Christian Merlhiot
On Transposition
Notes about Christian Merlhiot’s film writing (écriture-cinéma)
by Fabien Danesi
Transposition: n. 1 - fact of transferring, turning, altering, changing the order or position of, interchanging. Material that is transposed.
2 – (Music) fact of writing, performing or rendering in another key.
3 – (Shakespeare) act of transforming.
4 – (Mathematics) act of transferring one term from one side of the equation to the other, with a corresponding reversal of sign.
5 – (Mathematics) a matrix resulting from rows and columns being interchanged. [Fr transposer; see pose]
The acknowledgement of cinema as legitimate in the course of the twentieth century is mostly due to style and the subsequent emphasis on the singularity of the film-maker’s gaze. This conception inherited from the literary tradition still prevails nowadays: subjectivity has remained the essential criterion to define the artist’s own expression and the uniqueness of his œuvre. Most often, the artistic challenge consists in emphasizing a formal coherence and recurrent topical elements to prove that the technical aspect has not entirely evicted the human being. In this respect, cinema has attained recognition by taking example on painting, despite the repeated blows this discipline has suffered – even during the modern era – because of its supposedly humanistic creed. If recording images has become mechanical and the specificity of the body has therefore been distanced, the handling of the camera still reminds the personal gaze hidden behind the shots and easy to spot.
Christian Merlhiot’s films are hard to spot and resist classification: delineating the place from where he speaks proves difficult because his work does not immediately strike as homogenous. Using different types of material (16 mm film, 35 mm film, digital video), and dealing with a wide range of topics, Christian Merlhiot does not strive to ensure his works will be acknowledged. He does not aim at faire œuvre, which means producing mirror-like creations that would become one with himself. On the contrary, his films question désoeuvrement in a frontal manner by letting go of any desire to call homogeneity into being: thus they are absent from themselves in a relationship that implies both closeness and distance. They draw a curve and map out wanderings. They are accidents paving the way to unsteadiness. Therefore, Merlhiot’s films are not designed to reinforce his vision of the world but to jeopardize it, to weaken it by introducing an irreducible distance.
It might be when he first encountered the images shot by Marguerite Duras that Merlhiot started to conceive of cinema as a foreign body. In 1982, Dominique Auvray, who worked as an editor on Duras’s Navire Night (1978), came to the Institute of Fine Arts in Bourges to speak about the movie. Back then, the writer had stated: “The movie was certainly superfluous, over the top, not necessary, therefore useless. I think it of it as the union of desire in the very premises of the night, but the night once it has been chased away, replaced by daylight. I think we should never have cast light upon the lovers’ room. Once the text was written, it was too late for anything, for anything because the event had already occurred, the writing, indeed” (1). The film as non-origin, as the dead skin of the written word, a shallow, fruitless element that can only be truly attained through failure… Duras had not tried to elucidate the hiatus between a sentence and an image but had faced it violently. And her film kept on questioning its own existence. It did not manage to word the text, or if it did, it remained unheard: the voice of the film echoed within its own silence. “I was resting from a victory, that of eventually reaching the impossibility to film. Never have I been so convinced of having attained success than I was of having failed that night.”(2).
These words had a deep impact on Christian Merlhiot and launched his cinematic experiments. Learning that one could “film the disaster of [a] movie”(3) was a decisive event that led him to handle the image as the vehicle of a necessary yet concealed presence. This very gap is where one has to stand. Choosing such a posture is like stating that cinema never renders reality, that it is unable to reach it in a direct and innocent way. This implies that reality is cinema’s imaginary sphere, the fantasy of its supposed objectivity. But this does not mean that reality was taken over by a virtual sphere where pretences have substituted themselves for truth. Indeed – to word it more precisely – the world cannot be extracted from its many enunciation modes, and when saying this we intend to overcome our usual fascination for illusion. Illusion requires a perfect matching between reality and its replicas. It blows away the border between them by emphasizing the concrete sphere and defining it as the only signifier because it bears witness to the existence of a whole. Today, believing in the pureness of reality is a means to preserve a community, a world where “together” rhymes with “similar”. So much so that images remain concealed behind the power inherent in their duplication. They agree on a smooth and even translation of the world in order to avoid depicting it as divided.
Contrarily, Christian Merlhiot’s films focus upon representing a bottomless visible world and ceaselessly engendering re-productions. After a kind of cinematic modernity blurred the crystal-clear aspect of the mimesis, he decided to resort to transposition. This principle consists in displacing things so as to rid them of their integrity. They are never fully and wholly constituted because they also take shape as they are being transmitted. This way, transposition endorses the interruption of the being. Spreading its wings like a breach in the ontological being, it opens a new territory where images come into conflict with language. It invents a sensitive geography where objects are no longer accurately mapped out since they have parted with words, language and anything defining them from outside as entities. Transposition overturns the belief in an ideal communication thanks to which things would offer themselves as they are. It paves the way to fragmentation in a discipline where images are usually associated with cohesion.
Replacing historical reconstitution by a more vague temporality, Sauvez nos âmes (1991) expresses this historical disjunction: this film relates the story of a Portuguese prince, Henry the Sailor, son of John I. He is said to have founded a map-making and astronomy school in Cape Saint Vincent, a place renowned for its harsh, unrelenting winds and its deadly sea-currents. From the westernmost peak of the country, ships would sail off to the African terrae incognitae where wealth and glory awaited whomever managed to tame the ocean. Before writing a script for his feature-film, Christian Merlhiot had gone to search locations in the Sagres Fortress where the sailing crews once used to prepare the expeditions. But instead of completing his work-in-progress, he decided to use the images shot on that first trip to call to mind the shipwrecks experienced by the Portuguese fleet on its way to the Indies. Many an account of those tragic storms had been written by the survivors of these voyages. And in the eighteenth century, Bernado Gomes de Brito made an anthology out of them, thus turning these sailors’ adventures into myth.
However, Merlhiot did not intend to bring those past dramas back to life in an epic art work. Above all, he wanted to get rid of conventional narrative modes in order not to spoil the distance inherent in the descriptions. To make sure they were well-rendered, he had to avoid smothering the testimonies of the few survivors with images. Thus, a literal, down-to-earth account of the facts was prohibited: one can simply hear the shipwreck survivors’ tales against images of the site as it is today, covered in vestiges. The sailors’ voices blend with each other and insert into the narrative the temporality of the pages on which their adventures were recorded. Their words jostle together and vanish into the whispered “other place” where they come from. The void of time supplants the immediacy of the recording, thus opening a breach for reminiscences to enter the present tense. The film-maker’s refusing to synchronize soundtrack and images transcribes the oblivion stirred up by remembrance. If the words stick to the event, the shots of the Portuguese shore create a narrative space where the doomed ships are silhouetted on the horizon. The sunset floods with blood the shimmering surface of the Atlantic that sailors have hopelessly tried to tame. It casts light upon those deadly episodes while recalling that no fiction has the power to bring us back to them. And from the depths of this remote world, only crushed sentences come up to the surface.
Clinging to the cliff, the fortifications of Sagres proudly stand, surrounded by the muteness of the women seemingly collecting, like a tank, flows of syncopated speech. Those women, still as stones, are the gatekeepers of the citadel. From time to time, their deeply wrinkled faces appear staring at the viewer, like memories of what used to be. The fixedness of their gaze does not bear witness to their immutable durability but rather to their struggle for survival: those figures made of salt and flesh are kept prisoners by the wind while the sea spits out onto the shore the fear of the dead. Indeed, the waves swell with their own natural power before slamming against the rocks. Offering a mournful climax to the Portuguese adventurers – taken away five centuries ago –, the sailor’s song recalls the hugeness of the untamed element. It embodies permanency when the voices express human fragility.
Christian Merlhiot had “found the material to fill the screen while the sound, the story would flow” (4), as Marguerite Duras did a few years earlier. Sauvez nos âmes remains the only version that came out of this project about Henry the Sailor. Therefore, we could call it a drifting film since it was diverted from its original trajectory. Like all his other productions, this short-film has never been widely distributed. Created for the educational program Villa Médicis Hors les murs, it does not belong to the cinematic industry. In fact, most of Merlhiot’s films have been financially supported by the visual arts sphere. Grants and scholarships from institutions have played an essential part in the evolution of his work. This financial support has greatly influenced the structure of the visual objects created by the artist since it did not allow the same investments as for a widely screened film. However, this does not mean the film-maker made second-hand aesthetic choices: Christian Merlhiot’s films – sometimes even judged austere or stern – are deliberately sober and non-spectacular. The images do not catch the eye through a gaudy and seductive method but rather because they are most often part and parcel of a ruthless system. Indeed, some of his works follow an unrelenting logic that seems to go undisturbed.
Les semeurs de peste (1995) belongs to this series of films with a device. It deals with the transposition of the 1630 trial of two Milanese citizens, accused of having spread the plague epidemic that wrought havoc upon the city and the whole Lombardy area. This legal affair has remained sadly famous for the inhuman torture used by the magistrates in order to have the two men – suspected of having elaborated contaminated ointments – confess. The punishment inflicted upon them was supposed to serve as an example and has remained imprinted in the collective mind since then. As early as 1776, Pietro Verri denounced in his Observations sur la torture this crime committed by justice representatives in order to ease the fear of the people who demanded explanations as they were convinced the plague and cholera had been willingly spread. In the meantime, he wrote an account of the hearing which was later used by Alessandro Manzoni in 1827 in his Histoire de la colonne infâme, a title echoing the name of the memorial erected where the house of one of the two convicts used to stand before being blown up.
Through his film, Christian Merhiot confers these texts a non-romanesque dimension by staging an extremely rigid reading of the trial record. In a room inside the Villa Médicis, in Rome, there is a row of tables where each actor – convict or witness – settles to deliver his/her text. The character’s clothing, the microphones and light-switches soberly hint at the will not to re-create the aesthetic of the time. The movie is not concerned with rendering the historical truth, and the hypothetical presence of fiction is merely hinted at. It might as well be a rehearsal before the setting is installed. Therefore, the film is devoid and deprived of any traditional cinematic device: it does not aim at enacting the trial but strips bare the systematic alteration of each word uttered by the tried, a method which led to the sentence. The narrative action simply focuses on the shaping of a text deconstructing the version given in the trial record.
