One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
At the finale of Bruno Dumont’s L’humanité (1999), an enervating investigation of both body and soul has finally led to the arrest of Pharaon’s friend Joseph (Philippe Tullier) for the rape and murder of a young girl. Pharaon (Emmanuel Schotté), the presiding police lieutenant, walks into the room to face an inconsolable Joseph. In an epiphanous mix of eros, philia, and agape, Pharaon grates his face against Joseph’s, caresses his short hair, kisses him fiercely on the mouth, and, with an exclamation of relief, pushes him back into the chair and leaves. A few scenes later, we see Pharaon sitting on the same chair, handcuffed.
What Dumont undertakes in L'humanité, and indeed in most of his early films, is a visceral phenomenology of the human face. The cinematic face, by its very nature, transcends its anatomical features; it both veils and unveils, opens and withdraws, and, especially in the case of Dumont’s non-professional cast, bridges the gap between the sensuous and the metaphysical.
Throughout L'humanité, Dumont makes use of simple shot/reverse-shots: Pharaon looks out at something, we see what he is looking at (his friends Joseph and Domino engaged in carnal intercourse, a wet mound of soil, beads of sweat breaking out on a clammy neck, the verdant wind-swept French countryside), and Dumont then cuts back to a “reaction” shot of his face. These sequences offer no narrative progression; rather, what this elemental back-and-forth evokes is the bare experience of an encounter, the intensity with which the world impinges itself upon us. There is a dynamism in the linkages between the act of seeing and what is seen, a ceaseless movement that becomes especially pronounced by the film’s static frames. This is in keeping with Dumont’s own vision of human nature, where the most heinous acts of brutality are treated on a par with banal everyday routines.
Interestingly, Dumont first wrote a book version of the story, which was later used as the basis for the film script. The eponymous novel ends with the following passage:
“At the police station, Pharaon had taken up Joseph’s position in the room, sitting on the chair exactly as he had done in his reclusion, removed from the affections of daylight and the inclinations of the shadows. Handcuffed, in pain, suffering, he had therefore taken his place. There, absorbed in his task, the Saint actually had a smile on his face that was repenting of its ugliness. An infinitesimal joy.”1
Unlike his first film La vie de Jésus (1997), which ends with alternating shots of a blinding white sky, Dumont here doesn’t cut away to show us the reverse shot. Instead, the camera lingers on Emmanuel Schotté’s inscrutable visage, and the image gradually fades to black. In those last moments, we see the world reflected in the singular charge of Pharaon’s face, reflected in all its cruelty, bestiality, love and compassion, in every conceivable human disposition that now evokes the miracle of existence. In him can be glimpsed a spiritual yearning so all-encompassing and profound that it escapes all forms of representation. A pure immanence.
1. Dumont, Bruno. Humanity. Dis Voir, 2001.