A bout de souffle - footnotes to the film
(or, rather, a trivialist's slow crawl through its minutiae)
(or, rather, a trivialist's slow crawl through its minutiae)
In honour of the publication of Ramona Fotiade's engaging new guide to Godard's A bout de souffle (London: I.B. Tauris 2013), this is a listing of observations mostly too minor to find their way into a scholarly work, along with questions that I don't have answers to - all suggestions appreciated.
The observations were made after a slow, stop-start viewing of the film, and with reference to accumulated notes from past viewings. They are given here as a kind of running commentary.
The observations were made after a slow, stop-start viewing of the film, and with reference to accumulated notes from past viewings. They are given here as a kind of running commentary.
Marseille
Michel/Belmondo is reading that week's issue of the journal Paris Flirt - issue 137, dated 12 September 1959. The image on the cover is a 'pin-up' drawing by Bernard Charoy. A recent exhibition at the Galerie Geneviève Marty in Cannes foregrounded the use of Charoy's work in the opening of Godard's film:
Michel steals the 1956 Oldsmobile Holiday of an American officer and his wife who have boarded a boat for an excursion to the Chateau d'If, the island fortress famous as the setting of Dumas's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo.
Later we see the US Army-registered number plate of the stolen car. This is surely a fake, but does it look authentic?
Later we see the US Army-registered number plate of the stolen car. This is surely a fake, but does it look authentic?
car ride 1: Marseille to Paris via la RN7
Michel's drive to Paris is represented in 28 separate shots (counting all jumpcuts as dividers between shots), in none of which is there any indication of where exactly along the Route Nationale 7 we are.
The RN7 is a famous highway (with its own museum: here). In the newspapers Michel is referred to as ‘the killer of the RN7’. The four registration plates of passing vehicles that can be read are all Paris-issued, suggesting that this stretch of the RN7 is not too far from the capital. Except for an illegible road sign pointing the other way and a board advertising 'Le Commerce', a hotel and restaurant, there are no other topographical clues: |
[Update 22.05.2015:
In an interview published online in 2014 (here), Pierre Rissient, assistant on A bout de souffle, mentions that these scenes were shot 'on the motorway near Auxerre'. That would make this the R.N.6, not the R.N.7. I haven't been able to find specific locations on either of these highways.]
In an interview published online in 2014 (here), Pierre Rissient, assistant on A bout de souffle, mentions that these scenes were shot 'on the motorway near Auxerre'. That would make this the R.N.6, not the R.N.7. I haven't been able to find specific locations on either of these highways.]
From the two shots of hitch-hikers we can see that, topographically, the sequence is not wholly coherent. When Michel first sees the hitch-hikers and thinks about picking them up, they are standing a little forward of a BP petrol station and what looks like an oast house, but in the following shot, as Michel approaches them, they are on a stretch of road with no buildings nearby:
The murder takes place on a dirt-track turning off the main road:
Michel kills the policeman with a gun he found in the glove compartment of the stolen car. Shown in extreme close-up, the revolver can be identified as an Mle 1892:
In an American officer's car one might have expected to find a standard U.S.-issue weapon, rather than a French service revolver.
Full technical specifications of the Mle 1892 can be found at the Internet Movie Firearms Database, alongside a list of other film-appearances by this firearm , e.g. in the hand of Roger Hanin, below, in Borderie's La Môme vert-de-gris (1953): |
chez Patricia
The first time Michel goes to Patricia's hotel room and rifles through her things looking for money, we see a copy of Life magazine in her drawer. All of Life's U.S. covers can be viewed on Google Books (see here) but since this issue is not among them it must be the Europe edition.
I'm not sure who is on the cover, though it looks a little like Dorothy Dandridge. Update 22.05.2015: It is not Dorothy Dandridge but the Jamaican singer Barbara Lewars, on the cover of Life International, July 20 1959. |
chez Liliane
Michel crosses the boulevard Saint Germain from the Royal Saint Germain café and in the next shot is in the courtyard of an apartment building, the implication being that this is nearby. In fact the building is across Paris, on the rue du Colonel Moll, 17e. See here for more detail about this topographical illusion.
The apartment is the actual home of the actress here, Liliane David, and presumably most of the objects in the apartment are her personal possessions. She has, for instance, photographic studies of herself on display:
On the bed is a copy of Elle magazine, from 8 August 1959, and in the rack beside the bed is a livre de poche edition of Cocteau's novel Thomas l'imposteur and the June 1959 issue of Cahiers du cinéma:
Thomas l'imposteur reappears in Godard's next film, Le Petit Soldat, but in a different edition. On the cover of Cahiers is a still from Truffaut's Les 400 coups - Liliane David was Truffaut's girlfriend at the time.
