Le Crime Research Articles

Le crime à deux, la folie à deux : Étude du mécanisme de contagion. À propos de l’article de Paul Moreau de Tours : « Le crime à deux » paru en 1893 dans le numéro 18 des Annales Médico-Psychologiques

Eldest son of Jacques Moreau de Tours, Paul Moreau de Tours followed in his father's footsteps and chose a career as an alienist, first at La Salpêtrière and then at the Maison de Santé in Ivry. He was president of the Société Médico-Psychologique in 1885. His work was extensive, and among his various topics, the themes of suicide and criminology were both, in some cases, underpinned by the phenomenon of person-to-person contagion, highlighting the role of the Press as a contributing factor. In this article “le crime à deux”, published in issue 18 of the Annales Médico-Psychologiques in 1893, he draws an analogy with the concept of “folie à deux” as described by Jules Falret and Charles Lasègue, by studying the mechanism of contagion.

Rediscovering Guy Gilles, pioneer of queer

ABSTRACT This article positions Guy Gilles (1938–1996), an overlooked filmmaker at the periphery of the French New Wave, as an important pioneer of queer cinema. Situating Gilles in the context of the French gay liberation movement and the militant gay cinema of the 1970s, it brings the director in dialogue with the French philosopher, writer and activist Guy Hocquenghem, whose advocacy of a polyvocal sexual desire resonates with Gilles’s interrogation of traditional sexual taxonomies. Gilles’s fluid vision of sexuality is analysed in two seminal films, Absences répétées/Repeated Absences (1972) and Le Crime d’amour/For Love (1981), which crystallise the director’s exploration of non-normative desires and queer aesthetic. Reclaiming Gilles’s place in the wider genealogy of French queer cinema, the article seeks to contribute to the long-overdue rediscovery of this highly original director, who remains largely unknown in Film and Visual Studies.

Engine of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Anne Hidalgo’s twenty-first-century mayoral plans for turning Paris into the “fifteen-minute city” remind us of the spatiotemporal effects that public transportation can have on our urban experience—and of the contingency of today’s vehicular forms, from bicycles and cars to buses and trains. We are well aware of the key date of 1900 for the development of the Paris métropolitain system and because the Métro continues to provide rapid transit, it tends to overshadow previous models for communal urban transportation in the public imaginary. It is tempting to take the teleological view of transportation as a progressive development from oxcarts and galleys to airplanes and supersonic jets. Within that history, the horse-drawn omnibus that ferried small groups of passengers across the streets of Paris from 1828 to 1913 would seem merely a transitional mode, a hiccup before the propulsive advent of engines. Indeed, if we look backward to the nineteenth century through the critical prism of what David Harvey calls the “time-space compression” of postmodernity—or through the historical lens of what Mathieu Flonneau identifies as the democratization of the city under the “automobile revolution” of the Trente glorieuses, the omnibus might appear as a pale preface to modern, efficient modes of transport—akin, perhaps, to the kinetoscope as a quaint proto-version of cinematic technology.Such thinking would sell the omnibus short—something I would have been likely to do before reading Masha Belenky’s lively and well-researched book Engine of Modernity. In Belenky’s account, the omnibus emerges not just as an eclipsed precursor to the eventual acceleration of modernity but as itself already embodying that acceleration. In fact—and this is a nuanced, intriguing point that Belenky’s book develops convincingly—it is precisely because the omnibus was becoming swiftly obsolete that it registered in the popular cultural imaginary as the perfect symbol of the (Baudelairean) éphémère, of everyday life’s “provisional, transitory and fragmented nature,” and of sped-up anxieties about gender and class mixing in the capital city even before the changes wrought by Haussmannization (3). The etymological meaning of omnibus, “for everybody,” set up a horizon of democratization evoking responses of both hope and despair, with low-cost lines transgressing topographical boundaries and creating interior spaces where different classes, genders, and races rubbed elbows in new ways. Belenky harnesses a wealth of archival documents to support her analysis of the new mode’s sociological dynamics; one of the book’s pleasures lies in its black-and-white and color illustrations of omnibus-related caricatures, paintings, postcards, press clippings, advertisements, vaudeville songs, fashion, and even a board game.Engine of Modernity is more, however, than a cultural history of a mode of transport. Belenky’s book proposes the thesis that the omnibus not only fundamentally changed the material conditions of urban life as a “motor” of new sociabilities but also inspired innovations in literary form. As both vehicle and storytelling device with “powerful figurative and self-reflexive potential” the omnibus became a “super-topos” marked by heterogeneity (5, 165). In physiologies, story collections, popular vaudevilles, and more canonical works like Zola’s La Curée, the logic of chance encounters defines both the content and the mode of writing. Belenky deftly crosses the lines between intra- and extra-diegesis to trace a repertoire of recurring features in middlebrow tales of transit, including first-person narration by an “omnibus flâneur,” urban description, marriage plots, and themes of estrangement or connection in the enclosed space of the omnibus car. Bourgeois anxieties about a society in flux get staged through everything from an overturned omnibus turned revolutionary barricade in Hugo’s Les Misérables to the alienating sensory experience of working-class passengers emitting pungent smells in the cramped space of the omnibus in Maupassant’s short story “La Dot.” And in other literary texts, the bodily realities of sloppy wet nurses and bulky crinoline skirts crystallize wider discourses about transgressive female behavior and women’s bodies in public space, which Belenky usefully situates within critical work by scholars like Griselda Pollock, Catherine Nesci, Sharon Marcus, Marni Kessler, Temma Balducci, and Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. Engine of Modernity ends cleverly with a “final stop” addressing fin de siècle ambivalence about the omnibus as an emblem of urban modernity and mobility: Fortuné du Bosgovey’s Le Crime de l’omnibus and Zola’s Au bonheur des dames call attention to its violent dangers, while Octave Uzanne’s article “Omnibus de Paris” provides a nostalgic elegy for this mode of transport as it nears definitive obsolescence. Belenky’s book is a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in the rich, intertwined histories of literary mobility and transportation technology of the nineteenth century—a subject that continues to flourish, as evidenced by Kari Weil’s newly published Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France and Seth Whidden and Corry Cropper’s forthcoming Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France.

