Jean-Jacques Beineix, Destination Moon… or not!

Jean-Jacques Beineix, Destination Moon… or not!

Yesterday at Cannes, the filmmaker defended, tooth and nail, his aesthetics. 

We can’t say that The Moon in the Gutter received much praise at Cannes. Eagerly anticipated, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s second film is likely to disappoint those who liked his first film without convincing the others. In the middle of this complete failure, some real questions about the cinema. What if this new religion of “The Image” announced the return of an art?

Beineix’s second opus ended up being received with a few jeers and some half-hearted hisses. Never mind, the post-Diva era has begun and Beineix is both its symptom and prophet. It was perhaps inevitable that the critics, who had zero role to play in the cult success of Diva, jumped furiously on The Moon in the Gutter. It was too good an opportunity since it is indeed a complete failure. But unlike a bad film (boring, tense, autistic, etc), this second opus comes across as a curiosity. The first ugly-looking cathedral of the 36th festival. 

The story – you guessed it – is of little importance. A lot of money has been spent in Cinecittà to recreate the shabby universe of the great David Goodis. “Obsession” and “discontent” are the only two common threads. In a stylised America, a man hesitates between two women (one, jealous, who already loves him, “downtown”, the other, appearing from another world, “uptown”). At the same time, this man is “searching” for the identity of the rapist responsible for his sister’s suicide. 

The film goes back and forth, with a rolling of the story, a pitching and tossing of the fiction, a seasickness that gently repulses, a nausea from seeing all these means put to a rather modest end: to remake in vitro the cinema of “poetic realism” in the era of loft apartments, neon lights, Coppola’s high tech and “filmed cinema”.

We remember how, in poetic realism and old-style studio cinema, characters carried around a soiled soul and an inalienable right to purity. They collided with the decor, seemed lost, panicked, confined (Carné). Beineix inherits this “atmosphere”. As a filmmaker, he does the same. He keeps on slowing down the story so that we have the time to appreciate the work on the image. A work of labour consisting in multiplying cutaway shots, finding additional camera angles, lighting effects and unexpected details. In a word, to generate images behind the fiction’s back. A scene by Beineix works most often like crab steering. It progresses sideway or even in reverse, hitting the audience with a million proof points of Beineix’s cinematographic know-how and desire. With each proof point, we go back to square one. The film is like this motorbike that we saw yesterday at the Croisette, across from the Carlton, equipped with all the modern and postmodern features, so much so that we wondered if it actually worked. 

Diva was said to emerge from advertising aesthetics. We know that the only on-the-job training available to young filmmakers is advertising. Recently, this situation seems to have become acceptable. And, whether we want it or not, the return of formalism and of the tradition of quality (pre-New Wave) can only happen today on the back of the recycling of techniques and effects from the advertising world. Filmmakers attempt to prove that two hours of tv adverts put together can make a film, like a thousand rockets can form a firework. We know that nothing will be left of it, that the sky will become dark again, like a bottomless abyss, but the bet is up (see Deadly Circuit). And with Beineix, it’s even a challenge. 

It doesn’t work of course. It doesn’t work because advertising is still an ironic and ephemeral product. It doesn’t work because in his praise for the Image and solely the image, Beineix forgets that advertising is an image of seduction with only one concluding word: the name of the brand. If the moon ends up catching a cold in this gutter designed for a sniffer Louma crane, it is because Beineix over-advertises the brand “Image” and the sub-brand “Shot”. This narcissism wouldn’t matter if it didn’t end up, forever looping on itself, excluding the spectator. 

So, the film is a curiosity. Beineix said during the press conference that he enjoyed watching films in places that one can’t escape from: planes for example. He forgets two things: that it is possible to sleep on a plane or (like me) to refuse to pay two dollars for the headphones. The Moon in the Gutter is fundamentally a silent, aphasic film and its dialogue – even when murmured – is unworthy of a bad Delannoy of the forties. But would the film, reduced to its image only, function? Yes, but like a silent film seen out of the corner of your eye, like a trendy music video, a logorrhoea of images transplanted randomly onto a skeletal story and sketches of bodies (Depardieu isn’t bad but acts already “electronically”, like the actors in Tron who don’t see the rest of the image that they are immersed into). 

