02  Winter 2025

Jean-Claude Biette is a writer of beginnings and endings. A litany could be drawn of the elements, actions, and devices that, for Biette, brought film to life or threatened its integrity: light, speech, freeze frames, ^[1] and, of course, death itself. Not an eschatological thinker by any means, Biette can instead be thought of as a theorist and filmmaker of hesitant or false starts and protracted endings.

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In the May 1978 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, Biette approaches Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) as an early sound film in which the interplay between the characters’ postures and their words registers both the film’s figural proximity to the silent era and the radical reconfiguration of cinematic syntax that sound, especially the voice, brings about. Biette identifies ‘key words’ repeated by characters within and across scenes in the film — ‘happy’, ‘freaks’, ‘children’ — that he calls a form of ‘metamorphosis of the intertitle in silent cinema’. ^[2] At the dawn of the talkie, Biette registers the violence of phonic inscriptions in Browning’s film: not just the hateful words of the inebriated and avaricious that pierce the night but also of cinema itself intoxicated with its newfound capacity to unleash voices from bodies. ‘Tod Browning, Freaks’ is, at first glance, an outlier in Biette’s film criticism as almost half of the article details the plot of the film. This is especially striking because one of the first remarks Biette makes about Browning is the following:

A film’s plot was of little interest to Browning, as much as this kind of disinterest may be accepted in the framework of Hollywoodian cinema. All of Browning’s work rests on what in America is called ‘characterization’: he considered that plot must be the natural result of his ‘characters’. ^[3]

The notion of character [personnage] would go on to become very important for Biette, both for his writing and his filmmaking — a notion that isn’t self-evident, especially when it is uncoupled from psychology. The idea that Browning’s plots result from his characters can in fact be detected in the way Biette summarizes the events of the film. His is a plot description written at the level of the syllable and the scream. He stops at the word ‘alibi’, spoken by a stutterer in the film, noting how its last two letters are doubled, becoming ‘bye-bye’; he zooms in on another word, ‘children’, and observes how it’s used by one character as a ‘trap’ and by another as a ‘balm’. What draws Biette to Freaks is, perhaps, the fact that what the ‘characters’ do to each other is precisely the work of ‘characterization’ construed as a process of identification. The words the able-bodied characters wield against the ‘freaks’ are often inflammatory, accusatory, offensive — name-calling as identification and demarcation. If, for Biette, a character — and by extension a plot — is the sum of affective postures, gestures, and intonations, then what the characters in Freaks do to one another is reject the plan, the world, that they ought to share. In an article he wrote for the third issue of Trafic, in the summer of 1992, Biette recalls a statement made by Howard Hawks during the interview conducted with him by Jacques Becker, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut, published in Cahiers du cinéma, 56, in February 1956. Biette remarks that Hawks, who was ‘always celebrated for his precise observation of the human tempo,’ had trouble with ‘putting together his characters’ in Land of the Pharaohs (1955). He writes: ‘[…] he never figured out how to bring to life, to everyday life, a pharaoh, a high priest, an architect, a Nubian princess, slaves, workers building a pyramid in Egypt […]’. ^[4] This problem of constitution and cohabitation is at the heart of Freaks, but it is also easy to see how Biette’s own films resonate with Browning’s (and Hawks’s) both in their construction of a milieu for their characters and the key word or ‘magic words’ that resonate through them. Curiously enough, these words are often names in Biette’s films, spoken to conjure figures who are reclusive or absent, and repeated by actors like Jean-Christophe Bouvet as though he were discovering language itself: ‘René Dimanche’ (the name of Howard Vernon’s character, a painter) in Loin de Manhattan, while in Le Complexe de Toulon, Bouvet’s character intones the name ‘Charles Toulon’ (Howard Vernon, again, playing an actor/former scholar), to himself, and, in one of his many outbursts in English, riffs on his name by anglicizing it and turning it into a pun: ‘Charles Too-long’. By the end of a film like Loin de Manhattan, with its panoply of Parisian art critics and academics surrounding the gallery but each seeming astray, Biette is trying to constitute and reconcile his characters as though they were high priests, architects, and princesses in Ancient Egypt.

