Christelle Lheureux
A Multi-Track Remake
by Jean-Christophe Royoux
At first one could mistake Christelle Lheureux’s l’Expérience préhistorique for one of these remakes to which we have been accustomed by artists of the past ten years or so (1). After all, she does use the original soundtrack of Kenji Mizoguchi’s Gion No Shimai (The Sisters of Gion) – a movie about two Geisha sisters living in Kyoto in the thirties – and faithfully follows that film’s structure; she could simply have asked non professional actors to mimic the attitudes, facial expressions and gestures of the characters in the Japanese movie. But Christelle chose an innovative approach and decided to use Mizoguchi’s soundtrack as a mere musical score destined to spot within the movie’s temporal continuum all the moments when a character communicates with another one. From then on, Christelle Lheureux’s true invention lies in her restructuring the rhythm of the movie by focusing primarily on the dialogues to transpose them into an organized eye game. As in The Sisters of Gion, each spatial change is expressed through a change of sequence. The scenes in l’Expérience préhistorique are the exact same length as in the original. The number of characters and their gender, the interaction between indoor/outdoor, night/day scenes are the same as in the Japanese movie. However, the actions of the film shot in Kyoto in 1936 have been replaced by silent still shots: no more action, no more animation.
In its initial version, created during an artist’s residency in Kyoto (2), a benshi (3) – Midori Sawato, among the last ones still performing in Japan today – was to work out a first possible story likely to link together in a coherent narrative the twelve characters of the movie. In the end, it all came down to the relationship between two abstract elements: the mystery emanating from the motionless, speechless characters; the mystery emanating from a language indecipherable to the French artist who can but grasp hints of it through its hues, its flow of speech, its rhythm and the opaque facial expressions coming along with it.
Produced in the mid-thirties, Mizoguchi’s film can be seen as a movie bridging the gap between silent cinema and the talkies. Likewise, the title of Christelle Lheureux’s film derived from the latter – l’Expérience préhistorique – highlights the film-maker’s peculiar fondness for things fitting together: a sound and an image, a voice and a character. Though coming from an unknown territory, the voice still suits the character like a glove.
According to Japanese traditions, the benshi is related to kabuki theatre and lives on through it, passed on from generation to generation. It witnessed and acted upon the birth of motion pictures – especially the silent movies era – and faded away in the fifties.
Until about 1910, cinema all over the world was backed by a device called the “Great Speaker” (“Grand Parleur”, also called “bonimenteur” by André Gaudreault). This practice is directly reminiscent of a pre-cinematic heritage and most particularly to the magical lantern used by traveling lecturers in the late nineteenth century (4). The bonimenteur (literally “smooth talker”) is a kind of narrator/speaker who explains to the audience the meaning of the filmed sequences appearing on the screen. The juxtaposition of “spoken comments to a dramatic performance” is derived from a very ancient practice observed for instance in fourteenth century Italy where the Good Friday sermon and liturgy were illustrated by dramatic plays (5). Its equivalent in the field of painting is what art historian from Quebec Alain Laframboise (6) named the l’admoniteur (literally the “Admonisher”) in his translation into French of a term from Alberti’s Della pictura (7). The “smooth talker” or “admonisher” works as a kind of “linking agent”, a middle man between the work of art and the viewer.
Thus, the title of Christelle Lheureux’s work is extremely well chosen. The use of the benshi is indeed rooted in a prehistoric experience of cinema taking us back in time a few centuries before the birth of the new mode of Representation brought about by the conception of istoria in painting. Thus, this cinema takes us back to its pictorial prehistory, showing us how it has evolved in the Western World since the end of the Middle Ages. This hint at the istoria is made even more obvious through the way the images are recorded: still and laid out like paintings, without any actual depth of field except for the few landscapes glimpsed through an open door or window frame.
