Lucidno RETROSPECTIVES
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Basing much of his research on the Life magazine news story by Herbert Brean, "A Case of Identity" (29 June 1953), that inspired Hitchcock's film as well as on a one-hour TV dramatization with the same title that was broadcast on Robert Montgomery Presents on 11 January 1954, about two years before The Wrong Man went into production, Deutelbaum shows in detail that "while The Wrong Manretains the general details of Balestrero's arrest and trial, as well as the details of Rose's breakdown, the weak points of the police investigation, the ease with which Balestrero was able to establish his alibis, and the effectiveness of his attorney have been eliminated from the screenplay." (15) Moreover, the scene described by Godard and Truffaut as a "miracle" was Hitchcock's invention: "Though Balestrero was a religious man and prayed at his trial... [he] was not praying, but playing in the Stork Club band at the time of [the real robber's] arrest." Another discovery Deutelbaum makes, this one purely textual, is that the vrai coupable is seen crossing paths with Balestrero at least three times in the film prior to the staged miracle; Balestrero even bumps into him on his way to the insurance office where he is initially falsely identified as the robber. What all these discoveries suggest is that Hitchcock's metaphysical suppositions about the meaning of the story provided a filter for his documentary rigor, thereby shaping the narrative and even, one could argue, inflecting its documentary verisimilitude. The best defense of this approach is ironically furnished by Bazin: "Good cinema is necessarily, in one way or another, more realistic than bad cinema. But simply being realistic is not enough to make a film good. There is no point in rendering something realistically unless it is to make it more meaningful in an abstract sense. In this paradox lies the progress of the movies." (16) Insofar as Godard's films and videos better illustrate this maxim than any of Truffaut's films, one could argue that Godard eventually proved to be the more Bazinian of the two, in his practice as well as his theory. *** I don't feel qualified to discuss what it means to be a French Swiss Protestant in a French Catholic milieu, but I'd like to suggest that the French Catholic cinephilia of Cahiers du cinéma in the 50s partly involved seeing directors as if they were priests. In connection with this, I've always suspected that Bazin's taste for the low camera angles and ceilings in early Welles corresponded in part to the vantage point of someone praying. Similarly, the notions of destiny and fatality associated with Murnau, Lang, and Hitchcock had a particular Catholic inflection, and I suspect that part of what Godard brought to this metaphysics was a certain existential restlessness combined with a romantic view of politics and passion for dialectics. In effect, Godard adopted an Eisensteinian view of Hitchcock, a preference for montage over mise en scène, and in many respects his view of Hitchcock in the 90s sustains this Eisensteinian perspective. Even if Eisenstein never became a poet maudit for the masses the way Hitchcock did, one could certainly argue that what one forgets in Potemkin are personal motivations and plot details and what one remembers are a pair of broken spectacles, a baby carriage, and a series of stone lions. How does this view of Hitchcock become translated into social criticism? Problematically at best. In an oblique fashion Hitchcock's fear of the police implies a distrust of the established order, something one clearly also finds in Godard's work. Yet paradoxically, by the time Godard makes La chinoise, the notion of the faux coupable becomes transformed into the man accidentally killed by Véronique, a Maoist terrorist, instead of her intended target — a character whom she subsequently kills in turn when she returns to the same apartment house to correct her mistake. Moreover, this innocent victim is pushed so far into the margins of La chinoise that we never see his face — in contrast to Balestrero, whose face occupies the emotional center of The Wrong Man and becomes a central reference point in "Le Cinéma et son double". Let me quote again from Godard's review: "The beauty of each of these closeups, with their searching attention to the passage of time, comes from the sense that necessity is intruding on triviality, essence on existence. The beauty of Henry Fonda's face during this extraordinary second which becomes interminable is comparable to that of the young Alcibiades described by Plato in The Banquet [also known as The Symposium]. its only criterion is the exact truth. We are watching the most fantastic of adventures because we are watching the most perfect, the most exemplary, of documentaries." (17)
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Of course in The Wrong Man Godard is identifying more with Hitchcock than with Balestrero, and much of the lasting value of La chinoise, widely misunderstood at the time of its release, is its relative objectivity towards its Maoist characters, its refusal to take sides. But I think what Godard is mapping out in this description of Fonda's face, as Annette Michelson has suggested, is the notion of fiction and documentary forming a continuum, and this would inform his subsequent films politically as well as aesthetically. (18) (The political implications of this continuum are fully apparent in the contemporary social criticism of Alphaville, for example. By using existing Paris locations to represent the future in a distant galaxy, Godard created an allegory about France in 1965 that is full of specific as well as more general social criticism, altering the possibilities of science fiction films in the process.) In other respects, it's more difficult to see Godard functioning as a social critic while writing about Hitchcock, partly because it's debatable whether Hitchcock himself can be regarded as a social critic. The same thing could be said about Kafka insofar as a metaphysical reading of the work of either artist tends to rule out social criticism, and metaphysical criticism is what Godard and most of his colleagues at Cahiers du Cinéma specialized in. But recalling the suggestion of Joseph McBride that The Wrong Man constitutes a better adaptation of Kafka's The Trial than Welles's more literal adaptation, I think it could be argued that Kafka's novel and Hitchcock's film both offer powerful social critiques of bureaucracy, and some aspects of these critiques, or their equivalents, can be found in Godard's subsequent films. (19) In closing, I have to confess that I don't agree with Godard that Hitchcock was "le seul avec Dreyer qui a su filmer un miracle"–a compliment that takes too much credit away from Vigo and Buñuel, among others, not to mention Rossellini. Since I don't regard Dreyer's cinema as religious at all in many fundamental respects — for me his cinema represents not belief but challenges to beliefs, including paradoxically the beliefs of atheists — I have a lot of trouble connecting his materialism with Hitchcock's metaphysics. But of course it's difficult to disagree about miracles unless one can agree on what constitutes a miracle. I can accept the premise that the first official appearance of le vrai coupable in Hitchcock's film, superimposed over the features of Balestrero, represents a miracle in relation to the struggles of French Hitchcock criticism in the 50s because it furnishes a vindication and validation of what Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, Godard and others had been writing for years about the double and the transference of guilt in Hitchcock's films. This is why Truffaut could write in 1957, "This is certainly the most beautiful shot in Hitchcock's work and it summarizes all of it." (20) Perhaps for the same reason, Truffaut's review of The Wrong Man concludes, "it is probably his best film, the one that goes farthest in the direction he chose so long ago." (21) Less than decade later, while interviewing Hitchcock after becoming a successful director, he viewed the film more skeptically, regarding it mainly as a failure and saying to him by way of explanation, "You've convinced me that the best Hitchcock films are the ones that are most popular with the audience" (22) — a criterion that incidentally also rules out Vertigo, the film Hitchcock made just after The Wrong Man. Earlier in the same interview, Truffaut explains that he thinks Hitchcock's style, "which has found its perfection in the fiction area, happens to be in total conflict with the aesthetics of the documentary and that contradiction is apparent throughout the picture." (23) The same contradiction, I would add, helped to create the dialectical force of Godard's style as a filmmaker and made much of its social criticism possible.
Jonathan ROSENBAUM |
