South Central Review

The mise-en-scène of history and the politics of style

Before I get to the pan, and to put more flesh on the notion of the mise-en-scène of history, I would like to look at another sequence from the film, the one that follows the announcement that Batala, the owner of the small, courtyard printing company at the film's heart, has been killed in a train accident. This is the sequence when the realization first dawns that existing social arrangements are not set in stone. I will deal with the first part of it briefly before focusing more closely on two particularly interesting shots. The sequence does not begin promisingly. Firstly, Estelle, a young woman who works in the laundry which is also found in the courtyard next to the print-shop, announces to Lange, the hero, her intention to leave. She loves Charles, the print-shop bicycle delivery boy, but has been made pregnant by Batala. She decides to slip away quietly and asks Lange to say her goodbyes to Charles. Secondly, the print-shop itself is under threat. A paper supplier wants the machinery sold to reimburse him. The workers want to set up a co-operative but the solicitor of Meunier, the principal creditor, is not happy about the idea. Things look up, however, when M. Meunier fils, the creditor's son, appears, jumps acrobatically onto the table around which things are being discussed, and gives his approval to the co-operative proposal, despite his ignorance of the precise nature of what it entails. Confirming his non-conformism, he undoes the solicitor's bow-tie, declaring his dislike of [End Page 27] the item in question, before doing the same to Louis, the foreman, who has been speaking for the workers. Louis responds by throwing young Meunier's pocket handkerchief out of the window, declaring his own dislike for this particular object. The two laugh.

It is then that we see the two shots that repay particular scrutiny. The first starts as a medium shot of Lange down in the courtyard where, crowbar in hand, he sets to work removing the advertising panel that Batala has had placed over the window of Charles, who, at this stage of the film lies bedridden following a cycling accident. Without a cut, the camera pans right and tracks upwards to frame watching groups of print-workers at two of the print-shop windows before panning left to pick up a third group, including young Meunier, at yet another window. As the latter moves out of the window frame and out of sight, the camera cranes back down to find Lange again, still trying to remove the panel, even as the caretaker, M. Besnard, a rather ridiculous, ex-colonial soldier, tries to stop him because he does not have written permission. Still without a cut, the shot remains on the two as young Meunier comes back into the frame and adds his efforts to those of M. Lange. Finally, the cut comes. We now have a shot from within Charles's room looking towards the window frame. As the advertising panel is finally removed, and in typical Renoir style, interior and exterior are connected as Charles in the foreground looks out at the sea of faces crowding around his window. The figures then move back to allow him some air, opening up a line of sight through to the laundry door where Estelle is to be found. Hands propel her forward towards Charles's window as the lovers are reunited.

There is much going on here. Underlying it all, however, is a tension between a continuation of the status quo and the emergent possibility of its transformation, a tension inscribed in both the individual and collective trajectories of the characters and in the mise-en-scène of the sequence. We might begin by looking at what happens to Estelle. Fittingly for a film that knowingly draws upon and transforms popular cultural forms, she is the stereotypical innocent maid of the melodrama, one condemned to suffer at the hands of villainy. Her future seems prewritten. Born outside of marriage, the daughter of a father so "'discrete" that she never knew him, she in turn prepares to give birth to a child of another "discrete" man, who, having taken his pleasure has now taken his leave. Reuniting her with Charles, Lange's collectively supported gesture of removing the advertising panel is an intervention in the temporality of her life, one that opens it onto the future and undoes the apparent inevitability of social "fate" and the repetition of the same. The panel's removal thus serves as a visual manifestation of the sense that existing social and spatial [End Page 28] relationships are not set in stone and that possibilities can be opened up where none seemed to exist.

It is in this context that the little piece of apparently trivial comic business with the bow-ties and the handkerchief becomes more meaningful. Coming just at the moment when the co-operative idea is launched, it is a reminder that social roles and the accoutrements of respectability are open to challenge, not simply by the non-conformist bourgeois but also by the worker. Renoir is often thought of as a realist. Paradoxically, at the moment when his cinema really engages with contemporary realities, there is a kind of "theatricalization" of his mise-en-scène as the décor opens to change and the tie between character and social role is loosened. In the end, the real and the theatrical are not opposed to each other. On the contrary, it is precisely when characters decide to intervene in the real that it loses its dull solidity and becomes open to theatrical reinvention. Theatricality is thus an essential part of the film's mise-en-scène of historical openness.

