Film-Philosophy 16.

1 (2012)
Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 243
Review: Alban Pichon (2009) Le cinema de Leos Carax.
Lexperience du dj-vu. Lormont: Le Bord de leau
editions, 268 pp.

Daniele Rugo
1


Lexperience du dj-vu is an imaginative and exhaustive analysis of the
work of the former enfant terrible of French Cinema, Leos Carax.
Throughout the book Pichon convincingly manages to move beyond the
categories usually associated with Caraxs work namely the Cinma du
look and the Neo-Baroque to propose a distinctively fresh approach.
Pichon opens his highly original volume by saying that in Caraxs
films the beginnings are never what they seem to be: they actually are a
matter of repetition or continuation

(3). To those readings that define
Caraxs work on the basis of slick visual style or that stress the sense of
marvel often provoked by his films, Pichon responds that the cinema of
Carax attracts our attention because it provides an entrance into the illusion
of beginnings, achieved through a constant intertwining of sensorial and
cinematic memory.
The book covers Carax entire oeuvre, which stretches across almost
thirty years, four long features (Boy meets Girl (1984), Mauvais
Sang(1986), Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), Pola X (1991)) and four
shorts (Strangulation Blues (1980), Sans titre (1997), My Last Minute
(2006), Merde (2008)). Pichon organizes his argument in three parts. Under
the title Constants, the first set of remarks grounds the analysis by
illustrating the elements around which Carax filmography revolves.
Examining the regularities that punctuate Caraxs formal and thematic
choices, Pichon stresses the presence of a reflexive ambiguity. The titles of
the four sections Circulations; Everyday the same water; Encounter and
recognition; The detours of language symbolically embrace the paradoxes
that will guide the book. The second part explores the French directors
relation to the history of cinema, attempting to delineate a genealogy that
moves from the golden age of silent film to the nouvelle vague, but also
considers in a wider context the importance of cinematographic memory. In
the last section From memory to history Pichon writes since Caraxs
work traces and reactivates a number of problematic aspects of past cinema,
one could say that it rejoins the history of cinema (191). Following the
Godard of Histoire(s) though, Pichon adds that the presentation of the
history of cinema performed by Carax is always only the presentation of one
of many possible histories. The question of the history of cinema becomes

1
Golsmiths, University of London: dan.rugo@gmail.com
Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012)
Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 244
then a matter of memory and transmission, opening therefore a reflection on
the death and resurrection of cinema. Through more or less disguised
citations (in Mauvais Sang the character played by Binoche, called Anna,
looks and acts like a young Karina) and poetic statements, Carax places
himself on one side as the witness of this death and on the other as the
privileged survivor, who indicates a new beginning.
It is in the third and densest part that Pichon articulates his main thesis
more explicitly and it is here that the argument touches more closely on
philosophical issues. The notion of dj-vu, which forms the center of
Pichons critical approach often expressed in the forms of souvenir of the
present (an expression used by Alex in Boy Meets Girl) or false
recognition is derived largely from Bergsons work (filtered through
Deleuzes second book on cinema[for example Deleuze, 2005, p.77]). The
entire conceptual framework of this final part of Lexperience du dj-vu
rests on an appropriation of the French philosophers reflection on the
paradoxical nature of paramnesia. Pichons starting point is the Bergsonian
intuition of the duplicitous nature of our perception of events and time,

In a normal state of reception only the image of the present as present
accesses conscience, while the second the image as past does not,
since it could not be of any use. Nevertheless there are occasions when
we become conscious of the double dimensions of present time, which
then appears to us both present and past (234).

Faithful to the Bergsonian temporal paradox, Pichon attempts to reconstruct
Caraxs singularity around the idea of the dj-vu as reflective deception.
Caraxs films engage in a double system of references: on one side they
rework the history of cinema, and on the other they keep referencing each
other, producing a distortion right at the origin, undermining the very idea
of beginning and unsettling the notion of originality.
According to Pichon, in Caraxs films one witnesses then the
emergence of a distorted intimacy, one that is always redoubled and
permanently missed, constantly transfigured into the illusory. The romantic
pessimism that invests Caraxs works can then be traced to the problematic
nature of every encounter, which is submitted, to say it with Blanchot, to the
logic of the always, but not yet (Blanchot, 1997, p.37). While it is true that
his movies always revolve around a couple, it must be added that this is
constantly opened up by the presence of a third, or finds itself fragmented
through the intervention of foreign elements. The couple, emblem of
ambiguity, becomes then the key figure of this analysis: the love relation,
which aspires to be fully original and absolute, is always disturbed, weighed
down by memories or consumed in anticipations and coincidences (there is
always a potential other partner, in the past Les Amants du Pont-Neuf or
in a life yet to be discovered Pola X) becoming part of a series of shifts
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from which it can never seal itself off. The two is never a fully formed
outline; rather it is always committed since the beginning to a complex
series of references and remainders, which end up breaking it apart. The
exhaustion of language always at work in the couple, a proper fall into
silence (Alex in Mauvais Sang is ironically called langue pendu
chatterbox because of his proverbial silences), indicates of this relentless
interruption, but it also prefigures the constant possibility for something
extra-ordinary to happen, for a transfiguration of the present beyond
recognition. This also helps understanding how Caraxs interest in silent
cinema goes beyond a mere referential game, participating instead of the
very nucleus of his cinematic intention. Always lingering on the absurd, his
films proceed according to the impossible. In Caraxs own words we are
bound to the impossible.
Crafted around a number of philosophical digressions (Bergson, but
also Deleuze, most notably in Pichons insistence on difference and
repetition) and animated through a series of comparative studies (Carax and
Godard, Rivette, Garrel) the book is at times willfully repetitive, though the
author never falls into the anecdote. Pichon illustrates his ideas with a
wealth of examples, showing not only impressive knowledge of the subject
matter, but a profound ability to read the image.
The main problem seems to lay in the approach to the most
problematic philosophical points. When Pichon for example briefly
introduces the expression deconstruction of singularity, moving into the
complex Derridean territory, the author stops before his intuition could be
done justice to and, as a consequence of this, the discussion remains
hanging. There where a productive path could open up the analysis to an
even richer level, the philosophical and the filmic elements remain instead
foreign to one another.
Beside scholarly rigor and detailed analysis, the greatest merit of the
book is that of allowing the emotional intelligence and visual inventiveness
of Caraxs filmmaking to emerge. Pichon offers a significant contribution to
the understanding of one of the most interesting personalities of
contemporary cinema. Furthermore it provides a useful tool for those
interested in framing Caraxs work within a wider horizon, that of a cinema
that keeps interrogating its own nature and its place between the real and the
imaginary.