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Deux fois
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The
Experimental Night
Cinema au féminin … makes us rediscover what
the imperialism of the eye (it’s men who are voyeurs) had repressed: other
modes of montage of impulses where what is seen and what is heard change
perspective.
– Serge Daney, 1977 (1)
Let me see your
beauty broken down
Like you would do for
one that you love
–
Leonard Cohen, “Take This Longing”
Deux fois (1971)
begins with an apocalyptic announcement, uttered directly to camera by its
maker, Jackie Raynal: “This evening will be the end of signification”.
Henceforth, her film will enact what Stephen Heath once dramatically called
“the ruin of representation”. Narrative will be deconstructed; bodies will be
disfigured; all sense will drain away into stillness, silence and black frames ...
And
yet, is this all there is to see today in Deux
fois, this charming, strange, haunting cult classic of the French
avant-garde? Only ruins and transgressions, broken codes, heroic gestures of
cancellation and defiance? Only “a documentary about the spectator’s place in
the theatre” (Daney), with its scattered apparatus paraphernalia (cameras,
projectors) and stark, dazzling, reflected movie lights? (2) Only an
anarchistic, even masochistic exercise in feminist cinema, out to deface the
monolith of Woman as Sign?
In
its opening fragment, Raynal adds another statement to her apocalyptic decree
concerning the end of signification. Cinema may be about to die this very
night, but Raynal, with a twinkle in her eye and an almost screwball comic lilt
in her posture and voice, invites us, nonetheless, to sit back and enjoy the
show: “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening”.
Deux fois spontaneously draws into itself many influences, histories and traditions. Some
commentaries present it as an essentially formalist experiment. Louis Skorecki
noted its paradoxical premise: a former editor takes on “a dare (based on what
was, in its day, a terribly terrorist constraint): to make a film (...) in
which there was practically no editing”. (3) Taking this idea further, Noël
Burch praised it as “a deliberately elementary meditation on certain basic film
functions which may be said to underlie editing as such – expectation,
frame-scanning, perceptual memory, relationships between on– and off-screen
space, all explored in a series of autonomous shot-sequences of exemplary
simplicity”. (4) Four years later, the feminist collective of Camera Obscura magazine, in a detailed
textual analysis, broke the film down into its multiple transgressions of the
laws governing space, looking, legibility, narrative cues, functions of filming
landscapes and bodies ...
These
accounts are just – but only up to a point. It’s true, aspects of Deux fois might well have been inspired
by the work of Kurt Kren, or a delirious reading of Burch’s own classic ‘60s
text Praxis du cinéma (later
rewritten as Theory of Film Practice) (5) – reducing cinema to an incessant, maddening play of entries and exits,
off-screen spaces, lights dim and bright, still and moving shots, a kind of
anti-illusionist, practical demonstration of all the parameters of
representational form, taking them right to the edge of abstraction and
dissolution. (A comparson-point would be the epic late ‘70s Contracted Cinema series in Super-8 by
Philip Brophy and Tsk Tsk Tsk.) Or maybe the film was deliberately designed to
offer a wild, feminist chiselling of
the dominant cinematic apparatus (in a spirit akin to the Lettrists, mixed with
a little Valerie Solanas ...). Raynal: “Of course, it’s been advertised as a
feminist film because of my being there on the screen 98% of the time”. (6)
But
there is more. Raynal cites Surrealist influences, Luis Buñuel and Jean
Cocteau, as well as a theatricality inspired by Jacques Rivette (here, the text
used is Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Life
is a Dream, later an inexhaustible source for Raúl Ruiz). There are traces
of ‘60s Warhol in many scenes – especially in Raynal’s droll self-presentation,
an instant Superstar – and, equally, traces of other underground figures of
that period, like Stephen Dwoskin and his
hard, steely, erotic gaze. And Philippe Garrel, with whom Raynal collaborated
in the Zanzibar adventure (“At that time, I was learning from Philippe Garrel
how much you could change a scene through the lighting”). (7) Of Deux fois it could truly be said – as Gilles
Deleuze remarked of Garrel’s cinema – that “it spreads an ‘experimental night’
or a white space over us (...) it affects the visible with a fundamental
disturbance, and the world with a suspension”. (8)
What
is at stake in this dazzling inventory of historic names, influences and movements?
