Content uploaded by Robert Farmer
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Robert Farmer on Jun 26, 2017
Content may be subject to copyright.
MARKER, RESNAIS, VARDA: REMEMBERING THE LEFT BANK
GROUP
Robert Farmer
Published in Senses of Cinema, Issue 52, September 2009
Available from:
http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/feature-articles/marker-resnais-varda-reme
mbering-the-left-bank-group/
1. A Brief History of the Left Bank Group
The Left Bank Group are one of the most unjustly overlooked groups in the
history of European cinema. Perhaps this is due to the fact that their films tended
to be politically, aesthetically and intellectually demanding; perhaps it is because
they have been seen, unjustly, as being a highly literary, as opposed to cinematic,
group; or perhaps it is simply because their existence as French film-makers in
the late 1950s and early 1960s was chronologically concurrent with, and thus
overshadowed by, the most famous of all movements (or moments) in the last
fifty years of cinema, the French New Wave. Whatever the reason, it remains the
case that although innumerable books have been written about the French New
Wave , there are no volumes in English at all dedicated to the Left Bank Group .
1 2
Nevertheless, the group has been discussed since the 1960s, when the ‘Left Bank’
term was first used to describe their work.
From whence the term ‘Left Bank’ came is the subject of about as much
uncertainty as which film-makers rightly belong to the group. James Monaco
3
names Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy as belonging
to the group, and suggests that it was Jean-Luc Godard who first suggested the
term, ‘Left Bank New Wave’. The Harvard Film Archive and Chris Darke claim
4 5
1 Some of the key works about the French New Wave that spring to mind include:
Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave;
Michel Marie, The French
New Wave, An Artistic School;
Genevieve Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New
Wave Cinema
; Dorota Ostrowska, Reading the French New Wave;
Naomi Greene,
The French New Wave - A New Look
.
2 Much has been written about the individual directors over the years, some of
the best studies available being in the French Film Directors series published by
Manchester University Press. However, there is no one book dedicated to a study
of the Left Bank Group as a group
.
3 James Monaco, 1978, p.9
4 Harvard Film Archive, 2000
5 Chris Darke, 1996, p.444
1. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
the critic Richard Roud first coined the term, and cite Marker, Resnais and Varda
as being the most important of the Left Bank directors. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis
6
claims that it was Claire Clouzot who named the group, and who included
alongside Marker, Resnais and Varda the, “American expatriate in Paris,”
7
William Klein. Alongside the principal three directors Richard Neupert adds
8
both Demy and Henri Colpi to the list, and although Neupert does not discuss the
origin of the term Left Bank Group, he notes that their existence as a distinct
group was noticed as early as 1960 when Raymond Lefevre named them the,
“Nouvelle vague
2.” Ginette Vincendeau briefly mentions the Left Bank
9 10
directors in her Companion to French Cinema, and again cites Marker, Resnais
and Varda as comprising the group. It is only Kristin Thompson and David
Bordwell who do not name Marker when discussing the group, including
11
instead Georges Franju alongside Resnais and Varda.
Clearly it is not of paramount importance who first coined the term Left Bank
Group, but it is important to establish that despite the lack of monographs and
collections on the subject, the Left Bank Group is, and has been for nearly fifty
years, a definitely acknowledged, if not widely studied group of film-makers,
with Resnais, Marker and Varda at its core, and with Colpi, Demy, Franju and
Klein as directors on the periphery of the group.
Just as the most important of the French New Wave directors (Jean-Luc Godard,
François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette) were all
associated through their work as film critics for Cahiers du Cinema,
and by some
instances of collaboration it could be argued that the Left Bank directors formed
just as strong a group, especially since they worked together more frequently
than their Cahiers
contemporaries. The most well known collaborations are
between Marker and Resnais, who together made Le Statues meurent
aussi/Statues also Die, 1950-53:
and between Varda and Resnais; Resnais having
edited Varda’s first film, La Pointe Courte, 1954
. Varda and Marker worked
together on Marker’s Dimanche à Pékin/Sunday in Peking, 1956,
and all three
collaborated on the collective film Loin du Viêt-nam/Far from Vietnam, 1967:
although as Alison Smith points out, Varda’s contribution to the film was not
12
used, though she is still credited. Outside of the inter-relationships between the
main three directors, Colpi edited films for Varda, Resnais and Marker/Resnais;
Demy was married to Varda, although their only official collaboration was on Les
6 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, pp.261-2
7 Michael Koresky, 2008
8 Richard Neupert, 2007, p.299
9 Raymond Lefevre, quoted in
Richard Neupert, 2007, p.299
10 Ginette Vincendeau, 1996, p.110
11 Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, 2003, p.449
12 Alison Smith, 1998, p.201
2. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
Demoiselles de Rochefort/The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967
; and Klein, who
appears in Marker’s La Jetée/The Pier,
1962,
also worked on the collaborative
film with Varda, Marker and Resnais, Loin du Viêt-nam, 1967.
