Living in The Streets

Portrait of a Generation: Cyril Collard's "Les Nuits fauves"
Author(s): Carolyn A. Durham

Source: The French Review, Vol. 75, No. 3 (Feb., 2002), pp. 512-525
Published by: American Association of Teachers of French
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THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 75, No. 3, February 2002 Printed in
U.S.A.
Portrait of a
Generation: Cyril Collard's
Les Nuits fauves
by CarolynA. Durham
LET MEBEGIN WITHthe obvious. Cyril Collard is essentially the author of

a single work, even if the work in question does exist in multiple forms.
Collard, moreover, is dead, and his death occurred relatively early in the
last decade of the twentieth century. Thus, when the work in question, in
its final form, made history by simultaneously winning C~sar awards for
the best feature film and the best first film of 1992, Les Nuits fauves was
already, and by definition, also destined to be both Collard's only feature
film, as well as his best, and his last film, as well as his first. In this con-
text, I don't doubt that it may well seem like une viritable gageure not sim-
ply to ask any single film, and this one in particular; any single director,
and this one in particular; but even any single body of work, given this
one in particular, to serve as somehow representative of both French cin-
ema and French society in the 1990s.
Nor does it necessarily help that Les Nuits fauves is also openly autobio-
graphical in inspiration, and that reality, always difficult in Collard's case
to separate from fiction and film, became especially so once his death
from AIDS at the age of 35 definitively turned the man into a myth and
his life and career into a social and cultural phenomenon. This unusually
close identification between the man and the work curiously complicates
even further questions of textual significance and influence. Although the
books and essays that appeared virtually overnight would surely not exist
at all were it not for Les Nuits fauves, nonetheless much of that literature
focuses on Collard himself rather than on his film. Indeed, from this per-
spective, the conjunction intended to link cinema and society in the pre-
ceding paragraph sometimes appears more disjunctive than connective;
in the succinct phrase of one critic, "[LesNuits fauves], ce n'est plus un film
de cin6ma. C'est un phinomane de soci6t&"(Guerand and Moriconi 203).
Moreover, Collard's abrupt ascension to the stature of a mythic figure led
some to characterize him as unique and exceptional-to position him
apart from, rather than a part of, a particular time and place.
Still, a number of reviewers and critics, primarily French but, on occa-
sion, American as well, have also explicitly identified either Collard, his
512
CYRIL COLLARD'S LES NUITS FAUVES 513
audience, or his film with an entire generation. I quote a sample of such

designations at random and clearly, for the moment, out of context: "la
g6ndration de l'angoisse" (Collard, Condamni amour), "la g~ndration Col-
lard" (Garcin), "le porte-parole de la g~ndration Sida" (Durand-Souf-
fland), "le film culte d'une g6ndration Collard" (Liebowitz), "le t~moin
d'une (Sotinel)," "le Rimbaud des anndes Sida" (Delannoy
gn~nration
"un
173), enfant du si&cle dont la confession est devenue le brfilot
embl~matique des anndes quatre-vingt-dix" (Guerand and Moriconi 9),
"un jeune homme du si&cle" (Gravier), "the Collard generation" (Rid-
ing), "a powerfully accurate snapshot of the present historical moment"
(Cheshire), and, to end with what might be considered a somewhat
"official" version, in the words of former minister of culture Jack Lang:
"toute une g~ndration s'est reconnue dans le cindma de Cyril Collard"
(qtd. in M~dioni 148). Moreover, Collard saw himself as the witness of
his generation: "I1y a pour moi la mime n6cessit6, que ce soit pour la lit-
t~rature ou le cinema, d'essayer de t~moigner de son temps" (qtd. in
Guerand and Moriconi 160). What I find intriguing here is that the con-
nection between Collard and a particular generation frequently takes
the tautological form of "la g6ndration Collard." Rather than speaking
for or to some preconstituted group of individuals, already bound
together by a common cultural or social attribute, as one would expect,
Collard appears able, on the one hand, to bring a previously nonexistent
generation into existence, in keeping with a very different meaning of
the word generation, and, on the other hand, to constitute a generation
unto himself.
It is certainly true that Collard's own professional personality is fully
consistent with the notion that a single individual might live a life suffi-
ciently diverse to be in and of itself broadly representative. Although
film is unquestionably the most collaborative of genres, Les Nuits fauves
is, to a large extent, a one-man show in which Collard performs at once
as novelist, screenwriter, songwriter, musician, director, and lead actor,
just to limit myself to the roles in which he stars. More importantly, the
film itself is similarly eclectic and excessive in form and quite deliber-
ately so. Collard refers to his own work as an "objet bizarre," which he
acknowledges "peut apparaitre comme h6tbroclite, h~tbrogane [vu de
l'ext~rieur]," in keeping with what he describes as the "bulemic" charac-
ter of Jean, Collard's alter ego and the hero of his film, who refuses to fil-
ter experience, to make any choice that might exclude other possibilities
(Jousse and Toubiana). Thus, Les Nuits fauves overflows with a wealth of
potentially incompatible material. Part commercial, part music video,
part road movie, part realistic drama, part romantic fantasy, part com-
edy, part tragedy, part melodrama, part action/adventure film, part doc-
umentary, Collard's film constantly mixes genres and changes moods,
and it does so at often breathtaking speed. This "esth~tique coup de
poing" (Toubiana 22) is further characterized by fast tracking, a highly
514 FRENCH REVIEW 75.3
mobile camera-one which, in Collard's words, "gigote dans tous les

