Bons plans

A head pops out from nowhere. Against the black screen, a silhouetted egg-like shape starts to speak, admonish and reprimand:

“So, what’s up?
What have you been up to lately?
What do you say?
What are you doing at the moment?
What can you tell me about you?
You’re not doing anything fancy at the moment, are you?
You’ve got nothing to talk about, have you?
Right?
You’ve got nothing interesting to talk about, have you?
Nothing planned?
You’ve been up to nothing?
You’re not an extraordinary person, are you?
You’ve never done anything special, actually.
Nothing to talk about.
Nothing to say.
You’re really a prick.
You’re really not worth much.
Not interesting at all.
You never do anything special.
You only do plain things, in fact.
And a lot of those things you do are crappy.
You really disappoint me, you know.
I’m sure you do trivial things.
I’m sure you do dull, boring, uninteresting things.
Quite narrow-minded of you, don’t you think?
You gross me out.
You’ve got nothing to talk about.
You’ve got nothing to say.
Loser.
Scum.
Wimp.
I knew it.
I don’t know why I even bother asking you every time I see you.”

Valérie Mréjen, “Bouvet ”, 1997.

Bouvet, Valérie Mréjen’s first video, was made in 1997. It seems to be aimed directly at those viewing it and to scold, chide and humiliate them in an increasingly violent and slightly overdone fashion, in order to induce a response. But there is no response and the address – a rhetorical series of questions – states that what we’ve got here is a speech laden with power and contempt: “You’ve got nothing to say so keep your mouth shut”. However, doesn’t a speech claiming victory lose it right away by expressing it so rudely? (cf. The Dictator). As in an election speech on TV, the message is not to be heard in a full-frontal manner. It is to be watched above all. One can see it, and a sense of distance takes root in this gaze cast upon speech. Even if the soundtrack lets out increasingly accurate insults poured out of fountain-like mouths – and indeed, the image of this face might resemble a fountain – the shot remains still. Self-assured, the matador waves his red cloth made of words. But he is alone and no bull will dash for his decoy. The only battle he is involved in is fought on the screen, for the screen, and thus on the level of the screen.

To me, this feature, this theme – in the musical meaning of the word – composed of variations and repetitions, connects the work of Valérie Mréjen (born in 1969) to both artistic and cinematic inspirations; historic bonds that she appropriated in order to escape them more easily and thus be able to wander freely about her own stories. On the one hand, Bruce Nauman has showed us that the clown screaming “NON” in his installations will never be saved by us – whether his head be upside down or properly set on his shoulders – and that two lovers speaking to us cannot hear each other. The work (of art) has nothing to do with relationships. On the other hand, when in Une sale histoire Jean Eustache has two different characters, Jean-Noël Picq and Michael Lonsdale, repeat in turn the same first-person narrative, he adds up a comical touch to the first-person speech (du “jeu” dans le “je”) and expresses the plainness of an adventure while depicting its uniqueness. Cinema is not a sublimation. Thirty years later, Nauman’s work (which she does not refer to) just as Eustache’s or Chantal Akerman’s first movies (which she refers to) are duly mentioned in the yearbooks of masterpieces.

However, nothing could be more remote from Valérie Mréjen’s work than the somewhat pompous tone in which those statements and comparisons are made here. The peculiar aspect of her work makes its way concealed behind the seemingly plain surface of an everyday chronicle, behind a mask. In her works, events meaningless to the viewer yet cataclysmal to the persons involved in them are depicted without ever being handled as casework or as mysteries likely to be solved through psychological or sociological analysis. “Dialogues are events occurring exclusively between two characters talking to each other; they are not addressed to the viewer as is usually the case (…) and in this the dialogue is similar to life. The viewer is actually watching life itself”, a paradoxical life reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s statement about Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman. (1)

The language used here consists in a series of minor events going wrong. For instance, a mother chiding her teenage daughter: … “You should put yourself on a diet, you know. You’re starting to get a little fat, it’s too bad. I’m saying this for your own good. And you should also try to dress better. Look at you, you’re dressed like bum! You don’t know what suits you. I’m saying this because I love you, because I want you to look pretty, to feel good”… (Michèle et Aurore, 1997, 2’ starring Michèle Moretti and Aurore Mréjen). In Anne et Manuel, 1998, 2’15” starring Anne Consigny and Manuel Mazaudier, a young man keeps yelling at his girlfriend about a handful of peanuts: … “Oh my god! I can’t believe it! You’re so hopelessly clumsy! – Will you help me please! – Well, uh… I’m not sure I can. You’ve just called me clumsy, so…– ffff… It came out like that, I’m sorry I said that. You know I didn’t mean it! – You’re so literal-minded, you silly… – Come on, help yourself, you whimper!”… (« ah là là ! c’est pas vrai ! quelle incapable ! – tu peux m’aider s’il te plaît ! – oui ben, je sais pas, tu viens de dire que j’étais une incapable alors…- ffff… ça m’a échappé, je retire ce que j’ai dit, tu sais bien que je ne le pense pas – tu prends tout au pied de la lettre toi, hein imbécile… – bon allez, sers-toi, mauvaise tête! »…). But because she lets him speak does not mean he has the power: passive resistance.

