![]() ![]() ![]() |
F.J.
Ossang: The Grand
Insurrectionary Style
|
Cinematographer, writer, singer, messenger: F.J. Ossang, born in the
Cantal on 7 August 1956. Practices poetry in all its forms. Subject of a
retrospective at International Film Festival Rotterdam, 25 January – 5 February
2011.
He makes music – nine albums with his band MKB
(Messageros Killer Boys) Fraction Provisoire; he writes prose – some twenty
books, including De la destruction pure (1977), Corpus d’octobre (1980), Descente aux tombeaux (1992), Unité 101 (2006) and the emblematic Génération néant (1993); he makes films
– ten movies and as many visual poems, if poetry means a violent outburst of
vitality.
Ossang pretends not to concern himself with painting
and drawing, but he has created sublimely beautiful tones of grey in Silencio (2007), and always gives carte blanche to his outstanding
cameramen: Darius Khondji for Le trésor
des îles chiennes (1990), Remi Chevrin for Docteur Chance (1997) and Gleb Teleshov for Dharma Guns (2011), making it possible for them to create radiant
images without equal on any silver screen in the world. Joe Strummer said
(after Docteur Chance) that Ossang is
the only filmmaker he would immediately work with again. Ossang’s work belongs
to the grand insurrectionary style that runs throughout the history of
anti-art, from Richard Huelsenbeck to the films of Holger Meins. (1)
Ossang’s aesthetic has the singular capacity of
displaying his expressive, narrative and rhythmic inventions in the context of
an iconography of the most popular kind – in such a way that their poetic
intensity transforms archetypes (bad guys, social groups, femmes fatales,
warriors) back into prototypes, and facile effigies into fascinating creatures
distraught with love, emotions, flux and space. He is a great filmmaker of
adventure: bold images and scenarios in the form of expressive epic poems; the
psychological vicissitudes of characters who move from rapture to ecstasy until
they evaporate in the upper atmosphere because they can never again descend –
like, for instance, at the end of Docteur
Chance.
The story does not present events in the dreary
manner of the average film, but allows room for visual developments, like Jean
Epstein or the Soviet masters, including the Mikhail Kalatozov of I Am Cuba (1964). Instead of showing the
chase or the race, Ossang films the world that produces such velocity, plunging
into the substance of colours and the experience of sensations. Whatever the
story may be, it springs from a love of words: not so much the dialogue but the
formulation, the insert, the slogan, the point – giving rise to the monumental
handwriting that so characterises his work.
|
(1) Other publications by Ossang: Le Berlinterne (1976), Revue CEE (1977-79), Alcôve clinique (1981), L’Ode à Pronto Rushtonsky (1994), Au bord de l’aurore (1994), les 59 jours (1999), Landscape et silence (2000), Tasman Orient (2001), Ténèbre sur les planètes (2006), WS Burroughs/Formule mort (2007).
Most influential MKB Fraction Provisoire albums: Terminal Toxique (1982), L’affaire des divisions Morituri (1984), Hôtel du Labrador (1988), Le Trésor des îles chiennes (soundtrack,
1991), Docteur Chance 93 (1993), Feu! (1994), Frenchies Bad Indians White Trash (1994), MKB – Live (1996), Docteur
Chance (soundtrack, 1998), Baader
Meinhof Wagen! (2006). For extracts from many of these works, see here.
|
But, most of all, Ossang’s cinema involves bringing
back epic gestures to popular visual culture, tearing things apart until they
become inconceivably beautiful. In Dharma
Guns (2010), he creates a poetry of the ‘final images’, fits of giddiness, psychological
account-settling that invade our brains as death approaches – the gleams and
flashes he has still to extract from his much-loved argentic.
This gargantuan appetite for cinema also comes to the
fore in his first published texts. Issue number 7 of CEE, which was published by Christian Bourgois in 1979 and whose
contributors included W.S. Burroughs, Pierre Molinier, André Masson, Bernard
Noël, Christian Prigent, Claude Pélieu, and a key figure in Ossang’s universe,
poet Stanislas Rodanski (a meteor from the twilight days of surrealism),
contains the text ‘Video Scripts and Tribal Song’, a wild mix of manifesto,
diary, screenplay, meditation and pamphlet which, in retrospect, reveals itself
as an aesthetic platform for his films yet to be made.
In this text we can read, with the manoeuvres of a
global civil war as background music and punctuated frames as visual montage,
like so many frames and future film inserts (including one borrowed from Raoul
Haussmann):
|
|
Moreover,
there has never been art, only an incessant war of abuses against social time,
in favour of the diversity of the real. There are only – and especially –
actions to liberate what is always open!
|
|
Following the example of his riotous prose, Ossang’s
romantic, apocalyptic punk films are part of a guerrilla ethos in which
everything serves as a weapon: an exclamation mark, a capital letter, an iris,
a fade out, a homage to Murnau’s
|
(2) For the text of Wolman’s 1952 film The Anticoncept, see here. |
Dada Rock
‘n’ Roll Guerrillas. The driving force of the guerrilla is the absolute
rejection of a demarcated battleground. For the mental guerrilla, it is
absolute rejection of any fixed cultural register. (3)
|
(3) Ossang, ‘Video Scripts and Tribal Song’, CEE, no. 7 (1979).