It is still not universally accepted that the Left Bank directors actually constitute
a coherent group. Monaco says that distinction between the Left Bank and Right
Bank/Cahiers
group, “melts under scrutiny.” Smith claims that, “the ‘Groupe
13
Rive Gauche’ (Left Bank Group) … never formed anything like the coherent
group based at Cahiers” , and, “Varda maintains that there was never anything
14
more shared by the group than friendly conversation and a love of cats.”
15
However, I think that the discussion above suggests that this is not the case.
What is really at issue is whether the Left Bank Group is merely a subgroup of
the French New Wave, or whether it can be considered as a group in its own
right, which can be thought about not simply by its otherness to the nouvelle
vague.
Frequently the Left Bank Group as a group are absent from discussions of French
cinema, although the principal directors are always talked about. Sometimes, the
group are mentioned, but only as a vague collective without any real coherency.
More recently the group have been discussed as a subgroup of the French New
Wave; as a kind of intellectual, political, feminist, literary and/or avant-garde
wing of the nouvelle vague.
Vincendeau affirms that the French New Wave directors,
lacked an interest in political or social issues, concentrating on personal angst
among the (male) Parisian middle class (although another less media-prominent
band of film-makers known as the ‘Left Bank’ group – Chris Marker, Alain Resnais
and Varda – showed greater political awareness). On the whole, the New Wave did
not significantly challenge traditional representations of women.
16
Thompson and Bordwell note that the Left Bank Group were,
[m]ostly older and less movie-mad than the Cahiers
crew, they tended to see cinema
as akin to the other arts, particularly literature.
17
Neupert says of the Left Bank directors that,
[d]efinitions of this active cluster of young directors often concentrate on their
differences from the Cahiers
critic-turned-filmmakers and stress their deeper
involvement in aesthetic experimentation, their connections to documentary
13 James Monaco, 1979 p.10
14 Alison Smith, 1998, p.7
15 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, pp.261-2
16 Ginette Vincendeau, 1996, p.110
17 Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, 2003, p.449
3. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
practice, overt political themes, and increased interest in other arts beyond cinema.
18
And Claire Clouzot remarks that,
[t]he filmmakers of the Left Bank are inspired by artistic eclecticism. As creators
they are interested in the flow of mental processes, rather than cinephilic
fanaticism. It is not theoretical criticism which draws them to the cinema, but an
interest in filmic writing, and the relations this might have with literary production.
19
While it is undeniable that these quotes can be seen to reinforce the notion that
the Left Bank Group is indeed the
intellectual/political/feminist/literary/avant-garde wing of the French New
Wave, and whilst most writers on French cinema would be quite happy to leave
it there, it is Clouzot who goes on to provide a much more radical reading of the
Left Bank Group.
Clouzet considers the Left Bank group, “not as a faction of the New Wave, but,
rather, as a distinct group in opposition to it. Clouzot’s is a literary emphasis; she
takes “authorship” literally in her discussions to mean the essentially novelistic
preoccupations with time, memory, narration, and form that characterise the
group.” It is, for Clouzot, that the Left Bank directors are to be seen as authors
20
more than auteurs
, as they were more concerned with responding to the
traditions of literature and the nouveau roman
(new novel), than with
responding to the history of cinema: whereas the Right Bank/Cahiers
directors
are well known for being primarily critics and cinephiles, and for their work
being a response to the prevailing tradition of French cinema, labelled by the
Cahiers group as, ‘le cinéma de papa’
or,
“old fogeys’ cinema.” As shall be seen
21
when discussing the films of the Left Bank group, Clouzot is quite right to
foreground the literary preoccupations of the group, and to see it as one of the
most important defining features: Marker, a writer and novelist as well as a
film-maker, famous for his exquisitely constructed and highly literary voice over
commentaries; Varda, for whom the Astruc’s idea of the caméra-stylo
(camera
pen) is highly important, as is her own notion of cinécriture
(cinematic writing);
and Resnais, whose first two, and most important, feature films were
collaborations with two of France’s most important new novelists, Marguerite
Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Regarding the Left Bank Group, Clouzot goes on say,
[t]he shadow of Brecht and the New Novel hovers over their themes. The anonymity
18 Richard Neupert, 2007, p.299
19 Claire Clouzot, quoted in
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p.262
20 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p.262
21 Susan Hayward, 2000, p.145
4. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
of certain characters, the ‘flux’ of situations … the distancing of the spectator in
relation to those depicted on screen, the simultaneous time of action and time of
thought, all this is taken up. The ‘Left Bank current’ affirms itself as a cinema of
non-identification.
22
Finally, although it is not my intention to discuss the French New Wave in a lot of
detail, I think it is important to note, before moving on to discuss some of the key
films of the Left Bank Group, that much of the current thinking about the Right
Bank/Cahiers
French New Wave dispels the myth that it was a highly radical and
political cinema. Vincendeau notes that,
[t]he New Wave was neither a truly revolutionary nor a cohesive ‘movement’. To
opponents such as Bernard Chardère of Cahiers
rival Positif
, it was ‘rather vague and
not that new’… these films lacked an interest in political or social issues … did not
significantly challenge traditional representations of women … [and] although some
film presented ‘unconventional’ heroines … others were downright misogynist.
23
Vincendeau’s charge of misogeny against some New Wave directors is supported
by articles written at the time in the Cahiers
rival journal Positif.
