Wall Engravings 1967 FRE SUB ENG, FRE, ITA 1080p BluRay x264

Year: 1967
Country: France
Director: Guy Gilles
Cast: Macha Méril, Patrick Jouané, Bernard Verley, Frédéric Ditis
IMBD: Link

Language : French
Subtitles : English, French, Italian





To what extent can media other than literature become vehicles for poetry, and what does it mean for a film to be considered ‘poetic’? Ever since the first French avant-garde of the 1920s, filmmakers, theorists and critics – many of whom, like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein, occupying several of these positions – have thought about the interconnections between cinema and poetry as part of a broader reflection on the specificity and expressive means of the new medium film. Highlighting cinema’s ‘ability to juxtapose, within several seconds, on the same luminous screen, images which are generally isolated in time or space’, critic Emile Vuillermoz enthused: ‘all this could permit a poet to realize their most ambitious dreams’. Upending traditional definitions of poetry as a verbal art, Jean Epstein, together with Abel Gance one of the pioneers of poetic cinema, asserted: ‘The cinema is poetry’s most powerful medium, the truest medium for the untrue, the unreal, the “surreal” as Apollinaire would have said’. Along with painting and music, poetry became an important source of inspiration and model for the avant-garde’s quest for a ‘purer’ form of cinema, less driven by the demands of realism and narrative action, and more attuned to formal experiments and stylistic innovation. Some forty years later, the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini similarly insisted on the subversion of traditional narrative conventions in what he termed a ‘cinema of poetry’: ‘for the most part, the films of the cinema of poetry are not made according to the ordinary rules and conventions of the screenplay, they don’t obey the usual narrative rhythms. On the contrary, disproportion is the rule, details are greatly dilated, and points traditionally considered important are very quickly recounted’. Whereas the first avant-garde privileged montage as a tool of poetic expression, Pasolini, on the other hand designated ‘free indirect point of view’ – the filmmaker’s exploration of characters’ inner worlds and mental states – as the main feature of a cinema of poetry. Poetic cinema, then, seems to be first and foremost defined by its shift from action and plot to the exploration of subjective states such as dreams or memories, its puncturing of traditional notions of time and space, as well as the heightened form of perception and greater attention to detail that it affords spectators. Just as, in the words of Alain Badiou, ‘poetry is an arrest upon language, an effect of the coded artifice of linguistic manipulation’, so the poetic in cinema divests the medium of its merely dramatic character, opening it up to a deeper experience of viewing and sensing.

But what forms and figures does the poetic take in cinema? How does a language associated with literary writing find expression in the filmic medium? And what hybrid forms in-between the verbal and the visual emerge in a cinema of poetry? In this article, we will focus on French director Guy Gilles (1938-1996), a marginalised filmmaker who is slowly gaining in recognition in France and beyond, as a particularly original practitioner of poetic cinema. Born in Algiers, Gilles made his first short, Soleil éteint in 1958, before moving to Paris two years later, in the midst of the Algerian War. Though aesthetically innovative and highly prolific – he directed eight features, more than a dozen shorts and some forty works for television, including essay films on Marcel Proust and Jean Genet – he remained in the shadows of French New Wave and Post-New Wave cinema, his melancholy, uncompromisingly personal films failing to resonate with contemporary audiences. Trained at the School of Fine Arts, Gilles’s creative practice was above all influenced by poetry and painting: ‘I make films as one writes verse, as one uses paintbrushes’, he declares in a 1968 interview. The art of poetry is evoked in film titles such as Le Clair de terre (Earth Light, 1970), named after André Breton’s 1923 poetry collection; Au biseau des baisers (1959), after the first line of Louis Aragon’s poem ‘Elsa je t’aime’; or Chanson de gestes (1966), a pun on the genre of the Old French epic poem. If Soleil éteint recalls a line from the Parnassian poet Catulle Mendès, whose ‘Spleen d’été’ rather aptly characterises the characters’ morose mood, the title of his short TV documentary La Poésie est dans la rue (1970) sounds like the poetic manifesto of a director intent on capturing the beauty of faces and places in films resolutely grounded in the everyday.