When Liliane switches on her transistor radio the music we hear is Paul Anka's 1959 track 'Pity Pity' (listen here).
|
She has several postcards of paintings pinned to her wall, not all of them identifiable. Two of these three are by Ingres and Manet:
I can't make out the postcard to the left of these (below left) - suggestions here, please.
One of the postcards by the door looks like a portrait by Filippino Lippi, but I don't recognise the other (below centre). It seems Picasso-ish, but any less vague suggestions are welcome, here. You might also want to try identifying the postcard we see reflected in the mirror (below right) - I have inversed the image but I'm not sure that will help:
One of the postcards by the door looks like a portrait by Filippino Lippi, but I don't recognise the other (below centre). It seems Picasso-ish, but any less vague suggestions are welcome, here. You might also want to try identifying the postcard we see reflected in the mirror (below right) - I have inversed the image but I'm not sure that will help:
On the wall beneath the word written in packets of Gauloises (Disque Bleu), below right, is another Manet:
On Liliane's dressing table is her transistor radio, a Zenith Royal 500 - see here for a history of this model - and a Miss Dior perfume box:
Liliane tells Michel that her toy monkey is Swiss, but it looks like a German-made, Steiff model. This issue clearly requires more research:
The ashtray with a vintage Rolls Royce on it that Michel pockets is also probably German, though later he tells Patricia that it comes from Switzerland:
Here is a differently shaped ashtray with the same picture and inscription that is definitely German, manufactured by Alboth & Kaiser, Bavaria.
Saying that the monkey and the ashtray are Swiss is part of an undercurrent in the film of reference to Godard's origins. alongside Michel's statement that the best-looking women are to be found in Geneva and Lausanne, the use of Swiss forms of the numbers 80 and 90, and two paintings by Paul Klee (a German who became Swiss). |
the Champs Elysées & the avenue George V
As Michel and Patricia walk on the avenue des Champs Elysées they are approached by a strange-looking man who shows them a board:
The explanation of what he is doing comes much later in the film, when Patricia is at a café terrace on the boulevard du Montparnasse, and the same man approaches her group, proposing to draw caricatures of them:
On the avenue George V, at the junction with the rue Vernet, Michel is approached by a student selling the Cahiers du cinéma. This looks like it's the July 1959 number, with Hiroshima mon amour on the cover:
See here for other screen appearances by issues of Cahiers du cinéma.
Straight after, Michel witnesses a road accident. The victim is Jacques Rivette, who (I think) also played an accident victim in his own Paris nous appartient:
Straight after, Michel witnesses a road accident. The victim is Jacques Rivette, who (I think) also played an accident victim in his own Paris nous appartient:
The driver of the car is not, as some listings suggest, Cahiers critic Jean Douchet:
Douchet is the man who kicks Rivette to see if he is still alive. We can recognise him from his earlier cameo in Les 400 coups:
Or from a later cameo in Rohmer's 'La Place de l'Etoile', from Paris vu par... (1965):
The travel agency where Michel's friend Tolmatchoff works is across the street from the car accident, at 41 avenue George V. There are two model aeroplanes in the agency, a Boeing 707 and a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation:
the boulevard des Italiens
In the toilets of a café near the boulevard des Italiens Michel robs Cahiers critic Jean Domarchi. Domarchi had made an earlier cameo in Rohmer's Le Signe du Lion, chatting in a bar with Françoise Prévost, possibly wearing the same suit and tie he wears in A bout de souffle:
It has been claimed that this scene in the toilet references the 1951 Bogart film The Enforcer, but between the fight in the toilet in that film and the robbery in A bout de souffle there are no similarities whatsoever, neither in the dramatic situation nor in the cinematic staging:
In The Enforcer the man attacked is a policeman watching over the prisoner as he washes his hands. The prisoner attacks his guard with brutal violence, smashing his head three times against the sink before escaping through the window. (He doesn't steal the other man's money.)
As far as I was able to see, nowhere in the film does Bogart - who isn't either of the men in the toilet scene - perform the trademark gesture of rubbing his lips with his thumb, as imitated by Michel in A bout de souffle.
So unless there is another toilet scene in The Enforcer that is missing from the print I saw, we should stop saying that A bout de souffle quotes the earlier film.
As far as I was able to see, nowhere in the film does Bogart - who isn't either of the men in the toilet scene - perform the trademark gesture of rubbing his lips with his thumb, as imitated by Michel in A bout de souffle.
So unless there is another toilet scene in The Enforcer that is missing from the print I saw, we should stop saying that A bout de souffle quotes the earlier film.
