Stay yet, pale flower, though coming storms will tear thee,
My soul grows darker, and I cannot spare thee.
Ebenezer Elliott, “On a Rose in December”
A shadow looms over the camera, vaguely insectoid in silhouette. The image stutters, gradually reconfiguring the relation between the shadows above us as it pans towards a break in the clouds at the top left of the screen through which the diffuse glow of the sun struggles to break, able to cast enough light out on to the edges of the form hanging above us now to imbue it with the slightest hint of color. Somehow this color appears not as a quality of the form itself, but only out of the light spilling across its surfaces, from the tension between the backlight and front, reflectivity and transparency. The shape escapes us, then shifts again, displaces within the frame by a camera movement before it moves out of frame to be replaced by black insectoid limbs as the idea of what’s actually moving becomes indiscernible. The limbs gradually align with the backlit branches of the tree high above and a kinship is created between them such that these limbs become stems, vegetal rather than animal. We slowly pan up the length of this stem, the movement displacing the tree branches high above from the frame, clearing a light slate blue space into which emerges a dusky pink form, heavy yet fragile, thrusting upwards yet crumpling at the edges, curling folds across the origami planes of its membrane. Only once it fills the screen entirely can we finally name the rose.
The remaining branches high above the wilting petals are hidden by what seems like it must be a pan around the rose, yet the aspect in which the flower is captured does not seem to change at all, its position in the frame held as though it were itself moving and pulling the camera with it. Instead the rose’s shade shifts, changing as its position relative to the sun is altered until a magenta flare erupts into the image, as if the rose glowed from within. The camera wavers side to side, intensifying the flares, which dance before coalescing into rays of brilliant, pink-fringed white, slashing across the flower, intensifying further still into bursts of white light as the flower flickers in and out of being.
The camera continues its trajectory, and the rose, backlit once again, darkens as though burnt, before the magenta flare glows from its core once again, resurrecting this burnt-out remnant, phoenix-like. The camera pans back towards the sun for a similar ballet, the rays of light cutting through the rose, seeming this time not to consume it but to shine out from its core. We move in closer to the rose, though whether via a zoom or a traveling shot is impossible to say since any fixed point in space which may have enabled us to understand the logic of the movement has passed out of frame and the rose, filling more and more of the onscreen space, contrasts only against a pure wash of pale blue grey. The flower waves from side to side, nearly disappearing before taking its place at the center of the frame again.
Philippe Grandrieux’s L’arrière saison takes its name from the French title of Adalbert Stifter’s 1857 bildungsroman Der Nachsommer (translated into English as Indian Summer). The novel recounts the life of Heinrich as he approaches manhood and decides to become a natural scientist, which in Stifter’s world of course means long hours hiking through the Alpine landscapes directly observing nature. As he does so, he seems to open up to the world, to exist alongside nature rather than attempt to analyze or understand it. During one outing, Heinrich seeks shelter from a storm in an isolated house owned by the enigmatic Baron von Risach. Heinrich comes to know von Risach’s manor as the Rosenhaus since one side is entirely covered with roses, an image which seems to have had an impact on Grandrieux: his unfilmed adaptation of Heart of Darkness opens with a description of a rose-covered wall resembling something from Stifter’s novel far more than anything in Conrad’s.
Even though Grandrieux’s L’arrière-saison takes its title from Stifter’s book, there is no real way in which the installation piece could be said to be an adaptation of the book in even the broadest sense. And yet besides the recurrent trope of roses, the two share a philosophical core. Grandrieux’s L’arrière-saison consists of two 10-minute slow-motion takes of roses, shot from a constantly mobile perspective in the changing light of the afternoon sun. These two shots share an affinity with the sensibility of Stifter’s novel, in and of themselves expressing a distinct mode of relation to and being in the world, one resonant with the philosophy expounded in Der Nachsommer and moreover finds its most complete expression in the commentary von Risach provides on the roses adorning his house and its grounds.
von Risach grows perfect specimens of many different varieties of rose even in conditions generally not conducive to their healthy cultivation. Over a long period of time and attentiveness to their every sign of health or sickness, and by assuming what roses needed for optimal nourishment would necessarily come from roses – an assumption which led to him returning his rose cuttings to the earth in which his flowers grew – von Risach is able to grow roses superior to those found in nature simply by providing the optimal conditions for the rose to flourish. von Risach’s method consists of an extreme, slow attention to the rose itself and to what the rose tells him about itself, to what it expresses by simply being in its environment. In this way we can think of Stifter’s text as the inspiration for Grandrieux’s work which is, in effect, nothing other than a slow, focused attention on the rose as an expressive object.