Digging his film from the inside to cast light upon the incompleteness of the legal evidence used against the two tried men, Christian Merlhiot bores a paradoxical hole within the heart of cinematic embodiment. For instance, the cross-examinations conducted by the legal officers have been erased because they only revealed their own certitudes. Besides, the sessions during which the potential plague spreaders (called the untori) were interrogated are not shown explicitly. The use of torture to wring out useful incriminating material is evoked through the convulsive aspect of some sentences. The rigid formal aspect of the movie refers to the fiendish procedure led by the judges from the indictment to the conviction. Three different types of frames are resorted to here: the long-shot showing the protagonists as they enter the room, the medium-shot placing the two defendants, Guglielmo Piazza and Giacomo Mora, side by side while the portrait reviews each character separately. Facing the still camera, the actors are totally expressionless. Merely reading the statements without implying their inner being, they remain outside the psychological sphere.
With a razor-sharp accuracy, the film-maker dissects this story left as a heritage to future generations. Avoiding any dramatization, he gives a preference to a cold, heartless tension rendering the partiality of the almighty Law. The extreme harshness of the film lies in the mental hollowing-out, the refusal to buy into the fake obviousness of the circumstances. It brings doubt back into play as if stating that one should step back and question the narratives collected and sewn together to provide an explanation for the cause of the plague. This uncertainty principle is mentioned in order to replace the fiendish and peremptory verdict in its right place: that of a vain act. Order is blown into pieces and along with it the teachings of an all-knowing eye stimulated by its fantasized clear-mindedness. In such a context, the viewer is led to take responsibility for the trial and trade his/her skepticism for the unalterable Law. The characters’ one-directional gaze, staring at the camera, underlines the viewer’s responsibility. And if he/she finds him/herself in a quite unbearable posture it is because the sacrifice has already occurred and can no longer be cancelled.
Performing the text without acting it is a way to depict the plague as the spreading hysteria which aroused in judges the desire to punish the “dépeupleur”, this scape-goat figure found guilty of all deaths due to infectious diseases. In his Mémorandum de la peste, Georges Didi-Huberman wrote about this topic: “The first thing to occur is the implementation of a word epidemic. Not a thing has been stirred but words start to spread with such a sudden freedom and nonchalance, such a dreadful sovereignty […]. Words without a signified. Their only signified would be the immediacy of a possible, abstract, absolute signified – the evil” (5). The plague invades minds and language, which starts to pour out its insane logorrhea, an obscene speech veering out of control in its attempts to word hopelessness in order to repress it better. But talking about the plague and speaking its name result in both taming and expanding it, contending it and letting it flow. “Just think of how imagination would flare up during plague epidemics and how the subsequent fire would identify with that of the epidemic itself” (6). This said, transposing the trial comes down to jeopardizing the words that once engendered the wildest fables, so as to annihilate their power of destruction.
However, Christian Merlhiot’s posture does not blend in with an unquestioned belief in Reason. Granted, Les semeurs de peste casts a sharp and raw gaze upon seventeenth-century superstitions, but the film does not conceal the unfathomableness of this evil and the lack of understanding it may have engendered all throughout the abysmal depths of time. Instead of restating the arrogant self-assuredness of knowledge, he points out an ever-renewed anxiety. He even resorts to this non-knowledge principle again in his Voyage au Japon (1999), a film aiming at backing away univocal significance. In an era when things seem to give themselves wholly, this short-film recalls their thickness and resulting opacity. Japanese students are shown reading French texts in a phonetic way. Although they know all the texts deal with the island where they come from, they cannot grasp the scope of what they are uttering. Thus, the Western gaze cast upon the East fails to be mirrored by these young people since their language collides with the words to be told. The Japanese give birth to a kind of sightless language responding to the blindness of the comments by Diderot, Voltaire, Loti or Duret. This way, the film-maker strikes a blow to universality and its logic of sameness: the differences between the civilizations have not been smoothed off nor erased, which means that thought is not an ethereal element and that it always happens inside the mouth first.
Christian Merlhiot’s proposition echoes the depiction of the unknown language by Roland Barthes, a language allowing us to “undo our reality, influenced by other ways to divide the world, other syntaxes; to discover unprecedented positions of the subject within the enunciation, to challenge its topology; in a word, to step down into the untranslatable, experiencing its seismic jolts without ever subduing them until the Western world within us collapses and the rights of the fatherly language start to falter; this language inherited from our fathers and empowering us by turning us into the fathers and owners of a “culture” History will then transform into “nature” (7). The basic principle of transposition participates in this relativization process by implementing a viewpoint located outside of us. Language is here handled as a cultural fact: the Japanese students’ uneasy and nearly painful speech production exposes in a rough manner the physical and mental conditioning underlying every single syllable. Then, the organic substance of the words steps to the fore and becomes apparent instead of disappearing behind the smoothness of free flow, as it usually does. The signifier replaces the signified because it is given such a concrete expression that it overlays the other utterances. Through this reversal, language becomes the hallmark of the outside world shaping our most obvious and deeply incorporated phrases.
However, the film is not exclusively focused on this difference. If every student asserts his/her singularity through the tone and rhythm of his/her voice, the way they follow each other complies with a progression since the framing gets tighter and tighter as they speak. First, they are filmed in full-length shots, and then the camera gets closer and eventually focuses on their faces. The Japanese display their irreducible otherness but, as the recording goes on, one understands that dissimilarity does not necessarily induce dissonance. Beyond the violence lying in the imperviousness of meaning, the movie seeks to arouse an increased attention in the viewer. There even remains the possibility of a dialogue, as the camera allowing us to listening more and more carefully suggests. If the shots seem quite solemn, the camera nevertheless supplements the students with its passivity, maybe because they are not seen as real subjects. In other words, Christian Merlhiot resorts to a proximity not defined by identity. A way to describe a non normative relationship and to set up border points leading into dimensions alien to us. In their writings, the explorers had sought to tame Japan, to bring it back to themselves by describing its exoticism. On the contrary, the film-maker dismissed his preconceptions about the archipelago so as to make his trip into a true encounter free of any familiarity.
That is why the impersonal form suits this work best. The interval preserved all throughout the film stands for the dissolution of the being conceived as the headquarters of consciousness and thought command. Ultimately, the transposition of Western texts leads one to swerve towards an interstice (8) where reason becomes hazy: the writings do not remain stuck within themselves, buried in their own convictions. They are put to the test and start crumbling under the effect of the Japanese readers’ elusive language. They are not even doted with ideas of integrity to counter their physical decomposition. Indeed, each sentence undergoes a mutation when reaching its receiver. This comes down to saying that within words and phonemes lies a breach that cracks as soon as they are being transmitted.
Everything is altered through communication. This issue is raised again in Voyage au pays des Vampires (2001) which reflects upon Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Christian Merlhiot closely followed a group of tourists on a trip around Transylvania set up by an American tour-operator. During this excursion in the Old Europe, they walk in the steps of the novel’s protagonists. In several stages, they can experience the atmosphere of the story thanks to the locals’ cooperation. Indeed, the economy of the area is based on this transatlantic craze. Bram Stoker’s novel has become part and parcel of the territory and has even reshaped it: in the town of Bistrita for instance, the Golden Crown Hotel – where Jonathan Harker, the hero, is supposed to have spent the night on his way to Count Dracula’s Castle – has emerged from the space imagined by the author to become an actual place in the concrete world. The literary myth is but an “already-there” doted with the power to produce the “real” or, at least, to become palpable.
The American travelers play the part of the guide in this film where documentary gets entangled with fiction, caught up in its net. Right from the opening credit title, the shots begin with a chase through two scenes blending with each other in a parallel editing sequence: the departure of a night-train and the arrival of a plane in broad daylight. This merely roughed-out chase highlights Merlhiot’s choice to fight against the tourist-like flattening of the Romanian landscape, once ruled over by the Prince of Valachia, Vlad Tepes, also known as the Impaler. Although many over-emphasized details are scattered along the way – the Vampyre wine, the observation, torch-light in hand, of paintings depicting the monster’s evil deeds – the film-maker distances himself from true-to-life representations typical of American wax-museums: he disrupts the neat organization of the journey in order to reinvent an oppressive and ambiguous narrative.
In parallel with the cheesy reconstitutions one cannot buy into, the spaces traveled through flicker under the flame lit by worried gazes. For instance, the observation of a village square through a window-frame takes on a symbolical meaning: the quietness of the place is suddenly replaced with an ice-cold eeriness and the passers-by become the potential preys of a blood-thirsty being. Likewise, each time the glowing-red twilight sun appears, it seems to foretell a deadly and devouring fire. At the cross-roads between reportage and horror movie, Voyage au pays des Vampires bypasses both the pleonastic language of the news (what actually is) and the shilly-shallying of the fable (what is not). From this trivial trip, Christian Merlhiot squeezes out an anxiety that brings Bram Stoker’s novel back to life. And indeed, those peregrinations end up on an excerpt from the mythical literary piece: strongly contrasting with shots of peaceful fields, the boundless desolation pervading the text provokes a discrepancy likely to exalt the imagination. In the same way, acting as a counterpoint to the folkloric pageant staging the arrest of a witch in Sighisoara, the night walk under the moon’s eye participates in the allusive adaptation of the vampire legend. The camera’s sharp night-vision leads the viewer to some frightened horses before having him/her step onboard a train overwhelmed by darkness. This ability to float through the night is the only point keeping us in touch with the figure of Dracula. The camera focuses on an army guy sitting in one of the compartments and suddenly a transference occurs: sharp-eyed and bony-cheeked, the young man in a uniform ceases to play the part of the preyed-on victim and turns into the hunting predator. Transfigured by the camera, he becomes the new incarnation of the Devil. Thus, transposition bears witness to the figures’ ceaseless moves, symbolized by the vampire him/herself: the embodiment of a transitory state of being, a living-dead creature leading a suspended life. If the army guy’s connection with the spooky figure is but a far-fetched witticism, his image nevertheless contributes to the evolution of the situation. Thus, Merlhiot amuses himself, recording everything that could potentially be contaminated by his film through literary fantasy.
His trip went as far as taking over his initial plan: making a documentary about the vampirism epidemic that harrowed a whole area in Europe in the seventeenth century. Due to this infectious disease – named the “great shadow’s mouth” – which caused death without having the body rot away, police officers wrote numerous reports on living-dead creatures in those days. The rumor spread and began to poison people’s thoughts while fresh-blooded corpses kept piling up. In 1728, Michael Ranft gathered all the testimonies about this devastating phenomenon in a book titled De Masticatione mortuorum in tumulus, focusing on how the dead masticated within their graves. As in Semeurs de peste, the film-maker intended to insert in the first part of the movie a staged reading of several of the narratives included in this work.
