01  SUMMER 2025

Cinema should be a contemplation of rare, priceless objects. Among these objects, the list of which would constitute a precious, refined catalogue of jewels flecked with fire against smooth skin, cars streaking space with blazing strokes, gardens in bloom, half-open dresses, villas by the sea, or, in another series, slender ships, clattering weapons, flounced dresses, torn doublets strewn across the chests of heroes, the privileged object is in fact the image of ourselves, the actor. Since cinema is a gaze which substitutes itself for our own in order to give us a world in accordance with our desires, it will rest on faces, on bodies that are radiant or bruised but always beautiful, from the glory or heartbreak that bear witness to the same original nobility, from a chosen race that we are exhilarated to recognize as our own, the ultimate advance of life towards god.

It is in these terms that Michel Mourlet, in a long text entitled ‘Sur un art ignoré’ [‘On a misunderstood art’], published in the magazine Cahiers du cinéma (98, August 1959), seeks to define the essence of cinema.

The study in question, vehemently debated in film milieus, has the merit of precisely establishing the defense and illustration of a certain critical school, situated, depending on whether we use an ideological or an aesthetic classification, on the far right or the far left of the spectrum of opinions.

Illustrated by around fifteen texts by Michel Mourlet, Marc Edalo, Roger Ravanbaz and Marc Bernard, which have appeared since 1957 in L’Écran, La Revue des lettres modernes, Radio-Télévision-Cinéma, La Nouvelle Revue française and Cahiers du cinéma, this profession of faith is founded upon two essential definitions:

1. A negative definition. The following are foreign to true cinema:

a) filmmakers who, tempted by some enticement external to their art, or insufficiently gifted, have failed to achieve a specifically cinematic fascination, even though they recognized the need for it (Hawks, Hitchcock, Renoir, Rossellini, Bresson).

b) filmmakers of genius who, unfortunately, only had access to the incomplete art of the silent film, devoid of any possible fascination because it was unrealistic (Griffith, Murnau, Von Stroheim).

c) filmmakers who express a personal vision through the artifices of a script (Clair, Chaplin, Buñuel, Zavattini-De Sica) or who artificially submit their mise en scène to this preconceived vision of the world, thereby directing their actors in a biased manner or employing technical procedures foreign to mise en scène, such as montage effects and complex camera movements (Kurosawa, Bergman, Eisenstein, Welles, Visconti, Pudovkin, Fellini, Antonioni).

2. A positive definition. The integral part of true cinema is made up of filmmakers who, through the manipulation of set design and especially of the actor, have succeeded in exerting a more or less constant fascination on the viewer: ‘The positioning of actors and objects and their movement within the frame must express everything, as seen in the supreme perfection of the last two films by Fritz Lang, The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb.’

These filmmakers are called: Joseph Losey (Great Britain), Otto Preminger (U.S.A.), Vittorio Cottafavi (Italy), Don Weis (U.S.A.), Fritz Lang (Germany), Raoul Walsh (U.S.A.), Samuel Fuller (U.S.A.), Edward Ludwig (U.S.A.), Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan), Ida Lupino (U.S.A.), Edgar G. Ulmer (U.S.A.), Franz Eichhorn (U.S.A.), Harry J. Revier (U.S.A.), Allan Dwan (U.S.A.), Douglas Sirk (U.S.A.) and Richard Fleischer (U.S.A.).

We can and should express serious reservations about Mourlet’s theory, but we must nevertheless recognize that it is at least as important as those of an Arnheim or a Balázs. It constitutes the filmic inheritance of the Alexandrians, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Parnassians. The notion of a pure art, which the film theorists of the silent era associated with certain stylistic tics that were, after all, quite like those of literature, is at last defined clearly and accurately, without any of the foggy metaphors that were the sole currency of Jean Epstein’s treatises.

