South Central Review

In La Règle du jeu—as everyone remembers—Robert, the Marquis de La Chesnaye, is a collector of mechanical musical instruments. Critical writing on the film has tended to denigrate Robert's passion for these instruments as somehow frivolous and unworthy of his station. Erroneously, these are often described (and dismissed) as mere toys, when they are quite specifically clockwork instruments or sophisticated musical automata. (A manuscript correction to the shooting script actually changes "objets musicaux" to "instruments musicaux" to make the point.)¹ Furthermore, they are cited by critics as indicative of Robert's—and by extension the haute bourgeoisie's—dislocation from the twentieth century into the eighteenth, although the instruments we see actually date from a number of different periods.²

Be that as it may, one should not forget that in addition to serving as musical instruments, Robert's automata are also marvels of technology. The film clearly demonstrates the commitment of most of the upper class characters to the technologies of modernity circa 1939, specifically the latest means of communication and transportation—automobiles, the telephone, radio, the airplane—as well as their preoccupation with their consequences—records by land or air, the culture of celebrity, and the benefits of material progress. Robert is shown to have a particular affinity for contemporary technology by way of his brand new 1938 right-hand drive Delahaye coach, his telephones, and his several radios, both in his Paris townhouse and at La Colinière, his country estate. Robert is a man of the Enlightenment, liberal in outlook (against fences), active and informed (also against rabbits), not uninterested with respect to the lives of others (he befriends Marceau), but compassionate (he indulges Geneviève), and reasonable (about Christine's feeling for André). One can understand him as a supporter in principle of the Republic, if disconnected from its emerging lower middle and working classes, in favour of change (gradual), resolutely opposed to revolution (spontaneous), who would never be a supporter of Vichy, or of authoritarianism in any of its twentieth century guises (he is Jewish).³ In short, I take it that the presence in the film of the musical automata is in effect a citation of their history—and of a history they invoke—without some knowledge of which [End Page 6] we cannot hope to understand their role in the film. Citation invokes a genealogy; to cite re-situates that which is being cited.⁴

Through the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, mechanical musical instruments were commonly exchanged as admired gifts between European monarchs, diplomats and the aristocracy.⁵ Some of these were, indeed, novelty items, but many were valued because they provided private or public musical entertainment. As it happens, some of the best known composers in the Western tradition—C. P. E. Bach, Handel, Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven—composed for musical automata, and there are a number of modern composers—Stravinsky, Ravel, Honegger, Milhaud—who have also explored the "automatic" side of music. Mechanical instruments have figured in the musical repertoire for a very long time.

The classical period of the production and acquisition of these instruments was the eighteenth century and the period of the European Enlightenment. Some of the most famous automata ever created, Wolfgang von Kempelen's celebrated Turkish chess-player (proven a hoax), or Jacques de Vaucanson's mechanical duck (unquestionably real), were products of the eighteenth century and amazed both scholars and mass audiences for decades.⁶ Because the dominant Enlightenment view held that the universe itself functioned like a clockwork mechanism, automata of various sorts were regarded as exemplars of this rational order and gave evidence of the superiority and privilege of human reason to the mastery of oneself and one's world in all its aspects. Automata were built and studied as models which gave the relation between rational thought and the world as machine both metaphoric and metonymic expression. Just such a logical model of man and the world was used to justify disciplines as different as military training, medical analysis, natural history, and the architecture of factories and prisons.⁷ The Industrial Revolution—both in its inventions, and in its work processes—profited—in every sense of the word—from this model of human and natural economy. That Revolution would enable the mass production of mechanical instruments, both large and small, beginning in the early nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, their attraction as antique collectibles had become a serious matter and their acquisition the domain of the very rich. In short, Robert's connoisseurship is very much in the tradition of his class and means and is neither especially frivolous nor, as I hope to show, anti-modern. Of course, to someone on the outside looking in (an André Jurieux, for example), the collection of anything might seem a mad and irresponsible and anachronistic indulgence. This is not to deny, however, that the film does make much of Robert's passion, so much so that it deserves an appropriate commentary.⁸ [End Page 7]

