Julian Schnabel: the eye of the mind: in his film about a man completely paralyzed but for one eye, Schnabel has skillfully interwoven his character's memories with a phantasmagoria of art-historical references and imagery

Brooks Adams

When Julian Schnabers film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly opened at the Cannes Film Festival last May, I was amazed at what a French movie the American artist had made. That brilliant cast of European and Canadian actors and actresses assembled around the artist-director on the tapis rouge; the sheer amount of French verbiage expended on the subject of the late Jean-Dominique Bauby (1952-1907), the editor of French Elle who suffered a rare condition referred to even in French as "locked-in syndrome" and who wrote a book about it in 1997, famously dictated by blinking his left eye in response to a carefully devised alphabet; and later the hoopla when Schnabel won Best Director at Cannes--all filled my days and nights in Paris, where cable TV coverage of the festival is a 10-day long, nearly 24/7 affair.

One of the things that impressed me most when I saw the film in June was the fact that Schnabel had succeeded in getting French regional funding from Nord-Pas de Calais, an area bordering Belgium, where much of the movie was shot in the seaside resort of Berck-sur-Mer. I was particularly bewitched by the way he filmed those Northern coastal locations--the wide beaches, the red-and-white striped lighthouse and in particular the Maritime Hospital, where Bauby spent more than a year. That dour, 1860s brick complex of buildings (somewhat reminiscent of Mass MoCA) and those long, covered terraces along which the patient is wheeled as he gazes out to sea, put me in mind of modern convalescent imagery, even as the film's male subject is visibly and audibly fading away.

Last fall the movie completely disappeared from French circulation, and resurfaced only in early February at my local video store. Even then it was in hot demand and had to be grabbed off the shelves with some alacrity. By then Schnabel and his male lead, Mathieu Amalric, had picked up more French and American awards (Best Director at the Golden Globes, Best Actor at the Cesars, which are the French Oscars), and the movie had found an international niche. Important reviews by David Salle (Artforum) and Sanford Schwartz (New York Review of Books) appeared in the American press, and I was free to sit down and rewatch the movie, as well as his first two efforts, Basquiat (1906) and Before Night Falls (2000), in the comfort of my own kitchen during a winter break. (A fourth movie, Berlin (2007), a filmed evocation of a Lou Reed concert for which Schnabel and his daughter Lola did the sets, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2007 and opened in Paris t in late March.)

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The Diving Bell's sense of place and pacing; its existential concerns, nonchronological structure and impressionistic cinematography--not to mention its nonpuritanical sexual politics--seem plausible today largely because the film was shot in French, and because the screenplay, written by Ronald Harwood in English, remains so faithful to the book's Gallic spirit.

A word about Bauby's book, which I checked out from the library and read on a long train ride to Germany. It proceeds in very short chapters; each reads like a tone poem or meditation. Each was memorized, then dictated letter-by-letter (one blink for "yes," two blinks for "no") to a loyal female transcriber, who, in Schnabel's film, was developed into a full-blooded romantic lead played by the austerely beautiful Anne Consigny.

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The book could be said to belong to the tradition of the nouveau roman--it is certainly all about the construction of the "je" or the 'I' by means of an eye. What a powerful, cyclopean presence that eye becomes in Schnabers film. It's a book that, while challenging to write, is not at all difficult to read. Its poetics--for example, the central distinction between the diving bell, which signifies entrapment in the author's paralyzed state, and the butterfly, which signifies liberation, specifically the liberation afforded, as the author says, by memory and imagination strike me as old-fashioned. Indeed, the author Bauby even has a thing for Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, which he wants to rewrite with a feminine protagonist.

Luckily the book has plenty of rueful humor (all magnified by the voiceover of the marvelous Amalric in the movie), even as it traces the coming to consciousness, and final enlightenment, of a character who clearly has commitment issues. (In the film, his father, played by Max von Sydow no less, scolds him for not marrying Celine, the mother of his children, here luminously portrayed by the quintessential French blonde, Emmanuelle Seigner, a.k.a. Mrs. Roman Polanski.) Bauby is a self-described cad, or rake at least, but in the book, he does make progress.

