Guerín’s Tableaux Strasbourgiens: In the City of Sylvia / En la ciudad de Sylvia

En la ciudad de Sylvia has been greeted in some quarters as an unmitigated triumph and as the film to restore belief in the so-called art house film.

José Luis Guerin is rightly celebrated for such films as the pseudo documentary (on The Quiet Man) Innisfree (1991) and En construcción (2001). Filmed in Strasbourg, a city in which aimless wandering seems always to find one back in the vicinity of the cathedral, the film is in the tradition of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens. In the manner of his previous film En construcción the formal and temporal properties of a space frame the film which opens and closes within the established formal constraints set by the spatio-temporal framework. The film returns to certain streets at different times of a few bright consecutive summer’s days, and captures some of the same pedestrians, some more mobile than others, on different occasions. There is a strong sense of the quartier in which the male protagonist resides conducting business about which one is never informed. A marvelously rich sound mix gives us delicately rendered upward echoes as a couple walk out of frame past the junction at the centre of the image and into the canyon of the street. As the camera tracks in joint pursuit (with her pursuer) of 'Sylvia' it picks up and passes through a series of street sounds such as bicycle chains of freewheeling or back-peddling cyclists, music from car stereos and heels on pavement. If the protagonist will be the privileged site for an investment of the gaze Guerín, it must be said, makes sure the microphone vies for position against this privilege.

The replete sound mix nonetheless draws our attention to the film’s barely reconstructed sexual politics vis-à-vis the Baudelairean tradition. Before we proceed to the ‘A une passante’ dimension of the film’s pretext the opening scene is indicative of a rather pious approach to the central character. He is reclining on his hotel bed pencil and paper to hand, the very essence of the sensitive male poet. Perhaps away from home in a new city, inspired by his new surroundings, excited at the prospects of perambulation and requited desire. Anyone’s story then. Many males’ story is what it really is. Indeed this is one way of arguing that what follows need not be ridiculed for the apparent irony deficiency of Guerín’s film: the protagonist is a finely-boned, sensitive male, arrayed in loose-fitting soft white and cream attire, longing to find a soul-mate in a city in north-eastern France. But the sound distribution in the opening scene gives it away. The pensive hotel guest’s eyes flicker into recognition. The muse, the first of many, has indeed visited. The pencil goes to mouth to confirm that the ignition has indeed taken place and - bang! - it is pencil-to-paper time. What a noise ensues. This is not just any pencil to paper, this is high-definition sound transfer which is then mixed to come from off-screen; this is sound so resonant it seems to trail in the wake of the scraping lead-head. This is a voluptuous techne, gathering the viewer into the soul of man. We are in the presence.

If this is the myth of the writer, indeed perhaps of the writer on holiday as described by Roland Barthes (“Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop”). His logorrhea is complemented by his sketches, snatched outside the café of the Conservatoire, where the swaying, hair-flicking, exclusively youthful mass of Women make it into his notebook. Guerín even has the temerity to include a grotesque intentional-spillage-of-the-drink-scene so that the questing eyes of the Man can catch those of the waitress. Not content with one such recourse to cliché Guerín piles it on as the now-seated elsewhere Muse-propelled (he has moved seats to get a frontal view of the hair-twirling chignon-bearing Blonde who he has admired from behind) sketcher spills over his beer in his haste to follow Her through the streets.

In his Tableaux parisiens Baudelaire wrote the manual for such trajectories:

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair... puis la nuit! - fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?

Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!

Finally exchanging words with the object of his pedestrian attentions on a tram after she had temporarily evaded her pursuer, He recounts a story of a ‘Sylvia’ whom he met 6 years ago at the Bar des aviateurs for whom it now transpires he has mistaken her. Profuse apologies follow as the woman, having told him that it is “not nice, not nice at all” to be followed (thanks for this devastating undercutting of His flaneur privileges – a sort of 3 points on his license admonishment), blows him a kiss as the tram moves on. One might as well be watching the Lynx effect in operation. Or an ad for Carlsberg.

Bereft he takes to the bar – in what may be a flashback, corroboration of the story he has told the woman on the tram, or a self-justifying reverie retrospectively fabricating the story in question – and attempts to seduce a dazed, glazed-eyed young woman. The evocation of Manet’s A bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881-82) is well-wrought and beautifully composed. By contrast, what an assault then on both audio and visual perception is to follow with a posturing machismo in the song and a wild and abandoned ‘raunchy’ dance by the woman who has ignored His attempts at seduction. A montage of repulsions!

The next scene cuts to an interior with the form of a naked sleeping woman lying next to Him and illuminated tastefully and fleetingly by the lights of passing traffic. Guerín may not be able to resist cliché; at least he has enough determination for indirection to allow passing lights to allow the ‘conquest’ to come into view.

On with the quest to find the Ariadne’s thread out of this labyrinth which always leads back to the cathedral, or failing that the ubiquitous ‘Laure je t’aime’ graffiti visible on what appear to be most facades of the city. The graffiti underlines the repetitive nature of the man’s days as it does of his perambulations. It shows him trapped in the labyrinth, fleetingly perceiving the trailing threads of a woman’s hair (near the end of the film, the hair flows in a rising wind, as women cross each other’s paths pacing up and down awaiting the next tram, with Him static in the shelter gazing on), gazing on straight into the city for signs of Sylvia’s trail.

