"Objects Became Witnesses": Ève Francis and the Emergence of French Cinephilia and

Film Criticism
Author(s): Paula Amad
Source: Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media , SPRING 2005, Vol. 46, No. 1
(SPRING 2005), pp. 56-73
Published by: Drake Stutesman; Wayne State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41552426

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 "Objects Became
Witnesses": Ève Francis
and the Emergence
of French Cinephilia
and Film Criticism
Paula Amad

"Perhaps it [cinephilia] has also something to do with bearing witness ..."

- Paul Willemen

In her memoirs of the teens and twenties entitled Temps héroïques [Her
Times] the Belgian born actress Eve Francis recalls the revelation she an
her paramour Louis Delluc experienced on stumbling into a cinema in th
midst of the First World War. The two had gone to see a particular Ame
can film in which "[f]or the first time on the screen, objects became wi
nesses."1 Francis* apprehension of film's ability to interfere with the norma
order of things by allowing the passive object-world on screen - décor a
props - to adopt the witnessing properties of humans, abbreviates one o
the key themes animating film criticism of the period. It also alludes, i
obliquely, to her own mostly under-recognized participation in that culture
due in part to her primary status as a repeatedly objectified actress. In a
attempt to map the broader relevance of Francis' recollection and the
more specific contours of Paul Willemen 's enigmatic suggestion that w
nessing plays a special role in the history of cinephilia, I want to explore thi
loaded phrase, "objects became witnesses," in relation to three context
first, Francis' muse-like relationship to the most important French film
critic of the era, Delluc; second, the persistent though by no means unif
film discourse developing in the period on film's affinity with the inan
mate; and third, the purportedly masculine, individualist, elitist, and
fetishist underpinnings of the cinephiliac strain in French criticism.2

Framework 46, No. 1, Spring 2005, pp. 56-73

Copyright ©2005 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

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 "Objects Became Witnesses"

This inquiry is part of an attempt to account for the marginalized

muses and midwives of the birth of French cinema adoration, whose writ-
ings on the cinema, from the film criticism of Colette to the memoirs of
Francis (which remain untranslated) , have long remained in the shadow of
their arboreal giants - Delluc, Jean Epstein, and perhaps most significantly,
Germaine Dulac.3 While one obvious reason for this neglect stems from the
relatively small volume of Colette's and Francis' writings, another has to do
with the fact that the specific history of cinema to which they undoubtedly
belong - that is, the history of cinephilia - is in a sense yet to be written. A
second reason might have to do with the conventional association of
French cinephilia - variously defined in recent treatments of the topic as "a
way of watching films, of speaking about them, and then of diffusing this
discourse," a "certain kind of intense loving relationship with the cinema,"
and "the desire for the cinema" - with the postwar culture of the NewWave,
rather than with the "first wave" of cinephilia that blossomed in France in
the late teens and twenties, which Godard and Truffaut recognized as their
closest model.4 In addition, as Antoine De Baecque and Thierry Frémaux
have suggested, the real history of cinephilia is particularly elusive, in part
because if one wanted to get at the intensely personal heart of the phe-
nomenon (in which they too privilege the NewWave version) such a history
would necessarily have to rely on the terrain of the "anecdotal": ephemeral
and often traceless moments of watching, rewatching, and remembering
films.

In other words, the study of cinephilia must contend with the realm of
fleeting experiences that tend to hustle the historian onto the slippery
slope of untrustworthy genres such as memoirs, characteristically crammed
with the derided stuffing of the personal.5 To give an example of where
such evidence leads the historian, it will soon become apparent from my
own reading of Francis' particularly intimate chronicle of cinephilia that
the emergence of Delluc' s foundational and mythical obsession with cin-
ema was inextricably connected to the blooming of his love life. Revelations
indeed! And yet I am not just interested in asserting that Delluc's love for
the cinema finds its origins as a monument to his love for a specific woman.
While I'm not averse to toying with the idea that the origins of French film
theory go back to a series of flirtatious date-film encounters, what interests
me even more is addressing a certain blind spot in De Baecque and Fré-
maux's gender-free plea for the personal in histories of cinephilia, and
unraveling from within Francis' memoirs the ambivalent engendering of
one of modernism's allegedly most masculine modes of loving: cinephilia.
As Maggie Humm has argued in Modernist Women and Visual Cultures , the
key female writers interested in film, including Colette, Virginia Woolf, and
those associated with the British journal Close-Up (H.D., Bryher, and
Dorothy Richardson) , saw in the new specular and social dimensions of cin-
ema a space in which to expand on a gendered everyday that was simultane-

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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 46.1

ously part of their very different literary modernisms.6 For each of these writ-
ers the cinema was a supplementary, though no less important, space in
which to extend their testimony to a gender-specific experience of moder-
nity. Yet in dealing with the broader context of Francis' writings, which are
admittedly of secondary importance to the major accomplishments of her
film and theater acting career, one is immediately confronted by the need to
address the male figures peering over the shoulder of her literary testimony.
At first glance, Francis' writings seem to be structured from the position of a
silent witness, given how dominated her writing career is by the two famous
men in her life, Delluc and Paul Claudel. Delluc casts a considerable shadow
upon the memoirs, and the playwright, poet and diplomat Claudel is the
subject of her only other book, Un autre Claudel, published in 1973.7 At one
point in her memoirs Francis even describes herself as having turned into an
object when she found herself opposite Claudel for the first time; "petrified,
frozen, speechless" (médusée, glacée, interdite) (79).
The sotto voce aspect of the memoirs is also apparent in their style,
which is decidedly less chummy and democratic than that of Colette's or
Richardson's film criticism. For Francis is not addressing herself to a gen-
eral readership of like-minded contemporary women but a more limited
and frankly elitist audience interested in the history of cinema. As echoed
in the dignified tone of its title, Heroic Times is less interested in conversing
with than in lecturing to its readers. Nonetheless, when it comes to Francis'
recollections of cinemagoing, the memoirs share key features with the film
criticism of both Colette and Richardson, which is characterized by a type
of participant observation rooted in an attention to the embodied, gen-
dered, autobiographical, social, and generational specificity of cinema
spectatorship. Where her accounts of moviegoing differ from theirs is in
the fact that she chiefly recollects only those films to which she dragged
Delluc, and along with him, the future "masculinist" fate of French film crit-
icism that Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier have argued was conceived in
this period.8 She thus stands in for me as a troubling figure between two
supposedly separate modes of film criticism: on the one hand, the pur-
ported social, collective, and embodied characteristics of women's film crit-
icism (as argued by Humm), and on the other the ahistorical, individualist,
abstracted, and obsessive characteristics of men's film criticism in this
period (as argued, for example by Burch and Sellier) . Caught in this in-
between state, the question Francis' memoirs pose most forcefully is not
why were there no women able to professionalize their passion for cinema
(for Francis, Colette* Dulac, and Musidora, to name the most well known,
can clearly be viewed as cinephiles), but why the historical relationship
between the practices and discourses of early cinephilia fashioned it so per-
suasively for later historians as a masculinist domain? How might a new his-
tory of cinephilia from the perspective of women's passionate viewing prac-

