Juvenile Geographies: Les Mistons

Most viewers of Les Mistons remember the unsettlingly sensuous shot, taken in staccato slow motion, of a child lurching his face toward a bicycle seat from which a beautiful woman has just descended to take a swim in the limpid waters of the river. A prepubescent boy bathes his nose in a musky aroma smelling of everything he desires and fears. The scene would be what psychoanalysts call the relation d’inconnu, the relation with the unknown that drives subjectivity and is felt in the unending “mirror stages” that are lived from birth until death (Rosolato 1993, 153–69). As a moment in cinema it would be film crystallized in its purest state: the camera, in long tracking shots taken from a moving car, follows the woman pedaling from the streets of Nîmes, beginning from the Roman Maison-Carré in the background, along a serpentine road leading to the country, bending and passing over the Pont du Gard, winding to a grove where she stops, descends from her bicycle, and stoops to arrange her billowing skirt, ruffled by the wind, which is sticking to the seat. She pirouettes and bobs her way to the river. Suddenly, as in every classical eclogue, a band of satyrs runs and jumps out of the forest in fierce pursuit of the nymph.

Where, in classical literature, beasts had danced on their cloven hoofs and played flutes to entice their prey, now five boys crash into the clearing from the woods where they had been waiting to ambush the beauty. One seeks the bicycle, and the others a glimpse of the woman swimming in the water. In its close-up and extreme slow motion, transgressing the continuity of a classical film, the shot bears a juvenile fragility and exudes a new sense of style. The reader of Maurice Pons’s story of the same title gathered in Virginales (1955) discovers that the episode of the bicycle seat is the very first image inaugurating the narrative. Thus begins the written text of “Les Mistons” that makes no reference to a geographical setting:

La soeur de Jouve était trop belle. Nous ne le supportions pas. Lorsqu’elle se rendait au bain de rivière, elle laissait sa bicyclette cadenassée devant l’entrée. Comme elle roulait toujours jupe flottante, et assurément sans jupon, il arrivait, les journées chaudes, que la selle de sa machine s’en trouvât tout humide. De semaines en semaines, il s’y traçait plus apparemment de pâles auréoles. Nous tournions, fascinés, autour de cette fleur de cuir bouilli, as de coeur haut perché dont nous envions les voyages. Il n’était pas rare que l’un de nous, n’y tenant plus, se détachât de notre groupe et sans forfanterie ni fausse honte, allât poser un instant son visage sur cette selle, confidente de quel mystère? (97)

Jouve’s sister was too beautiful. We couldn’t stand her. When she went to bathe in the river she used to leave her bicycle padlocked in front of the entry. As she always rode with her skirt billowing in the air and without a slip, on hot days it happened that her bicycle seat was moist all over. From week to week on it were traced pale halos. Fascinated, we turned around and about this flower of boiled leather, an ace of hearts perched high and for whose voyages we were envious. It was not uncommon for one of us, unable to stand it any longer, to stray from the group and without boast or false shame went to set his face for an instant upon this saddle, a confidante of who knows what mystery?

Truffaut’s film casts the narrative along an itinerary that literally—topographically—departs from Pons’s minuscule novella. The first shot that follows the scroll of credits records Bernadette (Bernadette Lafont) pedaling away from Nîmes (that does not figure in the story) along the Pont du Gard (not in the story either) and past a group of older people promenading on the bridge with their dog. She rides toward the camera that recedes as she advances, moving through the arcs of shadow cast by the upper arcade of the structure. She traverses blocks of light and shade that suddenly resemble the photograms of a strip of film passing through the gate of a projector.

A straight cut gives way to a broad view of the architecture as it had been remembered for ages before the camera swish-pans left, along a career of 90 degrees, across the lush landscape of the Gard. The lens arrests on the faces (in medium close-up) of two boys who seem to gaze upon the aqueduct the viewer has just seen. In voiceover the first sentence of the story is uttered when the profile is seen of two youthful faces that are almost mirrored images of each other: “La soeur de Jouve était trop belle.” What are they looking at? Is it the aqueduct or the woman? The voice-off of an adult speaks in the indefinite past of what will become a tale of intolerable exasperation that cuts through children in their prepubescent years. His spoken words suggest that the adult is in the child. The former speaks over a gap of time that could be located either before or after the construction of the bridge (before a.d. 400). In the indirect discourse the children may be contemplating the adult that they have not yet become. Yet, as we hear the voice of the older man, he is of an arrogance enabling him to tell us who they were. It is as if an absent and possibly moribund adult is speaking from a time immemorial as that of the Roman aqueduct.