Maybe this strict will to avoid any spectacular effect is to be understood as a consequence of Valérie Mréjen’s approach concerning her works between 1994 – when she graduated from the Fine Arts Institute – and 2004. The short and even very short format has now become a trademark of her prose texts, videos, filmed portraits and published writings. This very book[1] beas witness to her fondness for concision since a whole dialogue spreading on XXX or XXXX scenes is here reduced to x pages thanks to the insertion of one, two, three or four photograms. The length of the videos never exceeds 4 minutes and three seconds – duration of the longest – and can be as short as 45 seconds. The 14 memories cinematically hinted at by different people in the first Portraits filmés do not last longer than 13 minutes 30 seconds (Portraits filmés, 2002). The later Portraits (2003) seem to carry on the same sense of transience, if we may use such a paradox. Her movies (La Défaite du rouge gorge, 2001, lasting 23’Chamonix, 2002, lasting 13’) undoubtedly belong to the conventional species of short-feature films. Her published narratives amount to 64 printed pages in Mon grand-père (1997), 80 in L’Agrume (2002) and 92 in Eau sauvage (2004). Her writing is rooted in the same search for concision: “One idea per sentence, avoid rambling” (2).

The image itself is quite laconic too: each of these portraits and scenes consists most often in a single real-time sequence-shot not even edited afterwards. The camera is still, the scene accurate. The character(s), sitting or standing are captured at mid-height. The upper part of the body appears on the screen, the lower part is most often out of frame. Chairs, seats, couches – many couches, actually, often cut out by the framing – and tables, laid out or not, are the only and rare mobile items in a quite shallow setting: wall, painted wall, wall and wallpaper, wall and light switch come along with the human beings on the screen. A person is worth a shot, a shot is worth a person who speaks and remains silent.

The outlines of the films are dryly worded in one or two sentences. An old lady keeps repeating the same formula over and over: “au revoir, merci, bonne journée ” (Au revoir, merci, bonne journée with Paulette Bouvet). In a kitchen, a lady asks questions to a young boy – probably her son, though their link is not clearly stated – about his vacation: did you have a good time? (Tonie et Etienne / 1’40” / 1997). A young lady relates a sensuous night (Jocelyne, 1998). A young girl has invited some friends over for a tea party but only one of them shows up and the afternoon gathering immediately turns into an embarrassing face to face (Le goûter 4’03” / 2000, starring Mireille Roussel and Jérémie Elkaim). Three girlfriends get together over a table to put pen to paper about their common project for the future (Le Projet / 1’54” / 1999, starring Anne Consigny, Jocelyne Desverchère and Lucia Sanchez). A man complains about a woman he is somehow connected to, Huguette. His grievances are reiterated six times in a row (Huguette, 3’08”, 1998). A girl cannot help uttering the overused word “sympa” (equivalent of “nice”) (1’10”), another one gets upset about “des trucs” (“stuff”) (1’30”).

This surgical precision is not exactly useless. First because it emphasizes a common feature that states a difference. Though extremely short, her works are far from being mere sketches (or anything suitable for the “film test” category), or fragments to be extended or magnified elsewhere. Nor do they take after the extreme conciseness typical of a Haiku, an aphorism, or a popular maxim. They have nothing to do with the journalistic practice so dear to art critic and anarchist activist Félix Fénéon with his “ brèves en 3 lignes ” (3 line news flash); nor with the theatrical skit or the folk singer’s performance, since there is no final twist or epilogue that would undoubtedly add a cathartic dimension to the work. Here, concision is not conceived as a virtuoso skill. It acts as a bond linking and weaving the different entries of a work that has as much to do with “film”, as with “artistic video”, “short story”, or “narrative”. The thing is, the transition from one genre to another inextricably entangles the chronological order.

Having sworn allegiance to non-conformism as regards these categories – art, cinema, literature –Valérie Mréjen assuredly shares with other artists, film-makers, writers from her generation this rejection of a favorite medium. After all, one must prevent artistic disciplines from remaining isolated; one must fight against the sacralization of their role in order to understand in a collective manner what creation is all about and what is at stake in art today. Some encounters are to be invented: take by way of illustration, Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits of Israeli soldiers, Thai film-maker Archipatpong Weerasethakul’s feature film Blissfully Yours, Belgian photographer Michel François’s pictures, Japanese film-maker Naomi Kawase, British artist Sarah Lucas’ installations, Gillian Wearing’s series of pictures shot on the street (“I’m desperate”..), choreographers La Ribot and Jérome Bel’s dancers, Scottish film-maker Bill Douglas’s somber trilogy all belong to these swinging motions Valérie Mréjen likes to refer to. Indeed, according to Vincent Dieutre (3), Valérie Mréjen refuses to draw the outline of the borders she trespasses, thus shaking out of their mold all the “internal” discourses typical of each discipline and forcing art critics to wander off on a dazzling path like erring hoboes. Their subsequent confusion is strongly felt here in their inability to define clear plots and to unravel the narrative thread of books, videos and films that keep referring to each other and echoing one another in a deafening tense-matching masquerade. and