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 "Objects Became Witnesses"

tices contribute to broadening the general history of the spectator-subject

in line with specific histories of pleasure in the cinema?9

The Making of a Cinema Evangelist

Born Eva Louise François, Ève Francis (her stage name) is widely recognized
as one of the key actresses of the French silent period.10 More specifically she
has been described as the "fetish actress" of the French avant-garde of the
twenties, playing key roles in Germaine Dulac's Ames de fous (France, 1918) ,
Le bonheur des autres (France, 1918), La ßte espagnole (France, 1919), and
Antoinette Sabrier (France, 1926); Marcel L'Herbier's El Dorado (France,
1921 ) ; and five out of seven of Delluc's films: Fièvre (France, 1921 ) , Le chemin
d'Ernoa (France, 1921 ) , Fumée noire , La femme de nulle part (France, 1921 ) , and
L ' inondation (France, 1923) . She continued to act in the sound era, adapting
to more matronly roles, first as the dormitory head in Club de Femmes
(Jacques Deval, France, 1936) , where she oversees gender run amuck in the
form of prostitution, pregnancy outside of wedlock, and lesbianism, and
later with Sessue Hayakawa as the older woman in a remake of Forfaiture / The
Cheat (France, 1937), which Marcel L'Herbier, to whom she was a sort of
artistic "assistant" during the inter-war period, directed. She also codirected
Roman d'un spahi (Michel Bernheim, France, 1935), based on a Pierre Loti
novel, and continued to act in films on and off until her death in 1980, with
roles in Patrice Chereau's Chair de l'orchidée (France, 1975) and Pierre
Granier-Deferre ' s Adieu Poulet (France, 1975).
In her middle age Francis became an active, if minor promoter or
guardian of the history of French cinema, somewhat like Musidora but
most definitely unlike Colette.11 No doubt spurred on by her friendship
with Henri Langlois and under the auspices of Les Amis de la Cinémathèque
and the Fédération des Ciné-Clubs (one of whose first clubs, the Canard aux
navets , she directed for a time in the twenties), Francis gave lectures on the
history of cinema after the Second World War both in France and North
Africa, using extracts of films by George Méliès, Emile Cohl, D.W. Griffith,
Carl Dreyer, Charles Chaplin, Abel Gance, and Marcel L'Herbier.12 Her
commitment to the history of French cinema is also displayed by her mem-
bership in the commission for historical research at the Cinémathèque
Française and the fact that in 1978, at the age of ninety-two, she worked on
a history of theater and cinema for television. But her "evangelical" devo-
tion to spreading the gospel of French cinema has left its biggest mark in
her role as the custodian of the memory of Louis Delluc (to whom she was
married between 1918 and 1922), and whose legacy she nurtured after his
early death in 1924 (175). Shortly before her own death in 1980 she
bequeathed to Marie-Antoinette Epstein (Jean Epstein's sister) the duty of

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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 46. 1

having Delluc's extensive writings (which she had entrusted to the Ciné-
mathèque Française) republished.13
In addition to her century-spanning film career, Francis has an equally
important renown in theater history. Even before she acted in her first film,
Francis was well known in the teens for her recitals of poetry by Verhaeren,
Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, and even more so as the chief interpreter and
semi-official muse of Claudel, whose works she recited or acted in all over
Europe, including a tour in Italy in 1915 that Claudel claimed contributed
to Italy joining the war.14 The intensity of her relationship with Claudel, on
professional, spiritual, and physical levels, is well documented.15 It is fur-
ther born out in the introduction Claudel wrote for her memoirs as well as
in Francis' only other book, L'autre Claudel, in which she delivers an infor-
mal and personal portrait of the dramatist most known for his ascetic reli-
gious dramas rooted in quasi-mystical quests.

The Woman from Nowhere

If Francis' dual theater and cinema celebrity allowed her to mix with key
artists of the period, she did not identify herself as a member of any avant-
garde. And yet, it seems pretty certain that Francis was the first person to
use the term "avant-garde" in relation to cinema under the pen name La
Femme de nulle part [The Woman from Nowhere].16 Of course Delluc
made a film that starred Francis a few years later titled La Femme de nulle part
(France, 1922). 17 However, there is no reason why Delluc would have
needed to use a pseudonym at this time, and as Nourredine Ghali has
claimed, it was probably Francis who provided the material for the articles,
even if Delluc actually presented himself as their author.18 My own research
suggests that Francis' identity as "La Femme" was strongly hinted at in a col-
umn from Le Film in September 1917 in which the "secret" surrounding this
new film critic took center stage. Wanting to keep the author's identity a
secret, the article admitted that La Femme was neither Delluc nor a famous
woman of letters (referring to speculation that it might have been Colette) .
Under the heading "Les Coulisses du Cinéma par une comédienne ," it sug-
gested instead that the author was a very successful comédienne who was cur-
rently shooting a film (which would have been Dulac's Ames de fous) that
gave her the opportunity to observe "these everyday scenes."19
Whatever professional frustrations Francis may have felt as the Woman
from Nowhere (which must have been considerable, given Delluc's sarcas-
tic reference in a brief biography of her to the fact that "there are people
who say that she writes"20) , we can at least guess they were minimally allevi-
ated in the few texts she did actually sign. These included several articles
for the cinema press during the teens (one on the distinction between the
cinema and the theater, another titled "Ève Francis by Herself"), and a
scenario (based on an idea of Delluc's) titled Un homme perdu [A lost man] ,21

