Think But This ... |
To the dark, to the past, to the dead ... – Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound |
The plot of Jacques Rivette’s 36 vues
Rivette, who has always grounded the visions of a
visionary in the mechanics of a pen’s brushstroke and (here) the whirling wires
and levers of a mid-air dance act, forgoes any explanation for why these two
magicians are moored to a traveling circus. Instead, he gives them modern, material
correspondences to Gods in exile passing through a closed-circuit society that
they can tamper with but not quite belong to: Birkin is English and Castellitto
Italian, both recognisably displaced every time they speak a word of French;
Rivette establishes Vittorio as magician simply by having him fix Kate’s car at
the film’s start, as modest an act as everything to follow, but a pantomime of
cautiously raised hands and bursts of movement that mime forceful thinking and
a flurry of inspiration in what should be a boring mechanical act (in Rivette, magic
is mechanics, but mechanics is magic). Especially, there are the performances
to question whether, as rambling artists, they are audience or performers:
Castellitto, cat-like, eying a scene before pouncing in on it with perfect calm
(Rivette’s camera does the same); Birkin, with cranial beauty, a body that
can’t act but reacts, that looks around and thinks. Both play the usual Rivette
character, physically three-dimensional in a full-bodied space with floor and
sounds of chirping insects; and mentally, whether by reticence, meditation,
invocation, in another world altogether.
It is a movie obsessed with ritualising stale roles and
flat-footed acts and bringing art to life – and vice-versa. Here the Other
World is simply The Past, and the shabby invocation/MacGuffin to control it is
not to recover and enter it, but shrug it off. The ritual – Kate having a
newspaper (Le Canard Enchaîné or ‘chained journal’, a real French satirical paper) torn in her hands by a
chain-whip – is dryly symbolic, bookended by a series of puns on casser (‘to break’) as ties to present
and past and logic are cut from the private world of fantasy. It is also a
restaging done on a stage. The tent, like the bedroom in L’amour fou (1969)
through to every room in Don’t Touch the Axe (2006), is a place to remake the world, a head-space. Where
Rivette’s small towns around the small mountain Pic St-Loup are given in the
dry natural light of Southern France – so that a viewer can watch shadows on
the pavement and know whether it is about 3pm, 4pm, 9pm (and know where in this
space the characters are) – the tent, in accented blues and reds rising and
falling as the tent flutters in the wind, looks the chimerical texture of early
Technicolor or an MGM musical, like near-Platonic versions of natural forms.
Time and space become indeterminate. Except at the
beginning and end, it is impossible to tell whether the acts performed inside
are in rehearsal or public performance as Rivette’s camera films from the
perspective of the audience – so the audience cannot be seen. It becomes clear
that each performance is a rehearsal for the next (whatever its public
function) and Rivette, respecting Bazinian space-time as the ultimate illusion,
shows a dismal clown show as a documentary of real people in clown make-up
kibitzing with each other in character either because that is the role or
because they are flubbing the role altogether. The point is beyond Tati’s in Playtime (1967) and Parade (1974) that real life
follows art, that ‘Playtime starts when the lights go up’, that reality (as
always in Rivette) is a game with an invisible set of rules art can clarify,
invoke or extirpate. The point is more that the cheap tent with its modest
clown routine is very literally a world of imagination and reimagined, restaged
lives, of chance and second chances, where what is irrevocable in material
reality (as in the mind) can be remade and riffed on a thousand ways. Only
imagination recovers the past.
It is an old point that Rivette makes new: Shakespeare
made it in his late comedies in which indolent spirits play God and artist to
remake webs of sex affairs that come undone and restrung as emotions pass and
all is forgiven – and forgotten. So did Renoir in The Golden Coach (1952) – a film Rivette is
remaking here. Re-creation is recreation, recall is recall, spectacle is
speculative, and what might have been is not. But art, as in the circus of
Ophuls’ Lola Montès (1955), lets one
think otherwise; in Rivette, believing is seeing. As the kids must believe in
Neverneverland before it will exist, must invent the fiction to make it
reality, Rivette’s characters convince themselves that they are in love to be
in love and that they are free from the past to be free from the past.
Sometimes it works. The first work of magic (art-turned-real) in any Rivette
film is that as life and theatre collapse, Rivette’s characters are the
equivalents of Shakespeare’s director Gods and hoodwinked mortals in one: they
are self-possessed.
Another is that Rivette, like Louis Feuillade, frames
spaces as stages, even outside: the movie exists only within the world its
characters have created. Characters enter the frame as they would enter a
doorway on-stage to join a scene; if they are not in frame, they are ghosts,
with no relevance to the scene at all except as ghosts, and when the audience
is not seen in the rehearsal/performances, it may as well not exist. As a
proper play, the film has two soliloquies, and both are played to the dead in
invocations. They are also played for the camera which, like Dreyer’s, seems to
enable their actions as it pans to empty doorways to call a character forward
into the scene, or to tables to summon characters there in the same shot or
next–its own form of invocation. Finally, at the climax, there is a
curtain-call: the characters step from the tent into reality to face the camera
and thank the audience in a recited dialogue that is both the film’s stagiest
bit and the moment when theatre at last dissipates into reality, even visually:
the back of the tent opens onto the grass, so that the tent forms a continuous
space from front lawn to back.