“In Valérie Mréjen’s work there is no sociological exoticism spoiling the obvious accuracy of the style. Her short and sharp films do not claim to extract themselves from reality thanks to a hand-held camera, nor to chase out excessiveness until the sneering outskirts of the social world. Through the use of still and reflexive shots, Mréjen gradually erases any trace that could betray the striking immediacy of the documentary genre and thus patiently recreates the timeless truth of a human exchange. A spotless and pure event that each viewer has experienced at least once.”(4)

Thus, the artist drains visual arts of their deep matter to retain only their most mundane scum, that of hollow and fragmentary conversation, where people with fluctuating plans meet and remain locked up within their own aloofness thanks to a strategy drawing on tiredness, boredom and silence: out of all this void, she manages to produce filmed and written artworks that sound dreadfully true.

…/….
Edouard
Yes

Franck
Do you have any plans?

Edouard
Yes.

Franck
Me too. I’m gonna have a look around. I haven’t seen anything yet.

Jocelyne
Hello

Eric
Hello

Jocelyne
How are you? What are you doing at the moment?

Eric
Well…Uh

Jocelyne
I have been so busy lately!
I’m in the process of setting something up, but I’d rather not talk about it for now.

Eric
Mmm

Jocelyne
I’ll keep you posted, if you want…

Eric
Oh yes, please do

Jocelyne
All right.

Eric
Thanks.
…/…

Valérie
Who was it?

Eric
None of your business

Valérie (embarrassed, feigning detachedness)
I was just asking out of curiosity.

Franck
I didn’t see you yesterday!

Christophe
Where?

Franck
At the Blue Bar.

Christophe
I didn’t know about it…

Franck
Too bad. I was invited at several other places, you know.

Christophe
Really? Well, yeah, no… I couldn’t have made it, anyway.

Chantal
I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I feel so tired.

Jocelyne
Yes… Maybe it’s because of the stormy weather?

Chantal
I don’t think so. It’s just that when it’s too packed – like here – it makes me numb.
Ok, see you in a few.

Jocelyne
Yeah, I’m sure we’re gonna bump into each other…

Sophie
All this snobbish small talk is making me sick.

Scali
Oh my god, I can’t stand it!

Sophie
Same here. I barely show up anymore.

Scali
Hi! (5)
…/….

Valérie Mréjen passed the placement examination of the Fine Arts Institute of Cergy-Pontoise (greater Paris area), after wandering for three days in the Department of Humanities of La Sorbonne – where she registered in hopes to attain a literature degree allowing her to take the placement test of La Fémis – and attending courses at the Fine Arts Institute of Paris for a little while without being officially enrolled, “I wanted to work in the field of cinema, she explains, but I landed in an art school and felt like writing. I was tempted to experiment things through speech but at that time I was utterly scared to step across the line. I ended up resorting to the written word in indirect, nearly hidden, ways.” Reminiscent of “some kind of calligraphies”, her school assignments feature plant veins used as typographic signs. She makes a curtain out of tiny squares of paper mache lined up and linked to each other by white string, and also a bag made of thin cardboard layers… Hers are voluminous installations, made out of quite fragile material, “conveying an attempt to approach language, speech and the written word while keeping a distance by beginning with rather tactile and visual works.”

At the time when Mréjen enrolls at the Fine Arts Institute of Cergy, teachers have already overcome the machismo inherent to visual arts. But because most students attending that training are female does not necessarily mean that all fine arts schools in the 1990s emphasize a critical teaching of gender issues. The usual masquerade consists in confusing fragility with femininity so that any question can be handled in the light of the so-called gender differences and mawkishness established as womanly art. And this infuriates Valérie Mréjen. Finding one’s identity as an artist implies above all searching for: “a way to word things. For instance, a way to word power struggles in relationships, a phenomenon I first sensed – expressed latently – within my family. There was an unspoken tendency to pay more attention to boys than to girls. That situation must have been quite beneficial to me, I guess. As if, somehow, it was not that bad for a girl to attend an art school because she would manage to get married one way or another and then everything would get back to its right place. Within my family I had to assert my own self by resorting to a kind of trickery, a means other than denunciation; I had to wear a mask and I think this has perspired into my work.”

In her first exhibition, held in the town of Mériel in the Val d’Oise county (greater Paris area) in 1994, she uses illustrations nicked from the dictionary to ponder over the word and the thing. Her second exhibition, in Châteauroux, displays a series of ready-made phrases such as “Comme on respire. Comme une reine. Comme un rat mort.”

