My latest column for Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, submitted about a week before flying to Europe (Bologna and Paris). — J. R.
En movimiento: Bulle Ogier as Hidden Star
Jonathan Rosenbaum
I have a special reverence for film criticism on film — by which I mean criticism on, by, through, and about film. A few of the gems in this hallowed category are Alphaville (as criticism of silent German Expressonist cinema), audio-visual essays about Ivan the Terrible by Yuri Tsivian and Joan Neuberger, Céline et Julie vont en bateau (as criticism of 1950s Hollywood melodrama), Los Angeles Plays Itself –and now a beautiful 2024 documentary by Eugénie Grandval about a great actress-auteur (one of the four writers-actresses who gave us Céline et Julie) whom I first discovered at a memorable midnight Paris screening of Rivette’s L’amour fou circa 1971: Bulle Ogier, portrait d’une étoile cachée.
She was indeed a hidden star because her gestures were typically synecdochical, tremors suggesting unfathomable depths. (Marguerite Duras once said, “Bulle is not the nouvelle vague, she’s absolute vagueness.”) For me Ogier was an essential part of all of Rivette’s key features. The only major exception is Paris nous apparient, his first, but that’s a film I cherish in part for its vulnerability as an amateur effort, its passionate embrace of bohemian losers — arguably the same properties that keep Rivette’s cinema excluded from the BFI Film Classics as it was established by its founder and canonizer, David Meeker. In an industry ruled by power, Ogier, like Jean-Pierre Léaud, offered intensity associated with solitude and obscurity, so the brief flirtation between their characters in Rivette’s Out 1, as this documentary spells out, is a volatile, lonely duet of riddles that eventually crumbles into mutual paranoia. Yet Ogier was a consummate professional who only pretended to be an amateur in order to remain an integral part of certain teams, Rivette’s included. That’s what kept her hidden and marginal. It was a moral, ethical, even political position about how she existed in the world, whether on stage (Grandval’s film includes many welcome samples of this work) or on film, which gives the lie to one critic’s suggestion that Céline et Julie being about “two magicians” somehow made it apolitical. (Surely all magic is political by virtue of engaging with an audience.)
I regret the absence of clips from some favorite Ogier films (Rendez-vous à Bray, Mon cas, Irma Vep), but this is basically a scrapbook of pertinent appreciations and insights from colleagues and critics, many drawn from the INA archives. A loving account of Ogier’s style and methodologies, it clarifies her own critical intelligence when she explains that she based her mannered poses in Céline et Julie on Delphine Seyrig’s in L’année dernière à Marienbad.
