PROGRAM NOTES

To mark the release of the second issue of Narrow Margin, a new quarterly film magazine, its editors will present two rarely-screened works by Jean-Claude Biette at Light Industry: Far from Manhattan and The Complex of Toulon. Narrow Margin’s latest edition features the first dossier, in any language, on the complete roster of production company Diagonale et Co., complemented by texts on and by its filmmakers, including a new interview between Claudine Bories and Pascale Bodet, as well as translated exchanges with Biette, fellow directors Jean-Claude Guiguet and Marie-Claude Treilhou, and Diagonale’s founder, Paul Vecchiali.

A critic at Cahiers du cinéma and later co-founder, with Serge Daney, of the journal Trafic, Biette made seven feature films and several short works between 1968 and 2003, with an impenetrable mystery at their heart. His sensibilities are informed by a confluence of important chapters beyond his writing—a brief foray as a “bad student” of Mac-Mahonism; a fruitful cluster of experiences as an actor (Straub-Huillet’s Othon is his first credited role); his long labor as Pasolini’s French tutor.

Far from Manhattan, Biette’s second and final outing with Diagonale, is staged across exteriors that anyone else would have shot indoors. The film’s characters—a gaggle of art writers, buyers, and patrons—are surrounded by Paris’ greenery, yet pay it no attention. Most resent each other, or otherwise attach themselves to successful members of their cohort. More than this, they abhor mystery. They play detective, attempting to answer what caused a period of aesthetic inactivity for the painter René Dimanche (Howard Vernon). They become ensnared in the traps they’ve constructed their lives around; the questions they ask seek solely the clarification necessary to confirm what they already presuppose. There is a woman, engaged with this world, who only writes poems for herself. When she meets the artist under dubious circumstances, everything collapses.

The Complex of Toulon circles around another present-absent figure, Charles Toulon, a Shakespearean actor and former scholar (however, not a painter), also played by Howard Vernon, also chased by a coterie of admirers, also avoiding everyone. Toulon had a psychological “complex” named after him, we are told, that identifies an aggressive-paranoid line of argument in the wake of May 68. If Far from Manhattan is all exterior, The Complex of Toulon burrows its way back into Biette’s faintly-lit spaces of performance, secrecy, and coupledom: the theater, the dining table, the bed. Jean-Christophe Bouvet (of Far from Manhattan) delivers his signature, hilarious facial contortions and outbursts, adrift between jobs, cities, lovers old and new.

Program notes by Hicham Awad and Joshua Peinado