Germany, like young film directors all across western Europe and Latin America, took their cue from Godard and his friends.[152]
What Truffaut, Godard and their colleagues had admired in the black-and-white American films of their youth was a lack of ‘artifice’. What American and other observers envied in the French directors’ own riffs on American realism were their subtlety and intellectual sophistication: the uniquely French ability to invest small human exchanges with awe-inspiring cultural significance. In Eric Rohmer’s Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969) Jean-Louis—a provincial mathematician played by Jean-Louis Trintignant—spends a snow-bound night on the sofa at the home of Maud (Francoise Fabian), the seductively intelligent girlfriend of an acquaintance. A Catholic, Jean-Louis agonises over the ethical implications of the situation and whether or not he should/should not have slept with his host, occasionally pausing to swap moral reflections with a Communist colleague. Nothing happens and he goes home.
It is hard to imagine an American or even a British film director making such a film, much less getting it distributed. But to a new generation of Euro-American intellectuals, Rohmer’s film captured everything that was sophisticated, world-weary, witty, allusive, mature and European about French cinema. Contemporary Italian films, though quite widely distributed abroad, did not have the same impact. The more successful products played too self-consciously off the new image of Italy and Italians as rich and ‘sexy’—often built around the corporeal attributes of Sophia Loren or the comic roles assigned to Marcello Mastroianni as a disabused roue: e.g. in Divorzio all’Italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961) or Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style, 1964).
Mastroianni had first played this role, but in an altogether more sombre key, in Federico Fellini’s Dolce Vita (1960). Fellini himself had a loyal following in many of the same circles as Truffaut and Godard, notably following the appearance of 8? (1963) and Giulietta degli spiriti (1965). An older generation of gifted Italian directors had not yet left the scene—Vittorio De Sica directed I Sequestrati di Altona (1962), from Sartre’s play, co-directed Boccaccio ’70 (1962) with Fellini and would go on to direct Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini at the end of the decade—but their work never recaptured the political and aesthetic impact of the great neo-realist films of the 1940s with which De Sica above all was forever linked. More influential were men like Michelangelo Antonioni. In L’Avventura (1960), L’Eclisse (1962) and Il Desserto rosso (1964), all starring Monica Vitti, Antonioni’s hard-edged cinematography and unappealing, cynical, disabused characters anticipated the disaffectedand detached world of later sixties art, self-consciously captured by Antonioni himself in Blow Up (1966).
Italian cinema lacked the seductive intellectuality of French (or Swedish) films, but what they shared in abundance was style. It was this European style—a variable balance of artistic self- confidence, intellectual pretension and cultivated wit—that distinguished the continental European scene for foreign (especially American) observers. By the end of the 1950s western Europe had not merely recovered from depression and war; it was once again a magnet for aspiring sophisticates. New York had the money and perhaps, too, the modern art. But America was still, as it seemed even to many Americans, a little raw. Part of the attraction of John F. Kennedy, as candidate and as President, was the cultivated cosmopolitanism of his Washington entourage: ‘Camelot’. And Camelot, in turn, owed much to the European background and continental self-presentation of the President’s wife.
If Jacqueline Kennedy imported European style to the White House, this was hardly surprising. European ‘design’ in the later Fifties and Sixties flourished as never before, the imprimatur of status and quality. A European label—attached to a commodity, an idea or a person—ensured distinction, and thus a price premium. This development was actually quite recent. To be sure, ‘articles de Paris’ had a longstanding place in the luxury goods trade, dating at least to the late eighteenth century; and Swiss watches had been well regarded for many decades. But the notion that cars made in Germany would ipso facto be better crafted than others, or that Italian-designed clothing, Belgian chocolates, French kitchenware or Danish furniture were unquestionably the best to be had: this would have seemed curious indeed just a generation before.
If anything, it was English manufacture that had until quite recently carried this reputation, a legacy of Britain’s nineteenth-century industrial supremacy. British-made domestic goods, vehicles, tools or weapons had for long been highly prized on foreign markets. But in the course of the 1930s and 1940s British producers had so successfully undermined their own standing in almost every commodity save men’s clothing that the only niche left to Britain’s retail merchants by the 1960s was high profile, low quality ‘trendy’ fads—a market they were to exploit ruthlessly in the following decade.
What was remarkable about European commercial style was its segmentation by product as well as country. Italian cars—FIAT, Alfa Romeo, Lancia—were notoriously shoddy and unreliable; yet their embarrassing reputation did no discernible harm to Italy’s elevated standing in other markets, such as leather goods, haute couture and even, in a less exalted sector, domestic white goods.[153] International demand for Germanclothing or food products was all but non-existent, and deservedly so. But by 1965, anything turned on a German lathe or conceived by German- speaking engineers could walk out of a British or American showroom at a price of its own asking. Only Scandinavia had acquired a general reputation for quality across an eclectic range of products, but even there the market had distinctive variations. Well-heeled foreigners filled their homes with high-styled Swedish or Danish furniture, even if it was a little fragile, because it was so ‘modern’. But the same consumer would be attracted to Sweden’s Volvo cars, despite their resolute lack of style, precisely because they appeared indestructible. Both qualities, however—‘style’ and ‘value’—were now inextricably identified with ‘Europe’: often in contrast with America.
Paris remained the capital of high fashion in women’s clothing. But Italy, with lower labour costs and unconstrained by textile rationing (unlike France or Britain), was already a serious competitor as early as 1952, when the first international Men’s Fashion Festival was staged in San Remo. However innovative its styling, French haute couture—from Christian Dior to Yves St Laurent—was quite socially conventional: as late as 1960, magazine editors and columnists in France and elsewhere not only wore hats and gloves when attending annual fashion shows, they wore them at their desks too. So long as middle-class women took their clothing cues from a handful of Parisian designers and fashion houses, the latter’s status (and profits) remained secure. But by the early sixties European women—like men—were no longer wearing formal hats, styled outer garments or evening wear as a matter of routine. The mass market in clothing was taking its cues as much from below as from above. Europe’s reputation as the capital of style and chic was secure, but the future lay with more eclectic vogues, many of them European adaptations of American and even Asian prototypes, something at which Italians proved especially adept. In clothing as in ideas, Paris dominated the European scene and would do so for a little while to come. But the future lay elsewhere.
At a March 1955 gathering in Milan of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Raymond Aron proposed as a topic for discussion ‘the End of the Ideological Age’. At the time some of his audience found the suggestion a touch premature—after all, across the Iron Curtain, and not only there, ideology appeared all too alive and well. But Aron had a point. The western European state, as it emerged in those years, was increasingly detached from any doctrinal project; and, as we have seen, the rise of the welfare state had defused the old political animosities. More people than ever before had a direct interest in the policies and expenditures of the state, but they no longer came to blows over who should control it. Western Europeans seemed to have arrived rather sooner than anticipated at the ‘broad, sunlit uplands’ (Churchill) of prosperity and peace: where politics was giving way to government, and government was increasingly confined to administration.
However: the predictable consequence of the nanny state, even the post-ideological nanny state, was that for anyone who had grown up knowing nothing different it was the duty of the state to make good on its promise of an ever better society—and thus the fault of the state when things did not turn out well. The apparent routinization of public affairs in the hands of a benevolent caste of overseers was no guarantee of public apathy. In this respect, at least, Aron’s prognosis was off target. Thus it was that the very generation which came of age in the Social Democratic paradise of its parents’ longings was most irritated and resentful at its shortcomings. A pregnant symptom of this paradox can be seen—quite literally—in an area of public planning and works in which
