Knut Erik Jensen.Net

"[...]And some singular phenomena were now happening, where it had become difficult to distinguish the point

where the imaginary and the real were similar. A presence was floating in the air: a form was trying to transappear,

to net on the space become undefinable."


in Contes Cruels, Auguste Villiers de L'Isle Adam

Main Introduction

Watching the world film production of the last forty years, we can affirm that the organic world has died with modern cinema. It means it is already a part of the past when Knut Erik Jensen starts his career in the 1970's. The organic world is no longer a part of the mode of representation but a part of the reflection. The world is getting empty. And this world is the primary character of Jensen's films. Knut Erik Jensen is often analyzed as a Norwegian director of short films or documentaries. He is depicted as a typical northern Norway product dealing with typical Norwegian specifities. But that's not the Norwegian perspective or the documentaries filmmaker analysis that are significant. To focus on his fiction films is a way to propose another kind of approach. The documentary part is though present in an oeuvre and cannot be reduced to some tiny categories. Jensen's poetic does not oppose his fiction to his
documentary productions. His mise-en-scène could sometimes remind us of Béla Tarr (Hungarian) or of Sharunas Bartas (Lithuanian), not of any Norwegian filmmaker. The common point to these three filmmakers (the list could be much longer) is their interest in the disintegration of life, of the real. But our experience of Real has no absolute value.

Jean Epstein recalls in Le Cinéma du Diable, in the chapter untitled Temps Flottants (Floating Times) 1 , that we experience the world through two abstractions. The first one is space, constituted in three dimensions: length, height and depth.
David Bordwell's chapter 2 dedicated to Narration and Space in Narration in the Fiction Film tries to consider space from a painter's point of view. The matters of the representation (light, color...) are his exclusive concern in the "Shot Space". But the graphic aspects of space are the less significant parts that define space. Mircea Eliade cited by Henri Agel and Agel's own reflections in L'Espace Cinématographique 3 are a bit more helpful regarding the qualities of space. They name the two essential qualities of space that are human's abilities to think of it in
dynamic terms. They are the concentration (on one hand, movements from the character to the site) and the dilatation (on the other hand, movements from the site to the character).
Space is also meaningful if we manage to think of it as being a space of the conquest, a sacred space, a space of the differentiation as human activity, as the sign of an awareness.

 

"Spatial dimensions seem immobile to us, but we can move easily in their frame.
On the contrary, The dimension of time seems essentially mobile to us; it seems a
perpetual flow, an uninterrupted flux."4


The second abstraction noted by Epstein is time, constituted in one dimension, a flux. Time is both interior, exterior, variable, instant, duration, perspective. It is more complex and more difficult to define 5. But the daily and the cinematographic experience show that space and time are linked in a continuum. One cannot exist without the second 6. With cinematograph, "the machine to think of the time" 7, time becomes a universal objectiveexperience of itself and becomes a reality, a data. Marey and Demenÿ's chronophotographical experiments are already participating to a will to discover the images of time. But this time is scientist, homogeneous (the logic of the interval and of the continuum 8) and would have the harmony of the palpitating world as a correlate. Lumière's views and their turbulence would be the program of the cinematograph: to reveal the invisible and the equilibrium of the world. This scientist time is built on the interval, on the decomposition and in the recomposition of the ideal gesture 9. The interval would catch the attention of some montage theoreticians 10. The restitution of the time, especially through the use of the slow motion 11, of the anamorphosis, would catch the attention of some others.

Jean Epstein belongs to the second category. The multiplication of the real 12, its anamorphosis through the use of the slow motion and the production of time 13 are among his concern, and his reflection regarding the cinematograph. The objective experience of time is invalid. The negation of time is mineral and alchemical by essence and both Epstein and Morin (Epstein in the caption, Morin in the reception) are aware of it 14. Their theories use terms linked to the occultists (automaton, crystal...). And that is in a first moment the crystal regimes
that are going to help us to define the concept of transparitions. The term of crystallization as echo to the philosopher stone is common to both Jean Epstein's and Gilles Deleuze's texts. But most of the readers never consider this aspect. What is crystallization before becoming Deleuze's crystal image? In Le Cinéma du Diable, Epstein evokes the attribution of specific qualities embodied by the first name Marguerite 15, which a western erudite would immediately associate with Goethe's Faust's heroin.
In French, the term of crystallization like "not resulting froma physic experiment" has been introduced with Stendahl's writings and qualifies the intellectual condensation of activities from the past, the present and the future, something that remains in Gilles Deleuze's crystal image:


"the crystal image was not the time, but the time was in the crystal." 16


The multiplicity is what Gilles Deleuze keeps from the idea of a crystal. The word itself depicts something hard with a complex surface. The attribution of the image of the film doesn't belong to the capture as in Epstein's theories
but to the crystal. The nucleus of the representation ideal as concrete then negates time. In that way, the crystal image is an alter ego to the philosopher time. It allows eternity and is freed from the sandglass. Deleuze privileges the result, the illusion. Epstein privileges the source mediated by the cinematographic machine.
A transparition is neither the first option nor the second one. Between transparition and crystallization, the term of chrysalis (Epstein and Morin deal with this theory) could be a compromise. It would allow thinking of a  metamorphosis, thanks to the membrane of the chrysalis, but a vectorized time (the caterpillar becoming a butterfly) would make the study regress.
A chrysalis responds to Jean Epstein's conception of time. It works with the sandglass time, in one way. The caption of an elsewhere with its invisible realities inside the daily experience of the world is what characterizes this process. Cinematograph according to Epstein is multiple, relativist, but vectorized in time, as the world is revealed by the camera.
In the film history it is thanks to Alain Resnais that time stops being an objective experience or a simple individual percpetion to become proteiform and go beyond Jean Epstein's and Jean Vigo's time games - Trond Lundemo remarks 17 that temps means both time and meteorology in French and Epstein among many others plays with it like in his Tempestaire (1947)- and gives the possibility of times.
Time loses definitely its absolute value but it keeps spiritual qualities. Time is then memory, temporality, incompossible (impossible at the same time) worlds. Time is times; a bunch of virtualities. They surely do not need to become actualized and to be crystallized. That's what happens to a major part of Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Most of the souvenirs are enunciated but just a few are actualized. The film can match Deleuze's sepulcher image as a crystal image. "The crystal image is in truth the point of indiscernability of the two distinct images, the actual one and the virtual one." So why couldn't the crystal image be a valid regime for Jensen?
Passing Darkness (2000) as Last Year at Marienbad is a classical fragmented drama but unlike in Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's film, people do not share their experiences of the time. It is then much more difficult to accept these mute experiences than the ones of the possible worlds of Last Year at Marienbad. Moreover the characters move in an open space and do not stay in a dismal hotel. The film never calls the condensation but on the contrary the dilatation. There cannot be any crystallization because there is not any condensation.
The same lack of condensation invalidates in my sense the article dedicated to Stella Polaris (1993), Margrethe Bruun Vaage wrote 18.
In her study she affirms that Knut Erik Jensen's first feature film corresponds to the crystal image. "Sansning, Tenkning, Teknologi" considers the film as a finished and condensed object. Nevertheless, by its nature, Stella Polaris opens space, narration and perception. It is not a film about memories identified by the audience, but a film about time.
We can regret the absence of all the cosmic dimension of the film in the article. The analysis of the crystal image and of the spiritual automaton only considers one half of the film. Then, Stella Polaris loses its aspiration to create a pure space. The film is perhaps an achieved object but never gives the space as finished and close information. Stella Polaris is a film working on different uncertain layers of time and on a fake narration inherited of Leibniz as Last Year at Marienbad does and as the first part of the essay will develop. Stella Polaris is a film of the cosmos by its title, like Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972).

The gaseous cloud, impossible to catch that globalizes space and time is the real materialization of the transparition. There is no longer either apparition or disappearing but fluctuation, turbulence, transformation taking place, without a beginning and without an end, inside of a chaotic world 19 embodied by the sea. The maritime world of Knut Erik Jensen cannot be thought as a dual world made of source (Epstein) and effects (Deleuze). It has to conserve though the alchemist concerns film historians have been coping with. The life has started in the sea and that's in this space Knut Erik Jensen chooses to deal with the loss of life. To start the analysis, the use of the sea as the place of the cycle of the azoth 20 , one of the four alchemical elements involved in the myth of the philosopher stone with salt, sulfur and mercury is then the solution. Azoth is present in the sea on three different forms: the dissolved gaseous one (N2, NH3, N2O, NO2), the mineral one (NH4+, NO2, NO3) and the organic one (with some microbian substances). As the philosopher stone is a common figure used in different theoretical approaches, and as Knut Erik Jensen is deeply linked to the sea, the cycle of the azoth is going to motivate this study from the organic regime to the mineral and gaseous regimes. But as the dying world is a starting point, the organic regime is going to be used as an introduction to the transformations of the matters of/in the frame.
Considering a supposed cycle of the matter, we see Deleuze thinking the history of film as the development from a solid mechanics to a fluid mechanics. According to Epstein or Morin, life is created with the mineral of the film emulsion.
The eternal life created by the alchemists' philosopher stone denies the idea of time as the perpetual transmutations deal with a never-ending cycle absent to the decay. For Epstein 21, Morin and Deleuze, the cinematograph is a machine that inscribes humans in the eternity (photogeny and crystal image) and keeps the same qualities as the philosophal stone.
These alchemist amusements lose their hermetism (in the magic and in the common sense of the word) with contemporary cinema.
Hereby we have to go from the organic to the mineral (the negation of time is linked to the decay of the organic) to question the caption, then from the mineral to the organic, before questioning the homogenous and immuable circulation of the time/space continuumin Knut Erik Jensens' films.


Organic and pathetic, an obsolete extasis


What links the experience of the time to the organic is the vanity, the decay of the living one and by correlate, the pathetic 22. The painted portrait had already been accusing this treatment. Cinematograph made it stronger. The cinematographic portrait loses the faces and the Human is either differentiated by his soul or his/her hand (thumb). It remains a close up which in a first time transforms the organic into an entity 23 before losing it. The pathos and the decay of the organic are matters of typologies for the living characters, plants, animals or Humans.
Knut Erik Jensen's conception of the lively is not that lively.


Animal: fragility


In his Svalbard trilogy, Knut Erik Jensen already chooses an animal as symbol for the fragility of the surviving. In Svalbard in the World (1983), the seal is the only presence of the organic in the deserted space that looked more like a tomb than like any other thing. In the next two films of the trilogy, My World (1986) and Cold World (1987), the seal is killed and recycled (eaten, used for the elaboration of some artifacts). The death of the animal, his open body and the red tint of the organs spreading in the diegetic space (the water) and in the frame have a repulsive effect on the audience. It is more the motive than the editing (I refute the idea of an organic editing) that is visceral and organic. This intimacy with morbidity, with space and with humans creates a unity where sea, death and man are linked. It is perhaps not important that the seal dies. He is just a symbol. He is a living creature as any other. By dying, he just reflects the working death of the man in front of him. The seal and the man can die at any moment, they have the same value. They are creatures.
When Simon kisses the fish in Burnt by Frost (1997), he tells his fellow that "His flesh is as red as" his. This gesture, the kiss is captured in a backward movement that is reminiscent of both Louis Lumière's Démolition d'un Mur (1896) and Jean Cocteau's Sang d'un Poète (1930). But it does not seem that fascination for the inverted movement or the dream motivates this choice.
Here, the reversibility is perhaps a way to exchange the values of the fish and of the fisherman. By not being in a polarized space/time continuum, they negate time. During a short "moment", they don't belong to the scientist sandglass time but to the eternity where they are the same kissing kind of creatures above the waters.
To use the sea is obvious for Knut Erik Jensen as he likes to remind that life has started in the water. Sea is a cosmic element and belongs to the mineral world unless the cycle of azoth.


Fish is organic.


In the late 20th century fish became a popular food as beef and chickens were contaminated. In an interview he accorded to me in march 2002, Knut Erik Jensen insisted on this point and made a pun in French by comparing the sea to a mother (Mer/ Mère) and by fearing the threat of a poisonous fish (Poisson/ Poison). Fishes embody a relay between the human world and a transcendence. They are fragile creatures who predestine human beings (since they precede us in the story of the living creatures on this planet). They are angels of love in both the love scene of Burnt by Frost and in the arctic feast in Passing Darkness. They are not a symbol for freedom like in Emir Kusturica's Arizona Dream (1993) but a symbol for its agony. Omgang's and Amalgamated Sea Food's fishes are deep frozen angels that can be chemically modified.
They are mutants in this dying world, in the economical space, where they are an alternative to money.


Fish is power in Finnmark's market exchanges.


Money has always been a motive for circulation in cinema -Robert Bresson's Money (1983), Vilgot Sjöman's 491 (1963) or Aku Louhimies' Frozen Land (2005). In Passing Darkness, money is replaced by fish. One plastic bag of this new organic value allows Georg to get Josef's car when the lawyer loses the trial. This literally means that fish replaces money and makes people move and work. But when fishes lose their value, when they disappear, another
creature (probably a Human) has to suffer for them. Fragility is a quality for both animals, children and women. A close up on a bunch of dead fishes in Stella Polaris announces the arrival of the German soldier (in a variation of the first encouter with the Nazi army) and the cruel killing of the cat. This terrible scene is much more terrible than the fascist execution of the cat at the end of the first part of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (1976). The pathetic is a
quality of the sadism, of the organic and especially of the Humans.


The defeat of the organic: Humans


The first quality of humans is however not their cruelty but their emptiness. The fish is lively but threatened. The adult human being is losing his vitality. The maritime animal was a symbol for all the lives. The man is a symbol for his own vanishing. Knut Erik Jensen's men are typically modern and remind Gilles Deleuze's description of the characters in Antonioni's films whose " body is never in the present, it contains the before and the after, the sloth, the expectation 24 "
They are tired characters who are weakly built by their private stories. This affirmation describes what might bothered the active audience of any fiction film by Knut Erik Jensen.


To be unable to move in the right space


Dieu sait quoi (1994), the masterpiece by Jean-Daniel Pollet recalls that the world is not tragic but absurd. Knut Erik Jensen's deliquescent organic shown in slow motion appeals the vanishing of Euclidian coordinates, the loss of time, the dislocation and the absurdity. Before becoming statues 25 , the modern characters are emptied of their abilities to think properly 26.
Josef Omgang starts the narration of Passing Darkness with a bottle of alcohol. He is dizzy and his words cannot make sense. He is drunk of his own drunkenness.
He reminds us of the main character of Hamsun's Hunger, hungry of being hungry. Alcohol is a good lair for the lawyer who fails with his Oslo job, with his girlfriend and with his urban life. It changes the Euclidean coordinates and the relationships between the drinker and the rest of the world. Fever, illness can occur too in order to metamorphose the conscience of a body in a certain space.
During the first part of the film, Josef cannot move normally: when Anna comes to Oslo to ask him to move back to Korshavn, he walks backwards. Haunted by the ghost of Doris in Oslo, he sees her sliding backward 27 in the airport too. To move forwards is still forbidden and the movements of the characters are a negation of the progression of (hi)story. As the young woman of The Path of Roses (2000), Josef Omgang needs another kind of translation
to go back to the place (and to the time) of his lost childhood.
But in The Path of Roses, it is not moving forward that is a problem but reaching the present. When the ghost of the Russian soldier disappears at the beginning of the short fiction film, the motivation to drive the car in order to go deeper to the past and to the private story is accentuated by the young woman's impossibility to grab, or even to touch the petals of roses in the snow.
To abort the movement, Knut Erik Jensen uses several techniques. The first one is the editing:
the ellipse that forbids an actor to accomplish an action. The second one is the impossible movement: or slow motion as it has already been explained or the inverted movement (when Simon kisses the fish in Burnt by Frost).