Outside on the boulevard Michel and Patricia are asked for a light by Jean Herman, husband of the film's assistant editor Lila Herman, and himself an assistant on Rivette's Paris nous appartient. He would soon be a filmmaker in his own right and, under the name Jean Vautrin, a successful novelist:
Herman was at this point, I think, on leave from his military service, where he made films for the Services Cinématographiques de l'Armée. But this doesn't look to me like a standard French uniform. Could he be disguised as an American?
car ride 2: place de l'Opéra to the Champs Elysées
Michel drives Patricia to her appointment on the Champs Elysées in a Simca Aronde 1300 Weekend (which I suspect was Godard's own car, as used in the film's final sequence). The drive is shown in 13 shots from within the car, 12 of them linked, famously, by jump cuts. The background locations can all be identified, and can be grouped into three distinct areas:
1/ 3 shots on the place Vendôme and the rue de Castiglione:
1/ 3 shots on the place Vendôme and the rue de Castiglione:
2/ 5 shots on the place de la Concorde, the cours la Reine and the avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt:
3/ 5 shots on the place François 1er, the avenue George V and the Champs Elysées:
Arranged this way, by me, this is a straightforward journey between the two points, but in the film the topographical order of these shots is shuffled:
The first three around the place Vendôme do come first, but Godard's editing puts the third of them second, so we see them first driving into the place Vendôme, then on the rue de Castiglione, having crossed the square, and then back on the place Vendôme, behind where they were in shot 2.
A similar thing happens with the shots of the second area. They begin on the place de la Concorde, are then on the cours la Reine for two shots, heading west, but in the following shot they are back on the place de la Concorde. The fifth shot of the group, on the avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt, is detached entirely from the others and inserted into the following group.
The last group begins on the place François 1er, and is followed, logically, by a shot of the junction of the rue François 1er and the avenue George V, but the next shot is back on the place François 1er, and then that is followed by a jump even further back, to in front of the Grand Palais on the avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt. The penultimate shot shows the avenue George V, and the last is a coherent conclusion to the journey, turning from the avenue George V into the avenue des Champs Elysées.
Despite beginning and ending in the right places, the logic of this sequence is not, clearly, its topography. Space is made subordinate to time, more specifically to the rhythm of montage, the succession of jumpcuts for which the sequence is famous.
The first three around the place Vendôme do come first, but Godard's editing puts the third of them second, so we see them first driving into the place Vendôme, then on the rue de Castiglione, having crossed the square, and then back on the place Vendôme, behind where they were in shot 2.
A similar thing happens with the shots of the second area. They begin on the place de la Concorde, are then on the cours la Reine for two shots, heading west, but in the following shot they are back on the place de la Concorde. The fifth shot of the group, on the avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt, is detached entirely from the others and inserted into the following group.
The last group begins on the place François 1er, and is followed, logically, by a shot of the junction of the rue François 1er and the avenue George V, but the next shot is back on the place François 1er, and then that is followed by a jump even further back, to in front of the Grand Palais on the avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt. The penultimate shot shows the avenue George V, and the last is a coherent conclusion to the journey, turning from the avenue George V into the avenue des Champs Elysées.
Despite beginning and ending in the right places, the logic of this sequence is not, clearly, its topography. Space is made subordinate to time, more specifically to the rhythm of montage, the succession of jumpcuts for which the sequence is famous.
the Champs Elysées, 2
Michel deposits Patricia in front of the Quick Elysées, at no. 114. This café, restaurant and ice-cream parlour opened in 1957. You can see here footage of the stars attending the opening.
Godard's film displays much of the café's striking décor, as Patricia takes the escalator up to the Grill Room:
Godard's film displays much of the café's striking décor, as Patricia takes the escalator up to the Grill Room:
After their meeting, Patricia and Van Doude leave in his Jaguar XK 120 Roadster. The year before this same car was driven by Roger Hanin in Michel Deville's Une balle dans le canon:
Van Doude's car had been parked in front of a cinema playing Hiroshima mon amour. As they drive off they pass a huge poster for Maigret et l'Affaire Saint-Fiacre, Jean Delannoy's second Maigret film with Jean Gabin. The cinéma de papa and the nouvelle vague are here together in the same space:
chez Patricia, again
In 1962 Alain Cavalier's Le Combat dans l'île paid homage to A bout de souffle by having Jean-Louis Trintignant go to the hôtel de Suède, in search of his wife, Romy Schneider:
She had been staying in room 12, the same room Jean Seberg had occupied two years before. The room Cavalier shows glimpses of is a bleak, dim place:
The picture leaning against the wall seems impossible to identify, it's just another sign of the space's desolation.
Two years earlier, this space was a musée imaginaire, full of images all clamoring for recognition. In the bathroom were juxtaposed a Picasso from 1954 and a 1770s' Fragonard:
Two years earlier, this space was a musée imaginaire, full of images all clamoring for recognition. In the bathroom were juxtaposed a Picasso from 1954 and a 1770s' Fragonard:
A similar poster of the Picasso would appear five years later in Pierrot le fou alongside the 'Portrait of Sylvette David in a Green Chair', also 1954:
There are two more Picassos pinned to Patricia's wall, a postcard and a poster:
The Lovers return as a close-up in Pierrot le fou:
(It took me a while to recognise this work, since we only see it reflected in the mirror, where the dancer appears to be massaging her right foot, not her left.)
