Losey’s film is a film set within History which, refusing the limits and constraints of historical reconstitution, presents itself as a meditation on individual responsibility in politics and on the deadly effects of the “sin of indifference.” It is also a reflection on the fragility of identity borders, a quest-investigation at the border between self and Other. A deadly border in an era when the Vichy laws rage, and when this Other — pariah, scapegoat, star-bearer — is destined for exclusion, deportation, and death. But, and this is the strength of the work, it is a border that reveals itself, sequence after sequence, impossible to delimit. It is, finally, a magnificent lesson in cinema that makes us aware of the role of moral unveiling that the image can play.
An art dealer, Robert Klein, buys, without qualms, paintings and precious objects from Jews obliged to have ready cash in order to try to flee or hide — a situation so common under the Occupation. The spectator thus witnesses one of these transactions, in which Robert Klein buys a family portrait, that of an old Dutch gentleman, at a ridiculously low price and with a tranquil cynicism. It is then that he finds on his doormat an issue of the newspaper L’Information Juive, which risks making him pass for a Jew — a hypothesis all the more dangerous in that the file of the newspaper’s subscribers has been handed over to the prefecture.
There then begins an investigation to find out who the other Robert Klein is, a namesake who is apparently trying to use the art dealer as a kind of screen. There also begins a strange quest, for the fascinated pursuit of this elusive double, this Jewish Doppelgänger, induces a questioning of an identity become uncertain: from the police investigation there gradually emerges an interrogation of the self, of origins, which inscribes the film at that confluence where parable, fantastical tale, and psychoanalytic interrogation meet History.
Monsieur Klein, a film set within history
The film was released in theaters in 1976, that is, five years after Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity) which, in 1971, was the first French film to shake the résistancialiste myth and one of the very first films to evoke both the Jewish destiny in France under the Occupation and the responsibilities of the French State1. There exists between these two films an almost organic link, since the central character of Losey’s film, Robert Klein, grappling with his identity, bears the same name as the character interviewed in Marcel Ophüls’s film — a haberdasher who, during the Occupation, had thought it wise to specify by classified advertisement that his name was Klein but that he was not Jewish. Another element of junction: the presence of Claude Lévy, principal witness in the central part of Le Chagrin devoted to the Vél d’Hiv roundup, who would serve as historical adviser on Losey’s film.
In the 1970s, it was a matter not so much of commemorating as of constructing the memory of this roundup, gradually constituted into a symbolic episode and a lieu de mémoire (site of memory). And in fact, in Losey’s film, the spectator witnesses a double construction. On the one hand, and at the expense of all historical reality, he witnesses the material construction of the place that will represent the Vélodrome d’Hiver. He sees workers nailing up bleachers, carrying planks, putting up signs. On the other hand, he is confronted with a complex filmic construction. The film presents itself, indeed, as the unfolding of two parallel stories. One is unpredictable: it is that of an individual, Robert Klein, who is taken for a Jew, which he denies. The other is inescapable: it is that of the group of Jewish victims, registered, placed outside society, destined for a deadly fate. Robert Klein, identified rightly or wrongly with this group, will or will not escape this fate, which will change nothing in the unfolding of this moment of History. The crossing and then the overlapping of an individual destiny and a collective destiny are thus at the center of the work.
An attentive reading of the image thus reveals that the film is composed of two films of different facture. The first film, the one that gives the work its name, is centered on the protagonist, Robert Klein, grappling with his double and with the vise of the racial laws tightening around him. A film in a sense classic, a reconstitution of the era with a plot of psychological dimension even if the psychology of the main character remains enigmatic, bringing into play varied and identified protagonists whose roles are held by a panoply of prestigious actors.
And then, coming to parasitize and cross this first film, there is another film, impersonal and implacable like a destiny on the march. Inasmuch as the organization of the roundup and its accomplishment constitute the skeleton of the work, and the Vél d’Hiv episode, which covers the last scenes, is announced, prepared, “tracked” from the very first sequences. This second film is composed of fragmented sequences, deriving from an aesthetic of their own, identifiable by their tonality, by the disquieting music that accompanies them, by the wan coloration of the image, by the mechanical rhythm of the protagonists: anonymous functionaries, commissioners in raincoats, gendarmes whose capes swell like bat wings, characters without name and without face who bustle about and cross paths like marionettes in empty spaces from which anguish seems to seep. And it is the reconstitution of this undifferentiated, impersonal, and anonymous group that can account for the impersonal, bureaucratic, and inhuman dimension of the crime being prepared.
