Séraphine
A biopic of painter Séraphine Louis (1864-1942). My feelings about this film varied a lot as it progressed.
At first, I was struck by the beautiful colours and textures that persist through the whole film. The natural lighting and detailed and musical ambient sounds help set this film firmly in a rustic feeling Senlis of the late 19th and early 20th century. The whole atmosphere and sedate, thoughtful pace was very immersive and just relaxing to be in.
But around a third of the way through the film I started to doubt the humanity of the film-makers: Séraphine was clearly a bit of a lunatic but I didn’t feel that justified the condescending tone I thought the film was taking. Séraphine’s almost infantile humming/singing as she sauntered along on her daily business or leisure was set at a volume that drew attention to it as more than just a background detail: it seemed more like a ‘hey look at this crazy woman, har har’. Chubby legs dangling unskirted from a thick tree branch as Séraphine meditates in a windy treetop was a little bit too: ‘hey look at this, it’s almost as if she’s meditating!’. Was the detail of Séraphine taking a pee in the grass behind the river (during a communal linen washer’s session) a documentary style description of country life, or a puerile snigger at the bestial nature of lunatic/historical/working-class life?
By two thirds through the film Séraphine’s new found riches were fuelling her lunacy and awakening her ego in a rather extended and dreary way: it was sad to watch and took up too much of the film. The film began to drag, which combined with my previous suspicions of snobbery, left a film that really couldn’t be sustained by beautiful textures and sonic details alone…
However, as the film drew into its last quarter I had a flash of insight, brought on by my enjoyment of the recreations (presumably they were recreations) of Séraphine’s paintings: they really were beautiful and inspiring records of meditation by mutating repetition. And I realised it:
This was a film made in the style of Séraphine’s own paintings!
Suddenly I could fully enjoy and appreciate the film without doubts. Bingo :) The deep textures and ambient sounds reflected Séraphine’s own perceptions as expressed through her work. The snobbishness was nothing of the sort: it was an opportunity to settle into the world as Séraphine experienced it: loud humming/singing reflects what you’d hear if you were doing it yourself… prominent chubby knees in a breezy tree emphasizes the feeling of wind on your legs, as well as losing yourself in the sounds and sights. All in all, I came to see that the film was doing a pretty good job of embodying the embodied quality of Séraphine’s life and perceptions, and the embodied qualities that make her paintings so satisfying. Set that off against the unembodied (perhaps alienated) qualities of modern technology mediated life, and I decided that this was a super film pointing the way to the possibilities of another world.
Some particular things that I really liked about the film:
- How being unhinged, but synchronized with the environment (as Séraphine is at the start of the film), is a blissful state. In comparison, being unhinged and dislocated from your environment (as Séraphine is from the middle of the film) is an alienating and painful thing indeed. This can be entirely attributable to the contributions of Wilhelm Uhde, who was Séraphine’s patron and chief ego inflater. Without him, she would probably have not become famous or respected, but perhaps her religious expression and satisfaction would have been purer without him…
- The way the film explores the dynamics between a muse (in this case Séraphine) and the person they inspire (in this case, Wilhelm Uhde). Previously, Séraphine had a muse herself, God, but it seems that becoming a muse herself opened the door to her ego, and perhaps a loss of focus on what was the source of her gift. I wonder if that transformation is visible in her work? I would like to find out…
- The way the wealthy can interfere in the lives of the ‘true’: money is a way to achieve things without environmental sensitivity, and Wilhelm Uhde’s large and unconsidered financial contribution to Séraphine seems like the main reason for the mental instability in her life (as opposed to her plain lunacy, which she was living quite happily with before).
- The observation that animals can cry. ‘If you take a calf away from a cow, the cow will cry.’ That is a perception that people who live with animals can understand, and those who don’t, can never really understand. Empirical philosophy. Nice.
Overall, I would say that this is a film about a woman who gained the money to express her madness without proper environmental restraint. A sobering and beautiful tale of the fragility of even strong people.
