Itinerarie de Jean Bricard - Straub and Huillet: London Film Festival 2008

The final film made by Straub and Huillet is a pared down exercise in the ‘pedagogy’ once celebrated by the late critic Serge Daney. A fixed camera mounted on a motor-boat captures in one long take the passing bank of the Loire; the sky is leaden, the foliage sparse; the river swelling. The first ‘event’ in the itinerary of Jean Bricard – the film’s title – comes after several minutes when the boat slows to turn a bend. To the boat itself, the camera, the various floating objects in the river and a moored vessel which the camera has passed is now added the fifth sign of human occupation of this territory (although the camera is autonomous generator of the presence before us and in this sense inhuman): a sign with an arrow pointing the direction round the river’s bend. Halfway back in the opposite direction a voice – that of Bricard himself as recorded in 1993 by the author on whose book the film is based, Jean-Yves Petiteau - surprises us by announcing that what we are observing is an island in the river, an island where he spent his childhood. The boat and the camera continue their course, with a seemingly identical sign and an indistinguishable second bend completing the circuit. Then a fixed shot of a rude country house with loud traffic driving past. An image of the house where he lives shot from across the river, the microphone picking up sounds of traffic from the house rather than the vantage point of the camera.

The sound of various engines intrudes on this film which ends up being about the political ecology of the post-war period and a further entry on the work of this film-making team on this period and its conceptual, aesthetic and political legacies. The Loire was a boundary between the German soldiers and the Americans, the local resistance ferrying the latter and risking arrest and deportation. A plaque commemorates the uncle and associates who were captured doing this. In the middle lies the island, repository of the memory of a pre-war childhood not itself immune to terror – this is the house where rats ate my finger while I slept Bricard recalls.

With the fixed camera on the motor boat, the film frame achieves its own ‘level’ because of the water’s height. The buildings on its banks have been part-submerged by the silting which has occurred in the postwar period when human intervention altered the topography. Bricard’s voice recounts how they once pulled a hundred rabbits to safety from the flood plain, but also is fascinated by the space now not visible once occupied by the oven in a derelict bistro. A reflection on erasure, archival inscription, submergence and divergence: this is a fitting coda to a marvellous oeuvre.

Leos Carax, Merde at the London Film Festival 2008

To say that Merde is a surprising addition to the slim oeuvre of Leos Carax is to put it mildly. The last frames of celluloid to be screened in his name contained one of the most outré performances of the recently deceased Guillaume Dépardieu playing the publicity-shunning author who had descended in a clinamen-like fall from the stratum of the French haute-bourgeoisie to the world of the sans-papiers. Yet when Denis Lavant returns to Carax’s world – after a 16 year hiatus – he, in some senses, returns from the same depths as the neo-Mellvillian protagonist of Pola X.

The Melvillian dimension is once more in evidence. Faced with the threat of being hanged for his crimes M. Merde responds twice “I don’t want that”. This Bartleby for our times lives in an underground chamber in the subterranean sewer system of Tokyo. The torrents in which Pierre and Isabelle are swept up in the dream sequence of Pola X give another allegory of uncanny space in Carax’s imaginary. Here, as in the television version, and in the opening credits of Pola X, the backdrop is war. In M. Merde’s hideout there are vestiges of 1937, the "heroes of Nanjing", hand-grenades and even a tank.

Following a series of comically misanthropic incursions on social normativity M Merde, like a distressed Joker-Penguin hybrid from Batman deluges a busy Tokyo pedestrian street with hand-grenades. Tracked to his lair he is detained for three years before being executed.

The echoes of the grand guignol version of Batman to which certain directors of instalments have been drawn recur in the character of the French lawyer who takes on the case of M Merde, having become associated with his cause because he claims to be able to communicate with him. Prior to this revelation Carax shows us him in action as an older double for the man from the sewer, with the same puckish beard, one blinded white eyeball and the same twisted gait and half-palsied right side. He will come, then, to represent M Merde in both senses of the term.

The uncanny double is a feature of the gothic genre in literature which has echoes in Carax’s film, but which permeates the horror genre and finds itself revitalised in contemporary films by Ruiz and Lynch.

As Merde comes back to life, in a resurrection prefaced by the Christ-like figure arrested by the Tokyo police, and observed by his last-supper (flowers and money/fric) providing observers, the shot of an empty noose is followed by a caption: Next instalment: 'Merde in USA' over a close up of Abraham Lincoln with a M. Merde makeover beard.

Merde like Beckett’s O (played by Buster Keaton) in Film shuns self-perception. He has never seen his reflection; the skin of his back is adhered to by a black fabric square. He loves life but hates people. He eliminates perceivers, shuns representation, but communes with a (legal) representative.

It is testament to the fervour of Carax’s imagination and wit that in an instalment in an omnibus film like Tokyo! he can succeed in making such a playful and inventive genre film, pay homage to Godard (Made in USA), reinvent the irrepressible Denis Lavant and make the viewer feel that somehow, for these small wonders, it has been worth the wait.