French Film Critics Research Articles

Analysis of Technological Development and Enhancement in Modern Film Noir

This paper explores the visual and technological evolution of film noir, particularly the transition from classic to modern film noir. Originally defined by French film critics, film noir is known for its distinctive low-key lighting and strong visual contrasts, emphasizing a mysterious and dramatic visual presentation. The article first compares low-key lighting in traditional and modern film noir, highlighting modern advancements in controlling lighting and shadows. It then examines color usage in both eras, noting modern noir’s use of low saturation and vivid colors for enhanced emotional impact. Lastly, it explores modern technology’s role in restoring classic film noir, emphasizing high-resolution scanning and digital processing for improved visual and auditory quality while preserving artistic style. These analyses underscore film noir’s adaptation to technological advancements in global cinema. Through these analyses, the paper reveals how film noir has adapted to technological advancements to maintain its significant place in global cinematic art. Nonetheless, it acknowledges limitations, primarily focusing on visual and technological aspects while neglecting potential socio-cultural, political, and economic influences on the genre. Future research could address these gaps by exploring interdisciplinary perspectives and incorporating quantitative methods to provide a more comprehensive understanding of film noir’s evolution.

Blue Boys: Maurice Pialat, Nicolas Poussin and the Work of Art

Maurice Pialat (1925–2003) in his Libération article “Éloge de Poussin” (1987) tells us that cinema has made no progress since the Lumière brothers’ first projected images. Provocatively, he informs his readers that only painting has progressed and, as such, remains the far more innovative art form. For all the pointed remarks directed with some force towards French film critics and filmmakers, Pialat’s short notes in Libé offer us something more. It is one of the few opportunities to consider the auteur’s critical and aesthetic approaches to filmmaking. While Pialat emphasises the failure of critics and filmmakers to elevate cinema to the level of art, the article more saliently invites us to analyse Pialat’s understanding of cinematic practice as an intricate enfolding of painterly and cinematic concepts. In this article I contend that, through a reading of the theoretical dimensions Pialat introduces in his “elegy” to the Classicist painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), along with an analysis of a selection of the director’s films, we not only discover Pialat’s film-philosophy; moreover, we discover new ways to study Pialat’s acute rendering of fraught manhood. Significantly, I argue, Pialat’s wrestling with masculinity (fatherhood, sexual desire, boyhood, and so on) reveals itself through a key element critical to Poussin’s aesthetic palette: the colour blue.

Male gaze : le devenir absent du concept

The article questions the becoming of the concept of the “male gaze” theorized by Laura Mulvey, through the study of its reception among French and Francophone thinkers. Written in close dialogue with Freudian psychoanalysis, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) indicates that the ideological stakes of representation go beyond the content of what is shown to reveal how the unshown is inserted between the form and the unconscious. The question that arises is whether there are viable conceptual alternatives to the critique of male gaze, such as the notion of “female gaze.” My hypothesis is that, given certain resistances encountered about the male gaze in critical literature, it is important to question the conditions of the exclusion of the female gaze, both as a concept and as a phenomenon that can be identified within artistic forms. Since Mulvey’s intellectual trajectory was deeply marked by her encounter with French film critics, the article examines more broadly the reception of her theoretical proposals in the French-speaking area.

The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968–1973) by Daniel Fairfax