Then, she turns to the “cut-up” technique, a sensorial and literary process born from Gysin and Burroughs’s minds and designed to cut out pieces from the material aspect of language and to take advantage of chancy combinations: a visual, material and inventive tool, like collage in painting or montage in film-making. She adjusts it to the material provided by surnames and family names. After all don’t they constitute the matter with which we all used to play Lacan charades? Roland Barthes recalled how he used to have a good laugh with “Madame Lebeuf, Barbet–Massin, Delay, Voulgres, Poque”(6) while Freud – concerned with the psychic mechanism underlying behind lapses of memory in 1898 – remembered that he had willingly forgotten the Signorelli’s name when trying to bring back to his memory the author of the frescos in the Orvieto Cathedral… Valérie Mréjen amuses herself with “Monsieur Georges Berec, Messieurs Raymond Roussel et Madame Marcelle Prout ”. And there actually exists a town in South-western France that has a street called “rue Pierre Ménard”[2]…

She draws her raw material from phone-books and composes terse, wire-like messages – again, out of desire to be concise – bracketing names and surnames in long single lines: “MON Roger BICHON Barthélémy BIEN Adélaïde ARRIVÉE Claudie OUF Alain”.

Valérie Mréjen defines these works as time-killing leisure activities: “I was severely bored. Instead of counting sand grains on the beach – impossible, absurd and complicated task – I thought: “hey, why don’t you read the phone-book?” So I undertook this deciphering, which kept me busy for several weeks (Paris, volumes 1 and 2). The task proved fruitful and astonishing”.(7) Classifying the game into happy families, she files the names that stick out into determined categories – body parts, temporal landmarks, animals, foods etc. –, finds material, composes sentences with the chosen names, and then roughly cuts out the spot where they are printed in the phone-book and sticks them – the way summer camp labels were stuck on the back of children’s clothes – on recycled paper similar to the one used by France Telecom:

Minus Jacob
Couille Pierre Molle Didier
Tu Jean–Michel Es Syaktra Un Sun33r (8) Pet Violeta De Wei Lapin Marcelle
Je Chang Sup Te Leng Chie Etienne Dessus Noémi

When reading those patronymic chains and looking closely at the first names, one notices the ethnic diversity inherent in the French territory way better than on election boards. The family name “Je Chang Sup” is repeated over and over every time the artist needs to use the first-person pronoun “Je” (“I”). Concerning other family names, one wonders how exactly they were truncated to appear as “Tu”, “La”, or “Un”.

Ultimately, we find out that there is nothing more anonymous than personal names. As if she wanted to emphasize this oxymoron, Valérie Mréjen starts to write dirty and quite stereotyped ads in a morse-like style and to stick them on the back of slightly old-fashioned post-cards devoid of all historic interest and exotic relevance, though. For instance, she juxtaposes Madame Gros and Monsieur Derche (“gros derche” meaning “fat bottom” in French). Another good example is:

GARS André, Fessu Michel Gros Agnes Bazar Jacky et Marie josé, Saute Robert, Poulette Andrée, Belle Eugène Paire Bernard De Lily Lolos Geo Dans Dominique La Pelkanj, Partie Michele Avant Dominique, De Ajit, Son Sanh, Camion Juliette

Or else:

Vieux Serge Sadique Mohammed Baisse Elisabeth Son Chantal Slip S Pour Maurice Faire Marthe Voir Angèle Son Bernard Kiki Simone Devant André Qui Alain-Tuan Veut David

These texts belong to a series of published works and exhibitions (chez Valentin, 1995, “Liste Rose”, Galerie du Jour, 1997), held very shortly after the artist’s graduation from art school. However, this early success is not enough for Valérie Mréjen to earn a living thanks to her art. She has to work for the Festival de cinéma de La RochelleMon Grand-père, and her first videos. From the sphere of visual arts where she moves about, Valérie Mréjen decides to focus on language-oriented works, branching off without choosing a favorite discipline, “because it occurred to me that the written word was sometimes more adapted to what I had to say. However, at other times, with works revolving around repetition, requiring some staging and actors, video had to be resorted to. When I realized that speech was what interested me at the utmost, my work evolved: speech became the topic rather than the medium.”

for quite a long time. The phone-book pieces require an extremely slow and tedious work – reading phone-books, selecting words, composing, researching and cutting names, setting up lists etc. On top of that, she has to start all over again due to an incident at the workshop she shares with another artist, Nicolas Moulin. And in the end, after such a Sisyphean twist, this process seems to become way more laborious than counting sand grains. In short: “people started to tell me: “hey, you’re the one doing stuff with phone-books!” I told myself it was time to quit”… Soon afterwards, she produces a literary narrative,

