The Art of the Present
(L'art du présent, Cahiers du Cinéma No. 132, June 1962)

The subject of Elia Kazan's last two films is time. Not some abstract idea, but everyday time as men must live it day after day. Wild River is built entirely around one of cinema's master themes, the confrontation between the old and the new: parallel to the epics of Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, here is a pragmatic, all-American meditation. But instead of contrasting two moments, two states of duration, Splendor in the Grass sets out to describe the very workings of time, the obscure degradation and metamorphosis that turns two strangers into a pair of lovers, a powerful man into a hunted man, a stable country into a drifting people, an established morality into an obsolete one. The collapse, or transformation, of values—of all values—is the focus of a film whose diverse voices unite under the common denominator of the idea of crisis.

If Kazan has never staged each shot with greater refinement, each second seeming to be lovingly crystallized for its own sake and around a secret core, it is because the filmmaker's art here lies precisely in this dialectic of instant and duration; the sensual and impressionistic prestiges are only so valuable as in the incessant modification, which itself is amplified by this appearance of resistance and permanence of beauty. The precision of the places and times, the quasi-maniacal characterization of each character, are the means of the same desire: what is sought here is a mixture of the individual and the collective, the social and the psychological, the material and the dreamlike, which is the very art of Chekhov; none of the elements mingle with the others, each is linked to all and refers back to them. What emerges is a universe, a totality, a world closed by the reciprocal necessity of its parts, but open at the same time, because it is exact and therefore allegorical of any social or organic complex, and a mirror of it. Where arbitrariness annuls and disperses, logic and necessity deliver.

Everything ultimately passes through the physical: the body is always there, with its diseases, its instincts, its nourishments; and all the objects around, and the setting, the décor with the man: all, one might say, on the same plane. For man, too, is totality, the totality of reality and society around him. "My crime is to have divided", said the faun; such is the subject of this film, which opposes the mutilated visions, familial or sporting, of the corpore sano, with a critique (and explanation at the same time) of the phenomenon: puritanism. Which is first and foremost rupture, judgment and privilege.

A medical film because the body is its subject, a psychiatric film because the mind is its subject, a surgical film because the soul is its subject. A film that wounds and cuts to the quick, but places itself entirely under the sign of water, river, dam and waterfall: an irresistible current of natural forces, but still a flow that conquers all appearances. "Look, it's the same," exclaims Bud's father in the nightclub; but no, it cannot be the same, and each being is irreplaceable, but Deanie Loomis is no longer the same either, for each of her moments is just as irreplaceable; and each shot closes in on its own truth. What art better than that of the twenty-fourth of a second could thus carry and give force to this absolute critique of the notion of identity?

There is nothing but the present, but one must want it and understand it. Is this resignation? I do not think so, because it is also necessary to build this present and inhabit it, then this other present, which is precisely progress. Admittedly, this work is more descriptive than critical: any lucid description contains judgment. In the end, the heroes are returned to time.

A film that must be seen again, like any film about time. Stripped of all blackmail, proposing facts without imposing meaning or morals, Splendor is one of those rare works where we make a journey, where, between the first and last frame, the world has shifted: the anti-Naked Island. All great films are chronicles. And here any dramatic progression yields to the order of simple temporal succession.

Only certain characters, precisely those who oppose and refuse, are “dramatic,” sometimes even theatrical, but that is because their ideas reign over them as if on a stage; these will finally be defeated, broken, and reduced to simplicity. And "characterization" is not stylization, or the creation of types, but the attentive, patient search for what endures in a being, and what in it is only fleeting, instantaneous, transitory: the unveiling of its curve, and of its becoming, which can only be grasped in shards and chips of time. But the fragment, inescapable, is here the sign of the whole; the serial cell contains all the possibilities of the work; the profound song can only be born of this debris, or dust. A fractured, colliding construction, where the conflict between traditional dramatic elements and free structures—whose rigor is more secret, whose appearance is that of the improvised—is the reflected image of the subject; a construction that seems to be the very work of time itself; a decisive step towards that definitively atonal cinema heralded by all the great works of today.

DISCLAIMER: This is an AI-based translation using ChatGPT-4 and DeepL Translate, mixed and matched for improved readability (while maintaining the essence of the source). Regardless, this is bound to be dodgy in more ways than one; for transparency, I have posted the original French text as well, which you can view here.

JACQUES RIVETTE.