The following was written to accompany the projection ‘12 Films by Alexandre Galmard’ on October 16th at United Unlimited.
Ensemble (2013) serious summer (2015) Faithful non-employment (2013) Partitions (2020) NM (2014) zum Beschluss (2020) République (2016) Faithful non-employment, 2 (2020) République, 2 (2017) log 1 (copy untitled) (2020) support d’écran (2013) Infinites of resistance to division (2019)
There’s a wonderful anecdote of John Cage and Morton Feldman driving in a car at night, tired and silent, and Feldman suddenly, as though awaking, saying “Now that things are so simple, there’s so much to do.” One can imagine an exchange like this between Alexandre Galmard and Isiah Medina, almost kids still, in 2012; for between these two near-drop-outs passing from apartment to street to club and back there was a New Music being born. Form begets abundance and in those years hundreds, if not thousands, of films were produced by two intrepid artists filled with what Clement Greenberg calls Arrogant Purpose. There is a glimpse in this program of that plenitude, but what we behold far more is the spectacle of tenacious fidelity, which is always the profounder to encounter. The works of an explosion at its moment fill us with a twin feeling of the immanence of irruption and the nostalgia of history, but the works that divine a path out of the burst, and are not swayed from it, teach us to live and become themselves living companions. So it is with these 12 films, what we feel in them is an eternal friend, ready to meet us anywhere in the wilds of time, and walk with us, draw us to see, shimmering through the veil of the world, a grand republic of thought. They are voluptuous in attractive frames but they are first testaments to the endurance of form.
We may search infinitely for the words to express the infinity so plainly expressed in the work. This is its preciousness: these are not translations, they are written in their Original Language. Galmard’s own rigorous philosophical mind is at the mercy of Cinema and must rush ahead, beyond what can be proved or expounded and we are carried along in this race to a vertiginous realm where systems break apart and the question, What is Cinema, is asked so freshly, so completely and with such sincerity we are reminded of the vitality of the question, the value and necessity of it. Its non-orientability — that Cinema is at once contained and the container — is not only articulated explicitly and directly, but is felt and lived by the viewer.
Anyone in the film game knows the production model developed in the early twentieth century, itemizing the elements into discrete departments and applying artists to roles within them. This model of reading movies as an industrial business has and continues to yield extraordinary results. However, a part of the power of Galmard’s work is his refusal to assent. In that world we start with a sales pitch, then we get a screenplay, then we get sets, costumes, props and a cast, then we light it, block it, shoot it, cut it, colour it, mix it, title it, and sell it. What is an image? It’s the costumed actor moving through the lit set. But for Galmard who begins with the cut, it is as though he’s suddenly able to move laterally along that process, reaching and folding and refolding these departments until they are so entangled they once again become free. He flattens the image out of its false, stagey depth and re-illuminates the shining screen: cropping, keying and superimposing images, the footage itself becomes the various walls of a painted set and we fall into the frames composed and at the same time are held outside them as witness. If we surrender, as we must in order to engage, we are rewarded with a kind of euphoric multiplicity opening between us and the film.
And what of content? What is inside this exquisite and daring form? When we look at Monet’s Waterlilies we are shocked to discover what we have always known: reality itself is abstract. So it is here. We see a white wall with two of Galmard’s paintings hanging and suddenly this space is filled, as though haunted, by a filmmaker hunched over a thought, Godard playing before him, camera gear set up and packed away, stacked books flash past, a youtube page flits by and appears again elsewhere. At one level, this is a fine portrait of Isiah Medina. But for Galmard there are no characters but only figures. In the early films, Medina is presented as the Master Artist, his voice runs through and we see Galmard digesting his position as Apprentice. When we hear Galmard speak, it is to tell us that the person on screen is not the subject, but rather the one behind the camera and in this instant we realize who is the true subject: Galmard is capturing the Apprentice so he can leap beyond that role. And so he does, in his later films, Medina suddenly appears instead as the figure of the Friend, the Fellow Artist, and the Comrade. But never does Galmard lose that youthful vigour, which every great artist has at all ages, and every film gushes with his enamourment with his medium, he seems to shout to us Take Up Thy Camera, Become Anew. That young, flooding quality is so tender, so dense, so urgent, even impatient, impatient with the pedestrian, with the colloquial, with the cliche, but as the films continue we see him gain another dimension, wider framed shots emerge to punctuate and to stitch together the fecund streams of line and colour and Galmard himself begins appearing in the figure of the Artist, which teases us into a vaster idea of subjectivity, for there is yet a broader mind behind the camera, behind the cut.
