Hasta La Motion!

An audiovisual essay by Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin. Films: ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne’ (Valerian Borowczyk, 1980 / ‘In the City of Sylvia’ (José Luis Guerin, 2006) FOR STUDY PURPOSES ONLY Sometimes two films suddenly speak to each other, in the cinephile mind, in a way that is totally unexpected and unforeseen. A way that is totally not prescribed by the films themselves, in that they neither belong to the same type of genre, nor share a similar narrative, style, or atmosphere. But, all the same, deep down in the unconscious – where strictures of label are forgotten, and all films melt down into a giant, fluid magma – associations will inevitably form. In the case of this audiovisual essay titled (after Arthur Rimbaud’s poem cycle) ‘A Season in Hell’, it was a simple, nagging question – where have we seen that face before? – that led to the intersection of image-fragments from José Luis Guerin’s contemporary art cinema classic ‘In the City of Sylvia’ (2007), and Walerian Borowczyk’s recently restored horror/exploitation film ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne’ (1981); and to the invention of a new, imaginary ‘scene’ to bind them. What connects the films is the motif – fleeting in one, prolonged in the other – of a ‘descent into Hell’. In Guerin, this is a matter of the sensitive hero (Xavier Lafitte) glimpsing a line of Goth Girls in a bar, and concentrating in particular on one of them; while, in Borowczyk, it is the entire subject of the reworked Jekyll-and-Hyde tale, reaching its paroxysmic conclusion with the surprise conversion of Fanny (Marina Pierro) into an altered state. In both cases, it is the vision and presence of a supposedly ‘demonic’ woman that allows the passage (imaginary or real, according to circumstance) into another, heightened world of sensation – with the cinema itself, both times, ramping up its properties of visual and auditory intoxication to match the male observer’s growing fever. Beginning with a passage from Octavius Elsinor IV’s strange, mystical treatise ‘The Abomination’ – itself a fragmented palimpsest or collage that seems to prefigure later pronouncements by Nietzsche, E.M. Cioran, and Thomas Mann – ‘A Season in Hell’ swims in that heady, very cinematic/cinephilic space where desire and guilt, pleasure and death, projection onto the Other and liberation of the Self, all intermingle. © Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin, August 2015