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Jean
Michel Bruyère ::
Si Poteris Narrare, Licet,
2002
Music: Thierry Arredondo
With: Fiorenza Menni, Issa Samb, Pape Camara, Mansour Guindo, Abdoulaye
Keïta, Ibé Konaté, Mamadou Lamine Sakho, Assane
Sène, Chérif Soumaré, Babacar Sy, Sada Tangara,
Ndatté Ndiaye with his ensemble
Two Landmark Dates
° YEAR 1 A.D. ::
»Nunc tibi me posito visam velamine narres,
Si poteris narrare, licet.«
[Metamorphosis. III. 192/193]
According to Ovid, this is what Diana said to Actæon,
the young man having surprised her and contemplated her nude in
her bath. »Si poteris narrare, licet,« then. If he is
able speak of it, she will allow him to do so. But she has just
turned him into a stag and has released him in this form to be surrounded
by his fifty trained hunting- dogs. Feigning her authority, the
goddess does not ignore the kind of carnage in which he will be
soon dismembered. The groan of an animal become his only language,
Actæon is torn to pieces, doubtless incapable of telling what
he saw, of recounting the ultimate experience of seeing which was
his own [but then again, what dog could have listened to it?]. Unable
even to call his own beasts and to make them recognize him, Aktaion,
that which belongs at the shore, dies stupefied, in the jaws
of the pack which had remained faithful for so long.
° YEAR 1999 A.D. :
- The artists of LFK declare that they are dogs.
- They affirm that they are descended from Melampus,
Ichnobates, Pamphagos, Dorceus, and Oribasos, Nebrophonos, Theron,
Lælaps, Pterelas and from all those who have eaten the hunter
in the prey, the master in the beast.
- They claim to be direct descendents from this
pack, the one which, having thus driven the negating, synergetic,
and initiatory action right to its end, was the inventor of the
first deed of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
- They recall that, making their meal of the man-animal,
of the Being-non-Being in which the image of divine nudity was
enclosed, the dogs of Gargaphie had also devoured and thus had
had to assimilate a mystical destiny. For, those dogs carried
in their stomachs the transformed material of an order, of a challenge,
of a justly »cynical« and divine authorization bestowed
upon the hunter become tawny and, finally, eaten : that of showing
what cannot be told, that is to say, the mystical itself, if Wittgenstein
is to be believed.
- It is on the basis of their particular canine
ancestry that the members of LFK found and justify their collective
interest in the arts in general, and in filmmaking in particular,
insofar as it be essentially the art of silence.
- Until that time a poor group with neither artistic
place nor aesthetic morale, a simple and errant band already practicing
negativity but in a purely instinctive way, the artists of LFK
henceforth claim their autonomy as a cynical people on
the territories of film. Following no master, faithful to their
only ancestors, they conceive of a cyno-gestural order, a kind
of cynema, that they uselessly call Vøspazà
and whose primary characteristic feature is the complete incomprehensibility
of its language [mysterious to itself].
- The bit by bit, element by element expulsion and
progressive evacuation of the faeco-philosophical and excreto-mystical
material of devoured myth will one day constitute the essential
deed of the repertoire of the Vøspazàrian film-makers
[cynéaste]. This will be intellectuo-convulsive,
above all.
- Given how complicated and fastidious it seems
to be to want to reconstitute the cervidae body of Actæon
as the product of extractions from a multitude of stomachs, how
impossible it would be in practice to bring him back to life and
how, despite all resurrection, he would nevertheless still be
incapable of telling what he saw as a man, the artist-dogs of
LFK renounce straightaway both coherence and narration in their
work. As well, it is not to extracts that they attribute an autonomous
value, but to extraction itself. The value of the pure deed, for
which they seek no end other than itself.
Si Poteris Narrare, Licet
Outline
While Si Poteris Narrare, Licet inaugurates
Jeffrey Shaw's iCINEMA, at the same time it is also, and foremost,
the first film of iCYNEMA. Thanks to the technology, the art of
the purest Vøspazàrian tradition reaches one of its
high-points here [9m, at the base of the video-projector], such
that it can be falsely commemorative, systematically gyratory, manifestly
ritualistic and strictly non-productive.
Cynepolis
At the equator of this round film, Actæon's city floats and
turns. More than a city, it's an entire caninorium that the
dogs have built in his memory and dedicated to the film cult [culte
cynématographique] of his devouring. It was conceived
according to the plans of Al Asmunaim, the city that the philosopher
Trimegiste erected at the doors of Egypt; Egypt where, as every
wandering people is persecuted at least once, the Vøspazàrs
also sojourned. The enclosure of the city consists of nine doors
and nine cavities.
Chiron before the doors of the cynema of the
future
The nine doors lead to the next films and are still therefore prohibited
to the public. They are guarded by Chiron, the wise centaur who
tutored Actæon, son of Aristee. He wants to take on an entirely
human appearance here, but one can make out the harness resting
around his neck, one that he rightly owes, as horse, to his overly
great familiarity with men. One can also make out the characteristic
incurable wounds that the arrows of Heracles have left him with.
He keeps the objects around him which he uses to impart the knowledge
and the wisdom of the world to his student but, with the deed of
the dogs eating the student, the established science of the master
is lost and is so completely dissolved in the canine intestines
that Chiron himself is deprived of them. The Chiron that we see
there is no longer man nor horse. It is a donkey. One can see how,
henceforth, the cognitive tools weigh on his arm like dead weight,
or even sometimes hinder his body and disturb his equilibrium; one
can hear his efforts, as vain as they are confused, to regain language
as it flees away.
Cavities of the cynema of the origins
Between the guarded doors, there are nine cavities. They are ancient
cinemas [the Vøspazàrs consider cinema, in contempt
of every historical truth, to be the only original art]. Timeless
images are projected on the wall; blurry and indistinct, they are
like the shadows in Plato’s cave. There are three kinds of
them, each occupying three of the cinema’s cavities.
Cavities of the first type
They show three young Vøspazàrian actors at three
different times, each having taken on the name of Actæon to
represent the young man nine times altogether at his age of initiation.
Each of them is running in non-landscapes, crossing immense flat
spaces where water and earth often merge. Under the pomp of massive
hunting gear, a tuft of fur is visible here and there on their bodies.
At the instant when the young hunters suspend their course and seem
to scrutinize the nothingness that surrounds them, one can discern
the whiteness, the transparency of their eyes. Is it the divine
nudity that they see, which pierces their glances thus? Were they
already blind before having seen it or are they blind because they
have already seen it? Are they on the search for a pure theophanie
or is this the moment of their escape from the pack? Are they on
the road to their ruin, or are they trying to escape from it? And
the fur appearing from under their dress, is it already a tuft from
the stag that they will become? Is it a part of their real fur,
that of the Vøspazàrian actor at the canine origin,
that of the artist-dog borne of the carnage that has not yet taken
place? Or still further, the end, as we know, returns unavoidably
to the beginning, so would it not be all that at the same time?
Cavities of the second type
Images are inscribed on their walls of three individual relations
to the mystical, the mystical here being essentially what it is
a matter of showing and of living without being able to seek recourse
to language. These three relations, complementary [complemen-taires],
are eroticism, trance, and ecstasy. During each, Diana is present
next to the image projected on the wall. The actor-dog-Actæon-stag
of the image seems to address his gestures to her, and she, to react
to them. Here, Diana makes her appearance clothed. The clothing
itself is unimportant: it is only in order that she not be nude
and precisely in order that her inexpressible nudity remain unrepresentable.
Cavities of the third type
They show us the images of three collective solutions to the mystical.
These three solutions, contradictory among themselves, are religious
dogmatism, pantheism, and the gag. One of the cavities resembles
a triptych of gestures derived from polytheism, prophecy, and shamanism.
Another shows the silent gestures of a villager amusing his neighbors
with a vulgar parody of the goddess, whose coat of arms and mask
he is wearing. The third shows the final action that points to a
pantheist philosophy: of bodies plunging together into the earth
for a collective, fated marriage with nature, naked and divine.
An ancient key twirls around above this last image.
Amphitheater of unspoiled nature
The lower part of the film shows a circular landscape which is perpetually
changing, and in which nine Actæons are looking at nine Dianas
in the bath. But the nude body of the goddess is not visible there.
Only her face is revealed for the contemplation of the hunter. What
of the goddess is unveiled, what is exposed before Actæon
is not, consequently, her ass, her legs, her stomach, or her breasts,
but the expressive totality of her face. Its total competence, its
entire adequacy to express what cannot be said of it. Diana does
not turn Actæon into a stag. It is enough that, in revealing
to him the perfection of her art, she also discloses to him the
absolute futility of human language for divine expression. Actæon,
with the vanity of his quest for self-consciousness and for consciousness
of the world thus recognized, thus revealed, will lose all reason
for speaking on his own and, his face given over to animal stupefaction,
he himself will throw his humanity to the dogs.
The immanence of the disaster
In the upper part of the film, the nine young cynics who have adopted
the appearance of Actæon are sadly replaying the comedy of
the human eye as it claims to see the world right up to God’s
very nudity. Then they take pleasure in mixing up the voice of man,
which they have adopted, with that of the stag, which they have
made him take on. This game of metamorphosis of the metamorphosis,
where thought is lost and which entertains the artist-dogs, disturbs
the order of the living so much that the sky turns on itself as
if to announce an imminent disaster.
Documentary
This part of the film erases all of the others and unwinds in time
[1 minute every 6 minutes]. It shows a fragment of a trance-ritual
and of a nomination, the Ndeup ceremony of the Lebou culture, recorded
in the Senegalese desert of the Peul people. During the course of
this ceremony, the great priestess Ndatte takes the life of a cow,
slits its throat, wraps an hysteric in the entrails of the animal,
and abandons her own body and her own voice to a series of animals
and spirits that want to take possession of them.
[Translated from the French by Sarah Clift.]
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