Still from Trois jours en Grèce, 1991
As usual at this time of year, I find myself with a little downtime and in a charitable mood. In the spirit of the season, I offer a translation of Cyril Neyrat's terrific essay on Jean-Daniel Pollet's 'Trois jours en Grèce,' originally commissioned for Les éditions de l'oeil's 2020 DVD release of the film. I began the translation back in 2020, in the hopes of putting it online along with subtitles of Pollet's film. Now that fansubs have finally appeared, here is the text which will hopefully (almost certainly) illuminate its many layers and themes, as well as its place in Pollet's filmography.
P.S. You can download the film with English subs here. Many thanks to the hard working subtitlers who shall remain nameless.
In Greece, Blessed, On A Magic Carpet
by Cyril Neyrat
“He looks in the mirror to reproduce his death accurately.”
Yannis Ritsos
Jean-Daniel Pollet called Greece his “second homeland.” He first went there in 1962, at twenty-six years old, on the trip that led to his film
Méditerranée. Upon his return, he spent several months locked in a cellar, assembling a cut that he finished “one Easter Sunday.” The result, something never before seen: a series of recurring images that form a fugue, whose loops retrace the author’s circular voyage on the Middle Sea. Over the years, Pollet never stopped returning to Greece, where he set and shot a number of his major films:
Bassae,
Le Soleil et l’Ombre,
Tu imagines Robinson,
L’Ordre. In 1991,
Trois jours en Grèce concluded the series and the filming; three decades after his first trip, it was his last visit to his native land. Faithful to the profound principles of Pollet’s cinema, the final Greek film is a return to the origin: a remake, reprise and relaunch of
Méditerranée. A reinvention of its fractured circularity, its syncopated allure, the same vertiginous dance over the abyss, but slackened, spread out, lightened or lifted by the grace of newfound serenity.
Yet, it is a film that, along with its author, returns from far, far away.
1988: invited to participate in a symposium on the Gulf of Corinth, Pollet seizes the opportunity, abandons the symposium, and spends three days alone in and around the small coastal town of Itea, filming with his camcorder.
April 14, 1989: Pollet tests emulsions by filming the train rails that pass below his property. He shoots at ground level, waits for the train to pass, hears the horn, but does not have time to step aside. The locomotive hits him (“I bounced on the second and third cars before falling back to the tracks”) and leaves him for dead (“Twenty-five fractures, seven of which were open”). He begins a long stay in hospital, a very long convalescence, a bedridden interlude of almost one year. From this prolonged absence, the work to come is born. It is in the hospital that Pollet imagines the film that will become
Trois jours en Grèce, based on the 1988 trip and the two hours of footage brought back from Itea. It is in that room that he writes and composes
L’Entre Vues with Gérard Leblanc, an exhaustive book that, before reviewing his life and past work and sketching the films to come, opens with a long account of the accident.
Autumn 1990: out of hospital, Pollet finishes preparations for
Trois jours en Grèce and travels to Greece to shoot. Two months circling the Golf of Corinth, as he had the
Méditerranée twenty-nine years prior.
Early 1991: editing of
Trois jours en Grèce. On January 17, “Operation Desert Storm” begins, launching the Gulf War. With the help of Leblanc, Pollet incorporates a series of images of the war taken from French television into his film.
Trois jours en Grèce is therefore the film of a revenant, of a man who has returned from the dead. Of a death-seer.
In the account of the accident that opens
L’Entre Vues, Pollet recounts the horror of his first days in the hospital, the panicked sensation of dying and the jubilation of coming back to life, like a second birth. He would add sometime after: “For two years, I felt blessed.” Two years, that is to say, the interval between the train accident and the end of editing of
Trois jours en Grèce: an enchanted intermission from life, a grace granted, a double-miracle of a survival, and a survivor film.
This miraculous progression from the accident to the film, the disturbing intimacy of the author’s catastrophe and his cinematic achievement, were experienced by Pollet in full consciousness.
On the accident:
“I shot up in the air and saw what a camera would capture if we threw it in the air… Cries from Françoise and my son. I was flying. I think I waited a little while before coming back down. I felt disjointed. I fell, conscious. I never lost consciousness. I lay there. I could hear the sound of the train receding. I said to myself “It’s done.” … Then, they arrived. Morphine and stretcher. “Here! What a beautiful tracking shot. Here, the weather is nice tonight.” Traveling indeed, the blue of the sky.”
