By Vedant Srinivas
“The issue of intrusion has resonances for much in life – phobia, rejection, desire. Intrusion is always brutal. There’s no such thing as a gentle intrusion.”1
“We are our most proper and therefore our strangest, most foreign others.”2
To watch Claire Denis’ L’intrus is to undergo a slow contamination. What contaminates is not something concrete or knowable but contamination itself, its ever-present possibility and threat. Denis’ elliptical approach to filmmaking is well known to those familiar with her body of work. And yet, there is something dangerously porous about L’intrus, an openness that belies all attempts at mastery, much like the wind —arguably one of its principal characters— that susurrates across Denis’ film, unconstrained and free.
L’intrus is the story of an adventure undertaken for a heart, by a man (Michel Subor) whose own heart has reached the end of its rope. Driven by desperation, Louis will journey across the hemisphere, from the Jura Mountains in France, to Switzerland, Korea, and finally Tahiti, in search of a healthy heart, and to re-connect with his illegitimate son. Thrown into the mix are other characters and narrative strands: a mysterious Russian woman who seems to be following Trebor (Subor), his other son whom Trebor has wantonly abandoned, and a neighbour who looks after the local wolf community, but also dogs, trees, checkpoints, changing seasons, reams of bright, multi-coloured confetti, and the colour of the sky, each of which has a part to play in the slow and seductive unfolding of this film. As is the case with Denis’ filmography, all conventional storytelling techniques —character backstories, linear causality— are done away with, and what remains is a wildly scattered jigsaw puzzle. Indeed, the closest equivalent for Denis’ film is what in poetry is called enjambment, the spilling over of sentences or phrases across lines without punctuation —in this case, blocs of images and sounds— giving rise to a multiplicity of sensations, rhythms, and resonances.
Denis’ L’intrus was loosely inspired by the eponymous text written by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. Written after undergoing one of the first heart transplants in Europe, Nancy’s text is an intimate account of what it means to survive a life-threatening illness, and to continue to exist in and through a grafted body. Enmeshed in a beguiling procedure over which he has little control, Nancy experiences a gradual slippage separating him from himself, a process whereby “my heart was becoming my own foreigner”.
Denis first read the essay while shooting her film Trouble Every Day (2001), an encounter that would pave the way for a long and sustained dialogue between the two artists. True to her cinematic proclivities, Denis realised that no amount of realistic storytelling could capture the implications —“so big, so vast”— of Nancy’s text. In place of realism, she instead zeroed in on the crux, the very heart of his essay, which is the figure of the intruder, an idea that pops up quite consistently in their respective oeuvres. Indeed, the overlaps between their works in cinema and philosophy are aplenty —themes of foreignness and exile, risk/exposure, the sensuous fragility of the human body— and, looking back on Denis’ film, it is perhaps now evident that what Denis was responding to was not a particular work of Nancy’s but rather his thought as a whole.
Nancy’s L’intrus, while partly autobiographical in nature, is also in some ways a treatise on strangeness: what underwrites each complication, and the medical program as a whole, is an experience of violent intrusion, an intrusion not just into the human body but also into the enunciating subject, the first-person ‘I’. Forced to relinquish the self-certainty of identity, Nancy stumbles upon an I composed wholly of linkages and relations, a self inextricably interwoven with the other. As he puts it, “the intrus exposes me, excessively. It extrudes, it exports, it expropriates: I am the illness and the medical intervention, I am the cancerous cell and the grafted organ, I am the immuno-depressive agents and their palliatives, I am the bits of wire that hold together my sternum, and I am this injection site permanently stitched in below my clavicle, just as I was already these screws in my hip and this plate in my groin.”3 At the heart of Nancy’s text is an acknowledgement of the perenniality of intrusion: there is nothing that is not foreign, just as there is nothing that is self-sufficient.
In 2001, a year after Nancy wrote his text, and a year before L’intrus came out, Denis was commissioned to make a short film as part of the anthology feature Ten Minutes Older: The Cello. Titled ‘Vers Nancy’, her black and white piece, shot entirely on a train, features Jean-luc Nancy himself in conversation with a young Yugoslav student. Set against the incessant motion of the train, and of the rolling French countryside as glimpsed through the window, Denis’ film revolves around ideas of national identity, homogeneity, and intrusion, and is in many ways a thematic precursor to L’intrus. In response to the student’s remarks on her immigrant status, Nancy affirms the importance of maintaining the foreignness of the foreigner, the essential alterity of the stranger. To normalise or assimilate by forsaking difference is to ignore the intruder’s strangeness, and to form an immunised identity that is “stupid, closed, sealed…like a stone”. Instead, one has to let oneself —one’s homogeneity— be intruded upon, for this intrusion is “an inherent part of the truth of the stranger.”
Nancy’s ontological musings on the self from L’intrus are here supplemented by the ‘we’ of the social world, a plurality always divided and multiple and yet mutually entangled. In contrast to an I that is distinguished without remainder, we remains indeterminate and inchoate, always “in the process of being formed, but not yet performed.”4 Indeed, Nancy’s overarching philosophical project has revolved around redefining human community and what it means to share and live together in this world, something that has doubtless had a key influence on Denis’ cinematic sensibilities. In one of his most important works, published around the same time as L’intrus (and whose preface begins with a long list of identitarian conflicts – Bosnia-Herzogovina, Chechnya, Rwanda, Tutsis, Tamil Tigers…) Nancy returns to the question of the irreducible strangeness of the other by referring to it as an origin of meaning, a singular affirmation of the world: “You are absolutely strange because the world begins its turn with you.”5 The world then is nothing but these multiple points of origins and affirmations; everything passes between us. Consequently, it is the with that constitutes Being, the we that predates the I. The essence of Being is nothing but co-essence, hence the term being-singular-plural: “Being is singularly plural and plurally singular.”6
Denis’ adaptation, or rather adoption, as Nancy refers to it, is then not so much textual as it is philosophical. What Denis succeeds in doing is invoke Nancy’s philosophy in and through the formal techniques of cinema, to cinematize his thought and inscribe it into the very flesh of the film. Transposed onto cinema, Nancy’s polymorphous figure of the intruder becomes the guiding principle of construction for Denis’ L’intrus.
