Transgression and Money on Screen: 1970s and

Transgression and Money on Screen:
1970s and 1980s French Films on High Finance
Diane Gabrysiak
This article examines the taboo around money in cinema and how its
representation in a set of mainstream 1970s and 1980s French films
on high finance often, paradoxically, links the display of money to
terrible consequences. Money shown on screen does not just represent
an object of everyday life; rather, it is a potentially lethal tool, a step too
far in the narrative, symbolizing all the ills of the characters and often
determining the rest of the story.
Despite the relative absence of finance as a topic in cinema, a
few significant French films centre on the world of money and high
finance, introducing the dimension of money as abstract capital used
in large-scale transactions. They emphasize the opposition between the
materiality and palpability of paper money, and the immateriality of
transactions in the financial world. Le Sucre (Jacques Rouffio, 1978),
L’Argent des autres (Christian de Challonges, 1978), La Banquière
(Francis Girod, 1980), and Mille milliards de dollars (Henri Verneuil,
1982) all focus on the business of ‘currency about currency’.1 Here the
value of money, since the abandonment of the gold-exchange standard
in 1971, is not aligned with a higher value (gold) and only refers to
itself. In these films about the invisibility of large-scale transactions,
money visible on screen, usually as banknotes, often refers to impurity,
illegality or a transgression of some kind. Showing money thus creates
a gap, a separation, between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ characters — characters
soiled by paper money made visible on screen and directly connected
to them — and between one story that can potentially go anywhere
1. Judith Williamson, ‘“Up Where You Belong”: Hollywood Images of Big Business
in the 1980s’, in Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture,
ed. by John Corner and Sylvia Harvey (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 151–61
(p. 158).
IJFrS 12 (2012)
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and another that ineluctably leads to death and destruction. Here, as in
Georges Bataille’s study of transgression in art, transgression happens
through representation itself.2
The present article offers an overview of both money and
transgression through a consideration of their etymology. It also uses
the work of Jean-Joseph Goux on the meanings and history of the word
money, as both moneta — a tool of exchange, as well as the specific
monetary unit of a country with no moral connotation — and pecunia,
or money as hoarding, a notion loaded with moral connotations.3 A
further aim is to understand how the selected films capture processes
that govern the functioning of money in its own meta-world. The
representation of money is examined in its different forms, with a focus
on its negative connotations when shown on screen, where money itself
is a sign of transgression. This in turn reinforces the conception that
anything that has to do with finance and banking is rather mysterious
and therefore morally neutral, in contrast with the materiality of paper
money, seen as dirty and evil.
High finance is the sum of all processes involved in the management
and administration of money. It is a system that encompasses the
making of investments as well as the provision of banking facilities, the
circulation of money and the granting of credit, all within a given legal
structure. Here money figures not only as a tool of exchange; it is also,
indeed mainly, capital to be invested, through which both the notion
of trust and the market continuously attempt to fix the volatile value
of stocks, bonds, commodities and money itself. It usually appears as
written or spoken numbers, in contrast to actual cash used in everyday
life, and functions as a kind of pure abstract construct.4 The four films
2. See Diane Gabrysiak, ‘Georges Bataille: Art, origine et transgression dans les
peintures de Lascaux’, Romanica Silesiana, 5 (2010), 108–21.
3. Jean-Joseph Goux, Frivolité de la valeur (Paris: Blusson, 2000), pp. 235–47, hereafter
FV in the text.
4. See Laurence Duchêne and Pierre Zaoui, L’Abstraction matérielle: L’Argent au-delà
de la morale et de l’économie (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), pp. 74–97, for a longer
discussion of the history of money in France and Europe, and its immateriality in high
finance, as well as La Monnaie souveraine, ed. by Michel Aglietta and André Orléan
(Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998).
TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN
67
under discussion offer a particularly interesting view of this contrast, at
a time when ‘finance […] has superseded manufacture as the supposed
cutting edge of capitalism’.5
La Banquière, a period drama, tells the story of Emma Eckhert
(Romy Schneider). The character was inspired by the Parisian banker
Marthe Hanau, a controversial figure of the 1920s and 1930s, and a
woman with a visionary approach to savings, investing and money in
general.6 Emma creates her own savings bank and manages to increase
interest rates dramatically for her ever-increasing number of mostly
first-time small investors. The creator of a newspaper, La Défense du
Franc, she falls prey to the Third Republic’s corrupt political system.
