There is something of a happy paradox when it comes to meeting Philippe Garrel in the midst of a health crisis. What would he have to comment on, he who since his first feature film, Marie for memory (1967), is akin to a diamond cutter cloistered in his workshop, apparently deaf to anything resembling a topical form – the very one that is slowly suffocating us?
“Inactual” is, moreover, one of the first words proposed to define it, in the sense given to it by Nietzsche: who acts “Against time, and therefore on time”. It was pointed out to him, for example, that there was no trace of technological objects in his latest films, however filled with young people of today. Used to this question, he remains puzzled:
“The philosopher Clément Rosset said that even the imagination was polluted by factories and machines. The whole industrial revolution influenced the unconscious, since the dream was imbued with these objects. It’s probably the same with digital machines, maybe it’s a dream. But since I don’t have a laptop, computer, or television, it doesn’t fit mine. ”
What does not go into dreams should therefore not go into the movies. “I don’t want to shoot nightmares. To me, a lot of movies, especially action movies, are nightmares. I can’t stay in front, I find it hysterical, it shoots me, I want to go out. “
That the cinema can act on the dominant time, offer us something other than a sick frenzy, this is what makes the cost of the Garrelian work. Some could evoke a form of slowness, but that’s something else: Garrel gives us back the time.
To see your cinema again is to leaf through a repertoire of ageless events: hands, tears, lovers in beds, faces stunned by the meeting, damaged by the end of a love affair. The wait, the anguish, the temptation to commit suicide, the child being born. And this emotional heritage which opens another era in fiction, it was necessary for a filmmaker to be its guardian and archivist for us to remember and be reassured: in the news, love insists .
Experimental in its infancy
Amused, the filmmaker remembers a young spectator: “She told me: ‘For our generation, it’s impossible to meet anyone in the street, it happens on the Internet”… She believed it for real. “ We dare to tell her that we understand the young woman, her films bear witness to a lost universe where everything was more direct, where the world and its streets carried the renewed promise of a love experience: “It’s completely crazy what you’re telling me, that to talk to someone you have to go through some kind of application… We’re really like George Orwell. “ Garrel only believes in his world, and everyone should do the same.
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