This is evident from the very first scene, which opens at a border control checkpoint at the French Switzerland border, where an extensive search operation is underway. Denis spends an inordinate amount of time setting up the scene, which finally ends with the man being led away by an officer, though nothing is shown or specified. Later, after one of many of L’intrus’ temporal dislocations, we will see a feral band of rifle carrying assassins sneak through a forest. Such moments of exposure are strewn throughout the film, and evoke a state of violent dread, of being constantly intruded upon.
It is however not merely a case of literal depiction; rather, every scene, movement, incident, in L’intrus comes across as an intrusion. It is there at the level of framing —jerky point-of-view shots framed from afar, wide shots juxtaposed with disquieting closeups— and also in its syncopated editing, an impressionistic cascade of sequences which thwart all attempts at narrative coherence. Denis’ construction of the film destabilises all received boundaries and categories —internal/external, human/animal, lived/dreamed— and instead makes voyaging essential to the film’s rhythm and form. Consequently, Nancy’s ‘Being-with’, his emphasis on the we, is here reimagined as an interstitial between-ness: all the action happens in between, between the morass of images, sounds, memories, identities, and places, a between-ness that begets relentless motion and movement.
Indeed, at the core of L’intrus is an experience of pure kinaesthesia. As Nancy puts it, “All the film is about travelling, traversal, moving through space, creating the space for movement…”.7 Along with protracted sequences of travel —via plane, ship, walking, through cities, countries, across hemispheres— are interspersed various modalities of movement: in and through language (French, Korean, Tahitian, Russian, Hindi), identities (most of which are either ambiguous or constantly challenged), and its fluid narrative temporality. Similarly, the film abounds with images of enclosures and partitions (borders, doors, bank vaults, windows, walls, the human body) and yet makes them vulnerable to incursion. There is something quite explosive about L’intrus’ orchestration of movement; it is too much and everywhere, a heterogeneity alway on the verge of spilling over. Jet skies slicing through water; a dog-sled fiercely bounding across snow; people moving in and out of a busy elevator; a boat bobbing atop undulating waves; the unhurried unfurling of multi-coloured streamers; shifting sunlight and shadow; colours; air; and finally time itself: textures, tonalities, and movements further complemented by a hand-held camera and breathtaking montage sequences (a cut from a rifle fired in the forest to raw meat being thrown to snarling dogs, or a sudden jump from the icy Jura landscape to a vibrant and sun-drenched Polynesian island). Everything moves, travels, traverses, exists in a state of perpetual flow. L’intrus rejects stability and totality at every turn, instead offering up a vision of a world that is fugitive and aleatory.
Couched within L’intrus’ displacements is also the global movement of capital with its own association of images (bank lockers, freight containers, cargo ships). Denis further allusively connects Trebor’s travels to Haiti with colonial histories of voyages undertaken to the ‘South Seas’, an idea which finds its visual counterpart in a stunning image of a purple-hued Pacific Ocean (Denis has cited both Gauguin and Robert Stevenson as points of reference for the film’s nautical sections).
This is not to say that, barring such dissonant elements, L’intrus in itself is smooth and stable in its form. Rather, what makes Denis’ film truly astonishing is that its parts function as synecdoches: at times the film as a whole assumes the frenetic momentum of its parts, becoming deliriously mobile and unhinged. Midway into L’intrus, Trebor gets into his car and drives down a long winding road. As headlights pierce through complete darkness, a mysterious refrain kicks in, and we suddenly encounter hazy outlines of people rushing across the road, people —refugees— swathed in their cultures and languages, rushing into the blackness of the forest. It is an astounding sequence, one that completely breaks away from the film’s narrative arc, an intrusion into its very formal makeup.
Another intrusion, much more daring and egregious, will occur towards the end of the film. As Trebor finds himself in Tahiti searching for his long-lost son, the film suddenly cuts to black and white footage from another film —Le reflux (1965) by Paul Gegauff— starring a young Michel Subor as a sailor. The images alternate, making it seem like a potential memory-dream of his character in L’intrus, but also at the same time an inter-textual memory of the many cinematic selves that Subor carries within himself (from Godard’s La petit soldat to Denis’ own Beau Travail). It is then cinema intruding into itself, into its own histories and fantasies, an epidermal cinema of the surface.
If there is one key takeaway that L’intrus offers, it is in its refusal of totalities, and in the manner in which it complicates all normative categories, thus implicitly forcing the viewer to discover new modes of seeing and being in the world. Its crux lies in a direct confrontation with strangeness, both with the other’s strangeness and also with one’s own, and with the very condition of alterity that binds us together.
Far from being antithetical to one’s identity, intrusion is fully constitutive of it. We are both intruders and the ones intruded upon. Or, to quote Nancy, “The intrus is no other than me, my self; none other than man himself.”8
NOTES
- Claire Denis, “Alien heart”, Sight and Sound, September, 2005.
- Jean-Luc Nancy, “Nous Autres”, in The Ground of the Image (New York; Fordham University Press): 106.
- Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’intrus”, CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 2, Number 3: 1-14.
- Nancy, The Ground of the Image: 106.
- Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (California: Stanford University Press): 6.
- Nancy, Being Singular Plural: 28
- Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’Intrus”, a lecture given at the European Graduate School, 2007.
- Nancy, L’intrus.