Film The Rise of Louis XIV at Harvard Epworth Church

"THINGS are there," Rossellini has said. "Why manipulate them?" To this end he has restrained his camera, withholding it at the limits of impartiality. His mise en scene is open and anti-compositional. Improvisational. Accidental. Noble acts and momentous events happen in the same way and produce the same impression as events of everyday life. He is the antithesis of baroque, while the famous royal style of Louis XIV is baroque itself. Baroque elevated to the level of classicism. Dramaturgy, glorifying in each new detail it brings under its sway.

Surely no two phenomena could be more incompatible-in the abstract. The abstract being that two-dimensional landscape of rhetoric and copulative verbs that permits such phantasmagoria as the preceding paragraph. Bitter tears, dear reader, on my copy of What Is Cinema? Open City, Voyage to Italy, General Della Rovere, and now The Rise of Louis XIV: there is something in the anonymity of Rossellim's aesthetic, beyond abstraction or mere being, which resists the a priori.

For example. Image: Daumier doctors (no, not Daumier) attend to the ailing Cardinal Mazarin. They assume grave countenances and huddle aside for a conference with Colbert, Mazarin's aid and confidant. Diagnosis: lung dropsy. Prescription: bleeding and the ingestion of rhubarb and precious stones. The opening sequences of Louis XIV possess all the touches of realism that we have come to expect of contemporary, slice-of-life realism, but it is a realism rendered bizarre by its historical setting. Realism reified, alienated. If the characters believe the witchcraft of the doctors, can we be sure at any moment that we know what they are thinking? Chaos creeps in from the edges of the frame.

It is into this vacuum that Louis appears. He becomes our path through the maze. Order. Its execution. In a world where over half the dialogue consists of lies, misinterpretations, meaningless rhetoric, in a world of charlatans, contentless rituals, Louis's imperative nature imparts a sense of causality. Behind his facade one senses a purpose, a historicity which propels the film through time.

"WE MUST make the state a reality," Louis tells the queen mother, then sets out to do just the opposite. He manufactures, instead, a state mythology, complete with forms and rituals usurped from Catholicism, infused, sui generis, with an illusion of order. "One rules minds," he tells Colbert, "by appearances, and not by the true nature of things." Louis's myth grows like a cancer, implanting gratuitous bourgeois details with royal significance. With each new detail, the monarchy extends itself horizontally, until it envelops and supplants reality. It is a monstrous calculus at deceit, made all the more appalling by its success.

Here is a comedy, pretending not to be. The war of oil against water. It is as if Rossellini scoured history to find an aesthetic most antithetical to his own, and once he had found it he let it run amuck. For this reason, Louis differs from almost every other hero of rise and/or fall narratives in that he is totally devoid of development. The same logic that complains his refusal of Mazarin's legacy in reel one, explains his disdain for forks in reel three. Money, forks, meats, music, for Louis it is a question of quantity and not quality. Louis remains stationary, while reality, i.e., appearances, kaleidoscope about him. He is heroic in preposterousness.

Rossellini in the shadows, Alice-in-Wonderland aghast with mock horror. He follows Louis's lead, loosening his camera to the dervishes of baroque pageantry, treating his subject with an iconic, reverential frontality. Only at the very end does he reassert himself. We see Louis at last in private. Suddenly the film is thrown back on the chaos of its own beginning. We see the spectre of Louis's future in the dying Mazarin. We see that even the Machiavellian Louis cannot escape the clutches of his own deceit. That his philosophy is made feasible only by what it ignores. That behind the facade there is, indeed, another facade. Etc.

"How can you live without Rossellini?" Or at any rate, why try?