"Anti Anti-Fidelity"

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Anti-anti-fidelity: Truffaut, Roché, Shakespeare

ERicA ShEEn*

Abstract This essay argues that the now orthodox negative response within adaptation studies

to the concept of fidelity needs more thought, particularly when applied to non-hollywood cinemas,

like the French new Wave, in which questions of literary value were central to contemporary debates

surrounding the emergence of new aesthetics of film. it offers an account of the idea of fidelity as it

manifested itself in the work of François Truffaut, from his early career as a critic attacking the literary

inauthenticity of the cinema de qualité, to the first stages of his own adaptation of henri-Pierre Roché’s

novel Jules et Jim, subsequent collaboration with screenwriter Jean Gruault, and eventual production

of the film. it argues that Truffaut’s use and then abandonment of the term can be understood as part

of a rhetoric of affectivity that links his difficult childhood to professional success, and suggests that the

literary values that presided over both are preserved, paradoxically, in the emergence of Shakespeare

rather than Roché as a marker of the film’s complex fidelity to its own contemporary moment.

Keywords Fidelity, anti-fidelity, Truffaut, Henri-Pierre Roché, Shakespeare, New Wave, Cold War

Europe.

This essay is about François Truffaut, whose work as a film critic was fiercely critical of mainstream practices of adaptation, especially as manifested in the French cinéma de qual-ité. It is about the making of his most popular film, Jules et Jim (1962), an adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roché’s autobiographical novel; and it is about Shakespeare, who emerges, paradoxically, as a marker both of the film’s final difference from its literary source, and of its continued identification with literary values. My aim is to present a detailed account of the interplay of ideas about fidelity and adaptation as they manifested them-selves in Truffaut’s metamorphosis from critic to director. The present discussion arises from a conviction that the current ‘anti-fidelity’ consensus within adaptation studies needs more thought. In revisiting what might be considered a primal scene of ‘the fidel-ity discourse’ (Borlotti and Hutcheon), I hope to show that the arguments that inform this position—that it imposes a ‘hierarchy of values’ informed by an assumption of the superiority of literature; that readings based on ‘the comparison of page and screen’ are ‘philosophically unsustainable and often sterile’ (Geraghty, “Foregrounding the Media” 94)—are grounded in generalizations that simplify the idea of fidelity as it performs in particular contexts of filmmaking and, as a consequence, impose potentially damaging limitations on the cultural and historical scope of adaptation studies as a discipline.

LinES oF FLiGhTI should begin by defining my terms. I am drawing on the use of the suffix ‘anti-’ in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s L’Anti-oedipe (1972; hereafter Anti-Oedipus), where it

*Department of English and Related Literature, University of York. E-mail: [email protected].

Adaptation Vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 243–259doi:10.1093/adaptation/apt001Advance Access publication 20 March 2013

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signals an ontology of becoming which ‘never ceases to undo the sedimentation of iden-tities’ (Alliez 8). I do so not because I believe Deleuze and Guattari’s work provides a privileged conceptual framework for the interpretation of film, but because it provides a quite precise starting point for a discussion of the cultural and historical dynamics of postwar European society in the years with which I am concerned in this article—roughly the decade from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s—and therefore also for the questions about adaptation that were at the heart of debates about the future of French cinema at that time.

Although I shall not be pursuing a Deleuzean reading of Truffaut’s film, Anti-Oedipus’s account of desire grounded in the machinery of capitalism rather than Freudian drives and instincts, in which capitalism is seen as a form of domesticated anarchy, sup-plies a useful paradigm for the unruly desire that circulates between Jules, Jim, and Catherine. It provides the point of departure, in this article, for an attempt to show how, in Truffaut’s metamorphosis from critic to director, the private and personal opens into the social and political—and here the notion of opening draws on the Bergsonian conception of openness, founded on a contrast between a convention-bound closed society and a state of being that can move towards broader human possibilities. Like Truffaut throughout his life, Jules et Jim struggles with the conviction that there is a larger historical potential at stake in the refusal to make desire conform to the cliché of the family. Bergson sees the contrast between closed and open moralities as one ‘between repose and movement’ (Bergson 324). From this arises a conception of his-tory as an ebb and flow of potentialities: Anti-Oedipus presents the movement between states of being and becoming in terms of the categories of deterritorialization and line of flight, ligne de fuite, where fuite, as Brian Massumi has noted, ‘covers not only the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance (the vanishing point in a painting is a point de fuite)’ (Massumi xvii). Alain Badiou has argued that Deleuze’s model of becoming is ‘purely and simply the occasion for mercantile investments’ (Alliez 8). But in a sense that is the point rather than the problem: Anti-Oedipus addresses the dynamics of a global order in which alternatives to capitalism can be articulated only as forms of anti-identity. Anti-social, anti-bourgeois, anti-Gaullist: these oppositions will illuminate our understanding of Truffaut’s work as a critic, his development as a filmmaker, the rise of the French New Wave, and the arguments about adaptation that were at the heart of all three.

Deleuze himself has shown how such a discussion might proceed. His two-volume study Cinema 1 and 2 is usually seen as a taxonomy of film rather than a history of cin-ema, so it is easy to overlook its account of the problems faced by the postwar European film industries. In these two books, Deleuze provides an account of cinema history as one of change from the action image to the time image, envisaged as a movement from a closed to an open state, in which cinema is ‘an aesthetic and political project capable of constituting a positive enterprise’ (Deleuze 210). I do not intend to discuss these ideas here: the question whether they are in any sense true is not relevant to my argument.1 What I am concerned with is the way Deleuze situates what he sees as the convention-bound American film industry at the end of World War II in relation to European cinemas searching for a new understanding of the image. I provide an extended series of quotations to demonstrate his argument:

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It is here that the American cinema finds its limits . . . In fact, what gave the American cinema its advantage, the fact of being born without a previous tradition to suffocate it, now rebounded against it. For the cinema of the action-image had itself engendered a tradition from which it could now only, in the majority of cases, extricate itself negatively . . . In fact, Europe had more freedom in this respect; and it is first of all in Europe that the great crisis of the action-image took place. The timing is something like: around 1948, Italy; about 1958, France; about 1968, Germany. (210, 211)

