Le révélateur

Looking round online a year ago,I stumbled on a video someone had made, where they had blended a completely silent French film, with tracks by the Post-Rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Trying to view it a few days later,I was sad to see it had been removed. Making a note of the title,I found the silent version recently,and after turning the local radio music station on, (felt bit odd watching it with Brexit news updates every so often!) I got set to see how the film develops.

View on the film:

Featuring no official score, no subtitles,and with the exception of a title card,no intertitles (not even a cast/crew list) editor/writer/director/producer Philippe Garrel marks the fading light of the Paris Revolution with a starkly black and white avant-garde tale. Filming the adult members of the cast on LSD, Garrel and cinematographer Michel Fournier sips the film into minimalism light caked in rows of shadows which linger on in long takes. Staying at a distance in giving outlines, but not clear viability to a plot, Garrel skids on the lines with startling manipulation of two film speeds running within the same frame, and the long,lingering takes being abrasively clipped by long tracking shots running along with the developing family.

The film has no sound at all (I saw it at the cinema and bought some skittles I couldn't end up eating), which I don't mind, but there could've been some soundtrack to it. There clearly is an intention behind that reason I hadn't been able to catch. However, I found it entertaining and new. The camera work unveiled some beautiful results too.

There are two adventures in cinema that I find the most fascinating, both wonderful, both restoring our narrow vision into dimensions that encompass a broader world. One is the folding of our world into the mind in an effort to apprehend the mechanisms that give rise to images and give rise to narratives; lately Lynch is the best we have working this, earlier it was Greenaway and Ruiz. The other, even more difficult to accomplish, is the severing of those mechanisms in ways that unlock life as a space impregnated with emptiness, such as once was the province of Antonioni. Bela Tarr is the one currently working on this, but he has to struggle against the dismay from his Nietzchean mind.

The first was primarily invented by the French in the '20s, derived from impressionist painting, itself influenced by Buddhist notions about the fleeting world. The subjective eye in motion, this was at the center of this first great school in film, later passed on from Epstein and L'Herbier to Eisenstein and co who analyzed even deeper to invent what is now a common vocabulary in film.

The French rested on cinematic motion however with a kind of cosmopolitan longeur for the sorrowful beauties of modern life. There was too much absinthe in Epstein and Kirsanoff's camera, wonderful absinthe. Views were distorted, lights dimmed, kaleidoscopic; but there was no still point in their moving universe, no spot that was immovable in which to ground oneself.

Resnais supplied a kind of emptiness in the center of that eye, this has been his greatest contribution. Everything else was resigned to be ineffable, chimeric. Next to him, as I now discover, is this guy who continues from the margins to make adventurous films to this day. I will want to explore, but for now we have this.

No doubt he had seen Marienbad, several times for its mysterious folded time with memory. Likely Tarkovsky, then breaking his own ground. Equipped with these, he set out to invent at a very young age.

So how to create in the space between these giants? His solution is simple, to a degree naive; film long sweeps of a moving world with an eye always at anxiety and oppression, allow traces of a familiar narrative in the parts but faint enough to resist us, then assert the whole to be reflecting more broadly by giving it to us from the eyes of a child. So a purely internal landscape is what we have, stirred by anxieties from a distant half-remembered surface.

The problem remains however, that Resnais attempted to solve by addressing the circumstances of life that would trigger the restless sleep of memory. There is no footing in a world that matters, no still point from which to harken at the silent roar from the engines of the universe. No insight of the controls.

Even so, if none of this ever made you pause, you can be soothed here by just how adept this guy was with images. The translucent beauty of the dreamscape. The sadness that permeates everywhere. If you have absorbed this and are looking for more, you may want to have a look at a little known film called Cuadecuc, Vampir. It is similar to this but more erudite I feel, in connecting the dream with the process that gives rise to it.

I like watching the Kino DVDs of experimental films. True, the results are hit and miss, but since most of the films run fifteen or twenty minutes, the viewing is none too taxing. In fact, I think that experimental films work best as shorts. It takes a very good one, usually with some type of narrative, to work as a feature (Eraserhead and L'Age D'Or are two such exceptions).

Le Revelateur is not a long movie (a little over an hour), but it still overstays its welcome. The film appears to be about a family of vagabonds, a father, a mother, and, the film's center, a little boy. I stress "appears" because the scenes of the family tromping through forests and roads may be the boy's dreams (since there is a home setting to certain scenes). There is no plot to speak of, but the film seems to be about the alienation the child feels for his parents. I assume this from the separation images which reoccur throughout the film. Also, the film hints that the relationship between the mother and the father is strained to the point of abuse.

Le Revelateur has strong black and white cinematography. The images have texture due to the high contrast film stock. This is particularly apparent in the forest scenes where an intense, yet singular, light source gives the image an intense but unreal quality, like a dream born out of illness.

While I was not bored, I did get tired of the film even considering its short running time. There are great moments, particularly the exterior shots with family walking (and sometimes fleeing) over fields and through forests. What the film lacks (perhaps deliberately) is forward motion. The world it portrays is interesting but becomes redundant after awhile. I was hoping the film would hit home with its finale but the film continues on past a couple of seemingly good places to conclude (a tracking shot separating the boy from his parents or an intense scene outside a military base). The film finally ends with an homage to The 400 Blows which drags on long after most viewers will have gotten it.

I have wanted to see Le Revelateur for five years now. I finally tracked down a copy of a copy. I am glad to be able to cross the film off my to see list. It did leave an impression. However, I don't know when (or if) I'll watch it a second time.

This movie begins with a shot that I will never forget. An androgynous child, sharply illuminated in an almost totally dark space, sits on a bunk in what appears to be a bedroom. The door opens and a man appears, in silhouette against the light behind him. The camera pans down to find a young woman, her face ghostly, sitting in the foreground, staring zombie-like before her. None of the characters is looking at the other. The man crouches down, puts a cigarette in the woman's mouth and attempts, in vain, to light it. (What would French films be without cigarettes?) The man then removes an enormously long cigarette from his pocket, puts one end in his own mouth and the other end in the woman's, and lights the middle of the thing, whereupon it splits apart into *two* cigarettes. (Shades of "Now Voyager"!) The adults rise and leave the room; the child is alone. What makes the scene memorable is the eerie silence (the film was shot without a sound track) and the ultra-high contrast black-and-white photography, by Michel Fournier, that makes the whole movie seem like the recording of some primitive rite. This short picture is notorious for having been shot while the entire adult cast and crew was high on LSD, which is not surprising, given its strangeness. What is surprising is the extraordinary maturity of its imagery and technique: though the director was only twenty when it was made, it feels like the work of a master. The night scenes in the forest are incredible, not least because Bernadette Lafont's eerie eyes and loping gait provide an amazingly disturbing image of schizophrenia (or else she was having a very bad trip). Though cars and other humans are occasionally glimpsed, the family appears utterly isolated, and there is an apocalyptic sense to the whole film (hence, presumably, the film's title, which evokes St. John the Apostle and the end of the world). The total love and devotion which the family members long to express for one another, and their simultaneous alienation from themselves and each other, give the picture its poignancy. Directed by Philippe Garrel, who is most famous for his relationship with the singer-songwriter Nico, this is the obscurest of obscure masterpieces.