UNDER THE INFLUENCE: DYNAMIC REALISM IN TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE
no surprise to see his vast knowledge of cinema emerge on-screen, borrowing from Bazin and Eisenstein, in an attempt to contrast scenes. Truffaut is a storyteller, but perhaps a sculptor, too. Tirez sur le pianiste absorbs a slew of genres, and by their distinct natures, a slew of forms. He plays with the plasticity of the shots and with the resources of editing; he intertwines the conventions of the comedythriller genres, so as to achieve a cinematic pun. In Tirez sur le pianiste, Truffaut coalesces binary traditions of filmmaking — Bazin’s and Eisenstein’s, for that matter — and inevitably succeeds in creating a world of its own, one that is perhaps counterintuitive, but that is nevertheless true.
by Alain Edouard
To revert to Tolstoy (in his interviews with the press), “The artist calls attention.” Fascinating bundle of contradictions.
Tirez sur le pianiste opens with a chase scene as we are introduced to Chico, the brother of the film’s protagonist, running about the gloomy streets of Paris, trying to escape a car. The opening scene is utterly expressive; Truffaut makes use of a fast-paced montage of shots, and contrasts the range of shots – from l.s. to m.s., back to l.s., to c.u., et cetera. The scene is utterly destabilizing, yet Truffaut further creates contrasts; some shots show Chico running past the camera, while some show him running toward it. Eventually, the 180 degree axis is crossed – the spatial direction of the action, disrupted – for the final shot (l.s., high angle), when he runs into a post and falls prostrate on the ground. Truffaut spices up the scene with Eisensteinian editing verve. While the scene could have been pushed further to augment its destabilizing effect – that is, beginning the film amid the action of characters we have yet to make acquaintance of – Truffaut may have chosen to, say, conflict every shot in their direction, rhythm, or camera angle. Alas, it would likely have been too abstract a sequence to begin with, and he may have lost the audience with the first few seconds. Truffaut had a sense of balance.
What are they calling attention to? What do “I” call attention to?1 — Sidney Meyers In the winter of 1959, François Truffaut began shooting his second feature-length film, Tirez sur le pianiste (1960). The film would turn out a cinematic experiment – as Truffaut, having made his short a year earlier, Les Mistons (1958), soon realized that he would have to stick to a familiar subject for his first feature (which became the well-known Les Quatre Cents Coups, released in May 1959). Truffaut was also known for his voracious criticisms of films, writing for periodicals such as Arts and Cahiers du cinéma. Most importantly, Truffaut, along with fellow film critics and filmmakers of the nouvelle vague, possessed great knowledge on film history and its theoreticians. Among them, Sergei Eisenstein and André Bazin – whom he considered a father figure – have influenced his approach to the cinema. It is safe to say that Truffaut embraced both theoreticians, and particularly that Tirez sur le pianiste bears the influence of both camps – “those filmmakers who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality,”2 as Bazin put it. Bazin wrote a myriad of articles and essays including “Qu’est-ce que le cinéma ? in which he argues that the filmmaker should tell stories using the camera as an eye capable of rendering the sheer fabric of reality, making use of the long take and depth of field, to expose a maximum number of planes (thus avoiding cutting or “biting” off reality). Conversely, Eisenstein approached cinema in a scientific manner, arguing that editing was the engine and “nerve” of cinema he used the metaphor of shots as cells, or molecules and sought to propel it by joining, err, clashing shots altogether, shots that would produce meaning by their relation to one another (montage of attractions). For Eisenstein, a + b = c. As for Bazin, he sought to reduce this equation to a bare minimum (what he referred to as montage interdit, meaning that editing should be kept to a minimum) and therefore obtain something along the likes of a = a. Truffaut’s second opus is an adaptation of David Goodis crime noir novel Down There, but also features a breadth of other genres which he added himself comedy, melodrama, slapstick, and romance, to name a few. It is
25
Chico is put back on his feet with the help of a man— ostensibly, a stranger—with whom he begins speaking about love, as they walk past boutiques. This time, the audience gets to contemplate Chico and the stranger’s face for the first time, as Truffaut shifts to a strictly Bazinian fashion of storytelling: the long take. The shot lasts a lengthy two minutes and twenty-five seconds, which, for Eisenstein, would have been a nervous breakdown. Yet, this is indubitably what the film does; it contrasts, it goes back and forth between both techniques of telling. Truffaut appropriates both methods in such a way that he drives the film’s story with a gearbox, so to speak, constantly shifting gears of seeing and feeling (editing fragments reality; cutting is dynamic; conversely, the long take emanates realism, and the cut merely prunes an “excess” of irrelevant reality). The long take of Chico and the stranger plays a great deal in that it establishes for the first time a sense of the film’s crooked, or implausible, narrative reality; the conversation’s subject matter is contrapuntal to what occurs earlier (one would expect a superficial dialogue on Chico’s injury). Yet, the tracking camera captures both characters walking down the street, gently following their movements, exposing a sense of reality that is never seen prior to this scene. The audience comes to believe a reality where one hits a posts and immediately