“LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE is a total masterpiece.”

- Henri Langlois, Cahiers du Cinéma

GME is pleased to add two new DVD editions of films by Philippe Garrel –- LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE (1972) and L’ENFANT SECRET (1979) -- to four other digital publications of this auteurist’s films that we previously have presented for academic study and research. Garrel began making movies at age sixteen, fired by a mythopoetic vision and a political fervor that crested and crashed in May ’68, whose turmoil he filmed in the long-lost, newly discovered ACTUA 1 (1968) and decades later re-created from memory in LES AMANTS REGULIERS (2005).

In 1969, Garrel was in Rome, finishing shooting LE LIT DE LA VIERGE, and staying in a rented villa when Andy Warhol superstars Nico and Viva dropped by for a visit. Garrel was smitten with Nico, who became his cinematic muse, and who starred in several of his ensuing films beginning with LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE. Garrel has written that his subsequent encounter with Andy Warhol changed his approach to his work, “Since CHELSEA GIRLS (1966) had run for a whole year in a New York cinema, I thought that we should be able to free ourselves from the genre of cinema that was acceptable in France at the time, which ranged from neo-realism [see UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE, 1959] to the New Wave [see LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, 1961].” LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE depicts the wanderings of a woman, two men and a child in exotic and desolate desert and icy terrains located and filmed in Egypt, Iceland, and New Mexico. According to Garrel, “You can't ask questions of LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE, you just have to enjoy watching it, in the same way as you'd enjoy taking a walk in the desert. The film is a record of what was going through my head at the time of the shoot; it can consist only of traces and marks.”

FILMMAKER PHILIPPE GARREL — FILMMAKER PHILIPPE GARREL

During the ensuing period, following the personal upheavals of drug addiction, depression, and shock therapy, Garrel made the conscious decision to turn away from the increasingly private poetry of his earlier work. He turned to the great screenwriter Annette Wadamant (THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE…, 1953), who helped him to organize his thoughts into a narrative of “things that happened to me,” and the result was this spare, elemental, devastating autobiographical film – L’ENFANT SECRET -- about two damaged souls (Bresson’s actors Henri de Maublanc and Anne Wiazemsky) trying to build a life together as her child (Xuan Lindenmeyer) is taken away. This film externalizes Garrel’s inner pain following the breakup with Nico, the love of his life. With this movie, Garrel became a kind of patron saint of narrative minimalists, making pared down, cloistered works fascinated with the significance of minute gestures yet encompassing wider world affairs both social and romantic.

According to Maximilian Le Cain, writing in Senses of Cinema, "Garrel’s films are made up of moments, moments of day-to-day intimacy or alienation, often elliptically linked. Quiet conversations and silences between friends and lovers. And thought. Few other directors have made reflection so central to their filmmaking and almost none have captured it with such unforced grace. It is a cinema of contemplation rather than narrative. He shoots with the most basic means in an elegant, portrait like style. Sometimes he uses quite long takes, always with very little cutting around in a scene and often none at all. Scenes are filmed with a stillness and a patience that do the exact opposite of what most effective narrative cinema does, that is, to grab audiences and manipulate them into a state of false emotion." L’ENFANT SECRET received a Personal Choice DVD Award from Juror Miguel Marias at the 2019 edition of the Il Cinema Ritrovato DVD Awards.

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Additional Philippe Garrel films distributed by GME

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