There are two works by Klee in this collection, a postcard of the 'Timid Brute' from 1938 and the a poster of the 'Kettle Drummer' from 1940:
There are two works by Klee in this collection, a postcard of the 'Timid Brute' from 1938 and the a poster of the 'Kettle Drummer' from 1940:
There is one other postcard of a work that I don't recognise (any suggestions here, please):
Amid the clutter on the bedside table can be identified the October 1959 issue of Sliver Screen, with Rock Hudson on the cover, a Pan paperback edition of Erskine Caldwell's This Very Earth and the copy of Faulkner's The Wild Palms that Van Doude had given Patricia at the Quick Elysées:
Among the LPs in Patricia's room are a recording of Bach's Magnificat by the Ensemble Choral et Symphonique de Stuttgart under Marcel Couraud and a recording of Mozart piano concertos by Clara Haskil:
A mystery surrounds the record Patricia actually puts on, however:
The cover seems to show an eighteenth-century musician, but the music on the soundtrack once she puts the record on sounds like Chopin. Investigations continue into what the LP cover is, and also into what the piece is by Chopin - though this is hard-going because, like Jean-Pierre Melville later in the film, I find Chopin 'dégueulasse'.
[Update 05.07.2013: the Chopin is a valse brillante, no. 3 from the opus 34 set - as featured on the Cinema Classics compilation 'The World of Jean-Luc Godard' volume 1]
[Update 05.07.2013: the Chopin is a valse brillante, no. 3 from the opus 34 set - as featured on the Cinema Classics compilation 'The World of Jean-Luc Godard' volume 1]
Patricia's radio is French, a 1956 Jicky Sensation:
Like Liliane earlier and like the Swedish model later (see below), Patricia has made her own image a part of the décor:
I can't tell if this is a photo done around the time of the shoot and for the shoot or whether it is an existing image from Jean Seberg's preceding career - I hope the latter, because then Godard would be playing the reality/fiction game even more intently than when, in his next film, he puts on his protagonist's hotel-room wall a Paris Match cover with Jean Seberg (dated March 1957):
Update:
The photograph that Jean Seberg (Patricia) has on her wall and in front of which she poses was taken by her husband François Moreuil. In his book of memoirs (Flash Back, 2011) he reproduces another photograph (right) taken at the same time. For more on Moreuil and A bout de souffle see here. |
quai Saint Michel and environs
Michel leaves Patricia at a café on the corner of the quai Saint Michel and the rue Saint Jacques, going first to the rue de la Bûcherie, in front of the Mistral bookshop (renamed Shakespeare and Company in 1964), in search of a car to steal:
He then tries to steal a Triumph TR2 on the rue Saint Julien le Pauvre before finding a Ford Thunderbird on the rue Galande:
He follows the Thunderbird's owner onto the rue Dante and into a building where they ride up in the same lift. The car owner is producer and director José Bénazéraf, who shared offices with the producer of A bout de souffle Georges de Beauregard.
I don't know where the building is that they go into. It doesn't seem to be on the rue Dante, possibly it's on the boulevard Saint Germain. The car stolen was Bénazéraf's own.
car ride 3: quai Saint Michel to rue de Berri
Michel picks up Patricia in the Thunderbird and they head south down the rue Saint Jacques. The next shot is a tracking from the car along the rue François 1er towards the avenue Montaigne. The journey ends at the Herald Tribune offices, 21 rue de Berri:
Passing the Dior shop Patricia asks if Michel will buy her a dress there, but he says there are better dresses at the Prisunic. When they arrive rue de Berri she has a dress in her hand, so they must have stopped at a Prisunic somewhere - she has also bought shoes and gloves. In Chambre 12 hôtel de Suède Claude Ventura shows documents confirming the purchase of a dress in a Prisunic:
Orly
The IMPDB identifies the one aeroplane we see clearly during the press conference at Orly, a Douglas C-54A Skymaster:
The microphone is attached to a very impressive tape recorder, the make of which I cannot identify (the writing on the glass pane looks Russian):
There are two other pieces of equipment on display at the press conference, a Bell & Howell Filmo 70 16mm camera and a Linhof Baby Super Technika field camera:
A wind-up movie camera and a foldaway stills camera strike me as unlikely apparatus to use at a press conference, but I'm probably wrong about that.
As for the people wielding this equipment, I have no idea who the man with the movie camera is, but the field photographer is François Moreuil, husband and lawyer to Jean Seberg.
