Sur le bords des routes
Je fais signe aux camionneurs….
Les gosses de riches, les porches, les Maserati
Ne m'inspire a moi que du dégout que du mépris1
In Le camion, the colors are ugly in the tradition of Hitchcock’s film Frenzy (1972) or Richard Fleischers Soylent Green (1973). All three are expressly ugly, sordid aesthetics. “Green, yellowed by heat… cracking dry soil.” Only the color blue survives, artificial but still beautiful.
Why sing to the chorus and indulge moviegoers with another intercepted love letter to cinema? Le camion is hate mail to film, stripping it down to its basest coercive essence. In 1977 film was still an incarceration of the audience, not yet a half-distracted hobby for the neighborhood homebodies. Old, stiff Duras and young, gentle Gerard Depardieu sit at a table and go over a vague script. They sit there talking about a truck, from noon to dawn. “It’s almost finished,” she assures him near the end.
Le camion seems to speak for me, but in this ugly way. It reads just like Cioran, who said everything should be read against the grain. Cioran who was about the devastation of a youth in politics, a youth lost to politics and the nihilism that comes from it. Duras from the left, and Cioran from the right. Cioran’s entire corpus of emptiness, all of his writing on futility and decline, can be explained as shame about his youth in the Nazi movement and in Romanian fascism. His shame led to an entire lifetime of acareerism, an entire lifetime of coping with the grief of a youth lost to a doomed political project. But even careers themselves in many cases are the sum of repeated attempts to correct the error of previous follies, like in Jeffrey Sachs. Duras: inert disillusionment. Cioran: mortified shame. Sachs: the scientific method.
This is the “anticommunist propaganda” in which the first world looks more drab than the second world was ever said to be.
The trucker who picks up the anonymous woman does not gaf about her or look at her, until she says “I think Karl Marx is finished.” Then he looks at her for the first time and says “oh yes, now I get it. You’re a reactionary.” He must pin her down.
Is she in politics? No. Has she ever done anything? No. Which is to say she was once in politics, which is nothing. She used to feel at one with two million men, the men of the party. The trucker is in the French communist party, so is the woman’s son-in-law. The second of these men may be imaginary. He tries to censor his wife, who wants to name their child Abraham. The party would be sensitive to him naming his son Abraham, for strange reasons of oversensitivity to the fact that he is not a Jew. This rejection of the name Abraham is why politics are “not worth it” and “empty.”
Nobody really knows whether politics is “empty and not worth it” until they’ve really gone into it, been militant, taken orders, suppressed doubt. Nobody should assume that politics is empty without first going into politics. But if you come out, you may come out scarred, antisocial. I am not here to say that “politics are empty and not worth it.” I am here to say that it feels almost impossible to believe anything but “politics are empty and not worth it,” even if it isn’t true.
What is the meaning of saying that politics is empty? It can’t just be because of the rejection of the name Abraham. The woman says that it’s because they concern nothing but material advantage. These are not the reasons why. The reasons why are more mysterious, painful. The feeling, after insisting that there is recourse, that actually there is no recourse.
In the world where politics are empty, in the world of the dead whose death we await, people care about only one thing, which is demanding to know, “who is she?” and saying “ah yes, i get it. you are a reactionary.”
“The fact that the world is goin to ruin is the only politics.” This truck movie is a manifesto for faithful amnesia post-political-heartbreak. The woman is confused forever. The movie picks up and drops off in the middle of nowhere, where the gilets jaunes picked up and left off forever.
A manifesto for confused amnesia, the cruelly honest kind. The movie is a vehicle (truck/trick) for forcing everyone, no matter who they are, to pay attention to the text. The images are there to be kind of ugly. Everything else about cinema is thrown out.
Duras says: “Cinema impedes the text, strikes down [the text’s] progeny–the imaginary–with death.” Then she makes in Le camion a film that does not impede its own text because it does not force the text to fix itself in image. Instead the entire text is read aloud at a table in a universe with bad colors. The camera moves on the road contemplating the beauty of the name Abraham against the blue sky or the gray road.
Cinema–opulent, a millionaire, with financial means to rival petroleum transactions and electoral campaigns–tries to recover the spectator…Cinema is no longer able to respond to the its audiences’ growing thirst for knowledge…
Cinema is an embarrassing millionaire. But what if it was low budget? What if it was just film?
I can read the dead sea scrolls in sans serif. I can convince AI that the Bible was written by a member of its own race. But image is fixed in history to the bone. Image dates like nothing else. I cannot update the ugliness of Le camion to 2023. The ugliness of Le camion will always fix it in the same decade as Frenzy and Soylent Green. Because the decay of the world and the advancement of the technics of image only move in one direction.
Writing and reading contain in them the continuous secret of being alive now. I am alive now as I write. I can resurrect and coincide minds.
But watching a film we feel a secret sense of having once been alive, and of soon being dead. With a film in my field of vision, I feel I was once alive, others were once alive, and soon we will be dead. The more anonymous, the more it hitchikes on bits of light, the more fluid, the more regressive to the mysterious afterlife of childhood, the more a film can find recourse in timelessness like text.
On the side of roads,
I signal to truckers.
….
The rich kids, the porsches, the Maseratis
Inspire nothing for me but disgust and contempt
-Serge Gainsbourg, “Help Camionneur,” 1972, sung by Jane Birkin