Imaginary Conversations on Film #8: Out 1: Episodes 1, 2 (1971) Jacques Rivette

Imaginary Conversations on Film #8: Out 1: Episodes 1, 2 (1971) Jacques Rivette

“If I was Prometheus, I would feel great ingratitude towards humanity.”

“Prometheus was bound because he taught man everything. He suffered for humanity.”

“If I was Prometheus, I would be silent.”

What would it be like to write Prometheus Bound, an Ancient Greek Tragedy, in post-1968 France? How relevant is a mythical story about a titan punished and chained by the Gods for stealing fire and protecting humanity from annihilation? Do we need Prometheus, in such post-Prometheus times?

These are the main inquiries which confront a group of theater actors preparing a modern text for the play. The film shows how laborious working on such an ambitious play can be; the group moves from one intense exercise to the next, rummaging their way through with their bodies and voices, inflecting violence and tenderness upon each other, bound and unbound, so that in the end they would reach the text. It would be deceiving to describe what they do as a journey with a final destination to be reached, since they don’t begin from scratch, but they have at their disposal a pile of old and contemporary material on Prometheus. And the finished product doesn’t matter either, what matters is the process through which this group would explore the different relationships between language, violence, politics, and their own bodies. A woman in the group questioned the need for Prometheus, if all what they wanted was to make something relevant to their present problems. Indeed, why would they need this abject suffering body in order to write their own suffering? Prometheus is the pretext for an interesting experiment. What is it like to breathe?

Episode 1

They begin their exercise with breathing. In French the word “breath” translates to “Le souffle”. In order to pronounce the word, one would have to take a breath, and then exhale the word out. Souffle, is a breath that is gently dragged out of the mouth, the way one drags out a cloth. After breathing, they forget how to talk, and learn how to touch. In two, they face each other and pretend to be mirrors. During this play of tangible reflections, they touch each other’s faces, they embrace, and they learn to trust. The main event in the exercise starts when each member of the group imagines a certain disability, and learns to adapt to it through improvisation and interaction with the other members. They can’t express their imagined suffering with words, all they can do is collide and bump into each other so that they would exhaust all possibilities. There’s room for aggression, violence, tenderness, and all kinds of emotions in this world of hypochondriacs. They bite, they lick, they touch, they destroy objects, they laugh hysterically, they groan, scream, and make animal sounds. They fold onto each other making a wave of limbs. They compose their bodies, lying on top of each other, creating a new organism. Through their malformation, this chaos of gesture and sound is striving for a resolve. They start uttering words: Fire. They strive for the word. When the exercise is over, they talk. These impostors are pretending to forget language in order to make something “pure”. They all agree that there’s something artificial about their approach. Even though the exercise pushes them towards new possibilities and limitations–which might produce something promising out of all this intensity–there’s still too much work to do. There’s no escape from language.

Episode 2

Before they begin with their second exercise, they gather around a pile of books and texts which are related to Prometheus Bound. They read the play in German, and reflect on how a different language could give more intensity to the text. One of them reads a story about a village in Mexico where children have been infected with an illness that causes blindness, so at their school they teach them how to read and how to work the fields in case they became blind. The group of actors first talk about language and then they learn how to be blind with aggression. In their second exercise, one woman in the group plays the role of an abject victim, a corpse lying on the floor motionless with her eyes closed. The rest of the group are supposed to do whatever they like with her. She becomes a subject that is objectified, since she volunteered. She let goes of her body. They jump around her making all kinds of noises, they lift her up, drop her down, bite her feet, breathe heavily on her belly, carry her on a stretcher, stroll her around on a chair, drag her body on the floor, smother her face, fold her arms. The possibilities are endless. At one point, they grab a heavy chair and hold it two inches away from her face. I was terrified that they might smash her head. When the exercise is over, they talk. She says that what had made her endure the violence was breathing. Le souffle. And when the noises became so intense, she was able somehow to leave her body and hover above it, “You guys looked ridiculous.” She says she trusted them. The rest of the group thought that they weren’t aggressive enough, and that next time they should start early in the day when they were in their full energy. “To be properly aggressive, you would need to be relaxed.” Next time they might smash her head.