Proceeding from here ‘towards a beyond of the movement-image’, Deleuze offers an account of the internal dynamics of European filmmaking which provides us with the context we need for the debates about adaptation that were central to the emergence of the French New Wave in the late 50s; that is to say, a context in which to understand why the emergence of an experimental cinema in post-war France was concerned with local, ad hominem polemics about what is, after all, only one, relatively minor element of film production, rather than, say, the high moral and intellectual ground of Italian neo-realism:

Why Italy first, before France and Germany? It is perhaps for an essential reason, but one which is external to the cinema. Under the impetus of de Gaulle, France had at the end of the war, the historical and political ambition to belong fully to the circle of victors. The Resistance, therefore, even when underground, needed to appear as the detachment of a regular, perfectly organised army and the life of the French, even when full of conflict and ambiguities, needed to appear as a contribution to victory. These conditions were not favour-able to the renewal of the cinematographic image, which found itself kept within the frame-work of a traditional action-image, at the service of a properly French ‘dream’. The result of this was that the cinema in France was only able to break with its tradition rather belatedly and by a reflexive or intellectual detour which was that of the New Wave. (211)

This belated break was staged centrally in the struggle between the young filmmakers who would become known as the New Wave, and the cinéma de qualité, a struggle in which the notions of fidelity and infidelity emerge not in any simple, polarized way as outdated criteria for a distinction between a conservative literary cinema and radical experimental film, but as the site of the ebb and flow from one state to another within them which must be seen as itself a movement rather than a commentary. Deleuze himself enables us to see it in this way: where the Italian neorealists had a ‘high tech-nical conception’ of the difficulties involved in the ‘birth’ of a ‘new image’, but at the same time a ‘no less sure intuitive consciousness’ of it, the French New Wave had to think it—‘it is rather by way of an intellectual and reflexive consciousness that the French New Wave was able to take up this mutation’ (213). The discussion that follows suggests that the debate about adaptation is a central, not peripheral manifestation of this ‘intellectual and reflexive consciousness’: a searching, often bitterly personal and deeply divisive interrogation of an aspect of filmmaking which, particularly in the American context, almost literally ‘goes without saying’.2 Following a discussion of the ‘new form’ of the voyage in Italian neorealism, Deleuze looks at how the motif appears in French films of the 1950s—in the promenade-fuite, ‘flight-outing’, of Truffaut and Godard, for instance:

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It is here that the voyage-form . . . begins to have a value for itself or as the expression of a new society, of a new pure present . . . In these [films] we see the birth of a race of charming, moving characters who are hardly concerned by the events which happened to them – even treason, even death – and experience and act out obscure events which are as poorly linked as the portion of the any-space-whatever which they traverse. (213)

We must attend carefully to this notion of a ‘new pure present’—is it ebb or flow, or the point of poise between them? The question is asked, and crucially not answered, by the very term ‘new wave’. Precisely at the point invoked by Deleuze, 1958, the term ‘nouvelle vague’ evoked contradictory dynamics within the postwar younger generation: dynamics that find a direct equivalence in Truffaut’s difficult childhood, delinquent youth, his controversial early career as a critic, and then emergence as a successful, even conventionally successful, filmmaker. In 1958, Françoise Giroud published a study titled La Nouvelle Vague: Portraits de la Jeunesse, part of a series on current problems evoca-tively entitled L’air du temps. Giroud’s study drew on that most favored postwar method of social analysis, the Gallup/Kinsey questionnaire, to establish a pattern of postwar juvenile disaffection and existentialist angst. Questions ranged from number seven, ‘Are you happy?’, through number nine, ‘Does love pay an important part in your life?’, to number twenty-three, ‘Do you believe it is necessary to have an ideal?’ According to Giroud, 90% of the respondents—8 million Frenchmen between 18 and 30 years—rejected contemporary politics; authors identified as influencing the generation were Sartre (20%), Gide and Mauriac (9%), Camus (5%), Malraux (4%). Perhaps more sig-nificant was the majority response to this question of literary influence: ‘no answer’ (48%) (Guérard 49).3

In 1959, a survey for Informations catholiques internationales produced a quantitative analysis entitled “La ‘Nouvelle Vague’, croit-elle en Dieu?”, based on responses from ‘1,524 young people, in order to determine the thought and religious convictions of the new generation’ (my translation). The term begins to make its mark in cultural contexts in a 1959 review of Jean Anhouilh’s play L’Hurluberlu, where we begin to get the sense that this disaffected youth could be situated in a very precise relation to contemporary French politics: Kenneth White notes the identification of the central character with de Gaulle and suggests that ‘one daughter, Sophie, is . . . swept away in the moral and intellectual pseudo-sophistication of the “nouvelle vague”’ (96–97).

In 1959 too, the label was publically associated with film in a series of discussions in Film Quarterly. In the first essay in the volume, Eugen Weber describes it as an ‘escap-ist realism’. He concludes that the films of this group are characterized, on one hand, by excellent camera work, on the other, by ‘sketchiness of scripts which leave many situations hanging or unexplained, the relative lack of dialogue, . . . and the heavy use of interior monologue or expressive music’ (14). He comments that ‘the stars of the Nouvelle Vague are the directors who have gone a long way toward the “cineast’s” dream of being writer-directors, and . . . when not the producers at least the real masters of their work’ (15). But he also comments on the extent to which these films, unlike Italian neorealism, ‘make no social, economic or political comment whatsoever’: ‘The films of the Nouvelle Vague keep away from what has become forbidden ground and in this they reflect a society that has abandoned its decisions to others. Life is incomprehensible and politics even more so’ (15).

