Late Bresson [Re-Presentation]

 

The only things that matter are invisible.
-Robert Bresson

The Great Voice Par Excellence of Cinécriture, this Robert Bresson, so one supposes we listen to him, no? When I delivered a seminar thing on Bresson as a grad student, some piddler in the cheap seats [from some whole other postsecondary] asked why some of us gushing novitiates like to take these dead French patriarchs at their convoluted word, quoting them lengthily in a conference context while we're at it, as though the Great Strawman's interpretation of His own work could ever be sounder than anyone else's. He wasn't wrong, this piddler, but I'm no fool, and I certainly had not in the paper I delivered quoted Bresson interpreting the meaning of his own work. Naturally, I had quoted Bresson from interviews and from his absolutely invaluable Notes on the Cinematograph, a book of sequential precepts/meditations undoubtedly informed by an abiding lifelong fellow-feeling for logician, mathematician, and theologian Blaise Pascal, he of the para-immortal Pensées, and as such a book, Bresson's, that could only ever really be a discourse on method—or merely provisional [sk]etchings with that general thrust to them. Descartes isn't the opinions about the Discours de la Méthode. He's the method itself, essentially, right? At least insofar as you or I might act upon a call to works. In the conference context I may also have quipped that, like it or not, one doesn't do academic papers on Hitler neglecting to acknowledge Mein Kampf. I am not one to throw down the indefensible Hitler card unless I can do it with a high degree of novelty. 

Bresson himself, in dialogue with Michel Delahaye and Jean-Luc Godard in 1967: "You must leave the spectator free. And at the same time you must make yourself loved by him. You must make him love the way in which you render things. That is to say: show him things in the order and in the way that you love to see them and to feel them; make him feel them, in presenting them to him, as you see them and feel them yourself, and this, while leaving him a great freedom, while making him free."

Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (Robert Bresson, 1956)

Keith Reader, author of a relatively worthy book on Bresson, part of the "French Film Directors" series from Manchester University Press, argues that Bresson's 1956 film Un condamné à mort s'est échappé cannot be thought of as a ‘Resistance film’ because “All we know of the activities that have led Fontaine, the protagonist, to be arrested and condemned to death is that he is alleged to have blown up a railway bridge." Okay, again, maybe true...meaningless, really; it can be spun around something near as many ways as some wiseass can spin it. What you are actually reading is Keith Reader doing the tiresome micropolitics of his moment such that he can claim that a film about a French prisoner of war who will stop at nothing to escape the Germans is not a 'Resistance film' because it is not a genre film about insurrectionary bravado and martial array set during the Second World War [this is a bad thing?]. Okay, a man is going to escape. This the film tells us in its French title. Fontaine has been condemned to death, and we really have no cause to imagine the Germans consider him the equivalent of something like a petty criminal. Plus, of course, the movie is about one hundred minutes of one man actively escaping, using all the resources of a sometimes stationary and sometimes animate sensorium, itself intercomplexed with the world around it at levels social, molecular, and more nebulously subliminal, in order to actively escape, which approximates the zenith of resistance for a man in Fontaine's position, at least as far as your humble Weirdbuckle's concerned. Wherever your sectarian bent has you placing your chips upon the felt, my friend, I assure you that a resistance is in process. Part of what bears special note here pertains also to the extraordinary sensorial tension Bresson's film creates and then retains for its duration, a fact testified to by many a contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous commentator of distinction, including Susan Sontag, who also said that Bresson films prior to '62's Procès de Jeanne d'Arc were "dialectical" and that future films by him in colour were "unthinkable," both of these constituting flamboyantly erroneous declarations. My thoughts with respect to why Un condamné à mort s'est échappé is believed by many to be nerve-racking, white-kuckle viewing, or some kind of approximation, has a lot more to do with stuff completely unrelated to knowing who the right bad guys are and the best means to wallop same, but rather sensory-motor responsivity in a shared system, viewer + movie [novelty unto itself!] bound up in the same kind of intensive business, curiously, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze sees at work in famous whip and fur fanatic Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. What becomes essential is waiting or suspense," writes Deleuze in the essay "Re-Presentation of Masoch," "as a plenitude, as a physical and spiritual intensity." It were almost as though those invisible things we have Bresson telling us at the outset are the only that matter are confirmed by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch by way of Deleuze and perverse means we could not and probably should not have expected [yay!]. Of course, then we have Deleuze doing far more good in a very short passage from Cinema 2: The Time-Image than all the formidable no-damn-good done by Paul Shrader's risible Transcendental Style in Film. As so many before him have, Deleuze cannot help but zero in on the doors/passageways and the disembodied human hands: "The hand, then, takes on a role in the image which goes infinitely beyond the sensory-motor demands of the action, which takes the place of the face itself for the purpose of affects, and which, in the area of perception, becomes the mode of construction of space which is adequate to the decisions of the spirit." Everybody is always going back to Pascal and Jansenism when it comes to Bresson—a broad tendency has him as an ascetic Catholic in a vaunted tradition, which he is and isn't—such that Deleuze's "decisions of the spirit" equates-out to religious faith or its ghost, when what the indefatigably logical Deleuze is actually pinpointing is an invisible site of actions and reactions expressed through cinematic means incorporating a visual focus on the business of hands. Because Bresson's montage or anti-montage [dialogic/poetic montage] so insistently prizes the affectivity of the invisible agent in the dis-unified bodily fragment, and because the intensive relations it establishes are meant to be felt as renderings, the spiritual and the erotic and the emotional, in point of fact, all sort of end up belonging to this territory of "the decisions of the spirit." Decisions are actions and reactions and chain-reactions: a conditional chemistry of the deluged and the effortfully angling [The Book of Genesis].

Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)

L'argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)

All those words and gestures you've invented are so insignificant they're humiliating. God doesn't reveal himself through mediocrity. 
- Female Parisian student in church forum, as subtitled, in Robert Bresson's Le diable probablement (1976)  

Darn near everyone with a basic knowledge of film history and audio-visual grammar will deduce from the experience of a Bresson film that its director is very often focused on the kinds of stuff he usually claims to be focused on, this largely a matter of shot selection and cutting, producing renderings judged successful or wanting on the grounds of a quality of the just so or as I'd experience or would like to experience it. Poetic, associative assembly of carefully selected images and sounds [the latter so calibrated as to employ a style of minimalism almost outlandishly maximalist, this a characteristic shared with the later sound films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, to be sure]. One additional bugbear that is I suppose somewhat amusing to me has to do with those reductive commentators—commencing with oft-pedantic French film critics of the day and persisting in the woeful Academy of ours—who want to separate the early Sontag-dialectical-or-whatever Bresson from the later, earlier "unthinkable," colour Bresson. One thing that can universally be expected here: a line of division drawn between the early Bresson in thrall to Pascal, and a later version of the guy, presumably VERY SPECIFICALLY augmented, who is subsequently in thrall to Fyodor Dostoevsky. People who have made such claims are universally people who have dutifully taken notes in the existentialism lectures in preparation for the existentialism exam. However, for a sensible person of learning, Dostoevsky is just as much "an ascetic Christian in a vaunted tradition" as are Pascal and Bresson, if we wish to pivot things such that that's where we've got them set up. The professor told you Dostoevsky was an existentialist and then provided you the pacifying bullet points as definitive proof. I skipped class that day, and for me Fyodor will always be a brilliant and highly baroque author of fictions as well as a gambling addict, womanizer, rail-thin heavy drinker, sufferer of unthinkable trauma, and lifelong epileptic who one might say complained of holy visions. For a man like Dostoevsky, who was used to sitting real still to see if something awful might be about to happen to him, a doorway, threshold, or liminal space might well be a bottomless pit of annihilating terror, or somedays it may just flicker and hover before the vision suspiciously a moment...before the ground comes out altogether. Deleuze, as we have noted above, connects the "decisions of the spirit" to "modes of construction of space." The construction of space, always an arrangement of extremely novel fragments, invariably calls to mind doorways, passageways, and thresholds, at least as far as concerns the major films of Robert Bresson, from about the time of Un condamné à mort s'est échappé in '56—his first perfect film!—to 1983 and L'argent, his final film, the quantum physics update of an old Tolstoy story about a forged bill of tender and the total incomprehensible hell it unleashes. Robert Bresson never called the four films he made between 1951 and 1962 a 'prison cycle.' Other folks did that for him. Still, aside from the doors and thresholds et al., the "construction of space" in Bresson has very frequently been a matter of building prisons [or buildings as prisons] and efforts of various kinds, however inept or hapless, toward individual "unjailing" [to appropriate a lovely expression of Dot Jaggers', she the literary creation of the great Paul West.]

A DOOR IS NOT JUST A DOOR

Let us take note of the phenomenology of threshold, as encapsulated in the brilliant opening of a short story by the great Patricia Highsmith, admiring also the perhaps crypto-Bressonian title, "I Despise Your Life": "A hole is a hole is a hole, Ralph was thinking as he stared at the keyhole. The key was in his hand, ready to stick in, but still he hesitated. He could just as well ring the doorbell! He was expected."

AND WHAT IS THERE OUT THERE NOT CAPABLE OF IMPRISONING?  

Lancelot du Lac (Robert Bresson, 1974)

Le diable probablement (Robert Bresson, 1977)

Two kinds of greater presiding sequence in the cinema of Robert Bresson: 1) Sequence and Sequencing of Prisons; 2) Sequence and Sequencing of Suicides.