The true power of the benshi – her magic, her nearly miraculous nature – lies in her ability to breath life into motionless bodies without one having to actually see or move them. Way beyond the moving image, this practice should be labeled “cinematism of speech”, of living speech, live speech, partially improvised speech supposedly occurring only once. Although detached from the images and bodies onscreen, this voice announces itself by standing outside the visuals, as if performing a play. Whereas in stage shows the actors’ performance always tends to bridge the gap between actor and character, here the voice being detached from the image emphasizes the outwardness of the performance; all the more so that the actor (the benshi) ceaselessly switches from one character to another, weaving relational constellations between the twelve characters appearing in turn on the screen. The benshi was granted absolute freedom concerning her storyline as the film director did not give her any specific indication or orientation. She makes up dialogues, speaks aloud the characters’ inner thoughts, gives psychological or scenario-related clues. She embodies all the characters within one individual. The most striking effect in the movie lies in the reduction of several characters to a single voice. In the unbelievable performance of the benshi, entirely absorbed in the live narration she is providing. Going further than just speaking for such or such character, she also embodies the story itself. What makes the movie so peculiar is that it managed to confer so many twists, so many narrative possibilities to seemingly motionless and expressionless bodies. The true happening lies in the contrast between the benshi’s impassioned flow of speech and the stillness of the image.
If from the 1930s until the invention of the telefilm, the history of cinema has overlapped that of the remake, that is to say the history of the many technical and narrative processes that have allowed movies to become increasingly widely screened – from multiple versions to dubbing, from remakes to serials based on similar narrative plots – what we’ve got here on the contrary is an attempt to re-singularize movie situations. The aim here is to enable the invention of a unique story at each new screening.
In this work, the remake reaches its limitations, which on a technical level coincide with the advent of the DVD8 and the juxtaposition of several linguistic versions on the same medium. Where the ever-growing emphasis upon the reproducibility of the film is reversed into a system producing non reproducible screenings. However, the tremendously increasing number of spoken narratives invented by narrators asked to use the same visuals at every screening might be seen as another way to express the identity common to all those stories. Structural identity of the narrative – I am here referring to An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of the Narrative, a well-known essay by Roland Barthes – revealed by the ever-renewed invention, unique yet identical, of the potential relationships within a group of characters. As if when unfolding methods invariably different from social norms by combining an independent visuals with a partially improvised narrative, one truly aimed at ranking by types the elementary forms of social life.
Christelle strongly underlines that she asked the actors – according to a precisely settled temporality – to “look one another in the eyes”. The whole continuum of the movie is thus mediated by the gaze. Each time a person is looking at another one, their gaze indicates that they are talking to each other. Each time one of the actors in the original movie addresses someone, a long glance is cast at his interlocutor. Translating words into gazes, Christelle resorts to a form of transposition pinpointing the conventional way in which the narration appears onscreen: prominence of the code, of encoding and its dimension, which means emphasis on the formalism of cinematic writing. One could even see this transposition of dialogues into gazes as the creation of a tradition quite reminiscent of what Westerners might first perceive of the social conventions in Japan. More significantly so, Christelle stresses how transitive the actors’ gaze can be when facing the camera. Watching the camera that watches them all throughout the movie and on a regular basis, the actors are looking at each other without looking at each other onscreen. Just like a ball bouncing on a pool table, here the entanglement of indirect gazes, the creation of a perpendicular space onscreen, a kind of horizontal playground overlapping the cinematic space to include the benshi’s gaze on the left-hand side of the stage, facing the screen, and that of the viewer seated in the room. In other words, during those moments appearing as the true pinnacle of this work, one can observe three kinds of gazes intertwining: that of the benshi, whose posture lies halfway between staring at the screen and staring at the audience; those coming from the screen, undivided though made of two or three actors’ gazes staring at us in the meantime; and eventually that of the camera recording them and concurring with our own gaze on the other side of the screen, in the room. As if our frontal way of interacting with images had been hindered twice in favor of two lateral visual trajectories: that of the viewer starting to “read” the performance from the benshi’s music stand on the left-hand side of the stage to drift towards the screen thanks to this first mediating element; that of the characters onscreen facing us and moving their gaze through the camera, from one end of the screen to the other. Like the smooth talker (bonimenteur) and previously the admonisher (admoniteur), the benshi always stands on the left-hand side, in the foreground, as if she necessarily had to be the first visual element perceived by the viewer starting to “read” the film / painting. True “junction between punctual and the vectorial elements”, the benshi reveals and emphasizes the importance of monstration, “exhibition” in live narration. Acting as the only link between the elements-characters, the indirect circulation of the gazes is the equivalent – within the internal construction of film – of the smooth talker and of the mediating distance between the smooth talker’s narrative and the visuals. This circulation gives birth to a powerful visual matrix, starkly deduced from the original movie, and duplicates in a way, fully taking on the translations and transformations induced by this adaptation.