For Gilles, ‘a flower, a wall, a street or the face of Greta Garbo are [...] equally “vehicles” of poetry and sources of emotion. It all depends on how you look at them’. If poetry, for the director, is essentially a question of looking, its cinematic expression by necessity relies on a certain quality of the image: ‘I think it’s impossible to translate cinematic poetry, in the Wellesian sense of the word, using anything other than images and plasticity: “the camera is an eye in the poet’s head”’. Poetry, as filmmaker Yann Gonzalez points out, permeates all aspects of Gilles’s cinema: ‘every photogram is a model of composition and framing, beauty bursts forth in a deluge of formal discoveries and moving gestures, the slightest shot [...] asserts itself as an incandescent poetic act’. While some contemporary critics mistook his preoccupation with form for futile aestheticism,most reviewers hailed the poetic dimension and profound sensitivity of his films, culminating in Jean-Claude Guiguet’s homage to this ‘messenger of a cinema of poetry’ in Cahiers du cinéma after the filmmaker’s death from AIDS in 1996.


Gilles’s wistful Au pan coupé (Wall Engravings, 1967), the second film of what could be called his trilogy of errancy, can best be described as a poetic attempt to keep present – through the resurrectional powers of the moving image – those who have departed. Seven minutes into the film, the rebellious protagonist Jean (Patrick Jouané), one of the many hypersensitive, searching young men that populate the director’s work, runs away, leaving his partner Jeanne (Macha Méril) grieving about his disappearance. His camaraderie with a group of beatniks seems at first to chart a journey of self-discovery in the style of Jack Kerouac, the ‘father of the Beat generation’, whose rejection of American middle-class values and restless wandering, manifest in the many alter-egos of his books, resonate with Jean’s uncompromising quest for freedom. Yet Au pan coupé is a far cry from Ray Smith’s search of spiritual enlightenment in The Dharma Bums (1958) or Jack Duluoz’s boozy retreats in the Californian canyons in Big Sur (1962). Affirming ‘I am not a beatnik’ – rather like
Kerouac himself in an interview shortly before his death – Jean embarks on a solitary journey, succumbing to fever and hunger, not unlike Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) in Agnès Varda’s better-known Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985) some twenty years later. The remainder of the film will be devoted to remembering and understanding Jean, as Jeanne – unaware of her beloved’s demise – is beset by memories of their shared life. Unburdened by any conventional demands of plot development, Au pan coupé in minute detail charts the emotional pain of a young woman faced with an unexplainable loss.

In a vertiginous criss-crossing between past and present, Gilles interweaves images of Jeanne grieving for the departure of Jean with her reminiscences of privileged moments of the couple’s happiness. While the present is filmed in a mournful black-and-white, rendered almost spectral by the persistent over-exposure of the image, the flashbacks of memory are in lush, vibrant colours evoking the cinema of Jacques Demy, one of the directors – along with Godard, Varda and Bresson – that Gilles admired most. The film interpolates different time frames in rapid montage sequences where past and present are increasingly intermeshed, then collapsed into one another. At times, as is emblematised in a sequence where we see Jeanne walking alone in a wooded street, followed by a jump cut to a similarly composed shot of the two lovers kissing, the flashbacks to the past are so rapid that they seem to tear the image open, making it porous to different temporalities, snippets of lost time recovered through memory. Named after the café where the two lovers used to meet, Au pan coupé is originally an architectural term, referring to the ‘slanted connection replacing the angle of two walls’ (Larousse). Truthful to its title, the film’s architecture establishes connections between two temporal planes by means of a montage practice that one is tempted to call ‘au plan coupé’, that is, a cutting up of the narrative into multiple shots that capture the fleetingness of time. Montage, in Gilles’s work, unlike the dialectical montage of Eisenstein or Godard, does not juxtapose to create meaning, but, rather, conjures up poetic moments in a shattered mosaic of time. Each shot signifies for itself – an evanescent moment of living is turned into an instant of pure poetry. Gilles’s cinema does not order, impose or enclose; it does not aim to shock, illustrate or represent, but creates moments of ‘time in its pure state’ that at once invoke the immediacy of presence and its inherent transience. Like an extension of the ‘image poem’ sequence of Godard’s Alphaville (1965), whose coda shot of Anna Karina looking out on the city with a copy of Paul Éluard’s Capitale de la douleur pressed against the window-pane is referenced in the opening shot of Au pan coupé, the entire film becomes poetry. Or rather, it invents a new form of cine-poetry that enshrines the evanescent moment in the seemingly permanent film image.

