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Jacques Rivette/John Carpenter: Insularities Compared
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‘We Are All Islanders’
‘What are the five films you’d take with you to a desert
island?’ It is not a journalist asking John Carpenter this question, but
Carpenter asking the journalist. And he answers his own question: ‘Well, I
know: Vertigo [1958], That
Obscure Object of Desire [1977], Rio Bravo [1959], Red
River [1948], and His
Girl Friday [1940]’. (1)
There is something touching about this game of questions and answers: this
desire to once again express his admiration for Howard Hawks (‘the only true
American filmmaker’), a desire mixed with a somewhat childish fear (as if to
say: ‘maybe you’re going to forget to
talk to me about Him, so I’ll take the lead’), followed by the jubilation
of an already prepared response (‘Well, I know’). Equally touching is the
apparently innocent character of this question, when we realise that it has
always constituted a powerful and alarming possibility for Carpenter – to find
himself alone on a desert island – and that it must be understood as a modest
expression of the very heart of his oeuvre: the major, obsessive concern over insularity.
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1. Nicolas Saada, ‘Unis par la peur. Dario Argento rencontre
John Carpenter’, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 542 (January 2000), p. 5.
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The two figures (the island and Hawks) come together,
moreover, when Carpenter is asked in what way the latter has influenced him.
His response: ‘By [Hawks’] sense of imprisonment. In his films, even if the
canvas was very big, he always arranged things in order to lead the scene into
a delineated zone; that’s especially what struck me, because I, too, have in
mind the idea that we’re always imprisoned and cornered in closed spaces’. (2)
Instances of islands in his work: Manhattan, the main island of New York turned
into a prison in Escape from New York (1981); Los Angeles, detached from the continent after an earthquake
and turned into an internment camp in Escape from L.A. (1996); in The Fog (1980), the island that a leper colony wanted to leave in
order to move to the coast – but their boat is sunk, so their treasure can be
taken. Then there are metaphorical islands: the besieged police station in Assault
on Precinct 13 (1976); the
besieged church in Prince of Darkness (1987); the research centre in the middle of Antarctica in The
Thing (1982); the ‘village
of the damned’; the nests of vampires scattered all over the world in Vampires (1998) ... In all cases, they
are islands of misfortune, islands of hopelessness. ‘In no world but a fallen
one could such lands exist’. (3) Always and everywhere, we are islanders.
Among us, however, there are some watchmen, some guardians
of the lighthouse: Adrienne Barbeau in The Fog, Christopher Reeve in Village
of the Damned (1995), Roddy
Piper in They Live (1988) ...
Nicolas Saada in Cahiers du cinéma can thus use the title ‘John Carpenter, the Sentry’. (4) This title echoes (beyond
Arnaud Desplechin’s 1992 debut feature) that of a film directed eight years
earlier by Claire Denis, dedicated to a filmmaker who, from the time he was a
critic, celebrated the ‘The Genius of Howard Hawks’: Jacques Rivette, the Night Watchman (1990). (5)
The meeting is unusual – but not really. The auteur of Céline and Julie Go
Boating (1974) and Duelle (1976) consorts well, after all, with
adventures of the fantastic. Phantoms (
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2. Olivier Assayas, Serge le Péron & Serge Toubiana,
‘Entretien avec John Carpenter’, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 339 (September
1982), p. 16.
3. Herman Melville, ‘The Encantadas’, Piazza Tales (New York: The Modern Library, 1992), p. 186.
4. Nicolas Saada, ‘John Carpenter la sentinelle’, Cahiers
du cinéma, no. 523 (June 1998), p. 39.
5. Jacques Rivette, ‘The Genius of Howard Hawks’ (1953), in Cahiers du Cinéma The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, The New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 126-131. |
Among the many characters of Rivette’s Out 1 (1970-1)
are several solitary figures, singular as much for their status as ‘actors’
(two critics and a filmmaker-critic) as for the nature and degree of their
implication in the fiction. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze is a chess player; Éric
Rohmer is a distinguished Balzac specialist; Michel Delahaye is an ethnologist.
