Document View

Within cinema, the incorporation of images borrowed from other media reflects the dynamic nexus of eros and thanatos. Using a 16th-century emblem as a crucial reference, this essay explores graphic and verbal configurations of death and desire in Francois Truffaut's "Le Dernier Metro."

Recent discussions of the tense relations between the specialized codes of film and the cultural codes and genres that englobe the cinematic apparatus have identified an underlying dynamic of "incorporation. A term that carries complex historical and psychoanalytic facets, incorporation has been used by Brigitte Peucker to describe the inclusion of literary and painterly images and tropes in classical cinema. As she explains, the embodiment of such images mobilizes cultural anxieties and questions concerning sexuality and death by foregrounding a crucial opposition between the "living," organic, naturalistic field of representation that is the purview of artistic and literary media, and the uncanny, mechanically reproducible aspect of the cinematic apparatus that-since it tends to fragment and mutilate the body-is aligned with death (3-12). In Timothy Murray's post-Lacanian study of the ideological fantasies that mediate among film, theoretical speculation and cultural identities, incorporation designates a nexus of mourning and repressed memories. As he sees it, iconographical allusions and stills in recent, avant-garde films function as ekphrastic incorporations or "de-compositions" that stage a disturbing merger of death and sexuality (25-64, 101-69). Despite important differences, both studies point to the crucial role that cultural artifacts from other visual media and genres play in cinematic representation.

The films of Francois Truffaut (1932-84), the best-known filmmaker of the French New Wave, provide a doubly fertile ground to explore the way such artifacts extend and complicate the convergence of eros and thanatos in cinema. Not only did Truffaut develop an innovative and highly crafted approach to directing but it could also be said that death and desire are his constant preoccupations. Based on both written sources and original screenplays, his twenty-one feature films portray characters caught in a wide array of tragic and comic dilemmas, and the enigmatic quality of these works owes much to their incorporation of photographs, paintings, maps and various forms of writing. Far from being a mere aesthetic exercise, moreover, this patterning of visual artifacts and narrative develops a crucial, historical inflection in Le Dernier Metro (1980); set in Occupation Paris and one of Truffaut's last films, in Le Dernier Metro configurations of sexuality and death are mapped onto speech and various propagandist slogans and poster art.1

Adopting a slightly different kind of historical inflection, in the following essay I wish to show how Truffaut's practice has much in common with the Renaissance memento mori and related allegorical tradition, focusing specifically on a 16th-century emblem by Andreas Alciato entitled "De Morte eS Amore." As Tom Conley has noted, the combinatory impact on cinematic meaning created by the collage of writing, narrative, and dialogue "derives from movements that are common to emblematic traditions in literature" (xi; see also 222-23n17), and in the case of Le Dernier Metro, the interplay of visual representation and rhetorical address in Alciato's emblem especially helps us understand how the staging of graphic imagery in Truffaut's film mobilizes its underlying thematics of death and sexuality into a critique of the semiotics of fascist ideology. As a way of highlighting the cultural project in which Truffaut is engaged in this work, I will first begin with a brief survey of visual objects and media in some of his other films, and then provide a close reading of how poster imagery functions in Le Dernier Metro, in the process demonstrating how it relates to Alciato's practice. Because they are separated by over five centuries, Alciato and Truffaut obviously bring different solutions and ideological contexts to the fundamental problem of representing/talking about death, and thus in my conclusion I will go on to discuss the particular problematics of Truffaut's linking of eros and thanatos, as well as the way that his incorporation of emblematic images and voices in Le Dernier Metro also delineates a camouflaged and troubling relationship with both the historical past of its narration and the artistic horizons of French New Wave cinema.

Scattered throughout many of Truffaut's films are objects and graphic details that trigger uncanny associations with the unfolding story. Their presence in the interlocutory and erotic space surrounding a couple (almost always a man and a woman) often works to refract the film's meanings into narrative and symbolic levels. For example, in Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent and La Chambre verte, insight into the relationship between mourning and representation is instigated by the inventive and unsettling placement of paintings, photographs and mirror reflections. In other films, the superimposition of a pictogrammatic object within the zone of visibility that links characters and background develops a chain of associations. A striking example occurs in Jules et Jim when Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) and Jim (Henri Serre) face each other in profile before a large window. Behind them, a large beetle crawls along the glass on a trajectory that leads into Catherine's lips where it disappears just before Jim kisses her, thus tracing a disturbing, visual parallel to their gestures. T. Jefferson Kline situates this bug in a series of other entomological signifiers in order to show how such allusions mediate the homosocial doubling of desire and rivalry between Jules and Jim. In an earlier scene, Jules had confessed to Jim that, "I envy the spread [l'ouverture] of your wings [eventail];' which according to Kline is a way of disguising his sexual feelings in a lepidopterous metaphor. Kline thus concludes that "the beetle on the window constitutes a return of the repressed doubling in the film thus far relegated to unconscious motifs" ( 17).

