CINEASTE, Fall 2009 37

In Philippe Garrel’s Emergency Kisses (LesBaisers de secours, 1989), there is amoment when we find ourselves looking

at a window. Natural light only partly illu-minates the interior of the room from whichthe camera is looking. There is some distant,muffled talk; finally, Mathieu (played byGarrel himself) enters the frame and comesto the phone—called to it, or called by it,like a Siren’s song, as characters in the filmsof this underdiscussed French director sooften are.

Phone calls are invariably dramaticevents in Garrel’s films. In the short RueFontaine (1984), René (Jean-Pierre Léaud)busts into the domestic life of his lover byway of a downstairs phone,begging to see her. In TheBirth of Love (La Nais-sance de l’amour, 1993),Paul (Lou Castel) is calledto the phone after hisnight spent away fromhome, in order to be reprimanded by hissurly, teenage son, Pierre (Max McCarthy).In Le Cœur fantôme (1996—the title alludesto Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”), the life of apainter, Philippe (Luis Rego), is torn apartby the call that alerts him to his father’sinternment in hospital. And in I Can NoLonger Hear the Guitar (J’entends plus la gui-tare, 1991), a phone call from Marianne(Johanna ter Steege), the ex-lover of Gérard(Benoît Régent), is so disturbing and unset-tling in its effect on his home that his wife,Aline (Brigitte Sy), hears a premonitory,phantom, virtual noise just before the actualphone ring.

Phone calls are hauntings in Garrel’s cin-ema, making demonic mischief with timeand space, heralding voices from the dead—or the soon-to-be dead, which amounts toalmost the same thing in these films. Frenchcritic Thierry Jousse has suggested that,increasingly in Garrel’s narrative work—theperiod begun by L’Enfant secret (The SecretChild) in 1982, which is chiefly the work dis-cussed in this piece—there are only twokinds of characters: survivors and phan-toms.1 Both kinds of character are definedin relation to a primal trauma or mortal cat-astrophe that occurs during a film’s fictionor just before it, or sometimes long beforeit—traumas such as death, separation, orelectroshock treatment.

Each new film by Garrel tends to begreeted as a summit, a distillation, a synthe-

sis… and sometimes an impasse. This pointsto a simple and obvious fact: that the samecharacter types, situations, experiences,motifs, and issues tend to come around timeand again, identifiable as the next chapter ofthe same, ever-expanding autoportraitroman.

Devotees of his work become tenderlyfamiliar with these representations of theauteur’s life story: his artistically-mindedparents (including actor-father MauriceGarrel); his precocious beginnings as ateenage filmmaker; the heady involvementat the barricades in 1968; his meeting withthe Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico,and their slide into drug addiction during

the Seventies; his period (during the Sixtiesand Seventies) of making silent, lush,mythopoetic avant-garde portrait films offaces in exotic landscapes; his descent intomadness and the painful experience of elec-troshock therapy; his crawl back to artisticproductivity and his negotiation of narrativecinema in the early Eighties; his circle offriends (painters, writers, actors, filmmak-ers) from the “Zanzibar” group of the Sixties(whose work has been resuscitated in recentyears) to the present day; the breakup of hismarriage to Brigitte Sy, the birth and growthof his son, Louis Garrel, and the other, moremysterious women who were fleeting lovers,girlfriends, mistresses…

But even this aspect of Garrel’s work isless “first person cinema” than somethingmore collective—a “family romance” basedon ages, generations, transmissions. Liberté,la nuit (1984) is Garrel’s imaginative projec-tion about the generation of his father at aprevious younger moment—the momentwhen the father becomes the son’s mirror ordouble. Le Cœur fantôme imagines thefather’s death, its real and symbolic conse-quences. The Birth of Love begins the direc-tor’s reflection on the agonized assumptionof his own parenthood—will he merelyrepeat the irresponsible, wayward sins of thefather? And Regular Lovers (Les amantsréguliers, 2005) brings everything to a peak

in its three-way dinnertable scene of son-play-ing-father (Louis Garrel),ex-wife (Brigitte Sy,Louis’s mother) playinghis own mother, andMaurice Garrel as now

the somewhat dotty but hypnotically appeal-ing grandfather. And Louis Garrel reappearsas the star of his father’s most recent film,the somewhat supernatural love story Fron-tier of Dawn (La Frontière de l’aube, 2008),which is among his most crystalline, perfect-ly formed works.