The exasperation, we soon learn, belongs to language and to the force of Eros. The children feel for a ravishing young woman desires exceeding what they could ever temper with their own words or actions. A long tracking shot follows a straight cut. The woman rides her bicycle toward an invisible moving vehicle on which the camera is mounted. Bathed in bright light as she pedals along a road bordered by flat shrubbery, she turns downward into a grove bathed in dappled light. Her descent is accompanied by the second sentence of the story that is slightly altered. “Elle roulait toujours jupe flottante et assurément sans jupon. Bernadette était pour nous la découverte prestigieuse de tant de rêves obscures et de nos imaginations cachées [the shot holds Bernadette in dark shadow when the voice utters cachées]. Elle était notre éveil et ouvrait en nous les sources d’une sensualité lumineuse [She always rode with a billowing skirt and of course without a slip. For us Bernadette was the prestigious discovery of so many obscure memories of our concealed imaginations. She awakened and opened us onto the springs of a luminous sensuality]” (98). The text draws the eye toward the play of light and shadow while the shot continues its backward track. The young woman pedals swiftly down a straight stretch of the road before it bends and dips to the left. She turns slightly and releases her hand from one of the handlebars to keep her skirt in place. A straight cut to a long shot of the road and woods begins a lengthy pan (of almost 300 degrees) left of Bernadette as she rides through patches of light and darkness as she had along the aqueduct. The film rejoins the beginning of Pons’s story. A sudden take in slow motion rewrites the effect the text had obtained through the metaphor of an ace of hearts and the halo of rings of musky sweat and vaginal juice accreted in the vellum of “boiled leather.”

It might be said that Truffaut’s cinematic cartography begins here. The camera breaks all rules of verisimilitude by changing its speed in medias res and without plausible explanation. A sensuous eros frees the film from both censure and prurience. In a broader way the shot brings forward what Truffaut, like his mistons, could not quite put into words in the letters he wrote to friends and colleagues when he conceived the film. Truffaut first mentions the idea of adapting Pons’s story in a letter he sent to the writer on April 4, 1957. He wishes to meet the young writer and to explain how he will go about financing the film. In order to show how good cinema is made from very short stories Truffaut invites Pons to accompany him to see Max Ophüls’s Le Plaisir, a feature based on three of Guy de Maupassant’s novellas.⁴ In May, without mentioning his project, he writes to Chares Bitsch from Cannes to say that Nîmes, the city where Les Mistons will be shot, “est très bien et aussi la campagne [is very good and the countryside too]” (128). In August he writes to Bitsch again about the progress of Les Mistons. Some initial glimpses of its vision begin to take form in the description of the way he goes about filming.

I shoot very quickly, almost without any rehearsing, in a single take, sometimes two. That (for me) is the best system, because I’m clear only during the projection and with freedom to rebegin and to reshoot three days later. It’ll be a very uneven film with some terribly sore spots but also with some really odd happenings; taking advantage of a real train in a little station in Montpellier, I shot six minutes of film (three takes of two minutes each) in twenty minutes (between the arrival of the train and its departure). Gerard really did leave on the train, Bernadette returning toward the camera crying like a baby: cut! (1988, 129)

Truffaut lets chance and improvisation win over careful repetition on the script; without admitting that at the Montpellier station he is rehearsing Lumière’s “Arrivée d’un train à la gare de La Ciotat” (1895), the director brags about getting six minutes of the final takes in the space of twenty minutes. Bernadette cries “like a madeleine,” as she might be indeed a refugee from Proust’s world in which memory flows when the narrator, tasting a spongy pastry dipped in warm liquid, releases a torrent of memory-images from the landscape.

In the same letter Truffaut takes coy pleasure in noting the embarrassment (or even slight timidity) of the two adult leads, Gérard (Gérard Blin) and Bernadette, when they work together. He complains that his cameraman (Jean Malige)

has no taste, he is maniacal and works “for the sake of quality”; his photography is an eternal compromise between what he likes . . . and what I like. Result: once again, uneven, very good under a grey sky and when I say, “So what, we’ll shoot nonetheless” (the station), pretty feeble when the sun shines bright (the tennis match). ... In truth, an odd film, an odd reel and and odd ambiance) (30)

The cameraman is of the “tradition of quality” that holds to the text of the story and seeks an aura of classical elegance, in strong contrast to the director who prefers invention and chance. Truffaut adds that where a graffito on a wall in the street was scribbled “Votez Poujade” (a politician of the far right) he and his team wrote “Votez Rivette” (Jacques Rivette, the fellow cineast of the New Wave Pléiade). Finally, he adds that in the film will be an homage to Lumière, Vigo, Hulot (Jacques Tati), Ford, Dario Moreno, and Rossellini. He does not say, however, that he will have the children tear a poster advertising Jean Delannoy’s Chiens perdus sans collier (1955) from a bulletin board by a local theater. The viewer gets a glimpse of the way that the film will be “written” by way of inscription and allusion.

A critical edge is born in the report and in the relation the director is gaining with the film. In a more formal letter to Maurice Pons in autumn of the same year (dated October 2, 1957), he invites the writer to work with him on the mixing in order to conserve the original tone. Truffaut is anxious about showing him a film not entirely faithful to the story. He finally admits that he has contradicted Pons’s style, declaring that the filmmaker’s temperament is at the antipodes of his author, and indeed the very images from the text that were most striking count among those that Pons will never recognize when he sees the finished work. To be adapted is to be betrayed. Truffaut defends himself before Pons as if he might have been a child having either transgressed the edicts of an imaginary father or surreptitiously denounced the writer in order to foment panic and scandal.

