MICHEL GONDRY AS TRANSCULTURAL AUTEUR by M. Block - J. Kirby
Excerpted from “Michel Gondry as Transcultural Auteur,” the Introduction to ReFocus: The Films of Michel Gondry, by Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby:
The oeuvre of French auteur Michel Gondry is both immensely varied, spanning multiple media and national contexts, and almost immediately recognizable due to “the variety of techniques through which Gondry repeatedly upsets comfortable philosophical assumptions by utilizing highly creative manipulations of the images that appear within a movie frame.” *1
Born in Versailles in 1963, Gondry first rose to prominence as a director of consistently innovative music videos and advertisements, before directing his first feature film, Human Nature, in 2001. Gondry is the director of eight feature films, three documentaries, numerous short form works and eight episodes of the first two seasons of the Showtime television series Kidding (2018–), for which he is also an executive producer. His works frequently combine materials and media in unusual or unpredictable ways, including blending analogue and digital technologies, and emphasize collisions between different mental states as well as aesthetic innovation. For example, Gondry’s 2002 music video for The White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl” uses figures that appear to be made out of Legos, but which are in fact animated. Gondry has worked in his native French language, producing critically lauded films such as The Science of Sleep (La Science des rêves, 2006), Mood Indigo (L’Écume des jours, 2013) and Microbe & Gasoline (Microbe et Gasoil, 2015), alongside successful English language films, such as the mind-bending drama of memory removal and recovery Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). For Eternal Sunshine, Gondry won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the screen-play which he co-wrote with Charlie Kaufman (b. 1958). According to Derek Hill, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind could well be the epitome of the American New Wave” as it is “a complex yet commercial film that demands a commitment from the audience but also wants to satisfy, spark an emotional response, and entertain without pandering.” *2
Indeed, in Christopher Grau’s estimation: Arguably one of the best films of the past decade, Eternal Sunshine combines the highly original visual creativity of director Michel Gondry and the sharp intelligence of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, both united and inspired by a simple but compelling idea about memory erasure first put forward by Gondry’s friend, the French conceptual artist Pierre Bismuth. Utilizing Bismuth’s conceit, the film manages to tread familiar territory in a novel way: the classic trope of a couple “divorcing” only to eventually, after some adventure, come together again is given a new twist thanks to a peculiar and powerful memory-removal technology.*3
Gondry’s works also vary greatly in scale and budget, ranging from high- concept to smaller, more personal projects, such as The Thorn in the Heart (L’Épine dans le cœur, 2009), a personal documentary focusing on Gondry’s family and in particular on the life of his aunt, schoolteacher Suzette. Another such personal project is Gondry’s foray into animation with Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?: An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky (2013), an animated documentary of Gondry’s discussions with Chomsky (b. 1928), a renowned American scholar of philosophy and linguistics as well as a major public intellectual, theorist, political activist, and Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Despite their differences, these two films by Gondry focus upon the contributions of extraordinarily creative individuals. Similarly, Gondry’s forays into American cinema include both the big-budget superhero film The Green Hornet (2011), in which an oafish immature playboy fashions himself as the titular masked vigilante, and The We and the I (2012), which takes place during a bus journey and stars a group of non-actors playing teenagers from a public school, based closely on their own lives and experiences. In both cases, however, Gondry confounds expectations. In The Green Hornet, he extensively uses analogue effects to create the impression of a child playing at being a superhero rather than relying solely upon sophisticated computer- generated imagery, reminding us that Gondry “has an uncanny ability to capture many of his most dazzling images via low-tech methods.” *4
Writing in 2008, before the release of The Green Hornet, Hill observed that: Gondry so far has managed to keep his abundant visual ideas ramshackle and hence low budget, much of the time relying on in-camera solutions instead of CGI and other post-production techniques that would ultimately tarnish the funky low-tech. This mix of lo-fi applications with high-tech concepts, something that he routinely applied for his music video work and advertisements, has helped give his films a look and feel unlike anyone else’s.*5
In The We and the I, Gondry adopts elements of social realism, such as the use of non-professionals and overlapping dialogue, but punctuates this film with stories told by the young people, accompanied by sequences resembling mobile phone footage, which often combine flashbacks with fantasies, rumors, and misunderstandings of events. This works to withhold information from and/or mislead the audience as well as highlights the students’ public performances of themselves.
