Du Rififi chez les hommes, Jules Dassin’s 1955 film noir, remains one of the most important and intriguing movies of postwar France.  Directed by an American in exile from the McCarthy hearings, Rififi offers no explicit political content, yet it resonates with some of the central questions about the relation between politics and aesthetics in 1950s France.  At the center of this film is a famous heist sequence, a 28 minute segment in which the gangsters rob a jewelry store without speaking a word.  This sequence of “pure cinema” reminds us that the question of silence and of compulsory speech remained a stylistic and a political problem in works as varied as Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature and Roland Barthes’ last lectures at the Collège de France.  Seen in this light, the sensory space in Rififi poses a number of questions:  In what ways does genre—the gangster film, the art film and the literary essay—condition our understanding of the politics of a work of art?  What is the relation between these silent sequences in sound films and censorship laws in cold war France? How do we untangle the complex web between works of art and contemporary events, in this case the polemics of the cold war and decolonization? 

Phil Watts is Professor of Literature and Film and Chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia. His research and teaching focus on 20th-century French literature and film and the relation between politics and aesthetics.  His first book, Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France (1999), was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize.  Since then he has continued to study how literature and film participate in democratic formations; an edited volume of essays on Jacques Rancière is forthcoming from Duke University Press.  His current book project examines the persistence of classical forms in postwar French literature and film.