“Now I’ve called for a more emotional cinema. So what I’m looking for is emotional texts. In the past, I avoided that, largely out of reserve. Then I wrote a short piece on Garrel’s L’Enfant secret in the first person and I realized that was a potential way forward.” - Stéphane Delorme
Delorme’s contribution
to the Cinéma retrouvé feature Onze
stations pour une histoire poétique du cinéma français on Garrel’s L’Enfant secret is an important text for
his editorialship at Cahiers du Cinéma.
On page 94 of the October 2012 issue (N.682), which on its cover features Hong
Sang-soo, in three paragraphs he is able to emphasize strong emotions and
poetry, which will be the key themes in a remapping of the history of French
cinema, and through repetition the key directors that will rise to the top are
Grémillon, Garrel and Carax. As well it is perhaps his most personal
contribution at the magazine, especially in regards to his conviction that he
could have directed the film. It is an important piece for Delorme, who now
mostly just writes editorials and is selective about writing critiques and événement
essays, as it culminates a focus on strong feelings associated with cinema,
which will gain more momentum and become the guiding drive at the magazine. For
example, in the editorial Avec ou sans
Maillot (N.695), “We needed to write a manifesto for an unruly cinema for
2014… a call to unleashes our demons and to throw ourselves in the water…
without a bathing suit!” In the editorial Exaltation
(N.696), “There remains only one antidote, to recite towards and against
everyone, like a mantra: “The wind rises! … We have to try to live!”” And now
more recently, for their 700th issue they received 138 contributions
of famous film people to share their own significant film experiences. Let’s keep
this going! – D.D.
***
L’Enfant Secret
I
am at the Forum des images in Paris, I’m twenty years old. One movie gives me
everything, like a blinding light. For a long time, this film is remembered by
its first images: a boy and a girl are in their nightshirts, they’re laughing
and kissing, it’s glorious, their experience is unforgettable, their happy. In
all of this, in these sumptuous white images, I don’t get much… There is a
great tenderness, the paradise of childish love, the secret of childhood. I
don’t yet know the great beginning of Au
Hasard Balthazar (1966): two children in a barn with the black donkey,
their on a swing, there is a little girl, who is pale and sick, and that is
looking at them while crying – these are as much fragments of the donkey’s
memory, as they are the rare years of happiness. The start of L'Enfant secret has this same silent
magic, the children are the only ones to occupy this house just like in
Garrel’s first film, which he made when he was 16, Les enfants désaccordés (1964). But it’s Bresson with Godard. Two
kinds of mysticism married together: the sacred and modernity. The voices are
lost, the image evaporates and comes back, the images are re-filmed in a
visionary way, piano music breaks through the silence in regular intervals. The
fragment and the rhythm does not destroy the representation but instead makes
it incandescent.
I
did not know that Garrel himself was re-learning how to make films, after his
reclusive years, to return to the streets, and to film Paris, the benches of
Paris or the lovers that stop at them to then separate. L'Enfant secret is the moment of convalescence, the return to
fiction, but that remembers the liberty of the great portrait-films that he
made in the Seventies with Nico. It is maybe not Garrel’s best film. Les Hautes Solitudes is more pure, J'entends plus la guitare is more
profound, Le Berceau de cristal is
crazier. But it is this rare equilibrium between an intimidate journal, that
would reign in the French cinema, and the flood of the power of dreams, that,
would unforgivably retreat. It could have been the film with potentially the
biggest influence.
There
is the question of a hidden child, Swann, of cinema, of a rupture and, like
always, of truth. The cinema of Garrel has nothing mute about it. From his
years of being amazed, he comes back talkative. The dialogue is reduced to
simple maxims: “The loyalty towards
others is the only movement of the soul.” Or poetic lightning bolts that
Anne Wiazemsky renders familiar: “Your
face is like lace.” We dream of leaving the city to go to the country to
work the land, like in a song by Gérard Manset. One day being poor. In seeing
them, we finally realize that there are two kinds of great films: those that
impress and that even from a distance shine like a thousand fires like an
exploding star (Vertigo). And those
that are so close that we could hold them in the palms of our hands. L'Enfant secret, I could make this
film, I could have made this film, it watches me. This isn’t a pretension, only
a certitude. And if there remains only one image, it’s the first, and the last,
which are the same one: a hand going through hair, a hand on one’s neck – to
love or to heal. In the preface to Une
caméra à la place du coeur, Leos Carax wrote about Garrel: “The air is
cold. Through his hair, a man looks at a woman. Together they shudder… THE
CINEMA TREMBLES.”
Stéphane Delorme
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