Invisible

(Les invisibles, Thierry Jousse, France, 2005)

(The following talk was given on a panel devoted to “Aesthetic Tendencies in Contemporary European Cinema” in Barcelona during June 2006, accompanying a screening program that included Invisible, as well as several other films mentioned. Critic-writer-director Thierry Jousse participated in the panel discussion.)

More than a trip … an encounter!
– Air Mauritius advertising slogan

I am looking today at a particular motif that strikes me in contemporary European cinema: the encounter, as in the chance meeting – usually the fateful, surprise meeting – for the first time between two people. Such an encounter has both intimate and cultural dimensions.

This is not an altogether new motif in cinema or the other arts. It was extremely important for the surrealists (see André Breton’s 1928 book Nadja) – where, as Octavio Paz said, in a very cinematic turn of phrase: “The realm of love is a space magnetised by encounter”. Many years after Nadja, but in the same surrealist vein, Robert Benayoun reflected melancholically or nostalgically upon what he described as “this lost miracle, this Sierra Madre which is the magic identification or fusion of two beings in a sudden shared domination of time”. With that statement, time is added to space to complete the cinematic equation.

Equally, this image of the overcoming or cancelling of time was evoked by Walter Benjamin (also stirred, albeit not uncritically, by the shadow of surrealism) when, in his youth, he conjured an infinite ballroom: “Night attains brightness and becomes radiant – time overcome – and who knows whom we will meet at this hour?”

What of the encounter in contemporary cinema during the first decade of the 21st century? Popular or mass culture gives us certain cliché descriptions of encounter, like love at first sight or two gazes meeting across a room … and we should not deny the spark of poetic truth, sometimes, in these deathless romantic clichés! But, to go a bit deeper into the question as it presents itself to us now, I will propose four types or modes of the encounter in cinema.

The first is the classic encounter, in precisely the surrealist (or surrealist-adjacent) spirit I’ve just evoked. The encounter that changes a life, a destiny, that lights up the entire world; encounter with the complete otherness or alterity of someone else – their newness, their strangeness. Rather more elevated than what Hollywood today enshrines as the ‘meet-cute’ – even if that odious term was inadvertently coined by the Master himself, Ernst Lubitsch!

In modern cinema, there is no better example of this than the films of Philippe Garrel. His work (as in Les amants réguliers, 2005, which doesn’t exactly mean ‘regular lovers’ as in the English rendition) aims to give us encounter in its sublime plenitude: the initial meeting, and the ‘birth of love’ (one of Garrel’s titles) that swiftly follows it. Almost all of Garrel’s films (especially since his turn to narrative) are based on reworking the classic encounter, as well as the pact – life-long, literally unto death, and even beyond – that it seals between partners, no matter how rocky their path ahead.

Another important element in movies of classic encounter – and here we should recall many legendary American romantic comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s, such as Mitchell Leisen’s Remember the Night (1940) – is what I think of as the necessary detour or diversion that the plot engineers for its central characters. A detour that takes them completely away from their predictable, conventional preordained track, as in the Powell-Pressburger masterpiece I Know Where I’m Going! (1945). From the screening program of this Barcelona event, who can forget the plateau-shattering introduction of ‘Mr Wilson’ (inspired by the 1975 John Cale song of that name) into Thierry Jousse’s Invisible?

Take the case of Chantal Akerman. Encounters in the sublime Night and Day (1991) or the charming Tomorrow We Move (2004) open up light, magical worlds full of music, dance, plein air. Or think of many contemporary examples, including James Toback’s When Will I Be Loved (2004), in which the act of encounter begins a breathless, headlong movement (often accompanied by handheld camerawork), a lot of walking and running … This is what characterises the cinema of the Dardennes, Jacques Doillon (an emblematic title: Carrément à l’Ouest [2001], ‘veering squarely west’) or, further back in history, Jean Rouch.

The second major form is the indirect encounter – indirect, because some filmmakers prefer not to show the first meeting; they deliberately suppress or undercut it. Jean-Luc Godard’s Éloge de l’amour (2001) offers a remarkable variation on this strategy: due to the film’s unusual narrative structure, we hear of a person’s suicide before we see the ‘fated’ meeting of lovers.

In this line, Pedro Costa’s films give us the cryptic encounter of people from different social classes, as in Ossos (1997) and Casa de lava (1994). As we watch, we wonder: what’s happening here, have these characters met before, what’s going on underneath their dialogues and transactions? We will only ever know well after the (seeming) encounter has occurred.

Another variant of indirection is the misrecognised encounter. In Invisible, the encounter of Bruno (Laurent Lucas) with Carole (Lio), the record producer, is one the hero doesn’t at first see, recognise or acknowledge – because his (repeated) fantasy encounter is elsewhere, in a dark room with a mysterious woman.

In Jean-Pierre Limosin’s Novo (2002) – remember that his early Gardien de la nuit (1986) provided a principal example of the notion of ‘refractory character’ for Philippe Arnaud [1951-1996] – it’s more the case that, every day, a new encounter ‘wipes the slate clean’: an equally precarious and malleable configuration.

Now we come to the third major form: the bad encounter – when the meeting turns bad, or was ‘never meant to be’, against nature! In such relationships, personalities are fundamentally mismatched, and the intensities (or love-styles) of the individuals involved are forever out of alignment. Even when these characters successfully manage to fuck, they do so over an abyss of difference. Bad encounters entail either an intense element of physical danger and/or a terrifying loss of self. Some examples: Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003), Doillon’s Raja (2003), Benoît Jacquot’s À tout de suite (2004).

What makes, or turns, an encounter bad? Not simply that it results in a total loss of bearings or even death (both options conclude Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of The Sheltering Sky [1990]). Rather, because it rests on two traps.

