Expressing the In-Between 

Andrew Klevan

‘Cinema is that which is between things’
          - Jean-Luc Godard (1)

Manny Farber says of the The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946, US): ‘[It] ignores all the conventions of the gangster film to feast on meaningless business and witty asides’. (2) One of the ‘fine moments’ in the film, he writes, is ‘no longer than a blink’: Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart, looks up at a sign as he crosses the street from one store to another. In fact, Farber is probably mistaken. Marlowe does not appear to look up at a sign. Rather, he seems to be surveying the sky in response to loud claps of thunder. A few moments later, after more claps, the heavy rain nearly makes it possible for him to spend the afternoon sheltering in the Acme Bookstore with the sassy proprietor played by Dorothy Malone. Instead, disappointingly, work calls, and he must follow bad guy Geiger through the stormy night. Bogart’s gesture is therefore not strictly, in Farber’s terms, a piece of ‘meaningless business’ because it relates to the impending storm which is a feature of the narrative. Yet, the spirit of Farber’s point remains: the claps of thunder and Bogart’s gesture are incidental at this point. The thunder and rain could credibly begin while he is in the bookshop.

2. Manny Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (De Capo Press: NewYork, 1998), p. 6.

Farber’s mistake (written before the privilege of repeated scrutiny permitted by video recordings) does not undermine his deeper understanding of what the gesture adds. He talks about the film having ‘a life of its own that goes on beneath the story action ... All the unbelievable events ... are tied together by miserable time jumps, but, within each skit, there is a logic of space, a great idea of personality, gesture, where each person is’. (3) Moreover, there is another ‘unnecessary’ gesture, which Farber does not mention. It takes place on the other side of the street – and in the background of the shot – where Bogart slaps the top of a water hydrant. Crucially, he does not stop. He may be quickly taking stock, touching-base (for safety, superstitiously perhaps), while remaining on the move. In general, it suggests Marlowe’s fluency and ease in the city, and Bogart’s on the set. As he crosses the road, I sense the construction of the setting, all its elements intimately packed into the frame – the crossing cars, the comings and goings of people – creating oblivious busyness. Yet, the meticulousness of the staging does not determine the action; paradoxically it creates a living world, precisely brought to life (an ideal environment for all that ‘meaningless business’). This is partly because responsive performers like Bogart inhabit the world built for them; they live in it. (4) In Farber’s terms, both the gestures give us ‘a logic of space, a great idea of personality, where this person is’ – this street, here, now, between these two bookstores, looking up, just before it rains, crossing it, now, touching this hydrant, as he passes. (5)

The whole scene that follows, between Bogart and Malone, is like a ‘witty aside’ but given density by all ‘those tiny, mysterious interactions between the actor and the scene’. Bogart speedily delivers, ‘Would you have a Ben Hur eighteen sixty third edition with a duplicated line on page one sixteen?’; announces that he would rather get ‘wet inside’ with the ‘pretty good’ bottle of rye that he ‘just happens to have’ in his pocket; hovers his right hand over his waist, lightly drumming his digits; and later points two fingers towards his eyes to prompt Malone to remove her spectacles. Malone, meanwhile, unhurriedly folds her arms; nimbly manipulates the pencil, evidently sexual but in scholarly hands; precisely delivers her list of each aspect of Geiger’s appearance while she ambiguously moves her eyes up and down each aspect of Bogart’s; takes out those little white cups in the upper drawer of the desk; and removes the pin, carefully spreading her lower hair just enough for it to open up and sit more comfortably upon her shoulders (tightly bunched hair prudently unfurled rather than spectacularly released). All that is ‘mysterious’ lies in the performers’ interactions, made readily available to us, and not in a secretive dissolve that insinuates but ultimately hides very little. Malone remains just a ‘pal’ – her sexual disappointment represented in his comradely squeeze of her upper arm – and she never appears again in the film.

3. Ibid., p. 6.

4. I explore the idea of the performer’s expressive rapport with his or her surroundings at length in Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (Wallflower: London, 2005).

