Jean-Claude Rousseau
The Image in the Window
by Erik Bullot
The extreme coherence of the films of Jean-Claude Rousseau strikes the spectator right away. A window. A landscape. The filmmaker in his hotel room. The self-portrait in the mirror. Someone fleeing the street in perspective. Intermittently flashing light. By using certain formal constraints – a fixed stable of motifs including recurring landmarks, the passage from inside to outside, the musical principle of variation – the filmmaker establishes the place, or, more precisely, the milieu, in the physical sense, of a possible event, despite its being a secret, held at the border, restrained, just on the verge of visibility. This precise and meticulous ritual of framing ends up silently provoking a feeling of delectable suspense in us, thanks to the repetition of visual motifs. Again we are privy to the view from the window, the landscape breathed into the light, the persistent hum of the outdoors, the look of the filmmaker, surprised in the half-light, colored dust in the air, the filmmaker’s arrival on the scene, inhabiting the frame just for the duration of that shot, like so many occurrences, both predictable and unexpected.
This rich tension between the self-reflexive elements of Rousseau’s films, wherein we experience the intimate and delicate nuts and bolts of filmmaking, and the refined result, to which we are also privy, struck me immediately upon viewing Rousseau’s two features, Les Antiquités de Rome and La Vallée Close. The filmmaker exposes his process by showing us the making of the selfsame film we are watching. By placing unedited Super-8 reels end to end separated by white leader, Rousseau challenges the very medium of film, the future of composition, and the distance between the initial shot and its unpredictable, almost hazardous, relationship with the shots that succeed it in the raw footage. One recalls the reference made to Lucrèce’s physique in La vallée close and Rousseau’s idea that editing is like placing various atoms around an orbit to form a constellation.
The deceptively simple filming technique, too, provides us with many opportunities for surprise, an emotion requiring a transfer of energy: a lightning bolt. Rousseau’s films feed this courant by using different methods of exposure: exposure of light, hazy through the curtains of a room, changing at the whim of the hours, burning the white surfaces, scarring the black interiors with a golden rectangle, veiling the film from time to time like a stained-glass window. Exposure of places, each mapped out by the filmmaker, lighted differently according to their orientation. Exposure of the main musical theme, variations of which the film declines. Exposure of the film strip, revealing the filler and the uninterrupted takes. Exposure, also, of the filmmaker as he enters the scene, sits, glances occasionally at the camera, explores the frame for the length of this shot that he himself, conceived, and disappears. It must be said that one can also undergo “exposure” to pillory and torture. The filmmaker’s process is long and agonizingly lonely; the periods of waiting exacerbate the bitterness of his hypothesis as well as the sensuality of his moments of bedazzlement.
But mightn’t these opposing forces work to bridge the gap between “mise-en-scene” as the Politique des Auteurs has defined it, and the raw elements of craftsmanship with which all artists are familiar? Jean Claude Rousseau’s films are situated at the crossroads of two asymptotes. The waiting light, the patient frame, the internal equilibrium of the objects as they all relate to one another, the restraint of the action; all are proof of the filmmakers stance vis-à-vis his craft. He elevates mise-en-scene to the position of vehicle for expounding upon his moral position. But, the way in which we witness the film being made and coming undone before our eyes, a seeming impossibility, made possible by the closely-related reels, the impersonal flatness of the visual presence of recording devices, and especially in the mysterious appearances and disappearances of the filmmaker, suggests the complete obliteration of the auteur.
These contradictory impulses elicit paradoxical expectations from the audience. But who is our audience? It seems that Rousseau is seeking more of an accomplice than a spectator; someone just beyond the horizon, to which the spectator looks for an uncertain future. An invisible presence, at the edge of the frame, often gives himself away. He will be discreetly present in the films to come, emerging from the darkness of the forum of Trajan, from the twisted mouth of the telephone, or maybe from the dark grotto in La vallée close. Needless to say, it is this very relationship between the absent filmmaker, the improbable third party and the viewer that best describes the territory explored in Jean Claude Rousseau’s films.
