A Film Canon

The greatest film about film to date, Elevator To The Gallows elaborates an emergent, virtual republic, in which images have replaced subjects, surveillance has become synonymous with spectatorship, and sovereignty has been entirely privatised. As a result, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) and Florence Carala's (Jeanne Moreau) plan to kill business mogul and husband Simon Carala - rather than attenuating or recirculating his images - is tragically anachronistic; an attempt to puncture a system that is not merely sufficiently flexible to reconfigure itself around them, but can actually reduce them to its own archetypal technological relation in the process. Trapped in a darkened elevator that culminates the hyper-geometrical aesthetic of the business world it services, and is continuous with the police interrogation room, prison and darkroom that conclude the narrative, Julien finds the mechanical constrictions of the cinematic apparatus condensed to his own body; walking the city in search of Julien, whose entrapment prevents him showing up at the designated appointment, Florence finds herself reduced to a disembodied, wandering image, hardly heard, barely seen, and seeming to float through the glassy media that embody the dialectic between their respective positions. Prescient, however, that this 'interrogation' of spectatorship is structurally futile, insofar as a fully detached spectator ceases to be a spectator - just as Julien could only have successfully killed Simon if he had become him, suggesting that human error is, like Miles' Davis improvisational score, implicit in his desire - Malle quickly moves from such overt metafictional devices as the opening cinema screen credits, and conspicuous lack of makeup, to provide a radical, denaturing identification with spectatorship, in the form of the two juvenile delinquents who steal Simon's car, and appropriate his personality, habits and possessions into a spree of idiotic, responsibility-free, self-consciously spectatorial enjoyment, culminating with a murder and suicide pact that allows them to purge everything about themselves apart from the images and generic narratives that they offer up to the media, by way of the police force: "We'll only be together in the headlines. The people who read them will understand." Not only does this reduce the previous generation - and history itself - to an irretrievable spectacle, but it produces a deep, pervasive pessimism about radical youth culture, haunting the exuberance of the imminent New Wave with the melancholy of poetic realism, while anticipating the generational transgressions of Murmur Of The Heart and Atlantic City.