Jean Renoir: Cartographies in Deep Focus

Much of the narrative of Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932) takes place in a bookstore adjacent to the Pont des Arts that stretches across the Seine from the Left Bank to the Louvre on the other side. The first two shots establishing the reality of the film in the here-and-now are taken on location in Paris along the Quai Conti. We see the façade of a bookstore located not far from the Institut de France, possibly where the Editions Champion, a bookstore mostly devoted to early modern French literature, once resided in view of the Pont des Arts. The first shot (the ninth in the film) follows a prologue in which two of the later leads, Lestingois (Charles Granval) and Anne-Marie Chloë (Séverine Lerczinska) play the roles, respectively, of a satyr pursuing a nymph on a modest stage behind which hangs a curtain on which is painted a perspectival view of a classical garden. Contrasting the stage and its décor of fake depth is the first shot of the bookstore, “V. Lemasle, Autographes,” that specializes in “authentic” works and, as the name indicates, in manuscripts in the hand of their authors. The second shot of the store, that immediately follows (shot 9), re-establishes the same view from the other side of the Quai where vehicles cross back and forth across the frame.¹

All of a sudden eight baroque maps come into view, all extracted from folio atlases, identifiably in the tradition of Gerard Mercator, Jodocus Hondius, Nicolas Sanson, and Guillaume and Johannes Blaeu. The face of the building appears to be a collage or even a serial display of signs and maps that resemble photograms in the dark space of the windows in the background. On either side of the doorway are four printed folio-maps with elegant cartouches. The map on the upper-left corner is a view of Africa from Johannes Blaeu’s Atlas major of 1662 (Goss 1990, 40–41). Below it is a topographic map, possibly of Holland, and to the right, both above and below, two others of the same kind. A Mercator map of North and South America is farther to the right and below it a map from any of a number of hand-colored folios in the Grand Atlas.

The spectator is asked both to read and not to read the image in the way one reads a map. The projections shown in the window are views of greater spaces in smaller confines. They are miniature worlds that invoke in the contained milieu a presence of other spaces. Yet they are of a paradoxically flat depth, and their immobility is set in play with the traffic that crosses the frame. Inviting the eye to wander over the lands and waters they depict, the maps are a foil to the deepfocus photography that Renoir exploits in the confines of the Lestingois household.² In itself a map room or a Wunderkammer containing books, copperplate engravings, city-views, and cartographic images, the apartment is a crowded world of framed forms. The maps prompt a spatial reading of the milieu. Everything in the field of the image is of equal valence in respect to everything else. Even if something in the depth of field or in the foreground does not seem to have the immediate value that a centered object is shown to possess, it is nonetheless plotted in an “equipollent” fashion in which all forms seem to bear equal significance and thus turn the shot into a system of loosely affiliated signs.³ It bears much in common with André Bazin’s readings of Renoir and Rossellini insofar as “the entire surface of the screen has to offer an equal concrete density” (1999 [1975], 282).

The cartographic impulse informs what Gilles Deleuze calls the tactility and legibility of Renoir’s modes of framing, especially insofar as it is based on baroque painting, the very style that informs the maps seen in Boudu:

[I]n Renoir or Welles the sum of movements is distributed in depth so as to establish linkages, actions and reactions, that are never developed the one beside the other on the same plane [sur un même plan], but are staggered at different distances and from one plane to another [d’un plan à l’autre]. The unity of the shot [plan] is made here from the direct linkage among elements taken in the multiplicity of superimposed planes [plans] that cannot be isolated from one another: such is the relation of parts seen near and far that produce the whole. The same evolution appears in the history of painting from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. (1983, 42)⁴

These maps are legible. They may inspire fantasy of the faraway spaces and worlds of times past, but as decorated surfaces they do not lead to points elsewhere or beyond themselves. They can be likened to opaque windows of the monadic world the autograph merchant and his family are inhabiting.

The maps invite the viewer to plot the movement of characters on different planes of different scales. The maps become patently visible in a sequence that follows Boudu’s seduction of Emma and Lestingois’ subsequent award of being “decorated” with a medal (and a cuckold’s horns). Boudu Michel Simon struts indolently about the façade of the bookstore. He ambulates in front of the maps, first to the right while the camera follows him and laterally reframes the scene, and then to the left—a car passes in front of the image flattened by the lens of a long focal length—before the silhouette of a man in the street enters the frame, occludes Boudu, and then crosses and exits the frame to the right. Having just walked in front of the maps, the man now approaches Boudu, displays his bowler hat and cane, peers inside, and discreetly asks, “Monsieur, je vous demande pardon, mais où pourrais-je voir Monsieur Lestingois, est-ce qu’il est là par hasard? [Excuse me, sir, but where might I find Monsieur Lestingois? Would he happen to be in?].” He continues, now putting his body in the box-like space of the adjoining window of the doorway, asserting that Lestingois had been going to procure for him an original and first edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. As he inquires, cars continue to pass; a couple behind a parked vehicle look at the scene being shot; two pedestrians crisscross the median space of the street; a convertible filled with curious passengers stops in front of the store for a second to gaze upon what is happening. Boudu ripostes that a bookstore is not a flower shop, a magasin de fleurs. To which, leaving the frame, the man replies, “Je reviendrai [I’ll be back].” In view of the maps the joke is not merely a quid pro quo in which things literal are exchanged for things figural. It extends to Baudelaire’s own geographical world that reaches beyond the borders of France.⁵

The maps in the field of the adjacent image invite reflection on spatial expansion. Marked here is the appeal to the allegorical voyages that had perhaps caused baroque cartography to anticipate cinematography.⁶ Space at once dilates and shrinks, not only in the shot-and-countershot that begins with the close-ups of the baroque projections, but also in the shots that follow. The upshot is that the contradiction of an “open” space outdoors, called into question by the mapped images of “closed” spaces from the world at large in the windows, is matched by the “closed” area indoors, in which cartographic forms invite reflection on “open” areas in times and places remote from where they are seen. The maps inspire questions concerning where the personages are and how the viewer relates to their own perception of their place in space.