When she was in art school, some of her calligraphic experiments turned into autobiographical works: “During my third-year there, I did an assignment in which I traced the names of some of my relatives (on my mother’s side) who had died in concentration camps in little rows of lined-up seeds”. This work tends towards an aim that has nothing to do with anamnesis: it is about casting light upon family stories known by all but told by none. Written in the library of the Glasgow School of Art – where she had enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts after attaining her French degree – Mon grand-père, named after the computer file, according to the artist, depicts speech as a way to lay things down. A first-person narrative mostly in the preterit tense, divided into short paragraphs, this piece contains a few hues, a few patterns, and a few nicknames taken from a chronologically and genealogically twisted family novel. One drama per paragraph. “Mon grand-père” – his mistresses, his wives – “Ma grand-mère”; “Ma mère”; her habits, her death. “Mon père”. However, one should not see these figures – “Mon père”, “Ma mère” – as part of an oedipal triangle with the “I” nestled in one of its corners. Behind the tale of the origins, there is no hidden rule demanding that the psychic truth be told. No truth other than the spoken one. The best aspect of this neutral yet dreadful narrative about childhood memories is that it never anticipates the next paragraph. This way, it becomes a never-ending piece and everything remains yet to be done. It nearly feels like the family novel is inventing its emotional implications as it is being written. Louise Bourgeois also constructed a family novel that neither leans on the side of truth nor on that of falsehood but merely lays down the author’s own speech, like a room to herself, a place where no one will ever come disturb her and ask: “where do you speak from?”

If the written word describes the spoken word, the image undoes or debases it. Valérie Mréjen starts to draw her inspiration from misunderstandings experienced by her and known to all: commonplaces that cross each other without ever actually meeting, “dead-ends spoiling moments of exchange. For instance, when I was asked questions I had no clue how to answer: “What do you do now?”; “What’s up?”… Everyday words that would make me feel uncomfortable because they introduced some sort of helplessness into the communication. Or those embarrassing memories: “How are you doing? Really? Sure you’re OK? Because you look exhausted, you know”. Slices of life that I did perceive as misunderstandings. I felt like using this raw material, like creating something out if it, staging it, trying to extract the comical, the absurd and the emptiness out of it”… Those first videos date back from 1997. At that time, Valérie Mréjen bought a camera with money she saved from her first wages.

Out of the 26 videos made between 1997 and 2004, 23 are based on the same principle. They are monologues and dialogues written – even “very written” – by the artist. Those short pieces turn situations seen, heard, related or experienced into staged scenes involving two or three characters. From their relationships, power struggles inevitably arise, embarrassing and confusing moments inescapably occur without really putting the weaker one at a disadvantage, though. And a paradoxical affection oozes from those exchanges. In Maïté et Philippe (1997), a father is seated in front of his daughter, both of them in an armchair. He asks her if she is doing fine, if everything is OK, if she hasn’t had too much on her mind lately, if there is something she doesn’t dare to tell him. As the questions turn into a real cross-examination, he ends up – not surprisingly – letting all out, confessing that seeing her brooding all day long worries him a lot, swearing that he asks those questions for her own sake, that it bothers him to see she is depressed, that he feels she is depressed. The worst is that his tirade eventually falls flat: “Are you OK? – Yes, I swear I’m all right. – Ah, fine then. ” The questions have soon turned into a minor aggression; eager to spark off frankness, the father paved the way to foolishness, anxious to question his daughter, he ends up questioning his own behavior, caught at his own game. As Roland Barthes brilliantly stated, claiming silence (the right to keep one’s mouth shut, not to answer, not to listen) is a means to fight against anger, affirmation, arrogance and everything that re-embeds the “conflicting modes of speech”. For instance adjectives used to harm the other. And adverbs. Or ready-made phrases such as: “comment ça va ”.

“Issue relating to social manners, modestly but very well raised by Kafka (Blanchot, The Endless interview): Kafka wanted to know when and how many times, when eight persons were having a conversation, one should speak in order to avoid being judged too quiet; an anxiety most of us have already experienced; I must say something, anything, otherwise people are going to think I am bored (and yet it is true, etc.) Here, the cost of the sign is estimated: which amount of repetitions does one need to create a sign – or outsmart the opponent’s sign (I am not quiet)? (9)”

In order to keep the distance, without gliding into a psycho-dramatic piece or “turning into a “Strip-Tease” of the social narrative”, as Vincent Dieutre wittily worded it (10), Valérie Mréjen asks actors to enact those written texts. The latter, filtered by a third-party’s interpretation, achieve – after many rehearsals – the same neutralization through speech as the one obtained with the written word. Sometimes she manages to drag professional actors into her lame plans (only half a day of shooting, no budget etc.). Among them Jean-Christophe Bouvet whom she met at a screening and whose number and address she was given by a producer friend of hers; and also Jean-Christophe Bouvet’s mother, whose presence you can notice in films by Vecchiali and his buddies; Tonie Marshall or Michèle Moretti, with whom Valérie Mrejen got in touch thanks to her boyfriend and accomplice script-writer and poet Stéphane Bouquet, who used to write film reviews back then. Those relationships lead to other ones: actress Denise Schröpfer, the lady in Une Noix, whom Valérie Mréjen had seen in a medium-length film, introduces her to Lucia Sanchez who has her meet Jocelyne Deschverchère – the actress embodying Jocelyne (1998) who describes with much detail the tedious and slightly disgusting machinery of a sexually thoughtless man; the last two ones will feature in other later films. One of Valérie’s sisters, Aurore Mréjen, plays in Michèle et Aurore, 1997. In Une Noix, a girlfriend of Iris’s, one of Valérie Mréjen’s friends’daughter, plays the part of the little girl asked to record her song but failing to do so because of her excessively zealous mother’s inhibitive behavior, bearing witness to the inflexible rivalry of the mother towards her daughter. Interrupting one another, not listening to each other but getting enslaved, all together, to a struggle for speech-sharing: This family is wallowing in its own perverse jouissance. “Right from the first scene, Barthes writes, language begins its long career as restless and useless phenomenon.” (11)

