Jean Breschand
The Reach of a Breath
by Stéfani de Loppinot
What are the common points connecting the Parisian metro’s meanderings (Métropolitaines, 1995), A. O. Barnabooth’s Florence diary (Une figure florentine – sur la trace de Valéry Larbaud/ A Figure in Florence, 1996), a woman’s trip to the Easternmost tip of Europe (D’autre part/ Besides, 1997), animals drawn on the rocks of a Paleolithic site in the Upper Douro Valley (Je vous suis par la présente/ I am Hereby Following You, 2001), and the shooting of Angelopoulos’s latest film, which opens with a history of twentieth-century Greece (Le Retour du monde/ The Return of the World, 2003)? It’s the line, the trajectory, the paths taken by these five films: fictitious, abstract, ephemeral itineraries sometimes carved in stone for twenty-five thousand years, the inscription on space and time of a body, a desire, a pen.
Walking the World Up and Down
In Métropolitaines, four narrative threads connect, giving shape to a storyline that will run along the whole soundtrack. Lucrece’s De rerum natura opens Breschand’s first feature; read with passion, it reenacts the creation of the world on the circuit of a peripheral unit, where particles of matter wriggle in all directions, dust particles gather in a molecular cluster, and gas turns into a solid. The world owes its ability to be rethought at any time to its system of correspondences, the very nature of things. Later in the movie, recalling Julio Cortázar’s “Manuscrit trouvé dans une poche,” (“Manuscript found in a pocket”) in which a metro map is described as holding tight “in its Mondrian-like skeleton, in its red, yellow, blue and black branches, a large surface yet delineated by spread out tentacles…”, a man recomposes the structure of the Parisian metro; on a sheet of paper he draws the city with its two main axes, the first linking the north to the south, from Porte de Clignancourt to Porte d’Orléans, the other following the curve of the Seine. He then covers those trajectories with numerous short lines that cross each other, get further away from each other, lose each other, bite each other, weave connections between each other, and—miracle!—suddenly reveal a tree that is, in fact, a study of a tree by Mondrian, with its trunk, the open shape of its branches, and its entangled leaves. Listening to him talk and draw, one thinks that this man could just as well be a writer, his pen tracing letters with sharp or soft outlines, with or without hair-strokes, letters that would turn into sentences, a vast landscape wrinkled with streets, scribbled on a sheet of paper; or he might be a musician, letting each string of his instrument vibrate, as to get in tune with the songs of the world.
There are many correspondences, indeed, between one space and another, one species and another, between words and faces and between images and sounds. Jean Breschand does not write or draw to prepare his films, but rather to accompany them, like a musical counterpoint. During the shooting of D’autre part, he wrote down insignificant daily events in his diary, such as buying olives, or he would draw something that appealed to him that he did not film. In the end, it’s this whole experience that builds up the movie and takes part in the soundtrack, a text written while the shots have already been edited in a mute version. Métropolitaines ends with an excerpt of Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, which describes the Aborigine’s need to recognize their territory by walking it up and down, singing to bring it to life. This is the first step towards its recognition, that of perception through singing: “The earth must exist first as a concept and then it must be sung. Only then can one actually state its existence […] Therefore musical phrases are equivalent to geographical coordinates. Music is a databank allowing one to follow one’s path in the world.” Filming means walking a territory up and down—in that sense, to film is to sing; it is the moment of an experience, the momentum of traveling.
And Yet this Desire to Touch
The contact zone between oneself and the world is both immense and tiny. What keeps us separated from the world? A thin layer of skin, similar to the one that allows the insect to slide on the water’s surface? Which gestures open the body? Is it the amorous stroke, “all that makes us human, the feel of your skin” (Une figure florentine)? The image carved in a stone, “mute as ever,” depicting the aurochs, horses, ibexes and fish of Foz Côa, “between you and me, the trace of a passage, the puzzling nature of a gesture as it is being born” (Je vous suis par la présente)? What is kept alive by the image, between you and me; per Cortázar’s story, reconnecting with the world requires the mediation of an image, the doubling of a reflection, allowing one to spot the invisible threads that link people together, circulating from one individual to another, just as they circulate from one shot to another. Théo Angelopoulos relates that it is only when the shooting begins—that is, when the image is born—that he notices and “inscribes” within himself his film’s locations. It’s a way to reconnect with the original cinematic image, created to make the invisible visible, as a remedy to prevent the escape of time and space. Filming thus appears as a way to resist the “monstrosity” of an untamable reality, working out new bonds between human beings, space and time, new spaces for contact and for breathing that let fantasy well up to surface. Le Retour du monde features several scenes shot in prison, where women locked up during the war managed to communicate through whispers unaccompanied by gazes, rhythms struck upon walls—a poetic language, a love song.
