The cinema of Robert Lepage: the poetics of memory

Abstract

THE CINEMA OF ROBERT LEPAGE: THE POETICS OF MEMORY Aleksandar Dundjerovic London: Wallflower Press, 2003, 181 pp. In the growing body of scholarship on Robert Lepage's theatre, a dominant critical paradigm has emerged to describe the global/local interfaces at work in the subject matter of his plays, and in the methods of their production and reception. Drawing on the work of Richard Schechner and Patrice Pavis, critics like Sherry Simon, Jennifer Harvie, Christie Carson, and Barbara Hodgdon have focussed mainly on The Dragons' Trilogy and The Seven Streams of the River Ota, pointing to the intercultural nature of Lepage's work. Employing the metaphors of translation and travel foregrounded in the plays themselves, these critics analyze the mixing of histories, geographies, languages, and performance traditions in Lepage's dramatic universe, as well as their transnational significations in different production contexts around the world. In the critical work on Lepage's cinematic universe, there also seems to be a dominant theme emerging. The focus here is again on an interface, in this case between the functions of time and space in Lepage's filmic representations of memory. Drawing primarily on the work of Gilles Deleuze, and making frequent comparisons to the cinema of Alain Resnais, critics like Bill Marshall, Henry A. Garrity, Martin Lefebvre, and now Aleksandar Dundjerovic have elaborated a poetics (Dundjerovic's word) of space-time collapses and present-past effects in Lepage's cinema. To cite one of the more famous sequences from Le Confessional, the space of our extradiegetic, present-tense viewing of the film seems to merge with the spatio-temporality of Lepage's fictional intradiegetic spectators viewing Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess in 1952. Such a shot sequence mostly demonstrates that the reconstructed past in Lepage's films-what Dundjerovic refers to as Lepage's personalizing of Quebec's collective cultural memory-is essentially a de- or unauthorized history. On the one hand, it is the result of involuntary memories (in Le Confessional neither Pierre nor Marc can logically be remembering, in 1989, what they were not alive to witness in 1952); on the other, it is an absence of memory altogether (in Le Polygraphs Francois claims that he cannot remember the past, which both the police and Judith end up exploiting). The pasts in both films, in other words, lack an identifiable narrator, or an implied author, in the sense that the cuts used to evoke the past temporally and spatially on screen are Deleuzean irrational cuts, which cannot be tied to actual sensory-motor recognition but only to virtual representation, what Deleuze calls the recollection-image. Neither can these recollection-images be tied to a stable point of view (despite, in the case of Le Confessional, the voice-over narration of Pierre that frames both the film and the film-within-the-film); other, that is, than that provided by the omniscient camera. In other words, if Lepage's films, by virtue of their status as mediated texts and adaptations (however broadly defined), lack an author (in the Barthesian sense), they do at least have an auteur. In The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics of Memory, part of the Directors' Cuts series put out by London's Wallflower Press, and the first booklength study of Lepage as filmmaker, Dundjerovic attempts to synthesize these strands of interculturalism, time, and space, and the new aufeurism'Operating in Lepage's films. He does so by emphasizing that the memory work on offer in Le Confessional, Le Polygraphe, No, and Possible Worlds (Dundjerovic fails to reference in any way the film version of La Face cachee de la lune [2003]) is simultaneously a product of Lepage's local family upbringing in Quebec City, his subsequent global itinerancy as a multi-disciplinary artistic nomad, and above all his training in the theatre. Drawing on his own interviews with the filmmaker (one of which appears as an appendix to this book), Dundjerovic does an excellent job of outlining how Lepage's childhood and adolescence as the biological French-speaking son of working class Quebec City parents who had previously adopted two Englishspeaking children informs the inherent translational and transcultural quality of his films. …