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’sAusterlitz

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’s<i>Austerlitz</i>

Reading the News, from Maupassant to Freud

Abstract This article takes as its subject the shorter fictions of Guy de Maupassant — in particular ‘Jadis’ (1880), ‘L’Ami Joseph’ (1883), ‘Le Crime au père Boniface’ (1884), and ‘Le Protecteur’ (1884) — and considers the representation of newspapers and their readers in light of critical and historical writing by Carlo Ginzburg and Naomi Schor. It explores the connections between Maupassant’s portrait of the press in these shorter works and that offered by Sigmund Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904), but does not do so in an attempt to pursue a psychoanalytic reading of Maupassant’s fiction. Rather, Maupassant and Freud are analysed as part of a reflection on the cultural history of journalism over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article argues that both writers draw attention to the mistakes or slips that creep into the simple act of reading the news. From Paris to Vienna, depictions of newspapers and readers reveal the traces of a set of deeper anxieties about the influence of the mass press on daily life — anxieties about the gap between fame and anonymity, and the distance of the past from the present.

Cinematic Timekeeper: Bertrand Tavernier and L'Horloger de Saint-Paul

Cinematic Timekeeper:Bertrand Tavernier and L'Horloger de Saint-Paul Jennifer Forrest Film scholars have interpreted Bertrand Tavernier's first feature film L'Horloger de Saint-Paul (1974) as having "clearly signalled his rejection of the nouvelle vague" in favor of a return to a more classical aesthetic reminiscent of the post-World War II Tradition of Quality (Forbes 153). One of the primary elements determining this judgement was Tavernier's co-authoring of the film script with Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, the writing team singled out by Cahiers du cinéma critic François Truffaut in "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" (1954) as representing the worst of 1950s film. Fixing the tensions of the stance taken by Tavernier in terms of the opposition cinéma de papa versus Nouvelle vague, however, reveals that the director found himself in a position similar to that of his protagonist Michel Descombes, whose moral and political options appear constrained by a Solomon's choice of either a conservative or progressive response to his son's murder of a factory "policeman." The third option chosen by both Tavernier (and Descombes) is that of the iconoclast who "sera sans système, sans règles organiques, hétéroclite et vivant," to use the description of the director by his lifelong friend Volker Schlöndorff (7).1 One contemporary Claude Beylie praised Tavernier for this deft sidestepping of an inflexible and deceptive dichotomy: "[c]e film nous permet enfin de sortir de la fausse alternative vieux cinema—jeune cinéma. Il n'aurait jamais dû y avoir d'un côté le cinéma de papa, de l'autre le cinéma des fils à papa" (6). Like Descombes, who resists pressure to adopt and thereby validate a world view promoted by the various ideological forces on the right and the left, Tavernier resisted the pressure to choose either the cinema of fathers or that of sons, making his own path in choosing citizenship in the community of French film and filmmakers. [End Page 103] The film's story turns precisely on the intergenerational strain between a father and his son after the latter's criminal act, a tension that mirrors the state of French cinema in the early 1970s. Descombes will spend the duration of the film closing that gap, a rapprochement figured ironically in the concluding scenes as a prison barrier through which father and son converse with surprising ease. The director, too, will determine his professional place in cinema with the production of this first feature film by declaring solidarity with classic and post-1960s cinema. In collaborating with scriptwriters associated with classic French cinema, and in adopting the practice of literary adaptation with which they were associated, the film renews ties with French cinema's past. It reaches further back than the Tradition of Quality, however, to include films and filmmakers from the interwar period, in particular scriptwriter Jacques Prévert. In dedicating his debut film to Prévert, Tavernier signaled his allegiance to a community of purpose like the one championed by Prévert, from his finishing contribution to the script for Jean Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) to the production's collaboration with members of the Groupe Octobre, of which he was a leading force, and the ethos of the Front Populaire. If this gesture looks back into the past, it also tends to cinema present and future. Tavernier's introductory offering anticipated a career of cinematic stewardship that unfolded on multiple fronts: the direction of his own films, the promotion and rehabilitation of work by other directors (Joseph Losey and Michael Powell, for example), the production of other directors' projects, scriptwriting for other directors, film history books, documentaries, and the promotion of unrecognized talent on all levels of production from scriptwriters, directors of photography, to composers. It is perhaps because he felt keenly the period's pull of cinematic political platforms that Tavernier chose to adapt Georges Simenon's L'Horloger d'Everton (1954). The director adopted the novel's fatherson theme as well as its protagonist's framing of familial bonds of shared resistance in an idiosyncratic experience of time in order...

Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, Volume One

Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, Volume One

Seattle Sightings: The Seattle International Film Festival

Reviewed by: Seattle Sightings: The Seattle International Film Festival Joan M. West Seattle Sightings: The Seattle International Film Festival, 2018. <siff.net/festival>. SIFF 44 screened some 250 features over twenty-five days in eleven main theaters (five for the entire time; six in Seattle neighborhoods and nearby communities for shorter periods). France, Belgium, Quebec, Morocco, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Benin supplied this year's selection of twenty-seven films with French connections. Interesting statistics: eight of this group accounted for forty César nominations. 30% of the group were inspired by a literary source (memoire, comic strip, graphic novel, novel). 37% of them were made by female directors, and the same percentage were debut films. Several SIFF French selections have already entered American distribution. Gauguin, voyage de Tahiti (Édouard Deluc) and Le redoutable (aka Godard, mon amour) (Michel Hazanavicius) craft portraits of two artistic giants—social rebels both—who upended the norms of their chosen forms of creative expression. Beyond the art, both directors address the destruction caused in human terms by such narcissistic prodigies. Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's Une prière avant l'aube, based on English boxer Billy Moore's memoir of his imprisonment in Thailand for drugs, yields a story of redemption after copious blood and violence. Along the same vein, Coralie Fargeat's debut film Revenge was the opening weekend midnighter. Attendees had mixed reactions: was this a feminist rape-revenge tale, a MeToo call to stand up against sexism, or just another example of New French Extremity horror (done by a woman)? Claire Denis's Un beau soleil intérieur also divided viewers: take this tale of search for true love seriously or cynically? In either case, searcher Juliette Binoche and voyant Gérard Depardieu earned plaudits. Michael R. Roskam's Le fidèle pairs Matthias Schoenaerts as a bank robber with Adèle Exarchopoulos as the professional-racecar-driver [End Page 205] daughter of a crime-connected businessman. These two bond in an irresistible, fateful passion. Even if set realistically in the criminal milieu of late 1990s Belgium and a tale drawing on conventions of the polar français and American film noir, the outlaw robber-lover's final, tragic gesture evokes that of a Romantic hero or a faithful medieval knight. Always eagerly anticipated, SIFF's archival program contained restorations of two French classics: Luis Buñuel's celebrated Belle de jour (1967) and Jean Renoir's Le crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), which the poet Jacques Prévert helped script. French schools from the Seattle area helped programming for young viewers by sponsoring Belle et Sébastien 3, le dernier chapitre (Clovis Cornillac) and two animated works. Le grand méchant renard et autres contes (Benjamin Renner, Patrick Imbert), 2018 Best Animation César, imagines a fox hatching a clutch of chicken eggs resulting in chicks who take him for their mother. Comical escapades ensue that keep "maman renard" on the run! The Franco-Belgian Zombillénium (Arthur de Pins, Alexis Ducord) animates De Pins's graphic novel about an amusement park run by real monsters pretending to be fake vampires, zombies, etc. Behind the stunning visual entertainment—tattooed teen apprentice witch Gretchen on her skateboard-broomstick, for instance—the directors include doses of social commentary, from consumerism to social caste and workers' rights, from inattentive parents and unreasonable teachers to pop culture references. Several character-centered dramas deserve mention. Sashinka (Kristina Wagen-bauer) and Le petit paysan (Hubert Charuel) share several points in common. They are debut features grounded in autobiographical elements drawn from family experiences and feature profoundly interesting, if imperfect central figures. Québecoise Wagenbauer depicts a memorable, bittersweet mother-daughter relationship. The extroverted, emotionally-needy mother, who emigrated from Russia under the illusion of furthering her singing career, re-enters her partially estranged daughter's life like a hurricane. The daughter, a singer on the eve of her big break, is sorely tasked to weather this storm. Charuel's picture (Best Actor and First Film Césars), focuses on thirty-year-old bachelor Pierre, who has taken over his parents' traditional dairy operation. Documentary-like details shot on the director's own family farm...

