“What else is a film if not “an expression of experience by experience”?”

Vivian Sobchack

Benjamin Millepied, the choreographer of Black Swan (2010), has made his directorial debut by creating a film adaptation of Carmen (2022) unlike any other.[2] Whereas film adaptations of Carmen are usually either realist dramas or glitzy musicals, Benjamin Millepied’s dance central Carmen is both. Reviews of the film, however, tend to criticize its dance scene vignettes, such as Variety which writes that the, “[…] dance sequences function as isolated, somewhat haphazard setpieces rather than as a consistent storyteller.”[3] Describing the film as “opera-free” and unable to decide if it is a dance piece, an avant-garde musical, or a melodrama, Variety situates the film as failing to adhere to tight and causal narrative structure or a particular genre. But, viewing the film as a “bad” narrative genre film misses its use of art cinema conventions and structure, a mode of cinema which privileges narrative ambiguity and episodicness, to reimagine the story of Carmen in contemporary and feminist terms. Perhaps Millepied’s inflection of commercial aesthetics through his contemporary music video-esque dance sequences has prevented it from being recognized as an art film. Despite its commercial dimensions, Carmen has the realist and expressive paradigmatic impulse common in the art cinema of Agnes Varda, Ingmar Bergman, and Jaques Demy. What is different is how the film simultaneously blends in a commercial sensibility. It is based on a well-known story written by Prosper Mérimée (1845), adapted into the popular opera by Georges Bizet (1875), and contains dance scenes which could be described as commercial. Millepied’s combination of art cinema principles into his adaptation offers a constructive lens in which the archetypal characters and overarching story of Carmen are reimagined through. This new version privileges Carmen’s perspective. It is a story about her journey which the soldier figure is witness to. Their love affair is not the center nor the destination of the story, and Carmen is not the soldier’s downfall but rather his guiding agent. In a true reversal, Carmen is not murdered and it is rather the soldier who dies not by her hand, but in her arms.

The reliance on art cinema aesthetics in this expressive and sensitive reimagining of Carmen begs the question: is the contemporary art film one which blends commercial sensibilities with classical aesthetics of French New Wave art film of the 1940s to 1960s? If so, how does the inclusion of art cinema aesthetics affect an otherwise commercial film? Close visual analysis of Millepied’s C_armen_ finds that the expressivity of film style makes the subjective experience of the protagonist felt through tactile film style. The tactile film style makes visible the “invisible” structures of feeling, privileging Carmen’s subjective embodied experience by projecting her internal experience onto the surface of the film. This is significant because the emphasis on Carmen’s felt experience challenges traditional dynamics of the male gaze usually inherent in Carmen and commercial narrative cinema at large. Even the sex scene between Aiden and Carmen privileges her physical experience. Reversing traditional gaze dynamics, it is her hands pulling his shirt off, her hands grasping his skin, her hunger being satiated. The formal film style of Millepied’s Carmen uses tactility and dynamics of the female gaze to produce subjective feeling more so than narrative meaning. In doing so, it produces a feminist phenomenology of female subjectivity by communicating the sensory lived experience to the spectator through overt, tactile film style. Rather than viewing Millepied’s Carmen strictly in terms of its meaning, the cinematic experience is understood here as a felt one.

In David Bordwell’s writings on art cinema as a mode of film practice, he perceives art cinema as quite opposite to that of the classical narrative mode.[4] Whereas classical narrative cinema has tight chains of cause and effect sequencing, goal oriented characters, and continuity editing, art cinema has a loose, episodic structure, characters which lack clear desires, and an editing style motivated by its desire to express rather than adhere to temporal coherence. Trying to read Millepied’s Carmen as a classical narrative film would lead to disappointing results. It would be seen as lacking coherence, continuity, clear meaning, and closure. Viewing it as an art film reframes the film not in terms of its “lack,” but rather for the subjectivity of experience that its expressive film style produces. As Bordwell suggest, “The competent viewer watches the [art] film expecting not order in the narrative but stylistic signatures in the narration: technical touches (Truffaut’s freeze frames, Antonioni’s pans) and obsessive motifs (Buñuel’s anticlericalism, Fellini’s shows, Bergman’s character names).”[5] Such stylistic signatures are boiled down by Bordwell into three key principles of the mode of art cinema: realism, authorial expressivity, and ambiguity. These principles construct the paradigmatic impulse of an art film that places the art film outside of the hegemony of classical narrative cinema.