These three films, Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre, Venise n’existe pas, and Keep in Touch, made between 1983 and 1987, reveal a sort of archeology of Rousseau’s works, providing us with the opportunity to retrace a genealogy. It is interesting to note that each film incorporates the filmmaker turning on the camera, turning it around, and sitting in front of the lens, as if to prepare for a self-timed photograph. Also, these three films, in particular the first, Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre, function as anti-chambers for the films to come.
Jeune femme, which redistributes and completes many of the motifs of the eponymous Vermeer painting, (a map on the wall with visible folds, a window, a letter, a model), becomes a “chamber film,” like chamber music, consisting of four movements in a series of formal variations. This complex and reflexive composition, where the structural elements of the film make up the raw material for the film itself, falls into the category of experimental films such as Michael Snow’s Wavelength or certain films by Kurt Kren.
The motif of the letter, which already has an enigmatic place in the oeuvre of Vermeer, is the central symbol in this ensemble of variations. “This letter would be in the film. We would see it on the table next to the young woman staring out the window. She will have stayed on after my departure and the wind coming in through the open window will not have rustled it,” repeats the voice off in the film. In Vermeer’s painting, the self-referential letter, placed on a step ladder, follows the principle of mise en abyme all too familiar to the filmmaker (just read his fine script, Le concert champêtre, to get a feel for his fondness for this device). The film exhibits its composition; it constructs itself before our eyes. Thus, the four reels placed end to end make up the four movements of the film, providing us with a literal interpretation of the whole structure. A number of signature Rousseau touches can already be found in this first film: the close relatedness of the rushes – a combination of pure happenstance and premeditated programming – the obsessive fascination with the window, close attention paid to variations on light and its possible exhaustion, the draw of emptiness, (evoked here by the reoccurrence of white: the map of a place called LE BLANC at the film’s opening, the plain stationary, the windows covered with blank sheets of paper, the white leader separating the reels), the comings and goings of the filmmaker, the self-portrait in the mirror, the letter’s theme, the invisible presence of a third party, and the recitation that unfurls off screen.
But the film is surprising less for its formal, modernist traits (serialization, mise en abyme, exposure of process, variations on a theme), which are its base elements, than for the novel vanishing point offered here as a form of closure for the whole system. In the film’s closing shots, having evenly distributed the painting’s scattered motifs, the filmmaker, letter in hand, enters the frame, approaches the window, and takes the place of Vermeer’s young woman. With all its successive approximations, its variations, and its mises en abyme, the film was merely searching for the justness of a single frame. Many takes are required to approach the precision of the painting, but the shot will eventually come. As he takes the model’s place, the filmmaker opens a black box, pierced by a pinhole, containing the raw elements of the film. At his place by the window, the heartbeat between looking and seeing iterates the theme of Rousseau’s films. The presentation of the painting’s motifs on screen reflected by the plasticity of their variations, leads to a vanishing point: the filmmaker’s regard at the crossroads, the first time the meeting of the materials and the finished product is articulated. Will the window be jammed? Is it an abutment? Is there a downpour outside? Jeune femme à sa fenêtre ends just before
The second film, Venise n’existe pas, examines Venezzia in quite a paradoxical manner. A similarly raw allure draws us in, the clean cut ambient sounds, the super 8 reels placed end to end, the window and the variations on light patterns, the comings and goings of the filmmaker, from the bed to the window, the invisible presence of a third party heard through a telephone line, cutting off after the flat delivery of a “No, no, no.” Nevertheless, the film has two new concepts to present: that of the panorama (they say it was on the Grand Canal that Louis Lumière’s cameraman, Eugène Promio, invented the traveling shot by bringing the camera with him on a gondola), and that of cliché (Venice is the city for public gathering places, as the traditional vedute pictures show us). These two topics are definitely present, yet remain elusive. The spell usually cast by the panorama is lifted by the stability of the camera and the window frame as it distorts the slow and steady passage of the boats, to the tune of a recurring theme. Venise is not that easy to capture. The spectator’s gaze must form what it sees; but, in fact, cliché steps in to save the day by providing a pre-fabricated mental picture. By concluding with a long, blurry shot of a postcard, wherein the letter motif is married with the sound of a ringing telephone, goes back to the theme of the letter receiver. Venise n’existe pas exposes the difficult crystallization of an image. From bed to window, from room to open sea, the filmmaker attempts to capture an image concealed from view, delayed, sent from one place to another. Is the handwritten title, Venise n’existe pas, appearing at the end meant to be the message scribbled on the postcard we just saw? And the film itself a secluded postcard?