The panel scene is worth further probing. The caretaker, the old soldier, respecter of established hierarchies and follower of orders, opposes Lange's actions. He wants an official say-so that means the rules are being respected. Lange is driven by something very different, a pressing need for a better life that cries out for immediate intervention: "Some air for Charles . . . We don't give a damn about orders. Hygiene first! Sun! Health." The dialogue between the two men is part of the broader, temporally charged confrontation that the film stages between the law, with its drive to protect existing arrangements, and justice, with its impetus to correct wrongs and inequalities and thus to effect change. The opposition between the competing principles is encapsulated in the struggle between the illustrated novels associated with the print-works. The panel was occupied by a poster promoting Batala's announced flagship vehicle, Javert, a publication named after the dogged, repressive policeman of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. The work that triumphs with the rise of the co-operative is the western novel, Arizona Jim, authored by Lange himself. The space of the film is the site of a struggle between these two publications and the principles that they embody. Arizona Jim, with its stories of wrongs righted, is originally confined to Lange's room, where a map of Arizona and other icons of the western adorn the walls, and limited to the night-time hours when he writes. By the time the co-operative is formed, it has broken out of these limits to make its presence felt in the print-works, its title clearly visible on the walls behind the assembled workers. Even as Meunier and Lange remove the panel with the poster for Javert, Meunier brandishes a copy of Arizona Jim. The spatio-temporal [End Page 29] contours of the world of the film are open to the struggle of competing possibilities, a struggle that is at its most concentrated at the time of the murder but which underpins the whole film.

There is a temptation when analysing Renoir's style simply to admire its bravura brilliance and to forget its intersection with a politics. Thus, looking at the two shots which I described in detail, we might limit ourselves to a focus on the extreme long take and camera mobility of the one and the complex staging in depth of the other. Chris Faulkner, amongst others, has worked to counter such a narrowly formalist approach to the director's style, pointing out how Renoir's mise-en-scène is always a mise-en-scène of social relationships that connects actions to their contexts and individuals to the social.⁴ Building on this insight, we might note how the camera mobility of the complex crane shot that takes in Lange in the courtyard and the workers at the windows broadens the dimensions of Lange's act, making it one both for and of the collective and confirming its nature as an immediate enactment of the co-operative's promise. Renoir's 1930s style always needs to be understood both as an alternative to classical editing (it does the same job by other means) and as something radically different. While classical editing could have dealt with the same action by cutting, for example, on looks or on exits, Renoir's choice to film the removal of the panel with just two shots, one of which is a single, exceptionally long take, ties everyone into the same action. The workers are not simply observing something of which they are not part, nor is Lange simply acting on his own. The length and mobility of one shot and the deep staging of the other are intrinsically tied to the emergence of a collective actor: no empty pieces of stylistic virtuosity, they work to pull people and actions into unity. The entry of history into Renoir's cinema is inextricably tied to this capacity to register the presence of a group able to effect progressive change.

When possibilities collide: the murder sequence

The filming of the murder is also a moment of virtuoso brilliance. It is preceded by two sequences, the first which figures the co-operative members joyously and raucously celebrating the decision to turn Arizona Jim into a film, the second that shows the startled Lange find Batala in the latter's old office. Batala did not in fact die, as had been thought, in the crash of the train on which he had earlier fled. Instead, he had opportunistically taking on the identity of a priest killed in the accident. Now, as he tells Lange, he has come back to reclaim ownership of the [End Page 30] print-works. It is after this conversation that the murder scene occurs. It is captured in two more remarkable shots. The first begins with a medium shot of Valentine, the woman whom Lange has come to love, as she confronts Batala, the returning "ghost," in the corner of the courtyard. The camera then cranes up to frame Lange looking down on the pair from the window of Batala's old office, a space now symbolically populated by the spreading iconography of Arizona Jim. As he moves left out of the window frame, the camera tracks him laterally through a series of windows. It then cranes back down as he descends the stairs into the courtyard and frames him as he pauses by the doorway and points his hand towards Batala and Valentine. There is then an axial cut, an editing device frequently found in the Renoir of this period, which, keeping the same angle of vision, moves us into a medium shot of Lange, emphasizing his bemused facial expression. As he begins to move forward, the camera famously abandons him and pans 270° round the courtyard in the opposite direction to pick him up again just as approaches the pair. It then tracks forward with him, a camera movement that no-one ever seems to have noticed, as he takes the last few paces towards Batala and shoots him. Finally, panning a little left, it frames Lange and Valentine as they look at the body. When Lange asks whether Batala is dead, the sound of the off-screen merriment of the celebrating co-operative rings out loudly as it has already done several times during the murder scene.

