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Double Concerto plus one for Literature, Painting and Film: Alan Rrudolph's "The

Moderns" (1988)

Colloque SERCIA sur le thème Cinéma/Arts, Centre international de sémiotique,

Urbino, Italie, septembre 1999. Colloque international

( L’auteur très pris par la preparation d’un livre, n’a pas pu le traduire à temps pour

le faire inclure dans les Actes,Le cinema et les autres arts, un recueil apparaissant en français,

pour lequel ce texte avait été accepté )

Trudy Bolter (Sciences-Po Bordeaux)

Double Concerto plus One for Writing, Painting and Film;

The Moderns (Alan Rudolph, prod. Altman, 1988)

Alan Rudolph's movie The Moderns (1988) is set in 1926, the year in which

Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises was published. Ostensibly a film about art forgeries in

expatriate Paris, it is in fact a reflexive film about what, in 1926, was the most modern of the

arts, film, in its relation to the sister arts, at a point in film history when it could still seem to

have more in common with painting than with literature: the Warner Vitaphone sound system

went into use in August, 1926, and Th Jazz Singer was released in 1927.1 But The Moderns

reaches this point obliquely through dealing explicitly with writing and painting, two of the

sister arts from which film derives, and only implicitly with film itself.

The structure of the film is based upon the mutual reflections set up between three

parallel characters, two within the diegesis and the third standing behind the text. . One is the

hyper-mediatized novelist Ernest Hemingway, presented on the eve of his fame in a way which

diverges from the more commonly presented image as virile outdoorsman. The contrasted

character is a fictional painter, Nick Hart, who is not only set up to reference Hemingway in

negative and positive ways, but also to connote the director of the film, Alan Rudolph, the third

member of the trio, whose artistic practice as image-maker resembles that of the painter, who

copies works of visual art using a means of mechanical reproduction that recalls the film camera

But Rudolph is also a scriptwriter, and he is thus connoted by the author-character too. Not only

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does Rudolph create a trompe l'oeil Paris, but as we shall see he also creates a trompe l'oreille

dialogue, echoing on two fronts the counterfeiting performed by his double, Hart, thus stretching

the chain of connotations into an endlessly reflecting circle with himself and the art of film at the

center..

But as one character reflects another, so does Rudolph's literary and artistic

Twenties serve as an objective correlative for the Hollywood film world of today. The title of the

film is ambiguous-The "Moderns" could mean "our contemporaries" (at the time the film was

made in 1988, or at whatever time we see it) as well as artists of the "modern" school of the first

quarter of the century. Rudolph has said that he sees the Twenties as the thin end of the wedge

that we now inhabit:

To me, this was a period that had no purity. It was the first time art went public, and it seems that whenever something like this becomes hugely popular, it is always after the fact. the real breakthroughs had come earlier; the thing about Paris in the 20s is that the serious arts had already left town. We've been living in this counterfeit culture ever since.2

To a French journalist, he said

L'art, à Paris, à la fin des années vingt, c'est l'art de vendre et d'acheter, pas celui de peindre. L'art n'est plus jugé en fonction de son mystère, de sa beauté ou de sa vérité, mais de son prix. Depuis cette époque, nous vivons dans une culture du "faux."3

The art world portrayed as being part of Twenties Paris is a mirror designed to reflect the present

day. "Hollywood is the city of the future" says one character to another:"that's what they said

about Paris six years ago" replies another.4

But the film not only plays time upon time and place upon place - it is also a game of

overlapping texts.. The film text is set up as an ironic rival to two of the main sources of

information on the mythical period of Twenties Paris, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast

(1964), and Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (1933), both cited in the

screenplay in slightly off-key ways. Rudolph (with Jon Bradshaw, his co-author) uses a process

of skewed reference which challenges these texts (themselves askew in the sense of not being

historically truthful) at the same time as it attaches them as adjuncts to his own.. The result is a

gallery of verbal and visual pictures (Rudolph's, Stein's, Hemingway's) each one-like all the

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paintings used in the film- in some way a "forgery", and all of which seem to hold equal weight.

This being so the inescapable conclusion to which the web of reflections leads us, is that

films in general-and The Moderns in particular- are works of art containing the same "essence of

modernity", and having at least the same masterpiece value, as paintings by Matisse, Modigliani

or Cézanne or literary classics like the Paris books by Stein or Hemingway: all the links may be

twisted, but the chain of art is still either pure gold (or dross, depending on the way you receive

the mixture of parody and lyricism which somewhat confuses the issues of the film)..

