The Nine Muses by John Akomfrah (2010)

The Nine Muses

Of the literary texts which provide the voice-over text (voiced by Vanessa Redgrave) for John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses – ranging from Homer to Heathcote Williams - it is arguably the work of Samuel Beckett that is most frequently employed. The words of Molloy in his mother’s room are heard early in the film and return near its close. The mother’s room for Molloy is a place where he feels at once at home and abroad – it amounts to the Freudian uncanny. Mythology and ancient philosophy spoke of the matrix in this context. John Akomfrah is aware of this, from his research both archival and literary, in preparing this elegant film essay about mass immigration into Britain after the second world war. The two Beckett texts he chooses were first published in French, and already then the work of an author who had emigrated, first to an inhospitable London and later to a more welcoming Paris. The Paris in which he published his post war novels of course had succumbed to the onslaught of the war, occupation and Vichy and it is the changed landscape of the post war period that sees Beckett’s trilogy (of which Molloy formed part), as well as Waiting for Godot and Endgame all published or performed.

There is very little in the way of literary voices from the immigrant community in this film. There is no Derek Walcott, no Grace Nichols. Indeed the Beckett texts which Akomfrah uses are primarily concerned with ontological not political material. An allied displacement takes place on the level of the image: men standing in Alaska looking away from the camera to lakes, jetties, hills, rivers, walking along snowy paths and highways. The director – uncredited – stands and sits in what may be London; he looks at the camera. These interludes punctuate a kaleidoscope of footage from the archives.

The port is of course where the people arrived; the ports in the film (in either new or archive footage) itself are either derelict or idle, because of the season or the economy. The only populated spaces are those in the archive footage. Hence Akomfrah’s use of Alaska: sparsely populated it evokes the idea of a space to be filled, of resources under the snow, of potential for the prospector, or the immigrant willing to endure the climate.

Some of the material is hackneyed: Schubert for the snow, and bits of predictable Shakespeare – “this sceptered isle”, “if music be the food of love” – in particular feel overused. Equally, however, the juxtapositions can be fresh and startling: ‘The ballad of Finnegan’s Wake’ – one of the referents of Joyce’s unapostrophised novel - is sung over images of the snowy dockside. Joyce’s Portrait is quoted not, as might be expected, on the question of national identity – about which the novel has much to say – but the thoughts of the young Stephen Dedalus on bed-wetting. His musings concern the education of the senses, and temperature, by extension climate and weather, but also home, where one sleeps, where one belongs (“first it’s warm, then it’s cold”). The ambivalence and fluctuating nature of belonging or feeling at one with a place.

If the film is content to let the viewer form their own conclusions about the signification of the figures in the landscape over which the voiceovers are delivered, Akomfrah is less flexible about other audio and visual connections, which on one or two occasions were arguably more concrete and not subtle enough. This was only an occasional unevenness however.

According to the director he wanted the dialogue to be between two worlds. Joyce’s Ireland was after all closer to Dublin than Kingston not least in terms of climate and the issue of visual blending in was available to Irish people. But as Beckett himself pointed out once one opened ones mouth (in England) the game was up.

The archive footage is mostly from the midlands – the Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham for example. This regional dimension is striking in itself in that it is not a metropolitan focus. Returning to elements of Handsworth Songs, the song element is still crucial in Akomfrah’s consideration of the immigrant imaginary.

Robinson in Ruins by Patrick Keiller (2010)

Robinson in Ruins
Robinson has been missing, in prison for an unspecified crime, and has returned to survive in the margins, in the periphery of London. The theme of borders is pervasive in a film whose geographical journey takes us from the boarded up dwelling haunted by Robinson to Newbury and whose historical journey thereby transports us from the financial meltdown in 2008 to the enclosures of the 16th century and the Swing riots of the 1830s. The intellectual journey is always one of the pleasures of a Patrick Keiller film and his guides are, not surprisingly, Walter Benjamin for the flaneurist predilections of Robinson and Fredric Jameson for a Marxian account of capital, property, commodities and periodisation.