Keep in Touch explores waiting periods. The filmmaker sits at a table in a room in New York, blank stationary paper in front of him. He turns on a lamp, leafs through an erotic magazine. Meanwhile, we hear various messages left on an answering machine: whispers punctuated by “love, love, love”; switching French to English, the voice tells of a move back into an old apartment. Another, in English, surprised by the answering machine, half-heartedly solicits a second date. The film explores this pause; the time between the initial encounter and the waiting period. The persistent hum of the city is perceptible, pierced by an ambulance siren. From still window frame to motionless view of snowy street, from the Brownian movements of skaters to the slow passage of clouds above the jetty, a formal layout seems to inform the flux of the elements, predicting the geometric compositions of Les Antiquités de Rome. Keep in Touch describes a steep, circular, solitary path. The lonely distance in the wait for a contact left in suspense, unresolved, this film resembles a refuge for pause and prayer. By its end, the filmmaker is again before his blank paper, letter still unwritten. The three words that appear on screen this time, Keep in Touch, seem to signal the beginning of the credits, but also act as a signature on the blank page. Thus, the films of Rousseau are literally envoys or filmed letters.
These last two films mentioned, Venise n’existe pas and Keep in Touch, provide us with examples of the fragile equilibrium between the coarseness of the artist’s raw materials – the film’s grain, the light burning the film, the white leader, right up to and including the desperate and surly tone of the off-screen recitation – and the whole score, the invisible framework supporting these elements, the imagined frontiers. Between fragility and rigor, instability and equilibrium, the films of Jean Claude Rousseau are forthcoming; they leave gaping holes through which reality can seep in from just beneath the surface. The image is not up for discussion. It is there in the defenestrated window. The filmmaker steps across the boundary.
This rich tension between the self-reflexive elements of Rousseau’s films, wherein we experience the intimate and delicate nuts and bolts of filmmaking, and the refined result, to which we are also privy, struck me immediately upon viewing Rousseau’s two features, Les Antiquités de Rome and La Vallée Close. The filmmaker exposes his process by showing us the making of the selfsame film we are watching. By placing unedited Super-8 reels end to end separated by white leader, Rousseau challenges the very medium of film, the future of composition, and the distance between the initial shot and its unpredictable, almost hazardous, relationship with the shots that succeed it in the raw footage. One recalls the reference made to Lucrèce’s physique in La vallée close and Rousseau’s idea that editing is like placing various atoms around an orbit to form a constellation.
The deceptively simple filming technique, too, provides us with many opportunities for surprise, an emotion requiring a transfer of energy: a lightning bolt. Rousseau’s films feed this courant by using different methods of exposure: exposure of light, hazy through the curtains of a room, changing at the whim of the hours, burning the white surfaces, scarring the black interiors with a golden rectangle, veiling the film from time to time like a stained-glass window. Exposure of places, each mapped out by the filmmaker, lighted differently according to their orientation. Exposure of the main musical theme, variations of which the film declines. Exposure of the film strip, revealing the filler and the uninterrupted takes. Exposure, also, of the filmmaker as he enters the scene, sits, glances occasionally at the camera, explores the frame for the length of this shot that he himself, conceived, and disappears. It must be said that one can also undergo “exposure” to pillory and torture. The filmmaker’s process is long and agonizingly lonely; the periods of waiting exacerbate the bitterness of his hypothesis as well as the sensuality of his moments of bedazzlement.
