A Film Canon

This idiosyncratic attempt to identify writing with directing, and literature with cinema, makes most sense when understood as a book. At heart, it is a written text, centred on segments of Guitry's own writing, discursions about what he is writing, and reflections on the nature of writing, all of which emphasise the word as a de-signified, material phenomenon. This written core is couched within a spoken text; or, alternatively, an authorial voice manifesting itself as Guitry's pervasive narration, which not only brings signification to what he is writing, but precludes the need for dialogue, or even any real diegetic sound. Finally, these written and spoken texts are couched within a visual, cinematic text, which constitutes so many illustrations for, or even impressionistic visualisations on the part of, the imagined reader; that is, a sequence of semi-autonomous, eccentric images, whose lack of accountability to each other is only equalled by their categorical accountability to Guitry's voice, as explicated in his taste for enumerating objects and actions, most dramatically in the opening sequence, in which he introduces the cast and crew. In this way, his determined adherence to a written narrative actually ends up freeing the cinematic narrative, gesturing towards the associative, coincidental play of the French New Wave, and producing an aesthetic sleight of hand that constitutes the real 'cheat' of the film, identifying 'cheat' and writer/director in terms of their shared dexterity.