I’m so glad to see someone else loves the film as much as I do!
I enjoyed reading your post. Thanks.
Once I finish up my homework I’ll talk more about your points and the film (a true young cinephile, indeed!).
Great OP Tom, with an excellent comparison of Godard and Bertolucci’s separate take on the whole question of ‘cinephilia’ and influence of cinema on film and real life – as seen on film. You should have posted this before the vote in the auteurs World Cup Round 1, where Drew had The Dreamers as his pick for team Italy. It got trounced by the voters, even though most of us could see and appreciate the cinematic references and the references to French history in the tumultuous France of 1968.
To me, the very themes you speak of in The Dreamers – Bertolucci’s tribute to Godard, Breathless, and the whole French New Wave – are the best parts of The Dreamers. As long as his characters stayed in tune with the ‘dream’ of cinema, and the many playful allusions to films every cinephile should like – it seemed true to its theme of ‘The Dreamers’. I don’t know just where it all came unravelled for me personally – because I loved that referential aspect to the film – even self-referential – but the characters became more of a parody than a commentary. Perhaps it was the acting or Bertolucci’s treatment, but it became more unreal – as in unrealistic – as the film went on. The film then seemed to allude to something greater than itself – ie, the other films it references. Perhaps something – for me – was lost in translation.
I hope Drew responds here, as he dearly loves the film and is as close to a true young cinephile himself as any of the three characters in the film – and as knowledgeable. I would like to see what he and others have to say about the vista to the film you have opened up. As I remarked when voting, this film was at least a film that acknowledges with respect the term ‘cinephile’.
Edit: I see Drew has already jumped in – no surprise there!
While Bertolucci’s are placed in a more real setting, where it supposedly reality, Godard’s are never quite real.
Just the opposite is true. Godard is the Lumiere and Bertolucci the Melies. Godard is 1000 times more the realist.
Nice essay, though.
I see what you mean Gringo Tex.
Thanks for the input guys.
Tom Mikos
“This is something that I dream about: to live films, to arrive at the point at which one can live for films, can think cinematographically, eat cinematographically, sleep cinematographically, as a poet, a painter, lives, eats, sleeps painting.”
-Bernardo Bertolucci
Before he started shooting his 2003 film, The Dreamers, Bernardo Bertolucci asked the seminal New Wave director, Jean-Luc Godard, for permission to include clips from A bout de souffle (Breathless) and Band a part (Band of Outsiders). Naturally, the director approved, and this is evident. If Bertolucci wants to “live cinematographically,” well, The Dreamers is his ode to this desire, and the early films of Godard are certainly the right basis.
The Dreamers takes place during the notorious May of ‘68, in France. While Bertolucci insists that one not attribute this fact to the main plot, it is important not to ignore it. For one, the ousting of Henry Langlois, a catalyst for months of turmoil involving class struggle and anti-de Gaulle attitude, was a perculiar, yet profound, occurrence in political and cinematic circles. It displayed the power of film, the power, more specifically, of cinephiles. Cinephiles, an evergrowing breed to this day, was but a smaller passionate caste of mostly students and other intellectuals. They firmly believed in the importance of 24 frames per second and met often to indulge in all it offered. As Matthew, played by Michael Pitt, claims early on in the film, “I became a member of what in those days was sort of a free masonry, the free masonry of cinephiles,” as his voice narrates over of images of the Cinematheque Francaise’s screening of Fuller’s Shock Corridor. “Only the French would house a cinema inside a palace,” he claims.
Bertolucci shoots Matthew in a dark, large theatre. His camera is at the bottom of the movie screen looking up as Fuller’s images play. He cuts to the projector’s faint ray of light and follows it back to the screen, behind countless heads of twenty-something’s and the likes. An exterior shot of the palace in which this is being shown, and a cut back to the inside of the theatre, now tracking a shot of the audience from the front, faces in awe, mouths half open, eyes glued. This is the free masonry. All the while the strumming of a familiar guitar, that of one Jimi Hendrix, plays faintly on the soundtrack. This is the late 60s, France, the Cinematheque Francaise. Bernardo wants to drill this zeitgeist into your head early. This is where you are.
