On Isadora's Children

 One of the hardest adjustments I have had to make, as a viewer and critic, is in understanding (and reminding myself) that a film can be anything at all. What I considered cinema when I was a young actor and cinephile - that is, the films I read about in my big book of cinema, and the magazines I bought every month - was a narrow, totally conventional concept of film. A director, making a fictional film with a proper story, dialogue, a cast playing roles, with music and sets and credits. That cinema is still my meat and drink, of course; but realising the possibilities of film, the ways in which it can twist and turn, and branch out, and surprise us, has helped me enormously to think about the choices that directors make. Recording a podcast episode last year I chanced on the films of Margaret Tait, a poet of the movies whose brief films, mere snippets, are like gasps of fresh mountain air; these are little poems, evocations, fancies. Her 'Portrait of Ga' is like a picture-poem, a Dadaist splash that feeds the senses; her 'Aerial' is a game, a deregulated mystery of distorted frames, movement, sound; these are films of four minutes. A film can be four, fourteen, forty or four hundred minutes (c.f. the work of Lav Diaz); it can have sound or none; characters or none; be "about" something or really not. A film can be a novel, but it can also be an essay, a haiku; a biography or a crazed religious epic.

In opening up your mind to the choices filmmakers make, to shape a film in such and such a way, to lend it such and such a tone, with music or without, with bright colours or dimmed, small or expansive, fast or slow, you get a sense of what film can do, and you begin to perceive the character of a director. I was thinking all of this over yesterday after watching Isadora's Children, the latest film by Damien Manivel, a director whose work I have come to cherish for its quiet, deliberate, gently obstinate individualism. This new film feels like a study, or perhaps it may be best to give it the French word etude, for the musical and pictorial connotations the word has. Manivel isn't particularly interested in a story, and indeed this film barely has one - but what his films have done from the start is to study bodies and faces, to describe the particularity of gesture, in a loving, delicate, sensitive way. 

Isadora's Children takes as its starting point the death of the children of Isadora Duncan, the ballet dancer and choreographer, and the grief that it plunged her into, before she incorporated (pun intended) those feelings into her work. On a hushed, poised partition by Scriabine, and with great deliberation, Manivel then films a series of dancers as they rehearse (in all senses) Duncan's work. It is a miracle to see with what unaffected simplicity Manivel captures the actor Agathe Bonitzer as she deciphers the markings of a choreography and repeatedly practises a light gesture of her hand, fluting it in a fluttering wave across her body, and then adding more weight to the movement, more purpose; angling her hand differently, imbuing her arm with more fluidity and grace. 

Manivel has chosen a subject so perfectly aligned with his own cinematics, for in referring to the ideas of Duncan, for whom expression was the primary consideration in dance, and in seizing the efforts of four dancers to perform with as much authenticity of expression as possible, he is echoing his own methods right from the beginning of his career. In his gleaming, assured second film Le Parc, Manivel  gave himself a simple set-up (boy meets girl) and then overlayed proceedings with a formal coup - after the meeting, everything seems to go backwards, with each gesture re-contextualised and seen anew, in startling ways. The film thrived on making the banal seem remarkable again, by working and working at movement, so that what we had seen takes on a startling new quality. In Isadora's Children, this happens again and again: capturing choreography is one thing, but Manivel also seizes the beauty of so much normality. In the film the simple act of unlocking a door becomes heart-stopping somehow; to see Bonitzer's rucksack fall onto her outstretched elbow is beautiful. Later in the film, the dancer Elsa Wolliaston undresses at night, all alone in her flat, in semi-obscurity; and again there is an unutterably gorgeous tension here in so much beautifully observed movement, in the way she pulls her top over her head, slowly, her face now covered in material, and reaches up again to tug the rest of the fabric again over her head, revealing her big lolling breasts in night light. In these scenes, it seems that Manivel gets more achingly close to cinematic 'truth' than anyone, because he has worked, and worked, at making us attentive to the ways the body can express ideas, personality, feelings, routine. 

Here again, Manivel pursues his own vein of filmmaking, continuing work seen in his film Takara: The Night I Swam, co-directed with Kohei Igarashi - a brief, wordless film that closely follows a little boy as he wakes up after his father has left for work. Again in this film Manivel works from the outside in, observing, catching, gleaning the specificity of the boy's movement, in order to give us a portrait of him; the rest of the world is filled in behind him, cross-hatched and coloured. In Isadora's Children words are again just a crutch, a necessity at times - Manivel's writing of dialogue is fine, but it plays second fiddle to this rehearsal of life. 

Damien Manivel is not reinventing cinema - he writes a screenplay, hires actor and a camera like everyone else - but in his growing body of work, these lithe and beguiling studies of people, these crepuscular observations of flesh and sinew in movement or at rest, he is making films that have begun to mean more to me than many directors, which make me halt for 70 minutes, and suspend my time to the dance I see playing before me.