SOURCE: "Elective Affinities: Aspects of Jules et Jim," in Sight and Sound, Vol. 32, No. 2, Spring, 1963, pp. 78-82.

[In the following essay, Greenspun discusses the cinematography in Jules et Jim and the way in which the film's images illustrate the problems in the characters' lives.]

The forms of life flourish within the protective circles of François Truffaut's Jules et Jim. Whatever is reflected in the kindly eyes of Jules "comme des boules, pleins d'humour et de tendresse," tadpoles squirming in a round bowl of water, the slow sensitive circling of a room by hand-held camera taking careful inventory of the pleasant labours of a reflective and observant man's life—circles enclose to promote and enhance the abundant vitality of this film's world and its creatures. Files of dominoes meander across circular tables. A young woman imitating a locomotive triumphantly puffs her way around Jules's room with a cigarette inverted in her mouth, followed in close-up by a rapidly circling camera. The camera races through an even more rapid circle in a café when the young woman, Thérèse, deserts Jules for another man. But after the camera's dizzy 360 degrees; pan Jules sits down, and draws on a round table top the face of another girl he might love. A figure of speech, the "family circle," becomes an image when the camera follows smiling glances from eye to eye at the German chalet. For the ways in which the film sees life, the cosmos itself according to Catherine's German authority being a great inverted bowl, the growing family ideally nurtures and extends possibility; the family circle can even improve the time, making a balance between an abstract symbol of perfection and all the inevitable signs of dissolution. Finally the protective charm is lost when through the broken arc of a circle, a ruined bridge, Catherine plunges herself and Jim to death.

While life in Jules et Jim naturally expands in circles, the patterns human beings impose on it tend often to be triangular. The central ménage à trois enforces the idea of a triangle, and in the artful arrangements of characters and above all in the opposition of camera lenses to the many corner settings the idea is subtly realised. To be caught in a corner is to be miserable; Jim and Gilberte, who are generally miserable together (and who are rarely alone except in the implicit presence of a third party), are usually to be found in corners—sitting glumly in their café, or lying in Gilberte's bed. In a film so devoted to celebrating the freedom and grace of broadly sweeping movements, and to seeing life, in Albert's ballad for Catherine, as a whirl, the rigid triangular figure, the cramped corner setting, are traps. Typically Catherine, although she never quite succeeds with circles, manages in spite of being repeatedly an impulsive party in a love triangle, never to be cornered. But often, in the placing of her various beds, in where she sits while the men play dominoes, you will find her up against a wall.

Catherine is conjured into view through an insistence upon the powers of seeing. First she is a photograph projected by concentrated light in a darkened room, then a carved stone head in the bright Mediterranean sun, and finally a living presence in a Paris garden. From the first her beautiful smile attracts, and at the end a subdued version of that smile is the last to be seen of her. She flashes the smile most brilliantly during the post-war reunion between Jules and Jim, when she tells Jim that though Jules thinks his future will be bright it may not be spectacular. As it turns out, she makes his future both bright and spectacular. Catherine's last act, the shaping of a destiny, confirms the slightly more than natural role she plays in the film. The enigma within her smile, which defies all the camera's clever attempts to hold it still, ultimately defines her. Jules, who is always willing to establish essences, says she is "une vraie femme," but before we are through with her we see the true woman costumed as "Thomas" in pre-war Paris, in high boots for the German countryside, and in extremely mannish shirt and tie in Paris of the 1930s. Variously identified as daring thinker, emancipated woman, "true woman," wife, mistress, mother, innovator in love, queen, almost a man—Catherine seems compelled to act out the contradictory impulses implicit in such a confusion of roles.

At their most mysterious the complications in her life serve aspirations towards a higher disorder in natural forces. She appears in a glow of light after a shower of water (in the camera's passage up from a gymnasium shower room, through an overhead glow, into Jules's garden), and after death by drowning she disappears in flame. Her first leap into the Seine produces fiery rings of reflected light upon water. When she pours liquid down a drain, smoke rises up in response. She is more than a little prone to catching fire herself. An enterprising witch, she does very nearly manage to combine fire and water, only to be defeated in each try by the violence of her means. Her direct assaults upon the elements contrast with the imperfect contact the men make, shivering in a shower, playing cautiously with the sea on a sunny holiday, sawing firewood against the winter cold. But those contacts, if not perfectly comfortable, are nevertheless viable, as Catherine's attacks are not. (On one of the best of days, during the foggy walk along the lake, when sky, earth, and water are very close to one another in natural harmony, Catherine has the men skimming stones over the surface of the water.) Attempts to realign the elements, particularly ones so traditionally antithetical as fire and water, produce not a new nature, but rather destruction in this one.