Enunciation is also given an important part within the film Autour de Bérénice (1998) based on the work by de Jean Racine (1670). A computer is set right in the middle of a well-ordered library with wooden bookshelves. It features a voice synthesis device enabling it to recite extracts from the play chosen by people entering the place one by one. Those excerpts only include the protagonists’ monologues and dialogues with their confidents. The scenes in which Titus, Antiochus and Berenice meet have not been selected. As a result, this adaptation locks up the main characters within their own loneliness and stresses the factual disintegration already pervading the Racinian tragedy. And in this, it relates to Roland Barthes’s structural analysis who, in 1963, wrote: “speaking equals doing, the Logos acts as the Praxis and replaces it: all the bitterness of the world contemplates and redeems itself through speech, the “doing” is emptied, the language filled” (9). Seated in front of the machine, the actors listen to the text made from the combination of basic sounds. Focusing their attention on the electronically recomposed voice, they inhabit the space where lies their absorbed silence. Their contemplative behavior calls off any dramatic action, any decisive gesture. The actors’ non communicative attitude can be explained by the computer’s hypnotic and weird use of words.
The artificial flow of speech was set up thanks to a series of parameters, so as to obtain accurate and peculiar inflections. Indeed, Christian Merlhiot modulated the voice range, its intonations, its rhythm, but also the breathing of the virtual speaker. The software was programmed to deliver the text so as to avoid both eloquence and neutrality. The film-maker strives to transcribe the passions without emphasis and verges on impersonality. Besides, several actors take it in turn to set the three main characters’ speeches into motion. Those protagonists are not personified and flesh is replaced with a sound vibe, as if their existence was still to be proven. A ceaseless unsteadiness in the narrative makes the viewer wonder who is speaking. The tirades weave a unique tune leaving each viewer impassive in front of the computer screen. As Barthes stated: “because the alexandrine is technically defined as a musical function, there is no need to word it musically; far from leading the actor to a musical performance, it frees him/her of this responsibility. (…) As in any codified theatrical frame, the rule replaces subjectivity and technique replaces expression” (10).
Autour de Bérénice elaborates a cold lyricism, devoid of any burst of feeling. By encoding the amorous urges born from Jean Racine’s pen, Christian Merlhiot bore a hole into the classical text. The aim here is not to tell the grandeur of the tragedy nor to pass it on for the sake of its immortality, but to try and climb as high as the gods when they have disappeared. There is no more secret to reveal: mystery has dissipated though there still remains a few unknown quartz sands within the Alexandrinian gem, a true motionless language used to word duration. In this respect, there is a mineral beauty to this film and one senses the breathing of the stones underneath its ivory-like surface. The traveling-shots encompassing the petrified scenes delineate an area where everything is suspended without explaining why all is kept waiting. Likewise, the camera’s wandering through the sculpture gallery turns Berenice’s Western world into an endless and aimless aisle. In this work, words are stuck at the threshold of a technological language reconversion the outcome of which it is hard to estimate. Anyway, the mise-en-scene of this film shows that transposition is far from authenticity. Merlhiot does not display the truth lying in Racine’s play but rather the indetermination inherent and hidden in it. This version reminds one that no thing can reach fixedness, let alone cling to Eternity.
Le Journal de l’Atlantique (1995) already addressed this issue by focusing on the German bunkers erected on the Atlantic shore during World War II. This short film is based on Paul Virilio’s excursions. Right after France was liberated from the German occupation, he discovered some of those blockhouses and set out to make an inventory of them in 1958. In his book Bunker Archéologie, he relates: “As I was walking miles and miles on the beach path everyday, I would encounter those concrete landmarks on the top of the sand dunes, of the cliffs, sprawled on the beach, open, transparent, the sky fooling around between the door frame and the entry way, as if each one of these casemates were a hollow arch or a little temple devoid of religion” (11). Those fortifications consolidated the borderline on the European coasts and engraved the map of the German Empire into the soil of the newly conquered countries. However, according to the author, their defensive function and attachment to the land already foretold the demise of the Third Reich. He wrote that “from the start, bunkers (…) acted as the funeral pyres of the German dream” (12).
Shot in black and white, Christian Merlhiot’s film deals with the influence of death upon those constructions and depicts geopolitical spaces as places where History is ceaselessly, unstoppably bleeding. His trip starts at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, where the Games took place in 1936. A series of brief shots of the entrance, the steps, the bowl where the Olympic Flame lies and the athletes’ idealized sculptures provide a sort of X-ray of the neo-classical architecture. Those monumental symbols of the totalitarian myth are associated with passers-by taking a time out, anonymous witnesses of the preservation of the vestiges of Hitler’s Germany. Extremely diverse, those viewers stand for the indifferent singularity of our modern-day societies nursing the illusion that Ancient Greece is experiencing rebirth. All these people have but one thought in mind: ancient times can never be restored.
On the French part of the Atlantic shore, the bunkers express the same idea. Indeed, they recall with a cruel irony that the Third Reich did not only erect monumental constructions in tune with a fantasized Golden Age. To ensure its protection, the dictatorship resorted to the most abstract and geometric shapes: “one of the essential features of the bunker, Paul Virilio asserts, is its belonging to the few monolithic modern architectural styles. While most buildings are rooted in the ground thanks to their foundation, the casemate does not have one. Its center of gravity replaces it” (13). The bunkers’ radically modern structure – required by their function – does not depict progress as a cause supported with faithful belief but rather as a dream that has been deserted. During the long walks evoked by the soundtrack, many images highlight this decay. Footstep noises give rhythm to the editing as the fortifications turn into characters. They expose the scars left by the war and the wounds inflicted upon them by the seasons passing by. The camera takes close-shot after close-shot of those injured façades, thus collecting traces of their past experiences. Eventually, the bombproof sentinels have surrendered and evolved into archeological treasures. Even the wind and the sea have played their part in the decay of those concrete blocks that have become one with the seashore landscape and sometimes resemble shipwrecks stranded on the sand. However, one should not believe that their appearance is merely due to the damages caused by time. As Virilio states: “to conceal themselves, bunkers tend to mimic geological elements that have been shaped by natural forces and conditions for thousand and thousand of years. Devoid of any superfluous outgrowth, the bunker’s shape anticipates this erosion; the bunker wears out and gets polished prematurely so as to avoid any impact; it coils up into the landscape until it becomes invisible to our eye used to landmarks and punctuations”(14). In fact, the monolithic stone bears its own ruin within itself: after burying itself in front of the sea to fulfill its duty as best it can, it cancels its own existence.
Merlhiot crosscuts walks along the seashore and traveling-shots filmed from a car driving through areas in Le Havre rebuilt after World War II. This architectural style served as a model for a rational town-planning during the economic boom that occurred in France in the sixties. It became the symbol of a modern-day construction technique that managed to meet the accommodation requirements of the rapidly soaring French society. A feeling of uneasiness gradually pervades this sequence as the music dramatizes this renewal: it highlights the fact that all has been rebuilt upon a gaping hole and that the bunkers are but the reappearance of this chasm, welling up to the surface like scattered fragments of a past that won’t die away. Each little piece of worn out mortar speaks of an increasingly overwhelming loss. One can feel the same void in the seaside architecture encountered during this trip as in the military constructions previously observed. With their windows shut most of the time, the façades of apartment buildings and houses seem to be lifeless. They appear as motionless spaces invaded by emptiness. The portraits of the few encountered inhabitants – always seen full-front and seemingly kept waiting – entirely grasp to which extent they have been deprived of their identity by the endless hours and days passing by. Their self-effacing and humble presence symbolizes the lack of transcendence in our contemporary world. The last resort: saving some precious moments from the duration into which all things fade away. The image is but a remnant, a ruin. And its black and white quality is not a return to the past but a veil shrouding the present, the now, an acute awareness of the transience of each fragment of time.
Christian Merlhiot did not call his film a “journal” for no reason: this kind of document is often associated with personal accounts of moments that have just occurred and that still live on within one. It allows the film-maker to step back from collective ways to remember and from the hypothetical conscience of future generations. Producing a journal allows the film-maker to resist the forms used by the community to ease their mind. This journal is the true account of what disappears into the flow of things. But one should not be deceived by the final come back to Ancient Greece through images of the Coliseum: the young age of Western civilization is the exact opposite of the first images of the movie. Rome is not a prestigious power to look back on but rather a time period so dazzling it could not last. Therefore, the marble faces’ empty gazes do not relate to any glorious continuity but call upon the work of mourning as a necessity.
Christian Merlhiot does not only produce very well structured works such as Les semeurs de peste, Autour de Bérénice and Le voyage au Japon. He also makes less defined works like, for instance, his Journal romain (1996). Recorded with a manually-rewound camera, this film is an account of the year he spent in Italy. It begins with a one-by-one presentation of the Villa Médicis tenants using portraits ordered by the Institution. Centuries fly by backed by the sound of a train leading the viewer into the diversity of self-expression. This way, Merlhiot creates the exact opposite of a journal – an extremely subjective and private activity. Through this first trip, he frees himself from his own personality. His being surrounded by a group of people when he first appears on the screen is quite meaningful: the artist has ceased to be the archetype of originality to become a being within an emotional network. And indeed, one of his friends finds himself facing Christian’s camera and reverses the mechanical eye by taking a picture of him. Then, those black and white pictures are hung on a board filmed anew by the film-maker. This subsequent repeat of the images suggests that transposition leads to exchange and helps the film-maker filter his own existence. Journal romain is not a first-person narrative. The self is brought forth by the people surrounding it and not a thought is given to natural expression without mediation. That is why Christian Merlhiot often stands out of the frame: instead of giving rise to self-image, he recognizes the gaze of the other as legitimate. As the sound is muted, conversations suddenly provide an opportunity to film the multiple faces of this friendship.
