Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 11, March 2004
Florence Martin
Reading Beineix:
Powrie's _Jean-Jacques Beineix_
Phil Powrie _Jean-Jacques
Beineix_ Manchester and New York:
Manchester
University Press,
2001 ISBN 719055334 240 pp. Phil Powrie's
_Jean-Jacques Beineix_, a dense little book from Manchester
University Press's series on French
Film Directors, is
useful in many ways. It can be used in Film Studies classes
(and I certainly plan to use it next time I teach one of
Beineix's films). It has also helped me unravel the polemic
around Beineix, the *cinema du look*, and _Cahiers du
cinema_. It is amazingly erudite and well crafted in its
argumentation around complex theoretical notions (such as
the baroque, postmodernism, and Kleinian psychoanalysis), as
well as more focused cinematic techniques (I am thinking
here of Powrie's remarkable analysis of voice -- Depardieu's
voice, and the notion of 'voice-over' in his study of _La
Lune dans le caniveau_). Finally it is helpful because it
offers a clear, multi-layered reading of Beineix's films,
both in dialogue with one another (as *oeuvre*) and as stand
alone pieces. In the latter readings, each film is studied
against the backdrop of the history of French cinema, in
relationship to French cinema criticism, and against the
backdrop of the history of ideas in the 1980s and subsequent
years. In that, Powrie's book tackles the issue of reception
with great dexterity, describing the viewer's *horizon
d'attentes* (while viewing the film), as well as her
anticipation of the viewing via her reading of the various
critical readings of the film. The book also avoids the
classic pitfall of hagiography often incurred by a study of
this type, by judiciously selecting biographical data (using
only what is relevant in Beineix's life to the shaping of
his work), and maintaining a healthy critical distance
toward Powrie's object of discourse. Finally, the book is
written in a luminously clear and dynamic style. Both a
Professor of French Cultural Studies and Director of the
Centre
for Research into Film and
Media at the
University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Powrie is also the
co-founder with Susan Hayward of _Studies
in French Cinema_,
an association and a journal of which he is one of the two
general editors. After his seminal studies,
_French
Cinema in the 1980s:
Nostalgia and the Crisis of Masculinity_ and
_French
Cinema in the 1990s:
Continuity and Difference_, as well as his more recent
_French Cinema: A Student Guide_ co-authored with Keith
Reader, and numerous articles, Powrie is proposing here a
study of Beineix's films that not only challenges some of
the received ideas around Beineix, but also the ivory tower
of French film criticism. The book is full of
surprises, not least his ironical use of paratext, and has
several narratives going: the study proper and the
peripheral texts (Foreword, Preface, footnotes, etc.) both
complement and collide with each other in a somewhat
postmodern ironic stance. For instance, between a Preface by
the author (in which Powrie posits himself squarely against
'authority') and the chapters of the study proper, Powrie
invites Beineix to write a Foreword. The latter -- as
*auteur* turned into an object of study --
writes: 'That it should be an
Englishman who is rescuing a Frenchman from the stake of
French critics smacks of Joan of Arc's revenge . . . I think
it is worth emphasizing . . . I have always deliberately
hidden things in my films. Powrie has discovered some of
those secrets. I don't feel I have been unveiled, quite the
contrary, I am happy to share these secrets with others.'
(xiii) The aim of the
'Englishman', it turns out, is not simply to unveil the
secrets of Beineix's films -- to deconstruct, analyze, and
evaluate their intrinsic qualities -- but also to carefully
examine where Beineix has stood in the phases of French
cinematic production since the 1980s, how his work has been
received (and vilified), and to map out various approaches
to his evolving cinema. Powrie's book is therefore more
organic than Beineix's Foreword lets on. And, of course, it
is also more 'authoritative' than Powrie's Preface lets
on. Powrie first
contextualizes Beineix as an individual (from his early love
of cinema to his experience in advertising) and as an author
in postmodern times. In his 'Beineix in Context' chapter he
unfolds the contradictions inherent to the notion of the
'postmodern' as style, and goes on to look at postmodern
cinema as a way of imaging the collapse of high and popular
cultures, by circulating images without origin, reproducing
the always/already seen. The images of postmodern cinema,
highly stylized and ironic, not only fragment narratives,
but also collapse surface and meaning, and trigger in the
viewer pleasure rather than thought, thereby stepping away
from the cinema hailed by the sacrosanct French institution
of _Cahiers du Cinema_. This focus on the visual, which led
to the phrase 'cinema du look', is carefully analyzed
throughout the book. Here I would like to
linger a bit on Powrie's Deleuzian analysis of Beineix's
films as an instance of the 'neo-baroque' (delineated in the
second chapter and in the analysis of _Diva_ in Chapter 3).