The film, then, deliberately begins in a capitalism that is ‘late’, with Robinson finding a new place, in the ruins, to haunt. Robinson too is late here, already in a sense dead in a film concerning itself with vestiges and cadavers, with waste ground and abandoned quarries, industrial infrastucture and defunct military sites.

To haunt is of course to frequent: living in the ruins of late capitalism, after the implosion, in the implosion. As Robinson’s diary, as the voice-over explains, discovered in a mobile home in the corner of a field following his disappearance and the abandonment of his research, notes the fortunes of oil prices, and of stock market share prices, he momentarily contemplates the possibility that we are about to witness a truly historic global shift.

Taking his cue from signs he can decipher in the landscape and trajectories suggested by his openness, in this case, to the suggestive and directional impetus of a motorway sign (with lichin, we later learn, shaped like a profile of Goethe), Robinson discovers the potential for a redemptive turn.

As if remembering Benjamin’s angel of history, in the guise of a biophilia dedicated to the world of plants and animals, and always it seems, centred on sites vacated by heavy industry and military installation or strategic military sites, Robinson’s sensibility offers redemptive possibilities in the most unlikely of locations. Thus, in an abandoned quarry, of great scientific value, he proposes to build an eco town.

If Robinson encounters any people on his journeys it is always only at a distance. His perambulations take him from location to location where he sets up a fixed camera and films the landscape – in a reprise of Turner he claims. There are no travelling shots, no zooms, pans or tilts, just the occasional reframing.

Turner of course, working with paint and canvas, had to suggest turbulence and the transformative force of climate and weather, whereas Keiller-Robinson can let the camera capture the contingencies of nature: leaves, flowers, rapeseed fields, poppy fields, butterflies all in their movements within and in and out of the frame, forming virtual and partial reframings. Within this context the quoting of Lynn Margolis is indicative of the film’s argument: morphogenesis considered as a model for an affective politics. Through the symbiosis will arise a new way of dividing the sensible (to invoke Rancière) and of responding to the landscape – part of the brief of the AHRC-funded project one of the fruits of which is this film. Various struggles against capitalism are evoked directly in the narration and in the images of abandoned places (either abandoned because of enclosures or the moving on of military-industrial strategic occupations – e.g. Greenham Common – or manufacture linked to nuclear armaments and delivery systems. At its heart the question of the commons, the common land restored at Greenham shown here with a pipe rusting amid the restored bucolic surroundings – a ruin amid life amid the ruins and the common land where earlier forms of resistance took place at Newbury – two enclosures of two common lands then, one early one late.




In its aftermath, global capitalism – the global market, the selling-off on national infrastructure and services such as a gas pipeline, the complex of invisible finance and the implosion of the economy all lead us to 2010 where we have a surprising result in the election and Robinson’s latest disappearance. This year also saw the release of another cinematic convict , Gordon Gekko. Needless to say Keiller’s meditation of the financial crisis provokes significantly more thought. Robinson’s crime remains unknown. The film ends with a close-up on a sign ‘Danger Road Failed’, a found poetic and surrealist amalgamation of Wall Street Crash and credit Crunch.

DEMONSTRATION AGAINST EDUCATION CUTS

STOP THE CUTS

CAMERON-CLEGG: THE AXES OF EVIL

Eduardo de Gregorio's Sérail on DVD

Sérail (1976) which has recently come out on a French DVD from Les films du paradoxe is like a hybrid of Rivette and Ruiz (with a smattering of Robbe-Grillet) and stars Corin Redgrave and Leslie Caron with Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier in the Rivettian roles of blonde and brunette in a house which is a house of fiction, a sinister funhouse in which an English author gets lost and perhaps entombed as he has passed to the other side of the mirror and is observing his own life as created at his typewriter in a devouring mise-an-abîme. The house is a threshold between its virtual instantiations: walls, windows, furniture, drapery and furnishings transform themselves alternately into presence and absence as two women play out an intrigue with Caron overseeing and orchestrating a snare of uncertain nature on a victim who may merely have conceived all of this as a work of fiction, or as a pathological projection. Claire Denis worked as first assistant director on the film as she was to have done on Rivette’s abandoned project ‘Marie et Julien’ (which was also to have starred Caron, playing opposite Albert Finney) while the Argentinian director Eduardo de Gregorio was also a collaborator of Rivette’s at the time the film was made.