Finding a Pace that Keeps the Body Balanced
Many threads traverse these images. One often catches a glimpse of them onboard trains; they follow the railroad tracks and lay out their ballet of caresses; they touch, they move away from each other, cross each other, creating areas that circulate within the frame of an image or from one shot to another. This dance is pervaded with great fluidity, and spiced up by sudden outbursts, as when two subways running parallel to one another abruptly part, one branching off to escape aboveground. Sometimes the camera follows this movement, though there are mostly static shots reminiscent of Lumière compositions. The fluidity emanates from passers-by (vehicles, street walkers, bird flights), but also from the wind, the rain, the race of rivers (the Seine, the Arno, the Douro), the unfurling of the seas (Aegean, Mediterranean), from voices reading aloud or whispering press articles, short stories, narratives, in a nearly continuous flow. Sometimes a pattern emerges: for a blink of an eye, the subway map is rear-projected onto the bodies walking behind it. The image takes on a radiographic quality, displaying beings within their intimate networks.
Scale and species shift, but there remains a principle of circulation, the one that spurs writer Valéry Larbaud in Une figure Florentine to keep running his endless race. A mobile man, similar to Lucrece’s atoms, he has walked the whole of Europe up and down during the first fifty years of his life. To his depiction of the Mondrian-like metro maps, Cortázar added: “This tree is alive twenty hours out of twenty four, a tempestuous sap runs through it, seething with very fine purposes […] diving into a part of the tree and surfacing out of another, emerging from posh Department store Galeries Lafayette to drop a pack of napkins or a lamp at the third story of the Gay-Lussac street.” This circulation principle, spreading from aboveground to underground places, can be found again in those movies projected upon the scale of time, like as many anchor points linking different archeological layers.
In Je vous suis par la présente, the animals carved into the surface of the world date back to time immemorial; the mists of time welling up to the surface bring back to the fore the primal and original gesture of the birth of the images. The film prolongs this gift of presence, reinventing illusory caves and projection devices. It weaves threads of connivance between human prehistory and cinematic archeology, up until the recent remnants, which already seem to belong to another era: photographs and Super-8 cameras, flickering silver ghosts projected on black or white sheets, or on the decaying walls of a nearby village. “After all, what traveling film makers are endeavoring to find again is the primal energy from the origins. Not out of nostalgia, but rather to breathe more easily, to regain equilibrium.” Thus, Je vous suis par la présente is wrapped up in a breath, as if the “I” in the title were an exhalation. This breath sets music instruments into vibration and images into motion, while turning mists and smokes into playful elements. It’s balance because it is the circulation principle within a body, and between this body in the outside world. Balance is born out this aerial rapport between the inside and the outside; it’s this very craving for breath and balance that spurs the woman in D’autre part’s transformation into clouds.
In its Motion Towards a Revival
Films bear within them the restlessness of time, of its ambiguous circulation, reminiscent of the Mobius ring. D’autre part begins with a metaphor for the birth of the image—blank sheets (linen) are about to be soaked into color baths—and ends with the white opacity of a cloud; it’s a story of dissolution and rebirth, primal, animalistic, waiting for life to run through it. Between those two white screens, a path, a breathtakingly high ascension, a drastic shift of mindset, a reversal. Le Retour du monde intertwines the threads of the shooting time and those of its fiction. From 1936 to 2003, the voice accompanying them remains the same. A long static shot shows a group of men, their hands raised in the air. As one of them is pointed at, one wonders: Who’s aiming at him? Is it the camera? A rifle? Does he belong to fiction time, or to documentary time? Is he standing in-between? Time in Le Retour du monde is undulating, undergoing anamorphoses, similar to the black and white photographs which pervade it.
