Review - Méditerranée (1963)

A landmark of experimental filmmaking, Jean-Daniel Pollet's intoxicating masterwork is an attempt at a cinema without narrative, genre or other such conventions, a purely visual and aural experience. It's a dreamlike journey, a travelogue with no apparent itinerary that spans Greece, Italy, Spain and Egypt, with only the haziest distinction between authentic footage and staged scenes. Dramatic ruins, rustic landscapes, strikingly posed statuary and the bloody climax of a bullfight are included in the parade of evocative, seemingly unrelated imagery. Pollet, a New-Wave outlier previously noted for his exuberant depictions of dancers in full swing, adopts the slow-tracking camera movement of his contemporary Alain Resnais, gliding through each vista with a ghostly deliberation. Like the meditative works of Resnais, Pollet's film explores the interstices - between documentary and mythology, unyielding history and ever-shifting memory, the concreteness of an image and the ambivalence of its symbolic content. It baffles and entrances, and in a scant forty-three minutes, suggests an entire world of visual poetry yet unseen. Antoine Duhamel (who would go on to compose the jarring music for Godard's 'Weekend') provides the ancient-sounding score, and Nouveau Roman writer Philippe Sollers pens and recites the cryptic narration.