01  SUMMER 2025

As a self-appointed scholar of the Tobe Hooper school of filmmaking, I have taken it upon myself to write about Luc Moullet’s effort in ‘shock’ filmmaking, his short-form take on the antiquated short story format: the at once new and old, self-possessing and out-of-pocket Le Litre de lait (2006). As a proponent of theories of materialism, I have always responded to Moullet, whose works do not stick to dead-eyed longueurs presenting capitalism as some sort of No Exit stage of dated furniture. Rather, they draw out the many stories that can sprout from capital’s evolutionary decay. The nuclear-level breakages and reformations evinced by historical materialism, to which the imaginative epigenesis of stories bears witness, is what Moullet has devoted his life to cataloguing, critiquing, creating, and finding transitional points within, all with a far more punitive sense of this calling than other filmmakers. It seems to be this that has brought him back to the time of the forging of modernist literature, when the masters were happily focusing their craft on the development of the short story towards its command of inner psychology. I was introduced to Le Litre de lait through a programming description that described it as a comment on the ‘horror genre’, and I cannot say whether that had an influence on the way I proceeded to process it, but I can say that I resisted the descriptor and its ‘superior’ implications, and was left in the end with a neutral simmer of personal investment that I feel accords entirely with Moullet’s intent.

Moullet has always been iconoclastic about genre, and his blunt acknowledgement of genre is part of that iconoclasm. He regards it in as concrete and non-prejudicial terms as he would budget and partisan politics (both similarly reductive, distortive) — just another commodity in the market of theoretical frameworks for broaching cinema. Whether there is an excess or an absence of generic formulas, Moullet’s public endorsement of genre is just one way to remain logically, inferentially sound when, in his own work, he renders genre impossible, sublated by virtue of his exercises in cinematic representation. Moullet’s film criticism often speaks of films through their deconstructed — or rather, unconstructed — elements; his analysis of characters in others’ films often very casually breaks through the auteur’s pet themes and personal ideologies, a subjective space, and lands upon terrain more commonly known as shared reality. What would have rotary phones done to Johnny Guitar and its lack of basic skills of communication? What if Rio Bravo’s extrajudicial law reflected post-World War society’s bloodlust? It does not, and this material perspective — signifying only what is in front of its nose — contributes to Hawks’s immanent art. But materiality — as well as cinema — has an important trans-temporal side, which Hegel has called ‘presupposing’: an existence that makes it possible to occupy different cultures in different timelines. Cinema is really the act of ‘finding a world’ that is both the one before oneself and the construct posited by a particular consciousness. Both worlds exist, but one in particular pertains to human consciousness’s creation and negation of something from nothing, with the ‘leftovers’ — where the nature before us and Essence presupposed of a thing fail to penetrate or comprehend the other — as the most illuminating raw material for the artist. Moullet will use the same rugged individualism Hawks depicts so purely to critique aesthetics of populism and revolution across all art and history. Hawks and all great filmmakers must accept penetrability by materiality or else they would have to admit their lack of creative capacity and position themselves outside the conversation. Such is their grandiose lot in life, thanks to minds like Moullet’s.

So one, we have horror. Two, dialectics of materialism. Three, the short story. It would be fruitful to approach Le Litre as an attempt to manifest and make legible what has so consistently set Moullet apart from others. This lies in his understanding of these three things, particularly in how they relate to one another, all being ‘cinema genres’ in one sense or another.

