Cannes 2024 – Mannerism and post-cinema
We discussed, in yesterday’s issue, use of video games in cinema. Their structure can sometimes serve to organize the dramaturgy and scenography of a film – as with Furiosa. Sometimes, their image takes over from the cinematographic image, for a few moments in the film – in Ghost Trail at the start of the festival, in Eat the night by Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, presented next week at the Quinzaine des cinéastes and in which a video game opens onto a world where utopias and desires can come true.
Alexis Langlois’s first feature film, Queens of Drama, draws on other types of imagery, post-cinema and even post-video game: YouTube videos, memes, influencer video blogs, clips from reality TV… The use of this 21st-century imagery is nothing new in itself; many films since the 2000s have incorporated and commented on its development. But this is perhaps the first time that a filmmaker has picked up these images with such fetishizing ardor, such passion for the pastiche, a melancholy linked to the remaking of images that have passed through us, comparable, in its intensity, to the feeling exerted by the greatest mannerist filmmakers on the history of cinema.
Alexis Langlois replays music videos by Priscilla or Lorie, a video of a Britney Spears fan pleading to be « left alone », an image of Britney herself shaving her head, or Miley Cyris twerking on an MTV show – all of that, and with the same libidinal commitment, the same marking force as De Palma, who re-orchestrated, for his entire life, a couple of Hitchcock-like motifs which he never really got over. It’s no coincidence that De Palma is everywhere in Queens of Drama: in the use of the split-screen, in its Dantesque vision of the blood-spattered female characters (Carrie), in the general atmosphere of a buffoonish tragedy transported into the very core of the music industry (Phantom of the Paradise). While the subject matter may differ – replacing classic cinema tropes with Generation Y’s pop-culture – the process is much the same. It is still a question of distorting, as much as possible and until the most baroque limitations imaginable, the images that haunt each and everyone of us.
There is something profoundly beautiful in the way the film invents new places for nostalgia to roam. Never before in cinema had the 2000s – the narrative opens in 2005 – here so whimsically and minutely reconstructed, seemed like such a forgotten time, with their Myspace accounts, mini-televisions and built-in VCRs, CD collections and blossoming of novel social media. The film, in its shots, neatly shaped like the surface of so many gemstones into which images scattered and reflect, encloses some chemically pure melancholy. A little bit from Ophüls. A lot of De Palma. But in a new iteration. In any case, a filmmaker is born.