Defining the term "modernism", Charles Harrison has said:

Alike in all the arts, modernism is at some point grounded in intentional rejection of classical precedent and classical style. Modernism is always and everywhere relative to some state of affairs conceived of as both antique and unchanging.5

Using the word in this sense, we may say that The Moderns is a "modernist"

variation on the classical Hollywood biopic form, showing a group, rather than a central hero,

and relegating the actual historical characters Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, to the

margins of the story rather than placing them at the center, as was done with the writer-character

in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), for example. (This bending of genre is comparable to the

playful technique used by Gertrude Stein in her Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Stein's partner,

which is in fact a memoir of Stein's own life6 ) Like the standard Hollywood biopic ( and like

Stein's and Hemingway's Paris memoirs) The Moderns is heavily fictionalized, but whereas

William Dieterle, the director of The Life of Emile Zola, placed a title in the first frames of his

movie underlining the distance from history taken by his tale,

the historical basis ....has been fictionized for the purposes of this film "and will not adhere to the literal historical truth".

Alan Rudolph leaves his spectator to figure this out for himself, choosing either to be fooled, or

to set off in search of the sources sometimes so clearly targeted, sometimes so maddeningly

vague.

If it is relatively easy to pick up the references to Hemingway and Gertrude Stein

after quick re-readings of the short books they authored about the Twenties, it is not so easy to

sift out the lines that one imagines must come from somewhere in the works of F. Scott

Fitzgerald, which we assume must be targeted when a characters speaks them standing under a

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portrait of the author in question.(A totally fictitious picture, since no such oil portrait of

Fitzgerald was ever made)7 One wonders about the works of André Breton, when a long-and

important section in French, is spoken by a "surrealist poet" just before the camera shows us an

artist doodling in a Breton-like vocabulary in the Selavy Bar where much of the action of The

Moderns takes place, whose caissière is a red-haired lady named Rose. This portion of screenplay

suggests that Hart and Oiseau, the failed artists (in terms of critical success and acceptance into

the sanctum sanctorum of Parisian cultural life, Gertrude Stein's salon), who are on their way to

Hollywood, are really in harmony with the newest of the new in French artistic theory. Says the

poet:, who here justifies the role implicitly given by Rudolph's film to cinema as the daughter,

but ultimately also the modern matriarch of all the arts:

Pris de la frénésie et de l'ombre, il réclame des sujets excessifs, des états culminants de l'âme, une atmosphère de vision, une vie portée à l'incandescence. Il implique un renversement total des valeurs . Il est plus captivant que l'amour, plus puissant que la morphine, plus excitante que le phosphore même. De quoi s'agit-il? Mais du cinéma, bien sûr.

Rudolph's film - like the standard biopic on whose theme it represents a

"modernist" variation - does carry some elements of historical truth. Stein and Hemingway were

both in Paris in this period, although, in 1926, Hemingway was on the eve of his divorce from his

first wife Hadley and also on the verge of leaving Paris. This was the point in his life at which

he ended A Moveable Feast, referenced quite explicitly at the end of the film when the

Hemingway character , at the Gare St Lazare, seeing Hart off or perhaps leaving Paris himself,

composing aloud and looking for the right formula, says

Paris is a bon repas....a traveling picnic...Paris is a portable picnic …

and other words referring to the same text are the last we hear in the film. Walking with a friend

on the way into the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art where Hart's forged pictures are on

display, Hemingway says to a friend

John, if you were lucky enough to have lived in Paris, lucky enough to be young, it didn't matter who you were because it was always worth it, and it was good.

These lines of dialogue refer to and partly repeat the words spoken to a friend in 1950

by Hemingway which serve as the Epigraph to A Moveable Feast, and go like this:

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If you were lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast8

At the same time, the film dialogue repeats and changes the lines which close A

Moveable Feast

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.9

The dialogue, both using and refusing the Hemingway model, skews the text it comes

from while giving a gloss of authenticity to the film. this is also the case with the quotations

taken from Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. One of the set pieces of the film is

an evening at Gertrude Stein's picture-filled drawing-room on the rue de Fleurus, in which the

dialogue is peppered with borrowings from an interesting mixture of sources. Hart arrives with

his friend the journalist Oiseau, and they are ushered in by Alice B. Toklas to the salon, where

Gertrude is holding forth,

GERTRUDE STEIN: I've come to the conclusion that I dislike the abnormal. It's so obvious. The normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.