As well as Patricia, we see six different journalists ask questions at the press conference. Apparently these are all actual journalists. I think the first one below might be Jacques Siclier, and I know that the second one is André S. Labarthe, but the other four are a mystery to me:
As for the people wielding this equipment, I have no idea who the man with the movie camera is, but the field photographer is François Moreuil, husband and lawyer to Jean Seberg.
As well as Patricia, we see six different journalists ask questions at the press conference. Apparently these are all actual journalists. I think the first one below might be Jacques Siclier, and I know that the second one is André S. Labarthe, but the other four are a mystery to me:
I shall be making a separate post soon where I try to fix an accurate cast list for A bout de souffle. One thing I hope to establish, among other things but if nothing else, is that, despite the IMDB, veteran British character actor Raymond Huntley (below) does not play a journalist in this film. (If it turns out that he does I'll eat his hat.)
Choisy-le-Roi (?)
While Patricia is at Orly Michel takes the Thunderbird to sell to a dealer. He had earlier called the dealer on the number 'Belle Epine 35 26'. Belle Epine is the exchange name for the area around Thiais and Choisy-le-Roi, south-east of Paris, just before Orly. There is a little evidence to support this identification: see here for details.
car ride 4: Orly to rue Lord Byron
A sequence of 24 shots.
Presumably Michel has found a taxi and collected Patricia from Orly, but the first we see of their journey is in Paris, driving east along the quai de la Mégisserie, 1e, and then northwards on the rue Guynemer, 6e:
Presumably Michel has found a taxi and collected Patricia from Orly, but the first we see of their journey is in Paris, driving east along the quai de la Mégisserie, 1e, and then northwards on the rue Guynemer, 6e:
Opening the journey with locations on different sides of the river signals that topographical coherence will not be the organising principle of the sequence, though the rue de Vaugirard in the following shot does connect to the rue Guynemer:
Michel claims to have been born in the first of these buildings and complains that the other has ruined the beauty of the location. This juxtaposition in the same shot of buildings from 1780 and 1957 is an overtly anti-modern statement, rare in itself but analogous to Michel's declared preference for old people over young and his enthusiasm for Bogart.
The car journey continues in the right direction with a second shot of the modern apartment building and a view further up the street, the rue Bonaparte - we can just make out the Bonaparte cinema through the taxi window:
The car journey continues in the right direction with a second shot of the modern apartment building and a view further up the street, the rue Bonaparte - we can just make out the Bonaparte cinema through the taxi window:
From this point on the journey abandons topographical coherence, instead mixing and matching shots from four different locations, beginning with a return to the quai de la Mégisserie, 1e:
These are shots 2 and 10 of the 22 that make up the whole sequence. With shot 1 that makes 3 shots on the quai de la Mégisserie. Shots 2 to 5, from the rue Guynemer to the rue Bonaparte, are the only ones in that area.
The next area shown is towards and on the grands boulevards, with 2 shots each of the boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle, 2e (shots 7 and 15), the boulevard Poissonnière, 2e (shots 9 and 13) and the boulevard Sebastopol, 1e (shots 14 and 16):
The next area shown is towards and on the grands boulevards, with 2 shots each of the boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle, 2e (shots 7 and 15), the boulevard Poissonnière, 2e (shots 9 and 13) and the boulevard Sebastopol, 1e (shots 14 and 16):
The stretch of the Cours la Reine approaching the rue François 1er, 8e, is shown twice, shots 8 and 17:
In the third view (shot 10) of the quai de la Mégisserie the taxi is approaching the place du Châtelet and Michel tells the driver to turn left into it. In the next shot they have stopped at the rue Saint Denis, just north of the place du Châtelet, and Michel goes to speak to two prostitutes on the Rue du Ponceau (shots 11 and 12 - thank you Misako Otani for locating the exact street):
I am sure of almost all of these identifications, but I realise that anyway the interest of this sequence does not lie in its topography. Once they have passed the house of Michel's birth, the sequence becomes an exercise in overriding topographical difference through visual matching. Between shots 6 and 17, seven of the transitions are jumpcuts premised on the repeated foreground, mostly the back of the taxi driver's head but in one instance the two-shot of Michel and Patricia. Here are shots 6 to 10:
Here are shots 12 and 13:
And here are shots 14 to 17:
The last group of shots before the journey ends are all in the same place, though I am not sure where that is (I think this is the Cours la Reine just after the pont Alexandre III). Shots 18 to 22 are all framed in the same way and the background is more-or-less the same in each. They are linked by four near-imperceptible jumpcuts:
These jumpcuts make no reference to the changing background, so are of a different type from those earlier in the sequence. They serve as a visual rhythm accompanying the rhythm of the dialogue, much like the jumpcuts when Van Doude was speaking at the Quick Elysées.