The story of Le Litre de lait, in which a teenage boy resists the initiative of his mother to purchase a litre of milk from a neighbor he fears (absurdly, and beautifully so, a jealous, purple-haired matron, wrathful of the boy’s mother’s affair with her husband), depicts a journey from point A to B, physically and psychologically. The two points can be deemed immutable, literally or even figuratively designated as ‘life’ and ‘death’, while the multitude of decisions that can be made between two points is the substance of a conventional horror narrative. Le Litre is about the horror within form, which is manifested in Moullet’s gamble with ‘shock’ cinema’s cheaper tricks — the cursory editing, the interplay between camera and subjectivity, the ‘tense’ musical underscoring (more than a little incongruous with Moullet’s dry objectivity) — and the Cinema of Moullet’s even cheaper ones, by which I mean the intentionally cursory editing, the subjective objectivity, the dry objectivity that uses diegetic and non-diegetic (or realistic and unrealistic, continuous and discontinuous) modes in a carousel-like circulation. Le Litre de lait expands the phenomenological effect of the work of horror, and it is a ‘short story’ film in how it severs the creation of future possibilities. Moullet has made many short works but only rarely, such as here, has he formally adopted/adapted the essence of the ‘short story’. The short story becomes the work of horror (the ‘work’, in the active sense, towards horror), and vice versa, since finality is itself terrifying, especially when it seems to be the result of a rusty cleaver (which the teenage boy in the film imagines poised over his own neck). The work — like a political or economic reality — is always on the brink of expanding further, encompassing and consuming the limits of its reality, but the limit is reached, in an all too pragmatic and existential sense: by ending, we close the loop on an historical era. The boy, Gilles, sees his life history closing in a constant loop, through a persistent shakedown of his own interior imagination, the actions of his exterior interactive body, and those of his autonomic, involuntary one (Moullet deploys a clever effect in a moment when he cuts to a medical X-ray view of a torso, presumably Gilles’, with animated red particles coursing out through his ventricles as a way to show blood drastically distributing from a suddenly overactive heartbeat). By presenting death as a future projection, a constant dread that constantly posits present and future unknowns, Moullet captures the essence of horror. This is a materialist conception of the work.

There is a point in the film where a filmmaker such as Tobe Hooper — whom Moullet seems to directly quote in Le Litre de lait in a cut to a small animal skull that adorns the home of the dairy merchants — were he showing the same actions (and he almost literally does: characters slowly walking towards entrances of unsettling, rustic farmhouses), would bring out the fear, hesitance, and decision-making with cuts (interruptions of a sympathetic response). But what Hooper communicates in cuts, Moullet condenses into a single, uninterrupted take. Another filmmaker Moullet may very well have encountered is Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a disciple of Hooper’s. Kurosawa conceals something — call it comprehension, call it the empathy evoked in Tobe Hooper’s classical construction of fear — in long, planimetric shots of horrific acts. Kurosawa expressly hides the fact that decision is effectively continuous and of unmanipulable duration by drawing out shots until they become spaces outside of time (duration is a core concept for Moullet, as he himself has expressed). Moullet’s conception of the principle of fear is not just a matter of treating fear in an affectless way, but choosing one’s units of time so as to properly demonstrate Bergsonian lived experience of it. Indeed, Bergson’s analysis of the mind’s experience of time and progression treats memory with a similar multivalence as that through which Moullet regards genre — inscribed within us, spiritual, and utilitarian. We can never be free of it, in that it informs our very free will, and we feel every effortful inch of it as it relates to our atomic, biological, and physiological experience.

The way in which our psychology reflects the reality of an organism within an environment and the truth behind the phenomena it experiences is what differentiates Moullet’s horror from that of Hooper and Kurosawa, as Moullet works to add an acute awareness of the psychological narratives imposed by conventions that stipulate a teleology where there isn’t one. There is no stopping and starting in the stories of our lives, especially our lives under capitalism (this is the internal combustion engine of Moullet’s farces). There is an end to Gilles’ constant, very teenagerly rituals of self-torture, the teenage mind represented amusingly by Moullet’s trademark harsh editing tricks, which playfully mimic the charming monosyllabism of horror pictures. But when Moullet inevitably arrives at the point at which genre is effectively sublated, it is the result of this materiality’s ascendancy over the initial mimicry, the body over the mind-construct — reality over our imaginings. As a short story film, Le Litre de lait responds to the Kurosawan thesis of ‘fear expansion’ by condensing it, materially. In other words, where Kurosawa favors mind-expanding fear, Moullet prefers fear to be ‘body-expanding’. Gilles finds himself on an ineluctable path that alternates wildly between his psychological projections and the purely sensory. Both Moullet and Kurosawa arrive at the same conclusions of an empowering self-determination moving us towards a cathartic annihilation, but they do so in contrary ways. Moullet reverts to the animal brain over the uncanny through a conception of real time. His are not empathetic cuts, nor does he conceal his cuts, but rather, when he uses them, it is as units of a molecular, energetic determination.

