The Polarizing, Magnificent
Cinema of Bruno Dumont.

by Nick Wrigley


There were boos at Cannes when Bruno Dumont's L'humanité (1999) won three major awards (1). Boos perhaps because he's self-taught, an unusual filmmaker working outside the main tradition of the French film industry, and a creator of such extraordinarily fresh work that he polarizes opinion moreso than Mr. Stone-in-the-shoe himself — Lars von Trier. Instead, Dumont — unhappy with modern art cinema ("it's lost touch with life") — wants his cinema to "return man to the body, to the heart, to truth". I greatly admire his clean, organic approach and find his films intoxicating, indeed, utterly essential (2). This article is my attempt to understand why he legitimizes cinema for some and crucifies it for others.

If you gravitate towards cinema that is more than just fickle entertainment (a rare pastime today, I know) then the haloed procession of poet filmmakers over the last century will probably have caught your interest. For me, Bruno Dumont's cinema is refreshingly devoid of the aristocratic notions and self-referential winking that can sometimes asphyxiate modern art cinema. Dumont refuses to let meaning be obfuscated by these unfortunate traits - traits which have ghettoized modern art films to the fringes of cultural discourse. His films aren't made as traditional entertainment nor do they exist to make money (something that must seem incomprehensible to most American filmmakers and audiences) — but how refreshing they are!

Background

Bruno Dumont (3) spent his twenties and most of his thirties working two jobs (teaching philosophy and making commercial films for local businesses) after being refused a place at the top film schools in France. His first film was for a bank surveillance company. Subsequent films dealt with heavy industry, machines in action and manufacturing procedures — basically from-a-raw-material-to-a-finished-product type films. He described the process in a 1999 interview (4), "I had the camera go inside the chocolate machine, which brought me one of my first emotions through film. It was beautiful to see chocolate fall down and I managed to amplify this and create emotion. People were touched to see the candy, and after that I was always trying, always searching for the emotion. I was only shooting the machines, but I was looking for the emotion in the machines." For fifteen years he shot candy manufacturing films, the building of a highway, a real estate attorney's congress, and other seemingly banal projects. Dumont described how, looking back on this, everything he was filming, no matter how dull, became interesting, "I learnt how to make uninteresting things interesting. The way I work today is completely linked to those ten years of filming nothing."

La vie de Jésus

Dumont became dissatisfied with his other vocation, teaching philosophy (5), because of "its limited ability to connect with people". He wrote his first feature film, La vie de Jésus [The Life of Jesus) (1997), as a novel, in order to express his own philosophical thoughts. It found its way into the hands of French producers Rachid Bouchareb and Jean Bréhat (6) who were bowled over by it. Upon meeting Dumont, they were apparently struck by his personality and uncompromising vision of how his "screenplay" should be made into a film. Dumont was hired to direct his own work and the film went on to win the Jean Vigo Prize at Cannes. The overused phrase "remarkably assured debut" does not begin to describe the sheer confidence and unfettered vision of Dumont's debut. La vie de Jésus is a simple, stark, brilliantly filmed tale of disaffected youth in the French countryside (around Dumont's hometown), centring on one epileptic young man named Freddy. In a 1997 interview with David Walsh, Dumont said, "I had the desire to tell the life of Jesus. Not to repeat what everybody knows. It is the significance of that life that interests me. I invented a story to regenerate the meaning, to show that there is a humanism in Christianity that they don't teach in the Church, in the schools. It is concerned with the power of man. I think that man has power. Man is elevated. At the same time, I think that man is also very base, like Freddy. I think that his life is suffering, pain, sadness, love, joy, sex. Evil is a part of life. It is necessary to confront it. Perhaps in that confrontation man can raise himself." (7)

In La vie de Jésus, Dumont represents the youth of today as decaying — lost and despairing — yet he's aware that they hold the future in their hands. He wants to combat their despair, to make them understand that they are capable of inventing their own future, "What's important is the person who watches it. He continues to live," — Dumont said at the film's release — "perhaps in this darkness he will see the glimmer, but I stopped, finally at the moment when the glimmer appears. I'm not a prophet, it is not for me to say anything, it is for people to do something." This is more than just ambitious, well-intentioned rhetoric. This is useful cinema, unpretentious, meaningful cinema — like the old days of De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson and Renoir. In his Enthusiasm piece from 2000, Steve Rose wrote, "Dumont is endowed with a self-belief that would be pompous had it not paid off." (8)