This is where Powrie's gesture of secret-digging is most
visible: his exemplary analysis of _Diva_, while also
masterful at recapping the scholarship on the topic, ends up
proposing a strikingly original two-part reading of the
film. The first part, grounded in the psychoanalytical terms
of the 1980s (taking his cues from Melanie Klein's narrative
of the child's moves toward splitting away from the
perceived 'bad', threatening mother, and toward fusion with
the 'good' mother, prior to the Oedipal phase) convincingly
shows Jules as a pre-oedipal figure, and demonstrates how
the viewer is led to identify with the pre-oedipal drama
through what Klein called 'memories of feelings'. The film
also shows one of the recurring couples in Beineix's work:
'bad' fathers (Saporta) and sons (Jules). The second part of
the argument is grounded in Deleuze's reading of baroque
folds or pleats ('a vertiginous animality that gets
entangled in the pleats of matter, but also an organic or
cerebral humanity . . . that allows it to rise up').
[1] This is an especially apt lens to look at _Diva_
(or, for that matter, other postmodern artifacts) because it
helps us understand how what we see and hear in the film
connects to the numerous instances of splitting/folding
which aim at the unutterable, the unreachable. At the end of
Powrie's reading of _Diva_, the voice of the opera singer,
her very performance, is given a new meaning beyond any
analysis I have seen of the film or any analysis of the use
of voice in cinema. At the end of the day, what Powrie is
doing here is paving the way for a new theoretical way of
looking at film-derived pleasure or emotion as a universal
process. The ensuing chapters --
analyses of _La lune dans le caniveau _, _37º2 le
matin_, _Roselyne et les lions_, _IP5_, and _Mortel
Transfert_ -- help configure an *oeuvre* with specific
authorial marks or clues left in the film as signatures,
much like Hitchcock's apparitions in his own film. These
include: the use of filters (notoriously blue in _Diva_,
green in _La lune dans le caniveau_, and cian -- blue-green
-- in _Mortel Transfert_ ); the recurring 'Zen dialogue' as
a fetish dialogue from one film to the next (started in the
baguette butter-spreading scene of _Diva_); the reflections
of women fetishized in mirrors and glasses (as Beineix
intentionally stages his own filmic representation of
woman); the presence of fetish objects (in particular cars:
the white Rolls Royce in _Diva_, the red Ferrari in _La lune
dans le caniveau_, the yellow Mercedes in _37º2 le
matin_, the black BMW in _IP5_, the yellow Porsche and grey
Cadillac in _Mortel Transfert_); and the use of empty spaces
(e.g. church, lighthouse, cathedral, parking lot). Through
it all, Powrie explains, Beineix images the spiritual by
exploring the tensions between the fetishized other and
empty spaces. Beineix's *cinema du look*
does not only appear authorial on the surface: it also deals
with themes that are both intensely personal, and as such
idiosyncratic (such as Beineix's double loss of a mother and
a friend, that caused him to stop filming fiction features
for ten years and shoot documentaries instead), and
universal. When they show 'bad' father figures and 'weak'
son figures, his films illustrate a crisis in masculinity
(that Powrie examines _French Cinema in the 1980s_) which
conflates the degradation of fathers and the wilting away of
sons, but it also does something else. It alludes to another
world of possibilities, both inner (the world of the
unconscious and of the spiritual) and 'out there' (in the
baroque vertical sense). In the end, his films pretend to be
Zen-like (either literally in the projected images of calm,
roomy interiors with Gorodish's wave, or ironically with the
vision of a house being emptied by angry Betty), but their
Zen-like surface barely covers another world of deep
turbulences. Powrie's _Jean-Jacques
Beineix_ succeeds in showing how Beineix is not merely
making good-looking films, but actually delivers complex
messages. Anti-establishment Powrie thus efficiently goes
against the grain of the unfair, relentless criticism spewed
forth by the French film establishment against Beineix, and
establishes him as a solid author. Baltimore, Maryland,
USA Note 1. Deleuze, _The Fold:
Leibniz and the Baroque_ (1988), trans. Tom Conley
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.
66. Bibliography Powrie, Phil, _French
Cinema in the 1980s: Nostalgia and the Crisis of
Masculinity_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). --- _French Cinema in the
1990s: Continuity and Difference_ (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999). Powrie, Phil, and Keith
Reader, _French Cinema: A Student Guide_ (London: Arnold,
2002), Filmography Short Films _Le Chien de M. Michel_
(_Mr Michel's Dog_), 1977. Fiction Films _Diva_, 1981. _La Lune dans le caniveau_
(_The Moon in the Gutter_), 1983. _37º2 le matin_
(_Betty Blue_), 1986. _Roselyne et les lions_
(_Roselyne and the Lions_), 1989. _IP5: L'Ille aux
pachydermes_ (IP5: The Island of Pachyderms_, 1992.
_Mortel Transfert_
(_Mortal Transfer_), 2001. Nonfiction
Films _Les Enfants de Roumanie_
(_The Children of Romania_), 1992. _Otaku_, 1993. _Place Clichy sans
complexe_ (_Place Clichy with no complex/cineplex_),
1994. _Assigne a residence_
(_Locked-in Syndrome_), 1997. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004 Florence Martin, 'Reading
Beineix: Powrie's _Jean-Jacques Beineix_',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 11, March 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n11martin>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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