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Review: Alban Pichon (2009)Le cinema de Leos Carax.

Lexperience du dj-vu. Lormont: Le Bord de leau

editions, 268 pp.

Daniele Rugo1

Lexperience du dj-vu is an imaginative and exhaustive analysis of the

work of the former enfant terrible of French Cinema, Leos Carax.

Throughout the book Pichon convincingly manages to move beyond the

categories usually associated with Caraxs work namely the Cinma du

lookand theNeo-Baroque to propose a distinctively fresh approach.

Pichon opens his highly original volume by saying that in Caraxs

films the beginnings are never what they seem to be: they actually are amatter of repetition or continuation (3). To those readings that define

Caraxs work on the basis of slick visual style or that stress the sense of

marvel often provoked by his films, Pichon responds that the cinema of

Carax attracts our attention because it provides an entrance into the illusion

of beginnings, achieved through a constant intertwining of sensorial and

cinematic memory.

The book covers Carax entire oeuvre, which stretches across almost

thirty years, four long features (Boy meets Girl (1984), Mauvais

Sang(1986), Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), Pola X (1991)) and four

shorts (Strangulation Blues (1980), Sans titre (1997), My Last Minute

(2006),Merde(2008)). Pichon organizes his argument in three parts. Under

the title Constants, the first set of remarks grounds the analysis by

illustrating the elements around which Carax filmography revolves.

Examining the regularities that punctuate Caraxs formal and thematic

choices, Pichon stresses the presence of a reflexive ambiguity. The titles of

the four sections Circulations; Everyday the same water; Encounter and

recognition; The detours of language symbolically embrace the paradoxes

that will guide the book. The second part explores the French directors

relation to the history of cinema, attempting to delineate a genealogy that

moves from the golden age of silent film to the nouvelle vague, but also

considers in a wider context the importance of cinematographic memory. In

the last section From memory to history Pichon writes since Caraxs

work traces and reactivates a number of problematic aspects of past cinema,

one could say that it rejoins the history of cinema (191). Following the

Godard of Histoire(s) though, Pichon adds that the presentation of the

history of cinema performed by Carax is always only the presentation of one

of many possible histories. The question of the history of cinema becomes

1Golsmiths, University of London: dan.rugo@gmail.com

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then a matter of memory and transmission, opening therefore a reflection on

the death and resurrection of cinema. Through more or less disguised

citations (in Mauvais Sang the character played by Binoche, called Anna,

looks and acts like a young Karina) and poetic statements, Carax places

himself on one side as the witness of this death and on the other as theprivileged survivor, who indicates a new beginning.

It is in the third and densest part that Pichon articulates his main thesis

more explicitly and it is here that the argument touches more closely on

philosophical issues. The notion of dj-vu, which forms the center of

Pichons critical approach often expressed in the forms of souvenir of the

present (an expression used by Alex in Boy Meets Girl) or false

recognition is derived largely from Bergsons work (filtered through

Deleuzes second book on cinema[for example Deleuze, 2005, p.77]). The

entire conceptual framework of this final part of Lexperience du dj-vu

rests on an appropriation of the French philosophers reflection on the

paradoxical nature of paramnesia. Pichons starting point is the Bergsonian

intuition of the duplicitous nature of our perception of events and time,

In a normal state of reception only the image of the present as present

accesses conscience, while the second the image as past does not,

since it could not be of any use. Nevertheless there are occasions when

we become conscious of the double dimensions of present time, which

then appears to us both present and past (234).

Faithful to the Bergsonian temporal paradox, Pichon attempts to reconstruct

Caraxs singularity around the idea of the dj-vu as reflective deception.

Caraxs films engage in a double system of references: on one side they

rework the history of cinema, and on the other they keep referencing each

other, producing a distortion right at the origin, undermining the very idea

of beginning and unsettling the notion of originality.

According to Pichon, in Caraxs films one witnesses then the

emergence of a distorted intimacy, one that is always redoubled and

permanently missed, constantly transfigured into the illusory. The romantic

pessimism that invests Caraxs works can then be traced to the problematic

nature of every encounter, which is submitted, to say it with Blanchot, to the

logic of the always, but not yet (Blanchot, 1997, p.37). While it is true that

his movies always revolve around a couple, it must be added that this is

constantly opened up by the presence of a third, or finds itself fragmented

through the intervention of foreign elements. The couple, emblem of

ambiguity, becomes then the key figure of this analysis: the love relation,

which aspires to be fully original and absolute, is always disturbed, weighed

down by memories or consumed in anticipations and coincidences (there is

always a potential other partner, in the past Les Amants du Pont-Neuf or

in a life yet to be discovered Pola X) becoming part of a series of shifts

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from which it can never seal itself off. The two is never a fully formed

outline; rather it is always committed since the beginning to a complex

series of references and remainders, which end up breaking it apart. The

exhaustion of language always at work in the couple, a proper fall into

silence (Alex in Mauvais Sang is ironically called langue pendu chatterbox because of his proverbial silences), indicates of this relentless

interruption, but it also prefigures the constant possibility for something

extra-ordinary to happen, for a transfiguration of the present beyond

recognition. This also helps understanding how Caraxs interest in silent

cinema goes beyond a mere referential game, participating instead of the

very nucleus of his cinematic intention. Always lingering on the absurd, his

films proceed according to the impossible. In Caraxs own words we are

bound to the impossible.

Crafted around a number of philosophical digressions (Bergson, but

also Deleuze, most notably in Pichons insistence on difference and

repetition) and animated through a series of comparative studies (Carax and

Godard, Rivette, Garrel) the book is at times willfully repetitive, though the

author never falls into the anecdote. Pichon illustrates his ideas with a

wealth of examples, showing not only impressive knowledge of the subject

matter, but a profound ability to read the image.

The main problem seems to lay in the approach to the most

problematic philosophical points. When Pichon for example briefly

introduces the expression deconstruction of singularity, moving into the

complex Derridean territory, the author stops before his intuition could bedone justice to and, as a consequence of this, the discussion remains

hanging. There where a productive path could open up the analysis to an

even richer level, the philosophical and the filmic elements remain instead

foreign to one another.

Beside scholarly rigor and detailed analysis, the greatest merit of the

book is that of allowing the emotional intelligence and visual inventiveness

of Caraxs filmmaking to emerge. Pichon offers a significant contribution to

the understanding of one of the most interesting personalities of

contemporary cinema. Furthermore it provides a useful tool for thoseinterested in framing Caraxs work within a wider horizon, that of a cinema

that keeps interrogating its own nature and its place between the real and the

imaginary.