The extent to which her profits are based on insider trading, as well
as her construction of what would come to be called a Ponzi scheme,
largely contribute to her fall.
The comedy Le Sucre focuses on sugar speculation at the
commodities exchange. Adrien Courtois (Jean Carmet), a retired
tax inspector, seeks investment advice for his wife’s inheritance. By
chance, he meets up with Renaud d’Homécourt de la Vibraye (Gérard
Depardieu), also known as Raoul, a financial advisor and broker. Raoul
works for an obscure brokerage company headed by the unscrupulous
Karbaoui (Roger Hanin). Soon enough, the naive Adrien succumbs to
Raoul and Karbaoui’s attractive proposals, charmed at the prospect of
easy money available at seemingly low risk. He speculates all of his
wife’s capital on sugar shares, going so far as to sign over blank orders.
Unbeknownst to him, however, sugar prices have been artificially
set to rise and inevitably at one point begin to collapse. Adrien loses
everything. His investigation, in which he is helped by Raoul, reveals
the underhand schemes of the commodities exchange as well as the
collusion of banks, brokerage houses, influential speculators and the
political establishment.
5. Williamson, ‘“Up Where You Belong”’, p. 158.
6. Dominique Desanti, Marthe Hanau: La Banquière des années folles (Paris: Fayard,
1968).
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On a different note, the drama L’Argent des autres relates the
struggle of Henri Rainier (Jean-Louis Trintignant) against his former
employer, Miremant (Michel Serrault), director of the Swiss family
bank, Banque Miremant. During the course of his investigation,
Rainier tries to understand the workings of an industry he previously
thought was honest and transparent, only to discover that the reality is
quite otherwise.
Finally, in the thriller Mille milliards de dollars, the journalist
Paul Kerjean looks at the world of high finance through the activities
of the corporation Garson Texas International (GTI). The film’s title
intimates the net worth of the twenty most important corporations in
the world. As Kerjean digs into the company’s history and discovers its
Nazi past, he finds his and his son’s lives threatened. He is soon able
to unveil the criminal and financial manipulations — all for the sake of
profit — of one of the world’s most powerful companies.
These four films provide the most prominent examples for a
discussion of money shown on screen, and of financial scandals as
depicted in French cinema of the period. They are set in banks, at the
stock market, at the commodities exchange, in stock-brokers’ and
asset-managers’ offices, as well as in the offices of newspapers and
magazines. They show board meetings as well as corporate events: the
annual GTI convention, for example, in Mille milliards de dollars, and
the corporate New Year’s Eve party on the train in La Banquière. They
all deal in some way with investment and risk, interest rates, brokerage,
venture capital, savings and dividends, and show financial expertise
in operation, as well as the management of money — other people’s
money.
Shot under the presidencies of Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing,
these box-office successes were not, however, conceived as politically
activist in tone.7 Dubbed ‘fictions de gauche’,8 they carried a light
7. Caroline Babe, ‘Henri Verneuil: “Je me contente de dénoncer”’, Le Matin, 10 February
1982; Francis Girod, ‘La Banquière: Saga of a Stock-Exchange Crash’, Cinéma
français, 36 (1980), 4–9 (p. 6).
8. Expression coined by Serge Toubiana in Les Cahiers du cinéma, 275 (April 1977),
47–51, while reviewing Yves Boisset’s film Le Juge Fayard dit le shériff (1976).
TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN
69
message for a moderate left-wing audience at a time when power
was in the hands of conservatives. Their point was not to construct an
elaborate political statement: ‘Il ne s’agit plus de s’indigner contre tel
régime totalitaire étranger, mais d’attaquer de front le système politique
français, en s’inspirant des affaires contemporaines les plus brûlantes.’9
Denouncing scandals is central in L’Argent des autres, for example, with
the director de Challonges’s denunciation of ‘gaullisme immobilier’
(MPCF 35), and in Le Sucre, which expresses and reinvigorates a
traditional stance against the ‘powers of money’ in a corrupt world. This
group of films functions in the mainstream cinema circuit with its largescale budgets, high-profile stars and immediate wide release. Here,
Rancière remarks, ‘ce qui reste c’est l’idée nue de la “machination”
[…] orchestrée d’en haut par une machine occulte et toute puissante’.10
Several of these films refer to scandals from the 1920s and 1930s and
in this they mirror a trend in films on finance that emerged in France in
the late 1920s, starting with Marcel Lherbier’s L’Argent (1928).11 They
also confirm the fascination that scandals involving the financial and
political spheres have always had in France, scandals that filmmakers
have delved into to create mainstream sagas (MPCF 64–65). This
fascination would explain why the main characters are in some way
marginal or marginalized within the larger picture of the established
financial industry: the unknown journalist Kerjean in Mille milliards
de dollars; the small-town speculator Adrien and the middleman Raoul
in Le Sucre; the obscure executive Rainier in L’Argent des autres
and the transgressive woman banker, Emma, in La Banquière. By
retaining a certain marginality throughout, these figures offer an almost
pedagogical position, as Dehée suggests when discussing Mille millards
(MPCF 205). The characters take us on a journey in order to understand
and denounce the complex and ‘perverted’ world of finance, together
9. Yannick Dehée, Mythologies politiques du cinéma français 1960–2000 (Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 2000), p. 34, hereafter MPCF in the text.
