Kim Jong-un and the Auteur School

Reading about the North Korean hacking scandal, and the role the persona of  country’s leader plays in the controversial film about his own assassination, one is reminded of the internecine battles that flared up amongst auteur critics like Truffaut and Godard, whose careers began as writers for Andre Bazin’s Cahiers du Cinema back in the 50’s. Significantly, of course, this was a around the time that Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) who would be an instrumental force in China’s cultural revolution, was refining her own interest in film. One thing that leaders in both China’s and North Korea’s totalitarian regimes and the auteurs shared was an infatuation with Hollywood and the stamp that one sensibility can have on an oeuvre or country. Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il was reputedly a great lover of Hollywood cinema (“Kim Jong-il: The cinephile despot," BBC News, 12/19/11)and what father and son would eventually share was an unwanted casting in films about their own demise (in Team America: World Police, 2004, Kim Jong-il is vanquished)—which when you think about it is a really auteur idea. Kim Jong-il’s tastes apparently ran to Liz Taylor and Sean Connery while Kim Jong-un's love of film has taken the form of an inurement in Disney characters with whom he has cavorted on North Korean television. Many commentators have been taken aback by Kim Jong-un’s heavy-handed tactics in creating a cyber attack on Sony in revenge against The Interview. But his behavior becomes more understandable when it’s considered in the light of his family’s generational interest in film and the generally competitive atmosphere that has always existed amongst film critics. While neither Godard nor Truffaut ever threatened viewers of films they disapproved of, as Kim Jong-un, did when his proxies warned of a 9/11 type response against chains which exhibited the movie, there were always heated battles about film. And one wonders if Kim Jong-un’s current tactics are not ultimately aimed at achieving cultural hegemony for his people, in a world dominated by eurocentric critics like Manohola Dargis and A.O. Scott of The New York Times. Whatever the result of the strategy, it’s plain that Kim Jong-un is positioning himself to be a major kingmaker (like the late Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice) in those precincts where auteur criticism still holds sway.

Truffaut’s Two English Girls

Truffaut’s Two English Girls (l971) which was revived at Film Forum’s Tout Truffaut retrospective is rather crafty. It begins as a nineteenth century novel in film form with an unreliable narrator of the kind one might find in Conrad, a generous use of the epistolary form and equally generous helpings of interior monologue. Truffaut’s liberal implementation of the iris and dissolve are part of the cinematic vocabulary for what at first seems like a period piece about unrequited love, say like the later The Story of Adele H (l975) Seeing the first hour or so of the Two English Girls based on, Two English Girls and the Continent, the novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, one thinks of the movie as a charming anachronism. Was Truffaut the Jane Austen of the New Wave? The nineteenth century novel was devoted to sensibility and the assertion of the inner life. One might say that it’s accomplishment was the invention of a certain kind of interiority that is more important today than  the specifics of what that interiority actually comprised. During the course of the film the Jean-Pierre Leaud character, an art connoisseur named Claude Roc, writes a novel in which the two sisters he’s in love with, Ann (Kiki Markham) and Muriel (Stacey Tendeter), are turned into men. He could also have called it Jules and Jim (that film incidentally was also based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roche). However, what soon becomes apparent is that the film is a wolf in sheep’s clothing which is to say that it’s determinately and uproariously modern. It’s not the Truffaut of The 400 Blows or even Jules and Jim, but far cooler, complex and more subversive. Rather than being the dewy eyed romantic Claude might better be described as an artistic decadent, a character out of the pages of Huysmans. He’s a believer in free love and an early collector of artists like Picasso, one of whose works is gently placed before our eyes as the camera pans his digs. The film plays with the dualities of French and English culture, with religion and free thinking, with repression and expression, yet the dour Muriel sends a confessional to Claude about her long life of masturbation, which he in turn would like to publish; the enlightened sculptress Ann turns out to be a soul murderer as well as procurer for her sister. Rodin’s sculptor of Balzac plays a cameo in the film and besides Huysmans he’s the one other l9th century novelist whose imagination could have accommodated all the selling of bodies and souls. There are lots of tracking shots in Two English Girls and also tracks. Truffaut is fascinated by the advent of modernity which takes the form of the train and an  uncanny ability to subvert the expectations created by familiar iconography. Early in the film, before the director puts his cards on the table, we realize something is amiss when the standoffish Muriel tempts Claude, who in the first scene of the film takes a serious fall in which he hurts himself—with an apple.