The murder sequence was not always admired. For some such as Roger Leenhardt, as Karla Oeler notes, Renoir's "zig-zagging" camera was a sign of amateurism.⁵ It would predictably fall to Bazin to provide the framework for later interpretations which saw the pan as the core of the film's meaning rather than an unfortunate self-indulgence. In his Renoir book, put together after his death by Truffaut, he wrote of the pan twice, once in his brilliant essay on "French Renoir," the other in his commentary on the film itself. In the former, he described the movement as a 180° pan, although it is not clear if he sees it as a separate shot or as the continuation of another shot.⁶ In the latter, clearly having been taken in by the axial cut's unobtrusiveness, and denied the indulgence of video or DVD, he perceives the two shots described above as a single shot that traverses 360° in its complex, meandering course.⁷ This merging of the two shots helps explain his famous comments. Noting that the two essential elements of the film's mise-en-scène are in-depth compositions reaching into the spaces that line the courtyard and pans that follow actions in the courtyard itself, he suggests that, circling the courtyard, and looking into the spaces that line it, the 360° pan, as he calls it, represents a summation of the way the whole film is constructed.⁸ Picking up on [End Page 31] this insight, but seeking to correct its neglect of the film's committed politics, Daniel Serceau and Christopher Faulkner have suggested that what really motivated the pan's counter-intuitive abandonment of the killer's movements was its desire to shift responsibility away from Lange, the individual, and towards the group that lived and worked around the courtyard embraced by the pan's sweep.⁹ The camera movement thus became an essential component of the film's politics, effectively collectivizing the murder and making it a political rather than a criminal act.

The kind of reading deployed by Serceau or Faulkner is insightful and, on its own terms, entirely persuasive. Where I would part company with it to some extent is in its prioritization of the spatial dimension of the pan, its ability to take in the courtyard and, by implication, the community that lives and works around it. My own preference is to read the pan temporally. If we relocate it within the broader context of the film's mise-en-scène of competing historical possibilities, my primary focus thus far, the fact that it covers about 270° rather than 360° takes on considerable significance. Were the camera to move full circle before it found Lange, the hero would not have moved and the camera's circling movement would simply have been taking stock of a static situation, exploring a setting and concluding that nothing had changed. However, the interruption of the circle by Lange's linear movement enacts a decisive, double shift. Firstly, it opens up the possibility of the radically new. When, failing to follow Lange with the obvious pan or tracking movement, the camera moves the "wrong" way, panning left as he moves right, it allows him to escape its totalizing circling gaze, to break out of the familiar and to step into the uncharted space of the authentic political act. Secondly, the combination of circularity (the camera's movement) and linearity (the hero's crossing of the yard) suggests a tension between repetition (the circle) and change (the line).

This tension is worth developing. The line does not simply cut the circle and prevent its completion. It interacts dialectically with it. The circle is destabilised because, once the potential for change is opened up, the repetition built into it can never be guaranteed. Yet, at the same time, the straight line's forward movement is also undermined. Change is always reversible and progress cannot be relied upon. This sense of reversibility is, of course, encapsulated in the figure of Batala. If, on the one hand, his earlier, accidental death opens up a space for thinking utopian reinvention, his return reminds us that the past is not so easily evaded, that revolutionary advances are haunted by reactionary possibilities and by "revenants," ghostly figures that come back to haunt the new. But ghosts never restore the past as it was. They signal its return [End Page 32] as something monstrous. When Batala returns he is not the same. This is signalled on a surface level by his grotesque disguise as a priest. At a deeper level, it is indicated in his conversation with Lange when he justifies the need for his reinstatement as boss. He says that giving a voice to all, even to the lowest, the co-operative represents disorder when what is in fact needed is a chief ("un chef"), as embodied by himself. He has thus mutated. Part boss, part parodic priest, he has also become a reactionary, authoritarian figure, an active un-doer of the new. When Lange slays him, he is killing more than one foe. Not least, he is attempting to slay the ghost, the figure that haunts those engaged in revolutionary change with the sense that historical advance is never guaranteed, that the past can always return.

