The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics of Memory is the first critical study of one of the most striking artists of Québecois and Canadian independent filmmaking. The book examines Lepage’s creative methods of filmmaking in their cultural and social context providing historical and industrial background to his many projects, and argues that his film work cannot be seen separately from his opus as a multi-disciplinary artist. Further, this study demonstrates that like Jean Cocteau, Mike Leigh and Alain Resnais, Lepage is a multi-faceted artist who works with a consistent group of actors on very personal themes, building his films during months or even years of a perpetual rehearsal process. It thus challenges the notions that Lepage be considered only in the terms of Québecois film tradition by illuminating the very ideosyncratic practices of Lepageís film and theatre work. In focusing on the cinematic output of this important contemporary artist, with case studies of Le Confessional, Le Polygraphe, Nô, and Possible Worlds, this important new monograph explores these themes and concerns, and includes an exclusive and detailed interview with Robert Lepage.

Aleksandar Dundjerovich is Lecturer in the Department of Performing Arts, Brunel University, UK. He is also a professional theatre director who has staged numerous international productions.

2002
192 pages
1-903361-33-7    £16.99 (pbk)
1-903364-34-5    £45.00 (hbk)


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chapter sample
Introduction


reviews
'Robert Lepage is one of Quebec's most important contributions to recent world cinema, making films that are crucial interventions in an emerging globalised industry. This book, which considers the director's entire cinematic oeuvre and puts it in the context of his innovative theatre, is most timely.'
Jerry White, University of Alberta

'An extremely impressive study ... well-informed and very enlightening. Above all, it is excellent at analysing Lepage's creative processes and at conveying the excitement of his genuinely original way of working.'
Professor David Bradby, Royal Holloway, University of London

