Arnaud des Pallières
ETC. (Is there a Death after Life ?)
by Jean-Pierre Rehm
Topography I
As everybody has noticed, a huge, sickening, white meringue overhangs Paris. Sad imitations of Byzantine style, the Sacred Heart basilica’s seven baby bottles, as Jacques Roubaud describes them (1), attract tourists from all over the world. What do we wish to feed them “A 30-mile wide panorama of the capital on a sunny day”, a tour guide answers coyly. A conquering view of a city that might allow people to invent for themselves a life shaped like a video-postcard, maybe. But there is something else: a more subtle poison which is quietly being administered to them in those holy places. Indeed, all those visitors fail to realize that they are on a pilgrimage when walking up and down those sacred spots. Erected upon request from the Vatican to pay for the so-called crimes perpetrated by the “communards” in 1871 at the spot where the uprising occurred, this basilica is but a symbol of expiation. A final but quite lame revenge: no one will be surprised to see how well the most grotesque architectural kitsch marries) with the abjection of authoritarian demand. An eloquent and uncouth example of commemoration, this monument offers a relevant justification of Benjamin’s assumption that History is dubious because always written by the victors. Simply by being there, the Sacred-Heart raises an issue: is it possible to warp History, is it possible to give the floor to the vanquished? Without claiming to speak on their behalf or merely about them, without hinting at their strength or weakness or at one’s own? Is it possible, according to Benjamin’s wishes, “to rub History the wrong way”? Here is, in short, the duty with which Arnaud des Pallières has entrusted his movies.
Topography II elsewhere
An inconspicuous street Froidevaux street to the intersection between: Edgar Quinet boulevard) and Raspail boulevard; it crosses the Montparnasse cemetery at the third of its width. But the quietness ruling over this street is due not only to the gothic nature of its location. It owes more to a long-lasting rumor according to which “during the repression of the Paris commune in 1871, Adolphe Thiers decided to have the cobblestones paving Emile Richard street removed, had a massive grave dug in the very same street to bury the insurgents and then had the street repaved so that the people of Paris would – without their knowing – tread upon the burial place of their line of duty or executed comrades.” Lurking at the back of the Mazarine Library, the historian uttering these words in La mémoire d’un ange (The Memory of an Angel) denies them right away: this story is but a popular legend. Emile Richard street neither an ignominious burial place, nor a secret monument; it follows a shallow layout, a mere passageway in the urban landscape. Paradoxically enough, the film endeavors to bring this passageway back to mind. For, as Jean-Luc Nancy straightforwardly states: “Art never commemorates. It is not designed to preserve memory [...] Granted, generally speaking, art deals with memory but with the odd memory of what never settled within a memory, and that is, therefore, unlikely to be forgotten or remembered since we never lived nor knew it; and yet it sticks to us.”(2)
Cinematography
So, here we are, in the midst of fiction – and even the T.V.-sponsored apologetic work Is dead, (Incomplete Portrait of Gertrude Stein) belongs to this inaccurate category. The titles of Arnaud des Pallières’s different films do not leave any room for ambiguity (La mémoire d’un ange / The Memory of an Angel, Les trois temps du reveneur, Le jardin du bonheur / Gleeful Garden, Les choses rouges / Red Things, Avant après / Before After, Drancy avenir / Drancy Future, Is dead), and we understand we are dealing with a political undertaking. In other words a grammatical undertaking: how can we conjugate the past in the present tense without betraying their connection in the translation process? Faking the fiction of a reality reconstructed to resist the documentary’s persuasive nature (forcing people into believing what they see), a genre always followed closely by an unbearable procession of stale alibis (an insincere – furthermore necessarily manmade – age-old symptom which depends on the value-added of authenticity: I was there, the camera saved it for me etc.). After-the-fact construction versus the so-called truth of live action: here is the time concordance Pallières decided to abide by. Commenting upon Drancy Future), Jacques Rancière stated that such “fiction is generally conceived as the very construction of the link between an idea of history and the power of art” (3). In that sense Emile Richard street is located beyond the mere anecdotal story; laden with an allegoric dimension, right from the start of this first short film, it paves the way to upcoming movies. Qu’est-ce qui la qualifie à ce titre de témoin d’emprunt ? Three recurring features in Arnaud des Pallières’s movies enable him to claim this function. First the concrete inscription: the street is a true transit area (as shown by the stubborn traveling shot towards the ground closing La mémoire d’un ange / The Memory of an Angel and investigating thoroughly, though in vain, the refreshing of the tarmac). Then, the inexorable proximity with the past: The street actually serves as a crossing point “among the dead” buried in the graveyard on both sides (“ Ils sont quelque part entre l’Achéron et le Léthé, ces morts qui n’ont pas été régulièrement enterrés par le spectacle, ils sont censés dormir en attendant qu’on veuille les réveiller, tous, le terroriste redescendu des collines et le pirate revenu de la mer, et le voleur qui n’a plus besoin de voler ” / “They lie somewhere in between the Lethe and the Acheron those dead whom the show business community forgot to bury on a regular basis, they are supposed to sleep while waiting for someone to awaken all of them: the terrorist returned from the hills, the pirate back from sea and the thief who no longer needs to steal”) says the voice-over of a soldier fleeing through the catacombs). And finally, the power to arouse imagination: empowered by the pervading narratives, it drags along the whole cinematic apparatus: sounds and images from far away (music, studio shots, documents, texts etc.). Therefore, the method selected here grants the witness entire freedom. Starting with long shots taken at passers-by’s height, the movie evolves towards the metamorphosis of a miniature model exposed to power’s panoptic vision. For just as long as The Memory of an Angel) lasts, the lane is the setting of a mandatory open tour unraveling a complex perspective which the viewer will have to walk up and down and interpret to his/her liking.
