Bertrand Tavernier:
Fractured Narrative and Bourgeois Values

by Emily Zants.
 Lanham, Maryland and London: www.scarecrowpress.com, 1999.

The Table of Contents and Introductory Chapter have been posted here for your preview.

Addenda: p. 5: "bore him a son, Nils (1965) and then a daughter, Tiffany (1967).

Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Preface xi

1. Introduction 1
Biographical Background 4
American Influences 7
Notes 13

2. Realism in Transition 15
Characters in Context 16
Everyday Objects 21
Meals 22
Everyman 23
Marginals 26
Periods in Transition 28
Historical Fidelity versus Storytelling 33
Notes 34

3. Emotion Instead of Plot 35
Counterpoint Rather Than Causal Development 40
Parallels 43
The Presence of a Look 44
Different Points of View 45
Use of Dialogue 46
Off-Screen Events and Cultural Artifacts 48
Butterfly Effect 50
Breaching the Hierarchical System, the Frozen Form 50
Notes 51
4. Sado-Masochism, the Power Structure, and Causal Plot 53
Definition 53
The Witness–the Other's Look 54
The Sadist in Clean Slate 54
The Sociopolitical Consequences
of Freedom from the Power Structure 55
The Totally Free Being 55
Juliette, La Durand: Examples from Sade 56
Escaping the Subject-Object Bond 56
Resultant Alienation 57
Techniques 57
Beatrice 64
The Judge and the Assassin 68
Life and Nothing But 71
A Sunday in the Country 71
Daddy Nostalgia 72
The Clockmaker 73
Deathwatch 73
Fresh Bait 75
L.627 76
Captain Conan 76
Notes 79

5. Towards Complexity 81
Transforming Prejudices 81
Open Endings 86
In Tune with the Twentieth Century 89
Notes 96

6. Tips for a New Cinema 97

7. Additional Film Notes 101
The Clockmaker 101
Clean Slate 102
A Sunday in the Country 104
'Round Midnight 105
Beatrice 105
Life and Nothing But 106
Daddy Nostalgia 107
L.627 107

Filmography 109

Bibliography 121

Index 127

About the Author 131




1

Introduction

Bertrand Tavernier has been called France's leading director by Martin Scorcese (Hoffman 1985, 96), and pour cause. He is one of those rare masters who can change our prejudices between the beginning and end of a film. Rimbaud wrote poetry “to change the world.” Tavernier has never been so pretentious. He just changes spectators one after another. He unsettles them because he undermines the hierarchical power structure, violating the causal narrative conventions that support it.

The world cannot evolve with all our old prejudices in place. The problem with most would-be revolutionaries is that they try to tell us exactly what our new prejudices should be. It would be comforting to know ahead of time what we can believe in after letting go of old prejudices. But Tavernier never comforts the viewer by providing new solutions. He merely unsettles the old habits, abandoning the viewer on the sidewalk, alone, to seek new solutions that do not perpetuate old problems.

Truly new solutions cannot be found until the frozen forms of thought that generated the problems have been dispelled. Tavernier's main enterprise is freedom from old preconceptions to allow for the birth of new ideas and new relationships. These new relationships cannot be predicted ahead of time. They can only materialize as a body of participants forms that is capable of adapting to and living by new ideas. First must come freedom from bondage to old forms of thought.

Tavernier achieves this transformation of the viewers by using techniques explored by writers such as Proust and Joyce, but incorporating them into the now century-old cinematic vocabulary. Essentially, the fundamental techniques involve the destruction of narrative. In film, this could easily be found in Buñuel's or Resnais's films. But whereas Buñuel remained outrageous and Resnais intellectual, Tavernier destroys narrative by serving the spectator an all too familiar world, then fracturing the apparently seamless structure by violating the anticipated form, the cause and effect development that is part and parcel of the linear hierarchical system. For this reason, you enter Tavernier's films feeling safe and secure, but you do not leave feeling the same way.

