MANDIARGUES AND CINEMA

par Alexandre Castant

May 25, 2024

I would like to thank Françoise Py and APRÉS for their welcome today, as well as Carole Aurouet, director of the "Le Cinéma des poètes" collection at Éditions Quidam, for her remarkable editorial work and her benevolent support of this book.

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The starting point of this book and this study, even though it only appears in the middle of the text, is a meeting on March 19, 1994 in Paris with Bona Pieyre de Mandiargues, the writer's wife. I was then a doctoral student, preparing my thesis on Mandiargues and the Image and, with this in mind, I wanted to ask her a few questions on this theme (Mandiargues had passed away in 1991). As I listened to my questions about Mandiargues and images, Bona was answering them when, suddenly, she spoke to me about the film "that never happened": the one that Michelangelo Antonioni had thought of making and which could not see the light of day, his adaptation of Le Lis de Mer, a story from 1956. Indeed, she told me, a "disappointing, failed" version had been made by an unknown French filmmaker, and after such a failure, Antonioni's agent had opposed this adaptation project. That day, Bona did not go further in the information, but I nevertheless carefully recorded her remarks. One day, perhaps, this story would have to be written... That was thirty years ago.

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André Pieyre de Mandiargues is a French poet, writer, art critic, playwright and also translator (1909-1991). A surrealist of the second generation, that is to say post-war (he would meet André Breton in 1947), he notably announces the nouveau roman in his stories, and, recognized in his time, he also won the Prix Goncourt in 1967 for his novel La Marge. We now know, because there have been several books from a critical and academic perspective on the subject, that Mandiargues is an exceptional writer of the gaze. Images, in all their meanings, traverse, irrigate, and constantly renew his writing.

The image in the sense of visual art, first of all, incredibly marks his biography. Mandiargues was indeed the grandson of Paul Bérard, who was one of Renoir's patrons, he was also the childhood friend of the future photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, with whom he would discover surrealism, and Mandiargues would therefore be the husband of Bona Tibertelli de Pisis, niece of Filippo de Pisis, the painter of course of the Italian Metaphysical School (moreover, Bona was herself a painter about whom the writer wrote magnificently, notably in his book Bona, l'amour et la peinture, published in the "Les sentiers de la création" collection at Skira, 1971). But, above all, Mandiargues was the author of five Belvédères, including one posthumous, five collections of writings on painters, sculptors and some photographers... In short, a writer, "accompanist," precise and fruitful, of the visual artists of his time.

So, the image in the sense of visual art nourishes his life and work, but also, the literary image, in all its possibilities, narrative, fictional, descriptive, metaphorical, rhetorical: his writing is not only made of images, it literally makes images!

Finally, the mental image, that of dreams, reveries, desire and fantasies, nightmares and traumas, is an element of his poetics, his aesthetics, and, according to his own term, of his creative pathology. Obviously, it is possible to link the mandiarguian mental image to that of the surrealists' dream... Be that as it may, through these three meanings of the image (art, poetic and mental), Mandiargues' writing unfolds as a remarkable writing of the visible.

So, given such an aesthetic affinity with visual artists, the seventh art should have found an obvious place in his work... The facts are however more complicated, quite strange since, at first glance, cinema is totally absent from his writings on art, and, in this case, from the Belvédères.

There is certainly a corpus, marginal but significant, if not of texts, at least of regular references to cinema in his correspondence (with Jean Paulhan, Nelly Kaplan or the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, we find for example cited throughout their letters Ingmar Bergman, Abel Gance or Hugo Santiago). Moreover, during television broadcasts or radio interviews, Mandiargues gives, about the seventh art, often very informed comments on certain films (like about The Tin Drum by Volker Schlöndorff, in 1979). As if he had, unconsciously perhaps and in any case in a very modernist way, chosen the audiovisual medium (television, radio) to talk about the audiovisuality of cinema. Such mise en abyme of image and sound moreover suits his reflexive writing very well.

Let us also note that Mandiargues is a cinephile, very close moreover to Anatole Dauman, producer with Argos Films, of masterpieces among others by Alain Resnais, Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky or Wim Wenders, and that he is sometimes consulted, rather on the relations between literature and cinema, by journals such as Études cinématographiques or Les Cahiers du cinéma. In this regard, the interview he gives to Ornella Volta and this time the journal Positif in 1976, about In the Realm of the Senses by Nagisa Oshima, is perhaps one of his most beautiful articles on art. It wonderfully illuminates his mystical vision of eroticism in general and sadomasochism in particular. However, this presence of cinema, in his writings on art and in his fictions, still appears as peripheral.

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And yet, the fact remains... In the current state of my research, seven films, still and this is not negligible, have proposed the adaptation of a story or a short story by Mandiargues: I give you the rapid inventory which is obviously developed and analyzed in the book:

Le Baldaquin by Chantal Remy, 1966 (it is an adaptation of Le Passage Pommeraye, short story from Le Musée noir, 1946), short film made for the ORTF Research Service: "I am very close [to Mandiargues] in spirit, Chantal Rémy will specify. [...] I would like the images and places to speak in place of the text."

