NINA ZIVANCEVIC : FEW WORDS ABOUT Merejkowsky Pierre

Few words about Merejkowsky Pierre

 

It is not easy to talk about the people we feel close to, whatever we say may appear banal- if somebody has asked me what I had learnt from Pierre Merejkowsky and that it does not appear banal is a very harsh working discipline and that probably goes way back to his Russian herritage, the very thing may be the key for understanding the work of his predecessors, the Russian writers Dimitri Merejkowsky and  Zinaida Xippius, who lived their whole life in exile. What's really interesting is that they escaped the Bolsevics, Lenin's Communism so that Pierre, as a French author and film director could only get back to it; he's a militant of the Left which borders on the belief in the individual “I” which characterizes the creativity of an anarchist autor.

And the we have the entire Pierre's work on film, some 50 films until today, work which is not only founded on Godard's heritage, as Godard was his great teacher and inspiration, but in his film work we also find the schools of his Russian film predecessors: Merejkowsky's films such as MEN PROPHETS , QUE FAIRE (CTO DELAT) and Small War , are films which come out of the schools of Eisenstein, Medvedkin but also Brecht's theater as well. For  Merejkowsky the shooting as a procedure in film means, above all , the investigation of IMAGE, or “CTO DELAT”(what to do) with the image. He's investigating the image as much as he investigates the theme,the real subject of the film,  the technique close to Brecht's method of establishing  the objective distance.  In his own CTO DELAT as much as later in MEN PROPHETS, the Maoist enquette or the investigation was the base for creating the cinematography  able to show the contradictions in the contemporary reality which these contradictions tried to explain. This cinematography fights against naturalism as much as it tries  to reject the idea that the shooting of a revolutionary action per se is enough for us to call such film a revolutionary one. From the start  Merejkowsky was interested in different ways in which he could not only draw the public's attention to the film, but also in the ways in which one could keep the spectator in the state of permanent active engagement. He had been repeating the fact that the naturalism of the athomsphere and landscape is more of a social game which society plays in order to make us accept their postulates. He entamed his own directing process probably thinking of Brecht who once said that “nothing could be considered a natural fact  as such,this is in order that we treat each phenomenon as something natural and  a potential subject to a new social change as well.”

One of Merejkowsky's aleatory technical methods is the method of repetition which, when it comes to the treatment of sound in his films , brings us to the cacophony of different voices and sounds. For instance, there is often a asynchronic sound in the film which makes us often wonder as to how  the director who searches for the “worker's truth” ,comes to the phenomenon of the asynchronic sound. Maybe we can understand this phenomenon, if we say that this sound is the product of the limitations imposed by the technicality which was further imposed by the economic limitations on the film; in his films we can also observe that as the spectators we have arrived  at something which is not only at some aesthetic effect . It is not only of the aesthetic nature but this effect  became a certain political action seeking to abolish naturalism, at the same time trying to awake the critical distance in the spectator. The presence of such sound in the film brings us to the question which most militant films after 1968 : how to record the inaudiable or often marginalized speech which is somewhere hidden but probably means something else? The answer of Merejkowsky is not very simple: he makes us believe that this type of faded speech is not a by-product but that it was carefully constructed prior to the shooting of the film; as such, it is constantly in search of a certain synchronization.

Merejkowsky or, as his friends simply call him “Merej”, often insists on the pruning of the images and placing them out of their natural context so that he would place them into their specific millieux or a specific historic context.  If we read in such light his film CTO DELAT  we are to think that the director is in the service of the revolution, marxism or workers' class, the way we read it with Lindsay Anderson, Schlesinger or Andrea Arnold,( the director who is more of Merej's generation). The spectators believehere that they watch the scenes which belong to a certain class millieux, however, the director/author/technician is likely to rebell against our labeling of the scenes; “are they “black” or “white” are they “politically correct” or incorrect? “

 The moral and pedagogical lesson drives the director insane and he escapes from it. Any sort of politically ouvert commentary as much as the formal treatment of it by running towards Brecht, Eisenstein, Vertov or any other Russian cousin- drives him insane; any escape towards naturalism drives him insane, no matter which cultural or political period  it belongs to! Perhaps that fear belongs also to the heritage of the French New Wave, the films which were not afraid of the influence of Mao Ce Dung and Che Guevara. In such “political attitude” film there is a strong line drawn between the so called author's intention and the critical reception of the public viewing this film; there is also the line drawn between the author's work and the possible critical interpretation of the film. To the already traditional escape from naturalism Merejkowsky adds his own strategies : he not only directly shows us the manner of using his strategies, the one of introducing the casual passers-by (as Fromanger or Braco Dimitrijevic in their art work), but he also introduces the idea (formerly abandoned by the naturalists) that a film can serve some higher truth. We should not escape from the truth and if the spectators cannot see it or hear it we have to repeat this truth in the script, and vary the tonality of the actor's voice from a very loud to a whisper.

Merejkowsky's films are taking a form of the formal strategies as for him the film as art means above all other things- an attempt which moves to the visual poliphony (and in this respect the musical training and composer's education come in handy for his  art). His film often combines (here we should underline the word « often ») militant documentary, epic theater, poliphony of the voices, organic and non-organic approach to the script, the strategies of communication, the generic and formal shifts of the spiritual image , the direct pastiche of the postmodern French cinema as well as the heritage of great Soviet school of Russian Formalism.

Nina Zivancevic-Merejkowskaya