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 "Objects Became Witnesses"

perhaps in response to her sometime pseudonym. Still, it would take

another thirty or so years before Francis would locate and situate the fabled
Woman from Nowhere in her memoirs, which were written between
August 1947 and December 1948. Interwoven with an account of her
Catholic upbringing in Belgium, the memoirs (purposefully subtitled "Cin-
ema. Theater") are primarily devoted to the rival arts between 1910 and
1925. As a rising luminary of that milieu still unpretentious enough to take
on the role of stargazer, Francis' portrait is marked by the subjective ele-
ments of the participant observer and the more objective aspirations of the
all seeing, knowing narrator as witness.
In their Zelig-like coverage, the memoirs sometimes resemble a Who's
Who of diverse avant-garde events of the period: from Henri Bergson 's lec-
tures on conscience at the Collège de France (69) to Loïe Fuller's dances
of "genius" at the Châtelet (217; 221-223), and from the premiere in the
same theater of Jean Cocteau's ballet Parade with décor by Picasso and
music by Satie (where she spots Apollinaire back from the war and meets
L'Herbier for the first time [353]), to the birth of the magazine Littérature ,
edited by Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault and André Breton (375) . There
is also much in the memoirs that indicates her developing identity as a val-
ued chronicler of early French cinema history, spinning tales through the
ennobling lens of those "heroic times," all the while ensuring the inclusion
of her crucial contribution to this period. Like other forgotten women in
cinema who wrote memoirs in their later years (for example, Alice Guy-
Blaché), in Heroic Times Francis was not simply writing a history but con-
sciously writing herself into the history of French cinema.22
Indeed, Francis' embeddedness in the cinema culture of the twenties
manifests itself in the graphic layout of the memoirs, which are illustrated
with reissued signature illustrations of key figures, herself included, drawn
by the most talented illustrators of the twenties, such as Sem (Georges
Goursat) , with whom she was friends, Spat, and Bécan. Providing the ulti-
mate focus to the memoirs' rehearsal of the critical themes and the graphic
specificity of the first French journals devoted to film is Francis' unique
commentary upon the prolific critical production of Delluc. She is particu-
larly acute in her analysis of her husband's infamously abbreviated writing
style, which she describes as a direct emanation of "the reign of the
machine and electric motors, of the plane and the car," comprising a "style
of short waves, of life in successive images, a style of the era of cinema: six-
teen images to the second" (287) .
While it is difficult to determine how much of Francis' critical com-

mentary on cinema is mediated retrospectively by her proximity to the

period's key film writers and how much of it reflects her own individual
insights, where we can identify Francis' particular voice most clearly is in
her personal experiences of going to the cinema. And yet I'm hesitant to
assert a level of transparent authenticity to her cinemagoing recollections

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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 46.1

that might impute a judgment of critical ventriloquism to the rest of her

commentaries upon cinema in the memoirs. Far from resembling unmedi-
ated moments of truth, the narration of the film-dates is highly stylized;
Francis stages them as pseudo-Pascalian battles. This is hardly surprising
given that her reputation as the "perfect claudelienne" was based on her
performance of "Christian profiles captured in the states of moral epipha-
nies and spiritual ecstasies" and that the fixation upon revelation by
cinephiles shares much (as Willemen has observed) with a Catholic tradi-
tion.23 Furthermore, the film screenings she describes are of course not just
any ordinary cinemagoing experiences, but ones which, from the vantage
point of the late forties (when she was writing them) are to be understood
as having ignited the critical renaissance in French cinephilia, that partic-
ular obsessive passion for cinema that would be rekindled a few years later,
partly in homage to Delluc, by the NewWave critics and directors like Truf-
faut and Godard. If the four hundred and fifteen pages of Francis* mem-
oirs are indeed a rich testimony to the everyday social experience of cin-
ema, they also overlap with an astute and vigorous witnessing of the
emergence of cinema as an object of intellectual and elite adoration. These
two domains - the affective and the intellectual, the collective and the indi-
vidual, and by implication the publicly recollected and the personally
remembered - are not separable in Francis* memoirs. The results of this
mutual dependency are revealed most interestingly in the four or so film-
dates Francis and Delluc have in the early years of their courtship.

Four Film Dates

In Francis' first depictions of Delluc in the memoir she takes ironic pleasure
in revealing the future "aposde" of cinema as an entrenched cinephobe who
was only interested in taking her to those establishments, especially the cir-
cus (where they go on their first date [77] ) and the café-concert, that the cin-
ema was on the cusp of replacing. On a second date in 1913 the young writer
and poet again asks her to share in his passion for the Medrano clowns but
she "resists" and affirms her wish to go to the cinema (62) . Delluc eventually
"resigns himself" and they enter, "by chance," a Boulevard cinema where a
Rigadin comedy is screening and thè "grimy" public is laughing in the "total
darkness" of the salle (62). Francis chooses to sit with the few "chic patrons"
whom she tells us were customarily to be found close to the screen or at the
back. In front of the flickering film, she notes, using the present tense that
characterizes all of the date-film encounters, "Delluc is absent. He even
closes his eyes." He is "appalled" and utters words such as "beastly, impossi-
ble, fairground comedy" [comique de foire ] (62). He then turns to the other
patrons, summing them up with the curt "take a look at the mugs on this
audience." Francis responds by saying "sure they are not lords, but cinema is
a popular art." Delluc replies "Must it exist, just because it is popular?" (63) .