sens" (Jousse and Toubiana 78)-and aggressive, in-your-face closeups,
suddenly juxtaposed to explicitly self-referential shots that distance the
spectator from the very reality they simultaneously reflect and reproduce.
In form alone, then, Les Nuits fauves is not only a product of the visual
technology and the viewing habits of the late twentieth century, but it was
predestined to be most readily accessible to that group of young specta-
tors, ranging in age from approximately 15 to 25, who did indeed turn the
film into a cult phenomenon. Compared to other generations, this "g6ndra-
tion Collard" has been persistently characterized in the mass media (I am
drawing here primarily upon a series of cover stories or special "dossiers"
that appeared almost weekly in Le Nouvel Observateurthroughout the
1990s) as follows: fragmented, eclectic, multicultural, more diverse, more
tolerant, less cohesive, splintered, amorphous, cynical but optimistic; in
short: elusive. In terms of media preferences, these viewers respond well to
aggression, preferably visual, violent, and sexually explicit; they are wary
of linear-plotted entertainments; and they prefer layered story lines that
resist resolution (see, in particular, Righini).
But if adolescents and young adults immediately warmed to Les Nuits
fauves, the film's critical reception, in contrast, proved to be almost as
varied, confused, and contradictory as the film itself was often per-
ceived to be. Notably, Howard Feinstein describes Les Nuits fauves as "a
slick if incoherent assortment of tracking shots, jump cuts, oblique
angles, and other self-conscious formal footwork"; and Richard Corliss
tries unsuccessfully to overlook a structure that he clearly finds equally
disorienting: "O.K., these days narrative coherence is for wimps." To
some extent, this is arguably a specifically American reaction, and I
introduce it here primarily to establish a comparative context useful in
cultural analysis. In the last decade, HIV has inspired a sufficient num-
ber of literary texts to have given rise in the United States to a parallel
body of critical work, generally informed by the assumption that "art
about AIDS tends to be raw" (Gaffney). As if the sheer destructive
power and human tragedy of the disease itself resisted all attempts at
aesthetic transformation, Emmanuel Nelson in AIDS: The Literary
Response characteristically qualifies the issue of AIDS as "too real to be
easily metaphorized or elegantly aestheticized" (1).1 Clearly, then, in this
context, it would be the height of insensitivity even to address such
texts-produced by gay men, assumed to be autobiographical, and read
as realistic-in explicitly critical terms, let alone to go on to assess their
relative aesthetic merits.2
But Collard is not American; in France Les Nuits fauves is not a film
about AIDS; and French audiences and certainly French critics, long
accustomed to the aesthetic practices of "New Novelists," New Wave
filmmakers, and postmodern theorists, no doubt have a somewhat
greater appreciation for textual experimentation in and of itself. But, in

that case, essentially the same problem may simply present itself in
reverse to the extent that formal innovation and narrative structure come
to be of interest independently of message and meaning. In France, it was
the status of Les Nuits fauves as, in the words of Serge Toubiana, "sans
conteste le film le plus ddrangeant du cinema frangais depuis longtemps"
(22) that put Collard on the cover of Les Cahiersdu Cinima twice within a
single year. In her study of post-New Wave French cinema, Jill Forbes
makes a key distinction between French and Anglo-American filmmak-
ers, one clearly consistent with broader cultural and societal differences
among France, England, and the United States, that is pertinent here. In
contrast to the desire of British and American directors "to change the
world rather than our ways of seeing the world," Forbes asserts that
French filmmakers seek "not to change society but to change the cinema.
... [T]heir impetus is always to film in a different way rather than to film
different things" (261).
Although earlier incarnations of the enfant terrible,to whom Collard-
"le Rimbaud des anndes Sida" (Delannoy 173), "the heir to Jean Genet"
(James)-has been compared, may once have appeared to abandon hope
in the capacity of literature to change the world and to choose a lifestyle
whose mythic dimensions would overshadow their work, their lasting
heritage lies in the practice of a revolutionary poetics in which politics
cannot finally be separated from the language in which it is expressed.
By chance, Collard and Genet were born on the same day some fifty
years apart, a coincidence that becomes something closer to a sense of
destiny in Les Nuits fauves, whose hero shares Genet's first name. The
news that Jean is HIV positive-the announcement, that is, of his own
death sentence-is revealed to us at the precise moment that he learns
that Genet has just died. The single sentence that Jean quotes at the
time-"Je pense Acette phrase de lui: 'La violence seule peut achever la
brutalitd des hommes' "-announces and reflects both the subject and the
style of Les Nuits fauves.
Clearly, literary influence can play a significant role in illuminating the
relationship between a text and its social and cultural context; it figures
importantly in what one might call the "codes of contagion" that help to
create and to define a national literature. Thus, although I could at this
point use the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and John Cassavetes as a frame
of reference, I want to propose that Genet, who made only a single film-
Un Chant d'amour (1950)-albeit one he both wrote and directed, none-
theless provides more appropriate access to Les Nuits fauves.3 Collard's
lifelong fascination with Genet included, in particular, a shared concern
with the exploration of sexuality and the indictment of racism. Because
we know that Collard read Edmund White's biography of Genet, let me
cite White's succinct explanation of Genet's characteristic narrative
strategies as they evolved from Journaldu voleur, which Collard sought to

