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L'Enfant
secret
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Finally
getting to see L’Enfant secret (1982)
as part of the Philippe Garrel conference in
Since that
time, I have managed to see most of of Garrel’s entire output, working
backwards to the earlier phases of his work in the ‘60s and ‘70s. All of the
films are fascinating and many (including Liberté,
la nuit [1983], Le Lit de vierge [1969] and Rue Fontaine [1984]) are
tremendous, with J’entends plus la
guitare rising in my estimation over time. I had always been keen to see L’Enfant secret – the film that, as
every loyal Garrelian knows, marks the beginning of his narrative period, and
the recommencement of the autobiographical project left behind after his first
short, Les Enfants désaccordés (1964)
– but I had no idea how overwhelming or extraordinary the experience would turn
out to be. L’Enfant secret is in
every sense the central film of Garrel’s career. It is also, in my view,
incontestably his best.
Intensity
is a quality I value in cinema, almost supremely. L’Enfant secret is a relentlessly and incomparably intense film,
with a remarkably sustained, oceanic level of emotion. Of all Garrel’s
autobiographical works since 1982, it is the one that seems to hold closest and
most directly to the outline of events in his life. Where his alter ego figure
in later films will transmute from theatre director to writer to painter to
architect, here Jean-Baptiste (Henri de Maublanc) is a filmmaker. Only,
perhaps, in the casting of Anne Wiazemsky as Elli (the Nico figure) – Garrel
called her a “French princess playing a German worker” – do we see the first
sign of the director’s creative, multi-faceted exploration of casting (as
Fabien Boully has suggested, Garrel’s cinema is truly an art of casting), and
his sense of the fictive possibilities of the auto-portrait roman (‘novel’) form. (Stoking this
atmosphere of the Romanesque is the very title, derived no doubt from life, but
also from a Juliette Greco song.)
The film
traces a line of events from the first meeting of Jean-Baptiste and Elli in a
communal household and an idyllic period of love, through to a separation that
precipitates a period of drug-induced psychosis for Jean-Baptiste and then
incarceration in a hospital where he undergoes electro-shock treatment. The
lovers are subsequently reunited, but the death of Elli’s mother sends her into
a depressive spiral that leads to heroin addiction. The secret child of the
title is Elli’s; alluding to Nico’s son by Alain Delon, Garrel explains that
“she had a child with a celebrated actor who would not recognise him”. (2) (Note the different selections and emphases Garrel makes for each discontinuous
slice of his autobiographical roman:
he largely conserved his memories of the May ’68 experience, for instance, for
the magisterial Les amants réguliers [2005].)
Where
Jean-Baptiste, as incarnated by the Bressonian model de Maublanc, is the most
strikingly sunken, heavy-set and morose of the director’s stand-ins, Elli is an
extremely complex, enigmatic and moving figure. In Garrel’s cinema the trauma
of a grown-up person having to finally confront the symbolic order of adulthood
(and parenthood) after suffering the death of a beloved parent tends to be
mainly a male story (I think, principally, of Le Cœur fantôme [1996]) – if only because masculine problems are
the ones with which Garrel is most familiar (despite his proud boast,
increasingly over the past decade, that he ‘turns his control over’ for scenes
written and scripted by women). (3) L’Enfant
secret is the striking exception to this rule. The part of the story
devoted to Elli’s grief over the sudden death of her mother, and the
cataclysmic effect this has on her future development, is powerfully felt.
Wiazemsky’s chanting of “maman”, in one of Garrel’s ubiquitous train scenes, is
lacerating, like the son who cries “papa” in
Talking of
the characters in this way – and one should never deny the flesh-and-blood
reality of the people in Garrel’s work, nor the acute psychological and
behavioural observation he brings to his storytelling – runs the risk of
erasing the special quality of L’Enfant
secret. It is in many ways an iconic movie, made up solely of compressed,
vivid high points – the kind of film that many dream of making but so few
succeed in shaping. The characters are not given a conventionally psychological
treatment, yet nor are they the grave emblems, set within the geometry of their
intersecting solitudes, that we find in Le vent de la nuit (1999). What matters
to Garrel in L’Enfant secret are the
pure flashes of intersubjective states – union and separation, despair and
derangement, ecstatic loss of self and hellish, immobile confinement. Although
the film is essentially linear, its only essential
driving logic is one of stark contradiction between one scene and the next:
nothing and no one remains static or unified for very long. Bed scenes, which
are a central motif of Garrel’s cinema, are here already used to conjure this
entire kaleidoscope of situations, tensions and sensations.
When I
suggested above that L’Enfant secret is in every sense the central film of Garrel’s career, I mean that firstly in
its chronological and descriptive senses. The film stands at the cusp between
what is, at present, the two halves of his oeuvre. It inaugurates the narrative
period, but is itself only minimally and tenuously a narrative – it takes two
main characters through from point A to B, but that’s about all. One could
rightly say that it is simultaneously a fiction and a portrait film, the jewel
in the crown of the series of works done in the ‘70s (including the remarkable Les Hautes solitudes [1974]). (4) The
work on attenuated duration – or, in Alain Philippon’s more precise words, “the
alternation of accelerations and decelerations, ruptures and open stretches”
(5) that marks all of his work from the portrait-films on – comes to be
focused, in L’Enfant secret, on
intersubjective looks, embraces, frozen (sometimes inscrutable) moments of
tension. (In Les Hautes solitudes,
that intersubjectivity exists, but its line runs from the subject in front of
the camera to Garrel, the hand-holding operator, behind it. In L’Enfant secret, Elli will accuse
Jean-Baptiste, in the aftermath of a painful love scene, of having “a camera
where your heart should be”). One also sees now, looking back at the ‘70s work,
how certain key Garrelian motifs and hyper-charged images – such as sleeping,
walking, or a woman leaning against a window – pass directly from the
portrait-films (where they are generated as spontaneous, documentary, primary
evidence) to the fictions.
At the
giddy height of this portraiture, there is no passage in Garrel’s cinema more
divine or heartbreaking in its eternal stillness and internal repetition than
the one about fifteen minutes into L’Enfant
secret, where Jean-Baptiste and Elli are locked in a nocturnal embrace in
the street, seemingly unable to say goodbye, but somehow forced to separate.
The entire push-and-pull intensity of the film is concentrated in that precious
combination of images, gestures and music.
At the same
time, L’Enfant secret returns to
Garrel’s work of the ‘60s – but in a ghostly way, picking up its distant
echoes. Where the director’s ‘70s phase inaugurates an arte povera, his ‘60s work – the
Raymond
Bellour was astute to yoke the memory of L’Enfant
secret to the currency of Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre (1998): “... not since Philippe Garrel’s L’Enfant Secret has one seen, from a
still young director, such a new and cutting-edge film in French cinema”. (7) There is much that links the films – from a view of emotions and experience
that is clearly marked by a psychoanalytically-influenced understanding of the
essential human drives (in both films, the scene of a small child viewing a
movie, as if the first time, is truly primal) and a subtle but crucial
reference to the realm of the fairy tale (stronger in Grandrieux’s film than
Garrel’s) to an astonishingly intricate exploration of a range of
conventionally forbidden techniques. These techniques include: extreme light
and darkness (via photographic over– and under-exposure); an early-cinema
preference for silence, music and noise over dialogue; and out-of-focus
blurring (there needs to be a filmic history of blur written, at the very least
to redeem it from the current modish use of the device in ads and rock video).
L’Enfant Secret seems to me to go even further than Sombre. The formal inventiveness of
Garrel’s film is prodigious: image-flares, repeated shots, black frames,
refilming off a moviola, shooting through various kinds of glass surfaces,
startling compositional decentring (one of its most beautiful shots gives us a
peek of tiny eyes without a face through the abundant leaves on a tree). Some
scenes begin suddenly, shockingly, with the film taking flight into a hitherto
unfamiliar stratosphere: the moments where Jean-Baptiste violently smashes a window, or Elli attempts to hurl herself out a window; or
two men dragging Jean-Baptiste by force into the clinic, as his disembodied
voice is heard on the soundtrack uttering a single word: “Resist”. This is the
most extremely dissipative and disintegrative of Garrel’s works.
