The Books of My Life: Jacques Tourneur (Fujiwara)

As someone who has devotedly watched films since the mid-1960s—many of them in the company of my sister and my friends—I early on gained a familiarity with the French and Hollywood director Jacques Tourneur, the son of another famous French and Hollywood director Maurice Tourneur. Sometime in the 1960s and 1970s I saw several of his films on television including the famous Cat People (1942), the famous I Walked With a Zombie (1943), the famous The Leopard Man (1943), all of which he made with the noted B movie producer Val Lewton at RKO, the famous Out of the Past (1947), and the famous Night of the Demon (1957). 

When I went to university I broadened not only my cinema going, the number of films I saw, including what were called at the time “foreign films”, and took a few Film Studies classes while an undergraduate. The auteur approach to film studies was still popular at the time, particularly with film critics who wrote critical reviews for the major newspapers. major magazines, many major film journals, and with me though it was being challenged, particularly in the ivy halls of universities, by structural, semiological, semiotic, Marxist, sociological, historical, psychoanalytic, feminist, and approaches to film that mixed and matched all of the above. They to, particularly the structural, semiological, Marxist, sociological, and historical approaches, also impacted my approach to auteurism at the time. 

The auteurist approach, along with critiques of auteurist approaches to directors and others, has impacted scholarly work on Jacques Tourneur over the years. The major question relating to Tourneur in auteurist or authorship approaches to film has long been whether Tourneur or Val Lewton, were the author of the films they made together and which made the name of both with the film going public and with auteurists. For some auteurist critics Tourneur was ultimately the author of the Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, the three films the pair made together. For others Lewton was the author of these and others of his films, a hypothesis given flesh by those who point out the fact that there are many Lewton biographical elements in, for example, Curse of the Cat People and the fact that Tourneur disagreed with some of the decisions made concerning The Leopard Man. For a few, myself included, both were the authors of these films. For Chris Fujiwara, the author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998) Tourneur is the primary author of the films he directed between 1931 and 1966.

In his exhaustive study of the work of Tournier, one that includes not only the short and long films he directed, the television shows he directed, the films he was a bit player in, the films he was a script clerk for, and the films he was an assistant director on, several of these foci a rarity in film studies, Fujiwara argues that one can find consistencies across Tourneur’s films and some of the television shows he directed. These consistencies, according to Fujiwara include consistent themes, consistent character traits, and a consistent mise-en-scene such as his consistent use of decor, his consistent use of sound, his consistent camera movements, his consistent acting strategies, his consistent melding of the real and the supernatural, and his consistent editing strategies, this despite the fact that Tourneur once said that he never turned down a film opportunity offered to him and the fact that Tourneur made films produced by others and written by others.

Fujiwara argues that in Tourner’s work, particularly in the best of it and in the films with which Tourneur was deeply involved intellectually and emotionally whether mystery films, horror films, western films, or noir films, one finds a tight relationship between his themes, his characters, his mise-en-sene, his camera movements, his use of sound, and his use of actors. Tourneur’s cinematic universe, Fujiwara argues, is one in which characters act naturally, in which the mise-en-scene is expressionistic, atmospheric, full of light and shadow, filled with the prominent use of natural light sources, in which camera angles are sometimes odd, in which the editing gives viewers a sense of dislocation, and in which things often happen offscreen. In this they parallel, Fujiwara argues, Tourneur's narrative emphases with their fluctuations, fluctuations between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, and oppositions between human and animal, the living and the dead, the healthy and sane and sickness and insanity, town and country, law and crime, male and female, and the powers of darkness and the power of the mind. Tourneur’s cinema is generally, Fujiwara argues, a cinema of mystery, a cinema of the supernatural, and a cinema dominated by outsiders.

Fujiwara’s analysis of Tourneur’s work will not please everyone. Those sceptical of the auteurist approach to American cinema will not likely find it compelling even though Fujiwara is attentive to historical and sociological contexts and makes use of semiological and psychological theory in his author centred analysis of Tourneur’s films. Those who find an approach grounded in a unitary ideal reader (akin to Chomsky’s ideal speaker) will find much that concerns them in the book given Fujiwara’s unitary interpretations. Those who find the mix of the descriptive with the normative problematic will find much to critique in the book given that Fujiwara not only describes the narratives, mise-en-scene, use of sound in the film, and the editing of the films but also whether he likes them or not. Some may wonder why the book wasn’t an article instead in a book given that it could have been if his extensive analysis of each film had been dropped in favour of a more linked and threaded auteurist approach as in the introduction to the book. Despite all this Fujiwara’s book on Tourneur is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton.