Rohmer's Triple Agent : Theatricality, Archive and the 1930s

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Rohmer's Triple Agent: Theatricality, Archive and the 1930s Ivone Margulies Art is a reflection of our time: isn't it also the antidote? —Eric Rohmer "After a certain moment," states Serge Daney in "Actualité de Rohmer," "the filmmaker was recognized as one of the rare witnesses of his times. Even his critics who could not see themselves in his conservative ideology and antiquated thematic felt that ten years later films signed by Rohmer would become sociological 'documents' of a certain atmosphere of the times which would not always remain the same." 1 For Daney, the films' accurate representation of his characters' social idiolect explains Rohmer's success in finding his public once a year. His characters, a wave of ever-young individuals, constitute an archive of types from one particular social stratum: bourgeois, liberal professionals, artists and intellectuals who are united in being talkative. As they conjecture they reveal a set of values and ideas. A minor but curious absence, that of a filmmaker, in Rohmer's extensive roster of professionals suggests there may be something to my inquiry on the role of cinema, or more precisely of documentary images in Rohmer's work. The unprecedented use of newsreel footage in Rohmer's Triple Agent (2004) leads us to ask whether the inclusion of archival documents of the politically charged 1930s signals a departure for a director who markedly shuns self-reflexivity and who is thought to keep politics at bay. Although Rohmer's adaptations have incorporated a wide range of artificial materials, including visual and audio references ranging from paintings and plays to cardboard trees, film footage has been conspicuously absent. In Triple Agent, momentous political news and change blast intermittently throughout in stark contrast to this chamber-like espionage drama, the interplay between the archive and theater bringing to the fore ontological issues that have always preoccupied Rohmer, namely, the status of the real and of documentary in cinema. Documents and artifacts have a time-capsule role in Rohmer's second-degree realism. Cinema, as an instrument of witnessing, preservation, and archiving is inseparable from Rohmer's attraction to history. He reconstitutes "what would have been produced if cinema existed," 2 ostensibly compensating for the lack of photographic record of a given time as he does, for instance, when he filters the Paris of the French Revolution through eighteenth-century landscape painting in The Lady and the Duke. [End Page 88] What happens once Rohmer recreates a time when cinema exists and he can thereby include, within his fictional thirties, a perspective other than his own, a broader witnessing viewpoint? What is the nature and effect of the newsreels' mediation, and does the actualities' irrevocable contingency, barely keeping up with the incredible popular energies sparked by the Popular Front, give a new slant to Rohmer's typically oblique approach to politics? 3 The Agent's audience Triple Agent's newsreel track starts with the news of Léon Blum's victory, and it covers events up to 1938; it ends with an abridged newsreel montage of events from the 1939 Munich Pact to 1943. The film is based on the actual story of a white Russian agent, General Nikolai Skoblin, named Fiodor Voronin in the film. It consists of a series of lengthy conversations between the protagonist, his communist neighbors, and members of the Association of White Russian army émigrés. Fiodor's fantastic political scenarios regarding his activities, his comings and goings, and the power maneuvers involving the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the White Russian community are addressed mainly to Arsinoé, his wife and main interlocutor. Originally a famous Russian singer, here she is Greek, and a middling painter. Rohmer was interested in Skoblin's story for its potential to revolve entirely around the on dit (rumor). In Shanghai on the Metro, Michael Miller relays that none of the secret groups operating in Europe after the First World War were comparable to the White Russians in levels of conspiracy and extravagant allegation. 4 It is this conspiratorial aspect of interwar international espionage, with its obfuscation of political consequence, that appeals to Rohmer's experiments with a closed-off storytelling style. This convoluted intrigue—we later...