The following are the introductory paragraphs to a larger ongoing analysis of THE DREAMERS (http://proofsoflove.blogspot.com/) exploring its language, themes, contexts, references, etc, reveling in the little details. I’m writing this piece (entitled ‘War of Imitation’) because I feel that THE DREAMERS is a gorgeous and marvelously articulate film that utilizes the means of all its elements to a nuanced end. Unfortunately, it is so often simplistically derided or overlooked. Many people seem to think that any use of explicit or peculiar sexuality stands merely as provocation or gratuity, but these people are missing a great deal of depth and complexity in their assumption.
I’d love to hear feedback and to generate further analysis of this film. THE DREAMERS is a film in love with film, and I am a cinephile in love with IT! My goal is to give life back to THE DREAMERS, as it continues to give so much to me. * -————————————————————————————-
“War of Imitation”
Whenever I hear the sentiment “imitation is the highest form of flattery,” spouted in response to some manner of playful pretense or emulation, I’ve always reverted immediately to the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, “imitation is suicide.” Two seemingly polar observations, and yet neither cancels the other out, so to speak. They can exist alongside one another. Take for example Shakespeare’s Romeo, who lavishes compliment upon Juliet’s brilliant slumberous corpse in the Capulet monument, even as he takes a deadly drum of poison to his lips in an effort to imitate her “unsubstantial death,” which is itself an imitation, for Juliet is but slayed of senses, not of life. Bertolucci’s THE DREAMERS is a playground for these varied sentiments, a blended but always uneasy mixture of fatalism and homage lacing every moment of tiered imitation. Emerson’s concise cautionary words are of a figurative urgency. They infer that sacrifice of principle, not flesh, is inherent in the adoption of guises, or that facilitating one’s identity through the medium of another’s constructed means, which subverts one’s own pre-existing model, is at the very expense of that model. The existential tailspin of the three principal characters in THE DREAMERS, toward its final minutes especially, is evidence enough of this truth, and further highlights that the refusal to grow, in the emotional case of the characters of Theo and Isa, is an analogous form to suicide; that of suicide by stagnation. Or put by another, “Not busy being born is busy dying” (Dylan).
Bertolucci’s triumph of unconventionally sexual cinema is a poetic and sensual exploration of the lives of three young adults; twins Theo and Isabelle, and their newly made friend Matthew, at the cusp of great personal and social upheaval in Paris. It is a film about simultaneous wars, and about refusals, both ideological and manifest, drawn with a mark of rare, and for some, a somewhat affronting intimacy. While the film speaks of social war and the unrest of the May ’68 demonstrations (a year that saw analogous uprisings the world over, such as the US’s strife against its own participation the Vietnam War), it is not a film about ’68, but rather one that takes place in that moment in history, and utilizes its intensity and its feverish embrace of the possibility of change, as an informing backdrop, if not catalyst. The film is, quite insularly, about the three main characters’ blossoming and shifting perceptions of “self” and the mechanisms of emotional identity, over the span of an exceptional month in self-imposed house arrest. Gilbert Adair, author of the novel and screenplay, explains that the actual telling of the story holds no intended or implicit irony. However, within its framework, particular and telling ironies which inform deeply on each character’s changing or unchanging personhood.
The “wars” in THE DREAMERS, as they may be termed, swell between action and inaction, between the public and the private, the political and emotional, between the teacher and the taught, between impressions and actuality, and between imitation and embodiment. Bertolucci acknowledges that each of these “combatants,” as it were, has a vested interest in its opposition in order to thrive, and from this basis he symbolically threads the film together with a palate of red and green, termed “complementary colors” but opposites just the same. Bertolucci stems from that symbolic language of opposites, into the narrative’s physical course; for instance, the stagnation that occurs within the closed-off apartment during a month of seclusion requires the punctuation of social upheaval raging in the streets to inform its own qualities. The twins, Theo and Isabelle’s increasing isolationism teaches Matthew an ironic universality of boundless love, however Matthew’s reversion of this principle towards the twins, that is to say, his efforts to instill in the twins his own learned broadness, is refused almost outright. Timid but ponderous Matthew, brimming from the first shot with boyish enthusiasm and an overly apologetic naiveté, is so complexly and confrontingly engaged by the Twins during this pocket of isolation, and yet it is they who choose to stunt their own emotional growth. It is no mistake that this attitudinal war fought behind doors unfolds as a war of ideology and principle is fought “dans la rue,” and that these two fronts should meet in the end with so much breaking of glass.
