Total Runtime: 95m
“I want to be a true classicist, to become
classical again through nature,through feeling. Before
my ideas were confused. Life! Life! This was the only
word I could utter. I wanted to burn down the Louvre,
poor cretin that I was! You have to go to the Louvre
through nature and return to nature through the Louvre.”
– Paul Cézanne quoted by Joachim Gasquet.
“Paul Cézanne pays a visit to the Louvre.
In front of each painting, he talks, comments, proclaims
his admiration or his disgust. He doesn’t like
the Italian primitives, nor Ingrès, but he
holds Tintoretto and the Venetians in the highest
esteem and Gustave Courbet is his hero. Cézanne’s
words come to us through Joachim Gasquet, a poet in
Aix-en-Provence, who wrote a biography of the painter.
So this is not a text written by Cézanne: the
visit is apocryphal. Above all, this is an artist’s
manifesto, that of Cézanne in the face of the
entire history of Western art; and that of the Straubs,
who have already made one film about the painter (Cézanne,
89) set around the Mt. Sainte-Victoire region, and
who aspire to be artists of the people and the earth,
poets of the real, as much as Cézanne and Courbet
before them. With A Visit to the Louvre,
the Straubs respond to Godard, engaging in a dialogue
with his Histoire(s) du cinéma, filming
the paintings from a fixed camera position—the
paintings themselves, that is, not their reproductions.
Possessed of a penetrating and elementary simplicity,
opening with a panoramic shot of the riverbanks of
Paris and closing with a panorama of a forest taken
from their earlier Ouvriers, paysans (01),
A Visit to the Louvre modestly proposes to
purify our vision, to make us into seeing people again,
and to separate the wheat of honest representation
from the chaff of decorative imagery. “Let them
set the Louvre on fire if they’re afraid of
what is beautiful,” Cézanne exclaims
to himself after having noticed that Courbet’s
The Burial at Ornans has been entombed within
the museum’s warehouse, denied public view because
of its too-powerful realism. But since no one is afraid
of beauty anymore, no one is afraid of the Straubs,
either . . . right?”—Frédéric
Bonnaud, Film Comment
“A study of art and the critical spirit, the
film is in line with the preceding works of Jean-Marie
Straub and Danièle Huillet, which consists
of adopting a different way of seeing extant art using
uniquely cinematic means. Kafka, Holderlin and Brecht
were given a similar treatment by the filmmaking couple.
Shown here in two versions running 47 and 48 minutes
consecutively, Une Visite au Louvre opens
with a long panning shot along the embankment before
entering the museum to stop in front of the Victory
of Samothrace, the only sculpture in the film.
Then we examine works by Ingres, Veronese, Giorgione,
David, Delacroix, Tintoretto, Courbet. The paintings
are filmed whole, the camera never zooming in on a
detail, in order to respect the format without subjecting
it to the cinematic frame. On the soundtrack we hear
the lovely voice of Julia Kolta, with its unusual,
deliberately artificial scansion. Attributed to Cézanne,
the comments we hear are taken from a biography of
the painter published in 1926 by the Aix-based poet
Joachim Gasquet, who admired the master and met him
on several occasions. If there is still some doubt
as to the accuracy of these attributions, they are
no less extraordinary, and compliment the visual aspect
of the film. Cézanne snipes at all kinds of
phonies, bad painting (“Ingres had no blood,”
“David murdered painting and introduced the
cliché”) and lets out joyful exclamations
when flesh bursts out of art, when beauty becomes
palpable and life tangible. After many utterances
filled with wit and intelligence, the film concludes
on these words: “Let’s burn the Louvre
if we’re afraid of beauty.”
Program 1: STRAUB-HUILLET’S A
TRIP TO THE LOUVRE
Program 2: THE DAILY PLANET (Unearthed)
Program 3: DAVID GATTEN’S SECRET
HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE: A TRUE ACCOUNT IN NINE PARTS
Program 4: THE TERRESTRIAL
OBSERVATORY
Program 5: BLUE MOVIE with special guest VIVA
Program 6: ALLEN ROSS’S GRANDFATHER TRILOGY
Program 7: LARRY GOTTHEIM
Program 8: MANUAL OVERRIDE (“Slip
Inside this House”)
Program 9: SHADOWHUNGER
Program 10: HEINZ EMIGHOLZ
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Sat Oct 1: 10:00 AM |