|
Some great poets, such as Epstein or José Val del
Omar, were of the opinion that cinema – an intelligent machine – had the power
to reveal the harmonies according to which the world is structured. In contrast,
a film by Ossang the musician lays claim to chaos, intoxication, pure and
inescapable disorder. He does not manage anything, especially not the emotions
of some drummed-up viewer; he does not tell a story, but only shows how we are
at the mercy of history, bombarding us with sensations and splendour. He styles
himself like a conspiracy in which, to survive, no one should understand
anything; he invents a different language and codes akin to a secret society or
unflinching prisoners preparing their escape; he creates an explosion in the
course of the world, an illuminated opening through which one can perhaps
escape or die – or probably both at once.
|
|
Cinema is the last chance, it is unitarian and collective art. Cinema is the great critical force of other forms of expression, it reinterprets literature. I think that in the 20th Century cinema has disrupted literature, that the silent film was the upheaval of storytelling by means of a network that rises above a linear storyline. Specific to cinema is not travelling outside of time, but the creation of a kind of disruption between time and space that corresponds to the acceleration of time in society. We can jump forward and then back again, although memory only works relatively. Going back results in a loss of time, and in the end about the only thing left to remember is the light – to create a future. (4) |
(4) Ossang,
|
La dernière énigme (The Last Enigma, 1982)
In-between essay and fiction, La
dernière énigme established Ossang's formal territory: a
contemporary mythology. Inspired by the book On Terrorism and the State by Gianfranco Sanguinetti, it evokes visual echoes of political events, where
a generation forfeits all revolutionary aspirations due to state terrorism.
Shot using two cans of Kodak XX 16mm film.
‘A story of gladiators against the
background of the German question. The men sell their life rather than let
themselves waste away in a territory controlled by the European middle class.
One of them has become a star to the underworld, but eventually cracks up.
There is but one way out: spill the beans to the press ... ’ (Ossang).Played as a futuristic epic, L’affaire des divisions Morituri concerns the rebellion brewing amongst European youth
after members of the Red Army Faction (most of whom were filmmakers) died in
prison. The imagery harks back to the original revolt by Spartacus, but
suddenly the black and white curtain is torn down and we are faced with the
naked oppression of ‘sensory deprivation’ and State crimes. A mythical
soundtrack consists of musical fragments from the most radical bands of the
time: MKB Fraction Provisoire, Cabaret Voltaire, Tuxedomoon, Throbbing Grisle,
Lucrate Milk. An emblem of French punk cinema.
The soundtrack to Le trésor des îles chiennes has
memorable songs like ‘Pièces du sommeil’,
‘Descente sur
Before finding several rolls of colour film from the German army and realising twenty minutes of pure chromatic genius in Ivan the Terrible (1944), Sergei Eisenstein had dedicated some pages to colour in film. In a story about fugitive lovers, Docteur Chance, the first colour film by an expert in black-and-white cinema, issues from the same experimental excitement: how do you bring a film to the level of the chromatic initiatives in painting, as in certain medieval altarpieces, engravings by William Blake or paintings by Asger Jorn? In his Notes de travail (1996), Ossang elucidates: ‘This film should have the razor-sharp and vaguely coloured purity of a poem by Georg Trakl – no to a cinema more miserable than misery, more sexual than sex, heavier than the lead it paraphrases. Detail: a black-and-white close-up doesn’t have the same effect as a close-up in colour (why?). Why do the scripts of contemporary films seem “comatised” by emanations? Defilement of colour by structures. Deterritorialisation’.
Silencio, Vladivostok and Ciel etient!: three silver pearls that
together form the Trilogie du paysage or Landscape Trilogy. The visual poem Silencio follows in the tradition of documentary elegies that began with the films of
Rudy Burckhardt and Charles Sheeler. But in the era of Throbbing Gristle,
poetry must measure itself against industrial disasters, invisible nuclear
apocalypses, a travel report, an optical meditation, an overwhelming array of
black and white tones, a love song, a progression of dim phantoms in the
terrifying caverns of hope ... strike!
‘Between word and worlds, teeming with mysteries’, wrote the
psychedelic poet Claude Pélieu about Ossang. The fragmentary Vladivostok cultivates the wealth of such in-between places. A concentration of Ossangian
poetry, the outcome of his happy collaboration with director of photography
Gleb Teleschov.
Before this, Ossang films were not
comparable to other films. But Ciel éteint! calls to mind early films by
Philippe Garrel (Marie pour mémoire [1967], Le révélateur [1968]),
closely related to anarchist filmmaker Jean-Pierre Lajournade. With the
mythological everydayness of the young, destitute lovers Philémon and Baucis
live in their cottage (made of reed in Ovid, made of wood in Ossang). At the
end of the credits, we find the most beautiful visual declaration of love ever.
The fable: a young man – poet,
scriptwriter and warrior – dies. How do you reconstruct the images in his
brain? What do we see in our moment of death? Can the spirit understand the
causes of death and clear a path for itself to another life? In what kind of
form do these these final images manifest? Will they dazzle? A feast of lights?
An invasion? As memories, hypotheses, assumptions? The magisterial expressiveness of Dharma
Guns allows us to experience the impulses of optical nerves
and synapses. Ossang has grafted the film onto the central nervous system, the
very place where mental images are born. ‘My eyes have drunk’, we hear in this
worthy treatment of Antonin Artaud’s expectations of cinema. Dharma
Guns is constantly airborne, buzzing, pushing its way towards
the isle of the dead. A masterpiece that slowly moves before our eyes, in the
staggering slow motion of certainty, into the company of Nosferatu (1922) and Vampyr (1932).
|
|
from Issue 1: Histories |
© Nicole Brenez February 2011. Commissioned and translated from the French by International Film Festival Rotterdam, revised by the author and LOLA. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |