1
François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock:
A Pygmalion Trilogy
Bibliographical reference: Preminger, A., 2007, François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred
, July, Vol. 35:3, p.Literature/Film quarterly (LFQ),TrilogyHitchcock: A Pygmalion
170-180.
This paper examines the influence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) on
two of François Truffaut’s films, Tirez Sur le Pianiste (1960) and Jules et
Jim (1961). (Of course the influence exceeds these works by far.) On his
way toward defining his own voice (as well as shaping the modern cinema
of the early sixties) Truffaut both absorbed from Hitchcock and rebelled
against him. Such a case study should prove particularly rewarding because
Vertigo holds a special position within Hitchcock’s oeuvre, and it is
intensely reflexive in that it is consciously concerned with the artistic act of
filmmaking.
My treatment of Truffaut’s relation to Hitchcock draws heavily on my
(mis)understanding of Harold Bloom’s theory of literary influence.
According to Bloom, any strong poem, no matter what its ostensible topic,
is essentially about an earlier poem (or poems).1
It is the enactment of the
latecomer’s anxiety lest he be imaginatively constricted by his precursor,
since “everything has already been said.” The younger poet thus adopts a
highly charged “oedipal” relation to his “father” poet.2
If he is strong
enough he deploys certain strategies (the six “ratios” specified by Bloom)3
that enable him to “swerve” away from the precursor at the point where the
aspirant feels he deviated from what would have been the right course. Thus
/François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock2
the ephebe revises, rewrites, or as Bloom usually puts it, misreads the old
poem.
To live, the poet must misinterpret the father, by the crucial act of
misprision, which is the re-writing of the father.4
He thereby gains an illusory sense of having originated the old masterpiece
rather than having been influenced by it.
Poets tend to think of themselves as stars because their deepest desire is to
be an influence, rather than to be influenced, but even in the strongest,
whose desire is accomplished, the anxiety of having been formed by
influence still persists.5
The psychological and rhetorical strategies enable the ephebe both to negate
the influence and also maintain it
emotionally, through a repressed processing
of it. The drama envisioned by Bloom is a
veritable power struggle (a “wrestling”).
There is no correct interpretation whether by
poet or critic; there are only stronger or
weaker misreadings.
Poetic strength comes only from a triumphant wrestling with the greatest
of the dead6
3François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock/
One should note that in the case of Truffaut, critic turned filmmaker, his
relation to Hitchcock is not a relation to a “dead poet,” as Bloom’s theory of
influence would seem to require, Hitchcock at the time being very much
alive and at the peak of his creativity. Moreover, as we shall see, much of
Truffaut’s cinematic reaction to Vertigo is fully conscious, which in no way
excludes there being repressed features that are not explicitly dealt with in
the present study.
My starting point is Hitchcock’s
“vertigo shot,” when James Stewart
looks down the tower stairway in the
first chapel scene, and the corresponding
shot in Jules et Jim (1961), when the
two men discover the Greek statue for the first time. Truffaut emphasizes
the discovery of the Greek statue by Jules and Jim through a special
shooting technique. The camera backs away from the statue in a “dolly”
movement, and at the same time the lens approaches it with a “zoom in”
movement. These contrary movements jointly induce giddiness, as the
statue’s size remains fixed, while the space between it and the background
shrinks. This is a distinctive cinematic expression of the emotional impact
the statue has on Jules and Jim, and also a cinematic ploy that draws
Catherine out of her material reality, suggesting her transcendent or
“divine” quality. Since looking at the statue has a dizzying effect on the
spectator, Catherine comes to be perceived as the cause of the dizziness.
Furthermore, this specific cinematic device, in which her image remains
unchanged in size, while the space around her shrinks, defines her as the
center around which the entire world revolves. The Vertigo association
/François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock4
intensifies our perception of her as a whirlpool that draws in the men in her
vicinity. Indeed, in an interview, Hitchcock tells Truffaut that in Vertigo he
invented this shot, which he had been seeking for years since shooting
Rebecca (1940), and explains what it meant to him:
Hitchcock. Did you notice the distortion when Stewart looks down the
tower stairway? Do you know how we did that?
Truffaut. Wasn’t that a track-out combined with a forward zoom?
Hitchcock. That’s it. When Joan Fontaine fainted at the inquest in
Rebecca, I wanted to show how she felt that everything was moving far
away from her before she toppled over. I always remember one night at
the Chelsea Arts Ball, at Albert Hall in London, when I got terribly
drunk, and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from
me. I tried to get that into Rebecca, but they couldn’t do it. The
viewpoint must be fixed, you see, while the perspective is changed as it
stretches lengthwise. I thought about the problem for fifteen years. By
the time we got to Vertigo, we solved it by using the dolly and zoom
simultaneously.7
The Vertigo shot emphasizes the character’s weakness and helplessness.