We could define their function this way: they are consultants. Each of them, at a particular moment in the film, is
visited by a character (Frédérique, Colin, Béatrice) who asks them, in their
own way, to enlighten them on the future of their personal path in the fiction
– and, more broadly, to make a fictional proposition to the film.
Doniol-Valcroze proposes to Frédérique (Juliet Berto) that
he teach her how to play chess; Frédérique refuses but hides the letters from
which she hopes to profit. In the grand game of the film, Frédérique is the
fragile and tragic piece, the one who plays without knowing the rules of the
game or the value of the pieces (she gets nothing out of the letters) or the
camp of players. She is the sacrificed piece. Colin (Jean-Pierre Léaud) tries
to penetrate the mystery of the Thirteen by dissecting Lewis Carroll’s The
Hunting of the Snark. Meanwhile, the viewer is invited to re-read (besides Balzac
and Carroll) Aeschylus. Three directions then, are proposed: ludic direction
(Doniol-Valcroze), exegetic direction (Rohmer) and ethnological direction
(Delahaye).
Exposed to the wind, lightly shielded,
the ethnologist is perched on a promontory (the roof of Chaillot palace). He
is, surely, not always there; but he is only ever seen there, and we can hardly
imagine him anywhere else. The ethnologist tries to convince his questioner
(Béatrice/Edwine Moatti) to leave her theatre group (which she will do) in
order to accompany him. In this conversation – where it is only a question of
enclosure, and where the slightly hostile incomprehension between the man and
woman dominates – an essential principle of Rivettian poetics emerges. The
ethnologist notes his own imprisonment: ‘The ethnologist finds that he
monologues on the others instead of
dialoguing with the others, instead
of teaching the others to reflect on themselves or, eventually, to reflect on
ethnology’. But, he notes, ‘the ethnologist’s advantage is that he understands
that even he is in a closed world. And that is the case for a lot of people, a
lot of groups, and a lot of professions’. The woman objects that she has no
desire to leave her group. The ethnologist pretends not to hear her, and
continues by recounting the misadventures of an ethnologist who wanted to study
Madagascar:
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| Madagascar is an island and a doubly
and triply closed world where, materially, questions pose themselves: how to
manage to do such a study on such a subject – let’s say, initiation rites –
without considering religion, since Catholic and Protestant missionaries
dominate the whole island, and pagan rites, moreover, are mixed in with them?
If we consider them, there are repercussions because the government isn’t happy,
and repercussions in
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6.
CNRS is Le Centre national de la recherche
scientifique (National Centre for Scientific
Research).
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Of course, he himself is the unfortunate ethnologist (we
imagine him on his promontory, abandoned by the CNRS, like a mutineer on a
flagship). Rather than studying the indigenous population, he chose to study
the Europeans in
Madagascar.
But, once opposed by them, the ethnologist, stripped of his credentials, was
forced to give up. So a new idea came to him: rather than studying Europeans in
Madagascar, study them in Europe and study the French in France: ‘A study in
France, that’s where I was going to return to and that’s what I was going to
do’. He brings up ‘an ethnologist who is, in fact, in the process of achieving
an experience of rupture with the closed world: he had studied fishing
societies in Niger, now he’s gone to study fishermen in Brittany, in the
company of a Nigerien who had done the same study himself in Niger. And both of
them, the Frenchman and the Nigerien, are going to do this in
Brittany’.
In 1970, Jean Rouch was making Petit à petit, whose
second episode, in the style of Charles de Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), shows a Nigerian going to
Between Rivette and Carpenter, then, this common axiom: ‘we
are all islanders’. Their interpretations of the formula, however, differ. In
Carpenter, insularity is the fate of the entire human race, which is, in sum,
the only island (we never leave it). The end of a state of siege is never the
end of captivity in his films. What future is there for the protagonists of Assault
on Precinct 13? The black police officer only leaves the destroyed police
station for another police station (someone points out to him that his superior
made him an odd present by leaving him in the care of the decommissioned police
station for his first assignment): who knows what kind of harassment
awaits him there? The prisoner will return to a cell while awaiting his
execution, and the woman can now add to her solitude the sadness of a meeting
that did not happen, or barely happened. Barbeau will not leave her lighthouse
(The Fog); while Snake Plissken, leaving
The island that we lived on well before
the state of siege tells us what the future will be like. It is history: the
Berlin Wall (Escape from New York), internment camps (Escape from
L.A.), savage liberalism (They Live), the Inquisition (Vampires),
the fundamental crimes of
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7. ‘Time
Overflowing: Jacques Rivette interviewed by Jacques
Aumont, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre’, trans. Amy Gateff. Original version
in Cahiers du cinéma, no. 204 (September 1968), pp. 6-21.