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 "Objects Became Witnesses"

He becomes more animated at the next film on the program, obviously a

travelogue, containing "boats, the sea, voyages, Marseille." However, it is
with the following film that the couple's developing rapprochement is
sealed: "on the screen, a Blériot monoplane flew over Versailles, we only see
the silhouette of the town and airplane in the sky" (63) . "What would be
amusing," Francis continues, "would be to film [ photographier ] the town from
above" to which Delluc responds "[t] hat will come . . . that is what we ask of
the cinema and not this buffoonery" (63) . Only then does the main feature,
a "pitiful" high society drama, begin (64-65).
The third major cinema date occurs just before the spring of 1914
when Francis rejoins Delluc after a visit to Belgium.24 This time she chooses
a "comfortable" theater where a documentary of the Panama Canal in
Kinemacolor is showing (170). She takes the time to describe the unique-
ness of the color technology that contributes to her appreciation of the film
as a "fantastic vision," and then she admits to becoming "bloated with satis-
faction" when she notices that Delluc too is "astounded" by the film. She
notes the piano and orchestral accompaniment, as well as the particular
skills of the sound effects man and then and only then does she turn to the
feature film. It is the first western ever seen by Francis and she recalls being
captivated by the "unexpected, supernatural landscape," describing it as a
"dantesque dream" (171). On turning to Delluc for his response she
exclaims "How magnificent to be transported into unknown countries," to
which he mockingly adds, "and photo-albums" (172). Francis protests,
emphasizing the unique quality of animation in the images, to which he
responds that they merely resemble "bad postcards." He increasingly
annoys her, particularly because she had noticed in her unrelenting obser-
vation of him that he had not been indifferent to the movement of the
images. She also expresses frustration at the perverse pleasure he takes in
"demolish [ing] everything" on purpose just to enrage her (172).25 After
the film the "fencing" (as she calls it) with Delluc continues when he de-
rides the film as "imagery for people without imaginations"; she responds
sarcastically that it's obvious he is a poet as he is incapable of adapting him-
self "to the mechanical" age (176).
Then on their fourth film-date, Delluc, perhaps attracted by the high
culture associations of the title, takes her to a large cinema in Montpar-
nasse to see Quo Vadis (Enrico Guazzoni, Italy, 1912) (203). He sneers
throughout the screening as the film fails to impress his aesthetic criteria,
which causes Francis to summarize her defense of film in their after-screen
post-mortem: "I don't go to the cinema to be bowled over or to think, I go
to 'see'" (206). 26 This declaration is followed by a discussion of the unique
landscape of France - Provence, Basque, Côte d'Azur - and the need for
French cinema to learn from documentaries such as the Scott Expedition
(Herbert Ponting, England, 1914) and to stop luxuriating in voluptuous
décor and theatrical sets (207).

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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 46.1

Before moving to the final date film I want to take a brief detour on an
extra-filmic date on which Delluc takes Francis to the Porte de Clignan-
court flea markets so beloved by the surrealists of the twenties (214) . Always
the sarcastic dandy, he warns her beforehand to dress up as a tramp in
order to blend in with the down-and-out milieu. Once at the flea-markets,
Francis admits to feeling particularly uncomfortable, describing it as a "sad
bazaar" of "assorted objects" (214): "I do not feel at ease, it's like a tragic
and desolate assemblage, and when all is said and done, a pathetic image
of dirty poverty" (215) . Delluc looks on, smiling at her in a "nonchalant and
ridiculing" way, she tells us, and then begins to "talk slang with the mer-
chant" and to "flâne [stroll] with an obvious delight" amongst the "bric-a-
brac of misfortune" (216). Francis ends her recollection of flea-market
flânerie by "timidly" suggesting a visit to the cinema, which Delluc overrules
in favor of seeing Loïe Fuller at the Châtelet Theater (21 7) P
Finally, just as the cinemas were beginning to reopen during the war
they find themselves one night in front of an enormous poster advertising
The Cheat (Cecil B. DeMille, U.S.A., 1915) at a small boulevard cinema (309).
The cinema is packed. In a manner strikingly similar to Colette's criticism,
Francis describes how in a Paris "dead to pleasure" as a result of war restric-
tions, people "finally relaxed in front of this exotic drama" that embodied
"un esprit nouveau" and "an accelerated movement, [and] dynamism never
before felt" (309) .28 In short, "the film had a soul" and "the cinematographic
machine" had "discovered rhythm." In response to this dynamic onslaught
she observes how beside her Delluc was "shaking" and that the " [d] etails
made him exclaim out loud [pousser des exclamations ] ." She gives an inventory
of the details in question - a "window of mat glass behind which the shadow
of branches swayed," a "small, low lacquered table, alone with the incense
burner," a "curtain shaking before the entrance of Hayakawa" - and then
asserts that "[f]or the first time on the screen, objects became witnesses.
Need we retell the story?" (310). Indeed, the rest is history; this is the infa-
mous, often recounted moment of conversion for Delluc, made in response
to an apprehension of film's unique inversion of the aesthetically condi-
tioned object-subject hierarchy, whereby, in this particular film, objects
became witnesses and the face of Sessue Hayakawa an "immobile mask"
(31 1) .29 Further on in the memoirs, she recalls how The Cheat had "pinched
him, [and] he becomes prey to an astounding revelation . . . declar [ing] that
the camera, this gigantic microscope, has the capacity to discover every-
thing, to disrobe things, facts and the most hidden sensations" (327). The
implication, then, is that this is the moment when Delluc seems to have
finally understood the full import of Francis' at first puzzlingly obvious
explanation of her fascination with cinema - "I go to 'see.'"
The holy triumvirate of Delluc's objects of worship reveals itself further
in another chance cinematic encounter where they discover Chaplin (and
each other in a fusion of tactile visual responses) - "he took my hand. He

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 "Objects Became Witnesses"

squeezes it. And that was his second coup de foudre [love at first sight]"
(328) 30 - and is finally completed when they view their first William S. Hart
western, both fixating on his "face, vibrating to the hundredth of a mil-
limeter in a near overwhelming impassiveness. His body is an arrow. He was
said to be a great actor, no he is a MAN" (332) .31 The next time Francis sees
a film we understand that the struggle of conversion is over, for "it is now
Delluc who invites me" (327).