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In what is probably the best known piece in this collection, Noël Burch gives the term a different background, but finds the same loss of political direction:

Originally [it referred to] the generation of forward looking youth (mostly professional peo-ple, business men and students) who were supposed to gather round Mendès-France and bring new ideas into French political life.4 Subsequent events have unfortunately emptied the phrase of most of its social and political meaning . . . In films, however, the new wave is primarily a commercial phenomenon. (16)

With the exception of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Burch finds these films politically and intellectually unadventurous, and adds in a revealing footnote:

It is a further indication of the way their minds work that the writers whom the vast majority of these young directors choose to adapt or collaborate with are amongst the most inconsequential and aesthetically conservative in France . . . one would imagine that such ‘daring’ directors would be more interested in enlisting the aid of men like Beckett, Ionesco, Robbe-Grillet . . . (19)

Burch could profitably have given some thought to Giroud’s statistical analysis. Like the 48% who did not respond to the question about literary influence, Truffaut was not interested in culturally prestigious literature for its own sake,5 and—until September 1960, when he was blacklisted for opposition to the Algerian war—he rejected any identification with politics at all, let alone radical politics. Even in 1968, he took direct action only to support the student demonstrations:

I’ve always been an individualist. I’ve always considered the people in the political contest as opponents . . . I’ve always felt that political parties never concerned themselves with the one thing that touched me in life, anti-social people . . . So what moved me about the students was that they were returning the blows they’d received from the police. (de Baecque and Toubiana/Temerson 246)

—a clear expression of the experiences represented in Les quatre cents coups (1959).

ThAT FAMouS FAiThFuLnESSAfter a disaffected, alienated youth that culminated in desertion from the army and impris-onment, Truffaut’s passion for cinema led to friendship with André Bazin and a career as a critic. His influential article “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” is recognized as the discussion in which the concept of the auteur is put forward, but it is primarily concerned with the approach to adaptation in the cinéma de qualité, particularly as manifested in the scriptwriting team Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost.6 Since the tendency of current criticism, particularly within adaptation studies, is to see this founding theoretical moment as one in which ‘Nouvelle Vague filmmakers [attacked] the literary-dominated tradition of the adapta-tion’ (Guiney 138; Lanzoni 210), it is worth looking at Truffaut’s position in more detail.

His primary concern is with two related features of the tradition de la qualité: its ideo-logical investment in ‘psychological realism’, and its preference for a system of produc-tion in which a team of professional writers develop the scenario and dialogue from a chosen literary text and then hand it over to a director who simply ‘adds pictures’. The principle observed by these writers is what Truffaut describes as ‘that famous faithful-ness’ (cette fameuse fidelité): ‘The entire reputation of Aurenche and Bost is built on two


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precise points: (1) Faithfulness to the spirit of the work (fidélité à l’esprit) they adapt, 2) the talent they use’ (Nichols 226). It is this notion of fidélité à l’esprit, also referred to as ‘equivalence’, with which Truffaut takes primary issue. With barely concealed irony, he points out that the fact that Aurenche and Bost cover a wide range of literary texts means that they are not articulating personal intellectual convictions:

In order to accomplish this tour de force which consists of remaining faithful to the spirit of Michel Davet, Gide, Radiguet, Queffelec, François Boyer, Colette and Bernanos, one must possess I imagine a suppleness of spirit, a habitually geared-down personality (une person-nalité démultipliée peu communes: literally, “an unusually multiple personality”) as well as singular eclecticism (Nichols 226).

And this is the crux of the matter: ‘faithfulness to the spirit’ is a cynical industrial imperative espoused by professional writers who have no real commitment to cinema, and are therefore selling it short because—whilst formally placing their work under the auspice of the prestigious French literary tradition—they actually prevent the films they are making from responding to the deepest issues engaged by their literary sources. Truffaut provides as an example a scene from Aurenche and Bost’s unfilmed script for George Bernanos’ Journal d’un curé de campagne: the scene between Chantal and the priest at confession. Based on the assumption that the scene as written in the novel was intournable, unfilmable, Aurenche and Bost replaced it with a completely different episode, cheaply sensational, grossly melodramatic (in place of the battle of wills between girl and priest, they supplied a scene in which the girl spits out the com-munion host in the young priest’s face). As Truffaut points out, ‘From a simple reading of that extract, there stands out 1) a constant and deliberate to be unfaithful to the spirit as well as the letter; 2) a very marked taste for profanation and blasphemy’ (228, italics in original).

He observes that they are playing a game of keeping the producer happy (rouler le producteur) ‘as well as that of cheating the “great public”’ (229). He describes this process as an ‘alibi’—l’alibi de la littérature—a notion that can be glossed from Roland Barthes’ use of the term ‘alibi’ in his essay “Myth Today”. It is ‘Literature’, in a Barthesian second-order sense, not literature as such, that presides over the act of betrayal that has taken place in these films. Truffaut recognizes the deeply bourgeois aspect of the ‘anti-bourgeois’ populism that masks this approach to production:

But what are Aurenche and Bost . . . if not bourgeois, and what are the fifty-thousand new readers who do not fail to see each film from a novel, if not bourgeois? What then is the value of an anti-bourgeois cinema made by the bourgeois for the bourgeois? (234, italics in original)

Truffaut argues that in the hands of a director who undertakes the process of writing him/herself rather than allowing it to be undertaken for him by a professional scenar-ist—in the hands, that is, of an auteur—the unfilmable scene may well prove filmable: ‘I’m not at all certain that a novel has unfilmable scenes, and even less certain that those scenes, decreed unfilmable, would be so for everyone’ (227). Robert Bresson’s extraor-dinary achievement with this confessional scene, praised by Bazin, is the exemplary instance of this fact. In other words, when the process of writing is undertaken from the standpoint of a personal commitment to film rather than a cynical professional

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negotiation of an industrial system of production, fidelity manifests itself as a positive rather than negative value within filmmaking; becomes indeed the terms on which that Deleuzean ‘new pure present’ might begin to be able to see itself. This subtle engage-ment, not just with principles of fidelity and infidelity in a formal or abstract sense but with the flow between them in this precise historical, cultural, and institutional context goes some way beyond an attack on ‘the literary-dominated tradition of the adaptation’, some way, too, beyond the rather too easy rejection of fidelity criticism in contemporary adaptation studies:

I consider an adaptation of value only when written by a man of the cinema. Aurenche and Bost are essentially literary men and I reproach them here for being contemptuous of the cinema by underestimating it. They behave, vis à vis the scenario, as if they thought to re-educate a delinquent by finding him a job. (Nichols 229; italics in original)

There again that crucial personal dimension. Truffaut spent years in one institution or another being ‘re-educated’ by the French state; it is his refusal of such re-education at the hands of what he would later refer to as ‘fonctionnaires de la caméra’ (de Baecque and Toubiana 163) that we are witnessing here.