5. The Bogart gestures appropriately illustrate Farber’s sense of Negative Space – the term that became the title of his collected essays. Richard Thompson summarises negative space as ‘all the area in an image which is not the subject: the background, corners, air, in fact anything that does not claim our immediate attention upon looking at the image’ (Richard Thompson, ‘Books’, Cinema 6, 3: 54-56 quoted in Noel King, ‘Manny Farber’, Framework, volume 40, April 1999). Farber (according to King) encourages us ‘to direct our attention away from the centre to the margin, suggesting that the most important meaning is likely to reside in unexpected places’ (p. 13). Foster Hirsch notes how Farber ‘will often single out details which lurk in the unostentatious corners of a film - the bit player with the special tic who suggests a whole way of life in a few seconds of screen time’ (Foster Hirsch, ‘Books’, Film Society Review 6, 9, 1971, p. 49-50 quoted in King, ibid.). He promotes peripheral detail over the declamatory. Farber loved, in his own words, ‘those tiny, mysterious interactions between the actor and the scene that make up the memorable moments in any good film’ (Farber, p. 145).

This essay addresses a further five films which put the in-between at their centre. Although much theoretical work (especially French, poststructuralist work) has long traversed a landscape of liminality, interstices and even voids, I was keen to explore the in-between through criticism, that is to say through an involvement with its expression and significance in specific films which appeared to me to be successfully realised. Apart from being well achieved, each instance represents a different register, especially with regard to rhythm and pace. Indeed, there is a progression through the essay from the manic (Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks, 1939) to the hurried (La Peau douce aka The Soft Skin or Silken Skin, François Truffaut, 1964) to the regular (Les Nuits de la pleine lune aka Full Moon in Paris, Eric Rohmer, 1984) to the slow (Secret défense, Jacques Rivette, 1998, Fr) to the still (Ohayo aka Good Morning, Yasujiro Ozu, 1959). Beyond that, I have resisted artificially imposing a grand explanatory narrative and overview or forging clear links. The discussion of La Peau douce is the most extended and is central, while the other films act as satellites. As an essay, it stands somewhat as an experiment and continues my explorations into the possibilities of a descriptive criticism that is less systematic than textual analysis and free from a determining, and driving, academic thesis. (6) It might seem perverse that an essay about in-betweens is without its own transitions but the intention is to leave open a space for a range of connections to emerge. I hope that aspects and ideas are locally crystallised while across the essay they are free to speak to each other – inconclusively.

II

Bringing Up Baby is giddy with diversion and distraction. Professor David Huxley (played by Cary Grant) and Susan Vance (played by Katherine Hepburn) are in the middle of the forest, an enchanted in-between place, where they are searching for two leopards, a dog and a bone (in fact, a dinosaur’s intercostal clavicle). All this keeps them together long enough for them to find each other, and themselves. (7) One particularly inspired interruption finds Susan slipping down a muddy embankment, and crashing into David from behind. She causes them both to roll, and in the process crushes the Professor’s glasses. (Never mind – according to Susan – David looks ‘much handsomer without them’.) As they rise from the ground, the film cuts to a shot that shows the whole of Hepburn’s body as she starts to limp. She barely takes a breath between her announcement that he looks ‘much handsomer’ and her ecstatic screeching of ‘Oh look David, I’ve lost my heel, I’ve lost my heel’. Similarly, after realising the heel’s absence she instantaneously takes advantage of the occasion to stage a playful act. ‘Look at me walk’ she says, while singing a military tune to accompany her lopsided march. Despite the imbalance, she performs the thoroughbred, manoeuvring in dressage: the purposeful and deliberate picking up of the feet and then the curving turn in a confined space, head lowered in preparation. Amongst all the clumsiness and calamity, Susan’s speech and actions are self-possessed and sure-footed, and flow deftly into each other. (8)

