Overcoming Silence - 9 June 2010
Jackie Raynal's Deux fois (1969)
by Colin Beckett
A woman sits at a table on the back porch of a house in some Barcelona suburb. She is eating frantically, shoveling forkfuls of salad into her mouth in darting, bird-like movements. You cannot see her making any effort to swallow, but she keeps eating more. She tears bread from the crust, inhaling it with the same ease as the lettuce. She takes big, quick gulps of soda from a goblet. Her eyes flit back and forth, as if self-conscious of meeting the camera's gaze. The lighting, high and diagonal behind her head, is soft and gauzy, swathing the tableau in a dreamy, washed-out haze. The flowers to her left might be tropical, but it is obvious that the chirping jungle sounds on the soundtrack are not coming from the yard behind her. Finally she stops eating. She pushes the plate aside and strikes a deliberate pose. Her eyes meet the lens. She begins speaking:
You will now see a young girl in a train, then I'll tell you a few little stories, then we'll do the pharmacy sequence. At the end there will be a real fall... For the sequence on man we'll see simultaneously an extreme close-up with a sky background, some birds, a city square, the man in the street, the man asleep, the man dreaming. We'll also see a city, an unidentifiable place, some everyday conversation. This evening will be the end of meaning. Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.
As promised, the film cuts to a shot of a little girl in a train.
The woman is Jackie Raynal. If you are watching Deux fois (1969), you probably know that she directed the film, and that she shot it in Barcelona and Paris in the final months of 1968. Given the effort you would have had to put into tracking it down, you probably also know a few other things. Like the fact that Raynal got her start in the French film industry when she was just 22, as the editor of Eric Rohmer's La boulangère de Monceau (1963). That she worked with Rohmer through 1967, editing a few marginal classics of the New Wave along the way, including Jean-Daniel Pollet's Méditerranée (1963) and the Chabrol/Godard/Rouch/Rohmer/Douchet/Pollet omnibus Paris vu par... (1965). By the late 60s she had joined the Zanzibar group, a loose coalition of filmmakers including Philippe Garrel, Patrick Deval, and the painter Olivier Mosset. Their activity was sponsored by Sylvina Boissonnas, an heiress who, in the feverish months before and after May 1968, financed about a dozen 35mm film productions by professionals and amateurs alike. You are most likely aware that after Deux fois, Raynal dropped out for a while, traveling in Africa and the United Sates, eventually settling in New York as the influential programmer of the Bleecker Street and Carnegie Hall cinemas.
That knowledge will not prove all that useful in the face of Deux fois, as strange and intoxicating a film as there ever was. It is composed of 32 segments, most of them rendered either in a single, unceasing long shot, or made up of multiple takes of the same sequence repeated like dailies. There is no story to speak of. Raynal herself and a man, played by Francisco Viader appear throughout. It seems they are lovers, but we are never quite able to ascertain the specific nature of their relationship. Scenes of the pair are intercut with unmotivated excursions, like the girl on the train, who rides in an unnerving silence, looking beyond the camera for direction, discarding props, and finding them quickly replaced by a hand that juts out from behind the frame.
Raynal's remark that "tonight will be the end of meaning" strangely comes to seem the most direct statement in her monologue. In our bewilderment, it is tempting to believe her. But Deux fois cannot avoid meaning, nor does it really seem interested in doing so anyway. The film is a parade of various significations, calling up and developing a consistent set of thematic tropes. It is apparent that Raynal is working through a handful of formal problems. The lore has it that Raynal developed the film on a dare Boissonnas issued her; forgo your trade and direct a film without editing. Whether or not the story is true, the anti-editing impulse becomes clear soon after Deux fois begins. Each segment runs quite long. Takes are repeated, sometimes three or four times. The sound of film on rewinds is the most frequent of the film's aural motifs, and various accoutrements of film production—cameras, lights—find their way onscreen. The camera either remains still or wanders of it's own volition; there is no attempt at the spatial illusionism or the psychologically mimetic maneuvers of classical Hollywood technique. These choices must have resonated as especially perverse to an audience who knew Raynal only as the talented young editor of the nouvelle vague.
In lieu of narrative, scenes develop almost exclusively via camera reframings and repositionings, slowly altering our conception of filmic space. A hand appears from behind the camera to give the little girl on the train a second prop newspaper. The camera slowly zooms from a long establishing shot of a barn towards its object, a man standing on a balcony, staring forward. A deep, perspectival shot down a road from its center becomes a 360-degree pan, abandoning any pretense to its status as human eye, flattening the space it surveys, turning banal shots of an ordinary road into an anamorphic spectacle. Deux fois consistently reeducates us on how to look at the frame, and about what counts as editing.
