C I N-D O C U M E NTS

SCOTT MACKENZIE

TH E M I SS I N G MY TH O LO GY: Bar thes in Qubec

Rsum : Cet article, qui introduit la traduction ci-dessous, examine le travail de collaboration de Roland Barthes et Hubert Aquin sur le film Le Sport et les hommes. En plus de combler une lacune dans lhistore du documentaire lONF/NFB, lauteur (qui a traduit le texte de Barthes) offre une nouvelle lecture de lintrt particulier que Barthes voue au sport-comme-spectacle-film.

ilm history, like all historical narratives, is filled with gaps and fissures. Often, though, rediscovering what is elided in film history offers us greater insight into the concerns of, and trends within, a national cinema. A re-examination of the French semiotician Roland Barthes collaboration with Qubcois filmmakers in the early 1960s provides us with such a case. Much has been written about the cinma direct films produced by the NFB/ONFs (National Film Board of Canada/Office national du film) lquipe franaise in the 1950s and 1960s and the profound influence these films had on documentary film practice in France and the United States.1 Much has also been written about the influence of both la nouvelle vague and French philosophyspecifically, the advent of structuralismon Qubcois filmmakers during this period. Yet, in spite of the fertile interchanges which took place between Parisian and Qubcois intellectuals and cultural workers, little mention is made of Roland Barthes work with the Qubcois writer, broadcaster and filmmaker Hubert Aquin on a film called Le Sport et les hommes (1961). Passing references, at best, are made to Barthes collaboration with Aquin in the key historical surveys of Qubcois cinema.2 None of the plethora of biographies and critical studies of Barthes work including Barthes own Roland Barthes par Roland Barthesmention his time in Montral.3 What is perhaps more surprising is that in the career-spanning uvres compltes, published between 1993 and 1995, which not only
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES REVUE CANADIENNE DTUDES CINMATOGRAPHIQUES VOLUME 6 NO. 2 PP 65-74

brings together Barthes collected writings, but also his interviews and even the plan dtudes for his courses, no mention is made of the film.4 Even those in Qubec who know about Barthes connection with the NFB/ONF typically refer to his acknowledgement in La lutte (Claude Jutra, Michel Brault, Marcel Carrire & Claude Fournier, 1961)a film inspired, in part, by his essay Le monde o lon catche from Mythologiesand leave his far more active role in scripting the commentary for Le Sport et les hommes by the wayside. As Barthes contribution to Qubcois cinema is often elided, so is the film career of Hubert Aquin. While Aquin is known primarily for his essays, radio broadcasts and fiction, he was employed by the NFB/ONF from 1960 to 1963, working on seven films during his three year career there: Lhomme vite (dir. Guy Borremans; prod. Aquin, 1960); Le Sport et les hommes (dir. Aquin, 1961); Le Temps des amours (co-dir. Aquin, 1961); Jour aprs jour (dir. Clmont Perron; prod. Aquin, 1962); La fin des ts (dir. Anne-Claire Poirier; co-script Aquin, 1963); lheure de la dcolonisation (dir. Monique Fortier; script Aquin, 1963); and Saint-Henri, le 5 septembre (dir. Aquin, 1964). He also worked on the translation of English language documentaries produced for the Comparisons series, re-shooting scenes and re- writing commentaries in French, in order to give the films a Qubcois context. Le Sport et les hommes was the only French filmthat is, produced in French firstto emerge from the Comparisons series. Comprised of nineteen films produced by the NFB/ONF for broadcast on the CBC and RadioCanada between 1959 and 1964, the series was essentially an attempt at the cross-cultural analysis of national practices in a comparative context. Whatever the practice under consideration, it was analysed in light of the national identity of the country in which the activity took place. The role played by internationalism in this series could be seen as pro-Canadian propaganda (Canada has a national culture just as India or Germany have national cultures), but the propagandistic impulse was offset when the Canadian sequences were re-shot in Qubec, in French, for broadcast on Radio-Canada. In an article about Barthes connection with the NFB/ONF, Joyce Nelson writes the following about the series: Each production involved on-location shooting in four different countries; a famous expert in the relevant field scripted the commentary and appeared on-camera for studio sequences which bridged the location footage. For each film there was a team of at least five directors and crews, with Ian MacNeill responsible for all the studio
66 Volume 6 No. 2

