Jean-Luc Godard et Maurice Pialat lisant Musset : rêves et restes d’une théâtralité romantique
This article investigates the traces of nineteenth-century aesthetics in films by two enfants terribles of cinema, namely Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard. It concentrates on the shared references to Musset, and more specifically on the uses of Musset’s play One Does Not Trifle with Love (1834) in Pialat’s À nos amours/To Our Loves (1983) and Godard’s For Ever Mozart (1996). This study demonstrates that the recourse to Musset is done against the grain, i.e. against the hackneyed image of the poet inherited from Romanticism, and aims at conveying the oeuvre’s original violence. Through a detailed analysis of the two films and their specific approach to theatricality (defined as a set of explicit references to theatre, a relation to the body, a treatment of space, a use of the tableau, a gestural language and an expressivity of speech), this article explores the valences of these anachronistic survivals of Romanticism, and their political value.
