actions; either in conversations with other characters, or in different modes of subjective voice-​over commentary that offers incursions into their inner-​life dilemmas and their own contradictions (including lies, self-​deception, secrets). This subjective use of voice-​over is different from Truffaut’s omniscient narrator in Jules et Jim, from Varda’s purely introspective voice-​over in Cléo, or from her authorial musings on her filmmaking process in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (Varda, 2000). As the central focus of the films, these commentaries access a deeper level of subjectivity than the more limited inner voices Aurenche and Bost used to present the protagonists’ thoughts in La Symphonie pastorale) or Le Rouge et le noir: One reason these tales are called moral is that they are effectively stripped of physical action: everything goes on in the narrator’s mind. The same story told by someone else would be quite different, or might well not have been told at all. (Rohmer 1980: viii)

The characters are driven by a common motif in each film. The male protagonist –​in our case studies Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) in La Collectionneuse or Jean-​Louis (Jean-​Louis Trintignant) in Ma nuit chez Maud –​is kept apart from a loved one (who remains off-​screen) and meets, by chance, another woman. This woman is the film’s main female protagonist and interlocutor. Once this premise is established, Rohmer usually derives his characters and plot information from some real-​life traits of his actors’ personalities. For example, he films them in their real-​life spaces and involves them in choosing film locations in order to achieve a fusing of their personal lives with their on-​screen identities. This does not, however, guarantee that their dialogue offers a transparent account of the diegetic reality; the characters are far from being reliable witnesses, and they illustrate Rohmer’s recurring motifs

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of secrets, lies and (self-​)deceit. In fact, Rohmer often subverts conventions by introducing these elements into the characters’ words:

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Extract 5 (La Collectionneuse): ADRIEN  [about Daniel and Haydée]: Leur complicité sentait l’artifice. Restait à savoir s’ils jouaient le jeu à l’égard d’eux-​mêmes ou bien de moi.31 The Six contes moraux are organised around subjective narrators who belong in the diegesis. In this respect they are unlike those used and played by Varda in her later films, who tend to be dissociated from the diegesis, for instance in Sans toit ni loi/​Vagabond (Varda 1985), or to act as investigators as in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse. In the early Contes, this narrator-​protagonist is omnipresent and dominates each film’s narrative. For example, the unnamed protagonist of La Boulangère de Monceau (Barbet Schroeder), is also the storyteller and narrator. He therefore offers a subjective narrative viewpoint, not only in the voice-​over but also in the way the images are framed and shots composed. These combined elements then shape the story as it is told by a subjective narrator/​protagonist who already knows how it will end (just as the filmmaker knows the script he has imagined as he shoots the film). The images and voice-​over commentary are thus juxtaposed to produce a cumulative narrative model in which a narrator tells a story retrospectively, while the images show it in the present.

La Collectionneuse Adrien is left to his own devices when his fiancée goes to work in London. He decides to spend his holiday experimenting with monastic life in the peace and quiet of the villa of a rich friend, Rodolphe, near St Tropez. The villa already has two occupants: his friend Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) and Haydée (Haydée Politoff), a young woman that he does not know. Haydée collects lovers and brings them home at all hours, disturbing Adrien in his ascetic pursuits. He pushes her into his friend’s arms, but Daniel soon moves on. Adrien then starts to envisage spending the last week of his holiday in an enjoyable affair with Haydée. He is on the verge of giving in to her charms when two men passing in an Italian sports car recognise her, invite her to join them in Italy, which she accepts. Adrien returns to the villa alone. He can now read and swim peacefully, but it is not what he wants any more. He picks up the phone and books a seat on the next plane to London.

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La Collectionneuse follows a different approach to storytelling. De Baecque and Herpe (2014: 199) note that rather than writing the dialogue in advance, Rohmer produced a tight narrative framework. Comparing the literary text version (Rohmer 1974)  –​a thirty-​five-​page document  –​with the forty-​eight-​page transcript screenplay published in Avant ​Scène Cinéma (Figure 5.2), confirms this. He completed the dialogue writing using a tape recorder with the help of the three nonprofessional actors, Politoff, Bauchau and Pommereulle, chosen for their actual social and generational background and personality. They ‘lent their real-​life personalities to the dandyish art-​ world characters they portrayed’ (Schilling 2007:  20). They only saw the script they had to learn shortly before the filming stage. Bauchau/​Adrien is assigned a double function of narrator and main protagonist. His voice-​over commentary both informs the audience and conveys his own take on the events shown on the screen, his words often contradicting the images one the screen, as the two versions of a scene below illustrate. Extract 6 is in prose (Rohmer 1974: 140) and Extract 7 including voice-​over commentary and description comes from the screenplay transcript (Rohmer 1967: 17) Extract 6 (La Collectionneuse (prose text)): Toutefois, il y avait je ne sais quoi de boiteux dans la situation et qui ne m’échappait pas, bien qu’Haydée dissimulât très habilement ce que, à tort ou à raison, je supposais être son jeu et cette réserve de sa part, précisément, m’irritait. Je pris donc le risque de tout brusquer et, par crainte de me laisser insidieusement mollir, optai pour l’irréparable. Un jour, je lui débitais tout ce qu’il ne fallait pas dire. Nous étions en promenade et j’avais arrêté ma jeep à la lisière d’un bois […]32

Extract 7 (La Collectionneuse (screenplay)): Plan général: le bois et les vignes sont séparés par un chemin en enfilade sur lequel roule –​vers nous–​ la mini-​moke d’Adrien. La voiture s’arrête. Haydée en descend elle est vêtue d’une robe courte a diagonales. On la suit qui va vers le bois et ramasse une fleur sauvage sur laquelle elle souffle. COMMENTAIRE: Toutefois, il y avait je ne sais quoi de boiteux dans la situation … et qui m’échappait pas, bien que Haydée dissimulât très habilement ce qu’à tort ou à raison je supposais être son jeu. (On reprend Adrien qui, une couverture à la main s’avance). Et cette réserve de sa part, précisément m’irritait. Je pris donc le risque de tout brusquer … et par crainte de me laisser insidieusement mollir, optai pour l’irréparable.33

Both extracts are very similar and read like novel prose. The use of the past historic tense conveys the literary texture of the commentary. More generally, the published screenplay distinguishes three narrative sources: a first-​ person narrator, the filmed protagonist Adrien, and the eye of the camera. This triple layering is an integral part of Rohmer’s storytelling

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Figure 5.2  The Avant Scène Cinéma version of the screenplay for La Collectionneuse.

method. The camera gives the audience some distance from Adrien’s position, highlighting the discrepancy between what he says and his actions and body language, thus exposing some self-​deception and the ambiguity of the character; Haydée’s point of view, however, is denied, and her representation is limited to what she says and does, including her facial expressions

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and poses. Moreover, the dialogue is sometimes detached from the images, offering the audience contradictory messages and leaving the words open to interpretation. In the morning scene between Adrien and Haydée in the cove, this discrepancy (explicit in the screenplay) is striking: Extract 8 (La Collectionneuse): La suite du dialogue se déroule un instant sur une plongée des jambes de Haydée dont les vagues font miroiter le bronzage. ADRIEN, off:  Ecoute, Haydée, Faisons la paix. HAYDÉE, off:  Nous ne sommes pas en guerre. ADRIEN, off:  Si! HAYDÉE, off:  C’est toi qui, sans arrêt, relances la bataille. ADRIEN, off: J’ai l’impression que tu interprètes comme hostile une attitude qui est fondamentalement amicale. HAYDÉE, off:  J’ai la même impression avec toi. ADRIEN, retour sur lui:  Donc, il n’y a pas de problème? HAYDÉE, off:  Moi je n’en vois pas. Mais toi tu aimes tellement te torturer l’esprit. ADRIEN:  Dans la mesure où tu ne m’es qu’à moitié sympathique. HAYDÉE, gros plan sur la nuque:  Nous sommes indifférents et c’est très bien. Ça n’empêche pas de vivre ensemble. Elle se tourne vers lui et lui sourit curieusement. (Rohmer 1967: 21)34 Ma nuit chez Maud Jean-​Louis, the narrator, is a devout Roman Catholic who subscribes to an austere moral code influenced by the philosophy of Pascal. When he spots a pretty young woman, Françoise (Marie-​Christine Barrault), at church, he promises himself that he will one day marry her. An old friend (Antoine Vitez) then introduces him to an attractive divorcee, Maud (Françoise Fabian). After a conversation about love and philosophy, the chaste Jean-​Louis spends the night at Maud’s flat, conflicted about what he desires, but ends up not sleeping with her. At the end of the film, they meet again by chance, and the audience find out that he has married Françoise.

For the third film in the series, Ma nuit chez Maud, which for practical reasons was filmed after La Collectionneuse and released in 1969, the subjective voice-​over is toned down. It appears to present the narrator’s viewpoint in two key scenes only: when the narrator realises that he will marry

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Françoise; and for the epilogue, which takes place on the beach. Rohmer deleted the other planned occurrences of voice-​over while filming, as he realised that Trintignant’s convincing performance made them redundant (Molinier 2001: 49).35 In this case, then, the writing was completed at the filming and editing stage to allow for circumstances that could not have been known at the development stage; something we will see again in the films discussed in Chapter 8. Rohmer’s dialogue-​writing strategies are unusual, to say the least. If we leave aside the formal register and literary feel of the script (including imperfect subjunctives), which are part of his authorial signature, the actual creative context of the writing process itself is experimental and innovative. He feels at ease with writing (and filming) conversations: I have often been inspired by talking characters for a very simple reason: the situations I  know best in life are those in which people talk. Situations in which no one speaks are the exception. It has nothing to do with literature but, rather, with reality. (Rohmer 1989: 17)

To give as much authenticity as possible to the language used by his characters, Rohmer gradually developed, especially from La Collectionneuse, investigative methods of accessing certain linguistic features of his actors to use them for the characters they played. He liked to meet his prospective actors and have discussions with them, which he recorded. He then used the recordings to feed his controlled dialogue writing. The actors were aware of his strategies, and Rohmer included their input in the writing credits. They were even asked to (re)learn their lines, thus excluding any scope for improvisation, partly because Rohmer was aware that flexibility could become a trap for the auteur (Rohmer 1980:  vi). His dialogue does not, therefore, correspond to a commonly held perception that associates New Wave cinema with a modern, informal linguistic register, and improvisatory freedom. For Ma nuit chez Maud, Rohmer used this strategy to write the conversations at Maud’s between Jean-​Louis and Vidal about Pascal. Here is an extract from the film’s dialogue, which matches closely –​but not word for word –​ the dialogue found in the published written version of the Conte (Rohmer 1974: 77): Extract 9 (Ma nuit chez Maud): MOI:  Non … je disais que je n’aimais pas Pascal parce que Pascal a une conception du christianisme très, très … particulière. Qui d’ailleurs a été condamné par l’Église. VIDAL:  Pascal n’a pas été condamné, en tout cas, pas les Pensées. MOI:  Mais le jansénisme si! Et puis Pascal n’est pas un saint […] Rien. Non … je pense qu’il y a une grande façon de concevoir le Christianisme. En

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tant que scientifique. J’ai un immense respect pour Pascal. Mais en tant que scientifique, ça me choque qu’il condamne la science. VIDAL:  Il ne le condamne pas. MOI:  Si, à la fin de sa vie. VIDAL:  C’est pas exactement une condamnation. MOI:  Non, je m’exprime mal. Prenons un exemple … bon … Par exemple, en ce moment nous … nous, en parlant, nous oublions ce que nous mangeons. Nous oublions cet excellent Chanturgue. C’est la première fois que j’en bois.36 What begins as a casual conversation over dinner, with pauses, hesitations and contradictions, soon shifts into longer cues inspired by real-​ life discussions that Rohmer had with Trintignant about Pascal (and which he recorded). He then rewrote the dialogue from the recordings, locking it into a very precise script. When it came to filming, there was usually only one take, even though Ma nuit chez Maud was the first film Rohmer made using direct sound (in Cardullo 2012: 39). The next extract, which occurs shortly after Extract 9 during the same dinner scene, offers examples of these longer cues and precision in the philosophical discussion. Rohmer integrates Pascal’s literary text into the dialogue and appropriates the linguistic/​verbal idiosyncrasies and sociolect of the actors, partly driven by a quest for authenticity: Extract 10 (Ma nuit chez Maud): VIDAL:  Pourrais-​tu me dire s’il y a une référence précise dans le texte sur le pari? (il lit): Partout où est l’infini et où il n’y a pas une infinité de hasard de perte contre celui du gain, il n’y a point à balancer: il faut tout donner … et ainsi, quand on est forcé à jouer, il faut renoncer à la raison pour garder la vie’ etc. MOI:  C’est exactement ça ‘l’expérience mathématique’. Dans le cas de Pascal elle est toujours infinie … à moins que la probabilité de salut ne soit nulle. Puisque l’infini multiplié par zéro égale zéro. Donc l’argument ne vaut rien pour quelqu’un qui est absolument incroyant. (1998: 79–​80)37 What this screenwriting method generates when the film is finished is a blend of ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ strategies, to borrow two concepts widely used in narratology.38 Rohmer’s style of written (pre)text is hybrid, intentionally combining dialogue and minimalist mise en scene. The writing process, then, operates through the juxtaposition of script/​language and images/​mise en scene, confirming that neither taken on its own produces cinema. Vincent Amiel (2007: 63) shows how this combination of modes is used in La Collectionneuse to reach a paradox in which the cold, dry words

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of the dialogue (the scripted version) contradict the sensual images and the body language of the characters. For example, the warm colours and the soundtrack contrast with the moralistic discourse pronounced by Adrien in Extract 8. This dissonance between sound and image frequently functions in Rohmer’s cinema –​and that of the New Wave more broadly –​to interfere with the identification process (Rohmer cited in Cardullo 2012: 51). The examples discussed above reveal the complexity of the process of dialogue creation in the Contes moraux. The evolution these films towards increasingly minimalist narrative structures continued in the screenplays that Rohmer developed for his next series of films, Comédies et proverbes/​ Comedies and Proverbs, made between 1980 and 1987.39 The dispositifs Rohmer implemented for dialogue development in this series relied even more heavily on the mise en scene of conversations, which increasingly became a major element of his authorial signature. He started to allow more space in the screenplays for improvised dialogue during the filming process. For example, in Pauline à la Plage/​Pauline at the Beach (1983), with a screenplay consisting almost exclusively of conversations, the dialogue drives the mise en scene, and the (pre)text used as the shooting script contains almost no literary prose or indications on actions.40 In addition, Rohmer increasingly reserved the narrative prose for the treatment (traitement) written and put forward for securing funding for his films. Le Rayon vert/​The Green Ray (1986) remains the most extreme case of flexibility since this project rested on filming completely improvised conversations between the actors or protagonists, with no pre-​existing script (Amiel 2007: 90–​1). This idiosyncratic style distinguishes Rohmer’s approach not just from the spectacular dialogue designed by Jeanson to be performed (see Chapter 3), but also from the dispositifs used by Truffaut, Varda, and later on, by Kechiche and Cantet to achieve authentic dialogue (see Chapter 8). The aim of this chapter was to (re)open discussions about actual  –​as opposed to perceived –​changes in screenwriting practice during the 1960s in the context of independent cinema. The ex-​Cahiers critics launched their directing careers calling for the demise of screenwriters and screenwriting canons, but they did not apply this to their own films. Within the space constraints of this volume, we focused on the writing methods used by three auteur-​directors around the New Wave. One aim was to elicit how these practices affected the visibility of the screenwriter (and his or her activity within auteur cinema). We also wanted to verify whether and how, from a screenwriting perspective, the 1960s had cemented a clear separation between auteur screenwriting and writing for commercial cinema in France. The critical mythology around New Wave practices has long promoted the presumption that its auteurs played the mise en scene against the screenplay.

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However, this chapter has shown that it might be more accurate to say that the process of screenwriting blended the activities of screenwriting and directing/​mise en scene. The examples of films written by Truffaut, Varda and Rohmer used here renewed film production modes, rather than doing away with the screenwriting stage. Truffaut did not dismiss screenwriters, quite the opposite, he partly redefined the collaborative nature of writing, promoting an authoritative director who controlled the production process and the final product. Varda and Rohmer used pre-​written materials that were often the result of careful thinking and multiple successive drafts during the shooting. Literary texts were not just retained, they were valorised by revisiting literary devices as integral screenwriting modes. Shooting scripts continued to be used by all, albeit as more flexible working tools to assist production. The ideal of the sole author remained a cultivated construct of the auteur mythology in the 1960s and after, but strictly speaking, it was not fully achieved, as the New Wave directors, even Varda and Rohmer, used writing and/​or editing collaborators in their early films. In fact, it could even be argued that the New Wave made film credits slightly more transparent during this period than they had previously been, because the development of a working method was a key part of the creative process. As a result, their methods were more transparent and their working documents archived more systematically. The geneses and development stages were usually addressed in the critical film studies, paradoxically placing emphasis on screenwriters. As a result we now know that most New Wave auteurs developed film ideas in the 1950s that they never completed and that some of their early drafts became films. Ideas also sometimes changed hands, and collaborative production teams, in which roles were exchanged according to circumstances prevailed over individual projects. Even if these practices were by no means unheard of in the 1930s and 1940s, they resulted in a more systematic merging of writing activities, including adaptation, plot and character development, dialogue writing, and sometimes editing, which they explicitly acknowledged as a stage in screenwriting. They also embraced critical constructs that supported their director-​centred practice. Truffaut did not hesitate at the editing stage to cut written scenes that he had already filmed; Varda’s cinécriture entailed some kind of preparatory screenplay  –​a pre-​ text –​that she would consult less once filming started, and reconciled visual arts, literary writing and film language through mise en scene; and Rohmer’s unusual approach to screenwriting fed his literary aspirations. By reworking screenplay drafts and actively participating in the editing, they all strived for the ideal of being sole author of their film, but they also discovered the limits of implementing this ideal in practice. The development stage remained, in

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different ways, a collective process. As auteurs insisting on the final cut, Truffaut and Varda legitimised rewriting at any stage of production, often justifying this flexible approach by ethical considerations and the pursuit of authenticity and realism. For Rohmer, as we have seen, flexibility was restricted by financial constraints once the filming started but this did not prevent him from obtaining the final cut. For all three, filmmaking rested on full artistic control within low-​budget independent production values and distinctive storytelling experiments. Changes in screenwriting strategies and conventions make it difficult to ascertain whether their early auteurist principles were sacrificed to pragmatic decisions. One thing is certain: the principles became fluid and sometimes ambivalent, and the critical writings of Truffaut and Rohmer in the 1950s are often contradicted by their later practice as auteurs. One principle, however, that was maintained was to challenge the opposition between telling and showing, in a subtle merging of the two elements that worked towards a balanced mise en scene. The change of perception surrounding screenwriting during the New Wave period is bound up with the ambivalent relationship between screen text and film object, and demands a fundamental questioning of what is meant by writing a screenplay and writing cinema. The screenwriting practices discussed in this chapter favoured a lasting move towards a polarised French film industry, with commercial cinema at one end, and independent filmmaking and self-​production mechanisms at the other. Truffaut, Varda and Rohmer worked with actors, technical teams and recurrent collaborators, but they did not share their authorship or signature. This discussion has demonstrated that one of the principles of New Wave screenwriting transformation was a revisiting of the narratological notions of telling and showing (Gaudreault 2008); not so much in the rejection of the notion of showing, but in blending of the two elements to fully embrace the potential of mise en scene. This merging addresses the ambivalence between the screen text and the film object, helping to reconcile some of the correspondences between screenplay and New Wave film grammar. As can be imagined, the appropriation of screenwriting activities by the auteurist directors in the late 1950s and early 1960s met with some resistance, not least from established professional screenwriters, who saw it as a threat. Jeanson and Audiard both used public outlets to express their outrage and tried to fight back (see Moussé 2002). From a film industry perspective, the demise of the screenplay as tangible capital for launching a production was also significant, especially as, concurrently, cultural institutions had developed policies for supporting films that based their funding decisions partly on their confidence in the screenplay submitted with the application. Different models co-​existed though, and screenplay-​led films continued to

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thrive alongside the New Wave independent cinema as the next two chapters will illustrate. Rather than the demise of the screenplay and disappearance of the screenwriter role, then, the New Wave sealed the lasting polarisation in film production and gave rise to the emergence of creative screenwriting and film development methods.

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Films mentioned written and directed by Truffaut Les Mistons/​The Brats (Truffaut, 1958; adapted from short story by Maurice Pons) Les Quatre Cents Coups/​The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959; original scr. Truffaut; adapt. and dial. Truffaut and Marcel Moussy) Tirez sur le pianiste/​Shoot the Pianist (Truffaut, 1960; scr. Truffaut and Moussy; dial. Truffaut; adapt. from David Goodis, Down There) Jules et Jim/​Jules and Jim (Truffaut, 1962; scr. adapt. and dial. Truffaut and Gruault; adapted from Henri-​Pierre Roché, Jules and Jim) La Peau douce/​Soft Skin (Truffaut, 1964; original scr. Truffaut and Richard; dial. Truffaut) L’Enfant sauvage/​The Wild Child (Truffaut, 1970; scr. adap. and dial. Truffaut and Gruault; adapted from Jean Itard, Mémoires et rapport d’un enfant de L’Aveyron [1806]) Les Deux Anglaises et le continent/​Two English Girls (Truffaut, 1971; scr. Truffaut and Gruault; adapted from Henri-​Pierre Roché) Baisers volés/​Stolen Kisses (Truffaut, 1968; original scr. Truffaut, Claude de Givray and Bernard Revon) La Nuit américaine/​Day for Night (Truffaut, 1973; original scr. Truffaut, Richard and Schiffman) L’Histoire d’Adèle H (Truffaut, 1975; scr. Truffaut, Gruault and Schiffman; adapted from Frances Guille, Journal d’Adèle Hugo)

Films mentioned written and directed by Varda La Pointe courte (Varda, 1954; scr. and dial. Varda) Du côté de la cote/​Along the Coast (Varda, 1958; scr. and dial. Varda) L’Opéra-​Mouffe/​Mouffetard Opera (Varda, 1958; scr. and dial. Varda) Cléo de 5 à 7/​Cléo from 5 to 7 (Varda, 1962; scr. and dial. Varda) Le Bonheur/​Happiness (Varda, 1965; scr. and dial. Varda) Sans toit ni loi/​Vagabond (Varda, 1985; scr. and dial. Varda) Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/​The Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000; scr. and dial. Varda) Les Plages d’Agnès/​The Beaches of Agnès (Varda, 2008; scr. Varda and Didier Rouget) Varda par Agnès (Varda, 2018)

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Films mentioned written and directed by Rohmer Le Signe du lion/​The Sign of the Lion (Rohmer, 1962; scr. Rohmer; dial. Paul Gégauff) Six contes moraux 1:  La Boulangère de Monceau/​The Bakery Girl of Monceau (Rohmer, 1963; scr. and dial. Rohmer) Six contes moraux 2: La Carrière de Suzanne/​Suzanne’s Career (Rohmer, 1963; scr. and dial. Rohmer) Six contes moraux 3: Ma nuit chez Maud/​My Night at Maud’s (Rohmer, 1969; scr. and dial. Rohmer) Six contes moraux 4:  La Collectionneuse/​The Collector (Rohmer, 1967; scr. and dial. Rohmer) Six contes moraux 5: Le Genou de Claire/​Claire’s Knee (Rohmer, 1970; scr. and dial. Rohmer) Six contes moraux 6: L’Amour l’après-​midi/​Love in the Afternoon (Rohmer, 1972; scr. and dial. Rohmer) Comédies et proverbes: Pauline à la Plage/​Pauline at the Beach (Rohmer, 1983; scr. and dial. Rohmer) Comédies et proverbes:  Le Rayon vert/​Green Ray (Rohmer, 1986; scr. and dial. Rohmer)

Films mentioned written and directed by Chabrol Le Beau Serge (Chabrol, 1958, scr. and dial. Chabrol) Les Cousins/​The Cousins (Chabrol, 1958; scr. Chabrol and dial. Paul Gégauff) Les Bonnes Femmes (Chabrol, 1960; adapt. Chabrol; scr. and dial. Gégauff) Les Biches/​Girlfriends (Chabrol, 1968; scr. and dial. Chabrol and Gégauff) Que la bête meure/​This Man Must Die (Chabrol, 1969; scr. and dial. Chabrol and Gégauff; adapted from Nicholas Blake) Le Boucher (Chabrol, 1970; scr. and dial. Chabrol and Gégauff)

Other films A bout de souffle/​Breathless (Godard, 1960; original idea Truffaut, scr. Godard)

Notes 1 More nuanced historical accounts of this period question some of these myths. For example, Kline (1992) discusses the close links between New Wave filmmakers and literary sources; Marie (2003) dispels some of the myths associated with the origins of the New Wave; Sellier (2008) stresses the

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masculine bias that underpins much of the auteurist discourses associated with the New Wave; and Graham with Vincendeau (2009) recontextualise many of the key critical texts within the debates of the time. 2 For example, the archives of Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Louis Malle, Rivette, Truffaut and Schiffman are held at the Cinémathèque française. In terms of published screenplays, the Avant ​Scène Cinéma collection, generally established from edited continuity scripts checked against the film, featured twenty-​seven New Wave films between its inception in 1961 and 1970 (see Alion 2019 for how those texts are prepared for publication). Others have been published by the directors, by Gallimard or in the Cahiers du cinéma’s ‘Petite bibliothèque’, and many are also available in English translation (for example, published by Lorrimer or Rutgers guides). 3 For example, see Gillain (1997:  41–​4) for Les Quatre Cents Coups; Marie (2006: 51–​62) for A bout de souffle. 4 We borrow the terms ‘sacralisation’ and ‘desacralisation’ from Mary (2006: 92). 5 Gégauff, often described as a dandy, fascinated New Wave directors who drew inspiration from his persona. Rohmer worked with him for the dialogue of Le Signe du lion/​Sign of the Lion (1962); he also inspired some of the Rohmerian male characters in the Contes moraux, in particular Adrien in La Collectionneuse and Paul in Le Genou de Claire (1970). 6 For example, Truffaut sold the original idea of A bout de souffle to Godard (see Marie 2006: 61–​2) and co-​directed a short film written with him, Une histoire d’eau (Godard, 1958). He co-​directed and wrote with Claude de Givray Tire au flanc 62 (de Givray, 1961) and wrote the dialogue for Une grosse tête (de Givray, 1962). He co-​wrote with Jean-​Louis Richard Mata Hari, agent H21 (Richard, 1964). His help was not always formally credited, see for example Me faire ça à moi (Grimblat, 1961). 7 See the correspondence with Helen Scott from 1960 (Truffaut 2000). 8 Le Berre (2005) provides valuable insights into Truffaut’s vision of the development stage of his films, which help to clarify his relationship with screenwriting and with the written script during filming. 9 See correspondence in which Truffaut asks Gruault to be more linear in his approach (Cinémathèque française, Truffaut 14, B13, letter from Truffaut to Gruault, 18 January 1976). Gruault (1985: 87) also mentions some simplification of his scripts by Truffaut in situ. 10 A press cutting inspired the taxi scene and murder of La Peau douce (Gillain 1988: 154). Other examples of faits divers inspired Truffaut’s Baisers volés (de Givray 1985: 84) and the plot of the film within the film in La Nuit américaine (Le Berre 2005: 182). 11 The show was ‘Si c’était vous’ and Moussy is credited as screenwriter and dialogue writer. (www.ina.fr, accessed 1 May 2019). 12 PSYCHOLOGIST: Your parents say you’re always lying. /​ANTOINE: Oh, I lie, now and then, I  suppose. Sometimes, if I  told them the truth, they wouldn’t believe me. So I prefer to lie. /​PSYCHOLOGIST: Why don’t you like your mother? /​

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ANTOINE: Well,

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she put me in a foster home and then, when they had no more money, they took me to my grandmother. But then she got old and she couldn’t take care of me anymore. So, when I was eight, I went to live with my parents. I could see my mum didn’t like me. She was always yelling at me for no reason. There were fights at home and I … I overheard that … my mother had … she had me … that she was a single mother, you know. And, with my grandmother once she had a fight … that’s when I  heard that she had wanted to have an abortion … and that if I was born it was thanks to my grandmother. 13 For a detailed account of their collaboration, see Gruault (2012: 193–​208). 14 See Le Berre (1995: 36–​44) for full account of the four main stages of writing. 15 Catherine the French woman had the smile of the Statue of the [Greek] island. Her nose, her mouth, her chin, her forehead were the pride of her province, that she has represented when she was a child, for a religious celebration. It started like a dream. 16 In Le Rouge et le noir (Autant-​Lara, 1954) for example, the voice-​over provides an additional way of accessing Sorel’s thoughts, especially the more cynical ones. The novel uses different levels of narration, including a commentary from Stendhal on the characters’ attitudes. In the film, the voice-​over and the flashbacks combine to privilege Julien’s viewpoint. 17 According to Le Berre (2005: 72), Truffaut rejected these scenes described as marivaudages (playful flirtations) in the script. 18 In interviews, Truffaut distinguishes his screenwriting practice from American cinema conventions, arguing that he subverts genre and suggests information in his screenplays, rather than spelling it out. He tends to remove explicit dialogue to force a response from the audience and leave a situation open to interpretation (Le Berre 2004: 130–​1). 19 For further reading on Schiffman’s contribution, see Schiffman (1985: 76–​82) and Smith (2015: 330–​7). 20 One such anecdote features in a scene that foregrounds the screenwriting process, in which the fictional director Ferrand (Truffaut) and his script supervisor Joëlle (Nathalie Baye) discuss the dialogue for the scene they are about to shoot. 21 Varda references Resnais as a filmmaker adopting this strategy:  he edited La Pointe courte and influenced Varda’s early screenwriting (Kline 2014: 3). Through Resnais and Chris Marker, she was linked to the Rive gauche group. 22 See also Flitterman-​Lewis’s analysis (1996: 220–​5). 23 In 1961, Varda worked on another project, Mélangite, which was never shot. She had prepared the filming with photos, made notes and started rehearsals (Varda 1994: 122). Flitterman-​Lewis (1996: 216–​18) argues that Varda already was experimenting with cinematic language before the New Wave, by including still photos as the structuring device, thus reinventing the connection between screenplay and photographic images. See also Conway (2015b: 328). 24 See Flitterman-​Lewis (1996:  270–​2) and Orpen (2007:  22–​30) for detailed analyses.

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25 In mid-​draught /​I’m an empty house/​Without you, without you/​Like a desert island/​Covered by the tide /​My beaches are empty/​Without you, without you/​ Pointlessly beautiful /​Naked in mid-​winter /​I’m an empty vessel /​Without you, without you /​No I’m not feeling blue/​Dead in a glass coffin /​I am covered with laughter/​Without you, without you /​And if you come too late /​I’ll be put in the ground /​Alone, ugly and livid /​Without you, without you. 26 For a complete mapping of the notion as developed by Varda, see Flitterman-​ Lewis (1996: 258–​9) and Mauffrey (2017). 27 By the time she made Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/​The Gleaners and I (2000), Varda more systematically used her own voice-​over (prose descriptions and first-​person commentaries). For example, Conway’s (2015a:  116–​19) documentation of the genesis of Les Plages d’Agnès provides precise information on two screenplay versions. 28 Examples include projects that she had when living in the United States in the 1960s but also film ideas that she recycled. She mentions it in Varda par Agnès presented at Berlin’s Festival in February 2019. 29 Paul Gégauff is the attributed dialogue writer in the credits. However, according to de Baecque and Herpe (2014: 97), Rohmer wrote the dialogue and Gégauff only ‘validated’ it. In other films, such as La Collectionneuse and Le Rayon vert (1986), the actors are explicitly credited as collaborators on the dialogue. 30 Rohmer had written the short stories by 1950; they had been rejected by Gallimard (de Baecque and Herpe 2014: 135) and he recycled them for the six Contes moraux films. For published version, see Rohmer (1980). The English-​ language versions of these prose stories, published by Lorrimar in their Classic Film Scripts collection (Rohmer 1980), provide quite free translations. 31 Their complicity seemed artificial. What wasn’t clear was whether they were fooling themselves or me. 32 Still, there was something about the whole situation that rang false, and I was well aware of it, despite the fact that Haydée played her cards very close to her vest, so that it was hard to figure her out. It was this reserved quality, actually, that bothered me most. So I decided to risk the peace –​perhaps out of fear that I might otherwise allow myself to take the easy way out. There was no turning back. One day I told her everything that I should have kept for myself. We were out for a drive and I’d parked my Jeep on the edge of a wood. NB:  This is Sabine d’Estrée’s translation of Rohmer’s prose text (Rohmer 1980:  137). It adds nuances which seem to come from seeing the images of the film. 33 Long shot:  the wood and the vineyard are separated by a narrow road on which the Adrien’s jeep is driving towards us. The car stops. Haydée gets out; she is wearing a short dress with diagonal stripes. The camera follows her towards the wood; she picks a wild flower and blows on it. /​VOICE-​OVER: Still, there was something about the whole situation that rang false … and I  was well aware of it, despite the fact that Haydée played her cards very close to her chest. (Cut back to Adrien who moves forward, a blanket in his hand). It was this reserved quality, actually, that bothered me most. So I decided to risk the

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peace –​perhaps out of fear that I might otherwise allow myself to take the easy way out. There was no turning back. 34 The next dialogue takes place while we look down Haydée’s tanned legs glittering in the reflection of the waves. ADRIEN, off: Listen Haydée, let’s make peace. /​ HAYDÉE, off: We’re not at war. /​ADRIEN, off: Yes we are! /​HAYDÉE, off: It’s you who always start the fight again. ADRIEN, off: I have the feeling that you see as hostile an attitude that is fundamentally friendly. /​HAYDÉE, off: I have the same impression with you. /​ADRIEN, camera on him: So there’s no problem? /​ HAYDÉE, off: Well I can’t see any. But you, you’re very fond of torturing your mind. /​ ADRIEN: Only in so far as I half like you. /​HAYDÉE, close-​up on the nape of her neck:  We’re indifferent to each other, and that’s fine. It doesn’t stop us from living under the same roof. She turns towards him and smiles in a strange way. 35 In the next Conte, Le Genou de Claire (1970), Rohmer uses the device of a diary read in voice-​over to account for events retrospectively. The screenplay for the final Conte, L’Amour après-​midi/​Love in the Afternoon (1972), also contains lengthy sections of interior monologue (Cinémathèque française, Rohmer, SCEN 118-​ B36, scénario L’Amour l’après-​midi, undated). In the film, the narrative is mapped out visually, with chapters and a calendar shown on screen. At the beginning, the monologue conveys the narrator’s mental emptiness. Once he has preoccupations linked to his affair, the monologue disappears, replaced by commentaries on events provided by each character as part of conversations. 36 ME: No … I said that I didn’t like Pascal because Pascal has a very … particular conception of Christianity. Which moreover was condemned by the Church. /​ VIDAL: Pascal wasn’t condemned, at least not the Pensées. /​ ME: But Jansenism was! And Pascal isn’t a saint […] Nothing. No … I think there’s a better way of conceiving Christianity. As a scientist, I have immense respect for Pascal. But, as a scientist, it shocks me that he condemned science. /​VIDAL: He didn’t condemn it. ME: At the end of his life, he did. /​VIDAL: It wasn’t exactly a condemnation. /​ ME: No, I’m expressing myself badly. Let’s take an example …. Right … for example, at this moment, we are eating and we … while we’re talking, we forget what we’re eating. We forget this excellent Chanturgue wine. This is the first time I’ve drunk it. (Source manuscript available at Cinémathèque française pp.  26–​7; our translation. Another English version is available in Showalter 1993: 55–​6.) 37 VIDAL: What were you saying? Is there … a precise reference … to mathematics … in the text of The Wager? (he reads): ‘Whenever there is infinity, and not an infinity of chance of loss against the chance of gain, there can be no hesitation, you must stake all … And thus, when you are forced to wager, you must renounce reason in order to keep your life, etc.’ /​ME: It’s precisely that, the ‘mathematical experiment’. In Pascal’s case, it’s always infinite … Unless the probability of salvation is zero. Because infinity multiplied by zero is zero. So the argument is worthless for an absolute non-​believer. (Our translation; another

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English version is available in Showalter 1993: 58–​9). NB: The Cinémathèque française’s manuscript version is slightly different in its phrasing. 38 See Gaudreault (2008) and Rabinowitz (2005: 531–​3) for a brief summary of this narrative distinction originally from Percy Lubbock (1921). 39 The screenplays of the films of this series are published as written by Rohmer (Rohmer 1998 and 1999). Some continuity scripts are also available in the Avant Scène Cinéma Collection (based on the film). 40 Hertay (1998:  50) retraces the genesis of this screenplay back to the 1950s. First there was an idea for a play, then a film with Brigitte Bardot as Marion, and then more dialogue writing in the 1970s before the ‘Comédies et proverbes’ film series.

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Le cinéma du samedi soir: Michel Audiard’s screenplays and cult dialogue

Although more than thirty years have passed since his death, Michel Audiard (1920–​85) is remembered as one of the most prolific screenwriters and dialogue writers in the history of French cinema. Between 1948 and 1984, he wrote the dialogue for around 130 films. However, perhaps surprisingly, he only signed twenty full screenplays. He also directed nine films between 1967 and 1974, but, essentially a man of words, his main talent resided in the conception of polished dialogue for specific actors, thus populating stories that were frequently written or adapted by established authors. Audiard’s fictional worlds bring to life a gallery of colourful characters, interpreted by national (and sometimes international) film stars with strong personas and rich language identity. He has also set up over the years a stable team of supporting actors: his chosen family of ordinary men (and a few women) speaking in the shadow of the stars. As increasing numbers of film projects developed around his name, Audiard became the most bankable screenwriter of his generation.1 A legend developed around his writing methods, and his cult following has continued well beyond his death in 1985. Yet, despite an exceptional career, he remains largely confined within the boundaries of the history of French cinema and French cultural heritage. His fame abroad has remained limited, with the exception of Italy (due to several co-​productions in the 1950s) and, to a lesser extent, Germany and Spain. Few of the films discussed here are readily available with English subtitles. This chapter investigates Audiard’s screenwriting practices and, more specifically, his role in consolidating the use of dialogue as a major element of French popular cinema in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, following in the tradition established in the 1930s by Jeanson, Prévert and others. It considers his work in the light of the criticisms directed at dialogue writers because of the dominance of auteurist orthodoxy in critical discourse. After briefly presenting the evolution of Audiard’s career from 1949 to 1984, we will focus on particular films from the late 1950s and 1960s coinciding with

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the emergence of the New Wave; these include cult comedies, crime stories and spoof gangster films. Because of the size of the corpus, we have opted to discuss a few representative case studies that illustrate Audiard’s screenwriting practice and style for readers who are less familiar with his films. We have adopted three main methodological perspectives. In the first section, we will identify Audiard’s ‘family’ at different stages of his career:  the writing teams, directors and actors who contributed to the writing process in various ways. We will highlight Audiard’s growing role as a financial guarantor in the pre-​production process. In the second section, we will focus on some of the features of dialogue that define his polished signature style as he was primarily interested in language and less inclined to develop plots. Finally, we will evaluate his impact on screenwriter visibility and his legacy as a dialogue writer. Having started his career as a journalist and critic after the Liberation,2 Audiard appears to have provocatively ‘written’ his own history of popular screenwriting taking a stand against auteurist ideology. Alongside Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, he stands out as a prominent figure in our project to rehabilitate screenwriters, especially as his career overlaps a period of major change in film criticism and production methods –​the 1950s to the 1970s. The peak of Audiard’s popularity in the 1960s coincided with lasting ideological upheavals caused by the politique des auteurs, in which critics and self-​proclaimed auteurs specifically questioned the legitimacy of screenwriters and the value of screenplays, and with the French New Wave, which polarised the film-​production industry and critical reception circles.3 Audiard’s work is diametrically opposed to auteur-​ centred cinema, and the films he scripted are identified with popular entertainment and industrial ventures that rested on lasting partnerships between star, screenwriter and director (and producer), a feature also commonly found in the auteur cinema of the 1960s as we saw in Chapter 5. In addition to championing an aggressive stance on the visibility of dialogue, Audiard remained a controversial political figure all his life. He was often labelled as a right-​wing anarchist and an anti-​Semite in the post-​war period; he was known for making extreme or polemic statements, including attacks on de Gaulle, and displayed an unconditional reverence for Louis-​ Ferdinand Céline’s works. As a polemist and choleric grande gueule, he contributed actively to heated debates and controversies. This led to violent public attacks on his work and his person, shedding a new light on some of his dialogue.4 Audiard (1995: 165) claims that he did not archive his work. As a result, to the best of our knowledge, few working documents on the films used as our main case studies are publicly available.5 We did not have access to any annotated drafts informing the different stages of the writing process,

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and we found limited evidence to confirm conclusively that the parties who appear in the official film credits were actually involved in the writing process and to what extent.6 The information made available by the various witnesses has proved rather unreliable, as suggested by the example of the writing saga of Les Tontons flingueurs/​Crooks in Clover (Lautner, 1963) to which we will return. This film and Audiard’s dialogue have inspired an impressive collection of books published in France, including artistic biographies by journalists, dialogue anthologies, and tributes and collector volumes devoted to specific films that are regularly renewed and updated by new generations of fans and entries. And yet, Audiard’s name occasionally appears in histories of French cinema (Billard 1995: 553; Frodon 1995: 172–​3), but he has received limited academic attention in France, and even less internationally.7 For the career overview and filmography, we have therefore drawn primarily on Philippe Durant’s Michel Audiard: la vie d’un expert, first published in 2001,8 Stéphane Germain’s L’Encyclopédie (2012) and Sandro Cassati’s Michel Audiard: une histoire sur grand écran (2015). Audiard is a much-​ quoted and parodied author, and Audiard par Audiard (Audiard 1995), published by his film distributor René Château, provides numerous extracts and quotations from his dialogue in addition to texts written by Audiard and extracts from interviews. His lexical use is so distinctive that it has inspired glossaries and dictionaries, such as Le petit Audiard illustré par l’exemple (Durant 2011), a glossary of lesser-​known expressions associated with Audiard’s world. In addition, collector tributes regularly appear in France, reviving the cult around Les Tontons flingueurs.9 These valuable resources will provide the reader with examples of Audiard’s dialogue style –​or his ‘verbal embroidery’, to borrow an expression used by Sarah Kozloff (2000: 52), a rare scholar who has analysed film dialogue comprehensively in the context of Hollywood. Our discussion of Audiard’s screenwriting relies mainly on recouped secondary sources (mainly of people who worked with him) and information provided on the unusual genesis of some of the film projects and the development stage. This is one of the reasons for focusing primarily on the dialogue writing process and the nature of the dialogue as performed on screen. For reasons of space, we have been able to analyse only a few examples out of Audiard’s extensive filmography. Our choice of representative films has been guided by the fact that he increasingly concentrated on (and was credited for) dialogue writing. As Ginette Vincendeau (2011:  341–​2) has noted in her analysis of popular cinema, the critical evaluation of film dialogue has received limited attention in French scholarly and critical discourse before 2000. Jean Samouillan’s Les Dialogues du cinéma (2004) and Michel Chion’s Complexe de Cyrano (2008) have started to do justice to dialogue analysis, approaching it from descriptive and sociolinguistic perspectives,

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and this has in turn inspired our own approach. Chion (2008: 6), for example, identifies certain motifs in the nature of French dialogue defined as ‘French for the screen, a specific language style only heard in films’, which is confirmed by Audiard (1995: 146) whose fictional language is not sourced in the French underworld. In ‘Comment parler la bouche pleine?’, Michel Marie and Francis Vanoye (1983:  54–​7) also address the ‘antinaturalistic conception’ of French film dialogue using a descriptive approach to differentiate between registers and types of speech acts. They stress the paradox of dialogue enunciation, namely the discrepancy between the audience’s impression that the character is speaking the dialogue and the fact that the author also speaks through the character, which often applies to Audiard’s dialogue.10 They also take into account the actors’ performance style for written or improvised text, which was a central aspect of his screenwriting practice. Finally, they propose guidelines (1983: 76) for analysing the nature of film dialogue, some of which will later be developed in Vanoye’s Scénarios Modèles, modèles de scénarios (2008: 149–​84), and which we draw on for our own analysis. Some studies published in English focusing on American film dialogue (Kozloff 2000; Jaeckle 2013)  have developed alternative methodological classifications for dialogue analysis that we also draw upon. Some of Kozloff’s dialogue functions (2000: 33–​4) offer useful reference points, especially when it comes to describing the anchorage of the diegesis and characters, the enactment of narrative events, the control of viewer evaluation and emotions, the exploitation of the resources of language, and ‘opportunities for star turns’. These criteria will help to identify certain recurrent motifs and rhetorical devices of Audiard’s style like metaphors, aphorisms and tricolons.

Michel Audiard: career overview Audiard began writing for French cinema in 1948, following a short career in journalism after the Liberation in L’Etoile du soir and Cinévie, using the pen names of Jacques Potier and Louis Bachelier (Germain 2012: 72). He collaborated with director André Hunebelle as a screenwriter for Mission à Tanger/​Mission to Tangiers (Hunebelle, 1949). This was followed by Méfiez-​ vous des blondes (Hunebelle, 1950), starring Raymond Rouleau and Martine Carol, Massacre en dentelles (Hunebelle, 1951)  and Les Trois mousquetaires (Hunebelle, 1953), his greatest box-​office success to that point, with over 5.3 million entries in French cinemas. Up until 1954, Audiard tended to receive commissions for full screenplays, including the dialogue, and his name was gradually linked with the so-​called cinéma du

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samedi soir, mainstream genre films that attracted wide general audiences. From 1954, he still contributed to some adaptations, but was increasingly the only person in charge of the dialogue. Poisson d’avril/​April Fool’s Day (Grangier, 1954) marks the start of his collaboration with Gilles Grangier and producer Jean-​Paul Guibert.11 It was closely followed by Gas-​oil/​Hi-​ jack Highway (Grangier, 1955)  starring Jean Gabin and Jeanne Moreau, his first adaptation of Georges Simenon.12 Audiard subsequently worked with Jean Delannoy, an established ‘tradition of quality’ director, on two ‘Maigret’ stories:  Maigret tend un piège/​Maigret Sets a Trap (Delannoy, 1958); and Maigret et l’affaire Saint-​Fiacre/​Maigret and the Saint-​Fiacre Case (Delannoy, 1959). Audiard’s commercially successful screenwriting partnerships with Delannoy, Denys de la Patellière and Grangier coincided in the 1950s with the revival of Gabin’s career.13 In 1959 alone –​a year better known for the debut features of New Wave directors Truffaut and Resnais –​nine films featuring Audiard’s dialogue (four starring Gabin) appeared on French screens (Germain 2012: 73). These garnered over twenty million entries and four were listed in the top fifteen at the box office.14 The Gabin–​Audiard partnership continued into the 1960s with Les Vieux de la vieille/​The Old Guard (Grangier, 1960), adapted from René Fallet’s eponymous 1958 novel, and Un singe en hiver/​It’s Hot in Hell (Verneuil, 1962), a close version of Antoine Blondin’s novel of 1959. These scripts firmly anchored Audiard in the camp of screenwriters’ cinema, perpetuating the tradition of quality decried by the Cahiers critics.

Tailored writing for actors Many of the screenplays that Audiard worked on were literary adaptations. He was an autodidact whose cultural heritage was fashioned by extensive reading, literary friendships and alliances with successful authors of the post-​war period.15 During the 1950s and 1960s, he adapted works by Simenon, Fallet, Blondin, Alphonse Boudard and Auguste Le Breton.16 With these authors, who were often screenwriters themselves, Audiard shared a taste for exploring flowery language and creating a distinctive sense of musicality, often by recycling popular expressions from the streets of Paris and appropriating certain slang words from the underworld to give them a new life. Throughout his career, he discovered books that he proposed to producers for adaptation, sometimes acquiring the rights for himself, as he knew this would usually help him to obtain a screenwriting contract.17 An initial draft would be prepared by other screenwriters and adaptors before he intervened, tailoring his dialogue for specific actors (mainly male stars)

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and their personas. Thus, he created seventeen major roles for Gabin, nineteen for Bernard Blier, fourteen for Lino Ventura, fourteen for Jean-​Paul Belmondo, eight for Annie Girardot and nine for Mireille Darc. Audiard’s scripts brought together different generations:  Gabin and Belmondo in Les Vieux de la vieille, and Gabin and Alain Delon in Mélodie en sous-​sol/​The Big Snatch (Verneuil, 1962). These generational combinations were all the more meaningful because they linked stars associated with two opposing screenplay models –​on one side, Gabin and the cinéma de papa, and on the other, Belmondo and Delon who had made their names in Italian neorealist and New Wave films. In the late 1960s, these new partnerships also rejuvenated character types and corresponded with a calculated move for Audiard towards commercial adventure and gangster screenplays.18 Frequently directed by Lautner and produced by Gaumont mainly for the French market, these films freed the writer from Gabin’s overpowering influence on his signature style.19 The 1960s screenplays increasingly became articulated around Audiard’s distinctive, easily identifiable, pithy lines, at the same time updating the conventions of crime and comedy genres. Ne nous fâchons pas/​Let’s Not Get Angry (Lautner, 1965) is a case in point. This was Lautner’s first Gaumont production in colour, and his last collaboration with Ventura, who disliked the film. The spectacular cinematography and the dialogue captures the emerging, fashionable 1960s Anglo-​American pop aesthetics and enhances a soundtrack that also contributed to the success of the Audiard–​Lautner team.20 Over the years, Audiard tailored dialogue to serve filmstars including Ventura, Blier and Belmondo. However, up until 1962, the monstre sacré for whom he wrote the best lines was undoubtedly Gabin. Gabin’s first encounter with Audiard’s screenwriting was in 1955 for Gas-​oil, a screenplay blending working-​class characters, Poetic Realism and romance, which sealed their lasting partnership. Gas-​oil One night, Jean Chape (Gabin), a lorry driver, accidentally runs over a man lying on the road and believes he has killed him. The man, a gangster called Scotto, had just carried out a heist and his accomplices come after Jean, convinced he has made off with the money. Meanwhile, Jean is pursuing a relationship with schoolteacher Alice (Moreau) amid concerns about repaying the loan instalments for his new truck. Together with his trucker friends, Jean manages to round up the gang and hand them over to the police who find who really killed Scotto.

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The dialogue style presents a more mature Gabin image to the audience, as this line subtly suggests: ‘Je suis beau, même dans le noir’ (I’m handsome, even in the dark). In this film, Audiard’s script is often self-​reflexive and refers explicitly –​and nostalgically –​to changes in social norms that were taking place in the mid-​1950s: Extract 1 (Gas-​oil): CHAPE (Gabin):  Autrefois les femmes tenaient la maison, repassaient le linge et briquaient les cuivres. Aujourd’hui elles votent et lisent la Série noire. (Women used to do the housework, ironing and cleaning brass. Today, they vote and read crime novels.)21 As Audiard became Gabin’s main dialogue writer, he increasingly used lines to provide ‘opportunities for star turns’, to use a dialogue function identified by Kozloff (2000: 34). He offered Gabin patriarchal roles that matched the star’s stocky figure and white hair; police chiefs, mature gangsters and bourgeois characters. The star’s voice and unique elocution style, so central to his persona, were enhanced by the rhythm and tonality of Audiard’s tailored lines, facilitating his transition from dramatic, active characters to more emblematic, static figures (Vincendeau 2010a). Depending on the social context, the dialogue registers range from bourgeois formality to popular colloquialism, including some mythologised underworld slang. Audiard managed to blend his literary verve with Gabin’s delivery, often by listening to the star and reproducing his expressions and pace of delivery on paper. He then matched the register to the diegetic scenarios and the characters. In this chapter, we present the development contexts for the production of two screenplays that resulted directly from Gabin–​Audiard collaborations, illustrating their close working relationship and mutual influence on the screenplays:  Le Cave se rebiffe/​ The Counterfeiters (Grangier, 1961; 2.8 million entries) and Le Pacha/​Pasha (Lautner, 1968; over two million entries). We also draw on Audiard’s most successful film dialogue, namely Les Tontons flingueurs, written just after Le Cave se rebiffe, and address his writing partnership with Albert Simonin in these two films.

The Audiard–​Simonin partnership Simonin (1905–​80) started out as a journalist and crime novelist in the late 1930s, but is perhaps best known for his trilogy of crime novels published in the 1950s in Gallimard’s Série noire, featuring the iconic gangster ‘Max le Menteur’, stylishly written in the colourful slang and coded language of the Paris underworld.22 Simonin began his screenwriting career by adapting the first volume in this trilogy, Touchez pas au grisbi (published in 1953) with

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Figure 6.1  Poster for Le Cave se rebiffe, prominently featuring Audiard and Simonin’s names.