The insecte also appears to function as an ideogram of the taboo of inceste that charges the triangular relations between the main characters. Catherine's phantasmatic "swallowing" of the beetle simultaneously internalizes or, according to psychoanalytic theory, incorporates a guilty and unspeakable secret while encrypting this secret within a banal wordobject (see Abraham & Torok 259-75). The beetle thus serves as a kind of pathographic pun or rebus fashioned out of a graphic code that must be translated into linguistic units. The beetle's movement across the flat surface of the window also recalls to the viewer's attention the film's projection upon a flat screen, a phenomenon that is belied by the medium's illusory representation of three-dimensional space.

Depth of field and uncanny doubling acquire similar overdeterminations in the white scarf worn by Julie Kohler (also played by Jeanne Moreau), the vengeful widow in La Marine etait en noir. When she arrives uninvited at a party in the high-rise apartment of a man named Bliss, the first of her victims, she wears the scarf (echarpe) like a veil and arouses his immediate interest. Bliss follows her out onto a steep balcony (a balcon escarpe) after she tosses the scarf onto a pole just out of reach. He gallantly offers to retrieve it for her, and as he attempts to seize it, she pushes him over the edge. The subsequent long, deep focus shot follows the scarf's serene flight over the landscape, paralleling both Julie's escape from the apartment and Bliss's fall to his death after being caught off-guard (surpris en echarpe). Julie has just committed her first act as a semi-professional assassin, or, in argot, escarpe. A kind of fetish that conceals her identity (its color disguises the black of her mourning), the scarf marks the origin of masculine desire as well as the site of Bliss's death. Its articulation of paronomastic figures, sexual and spatial illusions calls for an attentive reading that contrasts sharply with Bliss's fascinated inability to gauge the scarf's placement in physical and symbolic space.

These complex overlays of thematic structure, narrative and pictogrammatic signifiers in Truffaut's work constitute a kind of signatureeffect poised at the threshold of unconscious modalities. The verbal and visual articulations of the beetle and the scarf resemble the trajectories of plastic forms and doodles produced by the analysand and during a psychoanalytic session. Such forms, which Guy Rosolato calls the "perspectival object," point to a vanishing point or area where the conundrums of origins and of sexual difference are concentrated; an imaginary figure of visual appeal that organizes a question or an entire system of relations, the perspectival object crystallizes into a plastic or graphic form during moments of crisis when the patient tries to defend her/himself against the satisfaction of a forbidden desire or, conversely, the menace of an underlying death-drive (143). Works of art and other visual forms in Truffaut's films inscribe a similar dynamic. The primitive statue in Jules et Jim, the surrealist paintings of couples in the domestic interiors of La femme d'a cote, and the photographs of the dead in La Chambre verte are symptomatic of his highly self-reflexive exploration of the cinematic apparatus's relation to other genres and media.

Truffaut stated that he conceived Le Dernier Metro partly as a way to evoke the atmosphere and physical sensations of wartime Paris from a child's perspective, a perspective built upon his own memories (Insdorf 232). Its plot centers on the fortunes of a theater company, the Theatre Montmartre, whose Jewish director, Lucas Steiner, is forced to go literally underground during the Nazi Occupation. He hides in the theater's basement where he awaits his wife, Marion, to bring him food and news about her efforts to smuggle him out of France. By using a heating duct that opens onto a closet or placard in the wings, he is able to function as a phantom director for the company's production of a play entitled La Disparue ("The Missing Woman") in which his wife and another man, Bernard, have the leading roles. This production is closely monitored by a pro-Nazi critic, Daxiat, who has good reasons to be suspicious: in addition to Lucas's clandestine existence in the cellar, the company uses a Jewish girl as an assistant costume designer while Bernard is a covert agent for the Resistance. The theater's labyrinthine building thus serves both as a repository of and metaphor for the characters' secret activities and identities.

