Haunting the Left Bank

Figures

Figure 1: Death in Life, a coffin carried through a busy intersection in The Battle of the Ten Million (Chris Marker and Valérie Mayoux, 1970), © ISKRA, SLON, Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos and KG Productions.

Figure 2: The transience between life and death, a victim of the camps in Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956), © Argos Films, Cocinor and Como-Films.

Figure 3: Images of an auspicious past penetrated by the placard for the cemetery in Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963), © Argos Films.

Figure 4: Burying their guilt, soldiers in Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963), © Argos Films.

Figure 5: War and death find presence in the soldier’s thoughts in Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme, 1962), © Sofracima.

Figure 6: ‘Is it the thought that your noblest deeds are mortal?’, Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme, 1962), © Sofracima.

Figure 7: The waking woman no longer exists in the present world of La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), © Argos Films.

Figure 8: The spectre of a floating skull in La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), © Argos Films.

Figure 9: The pregnant doll and exposed foetus in L’Opéra-Mouffe (Agnès Varda, 1958), © Ciné-Tamaris.

Figure 10: Ageing faces again show signs of vulnerability in L’Opéra-Mouffe (Agnès Varda, 1958), © Ciné-Tamaris.

Figure 11: The imaged form of Death in the opening of Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962), © Ciné-Tamaris.

Figures 12.1 and 12.2: Cléo gazes … and is gazed upon in Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962), © Ciné-Tamaris.

Figure 13: François shaves on the left of frame, as Thérèse prepares the children on the right in Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965), © Ciné-Tamaris.

Figure 14: Thérèse’s alterity is absorbed, from which she can escape only in death, Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965), © Ciné-Tamaris.

Figure 15: Varda’s challenge to the carnal gaze in Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985), © Ciné-Tamaris.

Figure 16: Mona’s death shroud(s) in Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985), © Ciné-Tamaris.

Figures 17.1 and 17.2: Elle averts her gaze … then meets her reflection in Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), © Argos Films, Como-Films, Daïeï and Pathé Overseas.

Figure 18: Death i/on the mirror in Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), © Terra Films, Société nouvelle des films ←viii | ix→Cormoran, Argos Films, Cinetel, Pre-Ci-Tel, Silver Films, Cineriz, Como Films.

Figure 19: A resists the masculine-as-subject in Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), © Terra Films, Société nouvelle des films Cormoran, Argos Films, Cinetel, Pre-Ci-Tel, Silver Films, Cineriz, Como Films.

Figures 20.1 and 20.2: Reciprocal shot/reverse-shots engender sympathy in the spectator in A Grin Without a Cat (Chris Marker, 1977 and 1993), © ISKRA, INA, Dovidis.

Figure 21: The gaze of the filmed subject is welcomed, égalité du regard in Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1982), © Argos Films.

Figures 22.1 and 22.2: A glance away from the light and camera … before the desire to communicate is met, Description of a Struggle (Chris Marker, 1960), © Israel Film Archive.

Figure 23: The iris light sutures the distance between zones in Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1982), © Argos Films.

Figure 24: The woman with pitch-black eyes and a dark cowl of hair around her angular face in Gauguin (Alain Resnais, 1950), © Panthéon Production.

Figure 25: The bulb represents the death descending on the figures beneath it in Guernica (Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens, 1950), © Panthéon Production.

Figures 26.1 and 26.2: Multiple perspectives, camera eyes meet in Salut les Cubains (Agnès Varda, 1963), © Ciné-Tamaris and Pathé Cinéma.

Figure 27: Engaging reciprocally, the late Beny Moré meets the camera-eye and smiles in Salut les Cubains (Agnès Varda, 1963), © Ciné-Tamaris and Pathé Cinéma.

Figure 28: The sketch that represents a spectator’s reflection in the mirror in The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000), © Ciné-Tamaris.

Figure 29: Varda’s hands speak to an intersecting of subjects and life and death in The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000), © Ciné-Tamaris.

Figure 30: Laura enters the image fragment by fragment, projected from a spectral elsewhere, Level Five (Chris Marker, 1996), © Films de l'Astrophre and Argos Films.

Figure 31: Laura as screen reflecting images of an immaterial, deathly realm in Level Five (Chris Marker, 1996), © Films de l'Astrophre and Argos Films.

Figure 32: The eponymous, phantasmal chats in The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker, 2004), © Les Films du Jeudi, Laurence Braunberger and Arte France.

Figures 33.1 and 33.2: A pigeon flies along a subway … and is replaced by a shadowy figure in The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker, 2004), © Les Films du Jeudi, Laurence Braunberger and Arte France.