The continuity of her behaviour contrasts with the discontinuity of the narrative and its constant disturbances (many of which she happily instigates). Indeed, she is, for as long as necessary, impervious to interruption: a bemused David, himself infuriated at the disjointed story, eventually raises his voice to halt her – ‘Susan, Susan’ – and announces, ‘We’re not really getting anywhere’. She stands in front of him, looking up, continues to bob up and down, and repeats her mantra: ‘I was born on the side of a hill; I was born on the side of a hill’. He shouts ‘Stop’, and tries to restrain her by putting a hand on her shoulder, but as he releases it, she just pops up again. Each time the bobbing motion brings her face to face with him, and encapsulates her (so far undeclared) desire to kiss him (and the need, for the time being, to back down). Finally, she does stop, but not before she naughtily sneaks in a jerky, yet subdued, bob, irregular in rhythm, like the final shuffle of a child’s mechanical toy insisting to be wound up again. The fairy tale forest rewards her playfulness with a silvery light that reveals delicate developments in her expression: a pretend sulk delightfully grows into a grin with fluttering eyelashes to flirt with the Professor (bobbing up or down, she never relinquishes eye contact). In all, she goes back and forth, circles around, and bounces up and down on the spot, resolutely and advantageously failing to get anywhere. Susan is the embodiment of the film’s celebration and promotion of going round in circles, and its rejection of the straight (and narrow). She creatively plays in the time and space between things, and therefore, unlike those who always want to get on and put things in their place, mines its secrets. She juggles the elements of a moment and turns out new arrangements (a brave undertaking given that, as we well know, everything may drop and spill). (9)

For those women who wear them, the breaking of a heel will be familiar – so often on the way to somewhere – yet it is uncommon in film. Susan uses the break in her shoe, normally a frustration, to take advantage of a break in normality. The film is full of items of clothing and accoutrements that provide an endless succession of inspiringly irregular images. While frustrating the straight storyline, they often tempt us to enjoy the uncertainty of sexual characteristics against our ‘better judgement’ (and the instance of David, later, in the fluffy negligee is conspicuous and fabulous). (10) We may recall Miss Swallow, Professor Huxley’s fiancée and co-worker at the Museum, who is devoid of sexuality; her ironic name is surely one of cinema’s most wicked provocations. Professor Huxley is conventional and rigid, and Susan educates him to be the person whose name she forever repeats – ‘David’. Given that she is returning him to himself, it is little wonder that she has a usefully backwards idea of progression. Susan’s fluidity and flexibility of movement shows a capacity for indefinite behaviour, an elegant erasing of boundaries (erected by stiffer bodies and stuffy institutions). The mythical forest is ideal, but she turns everywhere into an in-between place, where a lack of conventional determinations and destinations arouse indeterminacy. Maybe this is because, as she repeatedly tells us, she was born, not on the top, nor at the foot, but on the ‘side of a hill’.

7. Cavell discusses the redemptive and therapeutic nature of forests and gardens, and their relationship to locations in Shakespearean comedy, in Bringing Up Baby and its sister ‘Remarriage Comedies’ of the 1930s and ‘40s. See Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Harvard University Press: Massachusetts and London, 1981).

9. Andrew Britton, in his stirring account of Grant and Hepburn, writes, ‘The principle is to identify “play” in the sense of recovered infantile polymorphousness ... with “sophistication”, the apogee of cultivated adulthood. The sophisticated couple is the couple whose sexuality is no longer organised by the phallus. The characteristic co-presence ... of two apparently distinct comic modes of farce and wit is the expression of this thematic principle. The partners engage in rough-house and in epigram and repartee; the anarchic consorts with the urbane; the infantile drives which precede maturity and civilisation are suddenly definitive of them.’ Britton, ‘Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire’ in Cineaction, December, 1986, p. 41. The majority of Britton’s impassioned essays, including the one mentioned here, now appear in an essential collection for anyone interested in film criticism (it isn’t quite ‘complete’ despite the title): Barry Keith Grant ed., Britton on Film: The Complete Criticism of Andrew Britton (Wayne State University Press, 2009); the quoted passage is on p. 10.

10. Britton writes about, ‘the feminised hero, and of a couple whose validity and vitality is continuous with his feminisation ... What we have in ... Bringing Up Baby is something like an image of a positive bisexuality – something with which we are familiar in the personae of many of the great female stars ... Grant formulate[s] a type of masculinity which is valuable and attractive by virtue of the sharing of gender characteristics with women. The particular beauty of Grant’s collaboration with Hepburn consists (questions of acting apart) in the complimentary bisexuality of the Hepburn persona.’ Britton on Film, p. 15.