In Carmen, its realist aesthetic initially stems from its realist location and topical concerns. Beginning on the Mexican-US border, the film plays off of concurrent socio-political anxieties regarding the American border and Mexican migration. The American town is represented as post-industrial with a dried up economy. The only industry in the town is in patrolling the Mexican border, leading to a chance encounter between Carmen and the soldier figure, Aiden. Before meeting Carmen, Aiden is represented as aimless. He has no drive, no clear passions, and it is his sister who tells him he needs to stop spending his evenings playing guitar alone and go make money at the border. An ex-marine who spent two tours in Afghanistan, Aiden seems out of place amongst the other border patrol who refer to Mexicans as animals. This is further pronounced when he and his patrol partner, Mike, stumble upon Carmen’s group crossing the border into the United States. Mike breaks protocol and starts shooting at the migrants, and Aiden fires his gun at Mike to protect Carmen. Then Aiden and Carmen have a semi-shared goal: she is running towards something while he is running away from the police – so they run together. Still, it remains unclear what Aiden’s desires are. And while Carmen knows where she is going, she does not know why she is going there or what awaits her. Their journey to Los Angeles is constructed through unmotivated cuts and chance encounters. Its episodic structure connects the scenes through its film style, such as sonic and visual motifs tying one scene to another, rather than cause and effect narrative continuity.

Bordwell posits that we are to understand such episodic structures and loose causal chains of events in art cinema as the guiding fingertips of the film’s author. The author is the overriding film structure, a formal component of the film itself, “What is essential is that the art film be read as the work of an expressive individual.”[6] Carmen can easily be classified as a result of Millepied’s artistic vision. Not only did he direct and choreograph the film, he also contributed to the screen story and screenplay. Millepied makes himself present as the film’s guiding voice through gaps in motivation, such as jump cuts, and recurring deviations from classical narrative features, such as unexplained characters like the man dressed in mirrors. Furthermore, the dancing itself can feel at times narratively disjointed. Trying to read such ambiguous story elements in terms of narrative causation might derive such instances as meaningless. Instead, meaning is situated in such stylistic divergences through the themes they represent. Themes, such as female connectivity, are physically embodied by the film style and the movements of their dancing. It is in this expressive film style and physicality of movement that subjective experience is made visible and tactile to the viewer.

According to Kate Ince, a chief concern of phenomenological feminist representations is in rendering female embodied subjectivity visible through attention to body comportment, motility, and spatiality.[7] Whereas Laura Mulvey warns in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” that the presence of woman onscreen functions as disruptive erotic spectacle in narrative film which disturbs the narrative flow, phenomenological feminist representations lean into this tendency, reappropriating spectacle as a site of subjective embodied experience through attention to activity, agency, and effort of female screen bodies.[8] The opening dance sequence of Carmen adheres to this notion of feminist phenomenological representations of female subjectivity. The scene begins in medias res. Zilah, Carmen’s mother, dances flamenco alone on a wooden platform with the expansive Mexican desert behind her. The camera slowly tracks in and then back out, as if pushed away by the force of her movement towards the camera. The following shot starkly changes in terms of scale, cutting from a long shot to a medium closeup as the handheld camera traces the circular path of her hands. There is an intentionality and force behind her graceful movements that is heightened here by the camera. From her toe to her head, she reaches outside of the tight frame, exceeding it. The force of her movements, the energy she exudes as the camera follows the trajectory of her hands, prevents the tight framing from simply fragmenting her body. Rather, this type of framing is an example of what Jean-Luc Marion describes as a saturated phenomenon of immanence.[9] In describing Marion’s notion of phenomenology in relation to film style, Julien Guillemet describes that, “This paradoxical framing apparatus becomes the condition for the frame to hold and keep what exceeds it: to reveal an out-of-frame phenomenon too big to be contained, to reveal a saturated phenomenon.”[10] In this case, it is the intense feelings which drive her movements that are too big to be contained. Her body reaching beyond the confines of the frame offers a visible structure to contain her otherwise non-visible immanence of being.

