Lucy Mazdon,
Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema.
London:BFI Publishing. 2000.
ISBN 0 85170 801 3
240pp
A$52.95

(Review copy supplied by Peribo: Distributors of Fine Books)

Uploaded 1 March 2001
This book arises out of the recent proliferation of American re-makes of successful French films. It proposes to contest the notion that such re-makes inevitably signal the degradation of an artistic French original into a crass Hollywood simulacrum. In the course of her critique of this position Mazdon usefully complicates what she sees as the standard but misguided condemnation of the re-make as a form of American cultural appropriation – as merely, that is, an aspect of American cultural imperialism. She does this in a number of ways – by debunking the notion that any film, French or otherwise, can ever be authentically original, by querying the high culture/low culture opposition on which the initial condemnation is based, and by exploring a number of points at which the French and American cinematic apparatuses interpenetrate, and indeed have always interpenetrated.

All this is extremely worthwhile. Nevertheless it does involve setting up a number of straw men which are ritually struck down again and again. It is relatively easy to demonstrate that no film is entirely original, that no national cinema (and least of all the French cinema) is entirely independent, and that the French ‘originals’ in the re-make scenario were not always entirely ‘high art’; yet these straw men are ritually demolished time and again with a smugly triumphant ‘Take that!’ The eminently sensible remarks on intertextuality contained in the conclusion would, if made 150 pages earlier, have rendered that whole aspect of the project superfluous.

In a sense, however, this nominally central aim turns out to be only secondary. The book is not so much about re-makes as about the recurrent re-working of images of masculinity that has taken place over the last twenty years. As proof of this, the re-makes chosen for discussion are far from comprehensive, or even representative. Of the twenty-three French films from the period to 1954 re-made in America, only one is given any space (Pépé le Moko, 1937, re-made as Algiers in 1938 and as Casbah in 1948), while only twelve in all of the rather uncertain total of sixty provided in the appendix are discussed at any length. Those twelve are clearly chosen as exemplifying a ‘crisis of masculinity’ apparent in the gender images of these and other recent films. This is a worthy topic, interesting in its own right, but quite distinct from the nominal topic of the book. One suspects that the intersection of re-makes and of gender has been chosen for that most pragmatic of reasons, to focus on a sample of films small enough to be manageable within the scope of the PhD thesis which was (altogether too obviously) at the origin of this book. The alternative claim (52), namely that preoccupations with paternity and masculinity “help to determine why the remake re-emerged at this juncture”, would be hard to argue, and no real attempt is made to do so here.

Despite this sidelining of the nominated topic it is worth emphasizing that the analysis of masculinity and to a lesser extent of femininity as they are represented in these films is meticulous, reliable and well-conducted. There can be no doubt that these films do indeed participate in the on-going negotiation of gender and of paternity which is one of the pre-occupations of the age. What is not so certain is whether the crisis thus identified is peculiar to these films, to the re-make culture, or even to the last few decades. To some extent masculinity and paternity have been in crisis throughout this past century, and working through anxieties of the sort discussed here has been a constant preoccupation of the French sound cinema, contrasted in the earlier decades as now with occasional aggressive assertions of an uncomplicated macho masculinity. There is little basis for seeing it as peculiar to these particular films or to the re-make process.

Mazdon’s argument is a little uncertain in another respect, as well. In view of her initial assertion concerning the absence of a high art/low art opposition between the French ‘originals’ and the American re-makes, it is mildly ironic that one of the themes to emerge most clearly from this study is the presence of a distinctive cultural difference in the representational traditions of the two countries, which looks very much like just such a high/low opposition. In relation to both Pépé le Moko and Le salaire de la peur Mazdon quite rightly identifies homoerotic connotations which disappear in the American re-make, along with other subtleties in the character dynamics (25). In Trois hommes et un couffin (1985) she notes a moral ambivalence and a mildly subversive mockery of authority which disappears in Three Men and a Baby (1987) in favor of ‘victory over wrongdoing, punishment and an affirmation of authority’. (53) In Mon père ce héros (1991) she underlines the ambivalence in Depardieu’s representation of masculinity, together with the unsettling sexuality implicit in the father/daughter relationship, all of which is rounded down to cliché, stereotype and comic farce in the American version (62-3). Elsewhere it is androgynous French prototypes which are translated into uncomplicated macho heterosexuality in their US manifestations (chapter 6). She frequently comments on the transformation of an episodic, digressive, character-centered French film into a much simpler goal-oriented American action movie involving linear causality, and several times contrasts the French tradition of cerebral and verbal humor with the more physical American tradition (notably chapter 5).

In sum, on the one hand she establishes a French tradition of complex, subtle character-centered texts with playful attitudes towards moral codes and mildly subversive social themes, and on the other an American tradition of action-centered films in which uncomplicated heterosexual heroes vanquish stereotyped villains according to linear generic conventions. All of this sounds very much like the opposition of a French high culture tradition to an American low culture tradition which she professed to be undermining.

Part of the problem here is the absence of any discussion by Mazdon of the comédie dramatique as a genre. French filmmakers frequently promoted the comédie dramatique, because they saw it as having precisely the qualities listed above, and because it thus served to contrast their national product and their national aptitudes to those of Hollywood. Another part of the problem is Mazdon’s ambivalent attitude towards popularity (if it’s popular it can’t be art), towards comedy (if it’s funny it can’t be art), and particularly towards genre. To claim that À bout de souffle can’t be a French art film because it borrows from cinematic genres that are neither French nor part of high culture is manifestly invalid (84). Indeed the chapter on À bout de souffle (1960) and Breathless (1983) is the least satisfactory of the chapters, involving some weak and tortuous argument, a paragraph in the middle of p85 which it would be unjust to the rest of the book to quote, and a strategic distortion of Godard’s statement about his intention in making the film to make it seem aimed exclusively at French filmmaking traditions. (pp79, 88).

One other less than satisfactory aspect of the book is its tendency to try to correlate the analyses of specific films to broad social and political movements in France, and to a lesser extent in America. Given the lack of any concrete connections between filmmakers and movements, these correlations (to the stages of the feminist movement, to the disappearance of the patriarch, de Gaulle, to the election to government of the Socialist party, to the ideological configuration of the US in the 1980s, etc) are not presented with sufficient circumspection.

But if these are the major problems with the book, other niggling worries surface with a certain regularity. To take a few from the opening sections: is it really valid to attribute the novelty and diversity of the French cinema to directors unfettered by the “dictates” of producers (14); is it really valid to attribute the lack of a French cinematic action genre to the lack of adequate funding (24); is it really valid to say that shooting Pépé in the studio automatically signifies “the imaginary nature of the space (…), not ‘real’ but reconstructed for the purposes of the fiction?”(33) And is it valid to claim that the New Wave critics’ aim in developing the politique des auteurs was “to interrogate the concept of traditional art cinema”(79)? Surely the aim was rather to exalt it, but extend it to auteurs working in Hollywood (just as French critics had been doing for the preceding 30 years).

Such worries, together with the more general problem of a PhD thesis inadequately edited into a more commercial format and dealing with two disparate topics, neither of them fully, make it difficult to recommend a book that is otherwise an honorable, well-informed study. Finally, the editors were most unwise to publish it in a faint and microscopic print which makes it painful to read. The editing job which ought to have been done on the thesis format might just have reduced it to a size that would have permitted a larger and more legible typeface, and at no extra cost.

Colin Crisp