adapt to the screen (Midioni 61), to the posthumously published Un
Captifamoureux:
In Prisonerof Love,Genet's typical cinematic intercutting becomes rapid,
constant, vertiginous-a formal device for showing the correspondence
between elements where no connections had been previously sus-
pected. . . In the novels of the 1940s the poet's urge to uncover corre-
spondences is encoded in brilliant metaphors. Here metaphors have
been replaced by a different method-the tight sequencing of different
subjects without transition. (627)
Collard uses techniques remarkably similar to those that White attributes
to Genet's late prose to remarkably similar purposes. The language of Les
Nuits fauves depends on such devices as rapid intercutting, associative
editing, and transition by ellipsis and juxtaposition to develop an origi-
nal strategy for the parallel exploration and understanding of two appar-
ently unrelated, though equally significant, phenomena of contemporary
French society: post-HIV sexuality and anti-Arab racism.
The title of Les Nuits fauves immediately identifies a metaphoric system
that not only functions internally to structure Collard's film but also con-
nects its images to France's visual and cultural past. Fauvism most obvi-
ously recalls a movement in French painting that emerged around 1900
and briefly characterized the work of another group of enfants terribles,
whose "wild animals" included such artists as Derain, Dufy, Vlaminck,
and Matisse.4 The paintings of the Fauves are marked by the bold use of
vivid color, combined in formal patterns that often include violent juxta-
position. In Les Nuits fauves, Collard pays homage to these pictorial pre-
decessors by filming a number of scenes in exaggerated shades of the
primary colors of red, blue, and yellow. The official publicity poster for
the film offers a particularly vivid example of the expressionistic combi-
nation of all three colors in alternating bands that stretch across a single
canvas, leaving visible the broad brush strokes that created them. Within
the film itself, shots of Jean's apartment most frequently show the three
colors in juxtaposition, although they do, in fact, appear in many other
settings, both interior and exterior, as well.
The rapid intercutting and elliptical syntax of Collard's narrative style
also recall the surprising contrasts and contradictions of color on a Fauve
canvas. Metaphorically, fauvism also clearly evokes the powerfully sen-
sory and sensual nature of Jean's nighttime sexual encounters. Although
fauvism has traditionally been seen as primarily decorative, more recent
accounts, such as those of James Herbert, have suggested that Fauve
paintings actually engaged controversial social and political issues of
their time, that "[they] made politics from culture" (8). If the notion of a
socially engaged art of unusual purity and directness, whose juxtaposi-
tion of bold color borders on the raw, makes us think, of course, of Les
Nuits fauves, another contemporary work of art immediately, and surely