The aim here is not to re-appropriate this stay by telling it but rather to project feelings which outline the fleetingness of contented happiness. The short beach picnic scene is the climax: in a few shots, this peaceful lunch is more hinted at than rendered because pleasure is a flickering vibe that cannot be called back. Therefore, images always have a slightly ashen taste insofar as the existence of a photogram implies the annihilation of the moment it captured. They do not hinder the flight of time but make it perceptible, the way the anatomical wax of the Florentine Specola does. As Nanni Moretti recalls Pasolini’s death, an emaciated face appears on the screen, thus abruptly casting light upon the unsteadiness of life. Avoiding any pathos, Christian Merlhiot pulls out the thread of life and gives it back its precious value by showing the perishable nature of things. Likewise, in Semeurs de peste there is a strong contrast between the nonchalance of the editing and the sharp structure of the trial. Journal romain offers a temporarily suspended cinema transposed into an existential move so broad it can barely be contained as a whole.
Likewise, comprised of eight sequence-shots, the second part of Voyage au Japon offers another version of it. Each image appears as a sort of straightforward visual haiku born from a sharp interest for vacuity. The sight from a plane window, the lights on a Christmas tree in an empty room or a venue without a show: no action or intention comes to justify the recorded images. They cannot be solved. Free from the diktat of meaning, these hollow moments grow like mere opportunities. The images are willingly filled with void so that the viewer realizes they are virtual. There are no constraints and the film-maker fades away to let the scene spread its own atmosphere, especially through the soundtrack composed of Western songs contrasting with the texts read aloud by the Japanese in the first part. These songs soothe the tensions repressed by the students as they are deciphering texts which remain mysterious to them. They act as landmarks, reference points one can easily cling to. Thus, Voyage au Japon is woven with complementarily opposed elements. If the erratic nature of language is at variance with the music’s steady flow, associating them together is a means – among others – to define a space between the physical world and abstraction.
Sometimes this in-between can resemble an abyss, like in Kyoto mon amour (2001), for instance. From the first sunset shot on, Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1974) pervades the film. Its soundtrack, composed by Carlos d’Alessio, is repeatedly played here, like a haunting leitmotiv. But beyond the explicit title, the writer’s figure is also outlined on the visual level still disguised by words. The narrator’s feelings are expressed through subtitles: autobiographical thoughts softly offering themselves since they lie in this dimension where voices come to hide. Within the void of language, Christian Merlhiot’s reflections follow one another in a disorderly fashion and fail to find a shelter. They express a disorientation also visible through overlapping images of the Moroccan desert and the city of Kyoto. His restless mind is incapable of filling the places he goes through because each site refers to a distance love cannot take. The sentences address an identified interlocutor: they are an outlook of the letters he sent to his partner at a time when their passion seemed to start waning. The film-maker’s lonely wandering eventually starts to resemble a dizzy spell, at a point when only the carnal dimension should still be alive.
The shots follow each other in a way that deprives them of their substance: the Japanese lady wearing a sumptuous dress, the traffic light, the traditional show and the sun-drenched beach are associated with one another and rendered in a red hue devoid of its sentimental connotation. These un-shivering patterns show that the image is not made into a fetish. Here representation is a weakness, a flaw, an impossibility. “I don’t like this place, nor this light, nor this sunset, nor this silence” Merlhiot states as the sun is setting on the dunes. The words rise against this landscape, indifferent to his pain, before giving in to the fantasy of an embrace arousing him twice as much because he cannot outrage the longed-for penis. One should be able to grab the penis, to make sure of its Being Here. But the sequence shows that incantation does not have the power to bring it back to oneself. Therefore, the image follows the split of the individual. It does not lessen his incompleteness nor promise a hypothetical return to a harmonious situation. In fact, even when transposed, it keeps giving omens: “it is not a thought, the film-maker concludes at the end of his trip, it is a print left on my body by our story and upon which I have no influence at all”. As if echoing this last sentence, his oeuvre revolves around one main theme: traces. It is to be understood as outside any presence even though it slashes the concrete world.
Saying and seeing cannot occur simultaneously. Such is the lesson taught by transposition, a reflection about discrepancy. In Christian Merlhiot’s movies, the continuous mismatched cut between speech and gaze shows that reality cannot be perfectly stitched: in our fragmented modern-day societies, it is useless to expect any kind of synthesis. Representations drift towards the brink of a nothingness on which a scattered space is outlined. Transposition provides a response to this nothingness by focusing on the perceptible dividing line between things. This comes down to saying that Merlhiot’s cinema is not rooted in completeness. On the contrary, it is ruled by emptiness; a feeling that disrupts the vision and tears up the conformity between images and words. Images often dispute the steadiness of language and invite one to conceive of it as a changing mass, a flux wrapping the objects and making them blurrier, not clearer.
Chronique des Love-Hôtels au Japon (2003) is incomplete and based on a total rejection of control and risk-taking. This time, the film-maker is searching locations for a documentary about the love rooms that have blossomed everywhere on the Japanese territory and been listed by photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki. Those areas are devoted to pleasure, for legitimate couples as well as occasional lovers. Jouissance is predetermined since each piece of furniture, each item helps staging the desire and urges the viewer to indulge in pleasure. Those windowless, cheesy yet sophisticated settings appear as weird bubbles inside which sex is pushed to an extreme. Christian Merlhiot endeavored to add a layer of erotic tension into the very heart of those cocoons by giving up journalistic objectivity to question his relationship with his partner: “I know there is no room for him in the movie. I know there would be no movie if it was not for him”, he remarks. This contradiction shrouds the rooms with a veil of complexity. Love cannot be brought down to something sweet, easy and handy like the sugar-coated rooms suggest. It is made up of a cheerful negative side seemingly denied by these air-conditioned satellites in orbit with sexual desire.
Therefore, this film appears as a report scouting out intimacy and based not on a fact but on an uncertainty. From this question linked with desire arises the need to film, without even knowing where to go since no other way than that of the love-hotels has been paved. The opening shot – two coat-hangers side by side – seems to depict a mirror-like couple. But right from the beginning, the voice-over disrupts this symbol by telling the reluctance the film-maker’s partner as regards the work in progress. Christian Merlhiot himself says the text aloud: he subtly evokes the arousal and disappointment inherent in his situation. His comments deal with the discovery of those adult playgrounds. However, the movie gradually drifts from the private sphere to the public space since stepping into the land of delight becomes quite tricky when sex takes on a homosexual dimension. The social world and its good manners surface again in the personal fiction the author hoped to see go astray.
Not every couple has access to the seeming hedonism pervading love-hotels. Behind the tolerated sexual display within Japanese cities lies a regulated and police-supervised acceptance of the phenomenon. In the entrance halls of those spaces dedicated to sensual pleasure, linguistic discrepancies still hinder communication. Misunderstandings arise and rejection gestures are made into an established yet straightforward violence. Faced with such hostility, the two men’s complicity takes on a peculiar dimension. The rooms likely to induce seduction – or even manipulation – transmute into the setting for an amorous harmony expressed out of frame. This way, Christian Merlhiot’s chronicle is far from the raw and activist-like assertion of an identity-defining sexual orientation. His demure exhibitionism rather expresses a reluctance towards the rigidly defined experience of desire.
There is no point in drawing conclusions about transposition. It is based on oscillations that fragment the linearity of speech, carried away in a move without a beginning nor an end. It calls on to an unexpected mobility, a kind of vibration born when things close and faraway in the meantime come into contact, accept and resist each other. Through transposition, things overflow from their initial state of being and from the classifications induced by it. It gives birth to a dialogue in which image and language do not exist per se but in a state of transition. Thus, all we have been doing in this review is carrying on this specific way of interpreting films. In fact, this text digs out the fringe: writing about (around) Christian Merlhiot’s cinema is like clarifying his movies while blurring their outlines. Meaning is shaken up through writing and the border delineating works of art becomes hazy, hard to perceive. Transposition takes one to the limitations of the object, where inner and outside world are turned upside down. And this extreme vantage point is where Merlhiot’s cinema stands. Therefore, the best definition of it remains ambivalent and avoids strict correspondence. Like many of Merlhiot’s references, it provides from the literary world: “what slips away although not a thing is concealed, what asserts itself while remaining untold, what lies here while falling into oblivion” (15).
Transposition strives to blow up conventional artistic frames; it shapes the semiological structure of reality while breaking away from its usual chattiness to sharpen and polish meaning by stripping it bare.
–––––––––––––––––
1. Marguerite Duras. Le navire Night – Césarée – Les mains négatives – Aurélia Steiner – Aurélia Steiner – Aurélia Steiner, Paris: Mercure de France, 1979, pp.10-11. " Je crois que le film était sans doute en plus, en trop, donc pas nécessaire, donc inutile. Qu’il était en somme le mariage du désir sur les lieux mêmes de la nuit, mais la nuit chassée, remplacée par le jour. La lumière dans la chambre des amants je crois qu’il ne fallait pas la faire. Après l’écriture du texte, tout venait trop tard, tout, parce que l’évènement avait déjà eu lieu, justement, l’écriture. " (My translation).
2. Ibid., p.15. (My translation)
3. Ibidem. (My translation)
4. Ibid., p.16. (My translation)
5. Georges Didi-Huberman. Mémorandum de la peste (Le fléau d’imaginer), Paris: Christian Bourgois Publisher, 1983, p.31. (My translation)
6. Ibid., p.141. (My translation)
7. Emphasis by the author. Roland Barthes, " L’empire des signes " in Oeuvres complètes. Tome III. 1968-1971, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002 (1994), pp.352, 354. (My translation).
8. About his stay in Japan, Barthes wrote: " je vis dans l’interstice, débarrassé de tout sens plein ". Ibid., p. 355. “I am living within the interstice, free of any complete meaning”. (My translation).
9. Roland Barthes. " Sur Racine ". Oeuvres complètes. Tome II. 1962 – 1967, Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 2002 (1994), p.105. (My translation)
10. Ibid., p.170.
11. Paul Virilio, Bunker Archéologie. Paris: Les Éditions du Demi-Cercle, 1991 (1975), pp.11-12. (My translation)
12. Ibid., p.29. (My translation)
13. Ibid., p.37. (My translation)
14. Ibid., p.44. (My translation)
15. Maurice Blanchot, L’attente l’oubli. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1962, p. 63. (My translation)
by Fabien Danesi
Transposition: n. 1 - fact of transferring, turning, altering, changing the order or position of, interchanging. Material that is transposed.
2 – (Music) fact of writing, performing or rendering in another key.
3 – (Shakespeare) act of transforming.
4 – (Mathematics) act of transferring one term from one side of the equation to the other, with a corresponding reversal of sign.