Moullet is interested in showing explicitly the sharp divide between the artificial and reality, the mind and body, by denying genre within his analysis of forms, even though the hard-pressed dichotomy behind Moullet’s mind-body hierarchy is only possible through recognition of their simultaneity. Moullet might be the preeminent filmmaker of common sense over the religious fears of eschatology and teleology (closely tied to notions of authority), which makes ‘horror’ and its constituent elements — fear, death, finality — something else for him entirely. As the classical atomists would propose, the ‘phenomenon may be true’ but there is a different ‘truth behind the phenomena’. Distinctions between sensory manipulations born of the mind and those born of reality are undeniable but also material and in fact real. The deconstruction of a genre exists as a material phenomenon. Moullet would be first to acknowledge that our experiences of anything at all do not exist in a void.

The film is from the start assertive of Moullet’s own generic identity, but also ready to drop it entirely. From across the wilds of Moullet’s ‘sexual escapade’ films — films of prurient, decadent communism — to the scenic ground of his ‘mountain pictures’, we arrive at a curious fusion that resembles nothing innately ‘Moulletian’: a prologue that begins with a prototypical Moullet woman, liberated and liberatingly incongruous, perched precariously on a rocky crag where one would typically expect a smattering of mountain goats. She seems at home in a slinky summer dress, proving adaptable even to ruralization as she paints the landscape she is placed in. Soon she is chased by two virile armed farmer boys, and the tracking shot that follows this tasteful rendition of the story of a goddess punished simply for her power over men finally comes to rest on a reader sat atop the same rocky cliff, who we soon find out is her quietly mortified son. Within this single shot, we are already being acclimatized to the transition from wild cinematic country to a delimited syntactical unit of communication, akin to a sentence in prose. A cut back to the mother after the title card, isolated yet again, though now appearing more ‘domestic’, with her hair tied back, suggests that time flows smoothly, in-frame or out-of-frame, on-the-page or off it, as her transformation between the cuts cannot be correlated directly with, or even figured out relative to, the time elapsed; rather, the time passed must be extrapolated through ‘measurement’ of emotional time: that of her interior movement from accosted goddess to collected mother, between two contrasting archetypes that includes suggestion of a more vulgar one (the ‘mother’ and the ‘whore’). And the cut itself is all the while putting pressure on these archetypes.

After the mother sends her son, our protagonist, out on his errand (unmindful of his fears, which suggest both self-preservationism and a social prudence inherited from somewhere other than his mother), we see him figuratively pulling his collar and dragging out his errand in numerous futile ways. An atavistic ritual of measuring the journey by counting his footsteps placed heel-to-toe (something Moullet would depict in the minds of the hypermarket consumer in his documentary short Toujours plus) is in fact no true atavism, but simply a shortening of his stride to its utmost limit, a total continuity (‘I keep my feet on the ground. It comforts me’) adopted merely to delay the inevitable. His attempt at pseudo-time dilation is short-lived, since he finds himself in the company of his dismissive younger sister, who has followed him out of boredom. Repeated actions and sound effects seem to equate the sister with a dog seen just before she appears — an animal that often figures in many Mesoamerican mythologies as a guide to the afterlife. Instead of the typical elegant, hairless hound, the dog we have been presented with is a shaggy and crassly lapping mutt. The symbols of the transition from the worldly to the otherworldly are as mongrel as the earth itself, in a pointed example of Moullet’s unique view of the uncanny. The mind imagines Heaven as pure and dignified, a thoroughbred of the imagination; the body trudges across dirt with matted fur. Throughout the rest of the film, the little sister, brandishing a mystical wooden staff (like a hunched-over witch, or a banished king), serves as a smart-mouthed oracle, a voice of petulant reason, the curses she places upon the tragic hero informed by rationality instead of superstition, though no less hectoring and ironic in their predictive capacity.

The socially prudent but imaginatively susceptible son manages to bypass the dreaded encounter with the offended family on his first go-around, solely by luck of timing. His survival seems to validate his fears. Only when he spills the milk, due to a course of action instigated by the sister, who claims fear is nothing but a sign of his irrationality, does the film suggest that his doom is in fact preordained by oracle, by the fates — like Greek tragedy, the film posits superstition and free will as two sides of the same coin of natural order. Moullet’s sense of natural order is just as bewitchingly open to old customs and beliefs (superstition is omnipresent in his stories, whether in regards to modern economic ritual or cerebral film critics) as it is to their proximity to epochal societies of war and peace and the invisible battles found in the natural order of coexistence. When Moullet sojourns into rarefied ‘prose-fashioned’ narratives and adaptation — with Le Litre de lait as well as the Henry James adaptation he made exactly a decade prior, Le Fantôme de Longstaff (1996) — he is doing with these containers of fiction what he typically does with rationality and irrationality in his ‘free’ works of cinema. He asks, why adapt a short story to film but not carry over the internal mechanisms that are the very DNA of the medium contradictory to film? What results from this effortless transposition between literary content and technical form (and back again) is a gratifying advancement of the triumph of common sense within the French New Wave cadre, meant for those who would never otherwise leave the boxes of the Right Bank, the Left Bank, the studios of France or abroad, the pages of Cahiers or Positif; those who partook in acts of adaptation with premature hubris, without a proper vantage point from which to look back on the nature of narratives.