But mightn’t these opposing forces work to bridge the gap between “mise-en-scene” as the Politique des Auteurs has defined it, and the raw elements of craftsmanship with which all artists are familiar? Jean Claude Rousseau’s films are situated at the crossroads of two asymptotes. The waiting light, the patient frame, the internal equilibrium of the objects as they all relate to one another, the restraint of the action; all are proof of the filmmakers stance vis-à-vis his craft. He elevates mise-en-scene to the position of vehicle for expounding upon his moral position. But, the way in which we witness the film being made and coming undone before our eyes, a seeming impossibility, made possible by the closely-related reels, the impersonal flatness of the visual presence of recording devices, and especially in the mysterious appearances and disappearances of the filmmaker, suggests the complete obliteration of the auteur.
These contradictory impulses elicit paradoxical expectations from the audience. But who is our audience? It seems that Rousseau is seeking more of an accomplice than a spectator; someone just beyond the horizon, to which the spectator looks for an uncertain future. An invisible presence, at the edge of the frame, often gives himself away. He will be discreetly present in the films to come, emerging from the darkness of the forum of Trajan, from the twisted mouth of the telephone, or maybe from the dark grotto in La vallée close. Needless to say, it is this very relationship between the absent filmmaker, the improbable third party and the viewer that best describes the territory explored in Jean Claude Rousseau’s films.
These three films, Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre, Venise n’existe pas, and Keep in Touch, made between 1983 and 1987, reveal a sort of archeology of Rousseau’s works, providing us with the opportunity to retrace a genealogy. It is interesting to note that each film incorporates the filmmaker turning on the camera, turning it around, and sitting in front of the lens, as if to prepare for a self-timed photograph. Also, these three films, in particular the first, Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre, function as anti-chambers for the films to come.
Jeune femme, which redistributes and completes many of the motifs of the eponymous Vermeer painting, (a map on the wall with visible folds, a window, a letter, a model), becomes a “chamber film,” like chamber music, consisting of four movements in a series of formal variations. This complex and reflexive composition, where the structural elements of the film make up the raw material for the film itself, falls into the category of experimental films such as Michael Snow’s Wavelength or certain films by Kurt Kren.
The motif of the letter, which already has an enigmatic place in the oeuvre of Vermeer, is the central symbol in this ensemble of variations. “This letter would be in the film. We would see it on the table next to the young woman staring out the window. She will have stayed on after my departure and the wind coming in through the open window will not have rustled it,” repeats the voice off in the film. In Vermeer’s painting, the self-referential letter, placed on a step ladder, follows the principle of mise en abyme all too familiar to the filmmaker (just read his fine script, Le concert champêtre, to get a feel for his fondness for this device). The film exhibits its composition; it constructs itself before our eyes. Thus, the four reels placed end to end make up the four movements of the film, providing us with a literal interpretation of the whole structure. A number of signature Rousseau touches can already be found in this first film: the close relatedness of the rushes – a combination of pure happenstance and premeditated programming – the obsessive fascination with the window, close attention paid to variations on light and its possible exhaustion, the draw of emptiness, (evoked here by the reoccurrence of white: the map of a place called LE BLANC at the film’s opening, the plain stationary, the windows covered with blank sheets of paper, the white leader separating the reels), the comings and goings of the filmmaker, the self-portrait in the mirror, the letter’s theme, the invisible presence of a third party, and the recitation that unfurls off screen.
