Le révélateur (1968)

 

Director: Philippe Garrel

Screenplay: Philippe Garrel

Cast: Stanislas Robiolles as The Child; Laurent Terzieff as The Father; Bernadette Lafont as The Mother

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Philippe Garrel, for better and for worse, lives in the camp of film directors who sustained a lengthy career, decades, beloved by cineastes in film festivals. Unfortunately, for worse this is a position, least in Britain, where his existence a vague thing as films like Le révélateur were not getting distributed here, let alone the later dramatically focused films. Like Hong Sang-Soo in South Korea, up until the recent streaming era a film may appear randomly as an attempt to distribute him Regular Lovers (2004) got an Artificial Eye distribution), and into the 2010s this is tried again when interest was taken as him as a great under seen auteur (Jealousy (2013) got a Studio Canal release). But there was not a real access to his work; even the streaming model, whilst offering more open access availability to these films is based on a limited license, more of a long term structured endless film festival than a permanent option, even if we have to thank MUBI for getting him more attention in their streaming of his career.

Another aspect that has to be addressed is that his early films are also not like the others. As with some directors, or any creator, it feels Philippe Garrel was trying to find himself, and having had seen at least one work of this era once in a fuzzy VHS rip, when it was insanely difficult to see any of them, Garrel had an experimental period early in his career that needs to be addressed differently. It is not the most difficult of work if you look at The Virgin's Bed (1969), the most overtly unconventional, but others like Le révélateur have one simple little change which really makes this abstract in a distinct and difficult way. Garrel's experimental period is fascinating as an outsider to his work as, from the influence of the likes of F.W. Murnau's Tabu (1931)¹, even when he goes to dialogue driven dramas which make up his main career, he kept aspects from these earlier films in style. Le révélateur is entirely without dialogue , but goes further than this in that it is not a silent film, as a pre-sound era film which had a musical track performed aside with the movie, but that it has no actual sound.

Initially you have a young couple onscreen in stark monochrome, the wife (Bernadette Lafont) clearly suffering from a trauma of the past as her husband (Laurent Terzieff) circles her, bearing in mind the obvious issue to address being how a viewer tries to "read" this film. They have a young boy, presumed in visual language to be their son, and as interpretation is going to be thing to lean on for this review, I can only wonder how much of this verging on a narrative of a child who watches his family collapse and is eventually taken away (metaphorically) into adoption. If this case, this is not even due to abuse or neglect, just the radiating ennui of the parents the cause.

That this also feels post-apocalyptic complicates the film. Later on this family will wander through field in the countryside, in a time before Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) was ever a glint in the Russian auteur's eye. You have, in a film of striking images in striking black and white photography, a scene of the young son wandering an underground tunnel, close to one for a nuclear bunker, only to find someone tied to a post outside he sets free. It is entirely abstract, undoubtedly, more as a film that it requires to be decoded. Whilst undeniably a film belonging of no other time than when it was shot, it nonetheless feels timeless, only that its type of cinema and the materials used to make it expressing a time of the past, all whilst Bernadette Lafont looks practically proto-Goth in her doll black dress. You as a viewer have to interject meaning for yourself, which is part of where the film takes a direction different from others.

I openly admit too that my eyes betrayed me a couple times during the viewing, in danger of closing to go to sleep. That is not an insult to the film - factors could be involved like tiredness - but as much of this is how my eyes struggled against an unexpected change that forced them to have to work harder. This film's biggest technical aspect has a challenging trait that is surprising. Considering how human beings visually communicate greatly, Garrel's films from this era with no soundtracks at all do force one to question how we process said information with our eyes. I will say right now that sound, or even music, would have been fascinating to have as it would have completely changed the tone of Le révélateur. As it stands, it does not necessarily draw a person towards these moving images as a film without sound, but has the potential to alienate them, or for me keep me at arm's length and view the film as more unconventional, forcing me to have to really think about the images or, if I merely let the images drift along, find them fed and influenced by the sound of even having sat still to watch a film play in front of me. Even memories and dreams for me have a perception of sound, whilst barring for someone born deaf or developing the condition, true silence is not a factor many people will experience, processing information of the world around them in sound as much as visually. Le révélateur caused the eyes to have to study the images without audio signifiers. Even the lack of music and extensive dialogue of a later Garrel film has its own information to unpack, whilst here this is a type of cinema which challenges in a different direction.

Even what is onscreen is a factor. One of the most famous figures who took this approach was Stan Brakhage, the American avant-garde filmmaker who had no soundtracks, but notably, whilst he shot films involving the people and world around him, not only were his films usually short features, but he constructed many around abstract visuals based on shapes and colour. Sometimes Le révélateur takes advantage of its mandatory silence. It is not subtle to have, as a scene, to have the child watching a stage play of the parents' breaking relationship, but subtly is not necessarily a good thing. The attempts to gain more from subtly are however effected for this viewer having distinct aspects of himself which effect perception, namely as an autistic person the senses are more alert and amplified, leaving a film like this entirely built around the eyes as having a more radical form to interpret. (Let alone the fact reading facial expressions and mood is drastically different from other people too). Even for other viewers where this is not the case, how you interpret these images is going to be radically different from mainstream cinema, as this does not follow these rules of interpretation following a technique that tells a clear narrative.

The silent structure, and that this becomes a series of vignettes, presents a challenge if you entirely stick to contrasting this to a mainstream narratively structured movie as an alien technique, even different from later Garrel films. Certainly, Le révélateur has a distinct style, the monochrome with many of his films having a striking aesthetic look, the film compelling even if the lack of any sound did alienate me from the intimacy of the images. Instead, it was spent considering them, even now as time has passed and memory plays with them, such as the young boy near a river with swans. The film, if it was indeed a metaphor for a broken family, does work in mind to its structure and what is presented. The scenes' length may prove distracting for some, but images do stand out that reflect a sense of coldness and sadness, such as two of the boy being moved on platforms, one on an unknown form and the other in the back of a van, with the camera by him moving with him, as his parents disappear from the side. Throughout this does present a couple in his parents who were not in a good shape to raise him, and for a film which I struggled with, images and thoughts come to me when composing the review that express admiration, and if a theme like this was the intention, that challenge proves a reward even if the film, ironically, has such an open form to allow some wildly varying attitudes to what it means intentionally or by accident. Even if this, truthfully, still is the experimental period where Philippe Garrel had to figure out the direction from his career, my appreciation of him as someone new to his work admires the experimentation and how, as mentioned earlier, traits of this film would appear in his later style still and find a place where he could design them fully. This felt necessary for him and sits as a film unique in the catalogue for its own sake too.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Contemplative/Distancing

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

 

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1) “Garrel is the last of the primitives –

He has always liked The Wedding March (Stroheim, 1928) and Tabu (Murnau, 1931)” –Antoine Rakovsky. [Taken from the following MUBI article HERE.]