un JULES ET JIM cinÉMAToGRAPhiQuEIt was to literature ‘as such’, and his sense of the extent to which it could offer a ‘man of cinema’ the potential to renew the cinematographic image, that Truffaut turned at the very earliest stages of his own adaptation from writer to director. As has been well documented, he found Henri-Pierre Roché’s Jules et Jim, published 1953, in a Paris book-shop and immediately began to think of it as a film. In the process, many of the issues discussed above re-emerge, reconfigured in ways that reflect changes in his writer’s under-standing of what was at stake in the relationship between literature and film at this point in the history of French cinema. The first public indication of his interest in this novel was given in a review, published in 1956, of a little-known American film, Edgar Ulmer’s The Naked Dawn (1955—titled Le bandit in France). As we read the review, it becomes apparent that the scenario of Ulmer’s film shares with Jules et Jim a concern with the distinctive dynamics of a love triangle; but it is equally apparent that this is not the main reason it interests Truffaut. It is, he says,

a low-budget film, . . . poetic and violent, tender and droll, moving and subtle, joyously energetic and wholesome . . . What counts are the delicate and ambiguous relationships among his three, the stuff of a good novel (Mais l’essentiel réside surtout dans les rapports des trois personages entre eux, d’une finesse et d’une ambiguïté proprement romanesque). One of the most beautiful novels I know is Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché, which shows how, over a lifetime, two friends and the woman companion they share love one another with tenderness and almost no harshness, thanks to an esthetic morality constantly reconsidered. The Naked Dawn is the first film that has made me think that Jules et Jim could be done as a film (…le premier film à me donner l’impression qu’un Jules et Jim cinématographique est possible) (Truffaut/Mayhew 155–56; Truffaut 179–80).7

So, The Naked Dawn attracts him because it is ‘proprement romanesque’ (literally, ‘properly novel-like’); and it is this—not the idea, perhaps, that it shows a would-be director how


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to pull off a risky story onscreen—that makes him think a good novel could become a film (in other words, that a good novel could become a film that is like a good novel). Once again, there is that complex sense of the implication, the enfolding, of literature and film. Within it, we perceive the imagined moment of the emergence of an adapta-tion as the unrealized potential of that enfolding. Note the impersonal construction that emphasizes the extent to which this potential presents itself as a process not yet defined by the later fact of it having been done by Truffaut himself: ‘un Jules et Jim cinématographique est possible’.

In fact, Truffaut’s sense of this process as a possibility for himself lies more in his spectator’s experience of the film than in any practical or technical perception of the viability of the adaptation as a production: the film was, he says, ‘poetic and violent, tender and droll, moving and subtle, joyously energetic and wholesome’. And indeed the first practical move towards its realization was made not by a would-be filmmaker approaching the novelist with a commercial proposition, but by the novelist making contact with the critic. Roché wrote to thank Truffaut for his comments; the contact developed into a friendship. Truffaut began to work on an adaptation in close contact with Roché; Roché gave him access to his manuscript and notebooks, resulting in a first draft in 1957. It is not surprising to find the register of intimacy in Truffaut’s comments on the adaptive process. ‘I fell in love with Henri-Pierre Roché’s prose’, he wrote, not-ing his ‘very short sentences’ and ‘everyday words’ (mots de tous les jours) (de Baecque and Toubiana/Temerson 103–04; de Baecque and Toubiana 154)8: ‘Through Roché’s style, emotion is born out of the void, the emptiness of all the rejected words (l’émotion naît du trou, du vide, de tous les mots refusés), it’s even born out of ellipsis.’ (Truffaut, “Henri-Pierre Roché Revisited” 243). This equation of a writer’s ‘rejected’ or ‘refused’ words with a Sartrean notion of ‘le vide’, the void, a state of mind from which becoming begins, is significant. He had found in Roché a starting point for a mode of creation which articu-lated that ‘break’ from tradition to which Deleuze refers. According to de Baecque and Toubiana, he ‘worked uninterruptedly, annotating, cutting and restructuring, using Roché’s sentences to create a simple linear narrative’. Adaptation as a process became the durée of his everyday life. He was, however, forced to recognize that he was ‘not ready or mature enough to handle the subject successfully’ and put it aside (de Baecque and Toubiana/Temerson 104, 105).

Over the next few years, the years in which he made his first films (Les mistons [1957]; Les quatre cents coups [1959]; Tirez sur le pianiste [1960]), the issues raised in “Une cer-taine tendance” remained a critical preoccupation. But his arguments were changing in ways that reflected a transition from a theoretical commitment to ‘personal’ filmmaking enshrined in the concept of the auteur to the practical experience of it. The ‘pure new present’ of French cinema begins to register the imminence of ‘the film of the future’ (le film à venir) (de Baecque and Toubiana 163): in the course of a bitter exchange with Claude Autant-Lara in summer 1957, Truffaut asserted that

the film of the future appears to me as even more personal than a novel; individual and auto-biographical like a confession or a private journal. The young cineasts will express themselves in the first person and will tell what has happened to them: it may be the story of their first love, or their most recent, a political act of conscience, the narration of a voyage, an illness,

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military service, marriage . . . The film of tomorrow (le film de demain) will not be directed by officials (fonctionnaires de la caméra), but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes an extraordinary and exalting adventure . . . The film of tomorrow will be an act of love (une acte d’amour). (De Baeque and Toubiana 163, my translation)

The idea of ‘the film of the future’ is an important one, particularly as it articulates an individual filmmaker’s sense of the historical significance of his or her work for cinema as an institution. From this perspective, Truffaut’s gradual replacement of his preoccupation with ‘fidelity’ with the idea of ‘an act of love’ demands atten-tion. When he returned to work on the adaptation of Jules et Jim in 1960, he spent two weeks working on it alone, but then asked Jean Gruault (Paris nous appartient [Rivette 1960]; Vanina vanini [Rossellini 1961]) to work with him—according to de Baecque and Toubiana because his own draft was ‘too faithful’ (trop fidèle au roman) (de Baecque and Toubiana/Temerson 175; de Baecque and Toubiana 255). I shall return to Gruault shortly. Together, they arrived at an approach which Truffaut described as ‘a kind of filmed reading’: ‘the approach I find good . . . uses a kind of filmed reading (lecture filmé) which alternates scenes adaptable as scenes with dialogues and acting and then purely narrative things with the narration and the commentary’ (Truffaut, “Introduction”). As he moved toward the start of the filming, Truffaut had thus arrived at an understanding of adaptation not so much as a movement from one medium to another, in which the question of fidelity is called on to arbitrate the values engaged by the movement, as a fusion of the two in which the director himself is the medium of their penetration.