Cinematographies
All of Arnaud des Pallières’s films have made the same bet opposing the necessarily organic authority of the fable and the narrow-minded resoluteness of images to speak out merely about themselves. And none of his films brings down this discrepancy through reconciliation; on the contrary, it has increased and divided into two poles resembling two antagonistic manifests.
The first pole is clearly didactic and shown in its most obvious schoolish light: blackboard covered in chalk, classroom, recitation, typical teacher and pupil figures (La mémoire d’un ange / The Memory of an Angel, Les choses rouges / Red Things), reading breaks, (Is dead), class scenes (the university auditorium or the singing lesson in Drancy avenir (Drancy future) in which the “heroine” studies History), etc. This is the basic transmission scene inherited from Godard and Syberberg and Brecht before them. A space dedicated to the need to learn, a frame within which speech can spread out, where one can name, demonstrate; a pedagogical open space where sound and image temporarily unite to overcome an obstacle encountered on their way. If this space takes on a dramatic dimension, insofar as speech is favored in order to better call on to the viewer (thus remaining faithful to those who inspired him: Oliveira, Eustache, Duras, the Straubs...), this is due to a desire to produce a work which, instead of plainly listing information, displays itself as jeopardized: speech is perpetually at odds with itself, fighting against its own inability to clarify things, against its univocal nature.
On the other hand, in the other pole – most often mute (or at least the sound, music or commentary, is off) – the image’s single duty is to record the hustle and bustle of the ghost-like part of everyday life, work, nature, etc. Obvious sign of this essential unsteadiness: the images’ shifting progression speed – from slow to fast motion – breaking free from all the synchronization requirements (both practical and symbolical) imposed by synch sound. That is why, unlike the first pole only doted with a limited number of archetypes, its randomness allows the second pole to be embodied by a great amount of figures. They never rise to the rank of characters but appear more as supports likely to welcome or arouse events: roadway, road sweeper (La mémoire d’un ange / The Memory of an Angel); maybe he originally belonged to the cleaning team glimpsed in the early morning in front of a movie theater on Sébastopol Boulevard in Duras’s Les mains négatives, peasant women, a grave digger, graves at the Père Lachaise cemetery, actress Micheline Dax, rustling leaves, a cowherd, a man on a motorbike (Les choses rouges /Red Things ), archive images (Is dead): somehow echoing Jonas Mekas’s Walden Journal this movie is undoubtedly the one that complies the most with Stein’s injunction: “The business of Art… is to live in the actual present, that is in the complete actual present and to completely express that complete actual present”). In a word, the stormy rhythm of the world which must not move against something but simply move. Indeed, as Stein asserts, “perhaps it is possible to know that [the world] is moving even when it is not moving against anything.”