At least this: Deux fois is not only
a formalist tour de force. It is also
surrealistic, mytho-poetic, ritualistic, incantatory. And also ironic,
performative, mocking, comic. Formalist analyses tends to ignore the content of
many scenes – or rather, they retain only the tokens of content that flatter
the ideological orientation of the analyst, such as sexual violence (as in the
remarkably intense shot where Raynal, windblown, is assailed by two bare hands,
and violently pulled out of the frame by her hair), or the perverse circuit of
scopophilia, sadism and exhibitionism (tightly knit and powerfully staged in
the tableau where Raynal agonises, stares into the camera and urinates, while a
devilishly laughing man effaces her image). Such analyses find only
second-degree signs everywhere, like the literal computerised, billboard
animation of a man and woman locked in extravagant, dance-like combat.
But
the film’s content – both superficially and profoundly – is richer than merely
this grim, Gothic scenario of the sexes clashing in the shadow of patriarchy.
What of the little girl; Raynal’s skipping and falling; the sounds of music
(flute and guitar) and breathing; the landscapes, streets and homes; the
glimpses of communal sociality; the birds caged and free?
The
multiplicity of the film’s references and influences also matters in an unfolding way: each new shot or segment
takes us somewhere else in this experimental night, starts the cinema over
again, renews what Jean-Luc Godard called the world and its metaphor. The first two
shots contain this unfolding pattern in a crystalline microcosm. Shot 1
(Raynal’s recited introduction) is fully theatrical, posed, staged: this is the
cinema of actors, artifice, props, the frame – all proudly re-discovered, like
a virgin, in the way every naive, beginning, amateur filmmaker does. Shot 2
presents another kind of birth: here, with the little child on the train, is
the beginning of spontaneity, of movement, of a landscape that flashes past
uncontrollably; the fleeting magnificence of the daily world as only the
obsessive gaze of avant-garde cinema can capture it.
At
the same time, this second shot also marks the birth of a documentary regard,
and an approach to phenomenal reality that oscillates between patience and
restlessness (as the camera moves, lifts itself, re-frames). Through the shots
to come, this existence of documentary cinema will force itself forward often:
as much in the static street scenes (“reminiscent of primitive cinema [Nadar,
Lumière]”) (9) as in the repeated circular pan amidst traffic, which could
almost be establishing-shot footage from some lost, forgotten, purely
conventional feature. But this documentary drive will always come head to head,
once again, with the theatrical and the artificial – as if each contained the
secret or the lack of the other. This is an instance of what Daney called
(inspired by the example of Raynal’s “magnificent film”) a “montage of
impulses”.
Deux fois segments easily into separate blocks, many of them single, prolonged sequence-shots
(the dossier established by Camera
Obscura notates 32 such blocks). The film takes the form of a collage, or
perhaps “an unfinished film diary”. (10) And like many films of this kind, it
trembles on the brink of incoherence, of pure arbitrariness, too much
multiplicity. Its fragments give subtle evidence of several languages, diverse
locations on different continents, mysterious traces of sensations and
experiences spread out over perhaps a number of years. Raynal insists on this
material heterogeneity: shooting took place in Barcelona as well as Paris. (11)
And who know what fragments of autobiography are possibly buried in this
procession, this secret, scattered ceremony of bodies, gestures and voices?
But,
beyond what we will never know or understand about this often deliberately
cryptic film, can we intuit a core logic, a phantasmal logic, that holds it together? Various motifs, echoes and symmetries have a
fugitive presence here: they come and go, never entirely gathering all the
fragments into a reassuring whole. Like many collage-diaries, Deux fois is haunted by loss and
oblivion, a “writing of disaster’” (Maurice Blanchot-style). Nonetheless, the
film vibrates with an aura of connections – potential, shadowy but deeply felt
connections, what Jonathan Rosenbaum calls “sexy forms of duplicity (...)
secret forms of agreement and accord, as well as (...) points of tension”. (12) So, laying out the various motifs may help to approach better the unique spell
cast by Raynal’s film.