Man as a conceptual envelop


The Path of Roses is the emptiest of the four narration films by Jensen. One man and two embodiments of a woman, some voices and some archives documents are the only characters.
The Russian soldier is there for all the Russian soldiers and the Swedish nurse, there for all the nurses. They are not conceived as private persons, as unique entities, but as ideas of what mankind could be. If we can follow Epstein's thought and consider the man as being the only scale quantity of the universe 28 , this world is becoming emptier every day. It is a paradox as it is very complex. But it perhaps is too complex and collapses on itself. That's why the organic is failing and falling.


The triple figure of the woman


A long time ago, women were a triple symbol for birth, life and death. They were the mythologic Parcae, Norns or the Three Weird Sisters. They were a symbol for the cycle of life. But in a collapsing world, they are confounded. In Stella Polaris the narration is focused on the reminiscences and the lives of one, two or three women.
As it will be the case in Jensen's next fiction films, it is very difficult to know the identity (/ies) of the female characters since they are the diegetic manifestation of the decay of the cycle and equilibrium of universe.
The first scene of Passing Darkness shows for example the presence of Doris on the Lofoten boat. The narration will make her lover and alter ego to the mother. Doris who happens to be Georg Tarafin's sister is a very composite character. She really looks like Tanja, Josef's mother. This aspect most of the spectators hate if they watch Passing Darkness only once is
that they are not sure if all the women they saw during the first part of the film were one (Tanja's ghost) or two (the red dressed Tanja and the red dressed Doris). Without moving and facing the camera Doris on the deck of the Lofoten looks like a ghost. She is a two dimensional figure : a phantasm, an apparition, an impossibility for the present, as Tanja is.
Evoked in some memory actualized by the film, Tanja's rapture transform her in an eyeless face that reminds us of the ecstasy scenes in Luis Buñuel's and Salvator Dali's Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930). She is no longer a human being, but a horny beast, a woman abstracted from mankind, a becoming ghost. She looks like a woman but has nothing left from her humanity, she is the affirmation that organic cannot survive in Jensen's world.
She is the mother and she is the death. Anna Marigold Ratama is the third mother figure to Joseph and presumably the real mother to Edvin, the two heroes of Passing Darkness. She is not a creature of sodium like Vilhelm Omgang. She does not belong to the sea on a symbolic level but to the earth. Her own words compare her situation to a bougainvillea. She needs water and allegorically love to survive in Korshavn. But her unsatisfied passion for Vilhelm
and the fact that she knows some aspects of the truth regarding the tragic vanishing of Tanja doesn't grant her survival in the tiny village. The common point to these three women in Passing Darkness is their multiplicity and their impossibility to be fully organic. The sea and earth elements are invading them.
In Knut Erik Jensen's films the defeat of the organic in favour of the mineral is materialized by a dead character (as the dolls alike corpses in Ingmar Bergman's films). The most obvious one is the dead woman of Passing Darkness, Tanja, who is closing what Norwegian critics named as being a Finnmark Trilogy 29 . Tanja is not only a never objective actualization (she is a part of people's memories) but also a terribly empty character. She is a character built as Russian dolls. The Russian woman is prisoner of a representation 30 hidden in a box. Her being is a mise en abyme.
She is prisoner of an icy coffin, inside a fridge, inside a factory. She is a fetish, some hair cut and conserved in a box in a safety deposit box in an office. She is fragmented by essence. She is polymorph 31 -because never objective a bit like Resnais' Muriel (1963) and in this particuliar way corresponds to Gilles Deleuze's definition of the crystal image. Tanja is as the fairy tale princess prisoner in an ice coffin that literally transform her into an ice cube, into a crystal.
As Marc Vernet notes in Figures de l'Absence, "would be then confirmed two theses by Mary Ann Doane: first the cinematographic tendency, asserted by the portrait films, to reduce the woman to her appearance, to a bi dimensionality both idealising and repressive, and the impossibility for the woman to access a proper identity, the status of subject, stuck in the role of an exchange object, of place for passing through."32
As far as the organic is concerned in Knut Erik Jensen, (s)he loses his/her humanity by becoming or an envelop or a corpse: a being without any soul. The purpose is to try to understand how we go from one figure to the other. This analysis of the decay of the organic has for consequence the questionning of the mineral and this transformation inside the representation that makes sense in Knut Erik Jensen's films, what I name transparition.


"As the oldest magic teaches, a name ends up always by creating the thing it means."33


Transparitions are not vectorized. They are emptied from the time. They cannot follow the cycle of the organic wich calls its own rotting nature. The mineral of course is disintegrating too but slower. The organic and the mineral components get some identical qualities by osmosis. They lose their qualities and appeal the loss of precision of the representation. The matter is being metamorphosed and the representation too.


"Nothing (not even God) now disappears by coming to an end, by dying. Instead, things disappear through proliferation or contamination, by becoming saturated or transparent, because of extenuation or extermination, or as a result of the epidemic of simulation, as a result of their transfer into the secondary existence of simulation."34

The extasis of the organic caption, the phenomenological approach of a "window opened on
the world" is changing and appeals the praxis. But can this praxis, this structure of the
representation last?


1 Epstein, in Le cinéma du diable (coll. Les Classiques du Cinéma, Ed. Jacques Melot, 1947, Paris, France) p.105
2 Bordwell, in Narration in the Fiction Film(The _University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, USA)
3 Agel, in L'Espace Cinématographique, (Editions Universitaires, 1978, Paris, France)
4 Epstein, in Le cinéma du diable, p. 124
5 Leirens, in Le cinéma et le temps, (Ed. Cerf, 1954, Paris, France) p. 19 "The notion of time applied to cinema is extremely ambiguous because
there is not some time, but some times."
6 Epstein, in L'intelligence d'une Machine, (coll. "Les Classiques du cinéma", Ed. Jacques Melot, 1946, Paris, France) p. 127 "it is impossible to
conceive space outside of its movement into time."
7 Epstein, in L'intelligence d'une Machine, p. 40
8 Epstein, in L'intelligence d'une Machine, p. 49 "local times and incommensurable ones"
9 Deleuze, in L'Image-Mouvement, (coll. "critique", Ed. de Minuit, 1983, Paris, France) p. 49 " two aspects of the time that are chronosigns: on
one hand time as whole, as huge circle or spiral, that receives the ensemble from the movement of the universe; on the other hand time as an
interval, that marks the smallest unity of movement or of action."
10 Bordwell, p. 321 "For Vertov, montage was not dialectical (pace Eisenstein) but differential, grounded in the notion of the "interval"-any
measurable difference (graphic, ideational) between shots."
11 Morin, Le cinéma ou l'homme imaginaire, (Ed. de Minuit, 1956, Paris, France) p.65, "This metamorphosis of the time precipitates a
metamorphosis of the universe[...]"
12 Epstein, in Le cinéma du diable, p. 157 "we meet, for the first time, a visual representation of a transcartesian universe, of a heterogeneous and
asymmetrical space time, of a continuum with four variables."
13 Lundemo, in Jean Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine, (coll. Cinemateket, Svenska Filminstitutet, 2001, Stockholm, Sweden) p.9 "The
cinematographic movement doesn't reproduce time -it produces time."
14 Epstein, in L'intelligence d'une Machine, p. 61 "makes life with mineral" & p.163 "Like the philosophal stone, the cinematograph owns the
power of universal transmutations."
15 Epstein, in Le cinéma du diable, p. 70
16 Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps (coll. "critique", Ed. de Minuit, 1985, Paris, France), p. 109
17 Lundemo, in Jean Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine, p.46
18 Bruun Vaage, in "Sansning, Tenkning, Teknologi: hvordan fungerer Stella Polaris?" (Rewritten part of Bruun Vaage's master thesis
"Maskinell tenkning -med Gilles Deleuze i forbindelselinjene melom film og tanke"(2001), Institutt for kunst- og medievetenskap, NTNU, Norsk
medietidsskrift nr. 1, årg. 11, 2004, Oslo, Norway)
19 in Météorologie, (Cinergon 10, 2000, Luc-sur-Orbieu, France) p.53 the cloud is linked to the chaos theory cf "Henri Atlan with the crystal and
the fume"
20 cf http://membres.lycos.fr/monaquarium/eaudemerecran9.html
21 Epstein, in L'Intelligence d'une Machine, p.163 "Like the philosopher stone, the cinematograph owns the power of universal transmutations."
22 Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p.207 "The organic has for correlate the pathetic."
23 Epstein, in Bonjour Cinéma, (coll. "des tracts", Ed. de la Seine, 1921, Paris, France) p.35 "the close up transmutes the man." & Deleuze, in
L'Image-Mouvement, p.136 "As Balasz was showing it already very precisely, the close up does not tear the subject apart from an ensemble he
comes from, where it would be a part, but, what is quite different, it abstracts it from all spatiotemporal references, it means that it brings it into the
state of Entity."
24 Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p.246
25 Lundemo, in Jean Epstein, p.52 "In slow motion, water appears like oil and finally becomes a solid, in fast motion the mineral becomes
vegetal or animal."
26 Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p.216 According to Deleuze, it is difficult to be. To think is not a power but impotence.
27 Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 82 The artificial cosmic movements deal with translations vehicles like tunnels, escalators and drive from space
time to time space.
28 Epstein, in L'Intelligence d'une Machine, p.133
29 Sørenssen, in Den standhaftige finnmarkingen, Knut Erik Jensen og suksessen "Heftig og begeistret", (Ottar nr 251/2004, s.23-35, Tromsø,
Norway) p.24
30 Debray, in Vie et mort de l'image, Une histoire du regard en Occident, (Ed. Gallimard, coll. Bibliothèque des Idées, 1992, Paris, France) p.21
The representation is in first place the liturgical term for an empty coffin exposed during an obituary.
31 Epstein, in Le cinéma du diable, p. 191 "The supposed personality becomes a diffuse being, of a polymorphism that tends to the amorphous
and which is dissolved in the mother waters."
32 Vernet, in Figures de l'absence, de l'invisible au cinéma, (coll. "Essais", Cahiers du Cinéma, Ed. de l'Etoile, 1998, Paris, France) p.95
33 Epstein, in Le cinéma du diable, p.40
34 Baudrillard, in The Transparency of Evil, Essays on Extreme Phenomena ([La Transparence du Mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes © Ed.
Galilée, 1990, Paris, France], translated from French into English by James Benedict, Ed. Verso, 1993, London-New York) p.4

"When comes the sunset, remember the statues"
in 3 jours en Grèce, Jean-Daniel Pollet

I. Transmutations of the mineral, a praxis of the world

What opposes the extasis, the phenomenological approach of the world, is the praxis. It describes the effort of mankind to structure things. As the organic has shown it could not succeed in remaining fully organic and was contaminated by the inertness and the materialization, the mineral regime is going to relate the value of this praxis compared to the extasis. We will then see if this way to consider the world can assess Knut Erik Jensen's mise-en-
scène.


1. Mineral typologies of characters


The typologies of organic matters have shown that they cannot remain as organic as they should. By losing their lively qualities, the characters also lose their ability to conquer their own spaces, to move and to exist in the present. The mineral (of the camera, of the space surely) is transforming the characters. To the failing organic typologies of characters has to correspond a mineral one. To create life with mineral, to be the alter ego of God, has always been a human obsession: Galatea, Dionysius the Aeropagite's android have been announcing, automaton and other artificial empty envelops looking like human beings. That's perhaps Galatea and Golem, made of clay, made of pure mineral, that justify the belonging to the soil, to the particular space (it is hard to imagine Golem outside of Prague) and embody the possibility of life only in a given mineral milieu.


1.1. A world of puppets


These empty characters considered as shells are first some puppets of flesh. What is significative is that puppets have widely been used as a question of the cinematographic restitution.
Literature has Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to question representation and/of life. The gothic literature has been a great source of inspiration for cinema. It is in the mises-en-scène by Terence Fisher, for the Hammer's, that this tendency became systematic 1 . In all his gothic films, there is always an abstract scene, disconnected from any narrative motive, that shows a puppet (The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957), a dancing limonaire (The Phantom of the Opera, 1962) or any kind of replica of the recording of time or of movement (in 1958, the copper rolls in Dracula directly taken from Bram Stoker's book).
This resurgence of the 19th century puppet concern is though different from Knut Erik Jensen's aesthetic.
His puppets are not literal. They don't question the value of the representation but the value of the characters. The unarticulated lying body of Georg Tarafin in Passing Darkness transforms him into both a puppet (he was both Krebs' and Samson's one) and into a becoming corpse. In this scene taking place in Roma, the only one where Josef is out of Norway, the puppet George is lying some meters from Krebs' corpse. His motionless body is an echo of the dead one 2 .
The particularity of the puppet is that it is manipulated. When a sparkle of life goes through it, the doll becomes an android. Still in Passing Darkness, we can see Josef Omgang as being one of these human automata. He is very mechanized, at least when the film starts, as his dizzy motion points out that this character is not fully aware, fully human. The first scene should expose one of his perceptions (a vision, a dream, a reminiscence?), but the lack of
rationalization, of objectivity and his surprising movements and words express this: Josef is an envelop, a rootless Golem going back to the place where his innocence and his origin are buried.


1.2. Mankind and the statue


From the puppet and the android to the sepulcher, the statue is a good step in the development of the mineral human body as an entity.
This inhuman body is not any technologic one as Edvin's (Passing Darkness), but a pure mineral one. This body is more realist, and it is a consequence of history as a suit of geographical and geological events. Jensen voids characters and transforms them into short cuts of their history. But by charging the body with such serious matter, the ensemble becomes too heavy to let the history go on. Then, the mise-en-scène tends to materialize this
geological geographical historical human hybrid through the use of slow motion as impossibility of passing 3 .
The very classical conception of "the slow motion of time (that) mortifies and materializes" 4 has for consequence to make the human beings resemble " a hardened face, to an interior frigidity, to a mortuary glacier." 5 For example, when a child is facing the horror of the killing of an innocent cat (Stella Polaris), reactions are hardly perceptible. Thoughts and time are annihilated by cruelty as stopping time is the specificity of sadism.


