Malle: Black Moon (1975)

One of Louis Malle's most experimental films, Black Moon opens with a young girl (Cathryn Harrison) travelling across rural France, fleeing what appears to be a war fought by transmission and radiation. She eventually takes refuge at a bizarre farmhouse, where the rest of the film plays out as a series of tableaux in the lives of its unusual residents (Joe Dallesandro, Therese Giehse and Alexandra Stewart). What holds it all together is the way this war, which is always in the background, appears to have brought human and animal sound onto the same transmissive plane. In the first ten minutes alone, Malle introduces  badger, snake, millipede, praying mantis, beetle and unicorn cries, while twisting and contorting human dialogue, with the result that human and animal sounds tend to converge on a series of glossolalic, operatic utterances, a typology of almost-language. To that end, Malle introduces sounds before the organisms making them – or listening to them – are presented, meaning that new sounds emerge in more or less the same way as new shots, scenes or images, as the main syntax and momentum of the film. That exquisitely evokes sensoria in which sound is prominent and precedes visuality, or at least sensoria in which sound is integrated with the other senses in different ways from our own. By the end of the film, it feels as if the skin itself has become a lingual interface, or speech is something that radiates out from the entire body, just as Malle manages to disaggregate ambience into all its component languages, all of which are revealed to be continuous with our own language. It’s the very definition of surrealism – surrealism as heightened realism, or naturalism – as Malle ponders what would happen if we could simply isolate every organic sound at any given moment. Perhaps that’s why it manages to be so lyrical as well – it was filmed on Malle’s estate and it’s clear that he loves its vistas, which periodically reaggregate or reconstitute all his disparate noises into beautiful, blue-green expanses of space, thanks in part to Sven Nykvist’s chilly cinematography. Like the best fairy tales, then, it captures the strangeness of nature in the most domestic and homely of spaces, and if it never quite embraces its magical overtones, that’s because Malle’s supernatural is just that – supernatural, an intensification of nature, rather than an escape from it.