Cruising the unknown: film as rhythm and embodied apprehension in L’Inconnu du lac/Stranger by the Lake (2013)

ABSTRACT

In Alain Guiraudie’s L’Inconnu du lac/Stranger by the Lake (2013), rhythm spans the human, the non-human and the cinematic. This article examines how Guiraudie’s film is invested in narrative, ecological and choreographic rhythms, and in a gap or spacing between bodies and things. Despite its depictions of queer sex, love and desire, Guiraudie’s film cannot be understood through bodies ‘in touch’. Bringing together accounts of lived and cinematic rhythm, the article develops an alternative account of film and the body that includes the sensing of distance, spatiality and dissonance. Returning to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s interest in rhythm and the cinema, the article broadens touch-based accounts of film beyond that of a shared and/or proximate encounter. Drawing attention to the sensuality of bodies in space and to the connections between touch, rhythm and film style, the article reconsiders Jennifer M. Barker’s tactile account of cinematic ‘apprehension’. As it solicits our embodied apprehension and is organised by a fatal arrhythmia, Stranger by the Lake highlights the gaps and the spaces, the felt distances and the conflicts that also shape filmic corporeality (including that of film and viewer).

KEYWORDS:

• Rhythm
• Alain Guiraudie
• embodiment
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• Henri Lefebvre
• apprehension

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On rhythm as an organising principle in contemporary cinema see Shaviro (2016).

2. Musical concepts such as the beat, metre and measure abound in critical writing about rhythm.

3. While I am interested in the rhythms of film form, this article parts ways from Eugenie Brinkema’s efforts to establish a radical formalism in film studies that is severed both from representational bodies on-screen and from the body of the viewer. See Brinkema (2014).

4. In addition to choreographing the body in relation to the environment, Guiraudie also marked out the film’s story through daily light indicators. See Frappat (2013).

5. As has been detailed elsewhere, the sense of touch includes tactile, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive modalities. See Fisher (1997) and Barker (2009).

6. On film rhythm and the emotions, see Laine (2015).

7. For an extended phenomenological discussion of how movement and Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on movement connect with the cinema, see Sobchack (2016).

8. See McMahon (2011). Film-philosophical work inspired by Nancy’s touch-as-spacing provides a valuable counterpoint to cinema as a tactile intermingling. See also McMahon (2012).

9. Like Marks’ influential concept of a ‘haptic visuality’, Deleuze is inspired by the early art historian Aloïs Riegl’s use of the term haptic. See Marks (2000).

10. On the haptics of cinematic space see Burch (1990). For an alternate theorisation of the haptic that moves between surface, space and depth in film, see Walton (2016).

11. To be clear, I am not at all suggesting that one cannot have an erotic response to the film’s sex scenes. Such a response speaks to a tactile discontinuity between film and viewer however, as the film’s expressive attitude treats human sex and one of the lake’s sunsets as equivalent events.

12. On care in queer cinema see Stevens (2013).

13. ‘Apprehension’ can also involve legal action such as the seizing or arrest of a suspect. Michel’s arrest is anticipated by the arrival of a police detective on day seven, although it never eventuates.

14. Numerous critics have noted the film’s connections with Alfred Hitchcock. There are intriguing parallels with Rope (1948), in particular: a single set, the long take and the careful blocking out of bodies in a hermetic space. Furthermore, Guiraudie’s foregrounding of the lake (and the spectral corpse it contains) could be viewed as a nature-based reconfiguration of Rope’s cassone. Thanks to Lucio Crispino for his thoughtful suggestion that Guiraudie is re-staging Rope by the water.

15. As mentioned, Barker does consider films that refuse to touch although she views this refusal as attached to a shared emotional state, reversibly enacted by the film and its viewer.

16. As Scott Bukatman (2014) discusses, moments of representational stasis function as a spectacular disruption or durational distention to the film’s larger narrative.

17. Lefebvre asks us to consider the alterity of non-human rhythms such as the midge ‘whose wings beat to the rhythm of a thousand times per second’ (Lefebvre [1992] 2004, 10–11).

18. Merleau-Ponty has also described film as a ‘harmonious aggregate’ (Merleau-Ponty [1948] 2004, 110).

19. According to Guiraudie, Michel’s sexuality is bound up with neoliberal capitalism and consumption.

20. As Ngai observes, dizziness, swooning and spatial disorientation are popular motifs in cinematic depictions of anxiety.