5 – (Mathematics) a matrix resulting from rows and columns being interchanged. [Fr transposer; see pose]
The acknowledgement of cinema as legitimate in the course of the twentieth century is mostly due to style and the subsequent emphasis on the singularity of the film-maker’s gaze. This conception inherited from the literary tradition still prevails nowadays: subjectivity has remained the essential criterion to define the artist’s own expression and the uniqueness of his œuvre. Most often, the artistic challenge consists in emphasizing a formal coherence and recurrent topical elements to prove that the technical aspect has not entirely evicted the human being. In this respect, cinema has attained recognition by taking example on painting, despite the repeated blows this discipline has suffered – even during the modern era – because of its supposedly humanistic creed. If recording images has become mechanical and the specificity of the body has therefore been distanced, the handling of the camera still reminds the personal gaze hidden behind the shots and easy to spot.
Christian Merlhiot’s films are hard to spot and resist classification: delineating the place from where he speaks proves difficult because his work does not immediately strike as homogenous. Using different types of material (16 mm film, 35 mm film, digital video), and dealing with a wide range of topics, Christian Merlhiot does not strive to ensure his works will be acknowledged. He does not aim at faire œuvre, which means producing mirror-like creations that would become one with himself. On the contrary, his films question désoeuvrement in a frontal manner by letting go of any desire to call homogeneity into being: thus they are absent from themselves in a relationship that implies both closeness and distance. They draw a curve and map out wanderings. They are accidents paving the way to unsteadiness. Therefore, Merlhiot’s films are not designed to reinforce his vision of the world but to jeopardize it, to weaken it by introducing an irreducible distance.
It might be when he first encountered the images shot by Marguerite Duras that Merlhiot started to conceive of cinema as a foreign body. In 1982, Dominique Auvray, who worked as an editor on Duras’s Navire Night (1978), came to the Institute of Fine Arts in Bourges to speak about the movie. Back then, the writer had stated: “The movie was certainly superfluous, over the top, not necessary, therefore useless. I think it of it as the union of desire in the very premises of the night, but the night once it has been chased away, replaced by daylight. I think we should never have cast light upon the lovers’ room. Once the text was written, it was too late for anything, for anything because the event had already occurred, the writing, indeed” (1). The film as non-origin, as the dead skin of the written word, a shallow, fruitless element that can only be truly attained through failure… Duras had not tried to elucidate the hiatus between a sentence and an image but had faced it violently. And her film kept on questioning its own existence. It did not manage to word the text, or if it did, it remained unheard: the voice of the film echoed within its own silence. “I was resting from a victory, that of eventually reaching the impossibility to film. Never have I been so convinced of having attained success than I was of having failed that night.”(2).
These words had a deep impact on Christian Merlhiot and launched his cinematic experiments. Learning that one could “film the disaster of [a] movie”(3) was a decisive event that led him to handle the image as the vehicle of a necessary yet concealed presence. This very gap is where one has to stand. Choosing such a posture is like stating that cinema never renders reality, that it is unable to reach it in a direct and innocent way. This implies that reality is cinema’s imaginary sphere, the fantasy of its supposed objectivity. But this does not mean that reality was taken over by a virtual sphere where pretences have substituted themselves for truth. Indeed – to word it more precisely – the world cannot be extracted from its many enunciation modes, and when saying this we intend to overcome our usual fascination for illusion. Illusion requires a perfect matching between reality and its replicas. It blows away the border between them by emphasizing the concrete sphere and defining it as the only signifier because it bears witness to the existence of a whole. Today, believing in the pureness of reality is a means to preserve a community, a world where “together” rhymes with “similar”. So much so that images remain concealed behind the power inherent in their duplication. They agree on a smooth and even translation of the world in order to avoid depicting it as divided.
Contrarily, Christian Merlhiot’s films focus upon representing a bottomless visible world and ceaselessly engendering re-productions. After a kind of cinematic modernity blurred the crystal-clear aspect of the mimesis, he decided to resort to transposition. This principle consists in displacing things so as to rid them of their integrity. They are never fully and wholly constituted because they also take shape as they are being transmitted. This way, transposition endorses the interruption of the being. Spreading its wings like a breach in the ontological being, it opens a new territory where images come into conflict with language. It invents a sensitive geography where objects are no longer accurately mapped out since they have parted with words, language and anything defining them from outside as entities. Transposition overturns the belief in an ideal communication thanks to which things would offer themselves as they are. It paves the way to fragmentation in a discipline where images are usually associated with cohesion.
Replacing historical reconstitution by a more vague temporality, Sauvez nos âmes (1991) expresses this historical disjunction: this film relates the story of a Portuguese prince, Henry the Sailor, son of John I. He is said to have founded a map-making and astronomy school in Cape Saint Vincent, a place renowned for its harsh, unrelenting winds and its deadly sea-currents. From the westernmost peak of the country, ships would sail off to the African terrae incognitae where wealth and glory awaited whomever managed to tame the ocean. Before writing a script for his feature-film, Christian Merlhiot had gone to search locations in the Sagres Fortress where the sailing crews once used to prepare the expeditions. But instead of completing his work-in-progress, he decided to use the images shot on that first trip to call to mind the shipwrecks experienced by the Portuguese fleet on its way to the Indies. Many an account of those tragic storms had been written by the survivors of these voyages. And in the eighteenth century, Bernado Gomes de Brito made an anthology out of them, thus turning these sailors’ adventures into myth.
However, Merlhiot did not intend to bring those past dramas back to life in an epic art work. Above all, he wanted to get rid of conventional narrative modes in order not to spoil the distance inherent in the descriptions. To make sure they were well-rendered, he had to avoid smothering the testimonies of the few survivors with images. Thus, a literal, down-to-earth account of the facts was prohibited: one can simply hear the shipwreck survivors’ tales against images of the site as it is today, covered in vestiges. The sailors’ voices blend with each other and insert into the narrative the temporality of the pages on which their adventures were recorded. Their words jostle together and vanish into the whispered “other place” where they come from. The void of time supplants the immediacy of the recording, thus opening a breach for reminiscences to enter the present tense. The film-maker’s refusing to synchronize soundtrack and images transcribes the oblivion stirred up by remembrance. If the words stick to the event, the shots of the Portuguese shore create a narrative space where the doomed ships are silhouetted on the horizon. The sunset floods with blood the shimmering surface of the Atlantic that sailors have hopelessly tried to tame. It casts light upon those deadly episodes while recalling that no fiction has the power to bring us back to them. And from the depths of this remote world, only crushed sentences come up to the surface.
Clinging to the cliff, the fortifications of Sagres proudly stand, surrounded by the muteness of the women seemingly collecting, like a tank, flows of syncopated speech. Those women, still as stones, are the gatekeepers of the citadel. From time to time, their deeply wrinkled faces appear staring at the viewer, like memories of what used to be. The fixedness of their gaze does not bear witness to their immutable durability but rather to their struggle for survival: those figures made of salt and flesh are kept prisoners by the wind while the sea spits out onto the shore the fear of the dead. Indeed, the waves swell with their own natural power before slamming against the rocks. Offering a mournful climax to the Portuguese adventurers – taken away five centuries ago –, the sailor’s song recalls the hugeness of the untamed element. It embodies permanency when the voices express human fragility.
Christian Merlhiot had “found the material to fill the screen while the sound, the story would flow” (4), as Marguerite Duras did a few years earlier. Sauvez nos âmes remains the only version that came out of this project about Henry the Sailor. Therefore, we could call it a drifting film since it was diverted from its original trajectory. Like all his other productions, this short-film has never been widely distributed. Created for the educational program Villa Médicis Hors les murs, it does not belong to the cinematic industry. In fact, most of Merlhiot’s films have been financially supported by the visual arts sphere. Grants and scholarships from institutions have played an essential part in the evolution of his work. This financial support has greatly influenced the structure of the visual objects created by the artist since it did not allow the same investments as for a widely screened film. However, this does not mean the film-maker made second-hand aesthetic choices: Christian Merlhiot’s films – sometimes even judged austere or stern – are deliberately sober and non-spectacular. The images do not catch the eye through a gaudy and seductive method but rather because they are most often part and parcel of a ruthless system. Indeed, some of his works follow an unrelenting logic that seems to go undisturbed.
Les semeurs de peste (1995) belongs to this series of films with a device. It deals with the transposition of the 1630 trial of two Milanese citizens, accused of having spread the plague epidemic that wrought havoc upon the city and the whole Lombardy area. This legal affair has remained sadly famous for the inhuman torture used by the magistrates in order to have the two men – suspected of having elaborated contaminated ointments – confess. The punishment inflicted upon them was supposed to serve as an example and has remained imprinted in the collective mind since then. As early as 1776, Pietro Verri denounced in his Observations sur la torture this crime committed by justice representatives in order to ease the fear of the people who demanded explanations as they were convinced the plague and cholera had been willingly spread. In the meantime, he wrote an account of the hearing which was later used by Alessandro Manzoni in 1827 in his Histoire de la colonne infâme, a title echoing the name of the memorial erected where the house of one of the two convicts used to stand before being blown up.
Through his film, Christian Merhiot confers these texts a non-romanesque dimension by staging an extremely rigid reading of the trial record. In a room inside the Villa Médicis, in Rome, there is a row of tables where each actor – convict or witness – settles to deliver his/her text. The character’s clothing, the microphones and light-switches soberly hint at the will not to re-create the aesthetic of the time. The movie is not concerned with rendering the historical truth, and the hypothetical presence of fiction is merely hinted at. It might as well be a rehearsal before the setting is installed. Therefore, the film is devoid and deprived of any traditional cinematic device: it does not aim at enacting the trial but strips bare the systematic alteration of each word uttered by the tried, a method which led to the sentence. The narrative action simply focuses on the shaping of a text deconstructing the version given in the trial record.
Digging his film from the inside to cast light upon the incompleteness of the legal evidence used against the two tried men, Christian Merlhiot bores a paradoxical hole within the heart of cinematic embodiment. For instance, the cross-examinations conducted by the legal officers have been erased because they only revealed their own certitudes. Besides, the sessions during which the potential plague spreaders (called the untori) were interrogated are not shown explicitly. The use of torture to wring out useful incriminating material is evoked through the convulsive aspect of some sentences. The rigid formal aspect of the movie refers to the fiendish procedure led by the judges from the indictment to the conviction. Three different types of frames are resorted to here: the long-shot showing the protagonists as they enter the room, the medium-shot placing the two defendants, Guglielmo Piazza and Giacomo Mora, side by side while the portrait reviews each character separately. Facing the still camera, the actors are totally expressionless. Merely reading the statements without implying their inner being, they remain outside the psychological sphere.
