The Thinking Machine 27

Philippe Garrel’s Elle a passé tant d’heures sous les sunlights… (1985) is full of Warholian, performative scenes based on the relation between actor and camera. One of them includes Mireille Perrier playing with and eating a white rose – an action reminiscent of the start of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Fando and Lis (1968). But the staging of this scene – its framing, the dance between face and prop, between showing and concealing – allows us to trace (with a certain sleight-of-hand) a less evident relation with another film, closer to it in place and time, with which it has a sentimental lineage. This audiovisual “poem in the shape of a rose” (to borrow a Pasolini title) is dedicated to Dana Linssen.