And once we have understood that we can only glean things in the gutter, we are free to think. 

During the screening of The Moon in the Gutter, one can play back the history of the cinema and fill it up like a shopping basket. Let’s salute a nice trailer (but without much of a film after), a good ad (with no after-sale service), an effective industrial film (not backed by an enterprise), etc. It’s a voyage in the country of the commercial image (the one that sells something and the one that sells itself) at the service of a metaphysical quest for the Cinema and the Great Work. Nothing prevents us, in the darkness of the film theatre, to ask fundamental questions: what is it, where does it come from, where is it going (the cinema)? Does it necessarily go – for better or, in this case, for worse – through the reflection of too pure moons in too dirty gutters?

In any case, Beineix, claws out, takes on an old line about his art: the Cinema, he says, is the Image. Perhaps but then one shouldn’t pretend to be surprised if, with crime novels as stock of stories, studios as return to the fold, and advertising as formal matrix, we can logically expect a new religion when it comes to the cinema. A Sulpician art. 

First published in Libération on May 13th, 1983. Re-printed in La maison cinéma et le monde, vol 2, P.O.L., 2002.  

City of Pirates

The ICA London program "Serge Daney and the promise of cinema" ended a couple of weeks ago and the organisers at Sabzian were kind enough to share a couple of new translations used as screening notes for the event. Thank you to Arta Barzanji and Gerard-Jan Claes. First, a piece on Raoul Ruiz.  

City of Pirates

There are films that we’re not quite sure we didn’t dream. They are perhaps the most beautiful. Like this new adventure from Captain Ruiz, in the land of our beliefs.

Take a child and make sure he dreams. Wake him and tell him a story. Lull him with your most beautiful voice-over. Make your voice insidious, and don’t forget the background music. Once he falls back asleep, the child must finish dreaming the story you whispered to him. When he wakes, he must feel that the story chose him, not the other way around. An Immortal Story — so ran the title of one of Welles’s last films; but any story is immortal, that's what all of Raoul Ruiz’s films tell us. Hence much delight, then too much delight, then terror. 

But if you don’t have the sleeping child, the suspended time, the voice that lulls, or the talent for improvisation (that is to say, the art of always having the last word), don’t insist, and give up trying to imitate Raoul Ruiz. He alone seems to have held onto the secret and the taste for such things. Since Welles fell silent and Buñuel departed for the Milky Way, there has been much talk of cinema’s return to fiction. But little has been said about the return of fiction itself (as one might talk of the return of the repressed or the return of Frankenstein). Ruiz’s films are stories, and they have an initiatory character. Finished, rigged, nested or malevolent, they possess a mad charm. Even if it took ten years (from the fall of Allende in 1973, which drove Ruiz from his native country, to the release, last year, of Three Crowns of the Sailor) for an audience, suddenly less negligible, to fall under that charm and march to the rhythm of that madness.

And this, despite Ruiz’s reputation for hermeticism and intellectualism, which only proves that when confronted with a true Latin American baroque, the French have a hard time admitting that their own tradition of labyrinth films, snakes and ladders and puzzle games, à la Robbe-Grillet and Resnais, is no match. That said (and said plenty; we promise we won’t say it again — next time we’ll treat Ruiz as already known, if not recognized), City of Pirates, which is something of a sequel to Three Crowns and recalls the half-successful The Territory (three films shot in Portugal) has its own tone, its private gimmicks, its dazzling accomplishments and its secret misfires. In short, a superb, dreamlike film, almost impossible to recount and totally bonkers.

