Francuski režiser koji je snimio nekoliko filmova s Nico iz Velvet Unedgrounda (vjerojatno zato što je 10 godina njome bio oženjen). Mitopoetični La cicatrice intérieure (Unutrašnji ožiljak) najeksperimentalniji je. Za Garrela film = Freud + Lumière.
Elle a passé tant d'heures sous les Sunlights...
Liberté, la nuit (1983)
Sauvage Innocence
Les Hautes Solitudes
Le Révélateur
L'enfant secret
Le bleu des origines (1979)
Les chemins perdus (1967)
Le Lit de la vierge (1969)
Philippe Garrel - Portrait of an Artist
UbuWeb:
Les Chemins perdus (1966-67)
Le revelateur (1968)
Les Hautes solitudes (1974)
Garrel made his first short film at 16 and was swiftly dubbed a
cinematic Rimbaud. He shot what Godard called «the best film about May
'68» (the student-worker uprising), and then, during the 70s, embarked
on a series of cinematic «experiments», avoiding conventional narrative
and specific social references in favor of private, symbolic worlds
replete with archetypal character and action. The influence of painters
Georges de la Tour and Ingres is evident in these «spectacles». Around
1969, he met Nico, the Velvet Underground diva, who became a sort of
muse, starring in a number of his films.
Working with minuscule budgets in relative obscurity, appreciated by a
small number of dedicated fans but ignored by the mainstream to the
point that only one of his films has been released in the Anglophone
world (his first feature, «Marie pour mémoire» in 1967), Philippe Garrel
is the archetypal romantic loner poet. He started filming in 1964 and
made his first feature four years later. A child of 1968 and the
Nouvelle Vague with a particular admiration for Godard, his films can be
split into two periods. The first are underground works, hermetic
visions of artistic alienation and, as the ‘70s wore on, film portraits
of the people around him, notably the German chanteuse Nico of Velvet
Underground fame with whom he lived for ten years. These were Garrel’s
wild years of drug addiction, permissiveness and extreme alienation,
which culminated in a traumatic experience of electroshock treatment.
They would haunt the films that followed. From 1979 he chose to move
into a more narrative cinema, to tell the story of his life rather than
immerse viewers in abstract hermetic visions that reflected it, often
only obliquely. The result is an ongoing series of autobiographical
films, one of the most coherent bodies of work in the cinema. Marriages
come and go, children arrive and ask awkward questions, parents pass on
their wisdom and die and the Garrel hero shuffles into middle age under
the shadow of lost loves and the lost dreams of the 1968 rising.
Garrel’s cinematic universe is a pared down, melancholy place two steps
away from the home movie. It is suffused with a uniquely affecting
tenderness, a sense of intimacy almost unknown elsewhere. The couple is
always at the centre of this universe, the pursuit of love and its
numerous difficulties being his constant theme and, for him, the only
theme worth dealing with. Among his best-known films are «Liberté la
nuit» (1983, with Christine Boisson), «J’entends plus la guitare»
(1990), «Le Coeur fantôme» (1995, with Luis Rego), and «Le Vent de la
nuit» (1998, with Xavier Beauvois and Catherine Deneuve).
(Source: http://www.centreimage.ch/cic_archives/02progE/bim/bim9/retro_philippe_garrel_e.html)
Voyeurism of the Soul: The Films of Philippe Garrel
In 1957, François Truffaut wrote: “The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession or a diary. The young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will relate what has happened to them: it may be the story of their first love or their most recent; of their political awakening; the story of a trip, a sickness, their military service, their marriage, their last vacation.and it will be enjoyable because it will be true.the film of tomorrow will be an act of love.” (1) Then the Nouvelle Vague came and went. For all of their achievements, with the notable exception of Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) they never quite fulfilled the conditions of this manifesto. Perhaps Eric Rohmer comes closest, with his delightfully intimate stories of day-to-day life and love. But even these lack the element of autobiography. In an interview for Cahiers du Cinéma last year, Maurice Pialat was delighted by interviewer Charles Tesson’s assertion that his films were what the Nouvelle Vague promised but did not deliver. (2) This is perhaps even truer of some other directors of his generation. Jean Eustache is an obvious example but perhaps the best is Philippe Garrel, the world’s greatest working filmmaker.
