1

Double Concerto plus one for Literature, Painting and Film: Alan Rrudolph's "The
Moderns" (1988)

Colloque SERCIA sur le thème Cinéma/Arts, Centre international de sémiotique,

Urbino, Italie, septembre 1999. Colloque international
( L’auteur très pris par la preparation d’un livre, n’a pas pu le traduire à temps pour
le faire inclure dans les Actes,Le cinema et les autres arts, un recueil apparaissant en français,
pour lequel ce texte avait été accepté )

Trudy Bolter (Sciences-Po Bordeaux)

Double Concerto plus One for Writing, Painting and Film;

The Moderns (Alan Rudolph, prod. Altman, 1988)

Alan Rudolph's movie The Moderns (1988) is set in 1926, the year in which
Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises was published. Ostensibly a film about art forgeries in
expatriate Paris, it is in fact a reflexive film about what, in 1926, was the most modern of the
arts, film, in its relation to the sister arts, at a point in film history when it could still seem to
have more in common with painting than with literature: the Warner Vitaphone sound system
went into use in August, 1926, and Th Jazz Singer was released in 1927.1 But The Moderns
reaches this point obliquely through dealing explicitly with writing and painting, two of the
sister arts from which film derives, and only implicitly with film itself.
The structure of the film is based upon the mutual reflections set up between three
parallel characters, two within the diegesis and the third standing behind the text. . One is the
hyper-mediatized novelist Ernest Hemingway, presented on the eve of his fame in a way which
diverges from the more commonly presented image as virile outdoorsman. The contrasted
character is a fictional painter, Nick Hart, who is not only set up to reference Hemingway in
negative and positive ways, but also to connote the director of the film, Alan Rudolph, the third
member of the trio, whose artistic practice as image-maker resembles that of the painter, who
copies works of visual art using a means of mechanical reproduction that recalls the film camera
 2

But Rudolph is also a scriptwriter, and he is thus connoted by the author-character too. Not only
does Rudolph create a trompe l'oeil Paris, but as we shall see he also creates a trompe l'oreille
dialogue, echoing on two fronts the counterfeiting performed by his double, Hart, thus stretching
the chain of connotations into an endlessly reflecting circle with himself and the art of film at the
center..
But as one character reflects another, so does Rudolph's literary and artistic
Twenties serve as an objective correlative for the Hollywood film world of today. The title of the
film is ambiguous-The "Moderns" could mean "our contemporaries" (at the time the film was
made in 1988, or at whatever time we see it) as well as artists of the "modern" school of the first
quarter of the century. Rudolph has said that he sees the Twenties as the thin end of the wedge
that we now inhabit:

To me, this was a period that had no purity. It was the first time art went
public, and it seems that whenever something like this becomes hugely popular, it is
always after the fact. the real breakthroughs had come earlier; the thing about Paris in
the 20s is that the serious arts had already left town. We've been living in this
counterfeit culture ever since.2

To a French journalist, he said

L'art, à Paris, à la fin des années vingt, c'est l'art de vendre et d'acheter, pas
celui de peindre. L'art n'est plus jugé en fonction de son mystère, de sa beauté ou
de sa vérité, mais de son prix. Depuis cette époque, nous vivons dans une culture
du "faux."3

The art world portrayed as being part of Twenties Paris is a mirror designed to reflect the present
day. "Hollywood is the city of the future" says one character to another:"that's what they said
about Paris six years ago" replies another.4
But the film not only plays time upon time and place upon place - it is also a game of
overlapping texts.. The film text is set up as an ironic rival to two of the main sources of
information on the mythical period of Twenties Paris, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast
(1964), and Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (1933), both cited in the
screenplay in slightly off-key ways. Rudolph (with Jon Bradshaw, his co-author) uses a process
 3

of skewed reference which challenges these texts (themselves askew in the sense of not being
historically truthful) at the same time as it attaches them as adjuncts to his own.. The result is a
gallery of verbal and visual pictures (Rudolph's, Stein's, Hemingway's) each one-like all the
paintings used in the film- in some way a "forgery", and all of which seem to hold equal weight.
This being so the inescapable conclusion to which the web of reflections leads us, is that films
in general-and The Moderns in particular- are works of art containing the same "essence of
modernity", and having at least the same masterpiece value, as paintings by Matisse, Modigliani
or Cézanne or literary classics like the Paris books by Stein or Hemingway: all the links may be
twisted, but the chain of art is still either pure gold (or dross, depending on the way you receive
the mixture of parody and lyricism which somewhat confuses the issues of the film)..
Defining the term "modernism", Charles Harrison has said:
Alike in all the arts, modernism is at some point grounded in intentional
rejection of classical precedent and classical style. Modernism is always and
everywhere relative to some state of affairs conceived of as both antique and
unchanging.5