Speaking about the modernity of Marguerite Duras’s movies, Youssef Ishagpour insisted on “the loss of its homogenous nature, the dislocation of its founding elements: each level can then detach itself, free itself from the random unit and develop into an autonomous sphere”. Then, according to him, the cinematic work becomes an “exhibition space” (9). And this is exactly what happened when Christelle Lheureux’s work was assembled lately at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Valence. On the one hand, the overwhelming sound of the voice broadcast everywhere on the site. On the other hand, the image projected on two screens set on top of each other, on two levels. On the bottom level, the cut-edited series of painting-like shots unravels the subtitled visuals; on the top level, the image of the sound, that is to say the benshi’s continuous and uninterrupted performance, reminiscent of a traveling shot. Here the dissociation experience is of several kinds. The voice with or without the image, the image of the movie without the voice, the sound of the voice and its subtitled transposition into another language, the “musical” voice with no understanding of what is being told, and so on…, appear as possible components of an endless interacting game, endless in the sense that the hypothetical signification of the interpretation offered to us by the benshi does not necessarily allow us to come closer to the meaning of this prehistoric experience.
Granted, in the configuration experimented in Valence, the vertical nature of the relationship between the two images seemed to induce a hierarchy: the voice, synchronized with the image of the benshi, comes from above. However, the multi-punctuality (pluri-ponctualité) of the film – I am here referring to the terminology of pioneering cinema historian André Gaudreault – that is the succession measured after the original movie’s partition of the still shots series on the visuals, seems to be at a standstill (10): it fails to launch anything, or to bring about anything but an interpretation of the link bonding the characters among many other possibilities. Always more than a mere story; multiple versions.
In other words, the succession of photograph-like shots in l’Expérience préhistorique – a quite minimalist and static piece – reminiscent of Jeff Wall’s very first images, offers a prehistoric “before” to all the stories by weaving a group of interchangeable, expressionless yet recurring element-characters forming a basis from which one can invent and multiply new narratives. In the end, this is how one should understand the meaning of the prefix “to experience from history, or rather from history to experience.” The kind of remake we are dealing with should not be understood as the literal transcription into another language of the dialogues from the first version, nor as the shallow – possibly updated – reworking of an already written or filmed story. It must be seen as the basic creation of a matrix – in our case, the visuals – allowing a series of ever-different stories to pile up. However, the very interplay between all those differences reveals the existence of a common structure, common not only to the narratives – maybe even to all the narratives ever told – but also on a larger scale to social interactions.
Beyond the scope of such or such particular movie, one can describe the cinematic utopia as the will to create bonds between beings so as to keep them going on, to invent ways for them to co-exist at the very time when all the traditional links between human beings were undergoing drastic changes. Besides, the cinematic machine is already – beyond any kind of single narration – a combining tool, a linking machine. When reverting to this original moment before the crystallization of the forms of association, Christelle Lheureux aims at re-discovering possibilities fallen into oblivion, buried too quickly under the talkies’ machine-like efficiency. To my mind, what is at stake here with this gaze looking back on the ingredients of cinema before they merged into one single body is a generic questioning about the conditions underlying any relationship. The filmmaker is fascinated by this moment when all the fragments of a movie are still separated and when the question of their association comes into play. But this moment of awareness and reflection about the conditions required for any re-presentation metaphorically raises another issue: what is it that makes the relationship between an individual and another one happen? What are the possible logical patterns of human association? Relationships – the mystery of attraction and its erosion, the mystery of difference within the relationship – may well be the true topic of Lheureux’s installation.