8. ‘For me, memory is history. It’s what happened before the
film’s story begins. It’s what is buried in the past and what affects the
present and those who are living in it. The question that memory, and thus
history, poses would thus be: “what happened before?” In my films, that’s what
I try to show: the characters don’t know that things have been concealed in the
past. And they are going to discover them’. In Nicolas Saada and
Jean-Baptiste Thoret, ‘
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| Edgar Allan Poe and H.G. Wells, at
their end of their lives and of their oeuvres especially, both report a
revelation, optimistic and wild for one, melancholic for the other (this
revelation is a sudden illumination of historical reality as expressed later by
Paul Valéry:
‘Our civilization now knows that we are mortal’). [...] The protagonists of
strange worlds were already tested on what was going to become a resource for
science fiction: each lives a catastrophic episode of the destiny of the human
race like his own historical curse. (9)
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9. Jean Louis Schefer, Du monde et du
mouvement des images (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1997), p. 7.
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If, for Rivette, we are all islanders, it is not that we are
all enclosed in the human race; it is because we one day discovered an island
at our side (Madagascar)
and, in making this discovery, we woke up to being islanders ourselves (the
French of France). Also, Rivette is less interested in the species than
in societies (secret societies, by preference, since we must discover
them). And since a second island is necessary for finding out that each of us
is an islander, it is the case that islands, in his films, come in (at least)
pairs: a house and an apartment (Céline and Julie), a house and a
theatre (La Bande
des quatre), an apartment and a theatre (L’Amour fou), a theatre
troupe and another theatre troupe (Out 1), a house and another house (Hurlevent, 1985).
Very significantly, The Other House (1896) is the
title of a novel by Henry James that held an important place in the development
of the script for Céline and Julie. In this novel, two houses, separated
by a river, face each other. A horrible drama takes place in the ‘other house’
(two women clash over the love of a widower who, linked by his vows to his
deceased wife, cannot remarry while his daughter Effie is living. Effie is
finally killed by one of the two women). Yet the majority of James’ novel (which
was originally a play) takes place in the first house. This house, we are told,
is ‘the side for the view – the view as to which [Mrs Beever the proprietor]
entertained the merely qualified respect excited in us, after the first
creative flush, by mysteries of our own making’. (10) But – the ultimate paradox – this
house that is graciously offered for contemplation by the other bank offers
nothing to see other than the echo of the drama that plays out entirely in the
opposite house. Thus, Mrs Beever’s house is destined to be viewed, but as in a
mirror: in looking at it, it is the opposite house, the other house,
whose reflection we see.
From two islands, the Rivettian fiction unlocks two
non-exclusive channels. The first is symmetry:
the often commented-on theatre/reality, improvisation/premeditation crystal (Deleuze’s term) in which the
above principle of permutation risks turning into a game of mortified mirrors.
The second is the archipelago.
When he directed Jeanne
la Pucelle, Rivette did
not only film Joan or Arc as warrior and prisoner. He made a portrait of Joan
as navigator of a
The archipelago in Rivette’s films is not only a geographic
fact: it is also an act of direction, and of editing (the dissemination of
insert shots in Céline and Julie intensifies the heroines’ mania to sow
objects around them: let us call this the politique of little stones –
little stones that germinate and grow while interlacing themselves like magic
beans). In Jacques Rivette, the Night
Watchman, the director told Serge Daney of his repugnance for cutting up
bodies:
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10. Henry James, The Other House (New York: New York
Review of Books, 1999), p. 106.
