Toward the end of Liberté, la nuit (1983—scene 25 in the script), Philippe Garrel connects three shots in a small but impeccable sketch of the classical principles of modern cinema.

Shot 1

A white rectangle against a white background, a sheet of paper on a creased sheet: a letter from Gémina (Christine Boisson) addressed to Jean (Maurice Garrel). “To tell you what's on my heart.” The surface rises in the frame, completely filling the optical space. The visual dazzle provoked by its whiteness erases what preceded it, creating a hole in the film's logical continuity like a bit of untouched canvas in a painting. The effect of reduction, of shedding is so intense that the screen itself can re-enter the shot, a screen conceived as an ideally pure dimension (perhaps due to the non-visible nature of the subjectile) maintained at the heart of every moving image.

Principle 1

In representation, the image is not an a priori given (no more so than the framing or lighting). However, the filmic economy elaborates a structure. Just like their rhythmic or plastic properties, the shots have a function and differential energy organized by the editing. Here, the shot of white-on-white is literally a barricade: It barricades what came before, contains the narrative pressure and derives the fable from the forms. For modern cinema, this means that any shot can alter, refuse, stop or restart a film, that moment to moment every shot is an adventure for the film.

Shot 2

In front of an iron railing and a white wall, over the course of a two-minute scene, Gémina and Jean act out every possible amorous emotion in a feverous arc building toward joy: destruction, sorrow, disapproval, passion, fusion. All of the episodes required for a love story can be discerned—abandonment, separation, dispute, complicity, declaration, intoxication—through their gestures and postures: prostration, tears, vivacity, trembling struggle, murmurs, kisses, hugs. If this scene is described and suggested rather than narrated, it is because a bedsheet spasmodically gets in between the actors and us, at the discretion of very violent wind.With its noise and light, it carries away the image and sound, sometimes partly and sometimes entirely, like a sudden fade to white occurring randomly throughout the sequence shot.