"Then, when there is no more visible movement in a rather spread time, the man becomes a statue, the lively is confounded with the lifeless, universe decreases into a desert of pure matter, without any trace of wit." 6


They have movements (what I named the sparkle of life) but no spirit. Knut Erik Jensen avows that he films his actors as if they were statues and they really become so. As Vingent Guigueno explains it in a lecture dedicated to the lighthouses 7 , the stone face, the frontispiece, is an allegory of the maritime front. Brittany and Norway share this specificity of exposing their coast to the water and the salt. That's the reason why the human entities become mineral.
They are earthlings exposed to the salty waters and by osmosis become like the landscape itself, stones corroded by time and weather. Faces become landscapes in ruins and keep the qualities of the stones.
To be charged by history is to become a part of history and to become like a ruin 8 .
Ruins are very important in Knut Erik Jensen's aesthetic.
They are the trace of a buried epoch (Ruins in Paradise, 2004) or of a burnt epoch (the scorched earth tactic devastating the village in Stella Polaris).
The Prisoner Of War camp in Ruins in Paradise, covered by the luxuriant vegetation annihilates the horror of history. As in Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955), it is then a duty for the filmmaker to stop the sandglass of time to explore the historical space in its immediate expression: the toponymy.


2. Toponomy


The movement is aborted, time is stopped. Then, what is the essence of the image? Space.
Henri Agel affirms, in the introduction of L'Espace Cinématographique, that searching an only sense of space is meaningless. The most important is not to find one meaning but the structure of this space.
Moreover as we will see that Knut Erik Jensen's aesthetic is over fragmented, it is very hard for the neophyte to draw a mental map where locations and spaces would be obvious. Spectators can hardly identify where or when the events 9 take place and assign to the space the quality of ambiguity. This blurred space is constant in modern cinema 10 and the difficulty to define its qualities means it surely belongs to chaos and to sacred order as well. It is a space of non choice. As Knut Erik Jensen's fiction films deal with the becoming of one character as smallest expression for the rest of mankind, an alternation of dilatation (symbolic) and of concentration (metonymic) is constitutive.


2.1. Macrocosm


First was chaos.
Chaos and cosmic elements are undoubtedly essential in Knut Erik Jensen's aesthetic. Naming his first long feature film Stella Polaris (Polar Star 11 ), dealing with the maritime world and the abstraction of the time are not innocent choices. The auteur shows approximative humans who are not that human since as Edgar Morin recalls in Le cinéma ou l'homme imaginaire that "to charge a man with the cosmic presence is called cosmomorphism." 12 One is what and where one comes from, the manifestation of a peculiar milieu. When a child is born at the end of Stella Polaris, this small human being is associated to the sky, to a constellation (Ursa Minor of course) and reminds 2001, a Space Odyssey (1969), as a call for a pure space. The reign of the Polestar can go on. But one specific milieu does not signify a micro society cut up from universality. The cosmic elements as sea or sky are fluid and appeal universality as all the earthlings bath in the same water and stare at the same stars. These components are sub human but sharable 13 .
Jensen's macrocosm is then both an unoccupied territory, a profane abyss, the "fluid and latent modality of the chaos" defined in the first chapter of Agel's L'Espace Cinématographique and a sacred one, differentiated by the coast of Finnmark and its proper names.


2.2. "Finnmark is not Norway" (Knut Erik Jensen)


The soil is worthy for what is buried in it 14 , its history, its graves, its secret archives. Knut Erik Jensen's Finnmark, Troms and Nordland are though more created than pre existent and cosmic. The scorched Finnmark at the end of the Second World War is perhaps the best way to create a new kind of life. To rebuild the history and the place from scratch, Jensen's Finnmark remains a littoral one but not a literal one as the geography is manipulated. Passing Darkness for example is shot in Berlevåg, where Knut Erik Jensen finds the inspiration for his biggest public success, the documentary Cool and Crazy (2001). But the village is re baptized Korshavn, the shore of the cross. It is the symbol of a place for redemption, the redemption of the soil and the redemption of the characters. To make films is his way to collect visual documents to restart an archive: the history of a place that was cleared once. To record the present and to explore the past is the program of his production. Browsing Knut Erik Jensen's filmography asserts the theory that the site is the main character of his oeuvre. Nordkapp Kommune, en presentasjon (1974), Nordkapp-Ekspressen (1976), Kulturkollisjon i Kautokeino (1980), Bilder fra Finnmark (1983), Finnmark mellom øst og vest (1985) or En Nordkalottcoctail (1999) are among the most significant films that show the appartenance of the director to the territory he was born in 15 .
By its extreme geographical situation, Finnmark is a frontier region. It is a contingent space, not a closed one. That's why Finnmark is with its neighbours the main character of Knut Erik Jensen's films. Russia, Finland or the archipelagos Svalbard and Lofoten open the unique place. By restarting the occupation of a soil, he proposes a local preoccupation and dilates both story and history.


2.3. Microcosm, the coast: between maritime and urban spaces


Norway has the second longest coast behind Chile. It means the sea is not dissociable from the country. Between the chaos of the sea and the soil, villages of fishermen indicate a zone of double belonging.


"The liquid abstract is also the concrete milieu of a kind of men, of a race of men
who don't live like earthmen, don't perceive and don't feel like they do" 16


2.3.1.Sea as an instrument for universality


Sea is by defintion abysmal and participates in the chaos. It is the fluid landscape protagonists cross to fish, to struggle, to die 17 . In Jensen's fiction films, only fishermen really interact with the waters. Characters are not actors (they do not act), they are voyagers. They float over the moving landscape without doing anything. They stand on the deck, in Passing Darkness or in The Path of Roses. They are typically modern in the sense of Deleuze. They remind characters from both neo realism, Theo Angelopoulos' or Aki Kaurismäki's films.
To remain at the surface of the sea is the only way to be safe. To split it is to call death.
The sea is not any place either for oppositions, quest or uniformity but the moving surface that is split by ships (the black sea fishing scene in Stella Polaris and the Lofoten trip in Passing Darkness) and that swallows and rejects U-boats (Burnt by Frost) and bodies (the British corpse in Stella Polaris or Tanja's icy coffin in Passing Darkness). Regarding this last aspect, Euripides wrote that "the sea cleans stains and wounds of the world" 18 . The bottomless
waters materialize an indefinite escape of deeps 19 not to erase these wounds but to make them come back. This escape in the depth is not the escape from reality but the opposite. It is an escape from the loss of information. This sea is the place of origins, of life, of hidden truths -as in Pål Øje's Villmark (2003) or Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom (1994). When the camera dares diving into it, this is to fix a body, a face, an appearance, a crystal coffin. We will see that Edvin is the character who reveals (the essence of photography). As he is the man of the lighthouse, it is probably the revealing sea that gives him by osmosis this ability. But Edvin's technological eye is close contrary to the sea filmed by a remote camera. The distance is a kind of visual equivalent of the objectivity and always calls an unreachable elsewhere: sky, wind and sea. The cosmos reminds that it comes together with history (as an objective data regarding the life on this planet). Sea remains chaotic because of its polymorph depth and forbids any unity as it moves in opposition to French lyrical films like Jean Grémillon's Gardiens de Phare (1929) for example.
However, the litoral changes the nature of the sea as the waters become a part of the local territory. When Passing Darkness starts, it could be on any sea since water is the moving and fluid element by principle. But on the deck of the ship, a yellow box reveals Honningsvåg, the name of the hometown of the filmmaker. The scene takes place in Finnmark, now it has been "clearly" explicated. The concentration of the space leads the character from the infinite waters to the shore of the cross, to Korshavn.
In the Old Testament, Humans' existence is condemned by their own deeds. The first separation from the Kingdom of God is by differentiating His sacred space from the Human City, Babel. Passing Darkness' Korshvan is a new Babel where foreigners babble in their mother tongues. It is the archetypical town, but not the only one.


2.3.2 The town


The answer to the cosmic waters are the shiny towns and cities. Firstly, Northern Norway is the spot for the struggle between Nature's full light 20 and full darkness. This is the treatments of the light that show the main difference between towns and cities in Knut Erik Jensen's films.
Darkness is declined through sun's spectrum: yellow, orange, ocre. Daylight is blue, color that usually fits an urban light, not a natural light. Kirkenes and Korshavn belong to the Finnmark Nova.
Both Korshavn and Oslo in Passing Darkness are controlled by electricity. But they are dissimilar.
Korshvan belongs to a darkened sky which seems humanized (the phosphorescent darkness recalls the will-o'-wisp emanating from the graves) contrary to the Norwegian capital which glitters like the city of perdition of F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) and reminds a constellation, though out of the reign of the Polar star. 21 Korshavn is the theatre of the drama, the place where people "act", or at least, work. Despite the fact that it is almost a village, it corresponds to a classical Greek idea of the City : either one is inside it (and participates in the drama) or outside (freed from the drama in the icy Nature).
The third city of Passing Darkness is Roma. The Italian capital is not an alternative to the Norwegian one. Oslo is the place of Josef's failing. Roma is the place for the efficient brain and the motivation for the business intrigue. Globalization has transformed the Omgang dynasty in a brainless executing worker. Brain and body belong to opposite realities. The remarkable aspect of the mise-en-scène of the light is the impression of simultaneity between the enlightened Italy and the darkened Norway. The Norwegian city is governed by darkness. The Italian one by sunlight. This shift of the light is separating the two spaces from their cosmic belongings. The displacing is incited by work, when historically, Finnmark's translations (to move because you have to not because you want to) were the immediate consequence of the scorched earth tactic at the end of the war. For Knut Erik Jensen who
experienced the deportation, the dislocation as a manifestation of following the riddles of history is intrinsic.


3. Narration


In Burnt by Frost, characters flee the threat of history. The first danger is the German army during the Second World War. The second one is the Cold War. The spy story is the motor to go from Norway to Russia and vice versa. More than a moral question, these double betrayals accuse the Finnmark as a no man's land, abandoned once by Norway, then by Russia (Kirkenes was bombed by USSR), then burnt by the German army. Geography occurs a more and more perceptible fragmentation, responding to the macrocosm with a migrating microcosm. The burnt soil of Finnmark is a decrepit space, a graveyard for a whole population's history. It occurs images in ruins and voices that do not belong to any site. To inhabit this place is a challenge. Knut Erik Jensen remains sensitive to the idea of the obligated dislocation, to the difficulty to stay in the same area, to the migration. His aesthetic is then to expose a fragmented space that has as correlate the fragmentation of the narration and the loss.
First of all, the most obvious component of Knut Erik Jensen's mise-en-scène is the loss, as the director uses the difficulty (more than an inability) to give a meaning to a suite of events when the action is over. To watch one of his films "[...]a complicated, even skilled, activity." 22
There is neither any theory of succession of the shots 23(Dziga Vertov), nor the idea of the multiplication (what Eisenstein learnt from his practice of the Japanese grammar), but on the opposite, an idea of the substraction of the editing. Adding the maximum of information by redistributing them with the strict minimum of effects is then distinctive. The erasure, the lower limit, the reversibility qualify this treatment. In opposition to this loss, the drama is often so heavy that it needs to collapse to become an absolute component of Knut Erik Jensen's aesthetic. The principle of fragmentation and the obsolescence of mankind are the essence of the stories his films expose.


3.1. Narrative Cinema?


Narration films are based on a telling organizing the world in a spectacle. The drama the protagonists are performing is often the essence of the understanding of the narration and of the film. But modern cinema has been widely creating obstacles to this comprehension since the 1960's. The narration is no longer omniscient (it annihilates Vsevolod Pudovkin's pattern of the ideal invisible observer) and is on the contrary, restricted. Ellipses, temporary and permanent gaps have become decisive. To trust and to understand the narration have turned to
be a problem. David Bordwell signals Last Year at Marienbad and some other films inspired by the Nouveau Roman as being the starting point of the default of narration in modern cinema. Nouveau Roman's aim was to create a pure space though literature had widely been dealing with time. Cinema was time by essence and was now trying to create a pure space too. Conceiving Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet had affirmed the moving structure of a statue the spectators would approach, turn around of, or leave. To create this situation, a close space (the dismal Swiss hotel) and a few characters were necessary. Moreover to create this space, time had to be separated from the space/time continuum. The fragmentation had started. Gilles Deleuze considered the film as a construction made of heterogeneous (fake or veridical) layers of time. Retrospectively, the result is though quite linear as the story is a (re)call of memories in order to (re)create a couple. The narration deals with possible simulacra 24 regarding characters' shared souvenirs. The fragmentation is temporal, perhaps structural but does not affect narration that much.
Such sharing of memories is absent of Knut Erik Jensen's films. The limit of the collapsing of his narration films is reached when he and Alf R. Jacobsen write their two scripts, Burnt by Frost and Passing Darkness 25 . But the collaboration makes the two men working one against each other. For Jensen, cinema is first made of images and his work as the only script writer on a film (Stella Polaris) points out his tendency to consider a script as neither explicative nor narrative, but essentially poetic.
That's why there are two tendencies in the narrative fragmentation of Knut Erik Jensen's films.
The first one is characterized by poetry and few characters 26 .
The second one deals with classical literary patterns and is created by Alf R. Jacobsen 27 . The two films responding to the first scheme are Stella Polaris and The Path of Roses (script written by Gunilla G. Bresky). The characters seem to hardly belong to this world.
They have no stable identity. To their quasi emptiness respond heavy mysterious characters.
The Alf R. Jacobsen's dramas (Knut Erik Jensen as a co-writer) are as precedently named Burnt by Frost and Passing Darkness and they suffer from the limits of the human attention Anne Souriau points out in L'Univers Filmique that:


"We cannot be shown a huge number of things, altogether. The Camera's frame has limits, Screen has limits, Human attention has limits [...]. These limits (...) oblige, to build a closed cosmos, to make a choice." 28


But these dramas have no limits. They are a charge of stories and histories and become almost baroque. When Marc Vernet describes the pattern of the typical gothic portrait film, it resembles the drama of Passing Darkness seen from the point of view of Tanja:


"[...]in a traditional and too solemn mansion, a woman prisoner of her husband is obliged to be what she cannot or does not want to be.[...]The mansion, as the one in Rebecca, will be destroyed by fire and the heroine will go to a calmer happiness[...]" 29


The only difference is that the drama of Passing Darkness is contemporary (2000) and that Tanja is already dead when she is relieved to the bottomless sea. The classical schemes of the family drama (Passing Darknes) and of the spy story (Burnt by Frost) miss their target as the drama and the narration are inadequate 30 . The gap is too big. Either the right drama or the right narration are synchronal.