Kenji Mizoguchi’s film can be said to deal with the impossibility for men and women to get along, a barren state of things that taints any form of communication and exchange between genders with a feeling of lack. Today, as the world is getting more and more unified while opening itself to the differences in which it is embedded, misunderstandings are multiplying. It may be time to see in them the opportunity to reconsider drastically the conditions that have to this day prevailed in our perception of the Other, a figure that modern cinema has conveyed as a privileged medium thanks to the double spur constituted by identification and projection. Therefore, the film-maker merely wishes to multiply – beyond the scope of singular stories – opportunities to get along with each other in a different way. Maybe by resorting to these other forms of address – according to the former meaning of the word – in which the prospective, post-cinematic dimension of Christelle’s investigation is entrenched. The fascination for Asia and on a larger scale for situations happening “elsewhere” pervading her entire oeuvre and enhancing her interest for cinema seems to confirm this guess. The characters in l’Expérience préhistorique seem to act as a metaphor for what everybody is hankering after nowadays: another kind of tact. The aim of Christelle Lheureux’s installation is to produce a matrix based on Otherness and likely to promote the search for this new kind of interaction.
–––––––––––––––
1. See Jean-Christophe Royoux “Remaking cinéma : les nouvelles stratégies du remake et l’invention du cinéma d’exposition”, in Reproductibilité et irreproductibilité de l’œuvre d’art, supervised by Véronique Goudinoux and Michel Weemans, Brussels: La lettre volée, 2001.
2. Kyoto, December 2003.
3. Unlike the Japanese tradition which requires the benshi to follow a script handed to him/her by the film director, Christelle Lheureux asked the benshi to work out a story herself.
4. André Gaudreault “Entre narrativité et pictorialité : le cinéma des premiers temps”, lecture delivered during the symposium Pour un nouveau narrateur. Enquête sur les nouvelles modalités du récit dans les arts visuels organized by François Albéra and Jean-Christophe Royoux called and held at the Galician Center for Contemporary Arts in Santiago de Compostela in 1998.
5. Istoria et théorie de l’art. Italie XVe, et XVIe siècles, Montreal: Montreal University Press, 1989.
6. In Della pictura Alberti writes: “ Et il me plait qu’il y ait dans l’istoria quelqu’un qui nous avertisse (amnonisca) et nous enseigne ce qui s’y fait, ou qui nous invite de la main à voir, où qui nous menace avec un visage fâché et les yeux épouvantés afin que personne n’approche ou qui nous invite à pleurer ou à rire avec eux ”. “I am pleased by the fact that there is in the istoria someone to warn us (amnonisca) and teach us what is being done, or to point to us what there is to see, or to threaten us with an angry face and a frightened gaze so that no one comes closer or to invite us to burst into laughter or tears along with them”.
7. The complete version of l’Expérience préhistorique will be released on a multi-track DVD coming with French and English subtitles.
8. Youssef Ishaghpour, D’une image à l’autre, la nouvelle modernité au cinéma, Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1982,(about Marguerite Duras’s Navire Night), p. 285
9. French version with Mickael Lonsdale. Italian and Korean versions coming soon…
10. Here one can observe a logic: the passage from the typical run of the cinematic medium to the scrolling of the images in dribs and drabs eventually building up a stock of images that I have described as a typical feature of those new types of remakes that have multiplied in the field of arts since the release of 24hour Psycho (1993), first archetypal remake of the nineties directed by Douglas Gordon. But one cannot deny that l’Expérience préhistorique fully ranks in this category. For further discussion see: Jean-Christophe Royoux, “Remaking cinéma : les nouvelles stratégies du remake et l’invention du cinéma d’exposition”, op. cit.