In many ways, establishing this mood and spirit early, Bertolucci is preparing you for the rest of his film. Splicing scenes and moments of films like A bout de souffle or Bande a part with near reenactments in his own, Bertolucci states in his commentary for The Dreamers that he wanted to present an idea of “one long film.” That although his work is decades after Godard’s early 60s work, or Fred Astaire’s dance scene in Top Hat, they were all part of this spirit: the love of film.
After Fuller’s Shock Corridor scene, we see Matthew heading to the Cinematheque on a separate occasion and he recalls, “there was one evening in the Spring of 1968, when the world finally burst through the screen.” It is here Bertolucci addresses the May of ‘68 riots. He shows archival footage of Henry Langlois leaving the Cinematheque Francaise, while a New Wave icon, Jean-Pierre Leaud, speaks to the crowd. But this isn’t all archival footage of Leaud. Instead Bertolucci mixes clips of present day Leaud, still, in many ways an icon, with footage of him from 1968. He is reading a text written by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette, amongst others. It is an odd mixture. In scratchy black and white archival footage, a younger Leaud speaks to a crowd. This is nonfiction, real life. In lush, hypnotic Bertolucci cinematography, he reenacts this moment in his life as an older man, 30 odd years later. So is this fiction? A humble homage? Regardless, Bertolucci, for the first time in many times throughout the film, uses other footage and mixes it with his own. The single “long film” plays on. This time, it is vital to note, he mixes real life events with his film’s events. And again Bertolucci is telling us of his wish to “live for films.”
This mixture of reality and “film reality” is important not only in The Dreamers, but in Godard’s own Bande a part. As James Monaco states in The New Wave, “if anything sets Bande a part apart, it is this joie de film: the characters have it within the structure of the film; Godard shows it outside the structure.” (p. 142) The “joie de film,” or in English, the joy of film. This could explain why Godard’s middle name is ‘cinema’ in the opening credits. Monaco explains that the three main characters, Arthur, Odile, and Franz, decide to commit a robbery not for any particular gain, but for the story it will turn out to be. “Cinema offers the security of known modes of discourse and protection from the emptiness and absurdity of what film people insist on calling ‘real life.’ Like so many of Godard’s people, they gain comfort from seeing the world in terms of metaphor of film, speaking in its language, acting through its formulated gestures.” (Monaco, p. 142) The characters of The Dreamers are very much “Godard’s people.”
As already mentioned, Bertolucci mixes footage from older films in reference to that of his own throughout The Dreamers. His characters, Isabelle, Theo, and Matthew, exert the same richness of Godard’s own, Arthur, Odile, and Franz. No more is this evident than in the Louvre scene. Infamous in cinematic history, the Louvre scene was first created by Godard in Bande a part, where the 3 characters race through the museum in an attempt to beat the record. Before paying homage to this moment, Bertolucci shows his characters lying around in a room, quizzing each other about films, debating who out of Chaplin and Keaton was better. To support each argument of Matthew and Theo, the director includes short, but powerful, clips of each legendary actor. It not only becomes a debate between these two characters, but with the audience as well. He is asking you: Chaplin or Keaton? Just as it seems Theo has convinced Matthew that Chaplin is the better of the 2, Isabelle restarts a finished record, a Janis Joplin record. Annoyed, Theo attempts to break the record in two and immediately Isabelle challenges Matthew to name a film in which someone drives another person crazy by tap dancing. This is not reality. This is “Godard’s people” laboring in their free masonry, cinephilia. After a brief mental struggle, as Theo and Isabelle wrestle on the floor, Matthew replies, “Top Hat!” And again, Bertolucci shows you a film. This time it is Fred Astaire, another cinema icon, tap dancing in his memorable scene. Upon this correct reply, a close-up of Theo and Isabelle stare, almost stunned. “You know what I’m thinking?” asks Isabelle. They’ve found their third person. “Band a part,” she says. It is as if Theo and Isabelle had been conspiring over this for years and had finally found their third person. They’re determined to beat the record, but Matthew has hesitations. For just a moment, one of Bertolucci’s characters leave this cinephilia and thinks of real world consequences. “I’m an American,” he tells them, “if I get caught I get deported.” Isabelle tells him they weren’t caught in Band a part, so if they beat the record they wouldn’t either. The humor of a cinephile’s logic. “This is a test,” she continues. A test to see how dedicated Matthew is to the love of film? Probably. The scene immediately cuts to the three running through the museum, a shot of Eva Green as Isabelle is mixed with Anna Karina’s Odile, and for a moment it is uncanny. The “one long film” continues.
