Jean-Louis, or the Good Days: Interview with Jean Narboni (CAHIERS DU CINÉMA, August 2022)

Interview with Jean Narboni
Translated from French with additional annotations by Jonathan Mackris
Interview by Marcos Uzal, published in Cahiers du cinéma, n. 789, July-August 2022

The editorial staff at Cahiers under Rivette, from left to right: Jean-Andre Fieschi, Jean Narboni, Philippe Carles (from Jazz Magazine), Jean-Louis Comolli, and Jacques Bontemps (1965)

Jean Narboni knew Jean-Louis Comolli for several years before their respective entry to Cahiers du cinéma, and far from Paris. When Jacques Rivette took over as head of the magazine in 1963, he made them his closest collaborators. Comolli became editor in chief in 1965 and Narboni co-editor in chief in 1968. Thus, in evoking his friend, the latter likewise revisits an essential period in the history of Cahiers. (Marcos Uzal)

From Algeria to Cahiers

Jean-Louis and I got to know each other in Algiers in 1958, en pleine guerre. The blows of friendship were immediate. We frequented the ciné-club directed by Barthélémy Amengual, a major programmer and author of some important work. As a communist, he was very focused on realist cinema and that of the countries of the East, which did not prevent him from taking his disciples in the opposite direction by writing a memorable text on Vertigo. Within the ciné-club, Jean-Louis and I were the “cahieristes” – we read Cahiers, though only understanding one out of every three articles since they often spoke of films we had not seen. But we loved the magazine. Amengual was open enough to allow us to propose and host series on Tourneur and Nicholas Ray, among others. 

On the pretext of wanting to pursue his studies, which he never completed, Jean-Louis left Algeria in 1961 for Paris, one year before me. He got to know the people at Cahiers at the Cinémathèque on the rue d’Ulm and joined it under Rohmer. In the beginning, he was completely in agreement with the positions of the latter and also of Jean Douchet, both their best (Hitchcock and Hawks) and their most debatable ones (Antonioni or Buñuel). One of the first texts by Jean-Louis, “The Ironical Howard Hawks” [1], attests to this. When Rivette became editor in chief, following the conflict we all know [2], he asked Jean-Louis and myself to become editors, having accepted our first articles. And when he left to make La Religieuse, Jean-Louis became editor in chief. Jean-André Fieschi (a Rohmerian defector), followed by Jacques Bontemps became editors. The team was then reinforced with collaborators who, when we judge it today, are not insignificant: Téchiné, Kané, Biette, Bonitzer, Claude Ollier, Daney, Eisenschitz, Sylvie Pierre, Jacques Aumont, etc. I am convinced Rivette had been impressed, among other qualities, with Jean-Louis’s enormous work ethic. He was able to be interested in a thousand things at once, without one harming or repressing the other. He was notably passionate about jazz. In Algiers, he met Philippe Carles as well, who later became editor in chief of Jazz Magazine, published by Filipacchi, our majority shareholder at the time. Jean-Louis wrote a dictionary on jazz with him, along with their famous Free Jazz, Black Power (1971).

The Red Years at Cahiers

When Jean-Louis became editor in chief, he did not impose a position. He had nothing Jupiterian about him (he was closer to Bacchus), nor did he have a taste for verticality: the work was totally collegial. The political evolution of the magazine was progressive, contrary to the legend of a “coup” after May ‘68. It was Rivette who initiated Cahiers’ turn to the left. We see this beginning with n. 138, where, in an entry in the petit dictionnaire titled “162 New French Filmmakers,” he wrote, under Rohmer and without a signature, a note on October à Paris, the film on the massacre of Algerians in 1961. [3] 