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‘Three Deaths’ (‘Trois Morts’), published in the February 1978 issue of Cahiers, is an article in the form of a triptych of obituaries for Charles Chaplin, Howard Hawks, and Jacques Tourneur — three filmmakers dear to Biette’s heart — who died within a few days of each other in December 1977. But Biette’s triptych tribute is more of a sextet: following the three entries on Chaplin, Hawks, and Tourneur — whose oeuvre Biette characterizes as marked by emotion, concreteness, and justness, respectively — is what he calls a ‘post-face’, an exhumation of sorts consisting of three more obituaries for the three filmmakers, an afterlife in the form of an afterword. Having just read Biette’s homage to Tourneur, the longest of the three entries, the reader finds herself with an article seemingly doubled or mirrored. What follows, structured in the same way as the first half of the article, is in fact radically reworked: gone are the biographical elements and the filmographies (however subjective) that populate the first set of obituaries. The post-face opens on a second obituary for Chaplin with a note for the doubtful or the confused:

One might perhaps be surprised to see me talking more about Tourneur than Hawks and about Hawks more than Chaplin. It is because of the very nature of his genius and the universal resonance of, first and foremost, Chaplin the actor, that Chaplin surpasses the specific problems of cinema. ^[5]

It quickly becomes clear that Biette’s post-face is as much corrective as it is commemorative. In fact, it reads like a lament and a lesson. The oversight made by critics writing about Chaplin, Biette goes on to claim, is that they do not recognize his ‘cinematographic genius’, failing to see beyond the Tramp. ^[6] The more significant remark, however, is the one on ‘the specific problems of cinema’, which Biette will trace across the three texts that make up the post-face. The first sentence of the second entry on Hawks converses with the opening lines on Chaplin, above:

We can better understand the reversal of perspectives by saying: the films of Hawks demonstrate the specificity of cinema more than those of Chaplin. Hawks works with very limited thematic and dramatic material: men willing to take all sorts of risks (even the risk of dying) to practice their jobs. ^[7]

The third and final of the three ‘post-face’ texts practically dons the form of a film by Tourneur. The clarity and succinctness of Biette’s dissection of balance in Tourneur doesn’t explicitly allow for a discussion of ‘specificity’ to tie into the comparison between Hawks and Chaplin — completing the method must have seemed too academic for Biette — but there is something about specificity nonetheless, the specific task and trajectory every element of a Tourneur film is bound to: ‘In Tourneur’s films, each element has to dissolve into the whole formed by the film and express the place it occupies. Thus, characters head for anonymity and discover that they are relays [. . .]’. ^[8]

Biette’s tracing of specificity and its surpassing in Chaplin, Hawks, and Tourneur can perhaps shed a light on the strange format of his doubled article or sextet of obituaries, for the format itself registers his reckoning with the almost-simultaneous deaths of three filmmakers who, for both his film criticism and filmmaking, served as his orbit: a milieu that he didn’t revere or inhabit blindly or automatically but cohabited with fascination and hesitation. How, Biette seems to ask himself (twice), can we live with the mutual coexistence and eventual disappearance of three systems of inhabiting the world: the equality of laughter and tears (Chaplin); blind ambition (Hawks); and a drive for anonymity (Tourneur). Perhaps Biette is like Ingrid, played by Sonia Saviange in Loin de Manhattan, who goes to meet René Dimanche (Howard Vernon), the reclusive painter, to tell him how much she admires his work:

Ingrid: Yesterday I started writing a sonnet to express all the admiration that I feel when I’m looking at your triptych of hawthorn bushes.

René Dimanche: It is not a triptych! They are three separate paintings.

Biette, like Ingrid, like death, knows a triptych when he sees one.