What we see and hear of Robert's collection in the film includes the following: there is his fauvette, a mechanical warbler, which sings every twenty seconds; a little, seated négresse, a new acquisition, which he demonstrates for his wife Christine; a music box on the mantel in Robert's study, with which he absent-mindedly plays when he telephones his mistress, Geneviève, to announce that he has decided to be faithful to his wife; a phonograph that Octave starts up when he pursues Lisette around the salon in Robert's Paris townhouse; the musical doll in the kitchen that Marceau activates in the scene of his flirtation with Lisette, which serves to underline his differences from Robert; the self-acting piano or "Pianola" (the latter actually a registered trade name from 1889 by the Aeolian Company of New York) which plays Camille Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre at the fête; and, of course, the orchestrion, or mechanical orchestra, on Robert's own admission the triumph of his career as a collector.

We also catch passing glimpses in the film of what I suspect are a couple of other clockwork music pieces. There is a mechanical soldier-trumpeter in Robert's study, a type of automaton driven by a spring motor, made in Paris about the turn of the nineteenth century, whose right hand brings the trumpet to its lips and which moves its head as it plays. A phonograph cylinder hidden in the base is the source of the sound.⁹ On a table in the salon at middle stage right there is what looks to be a French-made example of a bird cage containing three birds. The wooden base on which it stands houses a clockwork mechanism. During the musical note sequence, each of the birds in turn probably moved parts of its body (head, wings, tail).¹⁰ In sum, we should have the impression from the evidence in the film that Robert has a very substantial collection of musical instruments, both mechanical and non-mechanical, which he keeps both in Paris and at his country estate, La Colinière. Max Douy, the design assistant on La Règle du jeu, recounts that the small-size mechanical instruments in the film belonged to a contemporary collector on the rue Jacob, a street in the antiquarian quarter in the 6^th arrondissement, between the boulevard St. Germain and the Quai Malaquais, famous for its art galleries and antique shops, and that this collection is now to be found in a music box museum just outside Paris.¹¹

The presence of so many instruments in the film is something more than a matter of incidental detail. In one respect, two hundred years on from the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, their presence might be taken to satisfy the conditions laid out by Walter Benjamin for what he called a "phantasmagoria of the interior."¹² Benjamin saw the domestic drawing-room that emerged with the nineteenth century as like "a box [End Page 8] in the world-theatre," in which the private citizen could assemble those objects which represented "the distant in space and in time" that served "to support him in his illusions" of knowledge and control over his world. While Benjamin does not say so, we might take his "phantasmagoria of the interior" as evidence that the grand, emancipatory narrative of Enlightenment progress through science and rationality has finally crashed on the rocky shore of the totalitarian nineteen-thirties. As now part of the trade in luxury goods for the well-to-do, Robert's collection may therefore be seen to represent the degradation of an ideal. "The collector," Benjamin notes, "was the true inhabitant of the interior."

He made the glorification of things his concern. To him fell the task of Sisyphus which consisted of stripping things of their commodity character by means of his possession of them. But he conferred upon them only a fancier's value, rather than use-value. The collector dreamed that he was in a world which was not only far-off in distance and in time, but which was also a better one, in which to be sure people were just as poorly provided with what they needed as in the world of everyday, but in which things were free from the bondage of being useful.¹³

In this respect, Renoir has certainly taken pains to choose and place the instruments which he wishes to bring to our attention as a facet of Robert's wealth and social standing, and as a projection of the character and personality of those with whom they are directly associated in various scenes of the film. What is immediately telling is the way in which the mechanical instruments which Robert sets in motion serve to project his anxieties about the extent of his control over his emotional world. As Benjamin said about the collector: "for a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have with objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them."¹⁴ Finally, I believe, these mechanical instruments also stand as analogy for the medium of film itself and, by extension, for the work of this film at this moment in time. Before arriving at that argument, however, I want to discuss three of these instruments in a little more detail. Let me begin with Robert's fauvette.

