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Le déclin de l’empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire)



cast :

Dominique Michel, Dorothée Berryman, Louise Portal, Pierre Curzi, Rémy Girard, Yves Jacques

crew :

Directed by: Denys Arcand
Written by: Denys Arcand
Produced by: Roger Frappier, René Malo
DOP: Guy Dufaux
Editor: Monique Fortier
Music Score: François Dompierre

release date :

1986

On the surface, Denys Arcand’s ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is a film about nothing much at all. The film centres on a group of intellectual Quebecois, some of whom are professors at the Université de Montréal; they are portrayed as self-obsessed, self-indulgent, and shallow. The film begins with the men, Remy (Rémy Girard), Pierre (Pierre Curzi), Claude (Yves Jacques), and Alain (Daniel Brière) discussing sex and their many infidelities in a lovely country house in rural Quebec, while the women, Dominique (Dominique Michel), Louise (Dorothée Berryman), and Diane (Louise Portal), are at a gym, discussing much of the same. The women join the men at the country house; they make a grand dinner and discuss...what else? Sex. An unusual theme and concept for notable Quebecois filmmaker Denys Arcand, whose work usually contains more pertinent moral and social concerns. But underneath Decline’s shallow facade, there lurks something more profound, precisely a critique on the state of the Quebecois nation and its slow disintegration into the ‘end of history’.


Benedict Anderson has famously defined the nation as an ‘imagined community’; he claims this imagined community arose from certain historical conditions including, the proliferation of vernacular language, the abolishment or reduced power of the monarchies, and the emergence of the printing press. These circumstances allow a community of citizens, who share the territory of a nation-state but many never know each other face to face, to be connected by a shared experience. Arjun Appadurai explains that “the modern nation-state…grows less out of natural facts…and more out of a quintessential cultural product, a product of collective imagination”. Today, electronic media, such as film and television, have an increasingly greater impact on this collective imagination, on how people imagine themselves to belong to a national society. Quebec has long struggled to define itself as a nation within an English Canada. Beginning with what is known as the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, Quebecois governmental leaders have been trying to create a ‘francophone Quebec’ and have pushed for sovereignty. While an ‘imagined community’ of a (mostly) francophone Quebec may exist, Quebec has never been successful in realizing this community on a political level, which would be its separation from Canada. Two referendums on sovereignty were held, in 1980 and 1995, but both resulted in a slim majority against separation.


Historically, ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is categorised as a ‘post-referendum’ film. The aftermath of the referendum left many left-wing nationalists disillusioned; the struggles and the goals of the previous twenty years were felt to have been futile. But to categorise this film as being merely ‘post-referendum’ limits its reading to the site of Quebec; ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ also expresses anxieties not specifically Quebecois, but those which extend to a large portion of the world in general. The film is marked by absence. In an essay on Canadian contemporary cinema, Jim Leach claims that Canadian cinema in general is full of absences which signify its inferiority complex against Hollywood and European art cinema. But in this case, I suggest that the absence in ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is more of a recognition and mourning of the Quebecois cinema’s dying position as a politically inclined cinema. There is a strongly felt absence or lack in the portrayal of the protagonists, the plot, and the use of space. However, and perhaps more importantly, the film is completely absent of any Quebecois discourse, save the language.


The narrative structure of ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is relatively linear, taking place within one night, with the exception of a few flashbacks which depict the characters’ various sexual encounters. But it has a untraditional, perhaps postmodern plot, in that the film does not even have so much of a plot, as nothing really ‘happens’. There are no parts of a conventional story: the exposition, problem, climax, and resolution are all absent. The characters merely converse about idle matters, mainly their frequent and meaningless sexual relations. The first part of the film is organised with a parallel structure, we cut back and forth between the women while the men await the women at the country house. When the women arrive, the film continues in a completely linear form. As there is no climax, the end provides no resolution; at the end of the evening Louise discovers that her husband Remy has consistently cheated on her with her friends and her own sister. But even this results in a mere temporary trauma for Louise; the film continues the next morning in a cyclical pattern with their lives and discussions continuing again.