A better analog in the history of painting than impressionism, or even abstract expressionism or so-called action painting, may be suprematism, where figure and form become one and all elements of object, character, symbol and language are sliced away until pure idea claims its flat vortex of sensuous realization and senses surrender to thought. Under this undulating screen pressed to bursting, it comes as a surprise when a moment of still life, such as the box of blue Belmonts, so familiar to those who were there then, appears and we see Galmard slicing into an object’s nature as Cézanne would treat an apple, rather than slicing apart a subject until it is pure form, as Malevich might treat a peasant woman. Still there is perhaps another tradition invoked deeper in Galmard’s work: the icon painting of the late medieval and early renaissance period where gold leaf and a panoply of subtle and luminous faces, tendrils of light, branches of devotion crawl and enmesh into a vibrating sacred object. There is indeed an almost religious quality in his films for they seem to bear always on their lips the unsayable secret, and are populated by a structure, beyond the flashing image, of an inner circle who carry an arc.
If we give a man wings, they become an angel — if we give them a camera, then what do they become? Galmard seems to say we are a new species and why have you not awoken to realize this? Seeing these films strikes a wonder like the one we feel watching a child discover new faculties, and indeed it has that bottomless quality that every childhood has, intoxicated, mystified, frustrated and enchanted by all that is beyond it, all that it contacts, envelops, transforms and is transformed by. It is equally spellbound by the twitching blue and yellowgreen of digital noise or the blown out streetlights wreathed in yellow flame (that is, the materiality of his instrument), as it is by the figure of the Crowd, of the Police, and it meets these figures with the naïveté, so beloved and so necessary in a keen mind. Galmard is in the streets and yet his camera cannot quite subsume itself into the marching crowd, it cannot help that alienated romanticism of the Intelligent Child who sees so much more, too much, and is at once in love with the movement and also bewildered that the others cannot see. For the truth is, the void is always pressing in at all sides in these films and it contains a terror and an allure and, marked by it, the Camera’s eye cannot become one with the exuberance of experience.
Always, we are dropped in and already are off at a high dash, there is no time for orienting or guiding. The categories that are seen clear may be noted but the film has already flown along, and at times it flies past the same place again and again and we feel a growing sense, as though widening circles are creating a still point, that it is in fact a weird world that’s whipping around a fixed eye. And as this eye sees ever deeper it remains always a little helpless, and is even aware that its very helplessness is what makes it so intensely valuable: piercing through the brief costumes it dislodges the recognizable and in lightning flashes the Real, uncovered, blazes into us as audience. Even the ruffle of wind against a mic escapes its making and takes flight as music. There is much argument in the course of humanity over “evolution” or “revolution” but Galmard seems to declare a double negation and offers us the Cut instead, that strange limitless mystery, which Cinema exposes running through each and every instance of becoming.
Because the work lifts frames from across decades and weaves them together we see a lineage of failed loves and failed politics, phantoms which are ever haunting eternity, so much so they seem to be the very mud it is built with sometimes. In the comedy of duration, failing up through the ages, we find Truth meets us at every turn, unwavering. Galmard captures this by putting step after step, building up brick after brick, on his pilgrimage of Cinema, out from the birthing of New Music he was created in and towards the pyramids he was born to make, neither resting satisfied in small repetitions around his first discoveries nor rushing off restless to find new styles in dissipation. With each film he is on new ground. Unlocked in the later work is an offbeat humour in some of the flickers. When we see the setting up of the outdoor projection screen, or the movie set with Galmard as Director, head in hands, we notice a new lightness to his touch that had me laughing wildly before my laptop in this tiny room in Ticino. One of the most arrestingly gorgeous passages is the black and white in République, 2, where the precise movements of an artist’s hands pack away a camera, flickered against a foggy thicket of tree trunks, smoke billowing. There is in this not only the joy and nobility of life as an artist, but also the simple pleasure of it, a cherishing of the exact moment, the shutting of the car door, the closing of the set, imbuing the images with a directness altogether new. This robustness, ever accessing new tones, is part of what makes Galmard such an exciting director living and working today.
For the most part, questions of life and death are subtracted completely. We feel we are dealing with treeform rather than a unique tree, the figure and not the character (a character lives and dies, a figure recurs), and yet, afterwards, we are surprised to recognize a bravely personal basso continuo has been carrying us throughout and we feel close to a great benevolent personality, and closer also to ourselves. The mysteries of spacetime are more vibrant, the beauties of lifedeath are more sublime. We feel we have touched soul, more intimately, more close than any confessional poem could offer, and that voice across the void that we heard, is of an artist who lives in the cut. There are no “actions” in the films but in the cutting, in the making of the films and the making of the films is a cut each time, and we feel, trembling, that yes, it is just as true for us: our lives are lived in the cut, in the leap across. This is the truth Galmard touches and the reason his films have the power to touch the soul and not only dazzle the senses. There are frames blisteringly, staggeringly sumptuous but he seems to always be reminding us, be not concerned with the appearance of beauty, or with the beauty of appearance, but rather with the beauty of being, with the Being of Beauty.