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| There are a lot of filmmakers who, in a
conscious or unconscious manner, work with this idea of a cut-up body: not only
the face, it can be any part of the body, but it is obvious that the face is
the privileged part. And, when I look in the viewfinder, I always have a
tendency, after sometimes wanting to, of moving back, because the face is all
alone ... I want to see the hands and, if I see the hands, I want to see the
body.
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What Rivette describes here is a choice that precedes the
film and whose main goal seems to be to preserve the body’s unity inside the
frame. But this choice is described as a camera movement (thus, already a
participant in the film) whose extension makes another intention appear: ‘Yes,
I’ve always wanted to see the body in its entirety and so, equally, that of the
person in the set, facing the people in relationship to whom the body acts,
reacts, moves, submits ... ’
Beyond the body’s unity, what therefore counts is the
movement by which a body finds itself inscribed in a space occupied by other
bodies: the linking of distinct unities, the creation of an archipelago. If
Rivette is the filmmaker of the sequence-shot and of the ensemble-shot, it is
because he needs to satisfy his desire to see the intervals between bodies. And
this is why an island is only valuable for him through the distance that
separates it from other islands. The lesson in ethnology becomes a
lesson in direction. Two scenes are exemplary: Joan confronted for the first
time in Charles VII’s court (the anonymous King among his subjects, identified
in that mass by the Virgin: an island in an archipelago, approached without a
hint of hesitation); and the dancing scene (or variation
dansée) in Haut bas fragile (1995) where, while Enzo Enzo sings
‘Naufragés volontaires’ (‘Voluntary
Castaways’, with its lyrics ‘Wanting to be lost at sea/to find the secret of the mysterious
islands’), the camera explores the small planetary system formed by the dancing
couples: docking with one, then another, pretending to ignore the couple of
Nathalie Richard and André Marcon, moving away and finding them again, staying
with them for the second verse, isolating them from the other dancers … then
isolating Richard who moves away from her partner, recording (through a cut in
the sequence-shot) the amorous wound that Marcon has just inflicted on her by
picking up Marianne Denicourt on the other end of the dance floor; accompanying
her across the dance floor as she approaches the new couple and walks around
them … then the departure of the two young women, Richard’s unexpected return
to the dance floor, her collision with Bruno Todeschini who was following
Denicourt, her final revolution around Marcon … and, finally, her definitive
departure, leaving Marcon completely alone at the moment that the ballad of the
voluntary castaways ends.
Joan of Arc belongs to the large family of
navigator-traveller-walkers who already populated Rivette’s films: Céline and
Julie in their boats; Frédérique and Colin navigating through the archipelago
of the Thirteen (Out 1); Maria Schneider and Joe Dallesandro landing at
Roissy and quickly embarking on a treasure hunt (Merry-go-round, released 1981, shot 1978); and
especially Baptiste (Pascale Ogier) in Le Pont du Nord (1981) – a quixotic young girl wearing
men’s clothing, mounted on a proud battle steed, transformed by dreams of
chivalry – and the woman whose successive prisons determine her battles, namely
Suzanne Simonin (The Nun, 1966).
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Like Gulliver, Suzanne mainly visits two islands (the convent
of repression and the convent of debauchery) that she studies, and whose local
mores she submits to, but to which she refuses to conform. These two islands,
apparently opposed to one another (as Lilliput and Brobdingnag were), are in
reality two elements of the same constraint. After her escape, Suzanne makes
some quick journeys to some second-rate islands, without ever finding any rest
(Gulliver then went to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg ...), until this house of
masks: the place of debauchery where she decides to kill herself by jumping out
of a window. ‘And like the madness of a man who, not knowing what navigation
is, would go to sea without a navigator, such is the madness of a creature who
embraces religious life without having God’s will as her guide’. (11)
Do the convents form an archipelago? The archdiocese that
takes pity on Suzanne but wants, above all, to preserve order, would have us
believe it: ‘The Church, through the providential diversity of its convents,
allows each person to realise her particular vocation. There is a place for
everyone in this great body’. This false archipelago is the Rivettian hell: the
appearance of ‘providential diversity’ where, for Suzanne, there is only one,
great, doctrinal body. This is also, essentially, Carpenter’s nightmare. Evil,
in his films, is both discontinuous in its incarnation and indivisible in its
essence, both organic and ideological. The almost systematic presence of
churches in Carpenter’s films is significant. In Prince of Darkness (as
in Vampires) the contamination of bodies is also a process of
conversion. The jet of liquid in Prince of Darkness is a sermon; it
penetrates the body through the mouth (people literally drink its words) and
its ‘message’ is transmitted mouth to mouth. In Vampires, a priest gives
birth to vampirism. Freed from their master, the vampires find themselves cut
off from their origin. They no longer incarnate evil, but an unfortunate
people. The couple that survives at the end of the film present a new version
of Adam and Eve chased out of Paradise. In They Live, the colonisation
process is only another mode of ideological contamination: the colonies are
built on a foreign land in order to exploit its riches and spread the new
culture; the colonised people are converted to the cult of savage liberalism.
