A documentary classic that slipped through the cracks is seeing the light of day. The late Dominique Benicheti’s 1973 Locarno prize-winner, “Cousin Jules,” gets its belated US theatrical premiere at Film Forum in a new 2K digital restoration.
Shot over a five-year period, “Cousin Jules” documents — or rather contemplates — the daily routine of two weathered peasants, blacksmith Jules Guiteaux and his wife, Félicie, on their rural farm in France. What sets the movie apart from other exercises in observational cinema is not so much the emphasis on real time and process, whether repairing a hinge, shaving one’s face, mending a shirt, or making soup, as the fact that Benicheti is recording his subjects in color, CinemaScope, and stereo sound. Indeed, while dialogue is minimal, sound and image are coequal. The filmmaker holds a close-up of the hammer that Jules has just employed and placed by his anvil until the tool stops vibrating; another scene is a kind of duet for Félicie’s coffee grinder and Jules’s bellows.
The framed monotony of this dailiness show is transfixing. Everything on the Guiteaux farm has its place — “Cousin Jules” portrays a completely ordered rational life, which although loosely structured as a single (mainly autumn) day, is quietly ruptured by the gradual awareness of absence. Jules has his solitary meal with the clock ticking and a cat perched on the other chair.
Darkness falls although the movie ends with a montage of formerly seen, now empty locations. “Cousin Jules” not only evokes André Bazin in its use of duration and pure recording but another mid-20th-century French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, in documenting the lived experience of domestic space and the “poetics of space.”
“Cousin Jules” is playing at New York’s Film Forum, November 27 through December 1o.