For each of her whims she has a reason; being quits, keeping the balance. Jules has known few women; she has known many men: they might cancel out to make a good pair. A few hours with an old lover before her marriage pays off a few insults from Jules's mother. To justify her infidelities to Jim, "Gilberte égale Albert." But Catherine's reasons are never reasonable; being quits shades over into seeking revenge. In this she closely reflects the world in which she lives, imitating in her own sphere some of the statecraft games that modern Europe plays in its sphere, and finally going sour as everything around her goes insane. The instruments at her disposal increase in potential efficiency, from a quaintly mysterious bottle of vitriol at the beginning to the fatal automobile at the end. In a sense she is doomed by the way in which her wilful inventiveness finds its too ready match in the development of the world's inventions.

Between her delightful "Thomas", who as symbol so strangely moves the young men, and the masculine pose of her last scenes, there are ominous differences—age, increasing respectability, the styles of the times, and above all a simple change in the elements of disguise from a moustache playfully drawn on to a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. At the end she has lost some of her flair for being a man. She has substituted for it an impressive technical proficiency, which the camera closely records, in handling the knobs and levers of her automobile. Catherine herself is a deeply moving symbol, of the eroding demands of simply living (she seems to bear all the burden of ageing in the film), of boredom, of incessant wilful change, of whatever signifies the slipping away of life in time—in the times through which you live and which, with a smile if you are very lucky, will see you to your death. Destructive, with her fires and her burning liquid, desperately asserting balance and yet repeatedly losing it, Catherine is sadly fated at the same time that she seems to be fate; hiding behind pencilled moustache, prim spectacles, and a beautiful smile.

Catherine's role as it were emerges from within the mysteries of her appearance. For the two men the conventions of their appearance almost hide the mysterious humanity of then-roles. People call them Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and to some degree people are right. But Jim more nearly resembles the type of the Romantic hero—tall, dark, full lips, low voice, cape coat. At times he is betrayed into parodying the type, as in the struggle with Catherine over her pistol and the escape from the old mill. More often, however, he translates the traditional role into what must of course be its modern equivalent: the adventurous pragmatist whose "occupation" consists in seeing for himself, and whose special gift is an appreciation of the influence of conditions.

Jules, the little clown, saddened as his life continues, is almost as conventionalised in his appearance, even to wearing the same jaunty striped suit and string tie to his wife's cremation as he had worn for a game of leapfrog with Jim thirty years before, when the film began. He thinks of himself as an absolutist: Catherine is a queen; Baudelaire says mat woman is abominable, and Baudelaire means what he says "metaphysically." Jim succeeds in romantic love; Jules fails. Jim goes exploring (Catherine even tells him to go see for himself what is beyond the earth's crust in her cosmology); Jules, a lovable Buddha, withdraws into contemplation. As he retreats from it a little, Jules's ways of valuing life increase in their scope and coherence. Some day, he says, he may become ambitious and write a love story—about insects. The comment is rueful, but not bitter. The semi-comic frustration of so many of his desires combines with the love with which he approaches his naturalistic researches, to relieve him from the necessity for self-interested involvement in the world he so conscientiously observes. Catherine's last request is that Jim come with her in her automobile, and that Jules watch them carefully.

The three central characters largely are defined through the complexity and delicacy of the ways in which the film insists upon seeing them, in relation to a continually widening, life-sustaining round of outside contexts. Jules and Jim are writers and intellectuals, and they do a great deal of quoting and translating. Thérèse disappears while they argue about Shakespeare; Catherine on the other hand teaches all men—about Shakespeare—though she jumps into the Seine after too many quotations from Baudelaire. Jules will translate Jim's autobiographical novel into German, and he does translate Catherine's English quotation from a German author into French for Jim; but later Jim has apparently learned enough German to tell Gilberte that he is translating an Austrian play into French. Jim's very name, pronounced "Djim à l'anglaise," carries over from another language. To the political turmoils of the great world the interlingual activities of these ideal friends offer an ironic contrast. Literature and translation affirm a community, but not a simple identity, of human experience through letters, and show a better way to Frenchman and German than the national aspirations of their two countries. So far as the film's montage presents it, World War One is declared as if to interrupt Jules's rendition of the Marseillaise without an accent.