Oeler's account of the pan and of the film more generally is developed in her book A Grammar of Murder. Her broader starting point in that work is the relationship between cinematic representation and the absent referent, cinema always being a trace of something that has now gone. She convincingly suggests that the representation of murder is able to condense this tension between presence and absence, life and death. This is obviously so in the case of montage which can be used to generate a sense of murderous violence (as in the famous shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho) but can also be understood in terms of the violence editing does to the real through its capacity to cut, to segment bodies and to impose meanings. However, it is also more broadly true of cinematic representation in general where the particularity of individual lives or the excess of the real are obliged to fit within the frameworks of the discourse of films, even when, as in the case of Renoir, they are more typically associated with realism than montage. Thus, murder scenes tend to dramatize the violence done by film to what it shows. As Oeler puts it, "The discourse often rids itself of the character even as the murderer annihilates the storied victim, signifying that the character is, at a given moment within the plot, dispensable to the narrative. Murder scenes thus can court complicity with the very act they represent."¹⁰ Yet at the same time, because murder draws attention to elimination, it can also highlight the irreducible singularity of victims and their capacity to resist any final or totalizing judgement on them and their disposability.¹¹

We can see how well this general framework of analysis will map onto Le Crime. Oeler is clear about how, at the level of its own explicit discourse, the film repeatedly cues us to see the murder as necessary. She notes, for example, that, even before Batala's faked death, he nearly ruins the lives of Charles and Estelle, and, after it, how his absence "benefits an entire community."¹² She notes too how Batala himself tells Lange [End Page 33] he should kill him just before the actual murder. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely the wealth of this evidence condemning Batala that makes the pan's extravagance redundant. Whereas Serceau and Faulkner use it to underpin their readings of the film's politics, for Oeler, the political points have already been hammered home and its formal excess needs an alternative explanation. She notes that the film is self-reflexively aware of its own staging, as indicated, among other things, by the embedding of fictions such as Arizona Jim within its broader story. Within the context of this reflexivity, the pan marks the point when the film self-consciously calls attention to its own "discursive delimiting." She writes:

Just as the pan encircles the circular mise-en-scène, it is in turn encircled. The world represented within its circumference—indeed the circumference itself—reveals itself as arbitrarily demarcated or cut out from a space perhaps less tidily circular. The discourse thus becomes excessive in its justification of Batala's murder precisely as it reveals its own partiality—and consequent unreliability. Revolutionary violence is justified as staged within this circle, but justified provisionally.¹³

Rather than the pan simply enlisting the collective in the murder, it now points to what lies outside of the scope of the story itself and relativizes the film's explicit discourse of political commitment. The moment of "rhetorical excess," the pan, thus becomes the moment of "rhetorical collapse."¹⁴ At the same time, and in line with Oeler's broader framework, the film undermines its apparent politics from within itself by pointing to the problematic nature of Batala's removal. Thus for example, despite Lange's remark immediately after the crime, that the killing was easy, he grasps a post in the courtyard, "as if to hold himself up."¹⁵ More generally, the exuberant brilliance of the characterization of Batala by star actor, Jules Berry, means that even committed leftist critics like Goffredi Fofi, writing about the film in 1966, find that Batala provokes sympathy and that it is a shame that he must be eliminated.¹⁶ Lange's identification with his fictional creation, western hero Arizona Jim, means that "killing represented naively as the simple justice of the Western gunfighter appears, as in a palimpsest, with killing represented as a problematic political solution" in a way which reflexively questions the representation of the murder.¹⁷