At first one could mistake Christelle Lheureux’s l’Expérience préhistorique for one of these remakes to which we have been accustomed by artists of the past ten years or so (1). After all, she does use the original soundtrack of Kenji Mizoguchi’s Gion No Shimai (The Sisters of Gion) – a movie about two Geisha sisters living in Kyoto in the thirties – and faithfully follows that film’s structure; she could simply have asked non professional actors to mimic the attitudes, facial expressions and gestures of the characters in the Japanese movie. But Christelle chose an innovative approach and decided to use Mizoguchi’s soundtrack as a mere musical score destined to spot within the movie’s temporal continuum all the moments when a character communicates with another one. From then on, Christelle Lheureux’s true invention lies in her restructuring the rhythm of the movie by focusing primarily on the dialogues to transpose them into an organized eye game. As in The Sisters of Gion, each spatial change is expressed through a change of sequence. The scenes in l’Expérience préhistorique are the exact same length as in the original. The number of characters and their gender, the interaction between indoor/outdoor, night/day scenes are the same as in the Japanese movie. However, the actions of the film shot in Kyoto in 1936 have been replaced by silent still shots: no more action, no more animation.
In its initial version, created during an artist’s residency in Kyoto (2), a benshi (3) – Midori Sawato, among the last ones still performing in Japan today – was to work out a first possible story likely to link together in a coherent narrative the twelve characters of the movie. In the end, it all came down to the relationship between two abstract elements: the mystery emanating from the motionless, speechless characters; the mystery emanating from a language indecipherable to the French artist who can but grasp hints of it through its hues, its flow of speech, its rhythm and the opaque facial expressions coming along with it.
Produced in the mid-thirties, Mizoguchi’s film can be seen as a movie bridging the gap between silent cinema and the talkies. Likewise, the title of Christelle Lheureux’s film derived from the latter – l’Expérience préhistorique – highlights the film-maker’s peculiar fondness for things fitting together: a sound and an image, a voice and a character. Though coming from an unknown territory, the voice still suits the character like a glove.
According to Japanese traditions, the benshi is related to kabuki theatre and lives on through it, passed on from generation to generation. It witnessed and acted upon the birth of motion pictures – especially the silent movies era – and faded away in the fifties.
Until about 1910, cinema all over the world was backed by a device called the “Great Speaker” (“Grand Parleur”, also called “bonimenteur” by André Gaudreault). This practice is directly reminiscent of a pre-cinematic heritage and most particularly to the magical lantern used by traveling lecturers in the late nineteenth century (4). The bonimenteur (literally “smooth talker”) is a kind of narrator/speaker who explains to the audience the meaning of the filmed sequences appearing on the screen. The juxtaposition of “spoken comments to a dramatic performance” is derived from a very ancient practice observed for instance in fourteenth century Italy where the Good Friday sermon and liturgy were illustrated by dramatic plays (5). Its equivalent in the field of painting is what art historian from Quebec Alain Laframboise (6) named the l’admoniteur (literally the “Admonisher”) in his translation into French of a term from Alberti’s Della pictura (7). The “smooth talker” or “admonisher” works as a kind of “linking agent”, a middle man between the work of art and the viewer.
Thus, the title of Christelle Lheureux’s work is extremely well chosen. The use of the benshi is indeed rooted in a prehistoric experience of cinema taking us back in time a few centuries before the birth of the new mode of Representation brought about by the conception of istoria in painting. Thus, this cinema takes us back to its pictorial prehistory, showing us how it has evolved in the Western World since the end of the Middle Ages. This hint at the istoria is made even more obvious through the way the images are recorded: still and laid out like paintings, without any actual depth of field except for the few landscapes glimpsed through an open door or window frame.
