The Goldfish Bowl: 'The Romantic Englishwoman' (1975, dir. Joseph Losey)

What is it that's so unsatisfactory about this film? And what can that tell us? Before answering that question, a brief run-through of the plot. Glenda Jackson's frustrated bourgeois housewife, having gone to the spa town of Baden-Baden for unspecified reasons, maybe or maybe doesn't have a brief affair with Helmut Berger's young gigolo. In town on a botched drug deal, Berger operates through a combination of what we might term freelancing: as a car or drug smuggler but, it seems, principally as a gigolo whose opening line is that he's a "poet". (The role he plays here, as a class-ambiguous outsider who both manipulates and is manipulated by bourgeois families seething with tension, mirrors that of Visconti's then-recent Conversation Piece--or, indeed, Terence Stamp in Pasolini's Teorema, at once far more ambiguous and far more socially incisive than either film.) Meanwhile, back in British suburbia, Jackson's husband, writer Michael Caine abandons plans to work on a novel to begin a screenplay based on his jealous imaginings of his wife's Baden-Baden sojourn. When Berger telephones Caine to announce that he's an admirer of his work and turns up (literally) "for tea", the stakes are set for the triangle to play out, with the added drama in the final third of Berger's drug connections, among them the poker-faced Michael Lonsdale, turning up in a kind of lugubrious pursuit. 

No spoilers here, though the film doesn't aim at resolution so much as a kind of blank termination. The title is bitterly ironic, a phrase spoken by Berger's gigolo about the various ways he's paid for his services: with the utmost discretion by European women; with a kind of throwaway vulgarity by American women--"here, go and buy yourself some shirts"; and with a kind of guilt passion by English women, who wish to invest, not simply their money, but their whole beings into what for the others is more clearly transactional. Hence "romantic". Social roles, the film's ending seems to suggest, are fixed: the characters know this, they analyse it, generally with bitter cynicism or contempt, sometimes with frustrated outbursts of drunkenness, rage, or desire, but their knowledge does nothing to change it; attempts to move beyond these constraints in the name of 'freedom' are in themselves played out according to similarly hierarchical and fixed positions; desire cannot escape these prohibitions. The film exacerbates this sense by focusing on a limited range of characters and settings. These are bourgeois characters within bourgeois spaces: the house and garden; the hotel and its surroundings; the occasional visit to a dismal restaurant or club. Even as these characters, given the narrative events, spend much of the time engaged in international travel, the journeys through a setting that would reveal a fuller social world--a town, an airport, a port--are reduced to a truncated snapshot of empty spaces, seen at their edges. They move within a confined world and take that world with them wherever they go, in a grim and claustrophobic myopia. When they look out of the window--as in the shots of Jackson aboard a train that play over the credits--they see a mirror. 

In this deliberate limitation to a confined social setting, the film echoes Losey's earlier The Servant, The Go-Between, or Boom! In The Servant, principally the increasingly claustrophobic house; in Boom!, the luxurious island getaway, isolated from the mainland; in The Go-Between, the wide-open spaces of a lushly filmed Norfolk countryside whose empty flatness comes to stand for a kind of myopic claustrophobia characteristic of a particular class at a particular time. In The Servant, desire is manipulated as part of an endless, circular game of power relations and hierarchies, negotiated across lines of sexuality, gender and class; in Boom!, it's a Burton-Taylor tete-a-tete which is both a kind of "battle of the sexes" and an allegorical struggle with mortality; in The Go-Between, forbidden desire across class lines and the fetishised mediations of smuggled messages leads to a denouement in which the outsider protagonist represses all thought of desire as a founding trauma. Losey's films of the 1960s and 1970s--the period in which he reinvented himself from a filmmaker of social problem pictures and taut, gritty noirs, to an arthouse director--were often criticised for the essential vacuity of their gestures. Losey, it was said, took the formal innovations of Resnais-ian temporal ambiguity or self-conscious echoes of the history of art (as when Jeanne Moureau's Eve strikes a pose from Massacio's Explusion from Eden) and presented them for their own sake: they became empty signifiers, somewhere between costume dramas and the arthouse, in which a self-evident critique of a decaying social class was presented with gimmickry and trickery; or at worst, in which the formal presentation nullified the critique that was being made. (Is The Servant, for example, with its presentation of the usurpation of the power a member of one ineffectual, privileged class by another shown to be cynical and grasping, as Amy Sargeant suggests in her BFI Film Classics guide, ultimately a reactionary film?)

Such criticism was neither entirely right nor entirely wrong. During the '60s and '70s, Losey made films that were various combinations of flawed, highly skilled, and near-disastrously misjudged. In The Go-Between, things come together with a tact and taste that has far more beneath its surface than the costume drama feel implies. (It's a film, in other words, that's easy to misread as simply nostalgic, Downtown Abbey-style, particularly given the lush Michel Legrand score all all those sweeping shots of green fields--as Serge Daney punningly put it, "the depth of field which is often the depth of the fields, very green, crossed diagonally and nervously.") In Boom!, meanwhile the misjudgments are so far off that the film achieves the status of camp--quite brilliantly. (Not for nothing is it highly regarded by John Waters.) With Losey, quality--both the actual quality of cinema, or the pretentious trappings of a "cinema of quality"--was never absolute. 'Accident' was followed by the startling incoherence of Secret Ceremony and Boom! but in turn by The Go-Between. The Romantic Englishwoman and an indifferent Galileo--the literal return to Brecht--were followed by the incisive Mr. Klein, a film which actually felt to reckon with the weight of history, all framed through characteristic Losey-ian preoccupations. Tracing a through-line in Losey's work thus becomes both all too easy--given its auteurist excesses--and one that's frustrated by how unevenly it's executed. What we watch, at least from Eve onwards, is a set of variations on a theme, more or less successfully rendered. (And Losey's detailed breakdown of the making of his films in Michel Ciment's exemplary 1985 book Conversations with Losey gives a lovingly detailed sense of continuity between the more apparently diverse elements of his ouevre.) The Romantic Englishwoman has all the features of Losey's Pinter collaborations (for this script, one playwright--Pinter--is replaced by another--Stoppard; Losey had of course worked with a perpetually stoned Tennessee Williams on Boom!, as per the waspish recollections in Conversations with Losey), but without the deceptively minimal clarity of analysis--particularly relating to social class--that Pinter's presence afforded those films. 