Garrel’s ingenious casting adds anotherlayer of complexity to this perpetual rein-vention of self: what sort of alter ego is this,that can be played successively by Henri deMaublanc (L’Enfant secret), Benôit Régent (ICan No Longer Hear the Guitar), Lou Castel(The Birth of Love), Luis Rego (Le Cœur fan-tôme), essayist-novelist Mehdi Belhaj Kacem(Wild Innocence/Sauvage innocence, 2001),and his own son? In Night Wind (Le Vent dela nuit, 1998), Garrel splits his characteristicalter ego in two: he is both the callow, youngman (Xavier Beauvois) involved with awealthy, suicidal hysteric (CatherineDeneuve)—a displaced representation ofJean Seberg in the Seventies—and the older,wiser, silent, ruggedly good-looking man(Daniel Duval) melancholically recalling hispast. In this film, Garrel takes his autobio-graphical fancy to a new and shocking con-clusion: he contemplates his own death bysuicide, an intensely ethical as well as exis-tential act, in the shadow of Jean Eustacheand Guy Debord.

Yet, after arriving at this grim plateau,there is a rebirth through an immersion inyouth: Wild Innocence (a very free variation

A Cinema of Intimate Spectacle:The Poetics of Philippe Garrel

by Adrian Martin

Pages from an auteur's autobiography, as

the director of Regular Lovers and Frontierof Dawn continues to make art from his life.

Philippe Garrel in a 1999 interview for theCinéma, de notre temps French TV series.

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38 CINEASTE, Fall 2009

on the Nico story he has obsessively retoldsince L’Enfant secret), and especially RegularLovers, where at last the great myth of originunderlying the entire Garrel œuvre isrevealed, re-created, and directly depicted:1968 and the riots, the life-and-death strug-gles with police at the barricades… Andnow, the paranoia, the sense of being aneternal outsider to society, the fragility ofsanity and the anxiety of ever holding onto aglorious moment, all this suddenly makeperfect sense in the light of that momentousorigin in a divided Paris of’68 that resembles nothingso much (in Garrel’s retro-spective depiction) as aBosnian war zone.

Like the celebrated Tai-wanese director Tsai Ming-liang (The Wayward Cloud,2005), Garrel creates his own, distinctive,poetic universe from the repetition and styl-ization of select details from everyday life. Ihave the overwhelming sense, when I expe-rience a film by Garrel, that I am witnessingthe birth, or the rebirth, of the cinematicmedium itself—as in José Luis Guerin (InSylvia’s City, 2007), a rediscovery of the pri-mal, virgin image from the first films byLumière. It is exactly as Bernardo Bertoluccihas often said of his apprenticeship underPier Paolo Pasolini in the early Sixties: everytracking shot felt like the first-ever trackingshot, every close-up the first close-up… But,even more intimately than this formal dis-covery, it is the world itself—in its mostseemingly “regular” faces, bodies, gestures,spaces and places—that comes into being as wewatch Garrel’s work.

So let us begin an inventory of the ele-ments of Garrelian poetics. Windows,for instance, and the view beyond a

window to a passing street scene. Doors (socrucial also to Ingmar Bergman and RobertBresson, and today Pedro Costa): closeddoors about to be opened, half-shut doorshinging us between different characters,spaces, and events. Walking: individuals,couples, groups of friends walking down astreet, towards or away from the camera, asin a silent movie by Chaplin. Rain falling, its

drops accumulating and sliding on a glasssurface, like the window of a room, or a car.And hands, in close-up insert, feeling theirway, touching the hand or face or hair ofanother.