3.2. Fragmentation
3.2.1. Non linearity and default


Apart from some different typologies of characters, a constant in all the four films is the structure of the story that remains uncertain. The diegesis is either very simple or impossible to define. But especially in the stories by Jacobsen, there is a kind of inadequateness between the dramaturgic characters (Jacobsen) and the story that is being told (Jensen). Passing Darkness is symptomatic as it is not a quest for light as the title and the audience's expectation would suggest 31 but a simulacrum. It should be "a situation (...) presented, knot of obscurity the film
has to unknot by bringing to the light the original strings that were lost in the night of the past and of the unconsciousness." 32 especially when Passing Darkness' presskit presents the film as a thriller and as a drama. But is suspense a peculiar value of this supposed thriller?
No.
Jacobsen's drama is being devastated by Jensen's narration. The plots could indicate some action scenes. But in Jensen's films, the action is different from the peak of actualization Gilles Deleuze described in l'Image Mouvement.
Here, action remains a concept of its content, a conceptual action (not a virtual action) instead of an effective action. That's why the logic of suspense does not even have a reason for existing. This deception about the drama comes from a fake postulate: the scheme of a classical "detective alike story" has been manipulated. The technique of narration has changed the essence of the tragedy. Using suspense is the main trouble of Passing Darkness.
Actualisations cannot happen, as Jensen creates figural events 33 . There is neither logical connection nor relations of cause and effects in the non situations but plastical events that motivate the editing, the essence of the narration of the movie, but not its drama.

Passing Darkness and Burnt by Frost capture past present and future through the use of characters who are structured by their private stories, not devastated by them. This will tends to create a kind of maelstrom of temporalities instead of creating an eternity, the audience could accept (Stella Polaris). The mystery of a torn apart past contaminates the diegetical present. Jensen's narration is focused on the images and annuls the literary drama of his coscriptwriter. The films are then not collaboration works but a kind of mutual destruction.
David Bordwell indicates the dychotomy between a topic and his treatment like this:


"The syuzhet embodies the film as a "dramaturgical" process; style embodies it as a "technical" one." 34


But both are interdependent. There is not telling without telling technique and vice versa. Jensen's technique of narration is based on memories. Memory works by associations; that's what Freud and Proust taught. Nevetheless memories are not passive souvenirs coming back to the conscience of the narrator like in Marcel Proust's literature, but are an active process.
When Alain Resnais declares: "I believe that, in real life, we don't think chronologically, that our decisions never correspond to an ordered logic." 35 I recognize Knut Erik Jensen's preoccupation.
In that sense, both have the same interest in memory, even if their treatments and conclusions are quite different. What memories and Surrealists' technique 36 have in common is the free association. Then, the lack of absolute truth is structural, as pure subjectivity is ruling the narration. All the information regarding the telling are enunciated but in a non causal scheme. The narration is fragmented to its maximum, without any objective narrator and without any objective truth. If there is no more cause effect relation, the drama is hurt. That's obviously what is happening in Burnt by Frost and in Passing Darkness and we need to understand how this burst occurs.


3.2.2. Enunciation and the logic of the drama?


As the site is the primary character, we know that chaos is in some way ruling the narration. It is not any chaotic narration, but some narration of chaos. The loss, the free association modulate a mise-en-scène which never insists on the details. The spectators have to be focussed at any moment if they want to realize that the same man working for Samson (probably the one named Kim) in Passing Darkness is the one who precipates Josef in the sea
from the shore at his arrival in Kirkenes and is the keeper of the jailed Doris.
The audience is confused and wonders who leads the narration. If we had to choose one point of view to make film and literature coincid, we would have to establish the camera as the ideal narrator of the drama. Though, Svein Krøvel's camera is either above the human scale or under: rarely at the same level. It is a sub human camera which does not correspond to the invisible observer Vsevolod Pudovkin identifies. It is not any narrator but only some
perceiver which is worth for both of the filmmaker and the audience.
In Knut Erik Jensen's fiction films, there is no ordinary experience, no absolute knowledge: just a suite of feelings. The spectators don't watch the mimesis of a world they live in but the recreation of a different narrative (before becoming dysnarrative) staged universe. The camera might be an invisible witness (with quasi cinéma vérité shots that might be assigned to some characters) but is even more often an invisible researcher. It is perhaps a God by default, in opposition to an omniscient One, exploring the world as a spiritual void, but in His essence: the vital breath, what Orientalists name Prana. The aerial views floating over the earth are typical of this mode of narration where a distant camera corresponds to the difficulty of apprehending the fragmented drama, the quest that follows the same pattern in Stella Polaris, Burnt by Frost, Passing Darkness and The Path of Roses.
The distance and the negation of the omniscience assert that there is not any only narrator. The telling is like in Alain Resnais' Muriel a "(...) mechanism of recollections, real and fake, that favours the lecture of a transformation during the film." 37
In the four fiction films, the enquiry for a lost memory is rarely orally enunciated contrary to Alain Resnais' films. People hardly share their souvenirs in order to recreate a past that disappeared. Or when they tell about their private stories, as in Akira Kurosawa's Rashômon (1950), the objective recollection of memories is impossible as there is no communion between the characters' different experiences of the admitted events. Without any supposed
truth and any possible recollection of the effects, the lack of previous knowledge misleads the audience to some fake narrative habits. The doubt is then contaminating the perception of the story.
The Path of Roses is typical of this technique. The first screening is experienced as the quest for reminiscences and identity.
A young Swedish woman is travelling to Northern Norway to put some red roses on the place where a Russian soldier and a Swedish nurse once engaged. The Russian soldier's bride's voice is Harriet Andersson's one when the woman we see on the screen is the young Irma Schultz. The spectator's first reaction is built on classical habits. The road movie, the presence of the barbwire ring on the finger of the young Swedish woman and the embodiment of another character's memories tend to tell that she is the daughter of this couple. But this path is only a lazy interpretation. If she were the daughter, she would be about 60 years old when she drives the red Saab 900 but the woman we see is hardly 35. Moreover, the old nurse is never seen, only heard. And questionning Knut Erik Jensen about The Path of Roses, he just describes an impossible love story between a soldier during the Second World War and a contemporary woman. Luckily for the audience, The Path of Roses is a short fiction film and the number of characters is limited. The lack of knowledge is minimal.
As a matter of fact, the narration becomes harder to apprehend in the Jacobsen's dramas since the feature films keep this mise-en-scène of the default of information. The stories become then very little narrative as enunciation is different from the classical pattern of the only point of view. There are perhaps several undefined points of views.


3.3. Incompossible Worlds


The barbarism that "incompossible" is comes from my reading of Deleuze's texts. It is an hybrid word that brings together impossible and compossible. By compossible, Deleuze does not mean compatible but possible at the same time. Incompossible is then the impossibility of existing at the same time.


3.3.1.G.W. Leibniz's Theodicy


To assert the equilibrium of the components of the world, Leibniz develops at the 17th century the concept of the monads. These smallest units keep the quality of the whole but are disconnected. How can they then create a whole if they cannot communicate with the other monads? Questioning his concept, Leibniz affirms that his monads, created by God, are spiritual. And questioning the almighty perfection of God, Leibniz analyzes all the typologies
of evil to justify the goodness of this world. First of all, he describes the three types of evil: the natural one (catastrophes), the existential one (depression) and the moral one (murder). To respond to these three categories of evil, he proposes five theodicies.
The first one is the mystery of the hidden harmony only God knows about. Leibniz uses the example of a naval battle. Either this warfare takes place or it does not take place. For the Human harmony, it would be better to avoid it. But if this struggle is meant to happen, it is because it is the best solution to resolve a crisis and reach harmony again.

The second theodicy is the evil as a divine punishment towards sinners (moral evil).
The third one excuses the presence of evil with the certain reward after death, in heaven.
The fourth affirmation asserts that, without defaults, world would be God himself.
As a differentiation is necessary, and as God is perfect, even if He lets evil be present in Humans' lives, the majority of the phenomena in universe are optimal and we live in the best possible world (something the naval battle is illustrating too).
The fifth one recalls that Humans are not pre programmed. They are free to choose between good and evil morality. It is the obligatory counter party of the freedom given by God to Mankind.
For theoreticians, the (in)compossible worlds illustrated by the naval battle have become a kind of revolution as they opened the perspectives of the world. For Jean Epstein, the main concern in the structure of the world: "Would the structure of universe be ambivalent? Would it allow to go forward and to go back? Would it admit a double logic, two determinisms, two opposite finalities?" 38 and the negation of the reality by the multiplication of the reals 39 . The
structure Gilles Deleuze is interested in is the narration. According to him, with Leibniz and Borges, there is "a new status of the narration: the narration stops being veridical." 40
The narration using (in)compossible worlds deal with a game (like the naval battle). In Jean- Daniel Pollet's  Méditerranée (1963) for example, the chessmen of the program/game/story are redistributed to create a fusion inside the narration. To repeat and to realize variations transform the film in a kind of melody. Alain Resnais's diptych Smoking/No Smoking is perhaps the most achieved experiment about the possible modalities to play with the telling of a story.


3.3.2. From Theodicy to film


The incompossible worlds are not the exclusivity of Knut Erik Jensen of course. When David Lynch in Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me (1992) presents in a video sequence the transparition of the agent Phillip Jeffries interpretated by David Bowie in an absctracted space and time where Dale Cooper/Kyle Maclachlan is present, the doubt and the double re enter the story. Has this scene happened or not? Is there some compossible worlds where the characters
evolve? Does the audience have to choose to understand the essence of the thriller? Is it only a narrative problem or a question of the fidelity of the restitution of the image?41
Burnt by Frost, by following the double fake life of a spy (as Fire Walk With Me is following the double life of Laura Palmer), illustrates the same concern. While staring at the fjord, Simon sees first nothing, then in the exactly similar subjective point of view (through glasses) sees several boats. Leibniz' theodicy and his example of the naval battle are discrete here but are unforgettable.
We could perhaps wonder if it is exaggerated to invoke Leibniz when discussing narration in some Norwegian films. But it is because Leibniz is quoted in Passing Darkness that his theosophy motivates this approach. The first time Doris talks to Josef, she quotes the line that parodies Panglos' exaggerated optimism in Voltaire's Candide (1759).
This does not refer to the divine characterization of destiny, but by quoting Leibniz and his theodicy the dialogue affirms this aesthetic of non choice:


"All is for the best in the best of the worlds."


Let's consider Stella Polaris too. Margrethe Bruun Vaage's article "Sansning, Tenkning, Teknologi" questions the instances of the characters we see in this first feature film. How many women are there? Is it the same woman at different ages embodied in the same space? The man is as old during the Second World War as during the age of the industrialized fishery and we see him dying in the water as we had seen him as a child falling in the sea. Was not he dead? 42 Is it important? Where are the facts? Is this scene happening or is it another illusion? Margrethe Bruun Vaage points out that Stella Polaris is built on several "(...)divergent stories, stories that cannot be true at the same time." 43 "It is as if the film was searching different alternative version of the characters' lives." 44
In all the fiction films by Jensen, the spectators remain perplex as they have to accept not to choose any solution. They have to follow Jean Douchet's precept, to understand a film is not to analyze it but to admit it 45 .
Jensen's world is made of adiegetic perceptions as if several dreams were co existing and creating the matter of the narration. Finnmark's cosmogonic equilibrium is a chaos where light and day are mixed together inside the same actions 46. Though, for Jensen, time is first of all history.


3.4. Layers of time
3.4.1. A vectorial time


For Leibniz time is dynamic; for Jensen too, but it is thicker and slower. Resnais and Jensen show in their films a time that does not pass but that remains. It is not an aspiration to the future but a repetition from the past, "a universe where it is not possible to live in the present" 47. In both of their filmographies, time is an archeological one where the trace of the past is buried beneath the surface of the present, as "the spacial sign of the souvenir."48


3.4.2. Stratifications: Anchorage and Emergence


The mise en abyme of the divings into the memory have been very popular at least since Gérard De Nerval's Sylvie (1853). But memory and its treatment often brings scholars to think first of Marcel Proust's work.
However Proust's narration seems to follow the logic of some tree of time, going from one branch to the other, but letting the opportunity for the reader to understand the whole composition of these associations of epochs and memories. This is not the case in Sylvie as the structure of several literary flash-backs is a mise en abyme.
Moreover questionned about Proust, Alain Resnais avows that he could not see the connection between their works as the single axis of the research of the lost time Proust had chosen could not correspond to the multiplicity of Resnais' universe. With film, according to Resnais, there is no more aerial arborescence but hidden roots and mandragores buried in the soil to respond to Proust's labile search of time. The "[...] past arises by itself, as if something had cracked beneath the surface of the conscience". 49

a) Flash-backs
Unless a very weak temporal anchorage (The first scene of Passing Darkness is a rather close flash-back corresponding to Josef's trip towards Korshavn. Characters we see are Josef and Doris. But they will be revealed as contemporary persons when Doris will talk to Josef on the deck and will evoke Leibniz), Knut Erik Jensen's films use numerous flash-backs. As the filmmaker often declares one bears his own history. Flash-backs "don't question memory, they suppose it is still active."50 The characters can strangely hardly become younger in the flashbacks
of Passing Darkness. Edvin, Anna or Josef can. But not the morally rotten ones: Eberhardt Krebs and Vilhelm Omgang. In the flash-back of Josef's departure, his father is not younger, he is only grimed in green, or bares a green mask, that really recalls clay. As for the rest of the traces of times in space, flash-backs don't seem to belong to some subjective perception of one singular character, even if this one is the remembering one. All the flashbacks
of Passing Darkness try to worship the fetish Tanja. Even the sea is trying to remind her. When Josef has the accident on the shore of Kirkenes, he falls in the water and this diving occasions a fash-back that does not belong to any character but probably to the site. The flashbacks would be then the only objective enunciation of the drama as they would be constitutive of the history of the site. But these flash-backs seem allegoric or metaphoric. They look like dreams, use the slow motion, the music and contradicts the postulate of objectivity.
Paradoxically, the subjective flash-backs are more explicative. They literaly talk but the presence of the characters in their own flash-backs negate the reality of the possible occurrences. When Anna tells Tanja's story, she is talking and old in the same space as the young mute Tanja, a technique similar to Stella Polaris' flash-backs where the old and young versions of the characters are present in the same scene.
To open the layers of time, Knut Erik Jensen's mise-en-scène opens frames. The time is a spectacle, a representation, a construction en abyme, and is occurred by transparent textures.
Stella Polaris for example illustrates these openings of the times inside the spaces. The starting nightmare presents the face of a man through a car window and this image opens the narration. When later on, the leading role is looking through the window of the house, she sees her own past, her own figure but as a child, or at least can be understood so. The space is open, the frame is open and the time is open as well.
Times, spaces and different status of the same characters are compossible.


b) Flash-forwards
Flash-backs are ghosts from the past. Flash-forwards are ghosts from the future. The main difference is that flash-backs can often be fake (due to the subjectivity of the characters) but flash-forwards, as pre-visions enunciated by the filmmaker are always veridic but paradoxically "[...]very hard to motivate realistically." 51 That's why the flash-forwards are a rather unused figure in the aesthetic of film. The audience is used to the classical scheme of
cause and effect and sometimes is reluctant to the inversion of this model.


"The flashforward is unthinkable in the classical narrative cinema, which seeks to retard the ending, emphasize communicativeness, and play down self consciousness. But in the art film, the flashforward flaunts the narration's range of knowledge (no character can know the future), the narration's recognition of the viewer (the flashforward is addressed to us, not to the characters), and the narration's limited communicativeness (telling a little while withholding a lot)." 52


The action scene to liberate Doris in Passing Darkness is using the flash-forwards as ellipses and forbids the audience to fully understand what is happening. The drama is too complex and the actualization is escaping forwards. Can the present go on?