The effect
of all this is startling, sometimes bewildering, offering a hyper-charged flow
to which one ultimately must simply surrender – few films suspend the
apprehension of real time like this one. One appreciates better the poetic
oddities of Liberté, la nuit –
especially its Godardian duality of tender lyricism and violent abruptness –
having seen the film that precedes and prepares the way for it; but Liberté, for all its qualities, is
already a step towards the cleaner arthouse style that Garrel will adopt fully
only in Le Vent de la nuit – and only
temporarily, as it turned out, in the light of Sauvage innocence (2001) and La
frontière de l’aube (2008).
L’Enfant secret, by contrast, brings us very close
to a dream-image that has long animated a certain discussion of cinema, especially
experimental, animated, underground and Super 8 cinema: the idea that certain
works, certain forms, can take us close to the ‘unconscious of film’ itself, a
severe, primal, baroque place where language (of whatever kind) is still
piecing itself together in the maelstrom of pre-signification, all the drives
are superimposed in their impersonal intensity, and the very materiality of the
cinematic medium is exposed at its rawest nerve-ends. Garrel’s radical work on
flicker-effects and exposure ignites this dream, as does the presence of camera
noise, which is such an integral part of the film’s texture – one really feels
that one is attending, like a midwife, the birth of cinema.
On another
level of heterogeneity, there is the dazzling music by Faton Cahen and Didier
Lockwood. I have always been impressed by Garrel’s use of music as gesture, the
way he emphasises the act of its precise placement by isolating it or delaying
its entrance. But L’Enfant secret offers his boldest gesture of this kind. The first ten minutes or so of the
film are completely silent, until that amazing music floods in, soaring for
long passages. In a game that will reappear in a softer and more lyrical mode
in Les Baisers de secours, music and
dialogue at one point compete for aural dominance, weaving and fading in and
out of each other as the characters walk.
Experiencing
the shock of L’Enfant secret, I came
to appreciate the significance of a certain, intractable experience of
Otherness or alterity in his cinema. This stark presence of the other takes
many forms in Garrel’s work; his mastery of these levels of ambiguity and
strangeness is an overlooked aspect of his gifts as a director. There is the
shock of people whom his characters encounter, particularly children, like the
first view of Marianne’s secret child in J’entends
plus la guitare. There is the
matter-of-fact but fascinatingly deformed shape of a face in the same film.
There are mysterious events that unfold, magically, before us (this is the
Dreyer side of Garrel), like the instant togetherness of a new couple in
There are
otherly apparitions in Garrel. Psychosis: Jean-Baptiste sitting up in bed in a
military outfit. Some visions are frank and base – Marianne pissing, Alcaïs
menstruating – and others are obscene, like the hypodermic syringes that appear
in the bathroom in L’Enfant secret,
discarded on the floor in J’entends plus and especially the one found beside the young child in Le Cœur fantôme (a disturbing moment that Dowd rightly sees as
central to Garrel’s work). There are also, in this family of apparitions,
Garrel’s own odd, exclamatory insertions, such as the graphic signs whose words
point over-obviously to the scenes they frame in Baisers (the final ‘alarm’ sign on the métro platform) and Le Vent de la nuit (the Durex ad that
closes over Duval in the chemist as Deneuve watches and smiles). Finally, there
is material that goes beyond the merely cryptic into the outrightly
unassimilable or incommensurable (as the other must always, primally and
ultimately, be in philosophic terms).
It is easy
to forget or censor the moments in Garrel that come from nowhere, and receive no
explanation other than the fact that he has chosen, for secret reasons, to put them there,
like the drawing that begins Liberté, la
nuit. Garrel’s films sometimes start with either a prolegomena (as in Le Vent de la nuit) or a swerve (as in
the portrait study of the prostitute at the start of Le cœur fantôme) – Baisers is exceptional, by contrast, by plunging us into the fiction in its first
gesture and line, Sy’s “Why am I not in the film?”. The opening of L’Enfant secret is
extreme in seeming to start in another film altogether, a silent film of
teenage love (it is hard to avoid the speculation that these figures are,
symbolically, the main characters in a mystical, younger incarnation). This
gaze upon another couple who will not be the subject of the rest of the film is
part of the autobiographical reference to Garrel’s years in Positano (where two
couples co-habited) – it returns as material in both J’entends plus and most recently Un été brûlant (2011), which is dedicated to the memory of his
painter and close friend Frédéric Pardo – but it is also an emblem of the
essential form of his work, breathtaking and disconcerting, beautiful and
chilling in equal measure, like a disenchanted forest or a garden of stone.
One device
recurring throughout L’Enfant secret is particularly captivating – the refilmed imagery of Elli’s child, stopping,
starting, freezing, flickering. The haunting power of these images is
impossible to describe. Partly this is a matter of theme: more brutally than in
any other Garrel film, this child simultaneously incarnates the troublesome
other who drives adult lovers apart (as in the almost comic scene where they
cannot sleep together in the kid’s presence), and the lost boy who is
inevitably and hopelessly abandoned by his biological guardians in this
cruellest of worlds (this is where Garrel meets the Cassavetes of Love Streams [1984]). On another level,
the refilmed imagery of the child provides a gateway into the deepest level of
the filmic unconscious. Using a trick that may have already been becoming
clichéd and hackneyed in the late ‘70s, Garrel sets in train a film within the
film – directed by Jean-Baptiste and starring (it seems) Elli and her child; at
one point he describes a project (called “The Disenchanted Forests”) which was
one that, in reality, Garrel planned but abandoned.
But, as
usual, Garrel gives us only the barest bones of this fictional conceit. What
matters is the radical, contagious confusion in status this film-within causes
to every single image in L’Enfant secret.
In a giddily surreal sequence, the central trio go to
a movie theatre to see a silent comedy; Garrel passes from a shot of them in
their seats to the hall plunged into darkness and traversed by an odd
light-play, as talk continues and rinky-tink screen music begins. Soon, we will
see images of the threesome, accompanied by the same music, as if they were
themselves the image on that screen. And from that point, literally anything
goes: a repeated shot (separated by black frames) of Wiazemsky at a window – is
that Garrel’s rushes, or Jean-Baptiste’s? This is not meant to be a solvable
puzzle (as films-within-films so often are); rather, it opens forcibly the
domain of cinema as a realm of indecidable mental images, neither entirely
subjective nor objective. In this film which is so militantly concerned with
states of mind – from depression to hallucination – we can no longer draw the
dividing line between real shots, fabricated shots, and inner picturings. Nor
can we easily draw a line between the film in its finished state (although that
is surely what we are watching) and the many in-process, experimental layers of
its ragged, driven, swirling incompletion.
These
qualities come to affect the very constitution of the story and its nominal
verisimilitude (a pathetically inadequate word in the context of this film):
are those painterly smears of blood in Jean-Baptiste’s bath and bed evidence of
actual suicide attempts, or something altogether more conceptual? Genre
(another weak word in the context) also becomes impossible to fix: for a while,
in the electro-shock scenes that are both serene and terrifying, L’Enfant secret becomes the most
mysterious Val Lewton production ever made.
Reading
about L’Enfant secret all these
years, I had preserved a special memory of two particular citations. In The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze describes
(in the course of a magisterial few pages on Garrel) the moment in the film
where “we see the café window, the man with his back turned, and, in the
window, the image of the woman also from the back crossing the street and going
to meet the dealer”. (8) At the time of the film’s first release in
Garrel
comments respectfully but matter-of-factly on Deleuze’s analysis of the shot in
question: “One can naturally interpret this way of doubling Elli into two
images, real and virtual, but objectively the reason for this was the poverty
of resources: I had to film through a window to avoid yet more camera noise...”
