Running through October and November 2019, the recently concluded film series Dériver / Arrivée: A Century of Travel in French Cinema featured four films that dealt with the thematics of travel and travelling, framed by Malabou and Derrida’s analysis of the voyage and the attendant notions of dériver and arrivée (drift / derivation and arrival). The films featured include PlayTime (Jacques Tati, 1967), Visages Villages (Agnès Varda & JR, 2017), Nocturne Indien (Alain Corneau, 1989), and Gaston Méliès and His Wandering Star Film Company (Raphael Millet, 2015).

Conceptualised in relation to the NUS Museum exhibition “…you have to lose your way to find yourself in the right place” | Selected Works by Gilles Massot, the Dériver / Arrivée film series picked up on several recurring questions and ideas explored throughout Massot’s oeuvre. These questions include, inter alia, the nature of photography and the photographic event, Massot’s negotiation of self-identity as a long-term Singapore-based French artist, the possibility of coincidence, and liminal or interstitial space(s). As its title reveals, the Dériver / Arrivée film series engaged with travel in French cinema in particular, which we may also generalise loosely to ‘French travel’ – immediately relevant not only to Massot and his work, but also to the cinematic spectator who participates vicariously as tourist or traveller.

Malabou (2004) suggests that the Western conception of the voyage is predicated on a solidarity between dériver and arrivée; voyage / travel and destination are connected by the logic that ‘everything that arrives derives’ (p. 2). Adopting this line of inquiry triggers more questions in response to Massot’s “…you have to lose your way”: Has Massot in fact arrived at the right place, and if so, what is the place or state that is reached? How may we understand drift, or loss of control, in Massot’s voyage? It is hoped that this review of Dériver / Arrivée will help in elucidating the correspondences between film programme and exhibition, encouraging continued conversations on the issues presented in both.

Widely considered as Jacques Tati’s magnum opus and most ambitious film, PlayTime (1967) is set in a futuristic, ultra-modern incarnation of Paris – Tativille – a gargantuan set constructed for the film itself, in which vestiges of postcard Paris are seen only in the reflections of the glass-and-steel buildings which have colonised the cityscape. We follow Monsieur Hulot, one of Tati’s recurring characters, as he finds himself lost in Paris. A liberal use of long takes and long shots with deep focus underscores Hulot’s lost-ness in the urban fabric of Tativille, visually represented in a manner not dissimilar to the Where’s Wally series of puzzle books. Hulot’s displacement is not only spatial or geographical in nature, but also social; social life in Tati’s Paris appears highly ordered and robotic, and much of the film’s humour arises from the absurdity of the characters conforming (or failing to conform) to the social norms and expectations of modern life. It is clear that Hulot has lost his way in Paris. He drifts, with no clear destination to arrive at. What then, may we ascribe his arrival to? How does one find himself in the right place in PlayTime?

In his opening talk for the film screening, Dr Jeremy Fernando (fellow at Tembusu College) reminded us of the nature of the conceptual relationship in dériver / arrivée: ‘not so much from where or to where, for both are not quite anything or have any point without each other … the slash between them dividing and connecting them, connecting only in division … bear[ing] oblique traces of each other within each other’. Perhaps, in the case of Monsieur Hulot, finding himself in the right place is not necessarily arrival to a location per se, but to do with the inarticulable state(s) in-between drift and arrival. For it is within the chaos that Hulot and Barbara (an American tourist part of a tour group) cross paths and form an authentic connection, no matter how fleeting. In Deleuze’s (1985 [2013]) words, ‘the whole genius of Tati is a low-frequency wave-action, but one which spreads Mr Hulots everywhere, forms and breaks up groups, joins and separates characters, in a kind of modern ballet’.

If chance and coincidence appear to feature heavily in Tati’s PlayTime, as catalysts for ‘arriving at the right place’, they take centre stage in Varda and JR’s documentary film Visages Villages (2017). In the film, Varda expresses her fondness for chance, calling it ‘her best assistant’, and it is to chance which she attributes the meeting of the many faces in the many places they visit in rural France. In their roving photo booth truck, Varda and JR embark on a spontaneous, unplanned photo trip, documenting the personal histories of people they meet along the way, from residents in an old mining town, to farmers, and dockworkers and their wives. Chance, it seems, not only drives the duo’s artistic enterprise, but the documentary’s narrative itself. The expected climax of the film (when Varda and JR were to meet Varda’s contemporary and friend, Jean-Luc Godard) never materialises; the elusive Godard is nowhere to be found, leaving only an impersonal, scathing notice written in marker on his glass front door. As JR consoles Varda, he suggests that Godard’s rejection may have been a challenge to the film’s narrative structure, and it is that very encounter which then leads to the film’s true, bittersweet climax. In that climax, Visages Villages arrived at its conclusion, after the drift(s) found in the duo’s travels.

Parallels can also be drawn between Visages Villages and Massot’s art practice, both involving photography and photojournalism. As Tom White (freelance photographer and instructor at Yale-NUS College) said in the film’s pre-screening address, it is the telling of social stories which lies at the heart of his photo-work, as it does with Varda and JR’s project, and with Massot in his desire to make sense of his identities.