Neupert notes
that Godard was labelled by Positif
as, “a disgusting misogynist,” and Chabrol
24
was charged with being, “petit bourgeois
… [and] militantly misogynist.”
25
Vincendeau’s general view that the French New Wave is less revolutionary than
popularly supposed is supported by Susan Hayward, who writes that,
[a]nother myth that needs examining is the belief that because this cinema [the
French New Wave] was controversial or different in style it was also a radical and
political cinema. This is predominantly not true: the New Wave film-makers were
largely non-politicized.
26
However, it is important to note that Hayward distinguishes between two
periods of the French New Wave. The first period, 1958-62, which coincides with
the most important period of activity of the Left Bank Group, and the second
wave of the nouvelle vague
, 1966-68. The first wave is a definitely non-politicized
cinema, whereas the second wave was more politicized, but was just as much
about a reflexive attitude towards the film-making process as it was about
politics. As Hayward says,
[t]he tendency has been to conflate the two movements of its production (early and
late 1960s). This has meant that the first New Wave (1958-1962), which was
anarchic only in relation to the cinema that preceded it (le cinema de papa
), has
22 Claire Clouzot, quoted in
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p.262
23 Ginette Vincendeau, 1996, p.110
24 Raymond Borde, quoted in
Neupert, 2007, p.34
25 ibid
26 Susan Hayward, 2000, p.146
5. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
become imbricated into the more ostentatiously political cinema of the second New
Wave (1966-68).
27
The distinction made by Hayward is a useful distinction in terms of this
discussion of the Left Bank film-makers, because to answer the question
properly it makes sense to concentrate on a comparison with the first period of
the nouvelle vague
, 1958 to 1962 as this was the one that was temporally
simultaneous with the most important years of the Left Bank Group.
2. The Key Films of the Left Bank Group (1958-1962)
The film-makers of the Left Bank Group had all started making films well before
the ‘birth’ of the French New Wave in 1958, films that were highly regarded right
from the outset: Resnais and Marker both beginning with documentaries, and
Varda with a feature. Resnais was the first of the Left Bank film-makers to begin
making films, and unlike his Right Bank contemporaries, Monaco notes that
28
Resnais had had a practical, rather than theoretical, training. He had enrolled in
the IDHEC (the French national film school) and had worked as an actor, camera
operator and editor before being commissioned to make his first professional
documentary in 1948. In total Resnais had made seven short documentaries
before making his first feature film Hiroshima mon amour
in 1959, and had
gained a reputation as a highly accomplished documentary maker: the most
important of his documentaries being Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog, 1955
. As
is well documented , Hiroshima mon amour
was initially intended to be another
29
short documentary, not a fiction feature. Additionally, and unlike many New
Wave projects, all Resnais’ documentaries had been commissioned, including
what was to become Hiroshima mon amour.
Between 1958 and 1962 Alain Resnais made his last short documentary, Le
Chant du Styrène/The Song of Styrene, 1958
and two fiction feature films,
Hiroshima mon amour, 1959
and L’Année dernière à Marienbad, 1961.
In many
ways these two features are the finest and most important works of Resnais’
career, and are still the best known and most discussed of his films; especially
L’Année dernière à Marienbad,
which provided much inspiration for Peter
Greenaway’s film The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982
and which has lost none of
30
its power to provoke, confuse and baffle an audience.
Resnais’ first feature was Hiroshima mon amour,
and it remains a complex and
deeply thoughtful work that explores Resnais’ preoccupation with the themes of
27 Susan Hayward, 2005, p.205
28 James Monaco, 1979, p.9
29 see Roy Armes, 1968, pp.66-7; James Monaco, 1979, pp.34-5; Richard Neupert,
2007, p.304
30 see Amy Lawrence, 1997, pp.60-63
6. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
time and memory. However, it is also a highly political and literary work, and it
sets the tone for much of Resnais’ later works. The film was scripted by
Marguerite Duras, who, at the time, was one of France’s most well respected new
novelists, and the film is set both in Japan and in France, with both a Japanese
actor, Eiji Okada, and a French actor, Emmanuelle Riva. The outward story itself
is not especially difficult to comprehend; it is set in the present, late 1950’s Japan,
and concerns a love affair between two unnamed married people, ‘he’ and ‘she’,
who meet at various points during her last twenty-four hours in Japan before she
returns to France. She is an actor, making a film set in Hiroshima about peace (a
film that we never see, but which exists within Hiroshima mon amour
as a
testament to the idea of the un-makeable film about Hiroshima), and he is an
architect. Within the main narrative about the love affair, there is entwined
another love affair, this time set in France, in the town of Nevers, towards the
end of the Second World War, and told in a series of flashbacks seemingly
remembered by the woman: however, as Wilson points out, there is nothing in
31
the structure of the film or in the grammar of the editing that conclusively makes
the Nevers story her remembrances; they could just as plausibly be either his or
her imaginings or fantasies. The second love affair is the story of her affair with a
young German soldier during the occupation; their affair is uncovered, he is shot,
and she is publicly humiliated by the townspeople (as was the custom with
French girls who had affairs with German soldiers, and which is well
documented in Marcel Ophuls’ film, Le chagrin et la pitié/The Sorrow and the Pity,
1969
), and imprisoned in a cellar by her parents. At the end of the war her
parents allow her to leave in the dead of night. Within these two stories is also
entwined footage of Hiroshima: some of it newsreel footage taken shortly after
the bomb dropped, and some of it footage of artefacts collected from the bomb
site on display in museums.