As of the credits—the first shot—the story is entirely rewritten and redrawn. The tracking shot on which the credits scroll upward pulls backward. The viewer is invited to look through the writing at the woman on the bicycle but also to take note of the words and names that move upward on the visual field. A viewer of 1957 might have wondered if the inscription of the producer, Truffaut’s intimate friend “Robert Lachenay,” is an invention of the filmmaker insofar the name rhymes with Robert de La Chesnaye, the protagonist of Renoir’s La Règle du jeu.⁵ And the voiceover by a man named “Michel François” is especially “French” in the way the timber and grain of the calm and assured diction bears an Alexandrine measure.

Suspicions are confirmed in a brief shot inserted between the tracking shots leading from Nîmes to the countryside and the first take on the Pont du Gard. For an instant the moving camera meets and gives way to an American car—a 1955 Mercury convertible—that turns onto the roadway of the aqueduct. The car appears out of place in the décor of Provence and surely too long and wide for the road on which it is being driven. Yet the Mercury (an emblem of protean metamorphosis or of ruse and enterprise?) is seen beneath the name of the production company, “Les Films du Carrosse [Coach Films].” The carrosse refers both to a regal and classical conveyance and a metaphor—literally, a “mode of transport”— that belongs to old Europe, while the “Merc” beneath the writing indicates that a new or other world is present. Brief though it may be, the shot offers a telling allegory of the coextension of two traditions, two continents, and two cinemas. A classical geographical allegory of two ages of the world inheres in the shot.

The mix of writing and cinema in the credits pervades the film and becomes the key to many of its secrets. If Renoir’s name is transmuted in “Robert Lachenay” and possibly the name of his late feature, Le Carrosse d’or (The Golden Coach, 1953) in “Les Films du Carrosse,” the director’s images recur in a sequence that gives way to what, following Freud and Jacques Derrida, might be called a scene of writing.⁶ The boys have just been ogling at Gérard and Bernadette who leave a mas or stone-clad country house set behind a rocky wall.⁷ The wall dissolves into an order of five neoclassical balusters that support the cornice of a wall enclosing a terrace to which the four boys accede from a point deep in the background. They reach the balustrade on the left, their movement punctuated by the four cupped areas that catch them assembling in the space beyond the barrier. They look away and off to the left. They finally squeeze into one of the frames and seem to mold themselves to its form, their legs pushing down toward the ground at the spectator’s eye line and the rump of one boy and the upper bodies of all filling the open space above.

They are clearly defined by an architectural surround that has a somewhat unsettling effect—the children seem to be living caryatids in a type of frame or even a bas-relief—related to the Pont du Gard. The balusters are washed in the light of day and so brightly illuminated that they resemble gigantic lamp-chimneys, their squat and bulbous bottoms curving into elegant stems that support their lintel. The brightness occludes the somewhat darker background in the sunlit space into which the children have gathered. They are raw material for thematic and even psychoanalytical interpretation: the position of the spectator duplicates that of the children who had peered across the stone wall in the preceding shot that has dissolved into this sequence, thus implying that we too are prepubescent youth who are observing the mistons in the same way that the mistons set their eyes on the aqueduct and, in the lap dissolve, on the couple that exited from the doorway of the stone house. In this way a primal scene, what theorists often call the very condition of cinema that the New Wave made clear to its public, would be shown, in the space of one or two seconds, in the form of a diptych.

On one side would be the preadolescent re-enactment of the scène primitive, the lovers standing in for the parents who embrace in the classical Freudian scenario in which subjectivity and growth depend on the way that the child copes with its discovery that it is a persona non grata in the familial unit from which it finds itself separated. On the other panel, and in a gentle comic reversal, the spectator would now be the parent who gazes upon the children, but with a consciousness that rivals that of the child or that at the very least seeks to regain the children’s proclivities. Spectators would have purchase on the scene because they can hear the voiceover of the adult where the children cannot. It would mesh with the point of view that discerns the children through the parapet or balustrade. The optical and architectural composition of the scene causes the adult who looks through and across a classical form to wonder if the shot is merely given to inspire reflection on the topos of the child as the father of man by way of the man in empathy with the child: look as we may across the barrier, we cannot quite become the children we want to be. Our desire would mirror that of the children wishing to cross the line demarcating the child from the adult or the confused eros of the youth fathoming forever forbidden and unknown genital pleasures in the images they concoct for themselves of Gérard and Bernadette. In this reading a first primal scene, a scene reiterated time and again in the film, dissolves into another in which the spectator looks backward, as if it were through a glass or a stone barrier darkly, to see in the children the fresh and untrammeled force of eros, translated into the visual delight of gazing upon a world before it is named, striated, and mapped. The vision of the children mirrors that of the viewer.