In a large office that resembles a hive, functionaries bustle before a map, which the spectator will understand to be a plan of Paris. A few sequences later, he hears these functionaries enunciate the duration of the journeys between République and Saint-Lazare, Opéra and Bastille.
Enigmatic and icy sequences, without link to the preceding scenes, which seem a digression in the narrative whereas they constitute its fundamental structure — the spectator will understand this only later. For the spectator finds himself in the same situation of blindness as the victims2. It is only retrospectively that he will understand the meaning of these inexplicable scenes, of these incongruous and deadly preparations. It is the general rehearsal of the roundup being prepared, but it is only retrospectively that this story, lived in confusion and incomprehension, can take on a tragic coherence.
In an impossible sequence, Robert Klein, protagonist of the “other film,” looks through his window, which gives onto a courtyard. To this sequence succeeds an image of scaffolding and bleachers. This effect of montage by contiguity suggests (against all narrative logic) that what he is looking at, what he has before his eyes and does not see, are indeed the preparations for the roundup.
Gradually, this film within the film grows stylized. The ballet of helicopters in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in 1979 has often, and lyrically, been evoked. Perhaps less noticed, a few years earlier, was the choreographic aspect of the round of cars and black capes in a Paris silent, deserted, as if blind, and yet waiting. In the last sequences of the film, the ballet of black cars, shot from above, turning in the deserted streets, will be replaced by the round of green buses that unload the victims of the roundup, back up, set off again, follow one another with a kind of rhythmic frenzy.
At this moment, which is the knot of the work, the two films come together. The destiny of Robert Klein — arrested by two French inspectors, loaded into one of these buses — joins that of the Jewish victims, with whom he is led to the Vél d’Hiv.
An attempt to grasp the essence of a period
The spectator has recognized the stadium surrounded by barbed wire, the bleachers he watched being built, dominated by the immense alphabetical letters he watched being nailed up and beneath which the crowd presses, while loudspeakers broadcast lists of names. In the midst of this panicked multitude, at the heart of a throng and a panic that keep growing, is Robert Klein, holding under his arm the painting of the Dutch gentleman he bought at the beginning of the film. What is the nature of the link that attaches him to this painting and seems to explain a fascination and an almost suicidal behavior? For Monsieur Klein’s presence at the Vél d’Hiv is also the result of a series of steps that all turned against him, making him a little more suspect each day in his relentlessness to pursue the Other and to set himself apart from him.
The answer to this question was crucial only in the other film, the one that recounted an individual adventure. In this final sequence, Robert Klein is no longer anything but one of the elements of a multiform body, drained toward death. This compact body whose surge closes the film then refers back to the naked body, the humiliated body of the woman who, in the opening credits, underwent an anthropometric examination aimed at verifying whether or not she was Jewish.
Historical reconstitution obeys, in Losey, two approaches that may seem contradictory and that are complementary. “This film is not a precise reconstitution of the Great Roundup. It is an attempt to grasp the essence of this period and of the events that took place during it, in the form of a documented apologue, by way of a warning”3, he writes.
On the one hand, the filmmaker is very concerned with exactitude on the psychological level. For example, for the reconstitution of the roundup, he consults the members of the crew who had of this event a personal or family experience. He turns to Jewish organizations, which furnish him with extras. But, as he recounts, from the very first days of filming the oldest extras give up acting because they are too distraught, the past remaining too close to them.
Losey read the newspapers of the era in order to steep himself in an atmosphere and a mentality reflected in the cabaret scene, in the visit to the director of L’Information Juive. The medical examination, the opening scene already cited, gives the measure of the humiliation attached to a condition. The expropriation and spoliation of works of art and Jewish property are evoked both in one of the opening scenes, where Robert Klein imposes the price he wants on his client, and in one of the final scenes, where all of Robert Klein’s property, suspected of being Jewish, is placed under sequestration.
Losey took as historical adviser Claude Lévy, who combines historical knowledge and the memory of a very young man who lived through this era4. And at the same time the film takes great liberties with dates and places. The mise-en-scène signifies insistently that the film is not a historical reconstitution. One can thus note numerous elements of offhandedness toward History5: the roundup, which took place on July 15 and 16, 1942, is filmed in the dead of winter. There is no mention of the foreign Jews who were its principal victims. The Vélodrome d’Hiver appears in the form of an open stadium whereas it was a covered, closed building. But above all, this stadium is surrounded by barbed wire, surmounted by a watchtower, extended by platforms where cattle cars stand, into which the victims are pushed. Roundup, internment, deportation — the various stages of the victims’ itinerary are here condensed into a single place. A process of condensation that is false from the standpoint of strict historical succession, but that is nonetheless accurate and powerfully meaningful in what it makes us understand of a destiny that, for the victims, was knotted in this place and not in Germany, as too many French people believed for too long.
