A foreigner's gaze: The American films of Louis Malle.

Abstract

As a foreign auteur, Louis Malle has enriched the depiction of America generally presented on the screen by making marginal groups the center of his films, by examining the underlying ideologies that connect people to each other and to where they live, and by focusing on the American Dream as their motivating force. The dissertation is the first study which analyzes in depth Malle's American films, including the documentaries. Malle is particularly interesting because he has utilized various modes of production, genres and styles throughout his American period. The films comprise five fiction films and two documentaries. The latter tell the stories of a small Midwestern farming community and of the newest immigrants to the United States. The fiction films tell the stories of a child prostitute in New Orleans at the turn of the century, an elderly failed mobster and an aspiring young woman in Atlantic City, the dinner conversation of two New York intellectuals, a band of losers in San Francisco's mission district, and the conflict between Vietnamese refugees and Texas fishermen on the Gulf Coast. Malle looks at the United States with an inquisitive eye, but clearly from his personal bourgeois, humanistic perspective. For Malle the pursuit of success is the connecting thread between unique individuals, who belong to diverse subcultures. Since this American dream has continually been expressed in Hollywood genres, Malle uses generic conventions as a foil for his approach. At the same time, Malle positions himself as an interactive participant within the films, using everyday situations in order to illuminate the protagonists and groups he has chosen to portray. Louis Malle's filmic distance from the stories he narrates and the characters he portrays on the screen generate a reflective attitude in the viewer. He achieves this effect by a frequent use of medium shots and of long takes, by depicting situations that reveal that appearances can be deceiving, by using interrupted narratives, and by having the characters look straight at the camera and confront the viewer's gaze.