(---)OISEAU TO ALICE: ...Does Hadley like his new friends?ALICE: Ah, the pilot fish. Charming lot. Not terribly interesting but I like

their taste.NICK Hart (to HEMINGWAY):Do me a favor, pal - tell me a good joke.HEMINGWAY: You're standing in one. You know, Hart, there's only

two things that can really kill a man-suicide and gonorrhea.(---)GERTRUDE STEIN (to HART): Young man, Come....I have a very

important question regarding your work. How old are you? HART: Thirty-threeGERTRUDE STEIN: It won't do at all. American painters are twenty-six

this year.HART: Well, I'm not.GERTRUDE STEIN: Precisely my point. You won't fit in at all.

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NICK HART: (incomprehensible)..won't approve of that, either.I can always move towards the theatre

GERTRUDE STEIN: I'll introduce you to Jean Cocteau (laughter)........ Hemingway! Remember, the sun also sets!

HEMINGWAY: Yes, right on your big.....Hey, Bunny ?BUFFY: I don't think we speak to Miss Stein that way.HEMINGWAY: She never listens anyway

Some of the sources of this dialogue are easy to trace. Gertrude Stein's first remark,

about her interest in the normal, comes from the Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, at a point in

the narrative where, in the persona of Alice B. Toklas, she is relating Stein's failure to get her

medical degree and her ensuing breakaway from a projected career studying pathological

psychology:

She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.10

When Oiseau and Alice are discussing Hadley Hemingway's feeling about Ernest's

new friends, however, the Paris memoir being referenced is not the Gertrude Stein book, but

Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. The "pilot fish" is Hemingway's term for the person who acts as

a scout for the rich , looking out for whatever is new-and attention-worthy:

The rich have a sort of pilot fish who goes ahead of them, sometimes a little deaf, sometimes a little blind, but always smelling affable and hesitant ahead of them...He is always going somewhere, or coming from somewhere, and he is never around for very long .... These rich loved and trusted him an unidentified character because he was shy, comic, elusive, already in production, and because he was an unerring pilot fish....The rich came led by the pilot fish. A year before they would never have come. There was no certainty then. The work was as good and the happiness greater but no novel had been written so they could not be sure....In those days I trusted the pilot fish....Under the charm of these rich I was a s trusting and stupid as a bird dog who wants to go with any man with a gun, or a trained pig in a circus who has finally found someone who loves and appreciates him for himself alone.11

In A Moveable Feast, the pilot-fish is a harbinger of doom, leading to the breakup of

Hemingway's pure, hard-writing life and his marriage to Hadley. The date of the film, 1926, is

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about the time in which Hemingway became involved with his second wife: he divorced Hadley,

the first wife, in 1927 and left Paris in 1928.

When in the film, Gertrude Stein asks Hart how old he is, the dialogue reproduces

a section in the Autobiography of Alice B Toklas relating the meeting between Gertude Stein and

Hemingway, putting Hart more or less in the position of a certain George Lynes:

I remember very well the impression I had of Hemingway that first afternoon. He was an extraordinarily good-looking young man, twenty-three years old. It was not long after that that everybody was twenty-six. It became the period of being twenty-six. During the next two or three years all the young men were twenty-six years old. It was the right age apparently for that time and place. there were one or two under twenty, for example George Lynes but they did not count as Gertrude Stein carefully explained to them. If they were young men they were twenty-six. Later on, much later on they were twenty-one and twenty-two.So Hemingway was twenty-three, rather foreign-looking, with passionately interested, rather than interesting eyes. He sat in front of Gertrude Stein and listened and looked.12

The screenplay of The Moderns, written by Alan Rudolph with Jon Bradshaw, a

magazine writer who died in 1986 before the film was made, creates a fictional Hemingway

who both references and diverges from the persona drawn in the classic Hemingway account of

