Closing Distance: The Cosmic View, the Terrestrial Horizon, and Jean-Claude Labrecque’s Essai à la mille

Art & Trash, episode 17
Closing Distance: The Cosmic View, the Terrestrial Horizon, and Jean-Claude Labrecque's Essai à la mille
Stephen Broomer, October 14, 2022

Quebecois filmmaker Jean-Claude Labrecque began his career at the National Film Board of Canada, training in cinematography. By the time that he departed from the Film Board to begin his own independent film company in the late 1960s, Labrecque had gained a considerable esteem in Canadian film culture for his mastery of the expanding toolkit of the cinematographer in an era of rapid technological innovation. He had used a 1000mm telephoto lens, acquired from NASA, for the opening shot of his 1965 documentary 60 Cycles, a film about a long-distance bike race in Quebec. In 1970, Labrecque would use the lens again to make a short film, Essai à la mille, or, Test to the Thousand, that deliberated upon the various ways in which this extreme telephoto distortion could impact perception, the aberrations of vision and abstractions of form that it could provoke, the hallucinatory process of charting and collapsing great distances.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer considers the eschatological themes of Labrecque's film, its use of the telephoto lens, and the context of the film, coming as it is did closely in step with other visions of human life in the context of the universe, from Kees Boeke's The Cosmic View, to Robert Verrall's Cosmic Zoom, to Ray and Charles Eames's Powers of Ten.

SCRIPT:

The ‘telephoto’ lens can be used for its magnifying properties, capturing subjects at a distance; or it might be used to dramatically lessen the depth of field, allowing for a highly selective focus. It condenses the distance between objects, whether those objects are near and far, or far and farther, such that a background will lose its depth, closing the gap between background and foreground. Any perceived distance between the foreground subject and the background setting collapses. In its most extreme manifestations, with focal lengths in the hundreds, the telephoto lens can create highly stylized images, redefining the spatial relations among elements in a profoundly unnatural compression of space.

Quebecois filmmaker Jean-Claude Labrecque began his career at the National Film Board of Canada, training in cinematography. By the time that he departed from the Film Board to begin his own independent film company in the late 1960s, Labrecque had gained a considerable esteem in Canadian film culture for his mastery of the expanding toolkit of the cinematographer in an era of rapid technological innovation. He had used a 1000mm telephoto lens, acquired from NASA, for the opening shot of his 1965 documentary 60 Cycles, a film about a long-distance bike race in Quebec. In 1970, Labrecque would use the lens again to make a short film, Essai a la mille, or, Test to the Thousand, that deliberated upon the various ways in which this extreme telephoto distortion could impact perception, the aberrations of vision and abstractions of form that it could provoke, the hallucinatory process of charting and collapsing great distances.

Popular understandings of the earth’s place in the universe were evolving in the 1950s and 1960s. Kees Boeke’s 1957 children’s book The Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, mapped out orders of magnitude around a simple scene, of a child at play, both inward to the atomic level and outward to the widest celestial frame imaginable. Boeke’s book is a significant accomplishment. It anticipates the colour satellite images of the earth’s surface that began to circulate ten years after it; and conversely, it celebrates the legacy of photomicrography, the long development of which culminated in the first photographs of the atom only two years earlier in 1955. The orders of magnitude considered from the atomic up to the cosmic scale, or from the galaxy back down to the nucleus, would soon become the subject of films; only two years before Labrecque’s film, the outward and inward trajectory of Boeke’s Cosmic View had inspired two films that visualized such leaps of scale in near identical ways: Robert Verrall’s Cosmic Zoom, made by Labrecque’s former colleagues at the National Film Board, and Powers of Ten, made by modernist designers and filmmakers Ray and Charles Eames. These were essentially optimistic visions that sought to use scientific mastery at its most extreme scales to declare humankind’s place as a defining perspective of the universe, as dwarf to heavenly bodies, as giant to the particle. In these projects, humankind, whether in the form of a family laying on the grass for a picnic, or a girl playing with a ball, or a boy fishing with his dog, occupies the fixed subject from which the viewer journeys along these scales of magnitude. These figures occupy a position akin to that shifting valley of focus that defines machined optics. Their bodies become ‘hyperfocal objects’. Each of these projects offers precise visions of the atomic and the astronomic along a scale of magnitude. These visions are plainly illustrated, but one essential and inevitable truth of these extremes—the outer limits of the universe, the biophysical makeup of the organism—is that they simply do not belong to the visible world of everyday perception. The isolated plains of inner and outer reality remind the subject that they are lonely specks in a cosmic sea, floating in miniature. Like Prufrock, they ask the impotent question, ”Do I dare to disturb the universe?”

