Resistance against space
The remarkable DVD Alberto Giacometti marries two
documentaries, shot almost forty years apart, into an
intellectually dazzling investigation of the art and inspiration
of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Most famous for his
fragile, elongated human figures (which range from the
matchbox-sized to the monumental) and emaciated heads, he
flirted both with cubism and surrealism before refocusing on the
mystery of human existence, perhaps even human survival, through
a passionate, 30-year meditation on the human body. In the
process of investigating that passion, this compilation also
contrasts two genres of documentary filmmaking, the lean,
ideas-intoxicated odysseys of the '60s and the restless,
multi-perspective investigations of the late '80s and '90s.
The coup on this disk is the sustained interview with Giacometti
in the earlier film, A Man Among Men: Alberto Giacometti
(Jean-Marie Drot, 1963). Sometimes we see the interviewer.
Sometimes we hear him. Sometimes we even see a wide shot of the
studio that reveals the simple, face-to-face architecture of the
encounter. But most of all, we see Giacometti in mid-shot,
extemporizing on his obsessions, assiduously working the damp
clay of an as-yet inchoate figure. As his fingers probe and
tear, he wryly pooh-poohs the interviewer's anxieties about
disrupting his creativity: "The filming draws me to the work...
it's a chance to work..." And so Giacometti, the charming, witty
unrepentant workaholic emerges, reliving in what the poet
Jacques Dupin called an "intense, rasping voice," the cathartic
moments of his artistic career.
Giacometti located his creative epiphany in 1945 when he emerged
from a Montparnasse cinema and saw the world as if for the first
time, unclouded by the veil of the real. From that moment, he
felt the need to account for what he saw, knowing that all the
time he would fail, but that only failure itself would lead to
the truth. As he later noted, "The more you fail, the more you
succeed. It is only when everything is lost and -- instead of
giving up -- you go on, that you experience the momentary
prospect of some slight progress. Suddenly you have the feeling
-- be it an illusion or not -- that something new has opened
up."
As the interview progresses Giacometti cracks open artistic
inspiration as the frenzied pursuit of such illusions. Even
three years before his death, when he was internationally
recognized, the artist worked frenetically, as if a lifetime of
grasping for, but never quite capturing, enlightenment could be
reversed with just one more sculpture.
According to Dupin, interviewed extensively in Michel van Zele's
What is a Head?, Giacometti was so convinced that only
his newest work scraped close to truth that he would want to
pack and dispatch solely sculptures, still dripping water and
clay, to any exhibition. Only the interventions of his brother,
his wife, and his friends filled galleries with his finished,
haunting recreations of human persistence.
For Giacometti, drawing and sculpting did not represent what he
saw; instead he sought, through his art, to understand what he
saw. He perceived, that day in Montparnasse, a void that
isolated everyone and everything, leaving all "floating in
emptiness, separated by an immense distance." But isolation also
held within it courage and determination. Giacometti traced the
vulnerability of his figures, those slender trajectories of
resistance against space, to his perception of human endeavor:
"I always feel that there's a fragility in living creatures, as
if at every moment they needed an incredible drive to remain
standing, always at risk of collapsing." More than fragility,
too, he saw imminent extinction, knowing that death inhabited
the living and quickly abandoned the dead.As his fingers drew
presence out of the void, he saw his work as "testing a talent
to find a fact."
While Drot's film is itself rich in "fact," prowling slowly from
one masterwork to the next, often accompanied by the artist's
own recollections of its genesis and fruition (no small
accomplishment in a television documentary), it's van Zele who
focuses on one key element of the works themselves -- the
representation of the human head. In so doing, he casts his net
widely, drawing in close friends of Giacometti's such as Dupin,
Roger Montandon, and Ernst Scheidegger, a young German soldier
who met Giacometti while vacationing in a Swiss hotel.
Giacometti's fascination with the head began in the early 1930s.