Boudu ends with an extraordinary countertilt that catches a parade of bums crossing the frame in the foreground while in the distance, toward the clouds of the sky above, points the spire of Notre-Dame. The bums hail the “blue waters and the blue firmament” where, as the subtitles of the vocals make clear, “the violins sow their haunting strains and the love vows of the sender ever sweeter and more tender hold you in love’s embrace again.” Surely an ironic commentary on the film, the words have everything and nothing to do with the radical position of the shot, which is an icarian view of the sky taken from the ground. The shot registers a parade of many Boudus, bums of a collective autograph, marking a collective of classless souls who are not quite of the aesthetic order that Lestingois had found in the bum he had saved. A mixed political design is folded into the way the shot is taken and the way that it pertains to seeing the world.⁷ In a strong sense it corresponds to the establishing shot of Boudu in which a long take of the bookstore and its maps becomes the cinematic frontispiece, façade, the “autographe” and the “orthographe” to the rest of the film.⁸

A cartographic presence is confirmed and more broadly invested in two crucial cartographic sequences in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935). A map appears in the first shot of a long flashback (comprising most of the film) that represents the words of Valentine (Florelle), who has just escaped Paris and found temporary refuge in a tavern at the border of France and Belgium. Prior to the flashback the credits dissolve in and out over a background of a photograph of the cobblestones of what might be a street or a courtyard. The credits fade into an exterior shot of a closed door on whose transom a sign reads “Café-Hôtel de la Frontière.” A dissolve gives way to a close-up of a bar on which are amassed two bottles, some cups, and an array of shot glasses. At the center is a half-filled liter of “genièvre pur [pure gin],” indicating that the border might be along the northwestern reaches of France.⁹ The camera pulls back to record the bartender pouring a shot for an old client after a policeman had just read a description of Lange (René Lefèvre), a criminal wanted for murder. The policeman exits while the camera holds on the bar and the client’s judgment about the quality of the gin.

A regional locale is displaced when Valentine tells her story, which began in Paris and has led the couple to the border. In close-up Valentine describes how Lange used to stay up at night to write “impossible stories ... with an old-fountain pen [avec un vieux stylo].” The film dissolves into its long flashback. Valentine, facing the viewer, gives way to Lange, seen in profile at his desk, speaking (voice-off) the text that he seems to be conceiving: “Smiling, the niggerkiller pushed the poor black off the branch. . . . Everyone exploded in laughter. But a shot rang out; the rope split. The nigger was saved. Hands up!” The camera begins a slow upward pan to the left to a wall papered with a checkerboard floral pattern. On the wall a picture, reflecting light, is hanging and supporting a hat. It is above a pitcher and its saucer on a bureau, and to the right on the wall above are pinned a cowboy’s belts and holsters. In the same shot the camera pans right, keeping in view (in soft focus) Lange’s head that looks down as he is engrossed in his writing. The shot passes by a window looking onto what would be a courtyard where other windows on the back side are visible.

“Arizona Jim . . . ,” he mutters, as the camera loses sight of him and of the window while continuing its panoramic to the right where the wall is now seen decorated with a gaudy pair of chaps to the left and a wall map, circa 1925, of North America. The state of Arizona is in bold outline, seen in the ellipse between the first mention of the name of Lange’s hero and the second when, voice-off, he continues, “Arizona Jim kills one or two of them... and takes off.” The camera continues its pan right until it reaches the wall on the other side of the garret. “Hell-bent for leather,” utters the voice, as the camera pans left, back along the same trajectory, now showing the map in its entirety. “Carrying the nigger off... in a cloud of dust,” he utters off, before the camera returns to find him madly waving his arms in euphoria over the image he has just created. He stops when a church bell is heard ringing off, in unison with an alarm clock that he stops just as the plan-séquence cuts to an extreme long shot of a church at the end of a street on the slope of a working quarter in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris. The map marks the line of divide between the rampant imagination of the writer that inspires the unlikely story and the reality of the time and space in which the personage is living. It designates faraway spaces, off, that are in strong contrast to the windows, in, on the other side of the courtyard. On one level the map is a projection of the writer’s imagination in a closed space, while on another it refers to the fortunes of cinema, especially to the American Western. The camera draws attention to its movement when it passes over and across the map from west and east and back again from east to west.

The map acquires a mobility and presence that rival with those of the characters and their cinematic heritage. It returns, near the end of the film, with the living specter of the evil Batala (Jules Berry). The antagonist, dressed in a priest’s frock and sporting a wide-brimmed hat, resembles a clerical cowboy. Reported by a radio newscaster (voice-off) to have perished in a train wreck, the corrupt director of the publishing firm returns to the place where he had caused irreparable harm. He has ferreted his way into the offices of the firm that expelled him and that now celebrates, in part thanks to his demise, its new and unforeseen success as a collective enterprise. The members of the printing firm, celebrating their success, are tippling at a Christmas party. They meet in a room on the ground floor of one of the buildings facing the courtyard. In search of quiet and calm where they can share each other’s affections, Valentine and Lange take leave of the revelers.

The shot (of 54 seconds) bears all the marks of the spatial play that had been the signature of Boudu. The flat field of the door behind the lovers at first tends to hold them in separate frames. The backlit scene has a slightly noir-like aspect that underscores Valentine’s silver and silky hair and white blouse against Lange’s dark suit. Shadows of the mullions of another door (from which they just entered from the right) are cast upon them. The plan-séquence contains the contradictions of the greater story: Lange wants to do a film but must exit before he forgets, but he momentarily forgets (or realizes the idea of his scenario) to grace his love with a kiss. When Lange reaches the stairwell he puts his left hand on the newel as if to tell the spectator that he is touching what we are seeing. The world, a newel-globe, is in his hands. Tipsy, Lange climbs the stairs to where he can put his ideas to paper.¹⁰ He sets his palm on the newel in the last instant in the sequence. A globe, a totality in miniature, the promise of a world to come, is placed at the vanishing point in the shot.

