‘En ce joli mois de mai 1485,’ reads the illuminated manuscript, ‘Messire le Diable dépècha sur terre deux de ses créatures afin de désespérer les humaines’ (And so, in the lovely month of May, 1485, the Devil sent two of his envoys to this world to drive humans to despair). An unlikely specification for a story that plays out so heavily like a fairytale detached from time and place. At the close of the fifteenth century, France was finding itself in the same dormant state that preceded its 1940 invasion. With the head of the Valois monarchy subjugated to the Holy Roman Empire (i.e. the Habsburgs), aristocratic life withdrew to the delusions of romanticism. While the currents of central Europe were rapidly shifting, France amused itself in the brilliance of the fantastic, much like its 1942 Gaullist counterpart. Taking place a few decades before Columbus’ voyages and Luther’s Wittenberg theses, the film seems to cast its gaze precisely on the sort of Capetian behaviour that isolated the kingdom and cloaked it with chivalrous spectacle. It is here that Carné’s static pictorialism accentuates the escapism of archaic legends. This is the topos of psychological regression, a state of self-contempt and melancholy on a communal level. And if what we are met with is national lethargy weighing on a sheltered secular life, the passage from real onto fantastic time is a technique employed as awareness.

Les Visiteurs’ reconstruction is built chronologically rather than spatially. An aesthetic of distance and restraint, gilded by theatricality, governs this medieval snow globe. Mannered camera movements slowly penetrate the painterly surface guarding instinctual desire. Antonioni, who worked as an assistant director on the film, describes the result as ‘soffocante serenità.’ ‘Decoration and ornament no longer serve to heighten the natural beauty of a thing; they are overgrowing it and threaten to stifle it’ writes historian Johan Huizinga on his landmark study of late medieval court society, The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Carné’s compositions produce the stasis of a Flemish still life—a hermetically sealed heterotopia of amorphous time. Nothing jolting is allowed in this serenity; even when magical transformation take place and characters temper with the order convention dictates, they do so with a restrained gentleness.

Here lies a possibility to read Les Visiteurs as a queer gesture—and I mean this in the terms that Eve Sedgwick considers Proust’s writing as coming from ‘within the closet.’ It is a gaze that speaks to a specific ontology of queerness as an existential diorama. Saplings of this idea can be found in the kaleidoscopic nature of Carné’s world, where his visitors can command time to stand still and bend outside the universe’s orbit. Not bound up by such chronological constraints, they exist outside of nature; a heterogeneity made clear by their ambiguous relations to gender and sexual desire. Since most interactions are introduced with a formal plasticity that borders on stiffness, this is achieved through a demystifying relation to time. It is on these terms that the Devil (the story’s only performing father-figure) will attempt to emasculate his envoy/son by depriving him of the empirical mark of time: memory. And it is within this constant state of temporal metamorphosis that the two lovers’ bodies will be welded together into a single beating heart. The simultaneity of their plural pulse—at once beating and yet petrified—delicately alludes to a counter-consciousness of companionship that denies most monolithic assumptions. Eros, once held in the warmth of an open palm, is now chiseled in marble flesh that has yet to grow cold.

Les Visiteurs du soir
Marcel Carné
1942

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