1 Noxell-Smith, Geoffrey (ed) : Oxford History of World Film, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 211.2 Richard Combs, « Interview with Alan Rudolph », Monthly Film Bulletin, 1989, page 69 In a Telerama of 1988, Rudolph had excepted Picasso and Man Ray from this generalisation, see below Note 3.3 "L'Argent de l'Art" « Propos d'Alan Rudolph recueillis par Vincent Tolédano », Télérama, N°2017, 7 septembre 1988.4 It was Gertrude Stein who said that Paris was « where the Twentieth Century is happening. » ‘So Paris was the natural background for the twentieth century; America knew it too well, knew the twentieth century too well to create it, for America there was a glamour in the twentieth century that made it not be material for creative activity. »  Gertrude Stein, Paris France , New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, p.24.5 « Modernism », pp 142-155, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed Robert S Nelson and Richard Shiff, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1996 (1st edition),page 142.6 Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, New York, Vintage Books, 1990. A sequel Everybody's Autobiography, was issued some years later7 Thanks for this information to Pascale Antolin, Maître de Conférences à Michel Montaigne Bordeaux III, and author of a recent book on Fitzgerald (Pascale Antolin-Pires. L’Objet et ses doubles. Une relecture de Fitzgerald.Pessac : Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2000. 247 pages.)8 Ernest Hemingway, Epigraph A Moveable Feast , (Paris est une fête), (1964), New York, Scribner, 1996, on title page9 A Moveable Feast page 18210 Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, op cit, page 9111 A Moveable Feast ; op cit, pp 179-18012 Autobiography of Alice B Toklas , op cit, pp 229-30

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Twenties Paris. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway , living on his wife Hadley's inherited income

which was about equal to three times the average French worker's salary , he describes himself

(falsely) as being very poor, writing in cafés to escape his cold room, but also living in devoted

harmony with Hadley and their young son, Bumby, as well as the cat babysitter, F Puss. In

Gertrude Stein's recollection of the period, a very young Hemingway sits devotedly at her feet

like a willing student. James Mellow cites a letter in which Hemingway wrote to Sherwood

Anderson, who had introduced him to Stein, ending "We love Gertrude Stein,"13and Stein and

Toklas were Bumby's godmothers. However, in the film, Rudolph suggests the contempt that

Hemingway ultimately developed for his one-time mentor and literary model, expressed in A

Moveable Feast, and generally caricatures the Stein salon as being both precious and perverse.

Alan Rudolph's Gertrude Stein questions and evaluates the young painter exactly as the

wealthier, but not more powerful art-consumer Bertram Stone deals with artists in the very first

sequence of the film, when, sitting beside his wife (who is another kind of consumer, constantly

nibbling chocolates or drinking whisky) he is offered a choice of painters as if they were so

many dishes on the menu while the art-dealer vaunts their merits as if he were peddling the plat

du jour. (Indeed Stone's name begins like hers with an S and a T, although it finishes off with

three letters that are pronounced exactly like the verb to "own", possession being nine-tenths of

his persona.)

In The Moderns, the Hemingway character is a kind of "lounge lizard": this

characterization suggests that the widely known sporty outdoors Hemingway was perhaps a fake.

Rudolph's Hem is more like the stereotype of a bitter failed writer than a snapshot of a rising

star: he is something of a barfly, capitalizing on his fame to cadge drinks from tourists, visiting

the tarts who live opposite Hart's studio, and generally boring everyone who will listen with his

aphorisms. (An example of his incoherent but oracular style is the dirge he pronounces at the

funeral of the mock-suicide Oiseau:

The dead are the most brave. They take their love with them. Can you even imagine the courage to love someone, who loves you, when there's nothing you can do about it?

13 James R. Mellow, Hemingway A Life Without Consequences , New York, Da Capo Press,1993, page 149

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At worst, the Hemingway in The Moderns (many of whose lines were improvised by

the actor, Kevin J. O'Connor)14 seems almost like a contestant honing his wit to enter the Harry's

Bar and American Grill International Imitation Hemingway Contest, founded in 1980.15 At best,

however, his portentous comments on the action of the film, make it seem as if the action of The

Moderns is a kind of Hemingway first draft, a novel in the making - or indeed, that the historical

Hemingway was actually an alter ego of the Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises, unflatteringly

described by a companion on a fishing trip as follows:

You're an expatriate....Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers...You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You're an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.16

The Hemingway of the film is constantly mistaking people's names (He calls

Buffy Bunny, and uses the name Clark for Nick), as if he were in a state between fact and fiction

and couldn't decide whether to use the names they bear in diegetic reality or that he will give

them in his fiction.17 But this confusion also reflects the instability of character-identity in this

film, which in turn mirrors the instability of the collage of texts, disallowing any sure

identification of sources or any sense of historical authenticity.. In the opening sequence, Hart is

like Hemingway in this, since Hart calls Oiseau a series of declensions on his name, whether

Oisif or Oiselle, the name of a Parisian art critic in the diegesis confusion comes when an

expatriate, just off the boat, says to another one:

See that guy over there? He just wrote a book called The Sun Also Rises.Oh, that's Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The ultimate confusion of course is felt at the end of the film when paintings by Nick

Hart are called a Matisse, a Modigliani and a Cézanne.