4. The mineral is everywhere
4.1. Rusted present in a cyclic time conditioned by work


By using slow motion, flash-backs or flash-forwards, the mise-en-scène expresses the difficulty for the cinematographic apparatus to catch the present. The mineral regime is probably too heavy. Contrary to the organic creatures, all the machines, diegetic or extra diegetic don't have the same value in Knut Erik Jense's universe. They are not like the flesh, remaining a bleeding corpse, no matter if this is a seal or a man. The lively beings are belonging to chaos because they belong to the macrocosm. They bear their own (hi)stories and remain stuck in the past which accuses their own obsolescence. On the opposite, the machines are a way to conquer the present by repeating the same gesture and by calling the progress, the future: what the narration annihilates. The characters who can act in the present are not the pathetic ones, the organic ones, but the mechanical ones, the ones which are working instead of the mortals.

As all human activities, fishing is an act that has changed with epochs. Work has become mechanized. The fisherman has turned to be a worker of the standardization. He has been losing his gesture little by little as the machine took it away from him. The new fisherman is no longer reported missing after an unfortunate fishing trip on the sea. He is still wounded or dies because of his job but more often because of the machine.
Working with fish means to work with the becoming death. The tool or the machine occurs accidents. In Stella Polaris, a hook is precipitating the old fisherman in the mount of dead fishes. He dies like a fish, in the same space, with the same tool, in the same mise-en-scène. He is worthless.
The valuable worker of Passing Darkness is not Doris even if her job occurs a bewitching of time thanks to the musical, but Samson, the only one to have an adequate attitude relative to the space/time continuum. He is not the man of the repetition of the same gesture, of the same routine but the man of the outrageous progress. The English speaking sailor rules the time since he is a symbol for globalization.
Commerce is what have allowed people to travel and to discover the world for ages. But with the development of globalization, dismembering industries has become a threat for workers. Samson embodies the International Commerce, and the lack of moral linked to an industry with less humans, without the tradition and the pride of the family and without the pride of the original soil (or water). Standardization is then a more terrifying threat. It is a reality. It is probably a machine.
It has become famous that Taylor was an attentive observer of Muybridge's experiments to decompose the ideal gesture, the revolution that would transform the organic into a machine.
To use Jean Epstein's words, the intelligence of a machine has been a recurrent theme in cinema. Charles Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey or Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (2000) are among the numerous ones to have used it. The common part to these films is that the machine becomes a threat for the characters as "the assemblage man-machine will vary depending on the cases, but always to question the future." 53
As in Tancred Ibsen's Whalers (1939) or in Ingmar Bergman's Port of Call (1948), the cutting fish machine in Jensen's films indicates the potential of an accident. Baader 188 is one of the most frightening characters of Passing Darkness as it slashes both fish, hands and Edvin. It is presented like having a mechanism 54 before a function (to work, to hurt and to kill). It is a manifestation of the praxis. But even if the praxis is the concrete effort to master the world, the mineral regime can annihilate this will and turn the universe into a pure mineral.


4.2. salt and corrosion: towards a pure mineral


To work with fish also means to be attacked by the sea, by the salt. Passing Darkness' Samson is the fisherman of the present and of the future. Vilhelm Omgang is the fisherman from the past. He is by essence the total opposite of the English speaking sailor. He might not be that pure (he froze to death his own wife), he belongs to Korshavn and to the fish industry. Vilhelm has been acquiring knowledge for about sixty years and expresses it through his
being. The father of the Omgang dynasty is a character who can be as furious as the sea, who cries and sets fire.
He complains during a dialogue with his maid, in an interior decorated with sea landscapes and enlightened by candles that reminds paintings by Vermeer or Caravaggio, that there is not enough water, not enough salt, not enough fire in her cuisine. He is an alchemical character made of water, salt and fire. Vilhelm is made of the same matter that Finnmark he was born and brought up in.
Fire has become an attribute of Finnmark through the scorched earth tactic. When the population is deported in Stella Polaris, a corroded ship Ingvill Norge occasions a blurry mirrored effect on the waters. In one single shot, the flames let the place to the sea made of salt and water. This reflect is a kind of superimposition and creates a new figure. They are not either water salt or fire but a transmutation of one into the other, a spacial transparition. Salt
and water cannot be set apart. Water is the force for the cycle of present and eternity. Salt is the engine to the cycle of death and past. It is the natron to balsam Deleuze's mummy. It can even rain and replaces water in conserving lives in Stella Polaris and paradoxically erodes ceiling and other details of the set. When the kitty is executed by a German soldier, the little boy removes salt and blood that were covering the shore as if erasing the stained salt of the immediate present was erasing the posterior sign of the souvenir. It is a magic element which
in Passing Darkness is reminded as a way to cure plague and to chase bad spirits. It is the absolute mineral.
Between the salt of the sea and the eroded landscape and characters, there is an artificial mineral element which reveals also the world. It is Fresnel's lens. 55


4.3.The lens: between the crystal and the mechanical reproduction


Vincent Guigeno recalls in La vie des phares: événements, aventures et règlements, that the lighthouses were the first tentative to draw a network between distant points on European coasts. Built in the 19th century, they were typical products of the industrial era but like the fish industry, became threatened during the 20th century 56 .
The most obvious lighthouse in Knut Erik Jensen's films is the one on the coast of Korshavn in Passing Darkness. It materializes the link between the sea and the earth and so does the lighthouse keeper, Edvin.


The true hero of Passing Darkness is indeed Edvin.
This discrete character is the complement of Josef Omgang. Josef is looking for his past and lacks a huge amount of information. Edvin, on the other hand, knows everything. He is the lighthouse keeper and his eye (both organic and technologic through Fresnel's lens) watches the cost, the sea and the village of Korshavn. He is perceived through transparent matters and recalls the Deleuzian postulate of the crystal image just like the character of Tanja does too.
He is associated to the lens of the lighthouse, to a window glass, to the plastic doors of the fishery. He literally brings the light, he knows the aborted word (dead before it can be actualized); he knows and remains silent.
He is the mediator of the relationships: couples (Krebs/Tanja and Josef/Doris) and market exchanges (Samson, Georg, Vilhelm and Krebs). He sees everything. He knows everything. He is full of the information Josef misses. He is the first one to talk in a "time in", the first one to express something on his face. He is identified to the lighthouse, to the photography (both lenses and eyes of the 19th century) and to the fish cutting machine that will slash him: Baader 188. He is the man of the machine, that's why his manner of speaking and his gesture fail. He is condemned to die before the end of the story because he is the last warrant of the moral between a dying organic world (and work) and a mechanical globalized one. He is an anti Josef, an anti automaton. Edvin is a photographer and has the virtues of his art: he reveals. When he dies, the icy crystal melts. The truth has to go back to the original water, to the sea. When he passes away, he is no longer neither a mouth, nor a sight, nor a face, but an abstract envelop killed by a machine.
He vanishes and as he is no longer the mediator of the story appearances reveal their falseness.


Conclusion of the first part


The axis of narration has been questioned or lost and unless a vectorial time, the organic and mineral entities are losing their integrity. Films from the second half of the 20th century cannot accept an only axis. It might be because of sciences (atom, mathematics), because of literature (Joyce, Robbe-Gillet), the important point is that non choice has become primordial. In this fragmented world, the mechanical movement in its most frightening form, the accident, is announcing the decay of space. The pure mineral attacks. The salt and the lens aggress the frame and the audience. The dilatation is invoked. The chaos is still at work. The films have lost their characters, their narration, their cosmos. There must be some forms to express the mise en scène of obsolescence.

 


1The retrospective of some of his films at La Rochelle International Film Festival 2001 made me realize this.
2This effect recalls that the etymology of figure (in Latin figura) designs the doll or puppet symbolizing the dead one. In this family portrait of
the dead puppets can be named the corpses in Ingmar Bergman's Shame (1968), Tobe Hopper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre II (1986) or Philippe
Haïm's Barracuda (1997)
3Heidegger, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, ([Acheminement vers la Parole], coll. "Tel", Ed. Gallimard, 1976, Paris, France) p. 124 "to pass is other
than having been."
4Epstein, in L'Intelligence d'une Machine, p.58
5Deleuze, in L'Image-Mouvement, p. 129
6Epstein, in L'Intelligence d'une Machine, p. 59
7Guigueno, La vie des phares: événements, aventures et règlements, for Collège d'Histoire de l'Art Cinématographique at the Cinémathèque
Française (Grands Boulevards) the 5th February 2001
8Between the ruin and the statue, we can remember Kåre's story in Cool and Crazy when he tells that some shrapnel fragment, souvenir from a
bombing during the Second World War is still in his skull.
9An event is a phenomenon located at a single point in space-time; the fundamental observational entity in the relativity theory.
10Agel, in L'Espace Cinématographique, chap 3
11The brightest star in Ursa Minor.
12Morin, in Le cinéma ou l'homme imaginaire, p. 77
13ibid. "the fluid universe of the film supposes incessant reciprocal transfers between the microcosm man and the macrocosm."
14Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 318
15If the plots were analyzed, much more titles were reproduced in this list.
16Deleuze, in L'Image-Mouvement, p. 113
17Ropars-Wuilleumier, in L'Ecran de la Mémoire, (Ed. du Seuil, 1970, Paris, France) "[...]this world which is only a frame in a classical drama,
but which here is integrated to mankind to disintegrate it."
18Leprochon, in Jean Epstein (coll. "cinéma d'aujourd'hui" 28, Ed. Seghers, 1964, Paris, France) p. 65
19Agel, in L'Univers Filmique, ( Ed. Flammarion, 1953, Paris, France) p.195
20As in Erik Skjoldbjærg's Insomnia which describes the inner fight of a Swedish policeman in the midnight sun of the Troms.
21The only time the phosphorescent light of Korshavn trans-appears in the Norwegian capital, it is on Anna's face. This example illustrates a
northern light with human qualities, not fully cosmic.
22Bordwell, in Narration in the Fiction Film, p.33
23This moment uses the course about Stalinian Cinema by Natalia Noussinova (Second year's degree -DEUG- seminar at Sorbonne Nouvelle,
Centre Censier, Université Paris III Academic year 1997-1998)
24Régis Debray recalls in Vie et Mort de l'Image en Occident p.19 that in Latin, simulacrum means ghost.
25Passing Darkness is presented as the adaptation of the novel by Alf R. Jacobsen Tango Bacalao. But this book is an adaptation of the film,
not the opposite, as Stanley Kubrick's 2001, a Space Odyssey was.
26Debray, p. 119 " To see, it's to cut. To cut the linear logic of the words, fleeing the syntaxical corridors and embracing suddenly all your
anterior life."
27Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 179 "the cinema is till narrative, and more and more narrative, but it is dysnarrative as the narration is affected of
repetitions, permutations and transformations."
28in L'Univers Filmique, p. 64
29Vernet, in Figures de l'Absence, p.91
30As a matter of fact, Bjørn Sørenssen recalls in his article "Persistency paid off: Knut Erik Jensen from Farewell old Kjellvik Mountain to Cool
and Crazy" that Passing Darkness was severely attacked by the critic when it was released. It was described as pretentious academic and too
conscious of its effects.
31Passing Darkness' original title, When the Darkness is Over (Når Mørket er Forbi), recalls that people have no singularity in the darkness.
That's why it is so important for Josef Omgang to fight this gloomy part of his past. He is a lawyer who is looking for the truth of his childhood
and this quest leads him to some dismal situations.
32Rinieri, in L'Univers Filmique, p. 78
33Eco, in Opera Aperta, ([L'Oeuvre Ouverte], translated from Italian into French by Chantal Roux De Bézieux and André Boucourechliev, coll.
Essais, Ed. du Seuil, 1965, Paris, France) p. 91 "by tending to a maximum of unpredictability, one tends as well to a maximum of disorder, in
which it becomes impossible to organize not even the most ordinary meanings but all the meanings."
34Bordwell, P. 50
35in Alain Resnais, (coll. "Premier Plan", Serdoc, 1961, Lyon, France) p. 87
36Luis Buñuel is often cited in interviews with Knut Erik Jensen.
37Bailblé, Marie, Ropars, in Muriel, (Ed. Galilée, 1974, Paris, France) p. 294
38Epstein, in L'Intelligence d'une Machine, p. 16
39Epstein, in Le cinéma du diable, p. 145
40Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 171
41Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 15 "We reach actually a principle of indeterminateness, of non discernability: we don't know any longer what is
imaginary and what is real, physic or mental in the situation, it's not that we confound them, but we don't have to know and there is no longer
any meaning in asking."
42Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 358 "there is no more bound from the real to the imaginary, but indiscernability of both, in a perpetual
exchange."
43"Sansning, Tenkning, Teknologi" p.22
44"Sansning, Tenkning, Teknologi" p.8
45Comprendre c'est com-prendre, c'est prendre avec soi.
46Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 134 "This would be a sidereal time, a relativistic system, where the characters would be less human than
planetary, and the accents less subjective than astronomic, in a plurality of worlds constituting the universe."
47Ropars-Wuillemier, in L'Ecran de la Mémoire
48ibid.
49in Alain Resnais, p.7
50in Alain Resnais, p. 6
51Bordwell, p. 79
52Bordwell, p. 210
53Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 344
54Baudrillard, in Transparency of Evil, Essays on Extreme Phenomena p. 58 "Am I a man or a machine? There is no ambiguity in the traditional
relationship between man and machine: the worker is always, in a way, a stranger to the machine he operates, and alienated by it."
55Guigueno recalls in La vie des phares: événements, aventures et règlements that Augustin Jean Fresnel was an engineer of the 19th century
who invented the polarized light and the lens for maritime signaling. It has remained a French monopoly since as the fabrication of the concrete
tetrapods protecting the shores.
56Jean Epstein was dealing with the obsolescence, the arson and the disappearing of the lighthouses, theme that motivated Guigueno's lecture.

