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.

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.

Tennis and the supplement of family

With the proliferation of cameras covering big sporting events and modern editing possibilities has come more screen time devoted to inserts of spectators. At major international football competitions such as Euro 2008 the director selects from a deluge of crowd shots featuring attractive women and comedy-headwear sporting males a representative tableau of two particular niches which these two groups themselves traverse: individuals united in joy or despair. Lachrymose or merely crestfallen spectators have an enduring appeal, especially when matched to a reverse shot of defeated players collapsed on the turf. Tennis presents a different challenge to the television sports director. The fans of a Federer or Nadal are not identifiable by their adoption of a replica shirt, while the nature of stadia architecture and proportion, relative to the dimensions of the playing area means that identifying paraphernalia such as national flags are unlikely. More likely is a face-painting on the cheek of the national flag which only the most painstaking of camera operators will pick out. What is left? At Wimbledon at least it seems that the female beauty sensor has been disabled. Instead what the director favours is the family drama supplement to events on court. As mediated by the BBC the interpretation of almost every big match is channeled through a family narrative. It is one of the by products of Henmania. That and the execrable Henman Hill (I cannot bring myself to mention its new name). There has been a viral effect of this domestic prosthesis. The more a player's entourage is going to be on screen the more the tennis player is aware that the television audience is producing a particular image of the player as implicated in a domestic narrative. The Williams sisters cast of two and supporting cast has of course taken the supplement to a new level. The neutralising of the shot-reverse shot dynamic throws up an obstacle for the director. Indeed because they are sisters it could be argued that shot reverse shot between players is disabled. It is welcome however, that they perversely impact on certain of the cliches of this type of programme and so test the powers of the inane commentators who must struggle to find new ways of saying old things and must seize on, if not fabricate, any scrap of controversy to fuel conspiracy rumours and to find a reverse shot off-screen, in the unconscious.

Membranes, thresholds and the virtual

If, for Derrida, the lesson which Hamlet can teach in regard to representation is that the ghost dictates (in Spectres of Marx), for Deleuze the play offers a pedagogy of virtuality. One of the key differences between Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida in their respective approaches to texts and hermeneutics is in part clarified by Deleuze’s Logique du sens. Here, to the structuralist triad he had identified in his 1967 essay—of designation of concepts, manifestation of subjects and signification of concepts—he adds the fourth term, sense. Sense names the additional space of relation between language and objects/bodies. Sense is a transcendental field not exhausted by the operations of signification. It is, as Philip Goodchild points out, an empty place (Goodchild 1996, 38-48). By contrast, however, to the negative theology of deconstruction by which the absent process of différance produces all meanings (Derrida 1982, 6), inscription in Deleuze and Guattari is a synthesis of recording of the Body without Organs and is part of a contact with material bodies, culture and politics. The empty space works not to produce meanings, but rather to give rise to events. In the chapter of Logique du sens entitled ‘Fifteenth Series: of Singularities’, Deleuze sets out to articulate the characteristics of what he calls singularities; these are of the order of the Event, which escapes all of its actualisations/realisations, but which hovers over or under these latter as their condition and their impossible horizon. Taking his distance from the Sartrean perspective which holds on to consciousness and hence to person and individual, Deleuze wishes in fact to speak of the transcendental field, within which

emissions of singularities insofar as they occur on an unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unification through a nomadic distribution, radically distinct from fixed and sedentary distributions as conditions of the syntheses of consiousness. (Deleuze 1969/1990, 124-5/102)

Only when one acknowledges the pre-eminence of such singularities “do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental” (125/103). Since singularities, although they preside over the genesis of individuals and persons, do not exhaust the virtual through actualisations in bodies, individuals or persons, they belong to the same order as the Event. The battle, in Deleuze’s example, remains an event withdrawn from its actualisations on the field of battle per se: it is an incorporeal event. The event is non-localisable, then. Deleuze quotes Gilbert Simondon in support:

The living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit...The characteristic polarity of life is at the level of the membrane; it is here that life exists in an essential manner, as an aspect of a dynamic topology which itself maintains the metastability by which it exists. (Simondon cited Deleuze 1969/1990, 126/104)

If below are to be found events and singularities, on the edges at the membrane are what pass for beings, bodies and subjects. In effect, however, these latter are nothing more than individuations (as opposed to presupposed individuation: see Deleuze 1969/1990, 128/105) within a transcendental field. The idea of incorporeal events, then, while attesting to sense and retaining this in common with phenomenology, significantly departs from phenomenology in so far as force is returned the status foreclosed in the phenomenological tradition.[1]
[1] It may however be true then that Derrida continues a project that can be thought of as an ongoing radicalisation of concepts and problems introduced by Husserl (Moran 2000, 436-7), and that in that respect deconstruction is a phenomenology.

Academic hoaxes of our time # 2

...terrifyingly true.

Reading Holby City, CALL FOR PAPERS

The editors of this forthcoming volume of essays from Palgrave Macmillan welcome submissions on any of the broadly designated themes listed below:

• Holby City at the crosscroads of utopia and dystopia
• Holby's physical relationships: masked polysexuality
• The surgical mask as subculture identity for medics
• Foucaultian perspectives on the architecture of Holby Central
• The apprenticeship of corporeality: inscribing in the flesh
• The patient as carcereal flea
• Holby to the power of three: performativity, unveiling and the medical gaze
• Disciplinary continuum: From Holby to Holby Blue

Submissions are not limited to the above. All articles should be 5,000 words maximum, including notes and bibliography.

Please address all correspondence to Dr. Smite Corpuscle, annex 359, University of Antibodies, Police/Corps/Esprit Interface Associates LTD, PO Box 21345, UK. email: smite.corpuscle@ant.ac.uk