Assignment 3 - Artwork and Reference - Nicolas Provost's 'Papillon d'Amour'

Papillon d'Amour (Butterfly of Love) is Nicolas Provost's third experimental film.  Shot in 35mm in 2005, the piece is interesting on a number of levels.  We can see how - in taking a sequence (slightly re-organized) from Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), and splitting the screen in half to create a mirror effect - Provost has significantly altered the image and has managed, in the process, to create something that bears little resemblance, thematically, to the original.  'Provost,' notes his website, 'creates a hallucinatory scene of a woman's reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly. This physical audiovisual experience produces skewed reflections upon Love, its lyrical monstrosities, and a wounded act of disappearance.'

In some ways, the piece demonstrates how a hot medium (in Marshall McLuhan's terms) can be changed into a cold - something that has been subjected to the interactivity of an artist.  This process is in fact what seems to be literally happening to the transmogrified 'chrysalis' shape that appears in the film to morph into a 'butterfly.'  The fact that it does so in a violent fashion suggests that the artistic process is sometimes not easy, or not without its problems.  However, this analysis of the artwork cannot be supported with any real evidence.  The website's description, quoted above, does not in fact help.  Do the images really produce a 'skewed reflection of Love?'  I think a lot of the responses to a piece like this are likely to be determined by the spectator's own past, and the kinds of moving image he or she recollects when watching it.  For example, when the 'butterfly' emerges with violently flapping 'wings,' I was reminded of certain Edison actualities from early cinema - shorts that displayed interesting people or events that lacked narrative but which presented startled audiences at the end of the 19th century with unbelievable sights.  Annabelle Whitford's (appropriately-named) 'Butterfly Dance' springs to mind.

Provost manages to turn clear images into abstract forms, never more so than when the central figure's anthropomorphic shape ceases to look even remotely human.  But the results produced by the mirror effect also suggest - to me - the ink-blotter tests made famous by Hermann Rorschach.  Such a comparison to a clinical (and highly-debated) method of psychological analysis might seem strange, were it not for the possibility that Provost's images in this film could at any moment be freeze-framed, and the resulting still used for just such a purpose.

For all this, it must still be pointed out that, on one level at least, Papillon d'Amour does reflect and relate to the Kurosawa film's narrative.  In abstracting a previously clear cinematic image, and in the process engendering a highly subjective response in the spectator, Provost is at the very least commenting on the themes of subjectivity present in Rashomon.  However, because the images in Papillon d'Amour are simply so striking, I do not believe that most spectators' minds will immediately turn to the Japanese classic in order to elucidate personal meaning.  They may acknowledge the source material in Provost's piece, but will not believe that Provost is adding his own commentary to Rashomon's thematic concerns.  There is much more going on here than merely explicating Kurosawa's narrative.