Take the classic Losey-Pinter structure of flashbacks and flashforwards--longer or shorter inserts of scenes whose relation to the main narrative is not immediately revealed, which might later resolve into being seen as "earlier" or "later" than that action, or which might reveal themselves as a particular character's subjective fantasies, and which serve to offer an ambiguity of subject position and narrative temporality that, as Losey argued, was specific to the cinema, in what are at once intensely filmic and intensely literary adaptations of often dense source texts (novels by Nicholas Mosley--who, as the son of the British Fascist leader, knew all about power relation and masculinity--and L.P. Hartley, respectively). This device has been used to particularly good effect in the late '60s/early '70s Pinter collaborations Accident and The Go-Between. Its most obvious antecedent lies in Resnais--and indeed, Losey directed an obscure sequel to Resnais's La Guerre est Finie which shared its original star, Yves Montand, ten years after the original. Its use by Losey is, however, perhaps closer in spirit to a lesser-known film which, like Losey's, shares a more ambiguous mainstream/arthouse cachet: the 1968 melodrama Petulia, directed by that other American abroad, Richard Lester (and sharing with The Go-Between the presence of Julie Christie, radically different in both films). In Resnais, the most obvious forebear for this technique, the dense intercutting of multiple temporal levels furthers a political analysis, with--for example--narrative puzzle as analogy for the way that politics is subsumed or repressed vis-a-vis the Algerian war of independence and political torture in Muriel, or the workings of the political underground in La Guerre est Finie. In Petulia, they serve as a cynical demolition of the Californian 'summer of love' and its reverberations among the liberal (or not so-liberal) wings of the bourgeoisie--along with the presence of racism and intimate partner violence--and in Losey's Pinter collaborations, as a careful analysis of the ways that gender and class replay among networks of power--the ivory tower of Oxford University in Accident, on the one hand, and the English country house in The Go-Between, on the other.

Most of these examples are films about the past: or, if about the present, about the inability to reckon with the legacies of the past that serve as the return of the repressed, particularly in a gendered violence, done by men to women, which assumes unspoken structural dimensions. In the car crash and its aftermath that opens and closes Accident, a particular moment reveals itself as made up of a mosaic of different perspectives, while Losey/Pinter through various methods also suggest that much of what's seen exists within the warped imagination of Dirk Bogarde's central character, the Oxford don whose repressed desire leads him to commit an unforgivable act. In The Go-Between, meanwhile, the traumatic repression of an incident seen only at the end of the film (the discovery of the illicit, cross-class lovers in flagrante delicto, leading to social exposure and suicide) is cinematically expressed through the insertion into a broadly chronological narrative of brief flashforwards to its conclusion which function something like involuntary memories. While these might technically be experienced as flashforwards, they ultimately take place within what is essentially a flashback structure, in which the adult Leo is finally able to recall his suppressed childhood experiences, as signalled by the famous Hartley line heard in voiceover at the start of the film: "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there". In either case, from the perspective, both of its making in 1971 and the publication of the novel in 1953, the narrative is framed as a retrospective, deceptively nostalgic one, towards its clearly outmoded Edwardian setting (and one with an oblique nod to the colonial relations that, in Resnais' Muriel, exist on the peripheries of the narrative, yet are central to its puzzle-like meaning.) These are films in which we see country houses, Oxbridge colleges, games of cricket: the signifiers of nation and history that exerted a particular fascination for an exile like Losey, driven by McCarthyism to the old colonial heartland.

More contemporary in its setting, The Romantic Englishwoman is less clearly oriented towards the past, and its flashbacks become something more like premonitions: memories of an event that may never have happened, whose presence causes that event to affect the course of future events. These flashes--whether forward or back--centre on an incident that occurs, as in Accident, near the start of the film: the moment Jackson and Berger take a lift together in their hotel and may or may not initiate a sexual relationship. Yet, whereas in Losey's other films, devices of literary narration were incorporated or subsumed into what were, as he notes in Conversations, fundamentally cinematic temporal structures, enabling the recurring snippets of a traumatic event to oscillate through the film like shards of glass or wisps of smoke, here, the literary, constructed nature of memory is turned into a kind of clunking, meta-fictional conceit, in which in life imitates arts as the paranoiac, jealous fantasies of Caine's novelist/screenwriter--the encounter in the lift, and, ultimately, the wife's decision to abandon her husband and the entry of gangsters as the story turns into a 'thriller' (a more contemporary--and cinematic--mode of storytelling than that of The Go-Between's "costume drama")--come to life onscreen and in the narrative. 

In their initial appearance, these scenes are compelling enough. What happened in the lift in Baden-Baden? From whose perspective do we see this? What are the lines between desire--whose desire?--and action? In its opening third in particular, the incident in the lift serves as a central focus for the insinuation of various triangulations of a bourgeois marriage--a kind of infinite range of scenarios, generally operating according to the same pattern, on the various real or imaginary pairings of the heterosexual couple and a third partner: the frustrated wife and the younger gigolo; the frustrated husband and the young au pair; and so on. Yet as we see Caine type on screen and then see the fantasy come to life with Berger's arrival at the house, the film curls on in itself in a way that begins to shut off other possibilities. (Losey himself later expressed discomfort with the way the scenes of Caine writing fitted into the texture of the film.)

Like Fassbinder, Losey argued that the power dynamics so coldly dissected in his films are operations of sexuality in general, as opposed simply to those of heterosexuality: "With [the 1962 film Eve--perhaps the first of his 'arthouse' or auteur films] I wanted to make a picture - as I still and always do - about the particular destruction and anguish and waste of most sexual relations, whether heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or whatever". (Hence what is in effect a bisexual triangle, or quartet, or, at the film's end, a kind of expanding circle, in The Servant.) In The Romantic Englishwoman, they are particularly focused on the ways that such power dynamics play out within the context of heterosexual marriage. As with much of his work, the film couldn't easily be called either a feminist or an anti-feminist film: Caine's obnoxious outburst at Jackson's friend, a visiting gossip columnist, for repeating feminist statements about female homemaking roles, represents one pole; yet, in a film such as this, as, to a different extent, with Moureau's more liberated Eve, Jackson's dreams of liberation from marriage can occur only through another man, and no real possibility of sociability outside the heterosexual contract is offered. We simultaneously watch the playing out of male jealousy--Claude Chabrol-style--though Caine's character, apart from this one outburst, never reaches heights of Chabrolian murderous rage; and of Jackson's "romantic" desire for escape--the doomed template of much melodrama. Too often, though, the film simply presents this double-bind as is, with little other perspective on what we already know. Truth becomes truism, even fatalism. Does the presence of the gangster subplot imply an equivalence between the workings of organized crime and those of bourgeois marriage and the affairs and transactional sexualities that exist alongside it--the one 'legitimate' and the other the necessary other to allow that structure its legitimacy? 

If this were an early Fassbinder film, it might. Here, however, Losey is so preoccupied with formal exactitude that a more layered sense of meaning--allegorical, narrative, ideological--evades its grasp.Yes, the film allies form to content--as in Resnais, as in Lester, as in Losey's other films. The flashback-flashforward structure insists on the claustrophobic way in which its characters play out pre-ordained social roles--again and again. It insists on this at a formal level, at every stage. 

But to what end? 