Clearly it is all but impossible to make a film about what really happened at
Hiroshima, to encapsulate the vast scale of destruction and suffering that
occurred; and this was something that Resnais was aware of when making the
film, and why he turned down the opportunity to make a documentary on the
subject. However, whilst being about Hiroshima, Hiroshima mon amour
is not
about Hiroshima in any conventional sense (a useful comparison may be made
with Shohei Imamura’s film about the bombing of Hiroshima, Kuroi ame/Black
Rain, 1989,
which has a much more conventional narrative structure; it is the
story of a family trying to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of the bombing of
Hiroshima and the effects of the fallout; it is about Hiroshima in a more
straightforward way). Resnais’ film is more about the universal human
experience of suffering, and he entwines the two stories together to show how
our memories of our own suffering, which still cause us pain, are the things that
allow us to know how it feels when others suffer. This is perhaps what he means
when he tells her that she saw nothing at Hiroshima (which is perhaps true for
everyone, for unlike the Holocaust, the bombs dropped at Hiroshima effaced all
witnesses): she did not see or know directly the suffering of others, but she knew
her own suffering and imagined it multiplied. But she is also like one of the
31 Emma Wilson 2006, p.53
7. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
victims of the Hiroshima fallout, the scenes of her having her hair cut off are
reminiscent of the scenes in Kuroi ame,
where the young Japanese girl’s hair falls
out due to radiation sickness. She loved a man who is now dead, she suffered, she
was humiliated, imprisoned and exiled; but as time passes memories fade, and
she begins to forget. For Hiroshima mon amour
is also a film about the future and
the impermanence of memory, the inability to keep memories of the past alive.
She says in present tense voice over, as if to her young German lover, ‘I betrayed
you this evening with this stranger … look how I’m forgetting you … Look how
I’ve forgotten you.’ As Emma Wilson remarks, “[t]he merger of Nevers and
Hiroshima comes in the realisation that both are condemned to forgetting,
forgetting in betrayal of the past and in the hope of survival in the future.”
32
As well as the complex themes and ideas explored in Hiroshima mon amour,
it is
also a particularly remarkable film for its striking use of modernist aesthetics,
especially concerning flashbacks, voice-over narration and ellipsis. It is the case
for films made in the classical Hollywood style that we know what is occurring,
who is speaking and how the dialogue relates to the pictures. However, Resnais
breaks with these codes, and we are frequently at a loss to know how the sound
and images relate, whether the narration is a fragment of dialogue spoken in the
present, or in the past, or even spoken only as part of an interior monologue.
Also, we do not necessarily know what is true and what is fiction as regards
voice-over and the accompanying flashbacks, or even to whom the flashbacks
properly belong. Resnais also only shows us the middle of the story; we never
see how he and she met, or how their affair ends. He keeps the characters at a
distance from us, they remain cold and aloof, distant from the audience, forcing
the spectator to adopt a more critical and intellectual position, very much in line
with Brechtian notions of alienation or distanciation. “The protagonists with no
names remain obscure art film characters … [and] Hiroshima
remains a
stubbornly open ended film.”
33
According to Monaco, Resnais’ next feature, another film in which the characters
remained nameless, L’Année dernière à Marienbad,
“created even more of a stir
among progressive, educated audiences than had Hiroshima mon amour
two
years earlier … [i]t was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of perceptual
prestidigitation, and throughout the sixties served as the very model of the
modern avant garde in narrative film.” However, not all critics were as positive.
34
John Russell Taylor, writing only three years after the film’s premiere at the
Venice Film Festival described it as, “less of a film than an intellectual trap.” and
35
although he admits that, “what is being done is being supremely well done, [he
32 ibid, p.63
33 Richard Neupert, 2007, p.311
34 James Monaco, 1979, p.53
35 John Russell Taylor, 1964, p.224
8. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
goes on to ask] “but … was it worth doing at all in the first place?”
36
Like Hiroshima mon amour, L’Année dernière à Marienbad
was scripted by
another of France’s new novelists, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and again deals with
themes of time and memory, and of truth and fiction. To describe L’Année
dernière à Marienbad
is not a particularly easy task, as the narrative defies a
straightforward description, but the basic plot outline appears as follows. Within
the setting of a baroque French chateau a man ‘X’ tries to persuade a woman ‘A’
that they met last year in Marienbad (or, as he tells her, perhaps it was Karlsbad
or Frederiksbad); there is the implicit sense, from X at least, that they had an
affair in Marienbad, and have met up again in order to be together. However, A
denies ever meeting X, she tells him that he must have mistaken her for
somebody else. X tries a number of times to persuade A that they did in fact meet
up last year, he shows he a photo that he has of her, he describes her room and
some of her clothing that she wore the previous year. However, A continually
refuses to acknowledge that the meeting ever took place, despite X’s continual
attempts to persuade her. As well as a number of peripheral characters, there is a
third important character in the film, M. M is (probably) A’s husband, and
although he watches X and A in conversation, his does not intrude upon their
conversations. However, towards the end of the film he shoots A, but this ending
is denied by X, who says, ‘I must have you alive.’ The films ultimately ends with X
and A leaving together.