Shot 23 is in the same location as shot 22 - possibly the Cours la Reine. Shot 23 shows the taxi arriving in the rue Lord Byron, 8e:
Champs Elysées, rue de Berri, avenue MacMahon
When Patricia and Michel part at the exit to the passage leading from the rue Lord Byron to the Champs Elysées, Michel says he is going to say hello to his tailor. When we next see him he has indeed been to see his tailor, having replaced his fedora with a cap and his dark trousers and light-coloured jacket with a light-coloured suit. He has the same tie and seems to have kept the same shirt:
His tailor is at 12 rue de Berri, opposite the Herald Tribune's offices. (Strangely, Michel and Patricia went in different directions to arrive in the same street.)
This is the jacket about which Michel will later be chastised for wearing tweed with silk socks. I'm not an expert but to me this doesn't look like tweed:
This is the jacket about which Michel will later be chastised for wearing tweed with silk socks. I'm not an expert but to me this doesn't look like tweed:
Patricia gave the slip to the policeman following her in the Mac-Mahon cinema, 7 avenue Mac-Mahon, 17e. In the cinema we hear the soundtrack of Preminger's Whirlpool (1949). There are posters for this film outside, and also for John Ford's The Long Gray Line (1955).
Michel and Patricia go to the Napoleon cinema at 4 avenue de la Grande Armée, 16e. The film playing is apparently Budd Boetticher's Westbound (1959), though nothing of the film is shown on screen. What we see is Belmondo and Seberg, kissing. What we hear is an exchange between ‘Jessica’ and the ‘Sheriff’ (characters from Fuller’s Forty Guns). The dialogue is not from that film, however, but composed from fragments of poems by Aragon (‘Elsa je t’aime’) and Apollinaire (‘Cors de chasse’).
car ride 5: Champs Elysées to rue Campagne première
This is a long, drawn-out journey with four stops along the way and one change of vehicle. It begins in a 1957 Peugeot 403 pulling up at the Champs Elysées Drugstore (no. 133), where Patricia buys a newspaper:
They drive down the Champs Elysées and into the place de la Concorde:
At this point Michel decides to switch cars, and we cut to an ordinary street with a multi-storey garage. Nothing indicates the location, but the novelisation of the film says this is near the boulevard Henri IV, near the Bastille. As far as I can make out, this is a now-gone garage at 39 rue de Lyon, 12e:
They replace the Peugeot with what Michel calls a Cadillac Eldorado, but is in fact a Cadillac Series 62 Convertible, from 1954 (see a discussion of this point on the IMCDB, here).
In the next shot they drive past a building on the place Saint Lazare with, among other illuminated advertisements, an ad for the Bardot vehicle Babette s'en va-t-en guerre (Christian-Jaque 1959):
Then they drive past the Royal Saint Germain, turning from the boulevard Saint Germain into the rue de Rennes, which leads to the Pergola on the rue du Four in the following shot:
At the Pergola 'Gaby' tells Michel that the person he is looking for is in Montparnasse. The Pergola was famous for its basement cabaret, L'Arlequin, at which artists like Léo Ferré performed. Gaby is uncredited in any of the published cast lists for the film, but he may well be the famous Gaby who ran L'Arlequin, as remembered for example in Ferré's sung poem 'Gaby'. I haven't found a photograph of 'Gaby Pergola' (as he was known) to compare with the man behind the counter in the film:
They drive down to Montparnasse. This same car, incidentally, same registration number, appears a year later in Chabrol's Les Bonnes Femmes:
In Montparnasse Michel and Patricia find Karl Zumbach and Antonio Berruti. Though both are played by French actors, each carries a newspaper to suggest his character's national origins. Zumbach has a copy of the Zurich-based weekly Die Weltwoche, and Berruti has La Gazzetta dello Sport:
Michel and Patricia head down the boulevard du Montparnasse, past La Rotonde and Le Dôme towards the rue Campagne première:
chez la Suédoise, rue Campagne première
This is the third woman's apartment presented in the film. Like Liliane and Patricia, the un-named Swedish woman has many images and objects in her home. She too has pictures of herself, from her work as a model:
This suggests that Virginie Ullmann, the actress playing the model, is actually a model. Her other acting roles seem limited. Here she is from that same year as a party-goer in Vadim's Les Liaisons dangereuses:
If she is primarily a model, it may be that, like Liliane David's chambre de bonne, the apartment at 11 rue Campagne première is actually her home-cum-studio. It has the accoutrements of professional photography:
But the photographer is an amateur, Polanski's future scriptwriter Gérard Brach, at the time working as a press officer at Fox (where Godard had also been working):
If this apartment is not the actual home of a model it may be, rather, the home of a painter. The place is full of paintings:
These may just be someone's collection of modern artworks, but there is a table with the accoutrements of actual painting that suggest a painter on site:
Rue Campagne première had traditionally been associated with artists. The list of great modernists who lived, worked or drank there (not all at the same time) includes Modigliani at no. 3 (at Rosalie's restaurant), Sonia Delaunay and De Chirico at no. 9, Duchamp, Kisling and Picabia at no. 29, and Man Ray at no. 31. Many used S. W. Hayter's print studio at no. 17, including Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro, Ernst, Chagall, Lipchitz, Tanguy and Calder. Nicolas de Staël was at no. 13 in 1945. In December 1957 Oscar Dominguez killed himself in his studio at no. 23, where Foujita also had a studio. Across the street from the A bout de souffle shoot, Yves Klein was living at no. 14 (he died there in 1962). A late '50s phone book lists 25 artists in the rue Campagne première, though none at no. 11.
