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.
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