Freed from the linear strictures of narrative, Au pan coupé is acutely attentive to the gestures and bodily postures of the lovers, forming what, in a variation on Barthes, one could call ‘fragments of a lover’s gestures’. In images of their happier days, we often see their hands in close-up, tenderly interlocked or caressing, in stark contrast to Jeanne’s listless gestures in the present, such as when her hand comes to rest on a bag replete with objects that belonged to their shared life or pensively strokes her furrowed brow. At first glance, Gilles’s predilection for close-ups of faces and body parts such as hands and feet recalls Godard’s almost abstract, tableau-like compositions of the female anatomy in Une femme mariée – the film that launched Macha Méril’s career. Yet whereas Godard’s film indulges in a purely formal exploration of the painterly possibilities of the cinematic medium, here the close-up is used to give full expression to the characters’ most intimate states, to the fragmentation of existence, and to the heightened sense of inescapable finitude. Though similarly underpinned by a painterly, plastic conception of the image, Gilles pays attention to the fleeting gestures, postures and facial expressions of his characters as an outward projection of their inner emotions. Macha Méril’s subtly expressive face in particular becomes the vehicle for ‘speaking’ the demise of their love. As Marguerite Duras, an early supporter of Gilles’s work, comments:

Here, finally, love isn’t shown from an embrace-in-a-hotel-bed. Its evocation by the face – the face of a woman fifty times repeated, but for a shadow, a glance, a contraction under the stress of the wound – is quite simply admirable.

(Hugues Azérad & Marion Schmid)

[ About file ]

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Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2026 02:14:45 +0100
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[ Edition entry ]

UID: 2783313339689707874
Hidden: No
Selected by default: No
Playlist: No
Chapters:
00:00:00,000-00:01:24,000: Générique / Titles {und}
00:01:24,000-00:07:36,333: Au Pan Coupé ... / At the café Au Pan Coupé... {und}
00:07:36,333-00:12:04,373: ... Jean quitta Jeanne... / ... Jean left Jeanne... {und}
00:12:04,373-00:16:42,833: ... qui le chercha dans les images,... / ... who looked for him in images,... {und}
00:16:42,833-00:21:45,070: ... les maux,... / ... in pains,... {und}
00:21:45,070-00:28:18,275: ... l'oubli de soi et les traces,... / ... in self forgetfulness and in tracks,... {und}
00:28:18,275-00:33:10,875: ... les lieux qui fuient,... / ... in fleeing places,... {und}
00:33:10,875-00:38:53,075: ... la vie des autres,... / ... in other's life,... {und}
00:38:53,075-00:47:39,775: ... l'été enchanté et fleuri,... / ... in enchanted summer,... {und}
00:47:39,775-00:48:56,350: ... les paroles dites,... / ... in pronounced words,... {und}
00:48:56,350-00:50:59,888: ... une saute d'humeur,... / ... in a mood swing,... {und}
00:50:59,888-00:53:43,375: ... une séance de pose,... / ... in a moment of pose,... {und}
00:53:43,375-00:55:45,666: ... le retour à Paris... / in the return to Paris... {und}
00:55:45,666-01:00:05,366: ... et que son père chercha aussi. / and whose father looked for Jean too. {und}
01:00:05,366-01:02:23,125: Au Pan Coupé, elle le chercha encore,... / At Au Pan Coupé, she looked once more,... {und}
01:02:23,125-01:06:48,125: ... dans des paroles folles, éperdues,... / into crazy, wild,... {und}
01:06:48,125-01:07:45,800: ... mal polies... / ... rude words... {und}
01:07:45,800-01:09:30,800: ... et arrêtées sur les visages... / ... suspended on faces {und}
01:09:30,800-01:11:50,785: ... par la découverte de la mort. / ... by the discovering of death. {und}

This report was created by AVInaptic (01-11-2020) on 7-02-2026 02:34:11