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In search of the rare film [punning on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time]

There’s another point we ought to clarify: “the shoddy copies.” According to Serge Toubiana, the young public “won’t tolerate a shoddy copy … the image has to be impeccable.” No, the shoddy copies don’t bother us, on the contrary, we have a tendency to view such things as sacred. On the Internet, a number of rarities incidentally appear with an unfortunately bad image-quality. But every copy, every file has its own history. The VHS copy of a Biette found in a cellar; a laserdisc of Patrick Tam, reputedly lost, yet turned up in Taiwain; or even an institutional DVD only found at the library. This search largely goes beyond the Internet: the virtual has not, for us, trumped the real. We went to the University of Heidelsheim, in the north of Germany, just because they had a VHS version of Pierre, or the Ambiguities, the long version of one of the greatest films of the 1990s, Pola X (1999). When we got there, we discovered that the film had been dubbed in German. To see and to be moved are linked; we go to the film, the film doesn’t come to us, whether it’s on the Internet or not [another beautiful line in the original French that achieves an economy and brevity that you can’t capture in English: “Voir et se mouvoir sont liés, on se déplace vers le film et non pas le film vers nous, Internet ou pas”].

The demystification of the film object doesn’t exist, or else we wouldn’t go to the theater for every projection of a film by Eustache. It’s just that what happens gets switched around. Although we always watch a film in the theater with a certain excitement, it’s true that the projection of a rare film, especially by a director whose work we admire, can awaken our interest more than the projection of a “major” canonical film, by, say, Ford or Rossellini. Because it’s evident that for us the unknown film is part of the project of exploring, in the depths, all of the ghosts of cinema. It’s too bad if we haven’t seen all of the major films of all of the major filmmakers, but if we strive to see the films of even one filmmaker including the most rare, or a thousand rarities passed over in silence, it’s because it seems important, for us, to survey the work of a filmmaker all the way into the most hidden recesses: for example, the work by Paul Vecchiali in the 1990s, including such titles as De sueur et de sang (1994), Zone franche (1996) or his films-made-for-television Vous êtes folle Imogène (1991) and Imogène contre-espionne (1996). It’s a question of friendship and intimacy; to be up close and personal with a filmmaker who touches us deeply with his films, at that moment when they cross over the dead zones [zones blanches] of creation. It’s no longer about concealing our critical gaze (these films of Vecchiali waver between failed attempts and bad ones) but of being there, present, in front of a film that from the moment of its conception was hidden from the gaze of others. It’s there, the dignity peculiar to every passion: to explore everything in trying to know everything inorder to find, us too, the lands in need of reclaiming, and to share them.

So we let ourselves seek out the rare work. It’s no longer about the wait but the search. It’s a search that revives and stimulates us. It’s necessary to unearth. Of course, the most rare work isn’t the best. It’s just that the road that leads there is illuminated and helps us make contact with other films. If the Silent Night, Deadly Night 3 by Monte Hellman (1989) is bad, it may nevertheless lead us to see the excellent Iguana, made one year later. It’s a search that persists in discoveries. To those who would want to denounce an excess of dandyism, one only needs to mention Les Jeux de la comtesse Dolingen de Gratz, the sole and unique fiction film by Catherine Binet (1981), a lovely film shown in Venice at the time of its release, and yet unknown today. To discover this film by Binet, on Tuesday, January 21 at the Forum des Images, is at one and the same time to share a sweet secret of the insider but also to feel all the evidence of the banks of the Seine filmed in the summer.

Remaking history

Cinephilia on the Internet becomes most interesting when it makes choices counter to the official historiography. If this historiography is written from day to day — we know how the Young Turks eclipsed a certain French cinema — it’s all the better to be attacked later on. Should we criticize a cinephile because he explores films known in the past but today are forgotten or “passed by” (in this way, the work of Grémillon is currently taking advantage of a backfire [retour de flamme])? We’re campaigning today for the rediscovery of rare films. It’s clear that certain auteurs haven’t found the recognition expected of them (Jean-Claude Biette), limiting them to a diminished public of insiders, or that recognition slowly dissolved (as in the case of Charles Burnett). Many more lost their battle with the industry, letting themselves get swallowed up by the beast (Kirk Wong). The situations are diverse, without comparison, but they all tell the same story: the sidelining of an oeuvre — because it’s too fragmented, too arduous, too disparate…

For cinema to shudder and live, it’s necessary that it gets supported by a whole network of tunnels and undergrounds dug out by the thousands of cinephile-sentinels. The cinephile seems forever in search of that film that will return the pulse to cinema, the one that by a dazzling projection will continue to ensure that cinema be not only a representation of life but life itself, to borrow from Bazin. This desire to seek out the secret heart of cinema is bound up with another strong emotion: the fear to see disappear what you’ve discovered. Thus, love and fear, bound up one with the other like the transfixed lover of Tropical Malady, determine how the cinephile makes use of the Internet. What is the tiger we stare in the face and that makes us live? It’s this film not yet discovered, tirelessly sought out.

To expose to the light that which was formed and lived in obscurity is quite often synonymous with extinction. It’s a strange paradox because for a work to be seen, it’s necessary that it be exposed. But all the labor of the cinephile would be thus to find a mode of exhibition that’s just right, that would let everyone make the discovery. In other words, to know how to skillfully put into place an apparatus that would be able to reveal the work without it at the same time disappearing. From which we get this curious blend of pride and generosity found in the cinephile, or more generally among any “curious” type: first, enthusiasm, the excitement of the discovery, then the desire to share. But this desire finds itself tinged with a distrust towards anyone who will come to be exposed to this treasure. The cinephile and his hierarchizations make of cinema an art in perpetual movement because it’s always being questioned. Although there may be times to avoid the long way around, this labor of disruption, of the re-edification of the history of cinema, is in its very foundation a cinephilic act. It’s why this word “cinephile” endures despite all, and it’s why we lay claim to it.