Good Work,Little Soldier

Abstract

This article reads the relation between Denis’sBeau Travail and Jean- Luc Godard’s 1960 filmLe Petit Soldat as a film-on-film variant of film-on-book adaptation. The model informing this reading is not so much intertextual as pretextual. The principal points of contact between the two films discussed are ‘actor’ (Michel Subor), ‘character’ (Bruno Forestier) and ‘narrator’ (Forestier/Galoup). The use inBeau Travail ofLe Petit Soldat is compared with and differentiated from the use of Melville’s ‘Billy Budd, Sailor’. The conclusion arrived at is that the film-on-film relation can be read as a development of the mirror motif borrowed from Godard by Denis, in order to replace abyssal models of intertextual infinity with the finitudes of abyssal reflexivity. This is to offer a model of pretextuality that is not dependent on privileging the pretext: implicit is the suggestion thatBeau Travail andLe Petit Soldat may be read as a single, if hybrid, text.