I originally read this text on 26th October at Burley Fisher Books — all for the purpose of launching The Hinge of a Metaphor, edited by Richard Skinner. It’s a really great book of essays on films and filmmakers. You should get a copy.
Jean-Daniel Pollet is dead.
There was a point at which Jean-Daniel Pollet was not dead; this was certainly the case in 1958 when, age 22, he made his first film; the title of which translates to As Long as We Get Drunk. Jean-Luc Godard glossed it, approvingly: “go to the club; you won’t get a girl”.
Jean-Pierre Melville, the filmmaker — bald, jowly, with deep-set eyes —, approached Jean-Daniel Pollet after seeing the film; leading to the following backhanded compliment: “Perhaps you’ll make something as good as this again, but never anything better.”
Jean-Pierre Melville was wrong; or, he was right in the wrong way.
In 1963, Jean-Daniel Pollet set off on a road-trip with Volker Schlondorff — who would later become a major player in the New German Cinema. He’s still alive, though his university has been very coy in providing me with his email address. The resulting film is a strange, digressive, and elliptical thing called Méditerranée. It is formed of multiple repeating shots; a coldly morbid voiceover; it would send waves through the New Wave. Its subject is time. The script, written by Philippe Sollers, speaks of the “monotonous” return of memory — the “incessant” accumulation of history — a blindness and silence through which we grasp our way; just as “images” themselves are returned – “forgotten – and returned”.
Claude Melki was a tango dancer. He appeared, over the years, in six of Jean-Daniel Pollet’s films. He plays what Dan Sallit calls a “sad sack” and, for Richard Brody, a “fetish actor”; naive, desiring, amorously unsuccessful, pitied and pitiable. But, in L’acrobat (1971), Jean-Daniel Pollet allowed him to dance; and he dances wonderfully, shifting into and out of the light. For a brief moment, he’s beautiful.
If there is a typically Polletian character, there is a drifter: one who has been sundered from the world – from other people; by geography; even from themselves. Pedro peers through the window of his former home; Leon — played by Claude Melki — stands on the sidelines of the dance hall; an unconscious girl — she is laying on a gurney — is in a ‘forced’ sleep. Pollet studies their faces; they are cast adrift; Pollet — like Levinas (whom he never cited but whose presence loiters everywhere in his films) — considered the ethical obligation we have toward the ‘other’. We encounter them; face-to-face.
Jean-Daniel Pollet made two science fiction films: Le Sang (1971) and The Master of Time (1970). They’re rough and bloody and quite dissonant. They’re not particularly good. Definitely for the completionists.
But Jean-Daniel Pollet had very good friends; Julie Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, Volker Schlondorff, Jean Thibuadeau. Kristeva and Sollers would appear – fittingly, not together — in Pollet’s Contretemps (1988). Later, in Dieu sait Quoi (1994), Sollers’ head would reappear — trapped, as it were — inside the screen of a boxy CRT television. The scene plays out on a table; a gauzy curtain blowing in the background. This is a scene from Contretemps.
When he wasn’t making sentimental burlesques or existentially anguished studies of loneliness and alienation — remember, he made a film about Robinson Crusoe, in 1967 — Jean-Daniel Pollet also made essays films.
But he also made a series of short documentaries; one was about a forge; another was about fishermen; and yet another was about the cemetery of Pere Lachaise. Like everything else, they’re filled with repetitions, lyrically ambiguous narration, a sense of suspended wonder. Loneliness.
Jean-Daniel Pollet’s most identifiable technique is repetition; in Line of Sight (1960) — a film that anticipates the faceted narrative of Last Year at Marienbad (1961) —, his protagonist, Pedro, returns again and again to the chateau where he grew up. It’s unclear if these arrival-returns are the same shot — the same return — or many different shots and different returns spread out across the film.
In 1966, he adapted Maupassant’s Le Horla. In a sentence: Laurent Terzieff loses his reflection.
The repetition is at its most attuned in L’ordre (1974), a film — really a documentary — about the now-abandoned leprosy colony of Spinalonga. Jean-Daniel Pollet made use of dolly and tracking shots to return us, rovingly, through the weed-wracked avenues of this island-prison; he approaches and approaches; we probe toward a window; the scene resets; we probe toward a window. We meet Raimondakis, a former resident — or prisoner — who interrogates us, the spectator: who, among us, is really sick?
In 1989, Jean-Daniel Pollet was struck by a train.
But he didn’t die. Gravely wounded, he spent the remaining years of his life — until his death in 2004 — at his home in Cadenet, Vaucluse. Here he would make four ‘final’ films; a drama — starring Michael Lonsdale —; a travelogue of Greece (much of the footage had been shot before his accident); an ekphrastic essay-film about Francis Ponge, the poet. His final film — as if the work of entropy was complete — consists entirely of still photographs. It’s called Jour apres Jour, and was released only in 2006; after his death. It’s filled with things (pieces of fruit, lamps, books, stones, telephones, typewriters, instruments, pencils).
He had – in the words of Francis Ponge, his muse — “come back down to objects”. The probing dolly zoom, the repetition, reflections; these things are a form of attentiveness. Jean-Daniel Pollet wasn’t content to glance — as if his eye might bounce away from the surface; he wanted to peer very closely — to interrogate the disjunction between self/other, subject/object. In Ceux d’en Face (2001), Valentine Vidal — Lonsdale’s daughter-in-law — studies photographs taken by her absent husband; they are mostly — but not entirely — images from Jean-Daniel Pollet’s own films. Different — and the same.
She — Vidal — arranges the photographs into a series; a wall of happiness, a wall of sadness. She reaches out to her absent husband through his photographs; toward his imagistic “silence”. Like Méditerranée, the Other is “hidden in a [landscape] that we cross” but are unable to “reach”. Alterity confronts us — again; face-to-face. “Nothing speaks anymore”. We find ourselves listening; looking.
1958. Claude Melki combs his hair in a mirror; it is Pollet’s first cinematic act — the action of a subject regarding themselves, becoming aware of themselves as another. Terzieff loses his own reflection in a mirror. Leon — in Love is Happy, Love is Sad (1971), and in L’acrobat (1976) — finds himself separated from his love interest by the reflection of a mirror. He can’t bridge the gap.
You’ll have to buy the book to find out exactly how — and why.
Later. Cahiers du Cinema – you know them — wrote fondly but with uncertainty about the young Pollet, this nonconforming haut bourgeois who described himself as the “younger brother” — and sometimes “extremist” — of the New Wave: “Pollet”, they said, “is certainly the one whose future orientation seems the least predictable”.
They couldn’t have been more right.
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