Michael Sicinski •  26.02.2025

Été (1991)

Like most filmmakers who are part of the French scene -- Pip Chodorov, Olivier Fouchard, Nicolas Rey, Frédérique Devaux -- French experimentalist Martine Rousset seems to only intermittently get shown in North America, and so it can take a few films for a viewer (me) to get a sense of what she's up to. Having watched Chants (1995), Mer (2003), A l'instant (2008), and now her featurette Été, I may have enough basic information to discuss Rousset's strategies.

One of her common cinematic techniques is the employment of flicker. Rather than shifting between black and white, or a series of discrete images, Rousset's films play with the basic shutter mechanism of a celluloid projector, so the images she's films pulse with light and hover in space. Sometimes these sequences move, and other times Rousset is affecting a light pulse on what seems to be a still frame. Unlike other "flicker films," where the dark of imagelessness is a rhythmic component, Été plays with saturation and overexposure, so that pictures take shape but then dissolve in pure white projector light.

This play with extreme light, along with Rousset's generally painterly camera movement, tends toward flatness, and only at the crescendo of these passages, when the image darkens enough to take shape, is cinematic depth suggested. Été is mostly concerned with plant life in stark daylight, and how the saturation or absence of light can serve to adjust focus and resolution. It's instructive to compare Rousset's treatment of flowers and landscape with the films of Rose Lowder. Where Lowder's rapid alternation between frames produces an exaggerated solidity -- two space-times battling it out and subtending each other --in Été there's a haze that occasionally resembles French Impressionism. 

This is notable in the context of the history of landscape film. More often than not, filmmakers have looked to the landscape for some sort of grounding in hard material, which allows the viewer to establish some cognitive cues as the formal experimentation pursues its own agenda. Filmmakers as dissimilar as Brakhage, Benning, Hutton, Grenier, or Menken all usually look at landscapes as a way to stake out a specific space, which they then activate in various ways.

By contrast, Rousset is an evaporator of space. In the case of Été, this seems to correspond to the filmmaker's use of poetic language. Like the bushes , porticos, and treetops, the narration in Été holds out the suggestion of narrative meaning while aggressively refuting it. There is often a subject, "he," who performs various undefined actions. "There is a lake, motionless at the bottom of a narrow valley. He stays there, days, caught in a torpor." Sometimes Rousset is describing a nominative "it" that is very hard to pin down. "The lead weight without sunlight. It had been possible. It had arrived. It would have been a long time ago."

The language of Été kind of recalls the asynchronous voice work of Marguerite Duras. But where Duras is always edging toward an emotionally charged abstraction, Rousset is hovering on the periphery of storytelling. We soon realize that any connection Été forges between words and images will be vague or even accidental. But taken together, these two streams of information mutually subtract meaning from one another, forming a covalent bond between cognitive mirages. Instead of providing a fractured or incomplete experience of narrative cinema, Été renders these elements, bypassing liquidity and fogging the screen like a vapor, or better yet, a fugitive light wave, on the move and soon reduced to white shadow.