Using the word in this sense, we may say that The Moderns is a "modernist" variation
on the classical Hollywood biopic form, showing a group, rather than a central hero, and
relegating the actual historical characters Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, to the margins
of the story rather than placing them at the center, as was done with the writer-character in The
Life of Emile Zola (1937), for example. (This bending of genre is comparable to the playful
technique used by Gertrude Stein in her Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Stein's partner, which
is in fact a memoir of Stein's own life6 ) Like the standard Hollywood biopic ( and like Stein's and
Hemingway's Paris memoirs) The Moderns is heavily fictionalized, but whereas William Dieterle,
the director of The Life of Emile Zola, placed a title in the first frames of his movie underlining
the distance from history taken by his tale,
the historical basis ....has been fictionized for the purposes of this film "and will not
adhere to the literal historical truth".

Alan Rudolph leaves his spectator to figure this out for himself, choosing either to be fooled, or
to set off in search of the sources sometimes so clearly targeted, sometimes so maddeningly
vague.
 4

If it is relatively easy to pick up the references to Hemingway and Gertrude Stein

after quick re-readings of the short books they authored about the Twenties, it is not so easy to sift
out the lines that one imagines must come from somewhere in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
which we assume must be targeted when a characters speaks them standing under a portrait of
the author in question.(A totally fictitious picture, since no such oil portrait of Fitzgerald was ever
made)7 One wonders about the works of André Breton, when a long-and important section in
French, is spoken by a "surrealist poet" just before the camera shows us an artist doodling in a
Breton-like vocabulary in the Selavy Bar where much of the action of The Moderns takes place,
whose caissière is a red-haired lady named Rose. This portion of screenplay suggests that Hart
and Oiseau, the failed artists (in terms of critical success and acceptance into the sanctum
sanctorum of Parisian cultural life, Gertrude Stein's salon), who are on their way to Hollywood,
are really in harmony with the newest of the new in French artistic theory. Says the poet:, who
here justifies the role implicitly given by Rudolph's film to cinema as the daughter, but ultimately
also the modern matriarch of all the arts:
Pris de la frénésie et de l'ombre, il réclame des sujets excessifs, des états
culminants de l'âme, une atmosphère de vision, une vie portée à l'incandescence. Il
implique un renversement total des valeurs . Il est plus captivant que l'amour, plus
puissant que la morphine, plus excitante que le phosphore même. De quoi s'agit-il?
Mais du cinéma, bien sûr.

Rudolph's film - like the standard biopic on whose theme it represents a

"modernist" variation - does carry some elements of historical truth. Stein and Hemingway were
both in Paris in this period, although, in 1926, Hemingway was on the eve of his divorce from his
first wife Hadley and also on the verge of leaving Paris. This was the point in his life at which he
ended A Moveable Feast, referenced quite explicitly at the end of the film when the Hemingway
character , at the Gare St Lazare, seeing Hart off or perhaps leaving Paris himself, composing
aloud and looking for the right formula, says
Paris is a bon repas....a traveling picnic...Paris is a portable picnic …
 5

and other words referring to the same text are the last we hear in the film. Walking with a friend
on the way into the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art where Hart's forged pictures are on
display, Hemingway says to a friend
John, if you were lucky enough to have lived in Paris, lucky enough to be
young, it didn't matter who you were because it was always worth it, and it was good.

These lines of dialogue refer to and partly repeat the words spoken to a friend in 1950
by Hemingway which serve as the Epigraph to A Moveable Feast, and go like this:

If you were lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,

then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a
moveable feast8

At the same time, the film dialogue repeats and changes the lines which close A
Moveable Feast

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who
has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who
we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached.
Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But
this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.9

The dialogue, both using and refusing the Hemingway model, skews the text it comes
from while giving a gloss of authenticity to the film. this is also the case with the quotations taken
from Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. One of the set pieces of the film is an
evening at Gertrude Stein's picture-filled drawing-room on the rue de Fleurus, in which the
dialogue is peppered with borrowings from an interesting mixture of sources. Hart arrives with
his friend the journalist Oiseau, and they are ushered in by Alice B. Toklas to the salon, where
Gertrude is holding forth,
GERTRUDE STEIN: I've come to the conclusion that I dislike the
abnormal. It's so obvious. The normal is so much more simply complicated and
interesting.
(---)
OISEAU TO ALICE: ...Does Hadley like his new friends?
 6

