It pleases me very much to be able to claim on this, the last day of September, that the month has been a stimulating and rewarding one, though most all of them are nowadays. If September was not more rewarding than is customary at this point, it is at least deserving of special distinction on account of its having offered me the opportunity to attend (in a manner of speaking) two film festivals within the context of a drastically transformed landscape. Planet X, Year COVID. Select selections of the Toronto International Film Festival were earlier this month made available for the first time to Canadians far and wide, and I partook of six comically costly streams. One of them, Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple, now my favourite of those I dialed in from Toronto, subsequently became announced as a late edition to the Calgary International Film Festival, which commenced Thursday of last week, and I got to see Tamhane’s film a second time Monday night, this time in a theatre, enjoying it approximately a thousandfold. Much more can and perhaps at some point will be written about all this. Of the just-over-fifty films I have watched for the first time or revisited in September, only fourteen have been festival streamers or live festival theatricals (with two more of the latter on the docket for later today). One of the most critical not-festival-related cinematic felicities this month was the arrival of the new Criterion Blu-ray of Claire Denis’ monumental 1999 film Beau travail, finally available for convenient serial revisitation in the form of a 4K transfer presented at 1080p resolution. I have been a huge Claire Denis fan since a little before Beau travail came out, but for whatever reason I did not have the opportunity to experience the theatrical presentation of her most widely-regarded film during its original run near the end of the 20th century. It would certainly have played Ottawa. Perhaps I simply wasn’t in town. At any rate, upon scoping the Blu-ray, it becomes exceedingly apparent how utterly insufficient were the previous transfers of the film I have had occasion to view, that featured on the 2002 New Yorker DVD most especially. I have long prized Denis and her regular cinematographer Agnès Godard as the finest team in the business, and I am gratified to have finally been able to properly appraise the scale of their considerable achievement(s) on Beau travail. Many will be aware that Denis has a bit of a reputation as both a tight-lipped and an intermittently brusque interviewee. I recall not too terribly long ago a Facebook friend having shared a profile on the great director in which she, Denis, disparages critics and film theorists, only to have many responding to the post, some themselves critics and theorists, express, predictably, their ire. Touchy people. Fuck ‘em. Though Denis will regularly talk about the primacy of the human body in her cinema, she will likewise often become annoyed with commentators who discuss the sensual or corporeal nature of her films. Her issue—and I believe it more than merely legitimate—is with the reductive language brought to bear by those who can only manage to espy a bare minimum of the proffered spectrum. And utilitarian language, a bit of a hassle at the best of time, is not ever going to cut it. Otherwise you would get into the blocks of language racket as opposed to the blocks of image-sound one. Note how the great Robert Bresson, master filmmaker and precept man, puts it in an interview with Michel Ciment shortly after the release of what would prove to be Bobby B.’s final film: “I seek not description but vision. A sense of motion comes from building a series of visions and fitting them together. It is not really sayable in words. Increasingly, what I am after—and with L'argent it became almost a working method—is to communicate the impressions I feel. It is the impression of a thing and not the thing itself that matters. The real is something we make for ourselves. Everyone has their own. There is the real and there is our version of it.” Yes, Denis and Agnès Godard have a special capacity to capture the body and its movements, but they do so from the position of a holistic discipline of poiesis fielded by and within resonance. They are in synch with bodies, with minds, with spirits, and with a tradition in and beyond the arts. The work is primarily intuitive (impressions, renderings), and the intelligence is an intelligence of and through the cinema, not an intelligence of finessed discourse and exculpatory explanations. Denis makes great cinema that is unmistakable as anything other than cinema. If she is attracted to the haptic—the feel of a leather jacket, say, or the smell of wet hair—she is likewise attracted to Herman Meville, whose Billy Budd is the key jumping off point for Beau travail, William Faulkner, whose Sanctuary serves the same function in Les salauds (2013), and Clarice Lispector, whose The Hour of the Star I believe is being consciously homaged in the final sequence of Un beau soleil intérieur (2017), a film initially undertaken as a way of reimagining the taxonomies of Roland Barthes’ A Lover's Discourse. The literary enters into the cinema of Claire Denis by way of a perversion assuming the modality of something analogous to biochemical adaptation. When commentators insist on zeroing in on corporeality, sexuality, and sociality to the exclusion of all other considerations, they cut off the very rich poetics and the entire domain of metaphysics, Denis’ cosmicity, even when she is so bold and unambiguous as to set a film (2018’s High Life) in outer fucking space. Take as a not-especially-egregious example the scholar Judith Mayne, author of a 2005 book on the filmmaker, who has provided a video essay for the Criterion release of Beau travail. A key example of Mayne’s tendency toward unsatisfactory reduction can be found in her assessment of the film in question’s bravura opening sequence, a series of fragments or a montage drawing together a plurality of space-times and regimes of semiosis. Pay special attention to the manner in which Mayne addresses a single critical shot which superimposes the journal of Denis Lavant’s character Galoup, source of Beau travail’s intermittent voiceover, and a shot of the undulating sea. Mayne: “The rippling sea water suggests both calm and potential turbulence. Galoup’s writing, from