Just as Hiroshima mon amour
contained another film, her film about peace,
Vincendeau draws our attention to the fact that L’Année dernière à Marienbad
37
contains not another film, but a play, entitled Rosmer. Although not obvious from
viewing the film, the play is Ibsen’s play, Rosmerholm, a play about the
clergyman Johannes Rosmer, which begins exactly one year after the suicide of
Rosmer’s wife, Beata. Vincendeau also notes the spectre of sexual violence in
both Rosmerholm and particularly in L’Année dernière à Marienbad.
Robbe-Grillet even scripted a scene in which X rapes A, although whether this
was an actual occurrence or a fantasy remains unclear. Resnais refused to shoot
the rape scene, but Vincendeau notes that one interpretation of A’s denial that
38
she ever met X was the repression of such an act of sexual violence. A more
romantic interpretation is given by Peter Cowie, who believes that the film
alludes to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, “X may be Orpheus and A his
Eurydice, with M representing Death.”
39
Throughout the film, the strongest sense is one of unreality and impossibility,
and Resnais creates this sense in the following ways: he visually overwhelms us
with the ornate mise-en-scene
and Sacha Vierny’s beautiful black-and-white
cinematography; he does not give us a plot that we can make sense of; he does
36 ibid. p.227
37 Ginette Vincendeau, 2005
38 ibid.
39 Peter Cowie, quoted in
Emma Wilson, 2006, p.81
9. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
not give us characters whose motivations we can comprehend; he creates a
deliberately fantastical setting in which the characters move and behave without
emotion; he does not maintain spatial continuity; he gives us voice-over
narration which is at best based upon unreliable memory, and at worst upon
complete fantasy; he does not indicate whether the scenes that we see are set in
the past, present, or future; and he does not signal whether the scenes we see
depict actual events or fantasies/wishes conjured by the characters. In this sense
L’Année dernière à Marienbad
can be seen as an exercise in the complete denial of
the classical Hollywood continuity style, a reading that is emphasised by Monaco.
David Bordwell notes that the film is constantly, “teasing us to construct a
40
fabula but always thwarting us.” It provides us with the belief that there is a
41
story (diegesis/fabula) to be decrypted or deciphered, but does not provide
enough information, or provides contradictory information, in the plot
(discourse/syuzhet) to make this possible. As he goes on to say:
[t]he syuzhet is so wrought as to make it impossible to construct a fabula. Cues are
either too few or contradictory. One order of scenes is as good as any other; cause
and effect are impossible to distinguish; even the spatial reference points change.
42
It is, for Bordwell, a film that is, “constructed like a nouveau roman,
” and
43
Neupert echoes this when he says that it, “owes as much to the New Novel as to
the New Wave.”
44
Chris Marker, who remains the most enigmatic and least well known of the three,
was the next of the Left Bank directors to begin making films, although he started
his career as a writer, and from 1947 published a highly diverse range of articles
in various journals, including Esprit,
on a wide variety of subjects. Catherine
Lupton notes that in the years between 1947 and 1950 he produced, “poetry, a
short story, political and cultural essays, book and film reviews … short, pithy
reflections on current events and debates that were sometimes transposed as
imaginary fables. [He also wrote] a well received novel, Le coeur net
(1949 The
Forthright Spirit
) and an extended critical essay on the French playwright Jean
Giradoux.” Little is known of Marker’s early life, but amongst the more
45
interesting of the unverifiable ‘facts’ about him is that he studied Philosophy with
Jean-Paul Sartre in the late 1930’s and served in the French Resistance during
the occupation. However, what is known about him is that it was Resnais who
brought Marker to film-making with their three year collaboration on Les Statues
meurent aussi/Statues also Die, 1950-1953,
and that prior to 1958 Marker also
40 see James Monaco, 1979, pp.53-73
41 David Bordwell, 1985, p.233
42 ibid. p.232
43 ibid.
44 Richard Neupert, 2007, p.324
45 Catherine Lupton, 2005, pp.13-14
10. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
made another two documentaries.
Marker was more prolific than both Resnais and Varda between 1958 and 1962,
producing five works in five years: Lettre de Sibérie/Letter From Siberia, 1958;
Description d’un combat/Description of a Struggle, 1960; Cuba si, 1961; Le Joli
mai/The Lovely May, 1962,
and La Jetée/The Pier, 1962.
However, Marker’s early
work is notoriously difficult to view, as Lupton points out, “Marker himself will
no longer endorse public screenings of most of the films he made before 1962 – a
constant source of frustration to Marker enthusiasts.” And Sarah Cooper notes
46
that the years between 1950 and 1961 are, “what Chris Darke terms the ‘lost
period’ of his oeuvre.” Thus it is no surprise that most of these early films are
47
not commercially available; but fortunately Marker’s most famous work, La Jetée,
has been widely available for many years. Prior to Gilliam’s film Twelve Monkeys,
1995,
a ‘sort-of remake’ of La Jetée, La Jetée
was still probably the most well
known of Marker’s films, thanks in no small part to its unique method of
construction. Nevertheless, it is important to bear in mind that La Jetée
is
Marker’s only pure fiction film, and as such it is not necessarily representative of
his work: but given Marker’s vast and diverse output no such representative
work exists, although Marker’s interest in the themes of time, memory and
culture is visible in all his work.