Hier Ist Keine Frau [No Woman Here]: Sex, Sight, and the Body between Ingeborg Bachmann and Jean Baudrillard

This is the thesis I submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the M.Phil. in European Literature at Oxford University in 2001. It is an investigation of the body in the works of the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann and the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. The thesis focuses on Bachmann's poems in Ich weis keine bessere Welt, her novel Malina, and the short story “Undine geht.” Baudrillard’s texts Simulacres et simulation and Le crime parfait provide a significant theoretical intersection with Bachmann’s writings, insofar as they interrogate techniques of representation and their effects on cultural memory and human interaction. The crucial questions are the relationships among sex, sight, and the body, and the attendant questions of memory, sexuality, and representation. Le crime parfait in many ways is a text about the disappearance of women, and how that disappearance has been effected by and through, among other things, the mass media. This is not, of course, a literal disappearance, but rather an ideological extermination, paradoxically executed in the image of woman herself. Bachmann’s meditations on and strategies around the burden of the (female) body, and the related questions of sexuality and suffering, will be the primary focus of this study. Bachmann’s techniques of dis-embodiment, acorporeality, identification across ethnic, religious, and biological lines (i.e., identification with animals), are viewed as an anticipatory engagement with, possible means of resistance against, and correction for Baudrillard’s theorizations on the replacement of history and the memory of suffering with a mass produced media loop.

Amour Fou and the Informe: Jacques Prévert, the Popular Front, and the Forestalling of a People to Come

ABSTRACTFocusing specifically on Jacques Prévert's screenplays for Jean Renoir (Le Crime de M. Lange) and Marcel Carné (Drôle de drame and Les Enfants du paradis), this essay explores the legacy of the Surrealist Movement—particularly Georges Bataille's advocacy of amour fou and the informe—on the French political left's difficulties in generating a viable politics of collective resistance during the period of the Popular Front and the immediate aftermath of Vichy defeatism.

‘Prochainement: Arizona Jim contre Cagoulard’: framing the future of the Front populaire in Jean Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936)

Gilles Deleuze remarks that Jean Renoir’s entire œuvre displays the most fundamental operation of time, constantly holding the embodied past and the potential creation of a genuinely new future in tension. Although he fails to address Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, the film that cemented Renoir’s association with the Front populaire, Deleuze tantalisingly remarks that this dialectic stems partly from Renoir’s attitude towards the Front populaire. How Deleuze’s framework allows spectators to interpret this film as an expression of Renoir’s own ambivalence regarding the future of the Front populaire has yet to be sufficiently addressed. Drawing on Ida, an unfilmed screenplay written by Renoir during the making of Lange, this article argues that Renoir mobilises his signature techniques and proto-fascist iconography to reflexively criticise local attempts to implement socialist ideals in contemporary Paris.

