“Le Révélateur is a dream-like film about what psychoanalysis calls the primal scene: how a film is born, how a child is made, the first time a child sees his parents making love” (Philippe Garrel). A silent, abstract psychodrama starring Bernadette Lafont (La Maman et la Putain), Laurent Terzieff, and a four-year-old Stanislas Robiolle, Le Révélateur was twenty-year-old Garrel’s first post-barricades production. An apocalyptic foreboding menaces this re-envisioning of the Holy Family, who rehearse variations on the pietà. Shot in Bavaria in a desolate landscape, using sensitive film stock and a flashlight as its only light source, the film exudes a painterly chiaroscuro similar to the work of Georges de La Tour. The title is a French pun on the chemical used to develop celluloid – it reveals images, it reveals life, but the threat of annihilation, of the loss of light, remains. Le Révélateur is both unsettling and unforgettable and evidences a true poet of the cinema. —http://www.cinemathequeontario.ca
Philippe Garrel is a French director, cinematographer, screenwriter, editor and producer. His movies have won him awards at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival. He was born in Paris in 1948, the son of actor Maurice Garrel. He started his film career early directing and writing his first film Lés Enfants Désaccordés in 1964. Garrel met Nico in 1969 when she performed the song “The Falconer” for his film Le Lit de la Vierge and the couple were soon living together. Nico first appeared in the 1972 film La Cicatrice Intériure (aka the Inner Scar). Songs included in the film appear on Nico’s album Desertshore, which features stills from the film on the front and back covers. Nico appeared in a number of Garrel’s films after this. Their ten year relationship ended in 1979.
Prix Jean Vigo for the film L’Enfant Secret. He won Perspectives du Cinéma Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984 for his 1983 film la Nuit Liberté. Over a ten year period, Garrel enjoyed… read more
Garrel's experiment in silence captures the fragments of a broken marriage through action and acting in a way that Derek Cianfrance could only aspire to ape through dialogue and sound.
Showcasing a variety of memorable scenes along with one of the most interesting uses of light in B&W cinematography, Le révélateur creates an atmosphere of it's own through it's conceptual design and execution. Philippe Garrel at only twenty years of age managed to create a work that through it's rather ambiguous dreamscape, molded after Freud's theories, feels relevant and fresh even today.
Silenzioso psicodramma onirico. Evocazione della memoria di un bambino attraverso il sogno. Capolavoro d'epoca del primo Garrel ! Silent psychodrama dream. Evocation of a child's memory through the dream. Vintage masterpiece of the first Garrel !
I don't even know where to begin to describe how incredible of a viewing experience this was for me. The opening sequence alone makes it worth the watch.
Un ispiratissimo Garrel, travolto dalla recentissima ondata rivoluzionaria del Maggio ‘68, alla ricerca di nuovi percorsi sperimentali, inaugura il suo periodo migliore con questo terzo e folgorante… read review