Test to the Thousand is not concerned with orders of magnitude, but it suggests the operations of a greater cosmic order, announced in the lunar halo that opens it; it is not an evidentiary demonstration of the relative scales of the earthbound, the celestial and the infinitesimal, although it does represent the closing of great distances. It shares in the greater project of positioning the earth in a context. That context isn’t upwards to the heavens or inwards to the molecule, but pointed toward the horizon, an area that, in the open landscape, so often extends beyond vision, but which also remains traversable, within reach. Unlike the Cosmic projects, it is not a work of technological optimism: it is eschatological, a condition laid plain by the soundtrack, taken from Pierre Henry’s Apocalypse de Jean, which declares the arrival of a final cataclysm. In Labrecque’s poetics, the telephoto lens, a mechanical extension of the limited scope of human vision, sees not only to the distance, but to the future, to a tempest of sunlight piercing the earth.

Test to the Thousand, like the Book of Revelations, is a phenomenal catalogue, a summary of contents that takes a parting glance at the earth. The Book of Revelations deals with the end of the world brought about by the closing of a distance between life and the beyond, between the world-as-we-know-it and an intruding symbolic reality. It is a cleansing fire, and so too Labrecque’s film shall become by the last of its four episodes. The first of these episodes is a prologue in which the moon is seen through a distant cloud cover, the only light in a pitch-black sky. Labrecque’s composition centres the moon, as a lunar halo forms around it, an optical phenomenon with folkloric implications: in farmer’s almanacs, lunar halos were believed to anticipate storms, making this halo’s appearance a declaration of the film’s apocalyptic themes. The lunar halo is a perfect circle, which Labrecque adjusts through his zoom ring, a declaration of the supremacy of the camera’s mechanical eye. The lens zooms into the blown-out moon, allowing the light of it to overtake the image. As clouds pass in front of the moon, there is a subtle match cut that relocates the light in the distance, as the headlight on a train. The camera now points down a train track, its vision clouded by heat waves. However rapidly the train may be approaching, the long duration of this shot is proof that Labrecque’s lens is delivering a deceptively machined vision. It will take a full two minutes and fourteen seconds to come near enough to become visible as an engine front. For that duration, the eye is left to consider the composition’s extreme compression of the train tracks, the power lines, and vehicles that pass at a crossing ahead; and another effect of the lens distortion, magnified heatwaves. These heatwaves mark the entire composition with post-impressionist style, the rigid lines of the train tracks and electric poles frayed and vibrating. Labrecque’s selection of the railway as a subject to demonstrate the illusionary effects of the telephoto lens has its roots in one of the first films, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat by the Lumière Brothers; the Lumières signalled the technological marvel of a new age by reflecting back on another triumph of the industrial world, collapsing the distance of nineteenth century progress into a summary for a new century, from the steam locomotive of 1804 to the motion picture camera of 1895. Labrecque’s train never arrives.

Long before the train reaches the camera, a new image commands attention, of an airplane on a runway, obscured by those same vibratory heatwaves. Labrecque is touring icons of bridged distances: the train, which in the nineteenth century innovated cross-country travel; the airplane, which in the twentieth made intercontinental travel almost casual; the moon, beaming through this lunar halo, a transcendent distance recently crossed by the crew of the Apollo 11. These are not strictly speaking images of conquest, but they do suggest the ways in which humankind tames distances, exerting technological control to close the gaps between near and far. The telephoto lens does this, much as the telescope evolved, from nautical star-finders and spy-glasses to the large optical reflecting telescopes of mid-century astronomical observatories. As the final passage begins, the transcendent distance of the moon is dwarfed by yet a greater distance: the sun. Labrecque zooms into the sun such that it fills the frame, and as it vibrates with magnified heatwaves, it gives way to a rapid series of images: a family walking down a road; the shadows cast by a modern industrial bridge; a hydro tower and bridge seen through flames; the sunset eclipsed by the geometry of a vertical parking garage; a dog scampering through sun-licked dust; the sun a perfect yellow in a red sky; the dog barking furiously, riddled with light; children running towards the camera, the telephoto compression such that it almost appears as if they are running in place. With a final burst of red light, the image darkens, turning to a desolate landscape at night, its silence broken by distant howls, its stillness broken by the swarming of tiny whiteflies.