Jacques Becker and Maurice Griffe. The resulting film, Touchez pas au grisbi/​Hands off the Loot! (Becker, 1954), was a commercial and critical success and relaunched Gabin’s career, offering him a classic gangster role.23 Audiard and Simonin first collaborated on Courte tête (Carbonnaux, 1956), with the former providing dialogue for the latter’s screenplay, with input from Norbert Carbonnaux. This marked the beginning of a productive

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screenwriting partnership, with eleven screenplays developed between 1956 and 1967. Teaming up with director Grangier, they adapted the second ‘Max’ novel, Le Cave se rebiffe (published in 1954). Simonin worked on the plot structure and characters while Audiard focused on the dialogue, completing a first screenplay draft in just twelve days (Audiard 1995:  155). The three ‘auteurs’ controlled the pre-​production for producer Jacques Bar. As they had a say in the casting, which preceded the screenplay development, they were able to tailor the roles for Gabin, Blier and Françoise Rosay (Audiard 1995: 163).24

Le Cave se rebiffe The plot revolves around Ferdinand Maréchal (Gabin), known as the ‘Dabe’ (‘father’, ‘boss’ or ‘king’ in slang). A gangster, Charles Lepicard (Blier), and his friends persuade the Dabe to come out of retirement for a big forgery job. The Dabe agrees when he learns the currency involved is the Dutch florin; he retired having forged 100 florin notes just before they were taken out of circulation. The Dabe is not happy when he discovers that the chosen counterfeiter, Robert Mideau (Maurice Biraud) is a cave (i.e. not a crook). However, he will soon find out that Robert is the only trustworthy member of the gang …

The script evokes an artificial underworld atmosphere, with humorous, parodic and –​occasionally –​nostalgic effects (see Extracts 6 to 8 below). The authors mythologise the underworld, but above all, they match the roles to the actors’ personas and delivery (Audiard 1995:  146–​7), valorising the star at the expense of adhering to the codes of realism (see Kozloff 2000: 47–​8). Le Cave se rebiffe illustrates the emergence of a collective screenwriting model that Audiard and his collaborators would use throughout the 1960s:  each member of the team had a main responsibility, but some work was carried out collectively. Lautner’s influence on the screenplays’ development is not to be underestimated: he was the one who insisted on reinstating the famous kitchen scene of the kitchen in Les Tontons flingueurs that Audiard had written then removed (Doisne 1996:  76–​7). From then on, he increasingly pushed Audiard to surpass himself and shift towards more parodic effects and offbeat dialogue dialogue (Lautner 2005: 265–​73).25 The initial chapters of Simonin’s third ‘Max le menteur’ novel, Grisbi or not grisbi, published in 1955, provided the idea for Les Tontons flingueurs,

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reinforcing the collegial screenwriting around Audiard, and introducing two crucial new partners into his team, Lautner and producer Alain Poiré. According to Lautner (in Denat and Guingamp 1993:  9), what brought them together was a combination of

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a freedom of tone, a derisive spirit, bad faith, a critical mood and a hatred of fools, not all, not the nice ones, only the big ones, those who were proud to be fools, those who were part of the system.

The development process for Les Tontons flingueurs was not without challenges and has become an integral part of the mythology around the film; so much so that it is hard to retrace the true chronology of events (see Vanderschelden 2000:  60–​2). It seems that Audiard showed the novel to Lautner and Poiré, chief producer at Gaumont since 1962.26 Simonin then worked on a first faithful adaptation draft of his novel, retaining the crime plot. He was unaware that Audiard’s idea (supported by Lautner, who was to direct the film) was to explode (or ‘dynamite’) the popular policier codes, to borrow one of the neologisms from Les Tontons flingueurs (Lacomme 2013: 33). Hence, the screenplay retained little of the original plot and characterisation, apart from the first fifteen minutes (see Durant 2001: 166–​8). Audiard was given carte blanche to write the dialogue,27 but also played an active role in the development stages, including the casting of some of the actors. The result was a series of memorable scenes, surreal spoof action and cult dialogue that was immortalised in the collective memory and associated with Audiard’s legend and legacy. We will discuss a few examples later in this chapter.

Les Tontons flingueurs On his deathbed, Louis the Mexican (Jacques Dumesnil) asks his ‘retired’ underworld friend, Fernand Naudin (Ventura), to look after his daughter, Patricia (Sabine Sinjen). Fernand discovers that the Volfoni brothers, Raoul and Paul (Blier and Jean Lefebvre), who have been working for him running illegal traffic activities, are keen to take over the thriving business. With the help of a highly-​strung solicitor, Maître Folace (Francis Blanche), Fernand tries to impose his authority as executor, but the Mexican’s estate is a complex affair and Patricia is full of surprises. Fernand and his friends have to contend with parties which relegate them to the kitchen. Her plan to marry Antoine Delafoy (Claude Rich) is particularly unwelcome, at least until Fernand discovers that his father is director of the World Bank.

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The film development was complicated by the fact that Gabin pulled out of the project when Lautner imposed his technical team, which indirectly also influenced the casting. The lead role (Max in the books), initially offered to Gabin, went to Ventura, who accepted it after some hesitation, as comedy did not fit his star image. And Fernand Naudin became an emblematic figure of French cinema.28 The unexpected success of the film increased Audiard’s capital value among producers:  Gaumont commissioned a pseudo-​sequel, an original screenplay written by, and tailored for, the same team reuniting Ventura, Blier and Blanche. Les Barbouzes/​The Great Spy Chase (Lautner, 1964) was released the following year. While Gaumont had had little faith in Les Tontons flingueurs and had tried to limit the financial risk in the contracts, Poiré gave Lautner and Audiard carte blanche for their future partnerships.29 Lautner’s growing influence in the writing stage led to the screenplays including more spectacular scenes and parodic entertainment that tapped more into modern cultural references. For example, Ne nous fâchons pas references psychedelic 1960s pop culture with its colourful images, use of Beatles lookalike characters and trendy Anglo-​American music score,30 a strategy repeated in Le Pacha. The Audiard–​Gabin partnership had suffered in 1962 during the production of Mélodie en sous-​sol. Verneuil had changed the screenplay (especially for the long heist scene) and Gabin had blamed Audiard for dialogue decisions that favoured Delon’s role over his own (Durant 2001:  147–​ 9).31 The power games over the casting of Les Tontons flingueurs did not help to resolve matters. Nonetheless, in 1967 Audiard, Lautner and Poiré approached Gabin again with an idea which, after important changes, became Le Pacha. Simonin started working on the initial draft, but increasingly resented Audiard’s imposing visibility and the fact that his crime-​writing skills were being cast aside in favour of dialogue-​led films with spectacular action. He left the team and Audiard took over the screenwriting, using elements of Jean Laborde’s 1967 novel, Pouce!), tailoring the dialogue for Gabin and familiar supporting actors.

Le Pacha A chief police officer, Louis Joss (Gabin), is affected by the murder of his old friend and colleague Albert Gouvion (Robert Dalban) in the aftermath of a hold-​up orchestrated by Quinquin (André Pousse), an underground gang leader. To vindicate his death, Louis investigates and meets his old friend’s ambiguous mistress Nathalie (Dany Carrel),

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who leads him to the underworld mob that Albert made the mistake of mixing with to impress her. Joss sets up a fake heist, leaks information to Quinquin and a rival gang and lets them kill each other, thus cleaning up the Paris underworld before heading off into retirement.

The screenplay recycles tested motifs of plot and characterisation. The team retained from Laborde’s novel the idea of setting up a gang war to avenge the death of a friend; Gabin, who was keen to distance himself from the Maigret role the public still associated with him, suggested a less affable policeman character. Surprisingly, entire dialogue sections from the novel were retained as they coincided with Audiard’s style. However, Audiard attributed the screenplay’s most famous aphorism –​‘Le jour où on mettra les cons en orbite, t’arrêteras pas de tourner’ (When we start sending idiots into orbit, you’ll go on turning forever)  –​to a taxi driver (Durant 2001: 223–​4). This film marks a turning point in the Audiard–​Lautner partnership. The director did not hesitate to cut some of Audiard’s dialogue, for example in the scene with Le Coréen, to improve the narrative pace (Germain 2012: 181). He incorporated into the screenplay societal changes of the late 1960s to the screenplay, albeit using a modern, satirical tone (see, for example, the incongruity of Gabin in the psychedelic cabaret scene). Serge Gainsbourg’s soundtrack and theme song ‘Requiem pour un con’ also opened up new possibilities for Audiard’s creativity –​the ‘con’ motif offered a pretext for punchy lines and décalé (offbeat) humour (see Germain 2012:  181). The polished dialogue still resorts to familiar tropes  –​codes of honour, friendship and nostalgic stances, and embeds many aphorisms, tirades and ironic lines. For example, Joss describes his friend Albert as ‘la terreur des Ardennes, le bonheur des dames, mon pote, l’empereur des cons’ (the terror of the Ardennes, the ladies’ delight, my pal, the emperor of idiots). Some lines contain plays on words, such as this one around the term chapeau (hat) and the idiomatic phrase ‘porter le chapeau’ (to blame): Extract 2 (Le Pacha): QUINQUIN:  Vous avez quand même pas dans l’idée de me faire porter le chapeau? JOSS:  Nous, quand y’en a un qui traîne, faut qu’on lui trouve une tête. A la pointure ou pas.32 The script also explicitly includes historical and social references:  Joss compares the shootout at the end of the film to ‘la Saint-​Barthélémy du mitan’ (a Saint-​Bartholemew’s Massacre of the underworld) and refers to the closing down of brothels in France in 1946.

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Extract 3 (Le Pacha): NATHALIE:  Y faudrait des cliniques pour les obsédés. JOSS:  Y en avait, mais on les a fermées.33 The examples of collaborative writing we have developed so far suggest that the dialogue writer, the author of the novel or the director (or all three), and occasionally the star(s) may have taken on larger roles in the development process of the films than is suggested by the credits. This confirms what we have seen in earlier chapters; that attributing authorship is more complex for screenwriting than for writing a play or a novel. For example, it seems clear that Simonin’s contribution was eclipsed by Audiard’s growing reputation as a dialogue writer and by his appetite for publicity, especially in the films directed by Lautner (see Vanderschelden 2020: 61–​2). Yet the information gathered on the respective geneses of Le Cave se rebiffe, Les Tontons flingueurs and Le Pacha also indicates that the final screenplays emerged from successive ideas, adaptations and dialogue drafts, that were the product of collaboration as well as personal contributions. Therefore, it is difficult to assign individual authorship to anyone for any aspect of the screenplays –​except, possibly, when it comes to the films that Audiard wrote and directed himself.

Audiard directing for more freedom By the late 1960s, at the peak of his career, Audiard wanted full control over his scripts. Between 1968 and 1974, he directed nine films, including Faut pas prendre les enfants du Bon Dieu pour des canards sauvages/​Leontine (Audiard, 1968; two million entries) (hereafter Canards) and Elle boit pas, elle fume pas, elle drague pas, mais … elle cause (Audiard, 1970; 2.1 million entries) (hereafter Elle boit pas) both co-​written with Jean-​Marie Poiré (see Chapter 7). These long titles epitomise the excesses of Audiard’s wordy signature style and remain in the collective memory even today. For Canards, starring Blier, Marlène Jobert and a team of familiar supporting actors, Audiard displayed considerable freedom in terms of the tone of the dialogue and situations, but made little effort to use creative cinematography. Rita (Jobert), seeing that her inheritance is being taken away from her by Fred l’Elégant (Pousse), calls her notorious aunt Léontine (Rosay) to come to her rescue. Elle boit pas, featuring Blier, Girardot and Darc, is loosely constructed around a blackmailing plot set up by an unlikely criminal, a cleaner called Germaine (Girardot). Both films embrace the pop atmosphere of the late 1960s, with the second drawing more on pop art and bande dessinée visual codes. They stand out

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because of their outlandish scenarios and emphatic dialogue, using (and abusing) gratuitous mots d’auteur and subverting popular usage. In their own way, however, the films reflected the mood of the era, to the extent that de Gaulle played on the surreal title of Canards in one speech.34 More importantly for our analysis, the way in which Jobert/​Rita introduces herself to the audience (see Extract 11), and Blier’s tirades about his financial problems, illustrate that Audiard was writing around his favourite motif (money) more extensively than ever, using the excessively flowery language that he relished. Similarly to Jeanson, he undermined any narrative illusion and dismissed the suspension of disbelief in sequences where the dialogue is used self-​consciously for pure entertainment.35 Audiard never really saw himself as a filmmaker. He wanted greater artistic freedom, but taking over the direction carried many constraints (Durant 2001: 231–​66; Cassati 2015: 151–​61). Hence, he relied on his actors and technical team, admitting readily that he was ‘an author who occasionally played at being a director’ (Durant 2001: 318–​19). One of the benefits was working with friends; another, possibly, was to provide iconic female roles outside of his traditional male dialogue range. Thus, he invented a number of unconventional female protagonists (played by Darc, Jobert, Girardot and Rosay), who delivered memorable lines that, without dismissing suspicions of patriarchal attitudes and occasional misogyny, helped to identify women as leads, which was uncommon in 1960s comedies. Audiard’s biographers argue convincingly that he communicated with words, not with images or mise en scene (Durant 2001:  239; Cassati 2015:  151–​61). However, the entry in Dictionnaire du cinéma populaire français (Bihl 2004:  45) reports that the structure, use of close-​up and breaking of the fourth wall in Canards showed more creativity than has been implied, even if it was not entirely innovative:  Fernandel already used direct address to the camera in his 1930s vaudeville style comedies. If Audiard was still delivering polished, but excessive, dialogue for the likes of Blier, Rosay and Jobert, he had also clearly taken the 1960s in his stride and was pushing Lautner’s satirical tone to new limits. The same cannot be said of the films he directed after the two mentioned here, where lack of screenwriting inspiration often prevailed. This had consequences for not only his box-​office results but also his financial situation. By the 1970s, Audiard had become a star dialogue writer and he had developed a fully integrated production model articulated around his authorial signature. Like Jeanson before him, he had worked closely with actors and directors, valorising Gabin’s acting and enriching Lautner’s upbeat cinematography with his dialogue. His later scripts embraced the cultural changes of the period and the rejuvenation of character types. Lautner imposed modernity on the cinematography and soundtracks, and

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used youth action and adventure as thematic motifs. These production practices were partly influenced by the New Wave, but Audiard’s scripts were perceived as diametrically opposed to its spirit. In the late 1970s, the novelist and screenwriter Jean Herman (also known as Jean Vautrin) became a regular writing collaborator for genre films starring Belmondo, in which the numerous action scenes gradually eclipsed the dialogue: Flic ou voyou (Lautner, 1979), Le Gignolo (Lautner, 1979) and Le Professionnel (Lautner, 1981). Herman also worked with Audiard (alongside Michel’s son, Jacques) on the screenplays for the social thrillers Garde à vue (Miller, 1981)  and Mortelle randonnée (Miller, 1983). Much darker in tone and tenor, these screenplays revealed other facets of Audiard’s signature style to audiences. Their sober dialogue, written for Michel Serrault, possibly the actor who most closely represented the dialogue writer’s alter-​ego, expresses a defiance of the human condition that signals a change in tonality. This shift is worthy of closer attention than we can devote to it here, not least to evaluate Audiard’s part in the development of these late films (see Germain 2013: 13). It is difficult to assess the extent to which Audiard’s screenwriting went against the tide in the 1960s, the period we have focused on in this chapter. One hypothesis underpinning several other chapters of this volume is that the historiography of French cinema has largely neglected the role of screenwriters, due to the critical reign and visibility of the auteur at the expense of screenwriters, and an overwhelming critical focus on New Wave aesthetics (mise en scene over screenplay). When used in the singular from the 1960s onwards, the term ‘auteur’ in French usually refers to the auteur-​ director. Yet, as we have pointed out in our introduction, the term was used (more often in the plural –​les auteurs) from the 1930s to refer to the work of writing teams, which included the screenplay developer or adaptor, the dialogue writer, the director and (sometimes) the producer. The industry liked to enumerate these roles separately, even if we have seen in Chapters 1, 2 and 4, that the different elements of screenwriting were frequently shared, and that this was not always acknowledged in the film credits. Audiard supported collective work for better screenplay construction, but, like Spaak and Jeanson before him, believed that dialogue writing should be the job of one person (Audiard 1995: 163). When collaborators worked with him on early drafts, he demanded the final cut for the dialogue. This monopoly caused friction, for example, when Le Breton insisted on controlling the dialogue adaptation of his novel for Le Rouge est mis/​Speaking of Murder (1957) (Cassati 2015: 76–​7). In accounts of Audiard’s working method with Grangier in the 1950s, and with Lautner from 1963, the term ‘auteurs’ is regularly used in the plural in reference to the team providing the screenplay, but not when

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referring to the dialogue, which singles out Audiard. This explains how Simonin’s role in dialogue writing for many films between 1956 and 1967 could be underestimated on paper and film posters (see Guérif 1971: 121; Pinoteau 2005: 155). For example, Lombard (2013: 68) reports examples of dialogue lines in Les Tontons flingueurs recycled from Simonin’s earlier screenplays. This lack of transparency highlights the problematic limits of film credits that we have referred to in the introduction to this volume. Many testimonies from collaborators and specialists suggest that, although Audiard often came in to make the final touches to the dialogue, there were times after he had established his reputation when he was no longer the main writer.36 In terms of claiming ownership of the screenplay, he was the champion; his name featured prominently on film posters (see Figure  6.1), used as a trademark for the audience, and a financial guarantee for the producer. And the fact that he owed this visibility primarily to his dialogue is particularly noteworthy: keeping alive, against all odds, the traditional (and probably mythical) division of labour by promoting a self-​conscious signature for creative use of language, mixing registers at a time when dialogue that remained unnoticed was viewed by many as the desirable norm.

Audiard’s dialogue-​writing processes The chapter only briefly addresses character types and plot construction, because Audiard’s expertise was with words and his main trade was dialogue writing. He always favoured language over plot to define character, especially in the films that he directed himself. His playful use of language, like that of his role models, Jeanson and Prévert, includes mots d’auteurs. However, his style differs from the Poetic Realism of Prévert and contrasts with the neutral register used in other comedy dialogue, such as that of Francis Veber (see Chapter 7). Before 1975, Audiard’s primary aim when screenwriting was to entertain audiences and ‘exploit the reserves of language’, to return to Kozloff’s functions of dialogue (2000:  33–​4). This includes mixing registers and lexical fields to subvert language codes and produce humorous or parodic effects, and above all, exploring the rhythm to work on the musicality of language. Any attempt to analyse Audiard’s dialogue involves defining his register(s) and defusing a few preconceptions about his style and lexical range. The first of these is his alleged use of argot, a term that refers to the coded languages used in different periods by different social groups. For instance, the linguist Pierre Guiraud (1965:  31) has underlined the overlapping of argot and langue populaire and his assessment can apply to Audiard’s dialogue

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register. Reducing his prose to a recycling of underworld slang, as is sometimes done by critics and historians (Chapier 1963; Lanzoni 2014:  102), would be inaccurate. Audiard did not use much slang: ‘blase’ (name), ‘dabe’ (boss), ‘flingue’ (gun), ‘grisbi’ (cash), ‘schnouf’ (drugs), ‘mitan’ (mob) and ‘micheton’ (customer), and so on. In fact, the linguist Louis-​Jean Calvet (2013:  46) only cites about a dozen lexical items traced in Les Tontons flingueurs. Audiard (1995:  146) claimed to ‘hate slang’, and that his dialogue had little in common with slang use. However, for Les Tontons flingueurs, Gaumont used a ‘dictionnaire d’argot’ (slang glossary) on some posters to market the film (see Figure 6.2). The slang mythology is central to the establishing the diegetic world, and which we have analysed in detail elsewhere (Vanderschelden 2020). In the anthology kitchen scene (see Chardère 2000: 111–​13), the legendary dialogue does not use slang much, nor does it strive for social realism, but rather for a surreal, offbeat oral style that is wordy and incongruous at the same time, evoking a fictitious, mythologised past. According to Audiard (1995:  146), Simonin’s distinctive style, though considered realistic in its inspiration, is the literary creation of a ‘true writer’. Furthermore, Audiard is the first to argue that as slang is by nature elusive and unstable, the audience would not have understood any of the jargon of the mob. Therefore, when he adapted Simonin’s literary prose in Le Cave se rebiffe, Audiard primarily adapted Gabin’s style and diction to the situation,

Figure 6.2  Publicity for Les Tontons flingueurs featuring a glossary of slang used in the film.

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enhancing the verbal complicity between characters. This is illustrated in the reunion scene, one of Audiard’s favourites, between Dabe and his old friend Madame Pauline: Extract 4 (Le Cave se rebiffe): DABE (Gabin):  Je t’enverrai un gonze dans la semaine. PAULINE (Rosay):  À quoi je le reconnaitrai? DABE:  Un beau brun, avec des petites bacchantes, grand, l’air con! PAULINE:  Ça court les rues, les grands cons! DABE:  Ouais! Mais celui-​là c’est un gabarit exceptionnel! Si la connerie se mesurait, il servirait de mètre étalon! Il serait à Sèvres!37 This example is highly characteristic of Audiard’s writing, and corresponds to a dialogue function identified by Kozloff (2000: 33) as the anchoring of diegesis and characters. Here, this anchoring takes the form of a creative use of a langue populaire or ‘popular language’, spoken by ordinary French people in the streets, cafes, taxis and so on. The linguist Françoise Gadet (1992:  27; 2007:  115–​20) defines langue populaire, an expression which dates back to the nineteenth century, in opposition to slang as a stigmatised nonstandard usage consisting of a series of features indicative of the lower classes, including accent, morpho-​syntax and lexis. The popular language of Audiard’s dialogue in the early 1960s comes mainly from phrases spoken by ordinary Parisians. The few underworld slang terms he does employ are usually drawn from Simonin’s fiction. Recurring terms such as ‘cave’, ‘grisbi’, ‘micheton’ and ‘oseille’ (money) are incorporated into a rich langue populaire that Audiard then mythologises. The legendary ‘bourre-​ pif’ (punch) (Extract 10), sometimes thought to have been first uttered by Blier in Les Tontons flingueurs, in fact had already been used in 1940s novels and in Simonin’s Le Cave se rebiffe (Lombard 2017: 43). What really interests Audiard is to coin or hijack popular expressions which mix registers and styles to achieve expressive lines, employing imagery and musical combinations –​mainly for humorous, but sometimes also for more poetic, effect.38 The following tirade from Le Pacha (Extract 5)  –​ which had to be delivered in under thirty seconds and is highly characteristic of Gabin’s delivery –​thus blends slang lexis, such as ‘flingue’ (gun), ‘mitan’ (mob), ‘costard’ (suit) and ‘papelard’ (paper), with colloquial expressions, such as ‘décrocher’ (get out) and ‘j’en ai jusque-​là’ (I’ve had enough). The overall rhythm, and the use of metaphor and hyperbole in expressions, like ‘le gâteau’ and ‘les petits fours’ (cake) or ‘sortir du bal’ (kick out), suggest contrasting social backgrounds and set the platform for the ironic historical reference to a religious massacre: the ‘Saint Barthélémy’ of the mob.

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Extract 5 (Le Pacha): JOSS:  Le mitan, j’en ai jusque-​ là! Voilà quarante ans que le truand me chagne! Dans mon bureau, au ciné, dans le journal! En costard clair ou en blouson noir, je l’ai digéré à tous les âges et sous toutes les modes! Ça tue, ça viole, mais ça fait rêver le bourgeois et reluire les bonnes femmes! C’est romantique! Alors je vais me mettre au goût du jour. Les voyous, je vais plus les confier aux jurés de la Seine, je vais les sortir du bal! Et pas à coup de mandat, à coups de flingue! Cette fois, y aura pas de non-​lieu, ni de remise de peine! J’vais organiser la Saint-​Barthélémy du mitan! Et j’compte sur personne pour me couvrir. Je décroche dans six mois. Je sais que vous avez déjà préparé les allocutions et commandé les petits fours. Alors qu’est-​ce que tu veux qui m’arrive? J’serai privé de gâteau?39 More generally, the thundery ‘anger’ scenes that Audiard wrote for Gabin in Le Cave se rebiffe and Le Pacha, which served to enhance the authority of his choleric star persona, also reveal combinations of register: Extract 6 (Le Cave se rebiffe): DABE:  Oh là! Mais attention Messieurs, hein! Qu’est-​ce qui se passe? J’ai l’impression que vous êtes en train de me monter un turbin. LEPICARD:  T’es pas fou, non? DABE:  Ah non, je ne suis pas fou! Et puis pas fou du tout, même! Et si seulement vous voulez me faire jongler vous n’aurez pas beau chpile, c’est moi qui vous le dit! Et votre papier véreux, là, qu’est-​ce que c’est? Il n’était pas dans l’inventaire, d’où sort-​il? ERIC (Villard):  Écoute Dabe. Je crois qu’il faut être franc. On voulait vous faire une surprise. DABE:  (Il colle une gifle à Eric). Et ça c’en est une? Faire une surprise, vous vouliez me repasser, oui! Et avec du papelard à démaquiller, encore! C’est pour ça que vous avez cloqué le môme dans l’coup. Seulement, il s’est fait la malle avec ton talbin, l’enfant prodige! Alors comme çà, y a pas de jaloux, on est tous au repasse-​man! Pour une fois que ta Hollande me casse pas la cabane, il faut ce que soit un merdeux qui me fasse marron, à mon âge! Et j’peux même pas porter plainte!40 Dabe’s anger is expressed via repetition (‘fou’), rhetorical questions and exclamation marks. Audiard also occasionally invented similar outbursts for Blier (Extracts 7 and 10)  and Ventura (see Extract 12). When performed by the former, these tirades become hysterical eruptions that generate pure comedy, diffusing any illusion of power or authority:

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Extract 7 (Le Cave se rebiffe): LEPICARD:  Car j’aime autant vous dire que pour moi, Monsieur Eric, avec ses costards tissés en Ecosse à Roubaix, ses boutons de manchettes en simili et ses pompes à l’italienne fabriquées à Grenoble, et ben c’est rien qu’un demi-​sel. Et là, je parle juste question présentation. Parce que si je voulais me lancer dans la psychanalyse, j’ajouterais que c’est le roi des cons. Et encore les rois, ils arrivent à l’heure. Parce que j’en ai connu moi, mon cher maître, des rois, et puis pas des petits. Des Hanovre, Des Hohenzollern. Rien que du micheton garanti croisade […] Alors c’est pour vous dire que votre ami Eric, avec ses grands airs, il peut se les cloquer dans le baba.41 The fact that these tirades are very polished in the script does not completely exclude changes, improvisations or cuts. However, they also use specific rhetorical devices in their syntactic organisation, notably the ternary rhythm in the description of Eric. The long sentences can also prove difficult for the actors to enunciate, despite the very precise use of punctuation to enhance the rhythm.42 As for the audience, they need to listen to (or read) the monologues several times in order to capture the layers of polysemy, irony, parody and humour. Any attempt to translate for dubbing or subtitling is challenging on several counts:  the polysemic play on words, including homophonic puns, the preservation of rhythm and musicality and, last but not least, the transfer of humour, irony and cultural references. Audiard (and Simonin) excel at finding unconventional collocations to coin new popular expressions, as did Prévert before them. And, like both Jeanson and Prévert, they tamper with established phrases, resorting to pastiche or parody, diverting the phrases from their standard idiomatic lexical usage. In this way, they invent a fictional register designed specially for cinema, and inspired more by the elocution style of certain actors than by real life. However, as Extract 6 shows, if some syntactic and grammatical variation occasionally appears, we also find recurrent evidence of literariness in formal questions and subjunctive clauses, especially to connote status (actual or assumed) and hierarchy. Chion (2008: 69–​71) describes the lexical style of Le Cave se rebiffe as ‘verbal folklore of another era’, while Calvet (2013: 46–​7) unravels a number of syntactical manipulation strategies used in Les Tontons flingueurs which give the impression of subverting grammatical rules without affecting immediate comprehension. These include altering grammatical categories, for example, the nominalisation of adjectives –​‘l’honnête’ to refer to an honest man –​the use of adjectives as adverbs –​‘ça part sévère’ (it’s going seriously wrong) –​changing the status of transitive and intransitive verbs –​‘Fais tomber cent sacs au toubib’ (Give the doctor a hundred bucks).

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Chion also identifies as reasons for the lasting impact of Audiard’s dialogue intertextual theatrical influences, such as the use of extended metaphors and, even more especially, aphorisms: (Le Cave se rebiffe):  Faire confiance aux honnêtes gens est le seul vrai risque des professions aventureuses. (Trusting honest people is the only true risk of shady professions.) FERNAND (Tontons flingueurs): Chez moi, quand les hommes parlent, les gonzesses se taillent. (In my place, when men are talking, the girls beat it.)

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DABE

Audiard, like Jeanson, would frequently end an exchange with an aphorism (almost like a punchline) using formulaic phrases as decoy, as this example on the ‘benefits of crime’ illustrates: Extract 8 (Le Cave se rebiffe): LEPICARD (Blier):  Entre nous, Dabe, une supposition … Hein, j’dis bien une supposition, que j’ai un graveur, du papier, et que j’imprime pour un million de biftons. En admettant, toujours une supposition, qu’on soit cinq sur l’affaire, ça rapporterait, net, combien à chacun? DABE (Gabin):  Vingt ans de placard. Entre truands, les bénéfices, ça se partage, la réclusion, ça s’additionne.43 This extract also exemplifies another common lexical rhetorical device: the use of repetition (here of supposition) to scan Blier’s long cue and generate a dramatic build up for the mot d’auteur delivered by Gabin. Audiard relishes rhetorical devices, synonyms and convoluted syntax. His eclectic readings, ranging from Céline, Proust, Balzac and Simenon to Rimbaud and the Série noire novels, inform the lexical variety of the dialogue. He enjoys accumulating synonyms to create lines which can be compared to ‘verbal embroidery’ (Kozloff 2000: 52). In Le Cave se rebiffe, the parodic underworld language is justified by an overt gangster plot. Extracts 6, 7 and 8 provide numerous lexical examples of 1950s slang: ‘turbin’ (work), ‘talbin’/​‘bifton’ (banknote), ‘repasser’ (kill or deceive). There are also examples of borrowings from English (‘man’) and German (‘chpile’), and of neologisms, such as ‘cloquer’ (put).44 We are not aiming here to provide an extensive list of Audiard’s lexis or taste for neologisms, nor to identify borrowings in order to assign authorship to expressions immortalised in these films. Neither are we aiming to differentiate the registers commonly assigned to lexical terms frequently used by Audiard in his dialogue.45 Our aims here are rather to use selected examples to illustrate how the choice of a few specific lexical terms can colour the style of the film dialogue and point to the way in which Audiard blends registers and lexical fields to produce unfamiliar collocations and ruptures

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in style. The rich lexical fields of ‘money’ and ‘idiot’  –​two of Audiard’s favourite themes –​emphasise the resources offered by French popular language, including trends and variations linked to genre, the type of adaptation, the enunciator’s persona, and even the author’s taste for extended metaphor. Turning first to money, we find numerous examples across several linguistic registers. According to Le Breton, grisbi is a derivation of the English ‘crispy’, which was used for ‘cash’ in the 1890s (in Lombard 2017: 118–​20). Immortalised by Simonin’s novels, the term was little used outside cinema, making it a prime example of what Chion (2008:  6) calls ‘language for film’. ‘Thune’ and ‘pognon’, however, both used in the real world today by distinct generations and classes (see Lombard 2017: 188–​9), are employed indiscriminately in Audiard’s filmography in different generic film contexts. ‘Oseille’ is obsolete today and associated with cinema. ‘Talbin’ is even less used, though it experienced a revival in some rap lyrics in the 1990s (Goudaillier 2001a:  264). These terms punctuate Audiard’s dialogue, as parts of aphorisms or in cognate pairings, as indicated by the few examples presented in Table 6.1. Another lexical field closely associated with Audiard, which features explicitly in many of his memorable lines, is that of stupidity. This is epitomised by the recurrent character of ‘le con’ (idiot). In Le Pacha, Joss’s best friend Albert, who is killed in the first scene, is described as ‘un con’, and the film’s main musical theme ‘Requiem pour un con’, acts as a leitmotif for him. Joss uses the phrase in different contexts, thus producing an extended metaphor: JOSS: 

‘Se faire engueuler par un con pareil’ (to be told off by such an idiot)

JOSS: 

‘J’pense que quand on mettra les cons sur orbite, t’as pas fini d’tourner’ (I think that when we put idiots in orbit, you’ll go on turning forever)

JOSS: 

‘Les cons, ça ose tout, c’est même à ça qu’on les reconnaît’ (idiots don’t stop at anything, in fact, that’s how you recognise them).46

The con should not be confused with a cave –​someone who does not belong to the mob or who pays for women, and a favourite character type in Audiard and Simonin’s scripts.47 The latter refers to a naive male who does not understand the language and codes of the underworld and is the victim of a scam, as exemplified in Le Cave se rebiffe. ‘Cave’ is also very occasionally used as a synonym of con, with a friendly connotation of foolishness: ‘Il a toujours eu des problèmes, ce cave, mais c’était mon pote’ (Joss about Albert, Pacha) (he always had problems, this fool, but he was my mate). The end of the film echoes this synonymy with Joss’s voice-​over: ‘Mon pote, l’empereur des cons’ (my mate, emperor of idiots). As insults relating to

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Table 6.1  Lexical field: money Quotation

Remarks on lexis, register and rhetorical devices

Character/​film

Le faux talbin, Messieurs, est un travail qui se fait dans le feutré.

Talbin/​(counterfeit) bank note clashes with use of formal register.

DABE/​Cave

Dans un ménage, quand l’homme ne ramène pas un certain volume d’oseille, l’autorité devient, ni plus, ni moins, d’la tyrannie.

Only one slang term in a complex arrangement of syntax; Orality markers with elisions.

LEPICARD/​Cave

Alors, j’vais t’dire quelque chose: J’me suis pas tapé cinq piges de placard pour venir piquer thune par thune l’oseille des congés payés.

Underworld slang and orality markers (Lombard 2017); only reference thune [originally a five-​ franc coin] (2017: 188–​9); importance of rhythm; cultural reference to ‘paid holidays’.

CHARLES/​Mélodie

Quand on parle pognon, à partir d’un certain chiffre, tout le monde écoute.

Mixture of familiar and neutral lexis.

JOSS/​Pacha

Pour qu’il abandonne ses cactus On the use of béchamel [pickle/​confuse the et qu’il revienne à Paname, situation], see Lombard faut qu’il lui en arrive une (2017: 29). sévère au vieux Louis. Faut qu’il ait besoin de pognon ou qu’il soit tombé dans une béchamel infernale.

FERNAND/​Tontons

Dans la vie, on partage toujours Aphorism; colloquial les emmerdes, jamais le register. pognon.

ROCCO/​100

000

dollars

Dès qu’on leur parle de grisbi, ça leur bloque les méninges.

Aphorism; underworld lexis/​ colloquial.

JOSS/​Pacha

Touche pas au grisbi, salope!

Underworld/​vulgar register.

FOLACE/​Tontons

Vous autres, j’sais pas ce que Repetition; childish/​naive vous aimez […] moi, c’est les register. sous. Je pense qu’à ça. À ça et aux hommes. Aux hommes qui ont des sous.

RITA/​Canards

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stupidity constitute a favourite lexical field for witty and inventive dialogue, synonyms abound. Another cognate in the 1960s is ‘branque’ (idiot) (Le Pacha) (see Audiard 1995: 77–​80). Finally, humour sometimes comes from self-​ conscious metalinguistic comments made by the characters about unconventional language use in the diegetic dialogue. These cues hold a special place in Audiard anthologies. Blanche/​Folace’s laconic comment in Les Tontons flingueurs, ‘C’est curieux chez les marins cette manie de faire des phrases’ (It’s a strange habit these sailors have of speaking in full sentences), is a memorable example. They are frequently pronounced by Blier’s characters, as in Extract 9: Extract 9 (Canards): (Blier):  J’ai bon caractère mais j’ai le glaive vengeur et le bras séculier. L’aigle va fondre sur la vieille buse. GANGSTER 1:  C’est chouette ça, comme métaphore. GANGSTER 2:  C’est pas une métaphore, c’est une périphrase. GANGSTER 1:  Oh fait pas chier! GANGSTER 2:  Ça, c’est une métaphore.48 CHARLES

Dialogue in performance Marie and Vanoye (1983: 54) stress the difference between improvised dialogue and dialogue written to be interpreted. Audiard’s lines belong firmly in the second category, as illustrated by the tirade written for an irate Blier (Extract 7) which is an example of a faux ‘literary style designed to be heard’ (Chion 2008: 72). Tailored dialogue writing is not just about representing the personas or idiosyncrasies of actors as we have seen in Chapter 3; it also embraces the quality of the actor’s voice, its tonality and accent, the pace and the rhythm of delivery. In addition to creating a distinctive, parodic pseudo-​colloquial gangster register, Audiard subverts language, as shown in Extract 10. He does so by creating neologisms (‘correctionner’), enhancing situation comedy through the pace of delivery, emphatic marks and expletives (‘et pis crac’), using surprising metaphors (‘illness’/​‘cure’ to express a desire to kill), and repeating cognate lexis to suggest destruction: Extract 10 (Tontons flingueurs): RAOUL (Blier):  Non mais t’as déjà vu ça? En pleine paix. Y chante et pis crac, un bourre-​pif! mais il est complètement fou ce mec! Mais moi, les dingues j’les soigne, j’ m’en vais lui faire une ordonnance, et une sévère! J’vais lui montrer qui c’est Raoul. Aux quatre coins d’Paris qu’on va l’retrouver, éparpillé par petits bouts, façon puzzle … Moi quand on m’en fait trop j’correctionne plus, j’dynamite … j’disperse … j’ventile …49

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Such tirades, which illustrate the preponderance of rhythm, with alliterations, ternary patterns and unusual syntactic order to emphasise certain words, cannot easily be paraphrased or altered during filming. Designed to be performed to the letter, they are often served by close-​ups to maximise their effects. Blier’s characters are identified by their loud tone, vociferations and excessive wordiness:  features that Audiard also (stereotypically) uses for some female leads. In Canards, Rita is never lost for words, and her lines revolve around an excessive flow of language: Extract 11 (Canards): RITA  (Jobert): Je m’appelle Rita. Je suis drôlement bien foutue et vachement intelligente. Vous autres, je sais pas ce que vous aimez –​les œufs au plat, Teilhard de Chardin ou le rhythm and blues –​moi c’est les sous. Je pense qu’à ça. À ça et aux hommes. Aux hommes qui ont des sous.50 Rita’s register is closer to a colloquial register than to slang. The rhythm of the syntax creates a crescendo that is reminiscent of a lexical ‘bouncing’ effect leading to the ‘punchline’. Here we see clearly how Audiard is the heir of Jeanson. For Ventura, especially in Les Tontons flingueurs, silences are just as revealing and effective as any use of slang, and verbal sobriety often prevails; which makes his verbal explosions and offbeat vulgarity more striking and hilarious (see ‘ton Antoine commence à me les briser menu’ in Extract 12). In this example, the slow build-​up to the explosion is significant, replete with double entendres, and the expletives when they come are reminiscent of certain scenes written by Audiard for Gabin (see for example Extracts 5 and 6): Extract 12 (Tontons flingueurs): ANTOINE (Rich):  Oh non, au moment où la petite flûte allait répondre au cor, vous êtes odieux! PATRICIA (Sinjen):  C’est vrai tonton, ces choses-​là ne se font pas. FERNAND (Ventura):  Ah surtout, je t’en prie hein? PATRICIA:  Qu’est-​ce qui vous arrive, mon oncle? Vous avez été contrarié dans vos affaires? FERNAND:  Oh à peine. Si ça ne vous fait rien Monsieur Delafoy, j’aimerais bien avoir une petite explication. Remettez d’abord vos chaussures, vous êtes ridicule. ANTOINE:  Qu’est-​ce que vous voulez que je vous explique, cher monsieur. FERNAND:  Tout ça, lumière tamisée, musique douce, et vos godasses sur les fauteuils, Louis XVI en plus!

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ANTOINE: La

confusion doit d’abord s’expliquer, mais les termes sont inadéquats. FERNAND:  Ah parce que c’est peut-​être pas du Louis XVI? ANTOINE:  Euh, non! C’est du Louis XV. Remarquez, vous n’êtes pas tombé loin, mais les sonates de Corelli ne sont pas de la musique douce. FERNAND:  Mais pour moi ça en est. Et je suis chez moi! ANTOINE:  Ah j’aime ça, la thèse est osée mais comme toutes les thèses, parfaitement défendable. Mais nous allons si vous le voulez bien discuter de la musique par rapport au local, de l’élixir et du flacon, du contenu et du contenant. FERNAND:  Patricia, mon petit … je ne voudrais pas te paraître vieux jeu, ni encore moins grossier, l’homme de la pampa, parfois rude, reste toujours courtois, mais la vérité m’oblige à te le dire:  ton Antoine commence à me les briser menu!51 We see clearly here also how Audiard manipulates rhythm and syntax to adapt to the actor’s persona –​the short cues for Ventura contrast with the rather pretentious lexis and syntax for Rich –​while Extracts 7, 8 and 10 offer examples of the bouncy, convoluted sentences that characterise many of Blier’s monologues.52 This polished dialogue produces poetic and comedic effects in turn, involving the audience in a game of recognition of characters who are primarily defined by their conversation style. Some actors are ‘text-​reciting machines’ working with different personal and linguistic identities, while others such as Louis Jouvet (as we saw in Chapter 3), Serrault and, of course, Gabin, rely on their own world and idiolect.53 Marie and Vanoye (1983: 57) suggest that film audiences frequently assume that dialogue comes from the characters, who ‘are the initiators of their words’. This is especially the case when it comes to performers defined by their authenticity, as is the case with Gabin (Vincendeau 2010a) and, in a different way, Blier (see Guerand 2009:  31–​3; Guerand 2013:  24–​31). When Blier performs Audiard’s lines, his style tends to prevail over the author’s voice. Although there is recurrent evidence of recycling certain lines or language motifs from one film to the next, most were written with specific actors in mind.54 In spite of how closely audiences associate these lines with the actors who spoke them, Audiard has, remarkably, reclaimed their authorship as an integral part of his personal legacy. More than simply rehabilitating Michel Audiard’s screenwriting as a commercially viable alternative to the 1960s surge of auteurism in French cinema, this chapter has confirmed his legacy for film dialogue and his unusual visibility as a screenwriter. Few screenwriters have attained Audiard’s level of cultural recognition and bankability or influenced trends in modes of film production, especially as project initiators. Audiard achieved this during

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his career, with his value peaking in the 1960s. Undoubtedly, he deserves some credit for revitalising popular genre cinema through his writing in the second half of the twentieth century. Following in the tradition of Jeanson in particular, he highlighted the power of dialogue as a potential vector for caustic humour especially in comedies and spoof gangster films, but demonstrated more sobriety in other genres. He could bring characters to life through their lines, and create uncanny scenarios for them by using unlikely dialogue. His aims (and those of the friends he worked with until 1975) were, in order of importance, to entertain and be entertained, to make fun of stupidity, and to expose social contradictions (Audiard 1995: 166–​7). Once he had achieved legendary status, Audiard’s artistic talent was occasionally obscured by the whims of the bon vivant, although the final stage of his career reflected a darker side of his personality that has often been attributed to the tragic death of his son François in 1975. Even though we have not had space to discuss them in this chapter, his last screenplays, to which his younger son Jacques sometimes contributed, and especially Garde à vue and Mortelle randonnée written for Serrault in the early 1980s, are part and parcel of this legacy.55 This chapter has also shown that power relations operated in Audiard’s writing teams, and that the film credits did not always fully acknowledge all contributors to the screenwriting process. In some cases, Audiard’s fame might well have led to the roles played by some of his collaborators being undervalued; in others, his tendency to delegate, borrow and recycle was conveniently overlooked to perpetuate a myth of collegiality. This myth, as we have also seen in Chapter 2, is one that historians frequently attribute to French cinema in a bid to distinguish it from Hollywood. Audiard was a linguistic virtuoso with a strong lexical and syntactic identity. His sense of tonal quality and rhythm shone through in every generic and narrative context in which he chose to express himself. This is what gave his scripts their edge and allowed some of the films to withstand the passage of time, beyond the sense of humour displayed in some of the cult comedies, and in spite of dubious gender and racial attitudes. His legend has continued to thrive after his death in 1985, even though the mythical cinematic world and the distinctive dialogue style that he had invented disappeared with him. If Audiard has continued to inspire new generations of fans, he was never really rehabilitated by the critical establishment after his death. However, there is no doubt that he inspired the next generations of screenwriters and directors to continue the rich tradition of self-​conscious cinéma bavard.56 It is impossible to know whether Les Tontons flingueurs really influenced Quentin Tarantino’s style, as suggested in Lautner’s obituary in the Independent (Perrone 2013). What is undeniable is that in France, to this day, more than Jeanson or Prévert, Audiard

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retains a popular cult following that spans all generations and social classes, and remains alive in the collective memory and cultural heritage. Evidence of this can be found in the regular anniversary tributes around Les Tontons flingueurs, especially in 2013. A rare academic symposium devoted to the film organised at University of Paris Sorbonne in November 2018 even triggered unusual media and public interest (see Dreyfus 2018; Guyard 2018). Audiard’s expressions are still identified, (over)used and imitated in the media outside the world of cinema; for example, to evoke disorder in political and societal contexts, often with a nostalgic take on the past.57 His ternary use of synonyms and tendency to play with grammatical categories are often pastiched. His flowery use of slang and popular language continues to inspire new generations in France, including in the multicultural banlieues, as Rachid Santaki’s pastiche polar novel Flic ou Caillera (2013), an explicit tribute to Audiard’s style, illustrates. The examples of dialogue provided here have given readers a taste of its elusive nature. Audiard’s dialogue writing nurtures creativity with language and has specific cultural undertones:  humour, literary references and covert historical or political digs. His lines do not cross national borders easily, despite featuring in a few European co-​productions. Rather, they are marked by a specific local linguistic and historical heritage, and it is no doubt this unusual cultural grounding that explains their cult status and perennial appeal.

Films mentioned written in whole or in part by Audiard (Fr/​UK/​USA) Mission à Tanger/​Mission in Tangiers (André Hunebelle, 1949; scr. and dial. Audiard) Les Trois mousquetaires (André Hunebelle, 1950; scr. and dial. Audiard) Méfiez-​vous des blondes (André Hunebelle, 1950; scr. and dial. Audiard) Massacre en dentelles (André Hunebelle, 1951; scr. and dial. Audiard) Une histoire d’amour/​Young Love (Guy Lefranc, 1951; scr. and dial. Audiard) Poisson d’avril/​April Fool’s Day (Gilles Grangier, 1954; adapt., scr. Grangier, Gérard Carlier and Audiard and dial. Audiard) Touchez pas au grisbi/​Hands off the Loot/​Honour amongst Thieves (Jacques Becker, 1954; scr. Becker, Simonin and Raymond Griffe; dial. Simonin; from Simonin novel, 1953) Gas-​oil/​Hi-​jack Highway (Gilles Grangier, 1955; adapt. Audiard with Grangier [and Jacques Marcerou uncred.]; dial. Audiard; from Georges Bayle Du raisin et dans le gaz-​oil, 1954) Le Sang à la tête/​Blood to the Head (Gilles Grangier, 1956; scr. Grangier and Audiard; dial. Audiard; from Simenon, Le Fils Cardinaud, 1942) Le Rouge est mis/​Speaking of Murder (Gilles Grangier, 1956; scr. and dial. Le Breton and Audiard; from Le Breton Le rouge est mis, 1954) Courte tête/​Short Head (Norbert Carbonnaux, 1956; scr. Simonin; dial. Audiard)

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Maigret tend un piège/​Maigret Sets a Trap (Jean Delannoy, 1958; adapt. Delannoy and Rodolphe-​Maurice Arlaud dial. Audiard; from Simenon, 1955) Maigret et l’affaire Saint-​Fiacre/​Maigret and the Saint-​Fiacre Affair (Jean Delannoy, 1959; adapt. Delannoy and Arlaud, dial. Audiard; from Simenon novel, 1932) Le Président (Henri Verneuil, 1960; adapt. and scr. Audiard and Verneuil dial. Audiard; from Simenon novel, 1958) Les Vieux de la vieille/​The Old Guard (Gilles Grangier, 1960; dial. Audiard; from René Fallet novel, 1958) Le Cave se rebiffe/​The Counterfeiters of Paris (Gilles Grangier, 1961; scr. Simonin; dial. Audiard; from Le Cave se rebiffe (Simonin, 1954) Le Monocle noir/​The Black Monocle (Georges Lautner, 1961; scr. Pierre Laroche and Jacques Robert from the novel by Colonel Rémy, 1960) Mélodie en sous-​sol/​The Big Snatch/​Any Number can Win (Henri Verneuil, 1962; scr. Simonin; dial. Audiard from John Trinian novel) Un singe en Hiver/​It’s Hot in Hell (Henri Verneuil, 1962; scr. François Boyer, dial. Audiard, from Antoine Blondin novel) Les Tontons flingueurs/​ Crooks in Clover/​ Monsieur Gangster (Georges Lautner, 1963; scr. Simonin, Audiard, Lautner; dial. Audiard; from Simonin, Grisbi or not grisbi, 1955) Les Barbouzes/​The Great Spy Chase (Georges Lautner, 1964; scr. Simonin and Audiard; dial. Audiard) 100 000 milliards au soleil/​Greed in the Sun (Henri Verneuil, 1964; adap. Verneuil, Marcel Jullian; dial. Audiard, from the novel by Claude Veillot Nous n’irons pas en Nigéria, 1962) Des pissenlits par la racine/​Dandelions by the Roots (Georges Lautner, 1964; adapt. and scr. Clarence Weff, Lautner and Albert Kantof; dial. Weff in collaboration with Audiard) Ne nous fâchons pas/​Let’s Not Get Angry (Georges Lautner, 1965; adapt. Lautner, Marcel Jullian and Marsan; scr and dial. Audiard) La Métamorphose des cloportes/​Cloportes (Pierre Granier-​Deferre, 1965; adapt., scr. and dial. Audiard; adapt. from Boudard, 1962) Un idiot à Paris/​An Idiot in Paris (Serge Korber, 1967; scr. and dial. Audiard) Le Pacha/​Pasha (Georges Lautner, 1968; adapt., scr. and dial. Audiard; adapt. from Jean Laborde Pouce, 1967) Faut pas prendre les enfants du Bon Dieu pour des canards sauvages (Michel Audiard, 1968; scr. Audiard, Jean-​Marie Poiré and Henri Viard; dial. Audiard) Elle boit pas, elle fume pas, elle drague pas, mais elle cause (Michel Audiard, 1970; scr. Audiard, Michel Lebrun, Jean-​Marie Poiré; dial. Audiard) Flic ou voyou/​Cop or Hood (Georges Lautner, 1978; scr. Lautner and Herman; dial. Audiard) Le Gignolo (Lautner, 1979; scr. Lautner and Herman; dial. Audiard) Le Professionnel/​The Professional (Georges Lautner, 1981 scr. Jacques Audiard, Lautner and and Francis Veber (uncred.) and dial. Audiard, adapted from Patrick Alexander novel Mort d’une bête à la peau fragile 1978) Garde à Vue/​Under Suspicion (Claude Miller, 1981; scr. Miller and Jean Herman; dial. Audiard from novel by John Wrainwright, 1980)

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Mortelle randonnée/​Deadly Run (Claude Miller, 1983; scr. Audiard and Jacques Audiard and dial. Audiard from Marc Behm novel)

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Notes 1 He signed dialogue contracts for 25–​35 million francs per film from the 1960s (Paris Match, 14 April 1962; Chabrol 2001: 141, 147). 2 See, for example, Germain (2013: 9–​10) and Cassati (2015: 25–​39). 3 Truffaut, for example, disliked Audiard’s screenplays because they let the star protagonist despise and crush the other characters, which he judged unethical (see Gillain 1988: 136). 4 For more information on political debates around Audiard, see Germain (2013:  9–​10), Frey (2016:  50) and, for the passéist vision of France, Froger (2011) and Broussard (2015). 5 The Cinémathèque française in Paris keeps some archives, e.g. an unannotated typed screenplay of Les Tontons flingueurs (SCEN2621-​ B800) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France holds another copy in the Fonds Simonin and one of Le Cave se rebiffe (NAF28512). Other screenplays appeared in auctions and bookshops, such as an annotated version of Les Tontons flingueurs, number 91 in Bernard Leborgne’s Paris bookshop ‘L’œil du Mercure’ catalogue and sold at auction in 2017. See www.oeildemercure.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​ 2017/​05/​catalogue-​grand-​palais-​2017.pdf, accessed 11 November 2018. 6 Durant (2001: 425–​8) and Cassati (2015: 179–​89) address this lack of transparency. They report that while Audiard wrote scripts credited to others in the early stages of his career, later on, his collaborators were not always included in credits. 7 Many films are unavailable in the United Kingdom or the United States. For examples of mentions in film studies in English, see Vincendeau (2000; 2011) and Lanzoni (2014: 100–​2). 8 Re-​issued as Michel Audiard:  ou comment réussir quand on est un canard sauvage (Durant 2005). Audiard also features prominently in La Bande à Gabin (Durant 2009). 9 The (re)release of DVD collections and, regular broadcasts on French television channels help to keep the most canonical films in the collective memory. Audiard’s work is also present on the Internet (blogs, citations, cult extracts …). Germain and Gega (2013) is an example of a tribute fan volume. 10 Chapter 3 considered this paradox in relation to the concepts of monologic and dialogic address in Jeanson’s dialogue. 11 Audiard’s brother-​in-​law, who produced eleven films written by Audiard. 12 For Le Sang à la tête (Grangier, 1956), Audiard (1995: 165 and 184) claims that he could not keep Simenon’s dialogue which, while it read beautifully, did not work when spoken (see Audiard on this paradox in Durant 2001: 79). 13 In this studio-​based model, Audiard was hired by the producer (Guibert), with whom Gabin had a contract for six films over three years (1957–​60), then by

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Jacques Bar from 1960 (Brunelin 1987: 435–​56). On Gabin’s star persona, see Gauteur and Vincendeau (1993) and Vincendeau (2000: 73–​7). 14 Source:  CNC results 1959, available online www.cnc.fr/​documents/​36995/​ 154245/ ​ b ox- ​ o ffice+1959.pdf/ ​ 7 05e437e- ​ 1 038- ​ a 51e- ​ e b18– ​ 8 f910f0a7297, accessed 11 March 2019. See Durant (2001: 466–​8) for more box office results. 15 See Durant (2009: 124–​9) for examples of his readings and his admiration for Céline. 16 Audiard drew on their inventive style for his own dialogue writing:  see Boudard (1962) in the underrated dialogue of La Métamorphose des cloportes/​ Cloportes (Granier-​Deferre, 1965), according to Germain (2012:  165); the lines of Un singe en hiver were closely adapted from the style used in Blondin’s novel (1962) (see Renard 2014). 17 Examples include A Table (Wainwright 1980)  adapted into Garde à vue (Claude Miller, 1981). Audiard repeated tried to adapt Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) and Mort à crédit (1936) but failed to find the suitable format and financial backing (see Paucard 2000: 64–​7; Cassati 2015: 139–​50). 18 This also corresponded to an emancipation from Gabin’s influence which limited his opportunities to ‘say what comes to his mind’ in his dialogue (Chabrol 2001: 157). 19 See for example (Perrone 2013): the subversive humour and razor-​sharp dialogue of the crime comedies Lautner directed in the 1960s was often lost in translation, but in his native France they enjoyed a popularity comparable to the Ealing comedies in Britain. 20 A British audience could compare this to Peter Sellers’s French parodies. The film exploits English stereotypes and features a British aristocrat gangster and his gang of pretty boys. 21 Grangier’s films combine drama and a humanist dimension. The emphasis on social change is also noted by Billard (1995: 556) and Hewitt (2004: 73). 22 Like Audiard, Simonin was a child of the Paris faubourgs (he was born in La Chapelle in the 18th district in the north of the city). They shared similar popular parigot backgrounds and an interest in popular Parisian slang. Simonin, who spent five years in prison following the Liberation as punishment for his work for collaborationist newspapers under the Occupation, was an expert in slang, with links to the underworld. The crime writer Léo Malet nicknamed him the ‘Chateaubriand of slang’ for his crime novels written in a unique style. Simonin also compiled a slang dictionary, Le Petit Simonin illustré (1957). See Guérif (1971: 120–​1); de Tilly (2013: 44–​5). 23 See Hewitt (2004) for a detailed genesis of the film. 24 Gabin was influential in the development stages: for example, he refused the scenes set in South America and proposed Blier for the role of Lepicard, a shifty gangster prefiguring Raoul in Les Tontons flingueurs. 25 Lautner had worked with Pierre Laroche, a screenwriter friend of Prévert, on the black comedy Le Monocle noir (Lautner, 1961). This gave him a taste for sharp parodic dialogue.