The sensuousness owes less to childish innocence than to a relation with cinematic form. The voiceover of the adult who recalls his childish past is matched by a direct allusion to Renoir. A balustrade of the same style was both a theme and, as we have seen earlier, a spatial and even cartographic marker in La Règle du jeu. Renoir used the terrace of the château to keynote the thresholds of day and night, of public and private spaces, of dreams of love and of the nightmares of history, and of pre-Revolutionary France and the eve of the Second World War. The balustrade and the globes on its posts were an oblique frame that cut into the deep field of view in which Corneille, Schumacher, the Marquis, Jurieux, Christine, and Lisette crossed (as we have seen in chapter 2) when they mounted the alluvial stairwell. Sometimes it was seen in daylight and at others under ominous clouds. It gathered a play of light in contrejour when Octave (Jean Renoir), in the role of a music critic, mimed the movements of Christine’s father, a musical conductor before his symphony, in the silent darkness of a cold night in early spring (Curchod 1998, 218–19, 223–24). The balustrade became the décor for the most complex articulation of theater, cinematic form, pathos, and fantasy in the final sequence of the film (269–70) where the La Chesnaye calms his audience after the murder of the aviator Jurieux with parting words of sympathy and affection before he invites his public to return to the confines of the château and, by extension, to those of the film.

In this sequence of Les Mistons the architectural décor opens onto both new and familiar spaces of cinematic memory. The effect of occlusion, by which we perceive the children through or across physical and temporal barriers, is enhanced by the memory of other films embedded in the same image. Icons drawn from a history of film become the substance of an implied dialogue or even an allegory in which the dramatic, psychic, and cinematic stakes of La Règle du jeu are read through Truffaut’s short film and vice-versa. A multivalent sense of history is obtained when the present film affects that of Renoir. The fluid lateral movement of Truffaut’s camera, like Renoir’s in much of La Règle du jeu, does not allow time enough for an allegory (of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns) to settle into the frame. Unlike the tradition of the “cinéma de qualité” that Truffaut took to task for its visual stasis and turgid treatment of written material, the sequence draws attention to its own penchant to create a form of cinematic writing inscribed on the surface of a filmic unconscious. The camera moves as soon as it sets the children into the inner frame in the shot. It pans right as the voice-off calmly recalls,

C’est à cette époque que s’ouvrirent les hostilités. Sur les palissades, les troncs d’arbres, les parapets et des ponts, sur tous les murs de la ville de Gérard et de Bernadette nous annonçâmes les fiançailles à grands coup de coeur transpercé. Car nous étions à l’âge où on ne distingue pas encore les fiançailles de l’amour.

It was at this moment when hostilities began. On the palissades, the tree trunks, on all the walls of the city we announced the betrothal of Gérard and Bernadette with a stricken heart. For we were of an age where celebration is not distinguished from love.

When the narration ends with a slightly tonic accent on amour the camera begins a swish-pan to the right that sets the balusters in a blur between the horizontal line of the lintel and floor. The shot moves past a rectangular cartouche in the parapet as the one of the children casts a quick glance at the camera that follows him leading the three others off to the right. The four boys hustle en route to a place, revealed in a quick lap-dissolve, to be a brick wall and another cartouche bearing on its surface an illegible inscription. In the passage the blur of the pan suggests that the balustrade is a strip of film, and an architectural décor, like that of the Pont du Gard, a site fraught with history.

The classical appearance of the balustrade is matched by the limpid articulation of the voice in the setting of the shot that begins with the children running onto the terrace, crowding together, and then sprinting off to the right. As the children begin to run and as the camera begins its pan the voice declares in the preterit tense that “[o]n the parapets, the tree trunks, on all the walls of the city we announced the betrothal of Gérard and Bernadette with a stricken heart.” The parapet is the given space, in, of the shot, while the trees and walls are those, contiguous and off, that belong to the aura of the Midi. And the stricken heart, the emblem of a valentine, arches back to the figure of the bicycle seat that the writer had compared to an as de coeur, an ace of hearts that, when glossed in English, names the part of Bernadette’s body that obsesses the children. On the walls of the city they draw an emblem of the part of a magnificent rump that bore a cordiform imprint on the bicycle seat. It becomes their affective map, their version of a Carte du pays de Tendre.

The relation of the voice to the image suggests that the camera is endowed with mystical force. The narrator’s speech is conjuring an image that immediately becomes incarnate. “[L]es murs de la ville,” what would belong to a cavalcade of local images, emerges into view by seemingly being metamorphosed into what it is from what preceded its name and what was seen (including the name of the author Pons) in “les parapets et les ponts.” In the moving image the lap-dissolve accomplishes what enumeration in the sentence of the narrative could only approximate. In the shot that concretizes the textual allusion to the murs de la ville a delay is discerned between the vocal and visual signs. The film causes the wall (and the shot itself) to become a surface on which inscriptions will be drawn or carved.