An Enlightenment confidence in the ability of human reason to replicate mechanically birds and animals (and even humans) may have taken impetus from Descartes' judgment in his defence of an incorporeal consciousness in Discourse on the Method that living animals were really just machines without purpose, will, or feeling. However, the meanings [End Page 9] of these mechanical figures in La Règle du jeu, meanings that are available to us, who, especially since Freud, credit the unconscious, and who, especially since Nietzsche, doubt the sovereignty of reason, would have been inscrutable to Descartes. The loss of the key to his warbler, and the exaggerated distress this produces, is surely a displacement of Robert's anxiety about inviting his wife's suitor, André Jurieux, to La Colinière for the hunting season. The moment in the hall in which he loses the key follows immediately upon his concession to Octave's entreaties on André's behalf and his apparently even-tempered remark that he has utmost "confidence" in Christine and that if she must love Jurieux, "it's not by keeping them apart that I will prevent it."¹⁵ The facade of words is one thing, the reality of his feelings another. (However, we should not doubt either the sincerity of his desire to be faithful to Christine by giving up his mistress, Geneviève, or his admission late in the film that he loves Christine too, just as do André and Octave.) That his control of his warbler, like his control of his other mechanical instruments, is correlated to his control over his emotional world is clearer still when we note that the bird does sing on cue in the earlier scene, just as Robert extracts a tentative agreement from Octave that he will be going to La Colinière.

Curiously, a mechanical singing bird figures in Alfred de Musset's serio-comic play Fantasio, written in 1834, the year after his Les Caprices de Marianne, which was the play whose intrigues and character types formed the basis for La Règle du jeu. In Act II, Scene IV, the impecunious title character, Fantasio, has assumed a disguise as jester to the King of Bavaria, and promises the King's unhappy daughter Elspeth, who is betrothed to the Prince of Mantua, the wedding gift of "a stuffed canary that sings like a nightingale":

Elspeth:

How can it sing if it's stuffed?

Fantasio:

It sings wonderfully.

Elspeth:

You know, there's something fanatical about the way you make fun of me.

Fantasio:

Not at all. My canary has a little whistle in its belly. You touch a little spring under its left foot, and it sings all the new operas, exactly like Mademoiselle Grisi.

Elspeth:

A creation of your wit, no doubt?

Fantasio:

By no means. It's a court canary; there are a lot of well-brought-up young girls who behave the same way. They have a little spring under their left arm, a pretty little jewelled spring, like a dandy's watch. The tutor or the governess touches the spring, and right away you see their lips produce the prettiest little smile, and a charming stream of honeyed words comes out [End Page 10] in the sweetest, gentlest murmur, all very politely, like nymphs dancing on tiptoe round a magic fountain. The bridegroom stares wide-eyed; the audience whispers indulgently, and the father, filled with a secret satisfaction, gazes proudly at his gold shoe buckles.¹⁶

The projection here of a state of mind or feeling into the clockwork canary anticipates one of the functions of Renoir's use of these instruments throughout his film. In the speech quoted, Fantasio's cynicism about the possibility of sincerity of feeling and expression in polite society is also some indication of why Renoir found inspiration and a model for La Règle du jeu in an author such as Musset. I should mention, too, that while Fantasio does represent an interesting nineteenth century example of the use of a mechanical figure in a work of fiction, there are in fact numerous seventeenth century references in French and English which compare human beings to clockworks or automata, so that even by the late eighteenth century the comparison was actually commonplace.¹⁷

Tiny, singing birds were manufactured as an off-shoot of the watch and clock industry from the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth by master craftsmen like Pierre Jaquet-Droz (and son) and Jean-Frédéric Leschot (the former's adopted son) of Neuchâtel, the Rochat brothers and Charles-Abraham Bruguier in Geneva, as well as by Blaise Bontemps and Robert-Houdin in Paris. They were quite commonly mounted on decorative boxes and their display aspect was often more important than their musical note sequences, which simply imitated twittering or whistling sounds (as with Robert's specimen).¹⁸ Such birds were, in effect, elementary mechanical organs since they worked by means of a single pipe with a movable stopper or plunger that varied the pitch of the sound.¹⁹ Robert's fauvette, a species of French warbler, partial to bushes as a habitat (like those in the Sologne, where his country estate is set), is so called because of its gray colouring tinged with reddish-brown (i.e. tawny; Fr. fauve).

And why a warbler? This is what Buffon has to say in his The Natural History of Birds: "Of the joyous guests of the woods, fauvettes are the most numerous and the most charming: lively and volatile, each motion is expressive, each accent is cheerful, and each gesture displays the tenderness of love."²⁰ Far from suggesting that Robert is manipulative, as critics have often argued, his mechanical and musical instruments are a reminder that his negotiation of sexual difference is fragile, even though he might like to manage it with the predictability of clockwork.