Carmen (2022)

The other method Millepied uses to make visible Zilah’s invisible experience is that of film tactility. As described in Jennifer M. Barker’s The Tactile Eye, film tactility is a useful method for exploring cinema as an intimate experience which forges a close connection between film and spectator.[11] Importantly, Barker views tactility not only in terms of touch, “Tension, balance, energy, inertia, languor, velocity, rhythm – this book considers all of these to be tactile.”[12] While Barker does not discuss dance in her book, her definition of tactility applies easily to the filming of movement. Zilah’s flamenco, for example, is a non-lingual scene which nonetheless expresses a clear trajectory of feeling through elements such as velocity and rhythm. The beginning sequence of the dance is personal and internal. She dances with head bowed and eyes turned down as though lost in her feeling of the movement and the energy of her body. However, when she hears a car offscreen, her head shoots up and her heels slide back as her knees straighten into a defiant and perhaps defensive stance. The languor and intimacy of her previous body quality is replaced by a physical tension. While the sounds of her dancing before had a loose rhythm accented by the sounds of her toes sliding and scraping over the wood surface, her feet now take on a steady rhythm of toe heel steps. Zilah begins to layer in more sonic intensity by snapping her fingers. As the car makes its way down the long, dusty road towards Zilah, her movements become more jerky. No longer do the wrists smoothly rotate with fingers undulating in wave-like patterns. Now there is an extra snap of her wrist, emphasizing and mirroring the velocity and force of the increased tempo of the music she produces with her feet. No longer is her head bowed, she looks straight towards the oncoming vehicle. The velocity and tension of the increasing tempo of her movements produce a type of tactility that allows the viewer to connect with and read her changing subjective experience. Now she is in a dance of defiance towards the encroaching vehicle. It is her dancing and the sounds her dancing makes that contextualizes the moment as one of danger, but also as one of resistance. When the men disembark from the vehicle, a tremendous tremor of sound emerges from her tapping feet, and she hisses at the man. She says nothing when he demands Carmen and points a gun towards her. Instead, she looks at him intensely as her feet resume a death march of toe stomps in quick succession. Even the man momentarily looks mesmerized by the absolute force, power, agency, and effort she displays as her feet tap out a quick, rolling rhythm at gunpoint. Zilah performs a final, triumphant spin and slams her arms down along with her foot, staring at him with her chin up in defiance. The camera cuts away as a single gunshot rings out.

This scene constitutes Ince’s concept of feminist phenomenological representation in how it uses the film apparatus to capture the sensation of her experience through physical movement, creating important parallels to Carmen herself. In the flamenco dance, the close-up is not emphasizing Zilah’s to-be-looked-at-ness, but rather the agency and effort of her body.[13] The tight framing captures not her whole movements, but rather the immensity of her experience. She subverts the male gaze by performing a dance in defiance to man, sacrificing her life for Carmen’s and creating visual parallels that connect them even when the mother is gone. For example, while preparing her mothers body for burial, narration tells Carmen to go to La Sombra Poderosa in Los Angeles and find Masilda. After arriving at La Sombra Poderosa, a performance venue her mother and Masilda had made together in their youth, Carmen dances on the rooftop. Her dancing (figure 1) is framed, shot and performed similarly to her mother’s flamenco (figure 2).

