Reflections on the Philippe Garrel retrospective in New York
Philippe Garrel is the closest thing French cinema has to a filmmaker whose obsessive concern is with the aftermath of the “Events of May ’68.” The singular sensibility of these films enables them to serve as variations on an image of what the present period, which arguably can be dated to that moment, can be said to be about. (It is a very different take on this than that of the other French filmmaker most concerned with this question—and who also has a book on it, ably translated by film scholar Rachel Zerner as “A Post-May Adolescence”; Assayas’s cinema, which I have discussed elsewhere on this site, betrays his influence by Deleuze in privileging movement and speed, while Garrel’s approach to time has the pace of the unrelenting and is a cinema of fate).
We can start with the common French verbal habit of referring to what happened then simply as “the events” of that date. For this is to consign the subsequent period to the non-eventful that is at best consequential, a time that continues and not one that is or includes an event, a time that happens or in which something happens, and particularly something that changes you. The concept of event in fact became a key category for numerous philosophers (Deleuze, Lyotard, Badiou) in France in subsequent decades, which may be taken to suggest the depressive nostalgia whose sole cure is the happening that really is one and not the inconsequential and simulated occurrences sold us daily by the media and which Guy Debord, theorist of May par excellence, in his 1966 classic “The Society of the Spectacle,” had called by that name, another word for which is consecrated in French literature since Baudelaire and Flaubert: boredom.
One dies, perhaps, of trying not to “die of” boredom. But if events are the authentic alternative to spectacular entertainments, the alternative to boredom that is also its perfected form is the meticulous cultivation of everyday life in the aesthetic poverty of the enjoyment that is not a discrete rupture in the continuity of time, but an experience that is endured, that is a durée, duration, that is not a projected representation but lived. The importance of Warhol for Garrel lies in this, since Warhol’s filmed portraits use very extended takes to drain from the image every possibility of cliché that would permit us to react or judge on the basis of some idea rather than simply observe, in an ambiguity without irony, a concrete particular that, in the terms of Kant’s aesthetics, exceeds the reach of any concept. Time is central to this realist or hyper-realist aesthetic, which also reprises André Bazin’s notions of presence. It is a lived time of the concrete rather than a thought time of the abstract, and so montage gives way almost completely to mise-en-scène; it is the temporality of seeing and of experiencing and so enduring, of “going on,” which Beckett, to whose theater Garrel’s more experimental works like “La concentration” and “Le lit de la vierge” is not unrelated along with the avant-garde theater of the time generally, in his 1953 novel “L’innomable” had already questioned as to its conditions of possibility in our time, though to put it that way is already a reflection of the extent to which our, or perhaps any, manner of being in time is put in question in contemporary thought including (for this is Deleuze’s principal question in his Cinema) in film.
But enduring can be arduous; in English the word itself suggests an experience of torture or resignation. But the ethical alternatives in Garrel’s cinema do not turn around events and actions, but approaches the characters take to the experienced and lived time of their lives. It seems to go with this, as cause or consequence or both, that the unique possibilities for most of his characters, besides drugs and occasionally music (the dancing scenes in “Sauvage Innocence” and “Les amants reguliers” are ecstatic in the dancers’ expressive freedom), involve intimate relationships. Maybe the question of his films ought to be, What has become of the couple and the family after May 68? But that seems wrong. It is a question of the Church, and this artist of the thinking of the holy family, as Deleuze suggests, is, as he declares himself, resolutely atheist. Better to say that it is, What has become of the dreams and hopes (it seems wrong somehow to say struggles) of May ’68 given these possibilities of everyday life and the couple? Garrel has never wanted to problematize anything but everyday life, he sees no poetry outside it, and observing this life and its problems is the principal concern of most of his oeuvre.
His 1968 film “Anémone,” a portrait of the actress, figures a father (in fact, Garrel’s own, the actor Maurice, who would feature in a number of his films, evidencing a fairly amicable filial tie), who is by profession a psychoanalyst and turns out at the end to also be a cop (in French, the alliteration is irresistible: père=psychanalyste=policier). But after 68, indeed during the events, when he filmed “Le Révelateur,” he is already withdrawing into provincial solitude, wandering through the forests of Germany. “Anémone” was the last film in which an external social and institutional complex figures for a patriarchal order to be rejected; one thing that makes Garrel’s films a cinema of the after-68 is that that revolution seems to have been achieved, even if in the purely privately life of the spaces and time that remains the characters are haunted by the very depressive futility that is often said to frequently plague the generations that followed and that clearly speaks, even when not speaking of it, of failed hopes and lost illusions, of a world whose physically if not psychically withdrawn individuals suspect it of having remained the same, and offering little except perhaps the possibility of making an art that reflects upon the not entirely or necessarily dysphoric poverty in which the love and familial relations are immured or to which they are abandoned. The fullest reflection to date in Garrel’s cinema of the after-68 ,looking back while relentlessly, obsessively moving forward is “Le vent de la nuit,” in which the melancholy of the memory of ’68 is the direct motivation behind the suicidal dérive, drifting drive, which is literally a driving along highways in a red sports car, in a film whose three characters are all subsumed by melancholy and use sex as a way of escaping their solitude.