The second of the musical automata in the film that I want to look at is Robert's newly acquired "petite négresse romantique." In his biography [End Page 11] of his father, Pierre-Auguste, Jean tells the story of his first cousin Eugène, a professional idler, the son of his father's older brother, Victor. Eugène was raised in St. Petersburg, where his father was a tailor to the aristocracy. In the course of his life he learned fluent Russian, French, Mandarin and a variety of other languages. To avoid work, he never married, but enlisted—and re-enlisted several times—in the French Colonial Army, where he could lie on his back while giving out orders for "the glory of Western civilization." However, his devotion to laziness nearly came to an end when he unexpectedly fell in love. As Renoir tells it: "The object of his passion was a widow. She belonged to a tribe in Central Africa, and was not only coal-black but as beautiful as a piece of ebony. Unfortunately her tribal religion forbade her to remarry until five years after her husband's death. Eugène was sent out on military duty to Indochina, and he gradually forgot his Congolese Venus."²¹ No doubt the clichés—including the deliberate echo of the "Hottentot Venus"—convey Renoir's amusement, and veiled judgment, at the expense of cousin Eugène, but like Robert's affection for his "petite négresse" they also run the risk of obscuring the profound connection between masculine erotic fantasy and the colonial enterprise.

Furthermore, I do not think we should overlook the—no doubt unwitting—sexual connotations of "intact" in Robert's remark about his "petite négresse romantique." Noteworthy is the fact that Christine is dressed in white in this scene, in contrast to the black doll. Noteworthy, too, is the bare-breasted statue of a black woman which we can see on a pedestal beside Christine's bed during the second scene in her boudoir and again in the later scene in which she and Octave sit on that same bed. In both the statue and the doll Christine sees her ghost-written image reflected back from Robert's unconscious. Enough has been said about the collecting of images (paintings, statuary, here a musical automaton) of black women (whether African or American) by white men as inseparable from a projected anxiety about their sexual allure, and by extension the imagined sexual promiscuity of all women. This is the concomitant inverse of the exercise of masculine power (sexual and/or colonial). Manet's Olympia with its reclining white prostitute metaphorically displaced by an attendant black servant has become the paradigmatic artistic example. The paradigmatic real-life example was of course the treatment of Saartje Baartman, the so-called "Hottentot Venus." In the course of her brief sojourn in Europe until her death in Paris in 1815, she was exhibited as the spectacular object of sexual voyeurism. Men paid to examine her genitalia as confirmation of her difference (and incidentally of their appetite).²² Europe paid the price of its sexual fascination and colonial [End Page 12] legacy long after her death as well, since her genitalia were preserved at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris until 2002, when, with the help of Nelson Mandela, her remains were finally repatriated to South Africa for respectful burial.

Robert's négresse, even in its colonial and sexual associations, is a projection of his relationship with Christine at this moment in the film. She is all about his self-indulgence. It is Christine who would be "intact" to Robert, did André's confession on the radio not lead him to doubt her fidelity. The acquisition of the négresse this very day says everything about Robert's anxiety in his relationship with his wife.²³ Robert would like to be able to regulate the functioning of his emotional and sexual world with the predictability of a clockwork mechanism; however, as often as not his mechanical and musical instruments remind us that this control is precarious, either because they malfunction (the fauvette, as we saw earlier, or the orchestrion, as we shall see later) and/ or because his choice of instrument unconsciously reveals so much about his deepest feelings, as here. Apparently, human beings are not mechanisms and relationships refuse to function like clockwork. Immediately after demonstrating his négresse for Christine, he will hear her condemnation of lying as an admission that she has not had an affair with André Jurieux, and will act himself to cut off his affair with Geneviève.