III

Pierre Lachenay, played by Jean Desailly, (11) a critic and scholar of literature, and the editor of a literary review, is to deliver a lecture on ‘Balzac and Money’ in Lisbon. La Peau douce does not show him delivering the lecture, but it does show the moments before: preparing in a darkened back room where he had previously been eating his dinner with his hosts. He is partly in silhouette, smartening the knot of his tie, and moving towards the stage. The lecture hall is out there somewhere lit-up beyond the window and there are noises – the announcer, his malfunctioning microphone, and then the applauding crowd – off-screen. Lachenay marches off for his lecture. The camera does not follow, but his exit, by letting in light, illuminates the room only now that it is deserted. The film then cuts to the inside of a car, where Lachenay is being escorted back to his hotel – after the lecture.

11. From now on, I will call him Lachenay, rather than Pierre, because he is often treated formally in and by the film. The film seems to be on first name terms with Nicole so I share this address. These choices will result in the odd, but oddly appropriate, reference to their coupling: Lachenay and Nicole.

12. The film seems to be a philosophical meditation on a line by Pascal which is quoted by Lachenay at his public address in Reims: ‘The misfortunes of man stem from one thing: his inability to stay quietly in a room’.

13. Maximilian Le Cain writes: ‘[The film’s] intricately designed pattern of incessant movement unfolds with a remarkable smoothness’. His piece, suitably entitled ‘Love in Flight’, announces La Peau douce as François Truffaut’s ‘supreme achievement’, and gives a sharp overview of the film. I quote many of his fine observations here, as they usefully dovetail with my account of the film. Maximilian Le Cain, ‘Love in Flight: François Truffaut’s La Peau douce’, Senses of Cinema, June 2004.

14. Truffaut says of the film: ‘La Peau douce is truly modern love; it takes place in planes, in elevators; it has all the harassments of modern life’, New Yorker, 31^st October, 1964, quoted in James Monaco, The New Wave (Oxford University Press: New York, 1976) p. 56.

The next evening they meet for drinks, and leave the restaurant in the early hours. Apart from a shot of them exiting and moving away from the restaurant, the film only provides one short shot of them returning to the hotel through Lisbon. They take their happy place in the city in long shot, lovers at dawn, going to bed as others go to work; a skip, to the jaunty soundtrack, in front of an early morning tram. This is but a fleeting glimpse of the romantic, for them and us, indeed, one shot, only an image. It quickly disappears as the film abruptly cuts to them entering the hotel elevator. The dreamy image, and that precious skip, reminds us that despite the importance of roads and streets, and the film’s ease in handling the movement through these spaces, there are no energetic, sprightly steps through cities invigorated by a nouvelle vague spirit. (18) The film’s central passage is set in the provincial, lifeless, no-where streets of Reims (and the cinema in Reims, where Lachenay introduces a film about André Gide, is in the darkness on the edge of town). On the way to Reims, they stop at one of contemporary life’s ugliest in-between, nowhere places, the highway petrol station, bleak and soulless. We see them turn into the petrol station from a characteristic viewing position in the film: inside the car, through a windscreen. When Nicole decides to change from jeans into a skirt (because of Lachenay’s recently announced preference), she checks his back is turned, through the back window, and we see her scurry away to the toilets, through the side window. So much seen, and envisioned, through a mode of transport. And the car appears to control perspective and direct vision in more ways than one. Standing outside, Lachenay looks out upon other vehicles speeding along the highway, his face cut together with shots of passing traffic; is he contemplating meaningfully, or staring unavoidably (at the inescapable – escaping)? Close-ups of petrol station action punctuate the scene – pump removed, dials turning, pump replaced, cap screwed, and ignition pressed – intensifying the functional. The sequence and the film drolly concentrate the indistinct.