Mourlet is reacting violently against the biases that were so common in the silent era and are still not so rare today. By creating a criticism that we shall call ‘Loseyo-Cottafavian’, in the name of the two main filmmakers it advocates against all others, he is also reacting against the so-called ‘Hitchcocko-Hawksian’ criticism, whose proponents, the journalist-filmmakers Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, etc., recognize the primacy of mise en scène, but by no means censure the intentions of filmmakers.

And this reaction is so violent that it ends up achieving the opposite: if a work is admired by others, at once any admiration these critical ultras had for it is substantially reduced. This explains their perverse taste for filmmakers nobody has ever heard of: the illustrious Franz Eichhorn and the indecisive Losey are rated higher than Renoir and Rossellini, on a par with Preminger, Lang, Cottafavi, Fuller, Ulmer, filmmakers whose immense talent, even genius, is to a greater or lesser extent underestimated.

But the value of the examples matters less than the soundness of the reasoning. It would be denying the evidence and displaying blatant bad faith to take exception to these jabs, this desire to shock, to the point of neglecting a profession of faith that exposes the fragility of our aesthetic conceptions.

The sincere snobbery of our ‘Loseyo-Cottafavians’ is the same as that of a Walter Pater or a George Moore, whose flashy language Mourlet incidentally picks up again. These references clearly show that we’re dealing with serious things here, over and above any superficial, smug display of smoke and mirrors. The problems are the same for the two English writers, for our critics and for some of the filmmakers they defend — problems that are not devoid of a certain element of tragedy.

Mourlet’s dual stance raises two questions:

Is it possible to create a valuable cinematic work that is not beholden to the doctrine of art for art’s sake?

Can pure cinema, as Mourlet defines it, really exist?

In the course of his demonstration, Mourlet takes stock, always with the same lucidity, of the various hybrid conceptions of the cinematic art, rediscovering, in passing, the arguments of Bazin and critics related to him. But he goes right to the end of his system; the only definitive truth is that of form, of mise en scène. Catholicism is a matter of tracking shots. Only the content of the framing and the direction of the actors express a vision of the world. So be it. Everything seems clear and simple.

But let’s note that the problem does not at all arise in the same way as in literature: the purists of the schools we mentioned earlier — let’s say, Apollonius, Rossetti and Mallarmé — were merely pushing the principle of the literary work — and that of the pictorial work, in the case of Rossetti — to the extreme. Painting and literature, by their very nature, are unrealistic arts, subject only to the influence of reality, and therefore do not suffer in the least from being ruthlessly self-enclosed. Art for art’s sake in the literary sense, in which the painting of external reality is entirely subject to the artist’s choice, is therefore the exact contrary of art for art’s sake in the cinematic sense, which is entirely subject to the realism of the image.

Yet, since every creation requires a choice and a human intervention, it’s clear that literary creation is a direct creation, in which dialogue between man and the world is optional, and necessarily incomplete. And it’s clear that cinematic creation is an indirect creation, the fruit of a necessary dialogue — which is not to speak of a dialectic, a term that is terribly overused these days — between man and the world. Literary purity excluded the intrusion of intention, of thought, of bias. But cinematic purity does not exclude these intrusions at all — on the contrary, an art of synthesis is necessarily impure. And to reject these impurities is to be unfaithful to the essence of cinema.

What profound value could this apparent purity possibly have, if it bears no mark of effort, of contact with the temptations and errors with which the artist has to contend? In any case, we couldn’t speak of purity: there would have to have been some kind of purification of dregs beforehand.

It does not seem as though the intrusion into a film of elements foreign to its mise en scène can contaminate it. The intentions of the script and the formal investigations, as long as they don’t deform the filmmaker’s natural mise en scène, can only serve to enrich it. And even if they establish a certain preconceived style, the dialogue between man and world is not thereby broken. Hence the curious successes of a certain cinema that is honest but full of intentions, that of Paddy Chayefsky, Richard Brooks, even François Truffaut.