Near the very beginning Thérèse gets things going when she runs away from an anarchist painting a fence slogan that reads "MORT AUX AUTRE(S)." When the two men meet after the war, Jules at once asks, how are the others? A little later he tells Jim to give his regards to the others. The question of "the others" is complicated because while they are the ones who fill the cemeteries, they are also the ones who put them there; they write the books and paint the pictures, but they also burn the books and hate bohemian artists. "The others" are everybody, and they may excite concern, compassion, fear, or loathing. But no matter what the nature of their claim they direct attention to a larger view of the world, a corrective to the tightly involuted emotional tangle that runs through Jules et Jim. They are a reminder that beyond the tiring fascination of one woman's shuttling between her men there are other things to look at and care about: people, and in the smallest, most familiar, most surprising ways, the surrounding life of nature.

In the newsreel and old film footage of the First World War there are a few startling moments, during the sequences of horizontal distortion, when flattened soldiers scampering up the barren hills of no man's land look like insects. Later, to signify the end of the war, a field of tall flowers suddenly sprouts helmet-waving soldiers greeting the news of the Armistice. These begin a series of images that continue into the final moments of the film. There is of course some irony in the man-insect relation that pervades the middle portion of the film: Catherine as queen bee of the hive (earlier Jim had said that marriage made her less of a grasshopper and more of an ant, but it is Jules we shortly see sawing wood with ant-like industry while his wife and best friend kiss in the chalet); the love story about insects; an insect in the background wandering down a windowpane during part of a lyrically romantic sequence, Catherine's and Jim's "premier baiser, qui dura le reste de la nuit." The last example is instructive, because Jim's sensitive outlining of Catherine's profile in the half light is not seriously undercut by the insect's tentative journey; rather the two explorations are complementary in their delicacy.

The most important thing about the encompassing plant life is that it does totally surround; that it so interpenetrates the film's action that a fern branch comes naturally to Catherine's hand during her long night talk with Jim, or that the way of knowing the time or kind of day is to observe the quality of light upon trees—the early morning light on dense leaves near a window to mark the ending of Catherine's and Jim's first night; the harmonious misty closeness of trees, land, sky and water during the peaceful visit to the lake. Quietly significant moments for people seem to include plants: a vase full of them by Catherine's head as she sings her ballad, another vase beside her and Sabine as they sit knitting while the men play dominoes. The cremation sequence opens through a shot of funeral palms.

Although it includes death the natural world is almost always idyllic. At their best—a meal in Jules's Paris garden before the war, the south of France, much of the time spent in the German countryside—the affairs of human beings approximate that idyllic order. When they do not, the advantage always lies with nature. Towards the end of the film Jim concedes the failure of his and Catherine's attempt to live by new laws. The trouble with espousing any kind of revolutionary change is that it implicitly puts one in opposition to an environment that in all aspects demonstrates the rightness of gradual evolution. Tadpoles, insects, plants—all offer a lesson in the survival of ancient forms. Whatever thrives lives peacefully; flower-pattern shell bursts that destroy the land prohibit life.

Truffaut has compared his films with circuses:

My films are circus shows, and that's what I want them to be … I'd like people to boo the sequences that have gone wrong and clap the ones they enjoy. And since people who come to see my films have to shut themselves up in the dark, I always like at the end to take them out into nature—to the sea, or the snow—so that they'll forgive me.

Quite apart from the sophistications inherent in the relation Truffaut sees between audience and film (and apart from the charm of thinking of the final scenes of Les Quatre Cents Coups and Tirez sur le Pianiste as nature excursions), the idea of a circus show with its open assumption of putting on an act is especially relevant to Jules et Jim. Thérèse's locomotive act, Jules's and Sabine's equestrian act, Catherine's sloppy kid costume for "Thomas," the old film slapstick behind the opening titles, the elaborate double take of Jules' and Jim's Paris reunion near the end—all these suggest two frames of reference; one looking inward to the development of the film's action, and the other looking outward to an emerging insistence upon an idea of "theatre" as such. It is crucial to the film's method that it call attention to the various arts and their kinds (in houses, bridges, songs, statues, plays, paintings, novels, poems, films, etc.) so that it may make allusion to them when it wishes, and ultimately so that it may add all of them to the demonstration of marvellous diversity that is its meaning.