These “inexactitudes” inscribe other historical realities into the film. This open stadium could also be that of Santiago de Chile, where, in 1973, the victims of Pinochet were piled up, and that is why only a part of the extras in Losey’s film wear the yellow star. In his interviews with Michel Ciment6, Losey makes this reference explicit, moreover. He recounts that he had the project of reconstituting a precise event of the Santiago stadium, the one in which the hands of the musician Victor Jara are cut off. Losey thus films a transposition of this scene, with a character of a Jewish musician embodied by Ivry Gitlis, whose violin is wrenched from him to be broken. But he will not keep the scene in the editing, for the graft was too explicit, he says.
What is certain is that the mise-en-scène lays claim to two complementary intentions. One consists in setting the past and the present in echo. And Perec did nothing different, who, in the same years, in 1975, situated the island W, a concentrationary metaphor, near Tierra del Fuego, off the coast of Chile. It is thus a matter for Losey of restoring the memory of that very precise event that was the Vél d’Hiv roundup, but also, attempting to grasp the essence of this period, of resituating the event in a universal dimension aimed at denouncing the mechanisms of oppression, exclusion, and persecution wherever they are perpetrated. For the film bears very strongly the trace of the experience of McCarthyism, which so profoundly marked Losey that Monsieur Klein can be read as a parable bearing on the mechanisms of exclusion as much as a lucid gaze cast upon a moment of the History of France.
An ambiguous identity
Is Monsieur Klein Jewish?
Perhaps. In any case according to the criteria established by French law. Or perhaps not. The impossibility of answering this question invalidates the existence of a difference presented as so radical that it becomes deadly. The strength of the film comes in part from this undecidable that permits a whole play of identification, just as it permits a fresh gaze to be cast upon the persecution and upon the status of the Jews. In a sense, the film is very close to a certain number of literary and metaphorical texts (W ou le souvenir d’enfance (W, or the Memory of Childhood) by Georges Perec or Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld, for example), for their choice of displacement — spatial, temporal, and here identity-related — gives them the capacity to restore the surprise, the scandal, the initial incomprehension before the absurd character of this process of exclusion.
If Robert Klein were clearly designated as Jewish, his fate would partake of a certain logic, would arouse a compassion in a sense habitual, almost conventional. The fact that he is not, or perhaps not, restores to each of the imposed indignities its character of scandal and absurdity, an absurdity as if tamed by our historical and cultural memory, as is attested, for example, by the joke about the Jews and the barbers7. At one moment of the film, Monsieur Klein shouts, mad with indignation:
“They confiscate my identity papers, my car… They seize my paintings. They forbid me to sell or to buy… No more bars, no more trams, no more restaurants, no more cinemas… nothing left. Everything forbidden! According to them, I can no longer go anywhere, not even into the public urinals!”
Now what he describes are the impossibilities and prohibitions imposed by the Statut des Juifs (Statute on Jews). “I do not dispute the law… but it does not concern me!” he adds. Now here the film centers precisely on the moment when a criminal law begins to concern a protagonist who thinks it does not concern him, the moment when he sees the barrier between himself and the Other waver.
Who is this Other? That too is one of the objects of the quest. In what does the Jewish Klein differ from his namesake? In what consists the difference that his identity induces? The answer to this question is at the heart of Losey’s approach. It is, of course, negative. And this, from the opening scene where the woman scientifically examined by a physician leaves again with, as an answer: doubtful case.
For the rest, in what would the Jewish Klein be distinguished from his namesake? He is a seducer, he has made numerous conquests, he has a wealthy lover, Florence, he plays the piano, he has a motorcycle, the viewer believes he understands that he is in the Resistance. He is a cultivated, well-off man, and doubtless a grand bourgeois8. Losey, as is known, is very attentive to the relation of the different social classes. From The Sleeping Tiger to The Go-Between, not to mention The Servant, the deciphering of the world presents itself in Losey as the deciphering of signs of belonging to a social class and as the analysis of what this belonging induces in beings. The characteristics that the Jewish Klein presents are therefore logically traits that are proper not to a religion, or to a particular group, but to a social class. And as Albert Bensoussan very rightly writes9, the anti-racist lesson of the film holds in this axiom: the Other is the Same.