However, not only does the "petite négresse" expose once again Robert's precarious hold over his emotional world, I want to go further and say that the complex formed by its gender, racial, and colonial associations could be considered the repressed of its clockwork machinery made visible and legible, that this complex of energies could be considered the return of the repressed of the technology itself. The rational world of Enlightenment science and technology which lies behind Robert's clockwork machines cannot bring order to Robert's feelings. True knowledge of oneself or others cannot be obtained wholly by means of logical processes. The attempt to automate one's feelings, like the attempt to automate others (women, the colonized, the working class), is bound to failure. If anything, these mechanisms expose and exacerbate the unruliness of those feelings, expose and exacerbate everything that escapes reason and which can never be assimilated, reduced or annihilated, everything that belongs to the affective in our culture and in us, to the unpredictable, to energies that are left over and open, to wild natures both within and without. In other words, what I would say is that these energies are presented as though they were an inevitable (and epistemological) consequence of the technology itself.²⁴ Instead of fulfilling a compensatory function by sustaining one's illusion of power and knowledge over "the distant in [End Page 13] space and in time," it is precisely what produces "the phantasmagoria of the interior." As creatures of the Enlightenment, for the most part the characters in the film keep faith with reason, science and technology and, in turn, disavow the irrational (or superstitious), the bodily, and the affective (and, of course, in disavowal create them as a problem, which will return with the violence of the hunt). They will also project this repressed onto other peoples and places—the colonized everywhere, women and labouring classes, Africa, the non-Western world and its diasporas (see the references in the film to Buffalo Bill, Christopher Columbus, the Chinese, "Negroes," a Polish labourer and an Italian stonemason). It is specifically through Mme. La Bruyère at the level of character that the film questions rather than accepts Europe's singular claim to civilisation along with its colonization of minority cultures as (self-) justification in defence of its ideas of progress.

Robert's "latest acquisition," which he proudly displays as the "climax" to his career as a collector of musical and mechanical instruments, is a hugely complicated music box (this one powered by electricity) called an orchestrion. The orchestrion has its origins as a late eighteenth-century mechanical instrument intended to imitate an entire orchestra by using perforated cards, paper rolls, or pinned cylinders to control the passage of air to the reed stops and resonators of organ pipes, which produce the principal wind, brass and string sounds.²⁵ Ranks of pipes of variable length can be seen clearly in the long shot of the orchestrion when it is first shown in the film. Additional, percussive sounds can be produced by supplementary mechanisms that animate figures to activate chimes, bells or cymbals, as the close-ups illustrate. While the action of the orchestrion proper is pneumatic, ancestrally its mechanism is related to the barrel organ because it belongs to a class of self-acting musical instrument which relies on a pre-recorded score or program.

The principal manufacturers of the orchestrion were to be found in Germany, who exported widely to the rest of Europe. The French were next in terms of quality. The instrument that we see in the film is a Gavioli (the name just discernable on the face of the instrument), manufactured in Paris by Ludovic Gavioli, a native of Modena, who set up in business in France in 1845 with his two sons. The Gavioli family business survived into the early years of the twentieth century, until it was absorbed by Limonaire Frères, which itself effectively ceased business in 1918. Robert's orchestrion dates from some time after 1870, when the firm first started using the name Gavioli & Cie., and it operates by the system of perforated cards to produce the recorded music. The Gaviolis were superb craftsmen who brought a number of technological innovations to the production [End Page 14] of orchestrions and other large instruments.²⁶ That the instrument in the film was of native manufacture puts the lie to another myth about the production of La Règle du jeu, namely that cost overruns were due to expensive whims like the importation of the orchestrion from Germany, whereas it was likely borrowed, as Max Douy remembered, from a local, private collector.²⁷ While the earliest orchestrions were one-off mechanical and musical marvels which their makers exhibited as wonders (for a fee) to the moneyed upper classes of Europe, in wider production in the latter half of the nineteenth century they became showmen's instruments for fairground carousels, dance halls, panoramas and, later still, for skating rinks and movie palaces. The Gavioli company specialised in fair and showmen's organs.²⁸ This explains why Robert's orchestrion has the look of kitsch, with its light display and central, nude female figure. By the end of the nineteen-thirties, as their practical use declined, such instruments had become collectibles. Famously, Renoir has often been quoted as saying of the close-up that holds on Robert after the camera has tracked across the face of the orchestrion: "I believe that's the best shot of my whole life."²⁹ What Renoir liked about it was the mixture of humility and pride, of success and doubt, on the actor's face. We love the embarrassment of his pride, because he makes us share in it. That is what perfectly evokes the ground of the attachment that we all have to kitsch—an embarrassed intimacy.