Garrel’s films have a characteristicallyaustere, severe, minimalistic appearance.This is because walls, rooms, and streets forma perfectly self-enclosed architectural imagi-nary. All European cities seem the same. Theinterior walls are always bare, featureless. Allapartments look the same, as do all cafés:Garrel rarely plays on the class differences ofhis characters in terms of their environment,or on the visible vicissitudes of their socialmobility (as in François Truffaut or AndréTéchiné), preferring to subject them all,equally, to the same austerity. The Garrelianliving space is dominated by bedrooms; by

bathrooms, which we sometimes glimpse inmoments of unexpected intimacy; and bybits of kitchens—sinks and chopping boards,with very occasionally some half-heartedeating. (Unlike Claude Chabrol or Jean Renoir,Garrel’s cinema is not one of hearty ingestion.)Streets provide the passageways betweendomestic living spaces and hotel rooms (inwhich amorous assignations occur)—andthese hotel rooms, too, all look the same.

In that passage through streets, certainfixtures and stopovers also regularly recur:

the entrances and exits tométro stations (the unfor-gettably “lightweight” finalmoments of The Birth ofLove); spots for embarkingand disembarking fromcabs; and a range of servicepoints—tabacs, hardware

shops, florists, chemists, bookstores (thereis, however, nothing so modern as a video,DVD, or even CD shop). Outside this citybeat, there are the trips, the holidays by trainto country in Emergency Kisses and Le Cœurfantôme, the car ride to Italy and back in TheBirth of Love, and the extended voyage toBerlin in Night Wind.

Every great, distinctive filmmaker can becharacterized by the way he or she handlesthe passage from day to night. Some direc-tors (like Godard) destroy even the faintestsense of a normal day-night progression.For Garrel (as for Chantal Akerman), how-ever, day and night are the fundamentalpoles of a poetic logic. In The Birth of Love,day and night are mapped onto places, ontotypes of characters, onto types of images,and even onto types of bodies. Paul’s wife,

CINEASTE 38

“Each new film by Garrel tends to be greeted

as a summit, a distillation, a synthesis…

and sometimes an impasse.”

High solitude: Marianne (Johanna ter Steege) cries alone over the passing of the “heroic days”in Philippe Garrel’s I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar (1991) (photo courtesy of Zeitgeist Films).

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CINEASTE, Fall 2009 39

Fauchon (Marie-Paule Laval), is seen in theoverexposed white of kitchen or hospital; hislover, known only as “the young girl”(Aurélia Alcais) is mostly seen in night streets.

Back in the bedrooms, there is sleep. Gar-rel is a poet of sleep to rival, even surpass,Murnau. From its first moments, RegularLovers shows us its characters supine, laidout on couches or on the floor, relaxed asthey suck on the opium pipe. Among hissilent, abstract, experimental portrait-filmsof the Seventies, Les Hautes solitudes (1974)with Jean Seberg concentrates mainly on theWarholian spectacle of sleep—because whatevent could pose for us, more acutely, the“paradox of the actor” (as Denis Diderotonce dubbed it), whether he/she is “per-forming” or simply “being”? There are twotypes of sleeper in Garrel’s films: dead sleepersand light sleepers. Dead sleepers zone out,escape all torment and misery for thoseblessed moments of sheer unconsciousness.Light sleepers are those disturbed souls whosuffer every kind of night terror—and perhapsthe single most terrifying sight in any Garrelfilm is the glimpse of a child who cannot sleep.

In an eerie, almost horrific moment ofFrontier of Dawn, Louis Garrel reachesupward in a cold sweat, suddenly awake—and connected to his lover, far away, at herunseen moment of suicide. Garrelian sleepis the gateway to death—its prefiguration,for death, as Regular Lovers calls it, is the“sleep of the just”—and to the realm ofdreams. We should never overlook Garrel’sattachment to Surrealism: dream sequencesappear prominently in Le Cœur fantôme,Rue Fontaine, The Birth of Love, Wild Inno-cence, Regular Lovers and the forbiddinglyconvoluted Elle passé tant d’heures sous lessunlights (1986).

Garrel often films encounters and part-ings, hellos and goodbyes. The difficult,melancholic endings of affairs are balancedby the tremendous élan of the first glance,the first words, the first touch. Indeed, inGarrel’s cinema, love is always the same,always a repetition, and yet it is alwaysnew—because, as Leonard Cohen sang,“Everyone to love must come/but like arefugee.”