La sainte famille par Florence Seyvos

et passionné avec la rage de vivre et la lumière de la vérité, et surtout avec le plus grand plaisir de raconter. Il faut de nouvelles narrations à Haïti” (22). Additional topics treated in this insightful narration include a tribute to his birthplace, Cavaillon, a short treatise on Haitian voodoo, “L’île magique où les hommes et les dieux se tiennent la main” (138), and a frank examination of color bar issues that continue to divide: “Le noirisme, autant que le mulâtrisme, sont des plaies qui tuent. La République se mue en 10 millions de complexés qui se battent autour de la couleur de la peau” (191). Finally, the moving acknowledgment by Saint-Éloi in the last chapter that he owes his reading ability to his grandmother who could not read—“En fait, tu m’as donné ce que tu n’as pas. Tu m’as donné le verbe donner”(204)—reminds us all of the selfless gifts and true courage offered by so many in Haiti who give beyond their means and limitations. University of Colorado Linda Alcott Seyvos, Florence. La sainte famille. Paris: L’Olivier, 2016. ISBN 978-2-8236-0901-1. Pp. 176. The religious overtones conjured by this novel’s title give way to a more profane, visceral, and ultimately more authentic portrayal of family. Much like the messy, complicated reality of familial life, the narrative is not constrained to move in linear fashion, but rather ebbs and flows like the waters by the lake house where we observe the interactions of four generations of a mononymous clan. The home, itself perhaps the central character, serves as a grounding point in time and space, and a unifying force for a family unit gradually disintegrating. It is the setting where the novel begins and ends, a dank and dusty space inhabited by memories, peopled by generations past and present, filled with death, life, and secrets. The lake house is transformative. It is now, and then, and an indefinite in-between. It is all things to all people: the residence of the ailing arrière-grand-mère Jeanne, where she is cared for by grand-mère Marthe and spinsterly grand-tante Odette, a stopping-off point for a drunk uncle, a retreat for the divorced and depressed Hélène, and a refuge for her children Suzanne and Thomas, the youngest generation. The ambiguous narrative voice of the novel passes from an omniscient third-person to alternate between the two children as first-person narrators , allowing the reader a true 360-degree panorama of the home and those within it.We are offered many glimpses of their lives, from many angles, but are always drawn back to the home by the lake and into its baptismal waters, which seem to insulate and protect them from the world beyond its shores. From fraternal camaraderie, to first sexual experiences, to generation gaps, to suicide attempts, the most beautiful and the basest aspects of life are expressed in palpable detail through the sensory experiences of Suzanne and Thomas. Seasons change, time passes, relationships are 264 FRENCH REVIEW 91.2 Reviews 265 reshaped, and in the end Seyvos’s “holy family” becomes something wholly new, but no less sacred. Lipscomb University (TN) Danielle T. Walters Slimani, Leïla. Chanson douce. Paris: Gallimard, 2016. ISBN 978-2-070-19667-8. Pp. 227. Couronné du prix Goncourt 2016, ce deuxième ouvrage de Slimani est une sorte de roman policier mené avec une maîtrise peu commune. Le crime et le coupable s’annoncent dès les premières pages. Une mère rentre du travail plus tôt que d’habitude et découvre une scène d’horreur: ses enfants sont morts et la nounou de la famille— visiblement l’auteur des meurtres—agonise après une tentative de suicide ratée. Slimani procède ensuite au récit des événements qui précèdent le drame, principalement à travers les yeux de Myriam—épouse de Paul et mère de Mila et d’Adam, les enfants assassinés—mais aussi de ceux de Louise, la nounou que ce jeune ménage parisien de classe...

‘What we have done is shameful’: interrogating the relationship between France and its Algérie in Jean Renoir’s Le Bled (1929)

Funded to commemorate the centenary of the conquest of Algeria, Le Bled is widely dismissed as propagandist fodder and remains among the most critically neglected of Renoir’s key works. This article argues that the film marks a landmark in the director’s output for three main reasons: first of all, Le Bled was Renoir’s first attempt to criticise contemporary bourgeois society, specifically the newest generation of French immigrants to Algeria. Secondly, Renoir’s class critique is articulated through a highly politicised usage of deep staging, a technique that would form a key aspect of the director’s mise en scène during the golden age of French cinema, most notably in La Chienne (1931), Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) and La Règle du jeu (1939). Finally, Renoir’s depiction of the natural landscape as both a physical and social space foreshadows later works ranging from The Southerner (1945) to The River (1951). Key to this argument is a textual reading of Renoir’s exploitation of deep space, décor and costume design within a broader narrative framework of upper-class satire. Drawing on previously unpublished materials held at UCLA’s Jean Renoir archive, this article ultimately aims to re-evaluate Le Bled as a crucial turning point within the context of Renoir’s work.