The boys write their announcement on the brick surface as if it were a blackboard or even a palimpsest. On the cartouche reserved for the engraving of a street-name (just above the boys’ eye line) are marks of graffiti. The space that they reach upward to chalk with words is of two textures. One surface is riddled with lines and embeds a textual inscription, the other an unadorned surface on which an icon (or a nonlinguistic sign [a sign that does not transcribe a vocable into an alphabetic character]) is drawn. In the area to the left a text is drawn while on the right-hand side an image is written. The shot takes care to reproduce the parallel and correlative acts of writing and drawing in a single take. As “gerard et bernadette” is inscribed so also are the arcs of the heart soon pierced by a line indicating an arrow. The two hands of the boys on the left and on the right work as if in synchrony. When the boy on the right draws the shaft piercing the field of the heart, his companion on the left begins a new line of text in the area below, on the next level of bricks where the viewer awaits the inscription of predicate of the plural subject, and where “son” is drawn before one of the boys raises his right hand to indicate that the letter t has been omitted. “gerard et bernadette son ... t [gerard and bernadette ar ... e].”

All of a sudden the writing calls attention the economic virtue of cinema. The misspelled plural of “to be” (sont) indicates the nominal son or sound traduced in the silence of the flashback where no voice reiterates what is being written. The second boy raises his index finger to indicate that the consonant is needed for the graffito to make sense. He rehearses the same gesture in Poussin’s “Et in Arcadia Ego” (1647), known to anyone who has strolled through the Louvre, possibly the greatest of all classical paintings in seventeenth-century France, in which a group of heroic but apparently analphabetic shepherds gather about a tomb and trace with their fingers the inscription of the morbid device that tells them they are suspended in a timeless space. In Les Mistons an “Arcadian” or even a pastoral world, prior or outside of that of writing and of history, is suggested by the gesture. It is repeated when the second boy in the middle raises his hand to gloss the inscription. In Poussin’s painting the enigma about the character of writing in the medium of painting finds a cinematic correlative in Truffaut’s film. The boys feel to the quick a confusion of envy and jealousy; they have no language or symbolic agency to explain or to mollify the intensities of their emotions. They can only “learn to curse” by writing graffiti, a form of glossalia, that acts out their feelings instead of representing or translating them.⁸ The image or icon on one side is a complete and visually arresting translation of the graphic formula to its left.

The composition of the shot appears crafted to be superimposed on the next, a long shot that in a pan to the right and then left follows Bernadette on her bicycle as she rides along the zigzag of a road on the slope of a hill in a landscape typical of the Vaucluse. In the dissolve the dark background formed by the shrubs on the top of the hillside make visible the children’s writing that both emerges from and remains inscribed on the landscape. The act and movement of writing inaugurated in the preceding shot dissolves into the gentle course of the bicycle that Bernadette, her skirt billowing in the air and displaying her shapely legs, guides down the hill, from left to right, before she turns and follows the slope in the opposite direction. She literally continues the movement of the writing both of the text and of the inscriptive instrument—the arrow or pen—seen in the icon of the coeur transpercé.

The montage of images interprets the words of the text in order to defy the author’s—Pons’s—control of his story. The bicycle that emerges from the scene of the boys scrawling graffiti becomes a new and different writing instrument, an instrument of mobility, visual aura, and of erotic appeal. It becomes at once language and landscape replacing and supplementing what the children seek to put into words and icons. It seems as if the origins of cinema, indeed a film by the Lumière Brothers, are residually present in an allusion to one of the plansséquences of their oeuvre prior to 1900, in which a man rides a bicycle as if to signal mobility and even torsion that will inspire the camera to take to the road and enter the landscape. The bicycle is also at once a textual reference that extends laterally and almost synchronically from Lumière to Marcel Proust’s glimpses of young women riding bicycles in light that stipples the paths of A l’ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs. The landscape that flickers across the screen turns the “enemy” in the direction of an attraction both to the mysteries of Bernadette and to a richer and broader context of cinema and literature in which the children are at stake, and where their jeux, like those of Jean Renoir, cannot go without their rules. Crucial to the sequence—because it has been determined by the children’s graffiti—are the visual points in the frame where the speech seems to congeal and then vanish. Speculation about the nature of love turns into a celebration of movement that caresses signs of death and mortality, exactly where Bernadette is identified with the atmosphere, aroma, and light of southern France.

Much of what Truffaut makes explicit in his later work is glimpsed in the sequences that lead toward and issue from the children’s scene of writing. It is repeated three more times and in contexts that vary on the relation of the symbolic magic of graphic inscription to cinema. The children intensify their offensive against the lovers by agglutinating their enemies’ names into “gerardette” within the graffito of another heart. They spy upon and then disrupt the couple’s idyll in a sequence clearly referring to the episode of Henri and Henriette making love in Renoir’s Une partie de campagne (1936). They mock the lovers who steal kisses in a movie theater which begins, in a mise en abyme, with a take of Jean-Claude Brialy leading his blonde prey to a couch. Running out of the dark room and into the daylit street, they tear a movie poster—advertising Jean Delannoy’s Chiens perdus sans collier (1955)—from a wall adjacent to the theater from which they exit, literally “unwriting” their earlier inscription by removing a text and image emblazoning the film they decided not to see in its entirety. Ultimate revenge is enacted on Bernadette through a risqué postcard, on whose back they scribble their defaming words and then send to her domicile where she awaits the return of Gérard from an expedition to the mountains.