The true power of the benshi – her magic, her nearly miraculous nature – lies in her ability to breath life into motionless bodies without one having to actually see or move them. Way beyond the moving image, this practice should be labeled “cinematism of speech”, of living speech, live speech, partially improvised speech supposedly occurring only once. Although detached from the images and bodies onscreen, this voice announces itself by standing outside the visuals, as if performing a play. Whereas in stage shows the actors’ performance always tends to bridge the gap between actor and character, here the voice being detached from the image emphasizes the outwardness of the performance; all the more so that the actor (the benshi) ceaselessly switches from one character to another, weaving relational constellations between the twelve characters appearing in turn on the screen. The benshi was granted absolute freedom concerning her storyline as the film director did not give her any specific indication or orientation. She makes up dialogues, speaks aloud the characters’ inner thoughts, gives psychological or scenario-related clues. She embodies all the characters within one individual. The most striking effect in the movie lies in the reduction of several characters to a single voice. In the unbelievable performance of the benshi, entirely absorbed in the live narration she is providing. Going further than just speaking for such or such character, she also embodies the story itself. What makes the movie so peculiar is that it managed to confer so many twists, so many narrative possibilities to seemingly motionless and expressionless bodies. The true happening lies in the contrast between the benshi’s impassioned flow of speech and the stillness of the image.
If from the 1930s until the invention of the telefilm, the history of cinema has overlapped that of the remake, that is to say the history of the many technical and narrative processes that have allowed movies to become increasingly widely screened – from multiple versions to dubbing, from remakes to serials based on similar narrative plots – what we’ve got here on the contrary is an attempt to re-singularize movie situations. The aim here is to enable the invention of a unique story at each new screening.
In this work, the remake reaches its limitations, which on a technical level coincide with the advent of the DVD8 and the juxtaposition of several linguistic versions on the same medium. Where the ever-growing emphasis upon the reproducibility of the film is reversed into a system producing non reproducible screenings. However, the tremendously increasing number of spoken narratives invented by narrators asked to use the same visuals at every screening might be seen as another way to express the identity common to all those stories. Structural identity of the narrative – I am here referring to An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of the Narrative, a well-known essay by Roland Barthes – revealed by the ever-renewed invention, unique yet identical, of the potential relationships within a group of characters. As if when unfolding methods invariably different from social norms by combining an independent visuals with a partially improvised narrative, one truly aimed at ranking by types the elementary forms of social life.
Christelle strongly underlines that she asked the actors – according to a precisely settled temporality – to “look one another in the eyes”. The whole continuum of the movie is thus mediated by the gaze. Each time a person is looking at another one, their gaze indicates that they are talking to each other. Each time one of the actors in the original movie addresses someone, a long glance is cast at his interlocutor. Translating words into gazes, Christelle resorts to a form of transposition pinpointing the conventional way in which the narration appears onscreen: prominence of the code, of encoding and its dimension, which means emphasis on the formalism of cinematic writing. One could even see this transposition of dialogues into gazes as the creation of a tradition quite reminiscent of what Westerners might first perceive of the social conventions in Japan. More significantly so, Christelle stresses how transitive the actors’ gaze can be when facing the camera. Watching the camera that watches them all throughout the movie and on a regular basis, the actors are looking at each other without looking at each other onscreen. Just like a ball bouncing on a pool table, here the entanglement of indirect gazes, the creation of a perpendicular space onscreen, a kind of horizontal playground overlapping the cinematic space to include the benshi’s gaze on the left-hand side of the stage, facing the screen, and that of the viewer seated in the room. In other words, during those moments appearing as the true pinnacle of this work, one can observe three kinds of gazes intertwining: that of the benshi, whose posture lies halfway between staring at the screen and staring at the audience; those coming from the screen, undivided though made of two or three actors’ gazes staring at us in the meantime; and eventually that of the camera recording them and concurring with our own gaze on the other side of the screen, in the room. As if our frontal way of interacting with images had been hindered twice in favor of two lateral visual trajectories: that of the viewer starting to “read” the performance from the benshi’s music stand on the left-hand side of the stage to drift towards the screen thanks to this first mediating element; that of the characters onscreen facing us and moving their gaze through the camera, from one end of the screen to the other. Like the smooth talker (bonimenteur) and previously the admonisher (admoniteur), the benshi always stands on the left-hand side, in the foreground, as if she necessarily had to be the first visual element perceived by the viewer starting to “read” the film / painting. True “junction between punctual and the vectorial elements”, the benshi reveals and emphasizes the importance of monstration, “exhibition” in live narration. Acting as the only link between the elements-characters, the indirect circulation of the gazes is the equivalent – within the internal construction of film – of the smooth talker and of the mediating distance between the smooth talker’s narrative and the visuals. This circulation gives birth to a powerful visual matrix, starkly deduced from the original movie, and duplicates in a way, fully taking on the translations and transformations induced by this adaptation.