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11. These are the words of Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet in The Nun.
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Ideological organicity is represented by a double link in
Carpenter: blood and broadcasting. In order to unmask the
creature who is hiding in one of them, the hero of The Thing takes a few
drops of blood from each of his companions and plunges a heated needle into
each little cup of blood – knowing that, indirectly, he is putting iron in the
creature’s body. The scattered members of the discontinuous body are thus
irrigated by the same blood, and joined by the sole instinct of conservation. In Assault on Precinct 13, we are struck by not only the lack of
differentiation between the attackers, but by their indifference toward
themselves: they do not try to protect themselves individually; they expose
themselves to their adversaries’ bullets with a frightening willingness. This
indifference makes the same statement as the creature’s anguish for overall
preservation in The Thing. It also characterises
the behaviour of Alfred Hitchcock’s birds and George Romero’s zombies, whose
collective consciousness – species consciousness – is also an unconsciousness of the self. This kind
of unity is consecrated by a gesture that is very similar to that of MacReady
(Kurt Russell) in The Thing: the three different leaders (black, white, Puerto
Rican) mixing their blood at the beginning of the film. Another variant of this
solidarity of blood is found in The Fog: this fog is the unifying
substance of the Elizabeth Dane’s crew, but the crew’s solidarity with the boat
is something else – when a piece of the boat found on the beach suddenly starts
to ooze, we realise that the organic unity goes beyond the crew’s bodies and
includes the boat itself. When the crew ‘comes back to life’ to seek its
revenge, the wood starts bleeding again, simultaneously.
In Carpenter’s films, a mental link forms a network of
separated organs: it links the children, and conditions pregnant mothers by
dissuading them from aborting, in Village
of the Damned; associates the vampire and its victim during its
‘metamorphosis’ in Vampires; and breaks the switchboards at the moment
in The Fog when the sailors’ vengeance is set in motion. When the
creature, such as in They Live, is the social body, it is television
that assures the conditioning of individuals by instituting a pensée unique (the ‘single thought’
targeted by critics of neoliberalism). At the beginning of They Live, Carpenter arranges, in his character’s path, a man
stopped in front of TVs in a window display, broadcasting what looks like an
advertised version of the American myth: we see Mount Rushmore (the
monumentalising of history); an eagle (symbol of imperialism); an Indian dance
(folklore masking the reality of a massacre); a man on a horse in a rodeo and a
child riding a pony (other images of white folklore, terrifying in this case
because their juxtaposition suggests contamination: this child is frightening
like the children in Village of the Damned are frightening); young
basketball players who high-five each other in slow motion (popular sport and
its propagandist hijacking: ‘the fighters’).
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Blood ties and telepathy are no less important in Rivette’s
films. ‘The ties of blood must be renewed’ – this is the leitmotif of one of
the ‘zombies’ in Céline and Julie, whose agonising promise of eternity
(the ghosts’ and the film’s, by reversal and permutation) is solidified by the
‘blood ties’ established between the ‘island of the dead’ and the land of the
living. (12) The shared fate of Rivette’s characters is transmission of
thought, clairvoyance, premonitions and feelings of déjà vu. For Carpenter and Rivette alike, blood ties and mental
ties are associated with the danger of the loss of individuality. But while
Carpenter films the danger at the moment of its realisation – implying a
gaining of consciousness on the part of individuals threatened as
representatives of the human race – Rivette, in Céline and Julie, remains at the stage of suspicion.