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26 See Lacomme (2013: 33–​7) for Lautner’s detailed account of the genesis of the film, especially the difficult relations with Gaumont. 27 Audiard signed a contract with Gaumont on 5 December 1962 for a script to be delivered on 31 January 1963 bearing the mention ‘dialogue:  unspecified topic’ (Durant 2013: 236). 28 For the context of the falling out with Gabin and the casting of Ventura, a friend of Audiard, see Durant (2001:  163–​9), Lautner (2005:  265–​72) and Vanderschelden (2020: 62–​3). 29 The less successful La Métamorphose des cloportes (Granier-​Deferre, 1965) prompted a change of writing strategy, moving away from the traditional underworld. 30 Ventura who played the lead hated the film’s spirit so much that he refused to promote it and never worked with Lautner again. 31 In fact, Simonin had written most of the screenplay and Audiard had then added 25 key lines, which would become the most memorable ones (Germain and Gega 2013: 23). See also Verneuil’s testimony in Doisne (1996: 103–​6). 32 QUINQUIN: You are not planning to make me carry the can? [wear the hat is an idiom for take the blame] /​JOSS: Well, when we’ve got one lying around, we need to find a head for it. Whether it fits or not. 33 NATHALIE: There should be clinics for sex maniacs/​JOSS: There were some, but they got closed down. 34 Referring to the events of May 1968, De Gaulle compared striking students to ‘wild ducks’ mistaken for ‘children of God’, with the result of drawing more people into cinemas to watch the film (Cassati 2015: 154–​5). 35 See Kozloff’s functions of film dialogue (2000: 34–​5) already mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. 36 Several testimonies confirm discrepancies between Audiard’s recognition as sole dialogue writer in credits and his actual contribution. Pierre Tchernia, his co-​writer on Carambolages (Bluwal, 1963) is credited for the adaptation, but not for the dialogue, but reviews his actual contribution to the dialogue in his memoirs (cited in Lombard 2013:  68–​9); Pinoteau (2005:  155) recalls how, for a fee of twenty-​five million francs, Audiard changed twenty-​five cues in Simonin’s screenplay for Mélodie en sous-​sol. Conversely, Audiard’s contribution to the dialogue of Des Pissenlits par la racine (Lautner, 1963) was not fully credited: the credits and film poster mention Clarence Weff (in collaboration with Audiard), but Durant (2001: 179–​80) argues that in reality, Audiard substantially rewrote Weff’s dialogue. Germain (2012: 148) is quite critical of this dialogue, suggesting that Audiard only developed Jo’s (Maurice Biraud) lines. 37 DABE:  I’ll send you a guy this week/​PAULINE: How will I  know him? /​ DABE: Handsome, brown hair, with a small moustache, tall, looks like an idiot. /​ PAULINE: Tall idiots are everywhere you look. /​DABE: Yeah, but this one stands out. If stupidity could be measured, he would be the yardstick. He would be in Sèvres! [Sèvres is where the official measuring standard is kept.]

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38 Audiard calls this process ‘word chiselling’ (Jeanne and Roux 2002). Referring to his reading and his taste for listening to others talk, Audiard also admits in this interview to being ‘a word thief’. However, he then reinterprets the words with rhythm. 39 JOSS:  I’m sick of the mob. Forty years of being hassled by criminals! In my office, at the cinema, in the papers! In pale suits or leather jackets, old or young, I’ve seen every style. They kill and rape, yet their life is a middle-​class dream and women fall for them! It’s romantic! So I’ll go along with the fashion. I’m no longer going to send the crooks to court, I’m going to take them out of circulation, not with papers, but with bullets! No more cases thrown out of court, or reduced sentences! I’m going to organise the Saint Bartholemew’s massacre of the underworld! And I’m not counting on anyone to back me up. I’ll be gone in six months. I know you have the speeches ready and the cakes ordered. So what’s the worst that can happen? I miss out on my share of the cake? 40 DABE: Hey there, careful now you guys! What’s going on? It looks like you’re taking me for a ride. /​LEPICARD: Are you crazy? /​DABE: Oh no, I’m not crazy! Not crazy at all! And if you try to push me around, you’ll come off worse, I’m telling you! And what’s this dodgy paper, anyway? That wasn’t in the plan? Where did you get it? /​ERIC: Listen, Dabe, straight up, we wanted to give you a surprise. /​ DABE (slapping Eric): And you call that a good one? Surprise me, you were trying to rob me! With fake paper! That’s why you got the kid on board. But he cleared off with the cash, your wonder boy! So, no one’s spared, we’re all washed up! For once, it’s not your Holland screwing things up, it’s a little shit who browns me off, at my age! And I can’t even file a complaint! 41 Cos I’m telling you that Monsieur Eric, with his Scottish suits made in Roubaix, his fake cufflinks and his Italian shoes made in Grenoble, well, he’s just a fake. And that’s just his appearance. Cos if I went in for psychoanalysis, I’d add that he’s also the king of idiots. And even then, at least kings turn up on time. Cos I’ve known a lot of kings, my dear sir, and not cut price ones either. Hanovers, Hohenszollerns, guaranteed crusade material … All that to say that your friend Eric, with his fancy poses, he can’t compete. 42 Examples include Gabin’s monologue in Le Président (Verneuil, 1961), la Fleur’s (Dany Carrel) lines in Un idiot à Paris (cited in Durant 2001:  217) and Antoine’s (Claude Rich) cues in Les Tontons flingueurs (cited in Durant 2001: 168). 43 LEPICARD:  Between you and me, Dabe, just supposing … say, just supposing I find a printer, some paper and I print a million notes. Say, still just supposing, that five of us were in on it, what would be the net benefit? /​DABE:  Twenty years in the nick. Between crooks, benefits get divided, but time in prison gets multiplied. 44 See Thouvenin (2006) for a detailed analysis of the differences between argot and popular language. 45 These questions offer scope for further research on dialogue-​writing strategies. See Lodge (1997) for an overview of pragmatics of slang and the different types

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of popular registers associated with social identity. He demonstrates clearly the difficulty of classification. 46 All these lines are from Le Pacha. See Durant (2013:  82–​5). The term ‘con’ has provided expressions and comedy characters in all periods of cinema (e.g. Pignon in Veber’s Le Dîner de cons) (see Chapter 7). 47 See Thouvenin (2006) for analysis of the lexical field of ‘cave’. 48 CHARLES: I’m good natured, but my secular arm is wielding the sword of vengeance. The eagle will swoop down on the old buzzard. /​GANGSTER 1: That’s a nice metaphor. /​GANGSTER 2:  It’s not a metaphor, it’s a circumlocution. /​ GANGSTER 1: You’re pissing me off. /​GANGSTER 2: That’s a metaphor. 49 No, but did you see that? In peace time. He sings, and bang, a punch! This guy’s completely mad! But I like to sort out the mad ones. I’ll give him a prescription, and a strong one! I’ll show him who Raoul is. We’ll find him in all four corners of Paris, scattered in small bits, like a jigsaw … When I’ve had enough, I don’t bother correcting anymore, I dynamite, I disperse, I ventilate … 50 My name’s Rita. I’m well made and very clever. You guys, I don’t know what you’re into –​fried eggs, Teilhard de Chardin or rhythm and blues –​but I like money. It’s all I think about. That and men. Men who have money. 51 ANTOINE: Oh no, and just when the little flute was about to respond to the horn, you are hateful! /​PATRICIA: He’s right, uncle, it’s just not done. /​FERNAND: Well, that’s enough out of you. /​PATRICIA:  What’s the matter, uncle? Has something happened with your business? /​FERNAND: Oh hardly. If you don’t mind, Monsieur Delafoy, I  would like an explanation. Put your shoes on first, you’re ridiculous. /​ANTOINE:  What would you like me to explain, my dear sir? /​ FERNAND: All this, soft light, gentle music, and your shoes on the chairs, Louis XVI as well! /​ANTOINE:  This confusion should certainly be explained, but the terms are all wrong. /​FERNAND:  Ah, because perhaps it’s not Louis XVI? /​ ANTOINE: Well, no! It’s Louis XV. It’s true that you were close there, but Corelli’s sonatas are not gentle music. /​FERNAND: Well they are for me. And this is my house! /​ANTOINE: Well, I like that. It’s a daring thesis, but like all theses, can be defended. But if you don’t mind, we should discuss the music according to where it’s played, the elixir and the bottle, the container and the liquid. /​ FERNAND: Patricia, my darling … I have no wish to appear old fashioned, still less vulgar, the man from the Pampa might be unrefined but he is always courteous, but I am forced to admit that your Antoine is really busting my balls. 52 Audiard’s writing for Belmondo would also offer an interesting case study, highlighting generational shifts in the dialogue. 53 Audiard suggests that his encounter with Jouvet for Une histoire d’amour (Guy Lefranc, 1951) changed his ‘bankability as a dialogue writer’. 54 For examples of specific lines, see Germain (2012: 13). 55 See Vanderschelden (2016c) on Jacques Audiard’s screenwriting career. 56 For examples of screenwriters and directors, see Odicino et al. (2015). 57 For examples, see headlines in Le Point, e.g. ‘Sarkozy: le tonton flingueur de la politique’ (Mahrane 2013); political articles in L’Humanité (Crépel 2013) and Marianne (Konopnicki 2014); and sporting references (Telo 2016).

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Screenwriting trends in popular comedy

Comedy has been at the forefront of the French film industry since the post-​ war period in terms of both box-​office records and cultural impact. For readers who are less familiar with this genre, Les Comédies à la française (Geudin and Imbert 2011) and Comédies françaises (Grassin and Sender 2011) document the production contexts of the classic films and provide valuable insights. Comedy films have long been neglected and under-​ researched in France and in other countries, especially with regard to evaluating the writing process and critically analysing comic mechanisms and dialogue. Since 2000, the comedy genre has attracted more attention from scholars, but the critical discourse is still often restricted to its relationship with –​mainly vaudeville and boulevard –​theatre traditions (Lanzoni 2014), to comic stardom (Vincendeau 2000) and to the attractiveness of specific comedy plots for remakes (Mazdon 2000; Moine 2007). However, French comedy screenwriters are part of a strong francophone tradition, even if they also refer to other cinematic influences in interviews. Specifically, the American comedy style appeals as a model, with screenwriters making repeated explicit references to Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Woody Allen and, more recently, the Farrelly brothers and Judd Apatow. Comedy conventions promote narrative pace, effective timing and comic effects produced via dialogue. As a result, gags, plot and acting are often perceived to be more important than innovative mise en scene for generating comic effects, and this is discernible in the critical discourse around comedy. Referring to post-​war cinema, the film historian Jill Forbes (1992:  171) suggests that ‘the output of [comedy] directors and actors is often vulgar, formulaic and repetitive’ and ‘of less interest than other genres when examining how the cinema has developed’. Grassin and Sender (2011: 12) also identify trends that contribute to the perception that comedy is a less cinematic genre, whose success is due to the perennial popularity of comedy actors, and the way in which films capitalise on the air du temps. However, given the centrality of the genre to the French film industry and its popularity, we consider it essential to include a chapter on comedy

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screenwriters and the process of writing comedy films. We have chosen to focus on two cases representing significant trends:  an established comedy screenwriter, Francis Veber, whose career spans from the 1970s to the 2010s and who is probably the only French comedy screenwriter who can boast a career in Hollywood; and the more collective writing experience of the Le Splendid café-​théâtre troupe during the late 1970s. The success of Le Splendid’s film adaptations launched the solo careers of a number  of comedy authors, including Michel Blanc, Gérard Jugnot and Josiane Balasko. Recently, a larger number of comedy screenwriters have emerged from other artistic avenues, such as live spectacle and short TV shows. This has transformed modes of plot construction, character development and use of dialogue. Although a detailed examination of these screenwriters is beyond the scope of this chapter, which aims to engage critically with contemporary writing trends, they are mentioned occasionally for comparative purposes. Since the 1980s, women screenwriters have also played an increasing role in a genre that has long been dominated by male authors and comic characters. Coline Serreau and Danièle Thompson, followed by Balasko and Valérie Lemercier, have transformed the comedy landscape by putting female characters at the centre of their screenplays (see Vanderschelden 2015b). More than in any other genre, comedy screenwriters are in need of rehabilitation, in terms of both their legitimacy as artists and authors, and their crucial role as capital for developing the most profitable films that support the French film industry. As Marie-​ France Briselance suggests (2000: 81), comedy writing presents a series of risks for the screenwriter: the risk of being taken literally, the risk of offending the audience, and, worst of all, the risk of not being perceived as funny. Yet comedy authors rarely receive praise from French critics and cinema institutions, regardless of the public reception given to the comic object they have helped to create. Furthermore, dialogue, which is so important in the French comic tradition, attracts less attention in contemporary cinema than it did in the 1930s and 1940s, when most reviews included a paragraph evaluating its qualities (see Introduction). The public success of a comedy film tends to be attributed to other factors, such as actor performance, entertainment value or even a timely release date.1 The sizeable corpus of comedies since 1945 makes it impossible to be comprehensive, or do full justice to the diversity of the genre. Our choice of synopses and screenplays to illustrate contemporary comedy is driven by the desire to present examples of successful comedies and to compare writing methods and legacies. Rehabilitating comedy screenwriting requires eliciting the creativity of the screenplays, often devalued or dismissed in critical discourse as adaptations of pre-​existing works. This is especially

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true of comedy films derived from successful plays –​for example, Le Dîner de cons/​Dinner Game (Veber, 1998) –​or inspired by live shows in which performance style prevails over the cinematic dimension of comic effects. This is the case for the two Le Splendid cult comedies discussed in this chapter, Les Bronzés/​French Fried Vacation (Leconte, 1978)  and Le Père Noël est une ordure/​Father Christmas is a Jerk (Poiré, 1981), and in the screenplays of Dany Boon, Jamel Debbouze and Lemercier. Consequently, we draw distinctions in our examples between adaptations of plays and live shows on the one hand, and original comic screenplays written directly for cinema on the other. In order to present different examples of influential comedy screenwriters, their working strategies and the comic impact and nature of their screenplays, we draw on different literary and dramatic trends (e.g. farce and satirical comedy). We also refer to specific oral traditions, such as tirade, improvisation and stand-​up, in order to establish what has fashioned comedy screenwriting in France over the last forty years. Within this volume’s overarching objective of evaluating the role and visibility of screenwriters, we address the development of comedy plots, the construction of legendary comic characters and the creation of memorable humorous dialogue. These features contribute to defining contemporary comedy writing within French cultural identity and highlight the links between different types of comedies:  screenwriters’ backgrounds, comedy typologies and current trends. More specifically, we focus on three key areas. First, we explore the connection with theatre, the renewal of the vaudeville tradition in Veber’s comedy screenplays and the construction of ‘open’ characters, especially the legendary recurring character François Pignon. Second, we look at the screenwriting practices and career evolutions of the members of Le Splendid, who were influenced by the café-​théâtre tradition of the 1970s and whose hit comedy films were adaptations of their original live shows. They have dominated comedy production on the stage and in films since the 1980s. Finally, we consider the place occupied by women in French comedy screenwriting since the 1970s, illustrated by the career of Balasko. We use a range of sources, including published screenplays, press interviews (Salé 1981), reflective testimonies by Le Splendid in Génération Père Noël (Grenier 1994), Veber’s autobiographical account of his unusual career (Veber 2010), and critical writing on comedy in French and in English (e.g. Harris 1998; Moine 2007; Lanzoni 2014). Some of these sources help to establish direct connections between screenwriting and comic theory (Defays 1996; Critchley 2002; Stott 2005), while others reveal connections with modes of comedy used in théâtre de boulevard, café-​théâtre (Merle 1985) and the vaudeville tradition (King 2002; Brunet 2004). In addition to this work, which contextualises the trends and generic influences that have

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shaped French comedy writing, we also draw on Michel Chion’s (2007) typology of film dialogue, and on three of Sarah Kozloff’s (2000:  33–​4) dialogue functions:  ‘character and (linguistic) realism’, ‘opportunities for star turns’ and the ‘exploitation of the resources of language’. For Audiard (Chapter  6), this typology highlighted a number of creative strategies for writing dialogue in different genres, including pastiche. In this chapter, they frame the analysis of generic conventions associated with comedy screenwriting.

Comedy screenwriting: contexts and trends Little academic work in screenwriting studies has focused on comedy, even less so on French comedy. At best, comedy screenwriting is considered a skill that can be taught:  significantly, both of the manuals available in France for comedy screenwriting training are American works translated for the French market: Writing the Comedy Film: Make ‘em Laugh (Voytilla and Petri 2003), also published in France in 2005, and The Hidden Tools of Comedy: The Serious Business of Being Funny (Kaplan 2013). The first of these imports principles of comedy writing and proposes two comic perspectives: that of the author and/​or director and that of the actors. The second is marketed as a course in comedy writing as a commercial venture. Adopting a pragmatic ‘toolkit’ approach, both books address the main elements of comedy writing (character development, plot and dialogue) without making a distinction between original works and adaptations (play, live show and so forth). Drawing mainly on American examples, these two texts confirm the links between Hollywood and French comedy authors, as noted in the chapter introduction and in Table 7.1. In terms of academic work, postulates used by scholars or critics to define general screenwriting practices can be applied to French comedy writing. Jill Nelmes (2007:  107) makes a useful distinction between screenwriting as craft or creative activity. This accounts for the central features of French comedy: the established narrative conventions of comic dramaturgy, and the special attention paid to dialogue. Her distinction is echoed by screenwriter and director Olivier Assayas (1985: 7), who opposes ‘open’ and ‘closed’ (or ‘completed’) screenplays. Given Assayas’s association with auteur cinema, we might assume that he would place comedy screenwriting in the ‘closed screenplay’ category; that is, a screenwriting approach based on control in which all is ‘driven by dramaturgy’ (1985: 7). In Chapter 5, we considered the notion of open and closed screenplays in relation to New Wave screenwriting as a way of addressing the flexibility of the written text and its continued transitional status throughout the filming and editing stages. This

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idea is also relevant to the case studies in this chapter, in particular for comparing dialogue styles. Comic dialogue often needs to be performed exactly as it is written, respecting rhythm, lexical choices and sound patterns, but in films which favour an improvisational style, it is more likely to change from take to take. Finally, Steven Maras’s (2011:  281) approach, which distinguishes between ‘standardisation’ and ‘differentiation’ as writing strategies, can help to pinpoint trends and differentiate between comedy writing techniques. These preliminary distinctions will each help to articulate the analysis of the nature of comedy screenplays, starting with character development. Briselance’s (2000:  79–​81) short essay on comedy screenwriting also highlights a few features to add to our discussion. She points to the ‘inversion of values’ in comedy, the ‘anarchic function’ of comedy dialogue and its ‘militant subversive’ tone, all of which are directly relevant to discussions on our case studies. Creating emblematic characters is central to the comic tradition. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, partly in reaction to the New Wave, many popular comedies and their stars dominated the French box office for mainstream entertainment. Louis de Funès and Bourvil starred in vaudeville-​like situation comedies, often written by Gérard Oury, which relied on contrasting performance style and visual slapstick.2 Le Corniaud (Oury, 1965; 11.7 million entries) and La Grande Vadrouille/​Don’t Look Back, We Are Being Shot At (Oury, 1966; 17.2  million entries) revolve around the adventures of desexualised characters and make use of mistaken identities, bullying, chases and slamming doors (Vincendeau 2000:  145). On the other hand, the military comedies inspired by the ‘comique troupier’ tradition, such as Jean Girault’s ‘Gendarme’ films,3 the ‘septième compagnie’ and the ‘Bidasses’ series, all parody an excessive sense of order and use regressive humour aimed at family audiences (Vincendeau 2000: 145).4 The comedies written by Audiard and his teams, discussed in Chapter  6, also featured prominently during this period. From the mid-​1970s, an increasing number of new francophone comedy authors emerged from the café-​théâtre channels; for example, the Le Splendid troupe (see the case study in this chapter). From the 1980s, a new generation of author-​comedians emerged who built their reputation on trendy comedy shows written for television, notably Canal+. The sketches of Les Nuls made Alain Chabat and Chantal Lauby famous, and Jamel Debbouze, Kad Merad and Omar Sy wrote for various short recurrent programmes from the 1990s onward (Vanderschelden 2017). The original star personas they established through daring performances and innovative narrative forms prepared the ground for cinema careers in hit comedies such as Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis/​Welcome to the Sticks (Boon, 2008) for Merad, and Intouchables/​Untouchable (Nakache and Tolédano,

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2011)  for Sy. Lemercier is another example of an author-​comedian who crossed over from stand-​up to comedy acting, screenwriting and directing (Vanderschelden 2015b:  344–​5). This porosity between television or live comedy writing and screenwriting explains some of the changes in trends addressed in this chapter.5 Comedy box-​ office hits embrace realistic sociocultural contexts, portraying social change, class differences, the generation gap, geographical regional and spatial specificity, in addition to the sociolinguistic features of language in the dialogue (sociolect and idiolect). They often address current affairs or issues at the centre of public debate. Baurez and Benamon (2015: 61) refer to ‘comedy with a moral dimension’, while Steve Kaplan (2013:  33) talks of ‘the art of telling the truth on what it means to be human’. For example, Gazon maudit/​French Twist (Balasko, 1995)  uses inversion and farce to address gender prejudice and fluid sexual identity, and Le Placard/​The Closet (Veber, 2001)  addresses commonplace homophobia in the workplace. Qu’est-​ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu/​Serial (Bad) Weddings (Chauveron, 2014), a more recent hit co-​produced by TF1 and starring Christian Clavier and Lauby, exploits stereotypes and also tackles religious diversity (Delaporte 2017). It places itself in the lineage of the 1970s de Funès classic Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob (Oury, 1973), written by the director with his daughter Danièle Thompson.6 Rabbi Jacob makes fun of consensual cultural rituals (Nathan 2014), relying on situation gags around inverted social and family values, and resorting to politically incorrect dialogue on religion and ethnicity in ways that have become much less acceptable since 2000 (see Mury 2004). The screenplay of Qu’est-​ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu has the merit of engaging with cultural diversity; however, unlike Rabbi Jacob, it diffuses any debate by carefully avoiding religious questions and conforming to the comic convention of the happy end. Another significant factor to consider is the importance of comedies in the ecosystem of the film industry, which influences screenplay-​development trends and production mechanisms. For example, comedy budgets tend to be above average and their primary target is francophone audiences, yet they are rarely recipients of public subsidies. Box-​office results constitute the main measure of impact:  for films exceeding four million entries, the mass effect comes into play, enabling a reliable analysis of the impact on the public collective consciousness. Only a handful of recent comedies, such as Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis and Intouchables, have successfully exported French humour beyond the francophone world, albeit marketed as World Cinema and distributed in French with subtitles. Another method of measuring impact, which has been used since the 1970s, is to assess the practice of selling the rights of French comedies to American majors for potential remakes. The theory is that this should provide extra income for French

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authors, but in practice, it has often led to disappointment.7 In reality, it is not so much the screenplay that Hollywood acquires as the ‘concept’, which often changes dramatically when it crosses cultural boundaries. This process of recycling leads to comic remakes that retain little of the original French screenplay, as illustrated by the cases of Three Men and a Baby (Nimoy, 1987) and The Birdcage (Nichols, 1996) (Mazdon 2000: 91–​107 and Moine 2007: 164–​81). Table 7.1 presents the comedy screenwriters discussed in this chapter. It highlights that a large proportion of screenwriters also perform in or direct their screenplays (or both). The members of Le Splendid (the last five names in Table 7.1) began their careers as co-​authors of shows and a performing troupe; later, they developed solo cinematic careers as actors, authors and directors, confirming their screenwriting talent. In a different setting, Veber also moved from screenwriting into directing; however, unlike the members of Le Splendid, he never performed any role that he had created. French comedy film production is shaped by the comic traditions of the live stage, ranging from modern forms of Parisian vaudeville to café-​théâtre and live shows. This explains the porosity between comedy playwriting and comic screenplays. We focus here on two distinct styles of comedy writing that emerged in the 1970s:  the carefully structured writing of Veber, which was influenced by the bourgeois settings of boulevard and vaudeville (e.g. Feydeau); and the writing of Le Splendid, whose early collective screenplays fixed on paper oral modes of comedy that were largely improvised on stage. Vaudeville plays, which developed in nineteenth-​century France, were popular, multiple-​authored works. In this tradition, one author would specialise in the plot structures (called the carcasse, or skeleton, of the play), while the others focused on the dialogue, the raw material of dramatic comedy: Although vaudevilles were not based on a fixed cast of characters (as situation comedies are now), each play was infused with the same kinds of ingredients: stereotypes, situation-​based plots, reversals of fortune, mistaken identities and, of course, a happy end. (Terni 2006: 222)

Modern forms of vaudeville retain these elements. They often incorporate a commentary on social mores into the situation comedy, using quid pro quo, twists and turns, and light slapstick.8 The happy ending is no longer essential, and is frequently subverted in different ways. For example, the play Le Père Noël est une ordure (1977) is more ferociously satirical than the film, featuring a particularly dark ending, which was rewritten for the film to tone down the subversive humour. Veber’s screenplays reinvent vaudeville narrative without subverting its structural codes to the same extent. As we

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Table 7.1  Functions of screenwriters in the development of comedy films Screenwriter (acknowledged influences)

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Francis Veber

Playwright Novelist Director

Forty-​six credits Six plays as author and from co-​author from 1968 late 1960s Influences: Lubitsch, Frank Capra, Wilder, Danny Kaye, Harpo Marx, Feydeau, Sacha Guitry, Michel Audiard

Valérie Five screenplay N/​A Lemercier credits from 1996

Actor

N/​A

Twelve N/​A directing credits from 1976

N/​A

Five Actor in directing her films credits and for from others 1996

N/​A

Six Actor in directing own credits films from and for 2005 others

Dany Boon

One play Seven screenplay credits from 2005 Influences: Louis de Funès

Gérard Jugnot

Eight screenplay credits; co-​ author of four Splendid films Influences: Café-​ théâtre; Italian comedy, Peter Sellers

Christian Clavier

Fifteen co-​writing Co-​author N/​A credits including of five five Splendid films Splendid Influences: Café-​ plays théâtre; Louis de Funès

Co-​author N/​A of five Splendid plays

Eleven Actor in directing most of credits his films from and for 1983 others

One film (2011)

Actor in all co-​ written films and for others

(continued)

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Table 7.1 (Cont.)

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Screenwriter (acknowledged influences) Nine co-​writing Thierry credits including Lhermitte four Splendid films

Playwright Novelist Director

Actor

Co-​author N/​A of four Splendid plays

One film (1991)

Mainly actor

Co-​author N/​A of three Splendid plays

Five Actor in directing some of credits his films from and for 1984 others

Michel Blanc

Thirteen co-​ writing credits including three Splendid films Influences: Café-​ théâtre

Josiane Balasko

Author or co-​author Co-​author Three Eight Actor in all of eight full of four novels credits her own screenplays; co-​ Splendid directing films writing credits for plays from and for two Splendid films 1983 others Influences: Café-​ théâtre

shall see, the screenplays he derived from his plays simply implement pragmatic compromises to adapt them to the modes and codes of the film medium.

Francis Veber: reinventing vaudeville for film comedy Veber (b. 1937)  has constructed more than thirty screenplays around situation comedies characterised by, among other things, recurring character types, carefully paced narratives and effective dialogue. His career is documented in a biography, Que ça reste entre nous (Veber 2010), interviews and masterclasses (Salé 1981; Medioni 1999). Some of Veber’s plays have been published (Veber 1994), but archive material or draft screenplays are not available. Veber comes from a family of authors, including his uncle, the renowned playwright Tristan Bernard. He finds his inspiration in the American comedy tradition, including Danny Kaye, Harpo Marx, Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder (see Berger and Layrac 2001: 18). Like many French comedy authors, he also draws on the golden age of Italian comedy (the 1960s), which includes favourite classics such as I Soliti Ignoti/​Persons Unknown (Monicelli, 1958).9

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Veber wrote his first plays in the late 1960s, and success came with L’Enlèvement in 1968, adapted into Appelez-​moi Mathilde (Pierre Mondy, 1969). After working with Georges Lautner, he wrote the screenplays for the cult comedies Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire/​The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (Yves Robert, 1972)  and Le Retour du grand blond/​The Return of the Tall Blond Man (Robert, 1974). These established Veber’s screenwriting reputation more firmly and launched Pierre Richard’s career as a comic star. Richard’s oddball persona –​in turn absent-​minded, clumsy and burlesque10  –​was partly inspired by Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, although Richard’s version is more expansive. Empowered by the success of these films, Veber embarked on directing with Le Jouet/​The Toy (1976), developing the screenplay from a short story that he had written in the 1960s and employing Richard as lead.11 In the 1980s, Veber’s screenplays continued to generate comedy from the contrast between the characters played by Richard and Gérard Depardieu. Veber tailored a trilogy for them: La Chèvre/​The Goat (1981), Les Compères/​The Comdads (1983) and Les Fugitifs/​The Fugitives (1986), each relying on high-​concept comedy and a story developed in numerous successive drafts.12 This slow process of fine-​tuning characterises Veber’s method of producing a dynamic comic alchemy between the characters, served by carefully written dialogue and controlled actor direction that recalls theatre practice: Playwriting teaches you to retain the attention of the public and make characters come to life. It is a lot of work and humility. Then, the public decides, and you know if you got it wrong or not. On stage, you can still put it right, but in a film, it is too late already. (Veber in Wachthausen 2011)

This is why Veber places so much emphasis on actor direction and insists on the actors remaining close to the final version of the screenplay. This final version is driven by ‘economic’ preoccupations; namely, distilling the dialogue to what is essential in the knowledge that this will be retained in the edited version of the film. When asked about variations between the script and the finished film, Veber replies confidently that it remains ‘very much the same’ –​mostly for efficiency reasons, but also to preserve the musicality of the text: I sometimes lose one minute. It depends on the screenplay, you know. There are people who shoot 2 or 3 hours of material, and then they cut and cut and cut. That’s stupid, because they’ve lost money and time. […] It’s always about the performance. On the set, the dialogue is the same. It’s just the way you say the lines. One little change [in the way an actor says a] word makes all the difference. It’s like music. It’s a fascinating thing to direct the music of what you have written. (Veber in O’Keefe 2007)

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Combining the roles of author and director affects the way in which Veber approaches comic mise en scene. In keeping with his theatre background, he tends to maintain dramatic distance and favour farcical situations and dialogue over realistic settings and spatial mobility, although he claims to use intimate settings to enhance emotional moments. Thus, he makes a distinction between playwriting and screenwriting: I see myself as a screenwriter rather than a playwright. That’s where I  feel at ease. In plays, everything relies on the text, on the word that projects, on conventions accepted in advance. I  prefer the intimacy of cinema. It affects emotions and sincerity more, without forcing the tone. I  also like the way realism is closer to the logic of life. (Veber in Chardère 2000: 219)

As with Audiard (as we saw in Chapter 6), characters and dialogue writing take precedence over mise en scene and cinematic vision: I’m a writer who directs, which is just not exactly the same as a director. There are directors who love images. For me, what I’m trying to do is be as truthful as possible to what I’ve written. So I don’t need to have my camera out running around. Whenever possible, writer-​directors are usually more interested in their stories, than in being an acrobat with the camera. (Veber in O’Keefe 2007)

Veber’s writing is primarily character-​based. His screenplays explore stereotypes by observing individuals in a group and placing them in everyday situations. He has invented a gallery of recurrent fictitious archetypes, who even share the same patronyms from film to film (Pignon, Perrin, Lucas, Campana, Santini, and so forth). Different actors have played these emblematic characters over the years creating an ambiguity around identity that grants them a universal dimension. The best-​known recurring character, François Pignon, varies in appearance and social background depending on the chosen actor, but he has some consistent features. He is a naive, blundering, depressed or suicidal but ordinary person, or a victim exploited by others, with a tendency to encounter situations in which he is out of his depth but is not aware of it. Veber’s play Le Contrat in 1968, which he adapted for cinema as L’Emmerdeur/​A Pain in the Ass (Molinaro, 1973), was the first to feature the character Pignon, played by Jacques Brel in the film. Pierre Richard took on the role in Les Compères and Les Fugitifs, with Jacques Villeret taking over for Le Dîner de cons, followed by Daniel Auteuil in Le Placard and La Doublure (Veber, 2006).13 In the 1970s, a François Perrin character, often embodied by Richard, took form in Veber’s imagination and provided an alternative to Pignon in Le Jouet, Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire and La Chèvre. More emphasis rests on the oblivious, anti-​heroic side of the Perrin character type and the character’s

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lack of awareness triggers twists and gags in the plot that draw on burlesque and silent comedy traditions. Designed as antagonists for Pignon or Perrin, Veber’s strong, masculine character types are defined by their physicality. Examples include Milan –​ played by Lino Ventura in the 1973 version of L’Emmerdeur and Bernard Blier in Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire –​ Campana –​ Depardieu in La Chèvre and Jean Reno in Le Jaguar (Veber, 1996)  –​Santini  –​ Depardieu in Le Placard –​and Lucas –​Depardieu again in Les Compères and Les Fugitifs. They are violent, hot-​tempered or bullies (or a combination thereof), strong-​minded and self-​confident. In keeping with familiar comedy narrative structure and vaudeville tradition, they see their unexpected meeting with a Pignon or a Perrin, which sets in train a series of fast-​paced events, as disrupting their lives. In the collective public imagination, Veber’s fictional names have now become associated with familiar archetypes of incompatible opposites forced to join forces to resolve a series of crises. The actual characterisation and development of social backgrounds remains secondary to vaudeville, slapstick and situation comedy. As one critic puts it: [Veber’s] perspective on the world is simple, childish:  on the one hand, you have those who mock and on the other their victims; the bad guys and the stupid ones; the tricksters and the tricked. Knowing that of course, in trying to be popular, the script always turns the tables, the stupid one turning out not to be as stupid as one thinks, and the bad guy not as bad and so on. (Lalanne 2001)

Veber’s idea for a plot or pitch usually starts with a real-​life anecdote, from which he extracts comedic situations: the incongruous meeting of a suicidal man and a killer; two men looking for the same boy, each believing he could be their biological son. The narrative rests on exaggerated behaviour and repetition, an unlikely build-​up of situations and a combination of verbal and visual gags. As we have seen, the screenplays recycle familiar tropes from the théâtre de boulevard and vaudeville, including slapstick, verbal repartee and mistaken identity, but their construction around fast-​paced twists and turns also recalls American screwball comedy. Occasionally (for example, La Chèvre and Le Jaguar), they include bigger-​budget adventure plots, exotic journeys, or both. Veber’s scripts are often compared to clockwork mechanisms because of their carefully calibrated pace and rhythm and their cause-​and-​effect dynamics. The screenwriter’s objective is to achieve a continuous flow of comic situations around which ‘structuring arcs’ are developed: The situation is very important. When you take a cat and a dog and put them together, you have a situation. But then you have to enrich the whole thing.

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It’s a tough job. It takes about a year to write a script. Someone in France once observed of my Pignon that he does not choose his situation, he is always chosen. In La Chèvre […] Perrin is chosen because of his bad luck, but he doesn’t know it. Then the arc of the film makes these characters into heroes. That is what I do again and again in my films. (Veber in Merrill 2006)

Some critics see this as a negative trait, arguing that Veber’s screenplays are formulaic (Lalanne 2001). Others present Veber in a more positive light: as an ‘alchemist’ who knows exactly how to portion his comic ingredients in order to extract the universal aspects of human nature: A rigorous alchemist who has the perfect recipe for acerbic yet good-​natured comedy, including some cruelty, a pinch of feeling, the skill of associating talented and contrasting actors, and a sense of lightness rare in this type of humour. Normally, the heavier it is, the more it works. Veber’s style is closely related to Molière’s in that he knows how to focus on details of human nature in order to elucidate the most universal elements. (Romain, no date)

Le Dîner de cons provides a perfect illustration of this method.14 First performed on stage in Paris in September 1993 at the Théâtre des Variétés, with Pierre Mondy as stage director, it ran for more than nine hundred performances with Villeret in the role of Pignon, opposite Claude Brasseur as Pierre Brochant, the initiator of the dinner games.15 After the play toured in New York and London, Veber adapted it into an award-​winning screenplay and film.16 Alain Poiré and Gaumont produced the film for a budget estimated at eighty-​two million French francs (12.5 million euros), with the former Le Splendid actor Thierry Lhermitte replacing Brasseur as Brochant and Villeret keeping the role of Pignon.17 With 9.2 million entries in France, it topped the box office for 1998, attracting producers who wanted to buy the rights for an American remake. After many rewrite attempts involving different screenwriters but not Veber (Andy Borowitz and Cinco Paul; Ken Daurio and Jon Vitti), a screenplay for the remake was credited to David Guion and Michael Handelman. Dinner for Schmucks (Roach, 2010), starring Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, failed to repeat the success of Veber’s film, probably due to cultural differences, which make comedies so difficult to transpose into another context and language.18 Le Dîner de cons Pierre Brochant (Lhermitte), a successful publisher, is one of a group of friends who organise regular ‘dinners for idiots’. Each invites an idiot as his guest; whoever brings the biggest idiot wins. Brochant’s victim is François Pignon (Villeret), an accountant at the Ministry of

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Finance. Brochant hurts his back playing golf, so when Pignon arrives at his apartment, Pierre tells him they will have to miss the dinner. Trying to help, Pignon makes the injury worse. Brochant’s wife Christine (Alexandra Vandernoot) phones to say she is leaving him. Sympathetic, Pignon insists on staying and tries to phone the doctor. But by mistake, he phones Brochant’s ex-​mistress, Marlène Sasseur (Catherine Frot), who says that she is coming round. Brochant, suspecting that Christine may be with her ex-​ husband, his former friend Juste Leblanc (Francis Huster), gets Pignon to call Leblanc on a pretext, but Leblanc sees through the ruse and comes round to help. Sent out to get rid of Marlène, Pignon bumps into Christine, who has changed her mind. Mistaking her for Marlène, he gives the game away and she storms off. Dismayed, Brochant concludes that Christine has gone to see Meneaux, a notorious womaniser. Pignon contacts his tax-​ inspector colleague Cheval (Daniel Prévost), who is auditing Meneaux, and Cheval reluctantly brings round the dossier revealing the address. But Meneaux is with Cheval’s wife. Cheval leaves, threatening to investigate Brochant’s finances. News comes that Christine has been in a car crash; injured, she refuses to see Brochant. Marlène tells Pignon the truth about the dinner game. Though hurt, he phones Christine to persuade her that Brochant needs her, but at the last moment, Pignon screws up again.

In the adaptation process of the play, entire scenes were cut, especially from the second act, with the result that some of the information that had originally been conveyed in the dialogue became more elliptical. This principle of condensation is central to Veber’s screenwriting priority of achieving a ‘high concept’ by sharpening the dialogue and toning down the theatrical effects. For example, in the film, Villeret does not project his voice as much in the telephone call scenes (Figure 7.1), which contain major comic moments caused by verbal misunderstandings, gaffes and double entendres. This change is a direct consequence of the ‘reduced distance’ process and performance style used for cinema to increase identification with characters (see Chardère 2000:  219). Veber also added a few outdoor scenes to the screenplay, such as the initial scene involving a boomerang and Christine’s car accident at the end. He developed the secondary characters, who had mainly fulfilled narrative functions in the play: Cheval the tax-​inspector, a

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predator who transforms Brochant into vulnerable prey, and Juste Leblanc and Marlène Sasseur, who drive the narrative spiral. Their patronyms provide material for a series of verbal jokes, which contributed greatly to the public success of the film (see Extract 3). Pignon, a sensitive loser whose actions unwittingly affect everyone around him, triggers the domino chain of comic situations that alter the lives of all concerned, starting with Brochant. As Philip Kemp (1999) notes, the dynamics stem from inverting the power relation between the two characters: The key dynamic in this kind of comic pairing isn’t the gravitation of the idiot to the straight guy, which is understandable enough, but the reverse: the fatal delusion on the part of a logical individual, operating on cool self-​interest, that even the most unpromising human material can, with a little coaching, be co-​ opted into the same well-​ordered system. Rather than recognising Pignon as a walking disaster area, to be shot of as rapidly as possible, Brochant treats him as a challenge to be overcome –​a dire miscalculation.

The con finds himself in situations that are not necessarily light, and the plots contain serious or touching scenes; for example, when Pignon talks about his failed relationship and when he discovers he has been deceived. Through the vaudeville convention of the aside, Brochant says out loud what he –​and the conniving audience –​think of Pignon in such lines as these: [to Pignon]:  Vous êtes vraiment un champion. (Well, you are the champion in your category!)

BROCHANT

BROCHANT (talking

about Pignon):  Il l’a fait! (He did it!)

BROCHANT (talking

about Leblanc): Il ne va pas se méfier du tout! (He isn’t going to suspect anything at all!)

As implied by these examples, many of the comic effects rely on the timely delivery of carefully crafted dialogue –​which is central to Veber’s trademark. The dialogue contains motifs that recur from film to film, leaving little room for text changes or improvisation during filming. Several anecdotes describe Veber’s lack of flexibility during takes in his quest to perform the exact ‘musical score’ (in French, la partition) for the oral delivery of his written words. Some cues rely heavily on scanning and alliteration: (singing):  Il est mignon monsieur Pignon. (He is cute, monsieur Pignon.) Il est méchant monsieur Brochant. (He is a brute, Monsieur Brochant.)

PIGNON

In all Veber’s scripts, the register is neutral, associated with middle-​class speech and inscribed in the socio-​cultural context of the late twentieth century. Unlike Jeanson and Audiard, Veber rejects the mots d’auteur that betray a self-​conscious use of creative, flowery language (see ­chapters 3 and 6).

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He also avoids phrases that are linked too specifically to one social group or period –​the pseudo-​slang of the 1950s underworld found in Audiard and Albert Simonin, or the satirical expressions of the post-​1968 air du temps found in the Le Splendid comedies. As Chion (2008:  125) argues in his analysis of Les Compères, Veber adopts a formalist approach to language, and this can be extended to all his screenplays. He even claims to adopt a strict ‘self-​censoring process’ (in Grassin and Sender 2011: 118). The sharp dialogue calls for quick-​fire repartee, and it is uttered by middle-​class or classless adults with no discernible accent.19 Therefore, it is all the more significant that when Pignon adopts a Belgian accent with Leblanc in Le Dîner de cons, it is in the context of a diegetic mimicking performance –​in true vaudeville tradition.20 Veber, like Audiard before him (as seen in Chapter  6), exploits extensively the comic potential of the lexical field of the con in most of his scripts.21 This confirms the timeless effectiveness of this term and its rich evocative power across generations. The ‘con’ of Le Dîner de cons is intertextual, as demonstrated by the use of Georges Brassens’s emblematic song for the film’s credits.22 The following examples taken from the film’s lines explore different rhetorical effects –​irony, self-​derision and play on words –​ associated with the term: [to Brochant]: Un con qui en moins d’une heure amène ta femme à l’adultère et toi au contrôle fiscal, c’est tout de même prodigieux! (An idiot who in less than an hour drives your wife to adultery and gets you a tax audit is really quite remarkable!) (Irony)

JUSTE LEBLANC

[to Christine]: Allô? C’est le con de votre mari! (Hello, this is your husband’s idiot on the phone) (self-​derision)

PIGNON

[to Brochant]:  Parfois j’ai l’impression que vous me prenez pour un imbécile. (Sometimes, I think you take me for an imbecile). (Play on words)

PIGNON

In this last example, the audience is bound to replace the word ‘imbécile’ with ‘con’. A more detailed analysis of Veber’s screenplays would probably also confirm that his definition of a con varies according to who says the word, in what context and in what tone of voice. The term con is transgressive, especially in a film title (see Sadler 2001: 4), but it can be nuanced according to context. Some tenderness and a sense of vulnerability can be associated with the term. The meaning can also be narrowed through the use of suffixes. For example, Pignon and Cheval also use the more vulgar derivative ‘connard’ between themselves, which could be translated as ‘bastard’ and is perceived as being very rude. But the insult is softened by the tone of voice and the implicit connivance of the two colleagues: it is used jokingly.23 In fact, Pignon is upset when Brochant calls him a ‘con’, but

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himself refers to his friend Cheval as a ‘connard’. The extract below, taken from the scene following the phone call to Leblanc, provides a definition in situation of what Brochant means by ‘un con’: Extract 1 (Le Dîner de cons): PIGNON:  Et voilà, on a les droits!!! Ouh, ouhlalala! Et pour pas cher à mon avis, il a marché, il a marché à fond le gars! BROCHANT:  Et ma femme? PIGNON:  Quoi? BROCHANT:  Il a oublié ma femme … Il fait le clown pendant cinq minutes et il oublie ma femme! PIGNON:  Ah la boulette! BROCHANT:  Ça dépasse tout c’que j’ai pu imaginer! PIGNON:  Ah oui, j’ai fait la boulette … BROCHANT:  On a repoussé les limites là … PIGNON:  J’le rappelle …24 Pignon’s representation as a con is often linked to linguistic misunderstanding and literal meaning, yet he is also portrayed as a joker who can use language playfully. He too resorts to double entendres, puns and similes. This is illustrated in the following cue to Brochant, who is lying on the floor in pain. In this case, it is Brochant who is (indirectly) made to look ridiculous: PIGNON [to

Brochant]:  Vous faites peine à voir, on dirait un cheval qui a raté une haie, on vous abattrait sur un champ de course. (It’s painful to look at you; you’re like a horse that missed the jump. At the racetrack, they’d shoot you.)

Figure 7.1  Pignon (Jacques Villeret) and Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte) in Le Dîner de cons.

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Pignon’s misunderstandings caused by phonetically ambiguous names have become anthology comedy pieces. In Extracts 2 and 3, the quid pro quos are integrated into the narrative with clever use of syntax: Extract 2 (Le Dîner de cons): PIGNON:  C’est quoi son numéro? BROCHANT:  01.47.47  … j’vais l’faire moi-​ même …! Il s’appelle Juste Leblanc. PIGNON:  Ah bon, il a pas d’prénom? BROCHANT:  Je viens d’vous l’dire:  Juste Leblanc! … Leblanc c’est son nom, et c’est Juste son prénom! PIGNON:  Hmm … BROCHANT:  Euh, Monsieur Pignon, votre prénom à vous c’est François, c’est juste? PIGNON:  Ouais … BROCHANT:  Eh bien lui c’est pareil, c’est Juste! Bon, on a assez perdu de temps comme ça!25 The effect is repeated when Pignon explains to Brochant that he has called his lover Marlène’s number in error. Extract 3 (Le Dîner de cons): PIGNON:  C’était votre sœur. BROCHANT:  J’ai pas de sœur. PIGNON:  Vous n’avez pas de sœur? Je lui ai dit: ‘Qui est à l’appareil?’, et elle m’a dit: ‘Sa sœur’. BROCHANT:  Il a appelé Marlène! PIGNON:  C’est pas votre sœur? BROCHANT:  C’est son nom, Sasseur. Marlène Sasseur. PIGNON:  J’pouvais pas savoir, moi. Elle me dit: ‘C’est Marlène Sasseur’. Avouez que c’est confusant.26 These examples illustrate Veber’s talent as a dialogue writer and show that they can only function in a ‘closed’ screenplay mode. Every word is part of a series of devices to generate comedy that only function as a whole (via alliteration, repetition, polyphony, polysemy or association of ideas). The meaning and comic effects produced extend beyond the linguistic content. Veber’s constant refinement of comic screenwriting can be associated with craftsmanship. With the iconic Pignon, who has become part and parcel of twentieth-​century French comedy heritage, he achieved maximum impact as a screenwriter. His legacy to French comedy is evident in the continued success of recent comic screenplays and films based on vaudeville or adapted from plays, such as Le Prénom (Patellière and Delaporte, 2011) and Papa ou maman and Papa ou maman 2 (Bourboulon, 2015; 2017). Veber also

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mixed with other French comedy ‘families’, not least through repeated collaborations with former café-​théâtre comedy actors, such as Depardieu (for a time associated with Le Café de la Gare) and Lhermitte, one of the leading actors of Le Splendid.

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Café-​théâtre and comedy screenwriting: Le Splendid The café-​théâtre tradition features prominently in the Paris cultural scene. The 1970s saw the revival of live comedy shows on the small stage by emerging troupes such as Le Café de la Gare, Le Splendid and La Veuve Pichard (Merle 1985; Harris 1998). As the values of French society changed, the bohemian spirit, improvisation and ferocious humour of café-​théâtre breathed ‘a little fresh air on the cultural scene’ and led to an ‘authentic renewal of stage expression’ (Merle 1985: 3). The impact of these troupes reached a peak between 1976 and 1978, dismantling typically French stereotypes and developing a close rapport between the actors and the public. They made a ‘vital contribution to the renewal of popular comedy in modern French cinema’ (Harris 1998). In 1969, Romain Bouteille and his troupe created Le Café de la Gare in Montparnasse, ‘a school for freedom and contradiction, using the spirit and language of the time, preferring/​favouring life experience to/​over culture’ (de Comes and Marmin 1985:  159). It introduced new comedians, such as Coluche, Patrick Dewaere, Miou-​Miou and Depardieu.27 The other troupe, Le Splendid, was created by four youngsters who had met at college in Neuilly in 1968:  Michel Blanc (b. 1952), Christian Clavier (b. 1952), Thierry Lhermitte (b. 1952)  and Gérard Jugnot (b. 1951). This troupe began performing live in 1972. Although they were clearly influenced by Le Café de la Gare, their style of humour is described as ‘situation comedy which was more accessible and more traditional than the “nonsensical” anarchy of Bouteille’s troupe’ (de Comes and Marmin 1985: 159). In true café-​ théâtre tradition, the sketches and plays were written, staged and performed in precarious conditions with a sense of urgency.28 Early shows created collegially by Le Splendid include La Concierge est tombée dans l’escalier (1971–​72), Non Georges, pas ici (1972), Je vais craquer (1972) and Ma tête est malade (1975). Between 1973 and 1974, Marie-​Anne Chazel (b. 1951), Valérie Mairesse (b. 1955), Josiane Balasko (b. 1950), Dominique Lavanant (b. 1944)  and Bruno Moynot (b. 1950)  joined Le Splendid, writing and performing on stage in Le Pot de terre contre le pot de vin (1976), Amours, Coquillages et Crustacés (1977), Le Père Noël est une ordure (1979) and Papy fait de la résistance (1981). Between 1973 and 1978, they also received small parts in various films with noteworthy directors (Bertrand Tavernier, Claude Miller and Yves Robert) and contributed to a few comedy

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screenplays. This experience was useful for the film adaptations of their plays, which they wrote together between 1978 and 1983. In keeping with the post-​1968 atmosphere, Le Splendid promoted collective work at all levels in their live productions, as confirmed in published interviews that include retrospective analysis of their working method. Everyone helped during the writing stage, contributing different ideas and complementary skills: Lhermitte is like a volcano with fifteen ideas per second. Jugnot masters the gags. Clavier is very witty. Balasko and Blanc act as moderators for the troupe’s energetic overflow. (Coltelloni 2000: 105) Clavier was in charge of the structure and Balasko focused on dialogue writing. They rewrote the plays as they tested them on stage to the point that it is now difficult to remember who wrote what. (Jugnot in Apiou 2003: 26)

This model of collective work, which prevailed in 1970s comedy screenwriting, perpetuated in its own way the collaborative writing traditions of Aurenche and Bost or Audiard (see ­chapters 4 and 6). At Le Splendid, though, each voice was equally authoritative, regardless of the nature of the contribution; the credits testify to this, as individual names are not usually mentioned (Lhermitte 2009). This collective writing was first tested on stage, which explains the stylistic heterogeneity and lines’ instability in the plays. The adaptation of the live shows into screenplays –​a process entailing many drafts –​generated the definitive written versions. This group dynamic was not without friction or disagreement. Individual personalities surfaced, and their priorities did not always coincide. Our two case studies are Les Bronzés and Le Père Noël est une ordure.29 The first film, Les Bronzés, adapted from the play Amours, coquillages et crustacés in 1978, was produced by Clavier’s uncle, Yves Rousset-​Rouart. The team commissioned a young director, Patrice Leconte, also credited as a co-​author, even if his contribution was restricted to finding plausible narrative transitions for the set-​piece comedy scenes, because Le Splendid wanted to retain full control over the screenplay (Grenier 1994: 205–​7).30 The synopses clearly show that the screenplays’ narrative development revolved around this adaptation of set pieces, which are privileged over the adaptation of characters and dialogue. Les Bronzés Gigi (Chazel), Jérôme (Clavier), Christiane (Lavanant), Jean-​Claude (Blanc) and Bernard (Jugnot) visit a Club Méditerranée resort on the Ivory Coast. Bernard is reunited with his wife, Nathalie (Balasko), who

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has already spent a week there, and the newcomers are welcomed by Popeye (Lhermitte), Bobo (Luis Rego) and Bourseault (Michel Creton), who are in charge of tours and entertainment for the holidaymakers. Popeye’s attempt to seduce record numbers of women contrasts with Jean-​Claude’s failure to seduce even one.

