Brisseau & Courbet

[revised 2/20/10]

In an 1861 manifesto, Gustave Courbet wrote: "Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.” Let me pick apart those sentences.

• “Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects.” Courbet is working during the fabled time when paintings are still largely paintings, when the image is not yet an image and is something that belongs to a physical object. Paintings are concrete and therefore painting is concrete. It is the act of making a physical object that carries the image of other physical objects.
• “An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.” As the act of making physical images, painting is therefore bound to the physical. The painter creates an image by arranging and representing real things.
  

If, in 2010, Jean-Claude Brisseau were to write a manifesto, it would read: "Cinema is an essentially concrete art and consists only of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of cinematography, though it can be suggested through cinema.” Let me pick apart my own sentences.

• "Cinema is an essentially concrete art and consists only of the representation of real and existing things." Brisseau could never make an animated film. He is interested only in flesh-and-blood individuals engaging in acts.
• "It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of cinematography, though it can be suggested through cinema." Brisseau practices the most physical and forceful of languages: Fritz Language, which he speaks almost fluently. What he has learned from Lang, above all, is the way physical objects, properly arranged (whether through editing, or within the frame), can suggest the abstract. You can't photograph evil, but you can make it felt. In addition, Brisseau has discovered that you can't photograph sex, only people fucking. Like Courbet's fine ladies, slumped over in their beds, Brisseau's nudes are cold. It's as though he's thinking: "We can't feel the heat of a flame from an image, and therefore fire must become a symbol. A medium without sensation, temperature or smell has no place for sex, and therefore it too must become a symbol." And he uses that symbol every chance he gets.