Music and editing
This double assumption, which makes des Pallière’s films swing from one extreme to another (e.g. with the present of the past on the one hand, and the present of the present on the other), compels them to find their stylistic homogeneity not so much in a filmmaker’s pose as in a logic of severance. Hence the quite decisive editing. But what is editing when one does not simply claim it as a cinematic discipline but, on a wider scale, as a strategy? The least “innocent” part of cinematic creation is also its most technical aspect, a transposition of assembly lines (“chaînes de montage” in French, while “montage” means editing). Besides, Gertrude Stein evokes the connection between the release of her collection Tender Buttons in 1913 and the automation of Ford factories). Editing echoes the unproductive parceling each production activity has to go. This probably explains why worker figures in those films – unlike the widespread sordid or heroic archetypes – are rather prone and impatient to eliminate and reset everything: Streetsweeper, gravedigger, chicken plucker, actress, painter, writer. In fact, in des Pallières’s movies, the editing seems to be done by dismantlers doing the opposite of what an editor does. A means to “break free from all the uncouth naturalism” (Benjamin) editing in such a way prevents viewers from appropriating the story in a linear and Romanesque way. Oppositely, this type of editing implies a sort of stutter, never-ending retakes, tiny and unflagging repetitions. Rejection of the slavish evolution of thought speaking of that which Blanchot described Stein’s famous quote “a rose is a rose is a rose” as “pure resistance”. But the dismissal of the Author in des Pallières’s movies in favor of the filmmaker (then a mere underling) goes as far as the very act of writing: not a single text has not been borrowed or remade. Other films meddle with the narratives (for instance a clip of Orson Welles’s unachieved Merchant of Venice in Drancy avenir (Drancy Future)); and the compulsory archive images in Is dead float about, totally exempt from their hagiographic duty, suddenly free of copyrights). Each of the many voices called upon is asked to add a layer to “Everybody’s Autobiography”, as Stein would have wished. This initiative is delineated by a musical horizon. But let us not delude ourselves as to the prominence allotted to music. As the singing lesson in Drancy avenir (Drancy Future) shows with verve (we see a young cantatrice patiently practicing a terrifying lullaby) music is one more element adding up to the tension: a dialectic instrument. Like Adorno underlines about Mozart and Bach (respectively closing Drancy avenir / Drancy Future and La mémoire d’un ange / The Memory of an Angel), his essential YES is, above all, a way to say NO to pervasive negation. His approval can only be heard as raging and, as Benjamin states, leaves untouched “the gift to fan, for the past, the flame of hope”.
––––––––––––––––––––
1. La forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur des humains, Jacques Roubaud, Paris: Gallimard, 1999.
2. “ L’immémorial ”, Jean-Luc Nancy, in Art, mémoire, commémoration, Nancy: Voix Richard Meyer / Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Nancy, 1999.
3. “ La constance de l’art ”, Jacques Rancière, in Trafic n° 21, P.O.L. For further reading about Drancy avenir see Rancière’s article in Arrêt sur image, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou.
Topography I
As everybody has noticed, a huge, sickening, white meringue overhangs Paris. Sad imitations of Byzantine style, the Sacred Heart basilica’s seven baby bottles, as Jacques Roubaud describes them (1), attract tourists from all over the world. What do we wish to feed them “A 30-mile wide panorama of the capital on a sunny day”, a tour guide answers coyly. A conquering view of a city that might allow people to invent for themselves a life shaped like a video-postcard, maybe. But there is something else: a more subtle poison which is quietly being administered to them in those holy places. Indeed, all those visitors fail to realize that they are on a pilgrimage when walking up and down those sacred spots. Erected upon request from the Vatican to pay for the so-called crimes perpetrated by the “communards” in 1871 at the spot where the uprising occurred, this basilica is but a symbol of expiation. A final but quite lame revenge: no one will be surprised to see how well the most grotesque architectural kitsch marries) with the abjection of authoritarian demand. An eloquent and uncouth example of commemoration, this monument offers a relevant justification of Benjamin’s assumption that History is dubious because always written by the victors. Simply by being there, the Sacred-Heart raises an issue: is it possible to warp History, is it possible to give the floor to the vanquished? Without claiming to speak on their behalf or merely about them, without hinting at their strength or weakness or at one’s own? Is it possible, according to Benjamin’s wishes, “to rub History the wrong way”? Here is, in short, the duty with which Arnaud des Pallières has entrusted his movies.