With a razor-sharp accuracy, the film-maker dissects this story left as a heritage to future generations. Avoiding any dramatization, he gives a preference to a cold, heartless tension rendering the partiality of the almighty Law. The extreme harshness of the film lies in the mental hollowing-out, the refusal to buy into the fake obviousness of the circumstances. It brings doubt back into play as if stating that one should step back and question the narratives collected and sewn together to provide an explanation for the cause of the plague. This uncertainty principle is mentioned in order to replace the fiendish and peremptory verdict in its right place: that of a vain act. Order is blown into pieces and along with it the teachings of an all-knowing eye stimulated by its fantasized clear-mindedness. In such a context, the viewer is led to take responsibility for the trial and trade his/her skepticism for the unalterable Law. The characters’ one-directional gaze, staring at the camera, underlines the viewer’s responsibility. And if he/she finds him/herself in a quite unbearable posture it is because the sacrifice has already occurred and can no longer be cancelled.
Performing the text without acting it is a way to depict the plague as the spreading hysteria which aroused in judges the desire to punish the “dépeupleur”, this scape-goat figure found guilty of all deaths due to infectious diseases. In his Mémorandum de la peste, Georges Didi-Huberman wrote about this topic: “The first thing to occur is the implementation of a word epidemic. Not a thing has been stirred but words start to spread with such a sudden freedom and nonchalance, such a dreadful sovereignty […]. Words without a signified. Their only signified would be the immediacy of a possible, abstract, absolute signified – the evil” (5). The plague invades minds and language, which starts to pour out its insane logorrhea, an obscene speech veering out of control in its attempts to word hopelessness in order to repress it better. But talking about the plague and speaking its name result in both taming and expanding it, contending it and letting it flow. “Just think of how imagination would flare up during plague epidemics and how the subsequent fire would identify with that of the epidemic itself” (6). This said, transposing the trial comes down to jeopardizing the words that once engendered the wildest fables, so as to annihilate their power of destruction.
However, Christian Merlhiot’s posture does not blend in with an unquestioned belief in Reason. Granted, Les semeurs de peste casts a sharp and raw gaze upon seventeenth-century superstitions, but the film does not conceal the unfathomableness of this evil and the lack of understanding it may have engendered all throughout the abysmal depths of time. Instead of restating the arrogant self-assuredness of knowledge, he points out an ever-renewed anxiety. He even resorts to this non-knowledge principle again in his Voyage au Japon (1999), a film aiming at backing away univocal significance. In an era when things seem to give themselves wholly, this short-film recalls their thickness and resulting opacity. Japanese students are shown reading French texts in a phonetic way. Although they know all the texts deal with the island where they come from, they cannot grasp the scope of what they are uttering. Thus, the Western gaze cast upon the East fails to be mirrored by these young people since their language collides with the words to be told. The Japanese give birth to a kind of sightless language responding to the blindness of the comments by Diderot, Voltaire, Loti or Duret. This way, the film-maker strikes a blow to universality and its logic of sameness: the differences between the civilizations have not been smoothed off nor erased, which means that thought is not an ethereal element and that it always happens inside the mouth first.
Christian Merlhiot’s proposition echoes the depiction of the unknown language by Roland Barthes, a language allowing us to “undo our reality, influenced by other ways to divide the world, other syntaxes; to discover unprecedented positions of the subject within the enunciation, to challenge its topology; in a word, to step down into the untranslatable, experiencing its seismic jolts without ever subduing them until the Western world within us collapses and the rights of the fatherly language start to falter; this language inherited from our fathers and empowering us by turning us into the fathers and owners of a “culture” History will then transform into “nature” (7). The basic principle of transposition participates in this relativization process by implementing a viewpoint located outside of us. Language is here handled as a cultural fact: the Japanese students’ uneasy and nearly painful speech production exposes in a rough manner the physical and mental conditioning underlying every single syllable. Then, the organic substance of the words steps to the fore and becomes apparent instead of disappearing behind the smoothness of free flow, as it usually does. The signifier replaces the signified because it is given such a concrete expression that it overlays the other utterances. Through this reversal, language becomes the hallmark of the outside world shaping our most obvious and deeply incorporated phrases.
However, the film is not exclusively focused on this difference. If every student asserts his/her singularity through the tone and rhythm of his/her voice, the way they follow each other complies with a progression since the framing gets tighter and tighter as they speak. First, they are filmed in full-length shots, and then the camera gets closer and eventually focuses on their faces. The Japanese display their irreducible otherness but, as the recording goes on, one understands that dissimilarity does not necessarily induce dissonance. Beyond the violence lying in the imperviousness of meaning, the movie seeks to arouse an increased attention in the viewer. There even remains the possibility of a dialogue, as the camera allowing us to listening more and more carefully suggests. If the shots seem quite solemn, the camera nevertheless supplements the students with its passivity, maybe because they are not seen as real subjects. In other words, Christian Merlhiot resorts to a proximity not defined by identity. A way to describe a non normative relationship and to set up border points leading into dimensions alien to us. In their writings, the explorers had sought to tame Japan, to bring it back to themselves by describing its exoticism. On the contrary, the film-maker dismissed his preconceptions about the archipelago so as to make his trip into a true encounter free of any familiarity.
That is why the impersonal form suits this work best. The interval preserved all throughout the film stands for the dissolution of the being conceived as the headquarters of consciousness and thought command. Ultimately, the transposition of Western texts leads one to swerve towards an interstice (8) where reason becomes hazy: the writings do not remain stuck within themselves, buried in their own convictions. They are put to the test and start crumbling under the effect of the Japanese readers’ elusive language. They are not even doted with ideas of integrity to counter their physical decomposition. Indeed, each sentence undergoes a mutation when reaching its receiver. This comes down to saying that within words and phonemes lies a breach that cracks as soon as they are being transmitted.
Everything is altered through communication. This issue is raised again in Voyage au pays des Vampires (2001) which reflects upon Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Christian Merlhiot closely followed a group of tourists on a trip around Transylvania set up by an American tour-operator. During this excursion in the Old Europe, they walk in the steps of the novel’s protagonists. In several stages, they can experience the atmosphere of the story thanks to the locals’ cooperation. Indeed, the economy of the area is based on this transatlantic craze. Bram Stoker’s novel has become part and parcel of the territory and has even reshaped it: in the town of Bistrita for instance, the Golden Crown Hotel – where Jonathan Harker, the hero, is supposed to have spent the night on his way to Count Dracula’s Castle – has emerged from the space imagined by the author to become an actual place in the concrete world. The literary myth is but an “already-there” doted with the power to produce the “real” or, at least, to become palpable.
The American travelers play the part of the guide in this film where documentary gets entangled with fiction, caught up in its net. Right from the opening credit title, the shots begin with a chase through two scenes blending with each other in a parallel editing sequence: the departure of a night-train and the arrival of a plane in broad daylight. This merely roughed-out chase highlights Merlhiot’s choice to fight against the tourist-like flattening of the Romanian landscape, once ruled over by the Prince of Valachia, Vlad Tepes, also known as the Impaler. Although many over-emphasized details are scattered along the way – the Vampyre wine, the observation, torch-light in hand, of paintings depicting the monster’s evil deeds – the film-maker distances himself from true-to-life representations typical of American wax-museums: he disrupts the neat organization of the journey in order to reinvent an oppressive and ambiguous narrative.
In parallel with the cheesy reconstitutions one cannot buy into, the spaces traveled through flicker under the flame lit by worried gazes. For instance, the observation of a village square through a window-frame takes on a symbolical meaning: the quietness of the place is suddenly replaced with an ice-cold eeriness and the passers-by become the potential preys of a blood-thirsty being. Likewise, each time the glowing-red twilight sun appears, it seems to foretell a deadly and devouring fire. At the cross-roads between reportage and horror movie, Voyage au pays des Vampires bypasses both the pleonastic language of the news (what actually is) and the shilly-shallying of the fable (what is not). From this trivial trip, Christian Merlhiot squeezes out an anxiety that brings Bram Stoker’s novel back to life. And indeed, those peregrinations end up on an excerpt from the mythical literary piece: strongly contrasting with shots of peaceful fields, the boundless desolation pervading the text provokes a discrepancy likely to exalt the imagination. In the same way, acting as a counterpoint to the folkloric pageant staging the arrest of a witch in Sighisoara, the night walk under the moon’s eye participates in the allusive adaptation of the vampire legend. The camera’s sharp night-vision leads the viewer to some frightened horses before having him/her step onboard a train overwhelmed by darkness. This ability to float through the night is the only point keeping us in touch with the figure of Dracula. The camera focuses on an army guy sitting in one of the compartments and suddenly a transference occurs: sharp-eyed and bony-cheeked, the young man in a uniform ceases to play the part of the preyed-on victim and turns into the hunting predator. Transfigured by the camera, he becomes the new incarnation of the Devil. Thus, transposition bears witness to the figures’ ceaseless moves, symbolized by the vampire him/herself: the embodiment of a transitory state of being, a living-dead creature leading a suspended life. If the army guy’s connection with the spooky figure is but a far-fetched witticism, his image nevertheless contributes to the evolution of the situation. Thus, Merlhiot amuses himself, recording everything that could potentially be contaminated by his film through literary fantasy.
His trip went as far as taking over his initial plan: making a documentary about the vampirism epidemic that harrowed a whole area in Europe in the seventeenth century. Due to this infectious disease – named the “great shadow’s mouth” – which caused death without having the body rot away, police officers wrote numerous reports on living-dead creatures in those days. The rumor spread and began to poison people’s thoughts while fresh-blooded corpses kept piling up. In 1728, Michael Ranft gathered all the testimonies about this devastating phenomenon in a book titled De Masticatione mortuorum in tumulus, focusing on how the dead masticated within their graves. As in Semeurs de peste, the film-maker intended to insert in the first part of the movie a staged reading of several of the narratives included in this work.