shooting, and a different director sent to each of the four countries being compared.5 Commentators employed in the series included anthropologist Margaret Mead, historian Arnold Toynbee, film producer James Beveridge and poet and law professor Frank Scott, among others. After the first four films were shot, the Boards budget for the series was nearly depleted.6 Therefore Aquin, who had a life-long passion for sports, proposed to make the film about the phenomenology of sports out of stock shots, as the Board could not afford another prestige film. In this way, Aquin could direct a francophone film as a part of the Comparisons series. In April of 1960, Aquin re-read Barthes Mythologies, a text that was quite influential among Qubcois intellectuals at the time.7 He then approached Barthes in a series of letters. In the first letter to Barthes, dated April 4, 1960, Aquin writes, My intention is not to make a film on the history of sport, but rather one on its phenomenology and its poetics.8 In his preliminary letter Aquin says that he wishes to address car racing in Italy, the Tour de France, hockey in Canada, and football in Hungary or bullfights in Spain. Aquin also states that the sports in question are open to negotiation, which indicates how flexible he was willing to be in order to get Barthes to work on the film. Aquin did not want Barthes to simply write a commentary once the film was completed, but to participate in the film from its conception onward: If you accept to write a commentary for the final product, [I would wish] that you participate from the films inception, with the orientation of the film when it begins. And heres how: write to me, when you can, what you think of this subject overall, of its orientation; also tell me how you yourself imagine the construction of this film.9 To undertake this work, Aquin offered Barthes about $250.00 for his initial thoughts on the subject and $1000.00 for the final script, due six to eight months later. Barthes accepted.10 Aquin wrote Barthes a second letter dated August 3, 1960. In it, he reiterated that they were not making a film on the history of sports and that they had agreed to only address sports-spectacles and to put aside atheletics, solitary or Olympic sports. Aquin goes on to discuss Barthes suggestion that the film begin with a brief history of sports, an idea that was dropped from the final film. He then comments on a contentious idea put forth by Barthes, given his later writings on the photographic image
CJ FS / RCEC 67

and on jouissance. Aquin writes: You said that theres no eroticism in sport. Quite right. On the other hand, in Greece women were banned from the stadium, and from the Middle Ages until just recently they were singularly absent from sport. The universe of sports is almost exclusively male. Indeed, throughout his text, Barthes used only the masculine homme or hommes and never the gender-neutral personne or humain. In relation to gender-specificity, it is also interesting to note that Aquin ascribes eroticism-as-spectacle solely to the world of the feminine. Finally, Aquin addresses the role the spectator plays in Barthes formulation of the sporting spectacle. He writes: Coenesthesia. Here is one of the very interesting notions to be developed in our film. I hope to find adequate footage to illustrate it, but could you tell me if you plan to discuss this concept at great length? Do you consider coenesthesia a privileged form of identification between the spectator and the player? If so, this function, if well illustrated, becomes the occasion we need to talk about the public. Theres also the `ancient chorus aspect of the public: the cries, the punctuations, the gasps that express the publics participation in the spectacle. On this subject, essentially what difference do you see between the publics participation in the theatre spectacle and the sports spectacle? Is there one?11 The ritualized aspect of sports-as-spectacle is developed in the film itself. A recurring theme of purging violence from society into the spectacle of sport runs throughout the film. In this way, the film foreshadows the anthropological theories of scapegoating and mimesis later offered by Ren Girard.12 From these epistolary exchanges, the basic trajectory of the film emerged. Le Sport et les hommes would address the relationship between man and nature as it is ritualized in sporting contests. The film would also address the profound investment spectators have in the events unfolding before their eyes. Le Sport et les hommes, therefore, was an extension of the kind of cultural semiotics undertaken by Barthes in Mythologies. For Barthes, the concept of mythical significationfound in everyday objects like advertisements, popular films, sporting spectacles, and the likeexplodes the traditional binary oppositions which pervade structural semiotics. This shift, outlined in Mythologies, redefines the signs ability to communicate meaning, as the external and historico-cultural system of signification overpowers the traditional binary between signifier and signified. Meaning
68 Volume 6 No. 2