The incomplete, ambiguous aspect of the plot is also present in the characters. All we discover about them is their sexual preferences, their infidelities, and their quirky and often humorous sexual encounters. But beyond this, we learn nothing of depth. When Claude pees blood it is hinted that he may have a sexually transmitted disease, but this matter is never followed up; similarly, Diane’s appetite for violent sex suggests that she may be dealing with some deep rooted emotional problems, but the film fails to investigate this further. The characters’ families are largely absent, although we see through a flashback that Diane has a young daughter, and at the end we discover that Remy and Louise have two children. We learn nothing about how the friends met, what they do as jobs or careers (besides the three who are history professors), or what kind of people they are; we can differentiate them only in terms of their sexual histories. The film is a ‘slice of life’ in the most literal sense.


But it is the absence of any depiction of society surrounding the characters and spaces that is the most prominent in this film. It occurs in two ways; firstly, through the physical spaces used and the framing of the camera, and secondly, through the lack of any Quebecois’ discourse. As far as the mise-en-scene, ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is spatially very enclosed and ambiguous. The characters are dominantly confined to a private space, the country house. Although two scenes take place within a university and a gym, both of which are public spaces, we see literally no one in the grand hall of Université de Montréal, made noticeable by the camera’s long and high take. The hall is an empty space and could only be recognisable as a university interior if you have seen this hall of this particular university or if you are astute enough to notice the small bulletin boards that line the walls which then could only lead you to possibly guess that this was a university. The gym space has one or two ‘extras’ but the camera tightens in medium close-ups on the actor’s bodies cutting out most of the background environment. The flashback spaces are similar in that they are most confined to closed rooms, giving very few indicators of where the characters are located. Many of these spaces in ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ can be considered, in Deleuzian terms, as ‘any-space-whatevers’; Deleuze describes an any-space-whatever as a “perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways” . We see the disconnection of characters in relation to the space they occupy as the camera cuts out much of the background so that the focus is on what the characters themselves rather than their relation to the environment. The one space that does have a kind of symbolic meaning is the country house, where most of the film is set; it functions as a bourgeois oasis, a remote but comfortable place far away from the problems of the big city. Shots of the surrounding country, complete with the rainbow of coloured leaves that mark early autumn in Quebec, establish the setting as isolated yet idyllic, a place for pleasure and relaxation. The characters place within the country can be read as a symbol for their distance from any engagement in society.


The absences within the film function both as a global and national critique. On a global level, ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is representative of the anxieties towards Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the ‘end of history’. In 1992, Fukuyama published ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, which stemmed from an article he wrote in 1989, in which he claims that we are witnessing the ‘end of history’, meaning that liberal democracy is the fulfilment of humankind’s search for the ideal social form. Fukuyama uses the Hegelian concept of History to define it as the realisation of a grand metaphysical plan. The ‘end of history’ arises when humankind has been fully realised and established its ideal form. For Hegel, this 'end' was the realisation of the 'World Spirit' and the self-reflexivity of History. For Fukuyama, however, the ideal form of society is liberal democracy; even though not all societies are liberal democracies, this is supposedly what every society is striving for.


‘The Decline of the American Empire’ aptly depicts the outcome of Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’; without any political or social struggles to engage with, these once left-wing intellectuals are rendered petty, shallow, and in Arcand’s terms - being a devout Catholic - immoral. The main characters are, ironically, history professors, but they, like the film as a whole, are ‘history-less’; there is an absence of politics, of society, of religion, of morality. Accordingly, I would argue that these are not ‘characters’ at all, but merely ciphers for the fearful image of what individuals would be (or not be) with the acceptance of the ‘triumph’ of liberal democracy: selfish, empty, and meaningless. The ‘any-space-whatever-ness’ of the mise-en-scene allows for the plot and characters to stand for other people and places, not specifically Quebecois. In other words, by concentrating so closely on its characters within enclosed spaces, disconnected from society, the film is able to represent the general rather than the particular: the characters may be specifically Quebecois, but they also stand in as representatives of the archetype of the ‘western individual’. Even the plot of the film can be regarded as an ‘end of history’ as nothing happens. Arcand does not offer us solutions or alternatives to this negative depiction of the prevalence of individualism and capitalism, he merely judges it as negative. But perhaps his critical tone suggests that he is refusing to accept the ‘end of history’; he is acting in the spirit of Derrida who claimed that although there is no powerful political opposition to liberal democracy, we must not just accept it, we must keep the ‘spirit of Marx’ alive, we must continue to present and discuss other ideologies even in the face of a seemingly pervading capitalist world system.