ALICE: Ah, the pilot fish. Charming lot. Not terribly interesting but I like
their taste.
NICK Hart (to HEMINGWAY):Do me a favor, pal - tell me a good joke.
HEMINGWAY: You're standing in one. You know, Hart, there's only
two things that can really kill a man-suicide and gonorrhea.
(---)
GERTRUDE STEIN (to HART): Young man, Come....I have a very
important question regarding your work. How old are you?
HART: Thirty-three
GERTRUDE STEIN: It won't do at all. American painters are twenty-six
this year.
HART: Well, I'm not.
GERTRUDE STEIN: Precisely my point. You won't fit in at all.
NICK HART: (incomprehensible)..won't approve of that, either.I can
always move towards the theatre
GERTRUDE STEIN: I'll introduce you to Jean Cocteau (laughter)........
Hemingway! Remember, the sun also sets!
HEMINGWAY: Yes, right on your big.....Hey, Bunny ?
BUFFY: I don't think we speak to Miss Stein that way.
HEMINGWAY: She never listens anyway

Some of the sources of this dialogue are easy to trace. Gertrude Stein's first remark,
about her interest in the normal, comes from the Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, at a point in
the narrative where, in the persona of Alice B. Toklas, she is relating Stein's failure to get her
medical degree and her ensuing breakaway from a projected career studying pathological
psychology:

She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the
normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.10

When Oiseau and Alice are discussing Hadley Hemingway's feeling about Ernest's
new friends, however, the Paris memoir being referenced is not the Gertrude Stein book, but
Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. The "pilot fish" is Hemingway's term for the person who acts as
a scout for the rich , looking out for whatever is new-and attention-worthy:

The rich have a sort of pilot fish who goes ahead of them, sometimes a
little deaf, sometimes a little blind, but always smelling affable and hesitant ahead of
 7

them...He is always going somewhere, or coming from somewhere, and he is never

around for very long .... These rich loved and trusted him [ an unidentified character]
because he was shy, comic, elusive, already in production, and because he was an
unerring pilot fish....The rich came led by the pilot fish. A year before they would
never have come. There was no certainty then. The work was as good and the
happiness greater but no novel had been written so they could not be sure....In those
days I trusted the pilot fish....Under the charm of these rich I was a s trusting and
stupid as a bird dog who wants to go with any man with a gun, or a trained pig in a
circus who has finally found someone who loves and appreciates him for himself
alone.11

In A Moveable Feast, the pilot-fish is a harbinger of doom, leading to the breakup of

Hemingway's pure, hard-writing life and his marriage to Hadley. The date of the film, 1926, is
about the time in which Hemingway became involved with his second wife: he divorced Hadley,
the first wife, in 1927 and left Paris in 1928.
When in the film, Gertrude Stein asks Hart how old he is, the dialogue reproduces
a section in the Autobiography of Alice B Toklas relating the meeting between Gertude Stein and
Hemingway, putting Hart more or less in the position of a certain George Lynes:

I remember very well the impression I had of Hemingway that first afternoon. He was
an extraordinarily good-looking young man, twenty-three years old. It was not long
after that that everybody was twenty-six. It became the period of being twenty-six.
During the next two or three years all the young men were twenty-six years old. It
was the right age apparently for that time and place. there were one or two under
twenty, for example George Lynes but they did not count as Gertrude Stein carefully
explained to them. If they were young men they were twenty-six. Later on, much later
on they were twenty-one and twenty-two.
So Hemingway was twenty-three, rather foreign-looking, with passionately interested,
rather than interesting eyes. He sat in front of Gertrude Stein and listened and
looked.12

The screenplay of The Moderns, written by Alan Rudolph with Jon Bradshaw, a
magazine writer who died in 1986 before the film was made, creates a fictional Hemingway who
both references and diverges from the persona drawn in the classic Hemingway account of
Twenties Paris. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway , living on his wife Hadley's inherited income
which was about equal to three times the average French worker's salary , he describes himself
 8

