A Cinematic Language

Marie-Claire Ropars

A chance encounter, a love born at night, the ultimate impossibility of either separating or living together: is that the story of Les Amants (1958) or of Hiroshima mon amour (1959)? Alain Resnais’ initial theme seems no more revolutionary than Louis Malle’s, and a purely technical analysis of the films would not really allow us to answer the question any better. Resnais and Malle both possess a sufficient mastery of their craft to avoid turning their films into a simple demonstration of virtuosity, or an affirmation of formal principles. The era of the stylistic manifesto – with its controversies over montage, découpage and depth of field – is long gone; now the mode of expression is the same, and a certain writing appears to have been achieved by cinema.

However, there could not be two universes more foreign to each other than those of Resnais and Malle. It is not a difference of school, movement or principle, but of language. From writing to language: this is a passage from technique to aesthetic, from instrument to signification. And, to the extent that the language of Resnais, Jean Rouch or Agnès Varda puts the classical frameworks of narrative in question, it thereby engages a new vision of human beings within the world. This is the level at which a certain spiritual kinship between otherwise very different directors can be established.

Claude Chabrol, Malle or François Truffaut can, of course, by the lucid or cruel gaze they bring to bear upon friendship, love or childhood, try to create a cinematic humanism – a novelty more closely related to morality than to aesthetics. For it is in the logical unfolding of a clearly situated action that their thought is incarnated; and their characters, as contemporary as they may seem to us, are no less ruled by the laws of classical psychology: whether archaeologist or woman of the world, dandy, student or abandoned child, they possess a defined character (no matter how complex), they belong to a social milieu, and they live within the unique time and space of precise dramatic events.

But the language of Resnais, Varda or Rouch – like that before it of Jacques Tati or Robert Bresson – is situated on a plane which is not drama, beyond action or event. Hiroshima’s characters neither meet nor part, nor do they worry much about it; Resnais has himself said that he systematically cut, during the film’s editing, anything that smacked of anecdote, so as to leave only detail. That is why any interpretation that merely follows the literal thread of the story is doomed to arrive at a misunderstanding: love scarcely matters in Hiroshima. Likewise, the couple in La pointe courte (1956) do not live out an adventure, they only pursue a dialogue across a landscape: ‘I don’t like telling stories’, says Varda, ‘but rather what takes place between the key moments of a story; that’s what Antonioni does with his "weak times". I’d like to deepen those moments where we expect nothing – moments that reveal themselves to be more touching than all the rest.’ Weak times, dead times; the important thing is ‘between acts’, what is drawn out right across time and remains incomplete – like this interminable parting in Hiroshima, these sixteen hours of time to kill, during which the man and woman wander through the city – waiting room, tea room, river’s edge – leaving and refinding each other without us ever knowing the why or wherefore of these moments. This drawing-out, this unfulfilment – some scenes in The 400 Blows (1959) or George Franju’s Head Against the Wall (1958) already gave us such images: the prolonged flight of a child or a madman, amounting to nothing. But what is only an instant in Franju and Truffaut becomes the essential element in Resnais or Varda. Moreover, it is symptomatic that we can talk of a ‘universe’ on the basis of a single film; there is no Chabrol universe or Malle universe, they only tell stories. Neither La pointe courte nor (especially) Hiroshima mon amour tell a story; they only show two characters invaded by time and space, overcome by this world which is merely within the frame of a classical drama, but which here is integrated with man in order to disintegrate him.

‘If you really look into people, you find landscapes there too’ (Varda): in the husband of La pointe courte, there is, firstly, the fishing village; in the Japanese man there is Hiroshima; in the French woman there is Nevers. These characters are no longer situated in a milieu, but rather a landscape – the dead fish and cats, the burning sun which gives its rhythm to the couple’s decomposition, Hiroshima destroyed and rebuilt, through which the two lovers wander. The landscape becomes a visual counterpoint, maybe even an obsession: ‘You saw nothing in Hiroshima’, the Japanese man ceaselessly repeats, but he has never experienced Nevers. Nevers, Hiroshima: two sides of the story, one pathetic and the other enormous, set into a mirror relation. What counts finally in Hiroshima mon amour is neither love nor Hiroshima, but the correspondence between these two themes, this city which is ‘made to love’s measure’, this love drawn out via interminable strolls through the village. The couple in La pointe courte enters into an exploration of itself, while Robinson (Oumarou Ganda) in Rouch’s Moi, un noir (1958) finds himself in the thread of Abidjan’s streets, and his own dreams.