Besides
Four years have passed between D’autre part and Je vous suis par la présente; it’s the duration of a writing cycle which has intertwined with the films. It is but a matter of balance: writing and filming walk hand in hand in an uninterrupted pace. One cannot go without the other, and double figures meet in a mise en abyme. In 1995, Jean Breschand wrote a deeply moving essay about the Lumière brothers. He describes two photographs of them; the first was taken in childhood—the two brothers face each other, seated before a chess board; Auguste looks engrossed in his thoughts, Louis is watching him. The second, taken half a century later, resets them face-to-face with a table between them. In a mirror-like effect, this time a white-haired Auguste watches his brother, Louis, as he is concentrating. The account of their inventions—“an obsession spurs them […] the desire to reproduce reality, to double it with an image”—ends like this: “ But maybe this whole story, up to its obvious balance and transparency, lies in them being two, rooted in the twin figures wrestling with the notions of fusion and separation.” This figure of the double, and the fusion-separation principle described by the filmmaker, is highlighted in his works: what is Je vous suis par la présente if not the confession of a gesture of love between speech and image, expressed through an exhalation from inside towards the outside, a breath of air? In the Lumière brothers’ invention, the double is said to be “emancipative,” the two brothers having managed to work out a device that allowed them to split things in two, projection. It is precisely the device of projection that runs through the breath of Je vous suis par la présente.
Starting All Over Again with a Fake Identity
“It’s the first time I’ve had a double,” Valéry Larbaud says and, probably disappointed to learn about the existence of a namesake, decides to create a second double for himself, A. O. Barnabooth. This young billionaire, searching for love in Florence, thoroughly fills up his diary, “a diary in which Larbaud projected himself.” Indeed, a double is a projection of oneself onto the other, a shelter provided by fantasy. In Une figure florentine, Barnabooth’s diary is mostly read aloud by a feminine voice, as if this speech, traveling from a body to another, participated in the process of taking flight. The long travel letter in D’autre part is also read by a woman, relating the path that led her to turning into a cloud in Gibraltar, while each place gone through, each sentence written, and each memory is drawn from the film maker’s experience. Sometimes this woman seems to wish to become flesh and bone onscreen; she appears leaning on the rail of balcony, anchor point between an open reality and a fiction that springs up from under the earth. “Our lives are fictions caught up in reality’s dough.” You cannot do without this open form. It helps Cortázar’s short story to end with infinite hopes, and it brings about in each of these movies a small area for fiction, a kind of playground, takes part in D’autre part in the dissolution of the body followed by its breathtakingly high ascension from the heart of Gibraltar to the top of the overhanging rock, back to the original ether, and the primal breath where everything becomes possible again.
What are the common points connecting the Parisian metro’s meanderings (Métropolitaines, 1995), A. O. Barnabooth’s Florence diary (Une figure florentine – sur la trace de Valéry Larbaud/ A Figure in Florence, 1996), a woman’s trip to the Easternmost tip of Europe (D’autre part/ Besides, 1997), animals drawn on the rocks of a Paleolithic site in the Upper Douro Valley (Je vous suis par la présente/ I am Hereby Following You, 2001), and the shooting of Angelopoulos’s latest film, which opens with a history of twentieth-century Greece (Le Retour du monde/ The Return of the World, 2003)? It’s the line, the trajectory, the paths taken by these five films: fictitious, abstract, ephemeral itineraries sometimes carved in stone for twenty-five thousand years, the inscription on space and time of a body, a desire, a pen.
Walking the World Up and Down
In Métropolitaines, four narrative threads connect, giving shape to a storyline that will run along the whole soundtrack. Lucrece’s De rerum natura opens Breschand’s first feature; read with passion, it reenacts the creation of the world on the circuit of a peripheral unit, where particles of matter wriggle in all directions, dust particles gather in a molecular cluster, and gas turns into a solid. The world owes its ability to be rethought at any time to its system of correspondences, the very nature of things. Later in the movie, recalling Julio Cortázar’s “Manuscrit trouvé dans une poche,” (“Manuscript found in a pocket”) in which a metro map is described as holding tight “in its Mondrian-like skeleton, in its red, yellow, blue and black branches, a large surface yet delineated by spread out tentacles…”, a man recomposes the structure of the Parisian metro; on a sheet of paper he draws the city with its two main axes, the first linking the north to the south, from Porte de Clignancourt to Porte d’Orléans, the other following the curve of the Seine. He then covers those trajectories with numerous short lines that cross each other, get further away from each other, lose each other, bite each other, weave connections between each other, and—miracle!—suddenly reveal a tree that is, in fact, a study of a tree by Mondrian, with its trunk, the open shape of its branches, and its entangled leaves. Listening to him talk and draw, one thinks that this man could just as well be a writer, his pen tracing letters with sharp or soft outlines, with or without hair-strokes, letters that would turn into sentences, a vast landscape wrinkled with streets, scribbled on a sheet of paper; or he might be a musician, letting each string of his instrument vibrate, as to get in tune with the songs of the world.