Reviewed by: The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968–1973) by Daniel Fairfax David Fresko (bio) The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968–1973) by Daniel Fairfax. University of Amsterdam Press. 2021. 2 vols. 880 pages. $250.00 hardcover; also available in open access e-book. Reading Daniel Fairfax's The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968–1973), a spirited, brilliantly researched, and cogently written reevaluation of the militant period of the world's most famous French-language film magazine, is to be reminded of a time when film theory, practice, and politics were conceived as one. The year 1968 has long been mythologized in France as a rupture that brought the country to the brink of revolution and radicalized a generation; it also transformed French film criticism into a political enterprise above all through the efforts of Cahiers du cinéma. While the narrative of Cahiers du cinéma's revolution from an avatar of postwar cinephilia, which launched the careers of François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette as part of the French New Wave, into a radical organ of ideological struggle by the end of the 1960s is well known, it has only been available in piecemeal fashion to Anglophone readers. Fairfax not only synthesizes preexisting literature on the subject in French and English but also provides the opportunity to assess anew the theoretical nuances of this attempt to create a Marxist materialist theory of cinema and society. To this end, Fairfax addresses three key questions about Cahiers du cinéma's political project. First, how did it attempt to intervene in its contemporary historical moment? Second, how did it help shape the development of film theory in the Anglo-American world? And third, how might these texts illuminate not only the cinema in the decades since but also our contemporary audiovisual ecology? [End Page 203] The saga of Cahiers du cinéma in addition to its significance for the development of film studies has been abundantly covered by scholarship on the subject, above all across four volumes of English-language translations consisting of 131 articles and featuring in-depth overviews by their editors as well as a two-volume history in French penned by Antoine de Baecque.1 Despite drawing extensively on the work of Nick Browne and Bérénice Reynaud, who authored introductions covering the years 1969 to 1978, Fairfax faults existing literature on the Red Years for two reasons. On the one hand, Fairfax claims that English-language overviews of film theory tend to reduce Cahiers du cinéma's theoretical contributions to four widely anthologized articles—"Cinéma/idéologie/critique" ("Cinema/Ideology/Criticism") by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, portions of Comolli's six-part series "Technique et idéologie" ("Technique and Ideology"), the editorial collective's analysis of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), and Jean-Pierre Oudart's two-part essay "La suture" ("Cinema and Suture")—in order to subsume their influence within a subset of the so-called discourse of political modernism now commonly referred to as apparatus theory.2 On the other hand, de Baecque understands the Red Years to be a stain on the magazine's reputation. Having rejected cinephilia as well as the conceptual legacies of its co-founder and first editor-in-chief, André Bazin, in favor of Althusserian Marxism, according to de Baecque, Cahiers du cinéma only regained its proper footing at the beginning of the 1980s when it once again became a more conventional film magazine. To be sure, the Red Years left its critics "bruised, even traumatized," according to Fairfax, but the experience is to be more properly understood he writes as "a mixture of nostalgia and regret, bitterness and exhilaration."3 Fairfax interweaves these two interventions, building his chief arguments around dismantling Cahiers du cinéma's contemporary position within Anglo-American histories of film theory and recovering a Bazinian investment in ontological realism at the height of its militancy. Disentangling the multiple threads woven by Anglo-American film theory into apparatus theory allows Fairfax to distinguish false equivalencies made between Cahiers du cinéma...

Femme Fatale in French Film Noir

The term film noir was coined by two French film critics Borde and Chaumenton in 1956 to describe American detective stories mode in the 1940s. Noir films were seen as a counter-cultural movement within Hollywood at that time, and the French new wave continued this feature in the 1960s. Therefore, the term noir itself connects the Frenchness and Americanness. This paper tends to map out the film noir sensibilities in French content through unfolding the characteristics of femme fatale in two French noir films Jean-Luc Godards A bout de souffle (Breathless) (1960) and Jean-Jacques Beineixs Diva (1981).

A moda retrô e a fascinação com o nazismo: <i>Lacombe Lucien</i> e a crítica de cinema francesa

Quando Louis Malle escolheu colocar nas telas o tema da cooptação do jovem camponês Lacombe Lucien (1974) em vez de frisar a resistência francesa, ele adentrou num campo minado com a crítica de cinema da revista Cahiers du Cinéma. Num contexto de crescente politização, a publicação dedicou ao filme artigos em torno das teorias da enunciação, da semiologia, da criação de estereótipos e especialmente em torno da onda retrô. Por mais de um ano, o cineasta foi acusado de estar fascinado pelo nazismo ao invés de denunciá-lo. O assunto tabu para os franceses acendeu um debate intenso entre Pascal Bonitzer, Serge Daney, Pascal Kané, Serge Toubiana, Michel Foucault e Marc Ferro, que analisamos nesse artigo para ampliar a compreensão da metodologia da crítica de cinema francesa daquele momento.

Les Midinettes Révolutionnaires

In their quest for official and cultural recognition, French First Wave critics such as Louis Delluc discursively positioned the working-class female cinemagoer as emblematic of the sorry state of unsophisticated French film audiences. From this discourse came the stereotype of the starry-eyed midinette, which is still used by French film critics to describe lowbrow film taste and an overly emotional mode of spectatorship. This essay attempts to reconstruct the social practice of cinemagoing among the midinettes of 1920s working-class Paris by focusing on the female fans of the serial Les deux gamines (1921). Both a critique of intellectual cinephilia as a cultural discourse and a geographically specific retrieval of the multiple ways in which socioeconomically and culturally marginalized audiences interacted with the cinema, this historical study repositions young women from working-class neighborhoods as key actors in film culture—fans, but also social activists. Through a study of disparate, unpublished archival material, including fan letters, film programs, and announcements in the leftist press, this essay attends to the social realities of a number of female film fans in Montmartre and grounds their spectatorship spatially within their local communities.