Truffaut’s metamorphosis from critic to director, and the changes in the understand-ing of the adaptation process that resulted from it, were accompanied by the develop-ment of his personal and professional relationship with Jeanne Moreau. He had her in mind for the role of Catherine from the outset. They became acquainted in 1957, when they met at Cannes and Truffaut gave her Roché’s novel to read. Their friend-ship gathered momentum as the project developed; they met and wrote regularly to discuss it. It could fairly be said that Truffaut’s approach to the adaptation was deter-mined less by the idea that Moreau was perfect for Catherine than by the conviction that Catherine—his Catherine, not Roché’s Kathe—would be perfect for Jeanne. As a result, the adaptation drew on elements of meaning in the novel that changed radically as they were drawn into Truffaut’s creation of Catherine and direction of Moreau. In particular, Roché’s chronologically sprawling story, with its multiple love affairs, became concentrated into the single dominant narrative of Catherine’s relationship with the two men. My aim in the last section of this discussion, in which I argue that this transformation takes shape under the literary aegis of William Shakespeare rather than Henri-Pierre Roché, will be to show how it opens the film in ways that go beyond Truffaut’s personal becoming as a director, beyond even the local French moment of Nouvelle Vague as a renewal of the cinematographic image, towards the wider historical context of Cold War Europe. In order to do so, I have to embark on what anti-fidelity critics have deplored as the ‘default mode’ of analysis—a comparison of adaptation and source—but trust that the preceding analysis will have convinced the reader that I am not ‘unconscious’ of the values I engage by doing so.9


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c’EST ShAkESPEARE!At the simplest level of description, Shakespeare becomes a presence within Truffaut’s film because there is a series of small, relatively insignificant Shakespearean references in Roché’s novel which, in the process of compression into the more concentrated form of the film, become more focused and therefore more meaningful.

Of course, this immediately raises the question whether such references should be attributed to Truffaut, or to Jean Gruault. Given Truffaut’s distinctly non-canonical literary enthusiasms, it would be tempting to argue they are most likely to derive from Gruault. Indeed, Gruault’s previous experience as a writer had included Shakespearean subjects: an unproduced mise-en-scène of Macbeth for avant-garde theatre director Jacques Polieri; Rivette’s Paris nous appartient - a New Wave murder mystery about a student who gets involved in a Cold War conspiracy centred on a production of Pericles. Tempting, but reductive - particularly in view of the argument I am advancing in this essay. For a start, Truffaut’s decision to work with Gruault, which may appear to sug-gest he was abandoning the principles expressed in “Une certaine tendance”, actually confirms them, because it demonstrated a commitment he would maintain throughout his career: to work with collaborators chosen for their affinity with particular types of film - in Gruault’s case, literary adaptation. As Truffaut put it, ‘Je travaille avec des amis que je choisis en fonction du scénario’ (Le Berre 21). His choice of the word ‘ami’, friend, may seem unremarkable, but it is important. As the habits that would come to define him as a director took shape, the affective dimension of his critical principles - fidel-ity; film-making as an act of love; the intimacies of adaptation - began to flow into relationships with collaborators who shared his passion for cinema. Truffaut addressed Gruault exclusively in the informal ‘tu’ (BiFi 6); Gruault described their relationship as a ‘ménage’ (Gruault 279). This ‘ménage’ became part of the ‘family’ that took shape around Truffaut’s production company, Les Films du Carrosse (BiFi 1). Given the dis-aster of his childhood, and his increasing difficulty with the conventional framework of marriage, the use of this term to describe the organization of his professional life should be taken seriously. The practical outcome of his critical engagement with the rhetoric of affectivity was thus the creation of an institutional configuration that contrasted strongly with the exploitative employment model associated with the Hollywood studio system - and indeed with the contemporary connotations of the term ‘New Wave’ as it articulated the alienated condition of French society at this generative moment of New Wave cinema.

Within such a configuration, the question of exactly whom we hold responsible for the emergence of a pattern of Shakespearean reference in the final version of Jules et Jim is significant, but not in the trivial sense of who might be said to have ‘authored’ it. If the structure of intimate collaboration described above is the actual institutional form finally achieved by the theoretical notion of the auteur, it is this structure, paradoxi-cally, that gave Truffaut the freedom, finally, to explore the creative force of infidelity - but only because Gruault was there to maintain the underlying literary value of the principle of fidelity within their partnership. According to him, Truffaut was ‘plus libre que moi avec l’original’ (Gruault 208). He recorded the fact that Truffaut wanted to bring the scenario into the contemporary period, but succeeded in getting him to keep it in the past. Significantly for the textual analysis that follows, he also recorded the fact that

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Truffaut won important small battles to transfer lines spoken by Jim in the novel to Jules in the film (208).

This interplay between historical period and literary attribution, as it manifested itself in often minute infidelities within the organization of dialogue, is key to our understanding of what is going on with Shakespearean reference in this film. Written in the early 1950s, Roché’s Jules et Jim is set in the years leading up to and then fol-lowing World War I. At the heart of the story is the friendship between a Frenchman with an English name, Jim, and a German with a French name, Jules. As the linguistic interplay of their names already suggests, their lives flow in and through a multiplic-ity of European languages and cultures. Both writers, they write novels about each other, read to each other and translate their work from and into each other’s languages. Based in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s, they travel widely throughout Europe, and share women the way they share languages; women who themselves flow, like language, into Paris from all over Europe. After Gertrude, Lucie, Magda, and Odile, they meet Kathe, a beautiful German who embodies a mysterious ‘archaic smile’ they have seen on a statue in Greece. Both men are attracted to her, but she marries her compatriot Jules. As World War I breaks out, this entente is polarized by the defining trauma of twentieth-century European politics: the catastrophic breakdown of the relationship between France and Germany. Here we must remember that, while this autobiographical novel was written by a seventy-something-year-old man remembering his young life in the 1910s and 1920s, its adaptation was produced by a young man whose experiences were, as we have seen, definitely contemporary.