(falsely) as being very poor, writing in cafés to escape his cold room, but also living in devoted
harmony with Hadley and their young son, Bumby, as well as the cat babysitter, F Puss. In
Gertrude Stein's recollection of the period, a very young Hemingway sits devotedly at her feet
like a willing student. James Mellow cites a letter in which Hemingway wrote to Sherwood
Anderson, who had introduced him to Stein, ending "We love Gertrude Stein,"13and Stein and
Toklas were Bumby's godmothers. However, in the film, Rudolph suggests the contempt that
Hemingway ultimately developed for his one-time mentor and literary model, expressed in A
Moveable Feast, and generally caricatures the Stein salon as being both precious and perverse.
Alan Rudolph's Gertrude Stein questions and evaluates the young painter exactly as the
wealthier, but not more powerful art-consumer Bertram Stone deals with artists in the very first
sequence of the film, when, sitting beside his wife (who is another kind of consumer, constantly
nibbling chocolates or drinking whisky) he is offered a choice of painters as if they were so many
dishes on the menu while the art-dealer vaunts their merits as if he were peddling the plat du
jour. (Indeed Stone's name begins like hers with an S and a T, although it finishes off with three
letters that are pronounced exactly like the verb to "own", possession being nine-tenths of his
persona.)
In The Moderns, the Hemingway character is a kind of "lounge lizard": this
characterization suggests that the widely known sporty outdoors Hemingway was perhaps a fake.
Rudolph's Hem is more like the stereotype of a bitter failed writer than a snapshot of a rising
star: he is something of a barfly, capitalizing on his fame to cadge drinks from tourists, visiting
the tarts who live opposite Hart's studio, and generally boring everyone who will listen with his
aphorisms. (An example of his incoherent but oracular style is the dirge he pronounces at the
funeral of the mock-suicide Oiseau:
The dead are the most brave. They take their love with them. Can you even
imagine the courage to love someone, who loves you, when there's nothing you can do
about it?

At worst, the Hemingway in The Moderns (many of whose lines were improvised by
the actor, Kevin J. O'Connor)14 seems almost like a contestant honing his wit to enter the Harry's
Bar and American Grill International Imitation Hemingway Contest, founded in 1980.15 At best,
 9

however, his portentous comments on the action of the film, make it seem as if the action of The
Moderns is a kind of Hemingway first draft, a novel in the making - or indeed, that the historical
Hemingway was actually an alter ego of the Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises, unflatteringly
described by a companion on a fishing trip as follows:

You're an expatriate....Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote
anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers...You've lost touch with the soil. You
get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You
become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You're an
expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.16

The Hemingway of the film is constantly mistaking people's names (He calls Buffy
Bunny, and uses the name Clark for Nick), as if he were in a state between fact and fiction and
couldn't decide whether to use the names they bear in diegetic reality or that he will give them in
his fiction.17 But this confusion also reflects the instability of character-identity in this film, which
in turn mirrors the instability of the collage of texts, disallowing any sure identification of sources
or any sense of historical authenticity.. In the opening sequence, Hart is like Hemingway in this,
since Hart calls Oiseau a series of declensions on his name, whether Oisif or Oiselle, the name of
a Parisian art critic in the diegesis confusion comes when an expatriate, just off the boat, says to
another one:

See that guy over there? He just wrote a book called The Sun Also Rises.
Oh, that's Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The ultimate confusion of course is felt at the end of the film when paintings by Nick
Hart are called a Matisse, a Modigliani and a Cézanne.
Born in 1899, the historical Hemingway would have been twenty-six years old for
at least part of 1926, the year in which Gertrude Stein tells the painter, Hart, that this is the right
age for painters that year. Here, he scenario-writers have also used an event linked to the
biography of Hemingway (as told by Gertude Stein) as part of the narrative concerning the painter
Hart. But this is not the only way in which the painter Hart mirrors and merges with the character
Hemingway as developed in he film. during the sequence in Gertrude Stein's salon, Hart insults
 10