Where to begin? Let’s return to the metaphor of the sleeper. We’re in the South, facing the sea, subject to all kinds of paradox. In her bedroom, Isidore is asleep. Yes, her asleep, because she’s a woman. Her mother, who seems hardly older than she is, wakes her, saying, ‘Are you sleeping, Isidore?’ ‘Tell me a story’, replies the small, childlike voice of Isidore. On a table nearby are a few banknotes left by her father: he has once again abused Isidore and has just paid her. This scene obviously gives no indication of the countless events that populate this City of Pirates, but in a sense, it contains all of Ruiz. Like Buñuel, he delights in the simplest logical permutations. Perversion of name and gender, of ages and loves, of before and after. Incest, a social tie turned into a play on words or a game of ‘Happy families’. Moreover, this ‘city’ is no more than an island, except it only has one inhabitant, who plays all the roles. When it comes to the comfort of identification (who’s who?), Ruiz is the least reliable of guides. He doesn’t believe in identity, only in cards. Forced ones, preferably.

Does Isidore kiss a carabinier, with the red shape of the kiss turning out to be that of the infamous pirate island? Does a man blow his brains out, with a piece of those brains, ejected along with a stream of blood, forming the shape of that island? At first, it’s all a riddle. By the end, there’s nothing left but piddle. In the meantime, the beautiful Isidore meets a little boy, but this cherub of evil is a master criminal. She becomes his fiancée and accomplice; she follows him to the island. She will return, yes, but in what state! We sense that the word most ill at ease in the Ruizian world is the verb ‘to be’. It’s clear that there’s nothing to gain in trying to recount City of Pirates. It’s clear that nothing is clear.

And yet. The more discouraged we become trying to identify who or what we’re seeing on screen (to the point that, by the end, we mentally cry out ‘truce!’ and verge on boredom), the more delight Ruiz takes in the appearance of things, in the material, comical weight they retain despite everything.

Two rotting corpses take a Durassian tea, a yawn is filmed from the point of view of the glottis, foreground details eat away at the image for no reason, a skull turns into a rugby ball: a whole branch of seventeenth-century Spanish painting, that of the vanitas and Valdés Leal’s Hieroglyphs of Life's End, is ready to come to life. Under the pressure of the verses.

Likewise, the more we give up trying to figure out what kind of film we’ve stumbled into (to the point that, around the halfway mark, fatigued and forsaken, we decide that enough’s enough), the more Ruiz excels at conjuring, with constant joy, the phantoms of American B movies, of Cocteau and English Hammer films. There is something of John Mohune from Lang’s Moonfleet in the little boy in City of Pirates, just as there is something of Tourneur (that of I Walked with a Zombie) in the hallucinatory tone of certain voices. As if, to apologise for the outlandishness of his tale, Ruiz were dressing it in the memory of stories in which, as children, we had so little trouble feeling at home.

The more we convince ourselves that language too has been trapped, the more Ruiz manages to make his actors speak in a very gentle tone, their voices carrying that hint of desolate sulkiness that makes even the simplest lines deeply moving. There are few filmmakers working in ‘French’ who have better captured the musicality of the French il était une fois, the tuning note that opens the door to all stories. There are few musicians who can concoct scores worthy of an ironic Hollywood Ravel better than Arriagada (Ruiz’s regular collaborator). Finally, the more we agree to follow Ruiz in his authorial madness, the more we have to admit that he is more and more assured in his choice of actors. In City of Pirates, Anne Alvaro (Isidore) and Melvil Poupaud (the little boy) are particularly good.

All of this, you’ll say, has a name. Yes: seduction. But it’s the form that is seductive. What remains is the content. Ruiz is not a hollow aesthete. There is a content to his stories, and I find it staggering. A content replete with filth and promiscuity that no poetry can completely silence. Filmmakers — as I said at the beginning (to provoke) — have almost all lost the sense of narrative. And so the only one who has preserved it intact (Ruiz) has made it his own personal folly. The viewer, ‘too Cartesian’, will be less disoriented by a film like City of Pirates if they make the effort to see Three Crowns of the Sailor (which is still showing in one cinema in Paris). In that film, Ruiz set out the conditions under which a story could be immortal. It needed fresh meat. That of the one who would tell of how he believed it had only ever happened to him. That of the one to whom the story would be told, and who would (wrongly) think it would never happen to him. Once immortal, the story endlessly returns. In City of Pirates, it returns first as an adventure film, second as a Cocteauvian theatre, third as a theological paper, and fourth as a dialogue between the dead. 