(It must be noted that this political axiom, essential in the work, induces a disturbance of the order of the fantastical when it is verified to the letter. That is to say, when the Other’s dog attaches itself to Robert Klein despite his rebuffs, when a photo given to be developed strangely reveals his own features, or when he is recognized by people he does not know. A disturbance signified, on yet another plane, by the multiplication of reflections in the mirrors that punctuate the film, or by the painting/mirror correspondence suggested in filigree.)
What is certain is that the Jew in Losey seems to correspond to the Sartrean definition, that of a condition defined and imposed from the outside, and in particular by persecution, but which would correspond to no intimate feeling, to no memory or any transcendence. If the wanted man is so elusive, it is that he has, in fact, from this point of view, no consistency.
It would be worth dwelling for a moment on the episode of the strange party that Robert Klein attends while pursuing his double. He arrives thus, by night, at a small deserted railway station, that of Ivry-la-Bataille. He is greeted by an enigmatic chauffeur, crosses a bridge — that is, a kind of threshold as in all fantastical tales — and finds himself in a château where he takes part in a dinner whose guests are in evening gowns and dinner jackets within the frame of a scarcely legible ceremonial. Is it a family dinner staging an already bloodless social class? Is it a Jewish religious festival? In both cases, it is a spectral festival, emptied of meaning, having the desolate poetry of what is dying, like the party related in Le Grand Meaulnes. When Robert Klein wants to return to this château, he will find only a large empty edifice whose inhabitants have disappeared or have perhaps emigrated.
The question posed by the identity of the other Klein and of his friends thus seems to redouble itself to infinity: What is a Jew? What is it to be Jewish? What would a Jewishness be that was not in the negative, that had a content, whatever it might be?
For Jacques Gerstenkorn, the ambiguity of Monsieur Klein’s status and behavior arouses an interrogation of what the content of a positive Jewishness would be, or in any case of what would be, in Monsieur Klein, its trace and its quest:
Jewish identity is not only uncertain, inverted, indiscernible, it constitutes the very object of the investigation. Monsieur Klein thus appears as the story of a quest for origins, of a return to the sources that can be interpreted as the return of a repressed Jewishness. For nothing explains the fascination that Robert Klein feels for his Jewish double. The hero acts against his interest, his behavior gradually escapes rationality. The fixed idea that inhabits him takes root in his remorse and in his unconscious. It would then be tempting to recognize, through the impulse that animates Robert Klein, the manifestation of that spark, so dear to the Kabbalah, which can spring forth from the depths of assimilation. The kabbalistic symbols arranged at the four corners of the tapestry, metaphorically figuring the portrait of Monsieur Klein, might thus deliver the key to the character. And the mystery of the work would rest, in the last instance, on a mystical vision of Jewish identity.10
Are the kabbalistic symbols one sees at the four corners of the tapestry to be taken in the literal sense, in their mystical dimension, or rather as the sign that something here gives itself to be interpreted?
Losey’s film, a historical and sociological tableau of an era, presents a symbolic dimension that appears from the credits onward with the image of a vulture pierced by an arrow, and that reappears a little later when a tapestry representing this vulture is sold at auction. During this sale, the auctioneer will describe and comment on the motifs of the tapestry:
Azure… indifference. White… cruelty. Black… arrogance… And Violet… greed: an infinite series of concentric circles. In the central circle is represented remorse: a vulture11, its heart pierced by an arrow, which continues to fly. In each of the four angles are represented, in different colors, the very ancient kabbalistic signs.
The allegory seems to have taken on the dimensions of history. For it is above all the force of indifference that Losey applies himself to denouncing. Azure… From the very first images, Robert Klein bears witness to this indifference, profiting from the desperate situation of his clients. At the beginning of the film, he appears little different from his friend Pierre, magnificently played by Michael Lonsdale — conformist, scarcely courageous, scarcely scrupulous, not hesitating to enrich himself at the expense of his friend in difficulty, or to denounce a Jew to the police, lending his passive and sometimes active assistance to a policy that he does not even think to judge. The depiction of this crime of indifference culminates during the roundup, where the buses loaded with Jews stand in the streets, without the passers-by interrupting their shopping or their conversations, without their casting a glance at the victims piled up before their eyes. The work of the police and the administration then appears as an anonymous process, accomplished by executants without scruples, but tacitly accepted by a whole society.