appropriately, also comes to mind: one cannot help but picture the pow-
erfully evocative AIDS quilt, "le Patchwork des noms."
Given the structural innovations of Collard's work, on which I have
insisted, any attempt at summary clearly requires that what might be
identified as a primary plotline be artificially separated from the context
in which it is embedded and then reconstructed as if it were an inde-
pendent and coherent whole. In this sense alone, Les Nuits fauves tells the
story of a bisexual cameraman who is HIV-positive with early symptoms
of AIDS. On the one hand, Jean is caught between his relationship with
Laura (Romane Bohringer), an 18-year-old woman whose love takes the
form of jealousy and obsession, and his attraction to Samy (Carlos
Lopez), the friend and sometime lover who is increasingly drawn to the
violent racism of far-right politics. On the other hand, Jean is also
addicted to "les nuits fauves" of the title, casual experiences of sado-
masochistic sex that take place with anonymous men along the banks of
the Seine. Because Les Nuits fauves is constructed as a "slice of life," Jean
also travels, works, drives through Paris, dines with friends, visits his
parents, takes drugs, goes to parties, and so on. To the extent, however,
that dramatic conflict or narrative resolution come into play, Laura is the
source of both. Her growing hysteria and a suicide attempt finally result
in her forced hospitalization, during which her claim that she has been
infected with HIV by Jean is proven false. Jean, however, will subse-
quently use the possibility of infection as a threat to save the life of an
Arab youth surrounded by Samy's group of fascist skinheads.
Up to this point nothing that I have said would necessarily distinguish
between Collard's film and the 1989 novel on which it is based. Yet we
know that Collard had considerable difficulty with this transposition and
that he struggled, both while adapting the novel to the screen and while
editing the final version of the film, to keep certain elements of the novel
from disappearing (see Beaulieu; and Guerand and Moriconi 185ff).
According to Philippe Delannoy, Collard's difficult search for a producer
willing to back the film may have forced him to make some changes
against his will and apart from any aesthetic motivation: "A la rigueur, le
film pourrait se faire &la condition qu'il enlkve la pisse, le Sida, les voy-
ous, les fachos, les p6dds, les beurs, le sexe, les capotes, la violence, la
drogue, la podsie &la Jean Genet" (140). But if the film is indeed a some-
what more sanitized and certainly a far less complex version of the novel,
Delannoy's description merely lists the raw materials that had to be
streamlined without identifying the significant restructuring they under-
went in the process. For there is a difference-and de taille. If we are to
believe Collard and his public, the screen adaptation of Les Nuits fauves
results in nothing more nor less than yet another version of the romantic
love story (see, for example, M~dioni 95, 136; and Guerand and Moriconi).
518 FRENCHREVIEW75.3
Love stories, of course, can raise questions that may fairly be character-
ized as moral, at the very least, if not fully social or political. Although
the behavior of Jean, who initially makes love to Laura without inform-
ing her that he is HIV-positive and then continues to have unprotected
sex with her once she knows, tended to strike American audiences as
dangerously irresponsible, French spectators were initially either more
blas6 or perhaps simply more romantic. Collard's young fans, his young
female fans, in particular, found the implicit argument of Les Nuits
fauves-a late twentieth-century version of the belief that "true love con-
quers all," including the risk of contracting AIDS-more appealing than
appalling (see Liebowitz 4-9). Moreover, in the last interview he gave
before his death, Collard openly endorses this view: "C'est d'ailleurs tris
romantique, cette lutte entre l'amour et la mort, Eros et Thanatos. Laura
. pense que l'amour la pr6serve du danger, que rien ne peut lui arriver.
.
Cet acte, c'est du romantisme pur et dur que les jeunes comprennent;
c'est aussi un peu la passion folle de Chopin et de George Sand" (qtd. in
Ettori 53). This last allusion is once again culturally specific; it draws
upon a strongly French-inspired tradition of passionate love, whose
codes Denis de Rougemont has traced back to Tristan et Iseult.
The problem with this interpretation is that the film is not really about
what Laura thinks or does. It is, in fact, Jean, and not Laura, whose trans-
formation from novel to film is crucial to the reinterpretation of Les Nuits
fauves as a heterosexual love story that brings redemption to a new vari-
ety of romantic hero. Jean's unexpected naivet6 and return to inno-
cence-his "impression d'&trecomme un gamin"-directly conflicts with
the younger Laura's explicitly sexual past and desire for a similar pres-
ent. Jean wants to give Laura stuffed animals and extravagant birthday
dinners, affectionate cuddling, and romantic kisses by the Seine; Laura
wants to have sex. At the end of the film, moreover, it is Jean who pro-
poses reconciliation and still harbors fantasies of traditional marriage
and family. Thus, Jean's final words, although they certainly represent a
highly ambivalent and curiously disembodied "I love you," encourage
us to believe that Jean has finally learned to love.
I want to emphasize, however, that this description, although accurate
from a particular point of view, also seriously oversimplifies the com-
plexity of Collard's film. Meaning is frequently delivered in Les Nuits
fauves through, and as a result of, the editing process; it lies in the juxta-
position of successive sequences. Thus Jean's most idyllic moments are
ironically undermined even as they unfold. Laura and Jean's first romantic
kiss on the banks of the Seine contrasts with the subsequent passage in
which Jean and Samy pick up and attempt to share sexually a girl whom
they meet in the streets. A passionate lovemaking scene on the quais of
the Seine is arguably already contaminated by an excessively sentimental
cut from the very conventional couples who are dancing on a bateau
mouche,but, in addition, an experience that Laura explicitly characterizes
as unique to her heterosexual affair with Jean in fact takes place at the
very site of his "nuits fauves." Jean's final bout with sentiment occurs as
he says goodbye to Laura, who is holding a little boy in her arms: "Je
regarde ce bambin blond dans les bras de Laura et je me dis que c'est
vraiment notre enfant. Comment a-t-on pu faire un enfant aussi blond?"
This insistance on the child's unusual fairness of coloring seems tragi-
cally ironic, in retrospect; in the following sequence of the film, neo-Nazi
thugs violently attack a nonwhite victim because of his racial "impurity."
The explanation for the kinder and gentler hero of the film can no
doubt be found in the confluence of a number of factors, including, as I
have suggested, the purely pragmatic and apparently extending to the
purely personal: Collard himself attributed the evolution in his fictional
counterpart to the simple fact that he had fallen in love with Corine Blue
during the filming of Les Nuits fauves (Ettori). But love also sells main-
stream movies, and not only those that are produced in Hollywood. In
Lucy Fischer's words, "It is a truism of the commercial cinema that the
subject of love is central to the standard plot mechanism. Whether the
genre is western, musical, crime film, or comedy, the fulcrum of the
drama typically rests on heterosexual romance" (89). If Fischer and other