The gesture is repeated when, in the very long take (of 65 seconds) that follows Valentine’s closing of the door, Lange (in a medium close-up) approaches the double doorway of the office. He puts his hands to the two knobs on either side of the vertical line of the juncture of the door and thrusts their panels open. The space of the office appears, and all of a sudden the doors open onto the map of the United States and Arizona. Displaced from where it had been in his garret, the map now stands over the desk as if it were an emblem of the new enterprise. The back of Lange’s head is framed within the map, keylit in the same way as the newel in the previous shot. The camera trucks in to follow Lange in his entry, pans by the map, and reaches a point close to the back of the hero’s head and shoulders in soft focus. The unlikely hero discovers and gazes upon Batala rummaging about a large wardrobe.¹¹

The map cues the displacement and success that Lange has witnessed as writer and sponsor of the new enterprise. It also anticipates a dazzling movement of the camera that will achieve in its own terms what in the midst of their utopian ambitions the members of the collective cannot envision. Camera and map become coequal. The projection stands in the room as an icon of fictive spaces off, the site of American Westerns and of extraordinarily deep space unknown to the inhabitants of a place riddled by depression and corruption. The projection then becomes the point of departure for the revolutionary career of the camera. The lens leaves the map and holds on Batala, on whom Lange gazes interminably, wondering if the man he sees is really not dead. The camera pans and travels with him when he takes a pose by the right side of the map while Lange stands at the left edge, near the outline of the Arizona territory. Batala says that he has “always felt himself at home here [chez moi ici],” home implying any number of spaces, including the office, the United States and the western territories, or the world at large. “Why I am here at home, and I want everything, the world, everything!”

Soon Batala leaves the office and, in his exit, runs into Valentine not far from where the camera had left her. Astonished by the living ghost, she is aghast at what she sees. The camera then follows the line from her eye and a strut slanting upward; it pans up to the right, by a piece of corrugated roofing, to a closed but illuminated window on the second floor where Lange’s shadow comes forward as if to hear Batala’s voice-off, in response to her question asking him what he is doing: “I’m on a pilgrimage.”

The words apply to the journey of the camera toward the map that suddenly reappears in the image. The camera tracks and pans left to a second, open window that displays the map of America and Arizona on the wall in the background. The map that had been in Lange’s (or formerly Batala’s) office is now tacked on the wall of the print shop. The map has changed rooms. Has it been displaced to emphasize the haptic quality of the camera movement? Is it there to put in counterpoint to the depth of field of the window the flat but expansive space of the map on the wall? To provide ironic innuendo in which the non-place of the United States in the studio is matched by the utopian dream of it hanging in every room in the cooperative? No matter what the answer may be, the map has ambulated miraculously from Lange’s garret to the director’s office and now from the director’s office to the wall of the printing studio.

The shot continues its career, passing by four windows and then fixing on a spiral staircase at the opposite end of the courtyard from the smaller one from where Batala exited, now panning down, as Lange quickly descends, reaches the floor, and exits right in the direction of Valentine and Batala. A cut to a close-up of Lange seeing his target (off-screen to the right) precedes a sudden and dramatic panoramic of 290 degrees, complementing the panoramic track of the same career of the windows on the second floor. Instead of following Lange as he moves to the right, the camera now sweeps left and moves quickly, all around the courtyard. Astonished, they watch Lange approach. Lange assails Batala, grabs him by the sides, and shoots him in the belly. Batala exclaims, “Quoi, tu es sonné, mon petit vieux? [What, my little friend, are you out of your head?].” Just after the gunshot, in the midst of the revelry, the cry (off) of a baby resounds. Batala falls out of frame as the couple, now reunited again, stands in disbelief over what has happened.

Thus begins their exit from the courtyard and their trip to the border of France and the café-hotel where Valentine finishes telling the story seen in flashback. The panoramic that went in the opposite direction of the action, that lost grounding in the sweep of its movement, and that recaptured the stupefied gaze of Batala and Valentine remains one of the signature moments both in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and in Renoir’s cinema. The shot is one in which, for an instant, all visual bearings are upset and all sense of cardinal direction is abandoned. Bazin notes that the movement is contrary to all logic and even conveys a dizzying vertigo:

This astonishing camera movement, apparently contrary to all logic, may perhaps have secondary dramatic or psychological justification (its impression is one of vertigo, of madness, it creates a suspense), but its raison d’être is more essential; it is the spatial expression of the entire staging of the film. . . . It is true that this panoramic shot that cannot be immediately justified might appear arbitrary or smack of rhetoric. Thus Renoir prepared us to admit it unconsciously with the scene of the drunken concierge dragging the garbage cans all around the courtyard. The circular movement is thus inscribed in our eye, and its mental persistence is probably what causes us to admit the abstraction of the panoramic that will follow.¹²

Bazin’s reading of the shot is accompanied by a map. To emphasize the nature of its revolution he makes a diagram of the courtyard that includes its concentric pavement, the two spiral staircases, the four windows on the second floor, the laundry room, the concierge’s quarters, the three trashcans, the entry onto the street, and the fountain below Batala’s office. It does not account for the fact that the sequence began when Lange opens the double doors and discovers Batala standing below the map. Nor does it account for the chiaroscuro that results from the alternating images of illuminated rooms or windows and dark surfaces of walls and louvred shutters. On an unconscious level it might be said that Bazin’s spatial reading of the courtyard plotting of the sequence is projectively identified with the displacement of the map from the garret to the central office. His chart makes the space cohere where in fact it is being bent and twisted.¹³

Bazin’s map is prefaced by statements that testify to the problematic relation of local action to total or global ends or, in the terms of existential cartography, of action on a topographic scale that would enable local change to reach a global or geographic plane. Bazin recalls that in its initial form Lange bore the title Sur la cour (Over the Courtyard).

The general idea of the film is to group a certain number of characters and activities around the inner courtyard, in short, to depict somewhat unanimistically one of these tiny Parisian communities born spontaneously of urban topography. There are those who live and work “over the courtyard”: the janitors, the laundry woman, Lange and those who solely go there to work there: the typographers, Valentine’s women helpers, etc. But the whole of this little world is known to us (with the exception of a few “exteriors”) only through its constant or occasional relations with the courtyard and the activities for which it is the center. (40)

Bazin intimates that typographers generate topographies, and that within its circular frame a happy world sees the day. The way that Lange’s map moves in the film leads to different conclusions. A projection and a transitional object in the monadic frame of Lange’s garret, it remains a utopian representation of places, as they had been seen in the allusions to Baudelaire in Boudu, “anywhere out of this world.” The map betrays the utopian project, it calls it into question, and it becomes a critical object that forces counter readings—both of the panoramic that leads to Batala’s murder and the final shots on the beach at the border of Belgium. Enclosing circles had been everywhere in the film, not just in the camera movement but also in the strange ring of smoke that entered the frame from right to left when Valentine, seated at the table of the borderline café, began her story that would soon be told through a flashback of almost seventy-five minutes.