Working with minuscule budgets in relative obscurity, appreciated by a small number of dedicated fans but ignored by the mainstream to the point that only one of his films has been released in the Anglophone world (his first feature, Marie pour mémoire in 1967), Philippe Garrel is the archetypal romantic loner poet. He started filming in 1964 and made his first feature four years later. A child of 1968 and the Nouvelle Vague with a particular admiration for Godard, his films can be split into two periods. The first are underground works, hermetic visions of artistic alienation and, as the ’70s wore on, film portraits of the people around him, notably the German chanteuse Nico of “Velvet Underground” fame with whom he lived for ten years. These were Garrel’s wild years of drug addiction, permissiveness and extreme alienation, which culminated in a traumatic experience of electroshock treatment. They would haunt the films that followed. From 1979 he chose to move into a more narrative cinema, to tell the story of his life rather than immerse viewers in abstract hermetic visions that reflected it, often only obliquely. The result is an ongoing series of autobiographical films, one of the most coherent bodies of work in the cinema. Marriages come and go, children arrive and ask awkward questions, parents pass on their wisdom and die and the Garrel hero shuffles into middle age under the shadow of lost loves and the lost dreams of the 1968 rising. Garrel’s cinematic universe is a pared down, melancholy place two steps away from the home movie. It is suffused with a uniquely affecting tenderness, a sense of intimacy almost unknown elsewhere. The couple is always at the centre of this universe, the pursuit of love and its numerous difficulties being his constant theme and, for him, the only theme worth dealing with.
Garrel’s films are made up of moments, moments of day-to-day intimacy or alienation, often elliptically linked. Quiet conversations and silences between friends and lovers. And thought. Few other directors have made reflection so central to their filmmaking and almost none have captured it with such unforced grace. It is a cinema of contemplation rather than narrative. He shoots with the most basic means in an elegant, portrait like style. Sometimes he uses quite long takes, always with very little cutting around in a scene and often none at all. Scenes are filmed with a stillness and a patience that do the exact opposite of what most effective narrative cinema does, that is, to grab audiences and manipulate them into a state of false emotion.
Rather, Garrel’s style allows viewers to enter the scene for themselves, which results in a heightened sense of immediacy. The immediacy of the moment. Moments which we don’t feel are being played for us, but rather private moments we are observing.
Moments like Christine Boisson sitting up in bed after sleeping with Maurice Garrel for the first time in Liberté la nuit (1983) or later in the same film staring endlessly out of the window of a ferry; like Luis Rego quietly painting in Le Coeur fantôme (1995); like Garrel’s small son Louis floating paper boats in the bathroom in Les Baisers de secours (1988); like Catherine Deneuve anxiously preparing a bedroom for her rendezvous with Xavier Beauvois at the beginning of Le Vent de la nuit (1998). Moments whose haunting power is best summed up by Tony McKibbin in a phrase that perfectly encapsulates the source of these films’ power: “voyeurism of the soul”.
At the centre of these films are the actors and actresses. Some, like Jean-Pierre Léaud and the director’s father Maurice, with whom he likes to make a film at least every five years, are regulars. Others, like Benoît Régent (quite extraordinary in J’entends plus la guitare, 1990) and Lou Castel (La Naissance de l’amour, 1993), make their marks in passing. Among ‘his’ actresses Nico, Zouzou, Brigitte Sy, Christine Boisson, Johanna Ter Steege and Aurelia Alcais have all appeared more than once.