I also want to point out that the account given of the Comolli-Narboni period, from 1965-1973, is often very unfair (partial and incomplete, because it is uninformed or, frankly, malicious). The tree of a year and a half of drift, or of Maoist vertigo or delirium (let’s say 1972 to the first half of 1973) obscures the very rich forest of the prior seven years. For example, in the four lines of her homage to Jean-Louis for Libération, the excellent Camille Nevers does not fail to recall with pleasure the song “Mao-mao” from La chinoise. Seven crucial years in the history of the magazine, first in terms of re-evaluations of auteurs not as popular with the Cahiers jaunes, but especially in terms of discoveries. Jean-Louis wrote often on John Ford, whose immensity we assessed during a retrospective at the Cinémathèque française, followed assiduously by Rivette. [4] His great final film, 7 Women, rejected by most seasoned Fordians, was the subject of two articles, one by Jean-Louis and the other by me. Between 1965 and 1971 we had the privilege to live in a moment that will never be reproduced, where multiple layers of the history of cinema, multiple generation, coexisted: the final films of the pioneers (Chaplin, Ford, Dreyer, Walsh, Renoir…); the Bergman generation, Antonioni at full speed, Bresson and Rouch of course; and last but not least the young cinemas that have sprung up all over the world with filmmakers such as Bellocchio, Bertolucci, Olmi, Bene, Skolimowski, Jancso, Iosseliani, Tanner, Perrault, Forman, Chytilova, Ousmane Sembene, Brault, Groulx, Makavejev, Glauber and Paolo Rocha, Ôshima, Imamura, Yoshida, Hani, Moullet, Garrel, Eustache, Kramer, etc. This is to say nothing of Straub-Huillet, and there we were really alone. Our greatest omission, and I cannot explain it, was Fassbinder, but apart from him I don’t think we missed much. It’s in this period as well that Pasolini, Metz, Barthes wrote texts that made history. 

At the end of ’68, rather than devote the Christmas issue to the militant mediocrities filmed during the movement that we were pressured to promote, we decided to devote a special issue to Dreyer. And not just to be contrarian, but because we really considered him to be a politically important filmmaker, beside his genius. The first version of Jean-Louis’ editorial was even titled “Dreyer, leftist?” (I am not sure about the question mark!) Over this period, a huge number of texts signed by Jean-Louis, such as the series “Technique and Ideology,” were the product of his irreducible inclination as a theorist. Whatever the subject or film addressed, he tried to extract a general view on cinema. I admit that I prefer texts like “Two Fictions on Hate”, on To Be or Not to Be (n. 288), or the one on La Marseillaise and the king’s “excessive body” (n. 277), less obviously ambitious but more concrete, direct, vibrant.

A Romantic Anarchist

Later on, Cahiers defended La Cecilia. The film was in step with the aftermath of 1968 and fervently depicted the realization and failure of a utopian community, a theme dear to Jean-Louis. In 1981, when I was in charge of publishing, I devoted a special edition to his second feature, L’ombre rouge, with the cartoonist Ted Benoit. After the failure of Balles perdues (1983), he abandoned the field of fiction filmmaking and cut himself off from the world of cinema entirely to focus on his important documentary work and his books. He became immovable, in a way, and sometimes paid the price for it. The notion of a “grand family of cinema,” for example, filled him with horror. He remained a romantic anarchist, very active and very militant. He was less interested by what was released in theaters, but he continued to watch and rewatch many films. He was always awake and alert – even while sick, tired, exhausted – to his final day. The evening before he entered the coma, he spoke to me over the phone and asked to meet the week after, telling me “I have just added the word ‘end’ to a few pages.” The text, still to be published, is titled “Waiting for the Good Days.” [5] The class…

Interview by Marcos Uzal in Paris, 11 June 2022

[1] “H.H., ou l’ironique,” Cahiers du cinéma, n. 160 (1964), pp. 49-52. Translated as “The Ironical Howard Hawks.” Trans. Norman King. In Cahiers du cinéma, 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood, ed. Jim Hillier. London: Routledge, 1986, pp. 181-186.

[2] Narboni is referring to the ousting of Rohmer from the position of editor in chief in June 1963 by Rivette, aided by Truffaut, Doniol-Valcroze, and several of the younger staff, owing to the swing of the magazine to the far right under Rohmer’s stewardship.

[3] In his biography of Rohmer, Antoine de Baecque writes that the inspiration for Rivette’s capsule review of Octobre à Paris (Cahiers n. 138, December 1962, pg. 83) came from his belief that Cahiers was, under Rohmer’s leadership, indifferent to racism and to the Algerian War. The full text of Rivette’s review reads:

Réalisé sous l'égide du Comité Maurice-Audin, ce film est avant tout un irremplaçable témoignage sur la condition des Nord-Africains en France, et sur leur combat durant l'hiver 61-62: un pathétique reportage au bidonville de Nanterre, quelques interviews (en français) de travailleurs musulmans, une longue discussion (en arabe) entre responsables locaux du F.L.N., enfin un compte rendu, par force partiel, des grandes manifestations d'octobre 1961 et de leurs suites, policières et politiques — tels sont les éléments-clefs de ce document capital pour l'histoire de notre temps.

"Made under the aegis of the Committee Maurice-Audin, this film is before anything else an invaluable testimony on the condition of North Africans in France, and on their struggle during the winter of ’61-62: a simple report in the slums of Nanterre; some interviews (in French) with Muslim workers; a long discussion (in Arabic) between local leaders of the FLN; and finally a record, partially by force, of the enormous manifestations of October 1961 and their aftermath, for the police and for politics – these are the key elements of this essential document of the history of our time."