10.Jacques Rancière, ‘La Visite au peuple’, Cahiers du cinéma, 371–72 (1985), 106–11
(p. 107).
11.On the two waves of films about finance, see Jean-Michel Frodon, L’Âge moderne du
cinéma français: De la Nouvelle Vague à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p. 591.
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with its secret and lucrative arrangements with the political sphere.
It is important, then, to notice how money as finance sets the
atmosphere and filters through virtually every aspect of the stories. This
atmosphere establishes the films, from their opening, as being about
money’s overwhelming significance as capital rather than a simple tool
of exchange. La Banquière and Le Sucre both take place when high
profits on the stock market seem just within reach. Their stories are about
speculation, and rely on the stock market, the ‘capitalization market’,
in other words the epicentre of finance and financial activities, as their
central locus. The stock market is located above the two other markets
since it is neither commercial exchange, governed by the principle of
equivalence between money and commodities, nor the market where
the relationship between capital and labour is played out (in the form
of profit and wages), but is rather a market where ‘values’, that are
themselves shares of invested capital, are sold and purchased.12
The stock market is set against the market of commodities and the
market of labour; it is situated ‘above’ all other commercial activities
and, like a heartbeat, gives them their pulse. In La Banquière, all
of Emma’s business tactics centre on the stock market as her prime
means of amassing money and of raising the customary interest rates
paid to her clients, in the face of a more conservative, less risk-taking
traditional banking establishment. In a radio interview she comments
on this power as a new phenomenon of the 1920s — ‘nous entrons dans
une période où les profits en bourse vont dépasser toutes les prévisions’
—which allowed her the year before to offer a 9.32% interest rate while
traditional banks were still only offering between 1% and 1.5%. Scenes
that actually take place at the stock market emphasize its centrality as
well as the euphoria born of high market performance, whether it is the
frenzy of Moïse (Jacques Fabri) — with his horde of traders racing up
the grand staircase of the Bourse de Paris — or ourselves, ushered by
the camera into the precincts of the trading room, where we witness the
wild uncontrollable rise of the shares of an oil company, Royale des
12.Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘Values and Speculations: The Stock Exchange Paradigm’, Cultural
Values, 1.2 (1997), 159–77 (p. 161).
TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN
71
pétroles, at a time when oil itself has become the ‘new gold’. In Le Sucre,
the first scene at the stock exchange also illustrates the latter’s position
in the film. Here, the superimposition of the broker Raoul in buy-sell
frenzy, with a see-through chart in red illustrating exploding sugar
prices, emphasizes the dominance of stock market performance and its
central role in the film: sugar shares are fetching heretofore unheardof selling prices and it is these high levels of trade that determine the
film’s development. Each increase in share price is also superimposed
on filmed images of some kind of meter. The size of the numbers in red
grows in parallel with the cost per share.
