Into the zone: Guyotat & film
The experience of a film – in extreme solitude – can be so strong and engulfing that it accords with the experience of a coma. And the screen on which the film is projected forms the aperture which offers liberation, or leads directly into death. Guyotat describes the figure in the film of Andromeda, who is split in two, against her will, existing simultaneously in the world and in death. In Coma, her figure is no longer that of Andromeda, but instead that of a creature who has been reinvented, half-human, half-goddess, and engaged in an act of tightrope-walking, between the corporeal and the void. But the cinematic space also possesses its corporeal presence in Coma, and during the film’s screening, Guyotat descends a set of stairs beneath the auditorium, to vomit his pills in the toilets, but continues to hear, from that infernal subterranea of the cinema, the overhead voices of the gods battling over his future.
Stephen Barber reports on the legendary French novelist Pierre Guyotat’s lifelong rapport with film.