However, neither psychoanalysis, nor sociology are solicited here in this attempt to update the common goods of sociability. “Valérie, weeps over nothing, not even over the world of Art; she knows doing so would ineluctably imply that all is not lost, that things can still be restored (or at least held in a frozen frame for a while). But if the artist strives to rid her images of any socio-cultural background, it is because this immemorial heterotopia, reduced to the least common fiction, has become the last place where the narrative can find shelter. You can not just set a sociological ready-made aside and display it in a loop on a screen within a museum. It just is not enough. If, one day, she wants to see all the little isolated entities enlighten the world, Valérie should not count on documentary objectivity: it would be powerless. She must absolutely control the origin (closeness) and the making (feeling) of her art. It’s the only way. ” (12)

By resorting to repetition, Mréjen ousts the naturalistic humor embodied by French comedians “Les Deschiens” and evicts its symptoms. The only images we are reminded of here belong to the world of Copi, to his laconic and lonely Femme Assise (Woman Sitting). In Valérie Mréjen’s work, a similar figure, a woman sitting on a couch – full-front, though – complains about her husband’s behavior and recounts painful memories. The trilogy composed of Des larmes de sang (2’ / 2000), La poire (45” / 2000) and Elisabeth (3’19” / 2000) was not written by Valérie Mréjen but told by her aunt, none other than the lady on the screen sitting on a couch and telling the stories the film is made from. “One day, my father was telling me this story about the “Larmes de Sang” (“Bloodtears”). He was really good at imitating my aunt and I found the story hilarious. I thought to myself I should film her directly. I went to her place with my tiny camera and asked her to tell me this story. We did a film test that turned out pretty good even though when viewing the rushes I realized that we were not quite there yet. But my aunt being extremely cooperative, we rehearsed the scene and finally shot it as if she had learned her text by heart and was reciting it aloud. Actually, it was the first time I worked with someone without writing the story myself. It was all about her, her phrases, her emphases, the graphic way in which she described situations. After creating this slightly different series I grew anxious to work with the people around me, people I knew. I wanted to ask them to tell me a true memory, a personal story while working with them as with actors, making up the basis of the narrative and reshaping it bit by bit while shooting the takes.”

This is how the Portraits filmés series came to life, those memories told by a single person. Each figure is an isolated entity (we are not dealing with a group “portrait” here). Silence pokes into before and after the protagonist has spoken. Sitting or standing in a setting that, although rather dehumanized, still appears as the inside of a home, possibly an apartment. A wall, a barely visible corner, a pilaster, a closet, a piece of kitchen or living-room furniture, a sofa fragment: the presence of these objects bears witness to the carefully crafted switch from reality to abstraction. Valérie Mréjen always composes her portraits in the same way: a bust, a body cut at mid-height, hands invisible or on the edge of the frame; more than a mere face. Most of her portraits – and this is not fortuitous – depict people the same age as her, namely in their early thirties. The teenagers have grown up and their discourse no longer belongs to the world of “generic, ungenerational childhood […] “considered as a category as opposed to the adulthood seen as a genus”, (13) a childhood staged as muted and stubborn in the artist’s previous videos. No one plays smoothie anymore. And there is no room for resent.

Indeed, the memory changed into text, just like the books written by Valérie Mréjen did. In about fifteen takes, the originally personal and non-fictional stories recounted by the characters are utterly transformed. Sometimes after the artist’s own intervention. “Not always that much in fact. I only introduce a few components. For instance, if there is a final twist or a closing sentence I generally remove it so as to leave the narrative open. I put a lot of efforts in avoiding to repeat words, in erasing details that sound too oral, like hesitations.” Most importantly, when a story keeps being repeated over and over, it ultimately migrates from the innate to the acquired and becomes a text memorized rather than uttered, a tame memory, a deconstructed event, distanced from the prime emotion ingrained in the original narrative, l’originel as they say in French. In this, Valérie Mréjen’s filmed portraits are like a distortion of Cindy Sherman’s filmed self-portraits: they are copies devoid of originals.