The postcard episode is foregrounded by a sequence in the railway station beginning with allusion to Lumière’s Entrée d’un train en gare. Gérard has just slapped one of the children who has interrupted the couple in the landscape and has yelled, “Sale petit miston,” just before the shriek of the train whistle signals the arrival of the locomotive as it had arrived in the film of 1895. Before this moment some snippets of Boudu sauvé des eaux, Une partie de campagne, and La Bête humaine (1938) have appeared. A medium close-up records Gérard and Bernadette waiting for the train to stop and open its doors. Gérard climbs aboard and Bernadette follows him. He caresses her and then blows kisses with his hands, uttering, “Sois sage, tu m’écriras, et rentre vite car il va pleuvoir [Be good, you’ll write me, and come home soon because it’s going to rain].” She responds, “Tu m’écriras? [Will you write me?]” before he answers, disappearing in the perspective in the blast of steam and the noise of the chugging locomotive, “oui.” They will write but at the same time they are literally written by scenes of writing that have shaped the character of their attraction.

When the two lovers beg to write each other—in other words, to inscribe or mark each other, and not write to each other—their fate is named and sealed. Their destiny reveals an unnamed relation with another film of destiny, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943). The mosaic allusion tells much about the greater cartography of Les Mistons. The sequence that follows the arrival of the train in the station and the final separation of Gérard from Bernadette portrays the children demonizing Bernadette by sending her an anonymous carte postale. The camera attends to them composing their note that mocks the solitary woman in the name of “Les Mistons.” Sale petit miston, the word Gérard first uttered in swearing at the children, is now pluralized and signed in the name of an anonymous band of juvenile terrorists. Immediately after the postcard is mailed news follows that Gérard has died in an accident in the mountains. Close-ups of the text and photographs of reports in the newspaper tell of the mishap. In the greater texture of the film they are both the aftermath and the continuation of the initial scenes of writing. The parataxis or “impersonal enunciation” of the film suggests that the children’s writing and mailing of the postcard might have been the cause of the accident, and that so also would have been the decision the couple had taken, in the thick of the cinematic imbroglios that were scripting their words and actions, to write each other, that is, to objectify each other in fixed and immobile shapes.

Clouzot’s film of the Occupation comes forward under the name of the “mistons” who signed the fateful text on the verso side of the postcard mailed to Bernadette. Le Corbeau takes place in a provincial town that seems timeless and of a timeless character like the décor of Truffaut’s Nîmes. In its dark plot a town is tyrannized and terrorized by the mailing of letters that vilipend those to whom they are written. The letters exploit gossip and innuendo to play members of the community off and against one another. The image of a “crow” serves as the signatory autograph. It is eventually revealed that an aging doctor, the rival of a younger and progressive physician (Pierre Fresnay) who most resembles a hero, is the author of the notes. The would-be hero makes clear his beliefs by encouraging the women’s right to abortion and by affirming that he does not believe either in God or in pious ceremonies that invoke a superior deity or idea for self-serving ends. Having had a brief affair with a young woman who is the object of the affections of the old doctor’s spouse, despite his precarious status in the town, he remains resolute and calm in the midst of accusations and slander.

At one point the older doctor, a person taken to be a local sage, imposes a “writing lesson” on the suspected authors of the letters. Gathering them into a classroom and having them transcribe dictées in the spurious style of the letters as they have been gathered, he strives to find a victim who, under the stress of the exercise, will succumb to contrition and madness. The young doctor’s mistress, pregnant and of frail disposition, faints. For an instant she is scapegoated. Like others who are singled out for abuse, she wilts under false accusation. Ultimately the older doctor’s domestic, after noting the traces of his hand on the blotter in his office, plunges a knife into the villain’s back. The very man who engineered the dictation is the author of the letters. The last shots of the film are taken from the point of view of the younger doctor who visits the scene of the crime. He first beholds the head and shoulders of the cadaver arched over a desk on which the fateful blotter, stained with images of crows, absorbs the fresh blood flowing from the wound in his neck. Then he goes to the window opening onto a sunny street where, in solitude, the woman dressed in black walks away before the end-credits bring the film to a close.

In Le Corbeau the circulation of letters written to damage the community are anticipations of death notes. They belong to a symbolic magic of writing, on the one hand, but on the other, they also refer to the sorry history of letters that circulated abundantly in French towns under the Occupation for the sake of their authors’ vendetta. The German occupants exploited tipoffs and gossip to snare unwanted citizens, political dissidents, Jews, and whomever they felt were deviant. In 1957 Truffaut’s film would seem to be light-years distant from France of 1943; yet the last shot of Les Mistons, in which Bernadette Lafont, dressed in black, approaches the camera that backtracks as she moves forward, affirms that Clouzot’s film is being cited.