Considered as narrative complexes and narrative systems, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé, Pickpocket, Procès de Jeanne d'Arc, and L'argent appear to completely hinge on prisons, whereas Mouchette, Une femme douce, and Le diable probablement hinge on suicide. If you are emotionally primed to get it, you invariably do: these are movies about people who condemn in no uncertain terms and want out of whatever they're in. Charles of Le diable probablement doesn't even want to die! Even Hamlet's Great Solipsistic Question is too stupid for him to countenance!! The first two Robert Bresson films I saw and fell in love with as a teenager were Un condamné à mort s'est échappé and Le diable probablement, a fact which we may well imagine explains my natural tendency to want to read the oeuvre transversally, across a dividing line incarnated out of habit and its ferric dust; the discourse, the dreck, the wreck. Let us please kind of look at a basic overview. We have seen no elevation to the Kingdom of God in the cinema of Robert Bresson, but there have been endless prospective fliers and their innumerable little and less-little attempts to fly or flee. Escape from prison and suicide in the cinema of Robert Bresson, just as is the case in the world I share today with all manner of phenomena, earn their equivalence in the general laboratory of going concerns. If the title of Le diable probablement doesn't tell us the end of the movie the way Un condamné à mort s'est échappé does, we don't have to wait long; the grim denouement is dished at the outset in a newspaper mock-up complete with unambiguous headline and photograph of our handsome and we now know very dead protagonist-antagonist. Equivalence, I'm telling you! What's the difference between Fontaine and Jost escaping from Nazi confinement and Charles paying his humourless and stupid junky acquaintance to shoot him dead in Pere Lachaise cemetery? Fontaine is still semi-fucked; Charles would appear to be at rest. That is an emotional truth [no be all, no end all], like it or not. Because of the order in which I first came to the two films, I was immediately going to notice how the discreet but very specific shot of Charles and his amigo pistola hopping down from the retaining wall into Pere Lachaise unquestionably echoes the final sequences of Un condamné à mort, nor that in both movies, the sequencing having slid into a bit of turbulence, the abyssal horrors of some dumb eternity are addressed head-on with the not-inconsiderable consolations of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, not known to make any other kind of sense to most folks other than that which is [or those that are] felt.

Satinal Notionalism

They dug a body out of Benjamin Franklin’s garden of profits and inspected it at the rectory once the coroner arrived from his mutton. The vicar prepared coffee for the ambassadors who waited out by the paddocks humming estrangement directionless 

in the tumbling of mid-afternoon 

drunk as it was on the wharf

their coats were all properly stamped with the official seal of September and affixed with regions unexplored— 

terres 

inconnu.

Were they perhaps curious about the body being inspected inside the rectory, out across the charcoal? Inside, they undress the corpse and under the cave of ribs discover a parasite, suggesting to them that shortly before its death the body had to have been infected with aestuans animus & that the wise gardener had merely taken the necessary precautions pertaining to disposal in such cases. They all retire to the innkeeper’s for grog and ‘bacca.

Sometimes there remain traces of extension, in or out, the bubosa offers a gift of water rushes bound three by three, received by the parson and the minister with flubs and misses of Byzantine staccato, an array of meat thrown into the potluck for good measure, sometimes, weather permitting, a Bolshevik is devoured even before the main course has had time to rise above the yawning proscenium into line of light, an offering to savages of all colours and classes.

Benjamin Franklin is asleep by the fireplace and has spilled his Irish coffee on a stack of memos and matchbooks left by the bearded woman and her strong man. When Benjamin Franklin is asleep the secret service gather around the garden waiting for the sounds of speech in the Rocky Mountain sky where words cannot hide and where a whisper is carried for many miles in an inconsolably many directions. There will be no talk of Mohammed nor his Koran. There will be no talk of the thirteenth Dalai Lama or of textiles going to the French in Indochina. There will above all be no talk of any isms whatever, not during these dangerous hours when America lies asleep beneath Canada, asleep from brainstem down to the toes & ultimately the soil.

In the winter of jihad, at the dawn of the Muslim raids, things will no doubt be different for the German Nationalists. There will be less time for sleep or tenderness under blanketed youth. We will surely defend the garden, for the secret service has already seen to it, in a manner of speaking, the very manner of all our speaking. But our struggles may prove fruitless because in the winter of jihad one must renunciate [yip! yip!] the heathen with the sabre and then the self with the same, the garden will fill with bodies, and the profits will flourish on the Vines of Franklin.  

Lenora is in the garden, confused to finds no pansies or infidels neither, and her dress glistens on the haunches, knowing that growth in the third world will never be divorced from an excess of American seed—that if Benjamin Franklin doesn’t wake up soon she may very well have to sell plasma to the Soviets for a stale Baguette and a glass of wheatgerm. Her face looks to the ground and droops awfully, a waif-like dispossession as though sucked at indifferently by the earth, gleaning, waiting to be devoured by the plants the package said would take only five years to grow, & that was fifteen years ago—around the time Mr. Franklin fell fast asleep by the fire.

It is the hour of birdcalls and Lenora finds the hole in the garden of profits out of which the body was removed only hours before. The mud moves slowly under her, very disgusting imprints and a sort of magnesia pulse back, and she lays against the mud slowly slipping down the ridges into the empty grave without a whisper of prayer, vines pricking at her spine and chutes entering beneath her fingernails, a levy breaking as tear ducts creak and coo & there are worms.

The ambassadors, prone against the fence, thinking they see George Marshall approaching the garden across the charcoal with hammer and sickle sewn to his cowboy shirt, wearing also blue jeans, as the jets mount the crest and duck slenderly under clouds apologizing profusely with an excuse me sir, beg your pardon or quite sorry, I’m sure. At liftoff the crop is thrashed to death and the garden strains to hold itself to the earth, this the very earth that devoured Lenora before she could even close her eyes to the shadow of the Wermach tree.

