The Afterlife of Art and Objects: Alain Cavalier's Therese

Cinematic Preface

Four years before shooting began on Thérèse (1986), Alain Cavalier documented the earliest stages of the screenwriting process in a short 16mm film and accompanying diary. Produced for the magazine Cinéma-Cinémas and published with the diary excerpted alongside frame enlargements, this cinematic chronicle unfolds through a series of still lifes: first, of the blank sheet of paper lying on the director's desk, folded in half to provide a column for both image and sound; then paper and pencil as the director begins to scrawl plans for the scenario and story board; a sink, a bottle of wine, and a glass; an orange being sliced on a cutting board; a superannuated super-8 camera that "two years ago had been very sophisticated" (8); a heap of canisters of undeveloped film; a model of the quarters in the Carmelite convent; and, the final still life, bread, butter, a glass, a knife.¹ Interspersed with these lugubrious images of objects are a series of photographs of Thérèse Martin, pictures originally published along with her autobiography and now removed from that context, lying on the director's desk. These objects and photographs, which together comprise the working environment of the screenwriter, stand metonymically for the process of composing a film, as they allude to the basic dimensions—from the personal and biological to the technological and historical—that inform and sustain this process. This short film concludes with an extreme long shot of the roofs of Paris, a shot with its own expansive history encompassing René Clair and Bernardo Bertolucci, among many others, with each moment in that tradition hoping or failing to represent an ever-expanding, increasingly diverse and divergent metropolis from a single, privileged perspective. These roofs of Paris attest to the possibility—emerging and retreating in various historical epochs—of depicting a social totality, or of bafflement before an "unmappable system"(Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic 2). If these rooftops allude to various cinematic and geographic "lieux de mémoire," they also represent a chaos of memories, a history and a present that resist the insistent process of crystallization through which memory domesticates the past. The most telling aspect of Cavalier's conclusion is its departure from the enclosed spaces that encompass both the short film and Thérèse. With the jagged contours of Paris outside and Cavalier's voice directing the camera operator to film the interior again, this shot leaps dramatically from one order of magnitude to the next, from a circumscribed area proximate and accessible to the body to the infinite complexity of an expansive horizon, from the uncannily close to a vision of the totality possible only from a vast distance.

Both beset by a limited vision and extraordinarily ambitious, Thérèse accepts the charge issued by this cinematic preface, as it explores the various routes by which the relentlessly claustrophobic chambers of the convent and the similarly bounded spaces of the still life might open onto and illuminate a more extensive network of social relations. Although Thérèse itself takes place in cramped, windowless spaces, although it depicts an environment restricted to only a handful of visitors, although the cloister houses only a few tens of women and their strictly limited supply of precious mementos, the film also invites a leap onto the infinitely broader stage implied by the final shot of Cavalier's prefatory images. A series of vignettes from the life of Thérèse Martin, darling of the French troops during World War I and inaugurator of the "little way" to sainthood, the film also issues a challenge: how to focus on the circumscribed milieu of objects and seemingly trivial quotidian events, how to display this everyday life in stunning and defamiliarizing images, without becoming isolated in a world of images too eerily reminiscent of the spectacular society it opposes, without developing a cloistered aesthetic virtue that leaves everything outside undisturbed. Like the cinematic still lifes of its filmic screenplay, Thérèse unfolds in a context overloaded with the traffic in images...