The Book of Revelations long pre-existed the heliocentric model of the universe; it wasn’t until the mid-sixteenth century that Copernicus offered such a model of the cosmos, upsetting the solipsism of humankind. Still, the visions of John the Revelator draw from long-held imaginings of a fiery damnation. Like Copernicus’s On the Revolution of Celestial Spheres, The Book of Revelation was about cosmic relations, in its case, the distances of angels. The Cosmic View, Cosmic Zoom and Powers of Ten are evidence of the popular imagination of science as it had formed by the late 1960s; Labrecque reimagines the triumph of optics in fire and brimstone. Throughout, Labrecque is accompanied by condensed excerpts from a late passage in musique concrete composer Pierre Henry’s Apocalypse de Jean, a work that combines found sound and electronic tone generation with a dramatic reading by actor Jean Negroni. These parts form a sonic adaptation of The Book of Revelation, something like an oratorio that draws from radiophonic atmosphere and bleats of modulated sound to bring the menace of the end-times into a definitive present. If the religiosity of Labrecque’s imagery was ambiguous in isolation, it becomes profoundly Christian with this context. Two identifiable passages take prominence, placing emphasis on the fury of god and a merciless sun, ignited by angels to burn men with fire. Revelation 16:1—“j'entends alors une grande voix hors du temple disant aux sept anges aller est versée sur la terre les sept coupes de la fureur de dieu” (subtitled: “I then hear a great voice outside the temple saying to the seven angels go forth, and pour upon the earth the seven bowls of the fury of god”)—and 16:8—“La quatrième paire çe ça coûte sur le soleil fin les hommes et tous fait une chaleur extrême.” (Subtitled: The fourth poured out his bowl on the sun. And it was given unto him to burn men with fire). Like Henry, Labrecque is re-situating this provocative fantasy of damnation into a present moment of technological mediation, with “a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun.”

Although Pierre Henry’s composition continuously imposes eschatological themes upon the film, it is only in the film’s final passage that it is transformed from a study in space and optics into a full apocalypse. This apocalypse is also a further catalogue of the earth, turning away from a world of machine and mechanism to include the presence of human and animal life. Telephotography keeps these elements at a distance, but it does something else to them as well: it allows all those traits emphasized by distortion—heat waves, air particulates—to appear as if they are permeating and flowing through the distant figures. The child runs in place; the light itself speeds through them to reach us. If Test to the Thousand has a core poetic allegory, it is this: a solar permeation that rends space and scatters and immolates its subjects, an obliteration of depth.

CREATOR’S STATEMENT

This episode looks at not only Labrecque’s film, but films that mirror its impulse towards total containment, the ‘cosmic’ films, Robert Verrall’s Cosmic Zoom and Ray and Charles Eames’s Powers of Ten, as well as their source, Kees Boeke’s Cosmic View. As I argue in this piece, the cosmic films don’t have a direct parallel in Labrecque’s film, but they do put it in a context, and their contrast to Labrecque’s deepens my understanding of it: Essai à la mille is sort of like a compressed accordion, wheezing and breathless, while the cosmic films are a kind of boundless opening, like an accordion with an infinite bellows handled by a player with infinite arms. It may not sound like a flattering comparison, but I often prefer the wheezing and breathless.

Unlike the cosmic films, which were acts of progressive-evolutionary scientific visualization, Essai à la mille is a structural film that follows a minimalistic, episodic path. The celebratory tone of those films is in a sharp contrast to Labrecque’s raging, apocalyptic film, which carries a religiosity that also sets it apart from both these scientific films as well as his fellow structural filmmakers (the lone exception being, perhaps, Owen Land, but unlike Land’s films, Essai à la mille is aggressively humourless). I identify Essai à la mille as being structured in four episodes: the first is a zooming shot on a lunar halo; the second is a prolonged stare down a train track at the distant headlights of a locomotive; the third is of an airplane on a runway, obscured by heat waves; and the final episode involves suggestions of a great cataclysm, an immolation of the earth, whiteflies buzzing in the aftermath of an apocalypse. It’s a striking film, such that it’s amazing to think that it has fallen into such obscurity. My copy, a badly faded 16mm reel, is ex-library; it is the only copy I’ve ever seen. And I shouldn’t say badly faded, because the red-magenta tone of it has always struck me as very appropriate to the film’s theme of the earth being consumed in a ball of fire. Appropriately faded.

In Closing Distance, I’ve tried to place Essai à la mille in yet another context, that is, the context in which I teach it, as a work of telephoto imaging. For this reason I’ve started the piece with a tour of other telephoto shots in cinema, from the very subtle (Ran) to the very distorted (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). The extremity of Labrecque’s lens lays plain techniques that many filmmakers use in passing but which is seldom foregrounded for cinematographers-in-training, and so whenever I’ve had a chance to teach first-time filmmakers or introductory courses in film technology, I’ve used Labrecque’s film as a demonstration of what happens in the higher range of focal lengths.