Usually misunderstood by critics he receives little of the fanfare in the United States that European critics give avant-garde directors, especially if part of a new school or artistic movement with its own manifesto. His profound originality has received little attention for at least two reasons: his films are deceptively realistic and he does not proclaim a specific doctrine. Still, his films inevitably carry his stamp. Exploring this uniqueness is the intent of this work.

Artists appear to have a new vision of the world because we are blinded by the older, familiar ways of perceiving our surroundings, communicated to us by our culture. Every culture has boundaries, basic beliefs that help preserve it as a culture. But some of these beliefs often prevent evolution. And a culture that cannot evolve will eventually die. Consonant with modern scientific theories stressing the inter-relationships between events as more important than their sequential order (Chaos Theory, Complexity), Tavernier always seeks to reveal an aspect of those relationships that has been obscured by socio-political conformity.

Many of his characters have difficuly communicating because of this conformity. As a result they suffer from the exclusion. Communication occurs within a system only when the ideas and feelings expressed are familiar, déjà vu. Individuals experience crises within any given system when they have new concepts and relationships to express, but there is no framework to accommodate them. These are the truly creative individuals who are showing paths for evolution. Some are broken by the system. Most are recognized for their foresight only after their death or when they are too old or sick to care. Many of Tavernier's characters are creative people: the Regent in Let Joy Reign Supreme, the teacher Nathalie Baye in A Week's Vacation, the reporter Harvey Keitel and the writer Romy Schneider in Death Watch, the writer Michel Piccoli in Spoiled Children, the daughter Irene in A Sunday in the Country, the saxaphonist in 'Round Midnight and the writer-daughter of Daddy Nostalgia. The challenge consists in breaching the frozen forms of a culture so that new relationships can be perceived and fostered. Tavernier is master at breaching the walls of Western culture, particularly those of the hierarchical power structure.

Numerous prejudices are inherent in that structure. To attack the prejudices directly would reduce his films to mere political polemics. The more a system is attacked directly, the stronger the defense of its frozen forms. Tavernier's films rarely descend to that level, and only momentarily, for he “detests doctrines” because they prevent people from recognizing the problem, restricting the possibilities for answers. His films attack prejudices by ripping them open, exposing bleeding hearts, plunging the spectators into the entrails of the hierarchical power structure and leaving them there to extract themselves as best they can. He does not provide conclusions. Rather he opens the playing field to allow better solutions to contemporary problems. The spectators are introduced to parts of themselves they had not met before, a part pushed into the subconscience by social models of conformity. Tavernier's great talent is his success in revealing the spectators' prejudices to themselves, making them embarrassed to repeat the clichés acceptable to society so that its closed form can be sustained and perpetuated. More than any other filmmaker, perhaps, Tavernier disrupts bourgeois comfort. His ability not only to involve the spectators in initial acceptance of a given prejudice but to alter their commitment to that position by the end of the film constitutes the essence of his uniqueness and originality. In Clean Slate, for instance, the police chief first appears to us as a pitiful excuse for a man; by the end of the film we do not know whether to fear him, respect him, or pray he is our best friend.

The way he achieves this transformation is to dismantle plot or causal story development as the basis of film. His protagonist is never a hero, but John Doe Everyman. There are no big events. Take plot, heroes, and spectacular events away from a Hollywood film and nothing is left. Tavernier does that and ends up with a profoundly moving film. How? And in what way does plot destruction coincide with breaches in the walls of the hierarchical power structure?

