ONCE SEEN, NEVER FORGOTTEN
Time Out, UK –
May 23 2007
Patrick Bokanowski’s forgotten masterpiece, ‘L’Ange’ (1982) This
week, Londoners will get a rare chance to marvel at the unique work
of Patrick Bokanowski, an overlooked genius of film, according to
Gareth Evans.
After seeing ‘L’Ange’ at Cannes in 1982, the legendary French critic
Michel Chion described it in Cahiers du Cinema as ‘a "2001" produced
under the same conditions as "Eraserhead"’. Surely such a work is
part of cinema’s canon – even its cult wing? Sadly not, but for anyone
who was in the Cannes audience that day, or who saw it in its limited
Paris, US and Japanese releases, Patrick Bokanowski’s extraordinary
feature is likely to have remained an unforgettable experience.
In these days of global DVD retrieval of even the most obscure
grindhouse ‘classics’, it is rare to encounter the works of a filmmaker
one is astonished by, and whose absence from conventional registers of
the ‘great’ feels scandalous. Armenian documentarist Artavazd Peleshian
is one such giant; Bokanowski is another. Both share a preference
for the short form and both exist in dialogue with other art forms,
especially painting, poetry and music. But both also make films that
deploy the unique qualities of cinema, sculpting with image, sound,
colour and light to provoke an imaginative response.
Bokanowski, who lives in Paris with his wife and long-time
collaborator, musician Michele, is at once a technical pioneer,
advancing the visual reach of cinema with every film he makes, and an
artisan, a dedicated craftsman in the same vein as Jan Svankmajer,
Stan Brakhage or the Brothers Quay. Over 35 years, and in fewer
than ten shorts and one feature, he has developed a personal cinema
unfettered by narrative but resonant with a visual viscerality.
Studying photography, optics and chemistry, he works with mixed media
– live action, models, engravings – but manipulates the image in a
frame-by-frame optical printing process that allows engagement with
the very building blocks of film.
‘What makes me begin a new film,’ he says, ‘is nearly always an
impulse, a desire – or a sort of technical fury which pushes me to
try and see something that I’ve not already seen. Often, my trials
lead to nothing; but sometimes, I find one or more methods, then
images, then sequences that seem to work, that stand up to my own
doubts and criticisms. Little by little, a central thread appears,
less the result of ideas than desires.’
His 1991 short ‘La Plage’ took a day in the life of a beach and
turned it into a symphony of phenomena that embodied the delights
of sun and surf, the pleasures and the solitude of the shoreline,
through an intensifying distortion of the image that felt closer to
the experience of being there than any realist approach.
It is, however, in ‘L’Ange’ (1982) that the full scale of his
achievement is evident. A truly unclassifiable 70 minutes of pure
cinema, it follows an unidentified wanderer as he or she climbs a
vast staircase within an undefined space. Unsettling and disturbing
episodes occur on various landings: a suspended puppet is savagely
sliced, a Vermeer-esque maid repeatedly brings milk until the jug
smashes, a bald man combs his head in a tin bath, tiny figures try
to rescue a naked woman in a vast landscape – while the journey is
interspersed by brilliant flashes of light and great floods of water.
The location is unclear, the journey’s purpose obscure, but the impact
of the work, working visually and sonically deep into the unconscious
and the imagination, is neither. Very rare screenings of Bokanowski’s
work in London this week will provide a singular encounter with a
genuine artist of the cinema.
Patrick Bokanowski will introduce his films at the Cine Lumière on
May 22.
–Boundary_(ID_XIkFInRllSEp9zsS9vkd4A)–