The first trap is precisely fantasy. The other person in a relationship is seen only as an idea, a dream, a projection – not for whom they really are. Remember the wise words of Gilles Deleuze: if you get caught in the fantasy of the other, you’re fucked! This mode of entrapment opens the door to every type of deception (as in so-called ‘romantic thrillers’ like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo [1958] and Brian De Palma’s Body Double [1984]). And this constitutes the second trap, manipulation. We are, in general, referring here to films centred around only one character’s point-of-view – although all variations can be entertained.

Philippe Grandrieux’s work gives us an intriguing number of takes on this theme, mostly without the thriller-genre trappings. He sometimes presents a fantasy-turned-nightmare, based on total romantic delusion and blindness to reality, as in La Vie nouvelle (2002) with its doomed exchange between American tourist and kidnapped prostitute. Or there is a marriage between terror and sublimity, in the encounter of male serial killer and female virgin in Sombre (1998) – a fusional act that leaves him, rather than her, adrift at the end.

The newest trend in contemporary cinema is our fourth major mode: the phantom encounter. By this, I mean much more than simply narratives about people chatting with benevolent ghosts or being haunted by sinister spirits – it’s not The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947), Ghost (1990) or The Entity (1982) that I’m talking about here. Rather, beyond good and evil, sublime and bad, in this case it’s the very reality of the encounter that we come to doubt and speculate upon. Did it even happen?

As with all the modes, Alain Resnais’ cinema occupies the burning heart of this paradox: Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is wholly devoted to it. And, before Resnais and his collaborator Alain Robbe-Grillet, there was a special novel from 1940 in which the beloved one turns out to be a hologram: Adolfo Bioy Casares’ Morel’s Invention (poorly filmed in the 1970s, alas, but endlessly referenced – even by those who’ve never directly heard of it!). The loss of self involved in such a tale is indeed extreme: it amounts to total dissolution.

The phantom encounter is overanticipated, brought forth by the imagination before reality even intervenes: it has the air of ritual, of overdetermination. Maurice Blanchot’s book The Infinite Conversation (1969) gives us the roadmap to such encounters: he describes them as “the encounter with encounter, the double encounter”. And – as Arnaud has well elaborated – it has “misunderstanding as its essence, even its principle”. This is something more than the narrative devices of misrecognition or deception from the previous category: encounter, here, is more like an obscurely willed life-plan. Nick Cave captured the feeling well in his touching but spooky lyric: “Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for?”

Let’s turn again to the major example of Invisible. (Note, by the way, the semantic difference between the French and English titles: the former alerts us to the idea that there is more than person in it who can be considered invisible.) We experience: the man in the dark, waiting, secretly recording his encounters; the split between the woman’s mysterious body and (thanks to the film’s fix on the latest digital music technology) the fetishised sound of her voice – the ‘obsessive enclosure’ motif here echoing the films of Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien that Jousse so admires; the fantasy-flashes of that woman in daylight … Everything about this encounter is highly unreal and phantasmatic.

An even more radical example is provided by Raúl Ruiz’s underrated Klimt (2005). The encounter of the artist (John Malkovich as Gustav Klimt) with his Muse (Saffron Burrows as Lea de Castro) is something that seems to happen multiple times, but then again never truly seems to happen at all: the woman is frequently an apparition, a shadow, a silhouette – and it is in this form that Klimt embraces her. She is also literally a multiple being, distributed over several bodies (she has a twin), and a sinister behind-the-scenes figure boasts of ‘collecting’, and carefully depositing, in pre-staged scenes, all the available versions of her. Klimt’s first glimpse of this woman who will come to mean so much in his mind and his art is not even ‘in the flesh’; it is on a movie screen, in one of the first projections by George Méliès!

No longer the typical, driven femme fatale with a hidden agenda, this female figure is all at once a metaphysical phantom, a personalised fantasy and a con-game arranged by others. Ultimately, Ruiz’s Klimt learns that Lea has been dead all along (!) – and when he then encounters her ‘true’ phantom, we hear the question “Have you met Lea de Castro?”. So, all up, it’s a prolonged encounter based on a never-meeting!

Intriguingly, Ruiz declared that Spinoza – theorist of the encounter and its decisive mood-changes – is the philosopher most pertinent to the exploration (practical and theoretical) of cinema. It is a connection I have explored more fully in my essay “Avatars of the Encounter” [2006-2013].

A final word on the cultural dimension of encounters – often a stage for cross-cultural clashes and negotiations, at least since Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy (1953). Movies have brought us the meeting, embodied in characters, of North and South Europe, or Europe and America (as in Richard Linklater’s Before series [1995-2013]), or Europe and Asia (Tsai’s What Time Is It There? [2001]). It’s Tsai, among other queer filmmakers, who has given us one of the essential forms of cinematic encounter: the gay cruise of strangers in public or semi-public places – take a look at his astonishing The River (1997) for a rigorously developed statement on that practice.

In the British work of Michael Winterbottom (Code 46 [2003]) or Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things [2002]), we find one model of a cinema of contemporary cross-cultural encounter. Personally, I prefer Claire Denis’ model, as sketched by a representative film such as L’intrus (2004). There, cultural and national identities are ceaselessly made, unmade, and made over in a flux of constant encounters that are at once both real and phantasmatic, dreamt or virtual, taken up in ceaseless displacements and migrations …

I end, in this spirit, with stirring quotation from Ruiz (I paraphrase from memory): “Cultural identity is not just one, single, fixed thing. You must have many identities, if you want to truly become yourself”. And the contemporary cinema of encounter stages some routes to these dizzying exchanges.

© Adrian Martin 5 June 2006