Books

Fitm Criticism values a lively discourse about the printed word on

film and encourages potential book reviewers to contact the Book
Review Editor, Harry Kloman, <kloman@pitt.edu>

Frangois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality and Film

Adaptation
By Robert Stam
Rutgers University Press, 2006; 239 pp.; $62, hardcover; $23.95, paper.

Reviewed by Erin Foster

"The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an

individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary."
— Fran9ois Tmffaut, published in Arts magazine. May 1957.

Fran9ois Truffaut's own filmmaking, particularly his Jules

and Jim, Two English Girls, and The Man Who Loved Women, reflected
his vision of the future of cinema. Robert Stam's new book, Frangois
Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation,
illuminates this idea by exploring the creative links between the films
and their source materials, including Henri-Pierre Roche's novels and
diaries, the diaries and letters of his many lovers, and Tmffaut's own
personal connections to them. Highly ambitious in scope, the book
is both a fascinating biography and a valuable resource for scholars
of film, avant garde art history, and gender, sexuality, and adaptation
studies.
Published when the Roche was in his seventies, Jules and Jim
and Two English Girls are loosely autobiographical novels depicting
particular personal relationships Roche had as a young man. Jules and
Jim tells the semi-fictionalized story ofhis menage with Franz Hessel
(Jim in the novel and film) and Helen Gmnd Hessel (Kate in the novel,
Catherine in the film) beginning in 1925. Two English Girls narrates
Roche's affairs with sisters Violet and Margaret Hart beginning in
1895. In both relationships, all of the participants were active letter
and diary writers, and often they read and commented on each others'
private joumals via what Stam calls polyphonic writing. Roche infused

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his fictions with these documents, some of which were later published
on their own. One thing becomes clear immediately upon entering this
intertexual world: All of these people were obsessed with both the act
of sex and with writing about it. (Both Roche and Helen Grund Hessel
refer to Roche's penis as "God," for instance.) As Stam points out,
language constantly permeates sex, and sex itself becomes a sort of
language for the lovers.
Yet Stam lets the complex histories of these relationships speak
for themselves, without judging, moralizing, or over-theorizing about
the often sado-masochistic or misogynist subtext of the participants'
thoughts and actions. In a subtle move of critical analysis, Stam
allows the specters of Freud, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault to hover
over the text, much like Claude's ubiquitous mother in Two English
Girls—without drawing easy theoretical conclusions or suffocating
the reader's biographical curiosity.
At times, the book reads as a veritable who's who of the avant
garde scene, verging deliciously on & Hollywood Babylon of sorts for
the cultural scene of the era. Roche and the Hessel experienced the
modemist art movement in New York, Paris, and Berlin during the
first World War firsthand. They mingled with luminaries like Marcel
Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and
Alfred Stieglitz. Walter Benjamin even lived with the Hessels for a
time, collaborating with Franz on Proust translations while rejecting
Helen's flirtatious advances.
Film scholars will find this book an absolute treat to read.
To be allowed to witness the complete history of a film in such a
manner is extremely rare, and the book is a refreshing alternative to
heavily theoretical histories. Stam's stmcture of biography/novel/film
provides extraordinary insight into Tmffaut's inherently personal
filmmaking process, from writing to editing. Even the cleverly
selected cover photograph speaks volumes of Truffaut's and the New
Wave's overall aesthetic. In the photo, shot during the filming of The
Woman Next Door, an actress is splayed on her back on the fioor,
arms outstretched, and an actor is prone on top of her. Tmffaut and
his camera hovers directly above the actors, mere inches from the
composition, the director pointing down, God-like, at his creation.
The composition lingers uncomfortably somewhere between intimacy
and claustrophobia, speaking visually of the positive and negative in
the New Wave and cinema verite style.