Deconstruction is not a very exactword for the sort of formal play andvariation we find in Garrel. Neither,

finally, is minimalism a terribly exact word,for the minimalism of Garrel is not that ofAkerman or Jean-Marie Straub and DanièleHuillet or Tsai. In Garrel’s work, the mini-mal effect, that pure and intense atmos-phere, comes from the pristine isolation ofelements. As the late French critic AlainPhilippon once suggested, Garrel plays uponthe “alternation of accelerations and slow-ings down, ruptures and open stretches.”2

It is sometimes said that Garrel’s filmsare odes to malaise. They are usually sad(“sad and proud of it,” as director Raúl Ruizonce fondly commented) and sometimesdevastating; but it is also possible to under-stand them not in terms of the mirror-iden-tification they allow with a certain, deeplyexpressed sorrow, guilt, angst, or melan-choly, but rather in terms of a philosophy ofmovement, circulation, and change. Howelse to grasp the exactness, strangeness, andcomplexity of tone at the end of RegularLovers, in which the bleakness of death coex-ists with an invigorating lightness—and inwhich the total artistic gesture of the work,our exhilaration at that, redefines our senseof the explicit “unhappy ending”?

Garrel’s cinema is the cinema of restless-ness. Within each film, nothing—not eventhe finest happiness—stays in place for long.Garrel’s films explore what so many otherfilms simply exploit: that well-known the-matic of everyday life in which situationsand relationships sail along fine, on mutualpromises and understandings, dreams and

A happy family? Jeanne (Brigitte Sy), Mathieu (Philippe Garrel) and their young sonLo (Louis Garrel) attempt to patch things up on a holiday in Emergency Kisses (1989)(photo courtesy of Zeitgeist Films).

No way to say goodbye: Lilie (Clotilde Hesme), en route to New York, prepares to leaveFrançois (Louis Garrel) in Paris in Regular Lovers (2005) (photo courtesy of Zeitgeist Films).

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40 CINEASTE, Fall 2009

high hopes, until they fall into a deathly rut;and then, the necessity (both banal andmelodramatic) for revitalization, for a newenergy and inspiration; Jousse describes thisas a “coming back to the world.” AlthoughGarrel is rarely discussed within the terms(proposed by American philosopher StanleyCavell) of the “Hollywood comedy ofremarriage,” his films in factpropose one of the mostrelentless, profound prob-ings of the real, metaphoric,and symbolic stakes of mar-riage, divorce, and remar-riage, each time played outnot just between two people,but many, including all thefamily members of livinggenerations as well as spouses, ex-spouses,and lovers. And Frontier of Dawn winds upbeing the simple and precise story of a manon his wedding day—a man unable to makethe transition from a past, dead love to apresent, living one.

The philosopher (and cinephile) GillesDeleuze once proposed: “What Garrelexpresses in cinema is the problem of thethree bodies: the man, the woman and thechild. The holy story as gesture… the prob-lem of the three bodies remains cinemato-graphically as well as physically insoluble.”3

One of the things that truly haunts Garrel’scharacters—sometimes anticipated, some-times not—is the ever-constant possibilityof a slippage happening within this “holyfamily” structure, a person losing their“rightful place” in the triad and insteadoccupying another, far less comfortableplace. Garrelian fiction is comprised of pre-cisely the dread of such slippage, and thenits actuality. The haunting involves a dou-

bling: a grown son who finds himself,almost despite himself, genetically repeatingthe errancy and infidelity of his father (atendency discussed in The Birth of Love); orthe woman who refuses to have a child byher partner because there is another child,inaccessible or secret or even dead, by anearlier partner (the Nico-roman films).

Garrelian men and women fall into arange of almost mythic types. The men tendto be essentially one type: creatures of sinand guilt, incarnating the impulsive,unstoppable equivocation well captured inTerrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978):“Each of us got half angel, half devil in him.”Women tend to come in five types, andthese types clearly correspond (on the auto-biographical roman side) to key formativerelationships in Garrel’s life.

First, there is the wife-and-mother, likethe Brigitte Sy figure in I Can No LongerHear the Guitar, who saves the man from adeathly slide and gives him a solid, secure,normal family life. She is the angel ofredemption, but also (unfortunately for her)the symbol of everything that is static, thatwill lead to a domestic rut: accordingly, sheis invariably viewed indoors, glimpsed doingdishes, cooking, or changing the baby’s diapers—or sewing, as in the remarkable portrait-shotof Emmanuelle Riva in Liberté, la nuit.