There are many correspondences, indeed, between one space and another, one species and another, between words and faces and between images and sounds. Jean Breschand does not write or draw to prepare his films, but rather to accompany them, like a musical counterpoint. During the shooting of D’autre part, he wrote down insignificant daily events in his diary, such as buying olives, or he would draw something that appealed to him that he did not film. In the end, it’s this whole experience that builds up the movie and takes part in the soundtrack, a text written while the shots have already been edited in a mute version. Métropolitaines ends with an excerpt of Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, which describes the Aborigine’s need to recognize their territory by walking it up and down, singing to bring it to life. This is the first step towards its recognition, that of perception through singing: “The earth must exist first as a concept and then it must be sung. Only then can one actually state its existence […] Therefore musical phrases are equivalent to geographical coordinates. Music is a databank allowing one to follow one’s path in the world.” Filming means walking a territory up and down—in that sense, to film is to sing; it is the moment of an experience, the momentum of traveling.
And Yet this Desire to Touch
The contact zone between oneself and the world is both immense and tiny. What keeps us separated from the world? A thin layer of skin, similar to the one that allows the insect to slide on the water’s surface? Which gestures open the body? Is it the amorous stroke, “all that makes us human, the feel of your skin” (Une figure florentine)? The image carved in a stone, “mute as ever,” depicting the aurochs, horses, ibexes and fish of Foz Côa, “between you and me, the trace of a passage, the puzzling nature of a gesture as it is being born” (Je vous suis par la présente)? What is kept alive by the image, between you and me; per Cortázar’s story, reconnecting with the world requires the mediation of an image, the doubling of a reflection, allowing one to spot the invisible threads that link people together, circulating from one individual to another, just as they circulate from one shot to another. Théo Angelopoulos relates that it is only when the shooting begins—that is, when the image is born—that he notices and “inscribes” within himself his film’s locations. It’s a way to reconnect with the original cinematic image, created to make the invisible visible, as a remedy to prevent the escape of time and space. Filming thus appears as a way to resist the “monstrosity” of an untamable reality, working out new bonds between human beings, space and time, new spaces for contact and for breathing that let fantasy well up to surface. Le Retour du monde features several scenes shot in prison, where women locked up during the war managed to communicate through whispers unaccompanied by gazes, rhythms struck upon walls—a poetic language, a love song.
Finding a Pace that Keeps the Body Balanced
Many threads traverse these images. One often catches a glimpse of them onboard trains; they follow the railroad tracks and lay out their ballet of caresses; they touch, they move away from each other, cross each other, creating areas that circulate within the frame of an image or from one shot to another. This dance is pervaded with great fluidity, and spiced up by sudden outbursts, as when two subways running parallel to one another abruptly part, one branching off to escape aboveground. Sometimes the camera follows this movement, though there are mostly static shots reminiscent of Lumière compositions. The fluidity emanates from passers-by (vehicles, street walkers, bird flights), but also from the wind, the rain, the race of rivers (the Seine, the Arno, the Douro), the unfurling of the seas (Aegean, Mediterranean), from voices reading aloud or whispering press articles, short stories, narratives, in a nearly continuous flow. Sometimes a pattern emerges: for a blink of an eye, the subway map is rear-projected onto the bodies walking behind it. The image takes on a radiographic quality, displaying beings within their intimate networks.
Scale and species shift, but there remains a principle of circulation, the one that spurs writer Valéry Larbaud in Une figure Florentine to keep running his endless race. A mobile man, similar to Lucrece’s atoms, he has walked the whole of Europe up and down during the first fifty years of his life. To his depiction of the Mondrian-like metro maps, Cortázar added: “This tree is alive twenty hours out of twenty four, a tempestuous sap runs through it, seething with very fine purposes […] diving into a part of the tree and surfacing out of another, emerging from posh Department store Galeries Lafayette to drop a pack of napkins or a lamp at the third story of the Gay-Lussac street.” This circulation principle, spreading from aboveground to underground places, can be found again in those movies projected upon the scale of time, like as many anchor points linking different archeological layers.
