The Battle of the Sexes in French Cinema, 1930 1956 PDF
Preview The Battle of the Sexes in French Cinema, 1930 1956
" The BaTTle of The SexeS in french cinema, 1930–1956 The Battle of the Sexes in french cinema, 1930–1956 Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier Translated by Peter Graham Duke University Press Durham anD lonDon 2014 Translation © 2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾ Designed by Kristina Kachele Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burch, Noël, 1932– [Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français, 1930–1956. English] The battle of the sexes in French cinema, 1930–1956 / Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier ; translated by Peter Graham. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. iSBn 978-0-8223-5547-2 (cloth : alk. paper) iSBn 978-0-8223-5561-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Man-woman relationships in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures— France—History—20th century. I. Sellier, Geneviève. II. Burch, Noël, 1932– Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français, 1930–1956. Translation of: III. Title. pn1995.9.m27B8713 2013 791.43094409′04—dc23 2013018959 " Contents Introduction 1 Part I. The Prewar Period, 1930–1939 Chapter 1. Panorama of a Cine- Family Romance 15 Film Analyses 54 Part II. The German Occupation, 1940–1944: Fathers Take a Backseat Chapter 2. Castrated Fathers 91 Chapter 3. Women in the Service of the Patriarchy 103 Chapter 4. Misogyny Lingers On 114 Chapter 5. Absent Men, Fleeing Men 125 Chapter 6. Women Take Control of Their Destiny 133 Chapter 7. The Zazou Film: A Dissident Style during the Occupation 140 Chapter 8. A Woman Faced with Her Desire 150 Chapter 9. Gentle Male Figures and New Fathers 164 Film Analyses 180 Part III. The Postwar Period, 1945–1956: Settling of Scores Chapter 10. The Destabilizing Effects of the Liberation 237 Chapter 11. Restoring the Patriarchal Order 269 Film Analyses 305 Conclusion 341 References 347 Index 357 " Introduction alThough neiTher of the authors of this book is a trained historian, his- torical research of the kind that has emerged in France over the past fifty years or so, and in particular the history of representations, no doubt sparked our desire to approach film analysis from a fresh angle. This required a considerable change of course on our part in view of the fact that the disciplines that nur- ture film studies in France, quite apart from the traditional areas of aesthetics and art history, have, since Christian Metz’s key contribution to the debate, been linguistics and psychoanalysis. Not that the history of the cinema has been unexplored territory in France: ever since Georges Sadoul’s first comprehensive surveys of the subject, many researchers have focused their attention on an “art” which, although only just over a century old, has not always been very accessible. But among the multi- tude of angles from which such a protean object as the cinema can be ap- proached—as both a technique, a language, an industry, a business, an art, a popular culture, an institution, and an instrument of propaganda—we feel that French researchers have so far failed to take full advantage of film’s poten- tial as an ideal area in which to study the history of representations. This can perhaps be explained by the difficulty that film specialists and his- tory specialists have in communicating with each other, the former often being inTroDucTion enthusiastic cinephiles and too fixated on their subject of study (and love!) to be able or willing to use it as a way of achieving another end, the latter tending to instrumentalize the cinema as just one of several sources and to overlook its relative autonomy. Even the most pertinent historical work from our point of view (Ferro 1977/1988; Garçon 1984) articulates its argument around a non- cinematic factor (a political one in this case): films serve to gauge the impact of a political ideology on civil society or to confirm the existence of an ideology that opposes a given political regime. What we attempt to articulate here is an argument based on the films themselves. The cinema, a collective cultural product in the way it is both produced and consumed, is probably an ideal medium for the expression of a social imagi- nary. But it does nevertheless also constitute a language in its own right, whose highly complex and very diverse codes (mimesis, narrative, fiction, characters, lighting, sets, spectacle, music, dialogue, and so on) require a specific approach of the kind that the art historian Pierre Francastel wanted to see applied to painting. Our book is the result of our wish to combine certain aspects of contem- porary historical research with our so- called inside knowledge of the cinema as an object and of the specific tools that have been developed to analyze it. Among the approaches that have changed the way we look at films, mention should also be made of the fairly recent discipline of cultural studies, developed chiefly in English- speaking countries, which seeks to understand the symbolic productions of a given society without reference to the evaluation grid im- posed by the dominant culture. In France, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1979/1984) revo- lutionary approach to the sociology of culture adopted similar criteria, but France’s elitist view of culture is so pervasive that it acts as a hindrance to that kind of historical research, which is difficult to find anywhere except in the work of a historian like Pascal Ory (1989). In the field of cinema, in particular, the relatively recent struggle—which has been crowned with success in France—to get the cultural legitimacy of the cinema recognized by both the intelligentsia and official cultural institu- tions has had the effect of encouraging the setting up of a pantheon of “great” directors at the expense of a more modern (and in some ways more relevant) approach to cinema as a collective cultural production. This is the approach we have adopted in our book. Finally, the most recent but by no means least important ramification of the New History—the history of women, or rather the history of gender rela- tions—has begun to emerge in France with the five volumes of Georges Duby 2 inTroDucTion and Michelle Perrot’s Histoire des femmes en occident (1991), whose scientific value is enhanced by the authors’ constant concern to weave together the ma- terial and symbolic dimensions of male domination of women that forms the basis of our societies. The historical precision of that collective work, which is based on the premise that sexual identities are not essences but relation- ships and differentiation processes inherent in a given society and period, lent a useful extra dimension to the work of English- speaking historians— particularly in the field of gender studies—which, while substantial, was all too often sub specie aeternitatis. Moreover most of those same historians’ work on cinematic representations of gender was chiefly, if not exclusively, concerned with U.S. cinema. It fairly soon became clear to us that, ever since Laura Mulvey’s (1975/1981) trailblazing essay, any analysis aimed at under- standing the symbolic function of film and of its spectator as regards sexual relationships could not be applied directly to French cinema, for reasons that have precisely to do with history in general and cultural history in particu- lar. We do, then, distance ourselves from the principal feminist theories in English- speaking countries insofar as we are unwilling and unable to lock our- selves into the notion that any analysis of representations of gender relations would be of interest only to women endowed with sexual awareness (an argu- ment implicit in Modleski [1988]). Just as the French cinema continues to be aimed at spectators of both sexes without discriminating between them, we feel that gender relations concern men just as much as they do women. Equally, we have not followed the practice of most American feminists, who ignore the issue of class, for we feel that in the cinema of every period and in every culture that issue is profoundly interconnected with the issue of gender. In the end, while we would like our work to be seen as part of the general framework of the struggle for sexual equality, we regard as of secondary impor- tance the theoretical construction of a female spectator, which can be used as a basis for reassessing movies against the grain, so to speak, in other words, with- out paying any attention to a film’s historical and social environment (Petro 1989; and, from a critical viewpoint, Williams 1988). We are more interested in identifying and understanding the generally conflicting and contradictory im- portance of gender relations at a given period, particularly since, in a country like France during the period under study, the spectator’s position is resolutely male, in that the great majority of women, at least up until the 1970s, had in- ternalized patriarchal values along with the secular and libertine connotations peculiar to France (Fraisse 1992; Rosanvallon 1993; Viennot 1995). Our decision to focus on the period 1930–56 was motivated by various fac- 3
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