Truffaut’s use of Hitchcock’s shot could obviously be a mere borrowing of
a Hitchcockian technique. But given the further multiple links to Vertigo,
the shot is clearly part of a Bloomian misreading (albeit in the abovementioned
conscious mode) of a poetic precursor. Truffaut inverts the
meaning with an identical shot. He expresses the excitement of the viewers
and the glorification of the object viewed. At the same time, the quotation
5François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock/
hints at the helplessness of the men vis-à-vis Catherine’s powers, which
becomes evident further on.
I suggest that Vertigo itself should be seen as a misreading of the myth of
Pygmalion—a sculptor who, though he hated women, fell in love with his
own ivory statue of Aphrodite. In answer to his prayer, the goddess gave life
to the statue and he married her. This is how Truffaut himself sums up the
plot of Vertigo8
:
Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), who, due to acrophobia (fear of
heights), has resigned from the San Francisco police force, is asked by
Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), a former friend, to shadow his wife,
Madeleine (Kim Novak), whom he describes as a suicidal neurotic. The
former detective gradually falls deeply in love with the woman he is
trailing. He saves her life when she attempts to drown herself but, because
of his phobia, is unable to prevent her death when, some time later, she
throws herself from the top of a church steeple. Overwhelmed by guilt
feelings, Scottie has a nervous breakdown. With the help of an old
girlfriend, Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), he returns to a normal life. One
day, on the street, he encounters the living image of his dead love, who
claims she is Judy Barton and maintains she has never seen him, or heard
of Madeleine. He is attracted to the girl but puzzled by the uncanny
resemblance. The truth is that Judy is Madeleine, who, at the time of their
former meeting, was not Elster’s wife but his mistress. Her supposed death
was part of a carefully planned hoax to get rid of the real wife, with the
two accomplices staging the killing in such a way that the helpless
detective would swear he has witnessed Mrs. Elster’s suicide. Scottie
finally becomes suspicious, and in an attempt to make Judy confess, he
takes her back to the tower and forces himself to accompany her to the top,
/François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock6
only to see the terrified young woman accidentally trip and this time really
fall to her death.9
The missing fact in Truffaut’s eloquent
synopsis, for the purpose of our discussion,
is that Judy plays Madeleine not after the
model of the real Mrs. Elster, but after the
model of Carlotta, who had lived several
generations earlier, and whose portrait
hangs in a museum in San Francisco. What we have here is the incarnation
of an image of a historical figure.
The plot is conveyed through a narrative structure emphasizing that
Vertigo is a film about cinema. The film is divided into two parts, the
second part being a kind of “Take 2” on the first part. In the first part Judy
plays Madeleine whose ontological status is that of a total fiction—except
for the fact that she stands for the idea of “the wife.” The fact that neither
the audience nor Scottie ever sees Elster’s wife leaves her as a mere idea
whose appearance through Judy’s performance is the only thing we see. The
cinematic reflexive aspect of Vertigo is especially highlighted by the
historical-mythical background that Elster (archetypal director/producer)
lends to the artistic image of the fictitious Madeleine, by using the figure of
Carlotta—both her story and her museum’s portrait—in shaping her artistic
image.
In the second part we see a reconstruction/recreation/reflection of the first
part, in which Scottie changes from an actor maneuvered by Elster into a
director who maneuvers Judy, and in the course of his directing, eventually
7François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock/
acquires a genuine insight into his situation. This time Judy plays a
Madeleine who exists in Scottie’s memory as Elster had shaped her for him.
To achieve the reconstruction, Scottie makes use of the same cinematic
means that Hitchcock uses: casting, costumes, shoes, hair-dos, make-up,
props, shooting locations, and narrative. The two parts of the film link
together an objective external situation and a subjective internal situation.
The first is Elster’s desire to eliminate his wife and gain her money. The
second is Scottie’s subjective condition, namely, his desperate need for a
“second chance” (a key expression) to redeem himself from his crippling
guilt feelings for the death of his colleague in the prologue. The encounter
between the two obsessions—Elster’s and Scottie’s—makes possible the
first “artistic” act of creating a character and a plot, the one in which Elster
is the “director,” and subsequently the second, the one in which Scottie is a
“spectator” turned “director.”
Before turning to Jules et Jim, I will draw attention to the two Turning
Points in Vertigo, which are obviously prominent scenes. The first one is the
“Golden Gate Bridge” scene, where Madeleine jumps off the bridge into the
water, to be rescued by Scottie, and thus they meet for the first time. The
second turning point occurs when Scottie spots Judy as resembling the dead
Madeleine, and proceeds to transform her into Madeleine. From here on the
film moves on to its inevitable resolution, where Judy is led to her death by
falling from the tower and Scottie is liberated from his vertigo.