***

As the auteur model hardened into a kind of doctrine, within both mainstream and arthouse cinema, its worst characteristics--the delineation of directorial vision through mannered stylistic over-emphasis and the obsessive replaying of certain themes or preoccupations from film to film--ossified. Often, this gets called "self-indulgence": there can be a pleasure to that, as in the obsessive zoom lenses and luxuriant sweeps of historical decor in '70s Visconti (especially Ludwig), a critique from within of its own decadence with some parallels to that of Losey. But it can also become excessively mannered--perhaps mannerist. In The Romantic Englishwoman, the flashback-flashforward device takes its place alongside other characteristic Losey features such as the obsession with shots which use mirrors to produce a kind of mise-en-abyme or double framing, incongruously languorous, lushly romantic orchestral scores, and bitterly ironic cut-aways. By now, however, it has become an example of a technique, a device, a tic used to more or less good effect in earlier films--the mirrors of The Servant, the cutaways of Accident, the Michel Legrand score to The Go-Between--that simply replays itself, as if one could part the parts together to put something that, while in perfect working order, seems to have been produced without any real necessity. Yes, style and form enact narrative content: and on top of this, the meta-scenario of the script, in which Caine's screenplay becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, renders narrative itself a mise-en-abyme. But form and content here are too perfectly tied: the parts fit so neatly that any social commentary is reduced to a bare-bones outline. 

Writing of The Go-Between, Serge Daney argued that 

Losey feels obliged to attract the attention in terms of social relations toward a visual mechanism which was always designed to conceal these relations.

Perhaps this is the central issue. The cold distancing that such a style produces--one watches every shot, not so much as a moving, breathing thing, but as a kind of fastidious construction, like a well-made watch--superficially offers something approaching the analytic operations of early Resnais or the alienation effects of Losey's mentor, Bertolt Brecht, but without the content of thought and critical reflection on the mediations of the aesthetic medium that effect was intended to foster. 

As Jackson and Caine arrive back at the house where a party awaits them--the end of the affair, real or imagined, that disrupts the bonds of the couple form, the reiteration of the social bonds of bourgeois life--it's evident that there's no way out. We see this from the outside, looking in on the goldfish bowl--a bowl we may well ourselves have no access to, as the screen shows us yet more images of bourgeois life and tells us they are unhappy. The viewer is placed determinedly outside the frame, where they can stand with the arch-framemaker, Losey himself. 

Yet what kind of outside is this? In the Brechtian model, the artwork prompts a self-critical reflection on what is being shown and how it's being shown aimed to combat deception, smoke-and-mirrors, and the replaying of art as the endless perpetuation of a bourgeois perspective. And this is why Brecht's work--or the work of, say, Straub-Huillet--still feels so alive, however difficult. In a film like The Romantic Englishwoman, however, we seem to stand outside the characters for no particular purpose. Brechtian engagement is replaced by a kind of deadened admiration of craft for its own sake. Perhaps this is why the film feels so "cold", so dead, such an exercise in style. 

In Conversations, Losey recalls the picture as one in which he had relatively little interest. "I don't like the characters", he remarks. 

And they're not likeable [...] Helmut's character [...] [is] the only one in the whole film who has an articulated, concrete philosophy. It's an anarchistic philosophy but at least it's there. The others are just kidding themselves one way or another. I've made that picture a thousand times, maybe not as well, but - you know, it's a remake essentially. It deals with an impossible situation in which a bourgeois life encases people and they don't get out of it and to that extent it's The Prowler, Accident, Eve. 

Yet, beyond Losey's own dismissal of the film as a begrudging rehash of the kind of story he'd told before, the fact that it exists perhaps tells us something else about the evolving nature of cinema as the reactionary years of the seventies settled across the Euro-American world. What does it mean that such a film was made? Who was it for? There's more thinking to be done on this question that I have the capacity for here, but suffice to say that, for all its faults--in fact, because of those faults--The Romantic Englishwoman has something to tell us about the peculiar status of a particular model of cinema--not quite arthouse and not quite not-arthouse--that had evolved out of the ruptures and eruptions of what Getino and Solanas termed 'Second Cinema' and made a kind of uneasy rapprochement with Hollywood's 'First Cinema': a cinema within which, paradoxically, or so Daney argued, Losey had been able to make more socially subversive films than in the apparently more radical work of the auteur years--The Boy with the Green Hair, The Dividing Line, and so on. Losey's own comments on his film suggest that he had by this point himself become entrapped within the same world as his characters: a circular series of representations of a circular series of relations, the bourgeois life whose lovingly detailed exposure had become the de facto image of art cinema of a certain kind (Antonioni, Visconti, Losey...) 

In Losey's final film, La Truite, released seven years down the line, Isabelle Huppert plays what is in effect an updated version of the Jeanne Moreau character in Eve, or, indeed, of the Helmut Berger character in The Romantic Englishwoman: a figure whose act of rebellion and survival within a bourgeois world are both entirely directed against it and entirely dependent on and circumscribed by it: "an anarchistic philosophy but at least it's there". Once more, though the characters spend a lot of time travelling within settings of various opulence, there's, really nowhere for them to go. As Daney writes: 

Losey looks at this small world, this modern fish tank, with a slightly indifferent tenderness. He continues to pretend undoing the terribly tangled web of the plot, even though it is no more important than mishmash.

In the fishtank of formalism, aesthetics is divorced from pleasure: everything is a copy, nothing changes. Or, to adopt another metaphor, the picture that the puzzle portrays will always be the same, however the pieces are jumbled. Daney's "tenderness" might be read as "sympathy"--sympathy for Moureau and Berger and Huppert's acts of revolt, sympathy for the roles in which all the characters, without exception, are trapped--a sympathy so all-encompassing, and so low-level, that it can hardly be called "humanism", which protests, not with the anguish of Sirkian restraint or the caustic exaggeration of Fassbinderian satire, but with something colder, flatter, both closer in spirit to its bourgeois subjects and immeasurably further from any kind of transformative analysis of the situation in which it finds itself. And perhaps, after all, this is where certain aspects of Euro-American cinema, of Euro-American society, still find themselves, half a century on. 

Histoire(s) du Cinéma: Viewing Notes

Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-1998, eight parts, dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

From its start, the series makes audible the sound of technology from various periods: Godard's typewriter, his squeaky marker pen, the sound of the projector; levels mixed too loud, delay on voices, sound effects, snippets of the classical music canon, pop songs, noises. Godard repeats a number of key ideas several times across the opening episodes, sometimes verbatim: like musical themes coming around, sometimes as obvious recapitulations, at others as ghostly half-echoes; visual and aural puns (words split, truncated, divided) emphasizing first one then another part of a combined, often contradictory meaning. Making use of video to conduct an autopsy of cinema, the series develops the notion of cinema as out-of-time, fated, cursed; the forces of the modern are beholden to the nightmare of the past, borrowed costumes of present and past in mutual disguise. The roots of all modern technology were developed in the 19th century; the 20th century merely provided the technical means to execute them (whether these be projection or imperialism). Photography developed as compensation for the freezing and totalisation of all relations under the sign of capital--the technology for colour photography existed, but it was developed in black and white ("the colours of mourning"). Rather than releasing that which photography had frozen, cinema was a melancholy reenactment of that freezing. Cinema came along as a further method of mourning; technicolour ("the colours of funeral wreaths") is not celebration, but denial. Meanwhile, video and television have supplanted cinema's faux-cosmic possibility, boxing it up, condensing it, and have erased cinema's overwhelming time of the sublime, where a Proustian temps retrouvé be enacted beyond the scope of language ("cinema exists for the words caught in the throat"), condensed and controlled through fast-forward, rewind etc (video's revenge on cinema enacted in the very form of this film--see Jihoon Kim's article on Godard and video). So this is a further act of mourning, made on the periphery of the end of the Cold War: a flattening and totalisation. 