The film titles already indicate their concern with money and
finance: banking in La Banquière, other people’s money in L’Argent
des autres, and a vast sum in Mille milliards de dollars. From their first
shots, the films are about money and fill the stories with an ambiance of
speculation and investment, financial operations whose scale requires
capital. The word ‘capital’ refers to accumulated wealth and, because
of its Latin root capitalis — of or pertaining to the head — indicates
a principle or source. This in turn connotes the idea of something
essential, fundamental and pre-eminent, and for this reason capital
figures as something central to the whole notion of business. In the
opening credits of Mille milliards de dollars the ‘o’ in the word dollar
has been replaced by a US silver dollar. These credits are interspersed
with night-time long shots of stereotypical financial district high-rises
that accentuate both their isolation in space and their dark and shady
quality, and suggest a link with the remote and dark character of the
large-scale financial operations that will unfold in the film. L’Argent des
autres opens with long shots of a dazzlingly white, brightly lit hospitallike space functioning as an executive recruitment centre. This scene is
immediately contrasted with long shots of the silent, dark corridors of
the Banque Miremant that show an oppressive and almost frightening
obscurity occasioned by a sudden electrical outage. Once again the
darkness of the bank’s corridors suggests the darkness of the bank’s
own financial operations. The opening sequence of Le Sucre is both an
illustration of the title and an indication of what the film is about. In
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large block capital letters, the title flashes between shots of sugar beets,
the raw material of white sugar production. In close-up, a crane seizes
the beets and heaps them onto the growing pile, giving an impression of
overwhelming abundance. From a low angle, beets seems to fall from
the sky, and this is followed by an even more expansive panoramic shot
of an enormous mass of them, ready for on-site transformation, all set
in a stark semi-industrial environment. This scene of plenty is indeed
what the film is about: sugar, a concrete, palpable commodity with high
use-value, is contrasted in the rest of the film with an immaterial paper
commodity-share of little use-value, to be bought and sold for money
on the commodities exchange, and referring only remotely to sugar.
The title itself suggests that ‘the sugar in the film is that commodity on
paper that can spread fortunes or ruin on the stock market’.13
High finance, then, is central in setting up the atmosphere of these
films, often beginning with the titles themselves, whether it is at the
stock market, in banks or in other finance-related scenes. It works as an
almost abstract representation of money. Money here consists of evercirculating capital. These films, however, constantly play on the contrast
between the vast and immaterial sums of high finance and the all-toopalpable, smaller but still very real sums of money actually shown.
The distinction between monnaie and argent, established by Goux
in Frivolité de la valeur,14 a specificity of the French language originating
in Latin, permits a better understanding of two different dimensions of
money: one that is seen as useful and one that is considered corrupt and
corrupting, thus bringing to the fore the notion and the possibility of
transgression. If this distinction is not so obvious in English — since the
word money sometimes translates as monnaie and other times as argent
(FV 236–37) — it can still be used to examine the moral connotations
of money shown on screen. In Latin, moneta and pecunia correspond to
two distinct but not mutually exclusive understandings of monnaie and
13.Gene Moskowitz, ‘Le Sucre’, Variety, 223.1 (1978), 28.
14.See also Jean-Joseph Goux, Les Monnayeurs du langage (Paris: Galilée, 1984),
pp. 44–55; and Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘Catégories de l’échange: Idéalité, symbolicité,
réalité’, in Encyclopédie philosophique universelle I. L’Univers philosophique, ed. by
André Jacob (Paris: PUF, 1989), pp. 229–33.
TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN
73
argent. Moneta is an exchange tool, a measure of value, and the act of
exchanging itself. It was originally a cult title for the Roman Goddess
Juno, and it is in her temple and under her sovereign authority that money
was coined and minted. As Marc Shell underlines when discussing the
etymology of money, Moneta, like denarius, nummus, and nomismos
(Greek), carries the notions of payment in ready money, of coined money,
and of counting and measuring value.15 Pecunia, on the other hand, is
what belongs to someone and carries the idea of fantasy and treasure:
biens, fortune, avoirs, possessions, richesse, argent comptant,
monnaie, argent, somme d’argent, jour du paiement; c’est aussi la
déesse du gain et l’un des attributs de Jupiter. Et, significativement,
le mot pecunia, venu de pecus, ‘bétail’, garde la trace sémantique
d’un avoir ayant une valeur en soi, un bien réel et même vital, en
dehors de sa valeur d’échange. (FV 237)
In other words, pecunia is money as one’s own. In this sense,
‘alors que “monnaie” [moneta] a un sens exclusivement objectif,
qui n’implique aucun jugement psychologique ou moral, “argent”
[pecunia] implique une relation personnelle avec la monnaie, qui
devient une richesse’ (FV 237). Pecunia is money possessed or desired
by someone, money as invested with a quality or tied to an owner who
suffers or enjoys, loses or wins, accumulates or spends it. Pecunia
retains an emotional character while moneta remains more neutral. That
is why, when one talks of a sum, it will always be a ‘somme d’argent’;
whereas, when the discussion is on the nature and structure of economic
