On Un monde flottant
José Emilio González Calvillo • 09.11.2025
_NRFPT_02.png)
Un monde flottant (2021)
1.
Jean-Claude Rousseau’s films are films of frames. That statement sounds obvious because the frame is an essential aspect in any movie. However, this is a distinctive feature in the French director’s poetics not only because of his compositions’ meticulousness and accuracy but also because he explores and exploits it from the basis. For Rousseau, the frame is a surface created by four points joined together by two parallel vertical lines and two parallel horizontal lines. Those lines are not only employed to delimit spaces: they are actively used to interact and to establish relationships with what is shown in each frame. His cinema has plenty of frames within frames. For example, windows, which are an essential feature in his work, incorporate other fragments of the world within the images. His films find the exact disposition in its surroundings and in what is already there. Thus, it is not the director who, like a demiurge, places the objects in front of him. This is a geometer’s cinema: Rousseau measures terrestrial forms.
Un monde flottant doesn’t escape these aesthetical principals. The film is composed by a series of neat images that show urban landscapes in different Japanese cities, like Nara or Tokyo. Trying to describe those fragments is, in advance, a failed enterprise: what Rousseau shows is concrete matter that doesn’t need any words. Nevertheless, I will sketch out some of those images so that they can be envisioned as referents of the formal processes in the film. The descriptions are only traces: the remains of my sensible encounter with Un monde flottant.
2.
In a park where trees have conspicuous roots, some undaunted sika deers walk upon the leaves. The bird’s shrill singing doesn’t seem to disturb them. Inside a subway train, a young girl does her homework, some people read, and other people just wait silently for getting to their destiny. (It is fascinating the number of actions that happen simultaneously in the same shot, even when there is a large crowd or not). Outside, the landscape shifts from the bustled station to the suburbs, which are rapidly left behind, vanishing. Some couples and families drive rented boats that enter and exit the visual field. Parsimoniously, the boats plow the lake—not like those gondolas that are seen from a window inside that apartment-ship from Venise n’existe pas (1984), which disappeared as soon as they entered the frame. During the solitary night, a group of workers serve in the food courts decorated with big, luminous ice cream scoops. In a park, people make portraits, like the woman who sketches out what she sees sitting on a bench while her bicycle is parked in front of her or like the photographer who takes a picture of some ladies holding umbrellas. Even Jean Claude Rousseau himself appears in his shots. In his hotel room, he watches the treetops or zaps the tv. His presence doesn’t imply a particular interest of showing himself in a self-referential way, but rather he becomes another subject within the scenes he registers.
These images, along with the other ones in Un monde flottant, are shown in long shots or shots that are wide enough so that the multiple elements in the frame can be examined closely. Most of the time, the camera doesn’t move; however, this doesn’t imply that the shots are static, since there is a lot of dynamism in the movement of the entities that inhabit them. The shots are not montaged in a causal way. Between one image and the other there is not a spatial correspondence—there is not contiguity nor proximity between places—nor a temporal one —with some exceptions, each shot happens in a different temporality than the previous one. Sometimes, a place that has already been shown reappears again after a while. Rousseau’s refined system for joining shots highlights the fact that entities in the world are forms: they are lines or contours. Thanks to their geometrical qualities, the filmmaker finds some unsuspected figurative associations. Therefore, a lamp’s shade and the white surface from the tarnished window in the background resemble Mount Fuji. The lamp’s shade is the mount’s top, and the other surface is its base. Likewise, a shot of the most famous volcanic cone in Japan recalls a lamp upon a night table. This happens because, if we pay close attention to the perimeter of both figures, in the end, they are the same: a trapezium. Rousseau finds trifles in immensity and greatness in small objects. In Un monde flotant, there are no hierarchies between modes of existence.
The dispositive employed to join the shots in this film is very simple: a vibrating cut to black between each shot. It is the moment of the blink of the eye. In this emulation of closing the eyes, it is as if we were awarded with the gift of ubiquity; so that, when we open them, we can find ourselves in a different latitude. The cuts to black resemble zapping in the tv too. The filmmaker plays with this idea when he stands in front of the television in his room and starts zapping with the remote control. The trick lies on the fact that the tv is off-screen, while Rousseau looks in that direction, which happens to be where we, the spectators, are located. This suggests that, wherever we see the film, there lies an image, an instant of beauty like those Rousseau shows and which we cannot see because we are being a part of them.
The filmmaker doesn’t consider the way in which he joins his images as “montage”. In an interview for Notebook, he expressed his rejection of this term because it implies “[T]o relate images in order to say something. As if images became a sign, which is impossible—because then they would no longer be images. An image hides if one uses it in this way”. For this reason, the film doesn’t have any sort of narrative, nor it has external meanings beyond of what is shown: there is no desire of hiding and what is hidden, in any case, is what we can imagine between the limits of the frame.
Un monde flottant (2021)
3.
First moment: a man with a beret looks at a window covered with a lattice from where we can perceive some trees, the elevated rails of a train, and some buildings. Some music plays in the background when the silhouette of a man with a hat (presumably, Jean Claude Rousseau himself, because in previous films he uses that same hat) appears reflected in the surface of the window. Second moment: the man with the beret starts to fall asleep; a saxophone plays in the distance. Suddenly, the subway train enters the frame rapidly, superimposing with the window (in fact, the subway train is in the window). In the bottom part of this overwhelming image, Rousseau’s silhouette is illuminated mystically. Third moment: now, the outline of the man with the hat is shown in close-up; it covers the whole frame. An unnoticeable cut. The man with the beret is in a deep sleep. Outside the window there is a peaceful moment: the wind shakes the trees. In another space and time, the bang from a gong ends the man’s dream.