The film's sets, somber colors and chiaroscuro lighting powerfully convey a sinister atmosphere of claustration and perpetual night. The ubiquitous presence of posters, graphic slogans, and advertisements adds a disquieting dimension. These placards merge theatrical and propagandistic faces (actors, soldiers, and political figures), titles (mostly of films and plays), slogans (in both French and German), shapes (notably the swastikas), and colors. By opening onto an imaginary world of cultural commodification and mass identity, the posters and advertisements function as perspectival objects that organize the crossing over of visual and ideological boundaries. Their circulation of imagery and propaganda in wartime Paris exploits the strategic appeal of the visual that subtends theatrical and political spectacles. The ideology of such posters and official notices involves the power to create a virtual world where mass consensus is efficiently realized through the repression of sexual, class, and "racial" differences. Conversely, the viewer-like the characters-is confronted by the task of negotiating and demystifying the visual, rhetorical, and ideological apparatus of this virtual world.

After an introductory series of stills, documentary footage and accompanying narrative voice-over that locate the film's setting in Occupation Paris, September 1942, the main plot begins with a sequence of shots of a dimly lit street where Bernard attempts to pick up a young woman, Arlette. He rushes up to her side, awkwardly excuses himself, and blurts out, "Je vous ai vue... Je voudrais...." [I saw you....I'd like...]" (14). She calmly asks him if he wants to know the time, informs him that it is 7:20, and then asks if he is lost. Undeterred, Bernard explains that he has observed her from a bistro across the street and wonders if she would join him for a drink. She firmly declines and the camera follows her determined efforts to disengage herself from his advances as she walks from left to right along a wall. At the point where he tells her that it has been four years since he has tried to pick up a stranger, they stand in profile before a worn movie poster which depicts a man of heroic proportions looming over and enclosing an old woman and a young girl drawn to smaller scale within the outline of his torso. In the background that surrounds the man's head and shoulders, a cluster of faces peer out. At first glance, the old woman in the poster appears to wear a dress made of a material with horizontal lines. Careful comparison with the rest of the building on which the poster is fastened, however, reveals that the horizontal lines are actually slats in the wall, perhaps exposed by gunfire or bomb damage. Arlette tells Bernard she has had enough of their conversation and moves on. He stops her one more time and pleads for her phone number, which she gives with an exasperated sigh. As he jots it down, he realizes that she has given him the number for the correct time ("l'horloge parlante"). She laughs at his protests as she walks away and the shot then cuts to a nearby street where a small boy is playing on the sidewalk.

The poster under which Arlette repels Bernard's verbal campaign presents a kind of palimpsest in which its printed image and underlying facade merge into a transitional space. Although Bernard and Arlette soon become colleagues-he as leading role in La Disparue and she as the play's costume designer-he quickly discovers why his repeated efforts to seduce her are futile: she is a lesbian. Her unwillingness to respond to his sexual advances is a form of resistance against an ideological gesture of framing and inclusion within a symbolic, paternal order, a hierarchy that is graphically represented by the poster's heroic figure who envelops the vulnerable figures of the two women. Arranged within the confines of a patriarchy, this cluster displays a family unit (the husband, the young daughter, and the grandmother) from which the mother is conspicuously absent, or-to adopt the title of the play within the film-from which she has "disappeared."

Against this backdrop, Bernard appears to be trying to enlist Arlette as a way to cancel this familial (what Freud might term heimlich) void. The exposed slats and plaster in the image's interior reveal the uncanny or unheimliche signs of war, a view of the "reality" underneath that exposes the poster and its commodification of sentiment as a facade. The mother's absence reads like a kind of lap-dissolve over an image of destruction that blends into its surface through an accidental, but historically produced, trompe l'oeil. The second look needed to fathom the poster's ruinous and allegorical depth counters Bernard's reflexes of visual desire manifested by his first line: "Je vous ai vue...Je voudrais..." In addition to the poster's ideological doubling of the characters' interaction, the scene stages the appropriation of Bernard's voice and role. Arlette displays her familiarity with the standard pick-up lines by taking over his script: "Vous voulez l'heure?...Alors, vous etes perdu? [Do you want the time?...well then, are you lost?]." In effect, she "imitates" his desire in a way that revises it and renders it harmless and "innocent." Her offer of the correct time is replicated at the end of the sequence when she gives Bernard the telephone number for the horloge parlante. Since the topos of the mismatched couple and images of the passing of time (especially hourglasses, clocks, and so forth) are common motifs in the early modern tradition of the memento mori, an iconography of death acquires a nascent shape at the very opening of the film.

The interplay of the poster and characters subverts the balance and conventions of what Deborah Linderman calls the "dominant textual matrix" that governs the disposition of "traces, incomplete and alien simulacra from other contexts, undelimited and not integratable into by the narrative" (144). According to Linderman, the purport of such traces and simulacra is to "signify the impossible position of the feminine in the symbolic order of the patriarchy" (145). Such traces also dramatize the tension between the anti-Semitic, homophobic, patriarchal semiotics of the Nazi regime (and their Vichy collaborators), and the characters' efforts to accommodate their speech and appearance with this semiotic system. The viewer's assessment of the signification of these traces involves crossing the boundary that separates two-dimensional figures from the film's illusion of a three-dimensional depth of field.

The film's multiple references to boundaries suggest that they play a crucial role in structuring its meaning. In the opening series of still shots and documentary footage the narrator states: "The separation between the occupied zone and the free zone constitutes a sort of border that traverses the country horizontally" (13). This sequence culminates with a black and white photograph of Lucas Steiner, who, the voice-over intones (incorrectly), "had to leave France suddenly. He had no choice." The shot zooms into Steiner's face as it slowly dissolves into blackness, giving the viewer the impression of penetrating its surface. In order to "enter" the narrative, the viewer confronts an anatomical space beneath the skin. The thresholding of a flat surface of representation anticipates the opening shots of Bernard and Arlette where it reappears as a mise en abime (in a literal sense) in the movie poster.

Other allusions to borders and frontiers conjure up the imminent peril that threatens the characters' lives, reflecting the rhetoric of boundaries that is an integral component of the discourse of death in the Western tradition (Derrida 3-17, passim). When two actresses show Marion how they use make-up to draw a stocking line on their legs, Marion looks underneath their bared limbs and sees a newspaper headline: "German Troops Have Crossed the Demarcation Line." A ligne de demarcation cuts across theaters of war and the bodies of the women. It also designates the border of a secret: Marion's reaction to the headline, unnoticed by the other two, barely conceals her terror that Lucas will not be able to escape.

The plasticity of language and the rhetorical power of imagery in these scenes hearkens back to emblematic traditions dating from the Renaissance, and in particular to Andreas Alciato's seminal anthology of emblems (first published in 1534). A hybrid invention of humanistic wit and learning, the emblem marks an extensive tradition of semiotic practice and interpretation situated on the frontier between linguistic and pictorial representations. The punning title/motto of Alciato's emblem number 155, De Morte & Amore, suggests a homology between death and sexuality, which is captured in turn by the engraving's depiction of a young woman paired with a stooped old man in the left foreground walking away from a town in the background (see Fig. 1). In the sky above them, Cupid (on the left) and Death (on the right) have just fired arrows that they mistakenly exchanged. As a result, a young man lies dead behind and to the right of the couple while, as the Latin epigram explains, Death has inspired a mismatched love in an old man from whose back protrudes one of Cupid's arrows.

In the epigram, the young man comments on the confusion that has resulted from the mistaken exchange: "Spare me, boy; and you, Death,/holding the symbols of victory, spare me [Mors signa tenens victricia parce], / let me love, let the old man go to Hades" (Daly, n.p.). The epigram thus maps a narrative onto the picture's depth of field while introducing an ambiguous relationship between the pictured scene and the subject of its verbal enunciation. The young man speaks with one foot in the grave: his appeal, according to the finality of the illustration, will be in vain. His voice already fading, he beseeches Death to send his rival in his place. The logic of his speech is undone by the finality of the visual structure. The amorous couple-however mismatched-have passed his prostrate form without a backwards glance.

Gisele Mathieu-Castellani has shown that Renaissance emblems of death tap into a rich, allegorical tradition of commentary on the rivalry between discursive and graphic practices (7-16). If we grant this emblem a certain degree of self-reflexivity, if only at a pre-conscious threshold, its configuration indeed appears to allegorize the disjunction between the picture and its verbal commentary. Despite the attempt by the gloss to enclose the image, to bring its traces and simulacra into line with a sententious wit, the picture resists this discursive mastery. Just as the young man's speech ultimately and inevitably lacks illocutionary force, so the epigram falters as a metadiscourse to the picture's miniature drama. At the same time, a reading of the ensemble of speech and image raises a fundamental issue about the relationship between death and rhetoric: to be absent from the scene of representation is to be deprived of a voice, and vice versa. From this perspective, Alciato's emblem stages death both as a rhetorical voice that lacks a proper origin and addressee, as well as a dying subject that lacks an effective rhetorical voice.

In Truffaut's film, a similar disjunction between voice and image infiltrates the misunderstandings and rhetorical cross-purposes that are repeated in scenes where characters seem uncertain about how or to whom they can address their desires or share their secrets. Glances are exchanged without explanation, questions are posed but left unanswered, and scenes that have no apparent narrative or even thematic connection are sequentially arranged. Indeed, Michael B. Kline and Nancy C. Mellerski identify such visual, political and sexual ambiguities as integral features of the film's structure. In turn, the enigmatic plot of La Disparue, exacerbated by its fragmented presentation within the film, serves as a trope for the elliptical narrative and montage of Le Dernier Metro itself.

Within its apparently accessible story about wartime camaraderie among a theater troupe, a dialogue de sourds (dialogue between the deaf) is played out. Language becomes not so much an instrument of persuasion and communication as a means of deception, disguise, and inadvertent exposure. Identity and allegiances are formed through a constant process of reading one's place in a shifting and perilous environment. Surrounded by Nazi soldiers, Gestapo spies, and Vichy operatives like Daxiat, attention to visual detail is a vital concern. The film's Jewish characters adopt tactics of mimicry and camouflage in response to the semiotics of race: Lucas Steiner mocks anti-Semitic caricatures by wearing a grotesquely exaggerated nose, while the young girl who assists Arlette stylishly arranges a scarf to hide her yellow star. All are aware of the stakes involved in how they read (in both active and passive senses) within a regime of visual and linguistic codes.

This disruption of the characters' rhetorical voice-that is, their use of language in a way that conveys intention and perlocutionary force-and of their interpretation of visual cues, crystallizes around figures that elide desire and death. Near the end of the film, Bernard abandons his role in La Disparue in order to devote himself full-time to the Resistance. His decision reflects his tempestuous relations both on-stage and off with Marion, who plays the title role, Helena, in La Disparue. Cast in the role of a tutor, Karl, who falls in love with Helena, Bernard's conduct outside the theater provokes intense and even violent repugnance on the part of Marion. She repudiates his brutish, physical assault on Daxiat and when Bernard informs Marion of his intentions to leave, she slaps him in the face. Yet this reaction is hard to explain; as Lucas observes to Bernard when they meet in his hiding place in the basement, his wife is in love with Bernard.

The scenes that present Bernard's departure take place in his dressing room. He is packing his belongings and removing photographs and playbills from the walls when Marion enters the room to tender her farewell. After exchanging pleasantries tinged by an underlying bitterness, they confess their mutually intense feelings for each other and wind up making love on the floor. At the onset of this emotional and sexual crescendo, they are shot in profile facing each other in front of a large poster advertising a Grand Guignol production entitled Le squelette dans le placard (The Skeleton in the Closet) in which Bernard had played the lead role before joining the Theatre Montmartre. The illustration on the playbill features a skeleton that extends its grinning skull, upper torso, arm and hand to the viewer's left out from the recesses of a half-open closet next to an open doorway. Inside the doorway are listed the play's title and principal actors: the skeleton's hand points directly at Bernard's name, first on the list. From underneath the closet, a pool of blood flows into the poster's foreground.