Jules et Jim breaks the Aristotelian “unity of plot & action” rule and
therefore its fragmented plot can not be summarized in few sentences. Its
story however, is composed of fragmented episodes out of twenty years in
the lives of its three main characters Jules, Jim, and Catherine. It is
/François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock8
revolving around their “manage a
trios,” after the two men found in
Catherine the incarnation of the
smile on a Greek statue in which
they had fallen in love. I read
Jules et Jim as a film about a
woman who wanted to be “God”
and discovered that she was mortal. To be “God,” according to this film,
means to rebel against all limitations that restrict one’s life: physical and
bodily limitations, the limitations imposed by the laws of nature, and those
of social codes and interpersonal loyalties. To be “God” means to control
your life and the lives of those around you, to experience absolute freedom,
to create your life anew every day. This is Catherine’s personality and this is
the way she acts. As a result, her personality and behavior lead her along the
route of a Greek tragedy to the total destruction of her life and her loves.
Such a reading of the film stems from the cinematic means of expression, as
well as from an intertextual reading of the film. From the outset, Catherine
is not ordinary flesh and blood. She is a “Pygmalion”-like incarnation of a
smile that appears on a Greek statue that is first revealed to Jules and Jim on
a projected slide, a reflection of an ancient object that is not connected with
any real person. (Much as Elster’s creation of Madeleine relates to the idea
of the wife or to historical Carlotta.)
We now revert to the above-emphasized
turning points in Vertigo. The first one
corresponds to Catherine’s two jumps into
the river. The first apparently suicidal jump is
9François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock/
in protest against Jules and Jim’s chauvinistic talk. The second jump is her
real suicide. These two jumps echo the analogous jumps in Vertigo. In both
cases we have the woman staging an apparent suicidal jumping into the
water for the man spectator. Scottie in Vertigo ultimately extricates himself
from the seductive power of the woman and consequently, through his
dogged pursuit of his obsession, undergoes a therapeutic process. In Jules et
Jim, by contrast, the woman takes the man along with her to his death,
despite his attempts to liberate himself from her destructive influence.
The skeletons of the plots of both films display a strong affinity. The same
affinity also exists with Tirez Sur le Pianiste (1960), and it establishes a
unique relationship among the three films. Had the same filmmaker made
them all, we could call them “The Pygmalion Trilogy.” Now if we look at
the following plot elements in Jules et Jim, by a slight transformation we
can obtain the plot patterns of the entire trilogy:
1. A woman is the embodiment of a prior artistic representation (a
statue, a slide of a statue). The men fall in love with her after they have
fallen in love with the artistic representation that she is supposed to
embody.
2. The woman jumps into the water, apparently as an act of suicide,
but in reality as a manipulative protest against the men.
3. The woman commits suicide—at the end of the film she leaps
from the heights to her death.
/François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock10
Now let us replace in number 1 the slide of the statue and the statue itself
with an actress who plays the role of a woman in a painting. And let us
replace in number 2 the woman’s motive for jumping into the water as an
act of protest, by a sheer manipulation designed to spread a net of seduction.
What we get are conspicuous elements that distinctively single out Vertigo.
A minimal change reveals the plot of
Tirez Sur le Pianiste. The plot of
Truffaut’s second film focuses on
Charlie, a lonely bar pianist, who seems
to live a quiet life. In the film’s opening
scene his serenity is shattered with the
appearance of Chico, his elder brother, who is fleeing from gangsters who
want to kill him. Lena, the waitress at the bar, exploits the incident to come
closer to the aloof and alienated Charlie by hiding him in her home from the
gangsters who want to reach Chico
through him. On the walls of her
room Charlie discovers posters of
the famous classical pianist
Edouard Saroyan—that is, of
himself in an earlier identity before
he vanished at the height of his
artistic success. Charlie/Edouard tells Lena, who in fact already knows
about his hidden identity, the reasons for his disappearance from the stage.