The end of the film responds to these enclosing forms. Batala, dying, dissolves to a shot of the moving road ahead of the car that Meunier drives across the countryside to the border. The film returns to the tavern where Valentine finishes her story and awaits judgment. In a swift transition the inside of the tavern (made large by the door that Lange opens while Valentine stands up) dissolves to a close-up of the sands of a beach and a line of footprints. The camera tilts up to show that they are tracks left by Valentine and Lange. Their backs to the camera in a long take, they walk toward what would be a vanishing point on the horizon where the beach and the sky meet in the distance. Their bodies are mirrored by their reflections on the film of water covering the beach at low tide. In the gusting wind they turn around and wave goodbye, first to the spectator, then to two of the men who had been in the tavern: after Lange and Valentine bid adieu the shot cuts 180 degrees to catch the pair who wave back. They stand by the skeleton of a boat or a circle of wooden struts arranged around a pole on which is nailed to what seems to be a sign indicating a passage to the left. A hole is drilled through it.

In the parting shot it is impossible not to visualize an allegory of circles, cartographic spots or dots, of occluded vanishing points, and of problematic sites of egress “anywhere out of this world.” The final shots become the visual counterpart to the territory of “Arizona” first seen on the map of North America. The film indicates that neither the map nor the film is a real territory on which a revolution—at least of the kind that the camera itself has performed—can take place. The map figures in a tradition of utopian projections while its movement indicates that a revolution is taking place only along the cartographic edge of the frame.¹⁴ In Renoir’s world of neo-Baudelairean “correspondances” that Bazin so admired, the close-up of the beach at the beginning of the penultimate shot is a utopian place par excellence, an indistinct border between air and land or “molar” and “molecular” states of being.¹⁵ The beach and wind (a wind of possible change) blowing against the couple belong to an atmospheric condition of things in strong contrast to the hard and enduring aspect of the cobblestones in the earlier sequences.

“Au dessous des pavés, la plage [Below the cobblestones the beach]”: the famous slogan that captured the essence of May 1968 in France finds uncanny anticipations at the beginning and ending of Lange. After having driven Lange and Valentine to the café at the border, standing on one side of the hood, Meunier quips to Lange and Valentine on the other side, near the camera, “Là bas vous avez les dunes, et derrière les dunes ilyala frontière, et la frontière passée, la liberté, comme on dit [The dunes are over there, and just beyond the dunes there’s the border, and beyond the border, there’s freedom, so they say].” The beach seems to hold the promise of the erasure of the line of divide between two nations and the sky and the land below. It promises utopia “so they say.” The same site of impossible bliss was discovered in the ground of sand just below the cobblestones that the protesters extracted from the streets and threw at the police in the revolution of 1968. The movement, fomented by the perception that national policies were out of synch in a world riddled by intolerable social contradictions, was known to be impossible (Lyotard 1991, 47–48). The beach below the stones, the ground for a projection of utopia, had as its inverse in Lange the map tacked on the walls of three different places.

The beginning and ending of La Grande Illusion (1937) are not dissimilar to Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. André Bazin noted that the feature belonged, like Lange, to the spirit of the Popular Front, and that its narrative includes the sacrifice of a French nobleman (Boëldieu, played by Pierre Fresnay) for the cause of the collective project of an escape from the prison of a remote fortress in Germany (1989, 60). He observed, too, that the film is striated with unassailable borderlines and frontiers of nation, space, attitude, language, and class. An itinerary of evasion, like that of Lange, takes shape in the maps seen in both the image field and in the narrative. Renoir’s provisional treatment of the film contains what François Truffaut calls its essential pieces: the prisoners’ efforts at escape, the taking and surrender of Douaumont, solitary confinement, the high fortress, Boëldieu’s death, “the Swiss border and especially the idea that our interests in life are more important than nationalities and that humans, as Renoir was often to declare, ‘divide horizontally more than vertically.’”¹⁶ The text mentions a map that comes to the mind of Maréchal (Jean Gabin) after he “purges the pain” of sixty days of solitary confinement and returns to his comrades with the will to escape.

The idea is forever haunting Maréchal. . . . But how? The most useful instrument would be a map of Germany, and little by little he procures one, in tiny pieces, each the size of a postage stamp, that are delivered to him in the wrappings of chocolate bars. He glues them together. But many of the bars were lost along the way and as a result there are holes in the map. (Bazin 1989, 177)

The first sequence of the film, celebrated for the gentle flow of the camera in a military canteen, establishes a geography correlative to a map. Viewers recall how the first shot fades in from black. A tilt-down in close-up of a record spinning at 78 rpm shows a Victrola, resting on a table covered with a checkerboard cloth, set at a three-quarter angle with respect to the frame. Two hands hold the machine that sings the song in female falsetto, “Frou-frou, Frou-frou, le patron est . . . [Frou-frou, the boss is . . . ]” that Maréchal, the first player to be seen, repeats, humming, “Frou-frou, Frou-frou, da da da da da-dee.” The camera tilts up. Dressed in a uniform and wearing a képi, he watches the turning record, now invisible and out of frame below. The round top of the képi, a cruciform interlaced on its top marking four cardinal directions inside of its circle, reproduces the sight of the four bars of light reflecting from the center to the periphery of the spinning record. In soft focus, in the background to the right of Maréchal, stands a table and a chair. The camera pulls up farther. The Victrola now appears to be another of Renoir’s “desiring machines” (like the organ grinder in Boudu or the calliope in La Règle du jeu) that baits whoever is captive to its melodies.

The shot holds as three men, sitting down to drink, fill the space in the background. A man walks from left to right in the middle ground. Maréchal suddenly turns right and pulls back slightly (the soft focus revealing a window in the background, two tables, the three men seated below a couple of pictures behind them), barking, “Hey there, canteen-guy [popotier], are you going to Epernay?” The camera pans right, bringing into sharper focus the men at the table (now at the left) and a bar attended by a server who wears a soldier’s cap. Because the song is emitted in the same direction as the captain’s words, a mobile geography of voice and music ensues. The shot now implies that Maréchal’s voice could be a recording of the same kind as “Frou ... frou.” The song is emitted in the same direction as the captain’s words. Halphen, the popotier, comes into view on the right in such a way that it is unclear whether Maréchal, the music, or the camera is interpellating him.