The broiling but optimistic scene of social tensions of May ’68, between the powers-that-be and Parisian youths and intellectuals, is set immediately as our backdrop. At the tail end of the first shot, a descending close-up pan of the Eiffel Tower’s framework, into which the title sequence is integrated, we meet Matthew: the blonde, wide-eyed, un-spoiled American studying French in Paris. He is walking towards the Cinematheque Francaise, wearing a neutral palate of khaki, grey and white, revealing retrospective details about the time and place, and about himself, through voice-over-narration. He is our usher into this world from after the fact. Soon he is amidst one of the first organized public outcries against the deposing of Henri Langlois, the creator and curator of the Cinematheque Francais, for his reputedly slapdash handling of his resources (film, ephemera, finances). To many Langlois is the father of cinema preservation and programming, if not the encouraging rebel uncle to the elite cinephiles who would become the famed New Wavers; Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Chabrol, etc. Matthew’s self-enacted immersion into the film subculture becomes a vastly more affecting avenue of education than any of his institutional schooling. “Here is where I got my real education” he says. Though not French, Matthew is a member of the universal culture of cinema and has every right to embroil in the demonstration. This organized public uprising of principle and of personal objection taking place at the Palais Chaillot, which seemingly begins as something subcultural, is merely one aspect of what will expand into a near-formal city-wide movement. This tenuous moment fatefully brings together Matthew and the twins, Theo and Isa, though it is intimated by their smiling glances to one another that the twins had been discreetly pondering him at film screenings. “He’s American, just like I told you,” Isa says to Theo while introducing Matthew. The two young men bond over the name of Nicholas Ray.
This opening scene also sets the stage for THE DREAMERS’ most prevalent and outspoken visual motif; inter-splicing archival footage and film excerpts into sequences, virtually frame by frame reenacted, or content reflective. Immediately, by virtue of this meta-motif, we are confronted with a melange of concepts that are subliminally crucial to understanding the impending identity epoch that will unfold between our three protagonists. One might define the overlapping of archival and “modern” footage as a kind of surrealism, or even a symbolic temporal confusion, because separate realities deign to be of and within the same moment. Bertolucci says “In cinema you are allowed to conjugate only one tense, the present. Because when you shoot, you are contemporary to what you shoot and to whom you are shooting. This prevalence of the present is something we cannot forget or ignore. Even if you shoot a character in ancient Rome dressed up like Julius Cesar, the people in the theater are contemporary to Julius Cesar. This is really a privilege of cinema. The three kids who are acting the part of three kids from ’68, they, in their bodies and experiences carry the present.”
THE DREAMERS is a complex but elegant exercise of this temporal aspect of cinema. Actors of the present (Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green), are posing as fictional people (Matthew, Theo, Isabelle), in a fictional scenario placed within an actual past, who, to compound things further, imitate, almost as a second language, scenes from past films, which are themselves merely documented imitations of scenarios and feelings by other actors and filmmakers. Take for example the black and white newsreel images of French New Wave poster child, actor Jean-Pierre Leaude speaking out at the actual ’68 demonstration, juxtaposed with his own self-reenactment in the present, as it were, via the filming of THE DREAMERS in 2003, which is itself a restaging of ’68. Neither the archival Leaud nor the Leaud of today are in the proper time (the former pulled forward, the latter thrust back), yet they are both in the present, contemporary to each other, and to us as we view. On many occasions we are confronted with moments of the archival past and the immutable present-in-imitation of the past, compounded in singular moments. The twins constantly reenact film scenes as a game to test film knowledge and to subvert a grasping of “reality.” Their imitation games are a kind of manufactured twin-speech, a language that is both distilled in its specificity, but also diluted by several generations of removal (from their original contexts). Even if one doesn’t dissect these ideas very intently, it still carries wind of the pervasive action of imitation that propels the story, that defines and ultimately destroys the trio, and in a way, highlights the inherent sensual tactile nature of the film’s world. The Dreamers makes no shallow predication of its relationship to the lineage of cinema, doesn’t rest contentedly on the fact of simply being a film, or a film about cinephiles, but revels in its nature as a film in love with film, and creates a synthesis of itself into the family of cinema, and vice versa. Bertolucci borrows imagery from other films and weaves it into the lives of his characters (by their imitation of said imagery, and by the seeming nature that it is a phenomenon of their own conjuration), as well as into the literal fabric of the film itself, spliced into scenes regarding a material process. THE DREAMERS manifests this dynamic integration through abstraction and through a literal materiality yielding an inextricable poetic tangle.
These temporally enmeshed moments are but another, if not the initial dimension of THE DREAMERS’ pervading sexuality and sensuality, for they create a bifurcated penetration of films into films, creating amorous relationships between the imitator and the imitated, reflected again through Matthew’s invitation into the twin’s very specific gravity and the chaos he stirs in the displacement as he hopes to integrate. Sexuality in the explicit sense, is therefore a response rather than a motivator to this phenomenon.