This labyrinth is instated. Ariadne’s thread will not be found. He will sit, wait and spill drinks but there will be no encounter to jolt him out of fascination. If only Guerín actually delivered this conclusion. Instead two vignettes confirm quite a different outcome. As he sits gazing into and across the space of passing women (which parade of light summer dresses and hair is worthy of a L’Oreal advert, but also one token black woman, dressed in white in an extraordinarily racist decision, and a sort of minotaur – a disfigured woman with one eye) his eyes alight once more on the would-be Sylvia. She is on a tram and as it moves out of frame she is seen greeting an unseen fellow-passenger with a handshake. Fortunately (for Him) it is only handshake. His face is reactionless. Cut to the café. He has taken up smoking in order that the supposedly inherently comic African street-seller’s (another racist inclusion) frog-croak lighter can finally be employed for its practical function. As he lights up the waitress from the early café scene herself is ignited into a laughter which says: you have beguiled me, I am yours if you want me. But he is still waiting for Sylvia and so he sets off after another woman in red. Just as for the bearer of the narrative voice and the avid gaze in Baudelaire, He just keeps on looking. That avid gaze is offered up in En la cuidad de Sylvia as something to be affirmed as if it were the conscience of contemporary cinema (in the eyes of certain critics). For all its remarkable evocation of the quotidian life of a modern European city and for all its manner of extracting the extraordinary from the banal, this avid gaze is toxic, defiantly resurrecting the spectre of Baudelaire’s flaneur. Now please leave us alone.

Cependant des démons malsains dans l'atmosphère
S'éveillent lourdement, comme des gens d'affaire,
Et cognent en volant les volets et l'auvent.
À travers les lueurs que tourmente le vent
La Prostitution s'allume dans les rues;
Comme une fourmilière elle ouvre ses issues;
Partout elle se fraye un occulte chemin,
Ainsi que l'ennemi qui tente un coup de main;
Elle remue au sein de la cité de fange
Comme un ver qui dérobe à l'Homme ce qu'il mange.

José-Luis Guerín, En construcción (2001)

In his 2001 film En construcción Catalan filmmaker José Luis Guerin (currently much-acclaimed for En la ciudad de Sylvia about which I have also posted) employs building works both as metaphor and as framing device. The suspension of normal activity provided by the works provides a coherence and a focal point to anchor the images which otherwise would appear arbitrarily focussed and contrived. Playing with our preconceived perceptions about the boundaries of the documentary and fictional forms, Guerin seems of one mind with Godard who declares them to be the same. An apparently deranged vagabond declaims in the opening sequence against the proposed improvements. He urges “squares as one finds in London,” not old-fashioned narrow streets with apartment buildings. If there is one predominant voice in the film it is his, however, and during the course of the film we frequently see him wander in and out of shot offering opinions on all manner of questions. In one scene he proudly displays his stock of “capricios”, trinkets salvaged from his forages in the street; this eloquent scene reminds us of course that in his former incarnation - on board a cruise ship - he would have amassed exotic trinkets in the manner of Pere Jules in Vigo’s L’Atalante.

Clearly Guerin wants to give a certain integrity to his ‘cast’. His bricklayers are alternately a lonely insomniac and a voluble Moroccan sage who spouts Marxist dogma while lining up the bricks and mortar for the master builder. His head builder is, likewise, a gentle family man who playfully teases the truth from his daughter about her Sunday afternoon mischief on the building site, while the son is an unobjectionable suitor of the ‘girl next door’ - they court each other across the divide between his scaffolding and her balcony. This is film which coaxes the extraordinary out of the most apparently mundane situations and settings. The camera placement and framing deliver a mesmerising array of images estranged from (but still belonging to) their objects. Like Mallarmé Guerin's camera is determined to describe not the object itself but the effect it produces. The film paces itself partly in line with the real time of the construction of a wall, and partly in the slowed-down time of the dope-smoking lovers. Those exceptions to the film’s slow unravelling are the estate agents and prospective buyers who come to view the apartments. While they imagine their expensive furniture into place the builders - whom we recognize from earlier scenes - go about their own business. The film is partly about these two times, and about extracting another time from the repetitive and normalising advances of late capitalism.

The archaeologists slow down the progress while excavating an ancient burial site and the builders declare themselves delighted since they will still be paid; the dope-smoking lovers are oblivious to their surroundings and continue to be so as in the final scene - one long take - they piggy-back each other up the street to their new home; the Moroccan builder takes an ironic distance from the world but through his generous nature gains a niche of time to himself; the foreman and the property developer chat over lunch on the site and exchange views on the construction techniques used in ancient Egypt. The film recalls to me a remarkable passage printed in parentheses in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. William Bankes recalls with nostalgia how he once observed Mrs Ramsay stirring amidst the unfinished walls of a hotel under construction. There is much that stirs as well as much that is gently stirring in Guerin’s own Work in Progress.