still from 'Le Berceau de cristal.'

Through some strange cosmic confluence of cinephilic energies, June has become Philippe Garrel Month in New York, with the release of his latest film A Burning Hot Summer (Un Été brulant) at the IFC Center and an extremely rare screening of his 1976 film Le Berceau de cristal as part of BAM’s series devoted to films soundtracked by synth-kraut collective Tangerine Dream. (Berceau gets in on a technicality: the film is scored by Ash Ra Tempel, of which Dream’s Klaus Schulze was also a member.) These screenings bookend the month, but they also neatly frame Garrel’s career, lending a sense of coherence to a nearly forty-year arc that’s seldom received exposure in North America.

Garrel, a legendary figure for French cinephiles, was almost completely ignored in the US before his 2004 film Regular Lovers. While that movie seemed less abstruse than his earlier work, it was in fact a continuation of his obsessively consistent themes: the tragically stoned melancholy of the fallout from the 60s, the volatility of art and beauty, the impossible-ineluctable union of the romantic couple, the encroaching specters of the past, suicide, exile, addiction. Lovers struck a particular nerve in 2004 because it highlighted Garrel’s refusal to separate his life from his art. Alternately deeply narcissistic and brutally self-revealing, each of Garrel’s movies mines and reworks the psychic territory of his glamorously tortured (and extremely interesting) life: his enfant terrible origins as a denizen of the Cinémathèque and a partisan of the May ’68 movement; his fraught, decade-long romantic relationship with chanteuse Nico; his addiction to heroin for which he was committed to an asylum and subjected to electroshock therapy.

Le Berceau de cristal (The Crystal Cradle) is typical of the ghostly, threadbare silent films Garrel and Nico made together during the 1970s. These films have a strange, ambivalent relationship to narrative, seeming to offer tiny fragments of a (wordless) storyline, but mainly functioning as documents of Garrel’s friends and lovers. As a result, they have a curious intimacy that borders on invasiveness, forming a world which scholar Alain Philippon has described as “hermetic and rarefied.” Nico is the central figure here, emerging languorously from the dark enclosure of a clamshell bed, playing her harmonium, pensively pouring over her poetry (which we hear her read in voiceover), and toking on a one-hitter. While she is portrayed mainly in shadow, her pale jutting cheekbones suggesting a death’s head, the other figures are more assertive, gazing back at and playing with the camera. Dominique Sanda, posing as a diaphanous-gowned Pre-Raphaelite wood-nymph in a leafy arbor, smiles back at us with equal parts serenity and seduction. Anita Pallenberg gives the camera a lusty grin as she snorts coke off the back of her hand and munches on a couple of pot leaves. Even Garrel himself appears, though he’s predictably less ebullient: festooned in dark velvets and a mop of hair, he’s glimpsed brooding intensely in the reflections of a shattered mirror.

Perhaps the most important figure in the film is Frédéric Pardo, a painter and lifelong friend of Garrel, who died in 2005 after a long illness. (Regular Lovers is dedicated to him.) Pardo was a significant influence on Garrel in many ways: Pardo’s psychedelic paintings seem to have served as a point of reference for Garrel’s mythopoeic earlier films, like La Cicatrice intérieure and Athanor, shot in exotic locales on the dime of heiress Sylvina Boissonnas and deeply indebted to Symbolist painting. And Pardo’s dabbling in film—he made a silent document in 1968 of his then-girlfriend Tina Aumont acting in Garrel’s film La Lit de la vierge, entitled Home Movie, bears some resemblance to the portrait-films Garrel made in the 1970s.

Berceau establishes a clear correspondence between Garrel’s cinematic process and the very medium of painting. Not only does Garrel evoke Jacques-Louis David’s “Death of Marat” in the final shot, but he is clearly enthralled by the form of cinematic portraiture that Warhol explored in his Screen Tests.

While Warhol used his moving-image portraits as a means of capturing the nuances of the surface and the performance of identity, Garrel seems to have had something more probing, even psychoanalytic in mind. In these films, the camera takes on a role that is at once exploratory and incantatory, summoning the illogic of the subconscious to the surface. Deleuze described Garrel’s work as “a liturgy of bodies,” and indeed it is the triangulation of camera, subject, and spectator that he revels in. This is a state of grace largely uncorrupted by language or narrative, which is why, but for the woozy space-drone of Ash Ra Tempel and Nico’s (frankly awful) poetry, the film is silent. Comparing himself to his friend Godard, Garrel told Cahiers du cinéma in the late 60s, “Jean-Luc says, ‘The cinema for me is an image and a sound.’ For me it is an image. It is completely silent for me. The dialogue is all interior dialogue as in a dream. It is spoken but cannot be heard.”

Garrel’s resistance to narrative indicate a suspicion about representation that would give way to the experimental form of autobiography in his later work. His films about life in the 1960s and ’70s are marked by a rare abstinence from period-piece kitsch. While he was among the most prominent artists engaged in the May ’68 movement, and even made a film about it at the time (Actua One, now believed lost), Garrel largely resisted representing the events of those days until Regular Lovers. It was the fall-out of the years after ‘68—the intensity of relationships, the political disillusionment, the physical and mental decline of those around him—that served as the primary theme for the his work in the 70s and 80s, culminating in 1991’s gorgeous, eviscerating J’entends plus la guitare, an anguished, fictionalized, but not the least bit sentimental account of his relationship with Nico.

In Garrel’s new film, A Burning Hot Summer, the main character is — once again — Frédéric Pardo, or some variation theron, played by Louis Garrel, the director’s son and now-frequent star. The burning-hotness of the film’s title would seem to refer to the smoldering presence of Garrel-fils and costar Monica Bellucci, who plays Frédéric’s Italian movie-star wife Angèle. But while there’s many sullen glances and much pawing and gnashing of teeth between the two stars, the film gradually constructs a much wider network of awkward, painful, and irrevocable affiliations: Paul, a lowly, underemployed actor-cum-Leftist radical; Élisabeth, Paul’s circumspect wife (played by the wonderful Celine Sallette, House of Tolerance‘s Clotilde); and Roland, a scruffy-looking director with whom Angèle begins an affair.

Garrel establishes a complex and rhizomatic set of connections: Frédéric and Angèle’s tortured, needy marriage; Paul and Élisabeth’s loving, but squabbly young love; Élisabeth and Angèle’s feminine camaraderie; and Angèle and Roland’s clandestine trysts. Paul and Frédéric’s relationship is the most twisted — and perhaps the most convincingly erotic. Their connection makes Élisabeth, Paul’s wife, understandably jealous, but Frédéric makes a distinction between the demands of friendship and those of romance: “We’re not together. We’re side by side. There’s a difference. Friendship isn’t love.” Still, Frédéric and Paul’s relationship has its own demands and responsibilities, among them the need to square the latter’s politics with the former’s inherited wealth and aristocratic dedication to “art and love.”

Garrel himself rationalizes art and politics quickly and gracefully Berceau, with a scene in which the two friends witness a bust on sans-papiers immigrants, remark about what an asshole Sarko is, and then take a piss in the street.