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 Truffaut once remarked, "In love, women are professionals,
men are amateurs." Both Truffaut and Roche (as well as Helen Grund
Hessel and Franz Hessel) were bohemian in their sexualities. The men
fancied themselves as twentieth-century Don Juans, and Roche even
wrote about the figure in two books. Both had countless lovers, as well
as textbook Freudian relationships with their mothers (Truffaut's was
absent, while Roche's was smothering.) Yet perhaps most fascinating
are the primary accounts of female sexuality (Helen Grund, Helen's
lover Charlotte Wolff, Margaret and Violet Hart) through the women's
letters and joumals. Their writing navigates through the post-Victorian
and burgeoning feminist sexual landscape, exploring lesbian,
masturbatory, and even incestuous practices and fantasies and their
repercussions in the guilt and shame inherent to female sexuality at
the time.
Additionally, the women's sexuality is filtered through
Roche's masculine sexuality in the novel, which is then filtered again
through Truffaut's own personal sexuality with his screen adaptations.
The novel and the film both undeniably contain the stamps of Roche's
and Tmffaut's own personal sexual and relationship history, their own
issues with feminism and female sexuality, and the complicated (and
often Oedipal) relationships both men had with their mothers.
In regards to adaptation studies, Stam's exploration ofthe subtle
intertwining of texts renders inadequate simple qualitative arguments
regarding the primacy of novels over film adaptations and the retention
of some sort of "truth" in the process. Stam shows how Jules and
Jim and Two English Girls supercede simple comparative adaptation
studies, how Truffaut instead "applied a kind of electroshock" to the
novels (85). Truffaut admittedly streamlined and modified plots,
made them more accessible to mainstream audiences, and even de-
emphasized or eliminated much of the sexual content. But he also
utilized the visual medium of film and its unique narrative capabilities
to add dimensions not accessible to the written word.
The most disappointing aspect of Frangois Truffaut and
Friends ironically stems from its engrossing anecdotal nature.
Following the films' chronological release dates rather than the
Roche's actual biographical experiences, Stam begins with Jules
and Jim, then backtracks to Two English Girls, ending with The
Man Who Loved Women. While illuminating Truffaut's progress as
a filmmaker and an adapter of Roche's work, this organization is

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narratively anticlimactic. The book is at its most fascinating when
exploring the complex sexual history of Roche, Hessel, and Gmnd,
their polyphonic writing experiments, and the resulting novel and
film adaptation. Roche's relationship with Margaret and Violet Hart,
while fascinating in its own right, lacks the cultural complexity of the
Roche/Grund/Hessel triangle. The final chapter, analyzing Truffaut's
use of Roche as indirect inspiration for The Man Who Loved Women,
pointlessly repeats much of the information from the first two sections
and ultimately adds little to the overall enjoyment to this otherwise
riveting book.

Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film.

By Jeffrey Skoller.
Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2005. xlvi + 233 pp. $25 paper,
$75 cloth.

Reviewed by Gerd Bayer

. Jeffrey Skoller's Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History

in Avant-Garde Film offers fascinating insights into both film studies
and postmodemity. Skoller's detailed readings of select avant-garde
films focus on questions of representation, historical narrating, and
media arts in general. One of Skoller's central points is to emphasize
the political and ideological program of avant-garde cinema.
He argues that "the most innovative approaches to thinking and
representing historiographic temporality in cinema are coming out of
such aesthetically based cinematic practices" (xvii). In the way that
avant-garde films deal with questions of historiography, Skoller sees
an aesthetic response to the kinds of postmodem dilemmas that Michel
Foucault, Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard, and Hayden White have introduced
to the larger critical debate.
Alongside a number of other critics, in particular Walter
Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, postmodern thinkers feature strongly
in the book; it nevertheless is for the most part free of theoretical
jargon and overly abstract prose. The rather eclectic use of theorists is
justified by the lucid commentaries that Skoller offers in his individual
readings of films. With its focus on exemplary analyses, the book does
not, however, aim to establish a theory of avant-garde film.
It is only appropriate that Skoller focuses on the Holocaust