exchanges, one will talk of the ‘histoire de la monnaie’, ‘dévaluation de
la monnaie’, ‘monnaie métallique’, ‘monnaie de papier’ or ‘monnaie
fiduciaire’ (FV 236–37). In those cases, monnaie is the object, placed at
a distance by theoretical reflection, and not explicitly connected to an
owner directly affected by his relationship to argent. Monnaie here is
15.Marc Shell, ‘What is Truth? Lessing’s Numismatics and Heidegger’s Alchemy’,
Modern Language Notes, 92.1 (1977), 549–70 (p. 563). See also Marc Shell, Money,
Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to
the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
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the object of the vast, immaterial financial operations taking place in the
films, while argent (pecunia) concerns the contrasting display of cash
money attached to specific characters. This distinction clearly separates
argent, the object of a moral judgment (argent propre, argent sale,
argent roi), from monnaie, which concerns both the act of exchanging
and money within the financial and economic systems. Transgression,
in its relation to money, is directly linked to the idea of ‘la couleur de
l’argent et la transparence de la monnaie’ (FV 239) — that is, when
visible, shown in colour and in its materiality, argent (pecunia), which
also, in French, carries with it the notion of a material substance, has
negative connotations. Meanwhile, in simple transactions, ‘monnaie (et
le mot est une pièce de monnaie) dit à la fois la chose monétaire en
général et le reste d’une opération monétaire, par exemple la monnaie
qu’on rend ou la “petite monnaie” (change en anglais)’.16 Monnaie
thus retains some degree of neutrality. This notional distinction offers a
useful approach to the contrast between immaterial and neutral finance
on the one hand and, on the other, material and morally connoted money.
Against the immateriality of finance as a background and theme
running through all four films, money as banknotes, coins or even
cheques and credit cards, is rarely shown as such. When it is shown
it becomes meaningful and creates a sense of materiality in a world
of stock market speculation where share transactions are a ‘sign of
immateriality, difference, non-presence’.17 The stocks themselves, as
‘empty signifiers’, are contrasted with actual money.18 As David F.
Bell remarks about Zola’s L’Argent, in the Stock Market, the distance
between the sphere of material reality and that of financial operations
increases dramatically. This tendency is further radicalized by the fact
that buying and selling operations are possible in which the speculator
never actually takes delivery of the shares in question, never actually
possesses them.19
16.Jacques Derrida, Donner le temps I: La Fausse Monnaie (Paris: Galilée, 1991), p. 133.
17.Goux, ‘Values and Speculations’, p. 170.
18.Goux, ‘Values and Speculations’, p. 170.
19.David F. Bell, Models of Power: Politics and Economics in Zola’s ‘Rougon-Macquart’
(Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 131.
TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN
75
Banks and stock markets, large buildings and lavish offices, are
all there to represent money, to refer to money indirectly rather than to
show it concretely. Board meetings, trading scenes and other concrete
images of money-making (receptions, parties, dinners, luxurious
clothes and cars), as well as cash money itself, are featured in order to
counterbalance the complexity and immateriality, the virtual character,
of financial operations. There is not, however, any direct display of cash
in the films that corresponds to the sums discussed or referred to. The
filming of Emma in La Banquière bribing Sir Charles (Alan Adair) with
two wads of banknotes tossed inside his briefcase — recompense for
his insider information concerning new oil findings in Aden — contrasts
with the millions she makes speculating. In fact, most of her assets are
not in ‘real’ money but in shares, options and buildings: a mixture, in
other words, of material and virtual possessions. In cash, she keeps
‘only’ two million francs in her Boulogne country-house safe.
None of these films show suitcases stuffed with banknotes or
gold. The actual displays of cash, however, are striking and often filmed
in close-up: bundles of banknotes in La Banquière and Le Sucre, or
gold coins in the animation film-within-a-film in L’Argent des autres.
The banknotes in Le Sucre, connected with the broker Karbaoui’s
undeclared stock market profits, are initially laid out on a large table,
some destined for the vault and others stuffed into large black trash bags
to be closeted for safe keeping. In L’Argent des autres, money appears in
a short animation film presented by the businessman Chevalier d’Aven
(Claude Brasseur) to his major backers and investors to celebrate the
first billion raised by the Héritage Foncier, a mutual fund of his creation
for small investors. Money here is portrayed as an object with no
particular use in itself except as regards its own potential reproduction
and multiplication. Although set in the 1970s, after the end of the goldexchange standard marking the inconvertibility of the US dollar and
thus of all other currencies, this film, when it refers to potential profits,
presents louis d’or, gold coins symbolic of another era and redolent
of monetary security and stability. By this means the animated filmwithin-a-film emphasizes savings as producing profits in the form
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of ‘real’ money: that is, palpably heavy coins with an indisputable
value deriving both from the past and the substance they are made of,
accompanied by a song based on motifs typical of financial processes:
‘spéculation, inflation, devaluation’. As Goux remarks, ‘gold currency
also has, traditionally, this feature of the material commodity, in that
it carries the pledge of its value in itself, in its weight and substance’
(VS 170).