Enunciation is also given an important part within the film Autour de Bérénice (1998) based on the work by de Jean Racine (1670). A computer is set right in the middle of a well-ordered library with wooden bookshelves. It features a voice synthesis device enabling it to recite extracts from the play chosen by people entering the place one by one. Those excerpts only include the protagonists’ monologues and dialogues with their confidents. The scenes in which Titus, Antiochus and Berenice meet have not been selected. As a result, this adaptation locks up the main characters within their own loneliness and stresses the factual disintegration already pervading the Racinian tragedy. And in this, it relates to Roland Barthes’s structural analysis who, in 1963, wrote: “speaking equals doing, the Logos acts as the Praxis and replaces it: all the bitterness of the world contemplates and redeems itself through speech, the “doing” is emptied, the language filled” (9). Seated in front of the machine, the actors listen to the text made from the combination of basic sounds. Focusing their attention on the electronically recomposed voice, they inhabit the space where lies their absorbed silence. Their contemplative behavior calls off any dramatic action, any decisive gesture. The actors’ non communicative attitude can be explained by the computer’s hypnotic and weird use of words.
The artificial flow of speech was set up thanks to a series of parameters, so as to obtain accurate and peculiar inflections. Indeed, Christian Merlhiot modulated the voice range, its intonations, its rhythm, but also the breathing of the virtual speaker. The software was programmed to deliver the text so as to avoid both eloquence and neutrality. The film-maker strives to transcribe the passions without emphasis and verges on impersonality. Besides, several actors take it in turn to set the three main characters’ speeches into motion. Those protagonists are not personified and flesh is replaced with a sound vibe, as if their existence was still to be proven. A ceaseless unsteadiness in the narrative makes the viewer wonder who is speaking. The tirades weave a unique tune leaving each viewer impassive in front of the computer screen. As Barthes stated: “because the alexandrine is technically defined as a musical function, there is no need to word it musically; far from leading the actor to a musical performance, it frees him/her of this responsibility. (…) As in any codified theatrical frame, the rule replaces subjectivity and technique replaces expression” (10).
Autour de Bérénice elaborates a cold lyricism, devoid of any burst of feeling. By encoding the amorous urges born from Jean Racine’s pen, Christian Merlhiot bore a hole into the classical text. The aim here is not to tell the grandeur of the tragedy nor to pass it on for the sake of its immortality, but to try and climb as high as the gods when they have disappeared. There is no more secret to reveal: mystery has dissipated though there still remains a few unknown quartz sands within the Alexandrinian gem, a true motionless language used to word duration. In this respect, there is a mineral beauty to this film and one senses the breathing of the stones underneath its ivory-like surface. The traveling-shots encompassing the petrified scenes delineate an area where everything is suspended without explaining why all is kept waiting. Likewise, the camera’s wandering through the sculpture gallery turns Berenice’s Western world into an endless and aimless aisle. In this work, words are stuck at the threshold of a technological language reconversion the outcome of which it is hard to estimate. Anyway, the mise-en-scene of this film shows that transposition is far from authenticity. Merlhiot does not display the truth lying in Racine’s play but rather the indetermination inherent and hidden in it. This version reminds one that no thing can reach fixedness, let alone cling to Eternity.
Le Journal de l’Atlantique (1995) already addressed this issue by focusing on the German bunkers erected on the Atlantic shore during World War II. This short film is based on Paul Virilio’s excursions. Right after France was liberated from the German occupation, he discovered some of those blockhouses and set out to make an inventory of them in 1958. In his book Bunker Archéologie, he relates: “As I was walking miles and miles on the beach path everyday, I would encounter those concrete landmarks on the top of the sand dunes, of the cliffs, sprawled on the beach, open, transparent, the sky fooling around between the door frame and the entry way, as if each one of these casemates were a hollow arch or a little temple devoid of religion” (11). Those fortifications consolidated the borderline on the European coasts and engraved the map of the German Empire into the soil of the newly conquered countries. However, according to the author, their defensive function and attachment to the land already foretold the demise of the Third Reich. He wrote that “from the start, bunkers (…) acted as the funeral pyres of the German dream” (12).
Shot in black and white, Christian Merlhiot’s film deals with the influence of death upon those constructions and depicts geopolitical spaces as places where History is ceaselessly, unstoppably bleeding. His trip starts at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, where the Games took place in 1936. A series of brief shots of the entrance, the steps, the bowl where the Olympic Flame lies and the athletes’ idealized sculptures provide a sort of X-ray of the neo-classical architecture. Those monumental symbols of the totalitarian myth are associated with passers-by taking a time out, anonymous witnesses of the preservation of the vestiges of Hitler’s Germany. Extremely diverse, those viewers stand for the indifferent singularity of our modern-day societies nursing the illusion that Ancient Greece is experiencing rebirth. All these people have but one thought in mind: ancient times can never be restored.
On the French part of the Atlantic shore, the bunkers express the same idea. Indeed, they recall with a cruel irony that the Third Reich did not only erect monumental constructions in tune with a fantasized Golden Age. To ensure its protection, the dictatorship resorted to the most abstract and geometric shapes: “one of the essential features of the bunker, Paul Virilio asserts, is its belonging to the few monolithic modern architectural styles. While most buildings are rooted in the ground thanks to their foundation, the casemate does not have one. Its center of gravity replaces it” (13). The bunkers’ radically modern structure – required by their function – does not depict progress as a cause supported with faithful belief but rather as a dream that has been deserted. During the long walks evoked by the soundtrack, many images highlight this decay. Footstep noises give rhythm to the editing as the fortifications turn into characters. They expose the scars left by the war and the wounds inflicted upon them by the seasons passing by. The camera takes close-shot after close-shot of those injured façades, thus collecting traces of their past experiences. Eventually, the bombproof sentinels have surrendered and evolved into archeological treasures. Even the wind and the sea have played their part in the decay of those concrete blocks that have become one with the seashore landscape and sometimes resemble shipwrecks stranded on the sand. However, one should not believe that their appearance is merely due to the damages caused by time. As Virilio states: “to conceal themselves, bunkers tend to mimic geological elements that have been shaped by natural forces and conditions for thousand and thousand of years. Devoid of any superfluous outgrowth, the bunker’s shape anticipates this erosion; the bunker wears out and gets polished prematurely so as to avoid any impact; it coils up into the landscape until it becomes invisible to our eye used to landmarks and punctuations”(14). In fact, the monolithic stone bears its own ruin within itself: after burying itself in front of the sea to fulfill its duty as best it can, it cancels its own existence.
Merlhiot crosscuts walks along the seashore and traveling-shots filmed from a car driving through areas in Le Havre rebuilt after World War II. This architectural style served as a model for a rational town-planning during the economic boom that occurred in France in the sixties. It became the symbol of a modern-day construction technique that managed to meet the accommodation requirements of the rapidly soaring French society. A feeling of uneasiness gradually pervades this sequence as the music dramatizes this renewal: it highlights the fact that all has been rebuilt upon a gaping hole and that the bunkers are but the reappearance of this chasm, welling up to the surface like scattered fragments of a past that won’t die away. Each little piece of worn out mortar speaks of an increasingly overwhelming loss. One can feel the same void in the seaside architecture encountered during this trip as in the military constructions previously observed. With their windows shut most of the time, the façades of apartment buildings and houses seem to be lifeless. They appear as motionless spaces invaded by emptiness. The portraits of the few encountered inhabitants – always seen full-front and seemingly kept waiting – entirely grasp to which extent they have been deprived of their identity by the endless hours and days passing by. Their self-effacing and humble presence symbolizes the lack of transcendence in our contemporary world. The last resort: saving some precious moments from the duration into which all things fade away. The image is but a remnant, a ruin. And its black and white quality is not a return to the past but a veil shrouding the present, the now, an acute awareness of the transience of each fragment of time.
Christian Merlhiot did not call his film a “journal” for no reason: this kind of document is often associated with personal accounts of moments that have just occurred and that still live on within one. It allows the film-maker to step back from collective ways to remember and from the hypothetical conscience of future generations. Producing a journal allows the film-maker to resist the forms used by the community to ease their mind. This journal is the true account of what disappears into the flow of things. But one should not be deceived by the final come back to Ancient Greece through images of the Coliseum: the young age of Western civilization is the exact opposite of the first images of the movie. Rome is not a prestigious power to look back on but rather a time period so dazzling it could not last. Therefore, the marble faces’ empty gazes do not relate to any glorious continuity but call upon the work of mourning as a necessity.
Christian Merlhiot does not only produce very well structured works such as Les semeurs de peste, Autour de Bérénice and Le voyage au Japon. He also makes less defined works like, for instance, his Journal romain (1996). Recorded with a manually-rewound camera, this film is an account of the year he spent in Italy. It begins with a one-by-one presentation of the Villa Médicis tenants using portraits ordered by the Institution. Centuries fly by backed by the sound of a train leading the viewer into the diversity of self-expression. This way, Merlhiot creates the exact opposite of a journal – an extremely subjective and private activity. Through this first trip, he frees himself from his own personality. His being surrounded by a group of people when he first appears on the screen is quite meaningful: the artist has ceased to be the archetype of originality to become a being within an emotional network. And indeed, one of his friends finds himself facing Christian’s camera and reverses the mechanical eye by taking a picture of him. Then, those black and white pictures are hung on a board filmed anew by the film-maker. This subsequent repeat of the images suggests that transposition leads to exchange and helps the film-maker filter his own existence. Journal romain is not a first-person narrative. The self is brought forth by the people surrounding it and not a thought is given to natural expression without mediation. That is why Christian Merlhiot often stands out of the frame: instead of giving rise to self-image, he recognizes the gaze of the other as legitimate. As the sound is muted, conversations suddenly provide an opportunity to film the multiple faces of this friendship.
The aim here is not to re-appropriate this stay by telling it but rather to project feelings which outline the fleetingness of contented happiness. The short beach picnic scene is the climax: in a few shots, this peaceful lunch is more hinted at than rendered because pleasure is a flickering vibe that cannot be called back. Therefore, images always have a slightly ashen taste insofar as the existence of a photogram implies the annihilation of the moment it captured. They do not hinder the flight of time but make it perceptible, the way the anatomical wax of the Florentine Specola does. As Nanni Moretti recalls Pasolini’s death, an emaciated face appears on the screen, thus abruptly casting light upon the unsteadiness of life. Avoiding any pathos, Christian Merlhiot pulls out the thread of life and gives it back its precious value by showing the perishable nature of things. Likewise, in Semeurs de peste there is a strong contrast between the nonchalance of the editing and the sharp structure of the trial. Journal romain offers a temporarily suspended cinema transposed into an existential move so broad it can barely be contained as a whole.