The space of the canteen begins to dilate. Halphen responds, yes, he will be going to Epernay. A man entering from a backlit doorway emphasizes a change in venue. At the lower right-hand corner of the frame a hand brings forward a bottle of white wine that it displays to the camera and puts on the table while one of the two seated soldiers in the foreground cuts into a loaf of bread. The man who enters, dressed in a black sweater, sporting a mustache and wearing a kepi, is Captain Ringis. He walks left, ostensibly causing the camera to reverse the course of its panoramic and bring it back to Maréchal by the Victrola. The plan-séquence turns into a three-quarter two-shot that displays the crisp lines of Ringis’s face as he addresses Maréchal: “Dis donc, Maréchal . . ., il y a là un type de l’Etat-Major. . . . Il faut que tu l’emmènes [Hey, Maréchal, there’s a guy from headquarters over there . . . you’ve got to bring him along].” To which he answers, “Un gars de l’Etat-Major? ... Hé bé! Dis donc ..., y tombe mal! [An Etat-Major guy? Oh damn! Hurry up! What a drag!].” Ringis’s look changes from irony to disbelief at the mention of Joséphine. “Allez, vite, viens [Now, come on, let’s go],” he says, as if to cue yet another—now a third—pan of the camera (in the space of almost two minutes) to the right and toward the bar and doorway.

The megaphone is held in view, paradoxically as if it were recording the ambient speech of the three men at the table. The two on the left are visible, the third to the right, off frame, having just displayed the bottle of wine, now utters, “Eh passe-moi donc le camembert [Come on, hand me some of that camembert].” The Victrola that had stopped (as if to allow the words about the état-major to resonate and the conversation to fill the frame) now starts up again.

Two shots later, while the recorded voice, off, of the woman singing “Froufrou” continues, she intones a verse, “Que m’en direz-vous? [What would you say about this?].” Implied is that we know not what to say about the situation that unfolds before our eyes.

Before he can respond, the film suddenly cuts to a medium close-up of the “type de l’état-major,” the character in medium close-up who will soon be known as Boëldieu. Elegantly dressed in an officer’s uniform, wearing a woolen overcoat and a képi, he stares down at a sheet of paper. Behind him is a cadastral map of a region with towns and roads visible despite the soft focus. Over its lower edge is tacked another map whose border frames the edge of Boëldieu’s right shoulder. As he scrutinizes the sheet of paper the song on the Victrola is still heard (“moi, je dis de son Frou-frou ... [about his Frou-frou I say . . .]”), implying that the officer’s space is adjacent to the tavern or that, in the mobile geography of the film, he is as much straining to see the image over the words of the song as we are to look at the portrait of the état-major defined by the map behind him. Wearing a dark glove, he raises a monocle to his right eye to scrutinize the sheet of paper.

We are prone to look at the map exactly as he studies the sheet. The map doubles the paper such that what he cannot quite see is exactly what we fail to discern on the map behind him. Just as the megaphone had both emitted and received speech in the previous shot, the état-major looks toward a map that has its counterpart at his backside. The film cuts to a two-shot in medium depth that re-establishes the commander in three-quarter view in front of the map on the wall behind his little desk. Ringis, after some footsteps have announced his arrival, is in view to the left, standing in front of a smaller topographic map on the wall behind him. He occupies the center, turns left, and introduces Maréchal, entering from the right, heralding, “Capitaine de Boëldieu, état-major de division.” Maréchal salutes informally and utters his name (the song is still playing in the background) before Boëldieu hands the sheet to the captain, asking him if he is familiar “with this photo.”

All three men focus their eyes upon it. Maréchal affirms, yes, he knows of the picture because a certain “Ricord” took it. Boëldieu asks of the whereabouts of “Ricord” and learns that he is on leave. The état-major takes a baton and points its tip at a spot on the picture that he calls “cette petite tâche grise qui m’inquiète ...là, en dessous de la route [this little grey spot that bothers me, just below the road].” The spectator discovers that indeed two or three similar spots are also below as many roads on the map behind Boëldieu. Whatever it is, the spot is cause for consternation. Ringis says that “it’s not a road, it’s a canal,” while Maréchal esteems that it is “a railroad bed.” To which, in ironic rejoinder, Boëldieu notes, “a touching unanimity! This detail gives a rich idea of the perfection of our photographic equipment.” Maréchal hems and haws, “Yeah, there was fog on that morning,” before Boëldieu (always in front of the map) adds, “Indeed, yes, I’d like to resolve this little enigma.” Ringis interprets this as an order to call for a plane as if he were ordering a taxi: he turns to ring up a dispatcher while Maréchal departs to the left, Boëldieu still standing in front of the map on the wall and holding the photograph in his left hand, scrutinizing it through the monocle held between his nose and right eyebrow. Ringis asks him if he would prefer a flying suit or a fur jacket. Still looking at the picture, Boëldieu responds in ironic quid pro quo, “No preference at all. Flying suits stink, and fur jackets lose their hair.”

Ringis connects with the fighter headquarters as the shot dissolves to what will be identified as the German officer’s canteen, the counterpart to the space described in the first four minutes (and as many shots) of the film. In the intermediate area of the dissolve in which cohabit the two zones—indeed the decisive area toward which the narrative will beckon, between or in the midst of the geographic and national borders—the map behind Boëldieu is placed behind a poster whose verbal shards identify the canteen (we read “der Kriegszeitung ... Verlagers”). Three panels of surface emerge. On the left is a panel of wall behind Ringis. In the center is an open doorway that displays a great square of greyish white sky or abstraction over another rectangle of landscape bisected by the joining edge of the two walls of the French officer’s quarters which reaches down to the telephone box in the lower center. On the right is the third panel where the map and poster are over each other and where the picture Boëldieu studies is cut by the doorway emerging into view. In the foreground to the right emerges the wide end of a megaphone that we discern to be the exact double of the one seen in the canteen in first shot of the film. As the shot dissolves a bald German flyer (Erich von Stroheim), dressed in a flyer’s suit, his lips clasping a cigarette, enters into the space. The Rhenish landscape in the background becomes clear.