The transactions involve large sums, impossible to carry around
by hand in cash and also impalpable because they are the signs of a
different, virtual economy, and of currencies which are slowly losing
any reference to a ‘real’ object (gold). Money is not so much gold or
cash to be held somewhere, as it is the capital of the contemporary
economy, an abstract representation forever circulating, never hoarded
and always at work. When money appears as printed on notes, and its
value endorsed by the State, it signals that the story is taking a new turn
for the worse, like a bad omen. The materiality of money introduces the
idea of trespass, of erasing traces, since cash money, unlike the written
records of transactions, leaves no trace of its origin.
Beyond the actual amounts shown, money materialized in
banknotes announces a break in the narrative, a turn in the expected
course of events, a sign of illegality and simultaneously of transgression
for the characters involved with it. The notion of transgression is
useful in understanding the representation of money as a step into the
forbidden, as the crossing of an invisible line. The word ‘transgression’,
which first appeared in French in the Middle Ages, is characterized by
the notion of overstepping, of crossing beyond a threshold, a limit,
an interdiction. As Foucault argues in relation to Georges Bataille’s
L’Érotisme, transgression is ‘un geste qui concerne la limite; c’est là,
en cette minceur de la ligne, que se manifeste l’éclair de son passage’.20
Transgression happens with the ‘moment sacré de la figuration’,21
20.Michel Foucault, ‘Préface à la transgression (en hommage à Georges Bataille)’,
Critique, 195–96 (1963); reprinted in Dits et écrits I (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 233–45
(p. 236).
21.Georges Bataille, Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art, in Œuvres Complètes, 12 vols
(Paris: Gallimard, 1970–1988), IX (1979), 41.
TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN
77
in other words, here, through the very action of showing money in
all its materiality on screen, rather than showing only numbers or
discussing amounts. If Bataille situates the origin of art and the origin
of transgression as simultaneous, it seems that in films on high finance,
the representation of money and transgression emerge through the same
gesture.
In fact, the larger the sum displayed, the more evil are both
the money and the protagonists connected with it. Throughout La
Banquière, money seen is bad and signals bribery and illegality. This
is made apparent by the louis d’or at the beginning of the film when
Emma, still a teenager, receives a generous tip from one of her parents’
clients after she delivers a hat; by the banknote bribes; by the cheques
or stock-options she gives to accommodating board members from the
political sphere; and by the cheques paid to the gutter press. The regular
display of cash money, always associated with Emma, invariably
functions to signal her trespassing beyond the acceptable, the norm.
She is going a step too far and the narrative will soon enough take a
dramatic turn and showcase her spectacular downfall from the pinnacle
of banking to tragic assassination, all orchestrated by the traditional
banking establishment, unsullied because not associated with the
display of cash money.
In Le Sucre, the piles of banknotes in plain view also call attention
to the illegality and risky character of the transactions Karbaoui is
carrying out. From the moment money is first seen, it foreshadows
sinister happenings. In a Paris restaurant, the broker Raoul gives an
overstuffed envelope of 500-franc bills to one of his clients, a doctor.
Before handing over the envelope, Raoul is sitting on it, as if the money
was too ‘dirty’ and disreputable to be anywhere else. It is also a way to
protect the money physically, as the loot could easily be stolen. He can
neither put it in his pocket (the envelope is too big), nor simply leave it
sitting on the table — one does not leave so much cash in plain view for
everyone to see. Bewildered by the sheer amount of money (filmed in
close-up), the happy speculator-doctor, through Raoul’s clever agency,
decides to wager yet again all his profits on another potentially lucrative
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commodity: sugar. At this point it is clear by implication that the profits
symbolized in the close-up of the envelope presage a comparable scale
of financial loss. Here again, the showing of money signals the end of
Raoul’s luck and, more seriously, the end of Karbaoui’s business. In
both films, the banknotes and all the other displays of material money
can be seen as pecunia, as a sum of money linked to an owner who
treasures it. Money here is no longer only an instrument, it has been
perverted in its use as neutral capital and is now associated with other
uses. Transgression thus happens through the representation of moneyargent as pecunia, far from the moneta-monnaie of exchanges. Pecunia
can corrupt individuals (FV 236) who will then have to pay for their
overstepping the mark, as opposed to moneta, or even immaterial
money, which does not carry any particular moral connotation.