Thierry Henry’s handball, neo-liberalism and the limits of football

Despite the fact that football is played on the ground, with grass stretching between the two sets of goalposts which produce the principal orientations of the teams and players, its 'field', according to the cultural theorist Brian Massumi, is “also an inductive limit-sign rather than a ground in any foundational sense”.

There are limits to the playing surface but “play in itself is groundless and limitless, taking place above the ground limit and between the goal limits” (Massumi 2004: 72). We would add that play can also exceed the grid of the playing surface, as when players use the space beyond the lines to position their bodies to keep the ball in play (a recent spectacularly skillful instance by the Manchester United player Dimitar Berbatov made headlines) or to evade a challenge. Such moves are, strictly speaking, contraventions of the rules of the game and amount to an unauthorised departure from the field of play. In sport rules are, in Massumi’s analysis, instances of “ex post facto captures that take precedence”. Sport evolves in response to forces of variation asserting themselves, and rules respond to such assertions by means of “usurpation”. A new unheard of variation in play emerges which is usurped in the future by an ex post facto capture.

The hand of Thierry Henry operated right above the boundary of the playing grid. It kept the ball within the playing area by intercepting it as it moved to cross an imaginary boundary line; imaginary because projected upward vertically. All fouls in football involve crossing a line: a boot raised and rotated beyond a certain angle; a boot raised above a certain angle when considered against the angle of the leg it confronts: alter one or the other and the action may no longer be identified as a foul. Fouls are lines being crossed, but those lines shift.

One of the lines upon which certain sports such as football depend is the line between the predictable and the highly unlikely. The case of the Henry handball is ripe for discussion in this context. That there was an opportunity for a double handball was in itself an instance of rarity; that it went unnoticed even more rare.The match commentators, especially the radio commentators on BBC 5 Live, were acutely aware than this event would generate enormous debate; they knew a line had been crossed. That the line crossed was the one which separated fairness from cheating is one thing - but this is of course a line that no longer applies in modern sport - but quite another threshold was traversed marking the area between probability and the improbable.

In football occasions where players inform the referee that they have not been fouled by an opponent despite the official’s decision – Arsenal’s Andrei Arshavin and Ivan Egrich of the Turkish team Bursaspor (the subject of a tribute in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy) are two recent examples – are rare. The dictates of professionalism nullify any residues of the so-called Corinthian spirit. On the other side there is a more or less universally-observed example of players self-regulating in the interests of a putative fair-play: the common practice of kicking the ball out of play to permit an injured player to be tended to and then giving the ball back to the opposition from the throw-in won. A custom has built up in football for which there is no presiding legislation: the convention is that the ball is given back to the team which kicked into touch to enable the treatment. If a player or team does not play ball they are castigated.

When Henry handled the ball back into play and flicked it with his foot on to the head of William Gallas he induced a singular variation which is the mark of a star player’s style (cf. Massumi 77). It is a mark of such style to produce the unprepared for - Zidane's audacious high-risk penalty kick in the World Cup final against Italy in 2006 said, in one breath, I am transcendent, while his head-butt declared, in an inversion of the Christian narrative of resurrection, a commitment to terrestrial concerns.



In the same match, in what he knew would be his final appearance as footballer, on the biggest stage, Zidane pushed the limits of football in contrasting ways as far as outcomes were concerned faced with rules, but both actions belong to the same immanent field of style.