The German ambassador receives a premonition on high and follows the fences of the pen back to the engine room to receive his chrome lunch of grease and further orders. The Russian ambassador remains by the fence staring off at the bronzed stable doors and shudders to realize that there is agriculture in the Americas and not just factories. Beneath the mountains set to clocks biologic there's no thought of Lenora or the body left to the vicar in the rectory, nobody and nothing is swayed by the snoring of Mr. Franklin, there is no meat or egg in the church for the laity, and General George Marshall done gone & drunk all the wine.

The free world invades Franklin’s lucid dream of a ten shilling note and seethes in the basements of the estate, under the garden, the floorboards bulging like exploding veins beneath the elm and lowborn carpet, while a geyser stirs at the base of the stem of a reckoning. And soon the reader, just in time for winter, will awake in the arms of the vicar, panting on the table, alive despite this frozen end of September & very lengthy burial in the garden of profits.
 

Que la bête [humaine] meure Pt. 1

 What we see on the screen is not the murderous anger of Lantier, but that of Jean Gabin.
- André Bazin

“Perhaps one third of the films might fail to meet cost,” writes scholar Colin Crisp in the practically mandatory The Classic French Cinema: 1930-1960, angling into an overview of the perilous situation in Paris betwixt the 20th century’s two major collective conflagrations…“and in a fragmented industry up to a third of the production companies would crash.” Don’t know about you, but this sounds like exactly my kind of mess.

Or does it?

Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and Gustave Flaubert were the key 19th century salon culture literary eminences. We can introduce others—Balzac and Baudelaire and Symbolists and bomb-throwers of variable leaning—but you are doubtlessly able to see how things might very quickly get out of hand...

Zola and Flaubert especially become institutions in ways for which they are ill-suited and toward the reality of which they cannot help but become increasingly ill-disposed. To become institutionalized is one thing, and no small amount of relief can be shaken loose my means of boorishness, but to become institutionalized as an institution might well be too gross...trop trop...

These men, like Byron, are happiest when they fly the coop and luxuriate afterward in the retelling.

5e Arrondissement Paris, December 23, 2021

    Émile Zola wrote the 1890 novel La Bête humaine, a characteristically 'naturalist' tale of woe recounting the unidirectional decline and hereditarily predetermined crackup of locomotive engineer and alcoholic sex-murderer Jacques Lantier, to be played in the 1938 Jean Renoir film version—to be released pretty darn near the straight-up eve of invasion and harried flight, nary a reputable leg to stand on—by superhuman proletarian megastar Jean Gabin. Naturally, Gabin's parents were showbiz/underworld people, and colourful shirkers, thus, more than they were any kind of salt of the earth. His proletarian bonafides are earned through close contact and fraternization, doubtlessly, but he works his wrists like a dancer, in the manner of Chaplin, his eyes dancing and flirting too, especially when fishing for a little dollop of pity, and he's definitely both man and woman, in spite of [or just to bloody well spite!] the brawn and the ungentle manliness, the elements that will draw direct comment, routinely, as though that's the way to dispel the lower, lunar organics of the too-dashing beheld.         

 Zola's original novel appears not long after Nietzsche goes catatonic. 

Part of the larger and, to me, increasingly in'eresting [increasingly in'eresting to oldening me] point Colin Crisp is making early in The Classic French Cinema, is that a condition of international embroilment(s) already looks like war and destiny and a few other daunting things before it's making anything like that sort of sense to the people it is in the process of swallowing up whole. Foreign owned patents engendered a problematic situation in France, wherein competing interests delimited a specific, grim topography, much of this amounting to considerable, shall we say, influence being exerted upon French film production by German and American consortiums. 'Sound technology' patents, for example, underhandedly forced French production companies to pay for the right to shoot sound films; eventually Paramount Studios and the German company Tobis Film penetrate directly into French film 'domestic' production. French public and private life are surely what they are though one shouldn't necessarily be sure about that, and then of course we must hold this imaginary on-the-ground French reality in direct contrast with the economic interests of foreign enterprises, whatever we might imagine ourselves imagining those to be, such that there might then emerge a clear picture of how particular styles and modes of filmmaking come to act themselves out in the streets, studios, and warehouses of wherever specifically we wish to go with all this. Piece of cake, no? And guess what? Films in France that were set-up by Paramount were famously crap, always, basically, whereas those shot by Tobis did good business, impressed a lot of the right people, and may very well, Crisp implies, have continued being pumped-out as a matter of course if not for both the occupation and the results of the depression, which made the funnelling of French money into Germany rather problematic, on and off, not that French people weren't making movies under German supervision during the occupation (to the subsequent postwar detriment of many of these "collaborators"). Other national interests maybe aren't any different from 'other interest per se,' but as a progressive and unrelenting factor in the development of French cinema, these cross-lateral formations and wheeling-dealings start to make a real active picture of active complexivity making use of military and industry collaterally. Concentrated subdivisions [and subdividings] of social and economic bodies and/or structures, viewed as bad faith reductions committed inside a working laboratory of dynamic activities, is no go. I am not going to let the metaphysics escape off my history like some kind of steam. But neither am I inclined to cut too sharply the other way.        