To start with the latter of these questions will launch us into a full exploration of Tavernier's art, the purpose of this book. Suffice it to suggest at this point that causal plot development is essential to power structures and helps sustain belief in them. A hero, or power symbol, is accorded that stature precisely because he (or she) has performed certain acts that warrant that recognition. The relationship is causal. Characteristically in France, acquisition of heroic stature not only permits, but almost demands, that you reign over others, like General de Gaulle, for example. American heroes, on the contrary, ride on to help the next person in need, especially in westerns. That distinction between the two nationalities warrants a book in itself, and Tavernier would no longer be the principal subject matter. The hypothesis is relevant here because it suggests to some extent Tavernier's incredible attraction for much that is American, especially jazz and Hollywood B-movies, while execrating the importance accorded the individual in American culture. Indeed, a look at this appeal of jazz and B-movies is essential to a comprehension of Tavernier's revelatory techniques.

But first, who is Bertrand Tavernier?


Biographical Background

Tavernier was born into a literary family in Lyons in 1941: his father was already a writer. Bertrand was supposed to be studying for the law exams but the Cinémathèque Française was located next door. When he turned in a blank sheet of paper for his exams, his parents said he would have to start paying rent. In the early 1960s he wrote extensively for film magazines, especially Positif and Cahiers du cinéma, but he became disenchanted with their attacks on filmmakers and founded a film club devoted to showing B-movies (Yakir 1984, 18)

Impressed with Bob le Flambeur, he obtained an interview with the director Jean-Pierre Melville, working with him in 1961 as trainee for assistant production manager. The effect was enriching, but in a negative sense: he found Melville's cold and dictatorial method of directing deadening on the actors and promised himself he would never provoke that stifling an atmosphere on a set. By all accounts, he has succeeded remarkably in creating both a relaxed and creative atmosphere, allowing all to contribute. Because of Melville, who limited himself to detective films, Tavernier also determined to try different genres. He found that all of Melville's films began to resemble one another, limiting Melville (Bonneville 1982, 25-28). He has diversified so successfully that critics cannot pigeonhole him. He therefore remains an enigma to most. Tavernier began working as a press agent in 1962, quitting only in 1972 to make The Clockmaker, and since then has enjoyed solid and regular commercial success. During that same period, he collaborated with various film periodicals as a film critic and produced his first short films.

In 1962 he married the Irish scriptwriter Claudine (Colo) O'Hagan who soon bore him a daughter, Tiffany, and then a son, Nils. After fifteen years together, they separated but have often collaborated on film scripts since (Coulombe and Wera 1988, 15). In 1977 Tavernier founded his own production company, Little Bear.

Though he has built up his own cinematic family, working best with a team that he knows well, members of the team change from time to time because Tavernier fears the deadening effect of routine and is excited by the new directions in which new team members can take him. Philippe Noiret has been the lead actor in many of his films, and has become his best friend. Pierre-William Glenn, director of photography, and others have become just as familiar on the set, however different the film may be. Glenn noted that working with Tavernier was a unique experience because “he leaves people a lot of liberty which makes them trust him and want to bring him something as well. He completely validates the idea of cinema as a collective work where each person is a driving force” (Bion 1984, 86). In his movies, everyone contributes something creative to the final work. He remains the auteur because he knows not only how to accept the ideas of others, but to give them value in the work as a whole, as did Jean Renoir.

Any attempt to categorize Tavernier's films by subject matter or genre is futile. The opening voice-over of A Sunday in the Country could well be his devise: “When will you stop asking even more from life, Irene?” The question is that of Irene's now defunct mother and Irene's hyper-activity seems to reflect that of Tavernier himself, who, making films and writing their scripts, is president of the Société des Réalisateurs de Films as well as L'Institut Lumière in Lyons while co-authoring the best encyclopedia of American film to date. A brilliant and curious individual, he is fascinated by almost any social, political or human problem that results from taboos. Such themes include the fear of conformism and dehumanization, the impulse towards protest and revolt, the difficulties of effectively realizing such a protest in action, and the questioning of authority and power. The resultant and more intimate problems of isolation and lack of communication are equally present. All of Tavernier's films are films of love, of passion, of intense emotional experiences. They all deal with the extraordinary difficulty a human being has communicating the most profoundly felt emotions to others. Such communication seems to occur only under exceptional circumstances that permit the individual to escape isolation, if only for a brief time.