Thus end the first five shots covering two minutes and nine seconds of the film. The topographic map shown so prominently behind Boëldieu plays an ironic role in the military history informing the film. By 1916 aerial photography replaced triangulated (or “cadastral”) maps dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their avatars were the topographic maps first drawn by ingénieurs du roi, kings’ engineers or royal cartographers in the age of Henry IV in the final years of the Wars of Religion. Employed to redesign the fortifications along the borders of the nation, especially in northeastern France, the topographic maps served the ends of national defense. Their work marked a turning point in military affairs for reason of their innovation in the design of fortresses and lines of defense.¹⁷

The “little grey spot” that Boëldieu remarks on the photograph could be a decisively “petite illusion” within the frame of “la grande illusion.” The captain’s snide commentary on the so-called progress—that most important product— wrought by new photographic imagery replacing the cartographic fruits of the École des Ponts et Chaussées in the pre-Revolutionary Enlightenment crystallizes debate over old and new worlds taking place elsewhere in the film. Boëldieu and Rauffenstein belong to a generation of cartographers, to a world of maps in the tradition of the ingénieurs and four generations of the Cassini family who worked under the tutelage of the nobility. Maréchal and his cohorts are those who listen to popular songs recorded on discs and rely on the picture that someone named “Ricord” had taken with a camera in fog and morning mist. Boëldieu and Rauffenstein each wear monocles; thus they see the world through two perspectives. One, monocular, is “flat” and would be depthless, according equal visual value to any point in the field of view. The other, binocular, would be in depth, with attention paid to layered areas that the eyes traverse to gain a sense of three-dimensionality and of spatial illusion. In their plotting, the first shots of the film sum up and anticipate the story lines of the hermetic divisions between nations, classes, and gender. They offer, too, the effects of a thumbnail history of locational imaging in which a line of divide separates an older and seemingly aristocratic practice of warfare to a collective, murderous, and democratic counterpart of the First World War.

The men prepare their escape from the high castle of Wintersborn. One of the officers, the professor Demolder (Silvain Itkine, who played the role of Batala’s cousin in Lange), has little desire to leave the dungeon of pleasure where he is translating Pindar. He tells the men that the poet “is what is most important in the world . . . more than the war, more than my own life.” Far more idle in his trivial pursuits, Boëldieu has been playing with a deck of cards.¹⁸ He pushes aside a couple of dictionaries to make room enough for his game of solitaire. He distributes his cards on a surface littered with a box of tea, a pot, and a couple of jars of marmalade. The irony is multiple: the état-major who will sacrifice himself to insure the success of Maréchal’s and Rosenthal’s escape is at once alone and entirely given to a collective project where the professor is not. Draped over his shoulders, an ample checkered dishtowel covers part of his uniform. An accoutrement of a proletarian café, the towel makes visible a multitude of little squares, cartes, that match the oblique view of the playing cards on the table. The professor to the left can only read the material in front of his eyes, while Boëldieu, center-right, and haloed by his three comrades behind him, his monocle evident, can both read and see greater patterns of things as they are placed on the table. He is a cartographer. He teaches the men behind him how to discern objects and issues in space.

The next shot becomes a lesson in point. Boëldieu has just put a card on the table. The film cuts to a medium close-up of Rosenthal, in a slight tilt downward, putting topographic squares on a type of canvas backcloth used for military field maps.¹⁹ Rosenthal attends to getting the mosaic of pieces into their proper places. His hands touch the creases of the map extended over his lap and adjacent to the draping folds of a checkered cloth covering a table to his right. Behind him, along the contours of a hanging cloth, three squares of another “map” are visible: a print of a cubist work of lines and blocks to Rosenthal’s right; behind his head, that of a Caravaggesque ephebe; and in back of his left shoulder, the face of Botticelli’s Venus from the painting in the Uffizi Gallery depicting the birth of the Goddess on a cockleshell floating in the ocean waters. Rosenthal pulls back to look at his work: “Voilà! Ma carte est constituée ou presque! [There! My map is almost done].”²⁰ As the camera reframes the scene the image of another ephebe, seen obliquely, comes into view behind and to the left of the Botticelli print. Maréchal enters right, and the camera shows a portrait of a coiffed woman in the style of Rubens. As Rosenthal brings his map forward (we see its lines obliquely) an early Christian or medieval portrait of the face of the Madonna, in the mode of the mosaics in the two churches of Sant’ Apollinare of Ravenna, is on the left, behind the prisoner’s head. A Japanese mask adorns the cloth, and to its left is a guitar waiting for a painter to do its still-life. Directly behind him is a print in the northern style (from Roger van der Weyden) of a woman wearing a white veil over her head. Above it is a print of a baroque scene (possibly El Greco or Tintoretto). Behind the men there are visible some pots on the wall to the right over and behind a Senegalese solider who is drawing a picture.

The map in Rosenthal’s hands (and, now, in Maréchal’s too) foregrounds a musée imaginaire, a premonition of André Malraux’s genial “museum without walls.” The playing cards in the former shot, that surely cannot be seen without the presence of Cézanne’s “Card Players,” are now turned into a staging of the details taken from the art treasures of the western world. When Rosenthal affirms and indicates, his finger pointing at a spot near the left edge of the map, “You see, we’re here, just above this curve, twenty-five kilometers from the River Main,” the deictic nous sommes ici tells us that both they and we are not here. They are in a mosaic assemblage of works of art that constitute a map no less vital or imaginary than what they have pieced together from cartographic fragments. Rosenthal draws his itinerary across the map with his index finger (“in order to reach Switzerland above Lake Constanz, the only way to avoid crossing the Rhine, we’ll have to walk 300 kilometers. . . . We’ll need fifteen nights to walk the distance on six lumps of sugar and two biscuits per day”) just as the Senegalese soldier draws a line on the picture he is sketching on the top of an inverted wooden crate. The artist walks over to place his picture—that he names “Justice Pursuing Crime”—next to the map, implying by spatial juxtaposition that allegory and cartography might be worthy of comparison.²¹ The allegory is confirmed when Maréchal utters, after taking a detached view of the picture and returning to the map, “Non, mais, dis donc, pour aller à ton Constance [No, I mean, say, to get to your Constance].” Here, as in much of this film, and like Lange and La Règle du jeu, Maréchal makes clear the folly of people who seek a lake or a city of “constancy” in a world where relations—seen in this very shot—are mobile, in flux, and anything but constant. The itinerary actively drawn across the map bespeaks any promise of geographic or visual stability.