In Search of the " Here and Now" ofCinephilia

Eighty or so years later the multifaceted battle concentrated in the Francis-
Delluc exchange seems to have resurfaced in a more polarized form in Burch
and Selliens illuminating critique of the "masculine-obsessional principle
that subtends cinephilia."32 Although neither of them refers to Francis'
memoirs, they both trace the origins of French cinephilia back to Delluc and
the curious practices and discourses that animate Francis' narration. They
focus on four aspects of cinephilia, all of them recognizable in the date
exchange. First, the cinephile's approach to sorting through the vast amount
of films on offer is defined by his penchant for the "abstracted and transcen-
dent reduction [ism]" of "the collector, the classifier."33 Sellier pinpoints it
further by highlighting his "taste for inventory" that "places on the same
plane living beings and things."34 Burch and Sellier agree that this habit
stems from "the masculine sex's tendency to take human beings for objects
and objects for human beings."35 A second related feature points to how
cinephiliac criticism focuses on an "exclusive love for a cult-object," which
refers both to cinema in general (and American cinema in particular) and
the magnified objects that are worshipped on its screen (the close-ups of tele-
phones and other ordinary objects, on the one hand, and the faces of
Hayakawa and Chaplin on the other).36 Furthermore, most of these cult
objects are displaced onto an "exotic" otherness that is just as likely to be the
face of Hayakawa as the "dantesque dream" space of the American West or
even Europe's local version of that terrain, Spain.37 And finally, when that fas-
cination with male faces is aroused by an ideal virility, as it is in Francis' and
Delluc 's descriptions of William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks, it serves ulti-
mately to oppose a sense of the threatening "effeminate" and "decadent" cul-
ture of Europe.38 The ultimate claim in Burch and Sellier' s analyses of the
French tradition of writing about the cinema from a position of amour fou is
that cinephilia inevitably masks the "anxiety of being glued down in the here
and now" of the cinema's sociohistorical context.39
In addition to outlining some of the key features of this most evanes-
cent of discourses, Burch and Sellier's analysis of cinephilia fleshes out
what Richard Abel suggested about Delluc in his 1988 anthology, that is,
that "cinema's power of representation [as depicted in Delluc's writings]
turned on a male-oriented, quasi-psychoanalytical system of looking."40

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Framework: Th© Journal of Cinema & Media 46.1

However, as I suggested earlier, I also want to propose that Francis troubles

(both by reaffirming and challenging) the gendered arrangement of film
viewing discourses that subtends the Burch-Sellier position. In disturbing
this easy opposition between a female, social, localized mode of film spec-
tatorship and a masculine, individualist, reifying mode of film engagement,
she thereby also upsets the conventional association of women with fandom
and men with cinephilia.
There are several places in the date-film encounters where Francis'
dual identity as fan-cinephile and voyeur-fetishist disturb these divisions.
First, the date-films mark at once the progress of an intimate relationship
and a relationship of intimacy with the cinema. The erotics of the personal
encounter implicate the erotics of the cinematic encounter and contribute
to the production of a hybrid genre, part date-diary, part journal-of-the-
gaze. Secondly, in her recollected duels Francis produces a model of "a
community of interpretation" (albeit reduced to the unit of the couple)
that De Baecque and Frémaux place at the center of cinephiliac culture of
the twenties and postwar era.41 If from one perspective their debates resem-
ble a form of pillow talk, from another they provide a window onto a newly
expansive conception of French cinema culture in which the discourses
and spaces of cinephilia approach the status of an alternative public
sphere.42 For instance, while Francis' recollection of a canon of key films
indicates her participation in the highly personal "serialization of moments
of revelation" (that Willemen has described as being so typical of the cine-
phile's love of list making), her reframing of these canonical moments as
date-film experiences that meander across the social geography of Paris,
from the flea-markets at the periphery to the theaters at the center, injects
a dialogic, social, and collective horizon into her musings.43
Third, there is no way to separate Delluc's developing cinephiliac qual-
ities from Francis* already emergent and articulate engagement with the
cinema. For instance, if Heroic Times provides an intimate geography of
Parisian modernity, ranging from Francis* reviews of various bohemian
bars to her ethnography of filmgoing rituals, it is ultimately impossible to
determine whether her observational attention to the urban field marks
her as the student or teacher of Delluc's most emphatic advice to French
filmmakers: "Go for a walk and note down things. The street. The metro,
the trams, the shops are full of a thousand dramas, a thousand original and
strong comedies."44 However, if it is important to emphasize their mutually
developing love of the cinema, it is also crucial to point out that Francis
didn't just do French film theory the favor of dragging Delluc to the cin-
ema to find his future. She contributed to that future by persistently and
explicitly arguing with him into, during, and after the cinema screening in
debates that correspond to the key conceptual themes of his later writings.
A brief overview of the date descriptions is enough to reveal how all of
the supposedly unique characteristics of Delluc' s criticism from the late

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 "Objects Became Witnesses"

teens and early twenties were apparent in the earlier web of flirtation and
critical frustration that make up the Francis-Delluc date-films. We can
detect an ambiguous apprehension of cinema as a popular art that Delluc
would later rationalize into the opposition between the good "people" and
the bad "crowd"; a fascination with watching people watching the screen
alongside an ease with talking in the cinema (presented through the direct
use of the dialogue form) ; an unabashedly elitist self-consciousness of one's
social place in the cinema and elsewhere (which Francis underscores by
ridiculing Delluc's taste for slumming at the flea-markets); a recourse to
resistant practices such as closing one's eyes during the screening, making
oneself absent;45 a preference for nonfiction film (understood to contain
the essence of cinema) and an interest in local landscape; an attraction
towards the ineffable elements of mise-en-scène as opposed to the action and
character motivated aspects of narrative; a disrespect for the intended
integrity of the film program (the criticism often ends before the feature
film begins, as all of their discoveries are made by accident) or exhibition
context; a fixation upon a passive and hyper-virile male face; an excitement
about the future potential of cinema rather than the present imperfect
state of the medium; and finally, a respect for the deeply personal sense in
which the film acts upon the body as a wound that pricks or pinches.46
In her article on cinema and theater from 1917 Francis makes this last
point explicitly: "The cinema enlarges and fixes what is visible and what is
not visible; that is why it is so explicit. So fast and so well understood by the
most simple. The theater explains and comments. The cinema makes you
feel."47 Overlapping this capacity for a reinvigoration of the subject was an
increased and threatening sense of the cinema's unique endowment to the
object world. So that if Delluc adored Ince's films for giving "a soul to inert
things," Francis also described them as leaving them both feeling "immo-
bilized, speechless, ravished" [immobolisa, interdits , ravis] (348). 48 This sense
of the depletion of the human subject in the face of an at once disturbing
and delightful magnification of the object world, for me, punctures the ker-
nel of what we see germinating in the Francis-Delluc exchanges: the wary
pleasure to be found in film's capacity to overturn our expectations, trans-
forming objects into witnesses and witnesses into objects. This reversal of
expectations also hints at the enlarged, active sense of witnessing that is
involved in Francis' at-first-glance mute and passive testimony.
Contra Burch and Sellier, Francis' witnessing does not provide us with
evidence of the distracting feminine clutches of a "here and now"
grounded in the everyday that Dellucian cinephilia needed to repress with
the aid of substitution and abstraction. Her witnessing points to an appre-
hension of a different type of "here and now" that female spectators like
she and Colette bequeathed to cinephilia, an access, that is, to a history in
the everyday. To extend this argument to the possibility of a history in (and
not just of) cinephilia would be to recognize how enmeshed that way of