Far more than Roché, Truffaut registers the fact that the political crisis of World War I was dramatically escalated, first by World War II and then by the geopolitical dynam-ics of the Cold War and the national conflicts associated with it. His presentation of this escalation makes visible the machine of cinema: in documentary footage of trench warfare, and in the contextualization of the friends’ last meeting in a cinema watching a film of Nazi book-burning. His Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) are still German and French, but Catherine is now French, not German, and this change sum-mons a potent mixture of contemporary associations. Even at the end of the 1950s, a wartime relationship between a German man and a French woman could still invoke the collective trauma of ‘horizontal collaboration’, recently explored in Jean Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Both that trauma, and its displacement by the postwar pos-sibility of a new European integration, are confronted within the film in its presentation of Jules’ intimate communication with the pregnant Catherine, his letters to her from the trenches, as a German voice-over.

Conversely, the destructive postwar relationship between Catherine and Jim, now both French, becomes a marker of the gathering internal conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s, and it is to these conflicts that the film’s treatment of Shakespearean reference gives shape and direction. In the novel, such reference begins with Odile. One of the first women Jules and Jim share, she is described as ‘from one of the Nordic countries’:

‘What a mixture she is!’. . . ‘On her father’s side she’s an aristocrat, her mother was of the people. Thanks to that she’s ignorant of anything in between, and to everyone who looks at her she teaches —’


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‘What does she teach?’‘Shakespeare’, said Jules. (Roché 41)

Her ‘free spirit’ (Mackillop 2001) is perfectly encapsulated in the suggestion that she ‘teaches Shakespeare’. There is a nod here towards late nineteenth/early twentieth-century French and German traditions of Shakespearean reception, both of which were informed by just this mixture of ‘aristocratique’ and ‘populaire’, though to very differ-ent effects. But it is all but subliminal in Roché’s text, and in Odile’s case we are aware that the ‘teaching’ in question is more likely to be what would once have been referred to as ‘French lessons’ than literary criticism. Here, Shakespearean reference does little more than signal the general cosmopolitanism that pervades the novel.

The same is the case in the scene in which Kathe makes her dramatic plunge into the Seine. By this time, Kathe and Jules are already married, but that evening Jules had indulged in a literary discussion with Jim from which Kathe was excluded, so when they go out walking after dinner, she regains the upper hand by jumping into the river. As she does so, Jim’s inner voice hails her action with a quotation from Hamlet 1.5.40: ‘O my prophetic soul’. The quotation is unidentified, but its function in the novel is clear, and, again, it has little to do with Shakespeare: the episode is ‘prophetic’ simply because Jim knows it means he and Kathe will become involved. Earlier in the evening, sensing the danger of Jules’ casual sexism, he had remembered an earlier episode with Magda, when Jules had been guilty of a similar sexism and Magda paid him back by sleeping with Jim.

In the film, these two brief Shakespearean references are compressed into one. Magda and Odile become a single new character called Thérèse, who picks up the friends on the street and then sleeps with Jules. When we next see them going into a café together, the scene begins with a version of the excluding literary discussion, but here, rather than the inward quotation from Hamlet, the episode begins with Jules exclaim-ing enthusiastically, as if in response to a continuing conversation, ‘C’est Shakespeare! Je connais cette phrase!’ There is a distinctive process of condensation going on here, and it is qualitatively different from any of the adaptive procedures discussed in this article so far. It works on several levels. Here, too, there is the transfer from Jim to Jules, and it is one that makes use of the spectator’s potential awareness of Oskar Werner’s recent success in Shakespearean performance, notably as Hamlet in Vienna in 1953 and 1956, and on tour with Der Grüne Wagen in 1958. This is an extremely interesting effect: almost as if Truffaut/Gruault’s recognition of Shakespeare while at work on the novel is placed in the mouth (‘mit dans la bouche’ [Gruault 208] ) of a performer who could engage the audience’s sense of what is perhaps the most controversial aspect of the European Shakespearean tradition: its appropriation by opposing parties at every point in its contested history.

This effect becomes explicit in the film’s treatment of the idea about teaching Shakespeare, now relocated to one of the most famous scenes in the film: the episode where Catherine dresses up as a man, challenges the friends to a race, and wins by cheating. There is a direct counterpart to this episode in the novel, but there she is immediately recognized as a woman, and since other women are dressed in the same way, the episode does not define Kathe as it does Catherine:

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At Jules’ place Jim found Kate disguised as a young man, in one of Jules’ suits . . . They went down to the Boul’ Mich’ together and stopped at the dances in progress at every crossroads. Jules and Tom danced together. Now and then remarks were flung out which showed that Tom had been found out: ‘Hey sweetie!’ or ‘You’re a hot bit of property, you are!’ But there were other women disguised as she was . . . Kate was a good person to be about with, uncon-cerned, off-hand, with a gay, sparring style in conversation. She was closer to comedy than Odile, and further from farce. (Roché 78)

In the film, Catherine passes as a man in ways that cannot fail to activate an awareness of the Shakespearean ‘woman’s part’, so that when, at the end of the race, Jules tells Jim that Catherine ‘teaches’ Shakespeare, it means much more, and something completely different, than the original Odile episode:

—What a mixture!—Her father’s a noble, her mother’s a commoner;He’s from an old Burgundy family; Mama was EnglishSo she’s not average . . . and she teaches—What?— Shakespeare!10

Obviously, it no longer means simply that Catherine is a free spirit. This deeper, darker, Shakespearean Catherine presides over the movement of the film—drives its antitheti-cal energies—in a way that Roché’s Kathe does not. In fact, her Shakespearean persona could be said to be its defining dynamic, its replacement for the archaic smile.11 Just as the recognition of Shakespeare was built into the earlier episode, so here Catherine’s cross-dressing performance is identified, not simply as Shakespearean but as what Catherine requires us to identify as Shakespearean.