The Dériver / Arrivée film series continued with a roundtable discussion on the travelogue, which drew on Massot’s Meeting in Macau (2019) and Corneau’s Nocturne Indien (1989), as well as Tabucchi’s Indian Nocturne (1984) – the novella which the film is an adaptation of. Moderated by academics Dr Tania Roy and Dr Anne Thell (faculty members from the NUS English Language and Literature department) and NUS Museum Curator Dr Hsu Fang-Tze, the roundtable involved NUS students and NUS Museum staff alike, as well as the artist Gilles Massot himself. The meeting of these various perspectives created a polyphonic, dialogic space which resulted in fruitful discussion on the issues to do with the travelogue genre, transposed in the media of video art, film and literature.

The subjectivities of travel and travel writing arose as a topic that was germane and central to both Dériver / Arrivée and “…you have to lose your way”. In Nocturne Indien, we follow a Frenchman, Rossignol, who travels to India in search of his lost friend, Xavier. This undertaking brings Rossignol across India as he finds people who can provide whatever little information they may know of Xavier – from a prostitute in Bombay, to a fortune-teller at a bus stop between Madras and Goa, to a schoolgirl on Calangute Beach. A sense of foreignness persists throughout the film, and may be attributed to the irreconcilability of geography, language and culture. More than that, we come to realise that the film, as travelogue, is intrinsically solipsistic; it is impossible to distinguish between memory and imagination, narration and fabrication. Instead, the travelogue facilitates a recapitulation of the self – quoting Jonathan Swift, Dr Thell pointed out the travelogue genre’s onanistic, self-gratifying tendencies, as a travelogue ultimately fulfils its author’s egoistic desires. This is deftly shown through the filmic narrative, which concludes with Rossignol’s realisation that he is who he is looking for.

As Blum-Reid (2015) proposes, the traveller in Nocturne Indien, despite ‘getting lost’ in India, possibly never loses his European way, instead bringing with him his cultural baggage. Can a voyager, then, really lose his way? Is the resolving of our identities and finding ourselves in the right place contingent on said identities in the first place, which entails that we are never truly ‘lost’ in the first place? In response, Massot declared: ‘There is no coincidence, only narrative’. His work In the Footsteps of Jules Itier (2014) comes to mind – Massot’s recreation of Jules Itier’s daguerreotypes in Asia, a photographer with whom Massot shares many connections with. Here, Massot speaks about the significance of maps in a journey, and how they only become signifiers of the journey and their cultural images after the journey is concluded; before the trip, they mean nothing. Extending the metaphor, narrative may be the compass which helps us to locate ourselves. Like Massot’s work on Itier, recognising our personal biographies and how they are intertwined with broader histories and cultural narratives may be useful in understanding who we are.

The ideas of dériver / arrivée and the voyage are perhaps most readily expressed in the film programme’s final screening: Raphael Millet’s Gaston Méliès and His Wandering Star Film Company (2015). Transit and transience undergird the documentary film’s portrayal of the eponymous filmmaker as he travelled in search of ‘authenticity’ – initially westward in the USA for his Westerns, and later to Asia-Pacific to produce films which were a blend of documentary and fiction (many of which have been destroyed by the passage of time), where he adopted an almost ethnographic approach in casting natives as actors, rare for his time. This hybridity – not only in genre but in the films’ contexts of production – raises a salient question which may likewise be asked of Massot’s art practice: are Méliès’ ‘around-the-world’ films really ‘French films’? Or are they Tahitian, Javanese, Singaporean? As artist-curator Woon Tien Wei asks, does the transnationality, collaboration and the interdisciplinary nature of Massot’s work make it ‘incuratable’ vis-à-vis the current lexicon of art in Singapore?

On another note, Blum-Reid (2015, p. 166-168) points out that ports, as places of passage, are designed for the very purpose of dérive. They are inherently transient places and are characterised by the drifting of ships out to, or from the sea. That Gaston Méliès is organised by the routes of sea travel that Méliès takes, both to and from various ports, makes it a distinctively transitory film. Even when Méliès arrives and settles, we never get the sense that he has come to his true or final destination. Similarly, identity for the traveller may never be stable or singular, but rather constantly remade through hybridisation, transnationality and transculturality. Yet, returning home is a part of the voyage as well – as the narrator in Gaston Méliès reads from his diary, ‘I cannot keep wandering around the world forever … one day I will have to stop’.

Returning to the series’ title, ‘A Century of Travel in French Cinema’ implies a period that has passed, and which can be clearly delineated by time. Yet we have seen how that century continues to have a bearing on us today; the films’ themes and narratives remain relevant, not only to Massot’s exhibition but to our own understandings of voyage. While the series (and this review) may seem to lack a definite point of closure, raising more questions than it provides answers, perhaps the conclusion of the series, instead of arriving at a destination, allows for the continuation of an on-going discussion. And that may be what the series needed to do, allowing each of us, as travellers, to engage with dériver / arrive on our own terms.

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“…you have to lose your way to find yourself in the right place” closes on 13 June 2020. NUS Museum’s next film series will accompany the ongoing exhibition tropics, a many (con)sequence | an exhibition with Kent Chan, as well as the prep-room Sites, Stories & Subsequence, which focuses on the heritage and history of Singapore’s Southern Islands.