In true Le Splendid tradition, Les Bronzés portrays ‘ordinary’ young middle-​ class characters:  Jérôme is a doctor, Bernard and Nathalie are professionals, Gigi is a secretary, Christiane a beautician, and Popeye a holiday rep.31 These are adults behaving like teenagers; neither stupid nor heroic, they are just French people on holiday at the Club Méditerranée. The film conveys an atmosphere of mindless fun and partying, as suggested by the motto ‘sea, sex and sun’, incorporated in the film’s theme tune. Despite two incidents (a water-​skiing fiasco and the death of Bourseault), the characters play practical jokes on one another (dropping buckets of water on the new arrivals, stealing swimming trunks). They are in turn joker, victim and witness-​accomplice and the plot provides numerous twists, reversals of loyalty and chronic exclusion of certain characters; however, there is limited character study or evolution beyond a social satire of the ‘liberated’ middle classes of the 1970s. The comedy rests on stereotypes and satirical treatment through situation comedy and slapstick, the core features of Le Splendid’s approach to comedy and major contributing factors to the troupe’s success.32 Though often-​quoted dialogue contributes to the comic dynamics of Les Bronzés, the gags are often visual and linked to situation comedy. For example, when Jean-​Claude, who is wearing a bathrobe on the beach to avoid sunburn, tries to chat up Christiane (Lavanant), she aggressively responds: ‘Il a un malaise, le peignoir?’ (Is the bathrobe feeling unwell?), linking the joke to a visual effect. In the follow-​up, Les Bronzés font du ski (Leconte, 1979), the characters are more acerbic and some of the comic situations verge on the dramatic, for example when the group is lost in the mountains and a skier is injured. The characters are no longer carefree young people, and this makes them even more mediocre. Popeye’s private life is a mess, Jérôme and Gigi are always fighting, Bernard and Nathalie have moved into married-​life routine, and Jean-​Claude is lonelier than ever. Surfing on the success of Les Bronzés (2.18 million entries), Jugnot, Lhermitte and Clavier developed this screenplay directly for cinema, starting from the idea of the group lost in the mountains. Possibly because the writing context was more contrived –​ the producer demanded more scenes filmed in the resort, which resulted in some of the ‘wilder’ mountain scenes being cut –​the writing stage was

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more complicated, especially as the jokes had not first been tested with live audiences. Despite a few memorable situation comedy scenes –​such as Jean-​ Claude (Blanc) stranded on the ski-​lift, and the fondue dinner –​the second film left fewer traces in the French collective memory as is perhaps indicated by the dialogue’s reliance on linguistic devices and catchphrases familiar from the first film.33 In 1980, Lhermitte, Jugnot, Clavier, Chazel, Balasko and Moynot (according to the film’s credits) started to adapt their play Le Père Noël est une ordure in collaboration with screenwriter and director Jean-​Marie Poiré.34

Le Père Noël est une ordure On Christmas Eve, Félix (Jugnot), an outsider who hands out flyers dressed as Father Christmas, loses his job. He returns to his caravan to find that his pregnant girlfriend, Josette (Marie-​Anne Chazel), is about to leave him. When he goes after her, she takes refuge at SOS Détresse-​Amitié, a nightline charity run by two well-​meaning neurotic volunteers  –​Thérèse (Anémone) and Pierre (Lhermitte)  –​and the bossy Madame Musquin (Balasko). The evening is disrupted by a series of dramatic events involving a Polish neighbour who bakes inedible cakes, a broken lift and the unexpected visit of a suicidal transvestite, Katya (Clavier). Things really start to go wrong when Félix accidentally shoots a visitor. There was more conflict in the collaborative writing process for this film as the authors of the play were reluctant to make any changes. Poiré, who had writing experience, helped to improve the cohesion of the screenplay by balancing fierce satire and emotion. Using the scenes set in the SOS Détresse-​ Amitié office, he constructed the narrative around the notion that the people calling for help had no place in the office.35 The change of dynamics in the troupe also accounts for the inclusion of additional parts. Balasko, as Madame Musquin, remains conveniently trapped in the lift for most of the film so as not to interfere with the previously established structure of the play and Blanc receives a cameo role as an off-​screen pervert who shouts insults at the volunteers on the phone. This unusual writing method explains the multi-​layered dialogue of the film. Many of its satirical expressions are fully assimilated into French popular usage; for example, the invented word ‘doubitchou’ for the Polish chocolate truffle and the untranslatable expression ‘c’est kloug!’ (it’s yucky!), referring to the unsavoury appearance of

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Preskovitch’s cakes, often used even today to describe something odd or suspicious. The most quoted expression though is probably the expletive ‘C’est cela, oui!’ (I see, I  see!), which punctuates many of Pierre’s inane remarks, suggesting ironically that he does not quite grasp the situation (see Apiou 2003: 26–​7). In addition, the screenwriters repeatedly introduce neologisms and quips that play on repetition or homophony, sadly ignored by the subtitles. For example:

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MADAME MUSQUIN: 

Je ne vous jette pas la pierre, Pierre, mais j’étais à deux doigts de m’agacer (I’m not upset, Pierre, but I was nearly upset).

THÉRÈSE: 

C’est fin, c’est très fin, ça se mange sans faim (Exquisite! No need to be hungry).

These comedy effects rely on connivance with the audience, as the poker-​ faced characters deliver their word play while the audience laughs (see Chion 2008: 103). In the Splendid films, the characters are defined by their physical traits and costumes. A  form of ‘carnival’ is created around grotesque bodies, as illustrated by Jean-​Claude emerging from the sea naked preserving his modesty with seaweed or Jérôme’s taste for minimalist swimwear in Les Bronzés.36 This is further developed by the screenplays’ scatological humour and satirical treatment of stereotypes of sexual freedom in the post-​1968 spirit. The characters spend their time trying to ‘score’ with indiscriminate partners or discussing their future or past conquests. This translates in the dialogue as ‘avoir une ouverture’ (to have an opening) and ‘conclure’ (to score/​conclude)  –​repeated catchphrases that have had a lasting impact (Coltelloni 2000: 102). Popeye, the ‘lover boy’, contrasts with Jean-​Claude Dusse, who ‘fails to score’. This is a character type that Blanc went on to re-​use for his own hit comedy characters in the 1980s such as Denis in Marche à l’ombre (Blanc, 1984), and in darker dramas that he starred in later in his career, such as Monsieur Hire (Leconte, 1989).37 The single women (Gigi and Marianne) and the couple (Bernard and Nathalie) have similar preoccupations. Most of the conversations in the resort revolve around sexual freedom, with graphic accounts of performance (or lack thereof). Although the dialogue is occasionally crude and subversive, it remains within the boundaries of comedy humour aimed at young audiences: ‘an immature form of laughter but very much in the spirit of the times, which rests on a keen observation of language and behaviour’ (Villiers and Gressard 1985: 140). Most of the 1970s screenplays remain confined within the boundaries of heterosexual relationships and fantasies about group sex. In this sense, the Bronzés scripts are more consensual than Le Père Noël est une ordure, in which some of the characters are homophobic and violent. The dialogue of the latter is more

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explicitly obscene; it is reminiscent of landmark modern sex comedies such as Les Valseuses (Blier, 1973) and Tenue de soirée (Blier, 1986), which both feature (former) members of the 1970s café-​théâtre scene. Leconte (2000: 101) refers to the Bronzés films as ‘really modern comedy which has nothing to do with boulevard’ because the characters are ‘more corrosive, more aggressive, and freer’. Their satirical tone also incorporates a degree of stylisation, creating a distance (humour décalé) that softens the vulgarity and scorn (Frodon 1995: 453). Because the films reject pity and sympathy, the humour may sound cruel, as some critics have noted: [Such is] the comic subtlety of the troupe in a popular style which is dismissed by critics. This comedy is attractive and repulsive, seductive and frightening. It combines laughter and mockery, the stupid and the ugly, the trivial and the brutish. It reveals our faults, highlights and magnifies them. It contains some cruelty, without self-​pity or empathy. (Coltelloni 2000: 105)

Jean-​Marie Poiré (2000:  113) also notes that cinema generates a colder, more distant mode of expression, which reduces the instantaneous empathy achieved by live actors on the stage. Blanc (in Merle 1985: 101) confirms the modal changes between theatre and cinema: In café-​théâtre, we could get away with shows, which were not too demanding, and a ‘bitter’ tone. For the cinema, it is different. I  think in fact that café-​ théâtre cannot be transposed to film. If done too literally, it becomes bland and insignificant.

Adaptation thus involves subduing some of the theatrical excess and the fiercest jokes to give viewers time to adjust to the tone of the film. For example, as Leconte points out, the theme of racism had to be toned down for the screenplay of Le Père Noël est une ordure to comply with cinema codes of what is acceptable on screen (Merle 1985: 103). The Bronzés films draw on a wide range of visual gags, some diegetic (Bernard’s massage session, the judo class, Jean-​Claude’s seaweed) and some embedded within the shows of the club’s entertainment team (sketches and games).38 These gags recycle traditional comedy tropes, such as the use of a trio of jokers or the victim and witness/​accomplice.39 For example, the authors use realistic details to dismantle stereotypes and generate laughter (see Lhermitte 2009), linking laughter to transgression and the manipulation of the public consensus in French society (Coltelloni 2000: 106). The visual culture of the 1970s, popularised by satirical magazines such as Charlie-​ Hebdo, Pilote and Hara-​Kiri, also provided inspiration –​even if the scripts favour social observation over ideological messages. The last film derived from a Splendid play, mostly written by Clavier and Martin Lamotte in 1981, was Papy fait de la résistance (Poiré, 1983). The influential producer Christian Fechner approached them with a lavish film

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production package, and Clavier recommended Poiré as co-​writer and director. The production team had discussed the casting prior to the screenplay development, but, when approached, many stars declined the roles, necessitating substantial rewriting (Geudin and Imbert 2011: 161).40 Eventually, many ‘Splendid actors’ returned for parts of varying importance; the final script was tailored accordingly, and the film became their biggest commercial success with more than four million entries. By the early 1980s, the collective writing dynamics of the Splendid had changed (Grenier 1994: 262–​4). Some core authors began to focus on their individual careers, causing some friction:41 Blanc began to concentrate on social comedy screenplays, writing the dialogue, and starring in, Viens chez moi, j’habite chez une copine (Leconte, 1981)  before directing Marche à l’ombre that he also wrote. Jugnot started his solo career in 1981 with a symbolic one-​man show, Enfin seul (Merle 1985: 31). For him, too, screenwriting cemented a career as author, director and actor, with landmarks such as Pinot simple flic (Jugnot, 1984), Une époque formidable (Jugnot, 1990) and Les Choristes/​The Choir (Barratier, 2004). Clavier also achieved considerable successes co-​writing and playing iconic roles in the 1990s, including Jacquouille la fripouille/​Jacquard in Les Visiteurs, which he wrote with Poiré. He then was Astérix in the blockbusters Astérix et Obélix contre César (Zidi, 1997) and Astérix: Mission Cléopâtre (Chabat, 2002). He is also known for playing archetypal intolerant bourgeois characters, such as the Catholic father in Qu’est-​ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? Often considered a successor to de Funès, Clavier became the most bankable comedy actor of the group. However, when it comes to screenwriting, no one has signed as many screenplays or attracted as much critical attention as screenwriter and director as Balasko. Balasko has written and directed seven screenplays to date and acted in more than seventy films. She began to distance herself from the Splendid troupe in 1980, as she felt that she could not obtain the subversive main roles to which she really aspired (see Grenier 1994:  291–​8). She adapted her own play, Les Hommes préfèrent les grosses (Poiré, 1981), and took the lead part, but from 1985, she directed the comedies that she wrote. Her trademark as screenwriter and actor is the series of ‘unruly’ female protagonists she invented:  ‘rule breakers, joke makers and public bodily spectacle’ (see Rowe 1995:  12 and King 2002:  131–​4). Balasko’s early protagonists, such as the suicidal, frumpy Anita of Sac de nœuds (1985), written with Jacques Audiard, and the unconventional policewoman in Les Keufs (1987), written with Christian Biegalski and Jean-​Bernard Pouy, challenged the canon of the female sex-​symbol in provocative narratives. In the words of Tarr and Rollet (2001: 169), these protagonists ‘destabilise[d]‌ gender roles’ by providing visibility to unconventional female characters

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and challenging representations of femininity. Nowhere is this more true than in Gazon maudit. Gazon maudit is Balasko’s fourth film as writer-​actor-​director and her greatest commercial and critical success:  it won a César for best screenplay. She wrote a first draft after starring alongside Carole Bouquet and Gérard Depardieu in Trop belle pour toi (Blier, 1989)  and returned to it after a period of theatre work, which had influenced her writing style in terms of character construction and spatial unity (Strauss 1995:  62). As well as combining the familiar popular comedy tropes of subversion and emotion, Balasko’s screenplay challenges gender conventions in comedy by placing her own character, Marijo, the lesbian protagonist, at the centre of the narrative. The film revisits the slapstick farce and vaudeville traditions of the love triangle, a Feydeau-​like ménage à trois.

Gazon maudit Laurent (Alain Chabat), an estate agent, and Loli (Victoria Abril), a housewife, live in southern France with their young children. Loli is unaware that her husband is unfaithful. One day, a camper van breaks down in front of their house. The driver, Marijo (Balasko), a butch lesbian, asks to use their phone and offers to repair a blocked drain. On hearing about Laurent’s philandering, Loli takes her revenge by starting an affair with Marijo who moves in. Laurent is very angry and tries to make Marijo leave. He decides to wait for the affair to fizzle out and pretends to accept it. Meanwhile, Loli shares her affections between the two of them. When another lesbian couple –​old friends of Marijo’s  –​turn up, Laurent welcomes them, but Loli becomes annoyed and jealous. Marijo decides that the situation is not working. While Loli is away, she strikes a deal with Laurent: she will leave if Laurent has sex with her to conceive a child. Laurent and Loli go back to their old life, but their relationship has been deeply affected. When Loli hears that Marijo is pregnant and living in Paris, she is shocked. She insists they go there, and they find her working as a DJ in a lesbian club. Their intrusion provokes a fight and Marijo is fired. Loli and Laurent take her back home, where she has her baby. The ménage à trois is re-​established, with the two mothers caring for their children. The final twist occurs when a handsome man moves into the neighbourhood. He and Laurent gaze into each other’s eyes …

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Balasko draws on traditional devices of twists and turns (Cairns 1998: 226), integrating into the fast-​paced linear plot a sense of freedom of expression and sexual utopia inherited from the events of May 1968. The plot revolves around visual farce, including Laurent falling into a pigpen, a memorable head-​butting fight in the kitchen and uninhibited nudity. The script also relies on verbal sexual jokes and double entendres; this starts with the metaphor developed in the film’s title, which refers to women’s pubic hair. The explicit dialogue generates laughter, such as when Laurent calmly tells a rose vendor who wants him to buy a flower for his mistress: ‘Non merci, on a déjà baisé’ (No thanks, we’ve already fucked). In a refusal of reductive labels, Marijo often jokes about her sexual identity. In the restaurant, she calmly announces: ‘Je vais me poudrer le nez. Enfin, je vais pisser’ (I’m going to powder my nose –​I mean, to have a piss). Loli’s new sleeping arrangements for the week, and the distribution of her nights between Laurent and Marijo, have their limits: ‘Le dimanche, je me repose’ (on Sundays, I rest). These comic situations also create identity tensions in which ‘gender fluidity’ is encouraged (Waldron 2001:  65), producing destabilising comedy moments. Despite some caricaturing inherent to mainstream comedy, the screenplay questions family norms in sociological terms, moving away from formulaic unidimensional stereotypes to focus on character evolution and emotions. Balasko ‘pay[s]‌close attention to situations and characters’ (Jousse 1995:  62). For instance, Marijo is no longer a comedy character when she admits to Laurent that she is a virgin before having sex with him. The film’s ending favours a positive resolution by extending family models rather than exploding them, remaining within the boundaries of mainstream comedy (Cairns 1998). Like other screenplay writing discussed in this chapter, Balasko’s style, for this film and others, enhances the physical performance of the actors. In true Splendid form, she revisits the traditions of the ‘grotesque body’ and the carnival which were explored in Les Bronzés and Le Père Noël est une ordure (see Rollet 1999:  107–​8). Marijo not only masquerades as a man and portrays an ‘unruly heroine whose parodic disguises deconstruct the mechanisms of mise en scene and artifices of femininity’ (Tarr with Rollet 2001: 186) but also questions the canons of homosexual and heterosexual bodies. Before 1995, few mainstream comedies focused on female homosexuality, although popular comedies around male gay characters were more common, as illustrated by La Cage aux folles (Molinaro, 1978), adapted from the play with Veber, and Tenue de soirée (starring Blanc and Depardieu). However, Balasko’s screenplay is more subversive in its treatment of gender stereotypes than it is in relation to homosexuality. The screenplay enables gender fluidity, even if it incorporates conventional farcical clichés through

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dress codes and sexual jokes. This shows that Balasko, as a comedy screenwriter, is keen to provide reactive comments on social issues. The screenplay overtly encourages the male and female protagonists to question established social codes and double standards; hence, the film attracted attention from French critics who do not normally engage much with comedies (Jousse 1995) and Anglophone scholars interested in sexuality and gender studies (Cairns 1998; Hayward 1998; Waldron 2001; Tarr with Rollet 2001). Gazon maudit was a commercial success, attracting four million entries in France and receipts totalling around seventy-​five million dollars outside France; this is impressive for a French subtitled comedy. Following this achievement, Balasko developed a provocative new idea for a story, which involved a mature woman paying for the services of a young male escort. After the initial script for Cliente (Balasko, 2008)  was rejected, she published it as a novel (2004). It sold 250,000 copies, which eventually enabled her to finance the film. Its narrative on the reversal of gender roles addresses another taboo, but the script focuses more on drama than on comedy. Balasko was criticised for including voice-​over monologues to convey the protagonists’ inner world, and for introducing weaker secondary roles that diluted the treatment of the main theme of male prostitution (see Guichard 2008). In her later films, Balasko has been unable to reproduce the impact made by the powerful subversive screenplay of Gazon maudit. The screenwriters discussed in this chapter have contributed actively in different ways to films that have found their place in the history of French popular comedy. Some have also secured for themselves perennial acting or directing careers derived from their talent as authors. Drawing on Maras’s terminology (2011: 281), we can now confirm that comedy writing brings together some powerful ‘standardisation forces’ by creating box-​office hits that reach wide audiences and rest on established codes and conventions. This is particularly true of Veber, whose screenplays place iconic characters in typical vaudeville situations, but whose characters and finely tuned dialogue have become comedy trademarks. In addition to how these screenplays draw on the boulevard and vaudeville traditions, we have identified recycling trends in Veber’s career that enable him to rewrite screenplays and make them into new film objects. This includes recycling characters and situations –​for his own films and for the American remakes. Veber, therefore, stands out as a standardising force in comedy writing. Veber’s screenplays are also illustrative of what Assayas (1985: 7) calls an ‘activity attached to the artisan side of screenwriting’ in that he works alone in the development and writing process, assuring bankability by securing maximum control over his screenplays. As a screenwriter, he follows the traditional dramatic guiding principles of character construction and dialogue writing.

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Le Splendid’s transpositions of sketch-​type scenes for the screen also resort to standardising strategies. However, as authors, members of the group have pushed the limits of humour and subverted the rules of comedy writing with their freedom of expression. Therefore, their ‘differentiation strategies’, such as a caustic tone and satirical characterisation, prevail in their legacy to French comedy. In the cases of both Le Splendid and Veber, however, transforming a play for a screenplay required toning down the most ‘stagey’ elements:  exaggerated facial expressions, use of costume, tone of delivery and projection of voice. The ability to retain subversive situations and dialogue from the plays remains one of the strengths of the Splendid film screenplays and a reason for their perennial success. The screenwriters discussed here have successfully embedded the legacy of French dramatic traditions into their distinctive personal signature. For many, this was possible because they retained control over their texts by taking on the role of directors (Veber, Jugnot, Balasko, Boon, Lemercier, Philippe Lacheau, and so on). Veber moved into directing to retain more control over his carefully crafted texts. The former members of Le Splendid used their initial experience of collective writing and live performance as a stepping stone to solo cinema careers, in which they influenced comedy trends for the next thirty years in more personal ways –​usually performing (and sometimes filming) the stories that they had imagined. In both cases discussed in this chapter, screenwriting practice was a significant driving force in the evolution of comedy trends in France; it adapted to and epitomised changes in society, and at times it anticipated the public’s taste for entertainment. The case studies chosen have helped to demonstrate that co-​ existing trends were developing during the 1970s, sparking the renewal of comedy and playing an important role in ensuring the diversity of the genre that exists today (see Théate 2016; Ganzo et al. 2017). Other examples, mentioned briefly in the contextualisation of trends and careers, have also revealed some porosity between the various comedy families (for example, with Lhermitte appearing in a Veber comedy, or Chabat linking up with the Splendid team members Clavier and Balasko). Comedies have therefore brought different generations together, Clavier and Debbouze in Astérix et Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre and for Jugnot, Clavier and Lacheau in Babysitting and Babysitting 2 (Lacheau, 2014; 2015).42 French comedy authors have traditionally promoted dialogue, as we have highlighted in several chapters in this volume. In Jeanson and Audiard’s time, the script primarily conveyed the style of the screenwriter and/​or was tailored for the actors (see Chapters 2, 3 and 6 for star voices). Each in their own way, Veber’s screenplays and those of Le Splendid mark the return of dialogue as strategic in defining iconic characters: Veber’s Pignons, Perrins, Campanas and Santinis; Le Splendid’s social caricatures in Les Bronzés

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and Le Père Noël est une ordure; and Balasko’s subversive trio in Gazon maudit. A sign that comedy writing has been reappraised is that since the 1980s, more comedies have received nominations and César awards for best screenplay.43 Baurez and Benamon (2015:  60–​ 5) argue that comedy screenplays still suffer from a ‘literary heritage complex’ (an excessive emphasis on words and language), which implies that the ‘attraction of the text’ still governs funding practices for comedies in France. The authors suggest that the legacies of Molière and Sacha Guitry are difficult to overcome, though they cite some examples of more visual forms of humour.44 They identify new authors who are gradually taking over from Veber and the former Le Splendid authors:  Debbouze, Les Nuls, Les Robins des Bois (Pef, Marina Foïs) and, more recently, Lacheau.45 Baurez and Benamon (2015) also suggest that the new generation of authors is more willing to embrace multicultural references and pledges less allegiance to French literary and theatrical heritage, preferring to draw on the current trends in American comedy writing (e.g. Apatow, Zucker, Abrahams and the Farrelly brothers). However, comedy screenwriting continues to be governed more by financial imperatives than by the cultural policy model. As most comedies remain producers’ films, they rely on a screenplay or treatment to secure private funding. Comedy screenplays that substantially ‘differentiate’ through innovative formal or cinematic strategies and do not rely as much on dialogue are still marginal. The few attempts at comedy animation since 2010, such as Sur la piste du Marsupilami/​Houba! On the Trail of the Marsupilami (Chabat, 2012) and Pourquoi j’ai pas mangé mon père/​Animal Kingdom: Let’s Go Ape (Debbouze, 2015), have received mixed reviews. In Chapter  9, we will explore some alternatives to dialogue-​driven humour, looking at original comédies d’auteur written by women.

Films mentioned written and/​or directed by Veber Appelez-​moi Mathilde (Pierre Mondy, 1969; scr. and dial. Veber; adapted from Veber’s play L’Enlèvement, 1968) La Cage aux folles (Edouard Molinaro, 1978; scr. and dial. Veber; adapted from the play by Jean Poiret (Poiré), 1979). US remake: The Birdcage (Mike Nichols, 1996) La Chèvre/​The Goat (Francis Veber, 1981; scr. and dial. Veber). US remake: Pure Luck (Nadia Tass, 1991) La Doublure/​The Valet (Francis Veber, 2006; scr. and dial. Veber) Le Dîner de cons/​Dinner Game (Francis Veber, 1998; scr. and dial. Veber; adapted from the play by Veber, 1993) Dinner for Schmucks/​Dinner Game (Jay Roach, 2010; scr. and dial. David Guion and Michael Handelman). Remake of Le Dîner de cons

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L’Emmerdeur/​A Pain in the Ass (Edouard Molinaro, 1973; scr. and dial. Veber; adapted from Veber’s play Le contrat, 1968) L’Emmerdeur/​A Pain in the Ass (Francis Veber, 2008; scr. and dial. Veber). French remake of the 1973 film Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire/​The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (Yves Robert, 1972; scr. Robert and Francis Veber; dial. Veber) Le Jaguar (Francis Veber, 1996; scr. and dial. Veber) Le Jouet/​The Toy (Francis Veber, 1976; scr. and dial. Veber). US remake: The Toy (Richard Donner, 1982) Le Placard/​The Closet (Francis Veber, 2001; scr. and dial. Veber) Le Retour du grand blond/​The Return of the Tall Blond Man (Yves Robert, 1974; scr. Robert and Francis Veber; dial. Veber) Les Compères/​The Comdads (Francis Veber, 1983; scr. and dial. Veber). US remake: Fathers’ Day (Ivan Reitman, 1997) Les Fugitifs/​The Fugitives (Francis Veber, 1986; scr. and dial. Veber). US remake: The Three Fugitives (Veber, 1989)

Films featuring members of Le Splendid Astérix et Obélix contre César (Claude Zidi, 1997; adapt. and scr. Zidi; dial. Gérard Lauzier; adapted from the comic books by Goscinny and Uderzo) Astérix:  Mission Cléopâtre (Alain Chabat, 2002; adapt., scr. and dial. Chabat; adapted from the comic book Astérix et Cléopâtre by Goscinny and Uderzo, 1965) Les Bronzés/​French Fried Vacation (Patrice Leconte, 1978; scr. and dial. Le Splendid [collective]; adapted from the play Amours, Coquillages et crustacés, 1977) Les Bronzés font du ski (Patrice Leconte, 1979; scr. and dial. Leconte, Clavier, Jugnot and Lhermitte) Les Bronzés 3: amis pour la vie (Patrice Leconte, 2006; scr. and dial. Balasko, Blanc, Chazel, Clavier, Jugnot and Lhermitte) Les Choristes/​The Choir (Gérard Jugnot, 2004; scr. and dial. Jugnot and Philippe Lopes-​Curval) Cliente (Josiane Balasko, 2008; scr. and dial. Balasko; adapted from Balasko’s novel Cliente, 2004) Gazon maudit/​French Twist (Josiane Balasko, 1995; scr. and dial. Balasko, Patrick Aubrée and Telsche Boorman) Grosse fatigue/​Dead Tired (Michel Blanc, 1994; original idea Bertrand Blier; scr. and dial. Blanc) Les Hommes préfèrent les grosses (Josiane Balasko, 1981; scr. and dial. Balasko and Jean-​Marie  Poiré) Just Visiting (Jean-​ Marie Gaubert (Poiré), 2001; scr. and dial. Poiré, Christian Clavier and John Hughes). US remake of Les Visiteurs Les Keufs (Josiane Balasko, 1987; adapt., scr. and dial. Balasko with Christian Bigaelski and Jean-​Bernard Pouy) Marche à l’ombre (Michel Blanc, 1984; scr. and dial. Blanc and Patrick Dewolf)

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Papy fait de la résistance (Jean-​Marie Poiré, 1983; scr. Clavier, Martin Lamotte and Poiré, adapted from a play written by Clavier and Lamotte) Le Père Noël est une ordure/​Father Christmas is a Jerk (Jean-​Marie Poiré, 1981; scr. and dial. Poiré, Balasko, Chazel, Clavier, Jugnot, Lhermitte and Moynot; adapted from the Le Splendid play written and performed from 1979) Pinot simple flic (Gérard Jugnot, 1984; scr. and dial. Jugnot, Pierre Geller and Christian Biegalski) Sac de nœuds (Josiane Balasko, 1985; scr. and dial. Balasko and Jacques Audiard) Tenue de soirée (Bertrand Blier, 1986; scr. and dial Blier) Trop belle pour toi/Too Beautiful for You (Bertrand Blier, 1989; scr. and dial Blier) Une époque formidable (Gérard Jugnot, 1990; scr. and dial. Jugnot and Philippe Lopes-​Curval) Les Visiteurs (Jean-​Marie Poiré, 1993; scr. and dial. Poiré and Christian Clavier) Viens chez moi, j’habite chez une copine (Patrice Leconte, 1981; adap. Leconte and Michel Blanc; dial. Blanc; adapted from the play written by Luis Rego, Jean-​Luc Woulfow, Jean-​Paul Sèvres and Didier Kaminka

Other films mentioned Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob/​The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (Gérard Oury, 1973; scr. and dial. Danièle Thompson) Babysitting (Nicolas Benamou and Philippe Lacheau, 2014; scr. and dial. Lacheau, Julien Arruti and Tarek Boudali) Babysitting 2/​All Gone South (Nicolas Benamou and Philippe Lacheau, 2015; scr. and dial. Lacheau, Julien Arruti, Pierre Lacheau and Pierre Dudan) Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis/​Welcome to the Sticks (Dany Boon, 2008; scr. and dial. Boon, Alexandre Charlot and Franck Magnier) Buddy, Buddy (Billy Wilder, 1981; scr. and dial. Wilder and IAL Diamond). Remake of L’Emmerdeur Le Corniaud/​The Sucker (Gérard Oury, 1965 scr. Oury, Marcel Jullian; dial. André and Georges Tabet) La Crise/​Crisis (Coline Serreau, 1992; scr. and dial. Serreau) Le Distrait/​Distracted (Pierre Richard, 1970; scr. and dial. Richard and André Ruellan) La Grande Vadrouille/​Don’t Look Back, We Are Being Shot (Gérard Oury, 1966 scr. Oury, Danièle Thompson and Marcel Jullian; dial. André and Georges Tabet) I soliti Ignoti/​Le Pigeon/​Persons Unknown (Mario Monicelli, 1958; scr. Agenore Incroce (Age), Furio Scarpelli, Suso Cecchi d’Amico and Mario Monicelli) Intouchables/​Untouchable (Olivier Nakache and Tolédano, 2011; scr. and dial. Nakache and Tolédano; adapted from Le Deuxième Souffle by Philippe Pozzo) Les Malheurs d’Alfred/​The Troubles of Alfred (Pierre Richard, 1972; scr. and dial. Richard, André Ruellan, Yves Robert and Roland Topor) Neuf mois ferme (Albert Dupontel, 2013; scr. and dial. Dupontel, with Olivier Demangel, Laurent Turner and Héctor Caballo Reyes)

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Papa ou maman/​ Daddy or Mommy (Martin Bourboulon, 2015; original idea Guillaume Clicquot de Mentque; scr. and dial. Alexandre de la Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte) Papa ou maman 2/​Divorce French Style (Martin Bourboulon, 2015; scr. Bourboulon, Marina Fois, Laurent Lafitte, Alexandre de la Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte) Pourquoi j’ai pas mangè mon père/​Animal Kingdom: Let’s Go Ape (Jamel Debbouze, 2015; scr. Debbouze) Le Prènom (Alexandre de la Patellière, 2011; scr. Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte; adapted from the play Le Prènom) Qu’est-​ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu?/​Serial (Bad) Weddings (Philippe de Chauveron, 2014; scr. Guy Laurent) Sur la piste du Marsupilami/​Houba! On the Trail of the Marsupilami (Alain Chabat, 2012; scr. Chabat; adapted from the comic books by Franquin) Trois hommes et un couffin/​Three Men and a Cradle (Coline Serreau, 1985; scr. and dial. Serreau). US remake: Three Men and a Baby (Nimoy, 1987) Un air de famille/​ Family Resemblances (Cédric Klapisch, 1996; scr. and dial. Klapisch, Agnès Jaoui and Jean-​Pierre Bacri; adapted from the play Un air de famille by Jaoui and Bacri) The Upside (Neil Burger, 2019; scr. John Hartmere; remake of Toledano and Nacache’s Intouchables based on their screenplay) Les Valseuses/Going Places (Bertrand Blier, 1973; scr. and dial. Blier)

Notes 1 A comedy released at a time of political uncertainty or public anxiety over world events, for example, is likely to be more popular. Due to the emphasis on family, the Christmas season is also a time of year when comedies are widely viewed in cinemas. 2 Stott (2005:  92) defines slapstick as ‘physical humour of a robust and hyperbolized nature, where stunts, acrobatics, pain, and violence are standard features’. 3 Richard Balducci’s original screenplays for the ‘Gendarme’ series were adapted by Jean Vilfrid and Jean Girault. 4 See Demeure (1978) for an overview of troupier (army) comedy, including the ‘Gendarme’ series. 5 The excessive formatting of comedies co-​financed by TV channels. Many were traditionally financed by Gaumont and Pathé in collaboration with the main terrestrial channels (TF1 and F2). Canal+ has had a significant input in comedy production since the 1980s (see Vanderschelden 2017). M6 is a more recent but growing partner. 6 Despite twelve million entries in France and its success in Germany, Qu’est-​ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu was rejected by UK distributors, who considered the subject matter too controversial. In the United States, Variety accused it of ‘perpetuating racist stereotypes and feeding into France’s ambient xenophobia’

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(Mulholland 2014). See Lanzoni (2014: 129–​33) for Rabbi Jacob’s reception and treatment of race and religion. A sequel written by Thompson, Rabbi Jacqueline, was announced for 2019 but has not appeared. 7 For example, consider the fate of many of Veber’s comedies (Veber 2010). There are Italian and Spanish remakes of Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis but the American one was abandoned, even though Will Smith bought the rights. Intouchables led to a Hollywood remake, The Upside (Neil Burger, 2019). 8 See Brunet (2004: 61) for a discussion of modern forms in the twentieth century. King (2002:  24–​ 9) uses Anglo-​ American definitions of slapstick and vaudeville but, surprisingly, does not explicitly address the screenwriting. He does, however, use some French illustrations: Les Visiteurs (Poiré, 1993) and La Crise (Serreau, 1992). 9 Many French comedies share features with the satirical commedia all’Italiana of the 1960s and 1970s (see Lanzoni 2008: 85–​105). 10 Richard co-​wrote and directed two films in which he played this type: Pierre Malaquet character in Le Distrait (Richard, 1970) and the burlesque Alfred in Les Malheurs d’Alfred (Richard, 1972). ‘Burlesque’ is used in French comedy to describe the discrepancy between the tone used and the seriousness of the topic. It also refers to humour and caricature based on excessive and irrational behaviour. See Chapter 9 for other examples of burlesque comedy. 11 The American remake, Buddy, Buddy (Wilder, 1981) co-​written by Wilder and IAL Diamond, was considered a critical and commercial failure. 12 These films have generated American remakes (see Moine 2007: 173–​7). See the filmography for this chapter. 13 To date, seven actors have interpreted Pignon in films and many more have done so on stage. 14 For a full discussion of this film, see Vanderschelden (2013). 15 It was published in 1994 and is available online (Veber 1994). 16 Nominated for six Césars, it won Best screenplay, Best actor and Best supporting actor. 17 Alain Poiré, who was also the producer of the Audiard-​ Lautner comedy partnerships (see Chapter  6) had bought the rights to the play (see Veber 2010: 257–​8). 18 For example, Moine (2007:  175–​ 7) identifies the age difference between the respective actors and the choice of different American actors to play the recurring characters as important factors, as each star brings a persona that transforms the original identity of the Pignon character. The choice of Rudd and Carell in Dinner for Schmucks confirms this. 19 Chion (2008:  124–​ 7) draws similar conclusions in his analysis of Les Compères. 20 See, for example, the Belgian uncle in Occupe-​toi d’Amélie (Autant-​Lara, 1949, screenplay by Aurenche and Bost). 21 For example, Depardieu’s characters use the word repeatedly in La Chèvre and Les Fugitifs.

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22 Brassens wrote ‘Le temps ne fait rien à l’affaire’ in 1961 (also known as ‘Quand on est con…’). The lyrics are available at www.paroles-​musique. com/​ p aroles-​ G eorges_​ B rassens-​ L e_​ Temps_​ N e_​ F ait_​ R ien_​ A _​ L Affaire_​ 1961-​lyrics,p020060344. 23 Depending on the context and tone of voice, connard can have a wide range of lexical meanings and can be perceived as insulting and aggressive. 24 PIGNON: That’s it, we have the rights!!! Whaaoh! And for a song, in my view, he fell for it, he did! /​BROCHANT:  What about my wife? /​PIGNON:  What? /​ BROCHANT: He forgot my wife … he gabs five minutes and he forgets my wife … /​ PIGNON:  Oh! I  blew it … /​BROCHANT:  This tops my wildest dreams! /​ PIGNON:  Oh, indeed, I  blew it! /​BROCHANT:  This is really record breaking! /​ PIGNON: I’ll call him back. ‘Boulette’, meaning blunder, became a very widely used term due to the film’s success. 25 PIGNON: What is his number? /​BROCHANT: 01 47 47 … Never mind, I’ll dial it. His name is Just Leblanc. /​PIGNON: Ah! He has no first name?! /​BROCHANT: I just told you:  Just Leblanc! … Leblanc’s his name, and Just is his Christian name. /​ PIGNON: Hmm … /​BROCHANT: Well, Mister Pignon, your first name is François, just think? /​PIGNON: Yes … /​BROCHANT: Well. For him it’s the same, it’s Just! Okay, we’ve lost enough time as it is. (The dialogue here uses rather contorted syntax to play on the meanings of ‘c’est juste/​c’est Juste …’ /​‘it’s only’, ‘that’s right … It’s Just …’) 26 PIGNON: It was your sister. /​BROCHANT: I don’t have one. /​PIGNON: You don’t have one? I asked her who I was talking to and she answered: ‘His sister’. /​ BROCHANT: He called Marlene! /​PIGNON: Is she not your sister? /​BROCHANT: It’s her name: Marlene Hissister. /​PIGNON: How could I know? She said, ‘Marlene, his sister’. You have to admit it is confusing. (An additional joke here comes from the use of ‘confusant’, a French neologism and anglicism.) 27 See Merle (1985: 96–​8) on Le Café de la gare, and Merle (1985: 103–​10) and Lanzoni (2014: 156–​62) on Le Splendid and its legacy. 28 They were not a purely spontaneous generation: they trained with the comedian Tsilla Chelton (associated with absurd theatre and Ionesco). She helped them to develop their acting skills, voice and body language (Grenier 1994: 62–​4). They also approached Tania Balachova, Antoine Vitez and Ariane Mnouchkine (Harris 1998). 29 No screenwriting archives are publicly available on the adaptation process of the films, except a continuity script for Le Père Noël est une ordure, which is kept in the Cinémathèque française. However, the collector DVDs come with screenplays (Gontier 2002a and 2002b). The collective writing is documented in Grenier’s book, in fan forums around the films and in DVD bonuses. 30 See Raveleau (2019: 32–​6) for a detailed account of the adaptation process and examples of scenes cut. 31 They contrast with the colourful marginal characters of Katya (Clavier), Josette (Chazel) and Félix (Jugnot) in Le Père Noël est une ordure who are more

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burlesque (understand vulgar here), as are Jacquouille (Clavier) and Dame Ginette (also played by Chazel) in Les Visiteurs. 32 See Harris (2001: 63–​70) for an analysis of the ‘carnival’ in French comedy, applicable to Les Bronzés. 33 See Villiers and Gressard (1985: 144) and Geudin and Imbert (2011: 136). The proposal for a third film in New York was rejected. 34 The son of Gaumont producer Alain Poiré, Jean-​Marie Poiré, had written dialogue with Audiard and worked as assistant director to Lautner and Molinaro in the 1970s. His directing (and screenwriting) career developed alongside those of the former members of Le Splendid: he first worked with Balasko, and then developed a lasting partnership with Clavier, which culminated in the phenomenal success of Les Visiteurs (Poiré, 1993). For a portrait and interview of Poiré, see Nevers and Strauss (1993) and Pascal (1993). 35 See full published screenplay of Le Père Noël est une ordure, see Avant ​Scène Cinema (2000). For the adaptation stages, see Coltelloni (2000: 106), Grenier (1994: 262–​4) and Gontier (2002b: 78–​80). For Poiré’s input to the screenplay, see Geudin and Imbert (2011: 158–​9). 36 On representations of comic and grotesque bodies, see Bakhtin (1984) and Harris (1998). Further examples can be found in Le Père Noël est une ordure; Katya’s cross-​dressing, Félix dressed up as Father Christmas and Zézette’s protruding teeth, which affect her speech. 37 Monsieur Hire is adapted from the same Simenon novel as Panique (Duvivier, 1946) discussed briefly in Chapter 1. 38 For a detailed analysis of visual gags in comedy, see ‘Le Comique à l’écran’ CinémAction (Anon. 1997: 73). 39 See Bergson’s (1999) model of laughter based on forms, movement, attitudes, situations. See also Smajda (1993: 26–​7 and 52–​7). 40 See Grassin and Sender (2011: 17–​18). Bernard Blier, Michel Serrault, Annie Girardot and Jerry Lewis refused roles. De Funès was included, but died before the filming started. Michel Galabru and Jacqueline Maillan joined the cast. 41 They only reunited as a group in the mid-​1990s with Grosse fatigue (Blanc, 1994). More symbolically, nearly thirty years after the success of Les Bronzés, they co-​wrote Les Bronzés 3: amis pour la vie, attracting more than ten million curious and nostalgic fans (Réali 2006). 42 More examples of porosity between different generations are visible in collaborations involving ex-​Splendid members and actors launched by Canal+ TV comedies (Vanderschelden 2017). 43 Winners include Trois hommes et un couffin/​Three Men and a Cradle (Serreau, 1985) in 1986, La Crise (Serreau, 1992) in 1993, Gazon maudit in 1996, Un air de famille/​Family Resemblances (Klapisch, 1996) in 1997, Le Dîner de cons in 1999 and Neuf mois ferme (Albert Dupontel, 2013) in 2014. 44 For example, Le Prénom and Papa ou maman, and the more experimental comedies of Quentin Dupieux. 45 The role played by Canal+ as talent scout is considerable, offering in-​house production support and providing a stepping stone for comedy actors and authors since the 1980s (Vanderschelden 2017).

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Dialogue writing in multicultural France since 2000: exploring the words of young people In the previous chapters, we have shown that dialogue writing and the role of the dialogue writer have fashioned the French screenwriting tradition. Since the early talkies, France has nurtured a tradition of chatty cinema. In the 1930s, this could be seen in filmed theatre, comedy and in certain Poetic Realism to distinguish between characters (Jacques Prévert’s bad guys are often characterised by their verbosity). During the post-​war period, this tendency was developed in popular comedies and historical films, especially those written by Jeanson for stars such as Gérard Philipe or Martine Carol; it was further cultivated in the popular classics of the 1960s, such as Michel Audiard’s pastiche gangster comedies. Wit, verve, wordplay and mots d’auteur have always been central elements of French film dialogue, but cult lines are also an important cinephile pleasure; as testified by the many anthologies published in France (Chardère 2000; Chion 2008). As Ginette Vincendeau (2011: 341–​2) has pointed out, language has often been left out of film studies and national identity debates. French cinema has long cultivated this tradition of ‘chattiness’ alongside a more laconic trend celebrated for allowing film to show through mise en scene rather than tell through dialogue.1 One concern of recent auteur-​ screenwriters has also been to engage fully with dialogue that sounds authentic while reflecting sociolinguistic variations. Credibility and authenticity are by no means a new priority for dialogue writers: Marcel Pagnol, Marcel Achard and others already regarded the capturing of social and regional variation as paramount in the 1930s, as did Pierre Bost in the 1940s. However, in post-​2000 cinema, the idea of what constitutes ‘credible and authentic’ lines has changed somewhat. Of interest to us in this chapter are the self-​conscious ways in which language is used to represent young people in films, influencing dialogue writing and performance from the 1980s in banlieue film, recognised as a self-​ standing genre (Tarr 2005). Nonstandard French has been used as a vector of realism and identity in independent cinema engaging with multicultural

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and multilingual France, while the main function of regional accents and local vernaculars found in mainstream comedies is to generate humour (see Chapter 8). Many screenwriting auteurs seek to capture and reconstruct the evanescent language spoken by young people. In this chapter, we consider how screenwriters have developed effective strategies for transposing transient, nonstandard, local language variation into dialogue. Due to heterogeneity and fast-​paced delivery, the multicultural urban sociolect used by young people is harder to understand for mainstream audiences than the pastiche of literary slang reinvented by Prévert, Audiard or Francis Veber, to use a few examples from previous chapters. The writing practices and improvisation strategies combined to produce what counts as realistic dialogue are more complex than mere lexical or syntactical coding. Returning to studies of film dialogue already mentioned in the previous chapters, it is possible to identify the premises of dialogue construction in realist fiction. Jean Samouillan (2004: 123–​43) links the production of film dialogue with naturalness and credibility, two elements that are relevant when addressing social realist dramas. In the context of screenwriting, he defines ‘orality markers’ as the linguistic features of speech and aspects of its delivery as uttered by a specific speaker, in a specific situation and in an immediate communication context (2004: 267–​71). This may include lexical simplification, intonation, syntax dislocation and truncation, limited subordination, use of repetition and silent pauses. Francis Vanoye (2008: 69) has linked the conversational interactions found in film dialogue with his concept of screenwriting practice. In this chapter, we adopt Vanoye’s notion of screenwriting dispositif to refer more specifically to the different principles around which the film development is organised, pragmatically and aesthetically, and apply this approach to comment on the methods of two screenwriting directors, Abdellatif Kechiche and Laurent Cantet. Like Prévert, Jean Renoir, Jeanson and Eric Rohmer, they both explore authorial methods of preparing dialogue in collaboration with their actors (see Vassé 2003: 42), experimenting with partial improvisation and perpetuating practices pre-​ dating the New Wave, but which are often associated with its legacy. As in previous chapters, we also draw here on film dialogue research on other national cinemas. Addressing realism in British cinema, for example, Jill Nelmes (2011: 217–​18) proposes the notion of ‘real talking’, suggesting that ‘because screenplay dialogue is constructed to give an impression of how people talk in real life, it often appears to be inarticulate and lacking in complexity’. She envisages film dialogue as ‘a means of encouraging the sense that we are entering a living, transparent world’, echoing Samouillan’s notion of the essence of ‘natural’ dialogue (2004:  124–​ 6). The films discussed here enter the ‘living world’ of the banlieue or the multicultural classroom and in doing so immediately strive to immerse their audiences

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in the characters’ idiolects. As a result, far from performing a conventional function of informing plot and characters, the dialogue is intentionally difficult for the general public to understand because it fulfils a primary function of authenticity, adding a documentary value to the invented screenplay. As a result, it must negotiate the contradiction of fictional, created dialogue trying to express real-​life nonstandard speech. Todd Berliner’s (1999) approach to film dialogue can help reconcile these two contradictory features of Kechiche’s and Cantet’s experiments with dialogue writing. In a discussion of American films written for nonprofessional actors, Berliner (1999: 5) uses John Cassavetes’ films to argue that realism manifests itself ‘not as the authentic representation of reality but rather a type of art that masks its own contrivance’. The writing processes and film geneses of our main case studies L’Esquive/​Games of Love and Chance (Kechiche, 2004)  and Entre les murs/​The Class (Cantet, 2008), suggest that Kechiche and Cantet have adopted with their respective co-​ authors unusual writing methods for constructing dialogue and performing it on screen. For example, like Cassavetes and Rohmer, both worked with nonprofessional young actors to produce the dialogue for their films. What is perceived as natural and transparent language (similar to that used in real life) and contrived oral performance of a pre-​written script may therefore provide a useful comparative framework for evaluating the multi-​layered levels of speech used in their films. As we will see, in L’Esquive, the extracts from Marivaux’s play (written in 1730) embedded into the film dialogue (because the pupils are rehearsing a performance of the play) often generate metalinguistic comments by the characters as part of the diegesis (see Extract 3). In Entre les murs, it is a series of breaches of social language codes between the teacher and his pupils that become the centre of diegetic conflicts. This chapter investigates the writing process, the texture of the dialogue and its performativity in these two films to see how the screenplays address the dichotomy between authenticity and a mere masking of dialogue contrivance. It also explores how our screenwriters and directors capture, and sometimes appropriate, the language codes of young people in urban communities. It clarifies how, in doing so, they address and subvert the stereotypes attached to the parlers jeunes (Gadet 2017) while displaying the oral qualities and inventiveness of the dialogue. Finally, it briefly considers the extent to which these screenwriting strategies embrace the issue of the performativity of nonstandard dialogue; that is, in the context of this chapter, linking speech acts to social action and the construction of identity.2 Kechiche and Cantet implement screenwriting dispositifs that affect language use and dialogue in their films. These dispositifs serve their authorial signature style for which they have received comprehensive international

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critical attention: they have both been awarded a Palme d’Or at Cannes and Cantet’s Academy Award nomination in 2009 led to the widespread international distribution of his films. This focus of Kechiche’s and Cantet’s films on nonstandard dialogue in French does not seem to have created an obstacle to their international success in spite of the subtitles’ tendency to elide linguistic nuances. They have even attracted attention from many academic publications in English.3 We analyse two screenplays in more detail in this chapter, L’Esquive and Entre les murs, with a special focus on the dialogue-​writing process. We also refer to La Faute à Voltaire/​Blame it on Voltaire (Kechiche, 2000), La Graine et le mulet/​Couscous (Kechiche, 2007), L’Atelier/​The Workshop (Cantet, 2017), and mention briefly Bande de filles/​ Girlhood (Céline Sciamma, 2014), Divines (Houda Benyamina, 2016) and Swagger (Olivier Babinet, 2016). To illustrate the spatial cohesion of language variation, the dialogue study is restricted to films set in the Paris area. However, it would be equally valid to conduct similar studies on films set in the Marseille area, such as Cantet’s L’Atelier, Mektoub My Love: Canto Uno (Kechiche, 2017), Chouf (Dridi, 2016)  and Corniche Kennedy (Cabrera, 2016), which also merit analysis. Furthermore, we have chosen to focus on low-​budget auteur films, but a number of successful comedies would also lend themselves to a similar dialogue analysis; for example, Le Ciel, les oiseaux et … ta mère/​ Boys on the Beach (Jamel Bensalah, 1999) and Neuilly sa mère (Gabriel-​ Julien Laferrière, 2009). Kechiche and Cantet naturally attract comparison.4 They both write their films with regular co-​authors. They both lead the development stage, which includes the screenwriting or adaptation process. As such, they follow a widespread trend in France, where the majority of fiction screenplays are developed by the director, with or without the participation of screenwriting collaborators (see Kopp 2013 and the introduction to this volume). As auteur-​directors, they control the convergence between screenwriting and directing the actors. The actors’ individual styles are imbricated in the speech acts of the protagonists, and this style emphasises their authentic use of language in largely improvised set pieces. Casting inexperienced actors calls for unconventional direction strategies from the two filmmakers. As part of a controlled, auteurist process of creation, they have each in their own way revisited improvisation methods in rehearsal, prior to or during the writing stage, and even during shooting. Kechiche and Cantet have developed their own working methods to capture authentic dialogue, such as filming a large number of takes (for Kechiche) or using multiple cameras (for Cantet). Placing a strong emphasis on language and credible dialogue, their screenplays engage with social realism and the representation of young people.

