Philippe Fernandez

Philosophy and Burlesque

The film genre that shares the most affinities with philosophy is incontestably that of burlesque. That is why the most philosophical filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, so often populated his films with idiots, occasionally playing those roles himself. The idiot is one who looks questioningly at the world, asks himself out loud, “why is this so?” and goes on to reinvent its meaning with his subversive innocence. Not only is this the highest possible achievement of the philosopher, but it is also what the burlesque hero aims for, with some variations in mode and style.

The three films of Philippe Fernandez are delectable cinematic treatises of burlesque philosophy. With Bernard Blancan, lead actor in all three films, Fernandez creates an authentically serious and burlesque figure, the Knight of Knowledge, wandering from one film to the next in his armor disguise, an omnipresent grey suit, white shirt, and black tie.

In keeping with the conventions of a good burlesque character, this knight fully assumes his role as bodily adventurer. In turn sailor, cavalryman, spelunker (expert at getting into or out of caves, depending), he invariably ends up groping, climbing, walking, and, most importantly, watching. Like the idiot and the philosopher, he has this capacity for distraction which is the fertile grain of thought and solitude. After all, one instant of distraction and the gaze falls where no one else has looked, and one must, logically, come to his own conclusions. Such is the destiny of Plato's man in the cave (Conte philosophique [la Caverne]) as well as that of the burlesque protagonist. Simultaneously, he is equally as capable of a disciplined and meticulous concentration (compulsively noticing every light, reflection, and sparkle on an object). He seems on a different wavelength, able to empathize with everyday objects such as potted plants, unwanted food on a plate, the tip of his necktie, the reflections of light in a wineglass. He is, in that regard, the alter ego of Philippe Fernandez, who is always ready to follow his character to go film cows, beautifully strange exotic flowers, an ordinary dog, a fish unexpectedly lying dead between two rocks, or even a clump of rushes on the edge of a pond; moments instantaneously transformed into existential micro-adventures.

Objects are equally as affective as tools against overall indifference, or against the overly castrating verve of a mother. With some objects more than others, one can establish a tender relationship (tender to the point of the character gently stopping his car, a vintage Ford Anglia, by letting it naturally rock itself back and forth to a halt on a slightly furrowed path). With objects, he manages to fashion himself a censor-free zone, that of creative do-it-yourself. Musical composition for three casserole dishes, tape recorder and organ; oblong bathroom lamp passes dreamily for a flying saucer. Fernandez's recurring character manifests a typically burlesque taste for the haphazard, his tools a random grab bag of scraps assigned new functions: a fallen rear-view mirror, an abandoned shoebox, and a loose end of film are treasures worth cherishing.

The shady joys of reflection

It must be noted that, in both Réflexion and Connaissance du monde (Psychological Drama), this offbeat character is the distinguished author of works he calls "erudite" (in Réflexion). He deftly uses his cultivated sense of humor (Réfléxion), meets with scholars who are unanimously convinced that extra-terrestrials once roamed the earth, (supporting their conjecture with repeated readings of sacred texts and an iconographic analysis of the sculptures of ancient civilizations), lectures in the countryside always carrying huge stacks of his “série noire” like books (white letters on a black background) tied together like so many bank notes, in a briefcase, or in the trunk of his car like a cumbersome corpse. In other words, first off, this man is not all that naïve, and secondly, the knowledge of which he considers himself the guardian, and which he ceaselessly promotes, is dubious. Courageous and sincere, his quest for knowledge is no less dubious, as much in its procedures (hand-crafted and illogical) as in its admitted aim (tainted with esotericism), in all three films.

Therefore, one must situate the dialectical game running through the films of Fernandez between two eminent branches of the thought process: philosophy and hazy guessing games.

Light, an obvious metaphor for knowledge, is, in this case, that of the sun and the stars (Conte philosophique). But there is also the light of the visionaries' slide projector in Connaissance du monde (filmed head-on so that it appears as an incandescent ball at the center of a collection of media), and that of the film projector in Conte philosophique, a light made visible thanks to the cigarette smoke it illuminates– an authentically hazy light. Connaissance du monde orchestrates, within the framework of a fiction film within a film, ("drame psychologique") a game of hide-and-seek between a precise and documented knowledge of Easter Island, and the extravagant "extra-terrestrial thesis" maintained by the character. This theory states that the island's humongous sculptures, reputedly immovable using the island's natural resources and the society's techniques, were moved by an anti-gravitational field activated by beings of superior intelligence. In Réflexion, a lecture on "the meaning of history" (recorded by Marcel Clement, philosopher and Doctor of Social Sciences, and played on a tape recorder in the film) associating erudition (Greeks and the concept of circular time) and Catholic proselytism goes on to expand upon eschatology and almost becomes funny before the character goes off on a tangent (immersion in a pictorial motif), directing our thoughts towards a discreet meditation on the meaning of a painting.

