Pictorial 56

The Hunter

Apparently French films are now comfortable establishment workhorses for aging actors (with the odd cameo by Kristen Stewart, natch) and have completely lost their razor’s edge. So now I know why Gerard Depardieu became Russian. The last French film I remember was his namesake, Gerard Lauzier’s Mon Pere, Ce Heros (1991 – the French version, natch, not the English language namesake C5)

Films are visual storytelling, and Lauzier is a direct descendent of Godard and Chabrol of 60s New Wave evanescence.  Perhaps not totally surprising as he is a comic artist by trade (Alternates 6.) I mentioned Kristen Stewart, and her latest film happens to be Seberg, a piece set in the post-Breathless (Godard) days when Seberg became involved with a Black Panther, and performed a black power salute.

While the story is fascinating, the film is not, and it’s clear Stewart is there to sell it on the basis of a neat doppelganger.

The idea of visual storytelling in modern film has been replaced by the routine of a star that sells a bad film. Going back to Mon Pere, Ce Heros, it is quite understated and the Mauritius background does a lot of the work, sultry silhouettes, rock pools and beach retreats a la Tati. The story, the scenery, the surroundings and characters merging into one thing; realism as far as it goes, as against merely seeing actors going through their paces like the blatant copyists they are.

Reality   in the New Wave tradition of the 60s is location merging into characters; the camera as the witness to the merging of scenery with story. This happened in the Paris of Breathless and the darker interior Paris of Alphaville.

It happened in Seberg films such as Le Route de Corinth (Chabrol) and the English language Bonjour Tristesse, set in a sea resort similar to Mon Pere, Ce Heros.

So, what has happened to French film since 1991? Have they joined the global capitulation to the actor as workhorses for an establishment of text, and not visual language?

This was Godard’s view (the last I heard as he’s gone a bit quiet for 50 years or so). Visual language is essentially the physical world; that is, the real world that we see. It’s why the stars (in the sky) make such good storytellers as they stay in position, enabling Man to weave spectacular narratives on their designs.

If this physical world (of the turning Earth) is naive and not complex, that makes it visual, because animals and humans have simple, symmetrical shapes. What we see in the sky at night is the visual simplicity of a symmetrical universe. The pictures that we project against the celestial background. The pictures that match bodily symmetry to the stars.

The physical universe (of bodies and stars) is our universe because it is naïve and simple. Its rhythms are the rhythms the body can be attuned to (starmythworld).

In myth, this correspondence of body to the cosmos is everywhere apparent. When Ymir was usurped and killed by the sons of Borr, his body became our world.

His flesh became earth

His blood the sea

His bones the mountains

His teeth, cliffs and crags

His skull, the heavens and vaulted Asgard

His brain floating clouds

The gods dismembered the cosmic giant and made of him the cosmos. From his rotting flesh, carrion-feeders thrived which Odin changed into Trolls, industrious subterranean inventors (ring any bells?) The Mythology of Sleep, Kari Hohne.

Ymir – see Pictorial 55 – is associated with the root Gemini (twin), the same root found in Yima (Persian) and Yama (Indian).

This twin root can be confusing, but it seems to be owing to the androgyny of these entities, who produce offspring from their own bodies; so have male and female elements. They are always associated in Indo-European myth with a primeval cow, the source of life (and still in India).

I’d best pause there, as you may be wondering what the connection is to French New Wave? Well, myth makes sense of the natural world through alloforms: matching elements of the body to nature. It’s essentially a visual language of the world of action (clouds, cliffs, sea).

This is very close to Godard’s idea of image over text, as in

LE MEPRIS

Godard explicitly makes myth (Poseidon here) the subject of his films to subvert the “analytical man” (here Paul) of neurotic modernism. Modern Man is in his head, and this applies equally to modern films, which are all text which actors act, as opposed to the locales and surroundings being merged into the story (as here).

I could literally pick any of Godard’s early films and the same would be so. In short, at the moment we do not inhabit a mythical alloform of body; it’s more as if we exist in the brain of Ymir, the floating clouds. Not even the skull, as that has a craggy form.

It’s a parallel reality of scripted routines – DNA, algorithms – that resembles a hall of mirrors, run by acolytes of the original sorcerers (Darwin, Newton).