It is noteworthy that in all the furore surrounding the blatant ‘variation’ Gallas seems to have emerged blameless while Henry is derided as a cheat (even if praised for his 'bravery' by some Irish players in speaking publicly of his embarrassment). Yet Gallas could have stopped and not finished the move by heading the ball into the net. He after all had seen the double handball in close up, even if at full speed - an awareness of which emerges in Henry’s comments after Fifa rejected the Irish FA’s appeal for a replay, where he argues that television replay and slow-motion replay in particular (perhaps we should add, more crucially YouTube, which multiplies viewership and replayability) enable the exaggeration of his intention and distend the time-frame in which, he insists, he was merely intuitively operating. Henry was part of a team dedicated to winning by any means they could within the regulatory framework provided by Fifa and in football this means pushing the laws to their limit. In football every tackle is an exercise in awareness and a manipulation of boundaries and limits. Every piece of ball control is a deployment of the player’s body and mind to extract or prolong the advantage potentially already at work in the ball as it arrives. In Massumi’s account it is this play of potential in a field-condition which makes the ball take on a particular function: “Like the goal and the ground, the ball as a substantial term doubles the subject of the play, which itself is invisible and nonsubstantial, the catalysis-point of a force-field, a charge-point of potential" (73). At each moment the ball ‘stands’, the players likewise, in their formation, in their reformulation, in their dispersal and coalescence, all arrayed as potential. For a rare moment in the France-Ireland World Cup qualifying play-off the ball seemed to stop and fix to Henry, right on the end-line, with his palm perpendicular to the turf; with a palm which became a fence; with a palm which became a manifest boundary and blocked the exit of the ball from the grid, simultaneously blocking the exit of France from the competition. In so doing, however, he merely draws attention to the underlying condition of all play. The ball, Massumi argues, has a certain autonomy: it depends upon the continuum of potential which it doubles, and is nothing without this continuum; yet through the doubling it asserts itself as what he calls a “part-subject”:

The part-subject catalyses the play as a whole but is not itself a whole. It attracts and arrays the players, defining their effective role in the game and defining the overall state of the game, at any given moment, by the potential movement of the players with respect to it. The ball moves the players. The player is the object of the ball. (73)

This underlying condition of all play is brought into particular focus in the case of the arguments football has over ‘intention’. The recent high-profile case of the Arsenal player Eduardo who was accused of simulation (Fifa became good Baudrillardians some time ago), and had a case brought against him, was exonerated of any wrong-doing – of cheating. It will be interesting to see if Henry is hauled before a disciplinary committee to answer a similar charge. It is highly unlikely, because convention does not view an intentional handball with the same disapproval as it does simulation in order to influence a penalty kick decision. However, it is the force of variation in the Henry case which makes it one which seems destined to occasion Massumi’s usurpation (since I wrote this Michel Platini has backed plans to fast-track the use of 5 officials at the World Cup). No matter that the combination of events is so singular, the twist which he brought to bear on the operation of the field-condition, the play with the limits on several levels – on the end line, with the rules - prompted the instant predictions of Mark Lawrenson et al that we would never hear the end of this narrative.