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Film dialogue, when it is the object of critical analysis, is often considered as part of representation, performance style and mise en scene; only rarely is it viewed from the perspectives of the actual screenwriting process and the filming strategies that are associated with its performance. Kozloff addresses the ways in which film dialogue raises questions of authenticity and legitimacy, as dialogue is written, then rehearsed, to be performed: [W]‌e must bear in mind the ways in which film dialogue differs from spontaneous everyday speech. In narrative films, dialogue may strive mightily to imitate natural conversation, but it is always an imitation. It has been scripted, written and rewritten, censored, polished, rehearsed, and performed. Even when lines are improvised on the set, they have been spoken by impersonators, judged, approved, and allowed to remain. Then all dialogue is recorded, edited, mixed, underscored […] The actual hesitations, repetitions, digressions, grunts, interruptions and mutterings of everyday speech have either been pruned away or, if not, deliberately included. (Kozloff 2000: 18)

Kechiche and Cantet challenge this deliberate formatting of dialogue by intentionally looking for the real-​life language idiosyncrasies of the young people they are filming. Nevertheless, Kozloff’s points about vetting and editing dialogue are still relevant: when the subjects filmed are aware of the presence of a camera, even if the dispositifs grant them some freedom, there are questions about the authenticity of the language. This recalls Labov’s ‘observer’s paradox’, recognised by all linguists engaged in language-​ variation fieldwork: The aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed; yet we can only obtain this data by systematic observation. (Labov 1972: 209)

In our attempt to establish the roles played by Kechiche and Cantet in the dialogue-​ writing process, we focus on strategies used to generate credible and engaging interaction in the context of films that place language at the centre of their narrative. This does not mean, however, that we distinguish the writing process from its linguistic context. Evaluations of film dialogue tend to be qualitative and subjective. The critics (Marie and Vanoye 1983; Kozloff 2000; Samouillan 2004) avoid addressing the sociolinguistic perspective through which the dialogue has been created, preferring to take more functional approaches explored in Chapters 3, 5 and 6. Chion (2007:  136), too, identifies some pragmatic functional features of dialogue that aid screenwriters: advancing and commenting on the progress of the action; communicating information; revealing characters’ conflicts and emotions; establishing interpersonal relationships; and entertaining the audience. These features are a useful benchmark when unpacking the originality of dialogue screenwriting in the context of urban street language

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and its codes. In addition, Chion’s (2008: 7) essays on film dialogue overtly approach dialogue as texture rather than as utterances, embracing the tools of discourse analysis to define the language of multicultural urban young people in France. Our discussion of dialogue register is also informed by French linguists, especially Françoise Gadet, who has researched social variation in French language (Gadet 2007) and conducted a sociolinguistic analysis of Multicultural Paris French (MPF) as spoken by young people in the banlieues around Paris, a variation that she prefers to name parlers jeunes (Gadet 2017). We have adapted this denomination for our purposes to Multicultural Urban French (MUF) to account for the fact that not all films are set in the Paris area.5 The empirical research carried out by Gadet’s team of linguists is relevant to our investigation and provides numerous examples also found in our film case studies, suggesting that dialogue authenticity and its credible performance are priorities for Kechiche and Cantet. The team’s conclusions on lexical, syntactic and phonetical phenomena constitute a complementary reading to this chapter for those who are interested in further information on the linguistic features analysed and the deconstruction of certain language stereotypes. As well as challenging perceptions of the limited vocabulary and lack of syntax of MUF, they provide structured frameworks for analysing the phenomena found in the dialogue in our case studies, including accents, delivery, borrowings from other languages and verbal violence. Meredith Doran (2007) offers an American perspective on linguistic variation in French banlieues. Her argument incorporates ethnic diversity as a factor that not only inflects language codes but also reaffirms the bonds of shared membership in a multi-​ethnic community (2007: 503). These urban, nonstandard sociolects have appealed to screenwriting directors who engage with political and social realism in their films. Their experimental screenwriting dispositifs call into question dialogue improvisation and spontaneity of language performance in auteur films. This poses new challenges to dialogue writing, including the performative dimension of orality, presenting narratives and constructing identity through language. Realism in French film dialogue has been shaped by various cultural influences, including the long-​standing tradition of staged theatre lines on the one hand and a taste for improvisation on the other. As Samouillan (2004: 112–​15) reminds us, performing film dialogue entails working on a written text that is to be ‘transferred’ into oral mode. Changes often occur during this transfer process, as each speech act brings together an actor, a character and a fictitious situation. Hence, the ‘art of masking contrivance’ (Berliner 1999) governs the effectiveness of the dialogue as much as it aids the quest for realism or authenticity.

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Kechiche’s experimental approach to dialogue writing Kechiche (b. 1960) began his career as a film and theatre actor in the 1980s. He has since focused exclusively –​in auteurist fashion –​on screenwriting, directing and editing his own films. His screenplays are co-​written with Ghalya Lacroix.6 He has made six films in just under twenty years and developed a distinctive personal artistic signature, despite encountering difficulties in financing his projects and dealing with controversy. During the 1990s, he worked on several screenplays, including drafts of what would become La Graine et le mulet and L’Esquive, both of which failed to secure funding before filming; the avance sur recettes was awarded retrospectively.7 However, another project, La Faute à Voltaire, received screenwriting aid from the CNC in 1995 and was produced by Flach Film (see Mrabet 2016: 150). L’Esquive proved to be difficult to produce; over thirteen years, Kechiche wrote several drafts, all of which were rejected.8 Eventually, in 2003, Jacques Ouaniche produced the film for a fraction of its intended budget (Benamon 2013). Finally released in January 2004, the film attracted critical attention and went on to receive four Césars in 2005, including one for Best Screenplay. This drove its re-​release in French cinemas and a wider international distribution.9 La Graine et le mulet received the Grand Prix du Jury at the Venice Film Festival in 2007, in addition to the Prix Méliès, the Prix Louis Delluc and, in 2008, four Césars including best original screenplay. For years, this screenplay had been rejected, but when the director Claude Miller introduced Kechiche to the producer Claude Berri in 2005, Berri agreed to finance the film with Pathé, and this really revealed Kechiche as an important independent screenwriting director. In 2013, La Vie d’Adèle:  Chapitres 1 et 2/​Blue is the Warmest Colour, a three-​hour drama loosely adapted from a French bande dessinée, received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Kechiche’s difficulties with securing funding, especially for his early films, are not surprising when considered in the context of French film production in the 1990s when screenplays were already important strategic tools for approaching producers and funding organisations such as the CNC-​ supported commissions d’aide à l’écriture or avance sur recettes. Although Kechiche used familiar narrative codes and linear plots, which funders approved of, he failed to convince them due to his atypical writing methods, based on long rehearsal periods with actors before developing screenplays and dialogue: I wanted to talk about theatre in a banlieue estate. I wanted my characters to experience a ‘Marivaudage’. Marivaux fitted! Why not? I found it amusing to juxtapose the language of young people of the banlieues and that of Marivaux.

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I had no intention to educate or teach anything. It pleased me to mix the two different types of language. I  love Marivaux’s language, and I  love the language used by the young people today and find it inventive. It is a cultural mix. Its creativeness comes from its métissage. They bring new words and phrases from their own culture. It is a rich language […] the two types of language go together well, or at least it is easy to go from one to the other. (Kechiche in Melinard 2004)

This director’s statement explicitly confirms Kechiche’s intention to move away from a purely realist representation of the social problems associated with the estate of ‘Franc-​moisin’, a banlieue north of Paris where his plot is set. L’Esquive Lydia (Sara Forestier), Frida (Sabrina Ouazani) and Rachid (Rachid Hami) are busy rehearsing their parts for a school performance of Marivaux’s play Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard/​ Games of Love and Chance organised by their French teacher (Carole Franck). A teenage romance develops when Krimo (Ousmane Elkharraz) falls in love with Lydia, the extrovert lead who is completely absorbed in her role as Lisette. Krimo asks his friend Rachid to let him take on the role of Arlequin in an attempt to approach Lydia without losing face in front of his peer group (and fails). He rejects his ex-​girlfriend Magali (Aurélie Ganito) and cannot even confide in his best friend Fathi (Hafet Ben-​Hamed). When finally the play is performed in front of proud friends and families, Lydia and Rachid are on stage while Krimo, alone, watches the performance from outside. Within this narrative setting operating on two levels –​the diegesis and the embedded fragments of the play, the dialogue writing dispositif for the film is shaped by linguistic heterogeneity and the viewer engages with well-​delineated characters mainly through their expressive use of language, verbal interactions and body language. This leads to disruptive contrasts in the script, but Kechiche’s aim is not so much to engage in social commentary as to capture the language codes that young people use when talking among themselves. He is fascinated by their exchanges, which are ‘beautiful, atmospheric, filled with symbols, enriched by words brought in from their origins, full of gestures, of blended expressions’ (in Fajardo 2004). It is no wonder, then, that the dialogue of L’Esquive and, to some extent, La Graine et le mulet and Mektoub My Love: Canto Uno, should contain multilingual

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influences and local accents. The different registers cast cultural diversity in a positive light and produce inventive language effects noted in many reviews (e.g. Kaganski 2004; Melinard 2004) as well as a foray into more literary cultural references.10 The dialogue of L’Esquive also illustrates Nelmes’ idea (2011:  217) that realist dialogue offers an entry to a ‘living world’:  in this case, the lively exchanges reproduce a banlieue sociolect often stigmatised in French cinema in the 1990s. Kechiche’s project strives to combine the hyperrealism of their day-​to-​day routine with the artifice of the situations of Marivaux’s play that the characters rehearse, and that he incorporates into the main narrative. Instead of ‘masking contrivance’ (Berliner 1999), he experiments with dialogue metissage to expose the contrived nature of the urban young people’s language codes and links them back to more classical forms of language. For example, the term esquive is used by the character Arlequin in Marivaux’s play and by Rachid in the film. It can refer to the lexis of fencing in classical French, but it is also used today in MUF in the sense of avoiding dealing with a problem. This illustrates the linguistic bridges established between the two periods and language styles in the screenplay. It also exemplifies the diachronic aspect of language variation and register diversity, which are explored playfully in the manner of verbal ‘jousts’.11 Just as some of the film’s protagonists find Marivaux’s language exotic and difficult to understand and perform, many French viewers and reviewers (Thabourey 2004:  43) struggle to understand the heated exchanges between the young people in Kechiche’s film. For example, the opening scene (Extract 1)  shows a group of young people discuss a gang fight that has just happened on the estate, which involved one of their friends. The use of coded lexis (in bold in the extracts presented below) and the fragmented syntax take the audience by surprise, as does the fast pace of delivery: Extract 1 (L’Esquive): VOIX 1:  [J’vais y aller]. J’vais y niquer leur mère! VOIX 2:  De toute façon, leur quartier, c’est pas l’ Bronx ou quoi, j’vais y aller et j’vais tous leur niquer leur mère! VOIX 3:  Allez, on y va maintenant. VOIX 1:  Y en a un que j’vais l’serrer, j’vais l’séquestrer, sa mère … ce fils de pute. MAKOU:  le premier qu’on voit, la vie d’ma mère qu’on lui baise sa mère. Y a qu’ca’ à faire. Y a pas à … SLAM:  D’vant tout l’monde, les gens y faisaient rien, tu crois c’est normal ou quoi? ils passent à côté de toi y m’regardaient. FATHI:  C’est tous une bande de fils de putes!

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JEUNE BEUR: 

Y a les jumeaux dedans, c’est ça qui m’fait mal au cœur. J’vais les tuer eux. SLAM:  Ils étaient huit, Ils étaient huit! JEUNE BEUR:  J’vais les tuer! C’est des mecs y tournent ici. J’sais même pas c’qui viennent faire ici. JEUNE BEUR:  Ils habitent au moulin j’crois. VOIX:  Ah! C’est des keums du moulin en plus. VOIX:  Juré, fils de putes! FATHI:  Ces fils de putes, on va les prendre sur la tête de ma mère tu vas voir. MAKOU:  Ah, c’est ça, c’est ça. JEUNE:  Et ‘y nous prennent pour des bastringues [sur la vie d’ma mère] On va leur mettre des coups de massue. SLAM:  Moi j’y vais, et si vous êtes partants, vous venez. MAKOU:  De toute façon, toi t’es chaud. T’es chaud, t’es chaud, tout le monde est chaud. [JEUNE:  T’inquiète. Pas] MAKOU:  De toute façon on va leur rosser leur bouche. On y va, c’est tout. SLAM:  Ouais mais on y va … Après vous faites les putes hein? JEUNE BEUR:  Viens Krimo. Viens! Cours, putain. [KRIMO:  Y s’passe quoi là?] FATHI:  Y a embrouille là. FATHI:  C’est Slam y s’est fait péta ses affaires. KRIMO:  Par qui? FATHI:  Par ces fils de putes, là. KRIMO:  C’est vrai? FATHI:  Sur la tête de ouam. JEUNE BEUR:  Si t’es chaud on y va là. MAKOU:  Viens on y va, c’est parti! JEUNE BEUR:  Allez, fais pas ta salope! Vas-​y vas-​y, go, on va à la place. JEUNE BEUR:  On s’retrouve sur place. Dépêche-​toi! FATHI:  Vas-​y cours! (Kechiche 2005: 6–​7; as in all extracts, the dialogue in square brackets appears in the screenplay published in Avant ​Scène Cinéma but is not uttered in the film)12 The tone sounds aggressive and the register is crude, reinforcing stereotypes about the ‘linguistic ghetto’ and reflecting the insulting tone of casual conversations associated with the banlieue sociolect. Semantically, this scene does not communicate much information; hence the audience feels excluded, especially because it is impossible to understand immediately what is going on. The sentences are incomplete; they form disjointed comments made by

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several characters who are not really conversing. Eventually, it is revealed that the characters are reacting to the mugging of Slam, a friend of Krimo and Fathi, by a gang from another estate. The information provided about the mugging is fragmented, sometimes redundant, and often punctuated by indiscriminately used obscenities. The exchange generates some suspense for about thirty cues, until the audience gets some sense of what is happening. This conversation contrasts with that of the next scene between Lydia and the dressmaker, edited without transition, in which Lydia relentlessly requests an extra frill for the dress, using persuasive verbal strategies to obtain what she wants.13 Lydia is defined by her language use, her fast delivery and her verve, known as la tchatche in the late 1990s, a term employed by Kechiche to describe his ‘delectation for these words, which bring in a special tone, expressiveness and related gesturality’ (Morice and Rigoulet 2013).14 Lydia’s tchatche can be seen as a legacy of the gouaille of emblematic female characters played by Arletty in poetic realist films, such as Raymonde in Hôtel du nord (Carné, 1938) or Garance in Les Enfants du paradis (Carné, 1945)  (see Chapters  2 and 3). However, Lydia’s difference lies in her effortless ability to switch between the crude and aggressive banlieue-​coded sociolect and the affected lexis and syntax that characterises ‘Marivaudage’.15 However, Kechiche’s screenplay does not ask whether this eloquence could enhance her social mobility:  it only shows that the young protagonists are at ease with heated verbal exchanges and shifts in register. This reinforces not only the playful nature of the dialogue but also highlights the characters’ taste for arguing and debating (with the notable exception of Krimo, who is characterised by his silences, monosyllabic cues and lack of expressiveness). From the first scene, the conversations are grounded in an oral tradition of language that transcends generations. In Extract 2, Lydia is asking her teenage friends what they think of her (stage) dress. Although her speech is marked by pace and expressiveness, in lexical terms, it does not yet reveal the linguistic inventiveness that defines her character: Extract 2 (L’Esquive): LYDIA:  Et voilà! RACHID:  Magnifique! Magnifique! HANANE:  Elle est style. LYDIA:  Elle est belle? HANANE:  Elle est fracassante. LYDIA:  Ça le fait? HANANE:  Elle est stylée, y’ même pas de mot pour dire. LYDIA:  C’est vrai? HANANE:  Magnifique!

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LYDIA: 

Voilà! Voilà, elle est trop belle, mabrouk! LYDIA:  Sérieux? HANANE:  Ouais. LYDIA:  Elle est belle? RACHID:  Parfait. LYDIA:  Ça fait bien ou quoi? RACHID:  Mortel! LYDIA:  Ouais? Ça fait bien? RACHID:  Ouais, moi j’kiffe. LYDIA:  Sérieux? LYDIA:  T’sais, les mecs, ça m’fait plaisir.16 (Kechiche 2005: 22)

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HANANE: 

The lexis of this scene is limited to plain adjectives, which are interspersed with expletives. The syntax is minimalist:  it lacks the evocative power to explain the beauty of the dress. Beyond the coded multilingual lexical expletives (‘mabrouk’ [congratulations], ‘j’kiffe’ [I love it]) commonly used in MUF, what is striking is the lexical poverty of the exchange. Single adjectives are used repeatedly to praise the dress, in similar simple grammatical formulations with the verb be (‘elle est style’ or ‘elle est trop belle’ [it is stylish or nice]); there are also oddities with gender, such as the use of ‘les mecs’ [guys]. A theatrical effect is produced by the excessive repetition (albeit with different qualifiers) in the appraisal of the dress. Feelings of appreciation and satisfaction are communicated, but the conversation does not progress. The expressiveness comes from the way in which the language is performed (excessive rhythm, tone and accent). For example, Lydia’s short cues in Extract 2 contrast with her friend Frida’s tirade, shown in Extract 3. Frida, who is presented as a rebellious character, employs the most elaborate register and syntax of all the characters; she also uses Arabic terms more frequently than the others, which suggests that her linguistic heritage is important to her. In Extract 3, she mobilises rhetorical devices –​tricolons, emphatic direct address, unusual syntax and expressive repetition –​to articulate her point of view. She also shows her awareness of psychology and social difference. She has understood Marivaux’s literary devices well and what stands out in the roles they are acting: Extract 3 (L’Esquive): FRIDA:  T’sais, on n’en a rien à branler des costumes, hein, franchement, c’qu’il faut, c’est vivre les sentiments des personnages, faut qu’ça vienne de l’intérieur, tu vois. Faut ressentir l’esprit etc. Faut pas voir l’apparence, faut … faut voir ce qui se dégage, c’est pas l’apparence qui compte, c’est le cœur etc., tu vois?17 (Kechiche 2005: 23)

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In Extract 4, during the first rehearsal scene, Lydia criticises Frida’s acting style. Frida’s responses are loud and aggressive, and illustrate the gender ambiguity of expressions used by girls in the banlieue. Extract 4 (L’Esquive): LYDIA:  Tu fais trop de manières. FRIDA:  Tu me casses les couilles. LYDIA:  Tu fais ta fière. T’arrives, tu fais ça. C’est moi, j’fais la bourge dans l’histoire. FRIDA:  Au début, elle, c’est une bonne, elle doit pas bien faire la bourgeoise. Toi, t’en fais trop, t’es la bonne, na na ni, na na na … LYDIA:  C’est toi qu’y en fait trop. FRIDA:  Tu m’critiques, tu veux pas que j’te critique. Krimo, il rigole, il se moque de nous. LYDIA:  Il se moque pas, il regarde la scène.18 (Kechiche 2005: 26) In terms of the dialogue-​writing process itself, the actors have indicated in interviews on L’Esquive –​ and La Graine et le mulet –​that some lines were only added to the screenplay after an intense period of rehearsal (six months for L’Esquive).19 These rehearsals helped to identify and appropriate aspects of the actors’ personalities or sociolects; for example, Ouazani’s banlieue accent, Forestier’s expressive intonation and fast-​paced delivery for L’Esquive, and Hafsia Herzi’s Marseille accent for La Graine et le mulet.20 As a result, the actors helped to ‘determine the script’ (see Toulon and Baurez 2007: 102). Kechiche did not hesitate to rewrite scenes and roles after the casting was complete –​as was the case for the role of Rym, which he extended once it had been assigned to Herzi.21 For Kechiche, rehearsing leads to a state of non-​performance that is outside technical considerations. It can even bring some of the writing process into the filming stage, where takes are accumulated until real life and emotions emerge. This preparation offers the opposite of method acting:  rehearsing. We need to rehearse over and again. Not just the scenes and shots, but also the rest […] bits of Marivaux, of Molière, theatre scenes. This method has two overt aims: learning to control speech and diction; generating a bond between the actors, a troupe spirit. (Hagelstein and Janvier 2014)

This rehearsal does not involve using a dialogue script; it is more about working on its performance. Before La Graine et le mulet, Kechiche (in Porton 2005: 46) confirms that he left little room for dialogue improvisation during the takes; the rehearsals were the key stage for establishing the dialogue: I had to do a great deal of work during the casting phase to get the language right. I  gave the young people a great deal of freedom during the rehearsal

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period to explore the best way of saying certain things. That was work that we did together. Once shooting started, however, the script was fixed and we didn’t deviate from that.

He justifies this preparation in different ways. He needed a balance between eliciting authentic accents and diction from his actors and a process of stylizing the MUF, in particular the use of verlan (French back slang), to ensure the dialogue was comprehensible (see Kechiche in Lalanne 2004). He (in Morice 2007) also defends his control over the script, reasserting his auteur status and his legitimacy as an experienced actor: [The dialogue] is carefully written up. I first develop the dialogue alone, before I pass it to Ghalia Lacroix, my co-​writer, who is also involved in the editing. She is an actor, and so was I, we know what works best and how to avoid what bothers the actors.

Kechiche considers collective writing to be a process rather than a method.22 To enhance the richness of the dialogue for La Graine et le mulet, he extended that process to include actors and characters of different ages and with different linguistic backgrounds. Libiot (2007) talks of ‘dialogue scenes which sound incredibly right […] using the language of today in lively, rich and surprising ways’, and Frodon (2007: 10) speaks of working on words ‘to bring together verbal and body language’. Similar to the contrast between Krimo and the other characters in L’Esquive, in La Graine et le mulet the volubility of the female characters contrasts with the silence of Slimane (Habib Boufares). This is illustrated in the scenes between Slimane and his ex-​wife Souad (Bouraouïa Marzouk), with his daughter Karima (Faridah Benkhetache) and his partner’s daughter Rym whose social effectiveness comes from her linguistic abilities. For instance, when they are trying to get a loan for the restaurant from the bank, it is Rym who enthusiastically presents the business plan to the banker while Slimane remains more passive. At the end of the film, however, in a lengthy, dramatic belly-​dancing scene which drew much critical attention, she is silenced and reduced to a powerless object of the guests’ gaze. In the version of the screenplay for La Graine et le mulet deposited in the Cinémathèque française archive dated 18 July 2005, on pages 30–​40 –​late in the development process, but preceding the filming stage –​the long scene in which the family eats couscous at Souad’s does not include everything that is heard in the film (e.g. ‘Allez à table, c’est prêt, je sers’). Sometimes, as with the comment about eating peppers with couscous, the lines appear in both, but with a few changes (page 35). Other lines appear to have been added later, such as the discussion between Lilia (Leila D’Issernio) and her husband Mario (Bruno Lochet) on their use of Arabic expressions for love words in intimate moments (pages 36–​7), which is not completely included

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in the film. It might have been partly improvised, but it is more likely that it was added to the actors’ briefs before one of the many takes or during the lengthy rehearsals.23 This dinner scene, which is over fifteen minutes long, uses mobile hand-​held cameras and many close-​ups, to highlight how verbal interactions establish synergies in this tightly-​knit multicultural extended family. A rich intercultural atmosphere arises from the multi-​layered, lively and uninhibited conversation fragments, complete with interruptions and contradictions, which ignore the orderly conventions of dialogue writing. The heterogeneous registers of language and sociolects that are used in La Graine et le mulet are even more prevalent in L’Esquive, in which Kechiche explicity explores language variation of the parlers jeunes (Gadet 2017). L’Esquive deconstructs enduring negative stereotypes about MUF by promoting its linguistic inventiveness and by capturing on film its lively and expressive orality from which life surges.24 The characters play with street language in a creative way, deriving excitement and pleasure from contemporary banter and contrasts in register, as does the filmmaker (in Melinard 2004): We don’t realise because we don’t pay attention. There is a true culture of spoken language. It is very precise and intelligent. It’s musical, harmonious. When we hear it spoken fast, from outside, it sounds like a confusing mess, but the pleasure of language is there.

A ‘confusing mess’ is the very impression that emerges from the opening scenes of the film (see Extracts 1 and 2), but it illustrates the playful manipulation of language that is a key feature of Kechiche’s artistic signature: Playing is paramount in Kechiche’s cinema, play acting, playing treasure hunts, playing with words, as if the filmmaker kept returning to the essence of the artistic creation, the pleasure derived from playing like children did in the past. This cinema is all about pleasure. Pleasure of the flesh, pleasure of enjoying words, pleasure of trying the patience of the audience. (Mrabet 2016: 293)

It may seem an exploitative writing method, but it also shows his engagement with realism: Kechiche is an unconditional devotee of realism –​or even of something beyond everyday realism. ‘I don’t want it to look like life,’ he says of his cinema. ‘I want it to actually be life. Real moments of life, that’s what I’m after.’ (Romney 2013)

As noted by the linguist Claude Hagège (in Goudaillier 2001a:  3), the coded street language that is spoken in the French banlieues also responds to the speakers’ ‘need to assert their identity through a code that acts as a vehicle crossing ethnic groups and cementing their solidarity’. This stresses the ephemeral nature of the sociolects that Kechiche explores:  they are

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constantly reinvented, especially at the lexical level. Krimo’s conversations with Fathi and Rachid in L’Esquive illustrate the characters’ casual use of different language codes depending on their interlocutors. Fathi, for example, is vulgar and violent with Frida, but very gentle with Krimo’s mother and politely argumentative with the police officers.25 L’Esquive contains many examples of lexical creativity and expressive orality that are similar to those identified by sociolinguistic research on parlers jeunes (Gadet 2017: 123–​4). Verlan is a common form of lexical creation, as illustrated in Extract 1.26 Emmanuelle Guerin and Sandrine Wachs (2017:  114–​17) also report a phenomenon of ‘semantic neologisation’  –​ that is, when words undergo dynamic changes in their meaning –​such as embrouiller (blur and mock) and déchirer (tear and attack).27 The recycling of old French slang words and phrases is also common in MUF:  ‘daron, darone’ (father, mother), ‘bouffon’ (fool); ‘c’est d’la balle’ (it’s easy) (Frida), ‘on en a rien à branler’ (we don’t give a toss) (Frida). The expression ‘vas-​y’ (go on) is used as an expletive in all sorts of contexts in the film, and the dialogue is marked by redundancy and excess: many adjectives are qualified with the adverb ‘trop’ (too much), or with another adjective, such as ‘mortel, grave’ (very amazing). Yet another common usage identified by Guerin and Wachs (2017: 119) in MUF consists of lexical borrowings from the ‘heritage languages’ spoken by parents or grandparents, but not normally by young people themselves  –​often Arabic but also Wolof and Spanish. Examples used in L’Esquive include ‘inch’allah’ and ‘ahchouma’ (shame), ‘mabrouk’ (congratulations), ‘kiffer’ (like) and ‘tahib’ (welcome). The dialogue of the film also reveals that girls and young women have appropriated this highly male urban sociolect calling each other ‘mon frère’ (brother), a usage coming from Arabic, or ‘les mecs’, and referring to ‘couilles’ (balls) (see Extracts 1, 3 and 4 for examples of gender power relations in the script). Kechiche (in Lalanne 2004) sees this use of masculine forms as a mimetic way to appear stronger in mixed groups rather than as a sign of linguistic gender dominance. The female actors also confirm this (see Régnier 2004). These lexical examples of variation also illustrate the inventiveness of the sociolects of L’Esquive. However, they must reflect current urban youth usage as similar forms of linguistic manipulation and creativity also appear in the extracts of dialogue for our next case study, Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs.

Cantet’s screenwriting: an integrated dialogue dispositif Laurent Cantet (b. 1960)  and his regular co-​ writer Robin Campillo (b. 1962) met in 1983 at the IDHEC film school in Paris.28 They both graduated in 1986 at the end of three years of formal filmmaking training, and became

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regular writing collaborators from Cantet’s second feature film, L’Emploi du temps/​Time Out (2001) and Vers le sud/​Heading South (2006), which Campillo also co-​ edited. Entre les murs confirmed their partnership in screenwriting and editing. For this film, François Bégaudeau, the author of the novel in 2006, joined in the adaptation work. The independent production company Haut et Court agreed to back the project on the sole basis of a note of intention, without the support of a written screenplay (as would normally be expected before funding is granted). The film received critical and public acclaim, winning the Palme d’Or 2008 at Cannes, and four Césars (including that of Best adaptation and screenplay) as well as an Academy Award nomination for best foreign language film in 2009. This boosted its international distribution and helped Cantet to develop an international project in English for his next film Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (Cantet, 2012, adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’s novel of 1993, and co-​written with Campillo). The pair collaborated again on the writing (but not the editing) of L’Atelier, another film giving language a central place in its plot, which revolves around a group of teenagers taking part in a creative writing course. Cantet’s collaborative writing method, then, has been perfected over several films that each took a pre-​existing source as their starting point: a novel for Entre les murs and Foxfire, and a news article for L’Atelier. With just a handful of films, Cantet has developed a coherent thematic and artistic signature; he creates realist, socially anchored fictions in which he explores different ways of capturing real-​life moments and language contexts.29 His screenplays can be interpreted as variations on his interest in the ‘social boxes in which individuals are trapped and the ways in which they try to resist this well or not so well in order to escape’ (Odicino 2017). The characters in Entre les murs, Foxfire and, more recently, L’Atelier all fit this pattern in different ways. Moreover, in film after film, the screenwriting and dialogue dispositifs illustrate realist representations of specific generations of young people. The creative process is characterised by a close imbrication of screenplay and mise en scene, in particular, hence Cantet’s insistence on shooting scenes in their entirety, using several cameras. The writing process for Entre les murs has been documented in a series of interviews (e.g. Mangeot 2008; Burdeau and Thirion 2008; Mérigeau 2013). An annotated screenplay version of the film has also been published (Bégaudeau et al. 2008), which offers insights into the different stages of the writing process and includes specific comments on many of the changes that were made during the filming and editing stages.30 These documents also help to retrace the genesis of the film and its stages of development to produce a fictional drama in which the tension revolves around language –​Cantet (in Binh et al. 2012: 150) forcefully rejects any association with documentaries. From the start, Cantet aimed to transpose the social background and tone

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of the book into cinematic modes of expression, drawing inspiration from the literary text to establish a first draft of the screenplay that would not necessarily involve the same characters or situations.31 For Entre les murs, Cantet has identified five distinct stages of development (see Mérigeau 2013). In 2005, he was already thinking of a film project set in a school. After reading Bégaudeau’s novel in 2006, he contacted the author and they agreed on an adaptation set in a multicultural school in the Paris area. In a second stage, he and Campillo wrote a skeleton, broadly derived from the novel. Then he organised workshops with pupils in a school to find a cast of nonprofessional actors. He chose a multicultural school on the edge of Paris, the Collège Françoise Dolto in the 20th district. In the winter of 2006–​7, a group of pupils attended weekly theatre workshops for six months, developing improvisation techniques and acting out assigned situations using their own words. These sessions also enabled Cantet and Campillo to develop a new screenplay by using material tested during the workshops. The writing stage is never decisive as such. It only starts to be when I begin working with the actors. At first, there is a vague thread, or at least loose, so that more things can be incorporated. The casting stage is a way of testing what has been written, proposing situations, and seeing how they turn out. These improvisations are in turn brought into the written screenplay. I never know exactly when the screenplay is complete. (Cantet in Burdeau and Thirion 2008: 11)

The writing process continued into the filming, the fourth stage, which took place in 2007 over seven weeks in a real school, using several cameras to capture situations that arose spontaneously. Cantet refers to this method as captation (capture), a term that is often associated with the documentary technique of making an objective recording of a situation, also known as ‘fly on the wall’. Last but not least came the editing stage, integrated into a broader final rewriting process, with Campillo acting as main editor. Cantet (in Burdeau and Thirion 2008: 17) reports that ‘many decisions were taken during this editing stage’. This practice of (re)writing at the editing stage has been discussed in earlier chapters (see Chapter 5 in particular), highlighting collaborative partnerships and/​or role-​blending between director and editor. This is further confirmed in a collection of interviews with directors and editors (Binh and Sojcher 2017). In narrative terms, a plotline for Entre les murs developed gradually from the juxtaposition of episodic ensemble of classroom scenes with more dramatised scenes focusing on the character of Souleymane (Franck Keïta), mostly in the second part of the film. The school disciplinary process features prominently in the narrative structure as a motor for the fiction (Rigoulet

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2008b), as Souleymane becomes the central protagonist that Cantet had sketched out in 2005 (Burdeau and Thirion 2008:  18). Bégaudeau et  al. (2008) relate how written ensemble scenes changed during the shooting and at the editing stage to produce the definitive version in the film. This corresponds to a desire to grant back some autonomy to the actors of the class who are not just assigned a pre-​written role. Without comparing closely the dialogue of the book with that of the film, we have noted that some key scenes from the novel reappear in the film. Examples include the scene in which Khoumba (Rachel Régulier) refuses first to read and then to apologise to the teacher, and the scene that leads to the incident around the controversial use of the word pétasses (bitches/​sluts) (see Extract 8).32 What we see here, then, is how the actors enriched the dialogue with their own phrases and styles of diction, complementing the construction of credible characters with their own personalities. Rather than performing full improvisations during the filming, they influenced the rewriting of certain scenes (at least in terms of the dialogue). The guiding principle was that ‘fiction should emerge from chaos’ (Rigoulet 2008b), confirmation of the unstable nature of the screenplay. The written text was never treated as sacred; its loose construction allowed space for: finding ways of making what we want to see happen, rather than tell[ing] all involved parties what they should say. We knew that by approaching a subject in a certain way we were likely to get to what we were looking for. It involved nearly as much writing strategy as pure writing. (Cantet in Binh et al. 2012: 129)

Figure 8.1  François (François Bégaudeau) in Entre les murs.

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The only actor to work from a script was Bégaudeau, who played the teacher, Monsieur Marin (Figure 8.1). He was in charge of orchestrating the classroom scenes, inducing and managing the verbal exchanges between the pupils, who had not seen the screenplay beforehand: The young people never had access to a screenplay. We noticed that when they improvised situations guided by us, they were able to find the dialogue themselves:  some of the exchanges, some of the expressions, which were in François [Bégaudeau]’s book –​as if these were familiar archetypes of language in keeping with their own preoccupations. (Cantet in Mangeot 2008)

However, the appropriation of the language used by the class as part of the dispositif can still seem somewhat ‘contrived’ to return to Berliner’s point. The adolescents were in a staged environment and performed for the camera, as did the teacher. Using similar writing strategies and therefore establishing their dispositif, Cantet and Campillo perfected this staged method with another group of nonprofessional actors for L’Atelier in 2017 (Cantet 2017:  2–​3). A  two-​ week workshop with local teenagers preceded the casting, and the young actors chosen did not learn their lines: ‘They never learned their roles; rather they assimilated their roles into their personalities’ (Cantet 2017: 2). This allowed the characters enough autonomy to go beyond the simple needs of the screenplay narrative and justified the need to shoot every scene with several cameras.33 In our consideration of Kechiche’s screenwriting dispositif, we focused on a discussion of parlers jeunes from the perspectives of language variation and register. For this second case study, we consider the balance that Cantet strives for between a guided process of dialogue production and improvised speech. This gives us a better insight into the use and function of the screenplay, as opposed to the setting up of a dispositif as part of the film’s development process. Cantet and Campillo make full use of dialogue to achieve a number of narrative functions. More than merely advancing the plot, the dialogue often performs the actions of the film, communicating information about the characters. For example, the lessons on pen-​portrait writing lead to tensions and verbal conflicts that expose interpersonal relationships. Tensions around identity pride are exposed in a discussion between Souleymane and Nassim (Nassim Amrabt) about football and national teams. Wei (Wei Huang) reveals his sense of exclusion and cultural difference in a remark about his peers: ‘Les jeunes de cette époque, ils ont pas honte’ (young people today, they have no shame). And some explanation for Khoumba’s insolence in class may be found in her comment: ‘on peut pas toujours rester gamine’ (I can’t be a kid forever). The clash between Souleymane and Esmeralda after she expresses a desire to work for the police is the result of an unscripted exchange.

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Cantet films entire takes without interruption, using the ‘fly on the wall’ technique. He creates opportunities to record raw situations using zoom and close-​up, and then chooses whether to include them in postproduction. In the second half of the Entre les murs, the film’s dialogue and scene organisation stays closer to that established in the screenplay: precise dramatic mechanisms (and dialogue triggers) help to develop the plot around Souleymane’s disciplinary hearing, which leaves less room for improvisation. The scene when Souleymane disrupts the class by asking the teacher if he is gay illustrates the potential for deviation, however: Extract 5 (Entre les murs): SOULEYMANE:  Monsieur j’ai une question, mais si j’vous la pose, vous allez m’envoyer à [chez] Guantánamo. FRANÇOIS:  Ah? [BOUBACAR:  J’ai votre parole?] BOUBACAR:  Elle est chaude la question m’sieur. Sur le Coran, vous allez l’envoyer direct dans le bureau du principal après. FRANÇOIS:  J’ai déjà fait ça moi? BOUBACAR:  Non mais sa question m’sieur elle est trop chaude. FRANÇOIS:  Pose-​la, qu’on en finisse. SOULEYMANE:  Non m’sieur vous allez vous véner. FRANÇOIS:  On parle français. SOULEYMANE:  Vous allez vous énerver. FRANÇOIS:  J’ai une tête à m’énerver moi? SOULEYMANE:  C’est clair. FRANÇOIS:  Tu peux plus reculer maintenant. SOULEYMANE:  Y en a ils disent … non, laissez tomber, c’est mort. FRANÇOIS:  Ils disent quoi? SOULEYMANE:  Y’en a qui disent que vous aimez les hommes. FRANÇOIS:  Ils disent que je suis homosexuel? SOULEYMANE:  Ouais, voilà. FRANÇOIS:  Eh ben non. Ça a l’air de t’embarrasser que ton prof puisse être homosexuel? SOULEYMANE:  Ceux qui z’ont dit ça, ils ont juré sur leur vie. FRANÇOIS:  Eh ben, ça va encore faire des morts. SOULEYMANE:  C’est du mytho? FRANÇOIS:  Ben oui, j’suis désolé. SOULEYMANE:  Attendez, c’est pas une insulte, homosexuel. FRANÇOIS:  Mais, j’ne le prends pas pour une insulte. Si j’étais homosexuel, j’te l’dirais, mais là, non.34 (Bégaudeau et al. 2008: 34–​6) The edited scene that appears in the final film version is much longer than the one published in the screenplay extract reproduced here, and it includes

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interactive cues, expletives and repetitions. The teacher (rather, the actor) is clearly enjoying the unexpected development of the exchange, and he chooses to turn the question about his sexuality around. The commentary emphasises that the team took every opportunity to create an interesting situation out of nothing during the shooting, in this case, to explore the slight (and harmless) tension among the boys around this topic (Bégaudeau et  al. 2008:  36). Hence, the teacher adds an unscripted cue to probe:  ‘It seems to bother you that your teacher might be gay?’ It is not so much the words but the dynamics of atmosphere and tension that foster the authentic tone and rhythm. In this context, Cantet also refers to ‘parasiting the moment’ (parasitage) to define productive interference during a take leading to the inclusion of an improvised exchange (see Bégaudeau et  al. 2008: 128–​33). An example of this appears in the following short exchange between François and Angelica, which was not scripted nor prepared before shooting: Extract 6 (Entre les murs): FRANÇOIS:  Ben, moi ça m’intéresse de savoir comment les autres vivent … et ça me permet de les connaitre un peu mieux. JULIETTE:  C’est notre vie privée, ça ne vous regarde pas. ANGELICA:  Mais oui mais voilà … mais … je pense que vous dites ça parce que vous voulez qu’on parle … qu’on truc, mais j’pense pas que c’est vrai. FRANÇOIS:  Ah bon, qu’est-​ce qui n’est pas vrai? ANGELICA:  Ben, le fait que vous vous intéressiez à savoir, voilà … FRANÇOIS:  Ah, tu crois que je suis en train de mentir. En fait je ne m’intéresse pas à vous, mais que je suis en train de forcer le trait pour vous convaincre que c’est intéressant? ANGELICA:  Non c’est pas ça, mais pas autant que vous essayez de le faire paraitre … FRANÇOIS:  Peut-​ être que j’exagère un peu effectivement, vu que je vois que vous n’êtes pas d’accord avec moi …35 (Bégaudeau et al. 2008: 41) Unlike the previous two scenes (Extracts 5 and 6), the scene when Souleymane insults the teacher (Extract 7) allows for little improvisation. After several provocations, Souleymane’s breach of the social language codes, which dictate that a pupil must not address a teacher as tu, initiates the disciplinary procedure that changes the pace of the narrative and power relations in the second part of the film: Extract 7 (Entre les murs): FRANÇOIS:  Eh Souleymane, y a des limites là. SOULEYMANE:  C’est bon, j’t’ai pas parlé, toi!

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FRANÇOIS: 

Tu me laisses pas le choix là. Tu te lèves et tu me suis chez le principal.36 (Bégaudeau et al. 2008: 107, our emphasis)

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It is also a speech act that leads to a breakdown in communication between the pupils and their teacher. Extract 8 (Entre les murs): FRANÇOIS:  D’ailleurs je n’ai pas eu l’occasion de vous le dire mais franchement, tout au long du conseil, j’étais très mal pour vous. Ce n’était ni le moment ni le lieu pour ricaner. ESMERALDA:  Sérieux ça dérangeait pas. FRANÇOIS:  Ah si ça dérangeait … Je m’excuse mais moi rire comme ça en plein conseil, j’appelle ça une attitude de pétasses. KHOUMBA:  C’est bon, ça se fait pas de traiter les élèves m’sieur. FRANÇOIS:  On dit pas traiter, on dit insulter. ESMERALDA:  C’est pas la peine de nous insulter de pétasse. FRANÇOIS:  On dit insulter tout court, ou traiter de …, mais pas un mélange des deux. J’ai pas dit que vous étiez des pétasses, j’ai dit que sur ce coup-​là vous aviez eu une attitude de pétasse. [CARL:  Arrêtez de nous embrouiller. Vous les avez traitées de pétasses, c’est tout.] SOULEYMANE:  Vas-​ y, ça va bien de les traiter comme ça!37 (Screenplay Bégaudeau et al. 2008: 121–​2; our emphasis; dialogue in brackets not included in the screenplay) In addition to highlighting the subtleties of syntax in an attempt to diffuse the protest, the teacher exposes the polysemic nature of language variation. The pupils revert to using many slang expressions and expletives that we identified in L’Esquive as parlers jeunes  –​‘embrouiller’ (deceive), ‘vas-​y’ (go on) –​which they are repeatedly asked to avoid using in class.38 While in the first half of the film the dialogue often generates inventive entertainment through wit, puns and playful use of language, in the second half dramatic effects are provided by the contrasting registers, the subversion of language norms, the use of nonstandard or culturally marked phrases, and the teacher’s semantic faux-​pas in the pétasses incident. The pupils understand pétasse to mean ‘slut’ or ‘prostitute’, but the teacher understands it as a (much less offensive) term to describe a stupid woman. This is an ironic error, coming from a language and register specialist. The dispositif governing the making of Entre les murs involved making fiction emerge from chaos while filming. This required careful editing of over 145 hours of rushes in postproduction, a challenge for Cantet and Campillo, made possible by their flexible dispositif which gave them the freedom to transcend the traditional development stages of film production (Campillo

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in Rigoulet 2008a). As the screenplay no longer acted as guiding force by the time they edited, there was no rewriting as such; rather, gradually, a series of cuts and adjustments, driven by a desire to improve the overall rhythm and coherence (Bégaudeau et al. 2008: 140–​1; Rigoulet 2008b). This final test completed the writing stage applying criteria reminiscent of those commonly employed for proofreading interlingual translations. For example, among the reasons given for cuts explained in the annotated published screenplay, we find jokes that did not work when performed on screen and cues that were redundant or no longer relevant (Bégaudeau et al. 2008: 69, 101, 128). Cantet was especially keen to remove any explanatory dialogue in order to give the actors a chance to establish their characters more subtly through their actions. In this, he recalls Truffaut’s practice described in Chapter 5. Some scenes that detracted from the coherence of the preconceived artistic project were also deleted. For example, to portray the teenagers in a natural way, Cantet only retained a few scenes from the novel involving the teachers. He felt that the teachers’ cues sounded too literary or produced gimmicks in the early versions of the script, which could have compromised the overall cohesion of the film (Bégaudeau et al. 2008: 16, 20). Carried out in the editing stage, these changes distinguish the practice of Cantet –​and to some extent Kechiche, who occasionally rewrites with Lacroix while editing –​from the more rigid dispositif of Rohmer, whose ‘rule of economy’ prevailed over any temptation to make late changes during the shooting, thus excluding multiple takes and alterations to the screenplay découpage (see Chapter 5). Furthermore, Cantet and Campillo found it a striking paradox that, after making these changes, they still found so many similarities between their original script and the filmed scenes as interpreted by the actors without resorting to a proper shooting script. Their liberal approach to adaptation produced a film that was closer than expected to the novel’s themes, its idiosyncratic language and its style of register. If Bégaudeau’s influence during screenwriting was limited, we should not underestimate his guiding role as the lead actor, through which he was able to structure the classroom scenes and playfully seize opportunities to orchestrate the chaos that Cantet wanted to capture with minimum artifice. Cantet proposed another reason for this result: roleplaying with pupils in real classrooms involved repeating similar situations, routinely using the same language patterns; these patterns then reproduced themselves in the takes made for the film (see Bégaudeau et al. 2008: 55). Cantet’s experimental dispositif therefore tends to contradict our initial working hypothesis that the dialogue of real life is not often credible in films: One of the reasons we believe that the younger generation doesn’t know how to speak, is because we no longer give them the opportunity to do so.

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This indeed for me was the entire point of making a movie with them. In our rehearsals, I was stunned by the depth of our exchanges, the way they found the words to defend their ideas, but also their pleasure in playing with different language registers. (Cantet 2017)

This statement refers to L’Atelier but it also applies Cantet’s other films, especially Entre les murs and Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang. Despite the artifice of the film’s dispositif, Cantet and Campillo’s screenwriting method allowed their young actors to sound natural without improvising completely: I write a very specific, precise script with a dialogue-​logic that is fastidiously constructed. I like to confront the actors with the scene but I don’t have them do a table-​read –​I read it to them, and then they re-​enact the scene with their own interpretations, with their own words. (Cantet in King 2018)

Although there was an element of improvisation in the dialogue, it was as part of fabricated roles that the actors could appropriate: I’ve got the feeling that when you let the actors improvise, they just integrate –​ they are able to portray the role and find it quite naturally, without you having to define exactly who the character is or where they come from or engage in lengthy discussions about their psychology. What’s important for me is that all of the cast, each and every one of them, play a role. This is not a documentary. Having said that, the characters that we ask them to become are very much informed by the actors themselves. We use the tools at their disposal: their own body, their own personality, their unique way of speaking –​which has its own rhythms, gestures and idiosyncrasies. (Cantet in King 2018)

More generally, the dialogue of the banlieue films of the 1990s presents the coded vernacular of multicultural urban young people as exotic and trendy. Young marginalised protagonists using verlan are the focus of such dramas as La Haine/​Hate (Kassovitz, 1995) and comedies like Le Ciel, les oiseaux et … ta mère (Bensalah, 1999). Kechiche and Cantet have probed these stereotypes about language variation without reducing language interaction to exotic sociolects. Their strategy of mixing language registers and sociocultural codes is inclusive: it promotes linguistic métissage in film dialogue and counters linguistic prejudice through the performance of heterogeneous, playful orality. This type of dialogue writing strategy may raise questions of legitimacy, which can then be dispelled by openly exposing the contrivance of the method employed and the live performance of actors who play at being themselves. Kechiche and Cantet have developed their own dispositifs for dialogue writing. Like many independent filmmakers post-​2000, they place themselves at the centre of the screenplay-​ development process yet embrace

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a collective approach to dialogue writing, regularly teaming up with the same screenwriters and involving their actors early in the elaboration of the screenplay and dialogue. More originally, their methods subvert the chronology of the writing process usually imposed by the rules that govern the financing of independent films in France. They do so by bringing forward the casting and actor direction to the early stages of screenplay development. Some writing activity can also take place during filming, and as part of the editing process and the last stages of production. These director-​centred approaches to screenwriting are not altogether new; they were explored in the 1960s by New Wave auteurs, who were searching for spontaneity and experimenting with improvisation and modern dialogue. In fact, many of the practices discussed in this chapter echo those used by Rohmer, and sometimes Truffaut (see Chapter 5). In particular, the emphasis on live rehearsals can transform the actors into dialogue consultants. If both Kechiche and Cantet carefully plan their films prior to shooting and develop written screenplays, they adopt a flexible approach to actor direction while filming and editing, and do not hesitate to steer away from the script when needed. This enables the director to achieve the balance between planning and spontaneity that is a feature of auteurist cinema. Their experiments have been facilitated by the digital revolution, which, since 2000, has transformed independent filmmaking –​with smaller technical teams offering greater freedom for experimentation, and HD cameras allowing multiple takes and many hours of rushes. Although language features prominently in these two screenwriting directors’ dispositifs, to the extent that metalinguistic reflections are embedded into the diegesis, Kechiche’s approach to writing remains more grounded in literature, while Cantet tends to follow investigative humanist and socio-​political projects. Unlike Rohmer, however, neither Kechiche nor Cantet considers the scripted words to be sacred. The final product is a combination of the scripted dialogue, the staging of speech acts in situation, the filmed images and the individual voices performing them. Therefore, in Assayas’s words (1985: 7), the screenplays written by Kechiche and Lacroix and those written by Cantet and Campillo are scénarios ouverts (open screenplays) that ‘respond to the demands of the filmmaker’.39 What Kechiche and Cantet seek above all is to find a balance between the original treatment of the subject matter and the aesthetic form of the film –​ rhythm for Cantet, musicality for Kechiche. Their dispositifs offer effective ways of resisting the established codes and conventions of screenwriting, and of countering the social prejudice that is often conveyed by film dialogue (see Kozloff 2000: 27). They have successfully explored the limits of actor improvisation, language authenticity and orality in realist filmmaking.

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They have both assigned narrative and performative functions to dialogue in their films; however, their main concern when casting and rehearsing is how they can effectively mask the contrivances of using the transient yet hyper-​ realistic language codes of the young (and often marginalised) generation that they have chosen as their subject matter. By blending authentic language use and oratory set pieces performed by young newcomer actors, the filmmakers empower these actors to promote their own sociolects to wider audiences in inventive and entertaining ways. By challenging the stereotypes of dialogue writing, they cultivate the art of masking contrivance and, in some cases, they expose the contrivance of film dialogue. Since 2010, Kechiche and Cantet have pursued their quests for unconventional film dispositifs around young people. Kechiche has returned to contrasts between social classes for La Vie d’Adèle: Chapitres 1 et 2. For Mektoub My Love:  Canto Uno, Kechiche’s protagonist Amin could be considered as an alter-​ego even if the script was loosely adapted from another novel written by Bégaudeau, La Blessure, la vraie (2011). Kechiche has once more resorted to multiple takes (100 for the discussion that takes place in the house in the second scene) to obtain what he had in mind from the nonprofessional actors who were asked to merge their personality with their fictional biographies in the film (Balle 2018). As for Cantet, he has continued his exploration of young people in Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang and L’Atelier, two films in which the use of language still features prominently as an integral part of the dispositif implemented. The dispositif thus encapsulates the time of filming, the fictional dimension and all the interactions that bring the scenes to life. They may be uncontrolled and unpredictable, but they reveal a given moment (Diatkine 2017). Through their work on dialogue writing and the place that they give to language in their films, Kechiche and Cantet have also paved the way for other projects to film speech in action, language performance and eloquence using different narrative forms. Some are documentaries, such as A voix haute: la force de la parole/​Speak Up (2017), which is about a public speaking competition, and Cour de Babel (Julie Bertuccelli, 2014), filming a language-​learning experience in a multicultural transition class for teenagers who have just arrived in Paris. The film Swagger is the outcome of an experimental audiovisual community project carried out over two years in Seine Saint Denis; it is half ​documentary, half ​storytelling experiment. The motif of eloquence also continues to appeal in mainstream fiction narratives, such as Le Brio (Yvan Attal, 2017), starring Camélia Jordana and Daniel Auteuil. While the screenwriting process and dialogue-​writing practices take on different forms in these films, they can all be seen as legacies of L’Esquive and Entre les murs in their dialogue-​writing strategies and cinematic performance of different language styles.