While usually obvious, the distinction between moneta and pecunia
in the context of transgression is sometimes fuzzy. In Mille milliards
de dollars, for example, the president of GTI, Cornelius A. Woeagen,
announces at his annual corporate meeting that he wants the usual birth
and death dates on his grave, but also the last annual profit ‘gravé en
lettres d’or’, to remind his successors of his achievement. Money here
is a goal in itself, and the engraved numbers seemingly refer to both
sides of Goux’s distinction between moneta and pecunia: it is monnaie
insofar as it is a number that does not involve any psychological or
moral judgment, but it is argent insofar as it ‘implique une relation
personnelle avec la monnaie, qui devient une richesse’ (FV 236).
Woeagen transforms a monetary sum that is not his own into his personal
achievement and thus links it to himself and makes it his own. The
neutrality of the corporation’s overall money (moneta) is blurred, and
the amounts mentioned become personal treasure (pecunia), with what
this notion implies of possessiveness, jealousy, corruption, greed and
sometimes destruction and death for the characters who get to handle
the treasure in question.
There is no clear-cut reason as to why money, which is itself an
object with no inner qualities, is endlessly shown to be a bad thing in
La Banquière, Mille milliards de dollars, Le Sucre and L’Argent des
TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN
79
autres. There are, however, a few clues that help us better understand
this pattern. As Georges Conchon, the scriptwriter of both Le Sucre and
La Banquière, remarks, ‘c’est l’argent, chez nous, qui a la mauvaise
odeur’.22 It is, however, ironic and paradoxical that almost every use
of material money carries negative connotations in a film industry
itself necessarily dependent on large amounts of it. This apparent
contradiction can be explicitly present in the original idea for a film,
as for example with L’Herbier’s L’Argent (1928), which in many ways
prefigures the films discussed in this article:
Pour s’accrocher à un film, il faut un héros, qu’on l’aime ou qu’on
le déteste, c’est au fond la même chose: Gance a eu Napoléon,
il adorait Napoléon, il s’identifiait à lui, moi je devais trouver
quelque chose du même genre, or je ne trouvais rien à adorer,
mais par contre il y avait une chose que je détestais entre toutes,
c’était l’argent [....]. C’était ça le personnage qui me stimulait
prodigieusement.23
Paradoxically, while L’Argent continuously shows money to be
evil, it stands out as a remarkably big-budget film costing between
four and five million francs at the time,24 and the same can be said
of Le Sucre, L’Argent des autres, La Banquière and Mille milliards de
dollars. It seems that, in all these films, the idea of evil money goes
back to a more literary criticism of money linked to the stock exchange,
especially money ‘gagné trop rapidement’ (MPCF 66) from speculation,
as in Zola’s L’Argent (and its adaptation by L’Herbier) and Balzac’s
Le Père Goriot (an inspiration for Duvivier’s David Golder of 1930).
According to Dehée, virulence against money acquires a new impetus
in the 1970s following the oil crisis (MPCF 70) and also, I believe,
following the end of the gold-exchange standard.
22.Georges Conchon, Le Sucre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1977), p. 20.
23.Claude Beylie and Michel Marie, ‘Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier’, L’Avant-scène
cinéma, 209 (1978), 30–42 (p. 36).
24.Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave 1915–1929 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), p. 513.
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In a world where the dollar was the de facto world currency, the
dollar bill ‘as a promissory note became a tautological void’.25 Money
had been officially turned into signs no longer convertible into gold. All
money signs worldwide began to float one against the other without the
support of the dollar and its gold-exchange standard. A bank reserve in
dollars meant little more than the quotation for the dollar at a given moment
in time: the dollar became, in other words, ‘an inconvertible currency
with no intrinsic internal value whose extrinsic value with respect to
other currencies was allowed to float in accordance with market forces’.26
Money-signs, losing their solid equivalence with gold, suddenly became
even less material than they had ever been before. They had become
empty signifiers, thus introducing a degree of anxiety and insecurity only
experienced before with the loss of the gold standard, as expressed in
Greed for example.27 This first anxiety was increased by the ever more
immaterial nature of money, the growing predominance of cards and
electronic transactions and the slow disappearance of banknotes.