then becomes socially negotiated, but not culturally explicit, as there is a naturalness assumed by the sign which makes the reader feel that meaning is a priori, and not culturally determined.13 Barthes and Aquin applied this notion of myth to sport, stripping away the ritualized violence in order to determine its social function. This approach also fit quite well with the kind of cross-cultural analysis central to the philosophy of the Comparisons series. Aquin assiduously researched the footage he wanted for his compilation film. He travelled to New York at the end of August 1960 to find stock footage. He then went to Paris on September 27, 1960 and stayed there until November 1. During this time, he met with Barthes to discuss the film. On his way back, he stopped over in London to research stock footage for the film at the BBC.14 In the final film, stock shots came from many places, including the BBC in London, NBC in New York, and Leslie McFarlanes Heres Hockey! (NFB, 1953), from the Canada Carries On series. ASNs (Associated Screen News) newsreel on the Richard riot at the Montral Forum was used in the hockey section and even footage from Leni Riefenstahls Olympia (1938) was employed as part of the conclusion. Not one foot of raw stock was exposed in the making of the film. Barthes arrived in Montral on January 15, 1961 to work on the film; he stayed until January 25, 1961. While in Montral, he was interviewed on television by Ral Michaud and delivered lectures at Universit Laval and Universit de Montral. Aquin also interviewed Barthes for his radioshow Carrefour, which was broadcast in two parts on February 28 and March 7.15 Aquin set Barthes up at the Board with a Steenbeck and a copy of the film. As Nelson notes: He was presented with a cutting copy of the film, a shot list with timings for each sequence, and given space at the Board for multiple viewings. 16 From this process, he created his commentary. The films producer, Guy Glover, maintains that Barthes could not demand that parts of the film be re-edited, added or deleted, and therefore contends that the film itself imposed limitations on Barthes analysis. Nelson notes that an analysis of Le Sport et les hommes might reveal the visual structure Barthes had to work withthe filmic complications which placed him at one remove from sport as spectacle as the subject of analysis, and confronted him with filmed spectacle instead.17 However, as we have seen, Barthes was very much involved in the structuring of the film before the editing process began. It is true, however, that Barthes was not simply writing about sportsas-spectacle, but about sports-as-filmed-spectacle. In this way, both the spectators on screen and the spectators in the audience were part of the coenesthetic process. Indeed, this is where Aquins interest in sports lay,
CJ FS / RCEC 69

and in his own writing on the phenomenology of sport, he was greatly influenced by McLuhans work on television and film as cool and hot media respectively.18 It is also interesting to note that Barthes first practical confrontation with the strengths and limitations of the cinema as a mode of signification coincided with advances in his intellectual project. In the same year that Aquin approached the philosopher to write the commentary for Le Sport et les hommes, Barthes wrote his first serious pieces of film theory, Le problme de la signification au cinma and Les units traumatiques au cinma.19 These essays combine the cultural semiotics first theorized in Mythologies, the politique des auteurs found in the pages of Cahiers du cinma and the research undertaken by lInstitut de filmologie.20 La problme de la signification au cinma is an attempt to write a version of Le mythe, aujourdhui for the cinema, while Les units traumatiques au cinma engages with the intellectual project of Gilbert Cohen-Sat and the Institut de filmologie. This points to a major change in his work, at least in regard to the cinema. Up until this point, Barthes writing on film had been limited to reviews of films by Bresson and Chabrol and to short pieces on iconic actors like Garbo and Brando for Mythologies. A few words about the film itself. Le Sport et les hommes was broadcast on Radio-Canada for the first time on June 1, 1961. It then ran in English as part of the Comparisons series on the CBC. The English and French language versions were in distribution until 1977, when Le Sport et les hommes became an archival film, which could only be seen at the NFB/ONF or at the National Archives in Ottawa. The film begins with a brief montage of the different sports under examinationbullfighting, car racing, the Tour de France, hockey and soccer. Then, a title card appears which reads: Le Sport et les hommes par Roland Barthes, the only credit to appear at the beginning of the film. While there is not enough space to analyse each of the five segments of the film, it is worthwhile to make a few preliminary comments about Barthes analysis: one in regard to the Tour de France and another in regard to Canadian hockey. These two sections give us a good indication of the types of semiotic and cultural analysis found in the film. By far, the longest sequence of the film deals with the Tour de Francea subject Barthes had already written about in Mythologies. In his essay, Le Tour de France comme pope, Barthes writes: The Tour thus possesses a veritable Homeric geography. As in the Odyssey, the race is here both a periplus of ordeals and a total exploration of the earths limits.21 In many ways, this brief passage summarizes both Barthes vision of
70 Volume 6 No. 2

