Going Cold on Cool: Miles Davis and Ascenseur pour l’échafaud’

Of all the documents of jazz in post-war France, Louis Malle’s 1958 film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (or Lift to the Scaffold), with its soundtrack by Miles Davis, seems to loom largest in the popular imagination of the 21st-century. Here, overlaying the night-time Paris streets, is a cinematic attitude whose insouciance and texture speak of a famously innovative era in French film, and music of a timbre and dynamic that readily define a now-vintage American cool. But underneath all this are echoes, generally unheard nowadays, of two important contemporary intellectual discourses that informed Malle’s work: nihilist right-wing politics and realist film aesthetics. This paper addresses the making and reception of this classic film and its soundtrack, investigating the ways that image and music are put in the service of those political and aesthetic ideas