The Woman Lying on the Gurney Going Left and then Going Right

I re -watched Jean-Daniel Pollet's MEDITERRANEE  (1963) last night.  It forces your gaze on images that dominate the frame with their singularity and silence.  Ancient ruins quietly stand before us. A pumpkin patch has depth of field, but no depth of narration.  There are paths the eyes must take, such as to the left (bird sphinx) , to the right (bird sphinx), down below (bull fight from up in the stands).  How can we describe the very act of not understanding what it is to see fully, how impossibly one ever sees head on?  Pollet's film excels at making kinesis out of the struggle for accurate memory, and how that struggle makes all sight and sound impossible.  Maybe it is more true to say that his film utilizes sound and vision to engage us in a sense of what it is like to forget.

Frames focus on: ancient pyramids, Egyptian or Grecian artifacts such as an idol of a Bird Sphinx, a traditional bullfight with matadors. We see through, we see around, a direct line of sight is obscured. The camera moves nearly around the pyramids, yet ultimately denying us the full 360 view.

The fact of what we see is inseparable from the histories that created it. The direction is backward, as underlined by the film's Voice Over. The images are illustrations of a search.
We investigate by trying to move around, yet time and again we end up staring at a powerless hollow idol, or (the bullfight) a murder without a beginning or an end.


Regardless of the repositioning of the frame, and of the movement of the objects inside of it, the answer spins around in our heads, not moving us anywhere. Our vision makes us think that we move, but all is "ancient...monotonous..." The voice over tracks our nowhere progress: "We are captured in this theatre."