feminist film critics have been primarily concerned with how this roman-
tic plot structure entraps women in dramas that also privilege the indi-
vidual hero, psychological interpretation, and the private sphere, much
remains to be learned about how love functions in films that engage a
specific sociocultural context and demand a political or ideological read-
ing. From this perspective, the use of the narrative of romance as a
metaphor for colonialism in a number of French films, most of which
date from the same decade as Les Nuits fauves, offers an intriguing paral-
lel to the intersections of romance and racism in Collard's film.5 Auto-
biographical works by contemporary women filmmakers (e.g., Claire
Denis, Brigitte Rofian), whose sex no doubt provides the same access as
does Collard's sexuality to the ambivalent positioning of the outsider,
tend, in particular, to adopt a critical perspective in which the narrative
of romance, apparently foregrounded as in Les Nuits fauves, ironically
serves simultaneously to undermine the discourse of colonialism.
Although I do not agree with those reviewers who argue that the pri-
macy granted to heterosexual romance in Les Nuits fauves allows the film
to be interpreted as homophobic (see Feinstein), it does serve to fore-
ground Jean's bisexuality. The importance of this image of mediation, or
rather, intermediacy, as a social and political metaphor is reinforced by
the presence, original to the film, of the travelowho sings Edith Piaf love
songs in a bar frequented at one and the same time by gays, transvestites,
skinheads, and beurs. This ambiguous figure functions, as does Jean's
own sexual ambivalence, as and at the locus where the discourses of le
sida and la xenophobie meet to intersect and, most often, to clash. Al-
though Jean will commit himself to a specifically political action at the
end of the film, an event to which I will return in a moment, Les Nuits
fauves is predominantly a film of its times. France in the 1990s was a
country marked by a vaguely defined but highly persistent sense of
malaise, which has only very recently begun to dissipate; it was a nation
in transit, constantly changing, often in spite of itself, and without any
clear sense of where it was headed nor of what it would have become
when it had arrived. Appropriately, then, among the most characteristic
visual images in Collard's film are those of passageways, tunnels, corri-
dors. Beginning with the mysterious cave in Morocco with which the
film opens and including the shadowy quais along the Seine by night, the
tunnels through which Jean's car speeds, and the innumerable hallways
of its Paris settings, Les Nuits fauves conveys the sense of a world of end-
less possibilities but devoid of any sense of direction.
A more important concern is that the foregrounding of heterosexual
romance in the film version of Les Nuits fauves may displace the thematic
centrality of anti-Arab racism. Certainly this would be consistent with the
interests of Collard's primary audience. In a 1993 Sofres poll, the number
one concern of 600 young people between 18 and 24 was "la pr6vention
du sida" with a 79% support rate. Only 40% perceived "la lutte contre le
racisme" to be of primary importance and only an astonishing 18% cited
"l'intdgration des immigrds" (Righini). For Collard, too, clearly the pre-
vention of AIDS is of crucial interest, but it serves at the same time as a
strategy to denounce racial violence.6 Jean's illness and its treatment lead
to a series of physiological changes in his body; the most important of
these is the appearance of Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer of the skin whose
very visibility serves to link homosexuality, AIDS, and racial difference.
Jean's use of his own "bad blood" as a weapon to avenge an attack on
someone of color similarly equates racism with a fatal and infectious dis-
ease. Thomas Sotinel is one of the few critics to have made this connection
explicit in his review of Les Nuitsfauves, which he describes as follows: "A
la fois autoportrait d'un jeune homme brillant et condamnd et portrait
d'une socidt6 malade. Du sida, bien stir, mais aussi du racisme, de la pr&-
carit6, de la violence, de la corruption" (See also Cheshire).
Collard, in contrast, might appear to make the same error as most other
reviewers in substituting a relationship of opposition between AIDS and
racist ideology for one of similarity: "C'est un peu gros comme symbo-
lisme, le sida contre le fascisme" (Jousse and Toubiana). But in fact, there
is nothing remotely "gros," nothing obvious or unsubtle about the anal-
ogy, given the moral ambiguity that characterizes the film and which
Collard expresses elsewhere by drawing on specifically racial imagery:
"Les Nuits fauves sont nds de l'idde d'assembler deux contraires, le som-
bre et le solaire. Je voulais insister sur deux ou trois choses. Exprimer que
rien n'est jamais noir ou blanc mais noir et blanc" (qtd. in Madden 88).
Thus Jean has far too much in common with Samy for his revolt against
the virus poisoning his body to be significantly more convincing than
Samy's own search for purification through the blood rituals of the so-
called "alchemists." "Virus" is, of course, also a common metaphor for
the evil of racism (Sontag). Samy's initiation into the alchemy of fascism
begins with the same rituals of violent, sadomasochistic sex that Jean
seeks out nightly. Not least of all, by having unprotected sex with Laura,
Collard's hero is already a potential killer long before he conceives of
using his own blood as a weapon.
In this context, too, le fauvisme functions to establish an important net-
work of associations. In the lighting of Les Nuits fauves, Collard privileges
the ambiance of the clair-obscur,whose dialogue of light and shadow
reflects the moral ambiguity of his film. Thus, the explicitly cinematic
term, le chien-loup, serves as a mise-en-abymewithin the film; the term
recurs both to identify the moment of temporal ambivalence that sepa-
rates day from night at either sunset or dawn and to recall the metaphoric
dilemma to which the expression owes its name. If the confusion between
the "tame" and the "wild" refers to the men whose "savage" sexual
behavior awakens Jean's desire, it also has clear racial connotations, as
emphasized by the fact that black and white footage is juxtaposed to color
when the term is first introduced. The true "fauves" in the film are the
skinheads whose racial hatred literally transforms them into wild beasts
who prey on their victims in horribly savage ways (e.g., they propose to
cut off an Arab youth's genitals and stuff them in his mouth).
Finally, I want to note the important function, both thematic and for-
mal, that the sound track serves in the film and to cite several examples
of its rich evocative power that are directly pertinent here. Although
sound and music may well be "crucial for spectatorial identification" in
all films, as Shohat and Stam have recently reminded us (209), the popu-
lar music that accompanies Les Nuits fauves could clearly be assumed to
have special appeal for Collard's youthful audience. This expectation is
heightened for an MTV generation by the fact that the songs, written and
often sung by Collard himself, are in either French or English and often
in both languages at once. Although the CD sold extremely well on its
own, Collard's songs are also foregrounded within the film, where they
substitute for dialogue or voice-over and serve as key transitional
devices at times of rapid on-screen visual movement. Indeed, the very
title of the film and its significance are embedded in the English-lan-
guage "Paradise":
Living hard, leaving fast,