As characters exit out in the ‘real world’, only to be
regurgitated by the tent a few seconds later like alternate versions of
themselves, Rivette achieves his own equivalent to Puck’s valediction or the
wink at the final moment of Hitchcock’s Family
Plot (1976): a gracious thank-you for playing along as another stooge in
the artist’s plot, and for being complicit all along. It is a moment that
reasserts all the themes by breaking the form in one first and last
acknowledgement of Rivette’s long-take camera as an audience member unto
itself, waiting to see what it can find. As the characters perform for it, the
camera becomes the only justification for their actions. There is no reason for
the couples pairing off as they do in cosmic harmony. It is simply in the
stars, or the script, and Rivette nods to both of them that things turned out
all right in the scheme of things, and that there is ultimately some scheme
(mortal or divine) of which we can receive glimpses.
The structure of 36 vues is ostensibly the most
disconnected and lateral of all his films, with the usual improvisatory climax
surfacing from nowhere as a deus ex machina in which God disappears and the characters enjoy a moment of anarchistic
freedom against the tinny, half-tyrannical structure of a play. But, as always
– Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) culminates similarly but ends where it started, in affirmation of a
larger, circular cosmic structure – there is a rigorous form to support and
enable these small modern fables of entrapment and release. The rotating
between interludes – interludes of circus acts, interludes of soliloquies,
interludes of quickly discarded subplots, of city work life, of characters
discussing the things they did in other interludes, and maybe three or four
scenes about the stage-set murder of a lover that’s haunted Kate and destroyed
her life – is Rivette’s cubistic 36 variations on a tightrope act: people, as
usual, trying to defy material reality and, if only by illusion, make
themselves its master (the last shot of Va savoir, 2001). Shots of an
actor hang-gliding in space; of a town lit up at night as a tableau of café and
street scenes (as actors nod to it from a stage and the lights rise and fall);
of Vittorio calling Kate that the tent is on fire and she has to come back,
while he laughs outside the standing tent; of all the clowns redoing the same
act in new accents and of Vittorio pursuing Kate across a series of blank walls
as they progress and go nowhere and he remakes his argument at every cut; and
the moment when Rivette himself redoes a shot of an actor mounting a stage
halfway-through in a new take – all these moments begin with the recognition of
a physical place and perspective that characters are tied to before moving into
the phenomenological arena where people can reimagine the world as they like –
and, if not make it so, then think it so. Like almost all of Rivette’s works, 36 vues is a movie about people learning
to get over themselves, work by communal instinct, improvise, and reach that
strange moment with strangers where anything goes. In other words, like almost
all of Rivette’s works, it is revolutionary.
But rituals
reign. As in the rest of Rivette’s post-Duelle (1976) films, reality is
its own form of art; civilisation and civilities are enacted, acted, and
pantomimed, as much outside the tent as in: the opening moments, the silent,
circling pas de deux as Vittorio conducts
Kate’s car engine as if it were an orchestra, not only set up the former’s
preposterous role of surrogate God, but Rivette’s own ability to calibrate a
perfectly funny clown act, with all the pathetic, circuitous clown acts still
to follow. Vittorio’s own advice to one clown to improve –‘valorise the plate’,
hold his prop to the audience to give it some symbol of personal meaning – is
dismissed by the clown (‘this has been my craft for fifteen years’) and then
followed the next time he performs. Rivette has his actors valorise the mundane
likewise. As in early silent film where actors are seen entering a flat,
tableau-like room and turning it into a physical space by inspecting it and
eventually finding some use for every prop and decoration in the room,
Rivette’s characters – voyeurs first looking around to find out what they’re
looking for – notice, valorise, then exploit their space. An actor calmly
picking up a plate of apples that’s been sitting on a table to the right of
screen for an entire scene is enough to give a standard still-life actual
temporal life, the air to move in; again there is a distillation of everyday
living (as in late Dreyer) to the principle of expediency and functionality:
only the gestures that matter are performed, and only the props that matter are
displayed – and both, then, matter that much more. As a clown valorises a
plate, Kate, shying away from the circus ring, eying it like a spectre, and
motioning it away with her hand as she tries and fails to enter it, raises a
melodrama in a single gaze and tells the audience everything it needs to know
about the ring, like a spell, being both a curse and spell-breaker.
