"Apparently in response to the adverse audience reactions to Impatience, Dekeukeleire decided to try a new approach. After the French premiere, he told a Parisian interviewer:
The tone here is a bit pompous, but Dekeukeleire did manage to accomplish his goal in his first narrative film, Histoire de détective. The film contains devices familiar from Impatience: an obsessive repe...
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"Apparently in response to the adverse audience reactions to Impatience, Dekeukeleire decided to try a new approach. After the French premiere, he told a Parisian interviewer:
The tone here is a bit pompous, but Dekeukeleire did manage to accomplish his goal in his first narrative film, Histoire de détective. The film contains devices familiar from Impatience: an obsessive repetition of a small number of elements, handheld movements over landscapes, and rhythmic editing. But several new structures shape this material. The film presents itself as the record of a case made by a detective, T, who uses the motion-picture camera as his investigative tool. Aside from a few short scenes of T at work in his developing, editing, and viewing rooms, all the shot (except intertitles) purport to come from T’s work. Histoire de détective is thus a film within a film, and the intertitles tell us the story, not simply of the case, but also of T’s filming of the case.
The story concerns J. Jonathan, who is in a neurasthenic state. Mme. Jonathan has, at the beginning of the film, just hired T to discover the reason for her husband’s condition. The film shows shots of Jonathan in Brussels. He then goes to Ostende to recover, but he is bored there. He sets out to return to Brussels but goes on to Luxembourg, is bored again, and goes to Bruges, where he stays for some time, making frequent trips to the seaside. Dekeukeleire inserts series of shots of Mme. Jonathan, in modernist clothes, energetically talking on the phone, listening to the gramophone, writing, and giving a speech. She is portrayed as a frenetically up-to-date woman. Finally Jonathan wanders through a hilly countryside and decides to build a factory among its picturesque ancient ruins. His wife concludes that he is now cured; T has succeeded.
There is a strange tension in the presentation of these events in Histoire de détective. The images themselves convey none of the action. All we see are the two characters, and occasionally T, always in separate shots, walking, sitting, speaking into phones. There are no dialogue titles. Dekeukeleire intersperses shots of the characters with numerous shots of buildings and landscapes, often seen upside-down or rolling in extremely jerky handheld movements. He also includes shots of trivial objects—cups, books, pieces of bread—which do not enter causally into the narrative. Instead of conveying the events in accepted silent-film fashion, through as few titles as possible, Dekeukeleire inserts numerous lengthy titles. Virtually the entire narrative depends on these intertitles. The shots between seem so uninformative that they almost come to resemble found footage around which a narrative has been constructed.
Histoire de détective is an experimental film which allows narrative in, only to negate it by suppressing, not just acting, but all the visual conventions which the silent cinema had built up to present story material to the spectator. Contemporary reviews consistently rebuked Dekeukeleire for depending to heavily on intertitles. Commentators had long become accustomed to praising films like Der letzte Mann for eliminating intertitles. Little in previous filmmaking could have prepared spectators for a film that deliberately made its images wholly dependent upon an extensive text for narrative meaning.
The overall result of tactics like this is a film which seems almost to have an invisible narrative. The titles make the story line clear enough, but in watching the film the spectator cannot really see the narrative being worked out. The images don’t contradict what the titles present, but only occasionally do they show anything which adds to or really tallies with the verbal descriptions (except in a passive way, as with Jonathan sitting on the bridge as the titles describe him “not seeing” things). I don’t mean to suggest that the film is uninteresting—its violent camera movements and rhythmic montages tend to add some of the qualities of an abstract film. And, as one strains to discover the narrative significance of these shots, their very opacity makes them intriguing.
Kristin Thompson
侦探故事的短评 · · · · · · ( 全部 3 条 )
0 有用 生意. 看过 2023-09-10 17:29:09 山东
晦涩难懂，实验性叙事电影。
0 有用 暂时被分裂 看过 2020-07-26 16:42:15
20年代先锋派影片。实验性叙事。夏尔 德科克雷热（比利时）。大胆的影片，在任何艺术传统中都没有先例。主要由一些冗长的书写片段落组成，夫妻生活的陈腐影像作为间隔，字幕之外增加的东西极少。无资源
2 有用 Moodlebug 看过 2021-09-08 21:34:11
克里斯汀汤普森对本片的阐发是用极端详细叙事字卡和极端反叙事无意义匮少性重复并且还不承续字卡推进功能的无历时实拍场景来制造一种前所未有的形式之自相断裂，我觉得这是理论家没钱恰饭了在自己为难自己。当然我不是说导演乱拍，他可能有自己的理念，但汤普森没阐发到点上；且观众看这种私人化的实验影像必有禁止入内感或其各自知感与阐发依能指性发散的，我于是只体验差异并沉默。但有一个镜头绝妙我要谈，男主在海滩隆起的沙包... 克里斯汀汤普森对本片的阐发是用极端详细叙事字卡和极端反叙事无意义匮少性重复并且还不承续字卡推进功能的无历时实拍场景来制造一种前所未有的形式之自相断裂，我觉得这是理论家没钱恰饭了在自己为难自己。当然我不是说导演乱拍，他可能有自己的理念，但汤普森没阐发到点上；且观众看这种私人化的实验影像必有禁止入内感或其各自知感与阐发依能指性发散的，我于是只体验差异并沉默。但有一个镜头绝妙我要谈，男主在海滩隆起的沙包上瞌睡，这一闪而过的构图中起伏的沙峦和插排在沙峦边缘并齐向、密集、细长、柔顺长出的草茎，整个儿地形成了与达利时间的永恒中那些有性暗示的抽象马脸毛发极为相似的视觉组态，在象征上暗示男主此时对妻子的想念，且观感本身美，像是弧度柔美睫毛修长的沙峦也眯起眼打瞌睡了，匍匐其上的男主的孤独情欲化在其中去了幻梦乡 (展开)