Céline and Julie’s universe looks like a transitional object. ‘Of the
transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us
and the baby that we will never ask the question: “Did you conceive of this or
was it presented to you from without?” The important point is that no decision
on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated’. (13) In the
film, the question arises, but the answer is always differed. Thus, the dual
danger of the loss of individuality continues to weigh on the characters: the
collapse of the Ego or its omnipotence.
In Carpenter’s films, in order to struggle against the extension
of the ‘great body’, humans can, in turn, attempt to create their own network.
They try hard to ‘emit’, to broadcast (pirated shows broadcast by the Resistance
in They Live, video-dreams sent from the future to the scientists in Prince
of Darkness). This is what the lighthouse guardian understood in The Fog.
Even when her son is in danger, she stays at her microphone to maintain a vocal
connection at all costs, to oppose the blanket of fog with the warmth of a
‘human voice’. The rebels in They Live broadcast from a ghetto on the
border of Los Angeles; the guardian in The Fog from a lighthouse on the
edge of the sea. The question of the island is thus posed in new terms: the
‘great body’ against the ‘peripheral station’, the island in relation to the
continent.
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12. Miss Angel, one of the characters in the house,
alternately borrows the bodies of Céline and Julie.
13. D. W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional
Phenomena’, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 12.
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...
and what is the importance of the name of the future city to others? They are
also looking for their little house, not that one in the middle of the others,
but this one, among the trees, at a distance ...
– Rivette, review of Boris Barnet’s Щедрое
лето (Bountiful Summer, 1951) (14)
Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders
dumped here and there in an outside city lot, imagine some of them magnified
into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea, and you will have a fit idea of the
general aspect of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group rather of extinct
volcanoes than of isles, looking much as the world at large might after a penal
conflagration’.
– Herman Melville, Encantadas
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14. Jacques Rivette, ‘Une nouvelle visage de la
pudeur’, Cahiers du
cinéma, no. 20 (February 1953), pp. 49-50.
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The straightforward metaphor of the island only accounts for
the land/sea configuration: land at the centre, the sea around it. Bringing
into play the relationship between a centre and its periphery is, then,
appropriate for an insular reading. The police station in Assault on
Precinct 13, which becomes the centre of a hostile circumference,
corresponds to this vision of the island; just like the church in Prince of
Darkness which, during the state of siege (the Resistance inside opposed to
centripetal forces), associates the image of a seed in the process of
germinating (the pressure of the centrifugal forces exerted from the ‘belly’ of
the church by the green liquid’s gyrating movement) and a magnet (the
schizophrenic hobos are attracted to the outside of the church like moths to
light – the container constitutes itself as the centre as it reorganises the
world around it).
If, on the other hand, we consider the island in relation to
the continent, what stands out is that it is off-centred. The island’s
self-containment counts less than its geographic situation, which is ‘on the
side’. This is precisely the status of Los Angeles in Escape from L.A.,
the prologue of which explains to us that an earthquake separated it from the
rest of the United States. Compared by a fisherman-President to Sodom and
Gomorrah, Los Angeles has become the island of the condemned, on the margin of
a totalitarian continent: not a centre, but a disowned territory, abandoned (as
the island of lepers in The Fog must have been).
As a closed space, the island is constituted by lines of
force that trace its contours (difficulty of entering: Céline and Julie;
difficulty of leaving: The Nun), by its particular ‘vocation’
(theatrical, religious ...), by its heterogeneity inside the film (which also
brings into play the light as well as the acting and editing), and by the
constitution of an ‘isolating’ environment. This space in the films of Rivette
and Carpenter is never constructed around the island. Instead, it is what
carries the island in its own off-centring. The residential suburb (
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Abrupt movements of displacement characterise Carpenter’s
and Rivette’s films: the most striking example is the night-time sequence in Halloween (1978) where Donald Pleasence
goes to the mental hospital where Michael Myers is situated. The car resolutely
breaks off from the world of reason. The mental hospital is not a place for confining
vacillating consciousnesses; it is the border where humans become dull, obscure
and quiet – a place of drifting reserved for phantoms, beyond which Myers is
held, detached from affection like Los Angeles was from the American continent.
