by Douglas Messerli
Stéphane Marti (director) Le Veau
D'or / 2002 [15 minutes]
Generally, when viewing
a film by Stéphane Marti it is not something that you can talk about as much as
you simply experience. You recognize at the same moment, however, that it is
not merely your perception of the work that is central to his
art but the experiences / images of camera, the photographer, and the models /
actors who themselves appear not quite to know what secrets they are revealing
in their fetish-like actions. They are both enactors of the ritual gestures of
the film and subjects of it who finally in their interchange in a work such
as Le Veau D'or reject the photographer while still embracing
the film camera. It short, it is a complex interchange involved with all, a
past evidenced by the carefully curated objects revealed throughout the short
film, a present that is completely indeterminate, and a future of what you
finally of make the images you witness and what you might carry of them through
your own life.
As Michel Amarger has written:
“Marti plays with the
proximity of his subjects to one another, composing plastic variations in
choreography. The tradition of his predecessors is incessantly evoked; first
and foremost, that of Michel Journiac, who frequently works with the changing
identities of his subjects, from object to actor. Like Journiac, Stéphane Marti
celebrates rituals surrounding desire and death. Eros and Thanatos suffuse a
mythology interwoven with themes of antiquity, unbridled sexuality, and
traditions of cinema.”
Just as
the white model (Losio) paints the black man’s finger’s red, so does the black
model paint black and red rectangles on the feet and hands of the white boy,
and two luxuriate in a kind of exotic world filled with votive-like object such
as sacred skulls, crucifixes, dried flowers, Monique Delvincourt fragmented
mirrors, and Louboutin high heels, black and red also.
Their encounters with each other are both sexless and highly homoerotic as they
dress up, paint one another, and basically play at being various other selves
which seem finally too personal for the presence of the Marcel Mazé’s
constantly clicking camera. It is as if the mysterious performances that they
have invoked gradually become sexual and private, of which the film’s viewer
can only glimpse through the interstices of the continually shifting frames of
the video, film, and photographic images of objects, bodies, and music which
sensuously come to a sort of orgasm as the two paint one another with white,
red, and black bars almost as if skin color and blood equally have rubbed off
upon the other in their unseen sexual encounter.
Desire here is intertwined with interactions of race, gender, and
cultural experience that ultimately cannot fully be comprehended but merely
observed.
Los Angeles, December
30, 2022
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (December 2022).
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