The most remarkable and most immediately noticeable fact about La Jetée
is that
it is composed from a series of still photographs: nevertheless, it would be wrong
to say that these images did not move. Marker uses the images in a very
cinematic way, zooming in and out of them, panning across them, fading in and
out and dissolving between them, and varying the rhythm of the cutting: all of
these serve to create a very real sense of movement. There are probably more
shots and a greater sense of movement in La Jetée
than in some ‘moving’ films;
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Café Lumiere, 2003,
for example. Marker also uses music,
naturalistic and supposedly diegetic sounds, and a voice-over narration in La
Jetée
,
all of which converge to make the audience rapidly forget that the principal
instrument of its construction was a Pentax stills camera.
La Jetée
is the story of a ‘twice lived fragment of time’ – of a man ‘marked by an
image of his childhood’. It is a story that ends at the beginning, with a boy
witnessing the death of a man: we enter and exit the film at the same point, the
pier at Orly airport where the boy witnesses the man’s death. The man and the
boy are the same person, the moment at Orly airport is the twice lived fragment
of time, and only when it is too late does the man realise this. Thus La Jetée
immediately conjures ideas of Ouroboros, the arcane image of the serpent eating
its own tail, or the perfect immortal being described by Plato in the Timaeus. It
also calls to mind Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence. Perhaps the man is
the first of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch,
for he has witnessed the moment of his own
death, yet in denying the offer from the men of the future to escape, and choosing
to go back to the woman he loves he has, “expressed his unconditional
46 ibid. p.9
47 Sarah Cooper, 2008, p.11
11. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
acceptance of existence to point where he wills that everything should be
repeated, exactly as it has been, in eternal cycles.” And had he not have done so
48
the future of all mankind would have been doomed, for the image of his
childhood that secured his passage through time, that allowed the present to call
to the past and the future for assistance, would not have been created.
Like Marker, Varda did not come straight to film, but initially worked as a
professional photographer; also, like Marker, she studied philosophy. In many
ways it is Varda who is the most interesting of the three directors, for not only is
she the only woman director in either the left or right bank groups (and is now
regarded as one of the most important female directors in the world), and not
only because her first feature La Pointe Courte, 1954,
was made four years before
Chabrol’s Le beau Serge,
yet was later championed by Georges Sadoul as the first
film of the French New Wave, but because Varda made La Pointe Courte
completely outside of the French film industry, with no professional training,
using money from an inheritance, and had made the film having seen virtually no
other films at all. Unlike the Right Bank/Cahiers
film-makers, and as Clouzot
noted, Varda was not influenced by other films, but by literature: as she
discusses in the introduction to the film, it was William Faulkner’s novel, The
Wild Palms,
that was, “the intellectual basis for the film.” It is interesting to note
49
that whilst Varda was making her first film in 1954, Godard was also making his
first film: but whereas Varda’s earned her the reputation as the ‘grandmother of
the new wave’, Godard’s documentary about the construction of a dam,
Opération béton/Operation Cement,
is described as being, “a very conventional
document.”
50
Central to any discussion of Varda must be her own concept of cinécriture,
literally meaning cinematic writing. This is a concept derived from Astruc’s
notion of the camera-stylo,
the camera pen, and goes well beyond the
conventional notion of the director as auteur.
What Varda’s notion signifies is
that the film has been authored by someone who not only writes, directs, edits,
scouts locations, casts, etc., but that all aspects of the film have been chosen
deliberately in order to create specific meanings that the cinécririste
is aware of.
This goes beyond the conventional notion of the auteur,
which, in terms of
making meaning is considerably more passive than Varda’s intellectually active
idea of cinécriture.
Varda’s commitment to cinécriture
is very apparent in her
interviews and in her discussions of her own work where her attention to detail
and thoughtfulness are always very evident. As she says,
A well written film is also well filmed, the actors are well chosen, so are the
locations. The cutting, the movement, the points-of-view, the rhythm of filming and
editing have been felt and considered in the way a writer chooses the depth of
meaning of sentences, the type of words, number of adverbs, paragraphs, asides,
chapters which advance the story or break its flow, etc. In writing it’s called style. In
48 Michael Tanner, 1994, p.50
49 Agnès Varda, 2007
50 Richard Neupert, 2007, p.208
12. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
the cinema style is cinécriture.
51
Between 1958 and 1962 Varda made two short documentaries, L’opera mouffe,
1958,
and Du côté de la côte, 1958,
and her most well known fiction feature film,
Cleo dé 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7, 1961.