the Tour de France and of sports as a whole: in both the aforementioned essay and the film, Barthes continuously returns to the notion of man overcoming the resistance of things. Indeed, a similar observation is present in the film, when Barthes states: It is these excesses, or worse still their contrasts, that the racer has to fight against by continued, inflexible effort. The resistance of the earth has to be added to the resistance of things. The severest test set by nature for the cyclist is the mountain. The mountainthat is to say, gravity. To conquer the steep slope and the weight of matter is to assert that man is capable of controlling the whole physical universe. But this conquest is such a difficult one that man must throw his whole self into the task. This is whyas the whole country knowsthe mountainous stretches are the key to the Tour; not so much because they decide the winner, but because they clearly manifest the true nature of what is at stake, the spirit of the contest, the virtues of the contestant. The end of the mountain stretch is therefore the epitome of the whole human adventure. In the case of Canada, it is the weather itself which, Barthes posits, one must overcome and turn into sport. Out of all five sports, it seems that hockey is the one which Barthes understands the leastit is also the sport that has lent itself most often to the cinemas of Qubec and Canada. Hockey films have been a staple of Canadian and Qubcois cinema since the days of the actualits, produced in nearly every style and genre imaginable, including animated films such as Sheldon Cohens The Sweater (1980), documentaries such as Gilles Groulxs Un jeu si simple (1964), experimental films like William Cannings Blades and Brass (1967) and Bill Wees La Premire toile/The First Star (1973) and fiction films, such as Michel Braults contribution to the omnibus film Montral vu par (Atom Egoyan, Denys Arcand, Patricia Rozema, Jacques Leduc, La Pool & Michel Brault, 1992). Unlike the point of view taken by most of the preceding filmmakers, the vision of hockey offered by Barthes emphasizes its violence. Barthes considers hockey a sport where the symbolic battles between teams can quickly turn into real violence between the players and, in the case of the Richard riots, violence on the part of the spectators. What is interesting about this approach to hockey is that the analysis offered by Barthes as to the ritualized nature of the violence in hockey and how it can spill over into the world of the spectators became a guiding theme in the films of lquipe franaise. Similar to Le Sport et les hommes and the ethnographic films of Jean
CJ FS / RCEC 71

Rouch, such as Les Matres fous (1954), the sports films of lquipe franaise went on to explore the relationship between ritual practices, the maintenance of community, and the processes of scapegoating and mimesis in Qubcois culture. La lutte (1961), Groulxs Golden Gloves (1961) and Un jeu si simple (1964) and Gilles Carles Patinoire (1962) all, to differing degrees, address themselves to these issues. This, as much as the work he did on Le Sport et les hommes and La lutte, is Barthes legacy to Qubcois cinema. Finally, a note on the translation. As Mette Hjort writes in regard to the work of the translator: If we speak of a translators preface or afterword as a genre or type of discourse, such rhetorical devices as apology, selfdenigration, and dichologia (excusing failure by pointing to its necessity) would have to figure among the defining criteria.22 I certainly feel the need to engage in dichologia in regard to translating the work of Barthes. Joyce Nelson notes that Robert Russell translated from Barthes French, a task which Glover recognized as being `almost impossible because of Barthes richly nuanced style.23 In many ways, this is true. Nevertheless, I have endeavoured to translate this untranslatable text, balancing the metaphors of Barthes with the demands of the English language. In undertaking this translation, I consulted Barthes script, the original film, the English version of the film (the translation of which is quite different from Barthes script) and a post-production translation of the script done for Grant McLean. I have used all these texts as resources, but have tried to retain the integrity and spirit of Barthes script, to hold on to the grain of the voice. For instance, in both the French and English versions of the film, the commentary contains a few lines not present in Barthes script. As there is no textual indication that Barthes provided or even approved of these additions, I have left them out of the translation. There is a school of thought that believes translations of texts such as this one are doomed; others believe that the signifying practices of other languages can be translated, if context-specificity is maintained. Hjort astutely outlines the positions of these two camps: Where the idealist tradition projects transparency and the possibility of an exact mirroring of terms, the skeptical tradition sees opacity and the efficacy of a productive subjectivity and language.24 These problems come to the forefront when translating the work of someone who wrote and thought as much about language and its signification as Barthes did. In the end, though, I must side with the notion that translation is possible, even if transparency is not. Like stripping away the naturalness of signs which guided Barthes project, translation can be seen as a means of bringing to light the signifying practices which often lay behind the opacity of language.
72 Volume 6 No. 2

