Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (126 page)

At the same time, the ways in which they have subverted the idea that there is a general canon, or one way of looking at man, and telling his story, has undoubtedly had an effect. If nothing else, they have introduced a scepticism that Eliot and Trilling would have approved. In 1969, in a special issue of
Yale French Studies
, structuralism crossed the Atlantic. Postmodernist thought had a big influence on philosophy in America, as we shall see.

Roland Barthes
is generally considered a poststructuralist critic. Born in 1915 in Cherbourg, the son of a naval lieutenant, he grew up with a lung illness that made his childhood painful and solitary. This made him unfit for service in World War II, during which he began his career as a literature teacher. A homosexual, Barthes suffered the early death of a lover (from TB), and the amount of illness in his life even led him to begin work on a medical degree. But during his time in the sanatorium, when he did a lot of reading, he became interested in Marxism and for a time was on the edge of Sartre’s milieu. After the war he took up appointments in both Bucharest (then of course a Marxist country) and Alexandria in Egypt. He returned to a job in the cultural affairs
section of the French Foreign Office. The enforced solitude, and the travel to very different countries, meant that Barthes added to his interest in literature a fascination with language, which was to make his name. Beginning in 1953, Barthes embarked on a series of short books, essays mainly, that drew attention to language in a way that gradually grew in influence until, by the 1970s, it was the prevailing orthodoxy in literary studies.
⁵⁵

The Barthes phenomenon was partly a result of the late arrival of Freudianism into France, as represented by Lacan. There was also a sense in which Barthes was a French equivalent of Raymond Williams in Cambridge. Barthes’s argument was that there was more to modern culture than met the eye, that modern men and women were surrounded by all manner of signs and symbols that told them as much about the modern world as traditional writing forms. In
Mythologies
(1957, but not translated into English until 1972), Barthes focused his gaze on specific aspects of the contemporary world, and it was his choice of subject, as much as the content of his short essays, that attracted attention.
⁵⁶
He was in essence pointing to certain aspects of contemporary culture and saying that we should not just let these phenomena pass us by without inspection or reflection. For example, he had one essay on margarine, another on steak and chips, another on soap powders and detergents. He was after the ‘capillary meanings’ of these phenomena. This is how he began his essay ‘Plastic’: ‘Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastic, the products of which have just been gathered in an exhibition, is in essence the stuff of alchemy … as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible … it is less a thing than the trace of a movement…. But the price to be paid for this success is that plastic, sublimated as movement, hardly exists as a substance…. In the hierarchy of the major poetic substances, it figures as a disgraced material, lost between the effusiveness of rubber and the flat hardness of metal…. What best reveals it for what it is is the sound it gives, at once hollow and flat; its noise is its undoing, as are its colours, for it seems capable of retaining only the most chemical-looking ones. Of yellow, red and green, it keeps only the aggressive quality.’
⁵⁷

Barthes’s Marxism gave him, like Sartre, a hatred of the bourgeoisie, and his very success in the analysis of the signs and symbols of everyday modern life (semiology, as it came to be called) turned him against the scientific stance of the structuralists. Fortified by Lacan’s ideas about the unconscious, Barthes came down firmly on the side of humanistic interpretation, of literature, film, music. His most celebrated essay was ‘The Death of the Author,’ published in 1968, though again not translated into English until the 1970s.
⁵⁸
This echoed the so-called New Criticism, in the 1940s in America in particular, where the dominant idea was ‘the intentional fallacy.’ As refined by Barthes, this view holds that the intentions of an author of a text do not matter in interpreting that text. We all read a new piece of work having read a whole range of works earlier on, which have given words particular meanings that differ subtly from one person to another. An author, therefore, simply cannot predict what meaning his work will have for others. In
The Pleasures of the Text
(1975), Barthes wrote, ‘On the stage of the text, no footlights: there is not, behind the
text, someone active (the writer) and out front someone passive (the reader); there is not a subject and an object.’
⁵⁹
‘The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas.’
⁶⁰
Like Raymond Wilhams, Barthes was aware that all writing, all creation, is bound by the cultural context of its production, and he wanted to help people break out of those constraints, so that reading, far from being a passive act, could be more active and, in the end, more enjoyable. He was given a rather bad press in the Anglo-Saxon countries, although he became very influential nonetheless. At this distance, his views seem less exceptional than they did.
*
But he was such a vivid writer, with a gift for phrasemaking and acute observation, that he cannot be dismissed so easily by Anglo-Saxons.
⁶¹
He wanted to show the possibilities within language, so that it would be liberating rather than constricting. A particularly good example of this would occur a few years later, when Susan Sontag explored the metaphors of illness, in particular cancer and AIDS.

Among the systems of signs and symbols that Barthes drew attention to, a special place was reserved for film (Garbo, Eisenstein, Mankiewicz’s
Julius Caesar),
and here there was an irony, an important one. For the first three decades after World War II, Hollywood was actually not as important as it is now: the most interesting creative innovations were going on elsewhere – and they were
structural.
Second, and herein lies another irony, the European film business, and the French film industry in particular, which was the most creative of all, was building the idea of the director (rather than the writer, or the actor or the cameraman) as
author.

Hollywood went through several changes after the war. Box-office earnings for 1946, the first full year of peace, were the highest in U.S. film history and, allowing for inflation, may be a record that still stands. But then Hollywood’s fortunes started to wane; attendances shrank steadily, so that in the decade between 1946 and 1957, 4,000 cinemas closed. One reason was changing lifestyles, with more people moving to the suburbs, and the arrival of television. There was a revival in the 1960s, as Hollywood adjusted to TV, but it was not long-lived, and between 1962 and 1969 five of the eight major studios changed hands, losing some $500 million (more than $4 billion now) in the process. Hollywood recovered throughout the 1970s, and a new generation of ‘movie brat’ directors led the industry forward. They owed a great deal to the idea of the film director as
auteur,
which matured in Europe.