[4] In an interview with Daniel Fairfax, quoted in the following passage, Narboni expands on the impact of this retrospective: “If there is one figure, however, who can claim ultimate responsibility for Cahiers’ change in position on Ford, then it is Rivette. In spite of the fact that Rivette never wrote a single word in Cahiers on Ford, Narboni explains that the journal’s “hyper-Fordian turn came about under Jacques Rivette.” The key moment in this transformation took place during Langlois’ Ford retrospective: “I remember that after the screening of The Wings of Eagles, we spoke with Rivette about the film in front of the cinémathèque, and we were absolutely awestruck—it’s a sublime film. And after that, Cahiers became extremely Fordian.” The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma, Vol. 1, pg. 100

[5] This book, En attendent les beaux jours, would be published in January 2023 by Éditions Verdier, Comolli's publisher for over a decade.

Casting out the eights: John Ford's SEVEN WOMEN

Jean Narboni

Translated from French by John Caughie and Norman King

Originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, n. 182, September 1966; translated in Theories of Authorship, edited by John Caughie (London and New York: Routledge, 1981), 117-120.

Narboni can be associated with Comolli not only as editor of Cahiers but also as representative of the magazine's development away from the politique, towards a more complex view of the author as a problematic figure, the site of contradictions and repressions. Seven Women had been an almost universal disappointment, even to critics sympathetic to Ford (the exception being Andrew Sarris, who defends it as a 'genuinely great film': The John Ford Movie Mystery, p. 184). Narboni's title is "La preuve par huit," a play on the expression la preuve par neuf ('casting out the nines'), a mathematical proof for checking multiplications by a process of adding together the sums of the various digits after eliminating all the nines.  [John Caughie]

If we agree to count Miss Ling as one of the members of what used to be called the 'fair sex', whose number and presence provides John Ford's latest film with its title (and the fact that we are once again dealing with an outsider would seem to be a strong incentive for us to do that), we have to admit that these seven women in fact become eight. Namely: Agatha Andrews, the woman in charge of the mission, concealing beneath an armour of excessive piety a horrific combination of repressed sensuality and deeply felt vacuity; her shadow and ghost, the impalpable Miss Russell, smoky grey and got up later on, when rebellion and disrespect win her over, in a ridiculously oversized raincoat; Emma Clark, the young missionary, the object of every kind of tenderness, even the most perturbing; Flora Peter, making the mission vibrate with her continual screaming, in which the natural nervousness of the pregnant woman is in competition with the terrifying but thrilling prospect of being attacked by Mongol marauders; Dr. Cartwright (Anne Bancroft), tender, coarse, concealing her wounds, the archetype of the positive Fordian character; then two English women pursued by outlaws, Miss Bins and Jane Argent; lastly, Miss Ling.

Miss Ling is first of all the outsider, the absent one, everywhere a displaced person. Perhaps, we are told, a descendent of deposed Chinese princes, she accompanies the two English women as far as the mission. Silent, unseeing, isolated from the seven women, she waits. When Anne Bancroft says to Sue Lyon, 'You are the only one who can get away from here', the framing brings together the blond missionary and the impassive Chinese woman who is no more concerned or animated than a table or a plate. Then the Mongols arrive - and they are even more anti-Chinese than anti-American. Torn away from a group of which she wasn't really - or wasn't yet - a part, she is now subjected to all kinds of humiliation, demeaned, scoffed at, mauled, reduced to the position of slave and object.

One frequently finds, you may say, in Ford's films situations like this, in which two civilizations, two hostile, or at least foreign, racial universes are in conflict, interweave or interpenetrate: whites and Indians, Europeans and Polynesians, westerners and orientals. With, between the two, a whole interplay of exchanges, of difficult adoptions, of abductions and retrievals; a whole series of transfers and transitions, from exclusions to false recognitions, from treacherous reunions to repeated captures. Whites forced to become Indians, restored to their own civilization only to be rejected by the very people who sought their release (The Searchers, Two Rode Together); or the free choice and adoption of another world, of a new homeland (Donovan's Reef). It would be inviting, and much too easy, in that case, claiming to know Ford, to label Miss Ling as the classic type of the victim of racial ostracism, banished and despised. The diabolical structuring of the film, by declaring her 'out of play', makes it impossible to allocate to her the number Eight and thus to skirt round the problem.