Life
turns out to be the last refuge of art; Kate in her workaday life dyes cloth
the Fauvist-strength hues of the circus tent. But as she complains to her
co-workers in
Comedy and tragedy, the malleable art inside the tent and
the irrevocable reality outside it, are Rivette’s own bass and treble clefs he
plays in juxtaposition as two alternate forms of the same impulses. Where the
clowns’ stunted act is about a series of cowards running away from a gun (or
plate) in fear, and then not even sure what they are running away from, so is
the film’s main stage the story of a girl running away from what, she does not
know – maybe the past, or, its opposite, maybe the present – until, like the
Beckett-like clown, sure of his instinct but not sure what the motivation for
it is, it is fear itself she is running away from. After a few allusions to the
round-robin sex affairs of the side players (reality now the comedy), Rivette
shows an interlude of two acrobats rolling on stage together and lifting each
other up in a giant erection (art now the serious counterpoint). The
hang-gliding bird-man becomes the corollary to two characters’ fear of heights
as one stands on a chair near a cliff. Etc. Only correspondences incidentally,
these rhymes are more of Rivette’s own alternate variations and resprung seeds;
even his own films get remade in shorthand in the tent, as the opening shot of Out
1 (1971) is reinterpreted by the rolling acrobats, the meandering clowns
restage a hostage scene from L’amour fou, Kate’s involuntary recall and
Vittorio’s break-through at the climax are stand-ins for scenes from Céline
and Julie, while the final shot, of a full moon (for wolves, loups,
loops) invokes the secret Shellyian Intellectual Beauty from Duelle and Noroît (both 1976) that comes out, changes the characters’ lives by giving them some
power of possibility against an oppressive Power—and disappears behind the
clouds.
Ostensibly an open world by virtue of what is being filmed
(anything quotidian that the characters find worth flirting over) and a closed
circuit by virtue of its structure as a synaptical network of rhymes and
qualifications, Rivette’s film formally connects his one-shot stage-scenes
outdoors, each a self-contained cell, by a series of disconnected pans that
unwrap a tableau and set a stage, then cut in, sometimes from a different
angles, sometimes to a different scene altogether, to lock the space and
characters down as live-theater. Seemingly evolved from Kenji Mizoguchi and
Straub-Huillet, these pans set up the artwork before bringing it to life, have
a distant air of perspective on the statue-like characters who become relative to a landscape of meadows and a mountain, and open up a space
as much as they close it down into its own closed-circuit of back-and-forth
motion. Late in the film, Rivette films the circus’ he-man softly catching and
juggling flaming torches thrown to him from off-screen, and then pans to the
girl who’s been throwing the torches now receiving one back and balancing it on
her nose – and there is a similar pan later from the chain-flicker to Kate
sitting in the chair as the chain is flung from off-screen to break her
newspaper. These movements, as immersive in the Bazinian real-time realities of
death-defying stunts as they are removed from any stable perspective on the
action (Rivette’s gaze wandering after a while from one actor to another), make
reality unreal by posing a tension (whatever is going on off-screen) and then
resolving it matter-of-factly: as always in Rivette, it is the digressive,
deadpan realism of a shot dryly explaining how fantastical things are possible
that seems as hypnagogic as a swinging pendulum. There is also the signal, in
these circus pans, that Rivette, like his characters, has now physically entered
the scene, with his camera in the midst of the act, where before action was
self-contained.
But there are pans throughout forming ties between spaces
and breaking from them, opening the world up and closing it in: numerous
establishing shots, including the first of the film, anchoring the humans’
stories in the countryside and its mountain, Pic St-Loup, which the traveling
troupe revolves around like a constellation. These pans, bridging one space to
another and providing the pillow-shot links between scenes in and out of the
tent, are the ultimate connective tissue in a film about people trying to break
ties with the earth and form new ones with each other in an insulated, Hawksian
family of cranky old professionals and eager young ingénues. Paradoxically,
they ground the film in transience, in spaces and scenes left behind. It is the
structuring principle of the whole film that everything is seen in the
after-effects: not just Kate’s trauma, but love affairs and a number of the
clown acts are portrayed after the fact as the participants at a stand-still
discuss what happened. Everything is stuck in place; and then everything –
spaces, scandals, towns, hopes, ghosts, and clown acts – breaks down, breaks
out, moves, and moves on, even as the centre holds.
36 vues ends with the two leads having
nothing left to say to each other; like the couple in Anthony Mann’s Man of
the West (1958), only a trauma binds them together, and once the ties are
broken, there is nothing to keep them together. While most of Rivette’s films
seem to end in death as the characters’ last, Romantic resort to breaking ties
with their lives, this one seems the first of his career to move beyond that
moment and articulate how much his characters need those ties as a framework to
explode. Kate cannot live with her trauma and cannot live without it: it is her
emotional bind to the people around her. As the creation of a romance in L’amour
fou is only in its own sadomasochistic destruction, in the apartment walls
that can be torn down, the characters end the film without a structure to rebel
against, and move on. But Rivette finishes with the moon as genuflection to a
fate that played its part in the first place. Both leads do their own imagining
of how they might meet again, as in the end of Céline and Julie, to
relive/restage the plot in opposite roles. Vittorio’s line in the film as he
stands in the ring, ‘this is the most dangerous place in the world, and the one
where anything is possible’, has already been appointed Rivette’s tagline and epitaph.
But probably just as appropriate are the final words of the film, the ones
anyone has to wonder about a Rivette film, inside of it or out, and the last of
Rivette’s appeals to freedom in ‘doubt, chance, and mutability’: who knows?
|
from Issue 1: Histories |
© David Phelps and LOLA 2011. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |