Thus In the City of Sylvia is a "field recording" not just in the musical sense. It is also a visual field recording in which the whole city becomes the playing field. By labeling (in interviews and Q & A's) his protagonist variably as a "dreamer" or as a "flâneur", Guerín inscribes him into the rich tradition of other literary and cinematic flâneurs, from Baudelaire's "gentleman stroller", Aragon's "Paris peasant" and Joyce's Leopold Bloom to Varda's Cléo and Rivette's Marie and Baptiste. In fact, just like Rivette's Pont du Nord (1981), In the City of Sylvia is a psychogeographical film par excellence. And its main character, the mysterious El, engulfed by the plethora of disorienting urban sounds, is possibly the first adequate cinematic representation of Deleuzian "schizophrenic out for a walk" - although he starts the movie motionless in his hotel room, lost in reverie, more like a "neurotic on a
Speaking of reverie: in his recent essay "Reading, Rewriting Poe's The Oval Portrait - In Your Dreams"(2006), Jalal Toufic, armed with a Webster, dissects etymology of this word: "French rêverie, from Middle French, delirium, from resver, rever to wander, be delirious". With this in mind, the three movements of Guerín's city symphony can be thought of as three distinct trance-like states through which the protagonist gradually passes : 1) intense concentration (El in his hotel room staring out into space in search of a single line of poetry, later El in the sidewalk cafe focused on a solitary female face), 2) somnambulistic Nosferatu-like promenade through the city streets (following the elusive fugitiva), and 3) final catatonic delirium (El on the tram station transfixed by the multitude of faces reflected in the passing trams' windows, in the state also known as "every name in the history is
El's mastery of concentration exhibited during the first "night" gradually dissipates in the course of the second one, ultimately disintegrating into vertiginous faceted vision, with reflective surfaces taking over his fragmented, out-of-focus world. One can think of In the City of Sylvia, especially its second part, as a case study of distraction. Probably the most remarkable sequence of the film takes place in the outdoor Café du Théatre National de Strasbourg. The hero catches a sight of a female face in the crowd of patrons and begins to contemplate it, sketching it in his notebook. Soon, however, his attention drifts to another face, then another, then another, and so on. Subsequently, his gaze is diverted by a reflection in the cafe's window and then - via slight change of focus - enraptured by a face behind that window. (I will return to this cafe sequence later to elaborate why I find it so remarkable). During the flânerie that follows, El becomes successively (and successfully) distracted by: a dress hanging outside an apartment's window gently trembling in the breeze; sunflares on the surface of the same window; a woman changing her clothes seen through the open window; shadowplay of tree branches on the blank pages of his notebook flapping in the wind; and, finally, by faces of passengers waiting for the tram at the station. This constant refocusing, reframing of attention distinguishes In the City of Sylvia as a unique species of "contemplative cinema with Attention Deficit Disorder".
That distraction is an important theme for Guerín becomes further evident from a ...Sylvia's companion piece - photo-journal Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia (2007). In this latter film, the silent narrator returns to Strasbourg 22 years after a chance meeting with a girl named Sylvia, in an attempt to refind her. In his quest, the protagonist is sidetracked by (what else?) multitudinous female faces, which he incessantly photographs and from which he singles out one especially alluring woman, whom he promptly follows around the city, eventually loses her but (here comes the Ruizian/ Borgesian/ Greenawayan twist!) memorizes the names of all the streets he has passed in the course of his journey, writes them down (rue du Miroir, rue du Corbeau, rue des Aveugles etc.) and attempts to establish a meaningful connection between them. (A stroll from the center of the city to the periphery and its metamorphosis into a game is also reminiscent of Rivette's Pont du Nord). Moreover, our unfocused flâneur further entangles himself in a progressively vaster web of delirious connections, unearthing parallels between his own love story and those of Dante-Beatrice and Petrarch-Laura and ultimately ending up traveling to Florence and Avignon. A never-ending cascade of distractions pushes the dreamer further and further away from his initial object of desire - because distraction is inherently centrifugal. And, according to Bazin, so is its special case - cinema. The dreamer/flâneur loses himself in a labyrinth of his own reverie/delirium.
In his article "Partial Vision: Film and the Labyrinth" (1979), Pascal Bonitzer, frequent collaborator of the aforementioned Rivette and Ruiz, claims that labyrinths, nature of cinema in general and of suspense thrillers in particular have one fascinating aspect in common: the existence of a blind spot, granting the spectator only "partial vision". The "point of horror", the unknown always resides behind the next turn of the labyrinth, in the off-screen (nonspecular, blind) space, or in the next twist of the plot. Guerín takes this concept up a notch. The scene at the Café du Théatre National de Strasbourg is a masterclass in partial vision and blocked points-of-view. (David Bordwell has recently analyzed this scene in excruciating detail, and I refer you to his blog entry to study the frame enlargements documenting many instances of "partial vision" in ... Sylvia). Bordwell writes: "Obtrusiveness is one of Guerin’s most basic strategies in the sequence. Inevitably <...> what the Dreamer is looking at is partially hidden in layers of faces and body parts". By orchestrating this multi-layered obtrusiveness, Guerín riddles the on-screen space with the blind spots (producing something akin to a topologically inverted piece of Swiss cheese), allowing the labyrinthine partial vision to dominate the frame and the blind space to invade the specular space, thus in a way subverting the Bazinian dialectics of cadre vs. cache, with complex masking now occurring within the frame.
Here it would be appropriate to bring up another important Bonitzer's concept, namely that of décadrage [deframing]: "abnormal points of view which are not the same as an oblique perspective or a paradoxical angle" (Deleuze), with "limbs suggestively truncated, the inadequate reflections in clouded mirrors", "partial invisibility of the decors and characters", "a perversion", "displaced angle(s), the radical off-centeredness of a point-of-view that mutilates the body and expels it beyond the frame". It has been noted on numerous occasions that In the City of Sylvia is a "study of the male gaze" or a 'study of the female face". I would add that, to even greater degree, this film (a contemplative psychogeographical near-musical polyphonic piece with a severe case of visual and auditory ADD, building its non-narrative suspense out of a lacework of blocked, partial, off-centered visions) is an exemplary study of framing, reframing and deframing.
P.S. I tried not to dwell on the actual plot because I believe that most of the published synopses (e.g. "a young foreigner... is looking for a woman named Sylvia who he’d met years before in the same city ... then one afternoon, he thinks he’s actually seen her, and he sets off through the city to confront his memory") are not so much overly revealing but rather overly simplistic. We only know of the protagonist's supposed romantic intentions from his brief dialogue with a beautiful fugitiva on the tram, and we have no way to conclude whether he is truthful or not. Taking at face value the story that he (and perhaps the author of the press release) feeds us, we may overlook other possibilities and potential hints (camera lingering over the newspaper headline referring to another woman murdered, the "name" of protagonist being identical to the title of Bunuel's film about "strange passion", his willingness to abandon his quest for a night of casual sex, etc.). Is El an artist, a pick-up artist or a serial killer? I sense at least three different movies packed into this one "dense little film".
P.P.S. While I commend Guerin for his use of sound (including that ingenious burst of silence after El thunderously spills a cup of coffee at the end of the first "night"), I cannot help but feeling dissatisfied with the bar scene. The songs played in the bar are "too diegetic", too literal in their illustration of hero's presumed emotional state ("...I want this woman", Blondie's "Heart of Glass"), even if this literality is intended to be read as ironic. This scene comes too close to run-of-the-mill Hollywood and "independent cinema" fare with their uninterrupted flow of fresh or recycled hits to be later released on "original soundtrack" CDs. I much prefer the earlier instance of diegetic music at the cafe, where crescendos and decrescendos of two Romanian violin players superimposed on exquisitely choreographed dance of shifting POVs and blocked visions work their Kuleshov magic.
