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Le Livre de Marie
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It’s hard to see, on DVD, Le Livre de Marie exactly as it was meant to be seen: as an accompaniment to Jean-Luc Godard’s scarcely hour-long Hail Mary, cutting to black before the first intertitles and images of its sibling film. In that theatrical play-through, it was deliberately difficult to determine where one had finished and the other started. On some digital supports today, the two parts are technically separated (Miéville’s part as a take-it-or-leave-it, short-film ‘bonus’), with the black-frame-membrane both joining and separating them excised. A pity. It starts with a flurry of disconnections. We hear the testy dialogue of an estranged couple, abstracted from immediacy by its crystal-clear audio fidelity, as if recorded for a radio play. Meanwhile, we see 16 shots, empty of these characters or indeed any human figure, shots that (like in a Marguerite Duras movie) may or may not be building up a pointillist inventory of the domestic environs where this family drama occurs: the sun, a house, a rose, a fruit bowl, a chair. Finally, there is a blast of direct sound, as a woman (Aurore Clément) launches up from her seat, locked in verbal combat with her man (Bruno Cremer). But the disconnection and fragmentation still linger across the rest of this fairly cerebral exchange about copying and inventing in love: strange shifts in the volume and distribution of light and darkness in the room; jump cuts; movements of lips that do not match the words we hear. “It’s the beginning of the movie”, as Godard said of his Passion (1982), “and your foot is not yet inside your shoe as we say in France”. (1) Later there will be more jump cutting, insertions of black frames between scenes, odd compositions and movements into and out of the frame that confuse and scatter the relation of voices to bodies, of actions to events. There is a particular tradition, very prevalent and powerful in the Anglo critical world, which is often used to talk about such stylistic devices. It is an intellectual and artistic tradition going back to Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, given revived impetus by Godard and other politicised, montage filmmakers of the 1960s, relayed through ensuing decades by Screen (UK) and October (USA) magazines. This tradition stresses perturbations, ruptures, violent transgressions against the seamless temporal and spatial unities of the classical, narrative, realist style; today, it applauds the radically decentred, fragmented essay-mosaics of Yvonne Rainer, Alexander Kluge, Todd Haynes or the Australian political filmmaker John Hughes. Yet it may well be the case that Miéville’s film, for all its breaks and discontinuities, for all its philosophically inspired chat, cannot really be understood or experienced very well within that particular tradition. It is, in the first place, a quite simple work, perfectly transparent in its subject and intentions. A husband and wife split up, decide to live apart; this situation impacts young Marie (Rebecca Hampton), who spontaneously reflects the turbulence and confusion in various kinds of gestures and behaviours (play acting, loud singing, mad monologues, vigorous dancing). Marie is caught, alive and kicking, in between a past situation that has shattered and a future pattern that has yet to settle into a recognisable shape. Her mother assures her, in the penultimate scene, that “nothing can stay the same” in life, that “when a thing stops moving, it’s dead”. So the film observes the banality and the fun of Marie’s newfound state of shuttling back and forth between her parents on a train, finding herself together with her father in an unfamiliar apartment; or suddenly alone and free in the old, familiar flat, while her mother looks for a new abode elsewhere. Above all, it is a lyrical film. This is what all the discontinuities, fluxes and quiverings of style serve: a particular type of lyricism. Thus, we must start over on the description of it, picking up from some other point or level in which the material workings of this lyric poetry become evident. The second scene, after the opening just recounted, begins on a medium close-up of Marie. It is a shot of her listening, as the voices of her mother and father continue their interminable argument off-screen; her eyes dart back and forth between two spots, not exactly in sync with the words being heard. Then there is a disarming close-up of the father, a bulky, intense man in dark glasses. He talks, reacts, broods, sucks in the space of the room, becomes a world or island unto himself; the camera stays on him in a set-up that, although corresponding to no actual point-of-view of either other character in the scene, registers as a particularly intense gaze. When Miéville returns to this set-up later in the découpage, the unnamed father broods once more as, off-screen, Marie talks and walks and then exits the room, appearing in the image only as a pair of lips in the very top left of the frame, pressed to the side of her father’s heavy head. The space of the room thus becomes a multiplicity of micro-spaces or micro-worlds, always able to be redrawn or recommenced in the following shot. Colette Mazabrard could have been describing this scene when she wrote (of a quite different film): “Sometimes a counter-shot is missing: the camera frames a face that is talking and we hear the protagonist’s voice off-camera. The camera films the silence of the listener” – a style that transforms a potentially ordinary scene of naturalistic interaction into what she calls “a gaze on a gaze”. (2) In a sense, all the shots in this dinner table scene (for eventually we can piece enough together to call it such), all of the singles on each character in turn, have this contemplative, open-ended, separated-out quality: they do not begin in precise scenic continuity, and they could end anywhere, anytime. Miéville’s scene is also a dynamic one, its logic constituted in continual swings from dreamy gazes to sudden outbursts (of voice, as when Marie suddenly starts gabbling; or of physical gesture, as when the mother bangs the table in rage), breaks in rhythm, steep rises or falls in emotional temperature. Later, Marie listens to a Chopin piano concerto with her father and muses on its “changes of mood, icy, exasperated, I demand, fire, fire, careful, error, horror, suffering ...”. Le Livre de Marie is more about looking and listening, meditating and absorbing, than about talking and acting. When there is action – and Marie is certainly no comatose child-heroine – it has a quality not of clarity or will, but occurs, instead, at extremes of either hysteria or somnambulism, lack of control or remote control. Scenes drift off, lose their classical moorings of spatio-temporal unities – not because of grand, stylistic ruptures, but because of this quiet, steady insistence on looking and listening, this proliferation of ambiguously motivated gestures, this saturation of cut-off portions of micro-space by the passing of time. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze sees the crux of a modern, European postwar cinema in this steady replacement of action by observation. The character has become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action. He records rather than reacts. He is prey to a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaged in an action. (3) Jean Douchet agrees: all modern cinema – and, for him, especially French cinema – “plays on what is present and instantaneous”. (4) This is an extract from the chapter “Refractory Characters, Shards of Time and Space” in my book Mysteries of Cinema (2018/2020).
1. Don Ranvaud & Alberto Farassino, “An Interview with Jean-Luc Godard”, Framework, no. 21 (Summer 1983), p. 9. back 2. Colette Mazabrard (trans. M. Jani, R. Sharma & A. Forler), “Love, Cinema”, in Cahiers du cinéma 1951-1991 (Melbourne: Australian Film Institute, 1994), p. 39. back 3. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 3. back 4. Jean Douchet, “La Rue et le studio”, Cahiers du
cinéma, no. 419/420 (May 1989), p. 50. back © Adrian Martin November 1994 |