Topography II elsewhere
An inconspicuous street Froidevaux street to the intersection between: Edgar Quinet boulevard) and Raspail boulevard; it crosses the Montparnasse cemetery at the third of its width. But the quietness ruling over this street is due not only to the gothic nature of its location. It owes more to a long-lasting rumor according to which “during the repression of the Paris commune in 1871, Adolphe Thiers decided to have the cobblestones paving Emile Richard street removed, had a massive grave dug in the very same street to bury the insurgents and then had the street repaved so that the people of Paris would – without their knowing – tread upon the burial place of their line of duty or executed comrades.” Lurking at the back of the Mazarine Library, the historian uttering these words in La mémoire d’un ange (The Memory of an Angel) denies them right away: this story is but a popular legend. Emile Richard street neither an ignominious burial place, nor a secret monument; it follows a shallow layout, a mere passageway in the urban landscape. Paradoxically enough, the film endeavors to bring this passageway back to mind. For, as Jean-Luc Nancy straightforwardly states: “Art never commemorates. It is not designed to preserve memory [...] Granted, generally speaking, art deals with memory but with the odd memory of what never settled within a memory, and that is, therefore, unlikely to be forgotten or remembered since we never lived nor knew it; and yet it sticks to us.”(2)
Cinematography
So, here we are, in the midst of fiction – and even the T.V.-sponsored apologetic work Is dead, (Incomplete Portrait of Gertrude Stein) belongs to this inaccurate category. The titles of Arnaud des Pallières’s different films do not leave any room for ambiguity (La mémoire d’un ange / The Memory of an Angel, Les trois temps du reveneur, Le jardin du bonheur / Gleeful Garden, Les choses rouges / Red Things, Avant après / Before After, Drancy avenir / Drancy Future, Is dead), and we understand we are dealing with a political undertaking. In other words a grammatical undertaking: how can we conjugate the past in the present tense without betraying their connection in the translation process? Faking the fiction of a reality reconstructed to resist the documentary’s persuasive nature (forcing people into believing what they see), a genre always followed closely by an unbearable procession of stale alibis (an insincere – furthermore necessarily manmade – age-old symptom which depends on the value-added of authenticity: I was there, the camera saved it for me etc.). After-the-fact construction versus the so-called truth of live action: here is the time concordance Pallières decided to abide by. Commenting upon Drancy Future), Jacques Rancière stated that such “fiction is generally conceived as the very construction of the link between an idea of history and the power of art” (3). In that sense Emile Richard street is located beyond the mere anecdotal story; laden with an allegoric dimension, right from the start of this first short film, it paves the way to upcoming movies. Qu’est-ce qui la qualifie à ce titre de témoin d’emprunt ? Three recurring features in Arnaud des Pallières’s movies enable him to claim this function. First the concrete inscription: the street is a true transit area (as shown by the stubborn traveling shot towards the ground closing La mémoire d’un ange / The Memory of an Angel and investigating thoroughly, though in vain, the refreshing of the tarmac). Then, the inexorable proximity with the past: The street actually serves as a crossing point “among the dead” buried in the graveyard on both sides (“ Ils sont quelque part entre l’Achéron et le Léthé, ces morts qui n’ont pas été régulièrement enterrés par le spectacle, ils sont censés dormir en attendant qu’on veuille les réveiller, tous, le terroriste redescendu des collines et le pirate revenu de la mer, et le voleur qui n’a plus besoin de voler ” / “They lie somewhere in between the Lethe and the Acheron those dead whom the show business community forgot to bury on a regular basis, they are supposed to sleep while waiting for someone to awaken all of them: the terrorist returned from the hills, the pirate back from sea and the thief who no longer needs to steal”) says the voice-over of a soldier fleeing through the catacombs). And finally, the power to arouse imagination: empowered by the pervading narratives, it drags along the whole cinematic apparatus: sounds and images from far away (music, studio shots, documents, texts etc.). Therefore, the method selected here grants the witness entire freedom. Starting with long shots taken at passers-by’s height, the movie evolves towards the metamorphosis of a miniature model exposed to power’s panoptic vision. For just as long as The Memory of an Angel) lasts, the lane is the setting of a mandatory open tour unraveling a complex perspective which the viewer will have to walk up and down and interpret to his/her liking.
Cinematographies
All of Arnaud des Pallières’s films have made the same bet opposing the necessarily organic authority of the fable and the narrow-minded resoluteness of images to speak out merely about themselves. And none of his films brings down this discrepancy through reconciliation; on the contrary, it has increased and divided into two poles resembling two antagonistic manifests.
The first pole is clearly didactic and shown in its most obvious schoolish light: blackboard covered in chalk, classroom, recitation, typical teacher and pupil figures (La mémoire d’un ange / The Memory of an Angel, Les choses rouges / Red Things), reading breaks, (Is dead), class scenes (the university auditorium or the singing lesson in Drancy avenir (Drancy future) in which the “heroine” studies History), etc. This is the basic transmission scene inherited from Godard and Syberberg and Brecht before them. A space dedicated to the need to learn, a frame within which speech can spread out, where one can name, demonstrate; a pedagogical open space where sound and image temporarily unite to overcome an obstacle encountered on their way. If this space takes on a dramatic dimension, insofar as speech is favored in order to better call on to the viewer (thus remaining faithful to those who inspired him: Oliveira, Eustache, Duras, the Straubs...), this is due to a desire to produce a work which, instead of plainly listing information, displays itself as jeopardized: speech is perpetually at odds with itself, fighting against its own inability to clarify things, against its univocal nature.