While the crowdedness of the city skyline replaces the open desert sky and Carmen’s movement style is in the style of modern dance rather than flamenco, the sequence nonetheless echoes that of the film’s first dance. The camera similarly loosely traces the path of her arms as they circle above her head, stretching to the sky as her neck arches, head tilted back. She executes similar arm movements to that of her mother, and displays a similar pleasure in her physicality as she pushes through the space around her. The similarity of the two dance sequences emphasizes one of the main themes of the film: female connectivity, or the innate kinship between and amongst women. While the mother is gone, the paralleled dance scenes connect them through movement, as though her mother lives on through Carmen’s dancing.

Despite making it to La Sombra Poderosa, Carmen’s journey is not over. While Masilda offers the arms of another mother figure and a female community, Carmen has not yet been able to grieve the loss of her own mother and seems to be searching for how to feel whole again. Discovering Aiden and finding community at La Sombra Poderosa does not fill her up. This emptiness is made visible when she dances alone in the softly lit space of La Sombra Poderosa. Her hands explore the space searchingly. She scoops her arms up, looking sadly towards the vacancy in her hands. Her arms sink back down as if by an invisible weight, perhaps an embodiment of the weight the loss of her mother left behind. While her mother’s flamenco was a dance of defiance and resilience, Carmen rearticulates the movements of the flamenco into a dance of longing, grief, and searching. Masilda comes behind her, guiding her arms until they come in to wrap around herself, saying that what she is looking for is there. After running away from her home and the loss, she finds herself in an embrace as Masilda rocks Carmen back and forth. Carmen’s grief spills out of her, emanating outwards like her movements had before. Similar to the framing of Zilah’s defiance in the flamenco, Carmen’s grief is framed for its immanence of emotion. Her head dips as her anguish pours out, her head almost completely out of the frame to capture the saturated phenomenon of her emotions. Tactility is similarly emphasized here, making palpable to the viewer the intensity of her experience.​​ The felt experience of her grief is made tactile not only through the closeness of Carmen’s and Masilda’s physical embrace, but also through the duration of the shot. While some of the dancing shots in this scene last up to thirty seconds, the shot where Carmen cries is nearly four minutes long. The inertia of the shot causes the viewer to sit with Carmen and witness the wide range of emotions as she processes her loss. Her crying turns into a small smile as Masilda spins her, telling her the dancing will heal her because it connects her to herself and to her mother, since her mother is inside of her. What begins as an expression of grief turns into a dance about hope and healing within a single shot. The camera slowly rotates around Carmen and Masilda as if to capture the multi-faceted dimensions of the experience. The invisible feelings Carmen experiences are made visible at the scene’s intersection of movement, spatiality, and temporality, where her subjective experience is physically pushed beyond the scope of the frame. The long duration of the shot allows the viewer to sit with the intensity of her experience as she reconnects with herself through the memory of her mother embodied by the space of La Sombra Poderosa and Masilda.

The thematic importance placed on female connectivity and kinship in Carmen’s dance scenes offer major divergences from the original narrative, which traditionally favours the perspective of the soldier. Reversing the traditional gaze dynamics is an integral thematic element which gears Millepied’s Carmen towards a phenomenological feminist reading. While the original story presents Carmen as the cause of a soldier’s downward spiral into a life of crime, Millepied’s Carmen offers Aiden a different type of journey. While Aiden follows Carmen on her journey towards La Sombra Poderosa, his presence mostly emphasizes his displacement. Throughout the film, he is framed as being without kinship and close bonds. He is uncomfortable at his local BBQ before meeting Carmen, standing away from people and shutting down social advances. When an army vet with the same tattoo as Aiden grasps his arm, there is a ringing sound effect and the dialogue sounds distant and muted as Aiden shifts on his feet uncomfortably. The comradery that he should have with his fellow veteran is not there, offering the first visual and sonic sign that Aiden has PTSD. The lostness and isolation Aiden displays around his family and fellow vets could be what he is looking to absolve by following Carmen to Los Angeles. But, when they attend a social gathering with Carmen’s new friends from La Sombra Poderosa, a parallel to the first BBQ, it is clear that Aiden is to remain on the outside looking in. Unlike Aiden’s first BBQ, where people are somewhat awkwardly standing apart, Carmen’s party is marked by formal and physical closeness. The scene is introduced with a tight, medium frame which shows a crowd of laughing people dancing closely together. While Carmen is amongst the crowd exuding a sense of belonging, Aiden is framed as separate from the party goers. The contrast between them forms a visual of duality, one which situates the phenomenology of female experience as one of closeness and the male’s as one of distance.