The children were crows in the name of rascals. Their antics were possible cause for an unwarranted murder and revenge taken on a woman whom they feared and adulated. Where Le Corbeau ends with a woman in black who ambles away, Les Mistons finishes with the children gazing across a stone barrier at the woman in profile whom the spectator sees frontally. Clouzot’s film is an admirable study of the mechanism of the scapegoat and view of the travails of life in France under Nazi surveillance. Shot in conditions of extreme censure, its latent allegory underwrites a political virtue of the first magnitude: although the town being represented seems outside of history, the events are local, contingent, and specific to the Occupation.

Would Truffaut’s film betray a politics through its latent affiliation with Clouzot, a director for whom his feelings were complicated and difficult? The answer would be affirmative if the cause of Gérard’s death is taken to be a sign of the relation that Les Mistons holds with history. In 1957 a strapping young man would leave a provincial town less to estivate than to complete military service in the Algerian War. Were he to die, he would die in the midst of the indelibly bleak affair of the tyranny that goes with the imposition of Western democracy upon people of beliefs other than those of the occupants. Truffaut tells of the relation of his film to contemporary events through the unlikely cause of Gérard’s death. The accident can be the result of the mechanisms of writing— graphic and filmic—that mime what prevails in Le Corbeau; it may be an affirmation that an aesthetic cartography, a politique des auteurs, stands in the place of the tactics of survival and vindication in the postwar years and the as yet unfelt trauma of the Algerian War, or, too, it may be engaging in an écriture de l’histoire by which its politics are gleaned through the unnamed relation that the film is holding with Le Corbeau. In this way the spectator discerns a politics in an undercurrent that flows back to a traumatizing moment of collective and personal history. One film is folded into another. The effect brings forward a deeper political stake in what would seem otherwise to be a representation of prepubescent fantasy or a new mode of cinema.⁹

With coy or unconscious allusion to Le Corbeau we discern a film that writes a history of cinema within the geography of its narrative. The history tends to be originary by treating it on the same register as the origins of perception and the origins of the seventh art. In the narrative, the drama of the awakening of a child’s erotic drives in the present time of the story is matched by retrospective flashes to cinema when it became conscious of its own visibility.

The film thus reconceives human space and time by means of a technology that Truffaut, as shown in his words about his dialogue with Jean Malige, wishes to “liberate” from the grasp of the tradition of textual quality and artistic elegance. The voiceover of an older narrator, clearly a writer of an established tradition, tells of a nascent, indeed “virginal” eros where the image-track “writes” a visual text of its own signature with volleys of tracking shots and swish-pans which appear to be of a time and space beyond what the voice can describe. Something immediate and vibrant is brought forward. A major undercurrent of the film and of the time of Les Mistons is the flow and character of its writing, a writing inscribed upon a latent map of the French nation. The film engages a program of a new esperanto, a ciné-écriture crafted from a multitude of sources. By way of control and of chance it accedes to a hieroglyphics, to a new “language of the gods” by means of the art of adaptation, a grafting of allusions to and a staging of other films, in which unforeseen connections are made and a cinematic—but visually and linguistically French—synesthesia is born. From another angle it can be said that Les Mistons is crafted to have secrets circulate in its visual and aural texture. These enigmas or riddles constitute not only the delphic matter of the film, its mystery and symbolic magic, but also the reverie of children and their childhood. They are at once witness and blind to the hieroglyphics of which they are analphabetic or even arcadian readers.

From its very first shots Les Mistons betrays a new sense of cartography through the marriage of mapping to cinema. A geographical space is plotted and espoused in the narrative in which children seem to be orphans of the world they inhabit. Where the children are bereft of familial ties (they never return home and, if they have parents, they are Gérard and Bernadette), they belong to a national space marked through monuments, landscapes, and postcard images. Such is the role of the Pont du Gard in the political geography of Truffaut’s film, in which the aqueduct figures in the décor of the film in a manner comparable to the way it had in early modern cosmographies and atlases. The monument becomes a character, even a vestige of bygone ancestors and parents, which pulls both the children and the film into a project of identification with a national tradition. The film exhumes the past by revisiting old edifices; the movement of the camera, following Bernadette who could be a prosopopy of France or even an avatar of La Marianne, turns an inherited place into a living space. She redraws a topography with the tracks she traces with her bicycle on the landscape of the Midi.

The geography tends to alter some of our received ideas about the politique des auteurs. For Truffaut the short film may have been both an experiment and a total, autonomous work, what he had proclaimed to be an “act of love” projected through the children and their fetish-objects. If politics are defined as the “art of the possible,” the film invites its readers to fathom a cinema rejuvenated through new modes of writing. On the one hand, the narration of Les Mistons attests to what Truffaut stated five years later. “In fact, I believe that a film ought not to innovate everywhere at once. In a new film there needs to be something that ties it to classical cinema: the simplicity or the force of the subject, the presence of a star or other things. You get the feeling that many films were shot in a kind of unconsciousness.”¹⁰ Les Mistons counts among those films shot “in a kind of unconsciousness.” On the other hand, the same state of being is a politics of revision and erasure which, like film noir not long before, had been put forward as a virtue: the fate that befalls Gérard is caused by what is written of him in a newspaper and, indirectly by the black magic of the children’s writing. The death is an accident lacking an obvious historical cause but mantled in the secret of another, namely, through allusion to Le Corbeau, the relation of the eternal children and youth of the film to the German occupation of France. The film mystically erases is own erasure by alluding to what it cannot make explicit or else makes clear in presenting juveniles oblivious to what they are acting out.