Wild senses all alive,
You'll come and then dive
Into the savage nights.
Collard has noted his preference for "un fonctionnement 6motionnel et

impressioniste de la musique" in describing the film's score in language
that clearly echoes the visual effects of fauvism:
522 FRENCHREVIEW75.3
Les chansons viennent comme des taches de couleur se glisser entre les
schnes de dialogue. Elles sont comme un autre language .... Je voulais
une grande diversitd, une sorte de patchwork musical .... La musique
participe dans le film Al'id&ede la multiplicit6 des images et des sons
qui caractdrisent notre 6poque, i l'abolition des frontibres gdo-
graphiques, affectives, sexuelles. (CD jacket)
"La Rage," written and sung by Collard, accompanies the opening cred-
its of the film and precedes any visual images. The word rage, intro-
duced in a context of uncertainty and interrogation ("Qui peut dire
exactement / Qu'il sait ce qu'est la rage"), successively evokes not only
both violent anger and intense passion but an infectious and fatal illness
that can transform human beings into savage animals; it is, in short, a
microcosm of the metaphoric structure of the film as a whole.7 It is per-
haps not surprising, then, that this bilingual song also includes what
would appear to be a direct reference to Collard's self-identification
with Jean Genet:
Chercher au-deld du mal

Et bien avant la morale,
Se riveiller soldat
D'une armde de forgats.8
The very roughness of Les Nuits fauves-its unfiltered diversity, its

elliptical transitions, its multiple and sometimes contradictory allusions,
its lack of narrative coherence-is what allows Collard to suggest con-
nections that may not normally occur to us-indeed, that we may even
actively resist seeing. Yet, such connections are also fundamental to any
understanding of a contemporary French reality that will be character-
ized, of necessity, by "contamination," that is, made "impure" by contact
with others. In the words of Fr6ddric Strauss, Les Nuits fauves constitutes
"une communication forc6ment impure, faite d'images h6t6roclites, de
mots composites ... et forc6ment cacaphonique, avivant la n6cessit6 de
redonner une place &l'Autre." It is precisely this refusal to integrate the
disparate, to erase difference, and to deny conflict that allows Collard to
speak beyond his own experience, to reflect a generation and a decade.
Moreover, the specific situation of victims of AIDS can increasingly be
linked to the final sequence of Les Nuits fauves, in which Jean proclaims
his passion for life even in the face of, in his case, almost certain death: "Je
suis vivant .... Je vais peut-8tre mourir du sida. Mais ce n'est plus ma vie.
Je suis dans la vie." In the most recent article to date devoted to Collard,
Rollet and Williams cite this focus on life as what distinguishes his work
from that of other gay filmmakers of the same period: "Collard offers his
French audience the first-and possibly only-optimistic HIV-positive
character" But in France, as we know, Collard neither wished to be
(198).2
nor was either interpreted or remembered as a director of specifically gay
films. Although his untimely death separates Les Nuits fauves from a new
generation of young French filmmakers whose work has led to their
inclusion of late in a "nouvelle nouvelle vague," he can rightfully claim a
place as a precursor to what is also being called a cinema "Ala premiere
personne" (see, for example, Lopate). Collard provides one model for
Cassavetes-inspired camera work (e.g. hand-held camera, improvisation,
jump cuts) and political engagement which speaks out, notably, against
the racism of contemporary French society. Cyril Collard, had he lived,
would certainly have been among the 59 French filmmakers who in
February 1997 spoke out publicly, and not just through their films, against
the unfair immigration laws of Debrd and Pasqua (see Herzberg). Even as
AIDS-related deaths have declined, racism unfortunately appears to be
ever more resilient. The fact that 18% of those under 25 voted for Le Pen
in 1997, an eight-point increase over 1988 and three percentage points
above the national average (Beckmann), reminds us of the ongoing ur-
gency of what Collard believed to be the other crucial challenge facing the
young spectators who transformed Les Nuits fauves into a portrait of their
generation.'0
THE COLLEGE OF WOOSTER
Notes
'See also Kruger; Murphey and Poirier.