The end of the film responds to the sequences in which maps had figured earlier. Prior to the last shot, a variant of the beach seen at the end of Lange, a panoramic of a landscape of mountains in snow cuts into medium close-up of Maréchal and Rosenthal consulting the map before they make their break for the Swiss border.²² The latter tells Maréchal that lines separating nations are one of man’s artificial creations. Dismantling an allegory of space and nation, he constructs another about the smooth and undifferentiated spaces of a world where only ecological demarcations would hold.²³ Maréchal hopes for an end of “cette putain de guerre, en espérant que c’est la dernière [this goddamned war, in hoping it’s the last],” parroting the usual slogans about the “war to end all wars” at a moment when the film, along with La Bête humaine (1938) and La Règle du jeu (1939), indicates that nothing could be further from the truth. Responding that he is deluding himself (tu te fais des illusions) while echoing the title of the film, Rosenthal asks that they return to reality with a plan in the event they encounter a German patrol. A final panoramic leads to a snowscape where a railroad cuts a slightly diagonal path across the frame below two squat buildings with Germanic roofs. Two specks or smudges in the snow are perceptible. The shot actualizes what Ringis, Boëldieu, and Maréchal had scrutinized on the photo below the map in the officer’s room: a pair of grey spots (tâches grises) adjacent to a railroad (une voie ferrée). The relation of the photo to the map at the beginning of the film finds a visual correlative in the two “smudges” that bother the spectator as much as they had bothered Boëldieu. The maps thus buckle the film and, like the map of America in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, indicate both the utopian and real registers of the couple’s unlikely escape from the visual and historical frame in which they trudge.

Renoir had often spoken of some of his films being “rehearsals” for others. Parts of Lange rehearse spatial articulations in La Grande Illusion, and some lines of La Grande Illusion plot crucial elements of La Règle du jeu. In the masterpiece of 1939 equally decisive maps are found. They build on what Renoir set forward in films reaching back to Boudu. They figure in a style that expands on the cartographical qualities of cinema made clear in front of the bookstore by the Seine, on the beach at the border of Belgium, and in the snow at the threshold of Constance. Critics have rightly noted that Lange especially shows how La Règle du jeu turns off-screen space into theatrical space. The courtyard in the earlier feature shares the same virtues as the inside of the chateau in the film of 1939, both films offering “a play of artifice whereby reality is not falsified but theatricalised without losing its realism,” realism gaining presence “in the openness of the theatrical” (Rohdie 2001, 121). Theater within film, or a comic illusion in the style of Pierre Corneille’s Illusion comique, also draws on the spatial play of the theater-in-the-theater that had marked the middle sequences of La Grande Illusion.²⁴

Similar articulations stage the cinematic cartography of La Règle du jeu. After lengthy preparations and deliberations concerning the guests he has invited to spend a vacation with him in early spring at his château in the Solognes, the Marquis de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), having driven through torrential rains, arrives at his estate. Things have to get settled and put in their proper place. The following day he makes his first promenade and inspection of the territory around his château. A long shot begins with the sight of the Marquis (whose given name is Robert) seated, speaking with the keeper Schumacher (Gaston Modot), about the proliferation and damage done by rabbits. He gets up, is followed by Schumacher, and stops in the middle of a path, bordered by trees on both sides, that leads to a vanishing point in the distance. The plan-séquence develops from a dissolve of the outer stairway of the château.²⁵

Beginning from a dissolve displaying a row of balusters the shot (of almost 42 seconds) portrays the Marquis on his bâton de chaise, a cane fitted with a folding seat, on which he turns before getting up and walking toward a road that, with the converging parallel lines of its tree-lined borders, leads to a vanishing point in the distance. Rabbits are ravaging the property. Schumacher mentions local place-names. He suggests that fences need to be erected to keep rabbits from damaging the property. As soon as he mentions the need to plant a barrier the camera encloses the space within its purview by establishing the enclosing effects of a perspectival view. The shot is literally fenced at the point where Robert retorts to Schumacher that he wants no fences, but that he doesn’t want any rabbits either. When he utters his contradictory order to Schumacher, “Take care of it, my friend [Arrangez-vous, mon ami],” the camera follows suit by asking the viewer to look at the shot in view of an artificial perspective that would contain and control the spatial representation where the lateral reframing and tracking movement of the camera gave an impression of a cinematic eye ambling over the space as might the owner during a walk on his property.²⁶ The shot implies that it must be viewed and seen no less doubly bound than the paradoxical order given to Schumacher. An impossible situation is plotted to be seen once as a flat surface and as a landscape in great depth of field, as a delineated and center-enhancing composition rife with lines distinguishing layers of relief, and as a surface over which the eye moves about in order to read words and things in and on what it sees. The shot requires study at once from binocular and monocular points of view.²⁷

Such is one of the rules of the game that the film imposes upon its viewer. It brings forward the fabulous cartography belonging to one of the most important perspectival objects of the entire film, a pair of stone globes that decorate the two ends of the balustrade at the threshold of the perron of the left wing of the château. Almost all of the principal entries and exits to and from the inner space pass by the doorway, the steps, and the pair of globes. The latter are seen for the first time in the plan-séquence (shot 71 above) that precedes the Marquis’s discussion with Schumacher about how to reach a final solution to the rabbit problem. Two panoramic shots (68 and 69) have just followed two elegant cars driving across the landscape and toward the château (itself a classified monument that enthusiasts of baroque architecture recognize as La Ferté Saint-Aubin in the Loiret). A straight cut to a medium-long shot of the cars arriving, their tires crunching the gravel path in broad daylight, includes an older guardian in the foreground next to Schumacher. Their backs face the viewer. They behold the first car that arrives from the left. The camera is aimed at the left wing of the château. Bells ring to welcome the coming. Schumacher advances and bends over to open the door of the car. He salutes the Marquis who is seated inside with Christine, his wife, who says hello; he then leans toward the inside in saluting Christine. La Chesnaye emerges from the driver’s side and utters a curt “bonjour” to Schumacher before the camera tracks right to follow, in front of the first car, the Marquis who “turns about, embracing the landscape with a look of satisfaction” (Curchod 1998, 83). As he turns, a second, lightly colored car arrives, bringing into view a pair of large headlamps set on its wide front fenders. Corneille (Eddy Debray) exits from the right and then disappears behind La Chesnaye.