This skeleton's figure becomes a visual focal point behind and between Bernard's and Marion's verbal and erotic manoeuvres, which begin when Marion stands in the dressing room doorway and says good-bye. Bernard responds by closing the door and they kiss briefly. They then move away from the door and clear up their misunderstandings. Bernard admits that he is puzzled by her indifference to him, especially since she had kissed him on the mouth on the opening night. To this, as she moves in front of the poster, Marion asks incredulously: "Moi, je vous ai embrasse sur la bouche? [I kissed you on the mouth?]" (76). Bernard replies emphatically: "Vous-m'avez-embrasse-sur-la-bouche! [You-kissed-me-on-the-mouth!]." With the skeleton positioned between them, just to the right of Marion, Bernard seizes her hand and presses it to his mouth to kiss while she bends her head slightly downward. She laughingly appropriates Bernard's standard pick-up line and thus recalls Arlette's preemptive gesture in the opening scene: "II y a deux femmes en vous... [There are two women in you...]" In the background-but clearly in focus-the juxtaposed image of the skeleton simultaneously appears to hold out its hand for her to kiss. "Oui," Bernard replies, "il y a deux femmes en vous: une femme marine et une non-marine [Yes, there are two women in you: a married and an unmarried woman]." A few seconds later, they switch positions so that Bernard and the skeleton flank Marion. As the two lovers wrap their arms around each other, they shift slightly towards the skeleton so that its phalanges appears to reach out and give Marion's neck and shoulders a bony caress. They then lie down on the floor, and in the sequence's final shot, we see Bernard's hand caressing Marion's legs as she repeats, "Oui, oui, oui, oui..." (80).

As in the opening scene with Arlette, the poster engenders an uncanny doubling that disrupts the scene's ongoing narrative syntax. Whether accidental or posed, the alignment of camera, actors, and image publicitaire (advertisement) animates the figure of Death by introducing it into the dialogic and erotic space of the two lovers. The spectator's evaluation of the skeleton's significance-in other words, the emblematic meaning of death in the scene-engages a plethora of questions. Is Marion flirting with death? Or is it perhaps Bernard, who will certainly "court" death as a maquisard (Resistance fighter), or rather is it both of them, who are surrounded by death? Because Marion occupies passive and active positions (she is kissed and kisses), the configuration of the two couples (BernardMarion, Marion-skeleton) gives the assertion that "there are two women in you" a vertiginous disposition. An allegory of "deaths" proliferates: the death of the play within the film, the death of art when yoked to ideological purposes, or, as Bernard suggests to Marion, the death of marital fidelity.

Because of the controversial way that historical setting is handled in Le Dernier Metro, and in particular its Vichy-sponsored anti-Semitism, Truffaut's representation of death raises urgent and difficult issues. Not only was the film reproached for its glossy portrayal and trivialization of this deeply traumatic period (Holmes & Ingram 193-94), but critics also noted that, for a film about wartime Paris, it contains very little violence. Even Daxiat, the collaborator and theater critic who plagues the lives of the theater company, escapes in the end to Spain where he dies at an old age. It is, however, the film's conclusion that is particularly problematic, insofar as it tends to present death as a part of a Real that remains deferred by the story's nostalgic rendering of Occupation Paris. In the final sequence of shots, which pick up on the encounter in the dressing room, Marion visits Bernard in a hospital ward, apparently in order to renew their affair. At the beginning of the scene, the viewer can see through a window next to Bernard's bed a building across the street with two men leaning out from upper-story windows. Halfway through the scene, Bernard accuses Marion of having to invent new lies in order to visit him. She replies, "Mentir? Mais pourquoi mentir? A qui mentir? Puisqu'il est mort... [Lie? But why should I lie? And to whom? Because he is dead...]" (82). The set immediately changes: the figures in the window have become part of a painted backdrop in a theater. The encounter between Bernard and Marion turns out to be the last scene of a new play, written and/or directed by Lucas himself, who climbs out of his loge to join Bernard and Marion on-stage for a standing ovation that closes the film. Death is only one more trick of theatrical illusion.

In order to develop a more nuanced view of the film's relation to its historical subject and to the politics of cinematic representation, it is necessary to examine in greater detail the notion of a scandalous secret, a "skeleton in the closet," that haunts its familial and social situations. A network of relationships and narrative structures in the film is immediately evoked by this referent. Lucas's clandestine existence is the most potentially explosive secret in the story, one that requires extraordinary vigilance on the part of Marion. But each of the other characters who work at the Theatre Montmartre also has her/his secret, often involving some degree of sexual transgression or ethical ambiguity. Marion sleeps with a sleazy admirer whom she avoids at the opening night reception thanks only to Bernard's rather brutish intercession. Germaine, Marion's aged dresser, sends gloves to her lover, "mon numero deux," who is a prisoner of war. The stage-manager, Raymond, has to admit at one point that his "secret" love affair with another woman (who turns out to be a thief and black-marketeer) is just a false rumor that he tacitly abetted in order to prop his self-esteem and virility. Jean-Loup, the nominal director of La Disparue, is homosexual. Nadine, who has a bit part in the play, works both sides of the sexual and political fences: she flirts with Bernard, is caught kissing Arlette in a dressing room and eagerly accepts acting and dubbing work for German-sponsored productions.

