The actor & the aquarium (Bergala/Mourlet)

In 2001, Alain Bergala made a conference called "Sur un art ignore, côté face" (published in "Le Septième Art", 2003), which precisely addresses the issue of the character/actor (the identity between both terms not going without saying) in the centre of the film process. As a starting point, Bergala comments on the article by Mourlet "Sur un art ignore" (Cahiers, 59), particularly on its most famous sentence: "Since cinema is a gaze which is substituted for our own in order to give us a world more in harmony with our desires, it falls on faces, on radiant or bruised but always beautiful bodies, with this glory or this heartbreak which show the same primordial nobility, an elected race that, exhilarated, we recognize as our own, the ultimate progress in life towards the god." Bergala assumes that Godard deliberately falsely attributes to Bazin this sentence in "Contempt", maybe a bit embarrassed by the reference to an "elected race". Anyway, embarrassment or not, Godard, filming those Greek deities whose arms and gazes slice through the air organizing/creating the world, makes an explicit reference to the cinema according to Mourlet, where the actor shall be a god, whose actions and reactions within the set are the key of the mise en scène.

A few years ago, I guess I was mainly intrigued by mise en scène as a sort of struggle against the elements, where the art of the director lies in his capacity to master, to control every inch of the material given to him and to create his own world, "each stone at the right place". Where actors were objects among other objects. I can't analyse my change in view, but, now, I know I like to feel their breath. (It may be that the company of Vecchiali's work helped me so).

Back to Bergala. He tries to introduce another "figurative matrix" (?), which he presents as in opposition to the theory by Mourlet: the "aquarium-shot", where the actors' bodies are plunged into a glass parallelepiped. The main properties of this aquarium are the negation of gravity, the refusal of perspective and the undifferentiation of bodies, with a view to represent the humanity as a community.

All those properties assumed to be in opposition to the mourletian hero, god himself, free to exert his sovereignty over an open space. And the glass wall may introduce a distance between the actor and the spectator that violates the theory of fascination by Mourlet. I shall admit I'm not sure to follow Bergala in his theory... Anyway, aquarium or not, as Bergala admits himself, what is primordial in cinema is its capacity to reproduce human gestures and movements, through the actors. And that's where I stand. It's difficult for me to consider a film where the heart do not lie within the bodies of the actors. The miracle being that, within the space/the instant of one shot, in the smile on a woman face, may arise all the heartbreaks and all the bliss of the world. I need to feel the celluloid trembling under her breath.

Maxime Renaudin