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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 46.1

being and seeing is in what Chris Keathley calls the twin forces of "the pub-
lic and the private, the shared and the secret, the intellectual and the emo-
tional" or what Robert Ray describes as fetishism's usually discredited
means of "false consciousness and disavowal."49 Furthermore, if the "here
and now" that I am arguing for in Francis* accounts complicates any easily
gendered division of film spectatorship, it is also crucial to stress how her
insights into cinema avoid the essentialism of a simplistic account of cine-
matic realism. For example, when she tries to crystallize the dispersed cin-
ematic discourses of the period, she quotes Abel Gance: "[cinemato-
graphic art isn't in the images, it is between the images" (401). Perhaps it
is also why, when trying to capture the effect of Delluc's Fièvre - a film in
which Jean Epstein claimed décor-as-character was accomplished for the
first time in French cinema - she turns to Dulac, who argued that Delluc's
film was one of the most perfect examples of realist film. My point being
that Dulac was clearly referring to a beyond of realism, a realism capable of
suggesting a state that Francis knew all too well - "the unvoiced [that is]
beyond the actual images" [l'inexprimé au-delà des images précises].50 While
Burch and Sellier would probably see here the substitutions of a masculine-
based fetishistic denial, the presence of Dulac and Francis in this operation
of displacement forces us to consider how women's insight into this
"beyond" needs also to be addressed.
Francis hints at a description of this au-delà in the possible future
vision of the earth from a plane that she mentions in their second film-
date. On the one hand, these aerial ecstasies mark the height of early teens
aviation-mania; elsewhere Francis writes of the thrill of acrobatic aviation,
of watching men twist metal to their will, doing the loop-the-loop in a bi-
plane at 1000 meters (106); and the first time she uses the phrase "heroic
times" is in reference to these aviators. Yet the other side of this romanti-
cized vision of man-machine is the specter of human depletion. When
Francis writes that the day will come when we will be able to "contemplate
without an obstacle the earth from the clouds, [and] at the bottom of
the sky; men would appear as ants. . . . Then they would disappear" (106),
the reference to the First World War and the militaristic application of
such perspectives is undeniable. Furthermore, Delluc did in fact describe
the day on which that perspective on a diminished humanity arrived in a
poem written during the war tided "Prayer to the Aviators," which contains
the lines "The earth exists no more/The mud exists no more/Man exists
no more."51

Conclusion

Historicizing a particular style of spectatorship according to a usually

derided intimate and minor key allows us to complicate those modes of
dehistoricized spectatorship that were made famous in the cinephilia most

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 "Objects Became Witnesses"

commonly associated with Delluc and his heirs (Bazin, Truffaut, Godard).
Recognizing that women's participation and contribution to early French
cinematic criticism is not innocent of the "fetishistic passion for inanimate
objects," or the "reifying thought of men" should not lead us to reject such
criticism's penchant for abstraction as a violent ahistoricism, but to seek its
more ambivalent and muted connections to what I'd like to call the "then
and when" of history.52 Francis' memoirs confirm for us how the path of
Delluc's formative cinephiliac gaze was intersected by the sight-lines of
women: Francis' gaze systematically surveyed and tutored the opening
of Delluc's eyes in the cinema, while according to his own testimony
Colette's early film criticism inspired his own career in that field.53 The
Francis-Delluc encounters also make us aware that there are other histo-
ries, of resignation and resistance, both amorous and antagonistic, to be
told about cinephilia aside from the one that reads it as a driving engine of
the institution's hardwired masculinism. For if it is true that Delluc's fever-
ish style of writing film criticism "decant[ed] reality," as Francis so aptly put
it, thus bearing all the marks of an abstracted approach to film culture
as articulated by Burch and Sellier, it is also a style from which traces of a
feminine-based awareness of the social context and affective investment of
cinema were never entirely extracted (315). 54
In the spirit of reconnecting the fetish to an anecdotal if not social his-
tory, I want to end with a story about the most fetishized part of the French
avant-garde's most fetishized actress: the eyes of Eve Francis. The historian
René Jeanne fixes the uniqueness of Delluc's critical oeuvre upon his com-
prehension, dating back to his response to Hayakawa, of the "power of
expression in immobility." Jeanne goes on to claim that Delluc was the first
to succeed in replicating this virile objectification in the "face full of mys-
tery" of Francis, a feat that was aided by her trance-like gaze.55 Yet in her
memoirs Francis takes sweet pleasure in explaining how her eyes actually
acquired their squinting immobility due to the fact that she was severely
myopic (a trait, incidentally, shared by Colette) .56 The frozen, unseeing gaze
with which Delluc has been credited for retracing on her face turns out to be
an accident. If the history of cinephilia needs to be reinvestigated, it is with
the hope of avoiding a critical shortsightedness content with misreading
witnesses for objects and eyes straining to see for eyes incapable of (in) sight.

Paula Amad is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Comparative

Literature at the University of Iowa. She is currently working on a book about early
cinema titled Archiving the Everyday ( Columbia University Press , forthcoming).

Notes

I would like to thank Catherine Russell and Lauren Rabinowitz for helpful editing
suggestions.