14 Jaehne, Karen, "Time for The Moderns ," in Film Comment (New York), March/April 1988, p.27.15 Voir George Plimpton, ed., The Best of Bad Hemingway, New York, Harcourt, 1989.16 Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, New York, Arrow/Vintage, 1994, page 101 Also quoted by Charles Poore in his memorial article for Hemingway in the New York Times on July 3, 1961.17 One of the confusions he makes is "Buffy" for "Bunny" It's perhaps worth noting that Edmund Wilson, the critic and friend of Fitzgerald, bore the nickname "Bunny"

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Born in 1899, the historical Hemingway would have been twenty-six years old for

at least part of 1926, the year in which Gertrude Stein tells the painter, Hart, that this is the right

age for painters that year. Here, he scenario-writers have also used an event linked to the

biography of Hemingway (as told by Gertude Stein) as part of the narrative concerning the

painter Hart. But this is not the only way in which the painter Hart mirrors and merges with the

character Hemingway as developed in he film. during the sequence in Gertrude Stein's salon,

Hart insults the collector Stone's American wife (who is, in reality, Harts own spouse, since she

never divorced him before marrying Stone). Stone challenges him to a duel, which Gertrude

Stein alters to a boxing-match three rounds long to be undertaken in the American Gymnasium in

Montparnasse. This boxing match as developed in the film is not only a reference to the boxing

in The Sun Also Rises, but also an interesting adaptation of an event in Hemingway's own life,

which took place in 1929, as reported by one of his biographers, James R Mellow: using this

material, the screenwriters replace the historical Hemingway with the fictional Hart.

As Mellow relates the story, Hemingway had a date to box with the writer Morley

Callaghan, but, feeling the effects of a heavy lunch, he wanted to keep the rounds down to a

duration of one minute each, with two-minute rest periods in between - the most he felt he could

handle. F Scott Fitzgerald was on the bell and unfortunately let the first round go on for three

minutes and forty five seconds, enough time for Hemingway's face to be hit many times, for his

lip to be cut, and for the overfed contender to be forced to sink to the ground.18 In The Moderns,

the fictional Hemingway acts out the part of the real Fitzgerald and has the job of ringing the bell

at the end of the rounds, a job which he muffs exactly the way Fitzgerald is said by Mellow to

have done. Hemingway, engaged in conversation with Stone's henchmen, forgets the time and

lets the round go on too long, so that the collector is able to force the painter Nick Hart to the

canvas and finish him off with kicks, ultimately knocking out the referee as well. (Says the

Hemingway character in lieu of more substantial comfort, "A fight is just a fight, and when it's

fought, it's something else.")

What things are and aren't, and what they seem to be, how one thing can seem like

another, and the irrelevance of names: the confusion generated by questions of identity and the

randomness of notions of value is one of the leading thematic networks of the film. The very

genre of The Moderns is put into doubt: heavily indebted to literary models (to such an extent

18 Mellow , Hemingway A Life Without Consequences, op cit, page 387

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that the gates in the first sequence opening onto the Eiffel Tower can only remind us of the

covers of a book) and referencing landmark paintings, it spills over the boundaries of the usual

film text. Rudolph's Paris of The Moderns was well publicized by journalists as being a fake

actually created in Montreal. (The random, totally conventional nature of the Parisian-ness of

Rudolph's diegetic city is constantly emphasized: the Paris landscape perceived through the back

window of a car or the window of an apartment is as often an obviously painted background as an

actual street, and, instead of architecture or monuments, posters usually convey the sense of time

and place.)

All the pictures used in the film are fakes, but if the authors referred to in these

counterfeit art objects are easy to identify, the actual pictures themselves are impossible to pin

down: the key canvas, the Cézanne, vaguely reminds us of Les grandes baigneuses, or perhaps of

Matisse's Bonheur de vivre and details of pictures imprecisely recalling famous modernist icons,

such as Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon, flash across the screen. Like the trompe l'oreille

dialogue, these picture-references give a skewed, disorienting sense of referring to non-

identifiable but apparently historical models

So, too, is there confusion among the identity of the characters. Rachel, Stone's

wife, is really Hart's wife. Nathalie de Ville's lover, Armand, is really a cross-dressing woman.