Reading ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ alongside the idea of the end of history marks that the film is starting to be engaged with a newly emerging post national context but is ultimately still concerned with Quebec as a nation. As we have seen, what is lacking in the film is the space of the Quebec nation; therefore, the film’s absences symbolise the nation’s loss of unique identity. In this way, Arcand is able to critique not only the ‘general western subject’ but also specifically the Quebecois’ subject. As we have seen Arcand has left out all the ‘imaginings’ that constitute the Quebec nation. Although we recognise that the film is set in Quebec, because of the characters’ language, references to Montreal, Quebec, or Canada are largely left out. For a viewer not familiar with Quebec and/or Canada, the only clue to the geographical where beings of the film is a passing remark made regarding the characters’ proximity to the New York state border and how they are far enough away not to be affected by any nuclear threats. But by and large, the characters are literally disconnected from any social or political concerns. There are no overt references to Quebec politics, the Quebec national struggle, or Quebec identity. To someone who has not seen many Canadian or Quebecois films, these implicit absences may seem insignificant but if we acknowledge that historically Quebecois cinema has been a strong platform for communicating national-political ideas then this absence of anything remotely Quebecois is extremely telling.


‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is such a rich film in that it is able to put forth the general global anxieties of the ‘end of history’, the concern of the loss of human morality, work ethic, and tradition to idle individualism, a general ‘Americanisation’ of the western world, and at the same time, the particular and local Quebecois anxieties of the post-referendum sentiment of the loss of the nationalist struggle for independence, of the efforts to preserve Quebec culture and history as a ‘nation’ that stands in difference to the rest of Canada and the United States. ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ is the first of Arcand’s trilogy, which also includes the fantastic ‘Barbarian Invasions’ (Les Invasions barbares, 2003) and the more recent ‘The Age of Ignorance’ (L'Âge des ténèbres, 2007).


Watch


Country: Canada
Budget: £979,750
Length: 101mins


Bibliography:
Anderson, Benedict, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Cultural Roots’ in Imagined Communities, London: Verson, 1991, pp. 1-36.
Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996, p. 161.
Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 161
Marshall Quebec National Cinema, p. 285; Mackenzie, Screening Quebec, p17.
Leach, Jim, ‘Reel Nation: Image and Reality in Contemporary Canadian Cinema’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, v.11 n.2 (1 Oct 2008), p.6.
Deleuze, Gilles. 'The Affection-Image' in Cinema 1: The Movement Image, London: Continuum (2005), pp. 105-126.
Deleuze, Cinema 1, p.113.
Fukuyama, Francis. ’By way of an Introduction’ in The End of History and the Last Man , London: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. xi-xxiii.
Sim, Stuart. Derrida and the End of History, Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999, pp. 72.
Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx, New York: Routledge, 1994.
Anderson, Benedict, Introduction’ and ‘Cultural Roots’ in Imagined Communities, London: Verson, 1991
Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996.
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, London: Continuum, 2005
Derrida, Jacques, Spectres of Marx, New York: Routledge, 1994.
Fukuyama, Francis, ’By way of an Introduction’ in The End of History and the Last Man , London: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. xi-xxiii .
Leach, Jim, ‘Reel Nation: Image and Reality in Contemporary Canadian Cinema’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, v.11 n.2 (1 Oct 2008), p.6-10.
Marshall, Bill, Quebec National Cinema, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001.
Sim, Stuart, Derrida and the End of History, Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999.


Filmography:
‘The Age of Ignorance’ (L'Âge des ténèbres), 2007, Denys Arcand, Cinémaginaire Inc.
‘Barbarian Invasions’ (Les Invasions barbares), 2003, Denys Arcand, Astral Films


Pub/2008


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