Notes My thanks to Andr Loiselle for suggesting many helpful ways to improve the translation of Barthes text, and to Bernard Lutz, the National Film Board of Canadas printed document archivist, for kindly granting permission for the script of Le Sport et les hommes to appear in these pages. 1. See, for example, Eric Rohmer and Louis Marcorelles, Entretien avec Jean Rouch, Cahiers du cinma 144 (1963): 1-22 and Bill Nichols, The Voice of Documentary in Bill Nichols, ed. Movies and Methods. vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985): 258-273. 2. For instance, no mention of their collaboration is made in Gary Evans, In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada 1949-1989 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), Yves Lever, Histoire gnrale du cinma au Qubec. rev. ed. (Montral: Boral, 1995), or Pierre Vronneau, Rsistance et affirmation: la production francophone lONF 1939-1964. Les dossiers de la cinmathque 17 (Montral: Cinmathque qubcoise/Muse du cinma, 1987). One short article on Barthes time in Canada was published in Cinema Canada. See Joyce Nelson, Roland Barthes and the NFB Connection, Cinema Canada 42 (1977): 14-15. 3. See, for example: Stephen Heath, Vertige du dplacement: Lecture de Barthes (Paris: Fayard, 1974); Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes (London: Oxford University Press, 1983); Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes 1915-1980 (Paris: Flammarion, 1990); and Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 4. See Roland Barthes, uvres compltes: Tome I 1942-1965. ric Marty, ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1993). 5. Nelson, 14. 6. Nelson, 14. 7. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957). Translated as Roland Barthes, Mythologies. trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973). 8. Aquins letter to Barthes, 4 April 1960. NFB/ONF production file: Le Sport et les hommes. Reprinted in Hubert Aquin, Journal 1948-1971 (Montral: ditions BQ, 1992): 364-365. All translations from Aquin are mine. 9. Aquin, 365. 10. Barthes wrote two letters to Aquin, dated 15 September 1960 and 15 October 1960. Unfortunately, neither of these letters are in the NFB/ONF production file. 11. Aquins letter to Barthes, 3 August 1960. NFB/ONF production file: Le Sport et les hommes. Reprinted in Hubert Aquin, Journal, 366-367. 12. See Ren Girard, La Violence et la sacr (Paris: ditions Bernard Gasset, 1972). 13. See Roland Barthes, Le mythe, aujourdhui in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957): 191247. Translated as Roland Barthes, Myth Today in Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1973): 109- 159. 14. Aquins itinerary can be found in Guy Massoutre, Itinraires dHubert Aquin (Montral: ditions BQ, 1992). 15. Massoutre, 119. 16. Nelson, 14-15. 17. Nelson, 15.

CJ FS / RCEC 73

18. See Hubert Aquin, lments pour une phnomnologie du sport in Aquin, Blocs Erratiques: Textes 1948-1977. Ren Lapierre, ed. (Montral: ditions Quinze, 1977): 167-177. 19. Roland Barthes, Le problme de la signification au cinma, Revue internationale de filmologie 10.32/33 (1960) and Barthes, Les units traumatiques au cinma, Revue internationale de filmologie 10.34 (1960). 20. Major figures in lInstitut de filmologie included Gilbert Cohen-Sat and Henri Agel. See Gilbert Cohen-Sat, Essai sur les principes dune philosophie du cinma. rev. ed. (Paris: PUF, 1958) and tienne Souriau, ed. Lunivers filmique (Paris: Flammarion, 1953). 21. Roland Barthes, Le Tour de France comme pope in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957): 114. Translated as The Tour de France as Epic in Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noonday, 1979): 82. 22. Mette Hjort, Afterword: Portrait of the Translator in Louis Marin, Food for Thought. trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989): 243. 23. Nelson, 15. 24. Hjort, 246.

SCOTT MACKENZIE is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he teaches Canadian and Qubcois cinema. His most recent articles have appeared in The Canadian Journal of Film Studies and Public.

74 Volume 6 No. 2