In Schnabel's movie, Bauby is portrayed, by means of flashbacks, as a dandy in a hurry. In several scenes, he barely has time to take his coat off. After his stroke, in a state of near-complete paralysis, he is decked out in superb bathrobes and pajamas with insistent plaid and check patterns. (These were provided by Olatz Garmendia Schnabel, the artist's wife, who plays Bauby's beautiful physical therapist; she also played the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas's mother in Before Night Falls.) In fact, everyone in the movie wears checks and plaids, which serve as a kind of test pattern for Bauby's bleary vision. (Schnabel himself has a history with plaids and pajamas: consider his late '80s "Tati" paintings on red-and-white checked fabric, appropriated from the down-market French department store, and his extravagantly pajamaed vision of the East Village artist staggering down the street in Basquiat.)

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The Diving Bell depicts a persistent male fantasy of being completely immobilized and powerless yet, miraculously, under no pressure to perform, before a flock of beautiful, nurturing women who essentially do everything for him--wash him, feed him, take his dictation, edit his book. Chief among these is his speech therapist Henriette, played by the plucky Canadian actress Marie-Josee Croze, who almost steals the film with her firm yet adorable efforts to teach Bauby a specially devised alphabet, in which letters are listed in order of their frequency of use. Her pedagogical alphabet card, with its big white letters on a black ground, reminded me of '70s Conceptual art, particularly On Kawara's date paintings and Ben Vautier's scrawled verbal pronouncements, starting with his simple statement of identity, "Ben." The incantation of said alphabet by all the characters in the film (and by the end, none of them are using note cards) gives it a serialist, trancelike allure.

The figure of the paralyzed rake also recalls the 19th-century art-historical tradition of the recumbent pasha in paradise, an orientalist trope that we see, for instance, in Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus. In Schnabel's film, the visual fascination is to see Bauby and Schnabel's pasha fantasies recast in an artfully antiseptic hospital room, where the odd angles of the shots perforce recall the artist's '70s exposure to photographers such as William Eggleston and Lee Friedlander. Seen in this context, none of the character's travails look or feel boring. His flickering vision is captured with a shadowy delicacy in off-kilter, roving shots that are indebted to Cy Twombly's '90s bleary photographs of flowers, and to Sigmar Polke's '70s photographs of opium smokers in Afghanistan.

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Surrealist and Constructivist allusions are also key to the film. The early scene in which Bauby's right eye is sewn shut to avoid infection plays like a knee-clutching riposte to Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou, in which a woman's eye is seen to be sliced by a razor blade. In Schnabel's film, we see the needle doing its work from inside the eye socket, as it were. Late in the film, the protagonist's delirious first drive in his new sports car is shot with vertiginous, sideways and upside-down views of Paris sights that recall the 1920s photographs of Alexander Rodchenko and Laiszlo Moholy-Nagy, among others. Furthermore, the character's mind and Schnabel's screen pictures are occupied with all kinds of visual fantasies and appropriated visual material--everything from shots of Marlon Brando in a wig and makeup, to bullfighters, Tibetans at prayer, nature footage of butterflies dancing from flower to flower and of glaciers collapsing in slow motion.

There is considerable freedom and skill in the way Schnabel threads these fantasies and memories, appropriations and allusions together. One scene in which the narrator visits his housebound father and gives him a shave in the morning light looks to be visibly inspired by Impressionist interiors of men at windows by Gustave Caillebotte and Edgar Degas. Amplifying that Second Empire time frame still further, there are several fantasy scenes in which the character is visited by the youthful Empress Eugenie, whose bust is exhibited in a hallway vitrine and whose crinolines are seen swooshing down the drear hospital corridors. In this surprising interlude, a dancer playing Nijinksy in faun costume executes a triple leap, which, we are told by the assiduous narrator, was perfected when Diaghilev's Ballets Russes was rehearsing near Berck. Late in the film, Eugenie leads Bauby to his own fantasy burial in a ruined chapel where the open coffin is revealed to be full of dirt. This in turn recalls Before Night Falls, in which the opening and closing shot is that of a naked baby, the infant Arenas, playing in a open mud pit, or mass grave.