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Films written and directed by Kechiche in date order La Faute à Voltaire/​Blame it on Voltaire/​Poetical Refugee (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2000; scr. and dial. Kechiche) L’Esquive/​Games of Love and Chance/​The Dodge (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2004; scr. and dial. Kechiche and Ghalya Lacroix) La Graine et le mulet/​Couscous/​The Secret of the Grain (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007; scr. Kechiche; dial. Kechiche and Ghalya Lacroix) La Vie d’Adèle: Chapitres 1 et 2/​Blue is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013; scr. and dial. Kechiche and Ghalya Lacroix). Adapted from Julie Maroh, Le bleu est une couleur chaude (2010) Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2017; scr. and dial. Kechiche and Ghalya Lacroix; adapted from the novel La Blessure, la vraie by François Bégaudeau, Paris: Gallimard, 2011)

Films written and directed by Cantet in date order L’Emploi du temps/​ Time Out (Laurent Cantet, 2001; scr. Cantet and Robin Campillo; edit. Campillo and Stéphanie Léger) Vers le sud/​Heading South (Laurent Cantet, 2006; scr. Cantet and Robin Campillo; edit. Campillo and Stéphanie Léger) Entre les murs/​The Class (Laurent Cantet, 2008; scr. Cantet and Robin Campillo; edit. Campillo and Stéphanie Léger; adapted from the novel Entre les murs by François Bégaudeau, Paris: Gallimard, 2006) Foxfire: Confessions d’un gang de filles/​Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (Laurent Cantet, 2012; scr. Cantet and Robin Campillo; edit. Campillo and Stéphanie Léger; adapted from the novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang by Carol Joyce Oates, New York: Dutton, 1993). Written and filmed in English L’Atelier/​The Workshop (Laurent Cantet, 2017; scr. Cantet and Robin Campillo; edit. Mathilde Muyard)

Other films mentioned La Haine/​Hate (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995; scr. Kassovitz) Le Ciel, les oiseaux et … ta mère/​Boys on the Beach (Abdel Bensalah, 1999; scr. and dial. Bensalah; adapt. Gilles Laurent) Neuilly sa mère (Gabriel-​Julien Laferrière, 2009; scr. Philippe de Chauveron and Marc de Chauveron) Bande de filles/​Girlhood (Céline Sciamma, 2014; scr. Sciamma) Swagger (Olivier Babinet, 2016 [no screenplay credits]) Chouf (Karim Dridi, 2016; scr. Dridi) Divines (Houda Benyamina, 2016; scr. and dial. Benyamina, Romain Compingt and Malik Rumeau)

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Corniche Kennedy (Dominique Cabrera, 2016; scr. Cabrera, Philippe Geoni and Pierre Linhart; adapted from the novel Corniche Kennedy by Maylis de Kerangal, Paris: Verticales, 2008) A voix haute:  la force de la parole/​Speak up (Stéphane de Freitas, 2017; scr. de Freitas) Le Brio (Yvan Attal, 2017; scr. Yaël Langmann, Victor Saint Macary, Bryan Marciano and Yvan Attal)

Notes 1 The showing versus telling distinction captures two different modes of presenting events in narrative films discussed in narratology (see Rabinowitz 2005:  530–​1). See Gaudreault’s (2008) theory of monstration and narration also mentioned in Chapter 9. 2 It derives from definitions developed by the philosopher of language John L. Austin (1975), the linguist John Searle (1969) and the gender theorist Judith Butler (1997). 3 For example, Doran (2007); Nettelbeck (2007); Swamy (2007); Strand (2009); Williams (2011a and 2011b); Norindr (2012); O’Shaughnessy (2015). 4 For comparative analyses, see Strand (2009) and Vanderschelden (2012a). 5 This MPF project was conducted in Paris around 2010. It had a counterpart in London for English (Multicultural London English/​MLE) (see Gadet 2017: 16). 6 Ghalya (sometimes spelled ‘Ghalia’) Lacroix is Franco-​Tunisian. She is not credited for La Faute à Voltaire, but when Kechiche received his Venice Mostra prize he thanked her publicly for ‘carrying the film throughout’. 7 See Mérigeau (2010) for a full account of the development of the early films. Attentive viewers have noted a humorous reference to La Graine et le mulet in the screenplay of La Faute à Voltaire, confirming that a script for the later film already existed (Delorme and Frodon 2007: 15). 8 An early title was Abdelkrim poli par l’amour; this was developed around 1992 and rejected by the Avance sur recettes commission (Morice and Rigoulet 2013). 9 L’Esquive was screened in festivals as Games of Love and Chance and released on DVD in 2005 in the United States. It is referenced as The Dodge for the UK. Many of Kechiche’s films have also received a DVD release in Italy. 10 Williams (2011a:  399) analyses the literary facture of Kechiche’s dialogue enriched by ‘a wealth of historical and cultural sources, references and citations’; Marivaux in L’Esquive of course, but also Voltaire and Ronsard in La Faute à Voltaire. 11 The expression ‘joutes verbales’ is used in many reviews of the film (e.g. Piazzo 2004; Tessé 2004: 52; Régnier 2004). For a discussion of these rituals in MUF, and language as performance more generally, see Lepoutre (2001:  173–​99). The trend has developed further after 2010 with the development of ‘concours d’éloquence’, a topic that has inspired French filmmakers. See A voix haute: la force de la parole (de Freitas, 2017) and Le Brio (Attal, 2017).

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12 VOICE 1: [I’m going]. I’m gonna fuck them up! /​VOICE 2: In any case, their neighbourhood, it’s not the Bronx, like, I’m gonna go over there and I’m gonna fuck them up! /​VOICE 3:  Come on, let’s go now. /​VOICE 1:  There’s one I’m gonna get, I’m gonna sort him out, the son of a bitch. /​MAKOU: The first one we see, on my mother’s life, we’re gonna fuck his mother. That’s all there is to do. No need to … /​SLAM: In front of everyone, people did nothing, d’you think that’s normal or what? They were walking right by you and they were looking at me. /​ FATHI: The whole lot are sons of bitches! /​YOUNG BEUR: The twins are there, they really make me sick. I’m gonna kill them. /​SLAM: There were eight of them, eight of them! /​YOUNG BEUR: I’m gonna kill them! They’re guys who come round here. I don’t even know what they’re doing round here. /​YOUNG BEUR: They live at the mill, I think. /​VOICE: Ah! It’s the guys from the mill. /​VOICE: Fucking sons of bitches! /​FATHI: Those sons of bitches we’re gonna get them on my mother’s live, you’re gonna see. /​MAKOU: Ah, yeah, totally. /​YOUTH: And they take us for bullshitters [on my mother’s life] We’re gonna beat them. /​SLAM: I’m going, and if you wanna come then come. /​MAKOU: In any case, you’re up for it. You’re up for it, we’re all up for it. /​[YOUTH: Don’t worry about it.] /​MAKOU: We’re gonna shut their mouths. Let’s go, come on. /​SLAM: Yeah, let’s go. After you’re gonna squeal, right? /​YOUNG BEUR:  Come on, Krimo. Viens! Run, for fuck’s sake. /​ [KRIMO: What’s going on?] /​FATHI: A problem. /​FATHI: It’s Slam, he got beaten up. /​ KRIMO: By who? /​FATHI: By those sons of bitches, there. /​KRIMO: Really? /​ FATHI: On my mother’s life. /​YOUNG BEUR: If you’re up for it, we’re going to get them. /​MAKOU: Come on, let’s go, we’re off! /​YOUNG BEUR: Come on, don’t act like a bitch! Come on let’s go, we’re off. /​YOUNG BEUR: We’ll meet up there. Hurry up! /​FATHI: Go on, run! 13 Rym has a similar scene in La Graine et le mulet, where she uses a range of persuasive strategies to convince her mother to attend the inaugural party. 14 For a full typology of the oral features and lexical creation processes for the idiolects used by young people in the French cités, see Goudaillier (2001a; 2001b) and Lepoutre (2001); see also Doran (2007). Another term, swag, has been used since 2010 to describe the eloquence of banlieue youths, for example in the film Swagger (Babinet, 2016). 15 ‘The quality of being precious or affected in the style of Marivaux. The great myth about Marivaux is that he is all style and no substance. His enemies […] coined the term Marivaudage to imply mannered, precious dialogue’ (Collins Dictionary online). See Nettelbeck (2007), Swamy (2007), Blatt (2008), Shea (2012) and Sorin (2014) for analyses of Marivaux’s language in relation to the film. This term is also often used to describe Rohmer’s dialogue (see Chapter 5). 16 LYDIA:  There you go! /​RACHID:  Fabulous! Fabulous! /​HANANE:  It’s stylish. LYDIA: Is it nice? /​HANANE: It’s cool? /​LYDIA: Will it do? /​HANANE: It’s stylish, there aren’t even words to describe it. LYDIA: Really? /​ HANANE: Magnificent! /​ LYDIA: There you go! /​HANANE: Well, it’s really cool, congrats! /​LYDIA: D’you mean it? /​HANANE: Yeah. /​ LYDIA: Is it nice? /​RACHID: Perfect. /​ LYDIA: Is it cool or what? /​RACHID: Deadly! /​ LYDIA: Yeah? Will it do? /​RACHID: Yeah, I love it. /​ LYDIA: Really? /​ LYDIA: Y’know, guys, that makes me happy.

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17 FRIDA: You know, we couldn’t give a toss about costumes, eh, frankly, you need to live what the characters feel, it needs to come from inside, you see, you need to get the spirit, and all. It’s not the appearance … it’s what comes out, it’s not the appearance that counts, it’s the heart and that, you see? 18 LYDIA:  You’re too fussy. /​FRIDA:  You’re breaking my balls. /​LYDIA:  You’re showing off. You come on, you do this. It’s me, I’m the posh one in the story. /​ FRIDA: At the beginning, she’s the maid, she shouldn’t act posh. You’re doing too much. You’re the maid, na na na … /​LYDIA: You’re the one doing too much. /​ FRIDA: You’re criticising me, but you don’t want me to criticise you. Krimo, he’s laughing, he’s laughing at us. /​LYDIA: He’s not laughing at us, he’s watching the scene. N.B.: There are minor variations between the Avant Scène published script for Extracts 3 and 4 and what is actually said in the film. 19 See Domenach and Rouyer (2007) and Rouyer (2013: 20). 20 Forestier is not from a banlieue; she grew up in Paris. Herzi is from Marseille and was brought up in the Northern estates. Both actors were discovered by Kechiche, who gave them their first major roles. For those roles, they both received Césars for most promising actress. See Bégaudeau (2004:  79) on Forestier’s acting performance and her impressive appropriation of banlieue/​ street language. 21 See the interview with Herzi in the bonus of La Graine et le mulet (French DVD). 22 ‘une démarche, pas une méthode’ (in Delorme and Frodon 2007: 15). Rehearsing with actors has since been used by other directors who are interested in MPF; for example, Céline Sciamma in Bande de filles and Olivier Babinet in Swagger. 23 See Toulon and Baurez (2007:  103); Domenach and Rouyer (2007); Rouyer (2013: 20). 24 Kechiche has expressed this idea of life surging from the filming (and the screenplay) in many interviews. For example, ‘rendre la vie au cinéma, la faire jaillir malgré l’artifice’ (give life back to cinema, making it surge forth despite the artifice) (Delorme and Frodon 2007: 17). 25 See Gadet (2002: 45) for a discussion of politeness strategies in MUF. In La Graine et le mulet, the characters adjust their register to the social context (e.g. at the bank, or when welcoming members of high society in the scene depicting the inaugural opening of the restaurant). 26 Examples found in L’Esquive include:  ‘keum’ (mec/​ man), ‘vener’ (énervé/​ annoyed), ‘T’es ouf’ (t’es fou/​ you’re mad), ‘cimer’ (merci/​thanks), ‘chelou’ (louche/​dodgy), ‘reum’ (mère/​mother). They also include a series of neologisms; for example, ‘s’éventailler’ (use a fan), ‘ambiancer’ (chat up). 27 Other examples found in L’Esquive include ‘éclater’ (blow up/​hit or shoot), ‘crevard’ (jerk), ‘grave’ (very), ‘mortel’ (serious, lethal/​amazing), ‘lourd’ (heavy/​ a pain) and ‘chaud’ (hot/​keen to do something). 28 Cantet confirms that, his screenplay drafts are all read by his close friends at IDHEC, Gilles Marchand and Dominik Moll, as well as by his cinematographer Pierre Milon (in Burdeau and Thirion 2008:  10). In addition to his collaborations with Cantet, Campillo has written and directed three films: Les

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Revenants/​The Returned (2004; co-​written with Brigitte Tijou); Eastern Boys (2014; co-​written with Gilles Marchand) and 120 battements par minute/​120 BPM (2017; co-​written with Philippe Mangeot). 29 Cantet has shot all his films with the same cinematographer, Pierre Milon, whom he met at the IDHEC in the 1980s. 30 This published screenplay is annotated to show different stages of writing, including notes of changes made during filming and cuts carried out at the editing stage. This is the version we have used to quote dialogue extracts from the film. 31 Bégaudeau was mainly a consultant in the development stage, ensuring the credibility of the situations taken from the book. Bégaudeau et al. (2008) occasionally mention this initial draft in their comments. 32 These scenes can be found in the novel (Bégaudeau 2006: 54–​6 and 78–​83). 33 It is worth noting that L’Atelier’s diegesis is a mise en abyme of Cantet’s collective writing method with young nonprofessional actors. ‘Dans l’atelier’ is also the title of Cahiers du cinéma’s special dossier devoted to Entre les murs (Burdeau and Thirion 2008:  9). We do not have space to analyse L’Atelier’s development here, but Cantet provides specific examples of improvised scenes involving the character of Antoine captured via the multiple camera dispositif; others were re-​filmed. In addition, the terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016 induced some late dialogue changes (Cantet 2017). 34 SOULEYMANE: Sir, I have a question, but if I ask it you’ll send me to Guantanamo. /​ FRANÇOIS:  Really? […] /​BOUBACAR:  It’s hot, that question, sir. On the Koran, you’ll send him straight to the principal’s office when you hear it. /​ FRANÇOIS:  Have I  ever done that? /​BOUBACAR:  No, but this one, it’s too hot. /​ FRANÇOIS:  Get on with it, then. /​SOULEYMANE:  No way sir, you’ll get mad. /​ FRANÇOIS:  Speak in proper French. /​SOULEYMANE:  You’re going to get very angry. /​ FRANÇOIS: Do I look like I get angry easily? /​SOULEYMANE: Of course. /​ FRANÇOIS: You can’t go back now. /​SOULEYMANE: Some people… they say that, no leave it, it’s too risky. /​FRANÇOIS: They say what? /​SOULEYMANE: They say you like men. /​FRANÇOIS:  They say that I’m gay? /​SOULEYMANE:  Yeah, that’s it. /​ FRANÇOIS:  Well, I’m not. It seems to bother you that your teacher might be gay? /​SOULEYMANE:  The ones who said that, they swore on their lives /​ FRANÇOIS: Well, they’re dead then. /​SOULEYMANE: You mean it’s all made up? /​ FRANÇOIS:  Well, yes, afraid so. /​SOULEYMANE: Wait, it’s not an insult, gay. /​ FRANÇOIS: I’m not taking it as an insult. If I was gay, I’d tell you, but I’m not. See Bégaudeau (2006: 84–​5) for similarities between this scene and the novel. Cantet says Keïta appropriated the scene and added the Guantanamo line which was in the novel (Bégaudeau et al. 2008: 34). 35 FRANÇOIS:  Well, I’m interested in how others live … and that allows me to get to know them a bit better. /​JULIETTE:  It’s our private life, it’s nothing to do with you. /​ANGELICA: Yes, but well, there you are … I think you’re saying that because you want us to tell you … you know, but I don’t think it’s true. /​ FRANÇOIS: Oh, really, what’s not true? /​ANGELICA: Well, the fact that you’re interested in knowing … /​FRANÇOIS: Ah, you think I’m lying. In fact, I’m not

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interested in you, but I’m pretending to convince you that it’s interesting? /​ ANGELICA: No, it’s not that, but more that you’re trying to look like you are … /​ FRANÇOIS: Well, perhaps I am exaggerating a bit, since I can see you don’t agree with me … 36 FRANÇOIS: Hey, Souleymane, there are limits … /​SOULEYMANE:  OK, I wasn’t talking to you /​FRANÇOIS: You’ve left me no choice now. Get up and come with me to see the principal. 37 FRANÇOIS: By the way, I didn’t get the chance to tell you but, honestly throughout the staff meeting, I felt really bad for you. It wasn’t the time or the place to snigger. /​ ESMERALDA: Honestly, we weren’t bothering anyone. /​FRANÇOIS: Well, yes, you were. I’m sorry, but for me, laughing like that in the middle of the meeting, is what I call a slutty attitude. /​KHOUMBA: Come on, you can’t call pupils, sir, it’s not on. /​FRANÇOIS: It’s not call, it’s insult. /​ESMERALDA: It’s not right to insult us sluts. /​FRANÇOIS: You should say insult us, full stop, or call us something, not a mixture of both. I didn’t call you sluts, I just said that you had a slutty attitude, that’s all. /​[CARL: Stop confusing us. You called them sluts and that’s it.] /​SOULEYMANE: Go on, you can’t call them sluts just like that. 38 Other examples heard in the film include ‘charrier’ (tease), ‘vener’ (annoyed), ‘céfran’ (back slang for French), ‘tiéquar’ (back slang for neighbourhood). 39 Conversely, scénarios achevés (completed screenplays) are self-​ contained scripted texts that Assayas sees as ‘occupying the entire [narrative and dialogue] space’, suggesting a lack of flexibility during filming because ‘the story is tightly kept under wraps’ and the whole writing process is ‘driven by dramatic impact’ (Assayas 1985: 7).

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Réalisa(c)trices screenwriting the self: Noémie Lvovsky, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Maïwenn

The last chapter of this volume looks at three contemporary women screenwriting directors who have been making films since 2000. The first two, Noémie Lvovsky and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, are close friends. They have worked together extensively since the 1990s, acting in, directing and/​or co-​writing in their respective films. Their styles and agendas may differ, but numerous correspondences can be traced throughout their films, as well as with other screewriting practices discussed in this volume. Sometimes associated with French comédie d’auteur, a sub-​ genre identified by Raphaelle Moine (2005: 223–​32),1 and autofictional narratives, they both use personal experience as prime material to nourish their screenplays and they write with regular co-​writers; Agnès de Sacy for Bruni Tedeschi and Florence Seyvos for Lvovsky. In addition, they operate within a common circle of film professionals who, as we shall see, came to be associated with the ‘Young French Cinema’, a collective denomination given to the hundred directors who made their debut films in the 1990s (see Trémois 1997; Darke 1999; Prédal 2002; Nacache 2015). Our third screenwriting director, Maïwenn, is not part of this professional group but, as a child actor who married Luc Besson at the age of 16, before turning her hand to directing, she has been immersed in a cinema-​filled world from an early age. Maïwenn is credited as screenwriting director for all her films, sometimes with a collaborator in the last two films. Her often reflexive and playful screenwriting method provides a pertinent point of comparison for that of Lvovsky and Bruni Tedeschi, because like them, she directs, writes and –​in her first two, highly personal films –​plays the lead role herself. Coming from diverse backgrounds  –​only Lvovsky received formal screenwriting training at the Fémis (the Paris film school) –​all three writing directors approach writing for cinema using multi-​layered narrative modes recalling autofiction (see Vanderschelden 2012b).2 They have negotiated the legacy of the New Wave auteur in their own original ways: they have developed a special status, that of screenwriting ‘réalisa(c)trice’, a term conveniently coined as the title of the ‘making of’ film included on the DVD of

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Actrices/​Actresses (Bruni Tedeschi, 2007).3 The term refers to any director screening herself in films that she has scripted or co-​scripted. Their exploration of unusual character types who tread the line between fiction and self-​representation revisits filmmaking in the first person feminine.4 Lvovsky led the way, making her directing debut in 1994 with Oublie-​moi/​Forget Me, co-​written with several friends she had met at the Fémis. Though she has been well established as an actor since 2001, she only started appearing in her own films in 2012, taking on lead roles in Camille redouble/​Camille Rewinds (2012) and Demain et tous les autres jours/​ Tomorrow and Thereafter (2017). Bruni Tedeschi has cast herself as the protagonist in all her films to date, starting with Il est plus facile pour un chameau …/​It’s Easier for a Camel … (2003), followed by Actrices, Un château en Italie/​ A Castle in Italy (2013) and Les Estivants/​The Summer House (2018).5 Maïwenn took on the lead role in Pardonnez-​moi/​Forgive Me (2006) and in Le Bal des actrices/​All about Actresses (2009) and a supporting role (as a filmmaker) in Polisse/​Poliss (2011). The fact that Lvovsky, Bruni Tedeschi and Maïwenn are réalisa(c)trices constitutes a defining feature in the construction of their authorial identities. It is also significant that some of their screenplays and narratives partly revolve around the lives of actresses, screenwriters and playwrights, reflecting on the status of authors and artists. The varying degrees of transparency and derision with which they stage and/​or screen themselves as (partly or entirely fictional) actors, playwrights, screenwriters or directors in their films blur the traditional boundaries between (fake or pseudo-​) autobiography and fiction. This ambiguity has also been cultivated in their interviews around the films and noted by critics and reviewers who have repeatedly drawn comparisons between the screenwriting directors and the protagonists that they portray, sometimes trying to resolve their contradictions. For example, Isabelle Régnier (2007) refers to ‘a generation that draws inspiration from autobiography’ in a review of Bruni Tedeschi’s Actrices. As we will see below, Bruni Tedeschi tends to accept this autobiographical label but Maïwenn rejects it quite forcefully. We have argued elsewhere that these introspective, ambivalent narratives appropriate certain conventions and motifs of literary autofiction (life writing) to explore innovative forms of storytelling, combining ‘le réel’ (an illusion of reality) and ‘l’imaginaire’ (fantasy), the past and the present (Vanderschelden 2012b:  246–​9). In addition, the screenplays discussed in this chapter blend different genres –​ romantic comedy, mock-​documentary, intimist drama, musical, mock or real theatrical performances, thus enriching their expressions of creative contradictions.6 Since the 1960s, a number of women, including Agnès Varda or Josiane Balasko discussed in other chapters in this volume, have written and directed

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their own screenplays, often resorting to personal experience as inspiration for their writing. Though their status as ‘auteures’ –​as opposed to simply ‘directors’ –​has been (implicitly or explicitly) linked to their writing practice, little scholarly work has focused on this practice, whether performed in isolation or with collaborators.7 For example, in her study of Dominique Cabrera, Lvovsky, Laetitia Masson and Marion Vernoux, four women directors who emerged in the 1990s, Julia Dobson (2012: 7) points out that the pioneering screenwriting women directors of the 1970s, specifically Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras and Varda, ‘articulat[ed] new representations of French subjectivity, agency and gendered identities, both through a challenge to dominant modes of filmic representation and through formal intervention’. Dobson also refers to the work of Coline Serreau and Diane Kurys, emphasising their engagement ‘with the codes and conventions of popular generic forms’. As directors who wrote their own screenplays, they paved the way for the next generations of women screenwriting directors, including the three discussed in this chapter.8 The successful careers of Lvovsky, Bruni Tedeschi and Maïwenn have helped increase the visibility of women screenwriters, offering them (and their collaborators) some recognition. This visibility extends to their film narratives, which often make direct or indirect references to writing practices and the challenges that screenwriters face. For example, Les Estivants opens on a striking scene in which the protagonist Anna (Bruni Tedeschi), a screenwriter hoping to acquire ‘avance sur recettes’ funding for her next film on the basis of its screenplay, is interviewed by the CNC film commission (see Figure 9.1). It is no coincidence that Bruni Tedeschi and her regular writing partner, de Sacy, who actively campaigns for screenwriters’ rights, should choose this situation of the screenwriter defending her screenplay in front of the commission to introduce the protagonist. The power relations between grant commissions and screenwriters are flagged up here in comic fashion, as Bruni Tedeschi (in the role of Anna, the protagonist of Les Estivants) stages herself having to defend her screenplay and her film to a largely unsympathetic audience of professional colleagues. Later in the film, it is the collaborative nature of screenwriting that is highlighted through the close relationship between Anna and her co-​author Nathalie (Lvovsky) who, in the screenwriting tradition that we saw depicted in La Fête à Henriette in Chapter 3, retreat to the countryside (here, to Anna’s holiday home), so they can work together on the script. Like Lvovsky and Bruni Tedeschi, Maïwenn also reflects on her filmmaking practices in her early films. In Pardonnez-​moi, the pregnant protagonist, Violette (Maïwenn), is making a film about her family for the benefit of her future child. In Le Bal des actrices, the character of director played by Maïwenn is her double, also called Maïwenn, which makes it even more

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confusing for the audience to discern the fictional from the (fake) documentary features. However, these ambivalent writing tropes also illuminate the special status of screenwriting directors in the French cinema at the expense of screenwriters who do not direct. A report on the place of women screenwriters from 2003 to 2012, commissioned by the French Guilde des scénaristes (Haddouf and Wolgust 2014), makes this distinction between films written by screenwriters and those of writing-​directors.9 Just over a quarter of the films surveyed (26.94 per cent) are written by a female screenwriter and, unsurprisingly, in many cases, they were screenwriting directors. Out of the total of 116 screenwriters who wrote regularly for cinema over the period covered, 23 per cent were women. No names are given, but seventeen of the regular women writers signed between three and five films over the period surveyed, with only three having screenwriting credits for more than three films, indicating a concentration of talent (2014: 4–​6). Lvovsky must feature in this group, with five films credited in the IMDb, Maïwenn with three and Bruni Tedeschi with two films over this period. The only one to have signed over ten films (2014: 8) is likely to be the screenwriter Agnès de Sacy, Bruni Tedeschi’s regular writing partner, who claims thirteen IMDb writing credits between 2003 and 2012. What these figures reveal is the prevalence of collaborative practice in the independent cinema of the 2000s, a point already highlighted in other chapters of this volume. The 1990s are no exception to this trend, characterised to some extent by the establishment of a network or ‘professional family’ of young writing directors. The film historian René Prédal (2002: 39) has identified in the emerging independent directors of the 1990s a ‘Fémis family and spirit’ characterised by collaborative filmmaking practices fostered by relationships established during their time at the school. This can be extended to their writing collaborators. Lvovsky, for example, co-​wrote some early films of Arnaud Desplechin and is also credited as co-​author on all of Bruni Tedeschi’s to date. Lvovsky, de Sacy and Bruni Tedeschi belong to a cinema ‘family’ of close friends who often write screenplays together, forming a network of collaborations and intertwined trajectories.10 Bruni Tedeschi has played in Desplechin’s films, alongside his recurrent actor Mathieu Amalric. Amalric appears in turn in Actrices (as a theatre director) and in Lvovsky’s Demain et tous les autres jours (as the father of the young protagonist). Bruni Tedeschi’s training with Patrice Chéreau’s troupe at the Théâtre des Amandiers initiated some contacts with other actors, while friends and collaborators of Lvovsky (often associated with the Fémis) include actors and directors –​ Yvan Attal, Philippe Garrel, Benoit Jacquot, Pascale Ferran, Pascal Bonitzer and Eric Rochant  –​all associated with the Young French Cinema. If certain 1990s auteur films  –​En avoir ou pas (Masson, 1995); La Vie rêvée

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des anges/​The Dreamlife of Angels (Zonca, 1998) –​were characterised by a return of the political (especially in contrast with the 1980s cinéma du look), some, including the ones discussed here, were characterised by their combination of realist aesthetics and intimate themes that attracted occasional accusations of ‘navel-​gazing’ (Darke 1999:  25; Morrey 2020:  91). The blurred distinction between professional and personal connections has led some critics to associate certain of these 1990s and 2000s screenwriters and filmmakers with incestuous, inward-​looking filmmaking practices, an accusation that both Bruni Tedeschi and Maïwenn confront head on, as we shall see below. One notable aspect of the Young French Cinema was a revalorisation of the screenwriters’ work, thanks in large part to an improved visibility thanks to recurrent partnerships with directors. However, this was not enough to revolutionise the professional status of screenwriters, few of whom can live from their screenwriting alone. While a number of writers (including Lvovsky) found themselves in a position to address this situation by moving to directing their own films,11 the financing structures continued to undervalue screenwriting. This is highlighted by the ‘Club des 13’ pamphlet (2008: 35–​57), led by Ferran, which condemns the relative poverty of screenwriting in France, where on average since 2000 only 2–​3 per cent of a film’s budget is allocated to writing development (Vanderschelden 2016b: 118). Having established some of the issues forming the background to this chapter, we can now turn our attention to what is at stake in the process of feminine reflexive screenwriting as a form of inspiration for artistic creation and consider how collaborative writing works in this context. Recurring motifs and patterns emerge in the screenplays of the réalisa(c)trices we are focusing on in this chapter, including ‘social intimacy’, to borrow the phrase used by Dobson (2012: 20) to refer to the middle ground between the political and the personal. Their auteur cinema, like many films of the New Wave, is highly personal, sometimes close to autobiographical. However, rather than creating/​hiding behind alter egos, as the male New Wave directors often did, and using a kind of masculine solidarity to disavow the personal, Lvovsky, Bruni Tedeschi and Maïwenn are instead highlighting this practice. Their protagonists are to some extent versions of themselves which they feel compelled to interpret, according to their interviews, as if this could help them come to terms with real-​life preoccupations. Their use of self-​ parody, self-​ deprecation, fantasy and exuberance simultaneously highlights and distances the viewers from this self-​exposure. The screenplays of Lvovsky, Bruni Tedeschi and Maïwenn often willingly blur the distinction between fact and fiction, artist and character, to engage in broader, creative, gendered reflections on femininity and

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women’s condition. It is their special status as screenwriting réalisa(c)trices that we aim to analyse here. They may well have personal reasons leading them to accumulate these roles, including seeking catharsis for personal wounds (for example bereavement, yearning for motherhood, child abuse) and other personal identity challenges, such as dealing with their celebrity. What we will address primarily in this chapter is how the polyvalent status of actor and writing director affects their artistic practice, and the process of collaborative script development more specifically. We will discuss screenwriting strategies whereby they screen, stage and narrate the self, proposing a rich and playful reworking of auteur cinema in the first person feminine, in a welcome transformation of the ‘masculine singular’ highlighted by Geneviève Sellier in her critical revisiting of the cinema of the New Wave. Discussing ‘male heroes who are the alter ego of the screenwriting filmmaker’, Sellier (2005: 91–​2) notes the personal nature of the film projects, and how this shapes their representation of masculinity and relations between the sexes in that period. The three women auteur-​ directors of the 2000s discussed here pursue comparably personal projects with screenplays which revisit, through narratives often featuring alter ego characters and recurring tropes drawn from their lives and representations of femininity. We will turn first to a consideration of Lvovsky and Bruni Tedeschi, whose paths first crossed in 1993 and whose careers are closely intertwined as they have collaborated in various ways to each other’s filmographies, sometimes officially as co-​writer or actor, and in other cases more informally. Our third case study, Maïwenn, will then be presented independently, and compared only in as far as is deemed relevant to the screenwriting practices and filmmaking approach of the first two.

Noémie Lvovsky: screenwriter, director, actress Lvovsky (b. 1964) started her screenwriting career in 1992, co-​writing her friend Desplechin’s debut feature, La Sentinelle/​The Sentinel (1992) and collaborating on various films of other directors associated with the Young French Cinema, such as Pascal Bonitzer and Yolande Zaubermann.12 She has also co-​written the screenplays of the six films she has directed to date, as well as those directed by Bruni Tedeschi. The screenplay of Lvovsky’s first feature, Oublie moi/​Forget Me (1994), was developed with Marc Cholodenko, Sophie Fillières and Emmanuel Salinger from her end-​of-​studies short film Dis-​moi oui, dis-​moi non (1990); both films featured Bruni Tedeschi. From 1997, Florence Seyvos13 became Lvovsky’s regular co-​author, while other collaborators, usually friends, also had input into successive drafts of her screenplays. Although from 2001, Lvovsky had embraced an acting career

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in parallel to her screenwriting and directing appearing frequently in films written by others, it was only for her fifth feature, Camille redouble in 2012, that she took on the lead role.14 Camille redouble, often labelled a comédie d’auteur, offers a worldview that closely reflects the persona of the screenwriting auteure (and of the actress screening herself), namely a mixture of candour, physicality, tenderness, gravity and comedy (Mével 2012: 9). Presented at the Cannes Festival (‘Quinzaine des réalisateurs’), it received an enthusiastic critical reception and international distribution. With 871,645 entries, it was among the ten most profitable films for that year. It was then awarded the SACD prize and received nominations for thirteen Césars, including ‘Best Original Screenplay’, a notable achievement for an independent comedy.

Camille redouble Camille Vaillant (Lvovsky) is a forty-​something actress with a whisky addiction, struggling to find work. Eric (Samir Guesmi), her partner of twenty-​five years, whom she met at sixteen and with whom she has a daughter, Mathilde (Esther Garrel), has just left her for a younger woman. On New Year’s Eve, after asking a local jeweller (Jean-​Pierre Léaud) to repair her watch, Camille meets old friends Alice (India Hair), Louise (Julia Faure) and Josepha (Judith Chemla). During the party, she drinks too much and faints. When she wakes up in hospital, her parents are with her and she realises that she is back in the past. It is 1985 and she is sixteen again. And so is Eric … Camille is then confronted with a number of difficult situations, like reliving the sudden death of her mother and facing Eric. She has to make a choice: does she resist Eric’s attentions, knowing the unfortunate outcome of their union? As her teenage friends cannot advise her, she turns to a physics teacher (Denis Podalydès) who promises to help her.

Like many comédies d’auteur, Lvovsky’s screenplay draws on generic influences which are mainly American: science fiction, especially the Back to the Future series co-​written by Robert Zemeckis with Bob Gale (Zemeckis, 1985); teen movies, especially Peggy Sue got Married (Coppola, 1986), for the focus on school life and teenage romance; the comedies of Woody Allen, the Farrelly brothers and Judd Apatow (Garson 2012: 6). Taking a more historical and cinephile view, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder are recurring influences throughout her filmography (Floch’lay

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and Thévenin 2016: 48). In Camille redouble, Lvovsky associates these film references with her own memories of the 1980s, as well as occasional social commentary and the nostalgic introspection and social intimacy found in many of her screenplays that calls a middle ground between the political and the personal. Lvovsky herself admits that she is ‘often pulled to one side by her cinephilia and to the other by her life, her disposition and what she can actually do’ (in Binh et al. 2012: 70). This is particularly traceable in the screenplays addressing childhood influenced by Truffaut, and those embracing burlesque comedy tradition recalling Lubitsch and Wilder.15 She also includes events from her life that transcends in her fictional fantasy screenplays: ‘talking of personal things does not scare me as I know that it will not have any value in my eyes before this intimacy has been transformed by fiction’ (in Blottière 2012). This is particularly true of two films significantly dedicated to her own mother, Camille redouble and Demain et tous les autres jours. The development history of Demain et tous les autres jours broadens the notion of screenwriting process, extending it to the full duration of the film’s production due to contingent external factors. The screenplay used for the first part of the filming was affected by unexpected events that nearly put an end to the whole project. Luce Rodriguez, the child lead, had to leave for health reasons during the shooting, forcing two interruptions of filming. This induced some strategic rewriting and a review of the film’s overall structure during the editing stage.16 A  new temporal dimension was added to the narrative, adding scenes with the protagonist as a young adult played by Anaïs Demoustier. Production constraints thus opened up a new pathway to enrich the narrative, illustrating the flexibility granted to a screenwriting director in this type of independent filmmaking and the importance of the producer, in this case Jean-​Louis Levy, who supported the project throughout. Lvovsky (Lvovsky and Seyvos 2017) claims that these extra scenes shot and the editing –​with the editor integrated to the writing process17 –​ended up producing the effect that she and Seyvos had been seeking all along. She even compares a film (and its screenplay) to a ‘living organism’: Annette Dutertre, the editor, and I tried to build a new narrative from the rushes we had. [The producers] proposed that we rewrite a few scenes. Florence, Annette and I […] rewrote a few pages. For another actress. The little girl has grown up. Anaïs Demoustier came in. I  discovered during editing, with joy and surprise, that these difficulties, these upheavals, had brought the film to the bone. I realise with each film how much they have their own movement. A movement that I need to follow with flexibility, like a cork floating on water, while remaining tenacious. A film is like a living organism. It exists thanks to those making it, but also on its own.

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Demain et tous les autres jours Mathilde Zazinger (Rodriguez) is a solitary nine-​year-​old whose life is different from other Parisian children. Her parents have separated and she lives with her mother (Lvovsky), a hypersensitive person with fragile mental health. When Mathilde comes home from school, she is the one who has to take care of her mother. To deal with her mother’s declining mental health, Mathilde escapes into a fantastic imaginary world, taking comfort from a talking owl that her mother bought for her. With the help of the owl, Mathilde makes plans to help her mother reconcile a normal life with the eerie situations to which her madness drives her. When Mathilde’s father (Amalric), with whom she has a good relationship, realises that her mother’s illness is affecting his daughter’s wellbeing, he begins to take a more active roles in her life. One day, Madame Zazinger has to be admitted into a mental health hospital. Several years later, Mathilde (Demoustier), who is now a young adult, visits her mother in the psychiatric residential institution where she seems to live on a permanent basis. The two appear to have retained their close bond.

The fact that Lvovsky’s films operate on moderate budgets –​they epitomise the films du milieu identified by the Club des 13 (2008) –​does not prevent her from elaborating ambitious narratives. One striking feature of the screenplays written with Seyvos is their flair for integrating fantasy motifs and unrealistic effects, leaning towards the fantastique genre. In Camille redouble, the protagonist literally relives her youth and is transported back into the 1980s. This screenwriting project entails ambitious audio-​visual performances. Referring to Lvovsky’s double performance as Camille –​as both adult and teenager –​the critics have noted ‘an element of assumed grotesque’ (Mandelbaum 2012) and of ‘exuberance’ (Dobson 2012: 25), identifying burlesque effects, for example in the scenes when she is drunk at the party and when she relives events of her youth, posing an adult gaze on the teenager she was. This artistic distancing effect is enhanced by her decision to play Camille at sixteen herself without any artifice beyond a change of hairstyle and clothes.18 Like other films discussed in this chapter, Lvovsky’s two films revolve around personal evocations of the family articulated around an important real-​life event (sometimes suggesting a fracture or trauma) which leads some critics to compare the screenwriting and filmmaking process to a ‘successful psycho-​analysis’ (Mével 2012:  82). Lvovsky herself does not elude this

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interpretation: ‘A film, while the product of a collective effort, is a scan of its director’ she claims (in Colombani 2012). ‘It reveals all about [her] life, the conscious the unconscious and the desires.’ In Camille redouble, two events articulate the narrative: the end of a love story that the adult cannot accept and, more importantly perhaps, the sudden death of the mother from the perspective of her teenage daughter; in Demain et tous les autres jours, it is the mental health problems of her mother that Mathilde tries to cover up and cope with, while Lvovsky’s film turns into a tribute to her own mother.19 The pitches, as such, are not innovative, but the rhythm provided by the narrative choices and the formal experiments free up conventional screenwriting modes. Lvovsky’s offbeat and surreal approach in Camille redouble transforms an autobiographical preoccupation  –​the loss of the mother –​into an original, burlesque comédie d’auteur; and in Demain into a sensitive evocation of the ‘amour fou’ (mad love) between a mother and her daughter (Lvovsky and Seyvos 2017). Lvovsky’s approach to screenwriting is unusual on different counts. She writes slowly; successive drafts and active discussion of the successive draft with co-​writers are an integral part of her practice (see Lvovsky and Bruni Tedeschi 2010). The screenplay for Camille redouble was completed over a period of two years with Lvovsky at the centre of a cooperative writing process. While she never actually writes with her collaborators, they accompany her on her writing journey, bringing in their expertise (Mével 2012: 74–​5). To borrow a phrase from de Sacy (Sabaté 2013), who has worked with both Lvovsky and Bruni Tedeschi, they ‘work around her territory, around her own imaginary world’. Maud Ameline contributed to a first draft. Lvovsky then showed it to her friend Pierre-​Olivier Mattei for informal advice and to her usual collaborator, Seyvos, who helped to establish the shooting script, concentrating on developing the relationship between Camille and Eric and suggesting the recording of the mother (in Lvovsky 2011).20 Lvovsky’s recurrent collaborations with Seyvos rest upon long conversations and constant exchange of personal anecdotes, which feed both the characterisation and dialogue writing process. The characters are the starting points of the development, as Lvovsky (Binh et al. 2012: 68) makes clear: ‘I start from the characters before I move on to situations. [… When] I capture a character, it is as much through dialogue as through a situation’. The aim is to find a ‘thread’ that links the characters together (Floch’lay and Thévenin 2016: 34). A particularly idiosyncratic element is her identification with all the characters: she needs to ‘play’ them all herself first before organising the casting. The personal is reinvented, then placed at a distance though quirky discrepancies and ruptures in tone that, as Jacques Mandelbaum (2012) has suggested, disturb the comic mechanisms: ‘Lvovsky

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has introduced in the context of French auteur cinema a little music of her own. A cheerful harmony that takes on its meaning when the dissonance, “le couac”, occurs.’ These ‘flies in the ointment’, or discrepancies between situations, and the reactions that they generate, are identified as a ‘hiatus’ (Lalanne 2012), in the sense of a dissonance in the narrative logic which produces burlesque effects and narrative disruptions. The temporal gap in Camille redouble thus illustrates this hiatus, but other rupture effects make Lvovsky’s films and screenplays distinctive. For example, she is constantly exploring with her co-​writers how cinematic representation can show the gap between her outer appearance and inner turmoil, and how feelings cannot always be kept under wraps or gestures controlled. In Camille redouble, this comes as an ‘introspection that activates a reflection on the self, the past and failures, as if cinematic tales allowed to relive the past, or even to re-​boot our lives’ (Floch’lay and Thévenin 2016: 33). In Demain et tous les autre jours, she introduces dreamlike motifs borrowed from the fantastique, in the form of an owl who talks to Mathilde helping her to handle her mother’s irrational actions. This two narrative devices allow Lvovsky to pursue her ‘questioning of film narrative and its power to create tale of reality and its fantasy boundaries, churn it out and transform it’ (Danel 2017). Lvovsky places characterisation and dialogue in the foreground, usually written without any actors in mind. Once casting is completed, she discusses the roles with the actors to enable them to immerse themselves in the fictional world of the character, moving away from the written dialogue if necessary (Floch’lay and Thévenin 2016:  42–​3). In Camille redouble, the script thus remained open during the filming stage, as a space for the integration and fine-​tuning of emotion. For example, Moreau’s performance as Camille’s mother moved Lvovsky so much during the shooting, that she decided to develop the mother–​daughter scenes on set (Séguret 2012). She did not film the mother’s death, yet this moment became a crucial scene articulating the time travel plot and the flashbacks. In the end, she chose to film it from Camille’s perspective in a fluid sequence shot, leaving the mother off-​screen. Knowing her mother was about to die, Camille/​Lvovsky could not bring herself to leave as she had the first time. The time travel narrative gave the character the chance to relive the mother’s death and to make a recording of her voice as a concrete memory to take back to the diegetic present. As already seen for Demain et tous les autres jours, the editing stage constitutes an integral part of Lvovsky’s screenwriting process and a moment when crucial decisions are made. It is particularly relevant to the epilogue of Camille redouble, featuring Camille with Eric meeting (again) at the lake, a scene that was only finalised at the time of editing:

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We had always assumed that Camille’s time travel would make it possible to be with Eric for a while. Then Florence wrote the monologue of the penultimate scene and while I was test-​playing it I intuitively read a farewell letter to Samir Guesmi. I thought:  ‘What’s going on? Are they not going to stay together then?’ During editing, we tried out loads of different endings. Then I had to face the obvious and opted for this shot of Camille going away. (Lvovsky in Grassin 2012)

Lvovsky realised that the monologue that she had filmed did not work as anticipated in the screenplay.21 It had been written as a farewell scene before it became clear to her that Camille had to end up alone (Garson 2012: 4). Significantly, before shooting the scene, she had selected two songs for the soundtrack, both written by Barbara, which possibly unconsciously prefigured the change: ‘Une petite cantate’ (a song about bereavement) and ‘Dis, quand reviendras-​tu?’ (about absence with some hope for a return). The point of view adopted in the screenplay thus evolved during production, shifting from a narrative question mark –​how not to fall for Eric again when reliving their encounter? –​to a statement: the past cannot be changed. Thus, among many other, more overt references, the ending of Camille redouble also reflects on the fatalistic heritage of the classic French cinema explored in our earlier chapters on Charles Spaak and Jacques Prévert. The modified ending calls for a more open-​ended coming to terms with the past (Garson 2012:  4). This late change also shifts the boundaries of the film away from comedy, revealing the flexibility of the comédie d’auteur to integrate reflexivity and the personal signature of the filmmaker. However, it also contributes to erase the collective nature of the writing process once the film is finished; an auteurist stance exacerbated by the reluctance of many critics to integrate explicitly the input of co-​writers and screenwriters into their analysis that this comment illustrates: Behind Camille, we can detect the director’s enthusiasms, her pain, her regrets, her nostalgia, her anxieties and her stages of bereavement. A  spectrum of emotions filtering in pastels through the magic lantern of this colourful film. (Frois and Delcroix 2012)

In this particular case, it was not Lvovsky, but Seyvos, her writing partner, who, on viewing the rushes, suggested these changes to the editor (see Grassin 2012), which really highlights the intensity of their collaborative writing and the fluidity of their partnership. Other scenes which had been shot were cut at the editing stage on Seyvos’s advice; for example, in the screenplay, a fire starts in the flat when Camille returns to the present, but this was deemed too explicative and deleted. These late changes exemplify the transitory status of the actual written text in the filmmaking process of

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Lvovsky for whom the screenplay is an essential stage in the development of the film, not as a text but as a way of thinking the mise en scene:

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For me, a screenplay is very important in the sense that it contains the thinking behind a film project and its preparation. I don’t write for writing’s sake. It will all go in the bin; what matters is the film. (In Floch’lay and Thévenin 2016: 33)

Finally, the fact that Lvovsky in her last two films decided to play the two protagonists takes her screenwriting practice one step further. She screens herself, no longer hiding behind an actor, but giving free rein to complement it by her talent as a performer. Since Camille redouble, Lvovsky’s approach to screenwriting has thus cemented the link between writing, directing and performing. Already a well-​known actress for other directors, with almost sixty acting credits since 2001, she has exposed even more overtly the personal dimension of her writing by playing in her last two films, something that Bruni Tedeschi had always fully assumed in her own films. Seen in this light, their close working relationship, which will be discussed below, takes on a whole new dimension.

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi: actress turned screenwriting director Bruni Tedeschi (b. 1964) established her cinematic reputation as an actress before the public came to associate her with her rich Italian family and her sister, Carla Bruni. She trained with Patrice Chéreau at the Ecole des Amandiers, a drama school in Nanterre in the 1980s, and became a prominent actress in the 1990s, pursuing a career in both Italy and France, where she was often cast by women directors of the Young French Cinema in roles of unstable, exuberant young women. She directed her first film in 2003, Il est plus facile pour un chameau …, co-​written with Lvovsky, who had herself previously cast Bruni Tedeschi in her films Oublie-​moi and La Vie ne me fait pas peur. Bruni Tedeschi is very clearly a réalisa(c)trice. She interprets each of the protagonists of the four feature films that she has directed and co-​written to date. The characters have different names but they all recall her own social and cultural background, in particular her Italian heritage. They are overtly inspired by events of her life, various members of her family and entourage and her own preoccupations and wounds. The screenplays contain recurring intimate motifs such as family and filiation, motherhood, relationships, mental instability and they make frequent references to bereavement and religion. The autobiographical dimension – noted by critics (Frois 2007; Régnier 2007), perceived by audiences and reinforced by the artist’s discourse around her films and her public image – is enhanced by the fact that her real-​life

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mother, Marisa Borini, plays the mother of her alter ego protagonists in all the films. In Il est plus facile pour un chameau … and Actrices, the two films that we discuss more comprehensively here, Bruni Tedeschi reinvents the boundaries between autobiography and fiction, drawing simultaneously on her own life and relationship with her father, mother, sister and brother, but also on the star persona that she has developed as an actress, as noted in a review of her first film: Bruni Tedeschi draws on fifteen years spent in cinema as an actress. Playing roles close to herself [in Il est plus facile …], she offers a Valeria feast, gauche, dreamy, clumsy, burlesque, never far from the two marginal characters of Les Gens normaux n’ont rien d’exceptionnel [Normal People are Nothing Exceptional, Ferreira Barbosa,  1993] and Oublie-​moi which launched her ‘fan-​club’ in the early 1990s. (Guichard 2003)

In Il est plus facile pour un chameau …, Federica adopts many of the features associated with her nervous and sometimes excessive and irrational pre-​ existing star persona, encouraging the audience to identify Bruni Tedeschi and the (auto)fictional character that she has created and interprets. The plot revolves around her anxieties and her complex relationship with various members of her entourage.

Il est plus facile pour un chameau … Federica (Bruni Tedeschi), an Italian playwright in her thirties living in Paris, is too rich. This privileged position is a prison that impedes her from living an adult life or being responsible for her day to day existence. Seeking comfort in religion, she goes to a church regularly where she confides in a Catholic priest (Pascal Bongard) to whom she is secretly attracted. Her socialist fiancé, Pierre (Jean-​ Hugues Anglade), would like to start a family; then Philippe (Denis Podalydès), a married former lover, unexpectedly turns up again adding to her confusion. She falls out with her mother (Borini), her jealous younger sister, Bianca (Chiara Mastroianni), and her eccentric brother, Aurelio (Lambert Wilson). She is upset when she realises that her father (Roberto Herlitzska) is terminally ill. Weighed down by her future inheritance, the tangled relationships of the people around her and her own sense of guilt, Federica tries to find comfort in her imagination and daydreams, including regular incursions into childhood memories, where her life seemed so perfect and wonderful. The film ends with her father’s body being returned by plane to Italy.

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The screenplay makes clear that Federica, like Valeria, comes from a rich Italian background. Like Valeria, Federica arrived in Paris with her family as a child in the 1970s to escape kidnapping threats from the Red Brigade. The narrative revolves around the protagonist’s doubts and anxieties, which are associated with the childhood trauma of her family’s exile to France, but also with her present personal and professional difficulties. Eschewing generic conventions, the film’s structure is built around Parisian scenes loosely linked together with Federica as focal point. These scenes evoke her routine and expose her anxiety and occasional neurotic behaviour through her actions, dialogue with her entourage and inner world evocations. She appears particularly preoccupied with her religious faith and the desire to become a mother, major recurring motifs in all Bruni Tedeschi’s screenplays. The film’s episodic structure intentionally blurs the distinction between past and present, factual moments of her life on the one hand, including regular visits to a church, exuberant dance classes, a puppet show, and on the other mental images and memories, as if Bruni Tedeschi/​Federica were trying to construct another world in parallel to the one that has been imposed upon her. For instance, as she waits for her former lover Philippe in a cafe, she daydreams a scene of her jumping into bed with him and his wife. The screenplay also uses flashbacks and voice-​overs to recreate mental images and sounds from her childhood –​family scenes in Italy, memories of visiting funfairs and playing with children before her exile  –​evoked with nostalgia but also an underlying sense of guilt and trauma caused by her family’s forced exile.22 Tim Palmer (2011: 125) aptly compares these different narrative strands to a ‘stream of consciousness cinema, blending moments of youthful nostalgia, present-​day malaise and hypothetical projections of implausible victories’. This notion of ‘stream’ can be used to define the screenwriting strategy chosen by Bruni Tedeschi with Lvovsky and de Sacy. From the first film, the writing process is fuelled by a constant stream of communications between her and her co-​writers, leading to numerous successive drafts (Binh et  al. 2012:  70–​1). The first film therefore successfully establishes a method that will be retained for the future films. Bruni Tedeschi’s second film, Actrices, also co-​written with Lvovsky and de Sacy, tackles the world of theatre, another important part of her professional identity. It brings together conflicting facets of the personality of an established stage actress, Marcelline, who is looking for love and craving motherhood while rehearsing for the part of Natalia Petrovna in Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country.

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Actrices Marcelline (Bruni Tedeschi) is haunted by the role that she is rehearsing for her next play. She also suffers from anxiety at the prospect of turning forty, still single and childless and tries (unsuccessfully) to find some serenity by swimming regularly to the accompaniment of a Glenn Miller tune. She engages with the people surrounding her, including Denis (Mathieu Amalric), the pretentious director of the play, who admires her and thinks he can make her a great actress. When Marcelline meets his assistant, Nathalie (Lvovsky), she recognises a fellow student from drama school twenty years earlier. Nathalie has given up acting to get married and have children. This is the first in a series of events that destabilise Marcelline’s fragile mental state. She is increasingly overwhelmed by doubts about the purpose of her life and she starts to question her acting talent, especially when the ghost of her character, Natalia Petrovna (Valeria Golino), confronts her in the theatre. Desperately trying to understand what she is doing on Earth, Marcelline turns to the Virgin Mary with whom she makes deals, communicates with the ghost of her deceased father (Maurice Garrel) in her lounge, and that of her dead brother, Julien (Robinson Stévenin), who sits in a tree outside her flat. Her judgemental mother (Borini again) does not seem to understand her. Can Eric (Louis Garrel), the youngest member of the cast who kisses her one night, help her be happy? She finally flees in the middle of the performance, chased by Natalia Petrovna, jumps into the Seine and swims to the music of Glenn Miller.

Just as Bruni Tedeschi herself did, when she was training with Chéreau’s troupe, Marcelline is rehearsing a Turgenev play at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre. Like many of Bruni Tedeschi’s protagonists, she experiences an ‘interior split’ (Bruni Tedeschi 2007:  6) in her life and is yearning for motherhood. Her meeting with Nathalie, who has brought up her children at the expense of pursuing a career in acting, brings to the surface many unresolved tensions. Bruni Tedeschi (2007: 6) reports that the genesis for this film was a conversation with Lvovsky on an autobiographical event: I told her about a very important episode in my professional life: the moment when, playing the role of Nathalia Petrovna, I was replaced by the director’s assistant. For Noémie, as for me, it seemed obvious that this could be an interesting dramatic basis for a script:  someone taking the place of another person.