Schumacher, in his dark velvet guardian’s uniform, takes the occasion to beg a moment of his master’s time as they move upward and into profile. “M’sieur l’marquis will excuse me for speaking to him about this while at work, but it’s only ... because of my wife.” He complains that he leads the life of a widower while Lisette (Paulette Dubost), his spouse who serves Christine (Nora Grégor), spends all of her time in the company of the Marquis’s spouse. The remaining players arrive and greet one another. With a thick Burgundian accent the old guard tells Corneille that he has lit the stove and furnished the fireplaces, to which the majordomo responds, “Très bien, mon ami.” Lisette comes forward on the steps from behind Corneille. Schumacher salutes her and walks up the steps with her as the camera pans with them in a slight countertilt. She hastens to enter the château when there comes into view, as the couple moves right and past the balustrade, “[d]ecorating the extremity of each of these posts, two imposing globes of stone” (Curchod 1998, 85, emphasis added). Schumacher, veiled by the balustrade in front of the width of the field of view, sighs with relief that, finally, his wife has arrived: “Ah, enfin, te voilà!” The tracking shot ends with the globes and building dissolving away as Lisette enters the château and Robert appears (shot 71) seated on his walking stick. The globes enter into view before the slightly countertilted camera displays Schumacher following his wife through a row of six balusters below and to the right of the nearer globe.²⁸

Time and again the film returns to the sight and scene of the globes. As they become increasingly present—in broad daylight here and later in chiaroscuro, now obliquely, later frontally, and then obliquely again—the globes acquire explosive iconic force. They seem to be embodiments of two terrestrial and celestial spheres, of the style of classical globes that Vincenzo Coronelli and his avatars manufactured for the French nobility from the 1660s all the way up to 1789.²⁹ They also belong to a baroque vocabulary of power by which, as commonly seen in manuals of military architecture, they were associated with the attributes of Mars and Bellona, the god and goddess of war chosen to decorate frontispieces and allegorical pictures. They are both “globes” and cannonballs that figure in festoons and sways amassing the paraphernalia of artillery and warfare.³⁰ They belong to a triumphal order of panache, power, and empire that belonged to the pre-Revolutionary order. The globes refer immediately to an idea of the nobility as it could be imagined in an era stretching form the age of Henry IV up to Louis XVI.

Yet they seem to be globes without the outlines of continents, oceans, and islands or those of constellations and galaxies in the heavens. The granular surface of the stone that the camera caresses in its panoramic is one of a world map without borderlines or edges, a world in which contradiction and difference are impalpable. In the historical moment of the production of the film, Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and “peace in our time” with Nazi Germany had been established in Munich, and the Sitzkrieg itself was a term that went along with the grand illusion that the Maginot line would protect France from the German enemy (Tifft 1992). In the ambience of fear and uncertainty the globes seem to be cannonballs on the verge of bursting. In a broad sense they are icons eliciting a gamut of impressions that run from fear to uneasy anticipation. Reminders of heroic maps of times past and harbingers of future destruction, they simultaneously invite and resist typological or figural interpretation.

The spheres are inflected differently at the very end of the film. After La Chesnaye learns that Schumacher shot André Jurieu (Roland Toutain) by the greenhouse adjacent to the château a throng of guests assembles around the steps and perron where the two globes were first seen (shot 334). The camera is at a level above six onlookers who seem to be standing in the loge below a stage on which the Marquis faces the audience, viewers and participants alike, at the center. Midway on the steps, his left foot on one step below the one on which his slightly bent right leg is placed, Schumacher looks on the scene maladroitly, bending over, good subaltern that he is, as he had when opening the door of the car and greeting La Chesnaye upon his arrival at the château. In a keen treatment of the shot Stanley Cavell notes Schumacher’s awkward pose and his isolation that is halfway up the stairs, between La Chesnaye and the audience below. He notes, too, that the double-barreled shotgun slung over Schumacher’s shoulder “happens to be pointing exactly at the Marquis’s head” (1979, 221).³¹

The sightline that runs from the two barrels of the shotgun to La Chesnaye’s head can be glimpsed only if the viewer sees the staging from simultaneously monocular and binocular perspectives. From the point of view of the latter, the gun draws a line that goes from the foreground to the background (as had the trees on the right border of the path in shot 71) just as, from below and to the left, Saint-Aubain’s and the Old General’s lines of sight lead in a complementary way from the left up to the Marquis’s head. In this way La Chesnaye would be at the vanishing point of a scene whose interest goes into the depth of field from all sides of the frame. From the point of view of the former, Schumacher’s shotgun does not really happen to be literally aimed at the Marquis but only suggestively, only when the eye can connect the gun to the standing figure along a sightline made possible when the shot is seen in its flat aspect, before Schumacher moves up a couple of steps, turns about, and joins his master. From this vantage point every form in the shot would be of equal valence—the four pilaster strips on the wall, the bricks and quoins that give the wall the characteristic look of the Henry IV style, the illuminated balusters—and would be grasped without attention to depth of field. In that way the two illuminated globes that for a moment mark the separation of the Marquis from his public could be fancied as two slugs from the double-barreled shotgun, indeed reminders of the projectiles that struck and felled the aviator with such murderous force that he, in Marceau’s (Julien Carette’s) soppy words, “a boulé comme une bête quand on est à la chasse [rolled over like an animal shot when you’re hunting]” (shot 238, Curchod 1998, 264).

Suspended, the globes are also, in Renoir’s world of optical correspondances, two suspended shells that are the complement to the two globes—a double hemisphere in miniature—seen at the end of the barrels of the gun Schumacher had aimed in the direction of the greenhouse (in shot 321), just after the camera moved in a half-perpendicular panoramic from the background of the target to the hunter and his accomplice looking, stalking, and waiting for the arrival of their prey. In this shot, in which care is taken to put the end of the barrels at the center of the frame before Schumacher lowers the shotgun and lets the moonlight gleam on its metal, the end of the twin pipes becomes a miniature complement to the globes. A terrifying cartography emerges from the relation of the men with the gun to the architectural décor. It has to do with the projection of the characters’ fears and desires, to be sure, but also with the complicities of the camera, in its own labors, when it accounts for their projections and the pleasure we take in identifying with their murderously confused motives in a moment of extraordinary historical fragility.

Everywhere, but here especially, Renoir is a cartographer of cinema. His films are folded into and through the maps he portrays. It is a well-known fact that his cinema is a model, like a patron in a geographer’s studio, for generations of cineasts who study his films.