The Body as Interstitial Space between Media in Leçons de Ténèbres by Vincent Dieutre and Histoire d’un Secret by Mariana Otero

This essay examines the ways in which the representation of the body in painting is the starting point of a broader reflection on the plasticity of the medium in two French autobiographical films. In Histoire d’un secret (Story of a Secret, 2003) by Mariana Otero and Leçons de ténèbres (Tenebrae Lessons, 2000) by Vincent Dieutre, the body is indeed at the centre, albeit in very different ways. The first is a documentary about the director’s mother who died of the consequences of an illegal abortion in the late sixties. She was an artist and her paintings, many of which depict lascivious female nudes, pervade the film. The second is a self-fictional essay that weaves together narrated episodes of the film-maker’s story as a homosexual and drug addict with close-ups of Caravaggist paintings which tend to focus on bodies in pain. Whether prefiguring death and embodying the absent body through the latent evocation of maternity in the first case, or looking back into figural art in the second, both films point to the plasticity of the medium through the representation of matter, that is, paint and, ultimately, the body. The way in which both film-makers resort to light, the close-up, and, as far as Dieutre is concerned, the diversity of film formats, embodies what Deleuze defines as the haptic gaze to explore cinema’s own materiality. In addition, the presence of the paintings introduces the issue of intermediality which modestly points to a mise en abyme of the broader question of cinema’s shifting ontology.