New Cinema, New Critique: French Film Criticism at the Crossroads, 1960

New Cinema, New Critique: French Film Criticism at the Crossroads, 1960

Editorial

Editorial Drake Stutesman Situate This is a focus in Framework vol. 57, no. 2, as each author concentrates on newly situating their subjects. Besides the topics themselves—jazz, French film criticism, video history, adaptations, and experimental cinema—the writers’ examination of small details in these subjects that are not typically examined is fascinating. The writers ask questions: How are these facts and ideas situated in our culture, and why would we look at them? How do they fit into a longer view? Teresa Heffernan’s “When the Movie Is Better Than the Book: Fight Club, Consumption, and Vital Signs” examines the film Fight Club as “better than the book” and digs into reasons that go beyond a comparison of content, positing that reasons answers lie in why “origins and sources … should continue to haunt adaptation theory.” In “The Film That Almost Was: John Fowles’s ‘The Black Thumb’ and His Collaboration with David Tringham,” also about novel-film adaptation, Michelle Phillips Buchberger links the screen work of novelist John Fowles, whose writing dominated some important films of the 1960s and 1980s, to his struggles with the studio machine. Matthias Mushinski, in his detailed essay, “Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life as a Free Jazz Critic/Thinking Free Jazz as an Avant-Garde of the Masses,” uncovers jazz influences in 1950s French film criticism. Christopher Robé’s “Criminalizing Dissent: Western State Repression, Video Activism, and Counter-Summit Protests” reveals an involved and persistent history of video activism, through an analysis of specific moments, which, he argues, have a key importance and are precursors to major movements today, such as Black Lives Matter. Scott MacDonald’s interview [End Page 89] with the “Orpheus of Nitrate,” Bill Morrison, looks closely at the lesser-known world of Morrison’s filmmaking origins, discussing how Morrison developed his ability to take a tiny detail in celluloid footage and resituate it, allowing the viewer to see it differently. [End Page 90] Copyright © 2016 Wayne State University Press

The Fragile Present: Statues Also Die with Night and Fog

Although the phrase le cinéma moderne is a leitmotif in midcentury French film criticism, the shapes and ambitions assigned to the modern aesthetic have remained difficult to pin down. My article positions this slippery term in relation to early work by two figures who have become emblematic of this postwar moment, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. In exploring continuities between their reflection on African art under colonialism in the long-censored short Statues Also Die (1953) and the analysis of the Nazi camp system in their subsequent project Night and Fog (1956), I examine how an influential conception of cinematic modernity emerges from an associative practice that brings together images, issues, and moments in time. The modern here is the product of a montage-driven approach to form, but it also expresses anti-fascist political convictions that transcend the limits of the Second World War.