But the film is surprising less for its formal, modernist traits (serialization, mise en abyme, exposure of process, variations on a theme), which are its base elements, than for the novel vanishing point offered here as a form of closure for the whole system. In the film’s closing shots, having evenly distributed the painting’s scattered motifs, the filmmaker, letter in hand, enters the frame, approaches the window, and takes the place of Vermeer’s young woman. With all its successive approximations, its variations, and its mises en abyme, the film was merely searching for the justness of a single frame. Many takes are required to approach the precision of the painting, but the shot will eventually come. As he takes the model’s place, the filmmaker opens a black box, pierced by a pinhole, containing the raw elements of the film. At his place by the window, the heartbeat between looking and seeing iterates the theme of Rousseau’s films. The presentation of the painting’s motifs on screen reflected by the plasticity of their variations, leads to a vanishing point: the filmmaker’s regard at the crossroads, the first time the meeting of the materials and the finished product is articulated. Will the window be jammed? Is it an abutment? Is there a downpour outside? Jeune femme à sa fenêtre ends just before
The second film, Venise n’existe pas, examines Venezzia in quite a paradoxical manner. A similarly raw allure draws us in, the clean cut ambient sounds, the super 8 reels placed end to end, the window and the variations on light patterns, the comings and goings of the filmmaker, from the bed to the window, the invisible presence of a third party heard through a telephone line, cutting off after the flat delivery of a “No, no, no.” Nevertheless, the film has two new concepts to present: that of the panorama (they say it was on the Grand Canal that Louis Lumière’s cameraman, Eugène Promio, invented the traveling shot by bringing the camera with him on a gondola), and that of cliché (Venice is the city for public gathering places, as the traditional vedute pictures show us). These two topics are definitely present, yet remain elusive. The spell usually cast by the panorama is lifted by the stability of the camera and the window frame as it distorts the slow and steady passage of the boats, to the tune of a recurring theme. Venise is not that easy to capture. The spectator’s gaze must form what it sees; but, in fact, cliché steps in to save the day by providing a pre-fabricated mental picture. By concluding with a long, blurry shot of a postcard, wherein the letter motif is married with the sound of a ringing telephone, goes back to the theme of the letter receiver. Venise n’existe pas exposes the difficult crystallization of an image. From bed to window, from room to open sea, the filmmaker attempts to capture an image concealed from view, delayed, sent from one place to another. Is the handwritten title, Venise n’existe pas, appearing at the end meant to be the message scribbled on the postcard we just saw? And the film itself a secluded postcard?
Keep in Touch explores waiting periods. The filmmaker sits at a table in a room in New York, blank stationary paper in front of him. He turns on a lamp, leafs through an erotic magazine. Meanwhile, we hear various messages left on an answering machine: whispers punctuated by “love, love, love”; switching French to English, the voice tells of a move back into an old apartment. Another, in English, surprised by the answering machine, half-heartedly solicits a second date. The film explores this pause; the time between the initial encounter and the waiting period. The persistent hum of the city is perceptible, pierced by an ambulance siren. From still window frame to motionless view of snowy street, from the Brownian movements of skaters to the slow passage of clouds above the jetty, a formal layout seems to inform the flux of the elements, predicting the geometric compositions of Les Antiquités de Rome. Keep in Touch describes a steep, circular, solitary path. The lonely distance in the wait for a contact left in suspense, unresolved, this film resembles a refuge for pause and prayer. By its end, the filmmaker is again before his blank paper, letter still unwritten. The three words that appear on screen this time, Keep in Touch, seem to signal the beginning of the credits, but also act as a signature on the blank page. Thus, the films of Rousseau are literally envoys or filmed letters.
These last two films mentioned, Venise n’existe pas and Keep in Touch, provide us with examples of the fragile equilibrium between the coarseness of the artist’s raw materials – the film’s grain, the light burning the film, the white leader, right up to and including the desperate and surly tone of the off-screen recitation – and the whole score, the invisible framework supporting these elements, the imagined frontiers. Between fragility and rigor, instability and equilibrium, the films of Jean Claude Rousseau are forthcoming; they leave gaping holes through which reality can seep in from just beneath the surface. The image is not up for discussion. It is there in the defenestrated window. The filmmaker steps across the boundary.