L'humanité

The last scene of La vie de Jésus led directly to Dumont's second film L'humanité in 1999. He saw potential in the very ill-at-ease policeman interrogating Freddy in La vie de Jésus and wrote a script about a policeman who can't express himself and who suffers from hypertension. L'humanité is a film that people either seem to be locked into from the start or they just can't abide. At the time of L'humanité's release, Sight & Sound magazine in the UK ran a feature article (9) with an opposing rant and rave by two writers. The rave was by Mark Cousins who talked about the "stare" of the film. He wrote, "Dumont has no pity in his eyes for his extraordinarily empathetic policeman, who seems to absorb all the evil he sees. This creates a completely gripping system of looks — icy cold looking at burning hot — which is miles away from the Film Studies categories of the gaze, the objectifying look, the invisible narrative look. The stare of L'humanité is CinemaScope Pasolini, unblinking Bresson."

The constipated rant in the same issue was by Jonathan Romney who, in his own words, found himself "sniggering like a schoolkid at the pretension". He describes the film as "mesmerisingly awful" and "overwhelmingly portentous". Revealingly, Romney dismisses the film's ambiguities as "vagueness" from a director "not fully in control of his indeterminacy". Romney's piece is also full of keen observations, but that he was moved to laughter — with a row of middle-aged English-speaking critics, apparently all guffawing — suggests more a nervous laughter (at seeing a film that didn't fit his preconceptions of what a film could be, perhaps?) (10) How can such beautifully made films as Dumont's create such an indignant response? As Stephen Holden suggests in his insightful NYTimes review of Twentynine Palms, "Radical visions that audiences don't want to accept [are] a sign that an unwelcome vision with more than a grain of truth may be hitting home." (11)

Darren Hughes' article Bruno Dumont's Bodies (12) (which first turned me on to Dumont's films a few years ago), makes a fascinating observation about Dumont's first two films (Twentynine Palms wasn't made when the article was written) namely: "One recurring motif is a medium close-up that positions the actor horizontally within the Scope frame, usually in a side view from the chest up." These lingering shots of bodies, bare torsos, hunched over, give, as Hughes noted, "the appearance of one being flogged". Perhaps this too is how Dumont himself feels in today's consumer-led, spiritually-empty society, a culture that he believes "has failed politically, socially, and morally." (13) This pessimism/realism leads us to his bleakest film, the "experimental horror" film Twentynine Palms (2003), and in it his "bodies" become corpses. (The first time we see Katia (see below), sleeping, Dumont presents her with the pallor of a corpse.)


Twentynine Palms

Dumont's third is perhaps his most polarizing film yet. If one were trying to plot where Dumont might go after his first two films, you'd be hard-pressed to plot this. It's certainly no retread, and it marks a few important changes in Dumont's approach. Firstly, it's set in the USA; secondly, it features "proper actors" for the first time; and thirdly, it was written in two weeks whereas his earlier films took a number of years each. The fascinating extras on the new French Blaq Out DVD reveal that Dumont was scouting locations for his forthcoming "epic" set in the USA, called The End, when he quickly wrote the script for Twentynine Palms. Whether the idea was to raise Dumont's profile in the USA whilst more funds were sought for The End is unclear, but Dumont's producer intimates that they were looking for a big name American star. So, a quickie "experimental horror" film was made, resulting in an extremely pointed, unusual film and a wave of negative reviews when it skimmed the festival circuit in late 2003.

Twentynine Palms has been compared to Psycho and Deliverance because of its unexpected, earth-shattering violence. I've read a bunch of reviews of the film and no-one has yet compared it to Easy Rider — which I think it has much more in common with — however, such comparisons are lazy. Twentynine Palms is a unique film which shows — in the simplest, bleakest terms — how senseless violence can engender further senseless violence. The visceral immediacy of this summation stays with you for days. It's not the "Zabriskie Pointless" it's being painted as by a handful of critics scoffing over foreign auteurs who film in America. In his surface review in Village Voice, J. Hoberman flatulently declares that "irritating improv and bad acting are crucial to the Dumont experience" before stating that he's looking forward to reading what other critics have to say about it..... Ed Gonzalez's piece at Slant (14) is one of the more perceptive readings of the film I've come across, along with the NYTimes review by Stephen Holden (15). In James Quandt's recent, fascinating Artforum article "Flesh & Blood" (16) he lumps Dumont's film in with what he (reluctantly) terms the "New French Extremity". He bemoans Twentynine Palms and Dumont for letting everybody down ("everybody" being those who saw Dumont as Bresson's true heir). Well, he's not let me down, but I do find it sad that so many believe Dumont to have dirtied his copybook with this film. Quandt asks, "What new or important truth does Dumont proffer that his audience needs to be slapped and slammed out of its sleepwalk into apprehending?" — The answer, I believe, is that there is no new or important truth to be had — Dumont simply wants to slap us. His "dissatisfying violence" diametrically opposes audiences' expectations of current American cinematic violence. If you look to film for life's answers then Twentynine Palms is not going to please - this is Dumont's experimental horror film (and I'm glad it's off his chest.)

