L'amour

L'amour is a three-part video essay gathering films that address the idea of love not only as theme or narrative, but as a formal question: how different filmmakers — and different pairings between actor or actress and director — have organised the mise-en-scène to bring out something that love demands be filmed in very specific ways. Framing, distance, gesture, the duration of the scene, silence, the gaze. Cinema as the place where love is not told, but filmed.

The selection does not aim to trace a complete history or an exhaustive typology. It is, of necessity, subjective, but not arbitrary. The montage seeks to make visible, through juxtaposition, what each filmmaker discovers when love is placed before the camera, and what is at stake in each case. The work is published in three parts for reasons of length and internal structure, but operates as a single extended gesture.

Part I · 1h 49 min — Foundations and Modernism

Traces a historical arc from the foundational moment — the first filmed kiss at the origins of cinema — through the bodily intelligence of silent comedy, the mise-en-scène of passion in classical Hollywood, and the great European modernist moment in which love becomes an explicitly formal question. Keaton's gravitational humour, Rossellini's marital crisis, Godard's deconstruction of feeling, Antonioni's architectures of distance, Demy's chromatic melodrama, Varda's pastoral inversion, Wenders' long and elegiac farewell.

Works cited: The Kiss (William Heise, 1896); Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924); College (James W. Horne & Buster Keaton, 1927); Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933); L'amore (Roberto Rossellini, 1948); Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini, 1954); Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962); L'eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962); Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964); Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965); Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984).

Part II · 51 min — Pulse

Gathers three films that share a very particular register: love as pulse, as velocity, as sensation before interpretation. Where the first part examined the analytical work of modernism, here the cinematic gesture becomes lyrical, musical, almost hallucinatory. García-Pelayo's bohemian fugue across 1970s Seville, Carax's kinetic pop romanticism, Lynch's incandescent American fever. Three films in which love is not thought but performed — filmed as propulsion, as incandescence, as the body in pure movement. The mise-en-scène no longer describes the amorous state: it enacts it.

Works cited: Vivir en Sevilla (Gonzalo García-Pelayo, 1978); Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986); Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990).

Part III · 1h 05 min — Reformulations

Addresses contemporary reformulations of the amorous image under new conditions: urban solitude, digital technology, queer visibility, the brevity of the possible encounter. Tsai Ming-liang's architecture of the uninhabited city, Dolan's stylised melancholy, Jonze's love mediated by the interface, Haynes' classical rewriting of desire, Vigalondo's short as a suspended instant in which every possible outcome still coexists. The cinema of this century has not stopped filming love; it films it, increasingly, as something that must be reinvented each time, because its very conditions of possibility have changed.

Works cited: Vive L'Amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994); Les Amours imaginaires (Xavier Dolan, 2010); Her (Spike Jonze, 2013); Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015); Marisa (Nacho Vigalondo, 2009).