This is a powerful but questionable reading. It is surely right about the film's self-conscious awareness of its own discursive limits, but it re-orientates it for its own purposes. It also makes the pan do too much [End Page 34] work to shore up its own argument. The film is less an allegory of revolution, as Oeler describes it, than a fable of the possible that is constantly asking us to think of the tension between the utopian microcosm and its exterior. This is evident from the early scenes in Lange's bedroom where the Arizona Jim story is clearly brought up against the real, first when Lange's escapist nocturnal writing is interrupted by the chiming of a bell as the working day begins, and secondly when Valentine reminds him that life is harsh in the world outside his window and not simply in Arizona. As the film progresses, there is a dialectical exchange between the reality of life in the courtyard and the story of utopian justice contained in Arizona Jim. Real world events and situations migrate into the western fiction, reworking its contents, even as it itself spreads progressively out into the real, as when its iconography expands beyond Lange's room or when his story achieves distribution around the capital. The whole of the film is predicated upon an exploration of the possibilities for radical change and the real obstacles to their realization. Of course, this is the reason for Batala's two deaths. The first, the accidental one, is an invitation to see how a world no longer structured by capitalist relations of production could be a significantly better place. The second is a sharp reminder that capitalism will not miraculously disappear but will need to be overcome.¹⁸

The same sense of possibilities and their limits is hard-wired into the film's spatial organisation. The courtyard's partial self-enclosure both makes it available as a place of utopian experimentation and serves as a constant reminder of broader determinants—debts, the law—which constantly threaten to impact the world within it. Given this constant signalling of limits, and the narrative importance of passages through the courtyard's entrance, it is hard to see why the film should need to turn to the excesses of the pan to signal its self-conscious awareness of the bounded nature of what it shows. Might it perhaps be that Oeler's analysis points less to the film's relativization of its own commitment than to her own sense of distance from the kind of politics it embodies? The film may want us to be amused and seduced by Batala as part of its functioning as a piece of popular entertainment. But it is still clear that its world is better without him.

Colin Davis's analysis of the film is very different but, as we will see, still converges with Oeler's in some essential ways. The cornerstone of his reading is the use that he makes of René Girard's thinking on desire, violence and sacrifice. Davis summarizes key components of Girard's analysis of the foundations of human society thus: [End Page 35]

What I desire, according to Girard, is not inherently desirable; rather I desire what the Other desires. I desire it because the Other desires it. So there are three figures involved in the drama of desire: the desiring subject, the desired object and the prestigious mediator who makes the object desirable to the subject by desiring or possessing it first [. . .] Mimetic desire easily turns to violence. By desiring what the Other desires, I desire also to be like, even to be, that person. But I also establish the Other as my rival [. . .] So although I might admire and wish to emulate the prestigious mediator, I also want him dead [. . .] Antagonism and rivalry are thus integral to human relations. On occasion, though, the conflict inherent in shared desires risks becoming too acute [. . .] At such times of crisis, a community needs some means of restoring an acceptable level of peaceful cohabitation. Girard argues that ritual sacrifice establishes a mechanism which preserves the cohesion of the community by channelling its internal conflict towards a single victim [. . .] Sacrifice strengthens the community, if only for a while.¹⁹

We can see how well this broader framework maps onto Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. Noting that Batala has seduced the different women that Lange desires, Davis casts the corrupt boss as Girard's mediator figure. Lange's aspiration to copy Batala's actions also makes him his rival, with murderous consequences. A double process of scapegoating is thus at stake. If the film projects onto Batala "all the ills of the community" and fantasizes that "his expulsion will create the conditions of a better, conflict-free future,"²⁰ Lange is also scapegoated for carrying out the collectively desired murder. However noble his motives, "once he has killed he can have no place in a community founded on law, and he must flee . . . ."²¹

Like Oeler, Davis clearly recognizes that the main thrust of the film is to justify Lange's act. He comments, "the principal energies of the film do indeed seem to be directed towards exonerating Lange by placing his crime in a social context which justifies it."²² He suggests, however, that "the film's exuberant political optimism coexists and competes with the mechanisms of violence and sacrifice which run counter to the very premises of its utopian hopefulness."²³ Given this, it is unsurprising that his reading of the murder sequence runs counter to other accounts. Whereas Serceau and Faulkner, as we saw, noted the power of its famous pan to transfer responsibility for the crime away from the individual and towards the courtyard collective, Davis is struck by the absence of the community—or more precisely, by the contrast between its visual absence [End Page 36] and its auditory presence. Because the co-operative's members can be heard partying off-screen as the crime is carried out, Lange is separated from the celebration while the merrymakers are separated from his act. Tellingly, from Davis's viewpoint only Lange, Batala and Valentine, the three figures in the Girardian circuit of mimetic desire, are in shot when the gun is fired. Davis is therefore led to conclude, "the shot could be said to suggest Lange's solitude, his position outside the community, and the foundation of the murder in desire and rivalry rather than political commitment."²⁴ He unsurprisingly emphasizes the spinning pan's capacity to disrupt the spectator's position. He comments, "there is no secure position from which to view events because what we are about to witness does not serve to create a revolutionary community."²⁵