On filming:
“At this point, I’m on a magic carpet for two months. With the best technical team that I’ve ever had. And then Greece, of course, which completely carried me. It’s a film that was shot without notorious incident, neither physical nor mental, nothing. Of all my films, it is the one where the shooting was the clearest.”
Pollet remembers the film as an extension of the accident, as if, suspended in the air after the impact, he had not fallen but had embarked on a flying carpet to tour the Gulf of Corinth. “
I think I waited a little while before coming back down.”: two seconds of suspense stretched into two years of life, which ended with two months of filming.
Like
L’Entre Vues,
Trois jours en Grèce begins with an evocation of the accident. Like the book, the film seems to find its origin, its point of departure, and its basis in the experience of the shock, the suspense and the fall (and in syncope
[i] as an approximation of death). This evocation - made up of fixed shots of the tracks, miraculously retrieved after the accident, much like their photographer – follows the first in a series of long sinuous tracking shots and images of boats, a rather unique manifestation of world apprehension from the death-seer. The explorative Steadicam shots of the filmmaker’s home return at the end of the journey, altered by a few variations, as if the entire film takes place in this unstable interval. This temporal vertigo is clearly perceived and articulated by Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues and Jean-Louis Leutrat:
“The clock in the filmmaker’s home, which is seen at both ends of the film, is only shown to have advanced a few minutes from the beginning to the end. The film starts with images captured just before the accident suffered by the director; it ends with the launch of the Ariane at Kourou [ii], which occurred within a few days (a few minutes) of the accident. It’s as if these “three days in Greece” were flashing before the filmmaker’s eyes at the instant of the collision.”
Movement is strange: a sort of floating crawl, unassignable to any human or animal perspective or presence, simultaneously penetrating the visible while remaining detached from sensorial reality. It seems to come from the accident itself, springing forth in the wake of the departing train that left the author for dead along the tracks. Is this the return to the world and life after syncope? But it is not the movement of a presence: rather, it’s that of a spirit, the flight of a ghost, or the inner movement of a dreaming, imagining soul. As if the traveling subject of
Trois jours en Grèce had never left his hospital bed, or even the space above the tracks. Two seconds, two minutes: the film freezes time in the suspense of the impact. “Three days in limbo, until the resurrection,” wrote Péguy
[iii].
The initial exploration of the house is interrupted by a shot of Pollet’s hands cutting out photos of Greek vases, this after he discards a stack of magazines whose covers feature images of the Gulf War. The voice of Jean Thibaudeau, a friend and author who penned the voiceover, comments in a hushed tone: “He prepares his film. In the end, we do not have to know what comes before or after, if the trip is taking place, has taken place or will take place, or not.” These two perfectly contradictory sentences provide the key to
Trois jours en Grèce and its enigma. The first indicates the traditional essay film, in the category of “travelogue”: we see the filmmaker at work, we prepare to follow the making of a film about a trip to Greece. The second belies this assertion by stating on the one hand that there will be no chronology (what we will see will belong neither to the past, nor to the present or the future), that all temporal reference will be erased along with any concept of duration (three days, two years, a few minutes?), while on the other hand, questioning the reality of the trip itself. What Thibaudeau suggests, decisively, is that the experience in question does not follow the order of life lived; on the contrary, it follows its negation.
The sequences of the film that immediately follow confirm this, mixing temporalities to the point of dissolving them, producing a temporal vertigo that opens up an abyss of thought. From the following shot on, we are in Greece, but filmed as purely interior, imaginary movement: aerial tracking shots, non-human vision following the scheme initiated in the exploratory scenes of the house. Pollet’s voice recalls the first trip, that of 1988, a camcorder in hand. “Two years later,” he says, “the circumstances being favorable, I settled in my office.” In the meantime, there was the accident: the second trip, which bore
Trois jours en Grèce, was of a completely different nature: a motionless vertigo, suspended between a hospital room, a home office and the editing table. For it is above all (and again, as in
Méditerranée and
Contretemps) the editing that produces the vision from beyond the grave, that recalls another trip: to the land of the dead.
And it is vertigo. Vertigo from the back and forth trips from here to there – the repeated departure of the plane, denied as a reality lived, become vision. Intoxicating vertigo, Dionysian Steadicam tracking shots winding, swaying, crawling “under the delirious whip of God” – a chorus of Bacchae from Euripides, recited by Olimpia Carlisi in the streets of Itea. Still dizzy from the tracking shots punctuated by photographs – time seized, stuttering, permanent mishaps that ruin its passage with the irregular repetition of breaks. The poetry of
Trois jours en Grèce rekindles that of
Méditerranée, in the sense that it articulates and unites the two dimensions of syncope
[i], medical and musical: as fainting and returning, and as caesura, counter-rhythmic interruption. The syncopated rhythm, the breaks that never cease to disturb the flow, that suspend movement to resume it elsewhere and otherwise, are like an echo of the accident, the original syncope, extended and repeated in the narrative, an undulating propagation of the collision and the absence that birthed the film.