1(a) Toutes les Histoire(s) 

All the stories, all the histories, all at once: the episode, and the film as a whole, begins with simultaneity, with too much all once, visually and sonically. The opening minutes feel as if the tracking shot of the traffic jam in Weekend or its corollary, the assembly line in the car factory of British Sounds, had turned into an instant pile-up, every frame superimposed over the next. Nonetheless, a lot of this episode feels like throat-clearing (sometimes literally--a sound effect that will predominate in the much more aged voiceover, Godard wheezing and coughing, of Le Livre D'Image/The Image Book thirty years later). Godard repeats the history/story/stories pun of the title--Godard's story, the story of cinema, of history in general? The viewer spends the opening minutes acclimatising to method; the method is musical, in a sense; themes appearing, developing, crossing over: counterpoint, dissonance; but also the logic of the jump-cut, the tape splice, what musique concrète in music (or hip-hop sampling, plunderphonics, etc) and the Nouvelle Vague's separation of the elements of film-making accomplished in film. A dissection that is also a building up: accretion, bricolage, pile-up. Irving Thallberg as the epitome of invention--200 movies in his head everyday--and of despotic megalomania, cinema as dream factory, as illusion, as schizoid form--Howard Hughes' mania. Images of resistance and suffering--particular that of women--from Soviet and Third Cinema struggle from under the weight of these images, even as their heroisation contains its own problematics. (Godard's vision is here, as, as others have noted, almost exclusively that of a Western cinema, the 'Second Cinema' of Europe and of America with walk-on parts for Glauber Rocha but little else.) The sudden flash of corpses, the grasping of hands at guns or straws. 

1 (b) Une Histoire Seule

Dedicating this episode to John Cassavetes and Glauber Rocha, Godard here seeks to move beyond the Hollywood productions excoriated in the preceding episode, joining these icons of US independent film and of the attempt for a tricontinental Third Cinema (Rocha's debate with Godard, his cameo at the crossroads in Vent de L'Est sampled here). Scepticism about the possibility of cinema as medium was built into it from a start: its pioneers thought that it was a trick form, a parlour game, a fairground show. They were right and not right. The story of cinema alone, a history alone--cinema's connection and disconnection to world history--the role of newsreel. George Stevens filming the European camps in 1945--cinema as record; but is filming alone cinema? Reality and illusion. Cinema's aim to be more real than life. Godard looks up, off screen, at the screen, reads two books at once, at times types out a script we neither hear nor see with the exception of grunted words. 

2(a) Seul le Cinéma 

If the previous episode presented "only" a (hi)story--a single (hi)story, a (hi)story alone--this episode promises to dedicate itself only to cinema, to cinema alone, its uniqueness a particular or privileged access to knowledge as a well as an escape from the reality T.S. Eliot thought "mankind" could not bear much of: not so much head in the sand, but a voyage abroad, the narrative of national founding occurring first through the voyage (Ulysses to Aeneas, Greece to Troy to Rome; burning cities, boats, sacrificial pyres from which new stories flare up). Cinema as the only medium that could express certain relations, conjunctures; that enabled Godard to access history even as it consistently falsified it. Two principal frames for this episode, made nearly a decade after the first two and, though half the length, notably slower in pace. A chain-smoking Serge Daney (brand: Marlboros) interviews a chain-smoking Godard (cigars) about the project, how it sought to place Godard himself in the story of cinema, how one might begin speaking about this particular form and its relation to history. A teenage girl (Julie Delpy) reads from Baudelaire's 'Le Voyage'--Ulysses' voyagers set sail from the homeland, witness catastrophe, lay the grounds for the femme fatale stereotype, escape through intoxication, proto-cinematic dreams. The children from Night of the Hunter escape Robert Mitchum in a boat; cinema is cast adrift in the childlike world of imagination (Laughton's magical nighttime landscape, frogs croaking, eddies in the water, moonlight in the reeds, a whispered lullaby) but the logic of plot, narrative, and society must catch up. Behind-the-scenes footage of the filming of Le Mépris, the crew's dialogue in Italian; Godard giving Fritz Lang a line of Brecht to read; film history on film history. 

2(b) Fatale Beauté 

The second part will continue the female narrator's explorations of beauty, storytelling, dream, escape; this time, though, the focus is Proust, introduced by Godard: Albertine as the icon of lost beauty kept imprisoned: aesthetics and jealousy, the rage of vulnerability, art as fetishisation and reification of its objects. It's not a smell or a sentence or a piece of music that triggers involuntary memory and the re-finding of time--time's retrieval contains its 'trou', its gap or absence, its void, the way that Godard finds the emptiness within a shot that in context is given a panoply of meaning, the gap within a crowded scene, remixes them across time, puts them in dialogue. Godard starts early on that cinema could have been about flowers, babies, and so on, but it became about death. Eros/thanatos merge as icons of Hollywood martyrdom like James Dean brood in frozen still images, and the ever-present images of historical catastrophe--Vietnam, the holocaust, what I think is the First Intifada--allegorise this doubleness of spectatorship--most notably, an image of a little child walking past a field of bodies, apparently unconcerned, into which images of escape and fantasy (a woman clinging to an impossibly high streetlamp) enter, like one image emerging from the burning embers of another (Godard says that cinema comes from burning, a Promethean destructiveness that this repeated trope of emergence--a kind of joke about dissolves, wipes, fades, and the like--frequently enacts), more so in this episode than previously. Godard jokingly references the scopophilic and gendered nature of film viewing, a cap on his head, cigar in his mouth, sitting shirtless at his typewriter, his jaw dropping; images of female bodies and of the motif of hands (hands think, Godard states) grasping, groping, gesticulating: a visual equation between the gestures of power (fascist demagoguery, the salute and the raised arm) and sexual conquest? The episode's concluding section features a relatively fixed camera as an actor reads out statements on art and beauty: given the density of the preceding material, it feels like a moment of utter stillness, the suspended time that cinema always seeks and always rejects. 

3(a) La Monnaie de l'Absolu 

A template for these films: Goya's Saturn eating his children intercuts in stroboscopic fashion (with Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes), as Godard's voiceover is delivered with little more than a whisper, describing atrocities, the hypocrisy of governments not held to human standards, the horrors of war. Again, the relation of cinema to reality and fiction: we exaggerated these atrocities, the child was not tossed from pike to pike but merely bayonetted once, the village was not destroyed in a couple of hours but a couple of days. The complicity of French actors and filmmakers in the occupation; a train ride to Berlin to take part in a film project; the ruins of the war meant that the only national cinema of any value (Godard's axis is, as ever in this series, firmly Euro- and US-centric) was that of Italy--Rome: Open City was not made by those in uniform; a curiously sentimental montage of moments from neo-realism under a crooned Italian song plays things out. These episodes are much slower, more reflective than what's gone before.