Edouard had been a talented pianist who did not
succeed in becoming known until meeting the
impresario Lars Schmeel in a restaurant where
11François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock/
Edouard’s beloved wife Thérèse was working. Schmeel made Edouard an
international star. His success ruined his seemingly happy marriage. The
couple’s relationship reached its nadir when Thérèse confessed that it was
she who had paved his way to the top by agreeing to sexual relations with
Schmeel in return for Edouard’s career advancement. Now Edouard is
stunned. On the soundtrack we hear his inner voice telling him to go to her
and embrace her, but in actuality he walks out of the room in anger. When
he has a change of heart and comes back in panic, he finds an open window,
from which Thérèse has jumped to her death. Edouard retires from his
former life and builds himself a new identity, that of Charlie. Charlie earns
his living by doing the cleaning in the neighborhood bar. His hands are
drawn to the abandoned piano in the bar, and the owner makes him the
house pianist. Lena decides to bring Edouard Saroyan back to life. Charlie’s
love for Lena overcomes the isolation he had sentenced himself to, and he
tries to return to life. As in a Greek tragedy, Charlie does not manage to
extricate himself from his fate and from his fragmented personality. His
relationship with Lena repeats the pattern of his relationship with Thérèse
and also ends with a death, when Lena is accidentally shot by the gangsters
firing at Charlie’s brother. Charlie’s failures and his inability to act and to
take responsibility play a major part in the tragic ending. We see that Tirez
Sur le Pianiste’s two-part structure is a misreading of Vertigo’s two-part
pattern: Two love stories. The second episode is a reconstruction of the first,
which ends as a murder staged as a suicide. The man twice loses the woman
he loves through his own fault, because of a personal flaw (the fear of
heights is a metaphor for his inadequate functioning and for his anxieties
concerning relations with women, a theme that recurs in Rear Window and
/François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock12
other Hitchcock films). The first loss is caused by the murder of Mrs. Elster
and Madeleine’s disappearance. In the second instance the reconstruction
ends by Judy’s inevitable death. For once she yielded to Scottie’s obsession
she was tragically doomed.
As in Vertigo, in Tirez Sur le Pianiste too, there are two stories of two
different periods, in between which, the hero undergoes a crisis that causes
him to change his identity and his profession. Both stories have to do with
falling in love, and in Tirez Sur le Pianiste, too, the second case is a
reconstruction, albeit metaphorical, of the first. The parallelism between the
two films suggests Edouard’s guilt for the suicide of the woman he loved.
As in Vertigo, the sacrifice is a response to Edouard’s passivity, which is a
kind of emotional vertigo. The correspondence between Scottie’s vertigo
and Edouard’s internal split is further confirmed when we notice the
respective verbal and cinematic emphasis that both films give to the
representation of the protagonists’ defects. In the first scene between Midge
and Scottie, right after the prologue, Scottie’s problem is described by the
use of three different terms, which only the accumulation of their nuances
serves to define the problem besetting him, namely vertigo, acrophobia, and
fear of heights. The impression is that, in the exchange between Midge and
Scottie, Hitchcock employs all three terms most deliberately. Fear of
heights simply defines the phenomenon and emphasizes the connection
between it and the fear of falling, the fear of losing control. Acrophobia is
the technical term referring to the mental disturbance. It suggests the deepseated
pathology. Vertigo refers to the resulting sensation of dizziness, the
whirlpool that sucks the victim in totally. All these are graphically
expressed in the credit scene by the spiral in the woman’s eye, which is also
13François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock/
echoed by the curl in the hairdos of Madeleine/Carlotta/Judy. Equally, in
Edouard/Charlie’s case we have passivity, shyness and a few references to
fear. In the first dialogue between Charlie and his employer the latter says:
“You’re afraid of women.” Charlie listens and says to himself: “I’m afraid,
I’m afraid.” In the second part of the film Lars Schmeel, the impresario,
tells Edouard that for the sake of the success of his career one must treat his
shyness and his stage fear. So again we have several modes of references to
his tragic flaw. This clearly alludes to Scottie’s having to abandon his
promising career in the police force because of his vertigo. In an attempt to
overcome his failing, Edouard buys books about shyness and,
conspicuously, a book titled Stage Fright. This title echoes Hitchcock’s film
of the same title, which only strengthens the link to Hitchcock and to the
fear of heights central to Vertigo.
Moreover, Edouard’s wife jumps to her death at a moment when she
needs him and he is paralyzed and does not reach out to her. This echoes the
prologue of Vertigo, in which Scottie has a fit of vertigo that causes his
partner—who does reach out to him—to fall to his death. Still further, the
moment just preceding Thérèse’s suicide directly reflects the moment just
before Madeleine climbs up to the church tower for the first time. The
dialogue in Vertigo goes thus:
Madeleine. You believe I love you?
Scottie. Yes.
Madeleine. If you lose me than you’ll know that I loved you and I wanted
to go on loving you.
Scottie. I won’t lose you.