IV

Louise is in exile. She lives out in the New Town suburbs with her partner Rémi, but wishes to spend more time in central Paris (where she works for a design firm). (20) Rémi, played by Tchéky Karyo, works for the new town planning department, and he is comfortable with their location (according to Louise, played by Pascale Ogier, he considers it his moral duty to live in the sort of places he designs). A few minutes into Les Nuits de la pleine lune, her journey from the suburbs to the city is shown, not in its entirety, but in segments that concentrate on typical passages. She walks across a rather desolate square, past a shelter, a bus stop perhaps, to the train station entrance (15 seconds); she hurries off the top of the escalator onto the platform (10 seconds); she reads a magazine on the train (6 seconds); and she walks along a street in Paris that leads to her place of work (10 seconds). Each section of her journey, although mundane and workaday, is given continuous attention, but is then cut abruptly short as the film jumps to the next section: the square; escalator/platform; train; and street. The film dwells, then it snatches; consequently, each portion of the journey is routine and pointed. The segments also catch an ordinary movement, gesture or piece of behaviour and we recognise the unremarkable: the little scurry as she reaches the station; the scrunching of her scarf under her chin as she looks down the platform; the turning and folding of her magazine. The images are without artificiality, and naturalistic sounds of travel, train and traffic, often noisy, accompany the entire journey. In contrast to the street created just for Bogart to cross, just there and then, many people walk these streets. Location pre-exists Louise’s presence. Her place and her purpose are unexceptional, and despite the noisy, lifelike precision – the concreteness – these in-between spaces of the everyday commute, familiar and unimpressive, are indistinct. They disappear to leave only the person – the big red scarf moving against the watery blue-grey sky and urban repetition – with her thoughts. The routine commute is a period of self-contained thinking and provides a picture of self-absorption (a seemingly paradoxical product of the objective coverage). (21)

Louise is fragile. She has a very slim frame, swamped here under a thick coat and scarf with thin legs poking out (squeezed further by tight leggings). She looks girlish, rather than womanly – off to high school – with a large turquoise ribbon in her hair, tied with a big bow to sit upon her head, and rather than a briefcase, she carries a trellis jelly bag. Her occupation requires no formality, but these workday accoutrements are indicative. Her bag declares that she is open and carefree, but it is also skeletal and without security. Later, she shows her friend Camille the sort of lamps she designs: like Louise, the elements are tiny and spindly, and the construction angular, pokey rather than elegant, and easily broken. It also stands alone – precious – unable to assimilate into the surrounding décor. After completing the redecoration of her flat in Paris, she makes the final adjustments to the pieces on her table, many brightly coloured toys exhibited as if they were in a museum display cabinet: all neat and tidy and precisely the right distance from each other. She pinches one tiny item, moving it painstakingly, ever so slightly, to the right, and she lays out a picture book face open at a particular page; she stands back to assess the affected arrangement, and fastidiously wipes away some dust. Her flat in Paris gives her a space away from Rémi and the suburbs; she can party late into the night, and not worry about the return journey. How is it then that the accommodation of a liberated, independent woman is the secretive retreat of a young, teenage girl?

20. The proverb which opens the film reads: ‘He who has two women (wives?) loses his soul/He who has two houses loses his mind’.

21. Stanley Cavell suggests that for Ralph Waldo Emerson walking is a ‘philosophical picture of human thinking’. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1990), p.96.

With the room perfectly prepared, she is ready to go somewhere else. Unfortunately, one friend rings to cancel; and although she speaks to a couple of other friends, they too are unavailable that evening. While she is on the phone, there are no cuts to show these people; the film determinedly stays with her in the room (over-determined, like Louise, and her arrangements). Other people are out there. She is not settled but confined, and between people and parties. She resigns herself to staying in, collects a couple of books (one appears to be a large comic book), places them neatly in the middle of the bed, arranges pillow and covers, and brushes out the creases as if readying it for the pleasure of someone else (like a maid servicing a hotel room). She leaves the shot, but the film stays, resolutely once again, and stares at the bed, fixated; rather like Louise’s life, it should move on but it is unable. The bed is on display, but empty. Like her table with its toys and open book, everything is in its place but she cannot be; an apartment created perfectly in her own image, now renders her invisible. (22)