The heart of Davis's argument is perhaps the part that sound may play in underscoring the separation of Lange and the rest of the collective. My own feeling is that it plays exactly the opposite role. Davis is right, I think, to draw attention to its importance, not least because the brilliance of the staging and the camera movement in the film can so easily cause us to underestimate the importance of other elements when we analyse the film. But where he is wrong, I would suggest, is in suggesting that there is an implicit separation of Lange from the rest of the co-operative. Activating off-screen space, as so often in the Renoir of this period, the sound surely serves to remind us of exactly in the interests of whom or what Lange is acting. Through its celebratory merriment, it also reminds us of how positively the previously "grey" world of the film has changed in Batala's absence. The same raucous merriment also cues us relatively unambiguously not to take the murder in a sombre manner. Besides, we have heard the same linkage of death and laughter before, when the courtyard collective waited anxiously to hear news of Estelle, as she gave birth to the baby fathered by Batala. When Valentine announced that Estelle was fine but that the baby had died, the group initially fell silent. However, when Batala's cousin, the discredited police inspector, remarked, "it was a relative after all," as a way to explain his sad demeanour, a loud peal of laughter rang out. Another part of the film's inscription of competing possibilities, the stillborn child suggests the non-continuation of what Batala represents and the capacity of Charles and Estelle to start afresh. Laughter, again accompanying a death, underscores the film's refusal to see this tragically. Our ears may now be ill attuned to it, but its narrative function seems unambiguous whether we like it or not.

As is well known, the story of the courtyard is contained within a brief framing story located in an inn near the coast on the Franco-Belgian border where, following the murder and their flight, Lange and Valentine [End Page 37] are briefly waiting before leaving the country. While Lange sleeps, Valentine begins to recount the murder to those present in the inn, an improvised popular jury who must decide whether to hand Lange in or not. Unsurprisingly, Oeler and Davis, particularly the latter, devote time to discussing this frame story. Oeler writes, "there is the story, a delay, and then a judgement as to the meaning of the story [. . .] Explicit signification does not instantaneously arise from the image. The structure of the story substantiates the structure of the image, which is to show before it means."²⁶ In her account, the jury scene works above all to confirm the deferment of meaning and the opening of a space of uncertainty and reflexion. Davis picks up on details of the opening conversation in the bar: a mature man says that he has dreamed of killing "harmful people" ("des nuisibles"); another character replies that we do not have the right to kill; the landlord's remark that Lange may have murdered his old mother; the mature male replies, "Why not God the father"? If God is to be killed, Davis asks (he sees Batala as a perverse demiurge figure), and society's existing moral laws are to be disregarded, then what is to save us from moral chaos?²⁷ Such apparent doubt and questioning confirm his sense that there is "a subdued but sceptical counter-narrative in the film," a judgement buttressed by the ending with its image of two isolated figures on wind-swept dunes, which, he notes, building on earlier comments by Keith Reader and Alexander Sesonske, is hardly joyful.²⁸ The film seems set on undermining the same political message it appears designed to promote.

There is something seductive about arguments that suggest that a film is more complex and ambiguous than it appears on the surface, especially in an age when forthright political conviction has become suspect. Yet Le Crime is perhaps more straightforward than it might appear. It is worth remembering that the improvised jury is only really hesitant before it has heard the story. When Valentine has finished her tale, matters are dispatched in a few lines of dialogue. The inn-keeper's son, an unimpressive figure set apart from the main group of mature men, says "between two gendarmes," implying that Lange should be arrested. His father gives him short shrift, saying "shut up, fool" before adding, "this needs thinking through." The older man responds, "From my point of view, it's already thought through." Two other men immediately concur. We then almost immediately cut to the scene on the beach where two of the men from the bar wave the escaping couple over the border. While the film clearly recognises that not all may agree with Lange's release, it leaves little room for doubt over its own position as it moves seamlessly to acquittal. The argument that, if we move outside the law, we risk falling [End Page 38] into moral chaos, seems to run counter to the core opposition that the film stages between the law's conservative drive and the revolutionary potential of the urge to justice. Given that it is more than happy to kill a figure dressed as a priest and given the leftist or anarchist sympathies of Jean Castanier, (its set designer and the proposer of the original idea), Jacques Prévert (the writer of the dialogue) and the Groupe Octobre (the radical theatre group that provided much of its cast), it is also hard to believe that it is really concerned by deicide.

