Sunday, July 20, 2025

Stéphane Marti | Le Veau D'or / 2002

the devil's bargain 

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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