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The Past and the Passing of Death in French Cinema Dudley Andrew D EATH HAS a HISTORY, Phillipe Aries has given us to under­ stand, and so we are authorized to ask about “ Death in the Past,” and, more precisely here, death in the cinema of the past.1And we ask it with the suspicion that death has already occurred, that for the cinema at least death has very little future. As a biological universal, one can expect to find death represented at all periods and by all cultures; yet, biological universals (sex, death, vio­ lence) are precisely what cultures contain through ideology and outright censoring. Hence the roles death plays in films, and the manner in which it is represented or inflects representation, can distinguish one type of movie from another, one national cinema or period of film from another. Exemplary here is the demise of the hero in Pépé le Moko (1937) by delicious suicide facing the departing boat to France and the gunning down of his avatar in the American remake of the following year, Algiers. Suicide was literally unrepresentable in Hollywood during the classic period, whereas it marks the sensibility of Poetic Realism and guarantees the authenticity of Jean Gabin and his destiny.2 Thus a first line of inquiry into French death must be cultural, exam­ ining the manner in which death is presented, used, contained in this specific locale and across the twentieth century. But because France’s favorable cinematic situation has provided filmmakers with the produc­ tion and reception conditions to explore the limits of cinematographic representation, a second line of inquiry, more properly aesthetic, exam­ ines the disruptive friction death is capable of exerting when permitted. I. Cultural Approach The conclusion of François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim shocks the viewer with a close-up, not only of the caskets of Catherine and Jim entering the flames of the crematorium, but of their bones being ground into powder with a mortar and pestle in close-up. Accompanied by Jules, two uniformed mortuary officials bear these ashes in little boxes to their final resting place. As Jules turns away from the mausoleum and saunters VOL. XXXV, NO. 4 7 L ’E sprit C réateur rather light of foot down a hill and into a future without his friends, the narrator concludes the film with this sentence: “ Catherine had always wished her ashes to be scattered to the winds from the top of a hill, but it was not permitted.” What makes Jules so accepting of this separation? Undoubtedly he is relieved to be free of the vagaries of Catherine’s sexual impulses; but he is also perhaps comforted by the manner in which death is (or was, until the Second World War) culturally surrounded in Europe. Catherine’s and Jim’s remains are elegantly bound and then ritually shelved as though in an archive. Jules can look forward to reminiscing about his friends, turning those reminiscenses into literary art; the cinema, then, can be said to elegize his writing. Jules, Jim, and Catherine are properly mummified by the photographic image. Truffaut would return to this theme directly in the film that he thought of as his most personal, La Chambre Verte. Playing the lead role himself, he gives his life over to the careful memorialization of what he calls “his dead,” all those whose lives touched him in a positive way. The temple of death he builds and tends, replete with quasi-religious para­ phernalia (especially the candles), houses not the bodies of the deceased, but their photographs, in a glow of concern that might stand for the movie theater where we ourselves watch this ritual. Cinema, for Truffaut as for Bazin, is a temple of death mummified. We offer our ticket price and our attention and we expect to receive whatever spiritual nourish­ ment these specters—these absences—can provide. Even at his most personal and private Truffaut seems hardly anxious in the face of death, for he calls on rituals that function like antibodies to quickly choke off the potentially horrific rent that death makes in the fabric of social life. Around the hole of death, rituals form...

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