The fact that Eugenie was the founding patroness of the hospital when it was opened in 1869 as a seaside convalescent spot for tubercular children (all dutifully recounted in book and film) does not diminish the sense of deep lushness and costume-drama aplomb that Schnabel's movie achieves. Don't forget that his first movie, Basquiat, concludes with a Pasolini conceit--a medieval fantasia of peasants looking up to behold Basquiat, the boy prince, trying to escape from his tower prison. In The Diving Bell, we feel Schnabel going for a Visconti-esque opulence in the midst of a seemingly stringent, modernist, Bergman-style scenario.

Christian symbolism plays a visually arresting part in the movie, where most of the women wear pendant crosses. Schnabel seems to have most fun with the scenes set in Lourdes, the pilgrimage spot to which Bauby made an irreverent visit back in the early 1970s with a tall, wildly zaftig and very devout French girlfriend. Lourdes, with its cult of Bernadette, its lines of penitents hoping for a miraculous cure, and its maze of neon-lit streets full of carnivalesque rowdies and stores packed with expensive religious kitsch, provides the perfect pretext for Schnabel to reinvestigate his love of Christian trappings, be they baldachins, retablos or ex-votos. Schnabel, who was born in Brooklyn but grew up in south Texas, was at the forefront of the early '80s U.S. rediscovery of all this vernacular religious material. Though he was certainly not alone (Michael Tracy did it in Texas, Pierre et Gilles did it in France), Schnabel's cannibalizing of debased Christian imagery has had the widest repercussions for decor and taste.

The Lourdes scene becomes in turn one more memorable instance of baldly appropriated Christian iconography in Schnabel's oeuvre, the most recent being the "Christ's Last Day" series of large paintings shown at Gagosian Beverly Hills. These works, as we learn from the Gagosian catalogue, are based on early French X-rays, dating from 1911 (the year his father was born, Schnabel confides to Louise Neri in an interview), found in a deserted house near Berck. This structure, we learn, had recently been inherited by a female administrator of the Maritime Hospital, who showed it to Schnabel. He first used the X-rays in the opening credits of the movie, where we see they have Art Nouveau lettering--"G" and "D" for "gauche" and "droite"--on them and even the odd Parisian address: "Avenue de Massena," I could just make out on one. From these X-rays, I got the sense that that we were going straight to the heart (and soul) of the historical French body. The music at the beginning and end of the film is Charles Trenet's La Mer, an anthem of French postwar sentiment.

Indeed, Schnabel's movie may have done more for French culture (and tourism) than any other movie in recent memory, certainly as much as the Edith Piaf bio-pic, La Mome, or La Vie en Rose, in which Emmanuelle Seigner is wonderful again, as a prostitute who cares for the abandoned child Piaf in a northern French brothel. The Diving Bell may even trump the masterful Ratatouille (with its haunting soundtrack single "Le Festin" sung in French by the groovy chanteuse of the moment, Camille), and that's saying a lot. No wonder the region of Nord-Pas de Calais helped fund Schnabel's film; this movie has put Berck-sur-Mer on the map, for me at least, as an accessible weekend destination--more cutting-edge than Deauville or Trouville.

The irony here is that Berck is not entering the contemporary art canon for the first time. By sheer coincidence, Sophie Calle (with Fabio Balducci) made a video work, Ou et Quand?, about her trip to Berck, on the advice of a paid clairvoyant, which was shown as a work-in-progress at the 2005 Lyon Biennial [see A.i.A., Feb. '06]. That video, in which Calle obediently goes through the paces of visiting the seaside resort, made the location seem like the back of beyond (in French, taken onomatopoeically, "berck" also signifies vomiting), and the very name came to represent for me a deadpan, indelibly northern French joke. Now that Berck is thoroughly imbricated in contemporary art discourse, I can only imagine what kind of cultural programming will soon occur in its unforgettable, Second Empire architecture and along its windswept Northern shores.

Julian Schnabel's "Navigation Drawings" were shown at Sperone Westwater, New York [Jan. 8-Feb. 16]. His "Christ's Last Day" paintings were on view at Gagosian Beverly Hills [Feb. 21-Mar. 22]. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is now available on DVD.

Author: Brooks Adams is a writer living in Paris.

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