(the scene uses focal shifts in relation to this
reflective surface that, in the context of the whole film, register as
virtuosic). Garrel adds: “Always, when I shoot, I’m solely preoccupied with
technical problems”. (10)
Garrel is
too modest, because this is one of the most shattering endings to a movie I
have ever seen, with a masterly sense of dramatically accumulating duration. It
leaves the story at a completely unresolved moment: Jean-Baptiste now knows of
Elli’s addiction and she knows he knows, so they have merely reached a moment
that is both impasse and mutual exhaustion. She collapses onto his hand,
kissing it sweetly but desperately (a little as Catherine Deneuve will smother
her lover’s hands with kisses in Le Vent
de la nuit), he strokes her hair in brutal silence, she says over and over,
“don’t lecture me...”. And then the lights go up;
there are no credits (neither at the start nor the end, beyond the title and
intertitles), not even a black screen. This is one Garrel film in which his
alter ego does not get that fragile island of fleeting, intersubjective
redemption; there is no saving angel, no rebirth of love with another woman.
Thierry Jousse sees it as a film “traversed by a sort of fatigue, in the sense
that Blanchot speaks of fatigue as a constitutive element of a certain type of
modern literature, or Deleuze describes Antonioni as the filmmaker who
inscribed fatigue in bodies”. (11) There is existential weariness in the film,
yes, but also an incredible sense of artistic renewal and inventiveness; and a
solemn, ultimately sublime bearing witness to interior experience.
I am keen
to find out how many prints of L’Enfant
secret exist in the world, and what state the negative is in. Garrel, who
was his own producer on the project, still needs to give special permission for
its rare screenings; and a briefly available Japanese DVD release is now a true
rarity. Never in my life have I been so seized, during the projection of a
film, by a desire to protect and preserve it. I was struck by an intimate sense
of the fragility of the celluloid itself, as even its birth pains carried this
same aura: according to Garrel, it was completed in 1979 and remained locked up
in the lab until he could afford to get it out. L’Enfant secret is a film that should belong to every Cinémathèque
of the world, because – quite simply – it seems to me one of the greatest and
most monumental works in cinema history.
© Adrian Martin July 2001/November 2011 MORE Garrel: Lover for a Day, The Salt of Tears
1. This
essay is dedicated to Fergus Daly, who organised the memorable and
groundbreaking Garrel éternel event
at the Irish Film Centre. back
2. Philippe
Garrel and Thomas Lescure, Une caméra à la place du cœur (Provence: Admiranda/Institut de
l’image, 1992), p. 83.
3. See, for
example, the splendid interview by Stéphane Delorme and Nicolas Azalbert, Cahiers du cinéma 671 (October 2011), p.
73.
4. For an
excellent account of the ‘70s work, see Stéphane Delorme, “Désaccord majeur.
(Quatre films de Philippe Garrel)”, in Nicole Brenez and Christian Lebrat (eds), Jeune, dure et
pure! Une histoire du cinéma d’avant garde et expérimental en
5. Alain Philippon, “L’amour en fuite”, Cahiers du cinéma 472 (October 1993), p. 31.
6. As David
Ehrenstein notes, “Any one of [these titles] would serve for an earlier Garrel
film”. Film – The Front Line 1984 (Denver: Arden, 1984), p. 80.
7. Raymond
Bellour, “Pour Sombre”, Trafic 28 (Hiver 1998), p. 8.
8. Gilles
Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 200.
9. Alain Philippon, “L’Enfant-cinéma”, Cahiers du cinéma 344 (February 1983), p. 31.
10. Une caméra à la place du cœur, p. 95.
11. Thierry
Jousse, “Garrel: là où la parole devient geste”, in Jacques Aumont (ed.), L’image et la
parole (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1999), p. 199.
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