My Five Year Plan

Le Monde vivant (2003)

The following was written in response to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon being hosted at The House Next Door.

Eugene Green, American expat (he claims to have forgotten English) and French theater/film director, is one of the most exciting, underheralded voices in film today. His output as a filmmaker is small - at this point it is comprised of just three features and three shorts, none of which has received proper distribution in the United States. And yet he has established himself as a unique presence in the film world - championed by the Dardennes (who produced his Le Monde Vivant, a low-budget wonder in which medieval knights in blue jeans battle an ogre and a lion is played by a dog) and working with increasingly established talent (his more recent projects have featured Olivier Gourmet, Natacha Regnier, and Mathieu Amalric), his is an idiosyncratic form. His films are slow-paced, scattered with literary and philosophical allusions, and scored with compositions by baroque masters like Monteverdi. Performances verge on the Bressonian. Dialogue is shockingly formal and crisply enunciated, as in the films of Aki Kaurismaki. Most eccentrically, the films are marked by their stunningly symmetrical compositions, often focusing in tight close-up on human faces in conversation. These face-camera framings are at first jarring, confrontational, even upsetting - there’s something audacious and big-a ‘artsy’ (or big-p ‘pretentious’) about deadpan line-readings being expressed directly to the viewer, and yet, as one of Green’s films transpires, the device becomes remarkably moving - Green’s interest in the human face, often lit in the effusively glowing style of Baroque portraiture, is the surest signal of his investment in the human divine. Through this indulgence in extreme formal rigor, Green provides an unexpected outcome - a gripping, drainingly emotional experience.

Toutes le nuits (2001)

Green’s interest in the face is both aesthetic and philosophical. Like any good French intellectual, Green is well-read in 20th century philosophy, and specifically in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the Lithuanian-French Talmudic scholar and relational ethicist whose work on human identity of ‘the Other’ and ‘face-to-face’ interaction served as grounds for much of the work of Derrida, Levinas’ most important follower.

Levinas in a nutshell: the impulse of man to categorize and subdivide the world based on similarities and differences, i.e. the recognition of ‘the Other,’ is a violent one. We categorize in order to produce an experiential worldview that conforms to our own standards and thus prolong our own intents and happiness. As long as we are able to shape our own lives by our own systems of categorization, we in essence have autonomy over our world. However, when confronted with the face of another, we are taken aback - as we are when forced to confront the human face in Green’s films. The face of another is a mysterious, almost holy experience, the recognition of an ethical need to provide not only for one’s own well-being but for that of the Other. Violence derives from our ontological resistance to subsiding ourselves to the Other; we reduce humans to classes rather than to the mysterious beings they are. Levinas developed this ethical system in part as a reaction to world history’s most extensive and violent project of categorization/classification: the Holocaust. (Levinas famously rebuked Heidegger, saying that he was one of the few Germans he had trouble forgiving for his support of Nazism.)

Okay, now that I’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at some stills from Green’s short film Les Signes (2006), starring Amalric and Green regular Christelle Prot. Les Signes concerns the relationship between a woman (Prot) and her two sons, each trying to come to terms with the mysterious nautical disappearance of the father ten years prior. A mysterious man (Amalric) confronts both elder son and mother and probes their loss, offering the broken family a chance to come to terms with the father’s vanishing. Much of the film questions the notion of human recognition - if he returned, would the mother and eldest son even recognize the father? Physically? Emotionally? Could the aggressively probing figure of Amalric be in some way an unrecognizable incarnation of the father?

The intangibility of human recognition is central to Green’s themes, and the dialogue sequences, which start wide and draw into increasingly tight framing, forcing the viewer to decategorize the film’s characters and instead focus on the way their faces produce the mysterious ethical imperative.

There’s something very beautiful happening here: through a combination of the deadpan performance and languid editing, Green forces the viewer to explore his actors’ faces, lending them a heightened sense of recognition. We don’t necessarily identify with these characters, but we are emotionally transfixed by them. Green’s films offer an abstraction of human interaction in a similar way to how certain non-narrative filmmakers (Stan Brakhage, for example) offer abstractions of the viewing experience. Just as Brakhage insists on his formal approach as a means of returning his viewers to pre-categorical, pre-lingual modes of experience, Green’s formal strategies compel us toward pre-categorical, pre-lingual recognition of our fellow man.