Oiseau, the suicide is really alive, but passing as a woman during his own funeral. Stone, the real

suicide, a former apprentice to the magician, Houdini, emerges from the coffin at which he has

replaced Oiseau, as if he has just performed a masterful escape number following an epileptic fit

that feigned death. At the very end of the film, another identity crisis for Oiseau takes place in the

sequence set in the Museum of Modern Art - which, incidentally, opened in 1929 on the twelfth

floor of a skyscraper and not in the bank -like structure portrayed. A woman called Ada Fuoco

comes up to the journalist him and asks him if he isn't Irving Fagelman, her childhood friend

from Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Oiseau backs away, saying in French that he doesn't speak

English. Ada Fuoco walks off in a state of perplexity - but a look at the credits at the end of the

film tells us that the character, Ada Fuoco, is played by an actress really called Ada Fuoco. The

principle of shifting and overlapping identity is fundamental to this film, which is itself an

artistic collage whose list of components extends even to the paratext..

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This set of overlapping identities radiates outwards from the central pair of

contrasting characters, the fictional Nick Hart, refers to the semi-historical Hemingway and is

intended as a parallel character working in tandem with that of the author. . Nick Hart's name is

interesting- Nick Adams was the name of the Hemingway character in his early stories, taken by

many readers to be a pseudonym for the author himself. The painter's name Hart, not only refers

to his vital organ, but, when pronounced by a French waiter, as in the opening of the film sounds

like "art"19, but it also begins with an "H", clearly stressing the link to the writer There is

symmetry in their differences as well as in their similarities. Hemingway is already a success:

Hart is still, after six years in Paris (the same amount of time spent there by Hemingway,

although not within the same dates) a failure. Hemingway has been able to give up newspaper

work and devote himself to pure art: Hart is still making a living sketching caricatures for the

Paris Herald Tribune. Both Hem and Hart, working in cafés at solitary arts, are, as Oiseau says

in the opening sequence of the film "among the throng but not of the throng". But, just as the

character Nick Hart echoes and overlaps with the character Hemingway, he also overlaps and

merges with the director Alan Rudolph, implied behind the Hart who undertakes the central

action of the film, the forging of three works which are said to embody "the true spirit of

modernity", a Matisse, Modigliani, and very importantly a Cézanne.

Hart accomplishes a quintessential and mythic action performed by many writer-

characters (and other artists) in American Film, since he agrees to prostitute himself in exchange

for money (and personal attention from Nathalie de Ville), by forging the three great pictures

from her collection that she wishes to steal from her husband (the idea being that she will take his

originals to America, replacing them with Hart's copies). The irony, of course, is that by so

doing, one has the feeling that Hart rather than debasing it, is reaching a higher level of

excellence than he does in his own art, and that he only improves the quality (as read by the

critics) of the paintings he is paid to forge. We see him at work with a kind of magic lantern,

projecting the images of the originals onto a rectangular white canvas, a metonymy for the

cinema screen. Hemingway, doing "research" with the tarts next door, is framed in a window as if

he were part of just another more painting, incorporated with the others into an implied master

image including them all-the Rudolph film.

19 Jaehne, « Time for the Moderrns », op cit, p. 25.

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During the forging sequence, Hart is likened to the director when he is presented

as having a memory which duplicates one characteristic procedure of Rudolph's film, the sliding

from still photograph or documentary film, through fiction filmed in sepia which imitates

historical footage, to a full-color diegetic reality. Hart's studio is full of photographs of himself

and Rachel, or of Rachel alone: when he is riding in a car with Nathalie de Ville, he imagines

scenes of what might happen with her as if they were frames of a film. The images in his life

slide from past to present like the frames in Rudolph's film. Hart's imagination, perceptions and

memory, presented in a series of pictorial flashes more fully than those of any other character in

the film, duplicate the weavings in and out of visual reality conducted by the film director. His

memory is, on a small scale, constructed like the "memory" of the film as a whole (Thus his

"Paris"-a collection of little Eiffel Towers to which the waiter in the opening sequence makes a

contribution- is a scale model of Rudolph's Paris, in xhich imaginations are so dominated by the

presence of the Tower that a painter sitting at his easel in a dark street adds one to his picture

even if the monument is invisible to him.)