In Je vous suis par la présente, the animals carved into the surface of the world date back to time immemorial; the mists of time welling up to the surface bring back to the fore the primal and original gesture of the birth of the images. The film prolongs this gift of presence, reinventing illusory caves and projection devices. It weaves threads of connivance between human prehistory and cinematic archeology, up until the recent remnants, which already seem to belong to another era: photographs and Super-8 cameras, flickering silver ghosts projected on black or white sheets, or on the decaying walls of a nearby village. “After all, what traveling film makers are endeavoring to find again is the primal energy from the origins. Not out of nostalgia, but rather to breathe more easily, to regain equilibrium.” Thus, Je vous suis par la présente is wrapped up in a breath, as if the “I” in the title were an exhalation. This breath sets music instruments into vibration and images into motion, while turning mists and smokes into playful elements. It’s balance because it is the circulation principle within a body, and between this body in the outside world. Balance is born out this aerial rapport between the inside and the outside; it’s this very craving for breath and balance that spurs the woman in D’autre part’s transformation into clouds.
In its Motion Towards a Revival
Films bear within them the restlessness of time, of its ambiguous circulation, reminiscent of the Mobius ring. D’autre part begins with a metaphor for the birth of the image—blank sheets (linen) are about to be soaked into color baths—and ends with the white opacity of a cloud; it’s a story of dissolution and rebirth, primal, animalistic, waiting for life to run through it. Between those two white screens, a path, a breathtakingly high ascension, a drastic shift of mindset, a reversal. Le Retour du monde intertwines the threads of the shooting time and those of its fiction. From 1936 to 2003, the voice accompanying them remains the same. A long static shot shows a group of men, their hands raised in the air. As one of them is pointed at, one wonders: Who’s aiming at him? Is it the camera? A rifle? Does he belong to fiction time, or to documentary time? Is he standing in-between? Time in Le Retour du monde is undulating, undergoing anamorphoses, similar to the black and white photographs which pervade it.
Besides
Four years have passed between D’autre part and Je vous suis par la présente; it’s the duration of a writing cycle which has intertwined with the films. It is but a matter of balance: writing and filming walk hand in hand in an uninterrupted pace. One cannot go without the other, and double figures meet in a mise en abyme. In 1995, Jean Breschand wrote a deeply moving essay about the Lumière brothers. He describes two photographs of them; the first was taken in childhood—the two brothers face each other, seated before a chess board; Auguste looks engrossed in his thoughts, Louis is watching him. The second, taken half a century later, resets them face-to-face with a table between them. In a mirror-like effect, this time a white-haired Auguste watches his brother, Louis, as he is concentrating. The account of their inventions—“an obsession spurs them […] the desire to reproduce reality, to double it with an image”—ends like this: “ But maybe this whole story, up to its obvious balance and transparency, lies in them being two, rooted in the twin figures wrestling with the notions of fusion and separation.” This figure of the double, and the fusion-separation principle described by the filmmaker, is highlighted in his works: what is Je vous suis par la présente if not the confession of a gesture of love between speech and image, expressed through an exhalation from inside towards the outside, a breath of air? In the Lumière brothers’ invention, the double is said to be “emancipative,” the two brothers having managed to work out a device that allowed them to split things in two, projection. It is precisely the device of projection that runs through the breath of Je vous suis par la présente.
Starting All Over Again with a Fake Identity
“It’s the first time I’ve had a double,” Valéry Larbaud says and, probably disappointed to learn about the existence of a namesake, decides to create a second double for himself, A. O. Barnabooth. This young billionaire, searching for love in Florence, thoroughly fills up his diary, “a diary in which Larbaud projected himself.” Indeed, a double is a projection of oneself onto the other, a shelter provided by fantasy. In Une figure florentine, Barnabooth’s diary is mostly read aloud by a feminine voice, as if this speech, traveling from a body to another, participated in the process of taking flight. The long travel letter in D’autre part is also read by a woman, relating the path that led her to turning into a cloud in Gibraltar, while each place gone through, each sentence written, and each memory is drawn from the film maker’s experience. Sometimes this woman seems to wish to become flesh and bone onscreen; she appears leaning on the rail of balcony, anchor point between an open reality and a fiction that springs up from under the earth. “Our lives are fictions caught up in reality’s dough.” You cannot do without this open form. It helps Cortázar’s short story to end with infinite hopes, and it brings about in each of these movies a small area for fiction, a kind of playground, takes part in D’autre part in the dissolution of the body followed by its breathtakingly high ascension from the heart of Gibraltar to the top of the overhanging rock, back to the original ether, and the primal breath where everything becomes possible again.