In this case, there is, I think, no mediating reference to Moreau as a performer. Although a member of the Comédie française in the early 50s, with whom she played Perdita (Winter’s Tale) and Bianca (Othello), her career was not notably Shakespearean. How, then, does this new element of meaning work in the film? Certainly, it has the effect of balancing the Shakespearean dimension of the German Jules with that now associated with the French Catherine; of contributing to the new European integra-tion achieved by this Franco-German alliance.

That being the case, perhaps we should take up the invitation, noted earlier, to place Jules et Jim within contrasting European traditions of Shakespearean reception, and to consider the implications of these alignments in postwar Europe. Across the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries, the history of German Shakespearean reception was relatively consistent, if sometimes controversially so: its enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s distinctive combination of the aristocratic and the popular remained undiminished across the two World Wars. But French response to this aspect of Shakespeare’s work was always more divided. Despite a strong performance tradition, it had never quite laid to rest Voltaire’s conviction that Shakespeare was essentially barbaric (Voltaire 10). In the aftermath of World War II, this changed. The experience of occupation gave rise to a sense that it was precisely because of his capacity to present barbarity that Shakespeare was increasingly sympathetic to postwar French audiences, and indeed


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writers. Gide’s translation of Hamlet, unfinished before the war, was completed in 1948 and played to acclaim by Jean-Louis Barrault and the Comédie française - its style, according to Jean Jacquot, a ‘reconciliation of Shakespearean language and classi-cal French taste’ (Jacquot, 96; my translation). The production, Jacquot suggested, ‘moved us profoundly because the poet was . . . conscience to an age of implaca-ble political and religious conflict’, while in 1950 Georges Neveux’s Othello, with its ‘strange complicity between executioner and his victim, … discovered new meanings in Shakespeare’s work - or rediscovered old meanings that had been lost. Physical and moral torture are no longer relegated to a barbarous past, nor to the periphery of the civilized world’ (Jacquot 94; my translation). In 1964, Barrault’s hugely successful History cycle captured contemporary interest in its representation of ‘a society travers-ing a critical phase in its history’ (Jacquot 101; my translation).

The world order that presided over the making of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim was arguably such a society, particularly as the situation in Algeria deteriorated across the end of the 1950s. In September 1960, while working alone on his adaptation, Truffaut’s political reticence gave way to support for the ‘Manifesto of the 121’—a ‘declaration on the right to insubordination in the Algerian war’, a cause near to his heart after his own youthful experiences in the army. By the end of the same month, the witch hunt against the 121 writers and artists who put their name to this document was being described as a ‘French McCarthyism’: a blacklist banned them from work on television and radio, and threatened to withhold government subsidies for film production. Truffaut was summoned from his work on Jules et Jim to testify. Before he could appear, international pressure was successful and the blacklist was lifted. But Truffaut never reconciled him-self to the values of Gaullist France: ‘A country that can say “yes” to de Gaulle is a country that doesn’t give a damn whether culture disappears or not, hence that doesn’t give a damn about my films’ (De Baecque and Toubiana/Temerson 166, 167).

cE MoMEnT DE L’AcTuALiTÉThere is perhaps a retrospective recognition of the importance of this Shakespearean presence, both for French New Wave cinema and for its audiences, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part (1964), in which a teacher of Shakespeare once again presides over the crea-tion of a love triangle between two men with German and English names and a woman called Odile.12 However, the Shakespearean moment that coincided with the inaugura-tion of New Wave cinema was now passing. By the end of his career, Truffaut would base eleven out of his twenty feature films on literary sources; in none of them after Jules et Jim do we again find this particular presence manifesting itself as a marker of the literary values that continued to inform his work. In the introduction to his retrospec-tive collection of reviews, Les films de ma vie, he refers to the politique des auteurs as an idea that is ‘forgotten today in France but frequently discussed by “movie fans” in American journals’ (Truffaut 27, my translation). He no longer believes it is possible to theorize about film: ‘The practice of cinema has taught us many things’-

Success on the screen does not mainly result from good brain work, but from a harmony between pre-existing elements of which we may not even have been conscious: a happy fusion of chosen subject and our deep nature (la fusion heureuse du sujet choisi et de notre nature

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profonde), an unforeseeable coincidence between our own preoccupations at that moment of our lives, and those of the public at that point in time (ce moment de l’actualité) (Truffaut 27-8; my translation)

Nonetheless, for Truffaut, the filmmaker’s practical relationship with literature, a relation-ship that drew on the full personal and professional possibilities of the affective interplay between fidelity and infidelity, remained fundamental to his understanding of how he made film and why he loved it. The material I have looked at in this essay suggests that we may need to be more attentive to the ‘happy fusions’ that constitute particular processes of adaptation in the particular cultural, historical, and political circumstances from which they arise, and to which they give shape. It also suggests that the category of fidelity may often be relevant to such processes, and our aim should be not so much to disavow it as to establish appropriate frames of reference for the values that are engaged along the way. As Truffaut himself noted, Anglo-American film scholars regularly draw on French thinking to theorize film. Few of them see the need for a model of analysis that is as responsive to European cultures of cinema as to the Anglo-American industry. To a very high degree, adaptation studies assume the commercial fetishization of product peculiar to that industry. The resulting emphasis on ‘an’ or ‘the’ adaptation, and, increasingly, on critical approaches to it which disavow its relation to ‘sources’,13 threatens the historically and culturally situated approach to adaptation as a process that must underpin its devel-opment as a discipline. With this in mind, I offer the present discussion in the hope that it will serve to encourage a critical movement towards a beyond of anti-fidelity.

