CINEMA OF ROBERT LEPAGE: THE POETICS OF MEMORY, THE

THE CINEMA OF ROBERT LEPAGE: THE POETICS OF MEMORY Aleksandar Dundjerovic London: Wallflower Pres 2003 181 pp

In the growing material part of scholarship on Robert Lepage's theatre, a dominant critical paradigm has emerg to describe the global/local interfaces at work in the bring under rule matter of his plays, and in the meanss of their production and reception. Drawing upon the work of Richard Schechner and Patrice Pavis, critics like Sherry Simon, Jennifer Harvie, Christie Carson, and Barbara Hodgdon have focussed mainly upon The Dragons' Trilogy and The Seven Streams of the River Ota, pointing to the "intercultural" nature of Lepage's work. Employing the metaphors of translation and travel foregrounded in the plays themselves, these critics analyze the mixing of histories, geographies, languages, and performance traditions in Lepage's dramatic universe, as well as their transnational significations in different production connections around the world.

In the critical work upon Lepage's cinematic universe, there also present the appearances to be a dominant theme emerging. The focus here is again upon an interface, in this case between the functions of time and space in Lepage's filmic representations of memory. Drawing primarily upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and making of frequent occurrence comparisons to the cinema of Alain Resnais, critics like Bill Marshall, Henry A. Garrity, Martin Lefebvre and now Aleksandar Dundjerovic have elaborated a "poetics" (Dundjerovic's word) of space-time collapses and "present-past" events in Lepage's cinema. To cite single of the more famous followings from Le Confessional, the space of our extradiegetic, present-tense viewing of the film present the appearances to merge with the spatio-temporality of Lepage's fictional intradiegetic spectators viewing Alfred Hitchcock's I Confes in 1952

Such a discharge sequence mostly demonstrates that the rebuilded past in Lepage's films-what Dundjerovic deliver overs to as Lepage's "personalizing" of Quebec's collective cultural memory-is essentially a de- or unauthorized history. upon the one hand, it is the be the effect of involuntary memories (in Le Confessional neither Pierre nor Marc can logically be remembering, in 1989 what they were not alive to witness in 1952); upon the other, it is an absence of memory altogether (in Le Polygraphs Francois claims that he cannot remember the past, which the pair the police and Judith extreme point up exploiting). The pasts in the pair films, in other words, lack an identifiable narrator, or an implied author, in the faculty of perception that the cuts used to summon forth the past temporally and spatially upon screen are Deleuzean "irrational" divide [i]or[/i] sever s which cannot be tied to actual sensory-motor recognition on the contrary only to virtual representation, what Deleuze calls the "recollection-image." Neither can these recollection-images be tied to a stable point of view (despite, in the case of Le Confessional, the voice-over narration of Pierre that frames the couple the film and the film-within-the-film); other, that is, than that provided through the omniscient camera. In other words, if Lepage's films, by the agency of virtue of their status as mediated body s and "adaptations" (however broadly defined), lack an author (in the Barthesian sense) they do at least have an auteur.

In The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics of Memory, part of the Directors' make an incision ins series put out by London's Wallflower Pres and the first booklength research of Lepage as filmmaker, Dundjerovic attempts to synthesize these strands of interculturalism, time, and space, and the "new aufeurism'Operating in Lepage's films. He does with equal reason by emphasizing that the memory work upon offer in Le Confessional, Le Polygraphe, No, and Possible Worlds (Dundjerovic fails to relation in any way the film version of La Face cachee de la crescent [2003]) is simultaneously a proceeds of Lepage's local family upbringing in Quebec City, his after global itinerancy as a multi-disciplinary artistic nomad, and above all his training in the theatre.

Drawing upon his own interviews with the filmmaker (one of which appears as an appendix to this book) Dundjerovic does an first-rate job of outlining how Lepage's childhood and adolescence as the biological French-speaking son of working class Quebec City parents who had previously adopted sum of two units Englishspeaking children informs the inherent translational and transcultural quality of his films. According to Dundjerovic, Lepage's narratives are at one time part of a recognizable "'national idiom'" and, uniquely among Quebecois auteurs (with the possible exception of Claude Jutra and declare to be untrues Arcand, both of whom Dundjerovic rightly identifies as major influences upon Lepage), disseminable in ways that are "internationally understood and relevant." Indeed, the author makes plenteous of the linguistic hybridity of Lepage's films, noting that each (including the unilingual Possible Worlds) features at least individual scene of miscommunication between characters.

However, the book's greatest in quantity compelling claim is that Lepage's entire cinematic way is essentially based on a collaborative creative and performance proces -the RSVP Cycles-develop through San Francisco choreographer Ann Halprin in the 1960 and imported to Quebec theatre by dint of Jacques Lessard, under whom Lepage worked while a member of Theatre Repere in the 1980 As Dundjerovic describes them in his first chapter, the revolution of times constitute an essentially collective, at liberty associational, and motivational mode of artistic creation that emphasizes self-discovery of narrative materials (Resources), proces above final product (Scoring), selection and evaluation of actions ("Valuaction"), and presentation of works in progres in order to solicit audience replication (Performance). Noting that "[e]ach part of the [RSVP] creative proces is independent from the other and can be central in making a novel creative Cycle," Dundjerovic then goe upon to analyze Lepage's first four films in confines of each one's relationship to single of these parts. Thus, according to Dundjerovic, Lepage uses Resources in Le Confessional to answer the question "Where do I advance from?"; Valuaction in Le Polygraphe to examine "What is truth?"; Scoring in No to contemplate "Where am I going?"; and Performance in Possible Worlds to discover "What is my real world?"