For a small example of the method, consider a very minor vignette. While the camera circles Jules's room in the introduction to the German chalet, Catherine's voice explains the arrangements of the household. At one point she mentions a local girl who comes in to help with the housework and serving, and the camera lifts slightly to observe on the wall a small painting of a girl and a man kissing. Obviously the point is not that Jules and the girl are having an affair (the painting has already been seen in Jules's Paris apartment); it is rather that just in passing here is a way of thinking about young servant girls established in the conventions of genre painting. The reference has nothing more to say about the girl; its context is not her life, but the life of art. While a voice describes the way things are, the camera finds for them a pictorial tradition.

There are other still pictures: drawings of spiders, Jules as a Romantic Mozart, posters advertising art exhibits and films, Jules's period photographs of German beauties, Albert's slide collection of odd stone faces, the many Picassos, snapshots of Jules and Jim miserable in their uniforms, and of course still photographs made by stopping the moving pictures. There is even a sense in which moving pictures themselves are remarkable for being pictures that move, as in the curious conclusion to Jim's account of a soldier who in the midst of the Great War won a girl by letter, only to be killed before he could consummate his love:

    I will show you a series of photos
    of him … if you look at them
    quickly, he seems to move.

The story about the soldier and his personal combat is one of several more formal tales: Thérèse's story of her adventures, Jim's autobiographical novel, Catherine's side of the story of her marriage with Jules, Jim's account of how he came to his profession, the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Elective Affinities. The "story" of Jules et Jim both contains and stands in series with all the many stories that are told in the course of the film. The exceptional persistence of a narrator's voice itself draws attention to the integrity of narrative with its typical resources and devices. Thus "story", like "motion picture", is one aspect of the total film. Stories even have a special function of their own; an inartistic function by most modern judgment. Stories are for moral lessons: Jules's little fable of the ruler who was unhappy because he had two wives, Jim's indictment of Catherine based upon the story about a woman on a ship who wanted always to make love to a new stranger, the questionable morality of the Scandinavian dramatist who wallows in vice to preach virtue, what Baudelaire or Shakespeare teach, the significance of burning the books.

While literature teaches us the life of right conduct and tells us how to prepare for its trials, the visual arts, including the art of the film in historical perspective, give us a sense of style—a feeling for the ways in which we may most gracefully come to terms with the imperfections of external reality. A general notion of the efficacy of style as such seems to be behind all the demonstrations of particular styles of film-making, periods of Picasso, fashions in dress, even parodies of sculptural style in Albert's slide collection and in the outdoor museum. To the major subject of the relation between art and life, the film brings a new appreciation of the old aesthetics according to which the dual functions of a work of art are to instruct and to delight. Sound and sight, story and picture, example and image, learning and pleasure—related pairs that not only help explain but in their very doubleness construct the world of Jules et Jim.

Jules watches the time pass through a triangular-circular hour glass that tells him when he is to do—whatever it is he wants to do when he turns it over to apportion the day to his own needs and uses. This combination of geometric figures, like an accommodation of time's demands to the expression of personal vitality, seems a characteristic symbol for Jules, who wants Catherine and Sabine and Jim, and will do whatever he can not to see his circle disintegrate. While Catherine's fantastic, boring, sometimes frantic plans to force new combinations fail (though even as they fail they disclose at least a perverted understanding of her world's demands, if not its methods), Jules's quiet, intelligent, flexible inclusion of as much as possible within the circle of his nurture succeeds as well as anything can succeed in an existence in which personal visits to cemeteries must follow the larger actions.

The narrator says that after Catherine and Jim were cremated Jules might have mingled their ashes, but chose not to. At the end, close but separate, and not scattered over everything as Catherine wanted hers to be, their remains seem deeply and a little humorously a memorial to the best of the film's values. All the genuine combinations of this film, even the unsuccessful ones, are happy in some degree. German and French, short and tall, fair and dark, withdrawn and involved—Jules and Jim preside over a world of valuable disparities. Given the demands of the fiction and of the life it portrays, Jules's heroic attempt to hold all things together, no matter how ill sorted, is bound to fail. But beyond the fiction there can be at least momentary success for an analogous attempt in the privileged universe of a work of art. The burden of a work that is so at pains to distinguish the integrity of each of its several elements is exactly a love of multiple relations, tolerance, elemental order, gradualism, plenitude, the inclusion of all of "les autres." Upon the contrapuntal inventions of this Solemn Music neither any one nor any other, nor the submergence of one into another, but all the several forms and creatures that squirm, struggle, dance into life, in this great sustaining bowl their mixt power employ.