Second, there are the lovers, usuallyyoung, sometimes multiple or serial (TheBirth of Love charts the transition from theend of one lover to the beginning of anoth-er): we see them associated with hotels, taxicabs, night streets, métro stations, incessantmovement; they talk about kissing or sex,not getting married or having babies (the

men are generally the senti-mental sex in Garrel’swork).

Third, there is the JeanSeberg figure, the wealthy,glamorous but fatally neu-rotic and disturbed olderlover, whom we see fleeting-ly in J’entends plus la guitare(where she briefly catalyzes

an uncomfortable, La Maman et la putain-style three-way arrangement), and at lengthin Le Vent de la nuit (the anxiety of aging,and the crisis of dependence, agonizinglycaught in Deneuve’s performance, and espe-cially her gesture of desperately kissingPaul’s hand).

Fourth, there is the Nico figure, the veryfigure of restless motion and perturbation,since she wants a relationship but cannotstay in it (in this, she behaves rather like themen), but is haunted by absent family ties—a complex that leads to prolonged self-destruction (through drugs), as well as theflawless ability to prompt carnage in otherpeople’s lives. Laura Smet offers the latestand possibly most vivid incarnation of thisfigure in Frontier of Dawn.

Fifth—a more marginal but significantthread in Garrel (as it is in Godard) is thefigure of the prostitute. The “availablewoman” is a fantasy figure of Garrel’s men,but she also tends to prompt disquieting

“It is the world itself—in its most seemingly

'regular' faces, bodies, gestures, spaces

and places—that comes into being as

we watch Garrel's work.”

Partners in crime: the sinister drug dealer Chas (Michel Subor) and his assistant Flora (Valérie Kéruzoré)on set during the making of the film-within-a-film in Wild Innocence (2001) (photo courtesy of Photofest).

37 GARREL ARTICLE 8/6/09 7:24 PM Page 40

CINEASTE, Fall 2009 41

memories and phantasms—as in RueFontaine, where a whore disconcertingly“reincarnates” Genie.

But these types rarely remain still. Justine(Aurélia Alcaïs) in Le Cœur fantôme passesfrom lover to hysteric to wife and suffersevery trauma and uncertainty of this pas-sage. Wild Innocence, with its novelistic, Ver-tigo-style conceit of the new lover, Lucie(Julia Faure), playing the tragic Nico figurein a film-within-the-film, charts a more sav-age disintegration—with the implicationthat she virtually becomes a whore for thesake of procuring drugs from the sinisterproducer, Chas (Michel Subor), by the end.Again in Le Cœur fantôme, a man comes tothe crossroads of his identity when the deathof his father seems to imply an instant pro-motion within the Symbolic realm, a suddencessation of the errant ways of a prolongedyouth.

Periods of mutual separation, too, alwaysforce Garrel’s alter ego heroes into closer,less fraught, more quotidian relationshipswith their children—they start pushingprams and waiting at school gates, ratherthan suffering for their art. Restlessness,doubt, and agitation invade Jeanne (BrigitteSy) on the train platform at the end of Emer-gency Kisses (a great Garrel set-piece andfinale, worthy of Hitchcock) when she sim-ply spies her filmmaker-husband’s specialactress, Minouchette (Anémone), on theopposite side of the station—and shedoesn’t return or acknowledge the look. Thescene is like an alarm bell going off, restart-ing the entire story with its primal, intimatedisequilibrium (“Why aren’t I in thefilm?”)—this situation in which a body is“not in its place.”

On another, deeper level, Garrel’s filmsare about the problems of interrelating birthand death—at every conceivable level ofexistence. Announcements of death, recentor imminent, fill his films, as do attempts ator preparations for suicide (the plot-motorof Le Vent de la nuit is simply this: a man isinterrupted, prevented several times over,from killing himself, and finally he suc-ceeds). We frequently see relationships end-ing, in their death throes; and we see pro-jects (like the film in Sauvage innocence)painfully crash—even the project of 1968,with Garrel describing Regular Lovers as theaccount of a grand failure, a chronicle oflosers.