What Servet explains in reference to the introduction of the Euro
and the elimination of national currencies can help in the understanding
of these anxieties: ‘Le changement monétaire nominal a un effet
imaginaire qui exprime et mobilise des craintes plus profondes tenant
surtout à une perte d’identité et de repères.’28 The printing and issuing of
currency is part of a series of state-produced images that together form
what Dupré calls the ‘image populaire d’État’, a concept based on the
model devised by Althusser of ‘appareils idéologiques d’état’.29 Among
25.Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), pp. 88–89.
26.Rotman, Signifying Nothing, p. 89.
27.On the display of gold as an expression of the insecurity generated by the loss of the
gold standard, see Luc Dahan ‘Les Rapaces d’Erich von Stroheim’, Cinématographe,
26 (1977), 7–11 (p. 11).
28.Jean-Michel Servet, ‘Promesses et angoisses d’une transition monétaire’, L’Argent:
Croyance, mesure, spéculation, ed. by Marcel Drach (Paris: La Découverte, 2004),
259–72 (p. 263).
29.Michel Dupré ‘Figures de l’argent (copyright)’, La Voix du regard, 14 (2001), 23–30
(p. 23); Louis Althusser, ‘Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'État’, La Pensée, 151
(1970), 3–38 (p. 3).
TRANSGRESSION AND MONEY ON SCREEN
81
these images (including stamps, logos, etc.), the banknote is central both
in its function as sign of value, as instrument of exchange and as symbol
of the State’s sovereign authority. It is, like other instruments used by
the State, part of an ‘obligation absolue d’enrôler des mémoires locales
dans le fonds commun d’une culture nationale’.30 Banknotes and coins
serve to define national identity and culture beyond regions, peoples and
linguistic diversity: ‘la construction d’une mémoire collective apparaît
comme une nécessité prioritaire, un contre-pouvoir aux inerties des
différences, un contrepoids aux façons de vivre et de mourir’.31 Issued
and created by national institutions and circulating throughout the
country, banknotes and coins convey the common national and cultural
experience, and inscribe themselves on local memory, providing a link
with the national experience. The State also guarantees the value of
its national currency, in this case the franc. The disappearance of the
banknote, together with the franc’s floating value — paradoxically
emphasized in the films under discussion by numerous shots of actual
cash money — reduces the possibility for individuals to project
themselves collectively in a national symbol, itself backed by gold, and
creates an anxiety over what is perceived as a sure sign of stable value.32
While this phenomenon comes mostly from a loss of routine and habits
in people’s payment for things and management of their own money,33
it also reveals a deeper shift in the meanings of the notion of ‘money’.
Money as pecunia, as treasure, is here slowly being replaced by money
as moneta, lacking a strong emotional dimension and detached from
expressions often used to refer to it (such as ‘blé’ or ‘fric’). At the same
time, immaterial transactions create a new relationship with money, in
that payments or transfers become more personal, directly and forever
attached to the person who realizes them.
In the films discussed, the representation of money as transgression
can be read as a clear sign of these anxieties, and of the negative
30.Pierre Nora, ‘De la République à la nation’, in Les Lieux de mémoire I: La République,
ed. by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 651–60 (p. 652).
31.Nora, ‘De la République à la nation’, p. 652.
32.Nora, ‘De la République à la nation’, p. 652.
33.Servet, ‘Promesses et angoisses d’une transition monétaire’, p. 267.
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connotations of a medium suddenly devoid of any kind of substance
backing it. On the other hand, the more mysterious and unseen
capital of finance retains its neutral significance. Yet these four films
are themselves decidedly moralistic, sometimes naïvely so, in their
insistence on how bad money is, or how bad people become when they
possess it or lust after it. Far from being isolated examples, they show
a pattern of negative representation of money that still prevails. As we
have reached an age in which the scale of financial transactions is larger
than ever, it is interesting to find that the representation of immaterial
and obscure money transactions is still contrasted, in more recent
mainstream French films, with the morally connoted representation of
cash money.34
Birkbeck College, University of London
34.See for example Demonlover (Olivier Assayas, 2001) or Ma part du gâteau (Cedric
Klapisch, 2011).