Monsters are a frequent presence in narrative horror and science-fiction movies, but they also appear frequently in non-narrative cinema, at least in metaphorical ways. Since “all strange beasts” are welcome here at Camp Kaiju, we’re excited to analyze some experimental or avant-garde work in which monsters raise their beautifully ugly heads, often in formally audacious ways.
Director, Producer, Editor, Sound Design: Nicolas Provost
Music: Köhn
Premiere: January 2004 (Sundance Film Festival)
Country of Origin: Belgium
Runtime: 3 minutes
Case in point: Papillon d’Amour (aka Butterfly of Love), a 2004 short film by the Belgian visual artist Nicolas Provost. His approach seems simple: Provost takes footage from Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic Rashomon and, by duplicating the image through a vertical mirroring effect, reediting the footage, and adding an abrasive soundtrack, turns it into a meditation on loss, heartache, and the metamorphosis of the soul. By focusing mostly on a single female figure (surrounded by stoic men who observe her suffering impassively), Papillon d’Amour conveys her reverse progression from butterfly to caterpillar, reverting back into the chrysalis in response to some kind of unknown grief.
As is the case with some abstract experimental movies, the approach might seem simple, but the final result contains a multitude of possible interpretations. The film begins slowly and quietly, with a semi-human figure seen at the center of the frame in black-and-white. The figure is surrounded by four men, two on each side of her, though a closer look reveals that they’re same two men repeated on either side. A gray concrete wall stands in the background, the sky above it a slightly darker shade of gray. The figure in the middle begins moving, slightly at first, arching its back, raising its head, digging its hands into the gravel. It soon becomes clear that the figure is a woman, writhing in a pain the viewer cannot know. One close-up of her (doubled) face shows her tearful expression. Yet the men around her never move, untouched by her anguish. (This is true of the men who sit behind her as well as another man whose face suddenly appears, as if entering from a non-diegetic space.) About 80 seconds in, the woman rushes toward the screen and is flanked by a border of waving leaves, apparently catalyzing her metamorphosis. The film soon mounts to a shrieking crescendo of noise and wild gyrations, committed by a figure that’s human origin but has become something else. The figure eventually shrinks back down to a small wiggle of light, its journey back to entropy finally finished.
What does it all mean? That’s up to each individual viewer to decide. Given the title and the woman’s facial expression (which can be briefly glimpsed here and there), it’s easy to interpret a theme of heartache – the violent pain of separation or lost love, transforming the sufferer into a shell of their former self. Of course, the pain this woman is feeling might have a totally different origin – losing a family member, maybe, or being cast out from society (a reading which would be affirmed by the reactions of the men around her). Papillon d’Amour is primarily a formal exercise, but it’s also an emotional one in figuratively showing how a human being can transmogrify, if not into something monstrous then at least into something other by extreme suffering.
Those who have seen Rashomon might better understand the source of the footage. In Kurosawa’s film, the scene in question occurs when a wife (Machiko Kyō) testifies before a village court after she is raped and her husband, a samurai, is murdered. Although Rashomon makes the point that none of its characters’ testimonies are completely trustworthy, in this scene of the film she is alleging that, after being raped by a bandit and freeing her husband from his bonds (the bandit ties him to a tree with rope), the husband can only look at her with loathing, considering her a fallen woman. She then faints and finds her husband stabbed to death upon awakening (according to her testimony), wandering away in shock and attempting suicide. The source footage in Rashomon, then, suggests a very clear reasoning for the woman’s pain: rape, the murder of her husband, the cruelty of patriarchy, the loss of the life she knew. This context makes Papillon d’Amour even more affecting in its harsh depiction of a woman turned monstrous from the violence of existence, though the film is arguably even more rewarding as a symbolic depiction of human torment, without clear narrative motivation.
In its three and a half minutes, Papillon d’Amour delivers a haunting vision that’s bleakly humanist – there’s no question it sympathizes with its central figure, even (or especially) as it becomes increasingly disfigured – as well as formally daring. The “butterfly of love” in Provost’s film is only the first of many monsters from the avant-garde we hope to encounter on Camp Kaiju in the future.
written by Matthew Cole Levine
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