Acknowledgements

My gratitude first to Professor Sarah Cooper for supervising my PhD thesis, which was the source material for this book, and to others at the Film Studies Department at King’s College, London, where I was a Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellow whilst editing this book. For their understanding and support, thanks go to my friends and, for first impressing on me an enthusiasm for knowledge, my parents. Finally, for often being my first reader and for having the wit, will and patience to alternately attend to and challenge my ideas, I am more than grateful to Aimée.

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

Phantoms of the rive gauche

The so-called rive gauche group were, despite being considered a key aspect of the French nouvelle vague, ‘one of the most unjustly overlooked groups in the history of European cinema’, according to Robert Farmer.¹ Richard Roud coined the geo-political wordplay, rive gauche, stating that the three directors at the centre of this book – Chris Marker, Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais – formed the consistent core in this otherwise amorphous faction.² However, notwithstanding their close affinities, both personal and professional, there has not yet been a longer study of films by all three of these companions and fellow ailurophiles through a consolidating line of enquiry. These directors were frequent professional allies: their moving-image collaborations included Resnais editing Varda’s debut film, La Pointe Courte (1955); Varda fulfilling the role of ‘Consultant Sinologist’ on Marker’s Dimanche à Pékin (Sunday in Peking, 1956); Marker co-writing Resnais’s short film Le Mystère de l’atelier quinze (co-directed with André Heinrich, 1957); Resnais’s and Marker’s collaboration on the short, television film La Clé des songes (The Key of Dreams, 1950); Marker’s vicarious appearance in the form of his feline avatar Guillaume-en-Égypte, in Varda’s TV series Agnès de ci de là Varda (Agnès Varda: From Here to There, 2011); Resnais and Marker ←1 | 2→co-directing Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, 1953); and the involvement of all three – along with other key nouvelle vague figures, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lelouch – in the production of the portmanteau film Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, 1967).3 Although these collaborations indicate an overlapping of artistic and philosophical outlooks, one of the primary concerns in the work of all three directors – mortality – has so far been critically neglected.

Death at the Cinema

Daniel Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg argue that mortality is a ‘recurrent theme in films across genres, periods, nations and directors’ and that this nexus of death and cinema ‘is deserving of sustained analysis’.⁴ Mortality is a crucial concern in international cinemas, transcending generic, auteurist and temporal boundaries and clearly a subject worthy of comprehensive study. My thanatological pursuit here is to chart how a specific conception of mortality is represented in a selection of films by these three Left Bank directors for whom the idea of a death that haunts life is an especially vital matter. The first professional fiction films by Varda, Marker and Resnais are each symptomatic of the post-war cinema in which, Catherine Russell finds, there is a ‘discourse of death’ which attempts to represent ‘the social transformations of the second half of the twentieth century’.⁵ The most ←2 | 3→profane and profound disjuncture in the midst of the last century was the cataclysmic event(s) of World War II, which impacted global cinemas as they endeavoured to represent the prevailing post-war modifications to daily existence. As Russell argues, in films of this period there was a distinct reflection on death, not as a departure from but as a ‘participation in the continuity of being’.6 Following World War II, films depicted death as a quotidian experience, an element of life. Such works, as Gilles Deleuze writes, ‘invented a new type of image’, distinct from pre-war film.⁷ Deleuze is here building the groundwork for his own concept of the time-image, but the idea of death in life that drives this book’s argument, and specifically depictions of images perforated by death, is cannily analogous to the composition of Deleuze’s signal concept. In both his time-image and this theory of death stalking life, shadowing consciousness, past moments haunt present instants which then jointly project towards future points, and these subsequently reflect backwards onto present instants.

This book’s understanding of death in life is determined by the notion that the presently living are conscious of previous and future deaths: the recollection in the present moment of deaths past and the certainty of those to come. This understanding – which transcends both temporal and ontological divisions – is particularly relevant to post-World War II European film. To probe the parallel with the Deleuzian time-image a little further, this is perceptible, in the first instance, in the films of the Italian Neorealismo movement and especially Roberto Rossellini’s war trilogy, Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945); Paisà (Paisan, 1946); and Germania, anno zero (Germany, Year Zero, 1948).⁸ Inevitably, a deathly presence haunts these and other filmic representations of the post-war destruction and destitution of Europe, as in the several deaths that propel and conclude Rossellini’s triptych. André Bazin writes, for instance, of ‘the haunting death march of the little urchin’ in Germany, Year Zero.⁹