01  SUMMER 2025

‘In this film (Doctors’ Wives), the conflict between science and love is based not so much on a "spiritualization" that affects only Penning, but rather on the relationship of this spiritualization with a conversion. In the following films, such as Shipmates Forever, it is more a conversion than a simple transcendence; the conversion occurs only during the boiler room fire, which frees Melville from his doubts and allows him to gain self-confidence and true commitment.’ ^[1] These remarks by Frederick Lamster about two of Borzage’s productions suggest, given the loftiness at which they are pitched — unusual on Hollywood terrain — and the lengthy attention devoted to them, that these are significant works. However, these two films are so mediocre that I, a Borzage fan, left before the end of each. In a magnificent book, ^[2] Hervé Dumont, the filmmaker’s Swiss exegete, very clearly expresses his disdain for these two commissions, noting that they barely aroused the interest of the director, who was at the time obliged to produce three films per year.

If, by some misfortune, someone went to see these films on the strength of Lamster’s writings without knowing anything about Borzage, he’d think Lamster was taking the piss, and he’d be forever put off going to see other films by the celebrated filmmaker.

This kind of literature seems all the more scandalous since Lamster’s study was, until 1993, the only monograph devoted to Borzage. Lamster thus inherited an enormous responsibility, as well as a vast and almost totally unexplored body of work, of which he proved himself unworthy.

Such prose, focused on the analysis of scripts rather than on the impressions felt during screenings, is typical of the academic mindset, which has long prevailed in America and, alas, is beginning to spread in France.

Witness this declaration from Marcel Oms: ‘We must maintain a “neutral” perspective, without which no scientific history is possible. For example, personally I quite enjoy La Nuit fantastique, I loved the finale of La Duchesse de Langeais, and I find La Symphonie fantastique quite “crazy”. That being said, this is not a criterion. “I like it” is merely the criterion of the viewer. If we want to formulate value judgments and oppose them to one another, we will end up spending all our time on it. I believe we must situate the discussion on another level.’ ^[3] Astonishing naivety. It never occurred to Oms that the work of the critic might be to analyze why he enjoyed La Nuit fantastique and loved the finale of La Duchesse. Obviously, less time is wasted analyzing synopses, a discussion that is certainly on another level, but a lower one, not the higher one Oms supposed. The failure of this strategy is evident. Oms defines a film that purports to depict society in 1860 as follows: ‘Bernard Favre’s La Trace (1983), which, in any case, is already a classic in our eyes’, and adds: ‘La Trace is, in more ways than one, an exemplary work.’ ^[4] Yet this film, now forgotten, is ruined by an absurd structure: most sequences are the same length. Moreover, the same thing almost always happens: Richard Berry enters the frame from one side, meets characters, and exits the frame from the other side. The primary reality of the film is not its social or historical value, but the boredom, the feeling of déjà vu, and the unintentional humor evoked by such laziness. The only question the viewer has is: ‘Will the scene end before or after Berry exits the frame?’ Oms doesn’t say a word about this.

Admittedly, there is a certain logic to this principle. The academic mind adores scientific and incontestable truths. It hates the subjective, and proscribes the use of ‘I’ in theses. But what could be more subjective than the notion of quality in cinema? Le Camion, Les Carabiniers, Vénus aveugle, Sergeant York, Marienbad, La strada, Il gattopardo, Offret and L’avventura all have their unconditional admirers and detractors.

It’s tempting to clean up this mess by excluding all subjective criteria and focusing instead on the scalpel of supposed objectivity. But in doing so, we destroy the very notion of quality, and undermine the work of the creators, since almost all great filmmakers calculate their mise en scène and even more so their editing with a view to inspiring emotion deep within the spectator. We risk ending up with fake masterpieces that are soporific or insipid, or seeing in real masterpieces only elements — thematic or stylistic constants — that don’t necessarily bring about the success of the result. It’s putting the cart before the horse to make an objective, positive analysis of a film that doesn’t move you. I don’t think you have the right to write positively about a work that doesn’t fascinate you or puts you to sleep.

