118: Méditerranée

            I think what’s most striking to me about Jean-Daniel Pollet’s Méditerranée (1963) is that it’s listed in multiple sources as a documentary.  I’m not exactly sure what else it could be qualified as, but calling this film a doc is like describing Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) as an “archeology movie.”  There is so much more here than could be adequately described.  Pollet composed the film of about ten almost completely unrelated sequences, editing them together in varying orders and lengths.  We see a bull fight, a woman on an operating table, a countryside wedding, the pyramids, an Italian villa, an aging fisherman; all of them located in the Mediterranean region.

            That this is their only connection might be annoyingly vague were it not for the film’s self-explanatory title.  This is simply a slice of certain lives near that great sea.  The repetition of these sequences – in a random order, always with a bit more footage – is underscored by the transcendent music of Antoine Duhamel, who went on to work as a composer for Godard.  The New Wave icon loved this picture so much, giving it a highly favorable review in Cahiers du Cinema, that he hired Duhamel for Pierrot le Fou (1965). 

            The score complements a voiceover narration written by Philippe Sollers.  I can say little about its content, as the only available version of the film that I could find had no subtitles.  This would likely have bothered me with a narrative effort, but here I was swept up in the construction of the edited imagery to the point that I don’t think I lost anything.  I wasn’t distracted by trying to read, and I had to let the images and the score (music is the international language after all) create their own meaning.  In a way then, this was the most subjective experience I’ve ever been afforded with a movie.  Was it difficult?  Not at all.  It was poetry.  Lost in the shots unfolding before me, I could make them mean whatever I wanted, as if the were just for me, as Godard wrote “abandoned on the screen like pebbles on the beach.”  

If you are a regular reader I know what you’re thinking.  He hates pretentious “poetry films” like The Color of Pomegranates (1968; #161) and Godard’s “idea movies” such as 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967; # 166).  Yes, I’ve given poetically-based films negative reviews in the past, and I do think that Godard has been underachieving since 1964, but poetry still retains beauty when done justice on celluloid, and Godard will always be one of the most original cinematic minds in history.  In the case of The Color of Pomegranates, Parajanov should have taken much more from a film such as this. In the case of Godard, he should have taken much less.  It’s delicately beautiful, but rare it should remain.  Films about ideas and emotions that are not rooted in strong characters tend to fall flat.  Méditerranée is a rare exception.   

Language: French

Runtime: 45 Minutes

Available @ Youtube.com

Grade: 3 Hats Off