To explore a form of life fully is to reveal it in all its ambiguities, not as something purely false that can only be criticized, which is the perspective in a way of the young photographer in “La frontière de l’aube,” the film where the suicidal (presented in the rhetoric of romanticism) and the lovable quotidian are figured in two complementarily opposed women, both very wounded and fragile, the one articulating the truth of death (and death as truth of identification: hence, the mirror in which the ghost of the dead Carole appears) and the other in recovery and needing to be loved not just for love’s ecstasies but to be cared for, for love surely is not just the mutuality of desire but the conjunction of desire and caritas, caring for the other. Carole’s inability to be loved that is expressed in her repeated suicide attempts recalls that of the ghost of Hari in Tarkovsky’s “Solaris,” except that there the problem is her husband Kris’s since she just is his guilty memory. And so the photographer’s decision to join Carole in death is a copping out that appropriately occurs on the morning he is to be married. It is fitting that that film takes the standpoint of ambivalence, a world of ethical opposites to be clearly distinguished between. For it is the point of view of fatality that poses the Manichaean opposition between itself and the more quotidian and cautiously hopeful world whose own point of view is the uncertain character of what is ambiguous. The film is flawed by the uncharacteristic moralism on which rest its sharply drawn alternatives.
But the most centrally defining tendency of Garrel’s cinema is simply the movement of withdrawal into solitude and the life of the couple. After the heroin death of his first wife Nico (of Velvet Underground fame), heroin itself becomes a metaphor and organizes a series of metaphors of a retreat into solitude whose most profound tendency is the movement towards a probable though accidental death facilitated by this very retreat and its solitary pleasures, which are pleasures of solitude.
I asked Garrel in a Q. & A. during the recent New York Film Festival which was showing some of his films about the way in which in many of them a shared point of departure seems to lead at once in the presumably opposite directions of something like an eros and a thanatos. He replied by saying that these are not opposite directions but the same one. I thought that a very interesting reply, and it led me to ponder both this question in the abstract, on a philosophical plane as it were, and in terms of his films. In the films I think the answer must lie in asking the question as a question that I think the films pose, which is what is same and different between romantic love and the solitary high of a drug experience that begins in the ecstasy of solitary sensation and proceeds to a numbness that must be repeated to avoid withdrawal. The key lies in the two ecstasies. In part what distinguishes them is that one is absolutely solitary while the other is the solitude of the couple that is perhaps better called privacy. Let us say that this is a solitude that is shared or a sharing, a communication or communion that is solitary. And that both are an experience. We can also say that Garrel’s cinema draws all the consequences of Bataille’s declaration that eroticism is “l’approbation de la vie jusqu’à la mort.”
This enables us to make sense of the feel of Garrel’s images and way of creating a poetics of moving images of spaces through a time (the time is singular, not multiplied, as in Resnais or Ruiz, for that would render cerebral and contingent the experience, which has its quality of the experienced in Garrel precisely because of not only a concreteness, to which the literal poverty of many of the apartment interiors is linked, but also a necessity). To speak of necessity is to speak of fatality, and there is fatality, but that does not have to mean suicide. Most observers of Western (and also Japanese) ideas of romantic love will agree that suicide is one of its possibilities, but only one, and that were we to define it so that it is distinct from the suicidal, we would need to do so with a surgeon’s precision of theorizing. I suggest that in this regard what is fundamental is the idea of endings or beginnings, and of course to move through time with images or words or any use of form is to pass through thresholds that are both of these. Though Garrel’s time is a chronos and not a kairos, the time not of events but endurance. Decisions for his characters are most often fatal, the decision to die or to pursue a line of living that leads to death. This is not a cinema of epiphany, a feature of the work of a number of mostly French and Italian directors that became less prominent after ’68 as the dominant mode of hope shifted, often to melancholy.
If the experience in question allowed for a postmodern multiplicity, say, à la Ruiz, then I would be tempted to say that the difference that Freud theorized inadequately as eros and thanatos is that between convergent and divergent series, or the series that ends at a limit and the one that begins at a point of departure, a gathering into a closure or a dispersal that knows none. But that too in the natural and linear time of everyday life is the meaning of mortality and natality. We are always moving towards both, and at least for individual lives (and stories), it is only moving towards an end that is necessary, and this is indeed the figure of necessity, while departures and beginnings are figures of possibility. In a cinema that is essentially linear, and that has the post-Bazinian and post-Warholian hyperrealist focus on the everyday and what is real in the necessity of its being-there, there is no virtuality or multiplicity of what did, does, or may happen. Nor is their redemption, the pursuit of which is represented in his films only by heroin, and already in the achingly beautiful 1970 film "Le lit de la verge," a mostly silent film that reduces the action in the scenes to image and gesture. (The reference to Artaud’s idea of a physical and passionate theater that eschews narration and dialogue is hinted at by the borrowing of two actors, Pierre Clementi and Tina Aumont, from Bertolucci’s artistic and critical flop “Partner,” filmed the previous year). “Le lit de la vierge” presents a series of vignettes that are like midrashic variations on the story of Jesus and the two Marys, who seem to be incestuously assimilated in a single figure of Woman. The scenes are linked in no obvious narrative pattern, and while there are scenes of torture, obviously recalling the war and the Résistance, that may be analogues of the crucifixion, there can be no resurrection, and the torture scenes are gratuitously cruel. And yet, while eschewing what critic Leo Bersani calls the culture of redemption, since damnation is but the reverse side of salvation, and both belong to overly plotted notions of time based on a negation of the given in its transfiguration into something other, Garrel’s films articulate not so much a necessity or fatality as the materialism of a concreteness that gives us all the ethical consequences of a prosaic world presented, as prosaic worlds only can be, by a poet. This would be a programmatic aestheticist exemplary declaration of modernist purity but for the fact that Garrel does not declare such a revolution but draws the consequences of living in its aftermath, along with everything else that changed in the time, mythically concentrated into an essence by its historical punctuality as an actual set of events, involving the classical political protests, replete with street barricades and police battles, and a mass strike. There is no general agreement even today as to what the meaning of those events was and is, or what, culturally, it is exactly that changed; but everyone agrees that something, much no doubt, did. Garrel’s cinema may be the most sustained set of reflections in any medium on that brief period and its long aftermath that we have. If this were more widely grasped, it would surely provoke arguments, and be not without consequence.