The earliest orchestrions played music by Hayden, Mozart and other composers in the Western tradition. Beethoven composed his Battle Symphony (Op. 91), otherwise known as "Wellington's Victory," for a version of the orchestrion called the Panharmonikon. While the instrument could produce sound at a colossal volume (hence the Beethoven composition), the quality of the sound left something to be desired, which was why its obvious commercial heyday was the first quarter of the twentieth century and the advent of new mass entertainment and leisure activities. When he first introduces it, Robert's instrument plays "À Barbizon" (1927), by Vincent Scotto, but a few scenes later, when it breaks down, it is playing the waltz from the overture to Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus (1874).³⁰

As the player piano in the film signifies death (it plays Saint-Saën's Danse macabre, after all) so, at first glance, the orchestrion does seem to be associated with sexual desire, what with its Strauss waltz and its popular Scotto song about leisurely Sundays in the country. These may even be the two counterbalancing movements of the whole film, the death drive (hence, the sequence of the hunt) and the pleasure principle (hence, the fête sequence), although of course these two movements are not strictly opposed but different manifestations of the same inertia at [End Page 15] this moment in historical time at the end of thirties. The hunt is merely the fête played outdoors (its white-coated beaters the equivalent of the skeletons), while the fête carries on the hunt indoors by other means (the gamekeeper and the poacher still in pursuit of their quarry). In any event, there is certainly the temptation to draw an analogy between the disposition of the representational human figures on Robert's orchestrion and the two sets of love intrigue in the film. (Orchestrions came with all sorts of decorative features so that Renoir and his crew need not have chosen this particular example, nor have shown us its detail in close-up.) The painted figure of a seated, nude female is the instrument's central decorative element.³¹ She is on display, passive. The three upright figures across whom the camera pans are active, ringing bells or marking time with a baton. She could be Christine or Lisette. They could be André, Robert and Octave, or Octave, Schumacher and Marceau.³² Unfortunately, the first upright figure is rather androgynous, so we cannot be sure that it represents a male suitor at all. Nevertheless, Renoir's closeup on the female nude is unmistakably telling at this moment in the film, just as the love intrigues are about to unravel toward their fatal conclusion, with alternately Christine or Lisette the object of the pursuit. Like the other mechanical instruments in the film, this one too, the most dazzling of them all, when its mechanism derails and its music loses its tempo, once again says something about Robert's lack of control over his world.

Since the early nineteenth century and the Romantic period especially, numerous artists have registered their trepidation at certain kinds of mechanical instrument and at automata generally, sensing their affinity with death and/or the uncanny. Renoir himself wrote: "Keyboard instruments, the piano, the accordion, are inhuman, because it's they which produce the notes and not the flesh and blood musician. These creatures of wood, of metal and of cat gut, almost attain the fantastic grandeur of automata."³³ Renoir's conviction echoes the judgment of the character Lewis in E.T.A. Hoffmann's story "Automata" ("Die Automate") from 1814: "The fact of any human being's doing anything in association with those lifeless figures which counterfeit the appearance and movements of humanity has always, to me, something fearful, unnatural, I may say terrible, about it. . . . At all events, all mechanical music seems monstrous and abominable to me; and a good stocking-loom is, in my opinion, worth all the most perfect and ingenious musical clocks in the universe put together."³⁴ In his extraordinary short story, Hoffmann describes a number of automata, including Vaucanson's mechanical duck, along with a fictional invention of his own which he calls the "Talking Turk," and he mentions a number of mechanical musical instruments known to that [End Page 16] date, including the orchestrion. What emerges from such examples is a feeling, a sensation even, that certain kinds of musical automata, by a process of substitution, stand in for the living musician, that they evoke the uncanny double of man's flesh and blood, that like so many ghosts they haunt and shadow a real presence. In Jean Vigo's L'Atalante from 1934, the automaton of the orchestra conductor activated by père Jules literalizes this meaning, while arousing a strange (sexual) uneasiness in Juliette and in the viewer.³⁵

