Cries, whispers, silence and space :
death and the family in films by Pialat, Bergman and Ozu par Maximilian Le Cain
La Gueule ouverte (1974)

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        Hubert Deschamps seems to fall out of this system also, in the scenes following his wife’s death, scenes that are among the most moving and troubling in all Pialat’s cinema. Deschamps’ performance is undoubtedly one of the film’s great strengths. An almost cartoonish figure looking like a peasant cross between Ben Gazzara and Serge Gainsbourg, he struts about with a cigarette constantly drooping from his lips, making lecherous advances to every nubile female who crosses his path. Yet when his wife dies, the strutting posture drains from his body, leaving it crumpled up with grief. The exact nature of his grief remains undefined- sudden, selfish loneliness ? Remorse that he didn’t treat his wife better ? Bergman would have dissected, interrogated and precisely categorised his grief, but Pialat leaves this devastation unsettlingly open ended, an instinctual, physical reaction to the wound of loss, an unforgiving logic of bodies that mocks the comforting sophistication of psychology. Quietly weeping, Deschamps wanders through the scenes following the funeral, among the banal chattering of his son and other mourners, like an invisible ghost, his grief completely ignored by them. Pialat’s genius is at its most impressive in the way he avoids filming these scenes from a point of view of empathy with Deschamps. He does not judge the other mourners or accuse them of callousness or heartlessness. The static groups of mourners and their boring chitchat is life, prosaic and untranscendable ; the weeping ghost that moves through these tableaux is now beyond life’s pale, suspended between the rigidity of life and the silence of death, the same silence that Pialat films slowly occupying the wife’s death chamber with such terrifying patience in the scene of her passing.

        ‘Death at work’ : in order to capture this on film in terms of space and time, Pialat takes great pains to first establish the space and time of life’s undramatic progress. In complete contrast to Bergman’s hallucinatory, invasively encompassing subjectivity, Pialat shoots the spaces his actors inhabit with a rigorously objective camera. Few films- even by Pialat- maintain such a disciplined, observational view of the action that they record. Every shot is taken from the position or one of the positions that a human observer in the room would be most likely to occupy. It is an approach to mise en scène more common in the documentary than the fiction film. The discreet long takes from these angles give an exceptionally ‘lived-in’ feel to his images. Although the audience is never made aware of the exact architectural layout of the house, I cannot think of a single other film in which the spectator receives such a richly textured sense of a domestic space. This manner of treating the viewer as precisely what he/she is, a helpless observer, places him/her in a position of helplessness equal to that of the family when the moment of death arrives. The amount of time lavished upon the sick woman is sufficient to allow the viewers to create their own relationships with her suffering, unmediated by either the views of her family or her own thoughts and feelings during the latter part of her illness that die unexpressed with her. Thus, by keeping a distance between the characters and the viewer, by never telling us what to feel, Pialat allows us to develop a sense of involvement with the action that is wholly our own, our intelligence and perceptiveness unclouded by the sort of simplistic clarification that we come to expect of film narrative. Yet it is a warmly human, calculatedly physical distance. It is not an intellectual detachment (Oliveira, the Straubs) or a metaphysical perspective (Hou, Bresson) ; it is quite simply the distance between bodies in a room.

        Formally, the nearest Pialat comes to making a grand statement about the transitory nature of existence is in two complimentary shots, one roughly in the middle of the film and the other near its conclusion. In the first a wedding procession passes Deschamps by in the street. He watches it wind around a corner. The second, a very strange shot, comprises the entire funeral scene. A line of mourners stretches from a street into the square where the church is. The camera tracks along this row of people before panning around to the wall at the opposite side of the street and moving as far as the end of this wall, peeking around the corner like a frightened child at the family outside the church. The wedding procession’s movement around the street corner is completed by the tracking camera in the funeral scene- it reveals where the procession was headed, towards a funeral, towards death. Yet it is significant that Pialat takes his camera no further than a fearful glance around the corner at the funeral. There is an amusing anecdote about Fellini and Bergman falling out over an argument as to which of the two filmmakers knew more about death. Judging by La Gueule ouverte in general and the funeral shot in particular, it is not a discussion Pialat would have participated in. For all the mercilessness of his observation of sickness and death, there is also a humility in the way he stands back from it, a slightly fearful respect. The physical impulses that govern La Gueule ouverte have no time for the insolence of Bergman and Fellini’s metaphysical concerns with the ‘beyond’ ; death is not a spiritual mystery to be delved into but a horrifying and unknowable dead end to recoil from.

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