Cleo dé 5 à 7
is the ninety-minute story of a
beautiful young woman, a somewhat narcissistic singer, told in real time (its title
should really be Cleo dé 5 à 6:30
) who waits for the results of test; results that
may indicate that she has a fatal illness. The central concern of the film is Cleo’s
move halfway through the film from object to subject, which arises through her
anxiety in waiting for the test results. As Flitterman-Lewis puts it, “Cleo’s
transformation hinges on a turn of phrase: ‘How do I look?’ This question,
traditionally connoted as feminine, is displaced from its passive, objectified
meaning (‘How am I seen, how do I appear in the eyes of the world?’) to its active
complement (‘How do I see, how is the world viewed by me?’)” Varda is also
52
very clear on this transformative moment in the film, a moment that occurs
precisely at the halfway point of the film, and is signalled visually by Cleo’s
change of appearance – she removes her white clothing, and returns wearing a
simple black dress. She pulls off her wig, at the same time remarking, ‘if only I
could pull my head off too!’ Varda says of this transformative moment in the film,
In the middle of the film I wanted a clean cut, a sharp change. Forty-five minutes
into the film, the beauty feel herself cracking. The baby doll, the blond starlet,
everything cracks. She rips off her negligee, her wig. She leaves. At this point, she
begins to look at others. She looks at people in the streets, in cafés, she looks at her
friend, and then the soldier. I consider this a feminist approach. I wanted to focus on
her as a woman who defines herself through others’ vision. And at some point,
because she’s the one looking, she changes. She redefines herself on her own.
53
As well as being about the object and subject of the look, Cleo dé 5 à 7
is also
about the perception of time, about the subjective and objective experience of
time. Divided into thirteen chapters, all of which state the time, we are constantly
reminded of the regular and unstoppable progression of time, yet this contrasts
sharply with Cleo’s subjective experience of time, which for her is slowing down
as her frustration and anxiety build up, each second seemingly longer than the
last. Varda also draws us into Cleo’s subjective world, an example of which is a
short sequence in Chapter XIII of the film, which Neupert describes as,
“demonstrating Varda’s radical approach to time.” In the sequence, as Cleo
54
leaves a café and walks down a street it appears that she is being stared at by
everyone, something that would have brought her pleasure in the first half of the
film, yet she seems almost horrified by the gazes, as if realising for the first time
what they really represent. She ends up running away, as the man with the
skewer through his arm prophetically shouts, ‘open your eyes’. Yet although
51 Agnès Varda, quoted in
Emma Smith, 1998, p.14
52 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p.269
53 Agnès Varda, 2005
54 Richard Neupert, 2007, p.343
13. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
Varda does not explicitly signal this, we have the impression that Cleo is not
really being watched in so obvious a manner by the people on the street. The
shameless gazes that we see are the gazes as Cleo experiences them; raw,
oppressive and judgemental. These shots, intercut with shots that can only be
Cleo’s memories, skilfully take us from reality into Cleo’s subjective inner world.
3. Towards a Legacy of the Left Bank Group
It is to be hoped that this all-to-brief discussion of the history, context and key
films of the Left Bank Group has served to demonstrate the wide and, most
importantly, innovative approach to film-making taken up by Marker, Resnais
and Varda. As well as being radical film-makers of the late fifties and early sixties,
it should be noted that all three continue to make highly regarded and highly
innovative films. Alain Resnais won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in
2006 for his film Coeurs/Private Fears in Public Places,
and his new film, Les
herbes folles/Wild Reeds,
is due for release in 2009. Chris Marker’s beautiful and
innovative 1983 documentary Sans Soleil/Sunless
won many awards, and thanks
to the fact that it was released on the same DVD as La Jetée/The Pier, 1962
in
both the UK and USA it is perhaps one of his more widely seen works. His 1998
CD-Rom Immemory
was, and still is, a most remarkable synthesis of art,
photography, film, literature and multimedia technology , all the more
55
incredible when one considers that Marker created it when he was
seventy-seven. In recent years there has been something of a Marker revival,
with three books being published about him since 2004, and many of his films at
last being released on DVD. Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond, 1985,
which won the
Golden Lion, did much to revive Varda’s reputation as both a great film-maker
and to remind the world of her importance as a feminist film-maker. Her
documentary Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I, 2000,
which won
numerous awards, reminded audiences that she was also a great documentary
maker. It can only be regretted that Varda has said that her film, Les plages
d’Agnès/The Beaches of Agnès, 2008,
which won the best documentary award in
the 2009 Césars, will be her last.
As well as continuing to produce important and innovative works for over fifty
years, we must also, if somewhat briefly, note the influence of the Left Bank
Group on modern film theory, particularly as regards Deleuze’s work on cinema
and the time image. For Deleuze , Resnais (along with Kubrick) forms a new
56
kind of intellectual cinema, a cinema of the brain. Also, in recent years both Susan
Hayward and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis have sought to increase our
57
55 For Francophones Immemory
is (or was) available for both PC and Mac from
the Centre Georges Pompidou. For English speaking monoglots Immemory
is only
available for Mac users: although it has at last been made available again in an
OSX compatible version from Exact Change.