The scene is set in the United States. Reminiscent of a lover eager to yield to her desire but failing to find the place where to do so, a young woman humps along her little snack – a banana, a sandwich, and apple – from place to place and eventually finds shelter at the public library. Day after day, she comes here and draws from the depths of her bag the lusted-after foods to wolf them down in one go. Another portrait takes us to Argentina, where the mother of another young woman is excited because her turn is coming to organize a Tupperware meeting. But her husband –the young woman’s daughter – suddenly dies. However, the o so longed-for womanly social gathering takes place no matter what. A man relates that one day he was overwhelmed by a feeling of happiness and wrote “je ne crois pas en Dieu” (“I do not believe in God”) on a piece of paper, rolled it into an aspirin tube and buried it in his garden. A young woman realized one day that she hated her father and had developed an elaborate protection system to shield herself from the least sputter emanating from him during the meals since this would have left her unable to eat further. The same woman – dressed in another color – relates another memory, etc. In all these Portraits filmés, the person has become a protagonist of his/her own fiction: each one of them managed to invent at least one story, to nurture in his/her memory or imagination a recollection worth telling, worth linking to others. From all this emanates the deep sense of a shared secret and the glow of an anecdote that goes free of any metaphorical, mythological or tragic amplification: no Oedipus, nor Medea, nor Cinderella. On the scale of the image size the characters have become great actors. As Barthes states in the preface of his Fragments d’un discours amoureux: “It all started with this principle: that one should not reduce the lover to a mere symptomal subject but rather let the non actual – that is to say unrelenting –(14)

This is where video-making meets cinema. La Défaite du rouge-gorge – a 16 mm short film written by Valérie Mréjen in collaboration with Stéphane Bouquet – partly echoes the theme explored in L’Agrume, published in 2001 while Mréjen was shooting her first Portraits filmés. Anachronism and non-currentness. A first person narrative, L’Agrume is the “tragic-comical account of a relationship between her and a man who does not love her, but likes exhaust fumes, cleans his glasses with detergent on a daily basis, keeps standing her up and finally stops to call.” (15)

“He illustrated his depictions with hand gestures, miming the sprinkle hose, the opening of a lid or a Big Mac box. To express sensations linked to taste, he would slightly close his eyes and rub his finger tips as if he had just relished a slice and wanted to get rid of the leftover crumbs. One day he tried truffle juice and had an epiphany. He would ramble about his grandmother’s cakes, the cookies from the mall and the Mère Poulard biscuits [3] . Once, I dreamed I was on a train with him and his girlfriend. She was showing him different types of biscuits to catch his attention. Bruno was totally buying into it, enraptured by all these findings. He kept nodding and uttering small shouts: “ooh, ooh.”” (16)

La Défaite du rouge-gorge, a film featuring three main characters, Lucie, Bertrand and Pierre, is composed of about twenty shots, all still but one. Lucie met Bertrand during a friendly gathering in the countryside. « Il est mignon ? » ( “Is he cute?”), her boyfriend Pierre asks, « tu es amoureuse ? » (“You’re in love?”). The leading thread of the movie, seemingly this « agrumeuse » love story – a neologism referring to the above mentioned narrative, “agrume” meaning “citrus fruit” –, could be the persistency to insert into each shot a different food or drink. Even in the sensuous scene, the artist makes a close shot on some grapefruit wrapped in tissue paper with a heart-shaped pattern, and out-of-frame moans signal what is going on. Indeed, each shot includes different shapes and foodstuffs, whether a buffet, some coffee, a restaurant, a cucumber, some chocolate, some rum-flavored ice-cream, some marzipan, stale bread, ice, a disastrous lunch or some grandma-made marmalade keeping one stuck at home « alala je ne peux pas venir, c’est trop bon » (“Oh my God, I can’t come right now, it’s just too tasty”). The film ends on the cathartic recycling of a plastic bag, an object abandoned by all – like Lucie – which is eventually granted a new dignity when made into a framed picture. And guess what’s printed on this plastic bag that Bertrand finds « trop moche » (“ugly as hell”)? Fruit, grapes and pineapples depicted in a hyper-realistic fashion. And it is clearly not fortuitous that during an interview with French rock magazine les Inrockuptibles, when asked what her new mythologies would be made of – echoing Roland Barthes and his “return” – Valérie Mréjen replied « Le tube de dentifrice mou » (“the soft toothpaste tube”) and the « aliments à ouverture facile » (“easy-open foodstuffs”). Thus the character’s vegetable-like appearance is objectivized, made apparent. Why do male characters in cinema and literature always have to live for action? Why do female characters only show interest for persons they can truly seduce? This said, why should love always imply the same eternal return?

Valérie Mréjen was granted an artist’s residency at the Fresnoy, National Studio for Contemporary Arts, and a scholarship to shoot a film within a year. Though a rather short period, one year proved long enough to produce a short film. Frustrated because she had to cut out some of the memories she had been told, she decided to make a film out of them, Chamonix (named after the French cake). Again, facing the camera, nine characters tell one memory each. However, Chamonix is shot in a studio and 16 mm film, which necessarily implies a greater distance, further increased by the use of constructed settings instead of the inhabited apartments where the previous Portraits filmés were shot. Plain model-apartment sized wood-panels allow to play with lights and hues, so as to show only some selected architectural elements: setbacks, walls, shadows… So much so that Valérie Mréjen describes Chamonix, as the “fiction-like version of Portraits filmés”. In this film, only two persons tell their own true story: Kiko from Madrid, who also worked as a set decorator for this movie, and Charles Pennequin, the last of the nine characters, who recounts how he couldn’t resist car-chasing his wife and is the only one actually improvising a little. Being a writer, he is used to it, he just had to act his own story in “direct live”. What I found particularly enjoyable in Chamonix, is the team that came to life spontaneously, pervaded with a true team spirit. Some of the team members’ stories are told by others. The still cameraman and the assistant director – both students – also acted during scenes we shot at the end because we had some film and some time left.”

