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, as are LA VALLÉE CLOSE and DE SON APPARTEMENT, in the epistolary sense (the answering machine), not the good-conscience genre sense (for instance Robson's THE HARDER THEY FALL). In any case, 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)? And what is it that will trigger the sudden and vast collaboration with the earth and public (always a part of Rousseau's films) 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, a plan has been laid making it possible for the filmmaker and spectator to join hands, and lead one another. It happens through a single sound. The massively implied, fearful even, "Did you just hear something?" of suspense cinema will always be more avant-garde, more mutual––for those behind/in front/around the film––than the automatic yet unstated (more interrogative) "Did you just see something?" of rote 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 assumed 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 off noise of the claps and bangs 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 of a situation as in Mizo. For a moment, and in a way only newly possible in Rousseau's stickchair video, montage is produced by the breaking of the frame's bond with the spectator; a kind of shock reframing, but in need of another name. And now that he's mentioned it outright, has Rousseau made anything but mystery films?