'Robert Lepage's films are astonishing, beautiful, challenging. I remember the first time I saw Le Confessional (1995) and Le Polygraphe (1997) it was a revelation for me that cinema could combine a kind of naturalism in the reality of characters and situations, with a formal perfection and the distancing that a Brechtian approach would insist on. Lepage's films serve as poignant evidences of the constant process of a very special kind of reinvention of the self – positioning the individual in a much larger context and showing subjects emerging out of a vast context and yet managing to send ripples back into that context as actors with voice and agency. In many ways, The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics of Memory is in tune with this quest. There are several key questions which drive Dundjerovic's study of Lepage: Where do I come from? Who am I? Where am I going?
These questions – in part drawn directly from Lepage's interviews/texts, in part from his films – provide an impetus for examining the ways that subjects are formed and transform, gaining agency. This genesis of agents politically, culturally, individually – is positioned theoretically in a large framework imbricated within a geopolitical context of film culture, the economics of production, the hegemonies of Hollywood and the US film industry, and also the intimate fragilities of individual subjects. This book is an excellent overview of Lepage's cinema and theatrical work, process and thinking, and also of the political context in Canada that he reveals was instrumental in the formation of Lepage as a director. Dundjerovic sites Lepage's work in a kind of contemporary 'subaltern' practice, and attempts – perhaps following Lepage's example – to go beyond the conceptual limits that define some variants of subaltern thinking (more on this below).
Dundjerovic structures his book straightforwardly – his overview of the themes of myth and memory in Lepage's life and work leads to an in-depth historical review of Canada's political and cultural history; he then develops key themes of searching read through Lepage's theatre and film work, and several of the films in particular: Le Confessional, Le Polygraphe, No (1998), Possible Worlds (2000) – with illustrative chapter subtitles: Where did I come from?, What is truth?, Where am I going?, What is my real world? And in his conclusion restates the position he suggests Lepage's process and work occupies: a new and crucial form of invention of possible worlds and options for agency. Finally, an interview between Dundjerovic and Lepage provides more supporting evidence.
Although the text is packed with detail about Lepage's process, the genesis of the films, his background in theatre, and a nuanced and sometimes ironic examination of the Canadian context these films emerged out of, my initial reading of the book left me quite cold; the focus on a highly semiotic theory of cinema seemed to dominate Dundjerovic's approach to Lepage, which is at odds with my own encounters with Lepage's film and theatre, and also at odds with my own thinking through film … However, during subsequent re-readings in the course of writing this review, I came to change my opinion and subsequently perceived a much broader encounter with Lepage's work on the part of Dundjerovic, which is crucial in explaining the deep political and intellectual foundations of Lepage's theatrical and cinematic work. In fact, the book seems absolutely vital to me now … Ultimately it has fed back powerfully into my take on Lepage.
One of the strongest aspects of this book is Dundjerovic's siting of Lepage's work in the space of a 'subaltern' cinema. In this reading of the work he argues that it re-establishes/re-inscribes a very specific Quebecois identity and ultimately leverages that identity into position in a geopolitical arena. The function of a subaltern cinema might be seen on the one hand as simply providing a negative critique or alternative voice, with little power to change standing order. However, on the other hand, Lepage's breed of subaltern practice is understood to function as a vital part of the constant reinvigoration of global discourse, an expansion of possible stories and experiences that become available to subjects in daily life.
The entire process of Lepage's work – both in the final product evidenced in the films themselves, as well as the RSVP process (see below) which Lepage uses to prepare, rehearse, perform, refine, and re-perform in a constant tuning of the effect and form of the work, is oriented towards exactly this reconstruction of self, of identity, and of agency. Lepage has everything at stake in his work: he isn't just telling a story, he's reinventing his own and his viewers' relationship to history, time, responsibility, and the world … In my opinion, Lepage really puts himself at risk in his work and stakes a claim for the relationship between the individual and the collective such that responsibility for others is a defining characteristic – regardless of what culture it may emerge out of and in many cases regardless of what the ethical/moral outcome may be. These universal themes encompass a range of human experiences: from personal conflicts, acted out by agents unaware of the more intellectually grounded machinations of cultural theory (Marc, in search of his real father in Le Confessional); to the wild leaps of imaginative freedom that a teenager in identity crisis can have whilst on a midnight hallucinogenic spree (Lepage's own surrogate, in The Far Side of the Moon (2003)); up to the inclusion of historical moments and resonances which insist on a collective agency and subjectivity. Examples of this final category appear in many of his films, the most obvious his use of documentary footage from Tiananmen Square in Le Confessional, or the destruction of the Berlin Wall in Le Polygraphe.
There is an erasure of genre boundaries in Lepage's films, which Dundjerovic is very sensitive to throughout his text. His discussion of exactly how a genre of filmmaking is reconceived, however, is channeled through written ideas and theories of what a genre is, rather than directly addressing the techniques and tropes of a genre, and how they work to build autonomous languages of form that function parallel to the interpretive realm.
These other kinds of human and cinematic experience have little to do with an intellectualized investigation of national identity, language politics, failed separatist revolution, etc. Indeed, they have little to do with a 'theory' of cinema at all, which is what makes Lepage's oeuvre one of real genius. As Dundjerovic notes, Lepage himself plays with the suspense genre in many ways – in Le Confessional he not only directly quotes Hitchcock's I Confess but also sets up his characters in space-times which we as viewers have greater command of. This manoeuvre on Lepage's part, and the ways he explores the presence of multiple times in any situation, event, or body, is aimed squarely at inventing a new kind of viewer, one who recreates themselves, and situates themselves within historical time as an active agent literally inventing new meanings. Meaning can no longer “mean’: it can only resite itself as new meaning, new “sense”. Dundjerovic champions this thinking: it is an insightful and crucial observation about Lepage's work.
Dundjerovic's insight and good humour is at its best when on he describes reality in Lepage's films reflecting '…the social fabric of Canada, a country some commentators suggest is the first postmodern state. The term 'Canada' can be defined as an 'agreed-on set of distinctive policies and institutional arrangements' (Marshall 2001: 287), and as such can dispense with the usual trappings of a unified national identity.' (41) This way of approaching Lepage's work perceives the most urgent aspects of it, especially in the context (above mentioned) of contemporary subaltern theory.
Dundjerovic deals with the 'RSVP process' in a number of passages in his book, showing how this process of theatrical development contributed to Lepage's overall formation as an artist, and also plays a significant role in his filmmaking: Le Polygraphe, or the more recent The Far Side of the Moon, for example, were derived initially from theatrical productions which metamorphosed over time into cinema. RSVP is a process developed by Ann Halprin and Lawrence Halprin and used by Theatre Repere, a company founded by Jacques Lessard which Lepage worked with in the early/mid 1980s. This process cycles the material in development through a set of constraint based steps, as Dundjerovic writes: 'RSVP consists of four parts: Resource (motivational/material), Score (process), Valuaction (selection) and Performance (presentation in progress). Lessard turned these fundamentally dance-oriented processes into a model that can be used in the theatre devising process – Re (resource) Pe (partiture experimental and partiture synthesis) and Re (representation). Lepage learned this way of working from Lessard and brought it to his own intuitive method of spontaneous creativity.' (23) Here we find an interesting way to re-engage the semiotic vs abstractly machinic positions. Semiotic skill becomes transformed in the RSVP/repere process, which ties in several ways back to a reinvention of … Implied in Lepage's work is the possibility that this constraint-driven process could have a ripple effect back into the world, thus not only driving the creation of his theatre and film, or his own reinvention of self, but also the life-world experiences of his audience. Modernism and postmodernism struggle continuously with the exact moment and mode of introduction of these constraints; the RSVP process creates a balance between absolute abstract expressionism, and a play with existing flows of narrative, character, prop, plot, event, and image – thus revitalizing the concept of “sense”.
Ed Keller, www.film-philosophy.com

books of related interest
Contemporary North American Film Directors
The Cinema of Emir Kusturica: Notes from the Underground
The Cinema of Ken Loach: Art in the Service of the People
The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway
The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor
The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead
The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America
The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance
The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions
The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski: Variations on Destiny and Chance
The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: Dreams and Diaries
The Cinema of Mike Leigh: A Sense of the Real
The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror
The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World
The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows
The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light