3(b) Une Vague Nouvelle 

Almost no footage from actual French New Wave films here; instead, the films that inspired them. Beginning backwards; it ends with Godard's ruminative homage to Jean Langlois, founder of the cinémathèque where the directors of the Nouvelle Vague encountered formative and obscure films; the cinema Godard describes here, he says, is the unknown one, the unseen one, the films only known by legend rather than actually watched; an alternative current (bodies emerging into or falling out of rivers; a recurrent visual rhyme throughout these late episodes). Of course, I knew all these people, he ends--Truffaut, Demy, Duras--as their faces flash past, elements of hero-worshipping or name-dropping, of cinematic nostalgia (Godard himself once more at the centre) overpowered by a sense of mourning something lost. 

4(a) Le Contrôle de l'Univers 

4a) begins with a political / historical meditation--Europe is divided between undeveloped states and states with a revolution which enables them the comfort of waiting without hope for the inevitable misery, the only remaining link. Auteur theory rears its head, as the great directors come up on screen, one by one, having followed on from female writers (Virginia Woolf central among them). The figure of the (male) auteur becomes the ultimate in this 'control of the universe', both a counter-force to and reflection of the mendacious power of state, propaganda, government (the recurrent images of suffering--the camps, the Warsaw ghetto, Joan of Arc in Dreyer's and Rossellini's films). And so to Hitchcock, whose spectral voice floats up--the greatest, Godard says, because he made you remember objects (the wine bottle or the key in Notorious, the bus in North by Northwest), elevated image beyond plot, beyond ideology--he succeeded where even dictators failed, but this was an empty victory, for even if 'billions' do remember the bottle, the key, the bus, what does this do? Cinema, as the title cards flash it up, is cursed, forgotten, unknown ("maudit, oubliée, inconnu"), the words "histoire du cinéma" broken down to "né a toi"--so yet, the viewer, birth, promise, the philosophical dialogue slowly read out which suggests cinema as a kind of lover ("beauté fatale"). In what may be the series' most startling image, Hitchcok's birds fly/explode out of Marilyn Monroe's head, a by now familiar repertoire of clips--The Searchers, James Stewart and Kim Novak in the water in Vertigo--flash past, Godard's voiceover increasingly ruminative, his cigar-chomping presence replaced by the sound of his voice, the series as if winding down, muted and melancholy, the flashed repeated phrases now more on screen than in Godard's voiceover, the projector noise and extraneous noise of the earlier episodes instead replaced by bursts of music as punctuation and hushed voices, visual and verbal noise reduced to a kind of muted flashing, flashes in the fog. 

 4(b) Les Signes parmi nous 

The longest of the 1998 episodes, again as if winding down: once more, the focus on hands, hands reaching out or collapsing, hands that think. 1920s and 1930s vampire movies keep appearing, haunted monsters: Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, and in particular, Murnau's Nosferatu. From Rear Window, James Stewart looking through his camera in rear window looks into Hitler, who has morphed out of Charlie Chaplin. This recurs more than once as kind of tic or trope: Stewart peering through his binoculars, stand-in for the spectator, the director--but what he sees is revealed to be images from the camps, or images of a preening uniformed Hitler--framing and peering at atrocity. Cinema here is the fascinated and complicit peering on at horror, powerless to do anything. But that's not all it is. The final episode tries out some other metaphors and parallels--histories of cinema, stories of cinema, alternative pathways taken or not taken. The title cards present an oblique fable about a man who comes to a village, selling stories: they think it's the end of the world but it's the sunrise: the man is cinema. Echoing the unseen film from the Langlois episode (3(b)), here, the conceit of the impossible film, the 'other cinema', that which can't be written, like the invisible matter that scientifically makes up the universe's gravitational forces. The question is when to begin and end a shot. Godard asks, over an image of Maurice Blanchot, if time preserves cinema or cinema preserves time; the episode, and the film as a whole, ends with Godard, via Borges, describing himself as someone who wakes up from a dream of paradise still clutching a paradisal flower. And, for Godard, cinema remains this flower. 

(Notes drafted January 2021)

Two silences

Ο Θίασος (O Thiasos) / The Travelling Players (1974/5, dir. Theo Angelopoulous), De stilte rond Christine M / A Question of Silence (1982, dir. Marleen Gorris)

 Shot in the last years of military dictatorship, Theo Angelopoulous’ The Travelling Playerspresents history as a series of labyrinths, a kind of endless maze with no visible barriers, just open space, as the troupe of actors wander through the snow, through ruined forts, by the endless sea—Thalassa—journeys of departure and return, the narrative framing by which he justified the filming when questioned—members of the troupe play out the Agamemnon myth—seeing mythic structures bespeak political crises, the agonised emergence and suppression of new modes of representation, betrayal and complicity, resistance and torture, all in long shot, at arm’s length, the distance of time disappearing or moving too fast, history experienced by those who walk through its middle, at its edge. The camera pans and it’s 1939, pans again and it’s 1945, and again it’s 1952: the Communists shot in the square; the Communists who return to the square; red flags against the sky; the corner of a courtyard, the edge of a street, the dates bracketing differing forms of dictatorship, its national flags and chants, its bands of fighters for justice and its bands of fighters for the forces of repression. That empty corner remains as space of contemplation, shelter, refuge, and abysall emptiness, the void of defeat, the screams and shots coming from outside the field of vision, sound seeping through. This is a film in which the sound—all diegetic—enacts the field of conflict: monarchists and Communists sing competing songs to the same adapted tune before the monarchists pull out their guns; the head of the troupe who will later betray his colleague to the Fascists sings a Monarchist song to which his colleagues pointedly do not join; the accordion player plays whenever asks, when forced to stage a performance by a group of British troops, at the funeral of a murdered Communist, at the beginning of the never-completed bucolic farce they stage in their travelling show. Silence bespeaks the beginning of another song, another conflict, whether signalling a fresh hell or a fresh hope—a whistled Internationale; the imposition of American popular song by occupying soldiers—interlude, punctuation, space of contemplation, silence and empty space, as the camera pans, silence as holding place of trauma, holding place of possibility, placeholder, holding on. 