Storytelling. The
title Deux fois is a pun on the line
which begins all fairy tales: il était
une fois ... or once upon a time. So
the film sketches a narrative space that forms itself twice upon a time. This means all at once: a new kind of story; a
story told in a different way; a story constantly lost and re-found; and a
story always re-starting itself (as in the segments where we see several
different takes of the same action: Jackie with the hand mirror; Jackie at the
pharmacy). In the first sequence-shot, Raynal foretells or previews the film we
are about to see and hear: gathering up the fragments like this into an order
presumably only arrived at the completion of the filmmaking process, and
announcing that order at the outset (as if it were all preordained,
pre-planned), makes watching the film a strange, comic, uncanny process (as in
James Benning’s Grand Opera [1978]).
Naturally, the inventory does not exactly match what follows, and we are
constantly, naggingly trying to align the two texts.
Theatre. The
proscenium arch is never far way in Deux
fois. A scene between Raynal and a man plays out in dumbshow in a doorway,
like the ritualistic re-enactment of an everyday scene. A passage from Life is a Dream is staged and performed.
It is hard to see where domestic arrangements end and the play or stage begin:
this is the childlike thrill of the sequence-shot (also evoking the early trick
films of Méliès) in which Raynal appears in two places at once in the same
panning shot of a lounge room. Daily life becomes, at a first remove, theatre;
and then, at a further remove, pure graphic signification: hence the animated
sequence filmed from a neon billboard, showing a man and woman in an
erotico-violent dance.
The Couple.
Rosenbaum describes the film as being “about a couple, and about coupling”.
(13) The man-woman couple is there simultaneously in its hippie-era ideal (the
“adventure of the couple”, as Daney called it), and in its breakdown. The hands
that maul at Raynal’s hair and head; the demonic laughter of a male face into
camera, blotting out the woman’s presence; the extravagant pantomime of
passions on the neon billboard. Both the ideal of the couple and its breakdown
function as formal figures: the film is full of, on the one hand, rhymes,
mirrorings and repetitions; and, on the other hand, shards of surplus material,
stranded fragments never folded in to
a cohering pattern.
Dreams and Fantasy. “The
images of our imaginations are real”. This statement, spoken by Raynal, arouses
the Surrealist legacy underlying the film (as does the very title Life is a Dream). It is a rich and
ambiguous utterance. Does it mean that all the images in the film are images of
the imagination? If so, whose imagination – Raynal’s unconscious or some
collective unconscious? And what does it mean to say that these images are
real? Do these images take a place alongside or within reality, like a parallel
world? Do they resist reality, struggle against it, sometimes losing and
sometimes winning? Or have they have already absorbed reality? If Deux fois shows a dream-world, it is
only a broken, stuttering, intermittent vision. Some images seem heightened, Romantic,
expressionistic, oneiric (like the phantasmal image of Raynal struggling
against the wind). But they rise up in the middle of more mundane,
documentary-type material. In-between these poles, everything we see and hear
(Raynal using the cherished Nouvelle Vague style of sound design: usually only
one key sound, post-dubbed and floating above the image, for each cinematic
event) seems disturbed, uncanny, half-in and half-out of the real or the
imaginary. “If [Gérard de] Nerval needs to see, and to walk in the Valois, he
needs this like some reality which has to ‘verify’ his hallucinatory vision, to
the point where we no longer have any idea what is present or past, mental or
physical” (Gilles Deleuze). (14)
The Figure of the
Child.