/François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock14
Madeleine. Let me go into the church alone.10
After which they kiss. Madeleine turns away leaving paralyzed Scottie
behind. In Tirez Sur le Pianiste Edouard stands facing Thérèse, who just
concluded her confession, motionless and silent, and we hear his inner voice
saying:
Yes, look at her, go to her, kneel while there’s time. If you go now she’ll
be alone. You mustn’t.11
Having said this, he turns away and leaves the room. The gap between
Edouard’s inner voice and his actual performance alludes to the similar gap
between Scottie’s feeble verbal attempt to hold Madeleine back from going
toward the church and his utter paralysis in letting her go. In a flash of
realization after having left the room, Edouard frantically rushes back. But
as in classical tragedy, it is too late. The window is open and Thérèse has
already leapt to her death. The same happened to Scottie who, immediately
after Madeleine’s disappearance into the church looks up to the tall tower,
and in a flash of realization runs after her—but of course “too late,” a
recurring formula in Vertigo. As he climbs up the steps he is once again
seized by vertigo and he remains a transfixed witness to the woman’s fall
from the top of the tower. Truffaut thus transposes the dialogue between
Scottie and Madeleine into an internal monologue. In a sense then, the film
Tirez Sur le Pianiste could be seen as a corrective interpretation of Vertigo.
Furthermore the knowledge that Truffaut affords us of Edouard’s inner
being by means of “voice-over” dramatizes his attempt to provide us with a
15François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock/
more explicit, or explicated, cinematic view of what takes place on the
surface, as it were, in Vertigo.
Also, the deception that Elster builds around Madeleine and Carlotta in
order to entrap Scottie is transformed in Tirez Sur le Pianiste into a game
that begins innocently but later develops into the tragedy of the marriage of
Edouard and Thérèse. In the first shot of the part telling Edouard’s story, we
see him sitting in a restaurant while Thérèse the waitress addresses him as a
mere customer. In the background Lars Schmeel is seen sitting at a distant
table. The frame is structured so that a triangle is formed. Schmeel is
positioned at the far corner of the triangle—the line between him and the
spectator bisecting the imaginary line connecting Thérèse and Edouard. The
play-acting of the engaged couple behaving as if they were strangers
performing a mere waitress/customer transaction is a set up so that Schmeel,
like the spectator, is not aware of it. This is the inverse of what happens in
Vertigo where Madeleine in collaboration with Elster deceives Scottie.
Here, apparently, it is Edouard and Thérèse who are sharing the secret. But
as it eventually transpires, the crucial secret is the one shared by Thérèse
and Schmeel who conspire behind the back of Edouard the victim. In
Vertigo the husband is the manipulator of the deception. In Tirez Sur le
Pianiste the husband participates in the minor pretenses but ends up as the
victim of a major setup.
And, finally, the three-way split Judy/Madeleine/Carlotta—three
representations of one woman—in Vertigo is echoed by the personality split
Edouard/Charlie—two representations of one person—in Tirez Sur le
Pianiste.
/François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock16
A parallel split to Edouard’s, albeit circumstantially different, besets
Thérèse herself. In her confession to him she says:
You know how a spider works? Like pulling me away from myself as if
the heart was one thing and the body another. Thérèse didn’t go with him,
only Thérèse’s body. As if I weren’t there myself.12
And when Edouard himself tells Schmeel about his problems with Thérèse
he describes her in the following way:
It’s as if she’s fighting something. It’s become obvious. For instance, she’ll
suddenly walk out while we’re talking she locks herself in her room and
won’t reply. That’s how we are now. It’s the end.13
These words too seem like a condensed version of Elster’s characterization
to Scottie of his wife’s behavior:
She’ll be talking to me about something, suddenly the words fade into
silence. A cloud comes into her eyes and they go blank. She is somewhere
else away from me so I don’t know, to call her? She doesn’t even hear me.
Then with a long sigh she is back looks at me brighter, doesn’t even know
she has been away, can’t tell where or when.14
In both cases the husband is describing his wife’s behavior to a third person
that is tragically connected to the couple’s relationship. In Vertigo it is a
fictitious description whose manipulative purpose is to tighten the trap
around Scottie. In Tirez Sur le Pianiste the description is veridical, and
17François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock/
precisely reflects Thérèse’s mental state. In Vertigo the husband is the
manipulator and his interlocutor, Scottie, is the victim. In Tirez Sur le
Pianiste the situation is reversed: The husband is the totally unaware victim,
although his career has benefited from the conspiracy behind his back, and
his interlocutor is the manipulator who, despite his show of innocence, is
fully in the know. When describing her desperation to her husband Thérèse
says:
When it’s dark you can’t stop the darkness. It’s dark, getting darker all the
time. There’s only one thing for me to do. Say good bye and go.15
These words allude to Madeleine’s description of her desperation to Scottie
for the first time:
It’s as if I’m walking down a long corridor that once was mirrored.