Henry, like all players relates to other players, not empirically as discrete terms, but rather, as Massumi explains, in his and their “collective becoming”. This emergence, which is a “modulation of potential”, is captured by regulatory post-emergence appraisal, in concrete terms when the play is stopped for the referee’s assessment. The modulation introduced by Henry, involving a first disguised but intended handball, followed by a second blatant unmasked repetition, with the difference of its heightened and brash visibility, however, was a provocation too far. It will induce some form of usurpation by Fifa of this Henry variation. The adjudicators of this farrago failed to perceive any of the boundaries upon which the refereeing of a football game depends. A referee in a Sunday League veterans game, operating solo without the aid of a single further official, would have whistled for at least one of the four (arguably) infringements. S/He would not have missed the offside and the first handball and the second and the fact that the ball had crossed the end-line (admittedly the last is a fabrication clung to in my repeated lo-def YouTube viewings minutes after the final whistle). At the very least s/he would have seen the opportunity for a delay to consider the options, capitalising on the fact that everyone could see something untoward had occurred. S/He could have waved the players away and consulted the assistant referee. Between them they could have agreed on one infringement to identify as the reason for the refereeing decision. That the ball had gone out of play being the most obvious, even if fictitious. The simplest of lines, the simplest and most straightforward of the ways of crossing lines that football identifies as a reason for a stoppage in play, could have been invoked. The line however which modern television coverage has enabled cameras to cross - the line between mass visibility and hyper-visibility (itself in some ways the theme of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parenno’s film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait) - deprives the officials of this recourse; they themselves are under scrutiny as never before. In the absence of the cameras a consultation would have taken place. But this is football not as a sport but as a spectacle with a potential 1 billion pound pay-off for France. When Gallas nodded the ball over the Ireland goal-line he crossed the line which set up that profit. Once crossed the contracts were already signed, with a clause to allow back-out in the unlikely event of an Irish comeback – even though this nearly happened, with the Republic of Ireland forward Robbie Keane at the last moment misjudging his first touch – and it is the sheer scale of that 1 billion which talks the talk and walks the walk of the ‘va va voom’ man who may not even hold a place in the finals. A 30 million striker from Real Madrid was, after all, waiting in the place which Henry’s handball imperiously excluded – the sidelines, the area beyond the grid.

The case will prove that human eyes and judgement alone without visual prosthesis cannot effectively sustain the capture required of the events on the field. In the end neo-liberalism will have the ultimate say in this matter. It was already at work in Fifa’s ex post facto decision unjustly to introduce seeding to make it more likely that desired elite teams (France, Portugal, Russia) get to play in the World Cup, thereby ensuring more revenue from television, advertising and promotion on all levels of the Jules Rimet circus. Traces of what is ultimately and unconsciously the same neo-liberalism were already at work in the responses of some Irish players who said that faced with chance to handball their own team into the World Cup they would do the same. In the end professional collegiality and pragmatism outweighs team and national interest: Henry reluctantly defended by those he had cheated out of a place in the finals which they deserved on the basis of a shared knowledge of, and consensus in the face of, professional obligation. A fitting parable for our times, then. The reported 1 billion pounds cash-cow which qualification represents for the French Football Federation will overwrite all protest no matter how many people sign up to YouTube’s ‘Become a fan of Replay Ireland v France’. Henry pushed the rules to their limits, played with them at the very limit of the field of play. With his manager rarely having more than one hand outside his trouser pocket at a time and clueless as to how to shape a team and formulate a game-plan, Henry was a strings-free Pinocchio, with a hand loosened, then stayed in the intuitive act of fabrication and desperation of a floundering team without direction. In some ways his argument, which he has since upgraded to an expression of embarrassment, that the ball moved toward the hand and not the hand toward the ball, is the perfect illustration of Massumi’s argument. In the first contact the ball moved towards his arm, but prior to the second contact Henry elevated his hand and stopped it so that it remained true that the ball was still moving toward his hand at the point of contact rather than the other way round. Aside from the part-object part-subject conjunction which the Henry handball so beautifully and painfully (in some quarters) illustrates, he was also being merely enterprising, meeting his deadline to secure a 1 billion pound contract. He is in the end just a self-regulating individual talent harnessing his innovations as a company man (on bonuses too of course). The rules state that if you have not been identified as having committed an intentional handball then it has not happened in any meaningful way. When it comes to the question of intending to leave a hand in position things become vague, proving that this entire area derives from a flawed epistemological-ontological conjunction. As a player he must exploit such fault-lines. Fifa just had not yet had reason to consider the miniscule opening for enormous potential in the play of part-object (le main de dieu) and part-subject (ball) at a limit whose play the governing body simply could not see, except now, when it is too late. Its argument, if it read Massumi, would be ‘football wins’, but ex post facto, which will of course offer little in the way of consolation to Trapattoni’s green army^TM.