I sense that Dumont mistrusts mankind, and for a director who believes that our culture has "failed politically, socially, and morally", these are the films he brings us — unique, visceral, vital films that will weather time well.
----------------

"I'm not indifferent to the public. I will end up being a filmmaker for big audiences, I may be 70 by that time, but I will get there."
— Bruno Dumont

Bruno Dumont's forthcoming projects include Flandres, set during a future European war, and The End, an American police procedural which takes place as meteors fall to Earth.

by Nick Wrigley, April 2004
Copyright © 2004 mastersofcinema.org

NOTES:


  1. L'humanité won the Grand Jury Prize, Best Actor (Emmanuel Schotté), and Best Actress (Séverine Cameele) at the 1999 Cannes film festival. The president of the jury was David Cronenberg. Jury members were Dominique Blanc, Doris Dörrie, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Hendricks, Holly Hunter, George Miller, Maurizio Nichetti, Yasmina Reza, & André Techiné. ^


  2. Dumont's three films are La vie de Jésus [The Life of Jesus) (1997), L'humanité (1999), and Twentynine Palms (2003). ^


  3. Dumont was born in 1958 in Bailleul, France. ^


  4. A video interview on the US DVD release of L'humanité. ^


  5. He taught Greek philosophy ("the platonic school, Aristotle and the Stoic philosophers") as well as the German philosophers Kant and Hegel. ^


  6. Rachid Bouchareb and Jean Bréhat have produced Bruno Dumont's first three films. Bréhat talks about his artistic relationship with Dumont in detail on the French Blaq-out DVD of Twentynine Palms. ^


  7. Walsh, David. "Interview with Bruno Dumont, Director of The Life of Jesus." 20 Oct, 1997. Dumont was asked if he admired any living filmmakers, he replied: "No, dead ones. I have a great admiration for the great filmmakers, for the poets; those who made of cinema a true art, cinema of poetry. I think of Bresson, Pasolini, Rossellini, people like that. When I leave that sort of film I don't know what to think. It takes me a long time to work over. The hour and a half in the cinema is not the end. Kiarostami is a great master. These films nourish me for days, for years. Films that try to be spectacular, afterward, they leave you nothing." ^


  8. Rose, Steve. "L'Humanité: Steve Rose on Bruno Dumont" - Enthusiasm (UK) Issue 3, Autumn/Winter 2000: 34-37. ^


  9. Cousins, Mark, and Jonathan Romney. "L'Humanité: Rapture or Ridicule?" - Sight and Sound (UK) 10.9 (2000): 22-25. — I wonder if Romney's seen the film again? (and I wonder what Cousins and Romney think of Twentynine Palms?) ^


  10. In my continuing efforts to understand the naysayers, let's look at the qualms of someone else who couldn't stand L'humanité. As I prepared this piece, a friend in Michigan wrote, in relation to the film, "I hold a belief that we respond to art based on a recognition of what we know to be true — and know in a personal, individual sense. I think that this moment of recognition is ever more powerful, and personally significant, in a world in which our ideas and responses are routinely, overtly manipulated to cynical ends, that is, increasingly overwhelmed by mendacity. To catch a glimpse of something authentic, that affirms our sense of humanity, and gives us faith in the survival of hope, even hints at a transcendent reality — this is something for which it is worth staying awake. And different people will find this thing in different places." — so true! (and pertinent). Then he focuses on L'humanité, "So much of Pharaon's behavior seems overtly contrived by the filmmaker, such as his unlikely vocation as a police detective (on what planet?), or his abrupt (inappropriately sexual?) expressions of physical affection. Does Dumont hope these audacious narrative strategies will subvert our expectations and provoke a confrontation with assumptions about human decency and compassion? For me, the effect was to call attention to the screenwriter, waving his clever pen. That's what I meant earlier by 'unconvincing'. I don't give a rip about 'realism'." — this I can understand, especially in relation to his earlier comments about subjectivity (if only Romney had been so astute!). My friend closed with this, "Dumont courts a visceral response from the viewer, eschewing an intellectual one, but doesn't account for viewers like me, who remain distinctly unmoved. I'll watch the movie again, but I'm dreading it." —