"Build your film on whiteness, on silence and immobility."
in Notes sur le Cinématographe, Robert Bresson

II. Transparitions, decay of the praxis

René Descartes teaches that the best way to solve a problem is to give it a form in a static space
with three coordinates: length height and depth. Even if we are dealing with Leibniz and his
dynamic space (the Cartesian coordinates + time), the Cartesian approach helps to abstract the
causes and the consequences of the event and to find a geometrical form to the idea. Starting
with a mythical ribbon of time then the celluloid, the pure movement is going to lead us to the
circle, to the spiral before questioning the analogic restitution and the permeability of the
movement itself, the cinematographic caption and finally the essence of the transparitions.
1. The strips of History
When by convention we try to represent history we use a strip where the past and the present
are drawn and the future, only named as the band is not prophetical. The events follow the
chronology and the key events are inscribed. Using this technique is rather paradoxical for
Knut Erik Jensen as in his poetic the private memory is opposed to the public history. His
characters belong to history. But history belongs not fully to the characters but to the
geography and to the geology. That's why Jensen films the peaks of history as a direct
consequence of the soil.
1.1. Memory of the site
Henri Agel in the chapter 5 of L'Espace Cinématographique explains that to create a dilated
space, signs of earth and signs of air must alternate. What is a "sign of earth"? It is probably a
construction.
a) The memorial
Memorials are the most visible traces of time in space. They are erected in the soil. They give
an objective presence to history when characters and space have almost forgotten about the
facts. In Passing Darkness, Josef while arriving in Kirkenes explores the town and is
compared in a shot to the sculpture of the Russian soldier. This memorial dealing with the
liberation of Finnmark "Til Sovjetsamveldets tapre soldater til minne om frigjøringen av
Kirkenes 1944" recalls Josef's Russian mother and the mise en abyme of the devastation (the
scorched earth, the vanished mother and the sacrificed youth). In the short experimental
documentary, Ruins in Paradise, the peaceful ruins could erase the atrocity of the camp of
Russian prisoners. Luckily, some memorial recalls that this place was the theatre of some
horrible events "til minne om sovietiske soldater" as in Finnmark, mellan öst og vest where the
memorial reminds "For Norge 1940-1945". It is very rare that these memorials 1 evoke an
epoch anterior to the Second World War. One of the exceptions is in Svalbard i Verden, where
the open tomb is also experienced as a memorial.
It is a graveyard for history, a tomb for a human being "Bremen, 14th of July 1869" and the
way the cross is filmed (low angle shot) magnifies it and transforms it into a character.
Characters are emptied and transformed into statues. They are filmed like memorials which in
their turn become the heaviest characters2. The osmosis between the characters and the places
they are living and dying in has the memorial for crystallization. The secret archive, the
hidden corpses in the soil appeal the erection of memorials. In opposition to the world in
ruins, the memorials forbid the nature to erase the culture as human activity.
b) The museum
Nowadays, culture is a gathering of artifacts collected in museums. Without any museum,
there is no more place for the memory 3 . Museums accumulate proofs of the existence of the
private story of the characters at the surface of this planet to record them as traces of history.
They emphasize the deeds of a spy (the U2 story in Burnt by Frost), the liberation of Norway
(Tanja's picture beside the soldier's statue in Kirkenes in Passing Darkness). Museums are the
place of the public life of the archives. History doesn't belong to people. People belong to
history.
1.2. Archive(s)
To the elevation of the memorials and buildings corresponds the flat strip of the recorded
document. History archives and instant go together. The daily news are the archive of
tomorrow. The newspaper of Stella Polaris reminds about a U2 that will come back in Burnt
by Frost. Chronologically, the first way to catch the instant is the photograph, then the
development of the recording techniques of an objective experience of the time are supposed
to catch the eternity addressed to the eternity. Yet the archive document does not mean
objectivity but category (index).
a) Photographic document
In Passing Darkness, Tanja is an idol in the primar sense of the word 4 . She is "trapped inside a
portrait which freezes her." 5 No one is really sure about her death, but she is shown in a way
that reminds how photograph has been used since the late 19th century: a caption of the dear
one as a becoming souvenir, something magic.
As Alejandro Amenabar shows in his film The Others (2001) and as Edgar Morin recalls in Le
cinéma ou l'homme imaginaire "as soon as 1861, photography has been snapped by
occultism." 6 The photograph was thought to be extra lucid. It could capture the invisible: the
soul, the time, the hidden truth. Contrary to the portraits studied by Marc Vernet, Tanja is
neither painted nor sculpted. But her photograph remains a representation which keeps some
spiritual dimension as well. It is "(...)between Dorian Gray and Galatea" 7 as "the most banal
photograph has or calls a certain presence." 8
Tanja's portrait is opposed to another woman of the diegesis, Marion, Josef's girlfriend at the
beginning of the narration. Marion is a blond woman whose portrait is squeezed by Josef
when he leaves to Finnmark, after he finds out that she betrayed him with one of his
colleagues. The crushed face and the idealized one oppose themselves in their relationships to
Josef and in the territory they belong to. But they remain proofs of a failed past. They invoke
it. They show it. Inside the house of Stella Polaris, the photographs of the kids appeal the past
as well. When Norway is liberated, when the village has been burnt, when the kids have been
tortured, even their portraits are injured. The present is affecting and perverting the recording
of the past.
b) Sound document
Sounds are vectorized; they come from the past and are maltreated as well. The German
gramophone produces a far scratched sound in Stella Polaris, once the war is over. The
sounds from the past do not respond to a will but to the contingence. The way they are used
reminds more of the found footage technique than a peculiar poetic. The witnesses of history,
the trial of the U2 pilot or JFK's speech in Berlin in Burnt by Frost participate to this aesthetic
of the compilation. It is either a presentation of sonic clichés or the anarchic caption of radio
waves. The distance is heavily blamed by the sound. The scratch effects are much more
present than in the filmed documents.
c) Filmed document
History cannot be heard but it can be seen. The liveliest traces of the past are the filmed
documents. Knut Erik Jensen is mostly known for his documentary production and his use of
the filmed archives9. There is one poetic of the filmed archives in his historical universe as the
same images migrate from one film to another. The same Russian prisoners are in both Ruins
in Paradise and in The Path of Roses. The bombing of Murmansk is in Finnmark between
East and West and is screened on the children's faces in Stella Polaris. When the British
actuality film is seen in Stella Polaris, it actualizes a virtuality and opens a possibility. If
history is visible, if another time and another space are evokable, the filmed document can
have an influence on the narration film. Once history has come back to the diegesis, the
British soldier, the floating corpse can be seen in the fictional present.
The actors of the archives film do not perform, they are. To search to give a reality to people
who are not present anymore, who probably are dead reminds the occultist use of
photography. To transform the movement of the film into a still is what Jensen does when he
focuses on the faces of the Russian prisoners in Ruins in Paradise. But the point of view and
the granulating of the band remind snow. Something is being blurred. So why using some
historical material?Because he needs to accuse the difference between the terrible archive and
the void and flat present. And to reveal the decomposition of the diegesis that goes twice
faster. The filmed archives are catalysts.
2.1. The reversibility and the cracked glass
The catalysis is necessary to validate the experiment inside of the laboratory of the site 10 - to
compare Knut Erik Jensen's work to Jean Epstein's11 - is necessary as the lab is no longer a
closed space. Jensen's modernist approach is linked to the spreading of death after the defeat
of his laboratory. Finnmark and its fishing industry lead to Passing Darkness' international
firm. The experiments fail, the glass cracks and contaminates the whole space.
2.2. From the circulation to the inner trip
The distance is necessary to analyze the history. The projection of the past inside the present
is vectorial as assuming the historical value of the document. The film roll accuses the lack of
simultaneity. The sliding of the strip calls translation and circulation.
When Passing Darkness begins, the big boat named Lofoten is the place of the narration. It
looks like a negative with its huge dark surface opened by windows. Doris stands on the deck,
does not move during several seconds and looks like a two dimensional ghost, similar to F.W.
Murnau's Nosferatu12. She is perhaps like the mythical vampire, an entity who rules the
direction of the narration. The Lofoten is also a possible alter ego to the Demeter in Nosferatu.
They both name earth in different qualities (an archipelago and a mythological goddess) and
help the protagonists to cross space and time. Going back to Finnmark on a boat naming the
archipelago which inspired Knut Hamsun obliges Josef to face his past, both in qualities of
geography and history.
The quest and the reversibility can start.
Odysseus, Don Quixote or Candide are some literary examples of the quest. Its
cinematographic equivalent, the road movie, has become a popular figure with the
democratization of the private vehicle. But as the name indicates, a road movie insists more on
a road than on a vehicle. The trip of a character delimits an anthropocentric space. It is a path
and an inner quest. The journey is the way to grab new elements to help the audience to
understand the motive of the quest. A film like George Miller's Mad Max (1979) is the perfect
illustration of the classical idea of the road movie. The road movie corresponds to this
affirmation: "Every movement leads somewhere."13
When Knut Erik Jensen directs The Path of Roses, he conceives also a typical road movie.
The leading character is looking for a love story she will never experience since the romance
belongs to the reminiscences of another character. She moves into space and into time, going
deeper into the past of Northern Norway. When she finally belongs to the same space and time
as the soldier, she has the Swedish nurse's clothes. She cannot be herself in this phantasm.
Uniforms assess this affair. When the Russian man is dressed as a soldier, he is forbidden to
love and so is the woman when she is dressed as a nurse.
When the phantasm couple is in the diegetic present, the one of the path of roses in the snow,
they try to bewitch time by dance, but this trick cannot work. They stop, stare at each other, as
immobile statues, as the rocks behind them, cannot move and cannot talk. They fade away in
the landscape and signify the death of the romance, the death of the story and the end of the
film. But what about a road movie which would only be a road without leading anywhere?
The revolutionary sliding strip made road movie in the late 1990's is Lost Highway (1997).
Watching David Lynch's film might be the total opposite of watching Knut Erik Jensen's ones.
But both of the filmmakers are contemporary and like using structures and symbols to create
their universes. In both films -Lost Highway and Passing Darkness- characters are envelops,
concepts, vehicles. Lynch's characters are proteiform. He bets on their singularity and follows
their evolution in a closed space both in visual and metaphorical ways. The idea of
claustrophobia, of madness, is accentuated by the repetitive band of the highway. The only
breathes of the films are some deserts inserts. But they cannot bring a new wind in the scheme
of the film. The blow of the explosion of the house turns into an implosion, denies the idea of
a rational temporality 14 and achieves what could have generated the only breath of Fred
Madison's trip. The spectators are prisoners of the film, prisoners of the Moebius strip 15 as Fred
Madison/Pete Dayton is himself. For David Lynch, space is time, a pure modifiable time that
questions the quality of space. When are we? How is the time acting on the characters? and so
on... But this road movie without an end (without any imminent death as a goal unlike Thelma
and Louise (1991) for example) follows the concentration of information during the journey
of Fred Madison. The strip has no limit and draws the 8 of infinity but still gathers facts and
characters that will make the audience thinking of the potential paths in the story which
(re)starts with the line "Dick Laurent is dead". To go back to the future, to adopt multiple fake
identities, to meet several times the same characters with different attributes are the dramatic
sides of such a mise-en-scène.
At the opposite of Lynch's concentrated universe, Jensen's characters have lost their form,
their singularity: they are universal. His aesthetic of film creates a pure space with some
different uses of time. Space is composite and changes qualitatively without respite. The site is
not unique even if landscapes look alike. The anthropocentric space then calls always an
elsewhere: nostalgia, reminiscences of the past and call for death. The path is not a solid band
but a membrane where information is transmitted. Characters and facts go through. There is
no concentration. The more the audience knows the more new doors are opened the less the
spectators understand. Passing Darkness is a road movie where the quest has no more center.
There is no focus like in David Lynch's baroque world but a dilatation of the universe and of
the characters and of their private drama. The firework of experiences accentuates the fact that
a flat strip to collect drama time and space don't fit Jensen's aesthetic. To be liberated from the
human scale, Jensen alternates organic close ups and wide caption of the world out of human
perceptions. The open spaces of Jensen's fiction films are not comparable to what Noël Burch
names "pillow shots" in Ozu's work 16.
In Jensen's fiction films, the wide angle shots don't bring the spectators into an homogenous
temporality. These breaks could invoke poetry of the cinematographic apparel but Knut Erik
Jensen needs too much structures of space and time to let this breath happen. The geometrical
figure that might correspond to this dilatation is the spiral.
3. Dilatation
3.1. Helicoidally figure
Spiral rings never embrace the same space. They escape to the different models of bands. The
geometrical form allows two movements: the dilatation (deployment or firework or similar
models) and the concentration (helix of the chromosome). As we saw earlier, Knut Erik
Jensen's narrative films explore both of these directions even if his conception of the
concentration is inseparable from the permeability of the membrane.
Before becoming a spiral, the rotating movement starts on a unique axis and is literally a
plastic motive inside the frame. The projection of the light on one axis moving on itself is
slashed by the obturator of the lighthouse in Passing Darkness. The rhythm does not change
but soon appeals dilatation and the only axis of the movement opens space by producing a
light having the shape of a spiral. To dilate space, the mechanical movement of the work, of
the light, eventually the slow motion accompanying the decomposition of this movement and
the bewitching of the time through the use of music are exploding the frame and
metamorphose it into a pure space. The double movement seems to correspond to both
memory 17, mechanical movement and the composition inside the frame.
The motive of the helix really catches the attention as this typical kind of movement is
remarkable and unnatural regarding the human displacements. Cool and Crazy's Trolljazz
shows first the choir standing as an helix around the white tower, conquering for the first time
the height and the elevation towards the sky. The choir obliges the camera to spin too to catch
the space and the whole group of singers during the performances of Sangen om Sangen as
Cool and Crazy 2 (2002) starts. Music is acting on the camera, on the mise-en-scène. It has
been one of the main concerns in Knut Erik Jensen's aesthetic in both documentaries (Jazz og
Joik, 1981) and fiction films.18As an answer to the standardization of work, the music is an
alternative way to occupy space.
"Arne Nordheim's music for Stella Polaris and Terje Rypdal's music for Zero
Kelvin (1995) exist as original works in a film landscape where the trend
nowadays looks to go more and more in the stimulation of the cultural
standardization." 19
The fear of the standardization is inherent in all the films by Knut Erik Jensen 20 and his
struggle against a classical model to make films (the representation as reality) is the best way to
fight.
It is not easy to reconquer a dynamic space that has been vampirised by economics.
That's surely why the dynamic headroom, the capacity for a system to reproduce loud sounds
without distortion, is not always integral in Knut Erik Jensen's films. Often though, the music
is spread in the space in order to start a conquest of the territory by the human beings. To
"[...]the difficulty of being reponds the difficulty to express; there are then only two issues, the
silence or the singing." 21
3.2. To bewitch time
The common element to the different ways to decompose and recompose the movement is not
visual or not only: it is the rhythm. Hypnose for example is based on a monotonous scansion.
Rhythm and music are made of an objective time (something the phonograph and the
cinematograph share by their origins and their nature), and open a dynamic space. Time can
be controlled like a human mind by music. It is just a matter of repetition.
3.3. To concentrate the action in a ritornello
To stop time in Pour Mémoire (1978), Jean-Daniel Pollet stops the sound of the ritornello
sung by the little kids. To stop time -the present- Knut Erik Jensen restarts the music. Passing
Darkness' main theme is an original child lullaby written by Olga Petrova. The repetitive
melody is an efficient ritornello, a return on itself, a negation of the flux of time. When Josef
rescues Doris from Samson's boat, the action is annulled when he intones his lullaby. The
ritornello bewitches time and action. The nostalgia and the contretemps are appeals from and
of the past. As Olga Petrova's lullaby, Arne Nordheim's soundtrack for Stella Polaris opens
times when inside of the quasi eternity of the narration, the children who are inside the attic
look behind themselves and see another epoch where people were working with fish in this
same space they are playing in. Moreover the ritornello still in Stella Polaris, is a part of the
reciprocal movement: one opens a door, and this action opens the sound which at its turn
opens space...
In L'Image Temps, Gilles Deleuze affirms that "the musical is the depersonalized and
singularized movement"22. If it is depersonalized, it is then universal. The musical is made of
rhythm, music and dance to celebrate and to open a pure space. Sometimes, it happens that
one of these three elements remains alone (the musicless dance in Stella Polaris), but the effect
is still the same. Cool and Crazy is a step going to this achievement. It is still a documentary
but all the ingredients to reach the pure cinematographic space are here. That's the musical
which was Alain Resnais' goal to bewitch time. He made this come true with On connaît la
chanson. Knut Erik Jensen has a project regarding a musical about his youth. We can bet that
this will be the accomplishment of his will to create a pure space too.
The pure space and its dilatation have for correlate the permeability. Music bewitches time,
not history. Stella Polaris is abstracted in eternity until The Norwegian Nazi flag floats. The
objective chronology is back.
4. Permeability
The story and the history are deeply linked. The subjectivity and the mechanism of the
memory do not belong to the characters but come back by themselves. The dissemination of
the space becomes the dissemination of the human creatures 23. As in Resnais' films, memory is
a membrane "that makes correspond the grades of past and the levels of reality, the ones
emanating from an inside always already there, the others coming from an outside always in
becoming, both of them representing the present as their meeting only. 24 " The dilatation has
no edge contrarily to Moebius strip. Without any closed cosmos, the whole is not a unity but
an ensemble that loses its integrity. Something is in the air is gnawing all the components of
the frame; it is meteorology.
4.1. Meteorology
To sing and to dance is to celebrate a space abstracted from the temporality. But when time
presses space, it becomes weather, meteorology 25. Hereby, it modifies the appearance of the
site where humans evolve. It forbids characters' movements. To conquer Finnmark, the choir
of Berlevåg starts Cool and Crazy by singing the region. The raging sea does not let easily the
men appropriating their own space by the word. The song protects from the wind, from the
ice as the choir remains united. They are not any fiction films characters but they still are
compared to some statues as they are frozen or hold by the meteorology. What is common
between voices and meteorological phenomena is their qualities as "formless things" 26 and their
changing moods.
We saw that Humans belong to chaos, to a mythic infermo. As it is a part of chaos too and not
a Heaven, Knut Erik Jensen's sky is not homogenous. It is as polymorphic as inferno. Its
atmosphere is made of variations (term common to both music and meteorology 27 ).
"The atmosphere is this thickness of the air, a density or a fluidity, a transparency