Des hommes et des dieux by Xavier Beauvois

The third edition underwent several revisions, one of which is the replacement of the explication de texte with the commentaire composé in order to better reflect pedagogical trends in France. The increased clarity with which the commentaire composé is presented, including titled subsections, may well facilitate students’ comprehension of the sample text and their ability to construct a similar analysis. Another change to content in the third edition is a new text on ecology as the sample dissertation text. The relevance of this topic in both American and European societies will hopefully increase students’ interest and participation as they progress through one of the more difficult chapters of the book. A final update worth noting is the mention of E-mail practices in the correspondence chapter. Addressing E-mail usage is an essential addition to this chapter, as many students’ initial questions about correspondence concern such practices. However, the information is minimal, and sample E-mails would be useful and interesting counterpoints to the sample letters. Tâches d’encre lends itself to a variety of teaching contexts and would offer valuable structure to a traditional composition course, a course fusing composition , grammar and/or culture, or a writing workshop that centers on peer-review and editing. The wide variety of genres covered provides variety as well as an indepth presentation of writing in French; the presence of sample texts and ample relevant vocabulary inspires confidence in intermediate students in need of guided practice, and the focus on providing students with the tools to improve their own writing is conducive to a student-centered classroom. Ohio State University Elizabeth Bishop Film edited by Michèle Bissière BEAUVOIS, XAVIER, réal. Des hommes et des dieux. Int. Lambert Wilson, Michael Lonsdale, Olivier Rabourdin. Armada, 2010. When Xavier Beauvois’s Des hommes et des dieux came out in France in fall 2010, it met with unexpected box-office success. Playing for weeks in both art and popular theaters, French film critics had only praise for the film, which took the Grand Prix du jury at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival and won a César for best picture in February 2011. Des hommes et des dieux is a film about eight Catholic monks who live an extremely austere life in a mountain monastery of Algeria, serving God and the people of the small Islamic community there. Clocking in at two hours, the documentary-style film moves at a very slow pace, methodically recording the monks’ day-to-day activities which involve much chanting and prayer, presented almost always in their entirety, studying religious texts (one of the monks reads, writes and speaks Arabic and has a deep appreciation of the Koran), providing free medical care to the local inhabitants, and working the land and selling the fruits of their labor at the market. They are also integrated into the rituals of Islam, as they participate in local religious ceremonies and celebrations in the village. But an ominous tone is set from beginning of the film when the monks are in conference with some local Muslim men frightened by the murders of a favorite imam and an eighteen year-old girl who was not wearing a 612 FRENCH REVIEW 85.3 hijab. “We don’t know who is killing who,” they lament. Shortly thereafter in one of the film’s few violent scenes, men empty out of cars at a construction site shooting and slitting the throats of Croatian immigrant workers. When the authorities bring the news of the slaughter to the monastery, they strongly encourage the monks to accept their armed protection. Though visibly shaken, the monks refuse the offer. For the rest of the film, we follow each monk in his struggle to decide whether to stay or to leave the monastery. Ultimately, all decide to stay and all but two are killed, beheaded presumably by a terrorist group. Based on the true story of the Tibhirine monks who were abducted and murdered in Algeria in 1996 as the civil war was raging there, the film is not about really about the then current political situation in Algeria in which Algerian citizens could not be sure if Islamist fundamentalists or...

Lines of Flight: Jean-Daniel Pollet, Méditerranée, and the Tel Quel Group

It may be that Richard Roud’s designation of what he termed “Left Bank cinema” was intended as much to provoke reflection on the consequences of classification as to name a particular group of three post-war French filmmakers (Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker) with obvious intellectual and aesthetic affinities. Why else would Roud begin his 1962 essay on the Left Bank with the claim that classification “proves nothing and is only valuable if it tells us more about what is being classified” (24)? Perhaps the time has come to ask whether the distinction between a Left Bank group and the Nouvelle Vague still “tells us more” about the films and filmmakers under discussion. What other questions are deferred by the goal of categorization? Which films and filmmakers fall out of film histories because they cannot fit neatly into either category? Bracketing the question of classification allows films of the period to be inserted into broader thematics and debates that touch on multiple aspects of post-war French film culture. For a case of critical neglect, it would be difficult to find a better example than Jean-Daniel Pollet’s Mediterranee (1963), an experimental short subject hardly known outside France, but which played a crucial role in the development of film theory from the 1960s to the early 1970s. For French film critics, the importance of Mediterranee stems from its adaptation of experimental writing practices associated with the nouveau roman to the medium of film. Due in part to Pollet’s collaboration with avant-garde novelist and literary theorist Philippe Sollers, who wrote the voice-over commentary, the film became a primary example of revolution ary film practice during the period preceding and immediately following the events of May 1968, when literary theorists linked to the avant-garde journal Tel Quel made their first, highly influential forays into the field of film theory. Core members of the Tel Quel group—including Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, and Jean-Louis Baudry—all published articles and interviews discussing Mediterranee, collectively provoking a

From Louis Feuillade to Johnny To: Olivier Assayas on the future of French Cinema