If we move from the manipulations of cinema in Kurosawa and Hooper to another strong case combining the ‘fantastic’ genre and the ‘analytical’ — the uncanny works of the aforementioned Henry James, seminal in the creation of the modernist psychological novel — we can observe how this author’s characters often act according to what they sense will happen; often this psychology, immaterial and material, becomes the very subject of the narrative. In ‘The Turn of the Screw’, the suffering protagonist is made ‘temperate’ by an unorthodox first-person perspective (probably what sets it apart even from James’s other supernatural short stories); she constantly jumps ahead and renders past moments of unease as moments for careful analysis in the present of her telling. Superstition of the mind becomes her path to a preternatural storytelling capacity; against all odds one of common sense, which is a matter distinct from ‘reliability’ (the stigma of the ‘unreliable narrator’ trope is made moot through the narrator’s undeniable foreknowledge of the fates that will befall the characters in that story). Even given the analytical shortcomings of the protagonist of Moullet’s brief but weighty fiction, the mere sense of a future endpoint brings to the fore a mode of thought that is always active, anticipatory, suggesting knowledge of that same future. The essence of free will and our free choice of irrationality — our choice to experience fear and avert it — is our knowledge that we will end up somewhere. Moullet is more suited than even Rivette and Rohmer to adaptation, more attuned to the multiplicity of choice as well as the finality of the the void ahead that characters will inevitably experience by a story ending: this vision, synecdochally, is one of the end of a material epoch, and the short story rushes toward this pay-off headlong. The political limbos of the socially conservative Rohmer or the socially paranoid Rivette, by being more concerned with the consequences of acts, are stuck in their dread of the end they do not really ever see. They are thus destined to repeat their same critiques, where the senses are subordinate to ideals and performances that remain unchanging; in other words, cinemas of a void. Moullet is interested in the ‘swerve’, which is not just a matter of stimuli and instinct, but is as fine-grained as the invisible, atomic shudders of unseen accelerations. Moullet’s psychological approach effects both an exterior and visible, and interior and invisible, result.

In Le Litre de lait, the throes of a teenager, whose inherited sin is, in his view, like the end of the world, becomes almost certainly the sign of the end of a time of oracles and Medusas (while the invisible effect is all that occurs within him, regardless of his fate). Like genre and sensation, mortality will always exist as useful and evident goal posts for the characters of a story, those in an unpredictable relationship with reality and with the power to create finales of an Almighty order. But Moullet, like James, will allow no such fears to stop the possibility that common sense might usher in new thinking. Moullet will always clear a large swathe between what he is able to create with cinema and the dramas his characters create in their minds, but will leave a little room to suggest they can move forward without a moment of paralysis — even at the moment of so-called death. The ‘short story film’ thus becomes a way to serve philosophy in literary adaptation, which means also to covertly adapt works of philosophy from the likes of Descartes, Bergson, and Freud. Fear of death is the foundational idea of horror, and the elements that the programming notes I mentioned focused upon, calling the oddities of a sensational tenor Moullet incorporates into the film the ‘cues and cliches’ of horror (which can more charitably be called ‘conventions’), are what work to push characters trembling towards their end. Moullet prefers the view of Epicurus: fear and sensations — which are real and constitute our experiences — can be better accepted in the presence, not of cliches, but of a void, one of substance and ends. As the ancient philosopher puts it in the Principal Doctrines, ‘Death is nothing to us. For what has been dispersed has no sensation. And what has no sensation is nothing to us.’ ^[1] Moullet wishes he could tell the shaken young man of the film this: that there is nothing to fear, for there is a way to escape the moment in which we find ourselves.