In the end, the filmmaker’s inner journey brings him back to where he came from. But from where has he come? From his home, from the Favet farmhouse (filmed like an island), from Ithaca or the Island of the Dead?
[iv] From his own death, the other side? It is only at the close of the journey, just before the experience of the return trip, in the extraordinary nocturnal, subterranean sequence at the Omonia station of the Athens metro, that the voice of Thibaudeau explicitly makes the association with Ulysses’s
nekyia [v], his descent into the underworld in Book 11 of the
Odyssey. Just before, Pollet pays homage to Yannis Ritsos, the great, universally admired poet. Modern Homer, cantor of the sufferings and dreams of the Greek people in the 20th century, he died during the filming of
Trois jours en Grèce. Pollet invokes him through the editing, reciting phrases from
Monochords, their timeless brilliance a perfect antidote for the ugliness and stupidity of the televised images of the war. In return, like Virgil with Dante, Ritsos leads Pollet into the underworld of Omonia, to meet the dead. The war of the Persian Gulf is a rather sad remake of that of Troy, and Pollet does not pretend to measure
Trois jours en Grèce against the
Odyssey. But he does remember it, remembers that the journey, unlike war, is without a map or calendar, and that a return is possible. Omonia, like all the other places visited by Pollet in
Trois jours en Grèce, belongs to the world of the living, but is seen through death, made strange by the vision of he who does not return, shaken yet liberated, from the dead.
Méditerranée,
Bassae,
L’Ordre,
Trois jours en Grèce,
Dieu sait quoi: Pollet’s great essay films are profoundly molded by the paradoxical counter-movement of their absent subject, who has left the society of the living only to return as pure perception, wholly receptive to its immemorial appearance. Such an experience – the poetic experience itself – is not dark, but luminous. It is a joy, a jubilation, the feeling of lightness described by Montaigne and Rousseau when they recounted their return to the world after their respective accidents with horse and dog
[vi]. The shock of the syncope, which plunged the subject into the abyss of his past and future death, is also the root of the interior movement of the lying being, of the eternal convalescent who lets himself be carried, floated, rocked by the waves of thought and emotion.
Trois jours en Grèce is a miraculous film, primarily because it is the work of a man who has returned from his own death, and recalls the void. Pollet’s cinema comes to us from this non-place, imagines its expanse, invents its exploration. Like
Méditerranée,
Trois jours en Grèce is not a travel film in the sense that it relates the experience as lived by the filmmaker in Greece. The work of the cinema in
Trois jours en Grèce is that of the syncope: it consists of the negation of the lived, which opens up a poetic existence as a sort of altered life, outside of oneself, outside of time, suspended in a pure haze of memory. The poet’s journey is internal, and still. If Pollet winks at Nerval by titling a chapter of
L’Entre Vues, “I am the other,” it is because he too had “twice crossed the Acheron victorious.” Like the author of
Les Chimères, he returned from his round trip to hell an even greater poet.
[vii] Like
Méditerranée,
Trois jours en Grèce is, in every sense of the word, a chimera film.
[i] Syncope, origin Greek, has two meanings in this essay; the medical term for losing consciousness, and syncopation, the musical term for a disturbance in an established rhythm.
[ii] The Ariane was a series of rockets that were regularly launched from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana through the summer of 1989, the year of Pollet’s accident. The name of the model refers, of course, to Princess Ariadne of Greek mythology.
[iii] A quote from Charles Péguy’s dramatic poem,
Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc (1910).
[iv] L’Île des Morts, a small French island in the Bay of Roscanvel.
[v] An ancient Greek rite used to summon and question ghosts of the departed.
[vi] Circa 1570, French philosopher Michel de Montaigne fell from a horse and lost consciousness for several hours, an event he recounted in his Essais. In 1776, writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau suffered a concussion when he was run over by a Great Dane in the streets of Paris, an episode immortalized in his Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire.
[vii] Je suis l'autre is the title of the poet Gérard de Nerval’s autobiography. In Nerval’s poem, El Desdichado (included in his collection, Les Chimères), the narrator claims to have crossed the Acheron, one of the five rivers to the Greek underworld, and returned.