Renoir's Bête '38. A title card gives us the dish; here's the English on it: “Sometimes he had the feeling of suffering for all the fathers and mothers, for the generations of alcoholics who had rotted his blood.” Tell me about it. It's my story. Although, also...try telling it to the judge. It may largely be license taken on the part of the subtitl'r, but I intuit a good deal more irony in Renoir's slant on this material than I do Zola's. Right from the get go. Renoir's a good libertarian-collectivist who loves nothing more than holding court at table, and his movie isn't about to grant any real credence to any idea of poor people's blood being irrevocably poisoned however many generations back, this being a conscientious man of the Popular Front who doubtlessly thinks of himself as much a good social scientist as the next especially extraordinary fella with a gullet full of good grog. His is what we might call a more broadly Marxist lay of the land.

There can be no doubt: Lantier isn't exactly Lantier, though, not anymore, because he is very obviously and monochromatically now the larger-than-life movie star Jean Gabin, as noted by André Bazin, our always-observant Man of Reverence on the scène. Lantier's terminal trajectory has more to do with the inevitable fate of the Jean Gabin "character type" in extremis than it does any E. Zola confabulation. The track delimits the course, men of low status feed the insatiable furnace. Control is extended outward in every direction and meets adversity with versatility. The character is not under control of the actor, the actor is not entirely under the control of himself or his director, and the complexivity of control is in a general way diffused, everywhere, such that intentional things and robotic/mechanical things are at clumsy odds with one another and themselves. The movie puts its doomed characters on the one-way-ticket path. It's a big part of what would come to be called Poetic Realism, a phenomenon that, along with German Expressionism, would help produce a tertiary phenomenon only to be known as Film Noir after the fact.     

Fire surrounded by darkness. Strife & darkness & light. Elaborated upon. Elaborate. Throughout. Imminent violence is put off peripherally in a darkness. Camera dollies backward. Engine room of locomotive. 

LOCO-MOTIVE | NO WAY, NO HOW

Two filthy engineers are shovelling coal into the fire, feeding it and adding to the strife. Renoir cuts to a shot of the wheels of the train, accompanied on the soundtrack by the thundering sound of the loco. The film proceeds to cut back and forth between the workers shovelling coal and communicating in a series of brusque, unintelligible gestures, with shots where the photographer's rig's been fastened, apparently, to the side of the speeding train, creating much tension, much strife. It immediately conditions us because maybe this is the condition of conditions. Our point of view, in a sense, is being linked both to Gabin/Lantier as he shovels coal into the fire and to the train itself.

Speed forward, out of control. 

So now: both Gabin and the train, and the gestural web, the careening interlacings. Many graphic links between elements overheated and approaching threshold. Straight line. Momentum. Inertial repose, clamour of demystification. Tragic destiny and exasperated productivity. The co-alignment of the film’s perspectival vantage with that of the ocularly disadvantaged train, augmented moments later when Renoir begins to employ shots literally from the point of view of the train as it speeds along the track. The train has been tricked into believing it has a direction. Did it buy a ticket to the present exhibition? Or does the audience just know that things aren't going to go well for Gabin when he falls in with that minx? Unidirectionally minxward, are we? The engineers continue working feverishly in the engine room as the world shoots by through the window.

Musée Eugène Delacroix, November 25th, 2021 

As Claude de Givray says, “If The Golden Coach is a triangle film and The River a circle film, then La bête humaine is a straight-line film.” As such: it is a preeminent work of Poetic Realism, distinct for lacking any direct contribution from Jacques Prévert, the idiom's for-all-time poet laureate. In his piece called "Poetic Realism," Dudley Andrew writes of a certain French cinema up and running here and there, intermittent as you like, between '29 and '39, that is "simultaneously lyric and realist,” and, just like our boy Bazin basically sees it, “is surpassingly realist and most French when it brings out formerly hidden relations between 'objects and beings,' between the outer world and the inner.” 

For all your talk of determinisms metaphysical or, dear me, social, I think I may indeed be a good bit more interested in the interpolation of wonky paragential objects and beings, played out in peripheral temporalities or quasi-alchemically embedded ones. At least on my best days. Structural modes and archetypes. The stuff bubbling up from the earth ['culture'] is inherently bacterial, the imaginary space weapons which make sense of us as far away things right where we are...upon the subject of these I do not wish to fumblingly prognosticate...[I'm no virologist]...

Centre Pompidou, November 24th, 2021

Jean Gabin is here with us and he's not doing anything especially unseemly....he goes to...he lights a cigarette and...just as the flame...just as the flame sparks up...his lighter...the train enters a tunnel, bathing the frame in darkness. 

A strange relation between darkness and light is once again once again. And once again the reoccurring link between: fire and darkness, fire comprised of and productive of dark materials. Adds to the air. Literally. Adds to the literal air of gloom and to the strife furnace.

