For Corry Shores _____________________
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Unfortunately I have been unable to see this film in person nor have I been able to view in part or in whole on the internet.. ..
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The film's long opening shot to the music of Couperin. We see the camera move, stop in this particular decor, that particular spot, before this example of architecture.
We see the director laugh, speak, point to something; the film crew works on a particular arrangement of elements. We fear this is just one more example
of that way of introducing, into the film, the film in the making. Luckily, it isn't. The opening is not long at all.
The camera's mobility in this film appears to be something new. It is a way of planting. Not burying the camera on its feet, but rapidly planting it, just below the surface of the soil or terrain, and then carrying it elsewhere to plant it over again. An art of rice: the camera is stabbed in the soil, then stabbed again, farther away, in a leap.
No taking root, just stabs. In the film itself, the camera, the crew and the director will pop up suddenly right next to the couple making love: this is not a "literary" effect, nor a reflection of the film-making process in the film; rather, the camera is seen because it was planted here, stabbed there, to be immediately picked up and planted elsewhere.
The film, everything which the film shows, follows this procedure without the least artifice. The film and its opening are the same mobile story in two modes. A son kills himself, and the father, as though unhinged, will pass through a series of metamorphoses: a sadistic small-time crook, a disturbing wise man, a nomadic walker, a young man in love. The actor who plays the father, Patrice Dally, displays a deep sobriety, an almost humble manner, which intensifies the violence of the metamorphoses. The pretext is a sort of inquiry into the son's death. The reality is the broken chain of metamorphoses, which operates not by transformation, but by leaps and bounds. One beautiful scene is with Roger Planchon, the wise man, jumping around a young woman, trying to persuade her of something in the Saint-Sulpice's square. With astonishing
movements, Planchon repeatedly plants himself before her.
Another is with Pierre Julien, the nervous sadist, who pulls the player in every direction, height, depth, length, carving up space as with a knife.
It's like a story planted in Paris, not at all heavy and static, but with light stabs that correspond to each camera position. The story comes from elsewhere:
it comes from South America, from the Santiago-Borges-Bioy Ceasres ensemble, bringing with it that power of metamorphosis which one finds in the novels of Asturias, and it emanates from other landscapes: the Savannah, the pampas, a fruit company, a field of corn or rice. The precise point at which the story is inserted or stuck in Paris is a small bookstore, "The Two Americas,"
the father's business. But there is no application in the story, no symbolism, no literary game, as though an Indian story were being told in Paris. Instead, the story is precisely shared by the two worlds, a city fragment and a pampas fragment, each of which is quite mobile; the one is stuck in the other and carries it away. What appears continuous in the one would be discontinuous
in the other, and vice versa. I am thinking of the admirable way in which Santiago filmed the interior of the Meudon Observatory: a metallic and deserted city has been planted in a forest. The tam-tams leap from Couperin's music, the parrots screech in the Odeon hotel, and the Parisian bookseller is truly an Indian.
Standing
or bending, leaning or upright, she watches the metamorphoses from Meudon; she is at once the victim and the instigator of the game; she is the center for the bookseller's leaps. Actrice Noelle Chatelet: what talent and beauty,
what strange "gravity" in the detailed love scene.
What about the way in which she, too, though differently than the bookseller, maintains her relationship
with the other world?
What she says in architecture, in her look, and in her position, he says in movements, in music, and in the camera. It is strange that the critics didn't care for this film, even if it were only an experiment in cinema endowed with a new mobility. Santiago's previous film, Invasion, was already moving in this direction. (The tiebreaker: why is the bookseller named Spinoza?
Maybe because the two Americas, the two worlds, the city and the pampas, are like two attributes of an absolutely shared substance. And this has nothing to do with philosophy, it is the substance of the film itself.)
______________________ Gilles Deleuze
From Desert Islands
and Other Texts ~
Translated by Michael Taormina
Note:
1. In Deleuze, Faye, Roubaud, Touraineparlent de "Les Autres"—un film de Hugo Santiago, ecrit en collaboration avec Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1974).
This is part of a brochure rhat was distributed at the door of the theatre Quartier Latin to defend and support Santiago's film, which had caused a scandal at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974.
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There is a short'ish' entry about
Hugo Santiago chez__> Wikipedia
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