La Motocyclette by Jack Cardiff, 1968. With Alain Delon and Marianne Faithfull. The film, like most adaptations of Mandiargues, playing on a certain erotic triviality, will disappoint, alas. And yet... Jack Cardiff, cinematographer of films with sensory, baroque or hyper-colorized, plastic aesthetics such as Pandora by Albert Lewin 1951 or The Barefoot Contessa by Mankiewicz 1954 could have been the ideal filmmaker to adapt Mandiargues' synesthetic works to cinema.

Le Lis de mer by Jacqueline Audry, 1969; This is the adaptation, truly unknown and unconvincing, of Le Lis de mer that Bona was talking about... Two words however about Jacqueline Audry (1908-1977).

Quickly catalogued as too classical cinema by the New Wave, Jacqueline Audry was long forgotten, not to say erased from a history of cinema, including women's cinema. However, today, Jacqueline Audry, recognized for her "transgressive and feminist" work, according to Didier Roth-Bettoni's terms, is considered an icon of LGBT cinema. Indeed, her films often expose a representation of women with troubled and ambiguous identities which proceeds, in the 1940s-1950s, from an incomparable and audacious tour de force. In many respects, the aesthetics of Le Lis de mer participates in her androgynous filmography...

And then, of course, there are Walerian Borowczyk's adaptations: La Marée in Contes immoraux, 1974 (one of Fabrice Luchini's first appearances on screen); La Marge, 1976; Marceline in Les Héroïnes du mal, 1979 (it is an adaptation of "Le Sang de l'agneau," a short story from Feu de braise, 1959); Cérémonie d'amour (or Tout disparaîtra), 1987.

These films, very little seen today and often considered minor in the history of cinema, inspire a dubious curiosity and, sometimes, a certain condescension, notably due to their superficial exploitation of mandiarguian eroticism. However, a careful analysis invites us to identify interesting, even innovative artistic elements in them... I leave it to you to discover in the book my remarks which often relate to the visual and sound plasticity and the secret modernity of these films, because there is one, in such an exploration of the imaginary on screen. Indeed, it is between cinema of the imaginary and plasticity of mental images that the most beautiful moments of these cinematographic adaptations are inscribed – of which I certainly do not forget the defects. But these stories by Mandiargues brought to the screen thus synthesize and coagulate the notions of onirism and fantastic, hallucination and fantasy, visuality, color and materiality which make, all the same, the salt and, always, the artistic actuality of his writing.

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I now return to the information given, upstream, by Bona: the absent film by Michelangelo Antonioni... This is still admirable information.

Because, this set of seven cinematographic adaptations is also accompanied by films that never happened! To my knowledge, five impossible, or invisible films, that is to say whose filmmakers wished, envisaged, or even only evoked, dreamed, the idea of adapting one of the mandiarguian fictions, remain in the state of projects or utopia: and how not to see in such incompletion, often repeated, the symbolic expression of the strange encounter, which we have just evoked, between Mandiargues' imaginary and cinema?

These five filmmakers are therefore Michelangelo Antonioni, Noël Burch, Éric Duvivier or Nelly Kaplan...

We arrive at the second part of the book Mandiargues and Cinema. It consists of leaving the shores of comparative aesthetics (the relations between literature and cinema), to analyze these invisible films as the only virtualities that exist by and for themselves.

What is invisible cinema? Impossible? Unfinished? Which would exist outside of realization and even outside of support? What is this invisible cinema of which only scattered memories remain (Bona, about Antonioni), a scenario that could not be filmed (Noël Burch), correspondence and funding letters that signal its failure (Éric Duvivier) or projects in amorous or friendly correspondence (Nelly Kaplan). From then on, how not to see, in these unfinished films of which there ultimately remains only an immaterial form, an opening towards the hyper-contemporaneity of art where cinema would only exist in a state of virtuality, abstraction, process alone, conceptual art finally. A ghost cinema that exists in the state of cinema idea alone. From this fact, the critical gaze of Mandiargues and Cinema then shifts from literature and cinema towards contemporary art.

Because, surprisingly, these invisible films open a prospective field. From cinema of the imaginary and onirism, which it is obviously possible to observe in the adaptations of Mandiargues' stories, to films that never happened, and which cover an original poetics of lack, absence and perhaps emptiness, an other cinema can appear through these adaptations, their suspense or their incompletion. With his words, Mandiargues who often praised poetry as the ultimate experience of artistic creation, associates, rarely but unequivocally then, filmmakers and a seventh art of research which, in this case, evokes the interiority of clairvoyance: "The change of times, or their fantastic acceleration, he writes about Jacques Roubaud in Troisième belvédère in 1971, are expressed by the works of poets, painters, inspired filmmakers, long before being recorded by history; for men of such species are often mutants and mediums, or, if one prefers, seers".

From this conviction, about the visible, the invisible and the seers, Mandiargues and Cinema is in some way the story. A. C.