The Monsters Next Door

The Monsters Next Door Sergio Benvenuto (bio) "What a long tortuous path she had to tread before the desperate experience of murder tore her away [déchire] from her other self . . ." —Jacques Lacan, Motifs du crime paranoïaque: Le crime des soeurs Papin (1933) December 11, 2006: Rosa Bazzi a.k.a. Rosi (domestic worker) and her husband Olindo Romano (garbage man) decide it is time for action. For some time now, they have been planning to murder their upstairs neighbor—thirty-year-old Raffaella Castagna. Raffaella's husband, the handsome Azouz Marzouk, is away in Tunisia, the country from which he emigrated, for a few days. They want to take advantage of his absence. At approximately 8 p.m., they put on kitchen gloves and open their neighbor's door with a key that had been given to them by the former tenant. Unexpectedly, Raffaella's mother is home too: Olindo kills both mother and daughter. Youssef, Raffaella's two-year-old son, cries desperately and Rosi, following her husband, lifts him by the hair and stabs him in the neck. The child bleeds to death in half an hour of agony. Rosi had it in for that child too: "that kid's always shouting," she kept repeating after she was uncovered as a murderer. The couple then set fire to various household objects and furnishings. At this point, another neighboring couple, 50-year-old Cherubini and her 60-year-old husband Frigerio, notice the smoke and head for Raffaella's front door . . . Olindo kills Mrs. Cherubini and cuts Mr. Frigerio's throat. The latter survives: after several days in a coma, he recovers and denounces his aggressor. Investigators, however, had already uncovered Olindo. After the massacre, the two murderers take off their blood-soiled clothes, and drive ten miles to the McDonald's [End Page 435] in Como, where they have burgers and are careful to keep the receipt—their alibi. They then return home satisfied. "We'll get some peace and quiet at last," they assert in relief whilst relaxing. "The lightning had struck, the wood had burned and the sun had gone out for good" (Paul Éluard, 1933, p. 28). All this takes place in a graceful farmhouse converted into a small apartment block in the center of Erba, which is a prosperous, anonymous, industrious, and Catholic town in Lombardy, close to the lake of Como. Two days after the murder, the Romanos were due to appear in court, as charges had been pressed against them. For some time, the Romanos had been accusing their upstairs neighbors of "making too much noise." Occasionally, Raffaella and Azouz would quarrel. Raffaella's father had had a layer of fitted carpet installed between his daughter's house and the hypersensitive downstairs neighbors—to no avail. One day, Olindo had brutally grabbed hold of Raffaella. As a result, she had sued him, asking for 5,000 Euros as compensation. A horrific payout! Rosi was to tell investigators: "We were furious, it was us who had been damaged, and we were being put on the dock." In addition, Rosi would also complain: "Mrs. Castagna would mock us. She always said she'd squeeze money out of us, and then throw it away, 'cause she didn't know what to do with it." Indeed, Raffaella's father, Carlo Castagna, is a well-known entrepreneur who owns a trendy furniture chain store. He is a philanthropist, too: the Castagna family is one of the most prestigious in Erba. The domestic worker and the garbage-man felt persecuted by the rich family girl with a degree in psychology. The best thing was to kill them all. They also wanted to kill Carlo Castagna, "the biggest bastard of them all." Madness? The massacre deeply struck public opinion. Crowds of holidaymakers visited the scene of the crime. The killing of little Youssef was seen as particularly horrifying. And yet, Rosi and Olindo (43 and 45 years old respectively) certainly don't have the physique du rôle of beasts: two round faces, rather dull, typical of the lower class they're part of. "Quiet people, the [End Page 436] Romanos, silent," other neighbors utter in disbelief...

The politics of popular genres in Jean Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange

ABSTRACTWhile the narrative and political ambiguities of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange have received much critical attention, the film's structuring generic tension between the Western and crime cinema has not. Through a careful manipulation of genre, Renoir attempts to construct the audience's interpretation of the film's murder as a revolutionary gesture that founds a new kind of economic and social community. This article examines the politics of popular culture in Lange and situates its revolutionary potential within the context of Popular Front France.

Jean Renoir, American Artist

Briefly compares Renoir's La Règle du jeu and Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings under the heading of "modernity" as initiating a reconsideration of Renoir's "Americanness." A confluence of America, modernity, and race is implicit in La Règle du jeu via references to Charles Lindbergh and pre-Columbian art, and a similar invocation of aviation, race, and American culture is overtly in play in Sur un Air de Charleston . Ambivalence about modernity and technology is depicted in La Bête humaine and Le crime de Monsieur Lange . Questions of America, art, race, and sexual exploitation/slavery are raised in La Chienne and Les Bas-fonds. The Woman on the Beach is described as extending Renoir's ruminations on art and sex, while it also recalls the modernity of film noir and of Renoir's earliest impressionist experiments. Interprets The Southerner and Swamp Water as culminating Renoir's interest in American race relations, if indirectly or allegorically, while attending explicitly to questions of capitalist exploitation and injustice.

Breaking the Circle: Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and the Contemporary Illegibility of the Radical Text

This article approaches Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935) in two related ways. Firstly, it shows how, responding to the entry of history into Renoir's frame, shot in "deep time", the film is structured, not by any sense of inevitability, but by a mise-en-scène of competing possibilities. Secondly, looking at important recent readings of the film, and drawing on Alain Badiou's writings, it asks whether we can still respond to truly radical texts without distancing ourselves from them or making them relativize their own positions, particularly in relation to political violence. Particular attention is paid to the murder sequence which, in its mise-en-scène of the tension between the circle and the line, condenses the film's sense of historical openness and uncertainty. Influential readings have tended to underscore how the sequence collectivizes the murder. My preference here is to emphasize how, when the hero escapes the camera's gaze, he steps into the space of the not already known.