or a mist, that acts as a milieu for the diffusion of the waves that are going to
impinge on the film,(...) they impress themselves in variations of colors, tones,
density, transmitting their effects of pressure or of depression, of warmth or of
coldness that give the presence of a body, its touch, its singularity."28
One of the components of this atmosphere is the wind affecting characters and landscapes.
When it is a blizzard, men are made stalagmites (Cool and Crazy). When as in Tarkovsky's
films, the wind blows inside the house of Stella Polaris, it has an immediate effect on the
characters. It makes them clouds. As a matter of fact by belonging to the same chaos as the
sky, 29 sometimes, the Human is dislocated and disintegrated, he "[...]gets the density of a
cloud, the consistence of a fume; he is a pure vaporous animal, with a feline grace, with a
monkey agility." 30, effect the slow motion accentuates.
In Stella Polaris, the ships and the wooden materials are gnawn too by the bite of the
meteorology. Svein Krøvel's camera is flowing above the grass and searches another time.
To go out from the house means to search freedom. The wind is embracing a heuristic
function. The waters are mirrored. Some Aurora Borealis (title to another script by Jensen)
recalls the ionization of a sun invisible to most of the human beings. These meteorologic
phenomena are Deleuze's "avatars of time" 31: manifestations of the time as the only event.
Meteorology is then a caption of emptiness. Sometimes this monochrome infinity opens the
frame and gives the impression of serenity. Sometimes these snowy landscapes are hostile.
4.2. Emptiness
The indefinite zones by excellence are the sky, the sea and the snow. An open space does not
mean necessary the freedom, but the threat of the meteorology and of a transcendence. Henri
Agel names the westerns by John Ford as symptomatic of the wide spaces that become jails 32.
Knut Erik Jensen's wide spaces are not jails but tombs, places where the life is over.
A space wounded by the meteorology is the perfect place to separate and to disorient 33 . The
snowy wide open spaces make the image flattened. The horizon is blurred by the falling snow
that reminds some pixels(The Path of Roses). Video images are also present and accentuate the
blurry effect of non differentiation. Evrything is confused and whitened.
Emptiness in modern films after 194534 has often been a recurrent motive. This principle for
modernity is a declination of abstraction as well in the modern art as in the physical world
after the age of the atom. Monochromes 35, monotonous colors, unnatural colors are the way to
express a dying world, a meaningless world. Movements of the camera are wide and catch
screens/faces. Jensen's films deal often with a clear universe ruled by light, darkness, ice and
ethereal reflections of the sky on the enlightened landscapes. The dying world cannot spouse
arctic colors. In Passing Darkness, the nuances of blue, purple and green of Finnmark are
counter balanced by the yellow and black tones of both Eberhardt Krebs, Italy, Marion and
her lover. When Edvin passes away, the dychotomy ocre/blue fades away as well. The last
frame of Passing Darkness is sepia and green, as if the original colors had been contaminated.
Sepia (the tint of old fashioned pictures) and green (the color of nature and of a rotten dying
organic matter) call the past and actualize it in the only motive for a diegetic present of the
film: the revelation of Tanja's deep frozen corpse.
4.3. To precede the word
The loss of center, the infinite white jail of snow, has for consequence the loss of the word.
To understand the sense of the story through the dialogue is perhaps the hardest task for the
attentive spectator to a Knut Erik Jensen's film. When characters are not mute (Stella Polaris),
they just sound inadequate.
They speak a language (even an untranslated foreign one like German, Italian, English or
Russian) that comes always too late. The action, or more exactly the event happens.
The audience tries to understand the meaning of what is going on the screen. Situations
change and some seconds or minutes later, the Word is finally hearable. But it is too late. For
Jensen, it seems important to be too late. That's why his fictional characters cannot talk at the
present, of the present. The voice over effects put the accent on the difficulty to express
something in a time in. To precede, to be late and then to be adequate with the voice in always
takes a couple of seconds (Burnt by Frost, Passing Darkness and The Path of Roses). When
fiction fades away, when the event is abstracted in a non time, the site of the drama (Finnmark,
Russia, Italy...) takes the relay and imposes an historic word that is timeless and universal, like
when Krebs in Passing Darkness evokes the history of the discovery of the compass or in the
same film when the cabdriver tells the story of Kirkenes 36. An eternal word can help to
understand the drama underneath but also accuses the impossibility for the story to find a
realisation in the present.
Films recall that they are made with a non simultaneous material. Slow motion, use of archives
and an apparently chaotic narration fail in reaching the now of the situation. Moreover,
talking bodies, souls and characters are often cut up by the camera or filtered 37 . The spoken
words out of the mouths, out of the faces, out of the bodies, mean that the dialogue does not
belong either to the one who talks or to the diegetic character who listens to. The told or sung
words belong first of all to the site, and to another time that took place there too. It is the case
at the beginning of Passing Darkness in a scene taking place on the moving sea. Inside the
apparently empty boat's restaurant, dining guests are hearable. They were perhaps there once
or will be there at any moment of the cruise 38 . The audience is a bit perplex and can assign
this sound to the dizzy and drunk Josef who is walking back to his cabin. What are we
supposed to watch , to listen to, to understand? Nothing is sure.
As in films by Fellini and Tarkovsky, we assist to a "decentralising: we respect the clarity and
the intelligibility of the text, but a film is made whose the elements (movements and
interpretation of the actors, framing, decoupage and even script), are not focussed on the
dialogue and don't help in listening to them." 39 The words correspond then well to Heidegger's
description of the "reign of the duplication" 40 as they express the deployment of the
fragmentation.
4.4. The power of abstraction
Knut Erik Jensen's films are showing that they are more and more distant. They are really
made of "empty spaces that seem having absorbed characters and actions, to keep of them
only a geophysical description, an abstract inventory." 41 The erosion of charaters and spaces
caused by meteorology and time have for result the default of cinematographic restitution.
5. Transparitions
5.1. distance and default of restitution
The heuristic search of time has been mentioned several times. Time and space are being lost
as the context, the characters can disapear in a couple of frames. The camera is not frontal, not
objective in Stella Polaris or Ruins in Paradise, because it is a researcher's point of view that
structures the story. To lead a research in the Finnmark laboratory occurs a camera situated
above the site, as if it were a mix of a telescope and of a microscope. But when the revelation
happens, it switches the heuristic act of filming into a mystical one, using the emphasis. This
second kind of point of view is typical of the filmmakers interested in the importance of
history in a given place. To turn around an object with a low angle shot (the emphasis in the
sequence of Stella Polaris where the woman is perceived like the statue of Poseidon in Jean-
Daniel Pollet's 3 Jours en Grèce) is symptomatic.
To see from too far away or from to close can affect the audience's perception. There is no
perspective, the space is dilated, monochromous and the loss of coordinates makes it doubtful.
Moreover sometimes, the camera tries to blur the sight literally. Stella Polaris loses the focus
on the characters several times. What is then the essence of the image?
5.2. Transparitions of time in space
Not to see correctly invokes Hypnos, the younger brother to Thanatos 42 .
The fading of visual perceptions are commonly the apparition and the disappearing. But they
can be trans-paritions too. Transparitions of time in space are not born with cinema but with
literature. During the 19th century, in France, to trans-appear was often used to deal with
ghosts.
The opposition of transparitions with apparitions is the essence of these phenomena.
Apparitions deal with a supposed reality. Transparitions deal with fantastic. They are extra
lucid: "prestidigitation, as sorcery, succeeds with apparition, disappearing and
metamorphoses." 43
5.3. Transparence
The difference between a transparition and a transparence is their qualities. A transparition is a
metamorphose of the representation. A transparence is a quality of the representation. We are
not dealing here with "[...]the narrative cinema (that) would be the one of the
transparence[...]" 44 , that would accept the image as being real and the fiction as being possible,
but with the matter of the representation itself.
"Between the transparence and the white opacity, there is an infinite number of
degrees of blur(...). We could name white the being accidentally opac of the pure
transparent." 45
The transparence is a first step to catch the image of the death. By being transparent, the
image, whitewashed46 to use Baudrillard's words, creates an empty frame, an empty zone
waiting for something to happen. The event is going to transappear. The abstracted space of
Northern Norway occurs a whitened blurry sky that transforms it into a transparent surface. As
we saw earlier, the white is not a symbol for life but for death (the bleedy white towel in
Passing Darkness) and so is the transparence (the workbench at the fishery in Passing
Daknress is transparent and is linked to the dead fishes cutting). Linked to the representation
of death, "everything is both transparent and obscure". 47
However, the transparence is not the exclusivity of the objects inside the frame but of the
frame itself, or at least of what is perceptible as being the frame. It is the superimposition.
Jean Leprochon, writing about Jean Epstein and the transparence of the chrysalis describes the
cinematographic superimposition with these words:
"This photography of the depths sees the angel inside the man like a butterfly
inside the chrysalis. Death makes some promises via cinematograph." 48
But as we recalled in the introduction, the chrysalis reminds a sandglass time appealing the
death as consequence of the future. On the contrary, the superimposition does not call any
becoming future but a becoming past. As for any kind of projection, a screen is necessary.
White screens, black screens (both very present in Stella Polaris) are a repetitive in films
especially after the 1970's. The white surface is not only an effect of mise-en-scène but the
matter of the frame too. It can be literal (the screening of the news in Burnt by Frost), or a
concrete flat surface (the white wall of the deserted house in Stella Polaris), or a concrete
accidental surface (the faces/screens in both Burnt by Frost and Stella Polaris). It will remain
dematerialized, impalpable, fugacious49. But if the screen fades away as the space does, ghosts
will be everywhere 50 .
By becoming a double image, the superimposition loses its double texture, loses its
photographic definition, becomes flat and accuses a mise en abyme of the representation. The
past is invoked strongly. 51
But it is not a singular experience as the subjectivity is interior by essence. Knut Erik Jensen's
characters' subjectivity is not possible as their faces are sculpted by an historical time.
Some archives that should remain in a casemate seem to go out of their cupboard by their own
forces. They become actual again and show what people (both characters and audience)
would prefer to forget. When some of Knut Erik Jensen's characters have to face the
objectivity of history, they just do not face it. They become a part of the projection.
Filmed documents, in some extreme conditions, can be projected on the faces/screens.
"The face is both given by its monstrous presence, by its quiet domination, but
refused as well by its transparence, byt its ghostly evanescence that express its
belonging, as a lost object, in a finished past, as an object impossible to grab,
whose future is impossible." 52
Stella Polaris' first face/screen is the reminiscence of the Nazi soldier, projected of the girl's
face. This technique reminds Tony Oursler's sculptures (film of a face projected on the three
dimension white sculpture) or Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) (the bi dimensionality of the
representation of the first scene is accused by the fading faces on the morgue's screen).
Collective memory and personal memories come out of the brain and occur the discovering of
a disturbing reality.The bombing of Murmansk becomes an entertainment.
"(...)"the hero" has become unable to reach his thoughts", "he is reduced to see
defilating in himself some images, a number of contradictory images", he "was
robbed of his spirit"(...). The spritual automaton has become the Mummy, this
dismembered, paralyzed, petrified, frozen instance[...]" 53
Without thought, and with a defeated subjectivity, the events in the image remain affections.
To create a short cut between the different layers of times, something else than the classical
narration is necessary. To show the presence of time into space, Knut Erik Jensen uses
transparitions like figural events created by history. In his theory of the Figural, Philippe
Dubois recalls the four different levels of figuration. The first one, the figurative is Aristotle's
mimesis. The second one, the figured owes its meaning to Pierce. The third one, the figurable
is the potential figuration. The fourth one is the figural, what is in the figuration but is neither
figurative nor figured but remains figurable. This Figural is possible thanks to the dynamic of
plastic events and to the affection inside the image not to its logic. These events of the film
deal more with plastic forms than with contents (events in the film). These matters are color,
dynamic, frame: clues of the structure of a plastic drama that is taking place. The lack of
dialogue and the default of narration that make Stella Polaris possible correspond to this
theory of the Figural. When the leading part, the nameless woman, wakes up a second time,
the white color displaces the whiteness of her being (as white has been associated to her since
the beginning of the film) to the reality of a hospital room. The camera is dollying in on her
bed and the same movement enters another space (The same effect is created when the
whitened deserted house offers the possibility to become a snowy beach). The mirrored sea is
back. Without knowing the film, to tell the Figural is almost an impossibility as the events
don't assess a discourse but an experience of the dynamic resources of the cinematograph.
Figural is both Epstein's photogeny, his cinematographic trans-specification 54 and Deleuze's
purely optical and audible perspectives 55.
It never accentuates neither the source nor the mechanical caption but the effects both create.
It is then a matter of feeling and sensing the films.
The resemblance, the impression of deja vu Deleuze evokes is going through the whole
aesthetic of Jensen's films.
The migration of influences, of images creates a network, a structure of events absolutely
necessary to the figural manifestation transparitions are. The intellectual praxis of the world is
useless since the affect which is "something supra sensitive manages to transappear" 56 and
commands the editing as in Tarkovsky's films whose "editing reposes on the mental
circulation of the images." 57 The subjectivity of the affect and the inter-mental circulation of
the image belong to a chaotic space, to the editing and to the audience. It is therefore not a
real subjectivity but a migrating of the consciousness. 58
Knut Erik Jensen's fiction faces are consequently not the dreaming faces (weak subjectivity)
Marc Vernet talks about in Figures de l'Absence but accept the development of the idea of "a
kind of Kuleshov effect transfering to the character the quality of the object he is thinking of,
but in a single shot, in a single frame. 59 " Since the face and the image are confonded, there is a
zone of non discernability. 60
By becoming double, the image reaffirms that it is just a reflect, an absence, a trace, a defeat
of the face accompanying the loss of the transparence of the representation. 61 As a
consequence, if there is no longer any integral face, "there is no more site for the soul. Or: the
soul in perdition is everywhere". 62
5.4. Hypnagogical perceptions
The spreading of the ghosts of the images forbids the objective conventional representation
and focuses on the inner life. A paradoxical inter-mental universe made of some hypnagogical
perception: dream or hallucination 63 is taking the relay. It is not any perception belonging to a
special quality of the brain, but an hallucination experienced a direct consequence of the
cinematographic space.
"Hypnagogical visions, dreams, hallucinations, or even sensation of Unheimlich,
all these experiences, as dissimilar as they are, are lived on the mode of the
fascination, of the terror sometimes, because they open on an inhumed territory:
the one of the unknown percepts, possible but in latency, waiting for an event
capable of opening up the perceptive defenses." 64
The inter-mental perceptions make the screen exist everywhere; it is space itself, cosmos 65
characters and chaos.
5.5. Transparitions, besides Thanatos
Something goes through the image. it is time, reality, past, future, imaginary events 66 . It is
fantastic even if the event is real. This crossing of the image and/of the matter is announcing
the transparitions. To transform the representation, a metamorphosis must take place.
The near death experience makes characters and cinematographic events reborn in two
different worlds, the spiritual one and the physical one. The spiritual one is characterized by
the air, the fume.
The physical one by the water. They are compossible and the audience has to accept not to
choose which attributes correspond to which reality. The double modality of existence is
inherent to the double sacrifice.
"The death is the country where one arrives when one has lost the memory." 67
Hung by his feet, the young boy of Stella Polaris is punished. His figure is inverted and
recalls the hung man of the Tarot. In the same scene, the little girl is thrown at the water. The
transformation of the boy's spatial coordinates and the liberation of Norway are linked. The
information is being changed. A new order is coming. A time for transformation has started.
Burnt by frost explains this double punishment by the line "The one who is going to be hung
cannot drown". But someone drowns as Burnt by Frost starts. If this was Simon, he is given
the chance to restart a life where he will lose one eye 68 . Simon by losing one eye is half
human, with half visual perceptions. The rather close ups that ends Burnt by Frost
"(...)transforms the face into a ghost, and leads it to the ghosts." 69
But if we accept the program of destiny led by an incompossible sacrifice (to be hung or to
drown), the Finnmark trilogy composed with Stella Polaris, Burnt by Frost and Passing
Darkness proposes a variation regarding this punishment. The kids of Stella Polaris are hung
or thrown at the water. The male adult is precipitated by a net inside the sea. Burnt by Frost is
perhaps two versions of a story starting either with a drowning or announcing the final
reversibility of the punishment. If "the one who is going to be hung cannot drown", what must
we think of the man's death in Stella Polaris and of Josef's accident on the shore of Kirkenes
in Passing Darkness? At the beginning and at the end of the Finnmark trilogy, to be hung by
the sea and to drown is also possible. This does not modify the characters' coordinates but
makes them dive into the possible death, into the mother sea. They are also becoming ghosts,
Stella Polaris' man by dying and Josef by announcing the reappearence of Tanja's coffin.
Burnt by Frost's Simon by not being able to see correctly was already dead. Passing Darkness'
Tanja, The Path of Roses' Russian soldier or Stella Polaris' characters assert the denial of the
death by being some ghosts, the most obvious transparitions in Knut Erik Jensen's films. By
negating the time, Knut Erik Jebnsen's fiction cinema restarts the cycle. Having acquired the
knowledge, the representation does not transfigure any longer. It trans-appears.
Conclusion of the second part
Citing Mathieu, Umberto Eco writes that if "we assist to the collapsing of all the classical
values in the domain of art, another deep parallel revolution takes place in the domain of the
sciences where the recent failing of the concepts about space, matter, parity, gravitation and
resurgence of the notions of indeterminateness, probability, contradiction, entropy, postulate
from all parts the awakening of a mysticism and the possibility of a new transcendency." 70
Régis Boyer in his introduction to his translation of Knut Hamsun's work tells that the
common point to all the Norwegian artists is the expression of the difficulty to be, to belong to
this reality. What Jean-Daniel Pollet's Contretemps (1988) teaches is that there is for only
reality the apparency, contrary to Marc Vernet's postulate where reality and apparency would
be different. The contretemps is the art of the fusion. It is bringing out the ancient into the
new and vice versa. It is to become diaphanous, to become a new kind of event, a
transparition.To appear is to actualize a virtuality and to make it real. To dis-appear is to
vanish, to fade away, to become absent from the perceived reality of the present. To transappear
is to transform both of the two precedent ones into non vectorized actualities. The apparitions,
dis-paritions deal with time, the vectorized time analyzed in the first part of this
study when on the opposite the trans-paritions only consider the potential becoming. Knut
Erik Jensen does not need Science Fiction to replace the analogical world by the virtual one.
History time and music have created this new infinite space.