This uneasiness is extended by a writer like Hoffmann in both "Automata" and "The Sandman" (1816) to include all automata, so that for Freud the latter story becomes the very model of the Uncanny and the basis for his essay of 1919. Freud, remember, thought of his essay as an inquiry into "a theory of feeling" under "the subject of aesthetics."³⁶ What Hoffmann recognized is that not only are all automata about doubling the living with the dead, but they also defamiliarize the familiar (they are heimlich and unheimlich at the same time), that they produce a shiver at the unsuspected revelation that issues from within ourselves, and thus they effect the return of the repressed. So it is that in an extraordinary, prescient passage, Hoffmann has his character Lewis say about the imaginary automaton called the Talking Turk (this in 1814, remember):

Even if it does not clearly speak out secrets dormant within us, it evokes, in a sort of ecstasy induced by its rapport with us, the suggestions, the outlines, the shadowings of everything in our minds, all of which are seen by the eye of our spirit, brightly illuminated. . . . As a result it is we who answer our own question; the voice which we hear is produced from within ourselves by the operation of this unknown spiritual power, and our vague presentiments and anticipations of the future are heightened into spoken prophecy. It is much the same thing in dreams when a strange voice tells us things we did not know, or about which we are in doubt; it is in reality a voice proceeding from ourselves, although it seems to convey to us knowledge which we did not previously possess.³⁷

Do not Robert's automata unwittingly do as much for him in La Règle du jeu?

However, in addition to the understanding they may permit us of the emotional or psychological state of any of the characters in La Règle du jeu is the potential of the film's automata for evoking the very movement fundamental to the cinematic apparatus. Like the presence of theatricals and the role of performance in the film, or the acoustic and visual regimes [End Page 17] instantiated, on the one hand, by the importance assigned to the radio at the beginning of the film and, on the other, by the function of Christine's little field-glass at the turn in the film's narrative after the hunt, the musical automata of La Règle du jeu serve to point up a mise en abîme of cinema by further drawing attention to the film's self-reflexive aspect and the reality-illusion conundrum that it provokes. Because of their movement, the automata offer us the illusion of life as they oscillate between the condition of inert matter (a machine) and the state of a living organism (its movement). Is this not the cinema, or at least the Faustian bargain of cinema, because it mimes life in a perpetual motion which encourages us to take its illusion for reality?³⁸ The moving film, in the way it works mechanically, the film moving through the camera (and the projector), comes out of the same workshop, so to speak, as various automata. A roll piano which takes perforated paper works on the same mechanical principle as a motion picture camera (and projector) which takes perforated celluloid (or, once upon a time, paper). Provocatively, Philippe Rouillet calls these perforations "trous de mémoire" ("memory holes").³⁹ The Paillard family of Sainte Croix, in the Swiss Jura, who set up the first factory to produce music boxes, later produced gramophones, and later still, in 1936, the Bolex 16mm camera and accompanying projector. Celluloid, film, a motion picture strip, like the pegs on a barrel organ, the paper in a roll piano, the grooves on a phonograph cylinder, the perforated cards of the orchestrion, is a coded program, so that one can be sure of repeating—recovering—through its trous de mémoire exactly the same film (program) at every sitting. Film, like all automata, is a memory machine. (That it will not mean the same thing at each sitting because one has oneself changed is another matter altogether. As Freud noted about one of his own experiences, déjà vu is another condition for the realization of the uncanny.)⁴⁰ In other words, reliable repetition is every bit as important as faithful reproduction to the phenomenon of cinema, just as it is to other, similar mechanical devices (or automata) with which it is cognate and with which it is complicit genealogically.