The children are unaware of a future that might conscript them to battle not with a mysterious female but with Algerian nationals in a sordid colonial war. The magical erasure of collective history is paralleled by that of the perplexity over the nation, its past, and events in which the filmmaker was born. In demolishing a cinema de qualité Truffaut, wearing the hat of a critic, taps into broader disquiet about an aesthetics of fascism coloring his cinephilia. Prior to shooting Les Mistons, Truffaut had pitted himself against the proponents of the film à these. His detractors, defenders of “traditional” cinema, denounced him in the name of art for art’s sake and egocentrism running contrary to the collective task of the Liberation to clean France of the mess of the war years. The author of “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema” had praised pro-Nazi Robert Brasillach for having died for principles that led him to be executed. And Lucien Rébatet, virulent anti-Semite, film critic, and author, lauded Truffaut’s review in the right-wing Arts (November 4, 1955) that had recently torpedoed Jean Delannoy’s Chiens perdus sans collier. Truffaut’s independence of spirit made him comparable to the “hussards” of the French right, some of whom had been executed by firing squads while others had gone underground.

In Les Mistons the contradictions of a fascistic “liberation” of and by cinema are shown after the children act out their fears of the unknown in the local movie theater. As members of what would be at once a modern gang of prepubescent storm troopers and a traditional French charivari society they rail Gérard and Bernadette for exchanging kisses in the dark room where the public watches the projection of a love story that stars Jean-Claude Brialy. They exit merrily, regain the light of day, and rip from a kiosk the poster advertising Delannoy’s feature. The defilement would be a cinematic analogue to the words Truffaut had written in his review.¹¹ In the space of the film their gesture is more complex than the words in newsprint. The children fetishize the film by “writing” it, that is, by ripping it off—in other words, also ripping off it—in a manner close to what is felt through the mute presence of Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Here and elsewhere double-edged actions of inscription and effacement belong to a deeper or “thicker” tradition that has origins in early modern topography. The setting of Les Mistons is that where the French right has been strongest. From the start the camera uses emblematic monuments of the region to enhance children’s virginal conflicts of anger and fear over the attractive menace of a divine female. A Roman coliseum and an aqueduct become the sites of daring cinematic experiment. They also stand for the triumph of Gallia, of France, and of French cinema from the ruins of a gloriously checkered history. The Pont du Gard is effective for the way, as Bernadette Lafont rides on its path, it leads the viewer to imagine a bridge extending between two worlds. One, that is old, is that of France itself and its tradition of architectural quality. The other, new, would be that of a juvenile cinema and future renewal through the Americas.

The allegory is cartographic. It belongs on the one hand to the Querelle des anciens et des modernes in which Truffaut is an active player, while on the other it reaches back to a geography of apocalypse that saw an older hemisphere giving way to a newer one. Montaigne, one of the sacred authors of the New Wave, had remarked in his essay on “Coaches” (1962, 886–87) that his world has just discovered another,

si nouveau et si enfant qu’on luy aprend encore son a, b, c; il n’y a pas cinquante ans qu’il ne sçavoit ny lettres, ny pois, ny mesure, ny vestements, ny bleds, ny vignes. Il estoit encore tout nud au giron, et ne vivoit que des moyens de sa mere nourrice. Si nous concluons bien de notre fin ..., cet autre monde ne faira qu’entrer en lumiere quand le nostre en sortira. L’univers tombera en paralisie; l’un membre sera perclus, l’autre en vigueur.

so new and so childish that it is still being taught its a, b, c: barely fifty years ago it knew neither letters, weights, measures, clothing, wheat, nor wine. It was completely nude in the lap of its nourishing mother nature and lived only by her means. If we conclude well about our end . . ., this other world will only enter into light when ours will disappear. The universe will fall into paralysis; one member will be shriveled, the other in vigor.

Truffaut’s juvenile geography is of the same allegorical imprint: it must relegate its own past, in which are found wartime memories of a markedly French cinema that seemed to be outside of historical time and space, to shadows while it celebrates the entry into the light of day of another cinema, nourished by the breasts of mother France and soon, those of a Marilynian America.

The Pont du Gard, a cherished monument in French atlases and their gazetteers, is cited to advance the cause for a new French cinema. In Les Mistons it figures, too, in a tender map, a pubescent cartography of affect of a tradition that reaches back to the French classical age. Before seeing how Truffaut builds on the material of his first film we are behooved to see how La Carte du pays du Tendre figures with modern maps in Louis Malle’s Les Amants.