cj film studies62 mackenzie mythology

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Rsum : Cet article, qui introduit la traduction ci-dessous, examine le travail de col-laboration 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, lau-

teur (qui a traduit le texte de Barthes) offre une nouvelle lecture de lintrt partic-

ulier que Barthes voue au sport-comme-spectacle-film.

Film history, like all historical narratives, is filled with gaps and fissures.

Often, though, rediscovering what is elided in film history offers usgreater 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 theNFB/ONFs (National Film Board of Canada/Office national du film) lquipefranaisein the 1950s and 1960s and the profound influence these films hadon documentary film practice in France and the United States.1 Much has

also been written about the influence of both la nouvelle vagueand Frenchphilosophyspecifically, the advent of structuralismon Qubcois film-

makers during this period. Yet, in spite of the fertile interchanges which

took place between Parisian and Qubcois intellectuals and cultural work-

ers, little mention is made of Roland Barthes work with the Qubcois

writer, broadcaster and filmmaker Hubert Aquin on a film called Le Sport etles hommes(1961). Passing references, at best, are made to Barthes collabo-

ration 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 timein Montral.3 What is perhaps more surprising is that in the career-span-

ning uvres compltes, published between 1993 and 1995, which not only

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES REVUE CANADIENNE DTUDES CINMATOGRAPHIQUESVOLUM E 6 NO. 2 PP 65-74

CIN-DOCUMENTS

SCOTT MACKENZIE

THE MISSING MYTHOLOGY:

Barthes in Qubec


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brings together Barthes collected writings, but also his interviews and even

the plan dtudesfor his courses, no mention is made of the film.4 Even thosein Qubec who know about Barthes connection with the NFB/ONF typi-

cally refer to his acknowledgement in La lutte(Claude Jutra, Michel Brault,

Marcel Carrire & Claude Fournier, 1961)a film inspired, in part, by hisessay Le monde o lon catche from Mythologiesand leave his far moreactive role in scripting the commentary for Le Sport et les hommes by thewayside.

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 leshommes(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-ClairePoirier; co-script Aquin, 1963); lheure de la dcolonisation (dir. MoniqueFortier; script Aquin, 1963); and Saint-Henri, le 5 septembre (dir. Aquin,1964). He also worked on the translation of English language documen-

taries produced for the Comparisonsseries, 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 Comparisonsseries. Comprised of nineteenfilms produced by the NFB/ONF for broadcast on the CBC and Radio-

Canada 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 commen-

tary 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


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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 poetand 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 Comparisonsseries. In April of 1960, Aquin re-read Barthes Mythologies, a text that wasquite 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 his-

tory 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 bull-

fights 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 toget 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 orienta-

tion 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 ini-

tial 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 andthat 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


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and onjouissance. 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 singular-

ly absent from sport. The universe of sports is almost exclusively male.

Indeed, throughout his text, Barthes used only the masculine homme orhommes and never the gender-neutral personne or humain. In relation

to gender-specificity, it is also interesting to note that Aquin ascribes eroti-

cism-as-spectacle solely to the world of the feminine.

Finally, Aquin addresses the role the spectator plays in Barthes formu-

lation 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 identifica-

tion 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 seebetween 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 manand 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 thekind of cultural semiotics undertaken by Barthes in Mythologies. For Barthes,

the concept of mythical significationfound in everyday objects likeadvertisements, 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 communicatemeaning, as the external and historico-cultural system of signification

overpowers the traditional binary between signifier and signified. Meaning

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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 thisnotion of myth to sport, stripping away the ritualized violence in order to

determine its social function. This approach also fit quite well with the kindof cross-cultural analysis central to the philosophy of the Comparisonsseries.