the collector Stone's American wife (who is, in reality, Harts own spouse, since she never
divorced him before marrying Stone). Stone challenges him to a duel, which Gertrude Stein alters
to a boxing-match three rounds long to be undertaken in the American Gymnasium in
Montparnasse. This boxing match as developed in the film is not only a reference to the boxing
in The Sun Also Rises, but also an interesting adaptation of an event in Hemingway's own life,
which took place in 1929, as reported by one of his biographers, James R Mellow: using this
material, the screenwriters replace the historical Hemingway with the fictional Hart.
As Mellow relates the story, Hemingway had a date to box with the writer Morley
Callaghan, but, feeling the effects of a heavy lunch, he wanted to keep the rounds down to a
duration of one minute each, with two-minute rest periods in between - the most he felt he could
handle. F Scott Fitzgerald was on the bell and unfortunately let the first round go on for three
minutes and forty five seconds, enough time for Hemingway's face to be hit many times, for his
lip to be cut, and for the overfed contender to be forced to sink to the ground. 18 In The Moderns,
the fictional Hemingway acts out the part of the real Fitzgerald and has the job of ringing the bell
at the end of the rounds, a job which he muffs exactly the way Fitzgerald is said by Mellow to
have done. Hemingway, engaged in conversation with Stone's henchmen, forgets the time and lets
the round go on too long, so that the collector is able to force the painter Nick Hart to the canvas
and finish him off with kicks, ultimately knocking out the referee as well. (Says the Hemingway
character in lieu of more substantial comfort, "A fight is just a fight, and when it's fought, it's
something else.")
What things are and aren't, and what they seem to be, how one thing can seem like
another, and the irrelevance of names: the confusion generated by questions of identity and the
randomness of notions of value is one of the leading thematic networks of the film. The very
genre of The Moderns is put into doubt: heavily indebted to literary models (to such an extent
that the gates in the first sequence opening onto the Eiffel Tower can only remind us of the covers
of a book) and referencing landmark paintings, it spills over the boundaries of the usual film text.
Rudolph's Paris of The Moderns was well publicized by journalists as being a fake actually
created in Montreal. (The random, totally conventional nature of the Parisian-ness of Rudolph's
diegetic city is constantly emphasized: the Paris landscape perceived through the back window of
 11

a car or the window of an apartment is as often an obviously painted background as an actual

street, and, instead of architecture or monuments, posters usually convey the sense of time and
place.)
All the pictures used in the film are fakes, but if the authors referred to in these
counterfeit art objects are easy to identify, the actual pictures themselves are impossible to pin
down: the key canvas, the Cézanne, vaguely reminds us of Les grandes baigneuses, or perhaps of
Matisse's Bonheur de vivre and details of pictures imprecisely recalling famous modernist icons,
such as Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon, flash across the screen. Like the trompe l'oreille
dialogue, these picture-references give a skewed, disorienting sense of referring to non-
identifiable but apparently historical models
So, too, is there confusion among the identity of the characters. Rachel, Stone's
wife, is really Hart's wife. Nathalie de Ville's lover, Armand, is really a cross-dressing woman.
Oiseau, the suicide is really alive, but passing as a woman during his own funeral. Stone, the real
suicide, a former apprentice to the magician, Houdini, emerges from the coffin at which he has
replaced Oiseau, as if he has just performed a masterful escape number following an epileptic fit
that feigned death. At the very end of the film, another identity crisis for Oiseau takes place in the
sequence set in the Museum of Modern Art - which, incidentally, opened in 1929 on the twelfth
floor of a skyscraper and not in the bank -like structure portrayed. A woman called Ada Fuoco
comes up to the journalist him and asks him if he isn't Irving Fagelman, her childhood friend
from Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Oiseau backs away, saying in French that he doesn't speak
English. Ada Fuoco walks off in a state of perplexity - but a look at the credits at the end of the
film tells us that the character, Ada Fuoco, is played by an actress really called Ada Fuoco. The
principle of shifting and overlapping identity is fundamental to this film, which is itself an artistic
collage whose list of components extends even to the paratext..

This set of overlapping identities radiates outwards from the central pair of
contrasting characters, the fictional Nick Hart, refers to the semi-historical Hemingway and is
intended as a parallel character working in tandem with that of the author. . Nick Hart's name is
interesting- Nick Adams was the name of the Hemingway character in his early stories, taken by
 12

