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visual storytelling in modern film has been replaced by the routine of a star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.
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
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).