Matters of a Quarter Second...

A new short by Jean-Claude Rousseau, SÉRIE NOIRE, has been made available online at Independencia: HERE, with English subtitles – HERE, sans subtitles. It will only be available for viewing until July 29th. 

All of Rousseau's films and videos breathe quite grand fictions, or little lessons, and all of them, now that he's mentioned it, have something of the serial to them. SÉRIE NOIRE, his latest digital movie, has an allusive title, and is also wonderfully concrete, as you'll see. It's a "message" picture, like LA VALLÉE CLOSE and DE SON APPARTEMENT, in the sound-epistolary sense, not the genre sense. All who've tried to deny that cinema is a message machine have fallen on their own experimental swords.

One is always astonished by the diversity of expression in Rousseau's films. What is it that will tip the scales of a film toward comedy "or" tragedy, major "or" minor, in the midst of all this minute, solitary work of handicraft, where messages from another are always received alone (a condition of cinema)? What will trigger a sudden and vast collaboration with the earth and public, in these crumb, ash, paint-chip-filled corners of Europe?

The Private Eye takes it on a case-by-case basis. Here, in this detective film, or film of detection, it's possible for the filmmaker and spectator to join hands, and lead one another. The massively implied, fearful even, "Did you just hear something?" in cinema will always be more avant-garde, more mutual for those behind/in front/around the cinema, than the automatic yet unstated "Did you just see something?" of that same cinema. Most films beg no such questions. Most films don't see and hear like someone just out of jail.

"C’est l’affaire d’un quart de seconde," Rousseau says of a complete change, a total upheaval, that occurs in the movie, when a bit of music provides a strange opportunity to lift the camera from its mask-window function out into the weeds, up and over a vacant lot, changing the relationship between the shooter, the shot, and the spectator. An almost Mizoguchian seizure (and in the sound too: the claps and bangs of an off noise of some kind of intimate task become the shot's percussive score as much as its reality) and, for several seconds, it's just as grand, risky, implicating, culpable and naked. For a moment, and in a new way only possible in Rousseau's stickchair video, montage is produced by the breaking of the frame's bond with the spectator; a reframing, but in need of another name. Now that he's stated it outright, has Rousseau made anything but mystery films?