The duality between Carmen and Aiden underpinning the paralleled social gatherings connects back to the film’s opening monologue and sets up the major motifs of the film. In the film’s opening, the camera tracks overtop a vast desert as a narrator describes men as lacking and desiring what women have. Reversing the usual psychoanalytic notion that women are marked by an innate lack, the opening describes that if women lack, it is because men take from them:

But they are always the same man. One man. His eyes are sad but produce no tears. He is parched and cold like the desert in the night. His heart pumps sand through his veins, not blood. He yearns for the tears of our eyes. The milk from our breasts. The blood of our womanhood. Anything, that he might taste life again.[14]

This opening voice-over narration is visually articulated throughout the film by motifs such as fire and sand. In the vein of the art film, described by Bordwell as having “obsessive” motifs, the motifs here are similarly invasive. In Aiden’s first scene, fires spontaneously burst from the ground and he stomps them out with his feet, foreshadowing what he may do to Carmen. Carmen, on the other hand, is repeatedly drawn towards fires. Her taxi is stopped by fire mysteriously rolling across the road, and she walks towards the flames into a desolite carnival, as though in a trance. The dance scene that follows at first seems narratively unmotivated, a stand-alone episode. However, the choreography is rich with thematic meaning, showing Carmen effortlessly connecting with the women around her. The spontaneous choreography shows them moving in unison despite not knowing each other, interlocking and grasping each other’s arms while Aiden stands off to the side bearing witness. While Carmen’s closeness is associated with fire, Aiden’s isolation is associated with sand. As he drives, he looks down as sand mysteriously pours around his feet. When he is at La Sombra Poderosa, his glass fills with sand before his eyes. For those familiar with the original tragic ending, Aiden’s association with sand initially points to Carmen’s possible death at his hands. Sand, afterall, snuffs fire out. But instead it is his death which occurs, narratively signaling what the film style had suggested all along: Carmen’s journey is one Aiden could not follow on.

By reversing the perspective from Aiden to Carmen, Millepied challenges the original novella itself. In the novella, Carmen is already murdered by the soldier, and the story is told about her, echoing the making of the story itself. The figure of Carmen is made up of an amalgamation of stories Mérimée heard about women while talking to men during his travels in Spain.[15] Carmen goes on to become a major character archetype, one which frames female sexuality and independence as a threat to men, but she is made up of men’s attitudes about women. Millepied’s Carmen alternatively offers an experimental adaptation, one which relocates Carmen in present times and wonders what her story is and what her experience of being is. It actualizes this wonderment through its film style and movement style. Technical film elements, such as shot scale, camera movement, and shot duration work in tandem with the dancing to produce a phenomenology of female experience, one which considers the wide range of experiences these women have in their bodies. Agency, effort, exhaustion, resilience, defiance, grief, and hope are all unspoken elements made visible through film style and dance. It is this attention to bodily experience that makes this film an apt example of Ince’s notion of phenomenological feminism. Subverting the male gaze makes space for female subjective experience, and makes imminent the invisible structures of feeling through expressive film style and movement. In doing so, Millepied utilizes the paradigmatic impulse of realism and expressivity in art cinema, to recapitulate the story of Carmen into a story about Carmen. Despite receiving little critical attention, Millepied’s Carmen offers a fundamental shift towards updating the archetypical figure of Carmen while simultaneously reimagining how art cinema conventions can be used to elevate commercial cinema above visual structures which privilege male vision and subjectivity.