So, in a number of ways, the character of Nick Hart, a kind of sideways

Hemingway, is also slanted towards the image of the director as this is implied within the text,.

Some of the light shed by the main character upon the director is diffused and deflected, and

spills over the boundaries of the film text proper. The reviews of The Moderns (as for example

the file in the Bibliothèque du film or the collection presented on RottenTomatoes.com ) convey

information which can only be considered a part of the film text, since much of this material is

totally coherent with the themes of the film. Alan Rudolph is the son of a movie director and the

protégé of Robert Altman, another movie director who could be considered a kind of father-in-

art: if we accept the equivalency of copying a painting with "forging" the past in an ironically

historical film, then we have to equate Alan Rudolph himself with his character, Nick Hart. Yet

again, many of the paintings used in the film were actually produced by a real forger, David

Stein, who had actually spent time in jail for having imitated art - the opposite to what happens to

Hart, whose forgeries, partially the result of mechanical reproduction, go down in history as

examples of not only what is archetypal in modernism but also of what is inimitable, with just

those touches added by him which diverge from the originals (he has changed the face of the

Matisse to resemble that of his wife Rachel) being praised as the height of the sublime.specificity

of what are perceived to be originals.

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But if Hart connotes the extra-filmic character of David Stein, the art forger, and

thus refers through him to Alan Rudolph, a member of his diegetic"team" also connotes Rudolph

in his role of scriptwriter. This is Hart's friend Oiseau, the future Hollywood scriptwriter, an

interesting character probably based partly on two figures in expatriate Paris, the journalist

William Bird, and the bilingual journalist Eugene Jolas, who explicated the new art movements

in Twenties Paris to American readers and helped to create the myth while it was still continuing

in reality20. Says Oiseau,

If it weren't for me, people would have thought "surreal" was a breakfast food.

Oiseau is fed up with Paris, and wants to get out of his contract with the Paris Tribune

- thinking this is too difficult, he stages a mock funeral for himself after publicizing a mythical

suicide and having published the obituary which he wrote for himself. After he attends the

funeral disguised as a woman, he and Hart, whom he has finally convinced to go, leave France

for Hollywood. Meeting Hart at the bar, Oiseau says (in his female disguise)

Jesus, I just ran into Maurice Ravel in the men's room. He didn't recognize me. (Sees Americans) You know, Paris has been taken over by people who are just imitators of people who are imitators themselves. It's become like a parody. Believe me, Hollywood is going to be a breath of fresh air. ....This whole experience gives me a great idea for a picture I could write. It would be perfect for Von Stroheim.

Not only is identity a problem for the spectator, it is also a problem within the

diegesis. Nathalie de Ville's henchmen, who come to steal the originals of her paintings from

Hart's studio, take the copies instead. When Nathalie tells Stone that his pictures, the real

originals, are fakes, he believes her, because, not only are her own pictures "authenticated", but

the critics at Stone's party affirm that the Stone pictures are fakes, whereupon the owner slashes

them and throws them into the fire. On the other hand, at the end of the film, a critic holding

forth in front of the forged pictures lauds them in the following terms:

Ah, yes, Henri Matisse. Odalisque-study if you will the face-it's the most realized of all his work and to my mind the best...Cézanne, considered to be the father of modern (modernism?)..this revelation cannot be taught nor can it be duplicated.

20 See the chapters in  American Writers in Paris 1920-39 » Gale Research , Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. by Karen Lane Rood ; foreword by Malcolm Cowley. - Detroit, MI : Gale Research, 1980.

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Only the greatest artists can achieve what has happened here, and then only in a rare moment of time...;

The art critic seems to confirm what Libby Valentin, the art-dealer played by

Geneviève Bujold, says to Hart early on in the film when she is trying to get him to sell out and

forge Nathalie de Ville's pictures:

I never liked Caravaggio myself, but your father's Caravaggio, I loved. Your father is a master and you've inherited all his skills.

Not only is Hart as great a forger as his father, able to improve the works he copies,

but the conclusion is clear: a forgery can also be superior to the original upon which it is

modeled, an d Rudolph's Paris should be considered as at least the equal of Hemingway's or

Stein's. Thus The Moderns is actually a defense of the work of art in the age of mechanical

reproduction, whether this means be the magic lantern used by Nick Hart or movie camera

wielded by Alan Rudolph.

