Certain moments that insist on a pause are recovered in the 45-minute film Méditerranée (1963), a temporal suspension that considers images whose meaning has been lost. Jean-Daniel Pollet, who was once described as “the most concrete of the abstract filmmakers” of the Nouvelle Vague, filmed Méditerranée on a four-month journey throughout the Mediterranean and edited the footage over three years, at which point, according to Pollet, the film “edited itself.” Ancient statues, Greek ruins, a sacrificed bull, orange groves, young girls (one getting dressed, another dancing, and another that lies on an operating table) are edited against each other to signify an impending ending. The narration of an essay written for the film by the French writer Phillippe Sollers further amends this sense of disparity: “The line is drawn behind the curtain, where it is still forbidden to go, in the suspense of the conjunction of the final juxtaposition.” In the Mediterranean, where (in the Western world) light, earth, god, and humans are said to have first converged, Pollet suggests a radiance of an origin that is dimming, with its exit delayed and deferred.
Of the editing process, Pollet has recounted how each shot was used like a word, or a sign, to “maintain the free presence of things.” Akin to the law of nature, or something slightly more occult, Pollet attempts to attune presence and the present together as if he was a reliable witness. Carried on in Bassae (1964), Pollet returns to film Greek ruins. A furtive documentation of Doric columns, a deserted temple, stones upon stones, and the passing of clouds through them, depicts an accidental landscape. A poem by Alexandre Astruc retells the story of a place that was once a civilization where “the fate of countless other watchers who like us today did not know and waited without knowing.” The film is made with the certainty that civilization is mortal, and realistically, dead. In both Méditerranée and Bassae, there is a drive to address what ends endlessly—a ritual, an ocean’s wave, a memory, happiness…
Méditerranée + Bassae screen tonight, March 8, and on March 17, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Matías Piñeiro Selects.”