Even Gondry’s non-fiction works incorporate unusual aesthetics that man- age to convey the essence of their subjects impressionistically without adopting a typical documentary tone. For example, in the above-mentioned documentary Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?: An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky, Gondry’s filmed interviews with Chomsky – named “the world’s top public intellectual”*6 – are illustrated through hand-drawn animations made by Gondry that serve to explain the abstract or philosophical concepts covered in their conversations. Gondry’s earlier concert film/documentary Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (2005), plays with time and perspective to map the production and construction both of the personas of the performers featured and of the community spaces in which the film is set.
The overall argument of this collection is that Gondry is emblematic of transnational auteur filmmaking – with French funding involved even in some of his English-language and arguably most accessible work, such as his 2008 nostalgic comedy Be Kind Rewind – crossing aesthetic and cultural borders between national film industries as well as between art and popular cinema and between media. This collection avoids the kind of auteur criticism that Galt and Schoonover suggest “either personalizes style and mode of production out of all locational context or reifies style in terms of national cultural specificity.”*7
Instead, we acknowledge that Gondry’s work exemplifies the way “cinema’s transnational flows might intersect with trajectories of film form.”*8
The essays in this volume therefore identify connections and continuities between Gondry’s films, such as the themes of fantasy, memory, and love. Yet they also place Gondry’s oeuvre in dialogue with both French and American cinematic traditions and socio-cultural contexts, analyzing the insights that his often surrealist approach brings to topics such as history, race, and popular culture in his English-language films. Furthermore, they analyze his films through the framework of the genres in which Gondry has worked, including documentary, romantic comedy, the superhero film, and the road movie. This approach does not disavow Gondry’s status as an auteur, but rather examines how his stylistic and thematic interests intersect with the various contexts in which he makes films.
Gondry’s body of work defies classification according to traditional conceptions of European art cinema. Mark Betz explains that the European art film, especially since the modernist cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s, has traditionally been defined by four paradigms: “the variable spatial and temporal organizations of its design (form), the aesthetic heritage that serves as its animus and to which it frequently refers (cinema), the space and experience of viewing (spectatorship),” and, most importantly, “the signature of its director/creator (authorship),” which gives cohesion and meaning to the other elements.*9
These “formal-aesthetic” definitions of art cinema are often linked to a more “national-institutional” categorization, which views art cinema as fundamentally opposed to Hollywood filmmaking *10. While Gondry displays many of these marks of European art filmmaking, such as the self- referential relationship to cinema and the creative approach to temporal and spatial organization, these marks unite both his French- and his English- language films. For example, Microbe & Gasoline heavily references the American road movie while Be Kind Rewind features amateur recreations of iconic American films in a love letter to cinema blended with the broad stylings of American comedian Jack Black. Similarly, both The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind explore complexly layered dream spaces. Thus, this collection echoes Harrod, Liz, and Timoshkina’s assertion that increasing transnational production and globalization is challenging the traditional concept of Euro-pean cinema as Hollywood’s binary opposite, characterized by art filmmaking rather than entertainment, and complicating the identity of European cinema. *11 Gondry represents a contemporary breed of globalized auteur whose films and other works display both numerous continuities and an eclecticism worth exploring further. This volume is organized into five sections – “Dreams, Play, and Whimsy,” “French Cinema and Identity,” “Narrative and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Gondry in/on America,” and “Multi- Media: Music Video and Television” – that contextualize Gondry in relation to formal, thematic and narrative elements, aspects of transnational identity and multi- media experimentation.