• The train entering Le Havre 

First. The train's point of view. A question of what? Surely not much more than an industrial fanaticism respective of the production of impossible gazes. Perspective. OF THE TRAIN. Here is your station. Your loco stable. Here is your topsy-turvy perspective on your perspective, the train. And consequently: all the assembly of gazes in industrial terms. Of which. Of which that perspective is curtailed. A hand-held shot. A dolly. Is edited. Into the middle of this one. Into which the camera pans frantically. 

Over the sign designating the Le Havre station. 

Series of cuts. Series of cars. Serial passagings-through. Suggests. Through a subdued field of sense, tangential, non-loco, for nowe. That La Havre carries with it a great deal of destructive significance. What is this station? In its particulars? What compels the impatient train to dally here? Slowing down of the train. Slowing down of the train and...and thus, perhaps, Le Havre is where the “straight-line” will hit a big open pit or twister. It has been invested with destiny. In movie theatres—Paris, Marseille—there are audiences projecting as hard as the beaming equipment. The need expresses itself in the form of a special pent-up attentiveness: impotency and potency all at once and so we suppose it's imperative there be a quite positively horrific bust-up. This is emphasized. And let me follow that up with my own emphases, please. A few scenes later, following. A few seconds later...and any number of us. Jean Gabin explains that he is upset about the broken axle because “it happened here.” Because the tragedy to which the film is speedily hastening is to occur in La Havre, stupid, are you with us? In which Gabin. Jean Gabin. In which Jean Gabin leaps to his death as his locomotive speeds away from the provincial town. Is significant. His fall is complete and it signifies loud and clear [however variably]. Thus by attempting to continue. Shots that mirror those which precede. Shot sequences creating formal congruities that make of the doom text a nifty palindrome.  Shots fired, fire returned. Jean Gabin is merely flinging himself into an even deeper abyss. He has, having wrangled whatever he's wrangled, secured his below-board ambrosials, and signed on dotted lines we don't get to know about, already however-inadvertently compelled his shovelling of himself on into that blessed furnace along with all 'n' sundry else...

Thierry Mugler: Couturissime, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, November 26, 2021

  

Jean Gabin, locomotive engineer and alcoholic and homicidal sex maniac, refers to his loco as Lison, confusing the mechanic, who thinks that he is talking about a woman. 

Later when Pecqueux talks to him about women, Lantier exclaims that he is “already married to Lison.” A moment later when Pecqueux asks him about his plans, Lantier replies that he will “see her [Lison] through the workshop…then go see my Godmother...”

Pigalle, Paris, November 26, 2021

ARTE-FACT

Orphic Line

What day is it 

It's everyday

My friend

It's all of life

My love

We love each other and we live

We live and love each other

- Prévert

Text of bliss: The text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his taste, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

- Barthes

1. Devil-headed. Severe. Those who transfix and those who fall under the wheels. Those of boredom aside also. We are here to stand and observe before the bliss-text. Remarkable, such as to bear remark and ravaging. We used to speak a good deal about the blind diode as a means to not speaking about vantage point. I am on a circuit board; I am shooting out with speed. I am moving suddenly longitudinal and suddenly latitudinal, and I am moving faster and faster because this ritual is pure thirst for me. A film critic I like once wrote: "There's an exciting brand-new object in the world, and it's called Moulin Rouge." To that I counter: may it ever be so...

2. Barthes, the wise and blister-prone observer and negative flâneur, reminds us, in Pleasures of the Text, to make the effort to keep our pleasures leashed and domestic. Pleasure, at any rate, is already the process of counter-pleasure because pleasure cannot stop its fervid demystification of the already established. The mystical part of our pleasure becomes like a phantom limb or a vestigial one. Yes, okay, Love is Our Secular God until Love is no more than Sputtering and Suppurating Intensity. Right. Then it becomes the God of Life Itself. The Secular God had closed down shop and hoped to squat there indefinitely with the curtains drawn. Orpheus from Underground, Oedipus the Hero! Where do you stand in this complexivity of fetish? BLISS|OBJECT. How do you get your groove back, Stella? Are you just myth bound to desire and terminal flight? Wherefore art though, Moulin Rouge?

3. Getting out of prison and trying to stay out, Our Man Jackson declares war on society, buoyed by Love Moist Elemental [read: Aristotelian]. THE SOCIAL [myth] seeking to put Love [sex/kink hoodwink] back in the spot where it belongs. (Spot is a dog's name.) All blockbusters hate themselves. All blockbusters spend a lot of money on things to put into themselves in order to pretty themselves up. Is this auto-critique? Is this auto? Maybe it's mightily multiple! We begin by entering the giant complexivity of sideways spectacle and the scaffolding where its future parts are to go and erect. Theatrical as all this is, our introduction having commenced with the insinuation of actual material orchestra in the flesh (and gabardine), 20th Century Fox was always going to need a wand for that logo, this stolid monolith looming before my baby child. Immediately it is both clear and not so clear what a whore is. The onus is evidently on me. I had not been looking carefully, Ferdinand, but the wand has a conductor, and the conductor is attached also to the orchestra. I'm kinda freaking out here a little! Okay, okay. The ambiguous placement of the conductor-agent makes me realize I am being misdirected by aristocrats with sinister stratagems. I wonder where they all are. Come out, come out, wherever you are. I intuit incoming fatalities.