The idea itself had been around, of course, since the beginning of movies. But it was the French, in the immediate postwar period, who revived it and popularised it, publicising the battle between various critics as to who should take preeminence in being credited with the success of a film – the screenwriter or the director. In 195
1 Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
founded the monthly magazine
Cahiers du cinéma,
which followed the Une that films ‘belonged’ to their directors.
⁶²
Among the critics who aired their views in
Cahiers
were Eric
Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut. In a famous article Truffaut distinguished between ‘stager’ films, in which the director merely ‘stages’ a movie, written by a screenwriter, and proper
auteurs,
whom he identified as Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Tati and Max Ophüls. This French emphasis on the
auteur
helped lead to the golden age of the art cinema, which occupied the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s.

Robert Bresson
’s early postwar films had a religious, or spiritual, quality, but he turned pessimistic as he grew older, focusing on the everyday problems of young people.
⁶³
Une Femme douce
(A gentle Woman, 1969) is an allegory: a film about a simple woman who commits suicide without explanation. Her grief-stricken husband recalls their life together, its ups and downs, his late realisation of how much he loves her. Don’t let life go by default, Bresson is saying, catch it before it’s too late.
Le Diable probablement
(The Devil Probably, 1977) is one of Bresson’s most minimal films. Again the main character commits suicide, but the ‘star’ of this film is Bresson’s technique, the mystery and unease with which he invests the film, and which cause the viewer to come away questioning his/her own life.

The stumbling career of
Jacques
Tati bears some resemblance to that of his character Mr Hulot: he went bankrupt and lost control of his film prints.
⁶⁴
Tad’s films included
Holiday
(1949) and
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday
(1953), but his best known are
Mon Oncle
(1958) and
Playtime
(1967). Mr. Hulot returns to the screen in the earlier of the two, again played by Tati himself, an ungainly soul who staggers through life in his raincoat and umbrella. In this manner he happens upon the family of his sister and brother-in-law, whose house is full of gadgets. Tati wrings joke after joke from these so-called labour-saving devices, which in fact only delay the forward movement, and enjoyment, of life.
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Hulot forms a friendship with his nephew, Gerald, a sensitive boy who is quite out of sympathy with all that is going on around him. Tati’s innovativeness is shown in the unusual shots, where sometimes more than one gag is going on at the same time, and his clever staging. In one famous scene, Hulot’s in-laws walk back and forth in front of their round bedroom windows in such a way as to make us think that the house itself is rolling its eyes.
Playtime
(1967) was as innovative as anything Tati or Bresson had done. There is no main character in the film, and hardly any plot. Like
Mon Oncle
it is a satire on the shiny steel and gadgetry of the modern world. In a typical Tati scene, many visual elements are introduced, but they are not at all obvious – the viewer has to work at noticing them. But, once you learn to look, you see – and what Tati is seeing is the ordinary world around us, plotless, which we must incorporate into our own understanding. The parallel with Barthes, and Derrida, is intentional. It is also more fun.

The new wave or ‘Left Bank’ directors in France all derived from the influence of
Cahiers du cinéma,
itself reflecting the youth culture that flourished as a result of the baby boom. There was also a maturing of film culture: beginning in the late 1950s, international film festivals, with the emphasis on the international, proliferated: San Francisco and London, in 1957; Moscow two years later; Adelaide and New York in 1963; Chicago and Panama in 1965;
Brisbane a year after that; San Antonio, Texas, and Shiraz, Iran, in 1967. Cannes, the French mother of them all, had begun in 1939. Abandoned when Hitler invaded Poland, it was resumed in 1946.

The new wave directors were characterised by their technical innovations brought about chiefly by lighter cameras which allowed greater variety in shots – more unusual close-ups, unexpected angles, long sequences from far away. But their main achievement was a new directness, a sense of immediacy that was almost documentary in its feel. This golden age was responsible for such classics as
Les Quatre Cents Coups
(Truffaut, 1959),
Hiroshima mon amour
(Alain Resnais, 1959),
A bout de souffle
(Godard, 1960),
Zazie dans le métro
(Louis Malle, 1960),
L’Année dernière à Marienbad
(Resnais, 1961),
Jules et Jim
(Truffaut, 1962),
Cléo de
5
à
7 (Agnès Varda, 1962),
La Peau douce
(Truffaut, 1964),
Bande à part
(Godard, 1964),
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
(Jacques Demy, 1964),
Alphaville
(Godard, 1965),
Fahrenheit 451
(Truffaut, 1966),
Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d’elle
(Godard, 1967),
Ma nuit chez Maud
(Eric Rohmer, 1967),
La Nuit américaine
(Truffaut, 1973, translated into English as
Day for Night).
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Most famous of the technical innovations was Truffaut’s ‘jump-cut,’ removing frames from the middle of sequences to create a jarring effect that indicated the passage of time (a short time in particular) but also emphasised a change in emotion. There was a widespread use of the freeze frame, most notably in the final scene of
Les Quatre Cents Coups,
where the boy, at the edge of the sea, turns to face the audience. This often left the ending of a film open in a way that, combined with the nervous quality introduced by the jump-cuts, sometimes caused these films to be labelled ‘existentialist’ or ‘deconstructionist,’ leaving the audience to make what it could of what the director had offered.
⁶⁷
The ideas of Sartre and the other existentialists certainly did influence the writers at
Cahiers,
as did
la longue durée
notions of Braudel, seen especially in Bresson’s work. In return, this free reading introduced by the
nouvelle vague
stimulated Roland Barthes’s celebrated thoughts about the death of the author.
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