Speaking about the modernity of Marguerite Duras’s movies, Youssef Ishagpour insisted on “the loss of its homogenous nature, the dislocation of its founding elements: each level can then detach itself, free itself from the random unit and develop into an autonomous sphere”. Then, according to him, the cinematic work becomes an “exhibition space” (9). And this is exactly what happened when Christelle Lheureux’s work was assembled lately at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Valence. On the one hand, the overwhelming sound of the voice broadcast everywhere on the site. On the other hand, the image projected on two screens set on top of each other, on two levels. On the bottom level, the cut-edited series of painting-like shots unravels the subtitled visuals; on the top level, the image of the sound, that is to say the benshi’s continuous and uninterrupted performance, reminiscent of a traveling shot. Here the dissociation experience is of several kinds. The voice with or without the image, the image of the movie without the voice, the sound of the voice and its subtitled transposition into another language, the “musical” voice with no understanding of what is being told, and so on…, appear as possible components of an endless interacting game, endless in the sense that the hypothetical signification of the interpretation offered to us by the benshi does not necessarily allow us to come closer to the meaning of this prehistoric experience.
Granted, in the configuration experimented in Valence, the vertical nature of the relationship between the two images seemed to induce a hierarchy: the voice, synchronized with the image of the benshi, comes from above. However, the multi-punctuality (pluri-ponctualité) of the film – I am here referring to the terminology of pioneering cinema historian André Gaudreault – that is the succession measured after the original movie’s partition of the still shots series on the visuals, seems to be at a standstill (10): it fails to launch anything, or to bring about anything but an interpretation of the link bonding the characters among many other possibilities. Always more than a mere story; multiple versions.
In other words, the succession of photograph-like shots in l’Expérience préhistorique – a quite minimalist and static piece – reminiscent of Jeff Wall’s very first images, offers a prehistoric “before” to all the stories by weaving a group of interchangeable, expressionless yet recurring element-characters forming a basis from which one can invent and multiply new narratives. In the end, this is how one should understand the meaning of the prefix “to experience from history, or rather from history to experience.” The kind of remake we are dealing with should not be understood as the literal transcription into another language of the dialogues from the first version, nor as the shallow – possibly updated – reworking of an already written or filmed story. It must be seen as the basic creation of a matrix – in our case, the visuals – allowing a series of ever-different stories to pile up. However, the very interplay between all those differences reveals the existence of a common structure, common not only to the narratives – maybe even to all the narratives ever told – but also on a larger scale to social interactions.
Beyond the scope of such or such particular movie, one can describe the cinematic utopia as the will to create bonds between beings so as to keep them going on, to invent ways for them to co-exist at the very time when all the traditional links between human beings were undergoing drastic changes. Besides, the cinematic machine is already – beyond any kind of single narration – a combining tool, a linking machine. When reverting to this original moment before the crystallization of the forms of association, Christelle Lheureux aims at re-discovering possibilities fallen into oblivion, buried too quickly under the talkies’ machine-like efficiency. To my mind, what is at stake here with this gaze looking back on the ingredients of cinema before they merged into one single body is a generic questioning about the conditions underlying any relationship. The filmmaker is fascinated by this moment when all the fragments of a movie are still separated and when the question of their association comes into play. But this moment of awareness and reflection about the conditions required for any re-presentation metaphorically raises another issue: what is it that makes the relationship between an individual and another one happen? What are the possible logical patterns of human association? Relationships – the mystery of attraction and its erosion, the mystery of difference within the relationship – may well be the true topic of Lheureux’s installation.
