1929Belgium
"Apparently in response to the adverse audience reactions to Impatience, Dekeukeleire decided to try a new approach. After the French premiere, he told a Parisian interviewer:
The tone here is a bit pompous, but Dekeukeleire did manage to accomplish his goal in his first narrative film, Histoire de détective. The film contains devices familiar from Impatience: an obsessive repetition of a small number of elements, handheld movements over landscapes, and rhythmic editing. But several new structures shape this material. The film presents itself as the record of a case made by a detective, T, who uses the motion-picture camera as his investigative tool. Aside from a few short scenes of T at work in his developing, editing, and viewing rooms, all the shot (except intertitles) purport to come from T’s work. Histoire de détective is thus a film within a film, and the intertitles tell us the story, not simply of the case, but also of T’s filming of the case.
The story concerns J. Jonathan, who is in a neurasthenic state. Mme. Jonathan has, at the beginning of the film, just hired T to discover the reason for her husband’s condition. The film shows shots of Jonathan in Brussels. He then goes to Ostende to recover, but he is bored there. He sets out to return to Brussels but goes on to Luxembourg, is bored again, and goes to Bruges, where he stays for some time, making frequent trips to the seaside. Dekeukeleire inserts series of shots of Mme. Jonathan, in modernist clothes, energetically talking on the phone, listening to the gramophone, writing, and giving a speech. She is portrayed as a frenetically up-to-date woman. Finally Jonathan wanders through a hilly countryside and decides to build a factory among its picturesque ancient ruins. His wife concludes that he is now cured; T has succeeded.
There is a strange tension in the presentation of these events in Histoire de détective. The images themselves convey none of the action. All we see are the two characters, and occasionally T, always in separate shots, walking, sitting, speaking into phones. There are no dialogue titles. Dekeukeleire intersperses shots of the characters with numerous shots of buildings and landscapes, often seen upside-down or rolling in extremely jerky handheld movements. He also includes shots of trivial objects—cups, books, pieces of bread—which do not enter causally into the narrative. Instead of conveying the events in accepted silent-film fashion, through as few titles as possible, Dekeukeleire inserts numerous lengthy titles. Virtually the entire narrative depends on these intertitles. The shots between seem so uninformative that they almost come to resemble found footage around which a narrative has been constructed.
Histoire de détective is an experimental film which allows narrative in, only to negate it by suppressing, not just acting, but all the visual conventions which the silent cinema had built up to present story material to the spectator. Contemporary reviews consistently rebuked Dekeukeleire for depending to heavily on intertitles. Commentators had long become accustomed to praising films like Der letzte Mann for eliminating intertitles. Little in previous filmmaking could have prepared spectators for a film that deliberately made its images wholly dependent upon an extensive text for narrative meaning.
The overall result of tactics like this is a film which seems almost to have an invisible narrative. The titles make the story line clear enough, but in watching the film the spectator cannot really see the narrative being worked out. The images don’t contradict what the titles present, but only occasionally do they show anything which adds to or really tallies with the verbal descriptions (except in a passive way, as with Jonathan sitting on the bridge as the titles describe him “not seeing” things). I don’t mean to suggest that the film is uninteresting—its violent camera movements and rhythmic montages tend to add some of the qualities of an abstract film. And, as one strains to discover the narrative significance of these shots, their very opacity makes them intriguing.
Kristin Thompson