… I dont want take up too much more space here, so visit my blog… http://proofsoflove.blogspot.com/ …and read the rest!!! Tell me what you think! There is ever more to be discovered in this film.
aaron mannino
The following are the introductory paragraphs to a larger ongoing analysis of THE DREAMERS (http://proofsoflove.blogspot.com/) exploring its language, themes, contexts, references, etc, reveling in the little details. I’m writing this piece (entitled ‘War of Imitation’) because I feel that THE DREAMERS is a gorgeous and marvelously articulate film that utilizes the means of all its elements to a nuanced end. Unfortunately, it is so often simplistically derided or overlooked. Many people seem to think that any use of explicit or peculiar sexuality stands merely as provocation or gratuity, but these people are missing a great deal of depth and complexity in their assumption.
I’d love to hear feedback and to generate further analysis of this film. THE DREAMERS is a film in love with film, and I am a cinephile in love with IT! My goal is to give life back to THE DREAMERS, as it continues to give so much to me. *
-————————————————————————————-“War of Imitation”
Whenever I hear the sentiment “imitation is the highest form of flattery,” spouted in response to some manner of playful pretense or emulation, I’ve always reverted immediately to the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, “imitation is suicide.” Two seemingly polar observations, and yet neither cancels the other out, so to speak. They can exist alongside one another. Take for example Shakespeare’s Romeo, who lavishes compliment upon Juliet’s brilliant slumberous corpse in the Capulet monument, even as he takes a deadly drum of poison to his lips in an effort to imitate her “unsubstantial death,” which is itself an imitation, for Juliet is but slayed of senses, not of life. Bertolucci’s THE DREAMERS is a playground for these varied sentiments, a blended but always uneasy mixture of fatalism and homage lacing every moment of tiered imitation. Emerson’s concise cautionary words are of a figurative urgency. They infer that sacrifice of principle, not flesh, is inherent in the adoption of guises, or that facilitating one’s identity through the medium of another’s constructed means, which subverts one’s own pre-existing model, is at the very expense of that model. The existential tailspin of the three principal characters in THE DREAMERS, toward its final minutes especially, is evidence enough of this truth, and further highlights that the refusal to grow, in the emotional case of the characters of Theo and Isa, is an analogous form to suicide; that of suicide by stagnation. Or put by another, “Not busy being born is busy dying” (Dylan).
Bertolucci’s triumph of unconventionally sexual cinema is a poetic and sensual exploration of the lives of three young adults; twins Theo and Isabelle, and their newly made friend Matthew, at the cusp of great personal and social upheaval in Paris. It is a film about simultaneous wars, and about refusals, both ideological and manifest, drawn with a mark of rare, and for some, a somewhat affronting intimacy. While the film speaks of social war and the unrest of the May ’68 demonstrations (a year that saw analogous uprisings the world over, such as the US’s strife against its own participation the Vietnam War), it is not a film about ’68, but rather one that takes place in that moment in history, and utilizes its intensity and its feverish embrace of the possibility of change, as an informing backdrop, if not catalyst. The film is, quite insularly, about the three main characters’ blossoming and shifting perceptions of “self” and the mechanisms of emotional identity, over the span of an exceptional month in self-imposed house arrest. Gilbert Adair, author of the novel and screenplay, explains that the actual telling of the story holds no intended or implicit irony. However, within its framework, particular and telling ironies which inform deeply on each character’s changing or unchanging personhood.
The “wars” in THE DREAMERS, as they may be termed, swell between action and inaction, between the public and the private, the political and emotional, between the teacher and the taught, between impressions and actuality, and between imitation and embodiment. Bertolucci acknowledges that each of these “combatants,” as it were, has a vested interest in its opposition in order to thrive, and from this basis he symbolically threads the film together with a palate of red and green, termed “complementary colors” but opposites just the same. Bertolucci stems from that symbolic language of opposites, into the narrative’s physical course; for instance, the stagnation that occurs within the closed-off apartment during a month of seclusion requires the punctuation of social upheaval raging in the streets to inform its own qualities. The twins, Theo and Isabelle’s increasing isolationism teaches Matthew an ironic universality of boundless love, however Matthew’s reversion of this principle towards the twins, that is to say, his efforts to instill in the twins his own learned broadness, is refused almost outright. Timid but ponderous Matthew, brimming from the first shot with boyish enthusiasm and an overly apologetic naiveté, is so complexly and confrontingly engaged by the Twins during this pocket of isolation, and yet it is they who choose to stunt their own emotional growth. It is no mistake that this attitudinal war fought behind doors unfolds as a war of ideology and principle is fought “dans la rue,” and that these two fronts should meet in the end with so much breaking of glass.