Utopia and Eschatology

In an interview regarding the last of his three films, Philippe Fernandez references Sciences du Monde, a children's magazine he read as a youth, which featured an illustrated article on the statues of Easter Island. These slightly faded color photographs have been inserted into the 16mm footage included in Connaissance du monde. While Conte philosophique suggests a rereading of Plato's The Republic (book XII), this third film's title is an homage to the famous lecture series during which explorers show and comment on their filmed footage in direct live. "Connaissance du monde", a popular educational program born right after WWII from the very same enthusiasm that led to the newfound popularity of cinema clubs.
Wallpaper, objects, music hits (Je t'aime moi non plus in a deserted hotel restaurant), all help situate the films of Fernandez between 1950 and 1970, the “Trente glorieuses”, as the French call those 30 years of post-war prosperity; the France of DeGaulle and Pompidou. A universe in black-and-white (colors are reserved for the aforementioned 16mm stock footage), becomes, in the films of Fernandez, a contradictory place, both utopian and dead.

If Fernandez has a tendency to romanticize this time period, it is because he sees it as a sort of Golden Age for do-it-yourself experimentation. The Bolex camera, the organ, the slide projector, and the tape recorder are the modest instruments of a utopia where music, cinema, and culture in general are accessible to all; it is a political utopia wherein people take back the tools of creation. But mixed with this idea of utopia is the devastating feeling of a fossilized society; of a post-apocalyptic universe (the eschatological side of the work). In this place both utopian and dead, architecture plays a crucial role.
Fernandez is fascinated by architect Oscar Niemeyer, the brains behind one of the biggest urban development projects of the twentieth century: the construction of Brasilia, a capital city in the middle of a jungle, in the late fifties. The congress building and church at the beginning of Connaissance du monde are in Royan, France. These buildings, inspired by Niemeyer's in Pampulha, Brazil, represent the
reconstruction of the enterprising city in the '50s after its near-total destruction by the ally bombings on January 5, 1945. Symbols of this reconstruction, they are also concrete monuments the mass and solitude of which are enhanced by Fernandez's extreme low angle shots.
The cinematic style of Conte philosophique is another of these paradoxical monuments: a huge rectangular block with sharp edges (from the '30s), the letters “LUX” ironically inscribed at the top, it stands tall surrounded by nature, a doleful vestige of a destroyed civilization. These glorious burial monuments featured so prominently in Connaissance du monde are the powerful structures of a civilization that self-destructs with an unusual savagery, a savagery on which those watching from the cave in Conte philosophique offer a humorous take. Back in their room, petrified in their suits and ties like the Easter Island statues, spotlighted by the vacillating light and the low angle shots, they are frozen in a masculine society tragically calcified; a dead civilization.

Zesthetical and transcendental meditations

When a civilization dies, its great works do not always end up in a museum. In the films of Philippe Fernandez, these monuments remain standing in a space grown over by nature, abandoned by man. In Conte philosophique and Connaissance du monde, the burlesque hero faces sacred forms which remain active despite their being neglected: an organ still rings in the empty church; a projector still whirs in the projection booth of the cave-cinema, perhaps without any film in it, but most certainly without any projectionist to man it. The statues of Easter Island are like this organ, like this projector; they continue to radiate despite the death of God. Thus the painter out in nature in Réflexion, follows less the path of the impressionists (painting with a motif) than he proves his clairvoyance by immediately putting his painting there where oeuvres of art go to die after the end of the world (informed by his interlocutor that the apocalypse is “tomorrow”, his deadpan retort, without looking up from his painting, is, “Well, then, I'd better hurry”).
The search for the absolute enters into all three films via a curious aesthetic experiment: we encounter a fetishistic object of the cinema (a piece of film), we encounter the enigma of a painting so symmetrical we no longer see what it is depicting, and we encounter the totems of Easter Island. What of these encounters? The slightly pessimistic moral of all three films lies therein: something like a vexing dive into frigid waters with a consolation prize; the ever possible return to the utopia of tape recorders and organs. In Connaissance du monde, the filmmaker's dreams end up taking on the texture of his 16mm rushes. Unedited variant of the classic fantasy of total immersion in a film (see Sherlock Jr.), modest utopia is not the realm of cinema, it is the realm of pieces of film – a realm where time is neither circular nor linear but simply precarious, brightened once in a while by the colorful dance of Polynesian women.