To think of the rose in this way is to see it very differently from how it is generally figured, for the rose is of course the most overcoded of all flowers, the very archetype of a symbol considered to express many things but rarely if ever anything that would have to do with the rose itself. (Consider Stein’s refutation of Rilke, or Picasso’s: “Go in the garden and ask the rose its meaning.”) Grandrieux’s refusal to apprehend the rose in this manner, to integrate it within a preformed narrative structure is entirely unsurprising given his usual method, and so here, by his own account, L’arrière-saison resulted from an encounter with roses in which the site and the roses themselves played an active part. As Grandrieux explains in an interview with Boris Gobille:
I started off trying to film in the Jardin des Plantes, but I didn’t know, there was too much, probably too much presence all around me perhaps, too much… too much life all around. In Bagatelle you only have these planes passing overhead and the beautiful sound you hear in the film of these planes taking off, the sound you hear in the background comes mainly from those planes passing overhead and that come from Roissy. And the light, the axis of the light was very interesting because from four o’clock in the afternoon in October the sun falls across the axis of the roses. So I would go there about two or three in the afternoon and I’d wait for an hour, an hour and a half for the sun to be on this axis, and at that point I would look for the rose, the one that would capture me, because it had to capture me, it wasn’t me who decided, in a way, the roses need to capture me. Of course it was me, but not only me: it had to capture me. So my gaze floated as can listening, a look floating over the roses, and then suddenly there would be a rose that was there, which invited me from deep within. So I’d set myself in front of the rose and start to shoot. In fact, all the roses were done like that, one rose each day.
Grandrieux’s attitude towards the world and the roses before him resonates with not only von Risach’s, but with the openness required in order to attain Bergson’s intellectual sympathy, the operation by which “one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible.” For Bergson, this intellectual sympathy or intuition as to the nature of Being is opposed to analysis, “the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, to elements common both to it and other objects.” For Bergson, metaphysics must by necessity proceed from intuition, since only then can the metaphysician attain the absolute, since analysis, “in its eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is compelled to turn… multiplies without end the number of its points of view in order to complete its always incomplete representation, and ceaselessly varies its symbols that it may perfect the always imperfect translation.” Such a stance towards “a reality that is external and yet given immediately to the mind” — a given for Bergson — can only fail to capture the essence of reality since it proceeds by dividing reality into separate entities, objects, things, frozen moments in time to be apprehended and analyzed according to principles and concepts that are anathema to reality’s very nature. “This reality is mobility. Not things made, but things in the making, not self-maintaining states, but only changing states exist. …All reality, therefore, is tendency, if we agree to mean by tendency an incipient change of direction.”
To engage with reality in this way, however, is contrary to our normal mode of being in the world since, as Bergson continues,
Our mind, which seeks for solid points of support, has for its main function in the ordinary course of life that of representing states and things… it substitutes for the continuous the discontinuous, for motion stability, for tendency in process of change fixed points marking a direction of shape and tendency.
Our mind performs this operation because “this substitution is necessary to common sense, to language, to practical life,” and this long habituation occasioned by the practical exigencies of our lives makes it extremely hard for our intelligence to “follow the opposite method…, place itself within the mobile reality, and adopt its ceaselessly changing direction; in short… grasp it by means of that intellectual sympathy which we call intuition.” Although “extremely difficult,” the task is nonetheless possible, though only via extreme means. To depart from its habituated modes of engagement with the world and apprehend reality from within rather than without, to express itself according to its own internal forces rather than demand it conform to the exigencies of a pre-established set of axiomatics preceding cognition, the mind “has to do violence to itself, has to reverse the direction of the operation by which it habitually thinks, has perpetually to revise, or rather to recast, all its categories.”
The idea of a violence of thought necessary to break through the accreted layers of habituation and thereby access a vision of the world which is not only new but incessantly new and produced from within corresponds with every film in Grandrieux’s oeuvre. The natural world we encounter here is not one that would preexist the human subjects moving through it, but a reality in which there are only zones of indiscernibility between that reality and the subjects moving through it. Rather than constituting a point of difference between Bergson and Grandrieux, what this points to is rather a flaw in Bergson’s theory of intuition via which we are able to fall into intellectual sympathy with a preexisting reality, despite the fact his entire philosophical premise is founded upon the necessity of apprehending reality from within, not reconstituting the phenomena we encounter as preexisting entities imbued with a certain stability. Thus Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental problem with Bergson — once the former has moved beyond the foundational work in phenomenology for which he is best known and in which the idea of a necessary reduction to regress to the immediacy of things by bracketing out the outside world rests upon the kind of interpolation of a preexisting reality for which Merleau-Ponty would take Bergson to task in his later works. Reacting against Bergson’s philosophy of intuition access the immediate presence of existence, Merleau-Ponty writes:
Coming after the world, after nature, after life, after thought, and finding them constituted before it, philosophy indeed questions itself concerning its own relationship with it. It is a return upon itself and upon all things but not a return to an immediate — which recedes in the measure that philosophy wishes to approach it and fuse into it. The immediate is at the horizon and must be thought as such; it is only by remaining at a distance that it remains itself. There is an experience of the visible thing as pre-existing my vision, but this experience is not a fusion, a coincidence: because my eyes which see, my hands which touch, can also be seen and touched, because, therefore, in this sense they see and touch the visible, the tangible, from within, because our flesh lines and even envelops all the visible and tangible things with which nevertheless it is surrounded, the world and I are within one another, and there is no anteriority of the percipere to the percipi, there is simultaneity or even retardation. …When I find again the actual world such as it is, under my hands, under my eyes, up against my body, I find much more than an object: a Being of which my vision is a part, a visibility older than my operations or my acts. But this does not mean there was a fusion or coinciding of me with it: on the contrary, this occurs because a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things.
