The Woodcutter's Gaze: Luc Moullet and Cahiers du Cinema

Surely one of the most unjustly forgotten moments in the history of cinema is the day when Luc Moullet received a plastic leg in the mail from Samuel Fuller. The director of Fixed Bayonets! and Run of the Arrow was so taken with the article "Sam Fuller sur les brisées de Marlowe" that he sent its author an autographed fake limb in thanks.¹ The gift paid tribute to Moullet's argument, which held that Fuller was a filmmaker obsessed with the human body, and, in particular, with feet. Moullet saw this fascination as neither foot fetish nor Oedipal complex: instead, it exemplified how the plainspoken director's films started from the physical world rather than from preconceived ideas. The feet were the most humble part of the body, the part directly linked to the ground, to movement, to action—in short, to what the critic considered the essence of cinema.

The leg, signed "Sam Fuller, philopode," was accompanied by a long, enthusiastic letter and a request for a subscription to Cahiers du Cinéma, which had published the piece in their March, 1959 issue. In one fell swoop, Moullet and the review found themselves officially endorsed by a director who would remain close to them for the rest of his life. The article marks a late high point for the auteur theory Moullet had been instrumental in defending. At the same time, it also contains a key phrase—"la morale est affaire de travellings" [morality is in the tracking shots]— which faintly announces the move away from established Cahiers doctrine and towards the militant film criticism that emerged on a massive scale in late-sixties France.

While Moullet is a central figure in this critical shift, he is now primarily known as a director. To date, he has made over 30 award-winning movies, such as the mountain-climbing bicycle epic Parpaillon [1992] and the underground western Une aventure de Billy le Kid, [1971] starring Jean-Pierre Léaud. Moullet belongs to a generation of craftsmen like Jacques Rozier, Jean Eustache, or Jean-Daniel Pollet, all of whom started making films in the wake of the New Wave's initial success. Of all the second wave directors, however, his path follows those of Truffaut, Godard, and Rivette most closely. Like them, he built a reputation as a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma before becoming a filmmaker.

Moullet began his critical career at Cahiers, working there steadily from 1956 to 1969. During this period, he also contributed to other periodicals like Arts and Radio-Cinéma-Télévision and completed two books—a short monograph on Luis Buñuel and a longer one on Fritz Lang.² In the seventies he essentially stopped working as a critic, publishing less as he became more involved with filmmaking. At the end of the 1980s, however, he began a second stint at Cahiers, contributing a monthly column, important articles on directors like Ford, Truffaut, and DeMille, and a book for their press on actors in classical Hollywood cinema.

While all of this work deserves serious attention, here I will concentrate on Moullet's initial tenure at the review. Revisiting his early writing provides an opportunity to re-evaluate the radical changes that shook French cinema between the end of the 1950s and the end of the 1960s. These changes had far-reaching consequences for the critic as well as for the Cahiers. They transformed the review in three ways. First, they affected its theoretical orientation: in the space of ten years, it abandoned its Bazinian taste for realism in favor of Marxist, psycho-analytic, and semiological approaches that branded representation as suspect. Second, these changes provoked a new political engagement: by the late 1960s, the generally conservative publication had made a serious investment in radical left-wing politics. Finally, the changes signaled a shift in aesthetics. This is the period in which the Cahiers decentralize: Hollywood cinema and traditional conceptions of cinephilia were gradually left behind in favor of a passionate interest in new work from Hungary, Yugoslavia, Brazil, and, indeed, France...