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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 46.1

1 Ève Francis, Temps héroïques. Théâtre. Cinéma (Paris: Denoël, 1949), 310. "Pour
la première fois à l'écran, les objets devenaient des témoins." All page numbers
in parentheses in the main text refer to this book and all translations are my
own. That this revelation was made in response to Cecil B. DeMille 's The Cheat
(U.SA., 1915) will not concern me so much in this article as its reverberation
across a dominant topic and less well known participant in French film criti-
cism of the late teens and early twenties.
2 Paul Willemen, "Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered" in Looks
and Frictions : Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 223-258; 239.
3 For my initial work on Colette, see "These spectacles are never forgotten':
Remembering and Memory in Colette's Film Criticism," Camera Obscura (forth-
coming) .
4 For these three definitions of cinephilia, see respectively: Antoine De Baecque
and Thierry Frémaux, "La cinéphilie ou l'invention d'une culture, "Vingtième
Siècle : Revue d'Histoire 46 (April-June 1995): 133-142; 134; Christian Keathley,
"The Cinephiliac Moment," Framework 42 (Summer 2000) http://www
.frameworkonline.com/42index.htm; and Willemen, "Through the Glass Dark-
ly," 225. Although Willemen 's treatment of cinephilia is deeply embedded in
twenties French criticism, like the authors above he too associates "the heydey of
cinephilia" (227) with the French NewWave of the early fifties to the late sixties.
For further examples of this tendency, see Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian
Martin, eds., Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (London:
BFI, 2003) , 1-3; Bill Flavell, "Cinephilia and/or Cinematic Specificity," Senses of
Cinema (2000): www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/7/ cinephilia .html. In
1959 Godard stated that the New Wave critics' "fight for the film auteur" was
made "in homage to Louis Delluc, Roger Leenhardt and André Bazin." See
Godard quoted in De Baecque and Frémaux 135.
5 De Baecque and Frémaux, 137.
6 For an overview of these writers' relation to cinema, see Maggie Humm, Mod-
ernist Women and Visual Cultures (Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 157-194.
7 Francis, Un autre Claudel (Paris: Grasset, 1973).
8 Noël Burch, "Cinéphilie et masculinité I," iris 26 (Autumn 1998): 191-196;
Geneviève Sellier, "Cinéphilie et masculinité II," iris 26 (Autumn 1998): 197-
206.
9 The most exhaustive study to date of cinephilia in this period, Christophe Gau-
thier's Passion du cinema, regrettably does not address the question of women's
cinephilia. See Gauthier, La Passion du Cinéma: Cinéphiles , ciné-clubs et salles spé-
cialisées à Paris de 1920 à 1929 (Paris: AFRHC, 1999).
10 For a useful source of biographical information on Francis from which much
of the following is gleaned, see Gilles Delluc, Louis Delluc, 1890-1924: L'éveilleur
du cinéma français au temps des années folles (Périgueux: Edition Pilote 24, 2002),
77-85; 373-382.
1 1 On Musidora's similar work for the Cinémathèque Française, see Gilles Delluc, 66.
12 See Gauthier, 63, 137; Gilles Delluc, 381.
1 3 The outcome of this endeavor is the four-volume collection of Delluc' s writings
published between 1985 and 1990 by the Cinémathèque Française and Cahiers du
Cinéma and edited by Pierre Lherminier. The back cover of the first volume
contains the following imprimatur: "L'édition intégrale (voulue par Henri
Langlois et Ève Francis) ."

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 "Objects Became Witnesses"

14 See Claudel, "Préface," Temps héroïques , 7.

15 On her relationship with Claudel, see Michel Autrand, "Eve Francis ou l'actrice
selon Paul Claudel," L'Acteur en son métier , eds. Didier Souiller and Philippe
Baron (Dijon: Publications de l'Université de Bourgogne, 1997), 257-267.
16 As Nourredine Ghali argued in his exhaustive study of the French avant-garde
of the 1920s, the term 'avant-garde' had been in use for some time to refer to
other fields of art, but appeared for the first time in connection with cinema
culture in 1918 in an article by "The Woman from Nowhere" in the key film
journal Le Film. See Ghali, L'Avant-Garde Cinématographique en France dans les
années vingt (Paris: Editions Paris Experimental, 1995) , 32-33. For the article in
which the term 'avant-garde' is used, see La Femme de Nulle Part, "Insinua-
tion," Le Film 125 (5 August 1918): 7.
1 7 The source for the title La Femme de nulle part is no doubt the French title of the
William S. Hart film Rio Jim , L'Homme de nulle part/The Silent Stranger (U.S.A.,
1915). Thanks to Tom Gunning for alerting me to this connection. For Del-
luc's reference to this "lovely title" see "Cinema: The Cold Deck," Paris-Midi (14
and 17 February 1919) : 2, reprinted in Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Crit-
icism: A History /Anthology , Volume I: 1907-1929 (New Jersey: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1988) , 171-172. For further speculation on the cultural resonance of
the phrase Femme de nulle part and its possible meaning as a retort to Louis Feuil-
lade, see Lherminier in Louis Delluc, Écrits cinématographiques III: Drames de cin-
ema (Paris: Cinémathèque Française Editions de L'Etoile/Cahiers du Cinéma,
1990), 83-84.
18 Ghali, 32-33; 36.
19 See Le Film (24 September 1917): 14. To make matters more complicated, in
Alain and Odette Virmaux's edited anthology of Colette's film criticism, the
editors toy with the idea that Colette might have been behind the "Femme de
nulle part" articles. Interestingly, they ultimately decide not to include the
anonymous articles in their anthology as "they are markedly inferior to work
signed by [Colette] ." See Colette at the Movies , ed. and introd. Alain and Odette
Virmaux, trans. Sarah W. R. Smith (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), 7 8c 37.
20 For this less than supportive reference to Francis in his short satirical novel Cha-
grine demoiselle photogénique, see Delluc, Écrits cinématographiques I:Le cinéma et les
cinéastes (Paris: Cinémathèque Française Éditions de L'Etoile/Cahiers du
Cinéma, 1985), 314.
21 For articles authored by Francis, see "Ève Francis par elle-même," Le Film 91
(10 December 1917): 6-7; 10; "Les Deux rivaux: théâtre et cinéma," Comoedia
3924 (15 September 1923): 1 a-b. On Francis' scenario, see Gilles Delluc,
430-431.
22 See Alice Guy, Autobiographie d'une pionnière du cinéma: 1873-1968 (Paris:
Denoël-Gonthier, 1976).
23 See Autrand, 261; Mohammad Kowsar, "Lacan and Claudel: Desire and The
Hostage ," Theatre Journal 46 (1994): 79-93; 79. For the connection between
Catholicism and cinephilia, see Willemen, 237 & 239. Willemen also happens
to be Belgian.
24 Francis describes returning to Paris after having had to put up with Delluc's
endless love letters in which he threatened to do himself harm if she did not
return, taunting her with the jealousy of "I am flabbergasted at the thought of
you absorbed by a work [reciting Claudel poetry] in which I have no part"
(169). In addition to being jealous of Claudel, Delluc apparently also had to