Reference

Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002)

Dumont's Hadewijch at the London Film Festival 2009

Twentynine Palms gave us a dysfunctional couple to rival the more recent duo at the centre of von Trier’s Antichrist. In the eyes of its director Bruno Dumont the film was a kick against puritanism. In his latest, screened last night at the London Film Festival, Dumont's central character is a young woman intent on devoting herself to Christ as a nun. Thwarted from taking her vows by a mother superior who suspects that in her acts of self-denial and mortification there may be an element of self-love, the novice is requested to ‘return to the world’ where by virtue of encounters and chance occurrences she may find her ‘true self’ as well as discover other ways to come closer to God. Céline is known to one of her convent colleagues as Hadewijch, ostensibly the name of her place of birth, but one of the more basic of the many interpolations of the thought of the 13th century Dutch mystic and poet which help shape the film’s discursive terrain.

With the director’s characteristic Bressonian mise-en-scène and with the film’s many evocations of Bresson, Dreyer and Rivette, Hadewijch is also imbued with a strong sense of climate, temperature and light. Those familiar with Dumont’s previous work will be forgiven for dreading the woods which lie between her convent and a place of frequent pilgrimage in a nearby church – a grotto with a statue representing the entombed Christ – as a place of violent encounter in the non-convent world. It does not turn out to be the case, however. Indeed these same woods are later the setting for the conversation which will in fact find the devotee coming closer to God. The God, however, to whom she draws near is the divine being characterised by manifesting himself in his absence, as explained to her by an amateur Muslim theologian, Nassir, whom she meets having been befriended earlier in a cafe by his younger brother Yassine. As the questing acolyte suffers more and more the withdrawal of the Christ she wishes to love, and whose body she needs, she draws closer to the discourse of the man, as she does physically to both him and his brother. They are in effect the conduits allowing the becoming-manifest of the divinity, and it is for this reason that Céline feels compelled to express dawning sexual desire for Yassine (in the banal context of a pause while the fries cook in the deep-fat fryer). The world to which she has returned is, it transpires, one she has never been in to begin with. Her father is a government minister and the family live in a vast house in the Ile St Louis, while Yassine lives in the HLMs. Her Christ is coveted within spitting distance of the Notre Dame, while Yassine’s brother holds court in a room entered through a kebab shop. These polarities may appear at first sight heavy-handed, but when Céline as part of her ‘conversion’ (which the film presents as a continuation), visits the Lebanon with the brother to witness first-hand the ‘humiliation’ which in his worldview demands violent response, it is clear that Dumont views them as prerequisites for the film’s strategic ambivalence to operate. Céline should not become a martyr, the nuns advise at the film’s outset. Despite a momentary suggestion in the film’s denouement that she has in fact acted as a suicide bomber this does not occur at either of the poles of belief which her own religious faith can, without contradiction, occupy. The final scenes make manifest the withdrawn threat of violence which earlier scenes had asked us to associate with a construction worker working on renovations at the convent by showing us the builder back out of prison after his 3 months re-incarceration (for an unnamed infringement of his parole). As rain pours down he climbs down the ladder with bare torso facing the camera a stricken and inconsolable Céline is observed in the convent grounds with his customary ambiguous interest. Another young nun takes Céline to shelter in the greenhouse where the silent man also stands. When she leaves the grotto having berated her Christ for forcing her to pursue him and for constantly evading her ever more painfully she descends through the woods once more. Plunging to an attempted suicide by drowning the final encounter of the film is between the emerging Céline and the saving intervention of the builder. Her joy is expressed and his misshapen teeth form a smile. Religion constructs the image of the other as one wants the other to be, but often does so with the space of the other eradicated, bracketed off, annihilated. In this final encounter with the faces looking past each other in embrace Dumont shows us a world, a return to the secular world, which is always insistently and devastatingly unrecognizable.

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.