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La cicatrice intérieure
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| "We
Can Never Be Here" (Notes for/from an online lecture)
La cicatrice intérieure: psychodrama (Nico collapsing and wailing in despair as Philippe Garrel strides on, head down, into the white void); “ultimate trip-film” (Olivier Père); song of Earth (Henri Langlois) and of the four primal elements; distended music-clip (Nico’s Desertshore serving here as Leonard Cohen served Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana, 1971, punctuating the silences and the windblown atmos); precursor of long-shot/long-take Slow Cinema; crack-up of the Christian Holy Family (as already in Garrel’s Le Révélateur, 1968); palimpsest of the esoteric, the occult, the medieval, the Holy Grail and Aleister Crowley … At the juncture of what Serge Daney called “all the adventures” of the post-’68 era: travel, drugs, mysticism, “the couple” … encapsulated in Garrel’s association with the loose Zanzibar group (1968-1970) via the financial largesse of inheritor (and later militant feminist) Sylvina Boissonnas. (1) In retrospect, La cicatrice intérieure mingles its sands with a specific era of Desert Cinema: not only Herzog, Kenneth Anger among the pyramids, or Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychedelic Western El Topo (1970), these figures in a landscape also resemble Dennis Hopper and comrades in the Taos of The Last Movie (1970) – and, indeed, a figure on the edge of the Zanzibar scene, François de Menil (who had made a 1969 music clip with Nico and Iggy Pop), would himself head to Taos and recruit Hopper for Crush Proof (1972), before finally chucking in cinema for an architectural career. The same generative phantasm that propelled Hopper and so many countercultural contemporaries (including Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg of Performance [1970]) into frenetic, frame-splitting montage – the notion of all time lived eternally in a moment, or in the cyclical time of a loop – finds very different expression in Garrel: fundamentally, in the sense of a place without precise co-ordinates of time or place, an area in which Garrel’s determined walk-away from Nico reveals itself to be one of the film’s many circles … “In Garrel, there’s a feeling of time inside the shot, but not outside it”, commented Jean-Claude Biette. (2) In 1968, two years before the shooting of La cicatrice intérieure, and at the very dawn of the brief Zanzibar conflagration (see also Deux fois [1971] by Jackie Raynal for one its most brilliant outbursts), Garrel collaborated with Serge Bard, Patrick Deval and Daniel Pommereulle on “Four Manifestos for a Violent Cinema”, published in Alain Jouffroy’s glossy-radical art magazine Opus International. Garrel begins by evoking a cinematic act in which both maker and viewer should (must) be emptied of whatever preconceived self they came with. Cinema of the clean slate, of the return to degree zero (and hence minimalist) – a rhetoric so prevalent in those years, in so many fields. At the outset, this will (naturally) necessitate the militant refusal of “all anecdotal and psychological dramaturgy” – everything that falls under the rubric of mere recollection, presupposition, habit and convention. So: bodies/figures in a landscape, scraps of archetypal situation (naked Pierre Clémenti arriving by boat to the shore of who-knows-where), fleeting hints of an intrigue (a relationship breakdown, a child on the ice … ), stagings of a Ring of Fire or a sword sharpened on an alchemical stone, offered to the brooding Eternal Feminine Goddess of Nico … This is the core of Garrel’s personal proposal for a Violent Cinema, an idea relating less to content (Jodorowsky-style) than to an Artaud-like action vacillating between seduction and assault: Film cannot be evaluated according to spatio-temporal criteria, since any recollection, whether at the stage of reception or conception, is excluded. The new criterion that then appears to value a film is transparency. The spectator is assimilated – voluntarily, or by force – by the author who leads them into a waking dream that goes beyond their individual biographical traumas so that they can grasp their own condition. Identification ceases when the projection ends and the spectator emerges from the mirage, now obliged to redefine themselves – to follow, or not, changes in their behaviour, as they would after a dream. What we call thought is axial, contagious and evolutionary. According to this ideal, cinema constitutes a new mode of communication that proceeds by violating our personalities. (3) La
cicatrice intérieure is a richly
paradoxical object. I delve into its mysteries and complexities in a
2021 video lecture (in two parts) on my Substack, Adrian Martin Recommends. MORE Garrel: L'Enfant secret, J'entends plus la guitare, Sauvage innocence, The Salt of Tears, Lover for a Day 1. For background and anecdotes, see Sally Shafto, The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968 (Zanzibar USA, 2000), republished in a bilingual English/French version by Paris Experimental (2006). back 2. Quoted in Serge Kaganski & F. Bonn, “Poétique du flaneur”, Les Inrockuptibles, 7 April 1999. back 3.
My free translation from the reprint of this text in the catalogue Jeune, dure et pure! (Mazzotta/Cinémathèque française, 2001),
p. 298. back © Adrian Martin October 2021 |