Écrivains franco-russes ed. by Murielle Lucie Clément

the protagonists. Adnen Jdey discusses this same novel in terms of temporality, probing the nature of waiting. For the woman in love, such as Vera, waiting can be seen as both an interior esthetic and as a suspension of time. Arnaud Vareille studies sound in order to explain how acoustics metaphorically influence the development of the hero and his choice to become a writer in Confession d’un portedrapeau déchu. Ewa Malgorzata Wierzbowska and Murielle Lucie Clément consider the musicality of Makine’s novels. Wierzbowska discusses the rhythmic nature of the prose in La terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme; whereas Clément addresses the importance of feminine voices and song in Au temps du fleuve Amour. Maria Margherita Mattioda’s article explores the opposite of sound and music by pointing out the importance of silence in Le crime d’Olga Arbelina and La femme qui attendait. Mattioda posits that the reticence and silence of Olga and Vera contribute not only to the poetics of the prose, but also to defining these women for other protagonists in the novels. Thierry Laurent and Agata Sylwestrzak-Wszelaki consider the historical and geographical contexts of Makine’s novels. Laurent assesses the history of Russia moving from the Stalinist period of the Soviet Union through the democratization of the 1990s. Sylwestrzak-Wszelaki continues this discussion with the assessment of France and Russia as chronotopes in the lives of Makine’s heroes. The relative importance of one or the other country grows or diminishes within the spatiotemporal context. In articles by Stéphanie Bellemare-Page and Juliette Pétion, literary texts and genre are the focus of study. Bellemare-Page analyzes metatextuality in Makine’s novels and Pétion scrutinizes the inaccuracy of assigning the term autobiography to Le testament français. The final three articles examine Makine’s most controversial novel, Le crime d’Olga Arbélina. Tomasz Swoboda, Olga Wronska, and Ali Chibani address the incest and murder in the novel from psychological, judicial, and medical perspectives. The variety of approaches taken in this collection will, as Clément states in her introduction, open “des pistes inédites de recherche future” (7) in the study of Makine and his work. University of Wisconsin, La Crosse Leslee Poulton CLÉMENT, MURIELLE LUCIE, éd. Écrivains franco-russes. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. ISBN 978-90-420-2426-7236. Pp. 236. $63. Much has been written on African and Caribbean Francophone literature, yet little critical attention has been given to the rich literary production of Eastern European Francophone writers. In this collection of essays—one of the first of its kind—editor Murielle Lucie Clément successfully represents the extensive history of Franco-Russian literary traditions. Clément has written extensively on Andreï Makine, which perhaps inspired her to edit this survey of writers with Russian origins who chose to write in French, having immigrated to France under diverse circumstances relating largely to political, social, and religious persecution . Although Franco-Russian relations originate in the eleventh century, the authors of this volume concentrate on Franco-Russian literature dating from the nineteenth century to the present. Clément and her colleagues treat a diverse range of texts from children’s literature, travel literature, and fiction to science fiction from Henri Troyat, Vladimir Nabokov, Nathalie Sarraute, Irène Némirovsky, Andreï Makine, Zinaïda Volkonskaïa, la comtesse de Ségur, Pierre de Tchihatchef, 352 FRENCH REVIEW 85.2 Serge Charchoune, Michel Matveev, Elsa Triolet, Joseph Kessel, Arthur Adamov, Romain Gary, Alain Bosquet, Piotr Rawicz, Luba Jurgenson, and Iegor Gran. Naming plays a significant role in the works of these writers who struggle to establish émigré identity. Some assume pseudonyms and heteronyms, such as Vladimir Nabokov who first wrote under the name of Sirine, or Michel Matveev and Romain Gary who employed heteronyms. Still others changed their names in an attempt to assimilate within the French social order, such as Henri Troyat (Lev Tarassoff) and Romain Gary (Roman Kacew). The instability of naming as a means by which to indicate identity is reflective of these authors’ own deracination , as Rafaelle Zanotti suggests in her insightful discussion on naming and émigr é identity in relation to the author of...

“From a Daumier Drawing by a Process of Dehydration”