To live is to dream a story; to die is to tell it. Eternity remains for rotting.

First published in Libération on 25th February 1984. Reprinted in Ciné Journal, Seuil, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. Translated by Sam Warren Miell with minor changes. 

Pialat’s Dream (Van Gogh)

Second translation from the screening of the London ICA "Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema", with permission from the programers. 

Pialat’s Dream 

I've always thought Pialat’s dream (a painter’s dream, impossible in cinema) consisted in embarking on a film only on the condition that he could change all the collaborators along the way. So that, by the time the film was finished, he would be left alone with whatever had been deposited on the canvas that is the screen – after all the cries and crises, insults and separations. Pialat’s ‘vitalism’ is less a weighty ideology than a firm way of showing the door to those who forget that ‘real life is elsewhere’ and that a film is not a suffocating squat but above all a place of passage. We know the tragicomic episodes to which this stubborn voluntarism gave rise in the past. But how can we forget those adopted and ‘placed’ children who, from L’Enfance nue onwards, speak to the reality of this ‘true life’ (a bitch) and this ‘elsewhere’ (a place ones doesn't go through again)? In Van Gogh, Pialat’s dream has the vigilant serenity of something meant less as a war machine than as a call to order and a reminder of the state of things. For us too. And for the ‘character’ too. 

For if the characters around Dutronc/Van Gogh are so extraordinary, if we love them with a kind of astonished gratitude (‘so, it’s still possible?’), it’s because they bear the mark of one of the unwritten laws that define the cinema character: namely, that it’s someone who has other things to do. I love how, right from the start, the doctor Gachet is chiefly preoccupied with his schedule, just as I love the bistro owner who, before injuring her foot, runs her establishment with the tightest control. I love Théo, who doesn’t come to Auvers very often, just as I love the sublime drunks, father and son, who are always standing in the doorway for a ‘nightcap’. 

A cinema character is someone who never belongs to just one film, who exists in other spaces, in other Leibnizian ‘compossible’ stories. The most beautiful ‘secondary’ characters in cinema (and only the secondary ones are beautiful) are those who, between two appearances on screen, give the impression of having lived, got some fresh air, taken on colour, taken their time. They are like clouds in shots of the sky: not made to ‘stick around’. It’s for others to stay: the stars, the extras. 

Pialat has never stopped reminding everyone – actors, characters, critics and, for a long time, the audience itself – of the right and the duty to look elsewhere and see where they might be. In his work, this elsewhere is not another world – apart, behind or beyond – it is entirely domestic. This is why for me he evokes Ford’s seriousness – adopted children – as much as Renoir’s hedonism – screwed women. In Van Gogh, this obsessive taste for domesticity is nourished magnificently by the recreation of an era – already a century ago – when there was still manual work, visible gestures and incontrovertible time. To define characters not by their function in the script or their hierarchy in the cast, but by their use of time and the concrete gestures of their occupation, remains a moral approach to character. 

The gestures of the characters in Van Gogh wouldn’t move us, however, if they only had the merit of their archaeological quality. In Pialat, whether famous not, actors have the slightly worried, hurried precision (a ‘brushstroke’ effect, basically) of someone who knows they might at any moment be emptied from the film or the scene. Or who, conversely, might absent themselves for a while, disappear, or leave the film forever, taking off on a line of flight like the popular heroes of the old Darty Real ads who were always so happy to say: ‘Sorry, I’ve got an emergency!’ If work is part of real life, there’s always work elsewhere. The character is more of a worker (it’s the star who is ‘worked’, the figure is ‘to be worked’). 