    Personally speaking, Pharaon's unusual behaviour, unlikely vocation, and detached persona did not foreground themselves for me like they did for my friend. I never once felt manipulated by the script or by Dumont "waving his clever pen" because I was locked into the beautiful ebb and flow of each shot. The acting, especially Emmanuel Schotté, is so unconsciously lucid, that it transcends all traditional expectations and carries the film into new territory. I turn to Dumont again to explain his intentions better than I could, "What's important is the emotions. It is for the spectator to make these things conscious, it is not for me to do it. The spectator must think. He has a lot of work to do. The power of cinema lies in the return of man to the body, to the heart, to truth. The thing I'm mostly preoccupied with, is truth. I want the characters to be true-to-life. The characters are true because they are themselves, so I get what I want. Most professional actors are not true-to-life. I work a lot with unemployed people because I enjoy the work relationship. They're people who make movies only for the money. They have no desire to be in the movies. It's something really fantastic, making somebody off the street feel like acting in the movie. My experiences with actors who have learned to do it as a job haven't been satisfying, I didn't believe them. They have an artifice that is unconvincing. So the people that I film aren't even amateur actors - they're just people. They don't even really want to make films. In fact most of the time they were bored shitless with it." - ibid, #8."

    As with all great works of art, it's a combination of elements which gives a piece power, yet our perception of those elements can differ wildly depending on our own experiences. Maybe I like it so much because I'm tired of cinematic conventions and have spent the last decade unlearning "how to watch a film" ever since the (necessary?) unhelpfulness of Film Theory classes? Dumont, for me, is a new kind of cinema. I felt L'humanité as an honest, beautifully made, creative expression — and to top it all, it has craftmanship and formal exactitude to match the greats.

    Dumont — "I'm inventing a new cinema. It's not a cinema of desire. I don't make movies to make people dream or forget, to entertain them. It's democratic cinema. I don't make diversionary movies, entertainment movies, I try to make artistic movies which make the viewer think about himself, about life, about existence. What I'm interested in with cinema is the relationship between the movie and the viewers. My movie is never a model for the viewer, I like to present uncompleted characters with which to confront the viewers. I like the confrontation. So I'm always looking for something unreal in the way characters are presented. I want something to be missing, some gaps so as to create a clash with the viewer. I'm not interested in presenting someone completed and ideal, and that's why I don't have to be concerned with realism. I'm not trying to make a real, completed movie. A movie is never finished, the viewer completes it."- ibid #4 ^


  11. Holden, Stephen. "Feral Essence of Living (Few Words Are Needed)" - New York Times, April 9, 2004.^


  12. Hughes, Darren. "Bruno Dumont's Bodies" - Senses of Cinema, March 2002 ^


  13. ibid #7 ^


  14. Gonzalez, Ed. Twentynine Palms review. Slant magazine. ^


  15. ibid #11^


  16. Quandt, James. Flesh & Blood: Sex and violence in recent French cinema. Artforum magazine, January 2004.^


DUMONT ON DVD:


La vie de Jésus
The US Fox-Lorber disc isn't bad. It's non-anamorphic, yet is original aspect ratio (OAR), and has optional subtitles. No motion problems like Fox Lorber's Yi-Yi, for example. Not a bad disc. Cheap too. (The French version is pan and scan and currently OOP).

L'humanité
This Fox-Lorber disc is better. It's anamorphic, DVD9, OAR, with optional English subs. Includes a (badly edited) video interview with Dumont. The Fox-Lorber disc is much more desirable than the unneccessarily two-disc, non-anamorphic Hong Kong DVD by Panorama.

Twentynine Palms
At the time of writing (April 2004) the French disc (on the Blaq-out label) is the only one available. It's a reference quality disc, anamorphic, OAR, optional English subtitles, a making of docu, and an interview with the producer. See for yourself here. The Wellspring USA DVD will be out in December 2004.