In Marleen Gorris’ A Question of Silence (1982), three women—‘ordinary women’, as the court-appointed psychiatrist deems them—murder the proprietor of a clothing boutique with whatever’s to hand—broken coat-hangers, clothes display racks, their hands, their feet, his body mutilated beyond recognition. The psychiatrist (Cox Habbema), a middle-class woman who’s ‘made it’ in a world of supposed gender parity, of liberal policy, where even the Netherlands' prisons appear modestly liveable, tries to frame, to ‘understand’ the ‘ordinary women’s’ refusal to either apologise, justify or divulge the motivations for the act: the single woman who talks too much to fill the silence of sexism, of abandonment, of clinging to a shitty waitressing job because it’s all she can get; the secretary whose ideas are stolen in board meetings, relentlessly talked down to, her mother seeking to marry her off; the housewife in patriarchal containment, surrounded by the voices of children, the demands of a husband, her wishes and desires ignored, having already taken a kind of vow silence, barely speaking, sitting, smoking. When the psychiatrist challenges the male prosecutor who expects her to put in a plea of insanity—these women knew what they were doing and are not insane, she insists—trying to force her to insist that it would make no difference if they were men murdering a female shopkeeper or women murdering a female shopkeeper, the women in the stand burst into uncontainable laughter. In the audience, other women, silent witnesses in the boutique who never came forward, who maintain a conspiracy of silence-as-solidarity, laugh too; the prosecutor joins in: laughter as noise in the face of the discourse and logic of male order, law, psychiatry, rationality, the ‘reasonable’ conformity of gender oppression, silence as a militant silence rather than the oppressed silence it was before. In ‘Human Personality’, Simone Weil talks of the magistrate stammering before the court."Nothing, for example, is more frightful than to see some poor wretch in the police court stammering before a magistrate who keeps up an elegant flow of witticisms." One form of silencing, of broken and foreclosed speech. But silence in the courtroom might also be a mode of resistance. In her essay on Gorris’ film, ‘Silence/Laughter’, Amelia Groom links such silence to an example from history that’s also inscribed into the heart of cinema, via Carl Dreyer’s iconic 1928 (silent) film: at her trial, Joan of Arc, faced by remorseless questioning, said she couldn’t remember, refusing to divulge, refusing to be understood. If Angelopoulous’ silence bespeaks the absence of communal bonds—destroyed by torture, execution, murder, forced confessions, forced compromises for the sake of peace after years of dictatorship, occupation, and civil war, personal and collective loss and defeat, the rest is silence, Gorris’ silence opens up a space—the absence of comprehension of the apparently incomprehensible act that brings these women together in a temporary, shared space they’d otherwise occupy only as separated strangers sounding out both as the horrified realisation of the logical costs of the society that took them there and of another kind of possibility; slaughter, laughter, silence, continuance. 

Lord Shango (1975)

Here is the late Milford Graves, very briefly glimpsed as part of the percussion ensemble in the 1975 film Lord Shango. The film stars Marlene Clark of Ganja and Hess fame--here offering some of the best eye-widening expressions in cinema--and was marketed as a horror movie, though it might better be described as a drama with supernatural elements. Written by playwright Paul Carter Harrison--who also scripted Youngbood (1978) and an un-produced biopic of Sam Cooke--and shot in Friendsville, Tennessee, it concerns the clash of Yoruba and Christian religion, centring around the idea of sacrifice, spirit possession, and the relation of the living to the dead. In some senses an allegory for the suppression of a non-Christian past, it opens as a group of Christian congregants violently drown the Yoruba practitioner who tries to interrupt the baptism of his partner, who, along with her mother (Clark) seeks answers within the Yoruba ceremonies in which he participated. Guilt, revenge (of a kind), and the ambiguous presence of the town's resident alcoholic align with possession by the deity Shango, a convoluted marriage plot with vague echoes of the Southern Gothic, and various other plot twists it's sometimes hard to exactly pin down. 

Like Ganja and Hess--on which Harrison explicitly modelled the film--Lord Shango doesn't really fit any of the generic categories placed on Black cinema of the time--horror, Blaxploitation, drama--though it perhaps includes elements of all of these. And while it lacks the sheer surreal, a-narrative strangeness of Ganja--the pacing is more sedate and telegraphed--it's certainly distinctive. As might be expected, the film's character is a response to circumstances, and this perhaps explains its refusal to settle into any one type of film--in some ways both a strength and a weakness. A better sense of this can be gained from Nicholas Foster's interesting article on the film's production history and evasion of categories for Black cinema here. Consciously seeking not to be a Blaxploitation genre piece--"the days of Blaxploitation are over" ran a newspaper report on its production--the film was a coproduction between the Ronald Hobbs Literary Agency, who represented Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal and other Black Arts Movement figures, and distribution company Bryanston Pictures who'd also put out Andy Warhol's Dracula, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and later, Deep Throat (obscenity charges surrounding the latter leading to the company's collapse), with Hobbs apparently inviting the likes of Baraka, Neal and Adrienne Kennedy to evaluate the film at screenings.  

This in part suggests an attempt to break out of the stereotypical generic framings which, by the mid-70s, had constrained not only depictions of Black lives but the choices available to Black filmmakers, looking instead to the world of theatre, where a break with both the form and content of a white-dominated artistic apparatus had been broached. And Baraka's own experiments as a filmmaker--from documentation of political activism in Black Spring to unproduced scripts for an animated Blaxploitation parody called Supercoon and the surreal meditation/polemic The Death of Malcolm X--certainly suggest the possibility of an alternative trajectory. Yet the presence of Bryanston--operating at the intersection between the 'arthouse' underground and exploitation movies per se--might also suggest a kind of construction-by-committee--the film remaining caught in the commercial imperatives it also attempts to escape. (After all, this was a time when a major publishing house thought that a new book by Baraka would tap into the same market as Mario Puzo's The Godfather!)

And ultimately, the potential of Harrison's script often feels hemmed in, rather than opened out, by its filmic treatment. Director Ray Marsh made a few other shlock films with titles like Suburban Commando and Forbidden Love, and is never even mentioned in Harrison's reminiscence at Black Camera. While the auterist model is problematic in itself, we might note here that Gunn's Ganja and Hess is very much an auteur film--written by and co-starring Gunn, with Gunn's distinctive editing, the removal of exposition and backstory for the distinctive dream-like atmosphere, radically transforming the material at hand, as indicated by the batch of deleted scenes viewable here, nearly all of which are conventional exposition scenes that would have vastly clarified much of the film's otherwise obscured plot. Lord Shango is a different story. Gunn's film comes alive (or undead) both in its camerawork and its editing: its zooms and slow-motion pans, accompanied by a non-linear soundtrack in an effect at once delirious and ritualistically slow, as if the camera itself were a dancing, malevolent presence rather than merely an observer or frame. Marsh's camera angles, by contrast, are generally static medium shots, placed in juxtaposition that builds narrative momentum and suspense by numbers. The central Yoruba-Christian conflict is illustrated, not only in the script, but with an obvious and hackneyed cutting between different settings and incidents that ends up killing, rather than creating, any tension. In Gunn, that absence of tension (which is different to dread) is precisely the point: the reinvention of horror not so much as suspense or shock as a kind of endless, feverish, waking dream--the nightmare of history itself. While Harrison's script might also have lent itself to that kind of reinvention, however, Marsh's handling aims to reinforce zones of conflict and contrast rather than to blur them, to go deeper into their inter-animation. The opening scene, in which church-goers either deliberately or accidentally drown a Yoruba devotee who interrupts a Christian Baptism, should be resonant and tense. Instead, it's near-plodding, desperately crying out either for longer, more patient atmosphere-building or some severe editing, even with Graves' insistent percussion on the soundtrack. Sometimes it feels like we're watching the idea for a film rather than the film itself. 