Aquin assiduously researched the footage he wanted for his compila-

tion 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 interviewedon television by Ral Michaud and delivered lectures at Universit Laval

and Universit de Montral. Aquin also interviewed Barthes for his radio-

show Carrefour, which was broadcast in two parts on February 28 andMarch 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 com-

mentary. 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 thevisual structure Barthes had to work withthe filmic complications which

placed him at one remove from sport as spectacle as the subject of analy-

sis, and confronted him with filmed spectacle instead.17 However, as we

have seen, Barthes was very much involved in the structuring of the filmbefore the editing process began.

It is true, however, that Barthes was not simply writing about sports-

as-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,

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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 significationcoincided with advances in his intellectual project. In the same year that

Aquin approached the philosopher to write the commentary for Le Sport etles hommes, Barthes wrote his first serious pieces of film theory, Le problmede la signification au cinma and Les units traumatiques au cinma.19

These essays combine the cultural semiotics first theorized in Mythologies,the politique des auteursfound in the pages of Cahiers du cinma and the researchundertaken by lInstitut de filmologie.20 La problme de la signification aucinma 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. Thispoints 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 hommeswas broadcast onRadio-Canada for the first time on June 1, 1961. It then ran in English as

part of the Comparisonsseries on the CBC. The English and French languageversions were in distribution until 1977, when Le Sport et les hommesbecamean 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 parRoland 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 deFrancea subject Barthes had already written about in Mythologies. In hisessay, Le Tour de France comme pope, Barthes writes: The Tour thus

possesses a veritable Homeric geography. As in the Odyssey, the race ishere both a periplus of ordeals and a total exploration of the earths lim-

its.21 In many ways, this brief passage summarizes both Barthes vision of

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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 over-

coming 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 uni-

verse. 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 man-

ifest 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 there-

fore the epitome of the whole human adventure.

In the case of Canada, it is the weather itself which, Barthes posits, onemust 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 imagin-able, including animated films such as Sheldon Cohens The Sweater(1980),documentaries such as Gilles Groulxs Un jeu si simple(1964), experimentalfilms like William Cannings Blades and Brass(1967) and Bill Wees La Premiretoile/The First Star(1973) and fiction films, such as Michel Braults contribu-tion 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 ritual-

ized 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 lquipefranaise. Similar to Le Sport et les hommes and the ethnographic films of Jean

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Rouch, such as Les Matres fous (1954), the sports films of lquipe franaisewent on to explore the relationship between ritual practices, the mainte-

nance 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 LeSport et les hommesand 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, self-

denigration, 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 under-

taking this translation, I consulted Barthes script, the original film, the

English version of the film (the translation of which is quite different fromBarthes 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 tra-

dition 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 aboutlanguage 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 pro-

ject, translation can be seen as a means of bringing to light the signifying

practices which often lay behind the opacity of language.

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Notes

My thanks to Andr Loiselle for suggesting many helpful ways to improve the translationof Barthes text, and to Bernard Lutz, the National Film Board of Canadas printed docu-ment archivist, for kindly granting permission for the script ofLe Sport et les hommes toappear 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 BillNichols, 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 NationalInterest: 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 pro-duction francophone lONF 1939-1964. Les dossiers de la cinmathque 17

(Montral: Cinmathque qubcoise/Muse du cinma, 1987). One short article onBarthes time in Canada was published in Cinema Canada. See Joyce Nelson, RolandBarthes 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 RolandBarthes, 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 leshommes. 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 leshommes. 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 inMythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957): 191-247. Translated as Roland Barthes, Myth Today inMythologies (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.

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18. See Hubert Aquin, lments pour une phnomnologie du sport in Aquin, BlocsErratiques: 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 fil-mologie 10.32/33 (1960) and Barthes, Les units traumatiques au cinma, Revueinternationale de filmologie 10.34 (1960).

20. Major figures in lInstitut de filmologie included Gilbert Cohen-Sat and Henri Agel. SeeGilbert 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 inMythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957):114. Translated as The Tour de France as Epic in Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Towerand 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 Studiesand Public.

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cj film studies62 mackenzie mythology

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