The proximity of the emblematic closet in the scene of sexual passion between Bernard and Marion brings the film's representation of homosexuality into a particular focus. Truffaut's portrayal of gay and lesbian sexuality in Le Dernier Metro and other films has been praised by Stuart Byron as an example of his tolerance and "supreme humanism" (cited by Insdorf 236). Yet while Truffaut's politics of acceptance and his historically accurate linking of homophobic beliefs with fascist ideology are indeed admirable, sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular, remain vexed and troubling issues in Truffaut's work. The film's "squelette dans le placard" has an epistemological function analogous to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sees in the broader situation of homosexuality in Western culture and history, leading her to define "the closet" as a simultaneously marginalized and central site that ensures the alignment of cognition, sexuality, and transgression (3, 56-58). In the film, the circulation and concealment of secrets, including homosexuality, structure the characters' intersecting narratives and mediate various kinds of trauma. The subdued references to homosexuality work to haunt the phantasmatic recovery of a dominant heterosexual subjectivity embodied by Bernard and Marion.

The opening shot of the dressing room illustrates one aspect of this unease. Bernard's gesture of kissing the hand constitutes a kind of displaced eroticism that is reinforced by his transparent offer to "read" Marion's hand. In effect, his actions unite an ambiguous oral contact and an interpretative act that doubles or pretends to see a double of Marion: "il y a deux femmes en vous...." Marion's reciprocal and simultaneous "kissing" of the skeleton's hand would seem to suggest that on an unconscious level there are two (or more) women (or men) in the skeleton, or the closet, or the poster itself. The incorporation of the poster generates a self-referential movement by foregrounding a scandalous, pictographic detail into the story's narrative flow.

Historians note that, properly speaking, the aetas emblematicas ended with the advent of Romanticism and the revival of poetic metaphor or symbol, but the forms and habits of emblematic thinking have continued to thrive in modern and post-modern contexts ranging from Symbolist poetry to political posters to Pop Art. The emblem's compact juxtaposition of a miniature, naturalistic image, inscribed motto and epigrammatic commentary has proved a remarkably fertile paradigm for the generation of meaning in diverse cultural arenas. Like the Renaissance emblem-book, Truffaut's experimentation with pictogrammatic forms and emblematic voices cuts across representational genres and boundaries in order to develop an internalized reservoir of images, commentary, and texts. Just as the visual in Truffaut's film appears to structure a phantasmatic defense against the death drive through its apotropaic mise en scene, we find a similar nexus of death and eros in visual artifacts from the early 16th century.

Nevertheless, the obsessive motif of orality in the penultimate scene of Le Dernier Metro suggests a crucial difference, since the mouth, according to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, is the site both of introjection (the acquisition of language that ensures the subject's passage into a rhetorical community) and of incorporation, the negation of a traumatic loss through the phantasmatic swallowing of an object or situation that must be preserved at all costs (259-75). They identify this interiorization with the formation of a crypt, a psychic topos from which the object jealously guards the secret of its loss. As a pathological response to and denial of mourning, incorporation is symptomatic of a profound ambivalence towards the lost object and that object's historical origins.

A similar dynamic appears to have shaped the uneasy relationship of Le Dernier Metro with the larger currents of post-war French cinema. Created at a time when the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave Cinema) was considered a dying movement, the film won a Cesar for Best Film on the basis of a massive identification with Truffaut's sustained mourning for the auteurist elan of an earlier generation (Frodon 543-44). Yet this nostalgia for a defining moment of origins and originality is itself undermined by the fact that, as Gilles Deleuze notes, Truffaut and his confreres rehearsed a paradigmatic break with classical cinema accomplished by Italian neorealist filmmakers a decade earlier (9-13,19). In a broader sense, the incorporation of images in Le Dernier Metro reflects both the circuitous or emblematic route by which a network of memories can infiltrate cinematic representation as well as the ambivalent mourning and repression of memory induced by historical trauma.