At the same time, there is so much thatflowers: the birth of a child, held in a father’shands in the delivery room (The Birth ofLove); the birth of a scene during a theaterrehearsal (The Birth of Love again) or of apainting taking shape on the canvas (LeCœur fantôme) or of a film scene being shot(Wild Innocence), in Garrel’s many exactand loving depictions of the creativeprocess; the birth of love in a look, or thebirth of communal joy in dance (Wild Inno-cence, Regular Lovers). Birth and death existall at once in alternation, in tension, in tear-

ing contradiction, but also in some kind ofcosmic harmony or cycle—the kind that heexpressed, more abstractly, in his avant-garde epics of the Sixties and Seventies, likeThe Inner Scar (1970) and The Virgin’s Bed(1969).

Love is everywhere in Garrel’s films, anever-present possibility: it is born on thestreet in Le Cœur fantôme, in a café in TheBirth of Love. Yet the start of love, its firstflame, is only one small, inaugural step inthe Garrelian romance. Richer and deeperby far are those long, lingering embraces inhis films, among the most beautiful in allcinema: the embrace between Maurice Gar-rel and Christine Boisson in the darkness ofLiberté, la nuit; or the director and BrigitteSy at the domestic front door in EmergencyKisses; or Paul and Ulrike in The Birth ofLove, at the dinner table like two kids whenall the adults have left the room, desperately,plaintively wrapping themselves around oneanother, with him saying to her, “You’re mybaby”—the kind of intimate reality youthought you’d never see depicted properlyor well on screen. Nobody gets to suchembraces quickly or easily in these films:they take work, trial, and error—and time,experience, a flash of wisdom. As Frenchfilm scholar Fabien Boully has pointed out,there is no true link made between two peo-ple in Garrel that is not always, immediatelyand profoundly, a life-long connection, forbetter or worse.4 In Frontier of Dawn,inspired as it is by Théophile Gautier’s Spir-it, this connection becomes an amour àmort, a “love unto death.”

Such relationships—when they survivein the realm of the living, the everyday—require not only the abandon of themoment, but also tentativeness and tact; notonly new, revitalizing, mid-life crisis begin-

nings, but eternal circlings and ruminations.Love is truly a mystery in Garrel, and it hap-pens between people who (as in NicholasRay’s They Live by Night [1948]) have “notproperly been introduced to the world welive in”; the yearning to understand thismystery permeates these films, finding itsrichest expression in those early scenesbetween François and Lilie in Regular Lovers:two people standing or sitting together, justlooking, or being silent, or exchanging a fewwords… an intimate spectacle which returns usto the very heart of Garrel’s poetic cinema. �

End Notes1 Thierry Jousse, “Garrel: Là ou la parole devientgeste” (“The Place Where Speech Becomes Gesture”),in Jacques Aumont (ed.), L’Image et la parole (Paris:Cinémathèque française, 1999), pp. 195-204.2 Alain Philippon, “L’amour en fuite” (“Love on theRun”), Cahiers du cinéma, no. 472 (October 1993). 3 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 199.See also Philippe Garrel and Thomas Lescure, Unecaméra à la place du cœur [A Camera Instead of aHeart] (Aix en Provence: Admiranda/Institut del’image, 1992). 4 Fabien Boully, “Lier un corps à un regard: la rencon-tre et au-delà chez Philippe Garrel” (“Connecting aBody to a Look: The Encounter and Beyond”), Vertigo,no. 21 (2001).

Distribution Sources:I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar, Emergency Kisses andRegular Lovers are all available in the U.S. from Zeit-geist Films, www.zeitgeistfilms.com. The French dou-ble-pack of Sauvage innocence (Wild Innocence) and Lanaissance de l’amour (The Birth of Love) from Cahiersdu cinéma, www.cahiersducinema.com, comes withEnglish subtitles for the features (but not the extras oraccompanying texts). Night Wind is available on-line,after subscription and for a fee, through the WorldCinema Foundation-affiliated Web site “The Auteurs,”at www.theauteurs.com. From the earlier, avant-gardeperiod of Garrel’s work, La Révelateur (a silent film,hence no dialog) is available from Re:Voir in France, atwww.re-voir.com.

A camera instead of a heart: François (Louis Garrel) on assignment to photograph the actressCarole (Laura Smet) in her apartment—thus sparking their relationship in Frontier of Dawn.

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