In a recently published book, L’essai au cinéma – De Chaplin à Godard, Bamchade Pourvali distinguishes between two major types of essay films. In one, thought becomes form—that is, the text precedes the image—as in Chris Marker’s work. And in the other, form becomes thought, with the image preceding the text, as in Jean-Luc Godard’s later work. Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me, screening at the 58th Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s Horizons program, would certainly fall into the latter category—not just because so much of this 40-minute essayistic collage derives from the arsenal of iconic sequences of his own making, but because the film’s narration bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Godard’s for Histoire(s) du Cinema.
The images in It’s Not Me seem to have a life of their own. There’s a sense that Carax’s voiceover is playfully trying to control them, and to no avail, as they pop up on the screen. The relationship between image and sound is questioned through Carax’s thinking process—cracked open for all to hear. At one point, while we see what looks like archival footage of passersby on a city street, the narrator tells us that we’re looking at an image of the filmmaker, or of his father, amid the crowd, but then he quickly makes a correction, and another one after that: “Here…is my father…No, not him…Him…No, not there! Here! Yes. That’s him. Him! No, not him.” All the while, one image replaces the other, from the iconic still of James Murray from The Crowd with his hands in the air to a photo of Adolf Hitler relaxing on a chair with a blog dog at his side.
Carax thus reveals cinema’s ability to comment on the collective through the hyper-specific minutia that comprise an individual, as well as the unreliability of representation. At times, he all but fends the portrait of other filmmakers off the screen, as in a sequence where Carax makes an account of still images of Roman Polanski before returning to a more immediately recognizable exercise in self-portraiture. Suggesting the infinity of sides to any account of a man’s life, and perhaps the complicity of all men by virtue of sharing a gender, Polanski is described as both a “survivor of the Krakow ghetto” and one who “sodomized a little girl.”
The genesis of Carax’s project is image-centric in that the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, asked the filmmaker to respond to the question: “Where are you at, Leos Carax?” The exhibition ended up never taking place, but the answer in the shape of a film emerged anyway.
It’s Not Me begins with a modest “I don’t know” as a riposte to the proposed riddle, uttered through Carax’s hoarse and disaffected voice. This not knowing becomes the empty space to be filled with the philosophical speculations that are so central to the essay film as a genre. Here we have, then, a self-portrait that performs doubt as the purveyor of an unstable, and always preliminary, truth. For in the world of the essay, which Carax mimics with text-book precision, the filmmaker shares his vulnerability, not a ready-made argument. The one who’s supposed to know is exposed, perhaps sacrificed, as the one who’s simply supposed to wonder. And the forging of the oeuvre, ever so tentative, becomes the oeuvre itself.
The surprising thing about It’s Not Me is its orthodoxy. The film’s form abides, and in disciplined fashion, by the well-established coordinates of the cinematic essay as an increasingly sedimented style, from the intimate act of self-analysis rendered public to the citational fabric that sustains the fragments together into a found footage-like menagerie. Also crucial to this tapestry is an unabashed devotion to the written word through subtitles, intertitles, and chapter titles. Carax’s attempts at queering such a certified copy are timid, limited to abrupt cuts, a mischievous self-censoring where certain words are bleeped out from the narration, and unwarranted colorizing filters that are randomly applied to certain images.
The most noteworthy sequences here aren’t those in which images are pulled from the gems of silent cinema or Carax’s own films (from Boy Meets Girl to Holy Motors), but rather the less immediately recognizable references that are presented to us, forcing the viewer to search for possible associations or simply revel in the associative flow of images. Take the shot of a pan frying about a dozen eggs, which recalls the work of another legendary filmmaker’s foray into shorter film formats: Abbas Kiarostami’s one-minute piece from 1995, “Dinner for One,” whose narrative consists of one long take of an egg frying while we hear the voice of Isabelle Huppert leaving a message on someone’s answering machine. That brief shot in It’s Not Me is only the first in a short series of surprisingly touching images featuring an egg.
The film’s most haunting moment is one that also articulates one of the essay film’s most prominent features: its ability to capture the spirit of an epoch through the hyper-subjective musings of an individual. In the middle of the film, Carax asks the defining question for contemporary cinema, as images from F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise flash by: of the man from the countryside played by George O’Brien walking, in the middle of the night, toward his encounter with Margaret Livingston’s vampiric woman from the city. Carax retires the narrator’s voice to pose the question in writing across the screen, which is worth stating it in its entirety:
In the beginning, when grips pushed the camera on its heavy cart to follow a man, one had the feeling that GOD was following the man with his heavy eyes. But today, if a boy follows his girlfriend with his cellphone camera, that feeling won’t be there. How to reclaim the gaze of the gods?