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Each character sees in the other a reflection of the idealised lifestyle she does not have and the dreams she cannot bring herself to abandon. Marcelline’s difficulty with being an adult and her unresolved desire to have a child are brutally exposed by her own mother’s line, ‘There is only you in the world, you behave like a child, you are a child, an old child, that’s why you can’t have children’, words which are then echoed by Nathalie:  ‘People work. You’re not the centre of the whole world.’ Critics have often commented on the self-​ centred nature and navel-​ gazing of Bruni Tedeschi’s filmmaking (Frodon 2003; Schwartz 2007; Palmer 2011:  124). As the exchange cited above shows, though, this is a criticism she accepts, commenting on it with a dose of humour. In her latest film, Les Estivants, the issue of reflexivity is approached from a damaged self-​esteem perspective from the opening sequence in which director Anna (Bruni Tedeschi) faces the funding commission of the CNC trying to secure funding for her next film (see Figure  9.1). With typical reflexivity, this scene addresses some autofictional aspects of Bruni Tedeschi’s work, the accusations of over-​privilege, and nods to the fact that such criticisms are often couched in gendered terms. It is surely no coincidence that it is the ‘young man’ on the commission who confronts her most aggressively, paradoxically decrying the narcissistic nature of her script before asking if she is still engaged to the actor who will play her fiancé in the film. Her response, to unleash graphic sexual details of her relationship with the actor, is more articulate than her earlier attempts to defend her screenplay. In this way, the scripted dialogue captures her vulnerability but also integrates a hearty element of self-​derision, further intensified by the reference to Agnès Varda, featured in the scene as an unnamed ‘elderly woman’, a paragon of the engagé documentary (Anna says she particularly liked the one about ‘poor people’ and ‘heart-​shaped potatoes’) and the diametric opposite of Bruni Tedeschi. Although we do not have space here to discuss the screenplay of Les Estivants, it is striking to see just from this short screenplay extract how the method of character construction, the use of dialogue and the motif of self-​ derision are constants in Bruni Tedeschi’s filmmaking to date. Figure 9.1, which shows the extract from the working screenplay of this scene, reveals something of the collaborative writing practices of Bruni Tedeschi and de Sacy, with corrections from both writers that are typical of a work in progress.23 In the early stages of script development, Bruni Tedeschi usually begins by writing fragments of dialogue before working on characterisation and plot development with her collaborators (Lvovsky and Bruni Tedeschi 2010). She readily admits that she cannot construct a screenplay herself, and, together with Lvovsky, gradually incorporates lines of dialogue into

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Figure 9.1  Excerpt from working copy of screenplay of Les Estivants.

a screenplay, reworking text into scenes, exchanging successive drafts and meeting up for live discussions, with de Sacy acting as a script consultant (Binh et al. 2012: 64–​6). As Bruni Tedeschi writes most of the dialogue of her films herself, it is not surprising that she should draw on her theatre

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background. This is particularly significant in Actrices, in which the dialogue of the play echoes the diegetic dialogue (as was the case in L’Esquive discussed in Chapter 8). The dialogues were essential: as a theatre actress, that’s my background. When imagining a film, I begin with the text, the word, psychological and emotional situations between characters. For me, the text is the base, while I  am very aware that in the end the dialogue is not what is essential. What is essential is the feelings between people. And even more than that, the people themselves. I film people. (Bruni Tedeschi 2007: 8)

Although the dialogue of her films is primarily in French, Bruni Tedeschi, who is bilingual, often resorts to Italian for scenes featuring her protagonists’ families and the language of childhood. As she puts it (in Cohen and Frappat 2003:  77) ‘in French I  feel more adult, in Italian more like a child […] an old child’. The language used for the dialogue thus serves to express different aspects of her identity. In Il est plus facile pour un chameau …, the Italian language is often associated with family scenes, flashbacks and pop-​art images visualising childhood memories, while in Actrices, it features in conversations with her mother and the imaginary encounters between Marcelline and her father and brother, both deceased.24 Through their multi-​ layered narratives, Bruni Tedeschi’s screenplays transcend their personal plots with moments of fantasy, self-​deprecation and burlesque. Like Lvovsky, she makes use of a range of distancing techniques. These include burlesque comedy with excessive performance effects, such as when Federica literally flies at her dance class and ‘an air of folly passes through which unsettles the narrative’ (Frodon 2003), or when she presents her childhood memories with an animated cartoon version of herself. Françoise Audé (2003: 26) sees this as a ‘critical reconstruction’ and a ‘staged spectacle’ that nourishes the inner world of Federica. In Actrices, Marcelline holds imaginary conversations with the ghosts of her deceased father and brother; she strikes deals with the Virgin Mary: ‘Holy Virgin, give me a husband … and I will renounce … fame’; and the mental image of an angry Natalia Petrovna castigates Marcelline for her poor acting. Each distancing strategy causes a dissonance or hiatus effect announcing Lvovsky’s surreal situations triggered by Camille’s journey in time in Camille redouble and the talking owl of Demain et tous les autres jours. The comparison of this shared taste for creating comic or artistic distance, as well as thematic and style correspondences identified between the two réalisa(c)trices (see Guichard 2003; Baumann and Garbarz 2008) all contribute to reinforce the impression that their close complicity nourished their respective screenwriting practices, even if Bruni Tedeschi does not write for Lvovsky, and claims that it was Lvovsky initially who

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encouraged her to make her first film which was written over a period of five years (Rouyer and Vassé 2003: 28; Baumann and Garbarz 2008: 17). With Lvovsky (and de Sacy)’s help, Bruni Tedeschi was able to find an original perspective to intimate preoccupations and childhood wounds in screenplays which captured her artistic signature as filmmaker and roles that she could perform freely. It is in this unusual and ambiguous screening of the self, blurring the boundaries between fiction, creation of a distance and narcissistic self-​portrait to address personal preoccupations that we can find common ground between Bruni Tedeschi and Maïwenn, our third case study of a screenwriting réalisa(c)trice.

Maïwenn: from child actor to screenwriting director Maïwenn (Le Besco, b. 1976) is another actress turned director who writes and makes films in which she screens herself exposing intimate motifs. In her first two films, Pardonnez-​moi and Le Bal des actrices in particular, her screenwriting practices recall Lvovsky’s and especially Bruni Tedeschi’s. Released in 2006, Pardonnez-​moi was Maïwenn’s first feature film, but by no means her debut in French cinema. She had begun her career as a child actor at the age of five. She had a chaotic, heavily mediated early life (see Medioni 2009). Her mother, actress Catherine Belkhodja, repeatedly pushed her to appear on stage/​screen as a child.25 By the time she turned sixteen, Maïwenn had left home, married Luc Besson, become a mother, and was living in Beverly Hills. Although she did not train as a director or screenwriter and was not initially associated with the Young French Cinema, she certainly had direct connections within the cinema industry. She started psychoanalytic therapy in her twenties, which may have triggered her transition to writing: her successful one-​woman-​show Le Pois-​chiche/​The Chick Pea, performed at the Café de la Gare in 2001–​2, is an in-​your-​face autobiographical account of her abusive childhood prefiguring the themes of Pardonnez-​moi.26 In Maïwenn’s self-​produced debut feature, her protagonist, Violette, is herself making a film with a small DV camera, unveiling a dysfunctional family and exposing childhood scars.

Pardonnez-​moi While pregnant, Violette (Maïwenn) decides to make a film about her family to show to her child. Using the camera of her partner Alex (Yannick Soulier), she decides to confront the different members of

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her family at her birthday party. She has prepared a few surprises for her mother Lola (Marie-​France Pisier) and her step-​sisters, Billy (Hélène de Fougerolles) and Nadia (Mélanie Thierry). Paul (Aurélien Recoing), a journalist whom her mother knew twenty years ago, and whom Violette had invited on the false pretence of interviewing him, arrives unexpectedly at the party and is introduced to Nadia as her biological father. The final target in this settling of scores is her own father Dominique (Pascal Greggory), whom she accuses of child abuse. Confessions, screams, tears and mad laughter follow: no one will escape unscathed.

Pardonnez-​moi’s screenplay, inspired by autobiographic elements, shows the character of Violette making a film to come to terms with her abusive childhood, reworking an episode of Maïwenn’s life within a fictional frame. Its plot recalls other family score-​settling films, notably Festen (Vinterberg, 1998). The main targets of Violette’s outbursts, at her birthday party and in other key scenes of the film, are her parents, who she overtly accuses of child abuse. The screenplay also reveals other family secrets that Violette abruptly exposes for her amateur ‘documentary’, creating a screenplay dispositif of mise en abyme. This invokes a range of screenwriting strategies, comparable to Bruni Tedeschi’s, that allow Violette, the protagonist, to function on different narrative levels, recalling certain conventions of autofiction, such as a deliberate blurring of the boundaries between fiction narrative and the staging of the self. Maïwenn embodies multiple characters: Maïwenn/​ Violette the show woman, Maïwenn/​Violette the child, Violette the protagonist, Violette the actress, and Maïwenn the actress.27 Like Lvovsky’s Camille, Violette dresses like a teenager and the screenplay constantly draws the adult protagonist back to her childhood, a common point with Bruni Tedeschi’s protagonists. The réalisa(c)trice even recycles amateur video footage featuring herself in a casting interview at the age of ten. The evident unease of the young Maïwenn (this is not Violette) being asked to discuss her emotions and her father is disturbing. The audience witness her isolation as a child, her difficulty in being natural in front of the camera, as though she were already playing at being a star, an issue that arises again in another scene, fictional this time, when Paul asks Violette whether, as an actress, ‘she is constantly performing her life’, at which point she becomes defensive. This scene reflexively underlines the ambivalence of Maïwenn’s screenwriting dispositif, which relies on deliberately blurring different narrative levels, mixing fiction and autobiography within the dialogue in conjunction with mise en scene strategies: ‘My obsession is to make people believe that

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everything is natural. It is my mise-​en-​scene that rings true’ (Maïwenn in Frois 2009). For example, she uses black and white to signpost the ‘film within the film’ and intrusive camerawork to highlight the subjective point of view. Her camera is extremely mobile, often visible onscreen, breaking the fourth wall, thus reinforcing the illusion of capturing instantaneous images and reactions. She also films herself in fragmented form, through close-​ups which imitate reflections in a broken mirror. The screenplay imagined for Le Bal des actrices, Maïwenn’s second film released in 2009, experiments futher with the manipulation of narrative conventions and mise en scene. As an ensemble film that involves twelve French actresses from varied backgrounds, it shows Maïwenn as a filmmaker in the process of shooting a documentary.

Le Bal des actrices A filmmaker, Maïwenn (Maïwenn), who lives with the rap musician Joey Starr (Starr), sets out to make a documentary exploring the daily lives of a number of French actresses who can be seen as representative of a professional status: some popular stars, but also the unknown, intellectual, comic, and forgotten … Filming everything, with or without the actresses’ permission, the filmmaker gets caught up in her own game and allows herself to be consumed by these women who all appear to have personal scars. When she invites the cast to a screening of her film once she has edited it, the actresses attack Maïwenn, accusing her of having deceptively manipulated them to produce a narcissistic film about herself.

Maïwenn screens herself, at the same time actress and director, directing and filming others, and also being filmed by herself, creating a fictional role that clearly draws on her own real-​life experience. The film also hints at fragments of a fictional private life, with a celebrity partner called Joey, and a son, Roméo (Emir Seghir).28 The character of Maïwenn who makes the narrative junction between the different episodes is deceptive as it is not clear from the start that she is staging herself as a (fictional) filmmaker shooting a fake documentary about actresses. Maïwenn’s reinvention of mock-​documentary has attracted critical attention highlighting its fakeness. Cybelle McFadden (2014: 192–​6), for example, analyses the film as a (faux) documentary and Adrien Rannaud (2015) describes its cinematic ‘trompe l’œil’ effect. He also shows how the film’s narrative set up and its marketing

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discourse (poster and trailer) is intentionally designed to destabilise the audience. The film’s preproduction tells a different story. The pitch for Le Bal des actrices claims to explore the public identities and personal scars of women who happen to be actresses, and the screenplay was developed over a period of one year. In reality, Maïwenn approached a range of actresses with her project (many refused), and finalised her screenplay once she had selected her cast. Julie Depardieu, Romane Bohringer, Linh Dam Phan, Mélanie Doutey, Marina Foïs, Charlotte Rampling, Karin Viard, Muriel Robin and others are ostensibly playing themselves but, in fact, the screenplay imagined by Maïwenn requires them to re-​invent their own star personas, as indeed is also the case for Maïwenn herself. Although the actresses participate in this reinvention, it is Maïwenn, the réalisa(c)trice, who orchestrates the show: I had written several drafts but I needed to know who the actresses were to fine-​tune the screenplay. So I made a list of actresses with whom I wanted to work. I went to see them and said: ‘I like you. I’d like to work with you. I don’t have a part written yet because I will write it when you have accepted’. Their response guided the project. (Maïwenn 2009)

Setting out to explore different facets of feminine identity, she then wrote tailor-​made scenes, blending real and fake, realism and fantasy. She worked closely with them prior to finalising the portraits, reworking elements taken from the actresses’ public images. The screenplay development thus involved some informal collaborative writing prior to filming, then amendments to the shooting script through controlled actor direction on set.29 Although the dialogue of Le Bal des actrices was not fully scripted prior to filming, Maïwenn (2009) confirms that she had identified specific traits that she wanted to investigate for each actress. The tonality varies from one actress to the next. It ranges from hilarious moments, as in the case of Viard who wants to have a career in Hollywood but cannot speak English, to more emotional ones, as in the case of Bohringer, shown struggling to make a living from acting after having once been very successful, or of Robin, unable to accept being typecast as a comic actress. There are also surprising portrayals: Foïs bluntly discusses her physical image and (fictional?) use of Botox, while Rampling unexpectedly performs a Joey Starr rap. Depardieu and Doutey add a further dimension by bringing one of Maïwenn’s recurring motifs –​motherhood –​into the narrative. Echoing Bruni Tedeschi’s childless characters, Le Bal des actrices also engages, albeit in a different form, with this major consideration of screenwriting directors in the feminine singular. Another strategy deployed in the screenplay by Maïwenn was to assign a specially commissioned song to each actress to express an aspect of her (fictional) ‘social intimacy’ and ask her to perform it.30 The colourful

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interludes, recalling the musical genre, were imagined and choreographed by Maïwenn to de-​dramatise more serious themes she had integrated into her screenplay. They highlight the corporeality of performance as each actress lends her physicality to her character while addressing her (star) persona and her (fictional?) dream. These aspirations and concerns are then summarised in the lyrics of film’s theme song performed in an ensemble finale where Maïwenn playfully, but aptly, asks ‘What does it mean to be an actress in everyday life?’ The use of songs in Le Bal des actrices also illustrates the theatricality that characterises Maïwenn’s screenwriting style. It reaffirms her taste for literal and figurative masks, already used in Pardonnez-​moi with the puppet resembling Maïwenn that Violette hides behind to stylise a confrontation with her father and create distance from the raw emotions expressed. Le Bal des actrices too treads a fine line between theatricality and authenticity: the screened actresses confide in an ambiguous ‘fake’ Maïwenn in the diegesis, and she stages herself as a sympathetic mediator to convey their personal and professional wounds/​break. In a sense, she helps them to come to terms with their neuroses, as her line of the film suggests:  ‘Je pense qu’on ne fait pas ce métier si on n’est pas névrosée’ (I think we don’t do this job if we don’t have a neurosis). However, the film is also about ‘Maïwenn’/​Maïwenn:  the narrative dispositif brings her constantly on screen, as if she were actually exploring herself in the joint processes of acting and filming. There is thus an overt identification between Maïwenn the director and ‘Maïwenn’ the protagonist which acts simultaneously as a mask and a revelation; she is ‘screening’ herself in both senses of the word. There is a similar dynamic at play in the (re)presentation of the actresses. She sets out to unmask them, as literally illustrated in the provocative poster of the film where they all pose naked, and by asking them to mock and transcend an aspect of their public image (Rouchy 2009). This very act also acknowledges the constructed star image as a mask, allowing each star an element of control over their personae. For example, Robin challenges her comic image by auditioning for a role in a classical play while Rampling plays with her sophisticated image and confronts the difficulties of ageing for actresses. And, in terms of the writing process, their roles in Maïwenn’s screenplay are written with an artistic distance that maintains a certain level of collaboration to blur real life and fiction. In Maïwenn’s first two films, then, the female protagonists emerge as examples of complex experimental screenwriting serving a multi-​layered narrative structure, and sometimes the personal agenda of a provocative réalisa(c)trice. Just like Bruni Tedeschi, Maïwenn, as réalisa(c)trice, has faced criticism for navel-​gazing in her first two films, and also for excessive control over her narratives, hence of manipulating audiences (an accusation she directly

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confronts by placing it in the mouths of characters in both films). Unlike the fictional protagonists of Bruni Tedeschi and Lvovsky, however, Violette/​ Maïwenn in Pardonnez-​moi and Maïwenn the (fictionalised) filmmaker of Le Bal des actrices both film others as well as being filmed themselves. Maïwenn thus responds to this narcissism critique by a reflexive commentary on filmmaking. As Guillemette Odicino (2009) suggests, she ‘cleverly’ uses the narrative twists in Le Bal des actrices to diffuse any reductive evaluation of her multi-​layered screenplay: [T]‌he climax of the mise en abyme operated by Maïwenn is to conclude her film with a private projection of the film during which the furious actresses accuse her, Maïwenn of being the only one really seen on screen! With this final twist, the clever Maïwenn diffuses potential criticism of her narcissism.

This final scene reveals the actresses’ psychological scars (and possibly Maïwenn’s), but eschews a cathartic resolution. It shows the furious actresses (within the diegesis) at the private screening of the documentary organised for the cast criticising her editing decisions  –​a process already identified in this volume as the last stage of screenwriting. They expose Maïwenn’s manipulative and narcissistic attitude, claiming that the diegetic film entirely focuses on herself, not on them as they were led to believe. This produces a dramatic twist, where the réalisa(c)trice stages her own ‘auteur-​bashing’ exercise. By gently mocking both the actresses and her own status, Maïwenn thus acknowledges within the diegesis some stereotypes attached to the director’s cut but also suggests that making a film does not solve her personal problems, or indeed the (presumed) neuroses of her actresses. In so doing, she cleverly diffuses any possible accusations of narcissism attached to her filmmaking (e.g. Rouchy 2006; 2009; Icher 2009). Having been accused with some justification of using her first film to settle personal scores, she playfully exposes the ‘trompe l’œil’ effects in her playful, less introspective second screenplay, where as réalisa(c)trice, she writes, play-​acts and screens herself, manipulating actors and audiences alike. By increasing the artistic distance and offering a critical self-​reflexive ending, she ensures that the film cannot be reduced to a narcissistic venture. But, as we have seen above with Bruni Tedeschi and to some extent with Lvovsky, Maïwenn’s screenwriting practice in the first two films engages with some autofictional narrative conventions to screen the self with artistic distance and a healthy dose of self-​derision.

Réalisa(c)trices narrating and screening the self The screenwriting practices of the réalisa(c)trices presented above have revealed some ambivalent, overlapping correspondences between directors,

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actresses and the films’ protagonists. Using complex narrative mechanisms of fictionalisation of the self, they interweave different discourses specific to film (some narrated and some staged) and set, up dispositifs to expose family secrets, scars and/​or wounds in complex narratives which rework autobiographical tropes into creative screenwriting. Although the term autofiction has been used in the critical discourse around the films of Bruni Tedeschi and Maïwenn,31 but less for Lvovsky who does not expose herself so directly,32 we prefer to link these screenwriting practices to self-​reflexive processes of ‘mega-​narration’, combining ‘narration’ –​storytelling by means of screenwriting and editing, and ‘monstration’  –​shooting and acting out what is visible on screen (Gaudreault 2008:  88–​9; Vanderschelden 2012b:  249). Our réalisa(c)trices can screen themselves as storyteller, narrator, protagonist and/​or actress, thus constructing multi-​layered narratives. In the films discussed in this chapter, however, their identification with their protagonists remains intentionally ambiguous or partial. Even if Bruni Tedeschi (in all her films), Maïwenn (in her first two films) and Lvovsky (in her last two), literally embody the main protagonist, encouraging identification between the screenwriting director, actor and character, their films resist reductive autobiographical interpretations. Indeed, their frequently fragmented narratives and trompe l’œil effects allow the development of multiple viewpoints, including digressions, mises en abyme, theatrical performances, (pseudo) improvised incidents and reported by-​stories. By overtly blending recognisable facts with fiction, memories and fantasies, they can tackle their personal preoccupations head-​on or more obliquely; they can also choose to expose themselves or to re-​invent their pasts within a diegetic construction. Arguably, the better the screenplays succeed, the less the actual biographical elements are of interest to the audience. For example, Bruni Tedeschi asks her real mother to play the protagonist’s mother in all her films; Lvovsky has dedicated three films to her mother Geneviève; and Maïwenn (in Lalanne 2006) insists that many aspects of her films are fantasised, apart from those relating to the father: I have treated myself to a role in which I can do on screen what I would never dare to do in real life. I have never confronted the members of my family to get the truth out of them … I would be incapable of doing this. (In Gelly 2006)

In autofictional screenwriting, a psychological scar can trigger a form of artistic expression. Bruni Tedeschi, Lvovsky and Maïwenn recycle personal motifs into what critics have called ‘creative energy’ (Gomez 2006) with a powerful ‘sense of the visual’ (Guichard 2007). This artistic freedom underpins their desire to make films.33 For example Bruni Tedeschi (in Frois 2007)  refers to Actrices as a ‘personal diary that is reworked, autobiography with emotion’. She insists that her personal experience is subjected

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to a theatrical ‘process of elaboration’ (Attali 2003; Régnier 2007) whereby she drafts a script by improvising dialogue chunks that Lvovsky then reworks into a screenplay. Like Maïwenn’s Bal des actrices, it is a film primarily concerned with ‘the condition of the actor’ that she scripted and directed from an actress’s perspective, with little improvisation (Taddei 2009). The screenwriting process in her case links acting to a form of ‘confession’ (Cohen and Frappat 2003:  77), which is why in her screenplays, Bruni Tedeschi often imagines her characters literally confessing to others (a priest, a colleague, a friend …). But, while she accepts that acting helps her ‘take the lid off emotions’, it also leaves the actress in her ‘vulnerable and alone’ (Guichard 2007). By narrating the self, the three réalisa(c)trices work on memories and emotions by ‘telling a story’. If some catharsis is to be found in their screenplays, however, it often arises from a distanciation effect produced by humorous or burlesque self-​derision. For instance, in two cheerful, classically slapstick scenes written for two distinct screenplays by different writers, both Violette and Marcelline throw a ‘tarte à la crème’ in the face of another character, thus releasing some tension. And in Camille redouble, the métier of actress is deglamorised from the opening scene in which Camille is asked to perform a humiliating gory horror film sequence; a powerful introduction to the undignified and unrewarding aspects of being an actress. In Actrices and Le Bal des actrices in particular, the screenwriting and the mise en scene therefore combine to interrogate specifically the status of actresses  –​offering gendered responses that question their positioning within the performing arts. The actress-​protagonists of these two films are thus often seen reflecting aloud on their roles, or using their characters’ lines to discuss their own lives. In the screenwriting dispositif set up by Maïwenn, other characters often constitute an intradiegetic audience –​as is the case with Violette’s father in the puppet scene of Pardonnez-​moi. In Le Bal des actrices, the actresses become critical spectators of Maïwenn’s work. Finally, while the réalisa(c)trices of these autofictional narratives form a pact of complicity with the audience that requires the latter to take an active part in the viewing process, this complicity is only partial. Viewers need to remember that there is a dual sense to the notion of ‘screening the self’; these films hide just as much as they reveal, using screenwriting, performance and persona to play with ideas of subjectivity and of representing the self. As directors who write in the first person feminine, Lvovsky, Bruni Tedeschi and Maïwenn explore their personal histories and rework them into screenplays and films. Their practices perpetuate the self-​ reflexive auteurist values and collaborative writing practices inherited from the New Wave. Their narrative dispositifs work on several levels, however, blending personal experiences  –​and occasionally rewriting biographical elements

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of their lives into their screenplays. By screening themselves to play the roles they have created and turning into réalisa(c)trices, they reveal a new cinematic dimension of autofictional writing and forge new links between screenwriting and mise en scene to the point that the film fabrication process becomes comparable to what Lvovsky (2017) calls a ‘living organism’, eschewing traditional authorial control. By reinventing themselves behind and in front of the camera, exposing fragments of their lives, or at least reconstructed public versions of themselves that they are prepared to expose, they redefine the notion of protagonist in self-​reflexive, subjective narratives. Even if, as Bruni Tedeschi suggests (Binh et al. 2012: 84), the screenplays reflect the self and are ‘inspired by a reality that we know’, the autobiographical part of the written screenplays is eclipsed when considering the work of these réalisa(c)trices by their creative approach to the expression of a feminine subjectivity. This is particularly true of Maïwenn’s co-​written films Polisse (2011) and Mon roi/​My King (2015) which move away from screening the self while retaining familiar motifs and themes.34 Indeed, she (in Adams 2016) rejects autobiographical readings of her films, noting the gendered nature of such critical readings: I don’t see myself as an autobiographic artist. My country gives me this label like autobiographic girl, blah, blah, blah, which I don’t recognise myself. It’s like journalists have a contemptuous approach with this way of talking about me. […] the term autobiographical is quite limiting, degrading which I’m systematically exposed to whereas all these other directors aren’t given this label. Go figure why. For instance, Arnaud Desplechin […] He was not attacked but highly praised for his autobiographical film, whereas I’m attacked for autobiography.

It would seem that the ‘masculine singular’ that Sellier (2005) identified as integral to so many New Wave films still dominates over first person feminine filmmaking for many critics. Another important element that this chapter has highlighted is patterns of intense collaboration, often between close writing friends –​not just to put stories ‘into shape’, but also to establish a necesssary distance from the réalisa(c)trice’s inner world before it can be exposed it publicly. Experimenting with eclectic narrative devices  –​fake-​ documentary, time travelling, mises en abyme, choreographed singing, puppet shows, they create doubles or filters. These fictional settings imagined at the writing stage make it possible to approach intimate subject matter more covertly, and in some cases, to address indirectly personal scars or trauma to reach a form of cinematic catharsis. In this artistic process, the three screenwriting réalisa(c)trices all deploy considerable creative energy and freedom to explore screenwriting, film

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language and narrative form. They mix and subvert genres, draw on spectacular effects and imagine physical performances putting on a number of costumes and figurative ‘masks’ to create narratives of the self. In using the fragmented, interwoven discourses of stage performances or scripted shows, as well as seemingly more spontaneous confessions, they forge intermedial links between different forms of narration. However, these all share one common feature:  a relationship to cinema centred on the intimate. They blend the representation of a supposed ‘inner self’ and its surface enactment on screen (or stage), thereby mixing ‘le je (the I) and le jeu (game/​ performance)’.35 Some French critics have even called these practices ‘des jeux sur le je’ (games about the self) (see Guichard 2007; Tranchant 2007). In their various ways, then, our réalisa(c)trices reinvent film authorship through different screenwriting dispositifs based on forms of distanciation. In doing so, they free themselves from the traditional dichotomy between auteur cinema and popular genres –​legacy of the New Wave –​incorporating their preoccupations, and sometimes their personal scars, into playful, fictionalised, cinematic frameworks which create new spaces for interrogating femininity and corporeal performance.

Films written and directed by Noémie Lvovsky in date order Oublie-​moi/​Forget Me (dir. Noémie Lvovsky, 1994; scr. Marc Cholodenko, Sophie Fillières, Emmanuel Salinger; story by Noémie Lvovsky) Petites (dir. Noémie Lvovsky TV ‘Les années Lycée’, Arte, 1997; scr. Lvovsky, Florence Seyvos) La Vie ne me fait pas peur/​Life doesn’t Scare Me (dir. Noémie Lvovsky, 1999; scr. Lvovsky, Florence Seyvos) Les Sentiments/​Feelings (dir. Noémie Lvovsky, 2003; scr. Lvovsky, Florence Seyvos) Faut que ça danse!/​Let’s Dance! (dir. Noémie Lvovsky, 2007; scr. Lvovsky, Florence Seyvos) Camille redouble/​ Camille Rewinds (dir. Noémie Lvovsky, 2012; scr. Lvovsky, Florence Seyvos, Maud Ameline and Pierre-​Olivier Mattei) Demain et tous les autres jours/​Tomorrow and Thereafter (dir. Noémie Lvovsky, 2017; scr. Lvovsky, Florence Seyvos and Annette Dutrertre)

Films mentioned written and directed by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi in date order Il est plus facile pour un chameau …/​It’s Easier for a Camel … (dir. Bruni Tedeschi, 2003; scr. Bruni Tedeschi, Noémie Lvovsky and Agnès de Sacy) Actrices/​Actresses (dir. Bruni Tedeschi, 2007; scr. Bruni Tedeschi, Noémie Lvovsky and Agnès de Sacy)

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Un château en Italie/​A Castle in Italy (dir. Bruni Tedeschi, 2013; scr. Bruni Tedeschi, Noémie Lvovsky and Agnès de Sacy) Les Estivants/​The Summer House (dir. Bruni Tedeschi, 2018; scr. Bruni Tedeschi, Noémie Lvovsky, Agnès de Sacy and Caroline Deruas)

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Films mentioned written and directed by Maïwenn in date order I am an actrice (dir. Maïwenn, 2004; scr. Maïwenn) Pardonnez-​moi/​Forgive Me (dir. Maïwenn, 2004; scr. Maïwenn) Le Bal des actrices /​All about Actresses (dir. Maïwenn, 2009; scr. Maïwenn) Polisse/​Poliss (dir. Maïwenn, 2011; scr. Maïwenn and Emmanuelle Bercot) Mon Roi/​My King (dir. Maïwenn, 2015; scr. Maïwenn and Etienne Comar)

Notes 1 See also Baurez and Benamon (2015: 60) on comédies d’auteur after 2010. 2 Lvovsky is the first of a new generation of women filmmakers who graduated with a screenwriting major from the Fémis school, when it replaced the IDHEC in 1986 under the presidency of Jean-​Claude Carrière. A screenwriting pathway opened alongside the established directing route. Graduates include women directors and screenwriters who contributed to the return of personal themes and reflexivity in auteur cinema, including Solveig Anspach in 1990, Laetitia Masson in 1991 and Agnès de Sacy in 1992. 3 In Réalisa(c)trice (Yann Coridian, 2007), we can see Bruni Tedeschi staging herself, as actor and the director of the other actors, explaining the screenplay and her intentions and rehearsing dialogue. This ‘making of’ recalls Maïwenn’s staging of herself as a director in Le Bal des actrices. The term réalisa(c)trice has since been adopted in various critical essays (Vanderschelden 2012b: 299; Dobson 2012: 93). 4 Here we are adapting the term Sellier (2005) uses to denote New Wave filmmaking, ‘masculine singular’. 5 The first two were critical and public successes: Il est plus facile …: 423,653 spectators, Prix Louis Delluc; Actrices: 299,307 spectators and Cannes’ Grand prix du Jury. 6 See Juhasz and Lerner (2006) on fake documentary as a growing, self-​standing film genre, in which Bruni Tedeschi and Maïwenn could both have a place. See also Hight and Roscoe (2001: 42–​3) who use the expression mock documentary to define similar trends. 7 For studies of these screenwriting directors, see Tarr with Rollet (2001), Audé (2002), Wilson (2005), Ince (2008), Nelmes and Selbo (2015: 311–​62). 8 This generational filiation between post-​ 2000 writer-​ directors and ground-​ breaking earlier ones, including some discussed in other chapters such as Varda, Suzanne Schiffman or Balasko, is also noted in Women Screenwriters

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(Nelmes and Selbo 2015:  311–​62), which includes entries on twelve French women screenwriters. 9 Haddouf and Wolgust surveyed 1,414 French feature films that received the agrément between 2003 and 2012. Only 6 per cent of these films were written by a screenwriter alone. See also Kopp’s report (2013) which does not make any gender distinctions. A quick comparison shows that women screenwriters fare a bit less well. 10 They frequently highlight their close friendship in interviews (for example, Binh et al. 2012; Baumann and Garbarz 2008: 19), a shared passion for the theatre (which can be traced back in their collaborative screenplays) and a complicity explaining some echoes in their respective films: narrative motifs, themes, use of fantasy tropes, exuberance and dialogue style. 11 Other examples of screenwriters who moved to writing and directing discussed elsewhere in this volume include Balasko, Bidegain and Campillo. (Jeanson and Spaak also turned their hand to directing for one film each, but without any great success or desire to repeat the experience.) 12 Born in 1948, Bonitzer was not exactly young in the 1990s, but he made the transition from writing to directing. 13 Seyvos is an author of fiction and children literature and was Desplechin’s partner. For a profile, see Diatkine (2013). 14 She did not plan to interpret the protagonist at the time of writing. It was her producer who convinced her to play Camille (Mével 2012: 78). 15 See Chapter 7 (note 10) for the definition of burlesque in a French context, and in the case of Lvovsky and Bruni Tedeschi the American and Italian comedy traditions are also important sources of inspiration. 16 In the DVD commentary, the screenwriters repeatedly mention the development. Short of accessing the screenplay, this illuminates the writing process, including scenes written which were finally deleted. 17 For a discussion of editing as a stage of (re)writing, see Binh and Sojcher (2017: 6–​10). See also Chapter 8 for other examples of rewriting during editing. 18 These features are commented in many reviews:  Péron (2012); Guichard (2012); Régnier (2012). 19 Lvovsky elusively evokes her mother Geneviève Lvovsky in an interview as ‘un peu ailleurs’ (a little elsewhere) (Blottière 2012). She left the family home when Lvovsky was nine (see Balle 2017). 20 Céline Sciamma, another member of the ‘family’ (she graduated in the Fémis screenwriting cohort of 2005), also read drafts and made suggestions, such as including in the screenplay the mother’s death during Camille’s journey into her past. This dramatic scene was also one of the most polished sections of the script (Floch’lay and Thévenin 2016: 47). 21 The ending was also changed late on for La Vie ne me fait pas peur/​Life Doesn’t Scare Me (1999), another introspective journey story. 22 See review of the film (Joyard 2003: 76) in Cahiers du cinéma and supporting interview (Cohen and Frappat 2003: 77–​8).

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23 The screenplay extract is provided by Agnès de Sacy with Bruni Tedeschi’s permission. It contains manuscript annotations from both co-​authors. 24 For a discussion of her use of pop art and genre mixing, see Palmer (2007: 89–​ 102 and 2011: 124–​31). 25 She appeared in L’Eté meurtrier/​One Deadly Summer (Jean Becker, 1983) and La Gamine/​The Gamine (Hervé Palud, 1992). 26 In her debut short film, I am an actrice (2004), Maïwenn plays an actress who pushes her reluctant daughter into casting auditions as part of a narcissistic transfer. 27 For more examples of this see Vanderschelden (2012b: 244–​6). 28 For an account of how Joey Starr was involved in the development of the film see (Starr and Manœuvre 2017: 72–​6). He was first approached to write songs for the film, then offered a role. His take makes quite clear that the screenplay was established after Maïwenn found her cast. 29 The ‘Making of’ included in the DVD (Colby, 2009) shows her working closely with her actresses, tailor-​writing their roles and directing their performances. 30 Anaïs for ‘I can’t speak English’ sung by Viard and Anaïs; Benjamin Biolay for ‘La pin-​up du mois’ sung by Doutey; Pauline Croze and Antoine Massoni for ‘Dans les films’ sung by Depardieu; Joey Starr for ‘Revivre’ sung by Rampling and Starr. Nina Morato and Antonin Morel wrote the theme song ‘Le bal des actrices’. 31 See, for example, Guichard (2003) and Frodon (2003) for Il est plus facile…, Frois (2007) and Tranchant (2007) for Actrices, Mandelbaum (2006) and Odicino-​Olivier (2006) for Pardonnez-​moi. 32 See for example Bauche (2012: 25) who refuses to reduce Camille redouble to autofiction or autobiography. 33 See Bruni Tedeschi in Baumann and Garbarz (2008); Lvovsky in Mével (2012); Maïwenn in Odicino-​Olivier (2006) and Rouchy (2009). 34 Maïwenn (2011) states that for Polisse she wrote a first draft alone, before Emmanuelle Bercot intervened on later versions. ‘Everything is written, but I don’t want to stress the actors with the text and to ask them to learn each word. I want them to have a bit of freedom … but to remain close to the text all the same! I like the text, what’s said, but they need to say it in their own way […] I write a character bible –​one or two pages: I write the biographical information, his/​her positioning in a given situation, why s/​he isn’t well. The actors keep this with them at all times, and they read it again whenever necessary’ (in Mazzacurati 2011). For Mon roi, for which she stays behind the camera, the producer, writer and director Etienne Comar is credited as co-​writer. 35 Rannaud (2015), discussing Le Bal des actrices, refers to a ‘je historique’ and a ‘je lyrique’ using Odin’s narrative framework for fiction (2000).

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Conclusion

In 1949, reflecting on the nature of his work in an article entitled ‘Le Scénario’, Charles Spaak characterised the relationship between screenwriter and director in the French cinema of the time: Occupied with different –​opposing –​tasks, they come to consider each other as rivals, then as adversaries, and eventually as enemies. The one, proud of his ink stained fingers, and the other, all white from the studio plaster, each claims sole authorship of the film. Ego attack! These wasters of paper and film alike resort to arbitration to sort out their differences. Pictorial writing and ordinary writing are set up in opposition to each other, as if this were perfectly reasonable. As for the film, it’s a flop! It never stood a chance, because nothing of value can ever emerge without the collective effort of two friends and collaborators. (1949: 111–​12)

We might compare Spaak’s tongue-​in-​cheek account with a more recent one: How many films are chronicled, critiqued, praised, without the least allusion to those who co-​ wrote, co-​ thought, co-​ delivered it? How many pairs or trios of writers have shaped stories, chiselled them for months –​even years –​ honed them together, only to find them reduced at the launch to an anecdote experienced by the director, a life-​long interest for the subject, or a simple excess of the imagination. (Gorce et al. 2019: 210)

And yet, the same commentators continue: We know our role. Directors and actors are not our rivals; we write with them, for them, so they can take ownership of the screenplay, embody it, transcend it, betray it. But why does the film almost always end in the non-​recognition of the work we have done? (Gorce et al. 2019: 210–​11)

Written sixty years apart, these accounts are striking for the similarity of the issues that they highlight; key issues that have been consistently raised by screenwriters throughout the period covered in this volume, and that we have been concerned with relaying. The first is the fundamental yet often hidden role played by screenwriting in the development of a film, including

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many that have apparently emerged fully formed from the director’s imagination. The second is the importance of collaboration, especially between writer and director. These may or may not be the same individual, but it is a rare screenplay that is fully developed by a sole writer without any input from others. And the third is the false and unproductive rivalry between writers and directors generated by the question of authorship that masks the essentially collective and collaborative nature of filmmaking. In our introduction, we referred to the ‘hysterical relation’ to screenwriting that has existed in French film history and criticism, and which persists to this day, expressed as an anxiety around authorship. We have argued that an over-​investment in the idea of authorship is one of the main reasons for the lack of visibility of screenwriters, marginalised within the industry in favour of directors who must at all costs earn their authorial stripes. Thus the same difficulties of gaining visibility, credit and remuneration persist for screenwriters. Of course, this situation is not peculiar to France; the sidelining of screenwriters is an international issue, and we should also recognise that it is only one of the inequities within a global system where the rewards are in no way proportionate to effort or individuals’ contributions. However, there are certain inequities –​particularly as regards credit and remuneration –​that are specific to French screenwriters. First among these is the relative lack of investment in screenwriting in the French industry. Agnès de Sacy identifies an enduring paradox surrounding the screenplay, overvalued when it comes to casting and financing the film, yet undervalued at the time of writing, just when investment is needed. She goes on to point out that in Hollywood, 8 to 10 per cent of the overall budget of a film is typically devoted to the ‘development phase’ while in France, the norm is 2 to 3 per cent (Vanderschelden 2016d: 185). And, of course, this has an impact on screenwriters too. Their legal status as authors does not guarantee financial security; on the contrary, they are not eligible to be employed as salaried workers (unlike directors, editors and cinematographers, for example), and are therefore also unable to claim benefits during the inevitable periods of unemployment. The precarious system of remuneration is based on copyright transfer (cession de droits) administered by the SACD, with a so-​called ‘guaranteed minimum’, a sum negotiated with the producer, 25–​50 per cent of which is paid only when the film goes ‘into production’ (see Vanderschelden 2016d: 179–​80). Furthermore, writers are often obliged to chase royalties, and the obscurity of the accounts of television channels and other distributors means that these frequently remain unpaid. Haffar et al. (2019) present the impact of this remuneration system on individual screenwriters. This situation has been exacerbated in the digital era, especially with the growth of mostly US-​owned, global sharing platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. The

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European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, approved by the European Parliament on 26 March 2019 and adopted on 15 April, is an attempt by the EU to require such platforms to take responsibility for the sharing of copyrighted material on their sites and ensure that content creators receive fair remuneration. It was hailed as a ‘victory for screenwriters and directors’ in a press release by the Guilde des scénaristes on 27 March 2019. But the Directive is far from universally welcomed, with open web proponents fearing that the exceptions listed (which range from research and education to quotation, review and parody) will be impossible to distinguish from uses that breach copyright, leading to greater censorship. Indeed, the Polish government mounted a legal challenge on 24 May 2019, on the grounds that the Directive contradicts EU law on freedom of expression. Another fear is that the Directive will ultimately benefit giant tech firms who can afford to develop and put in place copyright filters and, as Google is already doing, sell them on to other platforms, to the detriment of smaller sites (Reynolds 2019). The amount of controversy generated by the Directive indicates the complexity of the issue and of the difficulties that screenwriters and other authors face in obtaining fair payment for their work. It will be interesting to see if the Copyright Directive does in fact improve this situation. Our focus in this book has been on individual writers and their practices, as a way of highlighting the variety of methods, approaches or dispositifs they use. This has also enabled us to explore different areas of practice, from adaptation to the development of narrative structure, focalisation, or character development to dialogue writing. Archival work has enabled us to trace the development of certain screenplays through various iterations. Annotated screenplays and correspondence have helped to identify the goals of the filmmakers (writers, directors, producers, actors, set and costume designers, and so on) and have also reminded us of the contingent aspect of filmmaking, frequently dependent on external circumstances. We have looked at a range of practices: from Prévert’s illustrated character or sequence lists, to Cantet’s improvisation grounded in lengthy periods of rehearsal and character development to Rohmer’s literary dialogue; from Jeanson’s mots ‘heard’ in the mouths of the actors to Audiard’s expressions –​ sometimes overheard in taxis or cafes –​many of which reach far beyond the cinematic realm to become integrated into the French language; from Spaak’s focus on situating characters within their environment to Varda’s cinécriture, in which personal relationships emerge from a vivid sense of place. In almost all cases, what has emerged is the essentially collaborative and interdependent nature of the filmmaking process. Research, too, is both contingent and collaborative, and this book is no exception. Our collaboration has enabled us to include screenwriters from

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the coming of sound to the present day, and to deploy a range of methodologies to study them. We present them here as case studies that offer glimpses into a vast and relatively unexplored subject. Each of our chapters could have been expanded to become a book-​length study in its own right, and the same is true of many other screenwriters that we have not been able to include here. One of the most encouraging aspects of this research, however, has been to discover the healthy state of the field, with recent publications revealing its rich diversity. Screenwriting studies in a transnational context is a vibrant area which brings together academic researchers and practitioners. For example, since 2010, the Journal of Screenwriting has mapped the field, analysing individual screenplays from a range of perspectives, questioning and developing screenwriting practice in relation to both old and new media and with regard to representation and identity, and exploring methodologies from ethnography to genetic criticism. Likewise, Palgrave’s series devoted to screenwriting studies addresses the topic from the perspective of craft and technique (Macdonald 2013; Pallant and Price 2015; Ganz and Price forthcoming), industry and technology (Novrup Redvall 2013; Millard 2014), and ethics (Maras 2016). In the Francophone context, we could mention two works that emerged from a conference series devoted to the roles played by screenplays in the relationship between cinema and literature. L’Adaptation:  des livres aux scénarios (Boillat and Philippe 2018) examines the functions of the screenplay in the adaptation process, most frequently from novel to film, in the context of the French tradition of quality. The focus on archival research and a genetic approach is adopted with a view to studying the screenplay as a ‘lieu des possibles’, when many films can yet be envisaged. A sister publication, Films à lire: des scénarios et des livres (Brangé and Jeannelle 2019), takes as its focus the screenplay as a work that is read, in many forms and contexts, and for a variety of different purposes, from illustrating screenwriting manuals to the adaptation of screenplays for illustrated novelisations in popular film magazines. Scénario et réalisation: modes d’emploi (Sojcher and Jabon 2016) interrogates the collaborative relationship between writing and directing from a practice perspective, while Scénario et scénariste (Tremblay 2015) conceives of screenwriters and screenplays as forming an ‘objet scénaristique’, which is investigated in terms of its position in the network of film production, as well as in relation to institutional recognition, of the lack of it. More urgently polemical are certain works emerging from the screenwriting community in France: Scénaristes de cinéma: un autoportrait (SCA 2019) paints a picture of a profession existing in spite of the working conditions, reiterating many of the concerns expressed by the Club des 13 but also celebrating work that most often goes unnoticed. The Introduction

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to this collective SCA publication points out that placing the spotlight on screenwriters is also a way of honouring the history of the profession (Vargaftig 2019:  16–​17); they highlight several of the writers included in this volume as part of the history of French cinema, but also of an international history of screenwriting. We have set out here not only to ‘honour’ the writers we have included, but also to place their work within the wider industrial and theoretical context, and to analyse different ways in which words and images are brought into play with each other in the development of a film. Our introduction cited Pasolini’s (2005: 187) famous description of the screenplay as ‘a structure that wants to be another structure’, an object in the process of becoming another object. Our aim with this book has been to highlight this process of becoming as a way of shedding light on the essential work of screenwriters.

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Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2009), ‘The “Cinéma du milieu” is falling down:  new challenges for auteur and independent French cinema in the 2000s’, Studies in French Cinema, 9(3), pp. 243–​57. Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2012a), ‘Filmer l’école:  un révélateur des identités langagières et des manifestations interculturelles dans la France d’aujourd’hui’, in Abdenbi Lachkar (ed.), Langues et médias en Méditerranée, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 217–​23. Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2012b), ‘Réalisa(c)trices staging the self in their films: Bruni-​ Tedeschi and Maïwenn’, Studies in French Cinema, 12(3), pp. 241–​55. Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2013), ‘Traits and traditions in French film comedy:  Le Dîner de cons and Le Placard’, in Studying French Cinema, London: Auteur, pp. 173–​87. Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2015a), ‘The star’s script:  Alain Delon, director, screenwriter and producer’, in Nick Rees-​Roberts and Darren Waldron (eds), Alain Delon: Screen Icon, London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 111–​23. Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2015b), ‘Women scripting and reinventing French comedy’ in Nelmes and Selbo (eds), Women Screenwriters, pp. 339–​46. Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2016a), ‘The French film industry:  funding, policies, debates’, Studies in French Cinema, 16(2), pp. 89–​94. Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2016b), ‘Money for writing: screenplay development and screenwriters’ earnings in French cinema’, Studies in French Cinema, 16(2), pp. 118–​33. Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2016c), ‘Jacques Audiard scriptwriter’, Studies in French Cinema, 16(3), pp. 248–​61. Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2016d), ‘Entretien avec Agnès de Sacy: le financement de l’écriture des films et la rémunération des auteurs’, Studies in French Cinema, 16(2), pp. 179–​85. Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2017), ‘Translating ‘l’esprit Canal’ into screenplays for cinema:  Canal+’s role in the development of French comedies since 2000’, unpublished paper, 25th French Media Research Group conference, Newcastle University, 10 November. Vanderschelden, Isabelle (2020), ‘Le Développement du scénario des Tontons flingueurs: les paradoxes d’un dialogue culte’, Temps noir, 22 special issue, Les Tontons Flingueurs, pp. 146–65. Van Nypelseer, Jacqueline (1991), ‘Le Ciel et rien d’autre’, Les Cahiers du scénario, 6–​7, pp.  79–​87. Van Nypelseer, Jacqueline (ed.) (1993), Les Cahiers du scénario, special issue: Charles Spaak: Les Années d’apprentissage 1919–​1927, 10–​11. Vanoye, Francis (1979), Récit écrit, récit filmique, Paris: Editions Cedic. Vanoye, Francis (2008), Scénarios modèles:  modèles de scénarios, Paris:  Nathan. Second edition. (First published in 1991.) Varda, Agnès (1994), Varda par Varda, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma. Vargaftig, Cécile (2019), ‘Entrée en matière’, in SCA (ed.), Scénaristes de cinéma, pp.  13–​18.

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Vassé, Claire (2003), Le Dialogue: du texte écrit à la voix mise en scène, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma. Veber, Francis (1994), Le Dîner de cons, Paris:  Ramsay. www.franceinfo.us/​03_​ books/​books/​veber_​diner-​de-​cons-​small.pdf. Accessed 8 April 2020. Veber, Francis (2010), Que ça reste entre nous, Paris: Robert Laffont. Vernet, Guillaume (2014), ‘L’Hypothèse d’une “prime à la qualité” au sortir de la Seconde Guerre mondiale:  discours, projets et rendez-​vous manqués (1944–​ 1948)’, in Vezyroglou (ed.), Le Cinéma, pp. 73–​84. Vernet, Guillaume (2017), ‘Aux origines d’un discours critique: la “tradition de la qualité” et la “qualité française”: la bataille de la qualité ou la mise en place du soutien de l’état aux films de qualité en France (1944–​1953)’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Université de Rennes 2. Vernet, Marc (2011), ‘Bazin the censor?’, in Dudley Andrew with Hubert Joubert-​ Laurencin (eds), Opening Bazin:  Postwar Film Theory and its Afterlife, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 234–​9. Verselle, Vincent (2018), ‘Le projet d’adaptation de Journal d’un curé de campagne d’Aurenche et Bost: un problème de formes’, in Boillat and Philippe (eds), L’Adaptation, pp. 113–​34. Vezyroglou, Dimitri (ed) (2014), Le Cinéma:  une affaire d’état, Paris:  Comité d’Histoire du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication/​La Documentation française. Villiers, Mara and Gilles Gressard (1985), ‘Thierry Lhermitte ou …tous en scène’, in Stars d’aujourd’hui, Paris: Ramsay, pp. 131–​69. Vincendeau, Ginette (1989), ‘Daddy’s girls:  Oedipal narratives in 1930s French films’, Iris, 8, pp. 70–​81. Vincendeau, Ginette (1998), Pépé le moko, London: BFI. Vincendeau, Ginette (2000), Stars and Stardom in French Cinema, London and New York: Continuum. Vincendeau, Ginette (2010a), ‘Jean Gabin’s voice: speaking class and nation’, unpublished paper, University of Manchester, 30 March. Vincendeau, Ginette (2010b), ‘Le Grand jeu’, Masters of Cinema DVD booklet, Pathé, pp. 5–​15. Vincendeau, Ginette (2011), ‘The Frenchness of French cinema’, in Will Higbee and Sarah Leahy (eds), Studies in French Cinema: UK Perspectives, 1985–​2010, Bristol: Intellect, pp. 337–​52. Vincendeau, Ginette (2013), Brigitte Bardot, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Viry-​Babel, Roger (2003), Une auréole pour Lange. Supplement, DVD: Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, Studio Canal. Voytilla, Stuart and Scott Petri (2003), Writing the Comedy Film: Make ‘em Laugh, Los Angeles:  Michael Wiese Productions. French edition (2005), Ecrire une comédie: faites les rire, trans. by Brigitte Gautier, Paris: Dixit. Wachthausen, Jean-​Luc (2011), ‘Francis Veber: La comédie est racoleuse’, Le Figaro, 28 March. Wainwright, John (1980), A table, Paris: Gallimard (Série noire, 1774).