Tavernier is particularly fond of historical periods that are in transit. The old values no longer appear valid; the principles of order, the frozen forms of the establishment have been questioned. Answers, however, are neither clearly spelled out nor readily available (Bertin-Maghit 1980, 109; B.B. and D.R.-B. 1992, 59). The use of transitional periods of history appeals to Tavernier for many reasons. First, they contain similarities to our own period of transition. Second, they are not as wellknown since they are not the moments of a society's crowning glory; their interpretations are not already cast in bronze. Therefore, they cater to disrespectful attitudes that put the conventions behind them in question, that can lead us to a better understanding of history and in potentially new directions.

By exploring different themes and emotions, Tavernier is exploring his own possibilities of self-realization. This tendency even explains the unique partnership that has developed between him, as director, and Philippe Noiret, an actor he has cast in extremely diverse roles, almost all of which he claims are the expression of something felt within himself. When asked about his very diverse cinematic interests, he said: “The only thing I try to do is to set up a completely different challenge for myself with each new film, to use what I learned from previous films to put myself in question again and never have the least feeling of comfort” (Cèbe 1981, 27). Of Clean Slate he said,


I made the film because I was angry at the time. . . . I wanted to break the image of my nobility, because I was being labeled as a humanist director, and I wanted to show a kind of dark, violent side, which I have and which I think I present in all my films. . . . it shows the fear I have in me. . . . Making such a film in a way is a kind of joke, but it's real, too, it's a way of curing yourself of some hate you have, or some fear or some anger. It prevents you from killing a few people. (Hurley 1983, 232-33)

Noiret, who also dislikes being categorized, has said,

what I like about being a leading actor is to wait and see what the director thinks of me and what he feels I can do. Sometimes, I am very surprised. When Bertrand gave me some of these recent parts, I was shocked. I would never think of casting myself in some of these roles, never. (Hurley 1982, 164)

American Influences

More than anyone perhaps, Tavernier is responsible for recognition of the contribution to film provided by B-movies, the western in particular. And he is addicted to jazz, having made, to date, what is considered the best film dealing with it. Understanding the appeal of these elements elucidates some of the characteristics of his own films.

Jazz

The improvisational nature of jazz appeals to Tavernier: “I strive for a loose, musical structure” (Coursodon 1986, 23). In his own films he incorporates seemingly extraneous material that surfaces during production into the film itself, enriching its texture. He is always exploring; a script does not set the action in concrete. If something happens during a shoot, Tavernier is likely to incorporate it, such as events or statements made by actors on the set that were not scripted. In his jazz film 'Round Midnight, when the musician Dale, played by Dexter Gordon, has just agreed to return to Paris with his best friend Francis (but does not), Dale says: “You know, Francis, there is not enough kindness in the world.” Dexter had heard another musician quote this from The Mask of Dimitrios1 several weeks earlier; he said it unexpectedly during rehearsal and Tavernier kept it as the last words we hear from Dale. It reads like his epitaph (Coursodon 1986, 18-19). Tavernier had asked another musician “why Dexter at times seemed bent on destroying himself, and he answered, `Maybe he's afraid he no longer has anything to give'” (Coursodon 1986, 22). Tavernier kept it as a remark by Dale-Dexter.

From master scriptwriter Jean Aurenche, Tavernier learned the freedom of incorporating all of life into a film. If he hears a phrase he likes while filming, it will most likely be incorporated into the film. The result is most engaging: the spectator is prompted to find an explanation–just as he does for coincidental things in life. But the technique also makes a richer, more dense film. When he was filming 'Round Midnight, one of the jazz musicians, Wayne Shorter, paid him what Tavernier considered to be the biggest compliment, “you are doing this film exactly as we make our music, by listening all the time the same way we are listening to the notes, taking, grabbing something, taking it, using it” (Jacobowitz et al. 1986, 70).