Landscape is thus no longer just the frame for an action, but the place where the character seeks and loses him/herself. A temporal deepening responds to this spatial valorisation; time is at the centre of Resnais’, Varda’s and Tati’s films, not passing or pressing time but, on the contrary, time which never passes (Hulot’s time), or which is already entirely past (Hiroshima). Only landscape can materialise this temporal dimension of memory always present within action: the images of Nevers which burst forth for a moment in the middle of Hiroshima are the spatial sign of remembrance, like the village in La pointe courte is the sign of childhood. Faced with this invasion of the past, the present is annihilated; the universe of Hiroshima or La pointe courte, like the universe of Robinson or Hulot, is one in which it is impossible to live in the present. ‘Why deny the obvious necessity of memory?’ The woman of Hiroshima destroys her present love with the memory of past love, and at the same time betrays this love for the young German by associating it with and relating it to her Hiroshima love; that is why, when she speaks of Nevers, she evokes this past in the present, and when she speaks of the German man to the Japanese man, she says: ‘I begin to remember you less well’; in Hiroshima, as in love, forgetting is impossible, and memory invades all future time: ‘When I will have forgotten you’, says the Japanese man, ‘I will remember you as the forgetting of this very love.’ The past flees, the present empties itself, the future does not exist.

By this extraordinary confusion of moments, places and people, time is totally derailed within space; and space becomes at once the visual sign of the past, and the place where present life draws out and dissolves itself. Likewise for the couple in La pointe courte, the present is devoured by recollection; and if there is no recollection, as for Mr Hulot, then the character dissolves himself in his contact with the world, leaving only a space, streets, mules, a village, a beach where everything seems stretched out and suspended in long, static, silent shots.

These confused times, these mixed-up spaces sketch, bit by bit, an obsessive universe, in which the essential problem is not confront a character with a drama, but only (using Varda’s remark) to ‘unhook the entanglements of a man with the world’. The couple in Hiroshima, like in La pointe courte, is anonymous, classless, even at times borderless, situated in a landscape and not a milieu, devoted solely to itself, in complete freedom – but unable to freely exist (who are we, where did we come from, where are we going?). Resnais’, Varda’s and Rouch’s characters define themselves as ‘anti-heroes’ – not people confronting their destiny, but beings unrooted in the world. And the visual permanence of this word, the constant weight of space and time, increases its foreign character. The question of Hiroshima does not concern love, but the possibility of existing, the possibility of living in the moment, of escaping this perpetual destruction of the present by memory, and memory by the present. Thus, a profound connection exists between Hiroshima and love: while there is certainly no common measure between the love for either the German or Japanese man and the death at Hiroshima, in both cases memory is at once destructive and necessary; both the city and the woman have been disintegrated – and this is perhaps the significance of the film’s opening shots, burnt flesh juxtaposed with smooth flesh, ‘a passage from the skin as the site of supreme pain to the sin as the site of extreme pleasure’.

The uprooting of Robinson the Nigerian wandering in Treichville, the decomposition of the couple in La pointe courte, the disintegration of the woman in Hiroshima (for the man is only a spectator): man seeks himself, and loses himself, in this search, as if he were dispersed in time and dissolved into landscapes, to the point where the present is merely a smooth, empty space – the entirely exterior space of Antonioni and Tati, where spiritual absence corresponds to the physical presence of the characters and the world, a space which ‘goes inward’ in Resnais, as in Bresson, via the intermediary of speech.

Speech is, in fact, for Bresson and Resnais, the instrument of this self-exploration. If Bresson uses the cinema as writing, Resnais tries to suggest, for the screen, the equivalent of a reading; but the only difference is in the point-of-view. One insists on the creative function and the other on the spectator’s role, but the field of their investigation remains the same; it is across static faces and by the intermediary of speech that they both seek to evoke this inner duration, so different from dramatic time, which constitutes the area of their meditation. But this is where the resemblance between Bresson’s universe and Resnais’ universe ends: it exists more at the level of means rather than meaning. The inner adventure of the ‘man escaped’ occurs within the certainty of a liberation, a triumph over destiny; but for the Hiroshima couple, there is no destiny other than simply existing – their encounter leads nowhere other than the ultimate uncertainty of these final hours in which time stretches out without, however, being able to cease being. And if Bresson’s language has the classical beauty of a Racinian tragedy, that is because speech, like the image, remains the slave to an inner signification, above all the sign of a spiritual presence; but in Resnais, on the contrary, speech plays the same role as silence in Tati’s films: through diametrically opposed means, both filmmakers end up suggesting the same absence in the face of the world, the same dissolution of a character in the world, at the very surface where he lives – Hulot’s universe is disintegrated by silence, the Hiroshima universe is disintegrated by speech. The difficulty of being comes hand in hand with the difficulty of expressing – for which there are two results, silence or song. Tati’s characters lose themselves in silence, Resnais’ characters – like the Knight of The Seventh Seal (1957) moving across the plains, although the Bergmanian quest remains dramatic – seek through words, constituting at once the instrument of their loss, and their last effort to refind it. Neither for Bresson nor Resnais does speech figure as the functional representation of a situation; but, while it incarnates an inner truth in Bresson’s universe, in Resnais it becomes a song on a condition.

