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BORIS CHARMATZ PRESENTS THE SILENT FILM "UNE LENTE INTRODUCTION" IN
DeSINGEL, ANTWERP
by Jeroen Peeters
‘Film muet’ reads a caption at the beginning, as if to stipulate the work’s
medium – silent movie. As if to make sure that ‘this is not a dance film!’
Though the French choreographer Boris Charmatz has created several ‘dance
films’ before, he always remained faithful to his belief that dance is not a
pictorial medium. Une lente
introduction is a film in collaboration
with the film maker Aldo Lee, and it stays indeed silent
throughout its 34 minutes. The end titles remind us that the film is based on
Charmatz’ 1997 choreography Herses
(une lente introduction); they
even list up the credits of that project, including, curiously, the titles of
the compositions by Helmut Lachenmann used in that earlier work. Still, Une lente introduction is not so much an erasure of Lachenmann,
nor of Herses (une lente
introduction). The film’s silence
insists that it is not just a registration of a dance piece, but a work in its
own right: the choreography does not happen in the image, but is taken elsewhere by the sound of silence.
Where does the
choreography actually happen? Although with the silence, you seem to be
immersed in the film already before the first images appear, it will take a
slow introduction to find out. Even after 34 minutes that slow start is still
about to happen without quite happening – it is a start that has already happened unnoticed and requires endless
stretches of time to be traced. As if its secret were swallowed by the silence.
Une lente introduction is certainly Charmatz’ most meditative
work, allowing for a distant contemplation of the imagery. But the film also
intoxicates you through the ears, making audible the muttering of your own
thoughts and desires, as if their volume were cranked up by the silence.
Wigs
But in
order to hear, we must first watch. Four naked bodies, two men and two women,
are exploring a small platform, tracing one another’s bodies, probing
distances, borders, horizons. Like often in Charmatz’ work, the dancers’
movements are highly idiosyncratic and resist legibility. At the same time,
these choreographic gestures of erasure revolve around a few clear reference
points, like for instance naked bodies launched one moment into joyful dancing
and hopping around – flirting with the fiction of an unburdened, natural body.
At a closer look, the performers appear to be not quite naked – they are
wearing wigs, and they carry meaning. Their striptease is a conceptual one:
bodies stripped bare of the clichés, fictions and narratives they are dressed
in all the time – which nevertheless continue to linger in our perceptual
habits, and sometimes surface in the dancers’ bodily projections.
Une lente introduction not only erases, reduces and suspends. The
film also adds quite a few layers to the choreography happening somewhere on
that platform. Lit by Madjid Hakimi, the dancers are wrapped in the strong
sculptural contrasts of chiaroscuro, sometimes they even disappear in the
darkness looming at the edges of the space. Then there is Aldo Lee’s hand-held
camera, which moves slowly as if skirting a landscape, which stops, wavers and
comes close, which suddenly shifts and plunges into a low perspective, which
wields a frame severing limbs and slicing bodies. It is the restless view of an
eye supported by a body. The video footage was later transferred to 35 mm
film, but not without first manipulating the colours, covering the bodies with
a somewhat artificial dim spectrum, shades of green and purple, and roughening
their skins with the grain of pixels. The frames and mediations are present,
yet they appear to create proximity rather than distance. Their violence is
softened by the silence.
Reverberations
The
thread that most clearly structures the dance sequences is a double pas de deux of two couples – the couple, yet
another strong marker of dance’s phantasmal realm. Julia Cima and Boris
Charmatz are engaged in a wild, contact-ridden physical duet, moving beyond the
imagery and clichés of the couple, though not avoiding strong sexual overtones
in their dancing. The simultaneous duet of Myriam
Lebreton and Vincent Dupont is constructed around distance and provides a
backdrop for the other duet. That at the same time yet another duet between the
film and the spectator takes place, becomes clear at the end of the film, when
a fifth dancer (Sylvain Prunenec) enters the frame and then the platform, to be
embraced by a mass of four people, forming one symbiotic, communal body. Une
lente introduction stages the desire of participation literally through the
possibility of walking into the image.
Again, not the promise and consumption of an ideal
image are at stake here, as this visual phantasm is accompanied by, even
steeped in silence. The real participation happens elsewhere. What ties us to
the image is our desire to hear those dancing bodies, muted by the editor’s
hand. We are in that sound – which is nothing else than the
reverberation of our own projections – and experience silence unbridling the
heterogeneous realm of the acoustic imaginary. Perhaps this is Charmatz’ main
choreographic gesture, carried by the separation of image and sound: to provide
with Une lente introduction a medium that elicits desires different
from those that conform to the codes of the theatre or the society of
spectacle, and allow the spectators to descend into the intimacy of their own
depths – where silence must inevitably touch upon the secret.
For information on further screenings, see
www.ednaedna.com .
(18.10.2007)
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