Fragments of that mirror are still there. When I come to the end of the
corridor there is nothing but darkness and I know when I walk into the
darkness that I’ll die. But I never come into the end. I always come back
before then, except once […].16
A bit later she continues:
I’m scared. I’m not mad. I don’t want to die. There is someone within me
that says I must die. Scottie, don’t let me go. I’m so afraid. Don’t leave
me.17
/François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock18
Truffaut does not content himself with a verbal statement of the split within
Thérèse, but also gives it plastic expression through her double necklace. As
opposed to ordinary necklaces that are displayed on one’s chest and clasped
at the nape, Thérèse wears a necklace that has two jewels, one in front and
the other hanging from the back of her neck. Besides the suggestion that
there are “two sides” to this woman, or that she is in a double bind, this
conspicuous exaggeration of the necklace “phenomenon” forces us to recall
Carlotta’s necklace that was Scottie’s only clue to the truth about Judy,
whom he had just turned successfully into Madeleine.
Clearly, the split self is a central theme in Tirez Sur le Pianiste and
Charlie/Edouard’s problem is one of identity. “Who am I?” and “What is
the connection between my past deeds and my present actions?” These
questions are brought to the fore by the narrative structure of Tirez Sur le
Pianiste via breaking the chronological order of the plot, in a way that
creates the sense of the past being still very present. These questions are
mirrored in Thérèse’s question in her confession:
But it’s strange. What you did yesterday is part of you today. I looked in
the mirror. What did I see? Your Thérèse? No. No Thérèse.18
These words of Thérèse allude to the
situation Judy finds herself in when she
is resisting Scottie’s attempt to transform
her back into Madeleine. She repeatedly
complains that the true object of
Scottie’s love is “her” (the woman from
19François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock/
his past, Madeleine) implying that she wants to be loved for her own self.
But which is her true self? Her problem lies in the connection between her
deeds in the past and her present. How could she bring Scottie to love her
without the consequences of Madeleine’s crime? She considers the
possibility of confessing all to Scottie when she writes him a letter. But she
feels she could only give him the letter if she disappeared. Unlike Thérèse,
she was too weak to completely give up the prospect of his love and
therefore stayed and exposed herself to his pressure to gradually turn into
Madeleine. Yet, as she saw it, she could not be Madeleine, the woman who
deceived him, and retains his love. That would be an ontological paradox.
Thus the end in which she as Madeleine falls from the tower becomes
inevitable, as reflected in Thérèse’s throwing herself from the window.
In the intricate plot that Hitchcock weaves in Vertigo he sheds new light
on an age-old problem concerning the relation between the interior and the
exterior, the character’s essence and its mere image, between the real person
and his or her appearance, between reality and its representation.
Hitchcock’s treatment of this issue achieves exceptional thoroughness due
to its reflexive quality. For one of the key questions in cinema is: How does
the external or perceptible world express inner being—How does an actor
act-out a character? Hitchcock blurs the boundary between the external and
the internal, the objective and the subjective, and brings out the complexity
of these issues, emphasizing the lack of correspondence, or even
independence of the two. That is to say, in contrast to the received view that
the exterior depends for its existence on the interior that it expresses, in
Vertigo the external entity is dissociated from all interiority and achieves
total separateness. Truffaut, who struggled with similar questions, could not
/François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock20
avoid engaging in an intensive dialogue with Vertigo, and it seems that he
goes a step further in blurring the boundary between truth and falsity. In
Hitchcock the deception is clear, and it is without a shred of truth. It is a
collection of facts belonging to a remote and irrelevant past (of Carlotta’s)
now being fraudulently recycled by Elster only seemingly true. In Truffaut,
by contrast, each hoax, each pretense, any embedding of one story in
another, does not exist merely as a set of facts constituting an appearance,
but always has more than a grain of truth to it as it occurs.
Another level of the system of splits in the two movies is expressed
through the talk of “a second chance.” Scottie feels that his relationship with
Judy in the second part of the movie affords him a second chance, an
opportunity to mend what happened with Madeleine in the first part. The
expression “second chance” is uttered several times both by Scottie and by
Judy. In the deception staged for Scottie, Madeleine is presented as
Carlotta’s second chance. Truffaut uses the concept of a second chance in
the way he tells the Charlie/Lena story as an attempted improvement on the
Edouard/Therese fate. Whereas in Vertigo the second chance is with the
“same” woman, in Tirez Sur le Pianiste it is with another woman. It is as if
Truffaut is saying to us in his corrected version, as it were, that even with
another woman, the same tragic fate would ensue. Fate, that is to say, is
within us, perhaps even “genetic.” It is not altered by the choice of with
whom one lives it out.