It's time to return, at the end of this digression, to Godard’s vehemence. As his prole says in Passion (‘In principle, the workers are right!’), I will say: in principle, Jean-Luc is right. Throughout this text, haven’t I encountered allegories, emblems, stars, avatars, specimens and other friendly monsters – figures inherited from other, often formidable, species? These figures are not, I admit, cinema characters. Originating elsewhere, they tend to ‘remain’ in the here and now of the image, inhabiting it as both their sole justification and their funerary abode. These are visual entities that (no longer) possess the use of nor the key to the thickness of the shot, who don’t know how to be small then large, near then far, present then absent. Their destiny is instead to stand guard and give the signal – always the same – at the outer limit between the screen and the theatre, between the theatre and the street, and so on. They are essential to the visual spectacle, to the contract with the viewer, except that the art of cinema has less to do with this spectacle than with that real invention that was the concept of the shot.

It's in relation to this concept that it is possible to say that there are, after all, at the furthest limit, cinema characters. But precisely: at the furthest limit. At the furthest limit, meaning in the interval of the environment. Because they are subject to all kinds of comings of goings, fort and da, phantoms and encounters. Because they are passengers in all kinds of off-screen space. Because a film, as we’ve said, is a place of passage, like a sky through which pass clouds of characters and thunderbolts of off-screen space. This violence of off-screen space has a history of which we (lifelong members of the Cahiers flock) have been the most willing victims and the best reporters. It passed through the heritage – Eisenstein, Hitchcock and Bresson – and the inheritors – Godard, Straub. But there was in all of them a dimension of mystical jubilation, of sadomasochistic astonishment and militant terror that was in keeping with the times. And the times changed. 

Imagination

So, it is Pialat who brings back the old chestnut of off-screen space by the most modest of means: that of character. At the front of the stage, in the ‘footlights’ of the shot, there is his ‘hero’, the painter Van Gogh, except that Van Gogh is not a character, he is a free figure from our collective history, a dance for us to dance, if we are up to it. Pialat, for his part, doesn’t hesitate, and his stroke of genius was to choose Dutronc, the only figure in French showbiz who has always been incapable of indignity. And in the background of the scene, in the ‘attic’ of the shot, is sometimes the object of the painting, an object that can descend on us – like in the sublime ‘salut’ of the brothel scene – with a violence which belongs to painting, and which remains, in my opinion, almost entirely foreign to cinema. 

And between the two, living their lives and having more than just that to do, there are characters. In a slice of life, as it happens. Natural, naturist and naturalist, all at once. We must understand that we only ever encounter them there, in this intermediary zone, in the middle of the ford between the world and the film. They are all ‘secondary’, and we recognize them by their way of constantly marking their territory, as if they were testing, for each other and for us, the very possibility of the shot up to its plasticity. In this, they retain something of a badly concealed burlesque (recall the speed with which Chaplin and Keaton ‘appeared’ by running from the back of the image). 

Pialat is, along with Rohmer, the one who has extended to the character the properties of the ‘Janus bifrons’ inherited from Bazin: ontological realism therefore weight of off-screen space. In Van Gogh, he has done this all the more supremely because he has always been a unique filmmaker who, filming a star or his concierge in one and the same movement, needs no democratic superego to grant his concierge the right to be the imaginary star of another film, parallel and simultaneous.

And what does it matter if we never see this film that no one will make, since we’ve gone back to imagining? For a long time, cinema rested on the need to see. Then it rested on the ethical possibility of the gesture that allows us to see. It remains all of this. But the means of allowing us to see must not discourage us from what we ourselves give and, must not hinder the exercise of that very human – and very political – faculty that is imagination. 

Excerpt from ‘Journal de l'an nouveau’, Trafic, n° 2, Spring 1992.Translated by Sam Warren Miell with small changes.

New Translations on Tennis

Serge Daney also loved tennis and wrote about it, mainly in Libération. I just found two new translations of texts included in the posthumous collection L'amateur de tennis. 

Birth of the tennis aficionados

First published in Libération on 30th May 1984. Reprinted in L'amateur de tennis, P.O.L., 1992. Translation by Sam Warren Miell.

Borg-McEnroe, or the beauties of pure reason

First published in Libération on 7th July 1984. Reprinted in L'amateur de tennis, P.O.L., 1992. Translation by Sam Warren Miell.