Yet the film's soundtrack--or the idea behind it--is a fascinating attempt to illustrate its central conflicts. Composer Howard A. Roberts--music director for Alvin Ailey and Harry Belafonte among others--scored the film: his choir provide spirituals to illustrate the Christian side, while Graves, who served as African percussion consultant, illustrates the Yoruba side alongside a group of unnamed percussion players. The film as a whole may fail to integrate its sonic experimentation, and its ideas in generally are little more than half-realized. Nonetheless, like the brief footage of Graves at his prime, to the side of his action but still magnetic, the film provides rich ground for speculation: grounds for the alternative history of a mode of Black cinema in America, operating at the tricky nexus between commercial imperative and artistic-political interrogation, that might have been.

"Real life is a reign of terror": Le Pont du Nord (1980, dir. Jacques Rivette)

In his best-known film, Celine and Julie Vont a Bateau/Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), Jacques Rivette had suggested that one can transform the ways in which life is narrated. Jumping in at the deep end of a mystery involving déjà vu, magic spells and secret houses, Celine and Julie gradually discover that they can change the content of what’s initially experienced as unalterable hallucination or dream, and thus in turn redeem time, history and a narrative that orients towards female victimhood (the murder of a young girl). The film ends with a gentle trip down the river, the protagonists, accompanied by the girl they’ve rescued from the clutches of time and death, forming a kind of substitute family of women. Celine was made the year of President Valéry Giscard D’Estaing’s first election, the year after the 1973 energy crisis, the end of the ‘Trentes Glorieuses’, the beginning of a regime of austerity and unemployment. Wearied by the succeeding half-decade, Le Pont presents no child to rescue, no boating trip or shaggy-dog story, but a bridge which, as in the children’s song from which the film drew its inspiration, selfish children will fall, in a kind of divine punishment dished out by a moralistic universe. (“The bridge collapsed and they drowned / See the fate of obstinate children”).

Protagonists Marie (Bulle Ogier) and Baptiste (her daughter, Pascale) first meet when Marie, absent-mindedly absorbed in her little red notebook—a joking nod to the radicalism of the ’68 generation (“see you at Mao”), rendered now pure introspection—steps out into the road in front of Baptiste, causing the latter to crash her moped and furiously slash a wire to quieten the out-of-control vehicle, still spinning wildly on the road. Running into each other twice more, Baptiste insists that she and Marie team up—for while meeting once or even twice might be chance or accident, three times is fate. Seeking to reuinite with her lover Julien (Pierre Clémenti) after spending a year in prison, Marie reluctantly and then more willingly teams up with Baptiste after Julien mysteriously disappears to undertake a task that will take him three days—after which, he promises, they can continue their love relationship. Ground down by prison, Marie tells Baptiste that she’s now committed to love as the guarantor of future happiness and security, but, as the film unfolds, this love affair is revealed to be caught up in more sinister machinations. Before their meeting, Baptiste has repeatedly revved up the moped as if threatening to confront a man who, apparently quite innocently prepares to set off on a motorbike being fixed at the side of the road. This man will reveal himself to be—perhaps—the principal antagonist in a vaguely-defined conspiracy operating through figures Baptise calls ‘Maxes’: spies or ‘guards’ who follow their victims, always in disguise, so many of them overrunning the city that “sometimes they kill each other”. After Baptiste exchanges Julien’s valise with a substitute, ruining an exchange involving large amounts of money: guns begin to be drawn, bodies to be found, threats to be made. The conspiracy centres principally on information—the valise contains maps, newspaper cuttings, obscure symbols—in the manner of the MacGuffin. We never really decipher what this information might mean, though we do discover that its consequences can be deadly. The protagonists’ quest to follow the mysterious diagrams they find drawn over maps of Paris, and approximating to the centuries-old children’s ‘Game of the Goose’, ends with Julien shooting Marie on the titular bridge, and Baptiste preparing to do battle with the chief ‘Max’ (Jean-François Stévenin)—a battle that then breaks through the fourth wall into a moment of levity that at once belies the drama of what we’ve just seen and heightens its lack of real resolution.

The information that Marie and Baptiste find in the valise reads as a kind of anatomy of the preceding decade: newspaper clippings, underlined in mysterious red and with arcane annotations covering everything from murder cases to bank robberies, political assassinations to corruption scandals, with Jacques Mesrine, whose name appears several times, as index of this ambiguity—a would-be Robin Hood who had been a member of the far-right OAS, in the ’70s declared Public Enemy no.1, whose death—denounced by some as extra-judicial execution on the part of the police force—had been celebrated by President D’Estaing. Marie hints that, Patty-Hearst like, she was manipulated into taking part in a series of bank robberies by those who argued that the real thieves were the banks themselves, but ideology, as with Mesrine, seems fluid here—whether the various deadly games in the film are taken on the part of the State, criminal organisations, or in the mercenary shadow world between the two. (Indeed, at one point, Stévenin suddenly speaks to Marie in German, raising the possibility of a clandestine network of former Nazis, material for a 1970s paranoiac-thriller of the ‘Marathon Man’ variety).

  

Gangsters, property developers, politicians: against this murky political world—involvement in which seems to have led to her time in prison—Marie clings to the promises of heterosexual romance, reuniting with Julien and telling Baptiste that she’s now resolved to devote herself to love—despite the fact that, as she admits, they’d been together only a week before she was arrested, and despite the hint that it was a romantic relationship which led to her crimes in the first place. Ultimately, it’s through Julien that Marie meets her fate, slain on the titular bridge. The lovers here take the titles of Rivette’s at the time-abandoned Marie and Julien project. A story of love and death inspired by the story of a woman who’d committee suicide, the film had led Rivette to a nervous breakdown (it would later be revived in the 1990s as a kind of ghost story). Yet this is hardly genuine amour fou (and all the gendered violence that the associated legal definition of the crime passionnel has historically covered), even if, early in the film, Rivette deploys the iconic romantic fatalism of Piazzola’s ‘Libertango’, which he described as “somewhere between a brothel and the church”.

Rather, it’s the relationship between Marie and Baptiste that takes centre stage: two women who traverse the city without the ‘guidance’ of a man, their relationship serving challenge to existing orders—whether it’s in the patriarchal expectations of a city of (male) gazes, or the double-bind between the routinised enclosure of the workplace or the prison (the workhouse itself, that fusion of the two characteristic of an earlier era, having given way to a more ‘civilised’ separation) and the ‘rootless’ wandering of the unemployed taken as such a threat by the State. Baptiste, in her leather jacket, anticipates a kind of wider-eyed, more lively version of Agnes Varda’s ‘vagabond’ a few years later, and she and Marie stand in for those who, ‘sans toit ni loi’ (without roof or law, the French title to Varda’s film) occupy space as transitory and transient inhabitants—not as romanticised images of movement, nor as pitiable images of suffering, nor as moralistic images of condemnation, nor as peripheral concern, but as central social fact. (After all, as Foucault suggested, it’s in the control of surplus populations, and in the increased surveillance function of the disciplinary apparatus, that the modern European state began to develop its characteristic forms.)