With the exception of Liberté la nuit, probably the finest of his ’80s work, which is set at the time of the Algerian war, his films of the past two decades have been contemporary and more or less autobiographical. L’Enfant secret (1979) began the cycle with a retelling of his affair with Nico; this was the inspiration behind J’entends plus la guitare as well, which looked back from the perspective of his later marriage and settled life; the short Rue Fontaine (1984) tells of another affair, this time with Jean Seberg, with the addition of his imagined suicide; Les Baisers de secours is an all family affair in which Garrel and his then wife Brigitte Sy play out a drama based on her devastation at being passed over for a role in another of his films. From J’entends plus la guitare on, the link from one film to the next becomes more pronounced. It ends with the hero’s marriage disintegrating, the main subject of his following film La Naissance de l’amour, which concludes with him taking up with a younger woman. This affair is the centre of Le Coeur fantôme, his most upbeat film in spite of the death of the hero’s father with which it concludes.
In contrast, Le Vent de la nuit is his most chilling film since the ’70s. It seems to mark a new direction in his work. Shot in uncharacteristic widescreen, the sense of closeness of the previous settings has given way to an unforgiving, glacially abstract world reminiscent of Antonioni in which characters move about pointlessly, hopelessly ensnared in their pasts.
In its story of a young man’s apprenticeship to a lonely, older man who carries the burden of Garrel’s past, it takes on an almost mythological dimension. Suicide is seen as the only solution in this tenderly lucid vision of perfect pessimism.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Garrel’s filmmaking is his trust in the inherent power of the cinema or at least the cinematic image. He once defined cinema as “Freud plus Lumière” (3) and Lumière is perhaps the director he resembles most. The astonishing directness of the relationship between Garrel’s camera and reality is in so many ways filmmaking at its most obvious. So obvious that no one since Lumière has had the courage or imagination to work that way. Yet his images have a poetry that is far removed from documentary drabness. In La Chinoise (1967), Godard claims Lumière was not the first documentary director, but rather one of the last great Impressionist painters. Garrel’s films are painterly in the same way. Rossellini stated, “things are there. Why manipulate them?” (4) Garrel proves the effectiveness of this approach definitively. Not only in terms of style, but also in subject matter. It is at his own life that his gaze is directed.
With the simplest of means and subjects that do not leave his back yard and are all the more deeply felt for it, Philippe Garrel has created a body of work that stands as a reproach to how stunted and self conscious most cinema still is. For anyone watching films in this era of computer manipulated visceral hyperbole, the tender toughness of Garrel’s austere approach is a much-needed reminder of the beauty of cinema in its purest state and its privileged position in capturing the face of reality.
Endnotes
- François Truffaut, Les Films de ma Vie (Paris: Flammarion), 1975
- Cahiers du Cinéma, October 2000
- Originally said in an interview with Gerard Courant
in 1982 and then quoted in a question by Thomas Lescure in his book of
interviews with Garrel, Une camera a la place du Coeur, (Paris: Admiranda/Institut de l’image), 1992
- Quoted from an interview with Rossellini by Fereydoun Hoveyda and Jacques Rivette in Cahiers du Cinéma, April 1959
Philippe Garrel
Le Lit de la vierge, 1969
There is an understatedly crystalline moment in Le Lit de la vierge (The Virgin's Bed)
when the scarlet woman, Marie Magdalène (Zouzou), having encountered
the fragile and aimless Jesus (Pierre Clémenti) for the first time,
cryptically explains that the men of the village pay for her company
through the archaic currency of stones - and along the way, has amassed a
collection that seemingly serves no other purpose than to have the
potential having things to throw. The allusion to the casting of stones
proves particularly incisive, not only within the loose, Biblical
allegory of Philippe Garrel's reconfigured tale of a dislocated,
modern-day prophet who crosses paths with (and shows compassion towards)
an adulterous woman, but also within the contemporaneity of the
widespread social unrest that had defined the political and moral
climate of May 68 - a turbulent, yet profoundly transformative era when
emboldened, young radicals like Garrel who saw film as an integral
instrument of protest were galvanized into direct social action, hurling
rocks (as well as more incendiary objects) at riot police during the
infamous Night of the Barricades (a personal watershed that Garrel would