Earlier, the apartment was more straightforwardly provisional, prior to decoration and furnishing, and Louise took her friend Octave, played by Fabrice Luchini, to see it. It is between stages, like Louise, and everything is out of place. Akin to the sequence in the elevator in La Peau douce, the scene is openly emblematic of the film’s concerns, suitably so given that the apartment is not yet fully presentational. Her red scarf drapes over the wardrobe door; his newspaper and book sit on the ladder; her handbag, filled with pink, is prominent, sitting by her on the floor like an obedient and attentive pet. The combination of odd objects, often vividly coloured, in a sparse and unformed location creates abstracted configurations. Through the doorway into the kitchen, three oranges (which they had carried with them) and a small white jug sit on a pine shelf in front of a cream background: a distilled still life. These images emerge naturally from characters temporarily inhabiting an impermanent space, and are typical of the way the film seamlessly fuses the concrete and the conceptual. The abstracted appearance matches the philosophical nature of their conversation that often condenses aspects of their experience into epigram (easily extractable: ‘the other person’s desire brings out mine’, ‘you look ethereal but really you are very physical’, ‘the one experience I’ve missed is loneliness’). The space is embryonic so they are free to open up (somewhat), but the intelligence of the insights flatters their veracity and applicability. Louise and Octave are equally rehearsing and performing ideas on this bare stage – trying them on. (23)

23. Gilbert Adair notes, ‘the recurrent presence on screen of a pair, one to each home, of abstract paintings (in reproduction) by Mondrian ... His most distinctive compositions – typically, two, three or four rectangles or squares in bright building-block colours, which are deployed on the canvas along an intersecting grid of thick, black straight lines – attain [a] sweet poised serenity ... And it is precisely such a serenity that Louise is endeavouring to impose on her own messy little acre of reality, as though craving abstraction in a world which remains irrepressibly, cussedly figurative’. Gilbert Adair, ‘Les Nuits de la pleine lune’, Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1984, Volume 51, Number 611, pp. 387-388.

24. A characteristic way of presenting conversations in the films of Eric Rohmer.

25. And leaning. For more on leaning and its suspensions see my chapter entitled ‘Unconcealing the Obvious: Eric Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime’ in Andrew Klevan, Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (Flicks Books: Trowbridge, 2000), pp. 170-205.

26. Blue occurs throughout the film. Indeed, in both senses of the word the film is blue. The quality of light is so precise in Eric Rohmer’s films that they frequently convey seasonal and diurnal particularity.

In Secret défense, Sylvie’s traumatic adventure originates within the routinely transitional. Sylvie, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, stands on a Métro train platform having just visited Paul, her brother, in hospital. He plans to avenge their father’s death, and she is concerned. Will she now take on the responsibility of revenge? (27) As the train pulls into the platform, one woman gets off and another woman gets on but unexpectedly Sylvie does not move. Her behaviour is obscure. Does her furtive look left and right suggest a guilty self-consciousness about her movements and a worry that people might now be reading her mind? Does her last moment jump upon the train, just before the doors close, suggest a leap into the unknown? The film suppresses these vital and pivotal thoughts (to her and to the narrative) by confining them to an ordinary location and situation that limits the potential for disclosure.  

We now see the journey in real time, without ellipse, between two consecutive stops, from getting on the train to getting off it (1 minute 45 seconds). (28) The familiar train carriage, without personality, is a suitably routine environment for a controlled experiment, related, perhaps, to the sterile laboratory where Sylvie works. From now on, Sylvie is under (our) observation. She stands alone (rather than sitting amongst others), and remains alone for the journey (no person enters the image), clutching her bag in one hand and the handrail in another. Because she travels alone, she cannot reveal her thoughts through conversation. Her isolation in the shot also emphasises her as a singular subject for examination – uncontaminated – and it intensifies concentration (hers and ours). Within this inexpressive environment, the performer might use any gestural movement, facial or otherwise, at her disposal. On the contrary, there is little variation in her manner: her body and face remain largely still and only a sideways movement of her eyes seems to mark a progression in thought. Her outward appearance remains appropriately restrained and unobtrusive for public transport. The passing scenery, behind her and next to her, provides most of the movement, as if it were graphically monitoring her passing thought. Without significant alteration of movement and gesture, the extended duration does not permit a more exact interpretation of her thoughts, but rather emphasises Thinking, consuming and prolonged (despite its containment and impassive manifestation). Bonnaire sustains the intensity of interiority without distinguishing or clarifying the details of thought, and without losing her composure. (29) Yet, it is during this short journey where Sylvie seems to launch her bold, even reckless, enterprise. (30) The film provides a telling picture of a common experience: the extraordinary progression of thought during the ordinary progression of a journey, and the imaginative transporting of our selves while being routinely transported. We are close to our own thoughts, but closed off to the thoughts of others (properly hiding behind sedate masks). The melodrama of thought conceals itself within the undramatic practicality of urban travel (between here and there).

27. Sylvie’s brother, Paul, played by Grégoire Colin, tells her that the death of their father, thought to be accidental – he fell in front of a train – was in fact murder. The murderer, according to Paul, is Walser, played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz, a partner of their father, and a close friend, and possibly lover, of their mother. Sylvie seems convinced by Paul’s evidence (a photograph shows Walser on the platform just before their father’s death). It is likely that it is during the métro journey I discuss here that she makes the decision to travel to their childhood home near Chagny where Walser is residing (possibly to dispose of Walser herself). Indeed, immediately after this métro ride, she undertakes this further journey which takes approximately 15 minutes of screen time (starting after 45 minutes of the film). Nick Roddick writes of the later longer journey, ‘the film’s intricately frenzied plot is in sharp contrast to its cool, elegant surface, exemplified by the tour-de-force journey Sylvie takes from Paris to Burgundy – one of French cinema's great ‘travelling shots’ – to commit the act that will redefine her world.’ (National Film Theatre Brochure, May 2006). Jared Rapfogel writes, ‘Rivette ... makes what is usually transitional and thus hurried over or merely alluded to, into something like a set piece. Her journey becomes ... a chance to sink into the movie, to observe, at great length and with great intimacy, Sylvie’s character. And the surprise is that, instead of losing us, the story becomes far more interesting, deeper and more mysterious, as a result. Letting us share the character’s sense of time brings us closer not only to her but to her story – we’re not being told her story, we’re experiencing it with her. This emphasis on what happens between the conventionally important moments ironically focuses our attention on what matters in the story, on Sylvie's thoughts and emotions, on what she knows and doesn't know, and, thanks to the interminable wait separating her resolution and her action, on the momentousness of what she intends to do.’ (Jared Rapfogel, ‘Secret Défense’, Senses of Cinema (October 2000; Rapfogel’s emphasis). On this journey which Rapfogel so fruitfully illuminates, she inspects her gun in the train’s washroom, and it does indeed appear that she is intending to shoot Walser. Yet, her genuine intentions are always unclear to us, and possibly to herself. She in fact ends up shooting Walser’s girlfriend by accident. The preceding period on the Métro, the sequence which I discuss, is a distilled version of the longer journey to follow, but it is genuinely in real time, and crucially between seeing her brother and travelling out of Paris.

Eventually, there is a break in Sylvie’s concentrated period of reflection. She makes one large movement, 15 seconds from the end of the journey, crossing the carriage to the opposite set of doors. Her move places her on the correct side of the carriage to disembark, but it equally indicates an adjustment in her train of thought. She is now more responsive to her surroundings, looking intently out of the window, as she awaits her destination. This final period echoes her train journey on the way to the hospital where we only saw the final 15 seconds and where she appears in the same position in the train and in the frame. (31) The film’s use of continuous, real time emphasises that on this occasion, we see the whole of this journey; and a particular segment of it, once perfunctory, is now charged. Métro journeys appear identical but her life has changed forever. Dispensable and indispensable periods of existence take place on the same stage, and join hands.

The film further complicates its meditation on what constitutes relevant time (in film, in life). (32) As Sylvie alights at the station, she hurriedly walks down, through the underpass and up to the opposite side of the tracks. At first, she appears to be merely changing Métro lines – the film eager to show the most intermediate and unimpressive aspects of her journey, perhaps to impress the significance of this occasion. On closer inspection, however, she has simply crossed to the opposite platform of the same line (and the train she just has got off is now pulling away). It appears as if she was originally travelling home, but made the decision to return to her office (where she discreetly collects a gun). This might account for her earlier hesitation on boarding the train and the reason why she urgently crosses the carriage when on it. (33) Nevertheless, Sylvie’s behaviour remains opaque, and equally the film barely acknowledges her change in direction. It respects her private thought and secrecy (her secret defence, perhaps), and preserves the journey’s mystery and banality, both essential and inessential (in getting her to where she wants to be).