many readers to be a pseudonym for the author himself. The painter's name Hart, not only refers
to his vital organ, but, when pronounced by a French waiter, as in the opening of the film sounds
like "art"19, but it also begins with an "H", clearly stressing the link to the writer There is
symmetry in their differences as well as in their similarities. Hemingway is already a success:
Hart is still, after six years in Paris (the same amount of time spent there by Hemingway, although
not within the same dates) a failure. Hemingway has been able to give up newspaper work and
devote himself to pure art: Hart is still making a living sketching caricatures for the Paris Herald
Tribune. Both Hem and Hart, working in cafés at solitary arts, are, as Oiseau says in the opening
sequence of the film "among the throng but not of the throng". But, just as the character Nick
Hart echoes and overlaps with the character Hemingway, he also overlaps and merges with the
director Alan Rudolph, implied behind the Hart who undertakes the central action of the film, the
forging of three works which are said to embody "the true spirit of modernity", a Matisse,
Modigliani, and very importantly a Cézanne.
Hart accomplishes a quintessential and mythic action performed by many writer-
characters (and other artists) in American Film, since he agrees to prostitute himself in exchange
for money (and personal attention from Nathalie de Ville), by forging the three great pictures
from her collection that she wishes to steal from her husband (the idea being that she will take his
originals to America, replacing them with Hart's copies). The irony, of course, is that by so doing,
one has the feeling that Hart rather than debasing it, is reaching a higher level of excellence than
he does in his own art, and that he only improves the quality (as read by the critics) of the
paintings he is paid to forge. We see him at work with a kind of magic lantern, projecting the
images of the originals onto a rectangular white canvas, a metonymy for the cinema screen.
Hemingway, doing "research" with the tarts next door, is framed in a window as if he were part of
just another more painting, incorporated with the others into an implied master image including
them all-the Rudolph film.
During the forging sequence, Hart is likened to the director when he is presented as
having a memory which duplicates one characteristic procedure of Rudolph's film, the sliding
from still photograph or documentary film, through fiction filmed in sepia which imitates
historical footage, to a full-color diegetic reality. Hart's studio is full of photographs of himself
 13

and Rachel, or of Rachel alone: when he is riding in a car with Nathalie de Ville, he imagines
scenes of what might happen with her as if they were frames of a film. The images in his life slide
from past to present like the frames in Rudolph's film. Hart's imagination, perceptions and
memory, presented in a series of pictorial flashes more fully than those of any other character in
the film, duplicate the weavings in and out of visual reality conducted by the film director. His
memory is, on a small scale, constructed like the "memory" of the film as a whole (Thus his
"Paris"-a collection of little Eiffel Towers to which the waiter in the opening sequence makes a
contribution- is a scale model of Rudolph's Paris, in xhich imaginations are so dominated by the
presence of the Tower that a painter sitting at his easel in a dark street adds one to his picture
even if the monument is invisible to him.)
So, in a number of ways, the character of Nick Hart, a kind of sideways
Hemingway, is also slanted towards the image of the director as this is implied within the text,.
Some of the light shed by the main character upon the director is diffused and deflected, and
spills over the boundaries of the film text proper. The reviews of The Moderns (as for example
the file in the Bibliothèque du film or the collection presented on RottenTomatoes.com ) convey
information which can only be considered a part of the film text, since much of this material is
totally coherent with the themes of the film. Alan Rudolph is the son of a movie director and the
protégé of Robert Altman, another movie director who could be considered a kind of father-in-art:
if we accept the equivalency of copying a painting with "forging" the past in an ironically
historical film, then we have to equate Alan Rudolph himself with his character, Nick Hart. Yet
again, many of the paintings used in the film were actually produced by a real forger, David
Stein, who had actually spent time in jail for having imitated art - the opposite to what happens to
Hart, whose forgeries, partially the result of mechanical reproduction, go down in history as
examples of not only what is archetypal in modernism but also of what is inimitable, with just
those touches added by him which diverge from the originals (he has changed the face of the
Matisse to resemble that of his wife Rachel) being praised as the height of the sublime.specificity
of what are perceived to be originals.
But if Hart connotes the extra-filmic character of David Stein, the art forger, and
thus refers through him to Alan Rudolph, a member of his diegetic"team" also connotes Rudolph
 14

in his role of scriptwriter. This is Hart's friend Oiseau, the future Hollywood scriptwriter, an
interesting character probably based partly on two figures in expatriate Paris, the journalist
William Bird, and the bilingual journalist Eugene Jolas, who explicated the new art movements
in Twenties Paris to American readers and helped to create the myth while it was still continuing
in reality20. Says Oiseau,
If it weren't for me, people would have thought "surreal" was a breakfast food.
Oiseau is fed up with Paris, and wants to get out of his contract with the Paris Tribune
- thinking this is too difficult, he stages a mock funeral for himself after publicizing a mythical
suicide and having published the obituary which he wrote for himself. After he attends the funeral
disguised as a woman, he and Hart, whom he has finally convinced to go, leave France for
Hollywood. Meeting Hart at the bar, Oiseau says (in his female disguise)

Jesus, I just ran into Maurice Ravel in the men's room. He didn't recognize me.
(Sees Americans) You know, Paris has been taken over by people who are just imitators
of people who are imitators themselves. It's become like a parody. Believe me, Hollywood
is going to be a breath of fresh air. ....This whole experience gives me a great idea for a
picture I could write. It would be perfect for Von Stroheim.

Not only is identity a problem for the spectator, it is also a problem within the
diegesis. Nathalie de Ville's henchmen, who come to steal the originals of her paintings from
Hart's studio, take the copies instead. When Nathalie tells Stone that his pictures, the real
originals, are fakes, he believes her, because, not only are her own pictures "authenticated", but
the critics at Stone's party affirm that the Stone pictures are fakes, whereupon the owner slashes
them and throws them into the fire. On the other hand, at the end of the film, a critic holding forth
in front of the forged pictures lauds them in the following terms:

Ah, yes, Henri Matisse. Odalisque-study if you will the face-it's the most
realized of all his work and to my mind the best...Cézanne, considered to be the father
of modern (modernism?)..this revelation cannot be taught nor can it be duplicated.
Only the greatest artists can achieve what has happened here, and then only in a rare
moment of time...;
 15

The art critic seems to confirm what Libby Valentin, the art-dealer played by
Geneviève Bujold, says to Hart early on in the film when she is trying to get him to sell out and
forge Nathalie de Ville's pictures:
I never liked Caravaggio myself, but your father's Caravaggio, I loved.
Your father is a master and you've inherited all his skills.

Not only is Hart as great a forger as his father, able to improve the works he copies,
but the conclusion is clear: a forgery can also be superior to the original upon which it is modeled,
an d Rudolph's Paris should be considered as at least the equal of Hemingway's or Stein's. Thus
The Moderns is actually a defense of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,
whether this means be the magic lantern used by Nick Hart or movie camera wielded by Alan
Rudolph.
The Moderns is a film that seems to have been written for an ideal spectator who
will know about the all the literary texts, and all the painters involved in Rudolph's elaborate
scheme of connotations, a viewer who will remember to watch the credits, and who will read the
reviews: This point is illustrated by the example of the painter, Cézanne, whose importance
within the film text proper is considerably different than it seems when a certain amount of
knowledge of the literary sources used in constructing the screenplay is brought to bear upon the
film.
In the film, outside of the critics who have the last word on the authenticity and value
of works of art, Cézanne is chiefly of interest to the painter, Hart, who though an occasional
(and unwilling) forger himself, lauds Cézanne who, he says, "was never tempted to cheat."
Cézanne was also responsible for Hart's artistic vocation, since, he says, when, as a boy, he first
saw a Cézanne he burst out into perspiration as if he had a fever, undercutting this statement with
irony by saying that in fact the illness was physiological and not due to esthetic shock: the child
did have a fever, but , in the ensuing period of enforced idleness, he began to draw. This finding
of a vocation because of the works of Cézanne corresponds to what happened to Gertrude Stein
who, having bought a Cézanne from the dealer Vollard, started to write fiction (Three Lives)
while contemplating the Cézanne:
 16

It was an important purchase (the Cézanne), because in looking and

looking at this picture Gertrude Stein started to write fiction
She had begun not long before as an exercise in literature to translate
Flaubert's Trois Contes and the she had this Cézanne and she looked at it and under its
stimulus she wrote Three Lives21

Paul Cézanne, via Gertrude Stein also influenced the writing of Ernest Hemingway.
James Mellow suggests that his character, Nick Adams, who appears in his first published work,
the collection of short stories entitled in our time, is in fact an aspiring writer 22, a point brushed in
with only a few words in the published version. However, in the original typescript, Hemingway
appends to the story "Big Two Hearted River (II)" a stream-of-consciousness passage of eleven
pages including material which makes it clear that the character is a Hemingway double
Nick Adams, a fisherman-writer , whose stories carry the titles of
stories by Ernest Hemingway 23 (---) The great hope of Nick Adams the writer--
and of Ernest Hemingway--was to write stories as objective and real as the
paintings of Cézanne, to do the country as Cézanne had done it. ("You had to do it
from inside yourself.") Nick/ Hemingway remembers the Cézannes he has seen,
the portrait of Madame Cézanne at Gertrude Stein's ....

and so on.
In an encyclopedia entry for Gertrude Stein we learn that in her Lectures in
America of 1935 she compares her literary technique with that of the cinema
No two frames of a motion picture are exactly alike, yet the sequence
presents to the eye a flowing continuity. Similarly, Miss Stein, by the use of partly
repetitive statements, each making a limited advance in the theme, presents an
uninterrupted series of instantaneous visions, so that one grasps a living moment in
precise, ordered forms.124