also recreate in Regular Lovers).Filmed in the smoldered ashes of the failed social revolution as Garrel and a community of young artists from Zanzibar film (a film collective of like minded, radicalized artists financed by heiress Sylvina Boissonnas) abandoned the emblematic barricades of domestic protest and retreated to Africa to transfigure their ideological disappointment into subsumed cultural action through the creation of an intrinsically personal, revolutionary cinema, Le Lit de la vierge is, in a sense, the reconstitution of a fevered, post-traumatic creative manifesto - an impassioned, reflexive apologia composed in the fog of a drug-fueled delirium that not only reflected a not yet resigned sentiment of implicit denial over the failure of the revolution, but also served to reinforce the counter-culture generation's delusive posture as alienated and discarded messianic ideologues who, nevertheless, continue to hold the keys to an ever-receding utopian paradise. In presenting an idiosyncratically distorted embodiment (or perhaps, resurrection) of fringe society through a sensitive, misunderstood, outcast savior plagued by self-doubt and dispirited by a pervasive sense of impotence against the weight of human suffering, Garrel illustrates, not only the profound loneliness and alienation caused by a singularity of vision (a recurring idealized representation of the May 68 generation as well-intentioned holy innocents that seeks kinship not only with the abstracted heroes of Carl Theodor Dreyer's cinema - most notably, The Passion of Joan of Arc and Ordet - but also posits their intrinsic state of immanence, as revealed through their allusive alter-ego's consuming empathy for the oppressed and the marginalized (an altruistic desire for connectedness that is reflected in Jesus' despair over the seemingly anachronistic sight of bohemians being harassed by authorities within the sanctity of their own commune-like cavern dwellings).
But more intriguingly, Garrel's fusion of iconic cultural history and allegorical social commentary also provides the prescient framework for what would become the inevitable mythologization of the events of May 68, where personal memory has been tinted by the idealized nostalgia of unrealized history, and irreparably altered by the intoxicated haze of (trans)formative years lived under the influence - creating an illusive (and delusive) romanticism borne of a need to reconcile a generation's spiritual desolation with a sense of irrecoverable enlightenment that has been obscured (if not extinguished) by its own reclusive, escapist, and self-destructive behavior. It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that the seemingly irreverent, Freudian casting of Zouzou in the dual role of the Virgin Mary and Marie Magdalène alludes to a duality of human nature that filmmaker Jean Eustache would subsequently explore in The Mother and the Whore, a film that also chronicles a moral self-destruction in the aftermath of the failed revolution. It is this perverted romanticization of incorruptible idealism and integrality of vision that is inevitably captured in the film's final image of Jesus marching out to sea that, like the indelible image of the wide-eyed innocent child of Le Révélateur, becomes a symbolic act of willful resistance against the raging tide - a gesture, not of benevolent self-sacrifice, but a staged, empty spectacle of quixotic defiance.
Le Révélateur, 1968
One
of the experimental works created from the cadre of radical, emerging
artists financed under the rubric of Zanzibar films that captured the
spirit of May 68 and the counter culture revolution, Philippe Garrel's
silent film Le Révélateur is a fractured and elliptical, but
instinctive, elemental, and haunting rumination on the process of
awakening, maturation, psychological trauma, and transformation of
childhood memory. As the film begins, the révélateur - the
processor of the images - is embodied through the isolated, spotlighted
shot of a young boy (Stanislas Robiolles) in the corner of the frame,
looking on as his father (Laurent Terzieff), apparently unaware of his
presence in the room, struggles to connect with his abstracted mother
(Bernadette Lafont) in an act of implied intimacy through the (iconic)
sharing of a cigarette before fading into the proverbial background
through a doorway suffused in a halo of light. But despite the physical
act of transitory connection, what is ultimately retained in the child's
camera/eye is not the residual image of tenderness and affection, but
rather, a pattern of codependency, manipulation, madness, isolation, and
perhaps even violence - an estrangement that is prefigured in the
Freudian, reverse pietà image of the child emerging from a long, dark
passageway towards his kneeling mother held in (apparently) resigned
captivity tied to a cross at the end of the tunnel - a sense of
pervasive emotional alienation and moral bondage that is further
reinforced by the austerity and desolation of a seemingly godless,
post-apocalyptic landscape. Pursued by an unseen, anonymous, but
ubiquitous enemy (perhaps an allusion to the faceless nature of the
embedded, guerrilla warfare tactics of the Vietnam War), the young
family is compelled to leave the comfort of their dysfunctional home
life and embark on an interminable journey to nowhere. Reduced to a life
of perpetual exile and transience, the child begins to rebel, a
defiance of parental control that is manifested in an act of literal
repellance through his directed, repeated triggering of an aerosol can
(in an elegantly composed, superimposed traveling shot) that further
underscores his willful, symbolic act of distanciation from his parents.