Those three moments happen in the same place; however, between them, there are several shots in other sceneries. What occurs is that the place is no longer the same. Rousseau’s entrance, the trains’ irruption, the scale of the shots, and the wind’s presence change the landscape from its previous appearance. We can describe these scenes; nonetheless, in Un monde flottant each alteration of the light or in the rain’s rhythm instantly creates a new image. (How can we guide ourselves in this world if our surroundings shift in the blink of an eye?). Thus, the filmmaker shows the many metamorphoses that take place in an instant, which is tragical and sweet at once. This is, as Kuki Shûzô writes in The Structure of Iki, “the resignation… [that] nests in a heart full of politeness, strengthen by the suffering experienced in this floating world and in this ‘bitter life’, undisturbed heart which has the elevated style of someone who has rejected every useless attachment to reality”. For that reason, even though they are dissimilar between them, the events in the film don’t provoke any kind of tension and are affably incorporated, as a complete acceptance of existence.
The earthquake sequence, for example, shows this impassiveness. The tremor of this moment is full of movement, which contrasts with the rest of the film. In the deer’s forest, the landscape moves upside down. Then, the quake is seen from a security camera in the subway station. In his room, Jean Claude Rousseau falls, an action that fuses with a lamp’s oscillation. Without stridency nor sense of urgency, the earthquake feels just like the natural event it is. A sense of vertigo is created thanks to the quick montage and the sound of an alarm in off (an entire text about sound in the film should be written). Furthermore, the movie achieves something remarkable: to witness an earthquake from different places almost simultaneously. A long black shot leads to a camera movement (one of the few in the movie) that shows a supermarket corridor where shampoo bottles are dropped all over the floor. This emotionally powerful moment comes from watching in detail these objects, otherwise insignificant, in the middle of an event that usually is shot with dramatism or sensationalism. In sum, it is an earthquake beautifully shot, thanks to the stoicism with which the Earth’s movements are shown.
4.
In Un monde flottant, movement is essential, although most shots are static. We just have to look at the scenes that take place in the subway, especially those where the camera is located inside the wagons, but what we see is outside. The passers-by’s peregrination in the station gives way to a shot of Mount Fuji. The camera movement reminds those of an early Ozu film like Hogaraka ni ayume (1930), where the camera follows the landscape located in a car wheel, or the ones in D’Est (Chantal Akerman, 1993) which showed different faces in an Eastern Europe trolley station. It is well known that Ozu and Akerman are two filmmakers akin to Rousseau. Furthermore, the movement traces a line that continues despite the change in the landscape. The cut to black that happens thanks to a tunnel’s darkness highlights the persistence of a horizontal axis through space and time.
Human movements are transcendental too. Like those similarities between the shapes of unanimated entities, there are similarities between human gestures. Before leaving his room, Jean-Claude Rousseau packs his perfectly folded shirts and his books. In the following shot, the young student that does her homework in the subway (and who we have followed intermittently through the film) keeps her notebooks and pens in a purse before she exits the wagon. The action is the same: to pack one’s belongings to move to another place. This illustrates Bashō’s maxim that says that “for those who let their lives float inside a boat or grow old riding their horses, every day is a journey, and their house is in itself a journey”. Leaving a hotel room or getting off the subway are actions that correspond to journeys of the exact same magnitude.
5.
Jean-Claude Rousseau shared with the film critic Serge Daney a pleasure for travelling. The filmmaker has made films abroad in places like New York (Keep in Touch, 1987) or Lisbon (Saudade, 2012). Not in vain, the opening shot of his first film, Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre (1983), shows a map of Le Blanc’s commune. In the interview that Serge Toubiana made to Serge Daney before the latter died, Trafic’s founder said that “the map (postcard or geographic map) comes before the land. The map precedes the cinematographic image. First, there is a map”. A lucky and beautiful coincidence. Isn’t it reasonable to consider Rousseau’s images as postcards in Daney’s sense? They are not the postcards that artificially portray a city creating signs or cliches; but they are “those whose beauty has not been planned or desired by anyone”. This Daney’s quote summarizes Rousseau’s system. Frequently, the French filmmaker includes inscriptions in his films. Un monde flottant is dedicated to Shigemitsu Takagi. Inscriptions come from the desire to pay homage to someone. In them, the person’s name is preceded by the preposition “to”, like letter’s addressee. The film, thus, is a series of postcards which are sent as witnesses of short stay in a faraway place: the addressee is anyone who watches.
The postcards from Un monde flottant show a variety of urban spaces, inside and outside, during the day or the night: food courts with ice cream figures, benches, luminous columns, and advertisements in the ceiling; two-way streets where a deer and a man talking in the phone cohabit naturally. Serge Toubiana says in the aforementioned interview that the postcard “is cinema’s metaphor: everything is visible for everyone, but those who desire to see more can do so”. Jean-Claude Rousseau, notwithstanding his detachment, looks at the world with the desire of apprehending everything that’s visible. Un monde flottant gives evidence of that and the geometry of its shots arises more and more discoveries. He wants to share the eagerness of paying attention to the evanescent aspects of this world. For this, we just need the desire to look at it.