Block and Kirby argue that Gondry’s most recent feature film, Microbe & Gasoline (2015), a picaresque narrative, draws from the conventions of the road movie through its focus on social outsiders, light-hearted depiction of run-ins with the police, and emphasis on male bonding. The film also provides a commentary on the notion and definition of home in France. Microbe & Gasoline, which follows two teenage boys taking a 250-mile-long journey through France in a makeshift house on wheels, links a coming-of-age narrative to a growing awareness of the complexities and divisions within the Hexagon. In this film, Gondry depicts his trademark childhood play and whimsy alongside a sobering adult realization of the injustices that exist in the world. Representing yet another form of border crossing, the film blends conventions from the American road movie with the French road movie’s potential for “elaborating flexible, transnational and multicultural alternatives to a monolithic version of France.”*12
It thus serves to reinforce Gondry’s status as an auteur whose work is frequently transnational in character, recalling Hill’s claim that Gondry is the spiritual heir not only to Jean Cocteau and Georges Méliès, but also to Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg.*13
Finally we take a look at Kidding, which is not only Gondry’s most recent work, but also, a television program that is a culmination of so many of Gondry’s main preoccupations. These include the way in which the puppets in Kidding – handcrafted objects that are used to process emotions – are not unlike the handmade creations in Gondry's feature film The Science of Sleep as well as the exploration of recurring themes throughout Gondry’s oeuvre, such as the inability/ impossibility of distinguishing between reality and fantasy, the terror of being erased or altered, and the co-existence of extreme despair and hope. All of these ideas which are explored herewith recur across the Gondrian universe and find expression in the diverse range of works that bear his stamp.
NOTES
Christopher Grau, “Introduction,” in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Philosophers on Film), ed. Christopher Grau (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), Kindle Edition, 10.
Derek Hill, Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers: An Excursion into the American New Wave (Harpenden: Kamera, 2008), Kindle Edition, Kindle location 2218 of 2840.
Grau, “Introduction,” 1–2.
Hill, Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers, Kindle locations 2105–10 of 2840.
Hill, Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers, Kindle locations 2115–20 of 2840.
Duncan Campbell, “Chomsky Is Voted World’s Top Public Intellectual,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, October 18, 2005). Available at <https://www.theguardian. com/world/2005/oct/18/books.highereducation> (last accessed February 26, 2020).
Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, “Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema,” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, eds Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9.
Galt and Schoonover, “Introduction,” 3.
Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 4.
Betz, Beyond the Subtitle, 10.
Mary Harrod, Mariana Liz, and Alissa Timoshkina, “The Europeanness of European Cinema: An Overview,” in The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning, Globalization, eds Mary Harrod, Mariana Liz, and Alissa Timoshkina (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 7.
Michael Gott, French-Language Road Cinema: Borders, Diaspora, Migration and ‘New Europe’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 4.
Hill, Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers, Kindle location 2085 and 2108 of 2840.
PRESENTED HEREWITH ARE EXCERPTS FROM REFOCUS: THE FILMS OF MICHEL GONDRY, EDS. MARCELLINE BLOCK AND JENNIFER KIRBY (EDINBURGH: EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, SEPTEMBER 2020).
THE EXCERPTS FROM REFOCUS: THE FILMS OF MICHEL GONDRY ARE PUBLISHED HEREWITH WITH THE PERMISSION OF EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, TO WHICH WE ARE MOST GRATEFUL FOR GRANTING PERMISSION TO PUBLISH THESE EXCERPTS IN ADVANCE OF THE BOOK’S PUBLICATION IN SEPTEMBER 2020.
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Marcelline Block’s publications include Le Grain de la voix dans le monde anglophone et francophone (2019); An Anthology of French Singers from A to Z: Singin’ in French (2018); the first English translation of Propaganda Documentaries in France, 1940–1944 by Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit (2016); French Cinema and the Great War: Remembrance and Representation (2016); French Cinema in Closeup: La vie d’un acteur pour moi (2015; named a Best Reference Book of 2015 by Library Journal); Fan Phenomena: Marilyn Monroe (2014); Filmer Marseille (2013); World Film Locations: Marseilles (2013); World Film Locations: Paris (2011; translated into Korean, 2014), and Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema (2009). Her writing appears in Afterall, Art Decades, Big Picture Magazine, Cahiers Tristan Corbière, Cineaste, The Guardian, The Harvard French Review, Hook Literary Magazine, Periodical, Soledad, Wages of Film, and Women in French Studies, and is translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, and Russian.
Jennifer Kirby received her Ph.D. in Media, Film and Television from the University of Auckland in 2018. She is currently a Senior Tutor in Media Studies at Massey University. Her research interests lie primarily in contemporary film and television, with a focus on the representation and organization of virtual and augmented spaces on screen, genre studies, and gender. Her work has been published in journals such as Literature/Film Quarterly and Senses of Cinema.