Conference Agenda

Into what genre does The Umbrellas of Cherbourg fit? That question has occupied—and sometimes preoccupied—commentators and audiences since the film’s premiere in 1964.

From the 1930s on, France produced many movies featuring song, including filmed operettas, films by René Clair, and films with pop stars like Charles Trenet and Tino Rossi. But cinematic musical genres were less stable in France than in Hollywood, a situation that presented a challenge (and an opportunity) to Demy and Legrand, to their producers, and to critics and audiences.

My paper discusses how (1) Demy and Legrand balanced and reimagined generic models from both France and the U.S.; (2) how the producers situated the film in publicity materials (where it was billed without reference to a specific genre as “en musique, en couleurs, en chanté”); and (3) how early critics sought to characterize Umbrellas of Cherbourg by juggling terms like comédie musicale, operette, mélodrame, opéra populiste, film-chanté, opera-film, and ciné-opera. (The ambiguity persists today: on the French website AlloCiné, the film is classified as a comédie musicale.)

I argue that the generic undecidability of Umbrellas of Cherbourg would stimulate French directors after Demy to create original, genre-bending film musicals, including Golden Eighties (Chantal Akerman, 1986), On connaît la chanson (Alain Resnais, 1997), Jeanne et le garçon formidable (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau), 8 Femmes (François Ozon), Les Chansons d’Amour (Christophe Honoré, 2007), and, more recently, Annette (Leos Carax, 2021) and Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024).

Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand’s 1967 film The Young Girls of Rochefort is one of their best-known collaborations; it is considered the pair’s most direct homage to the Hollywood musical, while imbued with distinctly French nouvelle vague sensibilities through its dense intertextuality and myriad subversions of the genre (Stilwell 2003; Powrie and Cadalanu 2020). Though most obvious in the film’s narrative, visual style, and choreography, these elements are also clearly present in the soundtrack. Nearly all of the main characters’ singing voices were dubbed, creating a multivalent soundtrack that further nuances our understandings of the film’s approach to intertextuality, stardom, and engagement and subversion of genre expectations through cinematic technologies.

This paper argues that dubbing in Rochefort serves as a sonic manifestation of Demy and Legrand’s reflexive nouvelle vague impulses. Drawing on scholarly approaches to the well-documented history of dubbing in Hollywood (Siefert 1995; Dwyer 2019), I examine how Rochefort both engages with and subverts this well-known cinematic practice. I consider the involvement of members of the French jazz vocal group the Swingle Singers, a musical marker of Demy and Legrand’s “French twist” on the American genre. I additionally explore the implications of the absence of Gene Kelly’s distinctive singing voice, recognizable from his Hollywood filmography, on the film’s approach to stardom. Lastly, I consider how the English-language dub of the film recalls historical practices of multiple language versions in the early years of synchronized sound, drawing on an aspect of cinematic history that further bridges French and American musical-cinematic practices.

After Jacques Demy’s death in 1990, Agnès Varda released three films on her husband’s artistry and musical sensibilities. Her feature Jacquot de Nantes (1990) imagines Demy’s youth, with scenes of his childhood intercut with clips from his films. The documentary The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993), splices together Varda’s behind-the-scenes footage from production of The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) with a celebration of the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The World of Jacques Demy (1995), offers a culminating survey of Demy’s career, interspersed with reminiscences from actors, musicians, and Varda herself. A fellow member of the French New Wave, Varda uses the documentary and feature film to explicate Demy’s relationship to music more generally and Legrand in particular.

This position paper demonstrates how Varda’s films memorialize Demy and Legrand’s partnership while also gently decentering it, reframing their work through other members of the creative team. In particular, I consider how Varda’s ambivalent auteurism-- playfully self-aware, improvisatory, and openly collaborative—introduces a subtle yet productive tension between her accounts of Demy and Legrand and the films they made. Finally, tending to Varda’s musical strategies in other films, like Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), contextualizes her onscreen representation of such collaborations and her own role within this creative group. (Cléo memorably casts Legrand, who also wrote the score, as part of a songwriting duo.) Varda’s films on Demy draw upon deep affection to prompt a reconsideration of how musical collaborations may resonate differently through the medium of cinema itself.

What can we learn by exploring the choices an artist did not make? This question drives my presentation on Jacques Demy’s Parking (1985). Demy’s adaptation of the Orpheus myth stars Francis Huster as a bisexual rock star at the height of his career who remains doubtful about his work. Demy wrote his script about the Orpheus myth with David Bowie in mind for the titular character and first offered the role to French pop star Johnny Hallyday; both of their absences loom large in histories of the film (Berthomé, 1982). The production experienced numerous challenges and Demy renounced the film in later interviews (Cahiers du cinéma, 1988), yet composer Michel Legrand remembers it in his memoir as one of Demy’s most powerful scripts (Legrand, 2018). Because Demy worked with Legrand for most of his career, the auditory portion of Demy’s aesthetic is largely defined by Legrand’s music. Parking is no exception, and Legrand’s exploration of synthesized instrumentals and 1980s sonic aesthetics are a notorious aspect of the film’s soundtrack.

This presentation uses the video essay format to imagine Bowie and Hallyday in the role of Orpheus (Orphée), using footage of them from music videos and contemporary films like The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), Détéctive (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985), and Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986). Bowie and Hallyday’s star personae have a visual impact, but their music styles also differ significantly from Legrand’s, and my “re-casting” emphasizes how pursing these choices would likely have pulled the film further away from Legrand’s influence. Working counterfactually (McNeill, 2004), this presentation uses what we know about Demy’s unrealized aesthetic desires, missed connections, and frequent collaboration with Legrand to videographically wonder how the past could have played out differently.