Merleau-Ponty calls this relation of overlapping or encroachment between the sentient and the sensible (and, indeed, between any dichotomy whatsoever) chiasm, a form of relation that substitutes the dichotomy for a dialectic. He writes:
Dialectical thought is that which admits reciprocal actions or interactions — which admits therefore that the total relation between a term A and a term B cannot be expressed in one sole proposition, that that relation covers over several others which cannot be superimposed, which are even opposed, which define so many points of view logically incompossible and yet really united within it — even more that each of these relations leads to its opposite or to its own reversal, and does so by its own movement.
In saying this, Merleau-Ponty is in large part mounting a critique of those philosophers (looking at you, Sartre) who posit an essential schism at the core of existence between being and nothingness. In the same move, he begins to formulate a solution to the problem he finds in Bergson, namely his recourse to a primordial, pre-reflective Being as the ground given immediately to the mind, with which we must strive to attain intellectual sympathy. The solution he finds extends the logic of Bergson’s appeal to a philosophy generated from within the flow of existence:
Between the thought or fixation of essences, which is the aerial view, and life, which is inherence in the world or vision, a divergence reappears, which forbids the thought to project itself in advance in the experience and invites it to recommence the description from closer up. For a philosophy conscious of itself as a cognition, as a second fixation of a pre-existing experience, the formula being is, nothingness is not is an idealization, an approximation of the total situation, which involves, beyond what we say, the mute experience from which we draw what we say. And just as we are invited to rediscover behind the vision, as immediate presence to being, the flesh of being and the flesh of the seer, so also must we rediscover the common milieu where being and nothingness are only λέκτα labouring against each other. Our point of departure shall not be being is, nothingness is not nor even there is only being — which are formulas of a totalizing thought, a high-altitude thought — but: there is being, there is a world, there is something; …One does not arouse being from nothingness, ex nihilo; one starts with an ontological relief where one can never say that the ground be nothing. What is primary is not the full and positive being upon a ground of nothingness; it is a field of appearances.
In erasing the divide between Being and nothingness, between the perceiving subject and the world perceived, positing between them an irrevocable and necessarily dialectical relation that joins one in the other without the possibility of one subsuming the other (obviating the possibility of any totalizing thought) Merleau-Ponty goes further than Bergson toward a vision of the world produced from within which remains always in motion, only formed out of the relations between incompossible forces, events and beings. This is what Merleau-Ponty terms the flesh of the world, a term which may appear to perform the kind of reification his philosophy intends to avoid, but does not because in and of itself it remains invisible. The flesh of the world describes the imbrication of the flesh of being and that of the seer, produced in the chiasmic relation between two axes irrevocably separate from each other yet producing Being itself. As a relation, this point is not visible in and of itself, nor fixed in space or time; it is, rather, merely the fulcrum around which these axes turn and produce Being, the visible, inherence in the world, vision.