4. Spectacle is an additives machine. Bohemians love additives. Making of Love a Pop Sickle. Indulge in your fetish; pounce on your prize and pulverize it. Holding God, Holding Love, Up Against the Duke. Up Against the Pistol, motherfucker. Tragicomic, inevitably. A rigged game; a rock video. A sad song, paint-by-numbers. Its bliss remains intact. And in text. Golly, guys. I think it prepared its critique before it came out to join us! It has been fooling us and fooling us hardy, trafficking in tonal sets and subtonal subsets and stuff. It has been positively throwing singers at Love. If you cannot sing good, please step aside. If you are a backstabbing son-of-a-bitch, you may be upper management material. I love you truuuly...truuuuuly, dear. As in certain films inside certain films by Cassavetes, Love can and very much will fake it 'til it makes it, because that's how you remember the words to "Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November..."

5. You, whoever you are. You have a date with death. And then another and another. Forewarned is forestalled. You have a date, too, with the Moulin Rouge. For me, you are a whore. For me, therefore, you are both a bliss and a fetish. They made a film about you so that you could become all tore up by the complex, with its bureaucracies and intelligences all its own. The bliss text is a honey trap and occasionally takes this up as its subject matter. You got that, kid? Dukes and Pistols at Dawn! Whatever else bliss does, it stands and it spritzes counter to any ideology whatever.

6. The economic problem of surplus is nothing more than the problem of surplus, but then as such it becomes the problem of too much of everything, per se. Is the ending of McCabe and Mrs. Miller nihilistic? Per se? You are just buying the farm in the snow. Listening to Leonard Cohen. Per se. Am I mistaken? A kind and generous resistance indistinguishable from affably stupid generosity of spirit. A guerrilla business ethics and general tone of giddy affirmation. Bliss just keeps on keepin' on, dead on its feet or dropped to the bottom of a child's sinking wish hole. The New may assert its unsteady rights. Inhabitants you've never met may well lay dubious territorial claims. Such bliss! It moves out in all directions and it plum courses. Robert Altman has sheepishly admitted that he simply does not often know how to end a movie without a death.

7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: "The more the archaic empire overcoded the flows, the more it stimulated decoded flows that turned back against it and forced it to change. The more the decoded flows enter into a central axiomatic, the more they tend to escape to the periphery, to present problems that the axiomatic is incapable of controlling (even by adding special axioms from the periphery)."

8. The beauty of a terminal or fatalist model is that it cannot help bucking it to the system. The machinery doesn't work; let me demonstrate. Do you see? Overcoding vs. arterial spray. Keep your resistance spraying like a wacky hydrant...and none too idealistic. When the hero dies at the end of a Robert Altman movie, elimination of one particular computer occasions a blissful apocalyptic trans-systemic (complexivity) resonance. REAL CUBAN FIRE. [The Brown River (Great She).] The register of resonance OPENS. A screaming comes across the sky...runs a spread on the network.... The problem of the computer is a headache for the circuits. Name it a failure, and, like each and every one of us, this or that computer will have every right to tell you...especially as we might now be discussing the Sun itself...that its failures aren't its failures so much as they're just its characteristics...

9. If you go to the Moulin Rouge to work there, you already know it's your head. Entertainment is murder and your boyfriend is threatening suicide. Again and again. You think you'd learn to read the marquee. The squeaky mice get real oiled. Boy Orpheus is in town; many a lass must lay down her life. When Michelangelo Antonioni (famously) brought L'Avventura to Cannes, he told everybody his new downer of a picture exposed the 20th century's spiritual malady, his greater [debatably] point being that moral, desiring, and above all spiritual development had grown, at best, static. It is amazing how many problems the people in The Iliad are having the we are having still today. My goodness! And yet technological progress literally skyrockets. Are we afraid of our databases and the broad beyond-backroom schematics that are their ever-moistening future? Do I use the word we satirically? If these and other questions are not on the back-burner, it's simply because I doused them in lighter fluid and burned them to crisps altogether very expeditiously in the tub!

          
          
                   

   
 

Scènes condamnées

As for me, and I come back to it, I attach enormous importance to form.

Enormous. And I believe that the form leads to the rhythms. Now the 

rhythms are all-powerful. That is the first thing. Even when one makes the 

commentary of a film, this commentary is seen, felt, at first as a rhythm. 

Then it is a color, (it can be cold or warm); then it has meaning. But the

meaning arrives last.

- Robert Bresson

A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut, Robert Bresson, 1956) 

The profoundly impassive man of curious scalpel-precise expressivity is named Fontaine . He is played by a non-professional (François Leterrier) the film's director calls a 'model,' this the term he uses for the entire on-camera company. He is condemned to death in the film whose title tells us so— 

just as it tells us, at least in original French, that he is to ultimately escpae with his neck.