James Monaco points out that there is a danger in “Godard’s people,” in which the mixing of reality with cinema can be “dizzying.” (p. 142) “But for the most part, Bande a part is satisfied to catalogue an ebullient collection of illustrations of this phenomenon.” (p. 142) He supports this by discussing Arthur’s actual death in the film as opposed to his fake one, the latter of which was the most believable. This is a person who knows how to die, as Monaco describes it, “cinematically.” And what about the robbery, Monaco questions. Leading up to this scene, each character is confident. But when it comes down to performing the actual crime, it is nothing like the films they know. “Godard’s people” can’t even break the window of the house they’re robbing.
The critic Robin Wood, in his essay on Band a part, writes, “Godard’s commentary reminds us frequently that the characters are basing their behaviour on pulp fiction and pop films.” (Wood, p. 70) He supports this by mentioning how the characters “wait till night before carrying out the robbery ‘out of respect for second-rate thrillers’” and how “Franz had a premonition of disaster ‘like the hero of an epic.’” Sound familiar? It should. While Godard didn’t splice footage of other films in Band a part, he certainly made it known that his characters were acting out what they had seen. Joshua Clover, in his essay on the film, goes further: “It’s as if they aren’t characters at all—they just think they are, acting out a movie they saw, one Saturday afternoon, called America.”
Wood described how the robbery is “planned out in simple gangster-film terms, the three expecting events to fall neatly into place around them.” (Wood, p. 70) This is much like Isabelle’s cinematic logic concerning the Louvre race. Wood goes on to explore the way in which Godard shows the three, almost bewildered by the difference reality turns out to be from that of their cinematic expectations.
This naivety of both directors’ characters is prominent in each film. The directors present it poignantly and humorously. For instance, when Matthew first meets Isabelle in The Dreamers, she appears to have locked herself to the gates as a protest. The melodramatic effect this has is silly, and when she reveals that she wasn’t actually chained to the gates, her fraudulent protest is not so much damaging to her character as much as it is essential. Bertolucci may have very well been playing with the concept of his characters merely acting out on these misperceptions of what they saw in the films they obsessed upon. Another example is when the three just escape a clash between protesters and police, and Isabelle tells Matthew she was born in 1959. This is impossible, unless Isabelle is merely 9 years old. In his commentary, Bertolucci explains that she says this in reference to A bout de souffle, which the director then juxtaposes footage of with her own reenactment of Jean Seberg’s “New York Herald Tribune” scene. He claims, “there was cinema before Breathless, and there was cinema after Breathless.” And it is in this quote one can see that he channeled this belief in Isabelle, “born” the year A bout de souffle was made.
Is it necessarily wrong to live the way these characters do? Not for film’s sake. It is important to understand characters like Godard’s and Bertolucci’s, who knowingly act as though in a film, are doing so in support of the directors’ goal. Aged old genres and cinematic cliche’s are reoccurring, but mixed with a certain amount of reality. Whether it is the bewildered three of Band a part as they rob a house, or Matthew realizing that running through the a Louvre could get him caught, regardless if they didn’t in Godard’s film. This dichotomy between reality and “film reality” is manipulated in order to give the audience something both nostalgic and fresh. It pleases the cinephiles by showing them themselves. While Bertolucci’s are placed in a more real setting, where it supposedly reality, Godard’s are never quite real. As James Monaco describes Godard’s films, specifically Band a part, it “has the distinct consciousness of itself.” (p. 142) While this may be the self-indulgence of the narrator-director, it also differentiates itself from The Dreamers for that very fact. The Dreamers is almost a testimony to the risks of living “cinematically,” and it proves this point most poignantly when using the reality of riots as a backdrop.