The power of moral revelation of the image
A detour by way of a Fritz Lang film, Fury, would allow us to evoke the status of the image in its relation to truth but also to the moral awakening it can induce.
In Fury, the first film he shot in the United States in 1936, Fritz Lang takes on the problem of lynching but above all he develops a reflection on the status of the image, on the coefficient of truth it bears. The main character of the film, Joe Wilson, has been unjustly accused of the murder of a child. An angry crowd attacked the prison where he was held and set fire to it. Having survived the fire by a miracle while he is believed dead, and having sworn to take revenge, Joe has delivered to the court trying the lynchers a film shot by a television crew, showing the accused (who had all fabricated for themselves perfect alibis) attacking the police station, brandishing flaming torches, then preventing rescue teams from approaching the prison. At the moment they see on screen their own faces, convulsed with hatred, at the moment they see themselves in action, the accused collapse and confess what they did and of which, until then, they were not clearly conscious.
Thus, Fritz Lang tells us — engaging a reflection on the image that will prove fecund — images, despite their damning status as proof, can lie. In the film, they show and attest to a crime that legally did not take place, since Joe Wilson is not dead. But the sequence nonetheless tells a truth that, for its part, is quite real: the desire to murder, and the enjoyment of murder. It has a power of revelation for the accused themselves.
In the case of Monsieur Klein and of the Vél d’Hiv roundup, the crime did indeed take place. There remains this power of moral revelation of the image that will push the French public to take note of what was perpetrated and then, as it were, forgotten. In the reconstitution of the scene in a cabaret12 where, at the end of a particularly odious antisemitic number, Robert Klein prepares to applaud then leaves his gesture in suspense, in the representation of the indifference of the crowd on the day of the roundup, one can see at work this morally revelatory power of the image.
In a sense, the scene where the auctioneer describes the tapestry in moral terms thus becomes the metaphor of Losey’s film and of the diversity of levels of interpretation it proposes. As Losey was able to say, “the mise-en-scène is a method of knowledge and this method differs in no way from that of the scholar or the philosopher: one must confront reality and then reconstruct it.”
Notes
Losey’s film was released shortly after Les Violons du bal by Michel Drach (1973), Lacombe Lucien by Louis Malle (1974), and Les Guichets du Louvre by Michel Mitrani (1974). Monsieur Klein translates neither a return of memory nor an interrogation of an heir. One could almost say that it owes its strength to the external gaze it proposes and imposes. And one can then recall the impact of certain external gazes in the relation of the French to the painful moments of their history, by citing the pioneering works of Marrus and Paxton on Vichy France, for example, as well as the admirable film by Stanley Kubrick, Paths of Glory (1957), which bore on the First World War.↩︎
Shoshana Felman has written very fine pages on the situation of blindness of the victims during the Shoah. Shoshana Felman: “À l’âge du témoignage,” Au sujet de Shoah, Ed. Belin, 1991.↩︎
Joseph Losey, Positif no. 186, October 1976.↩︎
Claude Lévy and Paul Tillard, La grande rafle du Vel d’Hiv. 16 juillet 1942, Laffont, 1962.↩︎
As Jacques Gerstenkorn demonstrates, “À la recherche d’une judéité perdue: Monsieur Klein de Losey,” CinémAction no. 37, Cinéma et judéité. Dossier compiled by Annie Goldmann and Guy Hennebelle. Ed. du Cerf, 1986.↩︎
Michel Ciment, Le livre de Losey. Entretiens avec le cinéaste, Stock, 1979.↩︎
The joke has several variants, the simplest of which would be: Tomorrow, we arrest all the Jews and all the barbers. A sentence that provokes the following reaction: But why the barbers?↩︎
The description of this social class is not without recalling The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani.↩︎
Albert Bensoussan, “Du syndrome de Klein au complexe de Zelig,” Les Cahiers du Judaïsme no. 20, 2006.↩︎
Jacques Gerstenkorn, “À la recherche d’une judéité perdue: M. Klein de Losey,” CinémAction no. 37, Cinéma et judéité, Ed. du Cerf, 1986, p. 191.↩︎
A first association is made between this vulture and Robert Klein, to whom Florence attributes the traits of a bird of prey. A second association is made with Pierre, who carries a cane whose silver pommel represents a vulture’s head.↩︎
The antisemitic cabaret number has often been used in cinema to depict the mentality of a whole society faced with Nazism. One may think of the very fine Cabaret by Bob Fosse (1972) or of certain sequences in The Serpent’s Egg by Ingmar Bergman (1977).↩︎