56 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 1989
57 see Susan Hayward, Beyond the gaze and into femme-filmécriture: Agnès
14. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
understanding of Varda’s importance for feminist film theory. Ultimately, the
legacy that is most strongly supported by the above discussions is that whilst the
Right Bank/Cahiers
group of film-makers were seemingly (and very visibly)
creating a radical cinema in the first period of the New Wave,
it was Marker,
Resnais and Varda, the Left Bank Group, who were genuinely, and more quietly,
creating a truly radical cinema that variously embraced the ideas of philosophy,
politics, history, time and memory, feminism, literature and the nouveau roman
,
the ambiguous relationship between fiction and reality and between the past,
present and future, unreliable narration, and complex narrative structures. It is
clear then that the achievements of the Left Bank Group were both radical and
remarkable, and it is to be hoped that in time their work will come to be more
widely admired and celebrated than that of their more famous contemporaries.
FILMOGRAPHY (Chronological Listing)
La Pointe Courte,
Agnès Varda (1954) DVD; The Criterion Collection.
Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog,
Alain Resnais (1955) DVD; Nouveaux Pictures.
Toute la mémoire du monde/All the Memory of the World,
Alain Resnais
(1956)
DVD; Nouveaux Pictures.
L’opera mouffe,
Agnès Varda (1958) DVD; The Criterion Collection.
Du côté de la côte,
Agnès Varda (1958) DVD; The Criterion Collection.
Hiroshima mon amour/Hiroshima My Love,
Alain Resnais (1959) DVD; Nouveaux
Pictures.
L’Année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad,
Alain Resnais (1961) DVD;
Optimum Releasing.
Cleo dé 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7,
Agnès Varda (1961) DVD; The Criterion Collection.
La Jetée/The Pier,
Chris Marker (1962) DVD; Nouveaux Pictures.
Muriel ou le temps d’un retour/Muriel, or the Time of Return,
Alain Resnais (1963)
DVD; Koch Lorber Films.
Le Bonheur/Happiness,
Agnès Varda (1964) DVD; The Criterion Collection.
La Guerre est finie/The War is Over,
Alain Resnais (1966) DVD; Image
Entertainment.
Le sixième faces du Pentagone/The Sixth Face of the Pentagon,
Chris Marker &
François Reichenbach (1968) DVD; First Run Icarus Films.
Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985)
& Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently.
15. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
16. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Armes, Roy (1968) The Cinema of Alain Resnais,
London, Zwemmer.
Armes, Roy (1985) French Cinema,
London, Secker & Warburg.
Bordwell, David (1985) Narration in the Fiction Film,
London, Routledge.
Cannes (2008) Cannes Festival Archives
[online]
Available from: http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/archivesPage.html
[Accessed: 3 January 2008].
Cooper, Sarah (2008) Chris Marker,
Manchester, Manchester University Press,
pp.11-71.
Darke, Chris (1996) The French New Wave,
In: Nelmes, Jill, Film Studies, 3
rd
Edition,
London, Routledge, pp.421-450.
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy (1996) To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French
Cinema, Expanded Edition,
New York, Columbia University Press.
Harvard Film Archive (2000) The Left Bank Revisited: Marker, Resnais, Varda
[online]
Avaliable from:
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2000mayjun/leftbank.html
[Accessed: 22 December 2008].
Hayward, Susan (2000) Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts,
London, Routledge.
Hayward, Susan (2005) French National Cinema, 2
nd
Edition,
London, Routledge.
Koresky, Michael (2008) Eclipse Series 9: The Delirious Fictions of William Klein
[online]
Available from: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/658 [Accessed: 22
December 2008].
Lawrence, Amy (1997) The Films of Peter Greenaway,
Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Lupton, Catherine (2005) Chris Marker: Memories of the Future,
London, Reaktion
Books.
Marie, Michel (2003) The French New Wave: An Artistic School,
trans. Neupert,
Richard, Oxford, Blackwell.
Monaco, James (1978) Alain Resnais
, London, Secker & Warburg.
Neupert, Richard (2007) A History of the French New Wave Cinema,
Wisconsin,
University of Wisconsin Press.
Smith, Alison (1998) Agnès Varga,
Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Tanner, Michael (1994) Nietzsche,
Oxford, OUP.
17. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
Taylor, John Russell (1964) Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear,
London, Methuen.
Thompson, Kristin & Bordwell, David (2003) Film History: An Introduction, 2
nd
Edition
, London, McGraw-Hill.
Varda, Agnès (2005) Cleo dé 5 à 7: Remembrances
[video] In, 4 x Agnès Varda,
DVD, The Criterion Collection.
Varda, Agnès (2007) La Pointe Courte: Interview with Agnes Varda
[video] In, 4 x
Agnès Varda, DVD, The Criterion Collection.
Vincendeau, Ginette (1996) The Companion to French Cinema,
London,
Cassell/BFI.
Vincendeau, Ginette (2005) Last Year in Marienbad: Introduction by Ginette
Vincendeau
[video] In, Last Year in Marienbad, DVD, Optimum Releasing.
Vincendeau, Ginette (2008) How Agnès Varda ‘Invented’ the New Wave
[online]
Available from: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/497 [Accessed: 22nd
December 2008].
Wilson, Emma (2006) Alain Resnais,
Manchester, Manchester University Press.
18. Robert Farmer – Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group
