Hergé and Film

On Tuesday, I was not surprised to learn that Hergé considered vaudeville and the silent cinema of comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to be major influences on his work.  The influence of these films is even more apparent than it was in the 'Krazy Kat' and 'Little Nemo' comics we looked at.  One need not know much about the history of cinema to recognize the slapstick action of 'Tin Tin' as something out of the movies.  Two brief sequences stick out in particular, both for their thrilling quality and the deliberate nature of their cinematic references.  The two center panels of page 12 depict Tin Tin jumping from window-to-window in a manner that calls to mind Harold Lloyd's Safety Last and it's hard to view the train sequence later on without thinking about The General.

Tin Tin seems to arrive in a version of the United States that could only have come from Hollywood.  Big business executives, cowboys, native Americans, and fashionably-dressed gangsters all pop up in droves.  In fact, these cinematic archetypes appear to be perhaps the only inhabitants of Hergé's America.  The way in which Hergé depicts Native Americans appears to be informed exclusively by cinema.  Hergé seems to have blended all of the various stereotypes perpetuated in the films of John Ford into one to create his version of the Blackfoot people. I was struck by the similarity of his "America" and the cinematic "France" created by the directors associated with the "French New Wave" of cinema.  Directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut were, like Hergé, avid fans of American cinema.  Many of their films are best remembered for the ways in which they employ the tropes and trappings of the quintessentially American gangster and Western genres of film.   I wonder what cinematic icons Hergé might have employed had he written TinTin in America some years later.  I have to imagine that a private investigator modeled after Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe would have made an appearance.