The ending may indeed have an element of defeat about it, as Davis notes, but this is surely part of the film's political awareness and not an undermining of it. The music provides a clue as to how we might interpret it. It is an orchestral version of "A la belle étoile," the song Valentine sung to Lange on the night she first seduced him. On the face of it, it seems to be about gloomy fate, with its tale of an ageing streetwalker, its repeated line of "from day to day" and its closing verse, "what a sad life." Yet it is sung, on its first hearing, by a radiant Valentine to the man she loves as she successfully intervenes in the course of their lives. Its return at the end is not simply an implicit admission of defeat. It is a reminder of its earlier performance and the tension it expressed between the existing and the possible, the same tension that subtends the whole film. This is also the sense of Lange and Valentine's lonely footsteps in the sand at the end of the film. They have to leave France because the world is still essentially the same. Yet, they have also shown that it can be changed. They are thus walking into the space of the possible, onto virgin sand where no path has yet been set in the same way, of course, that Lange walked into uncharted space when he escaped from the camera's gaze during the murder scene.

Our distance from radical texts

If this reading is at least partially convincing, then it could be that we need to shift the question we ask of the film. Rather than pondering why it might seem to open up an implicit distance between itself and its surface meanings, we might instead wonder whether the distance does not lie in our own responses and that it has not therefore become simply impossible to take a story of political violence at face value other than as an example of something foreign and monstrous. It is here that Badiou can perhaps help. His attempt to generate an immanent sense of how the twentieth century understood itself can give us insights into how an eminently twentieth-century artwork asks to be read. [End Page 39]

Badiou begins by suggesting that the desire to create a new humanity was the essential project that the century set itself and that this project was both productive and, needing to sweep away the old, destructive. The nineteenth century could believe in a teleological, Hegelian understanding of history. After the slaughter of 1914-1918, the twentieth century could no longer trust in history's movement. A belief in progress therefore gave way to a heroic conception of the need for politico-historical intervention. The new man would not come from the movement of history. History would have to be constrained.²⁹ The nineteenth century was the century of utopian ideals: the twentieth century can be seen either as a betrayal of this idealism, the collapse into barbarity of a fallen civilisation, or as an age marked by a determination to realize what the previous era had only dreamt. Badiou is convinced that the latter is the case.³⁰ Far from the century being the era of ideologies as is often said, it has a passion for the real and for effecting immediate and lasting change.

Born in conflict, committed to struggle, the century has to come to terms with the challenge of war: it does this in two ways, either by embracing pacifism or by seeking to wage the good war, the one that puts an end to war through a decisive victory over what is opposed.³¹ It is the century not of the one, because there is no underlying harmony or unifying (divine) power, nor of the many (because a balance of powers is not sought), but of the two and of confrontation. The real which it seeks is ultimately the real of an antagonism that looks for resolution in a definitive struggle whose approach can be perceived when one is faced with the choice between killing and being killed. Murder is therefore, as Badiou puts it, a core icon of the age, a metonymical representation of the broader history. Violence is justified by the new humanity that is to be created.³²

The creation of the new is the work of the collective. The century is marked by the search for fraternity, a coming together that is not an abstract ideal but which finds its expression in the physical presence of the group, as in a demonstration, when the collective subject takes note of its capacity to effect change. Within this context, the celebration (fête) is lived not as a form of demobilisation, but as something dynamic, associated with the demonstration, the insurrection and the abrupt suspension of the normal course of affairs.³³ This collective "we" defines itself against two kinds of "not us": that which lacks form and needs to be shaped, and that which defines itself as another "we" and which must be opposed.³⁴ In the face of this rival "we," the "we" makes itself homogenous and models itself on the "I," with the obvious dangers that this supposes.³⁵ Conversely, the individual "I" can only participate in the creation of the [End Page 40] new by becoming part of a "we." Given this, cowardice is the desire to stay where one is and to refuse to participate in the collective adventure. More than the fear of prisons, the individual must overcome the fear of losing his or her routines and the secure spatio-temporal framework that they give. Paradoxically, however, participation in collective action and creation is less an act of individual will than a giving over of the self, an abandonment to what is happening.³⁶