2The context in France, where Herv4 Guibert and Guy Hocquenghem are among the best
known of contemporary gay "writers of AIDS" and receive serious literary attention, would
appear to be quite different.
3Characteristics of Pasolini's work shared by Collard include the structural use of
metaphor and analogy, grounded in concealed connections; hybridity; paradox; an interest
in the sacred; and discontinuous editing. Characteristics of Cassavetes that recall Collard's
filmmaking include a present-tense cinema of the "surface"; apparent chaos; in-your-face
filmmaking; perpetual motion; fluid notion of the self; and raw data left visible (See also
Toubiana). Cf. Maurice Pialat.
4The designation les Fauves is attributed to a reference to "the wild beasts" made by art
critic Louis Vauxcelles upon entering a room with paintings by Vlaminck, Derain, Macquet,
Puy, Roualt, and Matisse at the 1905 Salon d'automne.
se.g., Claire Denis's Chocolat (1989), Brigitte Rofian's Outremer (1990), Jean-Jacques
Annaud's adaptation of Marguerite Duras's L'Amant Indochine
(1992), R~gis Wargnier's
(1992).
6The extensive network of allusions to France's colonialist past in North Africa, which in
Collard's novel accompanies and enriches the critique of contemporary racism directed
against French immigrants and citizens of Arab descent, has largely disappeared from the
film version of Les Nuits fauves. Still, at the very moment when Laura enters a clinic to be
tested for AIDS, we learn that her mother grew up in French colonialist Algeria.
7Inher important discussion of "AIDS and its metaphors," Susan Sontag recalls the rabies
phobia of nineteenth-century France, in which fear focused less on the disease as lethal than
as literally dehumanizing. Collective fantasy held that infection transformed people into
maddened animals and unleashed uncontrollable sexual impulses (38-39). More recently,
Jean-Marie Le Pen has used the reassuring Western belief that an AIDS epidemic originated
in-and has been since confined to-Africa as part of the National Front's xenophobic pro-
paganda (51-52, 66).
8In"L'Oiseau noir," Collard similarly associates himself with Rimbaud:
Un grand oiseau noir
Qui a perdu la mimoire
Et qui s'entite Avivre
Derriereles bateaux ivres.
9Ina recent interview in the Nouvel Observateur(Armanet), the singer Mano Solo, in some
ways Collard's successor among French youth, notes that even as "le fl6au continue" in the
third world, and especially in Africa, the future of those who are HIV positive in developed
countries has dramatically altered: "Ceux condamn&s A mourir doivent se rdhabituer A
vivre."
0Jl want to take this opportunity to thank a former student, Andrew Druliner, for first
introducing me to Collard's work. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as a paper
at a conference sponsored by the AFCS in April of 1999. For a related discussion of the
novel on which Collard's film is based, see Durham.
Works Cited
Armanet, "Le Thmoignage du chanteur Mano Solo." Le Nouvel Observateur23-29