Reinforced by the subsequent shot of his parents posed as seeming
trophy heads displayed on the corners of his headboard, the macabre
image serves, not only to illustrate their role as trophic figures that
he is weaning away from, but also represent their figurative impotence
in his inevitable process of autonomy and independence. Concluding with
the child donning his makeshift armor as he heads towards the sea, the
image evokes a more primal Antoine Doinel (the adolescent alterego of
François Truffaut's The 400 Blows) facing an alien and
inalterable horizon - a silent and quixotic defiance against the
oppressive and implacable forces of a cruel and inhuman human nature.Elle a passé tant d'heures sous les sunlights..., 1985
Gradually, the bounds between reality and fiction begin to disintegrate in the interpenetration of dreams and memories, passions and anxieties, becoming increasingly fractured and irresolvable. Like his alter-ego character on the bridge, Philippe has grown apprehensive over the seeming irresolution of the film, and enlists the aid of friends: Chantal Akerman who is, uncoincidentally in the process of shooting The Eighties, a metafilm on the nature of repetition and performance); Christa, also played by Wiazemsky, and who, in turn, also evokes a self-reflexive, permeable reality through reconstructed, iconic poses that not only allude to Nico's early career as a fashion model, but also mimic the Bressonian model figuration of her character, Marie in Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar); and actor Lou Castel, whose "new" character is introduced midway through the film shoot as Marie's new paramour (and indirectly, replacing Philippe - through his alter-ego - from her life). It is interesting to note that in introducing Castel into the film, Philippe not only enables a means of closure for his failed relationship with his former lover through their surrogate selves, but also illustrates the emotional process of transference, transition, and figurative rebirth. In essence, the transfiguration of death - subliminally illustrated, initially, through the liberating image of Marie riding carefree in an automobile to the music of Nico that serves as an evocative counterpoint to Jean Eustache's debilitation from a car accident, then subsequently, through the shot of a somber Garrel standing beside a collapsed noose that alludes to Eustache's suicide - inevitably paves the way for the film's second chapter (and metaphoric turning point), La Nativité. Inspired by the birth of his son, Louis (and who would later appear Emergency Kisses and Regular Lovers), the film dissolves into an instinctual collage of quotidian portraitures - of actors waiting, pacing, observing - of temps morts. Concluding with the elliptical, parting shot of Philippe standing by a window in visible discomfort as evening approaches, his suffering becomes as a double entendred, metaphoric representation: the physical withdrawal (whether through substance abuse or the separation of death) of profound loss, and the implacable - but necessary - ache of realized creation. - filmref.com/
Voluptuous Defeat: Philippe Garrel and LES AMANTS RÉGULIERS
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Commissioned by Sight and Sound, and written for their August 2006 issue. — J.R.
This is a problem I’ve been wrestling with for a quarter of a century. For the past decade, I’ve been trying to theorize my disaffection by ascribing the passion of my younger friends for this melancholy star of the French underground to a generational taste I can’t share. In some respects, I even like the way they like Garrel’s films more than I like the films themselves. They generate a kind of awe that few other filmmakers inspire, and the fact that he’s a minority taste in no way disqualifies him from being a major talent.