This century, suggests Badiou, is one that has now become foreign to us. We live in a time without revolutionary projects and are obsessed with the preservation of what exists, the only drive to change humanity now coming from the automatic mechanisms of technology and the market.³⁷ The twentieth century's active nihilism, its desire to sweep away the old and to destroy the false, has given way to a purely passive nihilism defined by the imperative not to do harm, and to preserve an existing humanity characterised by its capacity for suffering.³⁸ Unwilling to create the new, the present falls back on the comfort of repetition and the security of the familiar.³⁹ The desire for equality is now seen as utopian and unnatural. Active, creative fraternity is distrusted as it may lead to the tyranny of the "we."⁴⁰ Fraternity has shrunken to the tolerance of difference.⁴¹ The celebration has become the consensual negation of politics so that even "serious" newspapers can compare the public rejoicing after the world cup victory of 1998 with the celebrations that accompanied the Liberation in 1945.⁴²

This is, of course, only a very partial version of Badiou's account of the century, how it thought itself and our distance from it. It would obviously be foolish to seek to map it mechanically onto Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. However, I would suggest that it resonates in important ways with the film and with aspects of our contemporary response to it. If the film is about anything, it is surely about the desire to intervene in the real, to move from utopian dreams of justice to their realization. The film's sense of history clearly mirrors that which Badiou attributes to the century more broadly: it knows that there are no guarantees, no linear progress, that advances can be undone, but it also affirms the possibility of progressive advance and the need to intervene. Pulling individuals together, connecting spaces and groups, reworking the framework of individual lives, its narrative and stylistic choices are driven at least in part by the desire to track the emergence of a transformative, collective actor. Its high points come when the group forms, effectuates change or celebrates, as in the sequence when the window panel is removed or the co-operative has its festive meal. An active fraternity, in Badiou's terms, is at its core. When we look at the film now, we may be tempted to separate [End Page 41] its utopianism from its apologia for violent political struggle. We may also seek to relativize the latter, perhaps to hold on to a preferred vision of a generous, tolerant Renoir. But it could be that the film endorses the need for the murder without reservation, Batala being the incarnation of the old world and the oppressions that must be swept away for the new to emerge. It could be too that the laughter of the courtyard's revolutionary gathering may seem far less separate from the murder than we might like to think if we move to a more active understanding of the festive, insurrectional community along the lines discussed by Badiou.⁴³

It could be, finally, that the old, common sense explanation of the famous pan, that it expresses the disarray of Lange as he prepares to carry out his crime, should not entirely be discarded but simply purged of its normal grounding in individual psychology. The pan is, after all, the moment when, stepping into the unknown, Lange commits himself entirely to the group and detaches himself from the contours of his old life. The man the camera finds again on the other side of the courtyard is simply not the same person he was. Given this, Badiou's description of commitment as a giving over of the self rather than a pure act of will chimes well with Lange's almost drunken state as he carries out the murder. A contemporary ethics, negatively grounded, in Badiou's terms, in the command not to kill, cannot but condemn him. But such an interpretation may need to be balanced by a more positively grounded ethics that judges Lange's act in its commitment to the collective and to what the group can create.⁴⁴

There is a danger here that, by attempting to restore the film's radicalism by relocating it in the context of the period to which it belonged, I may seem to be asserting the claims of the historically contextualised reading over all other readings and inadvertently consigning the film to history. This is not my intention. My recourse to Badiou is designed more to help widen the range of interpretations currently available to us by rendering a more radical appropriation of the film readable once again. Of course, this begs the question of whether the film can still speak to us now without us needing to bracket off or distance ourselves from this radical potential. Perhaps it can. Indeed, it is perhaps because it seems so distant in some ways from us that it can serve to remind us of things we have forgotten or too soon consigned to history, such as the value of an active fraternity, the imperative commands of justice, and above all, the capacity of people to remake their world, to break the circle, even if it means creating openings (opening windows) where none seem to exist. Does this mean that we should therefore turn a blind eye to the film's endorsement of murderous violence? Undoubtedly not, but this [End Page 42] violence calls for a thinking through rather than a simple condemnation or a stepping round. The world is still full of Batalas and life in the courtyard needs urgent intervention.