Drumming the Point Home: La Doctrine
Basile Mercado’s fascinatingly strange 44 minute film La Doctrine proceeds simultaneously on two tracks, which only intersect intermittently and indirectly. Visually, the film is a portrait of Paris (with some shots of Madrid), seemingly a casual documentation of the filmmaker’s environment. Almost all the shots are extremely short, typically one to four seconds, and the constant visual jumps are both jarring and stimulating, as we strain to find connections between them. The film was shot on an iPhone, and it actually contains quite a few shots of other people taking pictures and videos with their phones, showing what a commonplace activity the collection of images has become.
Meanwhile, on the soundtrack, we hear an extended dialog between a man and a woman. She appears at his door, claiming that she grew up in his apartment, but he hesitates to let her inside. Throughout their conversation, she avoids responding directly to him, answering instead with tangential remarks, and they both liberally sprinkle their dialog with quotations. Her indirect mode of conversation is eerily algorithmic, and in a way, their conversation functions as an extended Turing test, in which the man tries to decide whether or not she is human. One shot shows the detached legs of a female mannequin, lying on a mattress in the street, and another shows a pair of high-heeled plastic legs waving from a window. Both seem to be images of a woman who is less than fully human.
At one point, he refers to someone who was “supposed to be embody a machine, a robot.” “So, what happened?” she asks. “He got caught in real life.” This is the story of the early 21st century: we hope to cede our wills and our minds to algorithms, but our human nature stubbornly makes this impossible.
The entire soundtrack is permeated by a highly processed layer of ambient street sounds, as if we are surrounded by urban bustle, but heard through several filters. The effect is to put everything we hear at a tremendous distance, as if beamed from another planet, using bad WiFi. The images likewise present a world mediated through screens: portraits with the faces blurred as in Google Maps, grainy photos with the mouse pointer arrow still visible. “That’s what I was trying to say,” comments the narrator Loïc, “Paris is the city of codes.” And perhaps not only modern Paris; 19th century French novels set in the capitol spend whole chapters decoding the minutia of Parisian social codes.
The film has no direct, obvious links between the dialog and the images, but they frequently allude to one another indirectly. For example, when the narrator states that dwelling on the past “prevents you from moving forward,” we see a shot of a figure skater, twirling in place. (This is followed by the shot of a billboard asking “Living with fear?”) Wittily, during a still image which is held for quite a long time, the woman asks “is it all going to be this boring?” She offers a quote: “Life is too short to watch bad movies.” Thus, she functions at times as the critical voice inside of the artist’s head.
These two parallel tracks, the images and the dialog, create a rich counterpoint, in which ideas, emotions and images comment on one another, and re-focus our attention. The overall effect, in the end, is that it is the images which constitute the real “story” of the film, which is a kind of love/hate letter to contemporary Paris. The dialog functions more as texture, a constant murmuring of intellectual discomfort (which itself is very Parisian).
At various points, the narrator refers to dreams, both to his and to hers (in which he also, mysteriously, appears.) Clearly, as in a dream, she functions as an alternative version of himself, an older version, one that struggles between her human and robotic sides. Although we hear her speaking in French, he describes her as having spoken in Spanish, and the Spanish sequences in the film may represent her childhood (and his). The filmmaker’s nom de plume, Basile Mercado, reflects his part-Spanish identity, not to mention the many street markets that appear in the film, and the online marketplace of competing voices, which animates its spirit.
At one point, they discuss the effect of cuts in film editing, the way the viewer is transported in a flash from one location to another. The relentless and rapid cuts in the film are unrelated to narrative or ordinary logic. Rather, Mercado follows a visual or associative logic: a rotating gear gives way to a man rolling up a shopfront. A shot of two boys bouncing a soccer ball is followed by round light globes, hung in the trees.
Many sequences of shots lack any clear through-line, but are simply visually stimulating, as they shuttle your brain between competing realities: a uniformed soldier, a display of coats in a shop window, a plastic bottle, a religious icon. When you are consistently fed these strings of momentary sensations, you become saturated with the sense of multiplicity and simultaneity inherent in urban life. A single unexpected cut can transport you to a different reality, but a film which consists entirely of unexpected cuts makes you feel as if you are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, in short, as if you are online.
Much of their conversation compares competing conceptions of the purpose of art: that art is for moral improvement, that artists should ignore the past, that they should study the past more. Loïc complains that, in the internet age, art is superfluous, because everything has already been said and is constantly available. The best one can hope for is to say something again, in a different way. Thus, their conversation consists of browsing through discarded notions from the past.
One sequence shows Loïc looking at the work of disabled French sculptor Laurent Vilar, whom he encounters selling his work in a street market. The camera dwells on the artists’ hands, and later on the hands of a woman, throwing a pot on a potter’s wheel. He seems to feel nostalgia for more tactile notions of the artist’s role, which prevailed in the past.
If there is a central doctrine embraced by the film, it comes from Heine’s poem Doctrine, which she quotes:
Drum all the people out of sleep,
Drum Reveille with a youthful leap,
March ever onward, drumming away,
That is the science in its whole.
Drumming, a loud but nonverbal sound, has the effect of awakening people. The central problem of the Information Age is of people largely unconscious of their surroundings, of their political situation, of the ecological situation of our world, of the emotional reality of other people’s experiences. The solution? Create loud, disturbing artifacts of all kinds (such as a long film filled with jarring cuts and juxtapositions), and it will at least have the effect of waking people up. In a related motif, we repeatedly see Loïc at the piano, practicing Rameau’s Tambourin. (The French word for “tambourine” is similar to the word for “drum.”)
Towards the end of the film, we see the film’s producer, Jason Akakpo, reading the opening lines from the script. (Perhaps it’s his screen test.) A dream has become a script, an artifact, raw clay for creating a work of art. Loïc is approaching middle age, and our culture is aging into a late, decadent phase. He may not have fully clarified for himself what useful role an artist should play nowadays, but the creative habit proves to be irrepressible. He continues to make films, trying to drum up a din loud enough to be able to be heard over the online cacophony of everyone on the planet speaking at once. Thanks to the finely honed and complex skill of the counterpoint Mercado creates, weaving together visual and verbal observations, we’re privileged to experience at least discrete moments of illumination. Perhaps that’s the only thing possible, for the moment.
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