The filmic representation of women is Raynal's other obvious concern. We see multiple acts of violence against women, both explicit and suggested—a light grid advertisement shows animated male and female silhouettes strangle and kick each other, their actions transforming into dance; we see Raynal sitting on a hilltop, staring forward, the wind jostling loudly against the microphone, as a pair of male hands pulls her out of frame by her hair. The film's most famous scene finds Raynal in the back corner of a white room, wearing only black stockings while a man sits on the floor, closer to the camera. The scene is silent. Raynal wrings her hands, writhes, opens her mouth wide as if screaming—impressing upon us some vague and terrible agony. The man disappears briefly and then pops up in the extreme foreground, hiding Raynal. When he vanishes again, he reveals her crouched, head in hands. She collapses and then gets back up, renewing eye contact. She pisses all over the floor. These images are clearly pointed toward a contestation of the way women have been depicted in the movies. Raynal struggles with the camera to control her own image.
Most commentary on the film has taken one or both of these tacks. The first issue of Camera Obscura*, the pioneering feminist film journal, was devoted almost entirely to Deux fois. There is a detailed shot breakdown in which every scene is minutely described, and then interpreted in definitively feminist terms. Their analysis is thorough and attentive—more compelling than much of the semiotics-fueled theorizing produced in the adolescence of academic film studies. In a sense Raynal's film begs for this type of exegesis, but this unimpeachable analysis is missing something of the film's strangeness. The tight, one-to-one formulations in Camera Obscura are unable to convincingly account for the film's haphazardness, it's deliberate vagueness and multiplicity. I don't want to paper over the film's quite real political motivations, but when the Camera Obscura Collective asserts things like "Raynal is attempting to re-write the codes of the image and function of woman in film", they suggest a film far more schematic than Deux fois. This kind of thematic heavy lifting would require a severer structural hand than Raynal's. There is no apparent order to the procession of tableaux that make up Deux fois, no real build even—just an accumulation of images from which we can identify certain preoccupations that are never developed toward any specific end. It is a mistake to put too fine a point on what this film does.
There is a difference between ignoring convention and attacking it. In emphasizing Raynal's radicalism, the CO collective overlooks the film's overwhelmingly dour tone—Deux fois is dark, claustrophobic, and freaked-out. It is hard to locate the transgressive or revolutionary spirit entailed by the Camera Obscura reading. It is a premonition of the listless, defeated feeling that would come to characterize a lot of the formally ambitious French films of the early 1970s—Garrel's post-Zanzibar productions, Rivette's long-duration works. The failure of May 1968 nudged some artists in more radical directions and others to a paranoid, alienated self-reflection. Deux fois evinces none of the militant rigor of, say, the Dziga Vertov Group films. It has the kind of flat, dissociated affect that reads as affectless. It progresses in a tentative, exploratory manner rather than an insistent, didactic one. Following it may require us to break with certain interpretive habits, but Raynal never grabs us by the collar and insists we do so.
Deux fois is boring. The movie deliberately drags, crushing time beneath the weight of its silences and its duration. The fact that you can never quite get your bearings, that the relation between one scene and the next is never apparent makes it almost suffocating. You become acutely aware of each passing second, but you cannot take your eyes off the screen. The film emanates a weird power that keeps you completely entranced even as you wait for it to end. It remains compelling. It treats entertainment the way benzodiazepines treat anxiety—your mind is engaged in the same processes, but the physical response is distant, inaccessible.
The clues Raynal provides at the outset serve as the film's sole structural guide. Some of them match up directly, like the little girl or the city square, but more often than not we are left scanning for connections, stuck in the crevice between language and image. Which of the many falls we see on screen is the "real" one? Who is the man asleep? The man dreaming? It is these loose parameters that keep us transfixed, waiting for something to happen. Without them, the film would be a mess. A beautiful, baffling mess, sure, but not one that would exercise any force as an experience in time. The merest hint of structure is enough to keep our attention, if just to find out what Raynal will fill it with.
It is a trancelike, exacting, and not altogether pleasurable attention. Like a fly, we are rapt, responsive to the slightest movement. This is the kind of attention an editor pays the material they are tasked with shaping. Raynal abdicates the responsibilities of her profession to us, turning the spectator into an editor. This is why meaning becomes so slippery here. Deux fois forces us to see how the slightest modulation in action or time alters our sense of what a film is about. It does not make an argument, it evokes a condition.
*The first issue of Camera Obscura was published in the Fall of 1976. [Editors]