In 1934, André Breton, contemptuous of Giacometti's
return to the human body as subject after his cubist and
surrealist work, scoffed that everyone knows "what a head is
now." Giacometti snapped back, "I don't," and abandoned the
surrealists forever. According to Scheidegger, who later shot
his own film about the artist, Giacometti found in the human
head "an insoluble mystery," perpetually drawing him towards
truth and into despair. Giacometti himself said, "The first time
that I saw the head I was looking at become fixed, immobilized
definitively in a moment in time, I shook with terror as never
before in my life and a cold sweat ran down my back. What I was
looking at was an object like any other, no, different, not like
any other object, but like something which was alive and dead at
the same time."
Unusually, van Zele begins with Giacometti's drawings and
paintings, using precisely shot (and exquisitely
color-controlled) close-ups to reveal the intensity of
Giacometti's assault on the head, especially at the point where
the eye socket and the nose meet. According to the artist, that
point encapsulated the "meaning" of the entire head. In one of
the most illuminating interviews in this film, the radical
artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest calls Giacometti's two-dimensional
works drawings that "refute drawing." For Pignon-Ernest, the
drawing embodies both the thought and the gaze, imparting a
"trembling of life," in which each fixed line interrogated the
next. Whether Giacometti drew or sculpted, he created not only
the subject, but also the space around the subject, a shimmering
liminal zone where the pressures of skin and air meet.
As van Zele's film unfolds, its returns to this crux of the
face, however important to an appreciation of Giacometti's
nvestigations, turn into something of a stylistic quirk. For
example, new interviewees are introduced visually in two ways.
The shot begins either with a tight close-up of the inside
corner of the eye and the bridge of the nose from which the
camera pulls back, or with a wide shot of each person, seated in
the characteristic knees apart, eyes straight ahead pose of
Giacometti's portraits of his brother, Diego, while the camera
moves (slowly, and to be honest, portentously) into the nose-eye
nexus. Once could be witty: more than twice is a tic.
Van Zele, like many contemporary documentary makers, doesn't
seem able to judge when visual business is distracting rather
than entrancing. And this disk, perhaps inadvertently, also
offers a striking contrast between his method of documentary and
that of Drot. For van Zele's generation, the seductiveness of
raw ideas has vanished, unless "prettied up" with visual
symbolism. He regularly indulges in tricks to keep the
audience's eyes occupied. At one point, anonymous, spotlit hands
appear, pasting sketches of Giacometti onto rough walls. At
another, the viewer encounters an ominously shadowed night shot
of his Geneva studio, rubbish-strewn and deserted. Nice in noir,
no doubt, but crude here.
By contrast, Drot's 40-year-old film requires less padding, for
it possesses the inestimable advantage of the artist himself.
Even so, it is less patronizing of its audience. The takes are
longer, assuming the audience's willingness to watch a talking
head for minutes at a time, assuming that talking head can
stimulate, challenge, and amuse all at the same time. Drot
allows ideas to evolve, instead ofsummarizing them in memorable
shorthand nuggets, so that the film evokes less certainty, but
more thought than van Zele's piece.
Partnered on disc, though, the films' very differences
complement each other extremely well. Van Zele's visual
affectations can't detract from the imaginatively chosen and
well interviewed dramatis personae of his film and Drot's
footage of Giacometti at work and in full intellectual flow
(illustrating as he manipulated the clay his own dictum that the
eye follows the hand) creates a rare sense of privilege.
Although the DVD plays the later film first, this reviewer would
suggest the reverse order, wherein one would first encounter the
man and artist, energetic and intellectually commanding. Then
one would move on to the dissection of the art, accompanied by
nostalgia for the flesh and the consolations of memory and art.
Finally, this other order would allow the viewer to end on the
one visual motif of van Zele's opus that does create a genuine
frisson, the glacial pans across stacked skulls crammed into
rows in mediaeval ossuary which close the film. They form a chilling glimpse into the indifference of the universe against which Giacometti worked.
— 23 May 2002
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