The film’s second shot, showing the little girl, seems crucially and
suggestively placed between two shots of Raynal. Is this, phantasmatically and
elusively, the child she once was; or the child she wishes to have; or the
child she wishes to again become? Later, in the country, she skips along like a
child (before falling like Isadora Duncan, brought down by her own scarf). The
title of a fable for children – Achilles and the Tortoise – is abruptly,
irrationally flashed (prefigured) during the pharmacy scene; later, a fragment
of its typewritten text fills the screen. Even with her various dark,
seductive, menacing men, Raynal often seems girlish: whispering and giggling,
or pounding her fists and craving attention.
How
might these various motifs hold together? To try to spell out the string of associations
is a trap, but nonetheless a seductive trap ... Deux fois is a new version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. A woman enters into a perpetual
metamorphosis, in which she becomes a child. She embarks on this
self-perpetuating, auto-erotic ritual not so much through hallucinogenic drugs
or other Dionysian props (as other filmmakers of the ‘60s did), but across the
bridges of storytelling, performance, theatre: all the masks and motions of artifice. However, such regression – or
liberation – into the imaginary realm is always threatened by instability and
danger: this woman is constantly drawn back to the public, societal scene of
adult sexuality, with its threatening, mysterious, alluring masculine Others, its
set roles and burdens. Deux fois is
not devoted to the elevated phantasy of the Holy
Family, the mythic and iconic trinity of
mother-father-child familiar from Garrel’s cinema; it is more (as in Chantal Akerman)
about the difficult trials and passages of the (as it were) “single woman” –
her absorption into herself and her relations with others, where both modes of
being are viewed as equally impossible.
As
Skorecki (in a lucid moment) proposed, Deux
fois is “one of the most precise films about paranoia”. (15) Inhabiting a
world where the images of our imaginations are real means also facing (as in
Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord, 1981) those
glaring, staring eyes at every turn: eyes seen and unseen, the eyes of men, of
children, of all the billboards, signs and screens of the Society of Spectacle.
As well as the eye of the camera itself as an apparatus of aggressivity, with
so coldly dispassionate a gaze that it can only solicit from the woman fixed in
its barrel a hysterical gesture of self-abasement (the silent Primal Scream of
urination).
From
Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (another goddess-mistress of trance-theatre-ritual)
and Raynal’s Deux fois through to the
contemporary psycho-Gothic-horror-thrillers of Mary Lambert (Siesta, 1987), Marina Sargenti (Mirror Mirror,
1990) and Kathryn Bigelow (Blue Steel,
1990), this is what cinema au féminin has always shown us in its “montage of impulses where what is seen and what is
heard change perspective”: the terror of the womanly masquerade; the fatality
and reversibility of its seductions; the savage fluctuation, insecurity and
mutability of personal identity. Yet, it is exactly in the dark eye of this
mortal storm that this gnarly branch of women’s cinema also finds its beauty
and poetry, its droll wit and wild radicality.
An
earlier version of this essay appeared, in French translation, in the
Cinémathèque Française/Mazzotta catalogue/book Jeune, dure et pure!
Une histoire du cinéma d’avant-garde et expérimental en France (2001).
1.
“Les Cahiers du cinéma 1968-1977:
Interview with Serge Daney”, The Thousand
Eyes, no. 2 (1977), p. 28. back
2.
Quoted in “An Interrogation of the Cinematic Sign: Woman as Sexual Signifier in
Jackie Raynal’s Deux fois”, Camera Obscura, no. 1 (Fall 1976), p.
12. back
3.
Louis Skorecki, “Deux fois”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 276 (May 1977),
p. 51. back
4. Cinema Rising, no. 2, 1972. back
5.
Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice (London:
Secker & Warburg, 1973). back
6.
Rosenbaum, Film: The Front Line 1983 (Arden Press, 1983), p. 156. back
7.
Ibid., p. 158. back
8.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (University of Minneapolis Press, 1989), p. 201. back
9.
Camera Obscura Collective, “An Interrogation of the Cinematic Sign”, p. 33. back
10.
Ibid., p. 12. back
11. Film: The Front Line, p. 156. back
12.
Ibid., p. 152. back
13.
Ibid., p. 152. back
14.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 11. back
15.
Skorecki, “Deux fois”, p. 52. back
© Adrian Martin April 1999 |