Critics stuck on a strict adherence to a sequential storyline inevitably take offense at these additions and may have little appreciation for the improvisational nature of jazz as well. Extraneous, improvised events or scenes help fragment an apparently realistic, recognizable bourgeois setting. As Dale explains to Francis, “I heard Lester Young and he was playing all those color tones, 6ths and 9ths and major 7ths like Debussy.” Tavernier's apparent asides are like the color tones of jazz. The viewer sees a familiar world and then the logic is not exactly what was anticipated; a new color was added.

Jazz represents the spontaneity, the freedom and potential of another form of thought not yet determined. In post-World War II France, jazz brought a breath of fresh air. Though the expression of an oppressed culture, it seemed free of the European forms of thought that had brought about that war. As in jazz, Tavernier's scenarios focus on the crosscurrents of the present, with little exposition or attempt to justify the present by the past. In 'Round Midnight, for instance, we know instinctively the lovely singer Darcy Lee must be an old flame of Dale's, but all we are shown is their happiness of the moment as she belts out “How Long Has This Been Going On?” The song could apply to their personal experience or any of the themes of the movie. One of Tavernier's reasons for selecting bebop jazz was because it was “outside the system. . . . [B]ebop is the only part of the American music which has never been recuperated, swallowed, by the system. I mean, Broadway has used the blues, has used Fats Waller, Duke Ellington. They took everything” (Dempsey 1987, 5). This absorption, or reduction of all that is new to fit into established structures is abhorrent to Tavernier.

'Round Midnight (1986)

The film was born when Martin Scorcese, the mutual friend of Tavernier and Irwin Winkler (producer for Scorcese's New York, New York and Raging Bull) introduced them at lunch where they discovered their love of jazz. Winkler was interested because “Other than film, jazz is one of the true cultural phenomena given to the world. The tragedy is that film has almost completely ignored jazz” (Hoffman 1985, 110). A photograph of Lester Young in Paris had captured Tavernier's imagination and was the “root of [his] desire to make such a film” (Coursodon 1986, 20). As his co-scriptwriter, he chose David Rayfiel with whom he had worked six years earlier for Deathwatch. A musician told him that if he wanted to develop relationships he “needed a non-musician character to play opposite [the] protagonist.” Tavernier found the bare storyline in the true relationship between pianist Bud Powell and Francis Paudras, an amateur pianist in love with the jazz he heard in Paris at such clubs as The Blue Note. Paudras told Tavernier that he would crouch outside the club to listen to Powell's music through a vent. “He spoke of checking Bud in and out of hospitals, taking care of him, getting him ready for his return to New York, a `comeback' that actually was to kill him” (Coursodon 1986, 20). Once given the source of the plot, critics immediately chose to dwell on the changes Tavernier made to real facts in the life of Bud Powell, though there had never been the pretense of a documentary. Tavernier did a jazz documentary: Mississippi Blues would be the film to criticize if infidelity to fact were the question, but there is little criticism of that film for its infidelity. There critics complain that reality does not have a better storyline!

Mississippi Blues documents an era in jazz as well as African-American history. That two Whites, his partner Robert Parish, and himself obtained permission to take cameras and crew inside Negro churches, bars, and homes to record the extraordinary Blues and spiritual performances that were still part of the living South is a feat in itself. They are extraordinarily privileged performances. The film stands as a testimony to the neglect and oversight American culture has evidenced to the contribution of jazz to the world.

