New York Dispatch. 4.

Through the Forest, by Jean-Paul Civeyrac of France at the New York Film Festival, takes on the near-impossible. Civeyrac wants to tell a story of a young woman who suddenly loses her boyfriend in a motorcycle accident, but can't lose her sense of loss. Time doesn't heal much - it just makes the heart grow fonder. Armelle's longing is inside of her, as is her imagining of their time together, as is her imagining his eventual return. Try putting that on the surface, on the screen - that's the challenge of making a film about it. Not quite as hard as bringing back the dead, not really so different. After all, what is film but wish-fulfillment.

There are some precedents for what Civeyrac is attempting that came long before movies. The classic play, Phædra, by Jean Racine, is the adaptation of a Greek tragedy by Euripides, in which a queen breaks with all decorum and confesses her desire for a young huntsman, the son of her husband. Even more dramatic is her confession of shame that she even has these feelings and can't control them. Majesty, for a woman of that time, is all about bearing, after all. Funny, the object of her desire happens to be named Hippolytus. (Hippolite is the name of a young man who resembles the dead Renaud, whom Armelle thinks is a vessel for Renaud's return.)

If this all sounds complicated, it is, though it isn't when you're watching it. Civeyrac has divided the story into ten spare chapters or scenes, each of which seems to be a single take, about six minutes long. He's going for something classic here, with his characters dressed mostly in white, and with graceful reduced movements, in interiors and exteriors that give you white-grey gradations of the same palette of lifeless urban infinity. If the camera weren't creating drama in its movements, you might be fooled into thinking this was a stage play. To repeat the cliché of clichés, the actors' movements are choreographed. They have to be. Each of the ten takes seems to be one shot. Elegant understates the effect. It's so elegant in the service of the drama that you can forget that you're watching a technical tour de force.

Armelle's sisters, with odd names like Berenice and Roxanne that call Molière and other classic dramatists to mind, represent the two poles of response to her mission. They could be characters in a philosophical dialogue (which is indeed what they are) - one scorns anything spiritual and scolds Armelle for continuing her pursuit of a dead man's spirit. The other doesn't say what she believes about spirituality, but consoles her bereaved sister. Is a sister's duty in this case to feeling or to truth?

Civeyrac doesn't seem to believe in the realm of the spiritual but in our need for it, so you never think that he's taking us into the spiritual; since his film seems to reject the possibility that film can ever get there - whether people can is another question, perhaps one that can't be answered by a film. But Through the Forest follows what we can see in Armelle as she searches - in dreams, in solemn meetings with mediums, on the street, where she encounters Hippolite.

The film opens as Armelle rises nude from their bed, talking to Renaud, singing to him (draped in a gauzy shawl that she'll pick up later when she's trying to contact him), talking inanely about her hair as she speaks of her love for him, as unaware as could be of anything profane. Love, after all, is the ultimate fool's paradise. Here it's a paradise of soft flesh.

The light and the tone of the characters get colder with Renaud's loss and the camera retreats from the body - no surprise, as the camera only gets near in head shots. In dreams, the camera approaches again, and Armelle's body fuses with that of Renaud/Hippolite in a warm reddish light. (We've seen that fusion in the work of Edvard Munch. He was dealing with a dream world, and that's where Armelle is. That's where we leave her.)

There's an accomplished balance of emotion and restraint here, a limited, almost morbid palette that still accommodates a range of feelings, and a grace of movement that's extraordinary. Since the spiritual world is impenetrable except in dreams (and yearnings, which is what dreams are), Civeyrac seems to be saying that film is one way of getting close to it, or watching a character try.

Is it sheer coincidence that Through the Forest is playing at the New York Film Festival just as The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult is opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? No one who believes in the occult is likely to believe in coincidences, but this is an opportune moment, whatever brought it about. Anyone interested in film, and in Civeyrac's film, should go see this exhibition. Many of the pictures have never been seen before in this country, and they weren't seen before the exhibition opened in Paris earlier this year. The images were chosen by Pierre Apraxine, one of the great photography collectors and curators working today.

The Perfect Medium was in Paris through the summer. Perhaps Civeyrac saw it there. According to attendance figures, just about everybody else in Paris did. Most of the photographs were taken between the 1870s and the outbreak of World War I, and they depict ghosts, life-forces in the form of white ectoplasm exiting normal people, vital fluids and levitated objects.   Photography was seen as a new medium in those days, even in the 1910s, and the realm of the occult gave it a chance to prove itself. In its verisimilitude, it could give a nuts-and-bolts reality to a realm that previous picture-makers only imagined. And because it looked so much like reality, it could fool you into believing that something absolutely preposterous was plausible. It still can. Think of the aerial photographs of Saddam Hussein's "nuclear" installations.

Seen today, theses glimpses into the beyond at the Met, sometimes graceful, can look as awkward as the once-fashionable beliefs of an era that have long since been discredited. It's almost pre-cinema, as if the scenes being depicted were begging for movement. Or would movement have ruined it all, exposing the crude seams of a staged drama, imposing disbelief? If seamless is the right word for Through the Forest, then crude may be the word for these photographs, seen through our eyes. The inner truth being sought here is more mechanical than spiritual - how do the life-forces work, what's the bone structure inside a hand, how does a ghost walk through a room, how can photography bring you closer to any of this than painting or drawing. We're looking at trial and error here, and all sorts of errors are forgiven if you're headed into the uncharted beyond. We take the camera and sound of today's movies for granted. We praise the "simplicity" of Civeryrac's approach to cinema. Of course, his images would have been the ultimate special effects for the photographers of The Perfect Medium. But the impulses of the characters in the film to bring back the dead haven't changed. We're still haunted.

Posted by dwhudson at September 29, 2005 11:34 AM