The proof? Mourlet condemns ‘in Rossellini the groping of the creature towards a creator, a theme external to the mise en scène’. Yet Rossellini, Christian filmmaker par excellence, vigorously defends himself against any confessional bias in the slightest shot of his films. As in Buñuel’s Nazarin, it is not the script but the natural mise en scène of the film that can be considered Christian. There is no demonstration there. And the only difference between Cottafavi and Rossellini is that in the latter the subject corresponds to the mise en scène, whereas in Cottafavi it doesn’t correspond to anything. In Rossellini, the subject serves as pretext, as springboard — it helps us understand the obvious lesson of the mise en scène, which is indecipherable in logical terms. The theme of transference in Hitchcock has no value in itself, but it helps us understand the formal signification of the work. The subject of a film must always exist in relation to the mise en scène. It serves as introduction, preface, even as critique.

Every filmmaker has had recourse to formal artifice — the upstanding Preminger himself is a virtuoso of the camera movements condemned by Mourlet. And the beauty of these impure forms of art — let’s accept this classification — can equal the beauty of the purest forms of art. The movement of a character’s arm in Welles can resemble the movement of a character’s arm in Cottafavi and can possess equal beauty. The differences in their respective methods in no way prevent these similarities. Doesn’t every artist aim for the same goal?

The test of time has shown that no school has ever passed into posterity; that it is the masters of the most opposed schools who have together acquired eternal glory. We have completely forgotten the disciples who professed the same opinions as them and consider disputes between geniuses ridiculous. A Hitchcock and a Preminger can fascinate us with identical shot sequences and camera movements, before which principles disappear forever.

The artist who sticks to a subject without substance runs a real risk, after a few films, of seeing the scope of their possibilities narrow, whereas the one who seeks to express a new or interesting subject will inevitably be led to solve new aesthetic problems that they would not have suspected otherwise, and so to make a better film.

The best proof of this is the evolution of one of the gods of this young criticism, Otto Preminger. He debuted with the ‘scintillating diamonds of fascination’ that are Laura and, especially, Whirlpool. Whirlpool is a difficult film that should not be handled by every Tom, Dick and Harry: cold and enigmatic, without subject or psychology, with no realistic basis other than the beauty and truth of the characters’ expressions and movements. When you come so close to the evidence of cinematographic essence, you risk getting burned. Commercial failure, loss of inspiration, even madness, lie in store for the purist filmmaker or critic.

Subsequently, Preminger endeavored to film scandalous and often very profound subjects (for example, The Man with the Golden Arm, about drug use), but without seeking to develop them. He could finally work on a solid foundation, assured of success, while continuing his investigations with a calmer mind.

Yet today, surprisingly, the purist Preminger has become a film auteur, a moralist. His indifference towards grand subjects, which he did not tackle, was already like the expression of a moral we find in Bonjour tristesse, without the formal value of the film being diminished. On the contrary, the film revealed the discovery of nothingness by heroes foolish enough to seek an ideal. Anatomy of a Murder, which has just been released, pays tribute to the triumph of the small details of life over reason and justice. The lawyer who doesn’t like the sheriff’s wife’s cooking, and prefers to eat hard boiled eggs in a diner, gains favor with the judge, an avid fisherman, whom he teaches a new way to catch frogs. The court lets the G.I. murderer — guilty in the public eye, innocent in the eyes of justice — go free, and they leave without even settling their defense counsel’s fees. A pair of underpants, a garbage can, a dog, and a pair of glasses are the objects that determine the outcome of the story; in Cukor and Preminger, the rejection of all morality tends to become a relativistic morality. As for the Cottafavi of In amore si pecca in due and Una donna libera, if he isn’t a film auteur, isn’t it because he isn’t allowed to shoot what he wants?

How fragile, then, does this notion of pure cinema, of art for art’s sake, appear; works that want to remain foreign to the domains of morality and metaphysics relate to them all the more directly by pretending to avoid them. Behind the barriers of gratuitous aestheticism, no filmmaker worthy of the name is free to indulge in esoteric delights.

Signes du temps, 11, September 1959, pp. 33–35.