Interviewing Rivette about the film, Marguerite Duras was wholly admiring of the gendered mobility of the film’s protagonists, of its refiguring of the city through perpetual movement, at once liberation and prison: “We have never seen women like this out in the open air, without any attachment, without identity, a film that runs along like a river...”) In some ways, the opening sequences recall the endless motion of Marguerite Duras’ late ’70s short films (Aurelia Steiner, Les Mains Negatives, Le Navire Night, Cesaree), shot in and around Paris at its edges, at dusk or dawn, with their overlaid narrations of desire, of missed connections, and of concealed historical trauma. This movement is also a kind of literal going round in circles. Riding endlessly round the square, shaking her fist at the stone lions, Baptiste invokes the Rastafarian/Hebrew condemnation of ‘Babylon’ in a kind of Quixotic windmill-tilting, right before her first encounter with Marie knocks her off her moped and renders her warrior’s horse useless.

Thereafter, Baptiste is on foot. For her part, Marie, rendered claustrophobic by her time in prison, refuses to go indoors; we first see her taking a lift in the back of an open-topped truck, then ordering a croissant from the door of a cafe and asking it to be brought outside; she runs across the crowded roundabout of the Arc de Triomphe, risking death from waves of cars, rather than take the pedestrian subway. As a result, she and Baptiste wander on the peripheries, tracing a route round the city that’s not so much circuitous as an unpredictable zig-zag, crossing, re-crossing, doubling back along railroad tracks, reservoirs, building sites, footbridges, endless steps in Escher-like matching shot patterns (see the extremely detailed shot analysis here). But rather than a liberated movement in the mode of the flânuer or the dérive, such movement feels expressive of a relation to space characterised by loneliness and a lack of security. “You’re the first person I’ve met [in this city]”, Baptiste tells Marie. Much of the latter portion of the film takes place in the largely deserted wastelands that develop as a consequence of the deals between property developers, city officials; half-ruined buildings, a graveyard so overgrown that the graves only become visible after a protagonist literally stumbles across them (along with a dead body), a church apparently in the middle of nowhere, missing buildings knocked down to make way for the new that’s permanently promised and never quite arrives.

 

Against this—the city as wasteland or trap—Rivette (and DP William Lubtchansky) juxtaposes Marie and Baptiste’s game-playing with the imaginative transformations rendered by cinema itself. After Marie rescues Baptiste from the giant spider’s web in which she’s been trapped by a ‘Max’, the camera moves across a set of new, multi-coloured but already-dilapidated apartment blocks rising like distorted fairytale castles from the surrounding ruins of one of the city’s many new ‘(re)development’ sites: two forms of the sublime, the ridiculous, and the pragmatic indexing the realities of urban property rights and the exclusions their surfaces and edifices both exacerbate and deny. This shot encapsulates the film’s methodology—to relentlessly draw attention to its own limited technical means (at various points we see the actors buy or steal props used in subsequent scenes) whilst also combining them with a kind of whimsical enchantment. Based on improvisation and delivered with a technical minimum of means, film is refigured as play, or play-acting: a child-like assembly and re-assembly of stock figures, poses and props, harking back to the simplified repetition of generic conventions in early film (as when an actor puts their head on a railroad line to listen for approaching trains), or to the replaying of film clichés in children’s games. And while Baptise and Marie make little direct reference to cinema, film posters appear throughout—whether as illusion of space and freedom (our protagonists spend the night in the cinema watching 1956 western The Big Country (Les Grandes Espaces)—or as indication of gendered oppression—when Marie suffers an anxiety attack aboard a train, Baptiste sits her down beneath a poster for the slasher movie ‘The Silent Scream’ (rendered in French as ‘The Silence that Kills’), and at another point we glimpse the poster for Clouzot’s strange piece of misplaced psychedelia about voyeurism, domination and attraction to imprisonment, La Prisonniere. Baptiste associates the visual forms of mass media—whether cinema or advertisements—as menacing forces. Obsessed with surveillance, slashing at the eyes on billboards (whether a Kurosawa film or an advert for glasses)— she tells Marie that “eyes are everywhere”. Indeed, what’s striking about the film in contrast to Celine and Julie is that, for all the games and play-acting seen here, the mood of the film is suffused by a fatalism and low-level paranoia with no real outlet or end in sight. Whereas Celine and Julie negotiate their way into an apparent magical transformation of reality, the protagonists’ role-playing remains trapped within the terms of shadowy male domination it attempts to resist. As Serge Daney put it: “Facing a scenario whose terms are set, more or less hypocritically, by men (stories of secret societies, scavenger hunts, traps), the women respond by inventing an even more aleatory way of acting! A game unto themselves, then a game between themselves – beyond all hope, parodic, and excessive.”

Breaking the fourth wall in the final scene opens the film up to a playfulness it’s hitherto—despite being largely about game-playing—managed to largely avoid. But it also suggests a further falling into the abyss of indecipherable meaning, doubling, switching and artifice that is as much index of powerlessness as tool of protection. Baptiste has rehearsed for this fight every morning—removing her jacket (“my armour”, as she tells Marie) in an activity between self-defense, aesthetic form and obsessive-compulsive ritual, in which respect for opponents (the closing bow which Marie returns with a sardonic affection) suggests a formalised naivety out of place in the present moment. The inadequacy of the form is suggested in the final ‘battle’, in which the ‘Max’ instructs her: “Don’t forget your enemy is imaginary”. Baptiste’s karate fight is, in fact, a game played for the cameras operated by men.

Asked about the film’s perspective, Rivette told Daney and Jean Narboni in 1981: “It’s never the point of view of power, that’s for sure!” Rivette continues that he can’t show those in power because he can’t take them seriously. Yet this refusal to dignify those in power with representation also means that power’s operations themselves become numinous, in true Foucauldian fashion—the ‘Maxes’ are only the (possible) agents of power, its representatives or conduits, never those in charge. When Marie questions some of her stranger speculations on fate as modes of fantasy, Baptiste responds: “Real life is a reign of terror”. Referencing the formative campaign of state violence that both lies behind and is denied within the French republic, Baptiste extends such histories to the present, whilst alluding to the shadowy campaigns of extra-legal killings involving Mesrine, the Far Right, and the State itself. Ultimately, Marie and Baptiste are up against capitalism itself: the combination of chance and intent that drives a system based on a combination of apparent pragmatic naturalisation (capitalist realism) and the most fantastic of justifications for rationalised irrationalism, legally- and extra-legally enshrined inequality. Their game-playing serves as their defiance of the system, set up within the system’s own terms: a folie-a-deux which self-perpetuates through the very ties it establishes and cements—forms of solidarity and friendship. What enables Marie and Baptiste—at first—to survive within this environment—their paranoiac game-playing—is also what renders them vulnerable and ignorable: a corpse on the periphery, yet another missing person or unexplained death, yet another disappeared and wayward life.