Around the turn of the next to last century, there was genre of writing attached to the historiographical turn of the late 1800s: the etat present in which the status of discipline, whether scientific studies, medieval studies, or oriental studies, would be assessed. Such efforts were in large part nationally defined, as in Maurice Wilmotte's L'Enseignement de la Philologie Romane Paris et en Allemagne (1883-1885), published in 1886, or the volume Histoire et historiens depuis cinquante ans, published in celebration of the progress of French historical studies in the fifty years since the founding of the Revue Historique in 1876. Well, fifty years is good round number, and, as it happens, it is just over fifty years since the death of Erich Auerbach, whose legacy in the U.S. included some of the people in this room: Steve Nichols, for example, as well as my own thesis advisor, William Calin. Auerbach at Yale after Pennsylvania State University, Henri Focillon at Yale where he founded the History of Art Department, Leo Spitzer at Johns Hopkins, Erwin Panofsky at Princeton, Alfred Adler at Brooklyn College, and Ernst Kantorowicz at Berkeley and then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, were, however, exceptions. Most of what passed for French or medieval studies in America in the decades after World War Il was more on the model of W. S. Merwin's description, in recent memoir entitled The Mays of Ventadorn (2002), of studying Old French in his senior year at Princeton: Our professor was French medievalist, stooped, hollow-cheeked, gray-skinned, emaciated, barely audible. To our youth he appeared to have arrived from Daumier drawing by process of dehydration. He gave the impression at all times of being the embodiment of his archaic subject, with nothing left over to be person. There were never more than three or four students. (12) Merwin's description puts us in mind of Nabokov's Pnin, who I am told was modeled in part on Romance Philology founder Yakov Malkiel, who taught at UC-Berkeley until the time of his death in 1998; or of Nabokov's Gaston Godin, the French teacher at the Beardsly College for Women in Lolita, a flabby, dough-faced, melancholy bachelor tapering upward to pair of narrow, not quite level shoulders and conical pear-head [...] devoid of any talent whatsoever, mediocre teacher, worthless scholar, glum repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language.... The desiccated philologist is genre, beginning with Robert Browning's A Grammarian's Funeral (1856)--Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, / Dead from the waist down--and reinforced by Anatole France's description of Paul Meyer and the journal Romania in Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard: [J]e me mis lire une revue qui, bien que menee par des jeunes gens, est excellente. Le ton en est rude, mais l'esprit zele. L'article que je lus passe en precision et en fermete tout ce qu'on faisait dans ma jeunesse. L'auteur de cet article, M. Paul Meyer, marque chaque faute d'un coup d'ongle incisif. That's the way it was in many quarters back in the 1950s--dehydrated, pale, dead from the waist down. Medieval literature was separate country, and the passport for entering it was certain kind of positivist philology whose aire often seemed to be nothing more than keeping others out. Despite the phenomenon of emigration after WW II, there was relatively little exchange between the U.S. and Germany or France. My one visit with Jean Frappier just before his death in 1974 was punctuated by his waving Peter Haidu's Aesthetic Distance in Chretien de Troyes (1968) in one hand and Lion Queue coupee (1972) in the other with the reminder that Americans exaggerate by mixing the dish rags with the bath towels. Before Hitler began to shake the great tree of German Mediaevistik and French medievisme in the 1930s, there was relatively little back and forth across the Atlantic, Joseph Bedier's semester at UC Berkeley in 1928 being great exception. …

Scenes of Love and Murder: Renoir, Film and Philosophy

The two canonical views of perhaps the greatest of French film-makers construct him as, on the one hand, the cinematic auteur par excellence and, on the other, the supreme exponent of pre-Second War cinéma engagé. The great merit of Colin Davis's elegantly written and provocative study is that it goes beyond these approaches without dismissing or disregarding them, in — appropriately for a work whose remit and grounding are explicitly philosophical — a kind of Aufhebung which finds in the work of one not generally regarded as a conceptual film-maker (unlike Godard or even Abel Gance) nothing less than a reflection on and of the constitutive unreliability and undecidability of cinema itself. The view of Renoir as jovial humanist is surely given its coup de grâce by the fact that there are, as Davis reminds us, a considerable number of murders in his work — indeed all the major 1930s films bar Une partie de campagne feature at least one violent death, a strike-rate almost on a par with that of his apparent opposite Hitchcock, with whom suggestive comparisons are here made. Davis's intertextual breviary draws not only on the ‘usual suspects’ Žižek and Deleuze, but also on Stanley Cavell's ‘philosophical hermeneutics of film’ (p. 17) and even, apropos La Grande Illusion, Aristotle's ethics of friendship as revisited by Derrida. This might seem to portend a downplaying of mise-en-scène and a deployment of films as exemplars to illustrate philosophical arguments — something which Davis not unfairly points out underpins much of Deleuze's Cinéma — but in fact his visual analyses are pertinent and incisive, as with the analysis of doorways and framing in La Chienne or that of La Règle du jeu's omnipresent theatricality and the consistent inconsistency of the perspectives it thereby offers the spectator. There are moments of possible imprecision in some points of detail; thus, to describe Batala in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange as the eponymous hero's ‘model’ perhaps imputes a degree too much self-consciousness to Lange, for whom Batala is rather frère ennemi or even Big Other, while to see woman-as-subject as foreclosed from La Marseillaise bizarrely omits any consideration of the inspiring speech given by a Republican fishwife to the Marseille Republican Convention, denouncing the killing of her lover — for me one of the highspots of the film. Overall, however, the book represents both a major contribution to the interrogation of the relationship between philosophy and film and a significant addition to work on an œuvre wherein the uncanny looms at least as large as the humanistic or the committed which it unremittingly shadows. The elegant presentation, good selection of illustrations, and handy guide to Renoir's 1930s films presented as an appendix will make this a valuable text for undergraduate students of the director as well as for postgraduate scholars and faculty.