In truth, it’s not just the academic mentality that is to blame. The issue is reinforced by Marxism. It’s hard to pinpoint the origin of the problem. Academicism existed long before the October Revolution. But Marxist film criticism long preceded the moment when cinema conquered the university — the 1950s in the USA, 1968 in France. The refusal of subjectivity among commies is somewhat different from what goes on at the Sorbonne. It’s a refusal of the cult of personality (a cult reserved only for the great helmsman who sees in each creator or critical individual a dangerous rival or the threat of going off the rails). ^[5] It’s a refusal of anything that opposes the collective, rather than a rejection, through theses and dissertations, of what has not been proven. But the result is the same, especially in view of the ultimate horror, the Dracula multiplied by Frankenstein, that is the Marxist academic. I write this with even less remorse because I find Marxism, in itself, very pleasant, and the university represents for me an oasis of intellectual honesty in the face of rampant commercialism. But how dangerous both prove to be in the field of film analysis.

By reducing everything to the sociopolitical, neo-Zhdanovism offers us its most hilarious gems: ‘Starting from this point [1950], we find a very social and very engaged French cinema. We must mention the importance of Henri Verneuil and a few films from 1948 that are completely political. French cinema became political, that is to say, dialectical, starting from 1948 with Yves Allégret.’ ^[6] He then directed Manèges, which broke the records for caricatured heroes and misanthropy... The elevation of the mediocre corresponds to the systematic disdain for talent: ‘Les quatre cents coups is first and foremost, I regret to say, an attack on the secular school. We are shown some teachers who are all either idiots or sadists. Then it’s an attack on soulless homes and godless families.’ ^[7] Of course, this text is completely off the mark, mainly because Truffaut never compares the secular with the private school, which is never mentioned in his film.

The grand prize goes to goes to J.P. Jeancolas, ^[8] who notes that in Gance’s Jérôme Perreau (1935), Jérôme delivers a harangue that resembles a speech by a Pétainist politician of the time. Based on this similarity, he confuses in the same opprobrium Gance’s masterpiece and the reviled collaborator Marshal Pétain was to become a few years later, without devoting a line to the dizzying verve of the filmmaker and his actors...

More subtly and more insidiously, the attention paid to certain films and the emphatic choice of noble terms sometimes contribute to creating the illusion of the quality of these films. In this way, N. Burch and G. Sellier, discussing Monsieur des Lourdines and Jeannou, claim that ‘it is the discrediting of the father that undermines the Pétainist ideology of these films and makes them bearable today’, after asserting that the choice of ‘an “always already chastised” father and a gently disapproving young girl [...] provides a striking confirmation of the specificity of this cinematic period.’ ^[9] Even if it doesn’t refer directly to the film, the term ‘striking’ ends up lending an aura of quality to the trifle described, especially as the process is repeated over and over again.

So-called historical criticism is nothing but a poor consolation for those desperately seeking a specific identity akin to the resolutely auteurist one once achieved by Truffaut and Rivette.

* * *

We can certainly tolerate such excesses as long as they consciously belong to the realm of board games, like Scrabble, or even pranks, ^[10] and constitute a parenthetical discourse appended to a primary discourse on cinema. But some authors devote the entirety of their writing to this. Masochistic, suicidal behaviour. There is no other choice than the subjective or nothing. For if cinema is reduced to a mere sociopolitical catalogue (or even an inventory of expressive techniques), mixing duds and gems indiscriminately, it deserves no more attention than the architecture of fast food restaurants or the typography of Paris-Turf. Perhaps even less, because in the case of cinema we’re faced with a reductive attitude, whereas in the other cases we will at least find the promotion of something original.

At present, almost everyone who writes on cinema teaches in academia, and this risks rubbing off on them. Many books on cinema originated as theses or dissertations. We’re arriving today at a point when the rejection of the subjective means that some people, writing a monograph on a filmmaker they adore, don’t dedicate so much as a page to explaining why the films are good or why they are moved by them, lost as they are in their objective analyses of themes or stylistic modes, whose quantity or variations leads to mistaken presuppositions about the quality of the films themselves. This is enough to permanently discourage potential viewers.

Cahiers du cinéma, 494, September 1995, pp. 66–67.