For his part, Rivette describes Le Pont du Nord as a film that leaves
behind conventional neighbourhoods (the Arc de Triomphe) to go, little by
little, towards neighbourhoods that are more peripheral, or on the way to
disappearing. (15)
The same movement drives Out 1 to the doors of Paris
and beyond, ‘outside the walls’, to a seafront house that, little by little,
establishes itself as the denominator of the Thirteen: a convergence point that
is also a border and even an outside. Thinking they have landed in an
underground passage, the two rebels in They Live find that they are in a
ship in the middle of outer space; then, in leaving it, find themselves on the
roof of a building. The church that the writer Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow)
makes his dwelling in In the Mouth of Madness (1994) – following the Prince of Darkness’ example – is on the
margins of a city that is itself in the middle of nowhere. Consistently (and
well before Scream, 1996),
Rivette uses telephones to produce troubling effects of aural dislocation (in Céline
and Julie, Out 1 and Secret défense [1998], the voice on the phone is, in reality, a voice outside
the frame).
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15. Serge Daney and Jean Narboni, ‘Entretien avec Jacques
Rivette’, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 327 (September 1981), p. 11.
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Many times, navigation in Rivette’s films risks becoming
drifting. In Carpenter’s films, we meet only exiles (the alien in Starman [1984], the mother and child at the
end of Village of the Damned, the deported in Escape from L.A.,
the unemployed guy who is an economic exile in They Live) and
ex-patriots (the fallen couple in Vampires, or Jamie Lee Curtis in The
Fog, a hitchhiker without attachments, convinced that she is cursed as
well). (16) The world is in a state of fatigue. Its edifices and institutions
are worn out: the police station in Assault on Precinct 13 is going to
close; the church in Prince of Darkness is hardly frequented by the
faithful anymore; the church in Village of the Damned empties out as the
children grow older; the Vampires evolve in an out-of-time setting in a ghost
town right out of a Western. In Carpenter’s films, there is a certain
melancholia about vacant lots – a reverie of low tide. The world is worn out,
but it gets its force from this wear and tear. The prisoner and the police
station employee in Assault on Precinct 13 seem to draw strength from
their state of fatigue. In Village of the Damned, fatigue and sadness
are also what arouse in Reeve’s mind the powerful image of a wave that serves
as a wall for him.
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16. At the beginning of Escape
from L.A., families surrounded by soldiers line up in front of a big sign
that says, ‘Deportation’. And we guess that the hitchhiker’s curse in The Fog is also a condition of learning:
in Village of the Damned, it is the experience of solitude that makes
David enter the human community, creating a defense against the egotism
collectively incarnated by the other children.
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We sometimes find a similar reverie in Rivette’s films.
First, because low tide is the moment when pebbles and strangely shaped shells,
polished by the outgoing tide, become beached; the moment, as well, when the
water finds itself trapped in rocky cavities, creating a micro-space, a closed
vessel (the bedroom in L’Amour par terre where a crab walks or the house
in Céline and Julie are, in this sense, low tide objects). Second,
because low tide is in retreat. Utopians go to sleep (Out 1); the
militarism of the 1960s and political struggles have turned out poorly, leaving
a bitter taste (Le Pont du Nord,
What is this world? In the fifteenth century, Nicholas of
Cusa defined God as a ‘circle whose centre is everywhere and whose
circumference is nowhere’. There could be, in Rivette’s films, a hidden God who
would thus be a ‘circle whose centre is nowhere and whose circumference is
everywhere’. We are all islanders, but our island is the periphery of a missing
centre. In the case of Carpenter, it is not God who has disappeared – it is us
who have fallen, condemned to wander the painful periphery of the Lost
Paradise.
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17. Daney & Narboni, ‘Entretien avec Jacques Rivette’, p.
13.
18. This expression, used in Jeanne
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from Issue 3: Masks |
French text © Emmanuel Siety 2002. English translation © Ted Fendt and LOLA 2012. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |