Cinema, Life and Solitude

Good films nowadays often come from a capacity for solitude, more or less endured and accepted. This gives them a unique tone, a muted rage or a desolate music, as though obliged to “make do” with what little is left for them. For a threat now hangs over the minimal contract that requires a film to be, in spite of everything, oriented towards the outside. An outside that is the place of the other, an alterity of which the “audience” is merely the most traditionally desirable form. In other words: the principle of insufficiency remains at the heart of cinema, even at a time when auteurs too readily drape themselves in the autonomy of “It’s enough for me”. The truth is, it’s never enough.

How far can a filmmaker go in solitude without losing not only the audience, but cinema? I discuss this with J.R., a truly solitary figure who has managed to create a buffer zone between himself and the outside world, populated by devoted allies who ward off threats. Rivette says it’s likely that such solitude (comparable to that of a painter or a musician) could only exist if we had all gone fully digital. Until then, any excessive solitude will remain a somewhat unnatural burden, and more than one filmmaker will continue to bemoan their fate. I agree with J.R.

You only have to take a step or two towards the video artists (those who already have a solid body of work behind them, from Viola to Vasulka, from Paik to La Casinière) to be struck by their obstinate good humour, their cheerful independence, their lack of pathos. They don’t seem to need any more public recognition than a molecular biologist or a senior technician. What they do need is funding and sponsorship.

What’s the difference? It’s light. As long as cinema relies on the luminous recording of people and things, it will give us a world where — no matter what we say or do, how we wriggle or manoeuvre — no one will want to stay in the shadows. The filmmakers no more than the actors, the audience no more than the critics. Of course, there is a history of cinematic light. Sometimes, it’s the cold light of justice that accuses, or of science that exposes, or of moral clarity that says what’s what (“to shed light on”). Sometimes, it’s a protective warmth that turns heads (“to be in the spotlight”). Always, it is the place of tropism, of magnetisation, of colonisation, and, even when it is unforgiving, of love.

At what point did it become historically possible for a filmmaker to lament their fate as a filmmaker — and to be lamented — in the way that writers have long expressed anguish before the blank page? I would put this moment just after the Nouvelle Vague. This movement, rather stoic, managed not to complain too much, but it was (to stick to France) figures like Eustache, Pialat, Straub, Rozier and Garrel who first came to embody, in our eyes, the filmmaker in the guise of Job and cinema as a real pile of horseshit. Since then, we’ve grown accustomed to the me-me-me jeremiads of less important filmmakers who’ve laughably become their own press agents. Today, weariness has overtaken everyone.

It was (as J.-C. B. whispers to me) when life became, for filmmakers, a kind of supreme value, a divinity unto itself, that a certain pain could traverse their work and pierce their films. And he cites Eustache. Reduced to itself, “life” is, in fact, nothing more than the spectacle of the human herd as seen from the perspective of the broom wagon that, on a whim, sweeps them one by one into the gutter. Such was the beauty of La maman et la putain, Adieu Philippine, Faces, and even of recent films like Van Gogh and J’entends plus la guitare: that they still managed to show life — that is, strictly speaking, death at work. But it might well be that the true moment of this insight and of this particular anguish has ended up as a mere pose.