noTES1 For an accessible discussion of Deleuze’s work on cinema, see Rodowick.2 See Barthes (10) for the concept of ‘what-goes-without-saying’: the ideological naturalization of semiotic systems as a ‘reality . . . undoubtedly determined by history’.3 For further discussion of Giroud’s survey, see Nowell-Smith (138–140).4 Mendès-France was a left wing politician who worked with de Gaulle after the Liberation but withdrew from his government in opposition to his colonialist policies. He led the anti-Gaullist group Union des forces démocratiques but lost his seat in the Assembly in November 1958. He made an unsuccessful attempt to be re-elected in 1962.5 John Anzalone records that Truffaut ‘had little patience for set, academic literary canons. As was the case with his passion for films, he read because reading excited him. His love of literature seems to have been remarkably broad, his tastes very democratic. Nor did this attitude change after he had succeeded in film: in 1967, when already established as a director, he tells an unnamed academic correspondent that he found Camus’s L’Etranger “inferieur a n’importe lequel des deux cents (romans) que Simenon a écrit . . . cela veut dire simplement que Camus ne m’aide pas”’ (Anzalone 48, 49).6 François Truffaut, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” in Cahiers du cinema, 31.1 (January 1954), pp. 15–29, translated as “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema” in Nicholls.7 References to Leonard Mayhew’s translation of Les films de ma vie are identified as Truffaut/Mayhew.8 References to Catherine Temerson’s translation of de Baecque and Toubiana are identified as de Baecque and Toubiana/Temerson.9 ‘The fidelity model [which] almost inevitably results in comparisons dictated by the source text . . . still persists as a default mode . . . Those making the comparison between page and screen seem consciously or unconsciously to draw on a hierarchy of values which is at odds with the practices of popular cinema’ (Geraghty 94).10 English translation as supplied in the subtitles of Jules et Jim, 2 Entertain DVD, 2006.11 ‘Frenchified in Truffaut’s version as Catherine, the heroine has none of the attributes implicit in the “archaic” smile (replaced in the film script by a “tranquil” smile): the Germanic part is missing and, along


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with it, the less “likeable” but more earthy quality of the original character’ (Grossvogel 51).12 Franz, Arthur, and Odile meet at English lessons in which they take dictations from Romeo and Juliet. However, against this suggestion that Godard’s use of the name ‘Odile’ glances back to Truffaut and Roché, it should be noted that Godard developed a lengthy treatment of Goethe’s Elective Affinities under the title Odile in the mid 50s (Gruault 176).13 See Geraghty (Now a Major Motion Picture) and Geraghty (“Foregrounding the Media” 94) for arguments in favor of ‘the deliberate act of abandoning the source to focus on the adaptation itself ’.

REFEREncESAlliez, Eric. “Anti-Oedipus: Thirty Years On.” Trans. Alberto Toscano. Radical Philosophy 124 (2004): 6–12.Anzalone, John. “Heroes and Villains, or Truffaut and the Literary Pre/Text.” The French Review 72.1

(1998): 48–57.Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1984:

1–26.Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, extracted as “Morality, Obligation and the Open

Soul.” Henri Bergson: Key Writings. Eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey. New York: Continuum, 2002.

Bibliothèque du film (BiFi), Le cinéma à quatre mains: les films écrits par François Truffaut et Jean Gruault. http://www.cinematheque.fr/expositions-virtuelles/truffaut/index.php.

Bortolotti, Gary R., and Linda Hutcheon. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and ‘Success’—Biologically.” New Literary History 38.3 Summer (2007): 443–58.

Burch, Noël. “Qu’est- ce que la Nouvelle Vague?” Film Quarterly 13.2 Winter (1959): 16–30.De Baecque, Antoine, and Serge Toubiana. François Truffaut. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1996.———. Truffaut. Trans. Catherine Temerson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1 The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London

and NYC: Continuum, 1986.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Capitalisme et schizophrénie Vol. 1: L’Anti-oedipe. Paris: Les Editions de

Minuit, 1972.Geraghty, Christine. “Foregrounding the Media: Atonement (2007) as an Adaptation.” Adaptation 2.2

(2009): 91–109.———. Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Lanham, MD: Rowman and

Littlefield, 2007.Grossvogel, David I. “Truffaut and Roché.” Diacritics 3.1 Spring (1973): 47–52.Gruault, Jean. Ce que dit l’autre. Paris: Julliard, 1992.Guérard Sr., Albert. “Review: Françoise Giroud, La Nouvelle Vague: portraits de la jeunesse.” Books Abroad 33.1

Winter (1959): 49.Guiney, Martin M. “‘Total Cinema’, Literature and Testimonial in the Early Films of Alain Resnais.”

Adaptation 5.2 (2012): 137–51.Jacquot, Jean. Shakespeare en France: Mises en scène d’hier et d’aujour d’hui. Paris: Le Temps, 1964.Hourdin, Georges. “La ‘Nouvelle Vague’ croit-elle en Dieu?” Informations catholiques internationales 86 (1958):

11–20.Lanzoni, Rémi Fournier. French Cinema, from Its Beginnings to the Present. New York: Continuum, 2002.Le Berre, Carole, “Genèse d’une exposition”. Vertigo 6-7 (1991): 21–48.Massumi, Brian. “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements.” Anti-Oedipus Vol. 2: A Thousand

Plateaux. Eds. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. New York and London: Continuum, 1992.Mckillop, Ian. Free Spirits. London: Bloomsbury, 2001.Nicholls, Bill, ed. Movies and Methods: An Anthology, vol. I. Berkeley: California UP, 1985.Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s. NYC and London: Continuum, 2008.Roché, Henri-Pierre. Jules et Jim. Trans. Patrick Evans. London: Marion Boyars, 1963.Rodowick, D. N. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.Truffaut, François. Les films de ma vie. Paris: Flammarion, 1975.———. The Films in My Life. Trans. Leonard Mayhew. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.———. “Henri-Pierre Roché Revisited.” Henri-Pierre Roché, Jules et Jim. Trans. Patrick Evans. London:

Marion Boyars, 2006.

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http://www.cinematheque.fr/expositions-virtuelles/truffaut/index.php

http://www.cinematheque.fr/expositions-virtuelles/truffaut/index.php


———. “Introduction.” Jules et Jim, 2 Entertain DVD, 2007.Voltaire. “A Shakespeare Journal.” Yale French Studies 33 (1964): 5–13.Weber, Eugen. “An Escapist Realism.” Film Quarterly 13.2 Winter (1959): 9–16.White, Kenneth S. “L’Hurluberlu ou le Réactionnaire amoureux by Jean Anouilh.” The French Review 33.1

(1959): 96–97.

AcknoWLEDGEMEnTSThanks to Margaret Atack and Keith Reader for help with queries. This essay is dedi-cated to Lily, who died while I was writing it.


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"Anti Anti-Fidelity"