Truffaut’s man loses the woman he loves no less than Hitchcock’s man. In
Hitchcock’s case, however, Scottie undergoes a therapeutic process. Scottie
loses the woman but overcomes his vertigo. The opposite happens to
Truffaut’s protagonist. Edouard loses two women only to reappear at the
21François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock/
end in the same old piano bar, without any indication that he has overcome
his flaw. In fact, the introduction of a new young waitress hints that the
pattern is going to repeat itself cyclically. At this point we see once more
Truffaut’s misreading of Vertigo. In Vertigo, ironically, what happens is
exactly what Midge had suggested at the beginning, that a repetition of the
trauma would cure him. On Truffaut’s misprision, the irony is intensified,
and it is suggested that Hitchcock was wrong to have Scottie completely
recover. True, he was cured for a short instant, and he even steps out to the
edge to look at the fallen Judy, but Truffaut forces us to examine the end of
Vertigo in a new light.
How should we understand the fact that in the end Hitchcock leaves
Scottie at the top of the tower, rather than having him descend and walk
away into the distance? Clearly, Hitchcock leaves him on top, where we
encountered him in the prologue. So we have come full cycle. Still, Truffaut
makes us question Scottie’s recovery. Is it possible that a new trauma of
another “partner” falling to her death—this time to enable him to overcome
his vertigo—might cripple him once again?
To conclude, In Bloomian terms, we can see Jules et Jim and Tirez Sur le
Pianiste as two variant misreadings of Vertigo. The meaning of the
misreadings inheres in the reflexive elements of the films. Jules et Jim, like
Vertigo, examines the relation between the reality and the artistic image,
and discusses the process of cinematic creation. Hitchcock employs a
classical poetics and discusses classical cinema. Carlotta is a classical
portrait of a woman who served as a model for a painter, and her historical
reality is not in doubt. Here the real object that receives artistic
representation indisputably exists. The tools used for the artistic realization
/François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock22
are classical and real: clothing, make-up, hair-do, props, locations, and even
narrative. Hitchcock imposes art on reality just as Scottie imposes
Madeleine on Judy, even as Elster had created Madeleine from Judy after
the model of Carlotta. Here too Truffaut is misreading Vertigo. The artistic
representation is not of a person but of a smile. In the case of Catherine we
are dealing with an inner entity, an abstract nucleus, which has an elusive
and mysterious expression. The smile belongs not to a real person but to an
ancient Greek statue, and the original—the model after which it was
made—is irrelevant. In order to create an artistic image of such an original,
one cannot use the classical Hitchcockian tools. Truffaut has to create a new
language, and to misread Hitchcock’s rigorous and precise cinema, which in
striving for full control and total perfection does not allow freedom for
unplanned moments that are necessary sometimes for giving real expression
to an elusive reality, as opposed to deceptive appearances in Hitchcock,
whose reality is definite and unambiguous. Truffaut is rebelling against this
kind of cinema. He desperately needs to free himself from Hitchcock in
order to create the free and spontaneous cinema that fits the free smile
whose essence he is seeking.
Truffaut is looking for the cinematic language that will enable him to
retain full creative control and still flow with the constraints attached to
actors, real locations, etc. The modern cinema that Truffaut defines begins
with images that are elusive, internal, and imperceptible.
Furthermore, in Vertigo, as in the Pygmalion myth, the men—the artists—
are obsessed, and the woman—the piece of art—is just a tool. In Jules et
Jim, however, the obsession is the woman’s—art has a life of its own that
comes to dominate the creator. Since Catherine is both “God” and the
23François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock/
creation, in Truffaut’s film the line between art and life is blurred, or even
erased.
The misreading of Vertigo in Tirez Sur le Pianiste casts light on yet
another facet of Truffaut’s conception of modern narrative. Both films
contain two parts, with the second part reconstructing the first. In Vertigo
the structure is linear. The second story begins after the first story ends.
There is a total correspondence between the order of the narrative and the
chronological sequence of the plot. In Tirez Sur le Pianiste, there is no
correspondence between the chronologies of the stories and the order in
which they are told. The film opens with the second story, the story of
Charlie, the bar pianist. The story that preceded this chronologically, the
story of Edouard the concert pianist who disappeared at the height of his
career, is revealed later. The narrative returns to Charlie’s story after the
viewer is aware of his past as Edouard. By breaking up the narrative,
Truffaut eliminates the possibility of making a schematic, psychological,
reduction of the connection between the past and the present. The
connection exists, but the reciprocal relations between the two events and
their metaphorical and semiotic meaning are more important than their
psychological meaning. The reality that is built in Truffaut’s films is more
elusive than the reality depicted in Hitchcock’s films.
