Old Films

These days, I've been revisiting some of my favorite films — films I had not seen for quite a while. What happened was, I stumbled upon full versions of them on youtube. The first one I saw was En Compagnie d'Antonin Artaud, a film from the 90's by the French novelist and film-maker Gérard Mordillat. It presents, in dramatized form, the real story of the last few months of the life of the great actor/theatre director and visionary poet Antonin Artaud, who, in 1946, returned to post-war Paris, after having been interned for almost a decade in a psychiatric hospital. The film follows the development of his friendship with a sickly and struggling young poet called Jacques Prevel, and is actually based on the diary kept by Prevel at the time — shortly before Artaud's death (and, a few years later, Prevel's own, from tuberculosis). Artaud is played very convincingly by the awesome Sami Frey, who lends his dark, abrupt and haunted features to the poet. In fact the whole cast is fantastic; it is able, with sober, subtle acting to really pull off the illusion that we are seeing these people as they were then. The style of the film is a kind of beautiful post-modern throwback to Nouvelle Vague cinema and also, intermitently, to the surrealist films of Germaine Dulac: we feel that we are witnessing slices of real life, but from beyond some ironic distance; slices of life, voices, people, somehow elegantly preserved for posterity in the stylish lights and shadows of black and white film, but also made alien and mysterious by eery, dissonent soundscapes.

I first saw this film when I was in my last year of high-school, when it came out. And I loved it. Quite apart from being a great film, it really struck a chord with me because a lot of the "action" consists of the two unhappy poets briskly walking around the city, having very earnest, articulate discussions about life — and, back then, I was having a great time doing just the same thing. I had met this guy in school, who was very brilliant and charismatic and cultivated and unhappy; and in a way we really found each other, in one of those incandescent "us against the world" adolescent friendships. For a while, this friendship brought a kind of quickening and excitement to my life that I've never quite recaptured since, and I have associated this buoyant feeling with the film. The funny thing is, the day after I saw this film, out of the blue, I got a very nice email from this very guy, after we had been out of touch for over a decade. Surely, Artaud would have seen the workings of some underground magic, of some telluric vibrations in this; I, on the other hand, am just grateful for happy coincidences, whenever I can have them.