It is precisely such a vision of nature Grandrieux presents not only in L’arrière-saison but everywhere in his work, an image (a term not beloved of Merleau-Ponty) of a world extant only as the expression of dialectical relations between elements, between the body of the filmmaker and the body of the rose, between the axes of light and time and of light and the roses, between light and shadow, light and the camera, between every conceivable element involved in the creation of this constantly mobile image, moving not because it is directed towards any particular end but simply because its Being, its materiality, is only produced out of and only exists in movement, never settling into a stable identity corresponding to a fully knowable thing in the world. Interestingly, in the working notes for The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty also seizes upon the rose as the object through which to think through this new conception of nature. In an entry dated February 1959 he writes:
Discovery of the (verbal) Wesen: first expression of the being that is neither being-object nor being-subject, neither essence nor existence: what West (the being-rose of the rose, the being-society of the society, the being-history of history) answers to the question was as well as the question dass; it is not society, the rose seen by a subject, it is not a being for itself of society and of the rose (contrary to what Ruyer says): it is the roseness extending itself throughout the rose, it is what Bergson rather badly called the “images” — That in addition this roseness gives rise to a “general idea,” that is, that there be several roses, a species rose, this is not insignificant, but results from the being-rose considered in all its implications (natural generativity) — In this way — striking all generality from the first definition of the Wesen — one suppresses that opposition of the fact and the essence which falsifies everything —
Unpacking this dense, evocative passage in the context of the work as a whole, Alphonso Lingis explains in his translator’s preface:
The sensible thing is not in space, but, like a direction, is at work across space, presides over a system of oppositional relationships. It is not inserted in a pre-existing locus of space; it organizes a space of fields and planes around itself. Likewise its presence presents a certain contracted trajectory of time. It is for this that it occupies our vision, that it is not transparent like a sign that effaces before the signified…
The unity of the thing is not that of a contingent cluster of particles, nor that of the ideal foreign to spatial and temporal dispersion; its unity is that of a certain style, a certain manner of managing the domain of space and time over which it has competency, of pronouncing, of articulating that domain, of radiating about a wholly virtual centre — in short a manner of being, in the active sense, a certain Wesen, in the sense that, says Heidegger, this word has when it is used as a verb.
…the things come into presence, come to command a field of presence, by their style. They hold together like the body holds together. Their unity is neither the unity of pure assemblage nor the unity of a law; it is produced and reproduced as the “bringing of a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being.” The style is that interior animation of the color, that interior rhythm that assembles the forms and shadows of the rose, that organized fluctuation that makes the thing arise as a relief upon a depth of being. The thing is borne into presence by a scheme of contrasts that commands a constellation, that modulates a trajectory of time, and that makes it leave its place to come reverberate in the receptive sensitive flesh that perceives it.
If indeed a sympathy exists between this idea of nature as it plays out in Merleau-Ponty and L’arrière-saison, it is then remarkable that a consideration of the rose should figure in the deployment of this idea in both Merleau-Ponty and Grandrieux’s works, yet somehow unsurprising, for a rose is a rose is a rose is the most overcoded of flowers when it comes to symbolic heft, perhaps the most familiar and oft-represented form in nature and thus the ideal candidate for a philosophical expression guiding us to reconsider entirely the fundamental nature of Being and our relation to it. Thus wherefore L’arrière-saison’s roses look nothing like roses at all.
The second half of L’arrière-saison is a variation on the same, produced out of the interplay of light, movement, color, scale and image capture technology. The same incommensurability, the same inability to attribute a particular movement or shift in tonality to any particular source is never clearer than in the opening of the second shot, when clouds slowly float over, an illusion broken as soon as treetops enter into the bottom of the frame and we realize the motion belongs to the camera itself rather than the clouds. Panning down, another rose enters the frame, and the indiscernibility of motion repeats as the pink folds of the rose float in space, the dark stem supporting it camouflaged against the backdrop of silhouetted treetops, the certainty of perspective obscured by the discrepancy of scale between the elements onscreen.
A blow-by-blow account of the second half of L’arrière-saison is superfluous: we encounter over and over the indiscernibility between elements, between moves and transitions effected in the materiality of the image by the changing conditions in which it is produced by the fluid relations between the constituent components of the shot’s form and content. Consistent with the vision of reality Merleau-Ponty describes, here too lies a figuration of the real produced only by the relation between incommensurable elements, an “interior animation.” Thus despite the superfluity of describing each moment in detail, it is nonetheless worth noting there are in the second movement of L’arrière-saison a number of shots in which the relation between incommensurable elements is on full display, such as the repeated returns to the rose in sharp relief against the blue sky and clouds, shots in which each of these elements, one in extreme close-up, the other at infinity, is held in focus.
Far from producing the illusion of reality favored by Bazin, the deep focus here creates an unreality effect, turning the rose into a digital cutout, the sky and clouds a surrogate background dropped in behind the rose via greenscreen. This unreality effect might more aptly be described as a denaturing effect, for what is figured here is the kind of chiasmic relation described by Merleau-Ponty. The chiasm enables Merleau-Ponty to describe how diametrically opposed terms are held in a dialectical relation with each other, creating a zone of indiscernibility at the point where the body touching itself becomes the body touched and the subject perceiving the world becomes the world perceived. This is the figure Grandrieux posits, a chiasm in which elements held apart from each other enter a relational contract, creating a movement nothing other than the expression of Being from within. At the intersection of these disparate elements the visible is born and Being contracts into actuality from the realm of virtuality, but this point in and of itself remains invisible, merely the fulcrum around which those negotiations take place. This point of intersection is then in no way punctual, nor really even an intersection, a point of meeting, but the gap between incommensurable terms, both of which are necessarily implicated in the contraction of Being into actuality produced out of the relation between them.
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