In the 1960s, when I was doing graduate studies at Columbia University, Ella Fitzgerald was scheduled to perform, once again, at the famous New York theater where she made her debut: the Apollo theater in Harlem, just “below” Columbia and Morningside Heights. I had two male friends reared in New York, one Jewish and one Catholic, who consented to escort me to the performance. We went early the night of the performance to stand in line for tickets. No other Whites were present. Upon entering we immediately proceeded to the back row of the balcony to remain as inconspicuous as possible. And when everyone rose to cry Hallelujah, we stood too; when the audience clapped, we clapped. It was my first experience of “sitting at the back of the bus.” Soon after that, Harlem was closed to Whites. I still feel amazingly lucky to have been allowed to participate in one of Ella Fitzgerald's last performances (perhaps the last) at the Apollo theater. This same extraordinarily privileged view of a music, a culture, and an epoch in American history is what Tavernier provides in Mississippi Blues. Between this documentary and 'Round Midnight, he has provided us with two treasures of our own culture–with or without a storyline.


Films

B-movies so intrigued Tavernier that, long before he even became a film critic, he founded a film club, the Nickelodéon, where he showed the films of such directors as Bud Boetticher, Samuel Fuller, Gordon Douglas, Douglas Sirk, King Vidor, and Delmer Daves, directors ignored by the New Wave movement and the Cahiers critics of the 1960s. Tavernier's 50 ans de cinéma américain (co-authored with Jean-Pierre Coursodon, 1991) has been deemed a more comprehensive dictionary of American film than anything written in English. The 1991 edition is an extensively updated version of their 1963 30 ans de cinéma américain; in the latest edition they add revised opinions of earlier entries as well as more information. From these directors and others–Tavernier has favorite directors in all nationalities–he garnered a whole arsenal of cinematic approaches and freely moves among them depending on the subject at hand. The intent of looking at major characteristics of B-movies that attracted Tavernier is to glimpse at the main source of some of his own esthetic concepts, and in no way wishes to exclude influences numerous others have had on him.

(1) Understanding of the ignored or outcast rather than the hero. In many American filmmakers he found a voice given to the oppressed and a sympathy and understanding accorded them, as in John Ford's Grapes of Wrath. The underdog or historically vanquished individual becomes interesting to us because Tavernier categorically disregards the politically correct version of history, letting the oppressed such as the rapist Bouvier in The Judge and the Assassin speak for himself, developing sympathy for the assassin and exposing the prejudices of the judge for what they are: prejudices, not justice. The judge proclaims the absolute need of society to banish vagabonds as detrimental to its values. But the butcher-rapist Bouvier reveals himself as the consequences of those values. He was commended for killing in war, a war defending his country and its values. But society had no place for a man with those talents once the war was over. Raped by priests while at the seminary, he cannot even get the Church to permit him to sweep floors. Suddenly the judge's would-be righteous values no longer appear so just. The dissolute Bouvier becomes more interesting than the judge, exposing many of society's values as semi-clichés. Still he is criminal by accident, a banal offspring of society's injustices, not a criminal in the heroic nature of a Mafia gang leader.

All of Tavernier's historical works deal with the vanquished, not the victors of history books. In The Clockmaker the youth in revolt are shown as the oppressed, not derelict delinquents. They revolt because they are ignored by society as was Bouvier, or a farmer in The Grapes of Wrath. Almost every adult but the father wants to interpret the murder by the son as a crime of passion because the private factory guard who was murdered had harassed his girlfriend. No adult wants to hear his political reason: the salauds always win over others. The youth who work hard do not have a chance. They revolt because they are oppressed, not because they are delinquent.

(2) Part good, part bad. Delmer Daves's film Broken Arrow (starring Jimmy Stewart making peace between the Apaches and the Whites) tackled the problem of racism in the guise of the western where Daves refused to see things in black and white terms, where some Whites are as blood-thirsty as Apaches and some Apaches as honorable as some Whites. Similarly none of Tavernier's characters is all good or all bad. Often the spectators think a character is a loser in the beginning and discover he was at least human and had some touching qualities before the end. All his films are examples of this characteristic, which will be explored in depth as part of his realism.