VI

29. As I suggest as the start of the essay, the three French films discussed in this essay exemplify three different rhythms: fast, medium and slow. In La Peau douce, Lachenay is always in a rush. He moves through in-between places quickly; he must get through them to arrive at the next destination. Despite logistical diversions, he is purposeful. Louise moves through her in-between places less resolutely and urgently. They are places she must walk through everyday, at a regular pace, and thinking fills the time (and this thinking later unveils an elegant, social version of itself in conversation). Sylvie is given more time and space within which to dwell (as is the audience). If Nuits de la pleine lune manages to infer a vague sense of inner thought from Louise’s journey from the suburbs into the city, Secret défense, while never clarifying the particularities of Sylvie’s interiority, makes it a focus for attention. For an extended discussion on the expression of interiority in films where specific thoughts are not clarified see David Turner, The Interiority of the Unknown Woman, unpublished Doctoral Dissertation (University of Kent, 2007).

30. Rapfogel writes that ‘each moment that could be considered a plot development feels like something much more authentic. Life doesn't consist of a rapid succession of dramatic moments; every important action in our lives struggles to stay afloat amidst a sea of contemplation, interpretation, and stabilization, stretching away on all sides. Secret Défense manages to tell its story without being false to this quality of experience.’ See also my study of the undramatic in Klevan, Disclosure of the Everyday.

31. Although the segments rhyme in time and appearance, this is not literally the same stretch of journey.

32. A preoccupation throughout Rivette’s career, but the exploration of duration is particularly eloquent here because it is disciplined by, and in conversation with, the situations and impetus of the ‘thriller’ narrative.

Throughout Ohayo, Minoru and Isamu (played by Koji Shitara and Masahiko Shimazu) desperately want a television to watch wrestling and baseball. Near the end of the film, their father, played by Chishu Ryu, relents (he buys the television to support Mr Tomizawa, who sells electrical goods, in his difficult retirement). The boys come home, find the television and are delighted. The film shows the television set unopened in its box in the hall, while at the end of the hallway the boys sit in their room. They have a celebratory fight for which their father scolds them (possibly jokingly), but they do not unpack the television. The box just sits there, and waits. Next morning, it is still sitting there, and the shot is the same, down the hallway, towards the boy’s room, but this time the hallway is in daylight. The hallway is a domestic place that people pass through, rather than a room where one settles and spends time, and suitably the box expresses an in-between moment: at last, the television is purchased, but it is yet to be set up and find its proper place in the organisation of the home. Indeed, the boys come out of their room smiling and walk past their new acquisition on the way to school. The box fits, its square shape in line with all the lines of the hallway, but it also protrudes like an obstacle (perhaps something to get around or get over).

Most of the film takes place in communal areas like the hallway, where people cross each other, or come across each other, like the grassy hill that we often sight down the alley between all the houses (and where the boys play their ritualistic game, hazardous for the boy who can’t master it, of learning to fart on command). Public and private intersect at doorways, entrances and porch areas where conversations with neighbours – welcome or unwelcome – take place. It is a fidgety film, where characters come and go, once again between the houses. Mrs Haraguchi, scurries around her neighbours, both creating gossip and trying to extricate herself from it. The film explores how human beings need lines, physically and verbally, most notably in the film’s title expression, ‘Good Morning’, which the boys complain is a false and worthless greeting, to which their tutor explains, ‘The world needs some unnecessary things.’ ‘Good Morning’ is one expression of the rigidities of human behaviour, both necessary and unnecessary, which Ohayo explores figuratively by emphasising a world of physical straight lines – hallways (with or without televisions), walls, screens, washing lines, picket fences, alleys, pylons, poles, roads, tracks, platforms – and observing the various ways characters work within, or manoeuvre between, them.

33. Her original direction is towards her home which is north of Gare d’Austerlitz and the river at Métro station Richard-Lenoir (line 5), but her workplace where the gun resides is south of station Gare d’Austerlitz in the other direction. This sequence closes with her standing on the platform and it is possible to see the overhead sign showing the southerly direction indicated by the terminus – Place d’Italie. Although it is possible, therefore, to piece together the geographical jigsaw, with a complementary knowledge of Paris – and playing that detective game is one of the options offered by the film – I must emphasise that the film does not situate this sequence, or ones leading to it, in such a way that Sylvie’s movements could be self-evidently located.

from Issue 1: Histories