Francois.
janvier 1997: 4-7.
Beckmann, Ren&."R~serv6aux Battants." Le Nouvel Observateur28 mai-3 juin 1998: 9-10.
Beaulieu, Lise. "LesNuitsfauves au montage." Cahiersdu cinima 466 (1993): 8-13.
Carroll, Raymonde. Evidencesinvisibles:Amiricains et Frangaisau quotidien.Paris: Seuil, 1987.
Cheshire, Godfrey. "Self Expressions: Cyril Collard's Savage Nights." Film Comment
January-February 1994: 74-77.
Collard, Cyril. L'Ange sauvage:carnets. Paris: Flammarion, 1993.
--. Condamni amour. Paris: Flammarion, 1987.
--. Les Nuits fauves. Paris: Flammarion, 1989.
Corliss, Richard. "C'est la Mort." Time March 14, 1994: 103.
Delannoy, Philippe. Cyril Collard:l'ange noir. Domaine frangais: Rocher, 1995.
Durand-Souffland, Stdphane. "Les Jeunes et le sida." Le Figaro 15 avril 1994: 1.
Durham, Carolyn A. "Codes of Contagion: Cyril Collard's Les Nuits fauves." French Forum
24 (May 1999): 233-50.
Ettori, Damienne. "Interview." Paris Match 18 mars 1993: 53.
Feinstein, Howard. "Savage Nights." CindasteOct. 1994: 50-51.
Fischer, Lucy. Shot/Countershot:Film Traditionand Women'sCinema.Princeton: Princeton UP,
1989.
Forbes, Jill. The Cinemain FranceAfter the New Wave.Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.
Gaffney, Elizabeth. "AIDS and Degradation." New YorkTimes 13 Feb. 1994: sec. 7: 23.
Garcin, J~r6me. "Les Nuits fauves: un film sans piti&." L'Evinement du Jeudi 11-17 mars
1993: 116.
Genet, Jean. Un Captifamoureux.Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
--. Journaldu voleur. Paris: Gallimard, 1949.
Gravier, Jean-Michel. "Cyril Collard." Paris Match 18 mars 1992: 48-52.
Guerand, Jean-Philippe, and Martine Moriconi. Cyril Collard: La Passion. Paris: Ramsay,
1993.
Herbert, James D. Fauve Painting: TheMaking of Cultural Politics. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992.
Herzberg, Nathaniel. "Les Lois sur l'immigration suscitent un foisonnement de protesta-
tions." Le Monde 12 f~vrier 1997: 9.
James, Caryn. "Bisexual Bravado Unto Death." New YorkTimes 27 Feb. 1994: sec. 2: 16.
Jousse, Thierry, et Serge Toubiana. "Propos recueillis." Cahiersdu Cincma460 (1992): 77-79.
Kruger, Steven F. AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science. New York:
Garland, 1996.
Lagrange, Hugues, et Brigitte Lhoward. "Comment l'amour vient aux adolescents." Le
Nouvel Observateur24-30 avril 1997: 36-37.
Lopate, Phillip. "Grim, Shocking, Didactic, a New New Wave Rolls In." New YorkTimes 22
Nov. 1998: sec. 2: 15+.
Liebowitz, Nicole. "Les Carnets intimes de Cyril Collard." Le Nouvel Observateur28 aofit
1993: 4-11.
M~dioni, Gilles. Cyril Collard.Paris: Flammarion, 1995.
Murphey, Timothy F., and Suzanne Poirier, eds. Writing AIDS: Gay Literature,Language,and
Analysis. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.
Riding, Alan. "The French Reconsider an Idol's Martyrdom." New York Times April 29,
1994: BI+.
Righini, Mariella. "18-25 Ans: les d~boussol&s." Le Nouvel Observateurjanvier 1993: 5-11.
Rollet, Brigitte and James S. Williams, "Visions of Excess: Filming/Writing the Gay Self in
Collard's Savage Nights." Gay Signatures: Gay and Lesbian Theory, Fiction and Film in
France, 1945-1995. Eds. Owen Heathcote, Alex Hughes, and James S. Williams. New
York: Oxford/Berg, 1998.
Rougemont, Denis de. L'Amouret l'occident.Paris: Plon, 1972.
Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism:Multiculturalism and the Media.
London: Routledge, 1994.
Sontag, Susan. AIDS and its Metaphors.New York: Farrar, 1988.
Sotinel, Thomas. "Cyril Collard et les exorcistes." Le Monde 17-18 avril 1994: 1.
Strauss, Frederic. "Cyril Collard, un art neuf." Cahiersdu Cinima 466 (1993): 6.
Toubiana, Serge. "Carpe diem and Night." Cahiersdu Cinima octobre 1992: 22-25.
Wetsel, David. "The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: The Emerging Literature of AIDS in
France." AIDS: The Literary Response. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. New York: Twayne,
1992. 95-113.
White, Edmund. Genet:A Biography.New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Worth, Fabienne. "Le Sacrd et le sida: les representations de la sexualit6 et leurs contradic-
tions en France 1971-1996." Les TempsModernesfdvrier 1997: 75-113.

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Portrait of a Generation: Cyril Collard's "Les Nuits fauves"

Author(s): Carolyn A. Durham

LET MEBEGIN WITHthe obvious. Cyril Collard is essentially the author of

audience, or his film with an entire generation. I quote a sample of such

mobile camera-one which, in Collard's words, "gigote dans tous les

greater appreciation for textual experimentation in and of itself. But, in

strategies as they evolved from Journaldu voleur, which Collard sought to

Nuits fauves, another contemporary work of art immediately, and surely

Living hard, leaving fast,

Collard has noted his preference for "un fonctionnement 6motionnel et

Chercher au-deld du mal

The very roughness of Les Nuits fauves-its unfiltered diversity, its

THE COLLEGE OF WOOSTER

'See also Kruger; Murphey and Poirier.

Armanet, "Le Thmoignage du chanteur Mano Solo." Le Nouvel Observateur23-29

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