Likewise, comprised of eight sequence-shots, the second part of Voyage au Japon offers another version of it. Each image appears as a sort of straightforward visual haiku born from a sharp interest for vacuity. The sight from a plane window, the lights on a Christmas tree in an empty room or a venue without a show: no action or intention comes to justify the recorded images. They cannot be solved. Free from the diktat of meaning, these hollow moments grow like mere opportunities. The images are willingly filled with void so that the viewer realizes they are virtual. There are no constraints and the film-maker fades away to let the scene spread its own atmosphere, especially through the soundtrack composed of Western songs contrasting with the texts read aloud by the Japanese in the first part. These songs soothe the tensions repressed by the students as they are deciphering texts which remain mysterious to them. They act as landmarks, reference points one can easily cling to. Thus, Voyage au Japon is woven with complementarily opposed elements. If the erratic nature of language is at variance with the music’s steady flow, associating them together is a means – among others – to define a space between the physical world and abstraction.
Sometimes this in-between can resemble an abyss, like in Kyoto mon amour (2001), for instance. From the first sunset shot on, Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1974) pervades the film. Its soundtrack, composed by Carlos d’Alessio, is repeatedly played here, like a haunting leitmotiv. But beyond the explicit title, the writer’s figure is also outlined on the visual level still disguised by words. The narrator’s feelings are expressed through subtitles: autobiographical thoughts softly offering themselves since they lie in this dimension where voices come to hide. Within the void of language, Christian Merlhiot’s reflections follow one another in a disorderly fashion and fail to find a shelter. They express a disorientation also visible through overlapping images of the Moroccan desert and the city of Kyoto. His restless mind is incapable of filling the places he goes through because each site refers to a distance love cannot take. The sentences address an identified interlocutor: they are an outlook of the letters he sent to his partner at a time when their passion seemed to start waning. The film-maker’s lonely wandering eventually starts to resemble a dizzy spell, at a point when only the carnal dimension should still be alive.
The shots follow each other in a way that deprives them of their substance: the Japanese lady wearing a sumptuous dress, the traffic light, the traditional show and the sun-drenched beach are associated with one another and rendered in a red hue devoid of its sentimental connotation. These un-shivering patterns show that the image is not made into a fetish. Here representation is a weakness, a flaw, an impossibility. “I don’t like this place, nor this light, nor this sunset, nor this silence” Merlhiot states as the sun is setting on the dunes. The words rise against this landscape, indifferent to his pain, before giving in to the fantasy of an embrace arousing him twice as much because he cannot outrage the longed-for penis. One should be able to grab the penis, to make sure of its Being Here. But the sequence shows that incantation does not have the power to bring it back to oneself. Therefore, the image follows the split of the individual. It does not lessen his incompleteness nor promise a hypothetical return to a harmonious situation. In fact, even when transposed, it keeps giving omens: “it is not a thought, the film-maker concludes at the end of his trip, it is a print left on my body by our story and upon which I have no influence at all”. As if echoing this last sentence, his oeuvre revolves around one main theme: traces. It is to be understood as outside any presence even though it slashes the concrete world.
Saying and seeing cannot occur simultaneously. Such is the lesson taught by transposition, a reflection about discrepancy. In Christian Merlhiot’s movies, the continuous mismatched cut between speech and gaze shows that reality cannot be perfectly stitched: in our fragmented modern-day societies, it is useless to expect any kind of synthesis. Representations drift towards the brink of a nothingness on which a scattered space is outlined. Transposition provides a response to this nothingness by focusing on the perceptible dividing line between things. This comes down to saying that Merlhiot’s cinema is not rooted in completeness. On the contrary, it is ruled by emptiness; a feeling that disrupts the vision and tears up the conformity between images and words. Images often dispute the steadiness of language and invite one to conceive of it as a changing mass, a flux wrapping the objects and making them blurrier, not clearer.
Chronique des Love-Hôtels au Japon (2003) is incomplete and based on a total rejection of control and risk-taking. This time, the film-maker is searching locations for a documentary about the love rooms that have blossomed everywhere on the Japanese territory and been listed by photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki. Those areas are devoted to pleasure, for legitimate couples as well as occasional lovers. Jouissance is predetermined since each piece of furniture, each item helps staging the desire and urges the viewer to indulge in pleasure. Those windowless, cheesy yet sophisticated settings appear as weird bubbles inside which sex is pushed to an extreme. Christian Merlhiot endeavored to add a layer of erotic tension into the very heart of those cocoons by giving up journalistic objectivity to question his relationship with his partner: “I know there is no room for him in the movie. I know there would be no movie if it was not for him”, he remarks. This contradiction shrouds the rooms with a veil of complexity. Love cannot be brought down to something sweet, easy and handy like the sugar-coated rooms suggest. It is made up of a cheerful negative side seemingly denied by these air-conditioned satellites in orbit with sexual desire.
Therefore, this film appears as a report scouting out intimacy and based not on a fact but on an uncertainty. From this question linked with desire arises the need to film, without even knowing where to go since no other way than that of the love-hotels has been paved. The opening shot – two coat-hangers side by side – seems to depict a mirror-like couple. But right from the beginning, the voice-over disrupts this symbol by telling the reluctance the film-maker’s partner as regards the work in progress. Christian Merlhiot himself says the text aloud: he subtly evokes the arousal and disappointment inherent in his situation. His comments deal with the discovery of those adult playgrounds. However, the movie gradually drifts from the private sphere to the public space since stepping into the land of delight becomes quite tricky when sex takes on a homosexual dimension. The social world and its good manners surface again in the personal fiction the author hoped to see go astray.
Not every couple has access to the seeming hedonism pervading love-hotels. Behind the tolerated sexual display within Japanese cities lies a regulated and police-supervised acceptance of the phenomenon. In the entrance halls of those spaces dedicated to sensual pleasure, linguistic discrepancies still hinder communication. Misunderstandings arise and rejection gestures are made into an established yet straightforward violence. Faced with such hostility, the two men’s complicity takes on a peculiar dimension. The rooms likely to induce seduction – or even manipulation – transmute into the setting for an amorous harmony expressed out of frame. This way, Christian Merlhiot’s chronicle is far from the raw and activist-like assertion of an identity-defining sexual orientation. His demure exhibitionism rather expresses a reluctance towards the rigidly defined experience of desire.
There is no point in drawing conclusions about transposition. It is based on oscillations that fragment the linearity of speech, carried away in a move without a beginning nor an end. It calls on to an unexpected mobility, a kind of vibration born when things close and faraway in the meantime come into contact, accept and resist each other. Through transposition, things overflow from their initial state of being and from the classifications induced by it. It gives birth to a dialogue in which image and language do not exist per se but in a state of transition. Thus, all we have been doing in this review is carrying on this specific way of interpreting films. In fact, this text digs out the fringe: writing about (around) Christian Merlhiot’s cinema is like clarifying his movies while blurring their outlines. Meaning is shaken up through writing and the border delineating works of art becomes hazy, hard to perceive. Transposition takes one to the limitations of the object, where inner and outside world are turned upside down. And this extreme vantage point is where Merlhiot’s cinema stands. Therefore, the best definition of it remains ambivalent and avoids strict correspondence. Like many of Merlhiot’s references, it provides from the literary world: “what slips away although not a thing is concealed, what asserts itself while remaining untold, what lies here while falling into oblivion” (15).
Transposition strives to blow up conventional artistic frames; it shapes the semiological structure of reality while breaking away from its usual chattiness to sharpen and polish meaning by stripping it bare.
–––––––––––––––––
1. Marguerite Duras. Le navire Night – Césarée – Les mains négatives – Aurélia Steiner – Aurélia Steiner – Aurélia Steiner, Paris: Mercure de France, 1979, pp.10-11. " Je crois que le film était sans doute en plus, en trop, donc pas nécessaire, donc inutile. Qu’il était en somme le mariage du désir sur les lieux mêmes de la nuit, mais la nuit chassée, remplacée par le jour. La lumière dans la chambre des amants je crois qu’il ne fallait pas la faire. Après l’écriture du texte, tout venait trop tard, tout, parce que l’évènement avait déjà eu lieu, justement, l’écriture. " (My translation).
2. Ibid., p.15. (My translation)
3. Ibidem. (My translation)
4. Ibid., p.16. (My translation)
5. Georges Didi-Huberman. Mémorandum de la peste (Le fléau d’imaginer), Paris: Christian Bourgois Publisher, 1983, p.31. (My translation)
6. Ibid., p.141. (My translation)
7. Emphasis by the author. Roland Barthes, " L’empire des signes " in Oeuvres complètes. Tome III. 1968-1971, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002 (1994), pp.352, 354. (My translation).
8. About his stay in Japan, Barthes wrote: " je vis dans l’interstice, débarrassé de tout sens plein ". Ibid., p. 355. “I am living within the interstice, free of any complete meaning”. (My translation).
9. Roland Barthes. " Sur Racine ". Oeuvres complètes. Tome II. 1962 – 1967, Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 2002 (1994), p.105. (My translation)
10. Ibid., p.170.
11. Paul Virilio, Bunker Archéologie. Paris: Les Éditions du Demi-Cercle, 1991 (1975), pp.11-12. (My translation)
12. Ibid., p.29. (My translation)
13. Ibid., p.37. (My translation)
14. Ibid., p.44. (My translation)
15. Maurice Blanchot, L’attente l’oubli. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1962, p. 63. (My translation)
Christian Merlhiot
- Textes
De la transposition
On Transposition- Notes sur les films de Christian Merlhiot
- Cinq lettres d’amour. Frontières intérieures
- Entretien / Des Indes
- Entretien / Wilde
- Films
- Sauvez nos âmes
- Journal de l’Atlantique
- Les semeurs de peste
- Journal romain
- La Seine
- Autour de Bérénice
Le voyage au Japon- Voyage au pays des vampires
- Kyoto mon amour
- Chronique des love-hôtels au Japon
- Cái hô [Le Lac]
- Silenzio
- Shining City
- El fin del mundo
- Des Indes à la planète Mars
- Rice Bowl Hill Incident
- Le procès d’Oscar Wilde