 

 


1Régis Debray in Vie et Mort de l'Image en Occident recalls that memorials appeared at the 19th century just like the lighthouses and the
museums.
2During the Russian circuit, Trygg mourns Aliocha in Cool and Crazy.
3Guigueno, op.cit.
4Debray, p. 19 idol "unreachable ghost of the dead one".
5Vernet, p. 91
6Morin, p. 28
7Vernet p. 89
8Morin, p. 26
9The film that revolutionned the perception of Finnmark in Norway was Finnmark between East and West in 1986. This was a real historic
project. For the first time, Norway had to face its history. Some non Norwegian archives (some exclusive Russian ones never used since 1944)
were used in order to be more objective.
10Heidegger, p. 41 "To situate means here first of all: to indicate a site. This means after: to be attentive to the site. (...) the site brings back to one,
maintains what it brings back, not as an hermetic closed envelop, because it animates of transparence and of trans-sounding (transonnance in
French) what is brought, and through this only liberates it in its own being."
11I might be borrowing this Epstein's lab comparison due to Vincent Guigeno's or Gaëtane Lechevalier's lectures.
12The Murnau allusions are based on the course by Luciano Berriatúa (Professional Master's degree seminar at Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Université
Paris VIII, February 2004).
13in Alain Resnais, p. 11
14Jürgen Müller cited the similarity between this scene and Louis Lumière's Démolition d'un Mur (Third year's degree -Licence- seminar at
Sorbonne Nouvelle, Centre Censier, Université Paris III Academic Year 2001-2002).
15Barry Gifford about Lost Highway on www.lynchnet.com
16The pillow shot corresponds to the quality of time that is present in Knut Erik Jensen's documentaries such as Cool and Crazy.
17in Alain Resnais, p. 8 "the work memory is effectuating progresses by spirals."
18Helseth, in Mørkets musikk, Musikk i norske kinofilmer (NFI skriftserie 6, 1997, Oslo, Norway) p. 57 "Knut Erik Jensen's Stella Polaris (1993)
is almost without any dialogue. Arne Nordheim's original soundtrack plays therefore a more important role."
19Helseth, in Mørkets musikk, Musikk i norske kinofilmer, p. 64
20His motto is "Kill the capitalist with fish", words noted in the interview with Simen Tveitereid "Brainstorm i kastan".
21Ropars-Wuillemier, in L'Ecran de la Mémoire.
22Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p.104
23Ropars-Wuillemier, in L'Ecran de la Mémoire, "By this extraordinary confusion of moments, of places and of persons, the time is disintegrated
totally in the space, and the space becomes both the visual sign of the past, and the place where the life is spread and dissolved."
24Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 269 & Epstein, in Le cinéma du diable, p.124"The time goes through, coming from the future, and going
towards the past. Sometimes we feel ourselves living from the past towards the future through the present."
25Bergson, in L'Evolution Créatrice, writes that "the real duration is the one that bites on things and lets its bite printed on it." His description
corresponds to both duration and weather as being parts of the same process, what in French only has one name: le temps.
26in Météorologie, (Cinergon 10, 2000, Luc-sur-Orbieu, France) p.42
27in Météorologie, p. 44 "When, in a film, climatic events and vocal emission impose their double presence, the attention between the sight and
the hearing is scattered too, carrying the process of variation to its edge."
28in Météorologie, p. 24
29The wind is progressing by whirls that reminds waves in My world.
30Epstein, in L'Intelligence d'une Machine, p. 14
31Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 145
32Agel, in L'Espace Cinématographique, chap. 4
33ibid.
34Jacques Gerber and Gilles Deleuze have enounced the basis of the emptiness in modern cinema in their respective works.
35Baudrillard, p. 17 "The fascination of a monochromatic picture is the marvellous absence of form -the erasure, though still in the form of art, of
all aesthetic syntax."
36It is remarkable to note that in both scenes, a statue is illustrating their tellings.
37Knut Erik Jensen uses a lot of filter effects: telephone, reverb to make the word come late.
38This also sounds like a displacement. The sea is hearable when Josef imagines some Oslo cocktail and we can imagine that it is the same Oslo
cocktail which is heard in the boat as reciprocal sonic event.
39Chion, in L'Audio-Vision, (coll. Fac. cinéma, Ed. Nathan Université, 1990, Paris, France) p. 154
40Heidegger, p. 120
41Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 12
42Debray, p. 31
43Morin, p. 60
44Vernet, p.5
45Goethe, in Theory of colors, §495
46Baudrillard, p. 44 "[...]we are doomed in consequence to a whitewashing of all activity -whitewashed social relations, whitewashed bodies,
whitewashed memory- in short, to a complete aseptic whiteness."
47Agel, in L'Univers Filmique, p. 195
48Leprochon, p. 152
49Morin, p. 42 "The image projected on a screen is dematerialized, impalpable, fugacious."
50Morin, p. 49 "the screen is fading into space. Ghosts are everywhere."
51Vernet p 64 "With the photographic double of the superimposition, making the subject diaphanous, the evoking is being assigned on the
representation.[...]a kind of alchemy in which the representation, by becoming evoking, makes visible the invisible [...]"
52Vernet p. 71
53Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 217
54Epstein, in Le cinéma du diable, p. 169 "As the cinematographic experiment attests, as soon as we modify the temporal rhythm in which a
phenomenon is represented, it becomes miraculously denatured, trans-specified, rejected from a category into another."
55Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 77 "the purely optical and audible perspectives of a desinvested present only have some link with a
disconnected past, floating childhood memories, phantasms, impressions of deja vu."
56Heidegger, p. 99
57in Météorologie, p. 79
58Baudrillard, p.4 "Nothing is truly reflected any more -whether in a mirror or in the abyssal realm (which is merely the endless reduplication of
consciousness). The logic of viral dispersal in netwroks is no longer a logic of value; neither, therefore, is it a logic of equivalence."
59Vernet, p.71
60Vernet, p. 72/73 "[...]which one creates the other,which one is the emanation of the other.(...) "By drowning the face, by removing its
substance, the superimposition figures the erasure of the subject, its fading, its weakness in front of the irrepressible force of the memories or of the
suspicion."
61Morin, p. 31 "The image is only a double, a reflect, an absence."
& Leirens, p. 132 "The cinematographic image is mediator. It keeps, according to André Bazin's word, the trace of a being, only its trace."
& Aumont, "The defeat of the face would accompany -is it so surprising?- the loss of all transparence of the representation."
62in L'Ecran Intérieur, (Cinergon 12, 2001, Luc-sur-Orbieu, France) p. 8
63Deleuze, in L'Image-Temps, p. 148 "inexplicable in the present when they come, much more nocive and autonomous. No more memories, but
some hallucinations."
64in L'Ecran Intérieur, p. 39
65in L'Ecran Intérieur, p. 41 "Without any doubt the water, in its liquid texture, moving support of a reflect in perpetual metamorphose, is
peculiarly benefic to blur the sight, bringing it to a kind of hypnotic contemplation, where the hallucination can emerge from."
66in Alain Resnais, p. 12 "There is no longer any frontier that separates th imaginary from the experienced, the possible from the real, the past
from the future."
67in Alain Resnais, p.3
68In some of Knut Erik Jensen's films, death is seen through an open eye, a fish's a sheep's or a human's. Death is a star reflected (surely the
polestar) in the eyes of the lifeless old woman and of the sheep in Stella Polaris. It is the opposite of a transparition, it is a pure crystal image. We
could say that it trans-appears, but the result of this caption of the sky is too vectorial to match the concept of transparition. It recalls the mythical
eye Roland Barthes once analyzed; an eye that would catch the last glimpse of life and the image of death.
69Deleuze, in L'Image-Mouvement, p. 141
70Eco, p. 122
"The phantoms of the screen have perhaps to teach us something else than the fables of laughter and cries: a new
conception of the universe and some new mysteries about soul."
in Le cinéma du diable, Jean Epstein

"The phantoms of the screen have perhaps to teach us something else than the fables of laughter and cries: a new
conception of the universe and some new mysteries about soul."
in Le cinéma du diable, Jean Epstein

Main Conclusion

For Jensen all the notions of times are confounded. The study of his narration films shows that the world is being defeated. The organic regime had ceased to be as soon as the study had started. Actually, the cinematographic caption is mediation which is neither objective (the bi dimensionality) nor organic (silver, nitrate, different chemical components until the contemporary electromagnetic support). The mineral regime showed that the original soil
could not be mastered and that the mechanization was accusing the essential default in a logic of death. When there is no more condensation, there is no more crystal. The organic, the narrative, the mechanical, the bio mechanical matters are losing their integrity. The source and the result make default, but the mise-en-scène subsists. Knut Erik Jensen is not proposing a mise-en-scène of the destruction unless the fragmentation redundancies that cross my study but a mise-en-scène of the loss, going back to the origin, denying time for the motives of the network and of the cycle.
To deal with the two other regimes of the supposed cycle of life, the mineral one and the gaseous one are consequently a chance to consider film history from the practical aspect to the virtual aspect: what qualifies contemporary cinema.