From Louis Feuillade to Johnny To:Olivier Assayas on the future of French Cinema Louise Shea Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996) centres on an aging French director's remake of Louis Feuillade's crime serial Les Vampires (1915). Matters are complicated, however, when the director, René Vidal (Jean Pierre Léaud), decides to cast a Hong Kong actress, Maggie Cheung, in the role of France's great silent star, Musidora. What began as a fairly straightforward project, the revival of a silent-era classic, turns into a complex reflection on the origins of French cinema and its future in an increasingly globalized world. Two questions demand attention: Why Feuillade? and, Why Hong Kong? In a film about the status of France's national cinema in the 1990s, why make Feuillade's crime serial stand for the quintessential French film of the silent era? And why look to Hong Kong to renew French cinema? Critics have by and large overlooked the first question, and responded to the second by focusing on the figure of Maggie Cheung, analyzing her as the fetishised, oriental other or as a symbol of France's failed encounter with the world. I hope to complicate the question by asking not, "Why Maggie Cheung?" but, "Why Hong Kong cinema?" and more specifically, "Which Hong Kong cinema?" I show that although Irma Vep explicitly associates Hong Kong cinema with Johnny To's 1993 cult action film, Tong fond sam hop/The Heroic Trio, it wilfully misreads Johnny To's fantasy film by filtering it through the lens of the more classical wu xia pian (swordplay) films of King Hu, thereby transforming the popular Heroic Trio into an art film. I argue that by cross-breeding Feuillade with Johnny To/ King Hu, Assayas creates an alternative to Hollywood's own attempt to cross Hong Kong and European cinema, a hybrid represented in Irma Vep by the action film Hard Target (1993), Hong Kong director John Woo's first Hollywood film, starring Jean Claude Van Damme. [End Page 121] Why Feuillade? The filming of Irma Vep coincided with the centennial celebration of the birth of cinema, and in such a context, one can readily see how Feuillade might stand for the (distinctly French) splendor of early filmmaking. Grace An identifies his work with "the glorious past of French cinema," (An 2000, 299) while Dale Hudson associates the remake with "a larger project of reasserting national patrimony" (Hudson 2006, 220). Yet the choice of Feuillade as the representative of French cinema strikes me as more than a little odd. Feuillade enjoyed a brief moment of glory under the Surrealists, but his vast cinematic production (over 800 films) had been largely forgotten by the early 1930s. It was not until the 1950s, when Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque française restored a number of his prints and promoted his legacy, that he once again gained the attention of spectators and critics alike.1 In other words, Feuillade, as we shall see, is not so much an icon of early French cinema as a complex and disputed sign, whose status within the canon of French film was neither immediate nor uncontested. Given this history, wouldn't the Lumière brothers or Méliès have provided a more apt subject for a celebration of the Frenchness of cinema? Why Feuillade? There are, I would argue, two related answers to this question. Both concern the disputed history of Feuillade's integration into the canon of great French directors, and revolve around two debates that lay at the heart of France's early attempts at defining a national cinema, debates that find deep resonance in Assayas' work. The first concerns the respective merits of popular and art house cinema; the second the relationship between French cinema and its global competition. Keen to elevate cinema above its status as a fairground entertainment and crown it as the septième art, early French film critics took it upon themselves to demarcate the films of Feuillade, which they considered popular forms of entertainment, from what one might call the art films of the day. They took Feuillade to task for pandering to the tastes of the masses...

Everybody's Noir Humanism: Chester Himes, Lonely Crusade , and The Quality of Hurt

Like Chester Himes, James Baldwin helped invent the noir sensibility at midcentury. In 1949, a young Baldwin published Everybody's Protest Novel, a famous indictment of so-called fiction and its most influential, most monstrous progeny, Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). Critics generally regard this essay as a rejection of the Marxist politics of Wright's naturalism--its insuperable confusion of literature and sociology--and an endorsement of psychological in the Jamesian mode (Baldwin 19). Baldwin's verdict? Fewer pamphlets, more novels. But the essay also crafts a surprising noir archive of sentimental politics, one that aligns the theological of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the tragedy of Bigger Thomas with liberal Hollywood's postwar penchant for problem pictures and the lurid prose of James M. Cain (Baldwin 15). As Baldwin stumps for fiction devoted to the disquieting complexity of the human being, he condemns the violence done to humanity by the spurious emotion of sentimentality joining far-flung cultural products: Both Gentleman's Agreement [dir. Elia Kazan, 1947] and The Postman Always Rings Twice [dir. Tay Garnett, 1946] exemplify this terror of the human being, the determination to cut him down to size. And in Uncle Tom's Cabin we find the foreshadowing of both (Baldwin 15, 14, 16). Unlike properly psychological fiction, Baldwin insists, novels are fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental; in exactly the same sense that such movies as The Best Years of Our Lives [dir. William Wyler, 1946] or the works of James M. Cain are fantasies.... The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe (20). In joining the violent inhumanity of nineteenth-century novels like Stowe's to that of their hard-boiled descendants like Wright and Cain, and to Hollywood's new glut of anonymous, statistically average Joes, Baldwin anticipates recent critical arguments about the shared sentimental genealogy of the hard-boiled novel and the film noir--the despairing turn towards sociological realism in postwar Hollywood that French film critics discovered on the heels of the Nazi Occupation, and at the dawn of the American Century (14). (1) Noir is of course an infamously fuzzy category, a broad discursive formation that consolidated at midcentury, but stretched long before and after its French invention. Paradoxically, the terms of Baldwin's essay sharpen this point by obscuring the matter even further: in 1949, the fiction of Cain, Stowe, and Wright, and the films of Wyler and Kazan, would be perceived as being part of a widespread, vaguely noir sensibility, extending across media, and defined for Baldwin by a shared inhumanity--a noir humanism. In this essay, I consider Himes's own social protest novel Lonely Crusade (1947) in a broader constellation of noir humanism--a phrase I use to describe a particular convergence of psychologizing tendencies at midcentury. Noir humanism yielded a universalizing, quasi-anthropological picture of the human condition as marked by pervasive emotional insecurity, and in Himes's work more particularly, by the violence of sentimental categorization and the exclusionary political formulas of postwar U. S. democracy. Himes's place in the noir tradition is well established, secured by the French publication of his Harlem Domestic cycle in Gallimard's legendary Serie noire, and critically cemented by many superb recent critical studies. (2) Less well understood is the role of Lonely Crusade in Himes's noir vision as crystallized in the postwar period. Often described as Himes's most accomplished or complex novel, a damning kind of praise that has probably helped consign the book to critical oblivion, Lonely Crusade is a messy book, ideologically speaking. Himes put more bluntly in The Quality of Hurt: Everyone hated it.... The left hated it, the right hated it, Jews hated it, blacks hated it (221). …