It is simply that, at the opposite pole, and not at the fringes but within the group of women itself, there is Anne Bancroft, representing a second known type of undesirable, for moral rather than ethnic reasons this time; all the more disturbing for being obstinately present and active: an energetic, brutal, outspoken presence, forcibly injected into the lethargic universe of the mission. Unequivocal in her tone of voice, her conduct, her language, tolerated only because of her function, fomenting a feeling of unease, made still more intolerable by her being indispensable. Within the walls of the mission house, doubly isolated by its location and the epidemic, she wreaks salutary havoc, sows healthy devastation.

What is so fundamentally new in Seven Women, what gives this film which seems on the surface to be so calm its 'disturbing' power, its disequilibrium and its controlled instability, its incessant and unpredictable rebounds, is, then, the confrontation of two orders, two types of conflict and situation which are usually kept separate in Ford's other films. Not focusing on one or other character, but effecting between the outsider and the intruder a series of to-ings and fro-ings, of exchanges; passing from the moral to the social order, making them subtly interact and fuse, condemning the two women to the same fate. Being excluded from one group equals being solicited and integrated by the other. Substitution replaces addition; racial discrimination and puritanism reveal the same features of hatred and taboo. Chosen by Tunga Khan - and it is with diabolical skill that Ford gradually reveals that she has been chosen not as a doctor but first and foremost as a woman - seated at the chief's right hand during the circus games, when adorned in oriental costume, Miss - and no longer Dr. - Cartwright creates by her absence a lack in the group. Immediately Miss Ling is handed back. The number Seven is restored by interchangeability. The women are allowed to go free. Anne Bancroft poisons the Mongol and kills herself.

It is perhaps not an exaggeration, then, to see in this single unit, this one number too many, this superfluity that may be thought anodyne, this hardly perceptible surplus, the most developed and most dissimulated form of the excess Ford has always liked to use - and now more than ever - in order to pervert conformity and tranquility to the extent of destroying them. Thus it is astonishing to see how perplexed, not to say disappointed, some of the most resolute Fordians have been, seeing Seven Women as an aberration, an untypical film, contradicting, even, the mythology of its author. No doubt it is one of those works which are at once synthesis and crowning achievement, in which the absolute project of its author is located at the borderline between the excessive and the sublime. Yet all Ford is present, though in a tranquil immoderation. Even the story is not absolutely new: it is enough to cast your mind back to a television programme in which we were told of the misfortunes of two nuns confronted by Chinese bandits. Once again it is a group of people united by the hazards of a journey or condemned to stagnation. Prisoners of the desert or of the high seas,* a group of men or, for the first time, of women, it all comes to the same in the end. (Ford plays all the time, moreover, on sexual ambiguity: the natural status conferred on Anne Bancroft because of her profession, then her hyperfeminization; the schoolteacher mistaken for a preacher, like the whiskey drummer in Stagecoach; Margaret Leighton's ambivalent attraction toward Sue Lyon, etc.). Always the same enclosed cell, here unchangeable, ossified, fusty; an abandoned planet over which Margaret Leighton scurries with her curious walk, like a broken marionette, half scampering, half gliding; an artificial enclave, quite deliberately and pointedly designated as such by the set, swept by arbitrary, violent lighting and moonspots. And the outside, the hostile surroundings, oppressive, without clear features. In the muted opening shots, bristling with hostility and white-hot, an inhuman pattern of relationships reveals its unbearable intensity. A whole series of internal dilapidations is brought into play, the exacerbation of desires, of hates in successive scenes in which militant atheism and blasphemy become intertwined with frigid, repressed or flagrant sexuality. From surreptitious advances to brief moments of painful separation, from violent confrontations to restrained frenzy, the plot moves along towards the resolution of the threat, the materialization of the Enemy. Abstract, archetypal enough for us to be able to acquit Ford of the charge of racism: Arabs, outlaws, Indians, or Mongols, it is less the name attached to this enemy that interests him than the intervention of an external force of whatever kind which, as though secreted from the inside, seems, rather than compromising or interrupting, to bring to an almost salutary end the fraught coexistence of a group of individuals who have reached the extreme point of crisis in their confrontation. In the last scenes, finally, we see the culminating splendor of the great funeral ceremonies of the screen in which, from The Princess Yang Kwei Fei to Europa '51 and from Les Dames du bois de Boulogne to The Naked Kiss, sacrifice, shame, cruelty, and insanity (in this instance of the mise en scène) exchange their sparkling unction. 

*Narboni is referring to The Searchers (French title La Prisonnière du désert) and The Long Voyage Home