A clue as to whether an actual artist was living at no. 11 might be found if we could identify the works on display there. Most are abstract, though the styles vary:
A clue as to whether an actual artist was living at no. 11 might be found if we could identify the works on display there. Most are abstract, though the styles vary:
More revealing than the style, however, is the signature visible on the first of these canvases:
I would guess, then, that this is a freshly painted work by Godard himself. A further guess would be that the other paintings in the room are also by him. None of the other signatures is legible, but the next two in the collection above look like they might be by the same hand. It would be particularly pleasing to know that the most visible painting in this space, below, was by Godard:
UPDATE NOVEMBER 2019:
A production still of the scene above allows us to see the signature on that painting, and it clearly isn't 'JLG'. It looks like 'M. Germain 57'. I haven't yet found who it could be; I first thought of the abstract artist Jacques Germain, whose works are not dissimilar to the above, but that is not how he signed his name. It must be another 1950s abstract artist. I'll keep looking.
A production still of the scene above allows us to see the signature on that painting, and it clearly isn't 'JLG'. It looks like 'M. Germain 57'. I haven't yet found who it could be; I first thought of the abstract artist Jacques Germain, whose works are not dissimilar to the above, but that is not how he signed his name. It must be another 1950s abstract artist. I'll keep looking.
In her essay on Godard and Nicolas de Staël, 'Leap into the Void', Sally Shafto has analysed at length the Staëlian qualities of this canvas, and from her demonstration of Godard's interest in the painter it makes sense that he would imitate his style. There is a signature visible, but it would need a more forensic eye than mine to read it as 'J-L G':
UPDATE NOVEMBER 2019:
A production still of the scene above allows us to see the signature on that painting, and it clearly isn't 'JLG'. It looks like 'M. Germain 57'. I haven't yet found who it could be; I first thought of Jacques Germain, whose works are not dissimilar to the above, but that is not how he signed his name. It must be another 1950s abstract artist. I'll keep looking. |
Two other kinds of object in the Swedish woman's apartment are of interest to the trivialist. Patricia puts on a record of the Mozart clarinet concerto:
The disk on the turntable is Jacques Lancelot's recording, conducted by Louis de Froment:
I don't have this recording to be able to check whether it is Lancelot's performance on the soundtrack.
There are also books in the apartment. Patricia and Michel sit in front of a shelf of books of which the only one I can make out is a Webster's Dictionary. On the table is a pile of books of which we can only identify the one seen in close up, the much-commented Abracadabra by Maurice Sachs, with quotation from 'Lenin':
There are also books in the apartment. Patricia and Michel sit in front of a shelf of books of which the only one I can make out is a Webster's Dictionary. On the table is a pile of books of which we can only identify the one seen in close up, the much-commented Abracadabra by Maurice Sachs, with quotation from 'Lenin':
There is no connection between Sachs' book and the supposed Lenin quotation, which has been attached to the cover of the book with a piece of adhesive tape. I have discussed here the re-attribution of Eugène Leviné's famous phrase to Lenin. The phrase returns five years later in Pierrot le fou, as if remembered from A bout de souffle by Belmondo, the actor in both films:
boulevard du Montparnasse & rue Campagne première
Patricia goes to buy the paper and returns via the boulevard du Montparnasse, passing west to east in front of the rue de la Grande Chaumière and then, still going in the same direction despite the change in camera position, in front of no. 138 boulevard du Montparnasse:
She is then in a bar at 17 rue Campagne première, having walked past the building at no. 11 to get there:
When Berruti arrives with Michel's money it is in a Simca Aronde 1300 Weekend, Godard's own car:
The IMFDB, once again, has all the information on the firearms used in this sequence:
Just before Michel falls to the ground after being shot, he stumbles past André Arfvidson's wonderful Art Nouveau-ish building from 1911 (see here for details):
You can just see some of the building's fine detailing to Belmondo's left, here:
When the protagonists of Pascal Aubier's Le Fils de Gascogne (1995) re-enact the death of Michel, matching the actions and the locale with otherwise great accuracy, Aubier cannot resist placing his stand-in for Patricia in front of the Arfvidson building:
Godard, on the other hand, had resisted the picturesque and given Patricia a less distracting background. I think, but am in no way sure, that his camera is looking the other way towards the building at 236-238 boulevard Raspail - a fine enough edifice in itself but not a Modernist classic:
Seberg's look to camera in the last shot of the film is its most explicit reference to her character's pretext, Cécile in Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1958):
In the last shot of Godard's film something can be seen in the background, ripe for trivialist identification, but the film prefers we not look at it, reminding us that a trivialist reading can be a limited, indeed limiting, reading. In a second-degree sequence like Aubier's reconstruction in Le Fils de Gascogne, everything is legible, every reading is legitimate. For A bout de souffle that is not the case. At this point in that film everyone should be paying attention to more important things, like the police inspector's distortion of Michel's dying words, like Patricia's mimetic Bogartism, like the umpteenth use of the word 'dégueulasse' (I promise I'll count them soon), like the umpteenth time (ditto) Patricia hasn't understood something supposedly French (apparently 'horoscope' wasn't a word in English), like the fourth look to camera (though actually this is the sixth time someone has looked directly into the camera - see below).