French Film Criticism and Cultural Hegemony: the Perpetual French ‘Discovery’ of Le Cinéma Des Antipodes

The exoticism of the Antipodes has for centuries been a major focal point of European fantasy. French critical reception of Australian cinema, and French constructions of Australian cultural identity, reflect the enduring popular image in France of an Australia that is a cultural as well as a geographical opposite – an orientalist relationship that ensures European centricity as much as it perpetuates the marginalisation of Australian cultural identity. The theme of perpetual discovery that emerges in French critical writing on Australian film is indicative of a sustained cultural marginalisation as much as a practical and commercial marginality. Similarly, Australian as well as French organisations, in their attempt to create a niche market in France for what is labelled the Cinéma des Antipodes, perpetuate the notion that each and every identifiably Australian film offers the potential for a fresh European ‘discovery’ of the Antipodes.

Jerry Lewis: The Deformation of the Comic

This comment, made during the publicity junket undertaken by Burroughs and Cronenberg to publicise the film of Naked Lunch, says much about the peculiar reputation of Lewis. Burroughs deems it appropriate that the French Order of Arts and Letters should include a wife-murdering ex-addict novelist and a maker of visceral horrorfests, but Lewis-comedian, film-maker, and Telethon-host-cannot be tolerated within such exalted company. Rarely has a public media figure been so deeply loved, and so intensively and so easily vilified. If art is in the eye of the beholder, what is that art that can frame the fearful dissymmetries of Lewis-his spastic physical contortions, his pretensions to godhead? The extremism that marks Lewis's public reputation-as man or myth, genius or embarrassment-began in the 1960s, when, following hot on the heels of the heretical politique des auteurs, French film critics launched their most devastating broadside yet against the fortress of traditional evaluative criteria. In 1967, for example, Jean-Luc Godard had the nerve to proclaim that Jerry Lewis ... [is] the only one in Hollywood doing something different, the only one who isn't falling in with the established categories, the norms, the principles. .... Lewis is the only one today who's making courageous films. And I think he's perfectly well aware of it. He's been able to do it because of his genius.2 Like many other French film critics of the 1960s, Godard was perfectly well aware of the scandal of celebrating Lewis's personal genius. Faced with such heady European validation of the comediandirector, even Andrew Sarris, the most ardent American auteurist, felt obliged to restore some sanity to the proceedings. In his 1968 book The American Cinema, Sarris fired off a 12-pronged salvo against Lewis's value-as-an-artist, and against the French critics' fundamental error of taste and judgement.3 But Lewis had himself fanned the flames of the contro-

From Hitler to Hepburn: A Discussion of Women's Film Production and Reception

Lenssen: Most of them refuse any models. Helma Sanders-Brahms is one of the exceptions and says she owes stylistic elements to Godard. Most of our women filmmakers started making films before any of us heard about Dorothy Arzner or read any American or French film criticism. Furthermore, many of us read about Arzner and Yvonne Rainer before we could even see any of their films. So the limited influence by women filmmakers has been primarily theoretical. As to the influence of men, I think that the misogyny of the German male filmmakers has been so great, that the women have simply had to ignore them as possible models. It's typical of a general cultural problem in West Germany. This is why our women filmmakers have been less attached to models than American women.