Beyond the reflexive meaning of Truffaut’s various misreadings of
Vertigo, they also have a thematic meaning. In Vertigo, as in the Pygmalion
story, the man’s fear of women and his inability to develop a connection
with a woman cause him to create a woman he wants, but even then, at the
critical moment he is unable to be with her. The woman pays the price. In
Tirez Sur le Pianiste the man needs the woman and is dependent on her. In
/François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock24
contrast to Vertigo, the woman has a part, if not in the creation of the man,
then in transforming him into a creative artist. As in Hitchcock’s film, here
too the woman pays the price for the man’s difficulties in functioning, but
she exists as a strong and independent person, not as the product of the
man’s creation. In Jules et Jim the man creates the woman, as in the
Pygmalion story. He is not afraid of the woman; rather, he actively seeks the
“vertigo” into which he will dive together with her. In the end he becomes
her victim. In contrast to Vertigo, in both of Truffaut’s films the man is
dependent on the woman, needs her, and accepts this willingly.
Aner Preminger
Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Sapir Academic College
Notes
1
Bloom, Harold, A Map of Misreading (London: Oxford UP, 1975) 18.
2
Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford UP, 1973)
11.
3
Ibid 14-16.
4
Bloom, Map 19.
5
Ibid 12-13.
6
Ibid 9.
7
Truffaut, François, Hitchcock by François Truffaut (New York: Simon, 1967) 186-87.
8
In spite of the fact that it is better to summarize a film in one’s own words rather then
quoting someone else, I quote here Truffaut’s summary of the plot since it is interesting to
compare his conscious summary of the film, as a film critic, to what has come out inhis
misreading of the film as a filmmaker.
9
Truffaut 184.
10
Vertigo, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, perf. James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Barbara Bel Geddes,
1958. 1:11:53-1:12:08.
11
Tirez Sur le Pianiste, dir. François Truffaut, perf. Charles Aznavor, Marie Dubois, Nicole
Berger, Michele Mercier, and Albert Remy, 1960. 0:43:14-0:43:22.
12
Tirez 0:41:40-0:41:57.
13
Tirez 0:38:47-0:39:05.
14
Vertigo 0:13:32-0:13:58.
15
Tirez 0:40:11-0:40:26.
16
Vertigo 0:59:37-1:00:10.
25François Truffaut Rewrites Alfred Hitchcock/
17
Vertigo 1:01:42-1:02:12.
18
Tirez 0:42:34-0:42:54.
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. London: Oxford UP, 1973.
Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. London: Oxford UP, 1975.
Truffaut, François. Hitchcock by François Truffaut. New York: Simon, 1967.
Additional Relevant Works
Braudy, Leo. Focus on Shoot the Piano Player. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1972.
Brunette, Peter. Shoot the Piano Player (edited volume). New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993.
de Baecque, Antoine, and Serge Toubiana. Truffaut: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1999.
Douchet, Jean. French New Wave. New York: Distributed Art, 1999.
Hedges, Inez. Breaking the Frame: Film Language and the Experience of Limits. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1991.
Hitchcock, Alfred. Vertigo. Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, USA, 1958.
Holmes, Diana, and Robert Ingram. François Truffaut. Manchester and New York: Manchester
UP, 1998.
McDougal, Stuart Y. “Adaptation of an Auteur: Truffaut’s Jules et Jim.” Modern European
Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation. Ed. Andrew Horton and Joan Magretta. New
York: Ungar, 1961. 89-99.
Insdorf, Annette. François Truffaut. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Kline, T. Jefferson. Screening the Text: Intertextuality in NewWave French Cinema. Baltimore
& London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
Preminger Aner. Cinematic Intertextuality and the Films of François Truffaut, Ph.D. Thesis,
Tel-Aviv U, 2001.
— — —. “The Human Comedy of Antoine Doinel: From Honoré de Balzac to François
Truffaut.” The European Legacy: Journal of the International Society for the Study of
European Ideas (ISSEI) vol. 9. no. 2 (2004): 173-93.
Stam, Robert. Reflexivity in Film and Literature, From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. New
York: Columbia UP, 1992.
— — —.Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
— — —.François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation. New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2006.
Truffaut, François. File: Ma Vie 1. Archives of Les Films du Carrosse, 1951.
— — —.Jules et Jim. Seuil/Avant-Scène, Paris, 1962.
— — —.File: CCH 74 (2). “Letters from François Truffaut to Jean-Louis Bory.” Archives of
Les Films du Carrosse, 11 Dec. 1974.
— — —. Tirez sur le pianiste. Les Films de la Pléiade, 1960.
— — —.Truffaut by Truffaut. Times Mirror Books, 1987.
— — —.Letters. Ed. Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givaray. London: Faber, 1990.