The Moderns is a film that seems to have been written for an ideal spectator who

will know about the all the literary texts, and all the painters involved in Rudolph's elaborate

scheme of connotations, a viewer who will remember to watch the credits, and who will read

the reviews: This point is illustrated by the example of the painter, Cézanne, whose importance

within the film text proper is considerably different than it seems when a certain amount of

knowledge of the literary sources used in constructing the screenplay is brought to bear upon the

film.

In the film, outside of the critics who have the last word on the authenticity and

value of works of art, Cézanne is chiefly of interest to the painter, Hart, who though an

occasional (and unwilling) forger himself, lauds Cézanne who, he says, "was never tempted to

cheat." Cézanne was also responsible for Hart's artistic vocation, since, he says, when, as a boy,

he first saw a Cézanne he burst out into perspiration as if he had a fever, undercutting this

statement with irony by saying that in fact the illness was physiological and not due to esthetic

shock: the child did have a fever, but , in the ensuing period of enforced idleness, he began to

draw. This finding of a vocation because of the works of Cézanne corresponds to what happened

to Gertrude Stein who, having bought a Cézanne from the dealer Vollard, started to write fiction

(Three Lives) while contemplating the Cézanne:

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It was an important purchase (the Cézanne), because in looking and looking at this picture Gertrude Stein started to write fiction

She had begun not long before as an exercise in literature to translate Flaubert's Trois Contes and the she had this Cézanne and she looked at it and under its stimulus she wrote Three Lives21

Paul Cézanne, via Gertrude Stein also influenced the writing of Ernest Hemingway.

James Mellow suggests that his character, Nick Adams, who appears in his first published work,

the collection of short stories entitled in our time, is in fact an aspiring writer 22, a point brushed in

with only a few words in the published version. However, in the original typescript, Hemingway

appends to the story "Big Two Hearted River (II)" a stream-of-consciousness passage of eleven

pages including material which makes it clear that the character is a Hemingway double

Nick Adams, a fisherman-writer , whose stories carry the titles of stories by Ernest Hemingway 23 (---) The great hope of Nick Adams the writer--and of Ernest Hemingway--was to write stories as objective and real as the paintings of Cézanne, to do the country as Cézanne had done it. ("You had to do it from inside yourself.") Nick/ Hemingway remembers the Cézannes he has seen, the portrait of Madame Cézanne at Gertrude Stein's ....

and so on.

In an encyclopedia entry for Gertrude Stein we learn that in her Lectures in

America of 1935 she compares her literary technique with that of the cinema

No two frames of a motion picture are exactly alike, yet the sequence presents to the eye a flowing continuity. Similarly, Miss Stein, by the use of partly repetitive statements, each making a limited advance in the theme, presents an uninterrupted series of instantaneous visions, so that one grasps a living moment in precise, ordered forms.124

If such is the style to which the influence of Cézanne was able to lead Gertrude Stein,

and if Alan Rudolph and Jon Bradshaw were consciously aware of the connotative resonance

their collage of periods, places, characters, texts, and media could engender - a series of echoes of

which I believe I have only been able to hear the loudest - then, upon study, this rather uneven

1 21Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, page 39. In fact she had written an earlier novel, Q E D, lost for many years and published posthumouèsly .22 Mellow , Hemingway, op. cit., p. 27223 Ibid, p. 27424 James D Hart, ed, Oxford Companion to American Literature, New York, Oxford University Press, , 1995, page 634.

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film about art becomes more artistic then it at first seems to be. Behind the sometimes clumsy

parody of cultural myth is an esthetic statement about film as a kind of "total work of art"

containing its sisters, at the same time that it outdoes them. To rephrase the inimitable Gertrude

Stein, a book is a painting is a film..

The word concerto has been defined as having two meanings, one which coming

from the Italian "consertare" designates a group of instruments making beautiful music together,

and another, from the word "concertare" which indicates rivalry between the different

players.25 Alan Rudolph and Jon Bradshaw have written a film which suggests that art and

literature at one and the same time compete and blend in the "mixed-media" work of art which

film is by its very essence, a kind of concerto to which the modern movement including

Cézanne, Stein and Hemingway have only been a prelude.

25Xavier Lacavalerie, « Union miracle : Critique du disque d'Alfred Brendel, Les cinq concertos pour piano de Beethoven », Télérama 12 May 1999, p.110.

© Trudy Bolter 2009