The broiling but optimistic scene of social tensions of May ’68, between the powers-that-be and Parisian youths and intellectuals, is set immediately as our backdrop. At the tail end of the first shot, a descending close-up pan of the Eiffel Tower’s framework, into which the title sequence is integrated, we meet Matthew: the blonde, wide-eyed, un-spoiled American studying French in Paris. He is walking towards the Cinematheque Francaise, wearing a neutral palate of khaki, grey and white, revealing retrospective details about the time and place, and about himself, through voice-over-narration. He is our usher into this world from after the fact. Soon he is amidst one of the first organized public outcries against the deposing of Henri Langlois, the creator and curator of the Cinematheque Francais, for his reputedly slapdash handling of his resources (film, ephemera, finances). To many Langlois is the father of cinema preservation and programming, if not the encouraging rebel uncle to the elite cinephiles who would become the famed New Wavers; Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Chabrol, etc. Matthew’s self-enacted immersion into the film subculture becomes a vastly more affecting avenue of education than any of his institutional schooling. “Here is where I got my real education” he says. Though not French, Matthew is a member of the universal culture of cinema and has every right to embroil in the demonstration. This organized public uprising of principle and of personal objection taking place at the Palais Chaillot, which seemingly begins as something subcultural, is merely one aspect of what will expand into a near-formal city-wide movement. This tenuous moment fatefully brings together Matthew and the twins, Theo and Isa, though it is intimated by their smiling glances to one another that the twins had been discreetly pondering him at film screenings. “He’s American, just like I told you,” Isa says to Theo while introducing Matthew. The two young men bond over the name of Nicholas Ray.
This opening scene also sets the stage for THE DREAMERS’ most prevalent and outspoken visual motif; inter-splicing archival footage and film excerpts into sequences, virtually frame by frame reenacted, or content reflective. Immediately, by virtue of this meta-motif, we are confronted with a melange of concepts that are subliminally crucial to understanding the impending identity epoch that will unfold between our three protagonists. One might define the overlapping of archival and “modern” footage as a kind of surrealism, or even a symbolic temporal confusion, because separate realities deign to be of and within the same moment. Bertolucci says “In cinema you are allowed to conjugate only one tense, the present. Because when you shoot, you are contemporary to what you shoot and to whom you are shooting. This prevalence of the present is something we cannot forget or ignore. Even if you shoot a character in ancient Rome dressed up like Julius Cesar, the people in the theater are contemporary to Julius Cesar. This is really a privilege of cinema. The three kids who are acting the part of three kids from ’68, they, in their bodies and experiences carry the present.”
THE DREAMERS is a complex but elegant exercise of this temporal aspect of cinema. Actors of the present (Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green), are posing as fictional people (Matthew, Theo, Isabelle), in a fictional scenario placed within an actual past, who, to compound things further, imitate, almost as a second language, scenes from past films, which are themselves merely documented imitations of scenarios and feelings by other actors and filmmakers. Take for example the black and white newsreel images of French New Wave poster child, actor Jean-Pierre Leaude speaking out at the actual ’68 demonstration, juxtaposed with his own self-reenactment in the present, as it were, via the filming of THE DREAMERS in 2003, which is itself a restaging of ’68. Neither the archival Leaud nor the Leaud of today are in the proper time (the former pulled forward, the latter thrust back), yet they are both in the present, contemporary to each other, and to us as we view. On many occasions we are confronted with moments of the archival past and the immutable present-in-imitation of the past, compounded in singular moments. The twins constantly reenact film scenes as a game to test film knowledge and to subvert a grasping of “reality.” Their imitation games are a kind of manufactured twin-speech, a language that is both distilled in its specificity, but also diluted by several generations of removal (from their original contexts). Even if one doesn’t dissect these ideas very intently, it still carries wind of the pervasive action of imitation that propels the story, that defines and ultimately destroys the trio, and in a way, highlights the inherent sensual tactile nature of the film’s world. The Dreamers makes no shallow predication of its relationship to the lineage of cinema, doesn’t rest contentedly on the fact of simply being a film, or a film about cinephiles, but revels in its nature as a film in love with film, and creates a synthesis of itself into the family of cinema, and vice versa. Bertolucci borrows imagery from other films and weaves it into the lives of his characters (by their imitation of said imagery, and by the seeming nature that it is a phenomenon of their own conjuration), as well as into the literal fabric of the film itself, spliced into scenes regarding a material process. THE DREAMERS manifests this dynamic integration through abstraction and through a literal materiality yielding an inextricable poetic tangle.
These temporally enmeshed moments are but another, if not the initial dimension of THE DREAMERS’ pervading sexuality and sensuality, for they create a bifurcated penetration of films into films, creating amorous relationships between the imitator and the imitated, reflected again through Matthew’s invitation into the twin’s very specific gravity and the chaos he stirs in the displacement as he hopes to integrate. Sexuality in the explicit sense, is therefore a response rather than a motivator to this phenomenon.
… I dont want take up too much more space here, so visit my blog… http://proofsoflove.blogspot.com/ …and read the rest!!! Tell me what you think! There is ever more to be discovered in this film.