 

There are the man's palms and the business of their irreducibility of business. They have to be busy. Somebody let me out of here. Palm up on lap. Weighing light. Weighing the weighing of the question of weighing light. Weighing the weight of the very supposition of light. We are in the back seat of a car, traffic noise can be heard but it is distant and impossibly [calculatedly] soft. Hands turn over on the lap. Irreducibility of the hands. The image encases us in the back of the car while the sound provides us corroboration of an outer world swamped in cotton swath. Bresson tells us that “freedom is greater with sound.” Here the sound literally represents the terrain of liberation, the outside, while the image places us in the back seat of the car, effectively already in prison.

An air of urgency, made to order. For a film about a man we already know escapes having been condemned to yet-to-set-a-date hangman's checklist, and yet the idea is that the mechanics of perception might make us make up [comprise and preemptively reprise] a hot and bothered invested-in-the-urgency...donkey.

The driver’s hand on the gearshift, prisoner reaching again for the door, waiting, waiting, pushing open a moment for acting, little fingers tadpoles, critical breathing, inimical breathing, clearly a sense of apprehension mixed with desperation. We hear a horse drawn buggy on the soundtrack but are unable to place the sound until it is corroborated a moment later on the image track. Throughout the film strange unknown sounds are presented to us only to be explained later visually. There is the buggy; there are the voices of the German guards who approach our man and take him to his cell moments later; there are the guards who come to our man's door throughout the film, revealed by their footsteps, their voices, or both; and most strikingly there is the squeaking of the bicycle during the escape sequence, which remains a mystery to us for a good ten minutes before one of our big kids on the skids finally peers over the wall and sees a guard riding it. Over and over we are left free by sounds only to have many of the holes filled in by the image. Many sounds are never filled in by the image. The guns that execute the prisoners in the distance are only ever heard. The voices of the guards are almost always disembodied. Sounds of movement outside the cell maintain a perpetual air of mystery.  

There are two specific ways sound is used in A Man Escaped to field dialogic resonating complexes (real) with respect to dynamics of freedom (virtuality) and containment (actuality). The first way is of course rather obvious. Sound as a terrain of liberated virtual space and invitation to abstract/virtual extrapolation/cartography. The world of flight and ESCAPE LOGIC contains sound, eavesdrop, resistance, unencumbered hands, and light(ness). The world of prisons is the image, the car, encasement, the bolted door. 

André Bazin espies in the film a suspension of space/time and a stunning absence of “dramatic geometry.” However, our man, lieutenant Fontaine, the model attentif, can hardly afford to come at matters from a like mindset.

We are unable to draw a suitable map of the prison in our minds. Or have we simply not had to try that hard?  This is exactly what our man is doing. He is branching out with his ears at night; documenting with all of his senses by day. All we see is waiting, or, more accurately, waiting counterpoised with bursts of effort and risk. We are confronted, just like our man, with the liberated space of sound and the imprisoned space of action-image. We too are building a world around the action with our ears. Quite simply, our eyes are situated on one side of the wall and our ears on the other, while we remain outside of the film. We build a film we watch and hear lined up against a wall, martial takedown or liftoff, experiencing points of connection, convergence, and intensive disjunction.

At the same time: guards, industrial machinery, draconian aurality. It is precisely these sounds that make it so hard for our man to carry out his escape. Using his ears, “dramatic geometry.” He is confronted with many sounds that re-inscribe imprisonment upon the sensorial body, connecting our man and his audience together through sound. It is difficult to “take the plunge” offered by the liberating enterprise because everywhere sounds retain their music of the prisons and ritual debasements. As escapes open, prisons re-inscribe: the plane of exposure. As soon as our man and his boy conspirator leave their cell there is no going back and this cannot be anything other than a done thing considered from any and every angle. All sounds become condensed, intensified. Sounds emanating from sources organized to vouch for and stage imprisonment can map a “dramatic geography,” or can be perversely fathomed to further induce productive building and risk within a context of conditional exposure.  The man arrives at the point of hearing himself and hearing the doors bolt shut there too. Or this is presumably what is at stake. (If I know it, it's 'cause I feel it first!) Sounds become important on the plane of exposure and then become the enlivenment of the planar exposure. What is most frightening to a man is his own future voice (preserved from one local-specific execution or not). It is “the noise I made and the constant fear of being caught.” The electric charge of chance further condenses and distills the sensory-motor vibrations while simultaneously increasing intensification in general. A realistic/naturalist bodily tension is created, nowhere to be seen (or heard) in standard prison movie fare. 

It had been cemented at the outset. Hands reach for the door, as such reaching merely and instinctually for the perhaps better. A sure hand conditions these tremulous claws-in-search-of-nook. Apprehension and desperation. Hand pulls away nervously, only to regenerate the gesture again and again until the courage is there. The ears are builders of the plane of exposure and the fingers tickle invisible ivories. The model must bridge the gap with his tools: hope, the momentary courage to act, the prevailing dumb luck that is all that which is left standing in the interim (the circus tent never an adequate hangar, this it's preeminent virtue). 

We bust from the car. Bust out. Blast off. 

At the beginning of the film. 

We are shot at, you are returned, I am beaten. It is because somebody lacks the third and final tool. Too many critics have mistaken this tool for something other than dumb luck. It is something other than luck, though, unless luck vibrates. Shut your mouth a moment and look upward. 

The hardest lesson I ever learned about escaping was to shut my goddamn mouth.