Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Philippe Garrel . By Michael Leonard

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knaa194

1468-2931

Ros Murray,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

Philippe Garrel has made forty-three films, some with miniscule budgets; even his best-known film, Les Amants réguliers (2005), a response to The Dreamers (dir. by Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003), was made with a tenth of the latter’s budget. Michael Leonard begins by addressing Garrel’s marginal status within the history of French cinema, arguing that this is due to the difficulty of categorizing his work. Eschewing the two better-trodden critical approaches — as a post–nouvelle vague filmmaker influenced by the films of Godard and Truffaut, and as an example of a Deleuzian ‘cinéma du corps’ — Leonard instead focuses on the films themselves. For Garrel, the personal is political: up until 2001 he only made films about his own generation, and he frequently casts partners and family members, including his much more famous son, Louis Garrel, in leading roles. Towards the end of May 1968 Garrel disappeared to Germany to make Le Révélateur, a silent, black-and-white, sixty-eight-minute experimental film, lit mostly with a pocket lamp. In 1969 he met Nico, who was to act and feature in many of his films, including the weird and wonderful La Cicatrice intérieure (1972), with a soundtrack taken from her 1970 album Desertshore, and featuring a naked Pierre Clémenti riding bareback through the desert on a horse. Here Garrel attains a ‘degré zéro du plan-séquence’ (p. 65), using circularity, Leonard argues, as a narrative and aesthetic theme. In the early films Garrel sought to make cinema intolerable for the spectator, but they include some of the most beautiful images in his entire filmography, and Leonard explores Garrel’s films for what they really are: the work of a cinephile. As the self-designated ciné-fils Serge Daney highlights, even in 1968 Garrel was first and foremost an artist, his engagement with political struggles taking second place. Leonard in turn remains faithful to a cinephilic interpretation, highlighting Garrel’s formal innovations. These include a pared-down, minimalist approach to lighting (Le Révélateur is quite possibly the most beautifully lit film ever made, and he never used light meters); deliberate over- and under-exposure and use of out-of-date film stock; a preference for single takes; a love of obsolete technologies; and a rough materiality, developed from financial precariousness transformed into a deliberate and singular aesthetics. If the early films explore disorientation, repetitious drift, or dérive, later Garrel adopts what Leonard calls an autofictional style, concentrating on failed amorous relationships. This is a logical step in a cinema of rupture, with Garrel’s films featuring separation as both a formal and aesthetic device. Ultimately Garrel’s marginality perhaps stems from his relentless attention to a single subject matter from the ‘narrative turn’ onwards: himself and his failed heterosexual relationships. Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain (1974) was a decisive influence, which may go some way towards explaining the later films’ questionable gender politics. Nonetheless, Garrel’s remarkable contribution as an auteur has been overlooked, and this monograph is essential reading for anyone interested in the knotty problem of the relationship between art and politics in the post–nouvelle vague, post-’68 era.