(3) Characters integrated into the social fabric and set. Another trait he discovered in B-films, which he already admired in Balzac and Zola, was the projection of the society that produced the oppressed, “When I interviewed some of these directors later, I found out that this was very deliberate on their part. This is another way the American cinema strongly influenced me” (Coursodon 1986, 23). The social context is implicit in the sets, the environment of the individuals. The psychological or moral solitude of the B-film protagonist–often a hero by virtue of this solitude–is preempted by the isolation of his physical surroundings, an easy correspondence to establish in a western. In the same manner, the lonely police chief of Clean Slate is relegated to the obscure little town of Bourkassa, lost somewhere in Africa.

Tavernier particularly values films in which the setting allows the complexity of an emotion to be better understood, not where it is used to merely sell an emotion (Tavernier 1981, 73). Emotions being the heart of Tavernier cinema, what he admired in King Vidor was “his cosmic apprehension of the world, of relationships between the Individual, Nature, Creation,” as well as “the excess of feelings.” The harmony of individual acts with the setting is paramount for Tavernier, and thus he admires Vidor because he can do “an extremely provocative love scene where the protagonists are one with the elements surrounding them” (Coursodon and Tavernier 1991, 956). Similarly, of Samuel Fuller he writes,

What is beautiful about Fuller's productions is that they end up making things “organic” that, taken separately, are hardly realistic. In Fuller, the setting becomes integrated with the principal characters, who no longer notice the violence around them, for they perform it automatically with no notion of a personal act. (Lajeunesse et al. 1981, 82-83)

He likes John Ford because his heroes always need help (Liberty Valence), that is, need a social milieu to support them. The New Wave's admiration of Howard Hawks, however, met with reserve in Tavernier because he found Hawks too devoted to the individual without a sense of the social context. For Tavernier, the filmmaker himself brings with him the sense of his own place or setting. Just as King Vidor remained a Texan in his search for higher truths, so Tavernier seeks to remain French. Thus, he transposed the American book's setting for Clean Slate to a provincial French African town.

(4) Questioning the status quo. Tavernier could write of himself what he said of Samuel Fuller, “there is a will to upset archetypes, a desire to take the opposite stand of everything that surrounds him” (Lajeunesse et al. 1981, 81). As in Tavernier's best films, “Ford is also attracted to periods that are distressed, to the moment when one world disappears to make way for a new society, often at the cost of heavy sacrifices (John Wayne in The Searchers or Liberty Valence)” (Coursodon and Tavernier 1991, 480). Tavernier has a categorical bias against the parti pris of Hollywood in favor of the individual over the group and Nature over Civilization (Coursodon and Tavernier 1991, 481). His introduction to the extensive Robert Altman entry in his Cinquante ans de cinéma américain could also stand as his own, “Altman's entire career is placed under the sign of provocative iconoclasm, defiance; . . . he bends over backwards to upset the comfort of the spectator” (Coursodon and Tavernier 1991, 274-75). His own realism will do just that.

(5) Destruction of storyline. One of the ways he found that Altman questioned the spectators' comfort was by “dynamiting” the concept of a storyline, “multiplying points of view and levels of narration . . . the destruction of linearity” (Coursodon and Tavernier 1991, 275). What he liked in both John Ford and Howard Hawks was their tendency to destroy plot. In The Big Sleep, “you don't have any plot. . . . you discover that once you have characters the plot doesn't count” (Kemp 1994, 18).

All of these characteristics lead us to the enigma of Tavernier's art: his realism is ruptured by improvisations, by violations to the traditional causal storyline with its beginning, middle, and end. Upon examination, his realism turns out to be disruptive after seducing the spectators into an apparently familiar world. His disrespect for the principles of storytelling, for heroes, and great events, undermines the spectators' anticipations of success within the hierarchical structure. The structure itself becomes uncomfortable by the end of a Tavernier film.


Notes

1. A 1944 Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet movie adapted from Eric Ambler's novel A Coffin for Dimitrios.