his place of exile in Marseilles, with the water superimposed on it, suggests that his journal is an idealized recollection of the Legionaries as well as an attempt to understand his actions.” While there is doubtlessly something to “calm and potential turbulence,” Mayne's concluding assertion regarding “idealized recollection” and an “attempt to understand […] actions,” is psychologizing hogwash that reflects a film culture no longer interested in or able to take into account metaphysics or poetics. The superimposition immediately hearkens back to the cinema of Jean Epstein, a pioneer for whom both superimposition and the sea assume their respective places of primacy as pertains to a cinematic metaphysics, as in the 1928 Poe adaptation La chute de la maison Usher, where the deceased beloved has been reconstituted into a presiding planetary vitalism, most forcefully manifested by wind and tide, themselves expressive phenomenal manifolds of humbling scale reflecting both Kant’s concept of the sublime and Henri Bergson’s concept of élan vital. The sea is always élan vital within a certain field of French poetics. The great many cutaways to waves rolling into shore or of the horizon line of sea and sky in the films of Jean-Luce Godard, especially those made in collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, should always evoke Bergson and Epstein for us just as they evoke the intersubjective heave of Virginia Woolf's The Waves. Judith Mayne speaks in her video essay of Denis Levant’s “pent up energy and release” or how Michel Subor is “solid and wise” or “quiet and solid,” and she believes she is only talking about bodies and gender, not of the universe and comportment within the universe, not of élan vital, drives that are merely provisionally localized in the body, the blockages and flows. Mayne can express how the explosion of Levant’s Galoup into aleatory dance at the conclusion of the film is presaged moments before by a lingering shot (famous and astonishing) which captures a vein pulsing in Levant’s arm, but it would never for a moment dawn on her that this too is of the same elemental stuff as are the sea and the wind. It is not for nothing that it is Galoup’s notebook that is superimposed over the sea (or vice versa). The notebook and sea situate the instantiation of the creative and/or reflective act, the vital force married inextricably to poiesis. This is the territory of Gaston Bachelard, author both of Water and Dreams and The Poetics of Space. Early in the latter book, Bachelard draws special attention to a formulation from Pierre-Jean Jouve: “Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form.” That is what Denis is figuring-forth with her superimposition and it is the work that her cinema has more broadly taken on. For Bachelard, the poetic soul “upsets the plans of the usual psychological explanations,” and rests in what Denis’ superimposition is already proclaiming: “infinite quality of the intimate dimension,” Bachelard later expanding this to qualify that “intimate space and exterior space keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth.” Attention is paid to an “astonishing variety of uses” to which Baudelaire puts the word “vast” and how the poet’s reverie “gathers the universe together around and in an object.” The image for Bachelard is a product of the imagination, not a photographic reproduction. The images in Claire Denis’ work with Agnès Godard are photographic reproductions of the imagination’s images in a context where those original images, those of the imagination and its poetics, have to be a product of lived encounters, a dance performed, largely intuitively, by a collaborative unit. This is why these films are more than merely corporeality, sexuality, and sociality. They are more properly a gathering together of the universe around and in themselves. A curious counterpoint can be found in an interesting though not especially strong film I streamed on Friday (care of the Calgary International Film Festival). Lawrence Michael Levine’s new film Black Bear, a good deal more prosaic than the Denis though obviously more than a little enamoured of its inventiveness, is a brokeback film whose two opposed halves are intended to produce a dialogic synthesis via their incorporation within a single field of sense. At first we have a very recognizable indie template, three people squaring off in a remote residence, eminently palatial. These three are large on smart-talk, low on credibility, sharing as such the attributes and the defects of their writer-director. Black Bear pulls an about-face at roughly the halfway point and the palatial residence is now configured within a new self-reflexive regime complete with a corresponding slippage of personages. The eponymous bear will show up in the late going, an agent of something like tenuous metaphysical interlacing, perhaps somewhat similar to the African woman first seen hawking her own rugs in Beau travail, originally situated curiously outside of the governing schematic, who returns later on to minister to the nearly dead Sentain (played by Grégoire Colin). Black Bear is idea-heavy (as in "high concept") and one senses that it has lost much of its promise at each stage of its development, entering into problems on the page, ultimately losing all or most of its moxie in production. It is mostly fatuous. It is pretty clumsy. Its intelligence is about tricks not about the things in the world or the frame that worlds. What is curious here, though, is that Black Bear has ended up back at the page, the final sequence endearing itself to me as such. We end with the film’s star Aubrey Plaza returning to her desk, opening her notebook, and commencing to write what we can only imagine will be the film we have just watched. The closing credits are themselves superimposed over lined notebook pages. The film has gone off the rails and probably never had much of a chance, too full of hot air from nearly to word go, but in returning to the page it returns to the site where it once experienced the intensifying onslaught of its own generative promise. The page is the instantiation of the creative act. The page is the universe. The page, to hijack a precept from Judith Mayne’s Beau travail video essay, is the neutral face of Greta Garbo. It promises. It receives our projections.
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