Like love in Rouge-Gorge, in Chamonix memory (remembrances) is thus given back to a fundamental person: the “I”. And this “I” utters an enunciation, not an analysis. The portrait is not “psychological” but “structural”… it enunciates a subjectivity disconnected from any kind of anteriority. “In psychoanalysis, love is always described as a screen concealing something else. It has no life of its own, either for itself or within istelf. It is not a force that creates relationships, feelings, discourses and therefore subjectivity. It is merely the symptom of an already-lived subjectivity and it must be re-connected to a cause one has to find back. (17)” A similar comment could be made about any type of memory (remembrances). Freeing oneself from causality is the supreme aim at stake in art and literature as seen and constructed by Valérie Mréjen. Written during her stay at the Académie de France in Rome (2003), Eau sauvage is shaped in a singular fashion, a single-voice dialogue. The voice is that of the father who keeps expressing paragraph after paragraph his desire to get in touch with his addressee (a woman) who has chosen to remain outside the text. His address, cut in a series of fragments, grows more and more oppressive as the text reveals the father’s issues, inquisitive features and admonitions. Like Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Tocklas, Valérie Mréjen writes to let Daddy speak through her own voice. In her other narratives, the “I” could claim to speak for her. But this time, the “I” and the “you” switch as if, on a painting, the view-point took the place of the vanishing-point. Indeed, both the written word and the image require a structure that provides –beyond the screen – a space for the eye and the ear.

Cinema provides the semiological model for this structure; Valérie Mréjen says she wanted each of these fragments to “resemble a cinema shot, while having this weird single-shot feeling. I wanted to reach a cinema closer to memories or flash-backs as far as duration was concerned, something recurrent, like a chorus”. One should not underestimate the idea of shot, meaning one should play with the polysemy of the word. A shot. Give it a shot. Stand shot. A cheap shot. A lucky shot. A hotshot. A big shot. element in his voice be heard.”

That is what Dieu (God) is all about. So Valérie Mréjen named a few portraits shot in Israel, where she started to focus on the difference between non-belief and secularity, a truly political act in a world threatened by faith coming back in wicked ways. But this goes beyond the scope of this essay.

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1.Gus Van Sant during a conversation with Todd Haynes, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles ”, in Chantal Akerman, Autoportrait en cinéaste, Paris: Centre Pompidou/Cahiers du Cinéma, 2004, p. 180. (My translation)
2. Unless otherwise specified, the statements symbolized by the sign XXX, come from conversations with Valérie Mréjen or from transcriptions or descriptions of videos she provided.
3.Vincent Dieutre, written statement about Valérie Mréjen published in the program of the Côté Court festival in Pantin (greater Paris area), 2001, p. 47. (My translation)
4. Ibid. (My translation)
5. Blue bar / 2’47” / 2000 starring Scali Delpeyrat, Jocelyne Desverchère, Vincent Dieutre, Franck Gourlat, Edouard Levé, Chantal Osterreicher, Valérie Mréjen, Sophie Planet, Christophe Prébois, Eric Savin, Véronique Varlet.
6. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, Paris: Seuil, Collection “Écrivains de toujours”, 1975, p.55. (My translation)
7. Valérie Mrejen, in Le Travail de l’art, n° 1, 1997, pp. 60-97.
8. The street name appears on some of the cut-up pieces.
9. The Neutral, Roland Barthes, Lecture at the Collège de France, 1977-78, New York City: Columbia University Press, 2005, p. 55.
10. Vincent Dieutre, op.cit.
11. Roland Barthes, Fragments du discours amoureux, Paris: Seuil, 1976, p. 243. (My translation)
12. Vincent Dieutre, op .cit. (My translation)
13. Vincent Dieutre, op. cit. Enfance “générique, hors génération […]. L’enfance comme catégorie face à l’adulte comme genre” (My translation).
14. Roland Barthes, Fragments, op. cit., p. 29. (My translation)
15. Frédérique Deschamps, Malice au pays des merveilles, Libération, April 9, 2002. (My translation)
16. Valérie Mréjen, L’Agrume, Paris: Allia, 2002, pp. 11-14. (My translation)
17. Jacques Lebrun, Le Pur amour, de Platon à Lacan, Paris: Seuil, 2002, pp. 289-340. Quoted by Didier Eribon, “… meet with the Greeks or how to free oneself from psychoanalysis”, Colloquium entitled Amour de la philosophie, philosophie de l’amour, Brussels, November 14 and 15, 2002. Original version of passage quoted in the text: « Dans la psychanalyse, l’amour est toujours un écran pour autre chose. Il n’existe pas pour lui-même, en lui-même. Il n’est pas une création de relations, de sentiments, de discours, et donc de subjectivité. Il est le symptôme d’une subjectivité déjà produite et doit être rapporté à une cause, qu’il faut retrouver. » (My translation).