If such is the style to which the influence of Cézanne was able to lead Gertrude Stein,
and if Alan Rudolph and Jon Bradshaw were consciously aware of the connotative resonance
their collage of periods, places, characters, texts, and media could engender - a series of echoes of
which I believe I have only been able to hear the loudest - then, upon study, this rather uneven
film about art becomes more artistic then it at first seems to be. Behind the sometimes clumsy
parody of cultural myth is an esthetic statement about film as a kind of "total work of art"

1
 17

containing its sisters, at the same time that it outdoes them. To rephrase the inimitable Gertrude
Stein, a book is a painting is a film..
The word concerto has been defined as having two meanings, one which coming
from the Italian "consertare" designates a group of instruments making beautiful music together,
and another, from the word "concertare" which indicates rivalry between the different
players.25 Alan Rudolph and Jon Bradshaw have written a film which suggests that art and
literature at one and the same time compete and blend in the "mixed-media" work of art which
film is by its very essence, a kind of concerto to which the modern movement including Cézanne,
Stein and Hemingway have only been a prelude.
1 Noxell-Smith, Geoffrey (ed) : Oxford History of World Film, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 211.
2 Richard Combs, « Interview with Alan Rudolph », Monthly Film Bulletin, 1989, page 69 In a Telerama of 1988, Rudolph
had excepted Picasso and Man Ray from this generalisation, see below Note 3.
3 "L'Argent de l'Art" « Propos d'Alan Rudolph recueillis par Vincent Tolédano », Télérama, N°2017, 7 septembre 1988.

4 It was Gertrude Stein who said that Paris was « where the Twentieth Century is happening. » ‘So Paris was the natural

background for the twentieth century; America knew it too well, knew the twentieth century too well to create it, for
America there was a glamour in the twentieth century that made it not be material for creative activity. » Gertrude Stein,
Paris France , New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, p.24.
5 « Modernism », pp 142-155, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed Robert S Nelson and Richard Shiff, Chicago, Chicago

University Press, 1996 (1st edition),page 142.

6 Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, New York, Vintage Books, 1990. A sequel Everybody's Autobiography,

was issued some years later

7 Thanks for this information to Pascale Antolin, Maître de Conférences à Michel Montaigne Bordeaux III, and author of a

recent book on Fitzgerald (Pascale Antolin-Pires. L’Objet et ses doubles. Une relecture de Fitzgerald.
Pessac : Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2000. 247 pages.)
8 Ernest Hemingway, Epigraph A Moveable Feast , (Paris est une fête), (1964), New York, Scribner, 1996, on title page

9 A Moveable Feast page 182

10 Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, op cit, page 91

11 A Moveable Feast ; op cit, pp 179-180

12 Autobiography of Alice B Toklas , op cit, pp 229-30

13 James R. Mellow, Hemingway A Life Without Consequences , New York, Da Capo Press,1993, page 149

14 Jaehne, Karen, "Time for The Moderns ," in Film Comment (New York), March/April 1988, p.27.

15 Voir George Plimpton, ed., The Best of Bad Hemingway, New York, Harcourt, 1989.

16 Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, New York, Arrow/Vintage, 1994, page 101 Also quoted by Charles

Poore in his memorial article for Hemingway in the New York Times on July 3, 1961.
17 One of the confusions he makes is "Buffy" for "Bunny" It's perhaps worth noting that Edmund Wilson, the critic and

friend of Fitzgerald, bore the nickname "Bunny"

18 Mellow , Hemingway A Life Without Consequences, op cit, page 387

19 Jaehne, « Time for the Moderrns », op cit, p. 25.

20 See the chapters in American Writers in Paris 1920-39 » Gale Research , Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. by

Karen Lane Rood ; foreword by Malcolm Cowley. - Detroit, MI : Gale Research, 1980.
21Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, page 39. In fact she had written an earlier novel, Q E D, lost for many years

and published posthumouèsly .

22 Mellow , Hemingway, op. cit., p. 272

23 Ibid, p. 274

24 James D Hart, ed, Oxford Companion to American Literature, New York, Oxford University Press, , 1995, page 634.

25Xavier Lacavalerie, « Union miracle : Critique du disque d'Alfred Brendel, Les cinq concertos pour piano de

Beethoven », Télérama 12 May 1999, p.110.

© Trudy Bolter 2009