The Afterlife of Art and Objects: Alain Cavalier’s Therese

Cinematic Preface

Four years before shooting began on Thérèse (1986), Alain Cavalier documented the earliest stages of the screenwriting process in a short 16mm film and accompanying diary. Produced for the magazine Cinéma-Cinémas and published with the diary excerpted alongside frame enlargements, this cinematic chronicle unfolds through a series of still lifes: first, of the blank sheet of paper lying on the director’s desk, folded in half to provide a column for both image and sound; then paper and pencil as the director begins to scrawl plans for the scenario and story board; a sink, a bottle of wine, and a glass; an orange being sliced on a cutting board; a superannuated super-8 camera that “two years ago had been very sophisticated” (8); a heap of canisters of undeveloped film; a model of the quarters in the Carmelite convent; and, the final still life, bread, butter, a glass, a knife.¹ Interspersed with these lugubrious images of objects are a series of photographs of Thérèse Martin, pictures originally published along with her autobiography and now removed from that context, lying on the director’s desk. These objects and photographs, which together comprise the working environment of the screenwriter, stand metonymically for the process of composing a film, as they allude to the basic dimensions—from the personal and biological to the technological and historical—that inform and sustain this process. This short film concludes with an extreme long shot of the roofs of Paris, a shot with its own expansive history encompassing René Clair and Bernardo Bertolucci, among many others, with each moment in that tradition hoping or failing to represent an ever-expanding, increasingly diverse and divergent metropolis from a single, privileged perspective. These roofs of Paris attest to the possibility—emerging and retreating in various historical epochs—of depicting a social totality, or of bafflement before an “unmappable system”(Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic 2). If these rooftops allude to various cinematic and geographic “lieux de mémoire,” they also represent a chaos of memories, a history and a present that resist the insistent process of crystallization through which memory [End Page 52] domesticates the past. The most telling aspect of Cavalier’s conclusion is its departure from the enclosed spaces that encompass both the short film and Thérèse. With the jagged contours of Paris outside and Cavalier’s voice directing the camera operator to film the interior again, this shot leaps dramatically from one order of magnitude to the next, from a circumscribed area proximate and accessible to the body to the infinite complexity of an expansive horizon, from the uncannily close to a vision of the totality possible only from a vast distance.