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Index

120 battements par minute (2017) 294 AAF see Association des Auteurs de Films L’Abbé Constantin (1933) 49–50, 52 abortion 92, 164 A bout de souffle (1960) 188 Abrahams, Jim 256 Abril, Victoria 252 accent 101, 102, 105, 108, 109, 210, 216, 242, 264, 268, 271, 274, 275, 276 Achard, Marcel 4, 6, 25, 98, 263 actor, actors 5, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 33, 34, 50, 59, 60, 66, 71, 72, 81, 83, 84, 85, 88, 90, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100–18, 140, 141, 157, 172, 174, 176, 181, 182, 183, 190, 193, 194, 196, 197, 206, 212, 216, 218, 227, 228, 230, 233, 236, 237, 245, 251, 255, 260, 262, 264, 266, 268, 269, 275, 276, 277, 281, 282, 284, 286, 287, 288, 293, 297, 299, 301, 306, 308, 310, 312, 316, 317, 320, 322, 325, 328, 330 nonprofessional actor 23, 24, 172, 178, 265, 280, 289, 294 Actrices (2007) 297, 299, 309, 310–12, 314, 321, 322, 325, 327 adaptation 2, 6, 7, 18, 35, 70, 90, 125, 127, 129, 132, 134, 141, 184, 197, 205, 207, 214, 223, 224, 230, 261, 262, 266, 279, 280, 286, 330, 331 adaptor 2, 17, 21, 28, 59, 81, 95, 128, 129, 134, 136, 150, 207 fidelity 129, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139 from literary sources 3, 10, 22, 28, 29, 35, 41, 135–51, 159, 161, 164–6, 174, 187, 197, 202, 280, 331

source text 3, 60, 129, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 150, 154, 155 from theatrical sources 3, 23–4, 30, 35, 40, 228, 229, 240, 244, 246, 250 Adolphe 154 Adorables créatures (1952) 50 adultery 40, 50, 138, 143, 149, 165, 242 L’Affaire du courrier de Lyon (1937) 132, 153 L’Affaire est dans le sac (1932) 67–8, 69, 70, 75, 79 Allégret, Yves 10, 124, 130 Allen, Woody 227, 302 Amalric, Mathieu 299, 304, 311 Les Amants de Vérone (1949) 78 Ameline, Maud 305 L’Amour après-​midi (1972) 191 Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde (1948) 99, 117, 123 Les Amours célèbres (1961) 82 Amrabt, Nassim 282 anarchic 69, 70, 75, 231 anarchism, anarchist 63, 82, 98, 116, 120, 121, 194 Annabella 45, 92, 107 Anouilh, Jean 82, 130 Anspach, Solveig 325 anticlerical 64, 130, 135, 150 anti-​Semitism, Jewish stereotypes 41–2, 64, 194 Apatow, Judd 227, 256, 302 Appelez-​moi Mathilde (1969) 236 Arletty 5, 22, 59, 79, 81, 82, 83, 92, 95, 100, 101, 107–12, 115, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 273 Arts 10, 34, 99, 128, 166 L’Assassinat du Père Noël (1941) 61

163

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Index Assayas, Olivier 9, 12, 168, 230, 254, 288, 295 Association des Auteurs de Films (AAF) 26 Astérix et Obélix contre César (1997) 251 Astérix et Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre (2002) 251, 255 Astruc, Alexandre 10, 160, 172 L’Atelier (2017) 266, 279, 282, 287, 289, 294 Attention au fakir! 67 Aubergé, Maurice 133, 154 L’Auberge rouge (1923) 155 Auboin, Ghislaine see Autant-​Lara, Ghislaine Au diable vert 90 Audiard, Jacques 9, 27, 207, 219, 226, 251 Audiard, Michel 5, 7, 11, 15, 16, 18, 23, 25, 27, 32, 62, 63, 72, 90, 95, 98, 99, 112, 158, 185, 193–220, 230, 231, 241, 246, 255, 260, 262, 263, 264, 330 audience 16, 22, 96, 97, 99, 101, 115, 117, 123, 126, 127, 141, 150, 154, 157, 167, 179, 189, 196, 197, 199, 212, 218, 223, 228, 231, 232, 241, 242, 245, 249, 254, 267, 319, 320, 322 Aumont, Jean-​Pierre 92, 107 Aurel, Jean 13, 166 Aurenche and Bost 6, 10, 11, 19, 22, 25, 28, 31, 33, 124–51, 166, 176, 194, 246, 260 Aurenche, Jean 5, 12, 22, 27, 64, 69, 75, 80, 90, 92 L’Aurore 95 Autant-​Lara, Claude 6, 10, 19, 22, 25, 27, 82, 124, 125, 127, 130, 132, 138, 143, 148, 153, 154, 155, 161 Autant-​Lara, Ghislaine 18, 27, 154 Auteuil, Daniel 237, 289 auteur cinema, auteur film 1, 6, 12, 13, 24, 26, 33, 156–86, 194, 230, 266, 268, 288, 299, 300, 301, 306, 324, 325 authorship 7, 14, 17, 95, 139, 157, 172, 185, 205, 213, 218, 324, 329 attribution, credit 5, 7, 18, 90, 98, 162, 181, 184, 188, 190, 195, 205, 207, 208, 219, 222, 224, 246, 291, 299, 328

361

auteur, auteur-​director 9, 10, 11, 12, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 33, 64, 88, 125, 128, 156–86, 194, 207, 266, 276, 288, 296, 298 auteurism, auteurist 8, 10, 20, 23, 74, 124, 156, 158, 193, 194, 218, 307, 322 auteur-​screenwriters 263, 264 author 31, 65, 128, 136, 141, 193, 196, 205, 206, 218, 228, 230, 233, 235, 250, 251, 254, 255, 262, 279, 297, 330 authorship debate 5, 125, 127 authors’ rights 8, 21 droits d’auteur 7 legal status 7, 21, 329 politique des auteurs 7, 10, 13, 17, 23, 124, 128, 139, 156, 157, 158, 169, 194 popular auteur 12, 296–324 autofiction, autofictional 23, 296, 297, 309, 312, 316, 320–3 Aux portes de Paris (1935) 29 Avant le déluge (1954) 50, 52, 57 Avant Scène Cinéma 178, 188, 192, 272 Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob (1973) 232, 260 A voix haute: la force de la parole (2017) 289, 291 Aymé, Marcel 60, 133 Babysitting (2014) 255 Babysitting 2 (2015) 255 Back to the Future (1985) 302 Bacri, Jean-​Pierre  13 Baisers volés (1968) 188 Bakhtin, Mikhail 97, 115, 150 Les Baladins/​Commedia dell’arte 60 Balasko, Josiane 12, 18, 24, 228, 229, 245, 246, 248, 251–4, 255, 256, 262, 297, 325, 326 Le Bal des actrices (2009) 297, 298, 315, 320, 322, 327 Balducci, Richard 259 Baleydier (1932) 67, 68 Balin, Mireille 102, 104 Balzac, Honoré de 60, 155, 164, 213 Bande de filles (2014) 266, 293 La Bandera (1935) 29, 30, 41, 44–8, 60, 61 Baquet, Maurice 74, 82, 90

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362

Index

Bar, Jacques 201, 223 Barbe-​bleue (1951) 99 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules 127 Les Barbouzes (1964) 203 Bardot, Brigitte 24, 99, 192, 345, 358 Barrault, Jean-​Louis 65, 76, 77, 82, 83, 85 Barrault, Marie-​Christine  180 Barski, Odile 13 Barthes, Roland 35, 63 Les Bas-​Fonds (1936) 50 Bataille, Sylvia 73, 76, 90 Batcheff, Pierre 66, 67, 80 Bauchau, Patrick 176, 178 Bazin, André 72, 126, 138, 156 Le Beau Serge (1958) 160 Becker, Jacques 71, 73, 91, 120, 133, 158, 200 Bégaudeau, François 279, 280, 281, 282, 289, 293, 294 La Belle Equipe (1936) 29, 30, 35, 57, 92 Belmondo, Jean-​Paul 23, 198, 207, 226 Bernanos, Georges 139 Bernard, Paul 48, 56 Bernheim, Emmanuelle 12 Berri, Claude 12, 269 Berry, Jules 65, 71, 73, 79, 81 Berthomieu, André 30, 33 Besson, Luc 12, 26, 27, 296, 315 La Bête humaine/​The Human Beast (1938) 91 Les Biches (1968) 160 Bidegain, Thomas 9, 13, 326 Biegalski, Christian 251 Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (2008) 231, 232, 260 Biraud, Maurice 201, 224 The Birdcage (1996) 233 Blanc, Michel 12, 228, 245, 246, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253 Blanche, Francis 202, 203, 216 Le Blé en herbe (1954) 27, 129, 154 Blier, Bernard 23, 52, 198, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 210, 211, 216, 217, 218, 223, 238, 262 Blier, Bertrand 12 Blondeau, Maurice 132 Blondin, Antoine 197, 223 Blum-​Byrnes Agreements  7, 126 Bohringer, Romane 318 Le Bon Dieu sans confession (1953) 27, 154

Bongard, Pascal 309 Le Bonheur (1965) 172 Le Bonheur dans le crime 155 Bonin/​T chimoukov, Lou  90, 91 Bonitzer, Pascal 13, 20, 299, 301, 326 Bonnell, René 8, 9 Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) 160 Boon, Dany 26, 229, 255 Borini, Marisa 309, 311 Bost, Pierre 6, 25, 59, 75, 95, 128, 263 Le Boucher (1970) 160 Boudard, Alphonse 197 Boufares, Habib 276 La Boulangère de Monceau (1962) 175, 177 Boule de suif (1945) 99, 120, 154 Bourvil, André 12, 231 Bouteille, Romain 245 Brassens, Georges 242, 261 Brasseur, Pierre 79, 82, 83 Braunberger, Pierre 73, 92 Breton, André 64 Le Brio (2017) 289, 291 Les Bronzés (1978) 24, 229, 246–8, 249, 250, 253, 255, 262 Les Bronzés 3: amis pour la vie (2006) 262 Les Bronzés font du ski (1979) 247 Bruni Tedeschi, Valeria 9, 13, 18, 24, 296–301, 305, 308–15, 316, 318, 319, 320–4 Brunius, Jacques Bernard 67, 73, 90 Buddy, Buddy (1981) 260 Bussières, Raymond 66, 88, 90 Busso/​Térac, Solange  18 Cabrera, Dominique 298 Le Café de la Gare 245, 261, 315 La Cage aux folles (1978) 27, 253 Cahiers du cinéma 10, 11, 23, 34, 99, 124, 128, 156, 160, 174, 183, 188, 197, 294, 326, 334, 335, 337, 338, 339, 341, 344, 346, 353, 355, 356, 357 caméra-​stylo 10 Camille redouble (2012) 297, 302–3, 304–8, 314, 322, 327 Campillo, Robin 9, 13, 278, 279, 280, 282, 285, 286, 287, 293, 326 Canal+ 231, 259, 262 Le Canard enchaîné 26, 95, 96, 97, 113 Cannes Film Festival 137, 169, 266, 269, 279, 302, 325

363

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Index Cantet, Laurent 6, 9, 13, 16, 24, 27, 183, 278–89, 330 Capelier, Margot 73, 90 Carambolages (1963) 224 Carell, Steve 239, 260 Carmen (1926) 30 Carné, Marcel 5, 22, 30, 65, 90, 92, 95, 123, 129, 130, 161 collaboration with Prévert 74–80, 82, 97 Carol, Martine 22, 99, 118, 129, 196, 263 Carrel, Dany 204, 225 Carrière, Jean-​Claude 13, 17, 20, 25, 27, 101, 325 Casarès, Maria 50, 83, 85 Cassavetes, John 265 Castanyer, Jean 71, 72, 91 Catholic Church 127, 150, 180, 251, 309 Les Caves du Majestic (1945) 61 Le Cave se rebiffe (1961) 199, 201, 205, 209, 210, 212, 214, 222 Cayatte, André 13, 31, 34, 57, 60, 78 CDCF see Committee for the Defence of French Cinema Ce cochon de Morin (1932) 40 Céline, Louis-​Ferdinand 136, 194, 213, 223 censorship 15, 22, 31, 55, 60, 67, 82, 85, 92, 95, 97, 98, 100, 125, 126–7, 129, 136, 140, 142, 153, 157, 171, 330 self-​censorship  127 Centre national pour du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC) 7, 8, 22, 169, 223, 269, 298, 312 Cerf, André 25 César 252, 256, 260, 269, 279, 302 Chabassol, Jacques 50 Chabat, Alain 231, 252, 255 Chabrol, Claude 7, 10, 12, 13, 156, 159, 160, 188 character 3, 5, 12, 15, 21, 25, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 40, 41, 42, 52, 56, 65, 75, 77, 81, 84, 88, 104, 108, 136, 142, 161, 166, 167, 174, 175, 176, 181, 184, 193, 196, 198, 199, 208, 210, 215, 218, 222, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235, 236, 237, 240, 247, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 260, 267, 268, 273, 276, 280, 282, 287, 300, 305, 308, 309, 312, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 322, 330 as myth, archetype 40–56, 76

363

secondary character 73, 75, 92, 168 Charbonnier, Pierre 130 Chavance, Louis 133 Chazel, Marie-​Anne 245, 246, 248, 261 Chéreau, Patrice 299, 308, 311 Chevalier, Pierre 8 La Chèvre (1981) 236, 237, 238, 260 La Chienne (1931) 91 Cholodenko, Marc 301 Les Choristes (2004) 251 Chouf (2016) 266 Choux, Jean 25 Christian-​Jaque 31, 33, 95, 99, 120 Ciboulette (1933) 69, 91 Le Ciel est à vous (1943) 29, 35, 50, 52–6 Le Ciel, les oiseaux et … ta mère (1999) 266, 287 cinécriture 158, 160, 172–3, 184, 330 cinéma de papa 157 cinéma du look 2, 12, 300 cinematographer 11, 34, 95, 107, 293, 294, 329 cinematography 2, 20, 198, 205, 206 Cinémonde 95, 128 Ciné-​Tamaris 169, 171 Clair, René 2, 3, 25, 133, 155 classic French cinema 3, 22, 28, 29, 33, 34, 40, 46, 50, 55, 96, 125, 157, 307 Clavier, Christian 232, 245, 246, 247, 248, 250, 251, 255, 261, 262 CLCF see Committee for the Liberation of French Cinema  Clément, René 6, 10, 27, 124 Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) 23, 169, 171, 172, 176 Cliente (2008) 254 Clouzot, Henri-​Georges 13, 113, 119, 122, 151 Club des 13 8, 26, 300, 304, 331 CNC see Centre national pour la cinématographie Cocteau, Jean 13, 27, 130, 154 Cold War 57, 126 Colette 18, 135 collaborative writing 5, 11, 15, 22, 23, 24, 31, 65, 71, 75, 81, 95, 99, 133–5, 140, 151, 158, 184, 246, 251, 255, 276, 279, 288, 294, 298, 300, 305, 307, 312, 318, 322 La Collectionneuse (1967) 175, 176, 177–80, 181, 188, 190

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364

Index

Le Collier de la reine (1946) 61 Comar, Etienne 327 Combat 95 Comédies et proverbes (1980–​87) 183, 192 comedy 29 coming of sound 2, 3, 21, 40 film muet 21 film parlant 3, 21 film sonore 3, 21 talkie 3, 4, 5, 98, 263 Committee for the Defence of French Cinema (CDCF) 126 Committee for the Liberation of French Cinema (CLCF) 127 Communism, Communist 56, 59, 126 Companéez, Jacques 20, 40, 60 Companeez, Nina 20 Les Compères (1983) 236, 237, 238, 242, 260 composer 7, 22, 34, 81, 88, 90, 95, 107 Le Comte de Monte-​Cristo (1943) 29 Continental Films 56, 61 continuity script 5, 15, 16, 81, 261 continuité dialoguée 5 continuity supervisor see script ‘girl’ Le Contrat (play) 237 conversion era see coming of sound Copie conforme (1947) 117, 123 Corniche Kennedy (2016) 266 costume designer 11, 74, 81, 88, 90, 95, 330 Côte d’azur (1931) 98 Le Coupable (1917) 120 Cour de Babel (2014) 289 Courte tête (1956) 200 Les Cousins (1958) 160 Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) 62, 65, 70–4, 75, 79, 80, 155 La Crise (1992) 260, 262 Croisières sidérales (1942) 133 cult films 23, 24, 194, 219, 229 Dabadie, Jean-​Loup  12, 20 Daïnah la métisse (1932) 30, 41, 42–4 Dalban, Robert 203 La Dame de chez Maxim’s (1933) 99 Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1944) 154 Darc, Mireille 198, 205, 206 Dasté, Jean 73, 90 daughter 41, 52, 53, 55, 67, 68, 76, 78, 138, 143, 149, 165, 202, 232, 276, 302, 304, 305, 306

Dauphin, Claude 49, 113 Debbouze, Jamel 229, 231, 255, 256 Deburau, Jean-​Gaspard (Baptiste) 82, 93 Decoin, Henri 5, 95, 99, 120 Decomble, Guy 68, 88, 90 découpage (technique) 5, 145, 175, 286 Défense d’aimer (1942) 132 de Funès, Louis 12, 231, 232, 251 de Gaulle, Charles 194, 206, 224 Delair, Suzy 118, 121, 122 Delannoy, Jean 10, 90, 124, 197 de la Patellière, Denys 197 Delon, Alain 198, 203 Demain et tous les autres jours (2017) 297, 299, 303–4, 305, 306, 314 Demoustier, Anaïs 303, 304 Deniaud, Yves 80, 88 Denis, Claire 12 Depardieu, Gérard 236, 238, 245, 252, 253, 260 Depardieu, Julie 318, 327 Dernier atout (1942) 133 de Sacy, Agnès 9, 296, 298, 299, 310, 312, 313, 315, 325, 327, 329 Desailly, Jean 50, 138 Des Pissenlits par la racine (1963) 224 Desplechin, Arnaud 9, 299, 301, 323, 326 Les Deux timides (1928) 155 de Van, Marina 12 de Vilmorin, Louise 18 d’Hée, Louis 41, 154 Le Diable au corps (1947) 22, 127, 129, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142–8, 150, 154 dialogue 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 15, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 31, 32, 56, 66, 70, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 84, 88, 90, 95, 96, 99, 100, 106, 127, 129, 132, 133, 134, 141, 153, 160, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173, 176, 178, 180, 182, 183, 188, 189, 193–220, 227, 228, 229, 230, 233, 235, 236, 237, 240, 247, 248, 249, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 263–89, 305, 306, 310, 312, 314, 316, 318, 322, 325, 330 authenticity of 6, 15, 24, 72, 115, 129, 160, 181, 182, 183, 218, 230, 263, 265, 266, 267, 268, 286, 288 bon mot, mot d’auteur 22, 28, 72, 95, 96, 101, 116, 206, 208, 213, 241, 263, 330 cult dialogue 202, 263

563

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Index dialogue function 97, 196, 199, 208, 210, 224, 230, 267, 282, 289 dialogue text 5, 15 dialogue writer 2, 6, 15, 17, 21, 23, 28, 59, 65, 72, 81, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 103, 112, 113, 117, 128, 133, 134, 156, 158, 167, 188, 190, 193– 220, 224, 226, 244, 263 dialogue writing 184 literary style of 16, 101, 174, 182, 209, 216, 264, 271, 286, 330 performance of 16, 22, 33, 96, 97, 100–18, 195, 210, 211, 218, 236, 241, 265, 268, 275 performativity of 103, 106, 265, 268, 289 speech 3 Diamond, IAL 260 Dietrich, Marlene 61, 92 Le Dîner de cons (1998) 24, 226, 229, 237, 239–44, 262 Le Dîner de cons (play) 239 Dinner for Schmucks (2010) 239, 260 Dis-​moi oui, dis-​moi non (1990) 301 dispositif 15, 16, 24, 159, 183, 264, 265, 267, 268, 279, 282, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 294, 316, 319, 321, 322, 324, 330 Le Distrait (1970) 260 Divines (2016) 266 documentary 66, 92, 130, 153, 164, 169, 171, 265, 279, 280, 287, 289, 312, 316, 317, 320 mock-​documentary 297, 299, 317, 323, 325 La Doublure (2006) 237 Douce (1943) 127, 130, 133, 153, 154 Doutey, Mélanie 318, 327 Le Drame de Shanghaï (1938) 123 Dreyfus/​Le Chanois, Jean-​Paul 67, 90, 132 Drôle de drame (1937) 65, 77, 78, 113 Du côté de la côte (1958) 169 Le Duel de Plouf (1918) 98 Duhamel, Marcel 64, 66, 67, 68, 73, 88, 90, 91 Dupieux, Quentin 262 Duran, Michel 132 Duras, Marguerite 13, 20, 27, 298 Durrenberger, Suzanne 18 Duvivier, Julien 30, 31, 33, 45, 92, 94, 95, 120

365

Eastern Boys (2014) 294 L’Ecran français 10, 128 editing 2, 11, 15, 20, 106, 157, 159, 164, 166, 168, 171, 172, 173, 181, 184, 230, 267, 269, 276, 279, 280, 281, 285, 286, 288, 294, 303, 306, 307, 320, 321, 326 editor 280, 303, 307, 329 Eliacheff, Caroline 13 Elle boit pas, elle fume pas, elle drague pas, mais… elle cause (1970) 205 Emile Emile, ou le trèfle à quatre feuilles 67, 68 L’Emmerdeur (1973) 237 L’Emmerdeur (play) 238 L’Emploi du temps (2001) 279 En avoir ou pas (1995) 299 En cas de malheur (1958) 154 L’Enfant sauvage (1970) 161, 167 Les Enfants du paradis (1945) 62, 65, 71, 74, 78, 79, 82–8, 273 L’Enlèvement (play) 236 Entrée des artistes (1938) 113–16, 117, 120, 121, 122 Entre les murs (2008) 265, 266, 278, 289 Entre onze heures et minuit (1949) 99, 117, 120, 123 È più facile che un cammello… (1950) 121 épuration, Liberation purges 57 L’Esquive (2004) 265, 266, 269–75, 276, 277–8, 285, 289, 291, 293, 314 Les Estivants (2018) 297, 298, 312 L’Eté meurtrier (1983) 327 ethnicity 16, 232, 268, 277 Fabre, Saturnin 103, 118 The Fallen Idol (1948) 139 Fallet, René 197 family 28, 29, 44, 52, 53–5, 78, 149, 172, 231, 235, 253, 276, 277, 298, 304, 308, 309, 310, 314, 315, 316, 321 bourgeois family 40 of creative collaborators 193, 194, 245, 299, 326 family values 232 Pétainist ideal of 55 Fanfan la tulipe (1952) 99, 100 Fargeau, Jean-​Pol  12 Farrelly brothers 227, 256, 302 fatalism 7, 22, 28, 35, 40, 104, 307

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366

Index

father, father figure 29, 41, 50–2, 309, 311, 314, 316, 321, 322 La Faute à Voltaire (2000) 266, 269, 291 Faut pas prendre les enfants du Bon Dieu pour des canards sauvages (1968) 205, 206, 216, 217 Fechner, Christian 250 Félicie Nanteuil (1942/​1944)  154 feminism, feminist 53, 56, 172 feminist criticism 47 Fémis 9, 296, 297, 299, 325, 326 Fernandel 69, 99, 118, 123, 130, 206 Ferran, Pascale 8, 13, 299, 300 Ferry, Jean 31, 113 Festen (1998) 316 La Fête à Henriette (1952) 94, 134, 298 Feydeau, Georges 69, 99, 141, 233, 252 Feyder, Jacques 30, 31, 35, 41, 45, 46, 48, 59, 76 Fillières, Sophie 301 filmed theatre 2, 3, 4, 5, 42, 263 Films du Carrosse 167 Films du Losange 174 films du milieu 8, 304 finance, financing see funding La Fin du jour (1939) 59 First World War 32, 97, 143 La Fleur de l’âge 90 Flic ou Caillera (2013) 220 Flic ou voyou (1979) 207 Foïs, Marina 256, 318 Foreign Legion 32, 44, 45 Forestier, Sara 270, 275, 293 Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012) 279, 287, 289 Franco, Francisco 45, 61 Frank, Nino 25, 128 Les Fugitifs (1986) 236, 237, 238, 260 funding 13, 15, 22, 59, 129, 160, 174, 183, 185, 223, 256, 269, 279, 298, 312 subsidies 21, 129, 232 underfunding 8, 329 Gabin, Jean 22, 23, 45, 50, 78, 79, 81, 92, 102–7, 112, 115, 118, 121, 197, 198– 9, 201, 203, 204, 206, 209, 210, 211, 213, 217, 218, 222, 223, 224, 225 Gale, Bob 302 La Gamine (1992) 327

gangster 49, 72, 75, 76, 81, 194, 198, 199, 213, 216, 219, 223, 263 Garcia, Nicole 20 Garde à vue (1981) 207, 219, 223 Gas-​oil (1955) 197, 198–9 Gassot, Charles 8 Gaumont 239, 259, 262 Gaumont-​Franco-​Film-​Aubert  4, 43 Gazon maudit (1995) 24, 232, 252–4, 256, 262 Gégauff, Paul 12, 160, 188, 190 gender 16, 25, 29, 53, 125, 148, 219, 232, 252, 253, 278, 291, 298, 312, 322, 323 feminine, femininity 25, 54, 56, 105, 110, 252, 253, 297, 300, 301, 318, 322, 323, 324 gender fluidity 253 gender roles 53–6, 148, 251, 254 linguistic gender 274, 275, 278 masculine, masculinity 25, 28, 49, 52, 54, 105, 106, 148, 188, 238, 278, 300, 301, 323 Pétainist ideal of femininity 29 Le Genou de Claire (1970) 188, 191 genre 3, 12, 16, 21, 22, 29, 33, 34, 124, 125, 128, 189, 197, 207, 214, 219, 228, 230, 255, 297, 324, 325, 327 banlieue film 263, 287 boulevard cinema 34 colonial film 34, 35, 44–8, 60 comédie d’auteur 256, 296, 302, 305, 307, 325 comedy 6, 12, 19, 22, 23, 27, 29, 35, 49, 69, 70, 124, 130, 194, 198, 203, 206, 208, 219, 223, 227–56, 263, 266, 287, 302, 307, 314 comique troupier 34, 231, 259 costume drama 59 crime film 6, 34, 124, 132, 194, 198, 223 film noir 35, 59, 142 genre conventions 21, 230, 310 historical film, costume film 12, 29, 34, 35, 125, 154, 263 melodrama 6, 29, 35, 48, 49, 75, 85, 108 musical 34, 59, 124, 297, 319 and myth 34–5 romantic comedy 297 science fiction 302

763

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Index

367

Les Gens normaux n’ont rien d’exceptionnel (1993) 309 Germinal (1963) 40 Gide, André 135, 138, 139, 154 Le Gignolo (1979) 207 Girardot, Annie 198, 205, 206, 262 Girault, Jean 231, 259 Giroud, Françoise 18, 20 Givray, Claude de 188 Le Glaive et la balance (1962) 57 Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000) 176, 177, 190 Gleize, Maurice 59 Godard, Jean-​Luc 1, 7, 10, 24, 156, 159, 160, 170, 171, 187, 188, 347, 352 Graetz, Paul 127 La Graine et le mulet (2007) 266, 269, 270, 275–7, 291, 293 Le Grand Bleu (1987) 27 Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire (1972) 236, 237, 238 La Grande Illusion (1937) 29, 34, 35, 57, 59, 61 La Grande Vadrouille (1966) 12, 231 Le Grand Jeu (1934) 29, 30, 33, 41, 44–8, 49, 60, 61, 76 Le Grand Matinal 90 Grangier, Gilles 7, 23, 197, 201, 207, 223 Gravey, Fernand 70, 101 Grémillon, Jean 16, 30, 31, 33, 34, 41, 42, 52, 59, 60, 75, 78, 155, 161 Griffe, Maurice 120, 200 Grimault, Paul 75, 78, 90, 130 Grosse fatigue (Blanc, 1994) 262 Groupe Octobre 62, 63, 66, 68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 75, 80, 88, 90, 91, 92 Gruault, Jean 12, 13, 160, 165, 188 Guerlais, Pierre 133 Guesmi, Samir 302, 307 Gueule d’amour (1937) 46 Guibert, Jean-​Paul 197, 222 Le Guichet 14 67 Guilde des scénaristes 8 Guisol, Henri 70, 121 Guitry, Sacha 3, 4, 234, 256

Hawks, Howard 10, 158 Hécatombe 90 Hecht, Ben 95 L’Héritier des Mondésir (1940) 130, 133 Herlitzska, Roberto 309 Herman, Jean 207 Herrand, Marcel 83, 93 Herzi, Hafsia 275, 293 Histoire(s) du cinema (1989–​99)  24 Hitchcock, Alfred 10, 158 Hollywood 2, 4, 15, 17, 21, 30, 34, 40, 46, 61, 67, 92, 126, 127, 142, 158, 195, 219, 228, 230, 233, 318, 329 L’Homme qui joue avec le feu (1942) 133 Les Hommes préfèrent les grosses (1981) 251 homophobia 232, 249 homosexual, homosexuality 60 L’Horloger de Saint-​Paul (1974) 137 L’Hôtel du libre échange (1934) 69 Hôtel du nord (1938) 78, 92, 95, 100, 101, 104, 107–12, 117, 123, 132, 273 Houellebecq, Michel 63, 90 Huit hommes dans un chateau (1942) 132 Hunebelle, André 196

Hadzihalilovic, Lucile 9 La Haine (1995) 287 Halley des Fontaines, André 71, 91 Harwood, Johanna 27

Jacquot, Benoit 299 Le Jaguar (1996) 238 Jaoui, Agnès 13 Jaubert, Maurice 74, 90

I am an actrice (2004) 327 identity, identities 7, 35, 117, 133, 175, 218, 219, 226, 229, 232, 237, 253, 260, 263, 265, 268, 277, 282, 297, 298, 301, 310, 314, 318, 331 IDHEC 6, 30, 135, 278, 293, 294, 325 L’Idiot (1946) 154 Il est plus facile pour un chameau… (2003) 297, 309–10, 314, 325, 327 improvisation 15, 72, 73, 157, 160, 164, 168, 169, 174, 181, 183, 229, 231, 241, 268, 275, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 287, 288, 322, 330 incest, incestuous 41, 49, 51, 300 interior/​first person narration 176, 178 intonation 99, 112, 264, 275 Intouchables (2011) 232 Italian neorealism 140, 198

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368

Index

Jeanson, Henri 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 16, 18, 19, 22, 26, 27, 28, 31, 33, 60, 62, 63, 72, 88, 92, 94–118, 128, 129, 132, 135, 154, 183, 185, 193, 206, 207, 212, 213, 217, 219, 222, 241, 255, 263, 264, 326, 330 Jenny (1936) 65, 74, 75–8, 80 Jéricho (1946) 56 Jeux interdits (1952) 141 Joan of Arc (1928) 133 Joannon, Léo 33 Jobert, Marlène 205, 206, 217 Jolivet, René 132 Le Jouet (1976) 236, 237 Le Jour se lève (1939) 46, 62, 65, 77, 78, 79, 81, 155 Le Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951) 139 journalism, journalist 4, 30, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 113, 120, 194, 195, 196, 199, 316, 323 Jouvet, Louis 22, 92, 99, 101, 107, 112–17, 118, 121, 122, 123, 218, 226 Joyeux, Odette 5, 113 Le Jugement de minuit (1933) 98 Jugnot, Gérard 228, 245, 246, 247, 248, 251, 255, 261 Jules et Jim (1962) 161, 166, 176 Juliette ou la clef des songes 82 Justice est faite (1950) 57 Kechiche, Abdellatif 6, 9, 13, 15, 16, 24, 27, 183, 269–78, 286, 287–9 Keïta, Franck 280, 294 La Kermesse héroïque (1935) 30, 52, 113 Les Keufs (1987) 251 Kopp, Pierre 8, 26 Korda, Alexander 99 Kosma, Joseph 71, 74 Kurys, Diane 298 Labiche, Eugène 155 Laborde, Jean 203, 204 Lacenaire, Pierre François 82, 93 Lacheau, Philippe 255, 256 Lacombe, Georges 33, 34, 92 Lacroix, Ghalya 9, 269, 276, 286, 288, 291 Lady Paname (1950) 99, 116–17, 122, 123 Laissez Passer (2002) 153 Lamotte, Martin 250

Lang, Fritz 24, 158 language 3, 5, 16, 21, 22, 24, 96, 100, 118, 153, 170, 176, 182, 193, 196, 208, 213, 216, 230, 232, 241, 256, 263, 279, 282, 288, 291, 293, 314, 330 language variation 24, 263, 264, 266, 267, 271, 277, 282, 285, 287 lexis, vocabulary 108, 195, 208, 210, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 231, 242, 264, 268, 271, 273, 274, 292 Multicultural Paris French (MPF) 268, 291, 293 Multicultural Urban French (MUF) 268, 271, 274, 276, 277–8, 291, 293 multilingual 264, 271, 274 orality markers 164, 264 register 32, 104, 121, 196, 199, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 268, 271, 272, 277, 282, 285, 286, 287, 293 slang, argot 108, 197, 199, 208–10, 223, 225, 242, 264, 278 syntax 100, 210, 213, 217, 218, 244, 261, 264, 268, 271, 273, 274, 285 verlan 276, 278, 287 La Lanterne magique 82, 90 Laroche, Pierre 20, 31, 75, 82, 120, 223 Lauby, Chantal 231, 232 Laudenbach, Roland 154 Lautner, Georges 7, 23, 27, 198, 201, 202–5, 206, 207, 219, 223, 224, 236, 260, 262 Lavanant, Dominique 245, 246 Léaud, Jean-​Pierre 162, 164, 302 Le Breton, Auguste 197, 207, 214 Leconte, Patrice 12, 246, 250 Leenhardt, Roger 70 left-​wing, the Left 63, 66, 98 Lehmann, Maurice 153 Lemaître, Frédérick 93 Lemercier, Valérie 228, 229, 232, 255 Lettres d’amour (1942) 153 Le Vigan, Robert 45, 76 Levy, Jean-​Louis  303 L’Herbier, Marcel 61, 129 Lhermitte, Thierry 239, 245, 246, 247, 248, 255 Liberation 31, 57, 60, 95, 127, 128, 129, 130, 148, 154, 194, 196, 223 La Loi du nord (1939) 30 Lollobrigida, Gina 59, 90

963

Index

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Loris, Fabien 85, 90 Lubitsch, Ernst 227, 235, 302, 303 Lucien Leuwen (1974) 130, 154 Lumière d’été (1943) 78, 79, 82 Lvovsky, Noémie 9, 13, 18, 24, 296–308, 310, 311, 312, 314, 315, 316, 320–4 Mac Orlan, Pierre 41, 60, 81 Madame du Barry (1954) 99 Maigret et l’affaire Saint-​Fiacre (1959) 197 Maigret tend un piège (1958) 197 mainstream, commercial cinema 1, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 34, 63, 69, 70, 125, 174, 183, 185, 231, 253, 264, 289 Mairesse, Valérie 245 La Maison dans la dune (1934) 41 La Maison des sept jeunes filles (1942) 52 Maïwenn (Le Besco) 9, 13, 18, 24, 27, 296–301, 315–24 Les Malheurs d’Alfred (1972) 260 Malle, Louis 188 Malraux, André 129 Mamet, David 25 Manèges (1950) 154 Mangeot, Philippe 294 Ma nuit chez Maud (1969) 175, 176, 180–2 Marchand, Gilles 293 Marche à l’ombre (1984) 251 Marcy, Claude 18, 27, 44, 60 Marguerite de la nuit (1955) 27 Marie-​Martine (1943) 155 marivaudage 6, 189, 269, 273, 292 Marivaux, Pierre de 265, 269, 270, 271, 274, 275, 291, 292 Marker, Chris 189 Le Mariage de Chiffon (1942) 132, 153 marriage 31, 55, 56, 68, 79, 165 La Marseillaise (1938) 59 Marx brothers 70 Marx, Harpo 235 Le Massacre des innocents/​Le Soleil se lévera demain 60 Massacre en dentelles (1951) 196 Masson, Laetitia 9, 298, 325 Mata Hari agent H21 (1964) 188 Mattei, Pierre-​Olivier  305 Maupassant, Guy de 40, 154 Maurier, Claire 162 Maxime (1958) 121

369

Mayo, Antoine 74 Meersch, Maxence van der 41 Me faire ça à moi (1961) 188 Méfiez-​vous des blondes (1950) 196 Mektoub My Love: Canto Uno (2017) 266, 270, 289 Mélangite 189 Mélodie en sous-​sol (1962) 198, 203, 224 Le Mépris (1963) 24 Merad, Kad 231 La Métamorphose des cloportes (1965) 224 metteur en scène 7, 95 milieu, setting 15, 32, 33, 34, 35, 42, 46, 52, 61, 117, 136, 154, 237 Miller, Claude 207, 245, 269 Le Million (1931) 133 Milon, Pierre 293, 294 La Minute de verité (1952) 121 Miracolo a Milano (1951) 153 mise en scene 2, 11, 15, 20, 22, 23, 35, 69, 79, 81, 83, 85, 88, 94, 97, 101, 105, 106, 135, 139, 141, 142, 157, 159, 161, 166, 168, 173, 176, 182, 183, 184, 185, 206, 207, 227, 237, 253, 263, 267, 279, 308, 316, 317, 322, 323 misogynist, misogyny 29, 49, 56, 148, 155, 206 Mission à Tanger (1949) 196 Mister Flow (1936) 99, 117, 122 Les Mistons (1958) 160 Molière 239, 256, 275 Molinaro, Edouard 262 Moll, Dominik 293 Mondy, Pierre 239 Le Monocle noir (1961) 223 Mon roi (2015) 323, 327 Monsieur Hire (1989) 249 Montparnasse 19 (1958) 26 Moreau, Jeanne 165, 197, 198 Moreau, Yolande 302, 306 Moréno, Marguerite 99, 118 Morgan, Michèle 101, 121, 138 Morocco (1930) 61 Mortelle randonnée (1983) 207, 219 mother, mother figure 29, 35, 48–50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 75, 76, 77, 164, 302, 305, 306, 309, 312, 314, 315, 316, 321, 326 motherhood 301, 308, 310, 311, 318 Pétainist ideal of 29, 55

370

Index

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Moussy, Marcel 160, 162, 188 Moynot, Bruno 245, 248 multicultural 256, 264, 277, 280, 287, 289 multiple-​language versions  4, 99 myth, mythology 3, 11, 21, 22, 29, 33, 34, 35, 41, 46, 52, 63, 73, 102, 135, 158, 159, 183, 184, 187, 199, 202, 209, 219 national myths 35, 56, 57 Naïs (1945) 154 Nakache, Olivier 26 Nana (1955) 99, 129 narration 15, 291, 321 focalisation, point of view 22, 48, 140, 143, 144, 148, 166, 172, 173, 175, 177, 179, 180, 307, 317, 330 interior/​first person narration 139, 140, 142, 148, 170, 191, 323 voice-​over 94, 140, 148, 166, 170, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 189, 190, 191, 214, 254, 310 narrative structure 3, 5, 22, 46, 143, 174, 175, 233, 319, 330 flashback 43, 81, 140, 141–8, 150, 154, 155, 189, 306, 310, 314 plot construction 16, 18, 65, 73, 162, 184, 194, 205, 208, 228, 230, 253, 269, 280, 283, 312 narratological, narratology 15, 182, 185, 291 Natan, Bernard 41 Natan, Emile 60, 67, 69, 90 Natanson, Jacques 6 La Natation, aka Taris, roi de l’eau (1931) 133 Nathalie (1957) 99 Nathalie, agent secret (1959) 99 national cinema 2, 35 nation, national identity 35, 102, 118, 123, 129, 193, 220, 263 Nazi, Nazism 60, 61, 64, 97 Ne nous fâchons pas (1965) 198, 203 Neuf mois ferme (2013) 262 Neuilly sa mère (2009) 266 New Wave 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 23, 99, 124, 132, 135, 150, 156–86, 194, 197, 198, 207, 231, 264, 288, 296, 300, 301, 322, 323, 324, 325 Nez de cuir, gentilhomme d’amour 155

Noro, Line 50, 102, 138 Notre-​Dame de Paris (1956) 75, 82, 90 Nous sommes tous des assassins (1952) 57 Les Nouveaux Messieurs (1929) 30 Nouvelle Revue Française 133 La Nuit américaine (1973) 167, 188 Les Nuls 231, 256 Occupation 29, 53, 55, 56, 57, 82, 99, 126, 153, 223 Occupe-​toi d’Amélie (1949) 141, 260 L’Opéra-​Mouffe (1958) 169 Ophüls, Max 6, 26, 158 Ouaniche, Jacques 269 Ouazani, Sabrina 270, 275 Oublie-​moi (1994) 297, 301, 308, 309 Oury, Gérard 12, 231 Ozon, François 12 Le Pacha (1968) 199, 203–5, 210, 214, 226 pacifism, pacifist 64, 97, 98 Pagnol, Marcel 3, 4, 13, 28, 98, 128, 154, 263 Panique (1946) 56, 262 Papa ou maman (2015) 244, 262 Papa ou maman 2 (2017) 244 Papy fait de la résistance (1983) 250 Paramount 4, 98 Pardonnez-​moi (2006) 297, 298, 315, 317, 319, 320, 322, 327 Pascal, Blaise 182, 191 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 14, 332, 350 Passeur, Steve 98 Pathé 259, 269 Pathé-​Natan 4, 41, 67, 69 patriarchal, patriarchy 53, 199, 206 Pauline à la Plage (1983) 183 Paulin, Jean-​Paul  33, 34 La Peau douce (1964) 161, 162, 166, 188 Pef 256 Peggy Sue got Married (1986) 302 Pension Mimosas (1935) 30, 48–9, 51, 76 Pépé le Moko (1937) 46, 99, 102–7, 122 Le Père Noël est une ordure (1981) 24, 229, 246, 248–50, 253, 256, 261, 262 Le Père Noël est une ordure (play) 233 performance 12, 15, 16, 21, 24, 79, 80, 82, 102, 104, 106, 115, 116, 129, 181, 196, 228, 231, 240, 242, 255, 267,

173

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Index 287, 289, 293, 304, 308, 314, 319, 322, 324 Périer, Alice 61 La Petite Lise (1930) 29, 30, 41–2, 43, 49, 50 Peyret-​Chappuis, Charles de 154 Philipe, Gérard 60, 100, 101, 118, 143, 263 Pinot simple flic (1984) 251 Les Pirates du Rhône (1933) 130 Le Placard (2001) 232, 237, 238 Les Plages d’Agnès (2008) 172, 190 playwright 3, 4, 83, 98, 234, 235, 237, 297, 309 Podalydès, Denis 302, 309 Poetic Realism 6, 22, 41, 42, 60, 63, 90, 95, 101, 104, 140, 263 La Pointe courte (1954) 23, 169, 189 Poiré, Alain 23, 202, 203, 239, 260, 262 Poiré, Jean-​Marie 12, 205, 248, 250, 251, 262 Poisson d’avril (1954) 197 Polisse (2011) 297, 323, 327 Politoff, Haydée 177, 178 Pommereulle, Daniel 177, 178 popular cinema, popular film 1, 11, 12, 24, 29, 33, 125, 128, 193, 195, 227–56, 263, 298, 324 cinéma du samedi soir 11, 23, 193–220 Popular Front 71, 73 Les Portes de la nuit (1946) 78, 79 Positif 10, 34, 99, 128 Pourquoi j’ai pas mangé mon père (2015) 256 Pousse, André 203, 205 Pouy, Jean-​Bernard  251 Le Prénom (2011) 244, 262 Le Président (1961) 225 Prévert, Jacques 4, 15, 17, 19, 22, 25, 28, 31, 33, 57, 60, 62–88, 95, 102, 107, 113, 128, 130, 132, 133, 135, 168, 193, 208, 212, 219, 223, 263, 264, 307, 330 Prévert, Janine 63, 73 Prévert, Pierre 66, 67, 90, 130 producer 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 20, 22, 23, 26, 31, 34, 40, 67, 69, 71, 73, 95, 98, 126, 127, 128, 133, 140, 143, 157, 194, 197, 201, 202, 203, 207, 208, 239, 247, 250, 256, 262, 269, 303, 327, 329

371

Le Professionnel (1981) 27, 207 pronunciation 100, 101, 105, 108 prostitute, prostitution 33, 41, 42, 44, 45, 69, 79, 107, 111, 254, 285 Proust, Marcel 136, 213 psychological realism 11, 124, 133, 140 Le Quai des brumes (1938) 62, 63, 78, 79, 80, 81, 92, 104 Quai des Orfèvres (1947) 113, 122 quality 1, 13, 35, 129, 138, 148, 150 tradition of quality 10, 22, 124, 125, 129, 135, 142, 151, 153, 156, 197, 331 Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) 23, 161, 162–4, 188 Que la bête meure (1969) 160 Queffélec, Henri 135 Queneau, Raymond 133 Qu’est-​ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? (2014) 232, 251, 259 race 43, 260 racism, racist 60, 64, 91, 219, 250, 259 Radiguet, Raymond 129, 138, 139, 143, 155 Raevsky, Georges 154 Raimbourg, Lucien 68, 88 Raimu, Jules 101 Rampling, Charlotte 318, 319, 327 Le Rayon vert (1986) 183, 190 réalisa(c)trice 23, 296–324 realism 6, 32, 70, 72, 185, 201, 209, 237, 263, 264, 265, 268, 277, 300, 318 realist films 23, 34, 35 realism and dialogue see dialogue, authenticity of Le Récif de corail (1939) 29, 34 Rego, Luis 247 religion, religious 29, 97, 126, 138, 210, 232, 260, 308, 309, 310 remake 227, 232, 233, 254, 260 Remorques (1941) 60, 62, 78 Rémy, Albert 148, 162 Renaud, Madeleine 51, 101 Reno, Jean 238 Renoir, Jean 10, 30, 31, 33, 59, 71, 72, 73, 91, 158, 161, 168, 264 Renoir, Pierre 46, 101 Resnais, Alain 12, 13, 171, 189, 197 Le Retour du grand blond (1974) 236

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372

Index

La Revanche de Roger la Honte (1946) 29, 50 Les Revenants (2004) 294 Rich, Claude 202, 217, 218, 225, 226 Richard, Jean-​Louis 160, 166, 167, 188 Richard, Pierre 236, 237, 260 Richebé, Roger 132 Rif War 45, 46, 61 right-​wing, the Right 68, 70, 91, 98, 130, 194 Rive gauche group 189 Rivers, Fernand 98 Rivette, Jacques 10, 12, 156, 159, 188 Robin, Muriel 318, 319 Rochant, Eric 299 Roché, Henri-​Pierre 164, 165 Rodriguez, Luce 303, 304 Rohmer, Eric 10, 16, 23, 27, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 167, 169, 172, 174– 83, 184, 188, 190, 191, 264, 265, 286, 288, 292, 302, 330 Le Roi et l’oiseau (1980) 78 Ronsard, Pierre de 291 Rosay, Françoise 44, 48, 49, 52, 76, 201, 205, 206, 210 Rossellini, Roberto 10 Le Rouge est mis (1957) 207 Le Rouge et le noir (1954) 129, 135, 136, 137, 141, 148, 150, 154, 176, 189 Rouleau, Raymond 99, 196 Rudd, Paul 239, 260 SACD see Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques Sac de nœuds (1985) 251 Salinger, Emmanuel 301 Salou, Louis 80, 82, 83 Le Sang à la tête (1956) 222 Sans toit ni loi (1985) 177 Santaki, Rachid 220 Sarkozy, Nicolas 226 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 133, 153 Sautet, Claude 12 scénario 7, 16, 331 Scénaristes de cinéma associés 8 scene text 5, 15 Schérer, Maurice see Rohmer, Eric Schiffman, Suzanne 12, 13, 18, 160, 164, 167, 168, 188, 189, 325 Schroeder, Barbet 174, 177

Sciamma, Céline 293, 326 Scott, Helen 188 screenplay construction of 2, 127, 167, 207, 238, 281 published version of 19, 80, 91, 92, 113, 157, 178, 188, 229, 262, 272, 279, 283, 286, 294 role in securing funding 15, 183, 185, 256, 269, 279, 329 scénario achevé 295 scénario ouvert 288 as transitional object 14, 17, 230, 308, 332 screenwriter–​director partnerships  12 screenwriting as a route to directing 13, 20 script ‘girl’ 4, 18, 94, 167 La Séance de spiritisme est terminée (1931) 130 Second World War 60, 67, 118 Seigner, Louis 94, 118 Semprún, Jorge 13 La Sentinelle (1992) 301 Serrault, Michel 207, 218, 219, 262 Serreau, Coline 12, 18, 20, 228, 298 set designer 11, 22, 69, 74, 81, 88, 90, 91, 95, 107, 330 setting see milieu, setting sexuality 43, 232, 249, 253, 284 gay 253, 283 heterosexual, heterosexuality 50, 54, 249, 253 homosexual, homosexuality 50, 253 lesbian 252, 253 Seyvos, Florence 9, 296, 301, 303, 304, 305, 307, 326 shooting script 16, 157, 159, 163, 166, 169, 175, 183, 184, 286, 305, 318 short film 69, 91, 160, 172, 174, 175, 188, 301, 327 Sigurd, Jacques 10, 154 Si j’étais le patron (1934) 70 silent cinema 6, 25 Simenon, Georges 154, 197, 213, 222, 262 Simon, Michel 25, 67 Simonin, Albert 90, 199–202, 203, 205, 208, 209, 210, 212, 214, 223, 224, 242 Le Signe du lion (1962) 174, 188 Sinjen, Sabine 202, 217, 226

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Index Siodmak, Robert 59 Six contes moraux (1963–​72) 23, 174, 175, 176, 177, 183, 190 social class 28, 32, 34, 35, 40, 43, 102, 148, 210, 220, 232, 242, 289 bourgeois, bourgeoisie 22, 40, 60, 68, 75, 79, 104, 143, 148, 150, 199, 247, 251 upper-​class  43 worker, working-​class 22, 43, 70, 71, 78, 102, 104, 105, 108, 112, 198 Société d’auteurs 7, 26 Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques (SACD) 26, 95, 96, 120, 128, 302, 329 I Soliti Ignoti/​Persons Unknown (1958) 235 son 48, 49, 50, 54, 67, 71, 83, 137, 138, 143, 149, 207, 219, 238, 317 Spaak, Charles 1, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 28–62, 76, 107, 112, 120, 132, 154, 207, 307, 326, 328, 330 Spaak, Claude 61 Spaak, Janine 28 Spaak, Marie 28 Spaak, Paul-​Henri  28 Spaak, Suzanne 61 Spanish Civil War 60 Splendid 13, 24, 27, 228, 229, 231, 233, 239, 242, 245–54, 255, 256, 261, 262 Starr, Joey 317, 318, 327 stars 10, 20, 21, 22, 28, 33, 34, 92, 97, 101, 107, 117, 125, 128, 153, 194, 198, 205, 222, 227, 230, 231, 255, 317 authenticity of 102, 105 star persona 101, 104, 106, 107, 112, 193, 198, 199, 201, 211, 216, 218, 223, 231, 236, 260, 309, 318, 319, 322 star screenwriter 5, 11, 156, 206, 218 Stendhal 129, 135, 137, 141, 150, 189 stereotype 232, 233, 237, 245, 247, 249, 250, 253, 259, 265, 268, 272, 277, 287, 289, 320 storyboard 16, 159 Sur la piste du Marsupilami (2012) 256 surreal 69, 202, 206, 209, 305, 314 Surrealism, Surrealist 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 75, 90, 130 Swagger (2016) 266, 289, 292, 293 Sy, Omar 231

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La Symphonie pastorale (1946) 133, 137, 139, 154, 176 synopsis 5, 81, 143, 145, 172, 228, 246 Tarantino, Quentin 219 Tati, Jacques 236 Taurand, Gilles 12 Tavernier, Bertrand 12, 95, 133, 134, 153, 245 Tavernier, Colo 12 Tchernia, Pierre 224 Téchiné, André 12 television 126, 130, 162, 228, 231, 232, 259, 329 Tenue de soirée (1986) 250, 253 theatre 6, 18, 23, 30, 68, 92, 96, 98, 99, 100, 115, 123, 229, 236, 237, 250, 252, 268, 269, 275, 280, 299, 310, 311, 314, 326 absurd theatre 261 boulevard 6, 40, 60, 99, 103, 227, 229, 233, 238, 250, 254 caf’ conc’ 6 café-​théâtre 6, 12, 24, 228, 229, 231, 233, 245–51 music hall 6 vaudeville 6, 206, 227, 229, 231, 233–5, 238, 241, 242, 244, 252, 254, 260 workers’ theatre 66 Thérèse Raquin (1953) 29, 40 Thompson, Danièle 20, 228, 232, 260 Three Men and a Baby (1987) 233 Tijou, Brigitte 294 Tire au flanc 62 (1961) 188 Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) 161, 167 Toledano, Eric 26 Tonnerre, Jérôme 12 Les Tontons flingueurs (1963) 23, 90, 195, 199, 201–3, 205, 208, 209, 210, 212, 216, 217, 219, 222, 223, 225 Tosca 92 Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) 200 trade union 7, 13, 95, 155, 157 Conféderation générale du travail (CGT) 25, 97 Guilde des scénaristes 26, 299, 330 Syndicat des scénaristes (Screenwriters’ Union) 7, 25, 31, 95, 96, 128 trade unionist 20, 98

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Index

La Tradition de minuit (1939) 132 Train d’enfer 90 traitement 5, 25, 145, 183 Trauner, Alexandre 62, 69, 71, 74, 81, 82 La Traversée de Paris (1956) 154 Trintignant, Jean-​Louis 176, 181, 182 Trois hommes et un couffin (1985) 262 Les Trois mousquetaires (1953) 196 Trop belle pour toi (1989) 252 Truffaut, François 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 64, 124, 135, 139, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161–9, 172, 175, 176, 183, 184, 188, 189, 197, 222, 286, 288, 302, 303 Turgenev, Ivan 310, 311 Ulysses (1983) 172 Un air de famille (1996) 262 Un carnet de bal (1937) 117, 122 Un château en Italie (2013) 297 Un dimanche à la campagne (1984) 133 Un idiot à Paris (1967) 225 Un journal d’un curé de campagne 154 Un oiseau rare (1935) 70, 9170, 91 Un revenant (1946) 99, 117, 123 Un singe en hiver (1962) 197, 223 Une belle garce (1947) 29 Une époque formidable (1990) 251 Une grosse tête (1962) 188 Une histoire d’amour (1951) 226 Une histoire d’eau (1958) 188 Une partie de campagne (1936) 73, 74, 92, 154 Valentin, Albert 31 Les Valseuses (1973) 250 Vanel, Charles 43, 44, 51, 76 Vanina Vanini 154 Varda par Agnès (2019) 172, 190 Varda, Agnès 18, 19, 23, 27, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 169–74, 175, 176, 177, 183, 184, 189, 190, 297, 312, 325, 330 Vautrin, Jean see Herman, Jean Veber, Francis 12, 18, 23, 27, 208, 226, 228, 229, 233, 235–45, 253, 254, 255, 256, 260, 264

Ventura, Lino 23, 198, 202, 203, 211, 217, 218, 224, 226, 238 La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (1952) 154 Vermorel, Claude 25, 128 Verneuil, Henri 203, 224 Vernoux, Marion 298 Vers le sud (2006) 279 Véry, Pierre 81, 92 Viard, Karin 318, 327 Vichy regime 55, 82 La Vie d’Adèle: Chapitres 1 et 2 (2013) 269, 289 La Vie est à nous (1936) 59 La Vie ne me fait pas peur (1999) 308, 326 La Vie rêvée des anges (1998) 300 Viens chez moi, j’habite chez une copine (1981) 251 Les Vieux de la vieille (1960) 197, 198 Vigny, Benno 98 Vigo, Jean 132, 133, 138 Vilar, Jean 78 Vilfrid, Jean 259 Villeret, Jacques 237, 239, 240 Viot, Jacques 81 Les Visiteurs (1993) 251, 260, 262 Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) 65, 78, 79, 82 voice 16, 44, 48, 82, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, 112, 116, 117, 118, 123, 144, 151, 199, 216, 218, 240, 242, 246, 255, 261, 288, 306 Wademant, Annette 18, 120 Waterhouse, Rémy 12 Weff, Clarence 224 Wheeler, René 20, 31, 60, 100 Wilder, Billy 227, 235, 260, 302, 303 Witta-​Montrobert, Jeanne 4, 18, 27, 120 women screenwriters 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 228, 229, 296–324 Young French Cinema 296, 299, 300, 301, 308, 315 Zaubermann, Yolande 301 Zemeckis, Robert 302 Zimmer, Bernard 113 Zola, Emile 40, 154 Zucker, Jerry 256