Jules and Jim (1962)

François Truffaut's landmark is a hard film to resurrect in a contemporary era that favors logic and emotional literalness over the French director's dreamy sense of the inevitability of disappointment and the invisibility of personal morality. A long-gestating pet project of the filmmaker, who happened across Henri-Pierre Roche's semi-autobiographical novel in a bargain bin in 1956 but waited to make it as his third film in 1961, Jules and Jim stands alongside Godard's Breathless as one of the early, instantly definitive films of the French New Wave, its impact on countless scores of subsequent films impossible to gauge.

            With an almost insurmountable liberty in his use of the cinematic form, Truffaut embraces contradiction to create meaning—Jules and Jim is sad yet humorous, breathless yet contemplative, universal yet hermetic, based on a book by a man in his 70s yet directed by a man in his 20s. It knows of life's folly so intimately that it is impossibly naïve, and its selfless love of the cinema borders on narcissistic. Another example of this reverie for art which profits from temporal manipulation occurs when Jules shows Jim photographs of his old girl friends. We see the photographs passed, yet the close ups to which we cut show Jim’s hands conspicuous by there absence.

Certainly one of the most striking features of Jules and Jim is temporal distortion. Truffaut utilises this effect by various means and for various purposes. In the first two minutes of the film, time is reduced in two ways: by the third person narrative, which encapsulates the film’s exposition in the most laconic of terms, describing the meeting and developing friendship of Jules and Jim, and also by the selective images which largely avoid redunant description of the aural narrative, but instead seek to interpret and compliment. Accordingly, when the narrator tells us that Jules is a foreigner in Paris; that he wants to go to an art student’s ball; and that Jim gets him a ticket and costume, the image we are offered is a simple one of the two playing dominoes. This image, incidentally, becomes a leitmotif in the film, supporting the theme of friendship and is touchingly varied much later when Jules plays instead with his daughter.

As well as temporal condensing and duality, Truffaut also makes use of temporal displacement. An early example of this occurs when Jules and Jim meet up with the anonymous anarchist’s girlfriend. The sequence begins with the girl running out of the frame to the left. The camera pans and we see her running away in a shot composed with shallow depth of field, with Jules and Jim out of focus in the distance. Another cut, this time bringing us in front of the girl. Again the camera pans, this time as the girl approaches. Another cut brings us in front of Jules and Jim. We begin to see the establishment of a pattern of shots in this sequence: cutting, panning, cutting, moving ahead, and panning and so on.

Truffaut, throughout Jules et Jim, uses various techniques—montage, freeze frame, rapid zoom etc.—to draw our attention to significant “hot spots.” Like a sudden cymbal crash in a romantic musical passage, these techniques demand our attention. To turn now from temporal to spatial distortion: an early example of this takes place when Catherine, Jules and Jim race across the bridge. The main purpose of this scene is character exposition, showing Catherine’s willingness to cheat—she is already cheating her femininity by dressing as a man—in order to attain her goals.

Truffaut make many and varied use of editing and montage. We shall examine first the way in which montage creates a narrative effect similar to, though in the absence of, the third person narrative. One characteristic example is the dress burning episode. The sequence begins with a long-take, composed in depth, with little activity. 

Another important example of montage as narrative occurs when Catherine throws herself off the bridge in mock suicide. Again we see rapid cutting, with five shots—this time static—in the space of only two seconds.