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Face-to-Face Encounters
“This relationship of an individual with the totality which thought is, in which the ego takes account of what is not itself and yet is not dissolved into it, presupposes that the totality is manifested not as a milieu that as it were only brushes up against the skin of a living being, as the element in which it is immersed, but is manifested as a face in which a being confronts me. This relationship of both participation and separation, which marks the advent of, and the a priori proper to, thought, in which the bonds between the parts are constituted only by the freedom of the parts, is a society, is beings that speak, that face one another. Thought begins with the possibility of conceiving a freedom external to my own. Conceiving of a freedom external to my own is the first thought. It marks my very presence in the world.
The world of perception manifests a face: things affect us as possessed by the other. Pure nature, when it does not attest to the glory of God, when it is no one's, indifferent and inhuman nature, is situated on the fringes of this human. To define is to locate a being within a horizon or circumscription, to draw a line around it, to circumscribe, determine and encompass or comprehend it... Things qua things derive their first independence from the fact that they do not belong to me; and they do not belong to me because I am in relationship with those men from whom they come. Then the relationship of the ego with the totality is a relationship with human beings whose faces I recognize. Before them I am guilty or innocent. The condition that is necessary for there to be thought is a conscience.”
Encounters and Confessions
The exchange of glances across an invisible shot/countershot axis is the most basic and fundamental operation in cinema. In our interview, Desplechin argued that this made cinema the natural heir to the Impressionist concentration on instants of time. It also makes cinema a unique vehicle for psychological exploration.
The theological dimension of this was expressed most powerfully in 1 Corinthians 13, where the inescapably partial and limited vantage points of individual human subjects (who see as if "through a glass darkly") are contrasted with the total recognition of "seeing face-to-face." In his philosophical writings, Jewish phenomonologist Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) emphasized the incommensurability of these two points-of-view, thereby shifting the emphasis entirely to the ethical plane and making the human face the indispensable limit for consciousness and conscience.
Desplechin's work combines elements of both traditions in the tender depiction of young romantics (as in the extract from My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument, 1996) and the devastating confessions of child-devouring parents (depicted with posthumous venom in Kings and Queen, 2004).
Music and the Face
In Ismael's Ghosts (2017), Desplechin once again invites comparison with the work of Jean-Luc Godard, by using a section from the same Beethoven string quartet (Number 15 in A minor, Op. 132, 1825) used throughout First Name Carmen (1983). Godard made sculptural and structural use of the music by repeatedly incorporating it into the montage and each time resuming where the music had previously stopped.
Desplechin instead adopted a different strategy, first introducing the Beethoven piece early in the film and then returning three times to the same intense section of the third movement. Each repetition summons up memories of the previous appearance and encourages the viewer to notice the gradual development from self-recognition (the first excerpt below) to intimate exchange to a full face-to-face reconciliation between father and daughter that gives concrete physical form to the layers of emotion swirling throughout the film.
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Film Music
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Caroline Champetier