On the other hand, in the other pole – most often mute (or at least the sound, music or commentary, is off) – the image’s single duty is to record the hustle and bustle of the ghost-like part of everyday life, work, nature, etc. Obvious sign of this essential unsteadiness: the images’ shifting progression speed – from slow to fast motion – breaking free from all the synchronization requirements (both practical and symbolical) imposed by synch sound. That is why, unlike the first pole only doted with a limited number of archetypes, its randomness allows the second pole to be embodied by a great amount of figures. They never rise to the rank of characters but appear more as supports likely to welcome or arouse events: roadway, road sweeper (La mémoire d’un ange / The Memory of an Angel); maybe he originally belonged to the cleaning team glimpsed in the early morning in front of a movie theater on Sébastopol Boulevard in Duras’s Les mains négatives, peasant women, a grave digger, graves at the Père Lachaise cemetery, actress Micheline Dax, rustling leaves, a cowherd, a man on a motorbike (Les choses rouges /Red Things ), archive images (Is dead): somehow echoing Jonas Mekas’s Walden Journal this movie is undoubtedly the one that complies the most with Stein’s injunction: “The business of Art… is to live in the actual present, that is in the complete actual present and to completely express that complete actual present”). In a word, the stormy rhythm of the world which must not move against something but simply move. Indeed, as Stein asserts, “perhaps it is possible to know that [the world] is moving even when it is not moving against anything.”
Music and editing
This double assumption, which makes des Pallière’s films swing from one extreme to another (e.g. with the present of the past on the one hand, and the present of the present on the other), compels them to find their stylistic homogeneity not so much in a filmmaker’s pose as in a logic of severance. Hence the quite decisive editing. But what is editing when one does not simply claim it as a cinematic discipline but, on a wider scale, as a strategy? The least “innocent” part of cinematic creation is also its most technical aspect, a transposition of assembly lines (“chaînes de montage” in French, while “montage” means editing). Besides, Gertrude Stein evokes the connection between the release of her collection Tender Buttons in 1913 and the automation of Ford factories). Editing echoes the unproductive parceling each production activity has to go. This probably explains why worker figures in those films – unlike the widespread sordid or heroic archetypes – are rather prone and impatient to eliminate and reset everything: Streetsweeper, gravedigger, chicken plucker, actress, painter, writer. In fact, in des Pallières’s movies, the editing seems to be done by dismantlers doing the opposite of what an editor does. A means to “break free from all the uncouth naturalism” (Benjamin) editing in such a way prevents viewers from appropriating the story in a linear and Romanesque way. Oppositely, this type of editing implies a sort of stutter, never-ending retakes, tiny and unflagging repetitions. Rejection of the slavish evolution of thought speaking of that which Blanchot described Stein’s famous quote “a rose is a rose is a rose” as “pure resistance”. But the dismissal of the Author in des Pallières’s movies in favor of the filmmaker (then a mere underling) goes as far as the very act of writing: not a single text has not been borrowed or remade. Other films meddle with the narratives (for instance a clip of Orson Welles’s unachieved Merchant of Venice in Drancy avenir (Drancy Future)); and the compulsory archive images in Is dead float about, totally exempt from their hagiographic duty, suddenly free of copyrights). Each of the many voices called upon is asked to add a layer to “Everybody’s Autobiography”, as Stein would have wished. This initiative is delineated by a musical horizon. But let us not delude ourselves as to the prominence allotted to music. As the singing lesson in Drancy avenir (Drancy Future) shows with verve (we see a young cantatrice patiently practicing a terrifying lullaby) music is one more element adding up to the tension: a dialectic instrument. Like Adorno underlines about Mozart and Bach (respectively closing Drancy avenir / Drancy Future and La mémoire d’un ange / The Memory of an Angel), his essential YES is, above all, a way to say NO to pervasive negation. His approval can only be heard as raging and, as Benjamin states, leaves untouched “the gift to fan, for the past, the flame of hope”.
––––––––––––––––––––
1. La forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur des humains, Jacques Roubaud, Paris: Gallimard, 1999.
2. “ L’immémorial ”, Jean-Luc Nancy, in Art, mémoire, commémoration, Nancy: Voix Richard Meyer / Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Nancy, 1999.
3. “ La constance de l’art ”, Jacques Rancière, in Trafic n° 21, P.O.L. For further reading about Drancy avenir see Rancière’s article in Arrêt sur image, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou.