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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 46. 1

worry about that other film critic and cinephile, Ricciotto Canudo, who was
vying for Francis* affections. See Gauthier, 58.
25 During this screening she also marvels at seeing American Indians for the first
time. This incites Delluc to correct her by arguing she had already seen some
at the Exposition (173). In a fascinating interruption of the cinematic present
by the repressed desires of the past, the sight of American Indians on the
screen triggers the memory of her youthful wish to be a missionary and convert
"the blacks" (174). On returning to the present in the narration she brings
along her former missionary fervor, describing her and her film-obsessed
friends as "evangelicals" (175) at a time when "all was new in this stuttering art."
26 As a backdrop to Delluc 's seemingly superior attitude to Francis, it is important
to note that in his only article entirely devoted to Ève Francis, he claimed that
her uniqueness as a film actress lay in her "intellectuality" and her ability to tap
into cinema's essentially "interior" force. See Delluc, "Eve Francis" Paris-Midi
(2 November 1918) in Écrits cinématographiques ILCinéma et Cie, ed. Pierre Lher-
minier (Paris: Cinémathèque Française Editions de L'Etoile/Cahiers du
Cinéma, 1986), 230-233. For further reference to Francis by Delluc in which
he admiringly describes her bond with film by claiming that "the cinema pos-
sesses her," see Delluc Écrits cinématographiques II, 327.
27 Delluc accorded Fuller a primary role in the evolution of cinema, arguing in
1920 that "all filmmakers are consciously or unconsciously the students of one
great inventor of the plastic arts, Mme. Loïe Fuller." See Delluc, "Photogénie,"
(July-August 1920) Ecrits cinématographiques II, 273-275; 274.
28 See Colette, "The French Cinema in 1918," Colette at the Movies , 43-46.
29 For references to Delluc's conversion at the altar of The Cheat, see Gilles Del-
luc, 96-98; Gauthier, 242-243. For one of Delluc's accounts of his conversion
to cinema, see Delluc, "La naissance du Cinéma ou la naissance de l'amour du
Cinéma," Cinéma et Cie (1919) in Écrits cinématographiques II, 23-25. Like many
of his works, Cinéma et Cie was dedicated to Eve Francis.
30 The Chaplin film was Chariot et Lolotte/Tillie 's Punctured Romance (Mack Sennett,
U.S.A., 1914). See Francis, 330.
31 For further references to the importance of Hayakawa, Chaplin, and Hart for
Delluc, see Écrits cinématographiqu£s I, 21.
32 Burch, 193.
33 Burch, 193.
34 Sellier, 199.
35 Burch, 193.
36 Sellier, 197.
37 Sellier, 198. For further claims regarding the centrality of masculine-based
fetishistic drives to cinephilia of the twenties, see Willemen. Georges Sadoul
and Marcel Tariol have argued that Spain served as the American West for Del-
luc. See Sadoul and Tariol quoted in Abel, "Louis Delluc," 212.
38 See Francis, 332; Delluc quoted in Sellier, 198. Although Delluc also wrote
about female stars, his most intense cinematic experiences were aroused by
male stars. In contrast, it is well known that New Wave cinephilia was enmeshed
with a set of erotophilic responses to female stars on the screen. For an analy-
sis of this impulse, see Antoine De Baecque, "Amour des femmes, amour du
cinéma" in La cinéphilie : invention d'un regard, histoire d'une culture , 1944-1968
(Paris: Fayard, 2003) , 263-294.
39 Sellier, 204.

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 "Objects Became Witnesses"

40 See Abel, French Film Theory , 109.

41 De Baecque and Frémaux, 135.
42 For the key theorization of early cinema as an alternative public sphere, see
Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 90-125.
43 Willemen, 233.
44 Interestingly, this happens to be one of the few times Francis quotes directly
from a text by Delluc. Francis, 358.
45 For reference to Godard's willingness to admit to closing one's eyes during
scenes of a film, see Godard quoted in Robert Ray, How a Film Theory Got Lost
and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2001), 11.
46 Nearly all of these qualities will be reproduced as central aspects of postwar
French cinephilia, perhaps with the exception of the preference for non-
fiction film.
47 Francis quoted in Ghali, 117.
48 See Epstein quoted in Gilles Delluc, 261.
49 See Keathley [online article has no page numbers] and Ray, 5.
50 Dulac quoted in Gilles Delluc, 262. The similarities between this approach to
the visual image and that proposed by Roland Barthes under the concept of
the punctum are uncanny. See Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography ,
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981 [1980]), 59.
51 Delluc quoted in Gilles Delluc, 91.
52 For these two phrases see Burch, 194-195.
53 For Delluc's admiration for Colette, see "Notes pour moi" Le Film (14 January
1918) in Écrits cinématographiques //, 164, 196; "La Croix de Colette," Paris-Midi
(19 March 1920); Écrits cinématographiques II: Le Cinéma au quotidien , ed. Pierre
Lherminier (Paris: Cinémathèque Française Editions de L'Étoile/Cahiers du
Cinéma, 1990), 163-164.
54 I want to stress here that the notion of femininity I am invoking is itself ambigu-
ous. While Colette's gender ambiguity is well known, Francis' memoirs also
give us an ambiguous portrait of her sexuality. See Francis, 261 & 363; Gilles
Delluc, 375 & 373.
55 Jeanne quoted in Gilles Delluc, 98-99.
56 See Francis, quoted in Gilles Delluc, 374.

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