Song: the only term, for Resnais, which can justify the crime of literature. Overcoming any ‘theatrical’ obsession he is loath to use speech, but the dialogue of Hiroshima, different in this respect to the dialogue of Les Amants, remains authentic to the degree that, without trying to model language on the image, it compels itself to discover a lyrical tone sensitive to the film’s musical composition. ‘The text is the verbal equivalent of the images, exalting the images to come’ – that is how Marguerite Duras defines her commentary; it is a question of correspondence and harmony, not expression or translation: image as speech, or rather voice, constituting two variations on the same theme, neither of which can exist without the other. In this musical perspective, speech, evoking every type of song, can raise itself from the simplest modulation – ‘I’m going to stay in Hiroshima’, ‘I think I love you’, ‘It’s impossible to leave you’ – to the most lyrical exaltation. For all these different tonalities are able to suggest the moving complexity of the character and his/her exploration: just like Mother Courage singing the song of the Great Capitulation, the woman of Hiroshima sings the song of contradiction. This is the film’s central theme: ‘I meet you. I remember you. You kill me. You make me well.’ And only that incantation which disengages itself from incessant repetition can get to grips with the obsession of time. ‘Like you I have known forgetting. Like you I am weighed down with memory. Like you I have forgotten. Like you I have struggled against the horror of no longer understanding the why of memory.’ And it is not purely coincidental if the language of Marguerite Duras joins up with the spontaneous poetry of Robinson, also singing in monotonous repetitions as he watches the film of his life unfold, his past, his hopes and disenchantment. ‘For me, I’ve done it all, everything a man can do, I’ve done it, and none of it had the slightest importance, I always stay the same ... I’m brave – I’m a man – I have nothing, I’m poor. I’m poor, I’m poor but all the same I’m brave. None of it amounts to anything, Little Jules. Let’s go home. Everything depends on God. God is All.’ Robinson, too, sings his song of contradiction.

Why this encounter? Because this lyrical language, this recitative tone, a sign of the self-discovery made by the characters – just as they seek, destroy and deliver themselves via this incantation of words. The verbal counterpart allows Robinson, like the woman of Hiroshima or the couple in La pointe courte, to detach himself from his existence and contemplate it with complete lucidity. For lucidity is sole outcome, the sole saving grace in this universe where characters, ‘unglued’, risk dissolving and losing themselves in the thread of the image. ‘Characters who with a lyrical recitative tone compose their gestures, but try to protect the heart’s truth, and who can appear, according to the words and the moments, authentic or mythic’ – that is how Resnais sees them. Conserving the ambiguity at the very heart of truth is the only way to give it meaning. But the condition of this lucidity is detachment: if speech expresses it, only narrative form allows the character to reach it. That is why Resnais’ and Rouch’s films, just like Bresson’s, are two-tier narratives, where the eye of the camera as impersonal witness meets the character’s narration as he reviews his past; the ambiguity is in their mutual contamination. And this passage from drama to narrative reveals not only a new language but also a news signification, the signification of a universe in which the character is unable to live, but can only (like Robinson) replay his existence and watch himself living.

To show thought in motion rather than the event in action, to seek the spatial and temporal depth of a universe in which man feels that the very possibilities of existence have been put in question, to translate via a verbal flux the ambiguity of duration: is this not, essentially, the journey through appearances that had already tempted novelists like Faulkner, Woolf and Proust? Very curiously, it seems that an entire slice of contemporary cinema takes this baton from the novel while, on the contrary, the novel is borrowing its techniques from cinema. Why this exchange? Is the novelist’s ideal to attain absolute objectivity, to suppress, between the work and reality, this distorting mirror representing the very consciousness of the writer, his style, his writing – isn’t all writing subjective? Discussing Alain Robbe-Grillet, Roland Barthes wrote that the novel ‘teaches us to look at the world no longer with the eyes of a confessor, doctor or God – all the signifying hypostases of the classical novel – but with they eyes of a man who walks through the city with no horizon beyond the spectacle itself, with no power beyond the power of the eyes.’ The gaze of a man walking through the city, the minute analysis of each detail of concrete reality, the refusal of style, which withdraws itself in favour of geometric precision: nothing, it seems, any longer distinguishes the novelist from a camera, and this systematic absence marks the final stage of the author’s renouncement of himself in the face of reality.

For cinema, on the contrary, this objective reality constitutes an obstacle, and if it borrows its language from the novel, it is in order to explore that inner duration which appears to close down the concrete presence of the image. So it happens that, in the novelist’s eyes, the purest truth can only be found, at the limit, in photography; while for the filmmaker things become deeper if the image appears, above all, as a subjective vision. But what is absent in the novelist – namely, a subjective consciousness – can never be absolute: the look in Jealousy is not that of a camera but a jealous lover – which, moreover, is the source of the book’s beauty. This is why the cinema, in assuming at once the ambiguity of speech and the exactitude of the image, seems closer to the truth; and it is hardly coincidental that novelists such as Jean Cayrol or Duras look to cinema for a new means of expression which will allow them to add to the concrete presence of the world the vision of a man, rootless in the face of this world, and for whom the sole salvation is in lucidity.

However, whatever our judgement on these contrary attempts, they both suggest the same anguish: if both novel and cinema use, in the last recourse, techniques which are unnatural to them, it is because the same feeling of discomfort obliges them to do so: both apprehend a world in which man feels himself at once both a stranger and compromised. For the novel it is absence and for the cinema it is speech which represents a tragic witnessing of this contradiction.