appendix 1: fourth looks
There are 6 'pure' fourth looks, i.e. where the look is directed at the camera without being motivated by another character's point of view. These are moments of direct address:
There are a further 9 looks that are either mediated in some way (as point-of-view, as a photograph) or are perhaps not quite directed at the camera:
For more on direct address, see Catherine Grant's illuminating interview with Tom Brown for Film Studies for Free: here. See also Tom's Tumblr on Breaking the Fourth Wall: here.
appendix 2: newspapers
When we first see Michel he is reading Paris Flirt, which is not a newspaper but a weekly entertainment for men, full of semi-salacious stories and illustrations. On his arrival in Paris early the next day, he buys a newspaper from a passing cyclist on the quai Saint Michel. I can't make out the title, but it's 'something Paris':
The newspaper seller is, incidentally, Cahiers journalist Luc Moullet.
The next paper he buys is Le Figaro, which he uses to clean his shoes:
The next paper he buys is Le Figaro, which he uses to clean his shoes:
On the Champs Elysées he buys the New York Herald Tribune from Patricia, but gives it back to her because 'there's no horoscope'. Does anyone know if there really wasn't a horoscope in the NYHT in 1959?
Instead he buys France Soir, with its first report of the murder:
By the time he meets up with Patricia on the boulevard des Italiens, he has bought a later edition of France Soir, and in the evening on the Champs Elysées he buys the eighth and final edition of France Soir:
The next day, outside the offices of the New York Herald Tribune, he buys France Soir, with more news on the hunt for him:
As he leaves a men's clothes shop on the rue de Berri he has bought another edition of France Soir, and later that evening he has Patricia run into the Drugstore on the Champs Elysées to buy an even later edition:
The next morning he sends Patricia out to buy some milk and France Soir:
That's ten newspapers in three days, seven of them France Soir.
Further appendices will follow, eventually, dealing with e.g. the cast list and the jumpcuts, but if there is anything trivial in A bout de souffle that I've missed and that you would like me to investigate, please ask, here.
Sources
- Alain Bergala, Godard au travail: les années soixante (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006)
- David Bordwell, 'Jump Cuts and Blind Spots', Wide Angle, 6.1 (1984): here
- Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: the Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Holt, 2008)
- Antoine de Baecque, Godard (Paris: Grasset, 2010)Ramona Fotiade A bout de souffle (London: I.B. Tauris 2013)
- Claude Francolin, A bout de souffle (Paris: Seghers, 1960)
- Roland-François Lack,' A bout de souffle: les intertextes d’un plan’, in Jean-Louis Leutrat (ed.), Cinéma et Littérature: le grand jeu, II (Paris: De l'Incidence, 2011) (an earlier English version is here)
- Roland-François Lack, 'Sa voix’ (on Godard’s voice), in M. Temple, J. Williams, M. Witt (eds), For Ever Godard (London: Black Dog, 2004)
- Roland-François Lack, 'The point in time: precise chronology in early Godard’, Studies in French Cinema, 3:2 (2003): here
- Colin MacCabe, Godard: a Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (London: Macmillan, 2005)
- Valerie Orpen, Film Editing: the Art of the Expressive (London: Wallflower, 2003)
- Sally Shafto, 'Leap into the Void: Godard and the Painter', Senses of Cinema, 39 (May 2006): here
- Chambre 12 Hôtel de Suède (Claude Ventura 1993)
- Deux de la vague (Emmanuel Laurent 2010)
- The Internet Movie Car Database: here
- The Internet Movie Firearms Database: here
- The Internet Movie Plane Database: here
- TSF-Radio: here
With thanks to 'Chris40' and 'Andre Malraux' on IMCDB.