The question is so rife with drama that to have a human voice perform it, and in whatever tone, would be overkill. The words on the screen ironically embody the type of subtitling social media videos employ in order to be watched in silence as the user scrolls. The fact that the same technique can yield mindless content and such haunting gravitas points to the contradictions of Carax’s interrogation. Refreshingly, It’s Not Me has no interest in answering its own questions, knowing that real cinema, the kind that Carax associates with the divine, is an intimate co-authorship between maker and viewer, not some ready-made gift from one to the other.
Abdellah Taïa’s Cabo Negro, screening in the Proxima competition program at Karlovy Vary, embodies some of the things that Carax mourns with his haunting question about the consequences of our banalization of images. This is a film starring two young people, Soundouss (Oumaima Barid) and Jafaar (Youness Beyej), who would, at a first glance, be the agents of their generation’s non-visceral relationship to visual production, one where the crafting of a moving image is a matter of snapping surfaces instead of a means of giving voice to profound feelings.
And yet, it’s not over digital distractions that Soundouss and Jafaar, queer best friends from Casablanca vacationing in the resort town of Cabo Negro, bond. It’s over posters of old Egyptian movies, ancestral tomb-washing and salt-spreading rituals, and dancing with strangers to hits from the 1980s (such as Rose Laurens’s infectious “Quand tu pars”).
Taïa’s second feature after 2013’s Salvation Army wrestles with his novels’ usual suspects: abandonment, the endless lament following parental death, and the imbrication between sex and violence. Soundouss and Jafaar arrive at the summer rental and await for Jafaar’s lover, Jonathan, an American who supposedly rented the place, and who ultimately never arrives.
In any case, Cabo Negro offers no shortage of opportunity for sex and even love, however fleeting. One such opportunity presents itself in a Frenchman, Mounir (Julian Compan), who Jafaar meets in a cemetery. Mounir is looking for his grandmother’s tomb while Jaffaar is washing his father’s tomb, and it’s there, amid the dead, that these guardians of memory become entranced by each other’s gazes. It won’t last long, it’s true. In Cabo Negro, Taïa portrays, as he has in his novels, the colonizer as the one who makes promises that he cannot keep. The Frenchman, then, albeit being half-Moroccan, is predictably ready to respond to Europe calling than to the possibilities of North African queer love.
Soundouss and Jafaar eventually resort to sex work in order to buy groceries and make their summery escape last a little longer. The body in Taïa’s work is there to be bartered, but it also has a knack for finding affection even in the most pragmatic, or abusive, of transactions. A sequence in Salvation Army of the child protagonist embracing his so-called abuser, desperate for emotional reciprocity, finds its correlative in Cabo Negro when Jafaar caresses his client’s salt-and-pepper hair, post-coitus, not unlike one would rub a lamp in order to make a farfetched wish. The encounter is meant to simply guarantee the maintenance of Jaffar and Soundouss’s getwaway, but Taïa captures the yearning of the sexual aftermath as an inevitable, and inevitably futile, queer wish for continuity, reciprocity, or recognition.
Ultimately, these are things that Jaffar and Soundouss will only find in each other. They’re linked by the apathy of the world (“Nobody loves me,” Soundouss tells Jaffar at one point), in a joint quest for a life where desire can be lived without shame, and without annihilating emotional dependence for the sake of preemptive self-protection. How beautiful and rare when a boy and a girl get to relate to each other without hierarchies of distinction. Not as follower and followed, the one who looks and the one who’s looked at, but as partners.
Maybe the impossibility for “the gaze of the gods” to arise “if a boy follows his girlfriend with his cellphone camera” that Carax grieves in It’s Not Me isn’t in the technology itself, or the generalized zombie-fication of the image-making process. Maybe it’s in the blindness of old discourses about images that could only see the maker-muse dyad in the heterosexual couple in its most traditional form: a boy running after a girl. And, perhaps, in the myopia of a bourgeois gaze for which scrappy means would never measure up to its standards of mastery.
The Karlovy Vary Film Festival runs from June 28—July 6.
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