Kenji Mizoguchi’s film can be said to deal with the impossibility for men and women to get along, a barren state of things that taints any form of communication and exchange between genders with a feeling of lack. Today, as the world is getting more and more unified while opening itself to the differences in which it is embedded, misunderstandings are multiplying. It may be time to see in them the opportunity to reconsider drastically the conditions that have to this day prevailed in our perception of the Other, a figure that modern cinema has conveyed as a privileged medium thanks to the double spur constituted by identification and projection. Therefore, the film-maker merely wishes to multiply – beyond the scope of singular stories – opportunities to get along with each other in a different way. Maybe by resorting to these other forms of address – according to the former meaning of the word – in which the prospective, post-cinematic dimension of Christelle’s investigation is entrenched. The fascination for Asia and on a larger scale for situations happening “elsewhere” pervading her entire oeuvre and enhancing her interest for cinema seems to confirm this guess. The characters in l’Expérience préhistorique seem to act as a metaphor for what everybody is hankering after nowadays: another kind of tact. The aim of Christelle Lheureux’s installation is to produce a matrix based on Otherness and likely to promote the search for this new kind of interaction.
–––––––––––––––
1. See Jean-Christophe Royoux “Remaking cinéma : les nouvelles stratégies du remake et l’invention du cinéma d’exposition”, in Reproductibilité et irreproductibilité de l’œuvre d’art, supervised by Véronique Goudinoux and Michel Weemans, Brussels: La lettre volée, 2001.
2. Kyoto, December 2003.
3. Unlike the Japanese tradition which requires the benshi to follow a script handed to him/her by the film director, Christelle Lheureux asked the benshi to work out a story herself.
4. André Gaudreault “Entre narrativité et pictorialité : le cinéma des premiers temps”, lecture delivered during the symposium Pour un nouveau narrateur. Enquête sur les nouvelles modalités du récit dans les arts visuels organized by François Albéra and Jean-Christophe Royoux called and held at the Galician Center for Contemporary Arts in Santiago de Compostela in 1998.
5. Istoria et théorie de l’art. Italie XVe, et XVIe siècles, Montreal: Montreal University Press, 1989.
6. In Della pictura Alberti writes: “ Et il me plait qu’il y ait dans l’istoria quelqu’un qui nous avertisse (amnonisca) et nous enseigne ce qui s’y fait, ou qui nous invite de la main à voir, où qui nous menace avec un visage fâché et les yeux épouvantés afin que personne n’approche ou qui nous invite à pleurer ou à rire avec eux ”. “I am pleased by the fact that there is in the istoria someone to warn us (amnonisca) and teach us what is being done, or to point to us what there is to see, or to threaten us with an angry face and a frightened gaze so that no one comes closer or to invite us to burst into laughter or tears along with them”.
7. The complete version of l’Expérience préhistorique will be released on a multi-track DVD coming with French and English subtitles.
8. Youssef Ishaghpour, D’une image à l’autre, la nouvelle modernité au cinéma, Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1982,(about Marguerite Duras’s Navire Night), p. 285
9. French version with Mickael Lonsdale. Italian and Korean versions coming soon…
10. Here one can observe a logic: the passage from the typical run of the cinematic medium to the scrolling of the images in dribs and drabs eventually building up a stock of images that I have described as a typical feature of those new types of remakes that have multiplied in the field of arts since the release of 24hour Psycho (1993), first archetypal remake of the nineties directed by Douglas Gordon. But one cannot deny that l’Expérience préhistorique fully ranks in this category. For further discussion see: Jean-Christophe Royoux, “Remaking cinéma : les nouvelles stratégies du remake et l’invention du cinéma d’exposition”, op. cit.