In La Règle du jeu, at the moment of the derailment of the orchestrion, the plot of the film also derails and what was a comedy of manners becomes now farce, and then tragedy, so that its final unravelling seems to escape everyone's control.⁴¹ The orchestrion's dissonance is the film's dissonance, so to speak, as though the cinematic apparatus itself had collapsed into its technological likeness in the mechanical musical instrument. Only the agent of Death can bring both to a conclusion. As André Jurieux's death at the hand of Schumacher closes down the film, so it is an errant shot from Schumacher's pistol which apparently causes the [End Page 18] orchestrion to derail and then cease functioning. To the various expected and, moreover, unexpected meanings (in French) of the word "jeu" that the film's title invokes—too numerous to elaborate here—one of the most interesting and pertinent is the easy and regular movement of an object or a mechanism (a lock, a gear, a spring) or, curiously, the expression of its contrary, the failure of two or more pieces of a mechanism to articulate or interlock properly: the (clockwork) mechanism works ("le jeu") or it doesn't ("il y a du jeu").⁴² By way of Robert's mechanical instruments, this latter meaning, as I have already suggested, invokes emotional life, social life and, now, (the) film itself. Furthermore, does the breakdown of the orchestrion not expose the potential for a-synchrony in the relationship between sound and image? Does this a-synchrony not expose the artifice, the work (ordinarily) required, to produce synchronous sound and image relations? In sum, the orchestrion is nothing short of metaphor and metonymy for the whole film. That is to say, it has both a part-whole relationship to the plot of this film, while it also stands in a relation of similitude to film altogether. The automata here, including film, offer us, by virtue of their technology, a critique of both ontological and epistemological certainty. If we cannot be sure who we are (think of the film's disguises, its mistaken identities, the associative meanings carried by the automata I have discussed), we cannot be sure what we know (the confusion in the film about who has done what to whom and why, the failure of reason to order the world, the collapse of harmony in the relations between its moving parts). What looks like a paradigm of Descartes' incorporeal consciousness is actually betrayed by that which its operations would seek to repress. The uneasiness, the feeling of the uncanny, is produced in defiance of the automaton as a construction subject to the laws of rational mechanics. Between its functioning and it effects there is a built-in and unaccountable paradox.

I have remarked that the heyday, the high-water mark, of the production (and even the philosophical, scientific and cultural discussion) of automata, including all forms of mechanical instrument, was the eighteenth century. Their presence in La Règle du jeu, now as commodities belonging to the luxury goods trade that suits "the phantasmagoria of the interior," represents nothing less than the fading half-life of the Enlightenment and its aspirations as Europe stands, in 1939, before the abyss of a second World War and the Holocaust. The character Robert, we should remind ourselves again, is Jewish. The first half of the twentieth century was an extension of the age of Enlightenment, but still not an enlightened age (pace Kant).⁴³ The post-Romantic perception of the uncanny nature of automata figured a distrust of Enlightenment and [End Page 19] expressed a concern that rational models can lead to rationalization, to models for being and knowing that are always at the expense of someone or something. (Parenthetically, that is why Freud could only have written his "Uncanny" essay in 1919, following the consequences of World War I.) Because of this concern, automata are perceived to relate to a mode of production that results in the rationalization of labor by means of the factory system, to a mode of consciousness that represses feeling, and to a mode of being that involves mind over matter and the suppression of the body. Enlightenment as the shared project of the West has foundered on its own convictions. The best will in the world turns out to have been the worst will in the world. But lest I seem merely to be suggesting that La Règle du jeu shares (avant la lettre) the post-war pessimism of an Adorno and a Horkheimer, let me hasten to add that the point is not simply to rehearse once again the observation that the values and attitudes identified with Robert, both good and bad—and they are both good and bad—(on the one hand, his liberalism and generosity, his metropolitanism and his trans-Europeanness—on the other, his infidelity, his colonialist associations, and his class snobbery)—the point is not simply to rehearse the observation that these values are both produced by his Enlightenment heritage (as symbolized by his musical automata) and that they failed to prevent the collapse of European civilization and the outbreak of World War II. It is too easy to conclude that the film is simply a study of haute bourgeois hypocrisy. The characters, as individual characters, are not in control of their destiny. The way in which the machinery of the plot works toward its conclusion makes that clear. There is—importantly—no protagonist to act as a moral guide, no class with a sense of shared purpose which might offer the possibility of renewal. The characters simply do not know what else to do but play out the string of their undoing. To charge them with deceit or hypocrisy is not enough, is too narrow a view of the great sea change in the cultural and social values of the West this film may be the first work of cinema to record. Their master narrative has failed them and they have failed it. This, truly, is the end of history (long before it was pronounced at the end of the 1980s). The point is that this is also, for Renoir, the failure of his brilliant film as the summit of the failure of a brilliant career in the 1930s, a failure he admits to himself by taking on the role of Octave, the failed artist figure within the film. La Règle du jeu marks the end of something, not the beginning of something else. It is nothing short of the failure of cinema altogether to be enlightened and enlightening, its failure, in the run up to 1939, to relieve misery and want, its failure to bring about moral and social improvement. We could never again let ourselves believe that it might. [End Page 20]