These far-flung cinéphiles, all born around 1960, include Nicole Brenez, based in Paris; Alexander Horwath, based in Vienna; Kent Jones, based in New York; and Adrian Martin, based in Melbourne —- all of whom share similarly acute feelings for John Cassavetes, Abel Ferrara, Monte Hellman, and Maurice Pialat. They all collaborated on a 2003 book I co-edited with Martin, Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (BFI Publishing) -— a book that started out as an attempt to account for their curious synchronicity of interests. More recently, I’ve been discussing Garrel’s latest film with South Korean cinéphiles who saw it at the Jeonju International Film Festival, many of whom singled it out as their favorite film of the past year —- a sentiment shared by several western friends and acquaintances.
***
As a side-product of my long-term theorizing, I was honored to have
been the sole dissenter invited in June 2001 to participate in what was
probably the only Garrel conference that has ever been held anywhere. As
an immediate follow-up to the four-day For Ever Godard symposium held
at the London’s Tate Modern, a much more modest but no less intense
two-day gathering, Garrel éternel, was held at Dublin’s Irish Film
Centre. The combined panelists and audience came to scarcely more than a
dozen people, but the energy never flagged.
***
***
Until fairly recently, the Paris Cinémathèque was mainly inhospitable
to and incurious about contemporary experimental films. But Garrel, a
particular favorite of Henri Langlois (who regarded La Cicatrice Intérieure
as a ‘total masterpiece’), was a notable exception, and the fact that
he grew up in some proximity to the local film world because of his
father probably helped to establish him early on as a legendary as well
as highly respected figure. As Cahiers du Cinéma’s Jean
Douchet has observed, Garrel `occupies a singular position within
French cinema’ because his ‘small but devoted public’ is essentially the
one that has traditionally developed in France around poets. (Douchet
adds that Garrel’s tradition is closer to André Breton’s in his Nadja mode than to Jean Cocteau’s, and that `his cinema descends in a direct line from that of Lumière, not that of Méliès.’)
***
***
The Dreamers was supposed to show how great it was in 1968 to be young and horny and in Paris and political and smitten with movies seen at the Cinémathèque. But I must confess I was all of those things and the movie brought back none of my experience — perhaps because it was aimed at viewers the same age as Gilbert Adair’s and Bertolucci’s characters, not at me, even though one of those characters was an American cinephile like myself. Admittedly, I’d arrived in Paris that summer by mid-June, just after the police had taken the Odéon Theatre back from the students and cleared away the makeshift street barricades. But remnants of felled trees still lined portions of Boulevard St-Michel, and the city felt strangely energized. I found myself fleeing from a police charge one day and getting a sudden and potent whiff of tear gas on another.
Garrel’s film is only about French kids, and it starts rather than ends with the May events. It understandably feels much more authentic because Garrel was a participant in the May events (albeit a `very nonviolent’ one, by his own account) as well as an observer. As filmmaker Jackie Raynal, who worked as Garrel’s editor and assistant director during this period, once told me in an interview, ‘Godard had an Alfa Romeo with a 35mm camera [at the time], and he and Alain Jouffroy and Garrel went around shooting footage,’ adding that, ‘Because of the Alfa Romeo, the police left them alone.’ (The ten-minute collective film that resulted, Actua I, which Godard has praised, was lost in a processing lab and never seen again.)
This isn’t an understanding Garrel appears to have much truck with. It’s a comprehensible position for a former heroin addict to have, but it can’t illuminate why radicals who smoked grass in the ‘60s didn’t regard their activity as a political copout, whereas those who favored heroin were unlikely to be involved with any sort of politics, except peripherally. Maybe that’s why this film feels, like Keats in `Ode to a Nightingale,’ ‘half in love with easeful Death’ — almost viewing political defeat itself as a kind of voluptuous embrace.
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