Sight and Sound

In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ George Orwell described political language as “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Written in 1946, his plea for cant-free clarity of expression resonates strongly today when politicians adopt the argot of managerial ‘efficiency’ and soldiers talk of bombs as ‘ordnance’ and dead civilians as ‘collateral damage’. And when your employers regard you as ‘human resources’. That’s to say, humans as resources, as ‘things’. Or, in a German word that surges from the nightmare of history in Heartbeat Detector, as ‘Stücke’ – ‘pieces’. Nicolas Klotz’s film is about what such words conceal, and beneath modern corporate talk of ‘restructuring’ it finds the euphemisms of Nazi extermination programmes. In adapting François Emmanuel’s novel La Question humaine (2000), Klotz and screenwriting partner Elisabeth Perceval have created a film whose soupy, miasmic feel brilliantly conveys a common intuition that behind the slick carapace of corporate life lurk truly barbarous forces. But to equate the operations of modern-day capitalism with genocide, isn’t that going too far? Is it not obscenely disrespectful even to countenance the comparison?

Heartbeat Detector is as much about the horror of having to countenance the comparison as it is about the comparison itself. It is therefore about realising the responsibility that history should force upon us but rarely does. The character through whom the shock of this realisation passes is Simon Kessler (Mathieu Amalric), an ambitious psychologist in the human resources department of German petrochemical firm SC Farb (any resemblance to IG Farben, suppliers of Zyklon-B gas to the death camps, is surely deliberate). Kessler is a ‘golden boy’, as the French call their top young executives, and the film sees him unravel as company intrigues whittle away his self-belief. One of his superiors, Karl Rose (a rapier-like Jean-Pierre Kalfon), entrusts him with a secret mission to investigate his boss, Mathias Jüst (Michel Lonsdale), who is suspected of being mentally unfit for his job. Kessler confirms Rose’s suspicions: his boss sips whisky at work, weeps at Schubert Lieder and curls up in his dead son’s cot. But Jüst sees through Kessler, realising that he is spying for Rose. His revelation that Rose is the offspring of a Nazi ‘Aryanisation’ programme and has channelled money to a far-right German group marks the moment of Kessler’s transformation. He doesn’t know what to do with the information other than go easy on Jüst and hence lose Rose’s trust.

The Shoah has been interpreted as a historically unique atrocity that silences language and forbids representation but also as a founding act of modernity. In this latter view, dehumanisation of certain races colludes with a technocratic language of ‘efficiency’. While Heartbeat Detector takes the latter interpretation, the theme of ‘silenced’ language is explored at the levels of plot and texture alike. Kessler and Jüst both receive anonymous letters from former Farb employee Arie Neumann in which excerpts from an actual historical document of the Nazi era concerning ‘improvements’ to gassing-vans are interspersed with extracts from a modern corporate training manual. In both, says Neumann, the language is “dead, neutral, technical… a language which gradually absorbs its own humanity.” But the power of the film owes as much to how it expresses this theme in the interplay between voice, image and music to create a woozy, subjective quality, as though from within Kessler’s own fractured psyche. This is reinforced by his voiceover and the implication in his opening words (“Where do I start?”) that this is a story told retrospectively, history already on the verge of becoming a memory. The film employs a range of music – fado, flamenco, classical, rock and electronica – to create a world parallel to language in which pure expression may be found.

Heartbeat Detector is not exclusively about how historical memory resurfaces as trauma; it is also profoundly political in asserting the modern corporate world as the context of this traumatic return. And while it can be seen as one of a number of recent French films about the human cost of neo-liberal economics (from Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources to Seigrid Alnoy’s Elle est des nôtres), it is also the third work in a trilogy by Klotz and Perceval which includes Paria (2000) and La Blessure (2004), the first about homelessness, the second on immigration. In Heartbeat Detector, the pair have made one of the most remarkable, formally ambitious and properly disquieting films in recent French cinema. Chris Darke

Empire Magazine

The sanity of chemical company director Michel Lonsdale is called into question in Nicolas Klotz's simmering adaptation of a novel by François Emmanuel, as Lonsdale's ambitious assistant Jean-Pierre Kalfon orders in-house psychologist Mathieu Amalric to monitor the eccentric behaviour that is concerning the German head office. However, as Amalric (a loner whose own life is far from trouble free) begins his investigation, he comes to realise the firm's shiny façade hides a murky past. Suggesting that the competitive spirit of modern capitalism originated in the political excesses of the early 20th century, this is a searing indictment of corporate responsibility that will intrigue conspiracy theorists, as Amalric becomes aware of the sinister motives for his mission and the significance of Lonsdale's membership of a long-disbanded string quartet. Dark, intense, compelling. **** David Parkinson, Empire Magazine

Film Comment

The Unnerving Questions of Nicolas Klotz



 
The question in La Question humaine (2007)—or, as it has been re-titled for its international release, The Heartbeat Detector— is one of language.  A corporate thriller of sorts, set amidst the offices, halls, and parties of managerial class, La Question humaine is also a philosophical inquiry into how we inhabit the language we use and how language inhabits, and uses, us.  It is a controvers ial and provocative film, one bound to unsettle audiences who take its questioning seriously and upset others who bristle at its core analogy.  Like all of Nicolas Klotz’ recent films, it is a response to and comment on the present—the present of neo-liberal capitalism, industrial downsizing, and the displaced and disaffected who do, or don’t, manage to adjust.  
 
 
Based on a novel of the same name by François Emmanuel (Stock, 2000), La Question humaine is narrated by Simon, an in-house corporate psychologist played by Mathieu Amalric, who is asked to investigate the erratic behavior of the company CEO (Michael Lonsdale).  Simon’s covert research, framed as an attempt to assess interest in forming a musical ensemble of and for employees, leads him into obscure psychic and ultimately historical territories.  In spite of various insinuations, Simon is never sure of the true motive for the investigation.  Is it genuine concern for the future of the company or a vicious power struggle among aging executives?  Nevertheless, with Simon we discover traces of the repressed past that haunts Lonsdale, a past that then begins to haunt Simon’s and our relationship to the present.  A series of anonymous leads him to an encounter with a former employee (played by an ethereal white-haired Lou Castel), laid off during a recent downsizing.  The letters, in which the language of Nazi technicians is intertwined with the language of corporate management, appear to be the work of an embittered worker, but they articulate, through their mad juxtapositions, a much more profound disquiet.  It is this disquiet that ultimately binds the characters together and attaches each of them, and us, to history.  And it is the hallucinatory textual collage that poses the fundamental question of the film.



Klotz and his filmmaking and life partner, Elisabeth Perceval (credited with the scripts), have been making films together for the last decade, and La Question humaine is the third film in a collaborative trilogy. With a background in music documentary and theatre, Klotz combines attention to socio-economic realities, corporeal gesture, and music in an absolutely unique way.  Indeed, Klotz and Perceval’s recent features mix fiction with documentary details to the point that sometimes real life erupts through the thin texture of the story and the narratives almost collapse under the sudden weight of the real.  At the same time, musical interludes, whether sung performances or a letting go of mind and body through unrestrained dance, also periodically disrupt the narratives’ forward march.  All of Klotz’ and Perceval’s collaborations are preceded by periods of intense field research which then informs the stories, dialogue and the mise-en-scène of the films.

While quite different in cinematic style and subject matter, each of the three films of the trilogy—La Question humaine, La Blessure (The Wound, 2004) and Paria (Pariah, 2000)—interrogates the impact of the contemporary socio-economic order on the lives and bodies of those either discarded by or caught up in it.
 
 
The two earlier works focus on the discarded.  The detritus of the new world order, what seems to have become its necessary, and acceptable, waste product, are those who can’t, don’t, play by the rules:  the unemployed, the homeless, and the illegal “aliens” wandering from one inhospitable country to the next.  While Pariah wanders alongside the lives of a handful of people found drifting, drunk, or barely alive on the city’s late night streets, The Wound explores the world of an asylum seeker and the community she lives with during her first weeks in France. 
Pariah frames its fiction with a turn-of-the-millennium New Year’s eve ride in a van operated by medical social services.  The staff’s task is to pick up vagrants from various corners of Paris, give them chocolates, and deliver them, forcibly or voluntarily, to a homeless shelter outside the city where they can get medical attention and spend the night. Full of vitality and humor, in spite of its sometimes harrowing subject matter, this lengthy opening gives way to a detailed exploration of two previous days in the lives of two of the van’s occupants, both young men, before returning to the opening to continue through the night at the shelter and following day.  Shot mostly in low-light and on handheld dv, Pariah often feels like, and sometimes is, non-fiction.  The immensely compelling non-professional actors are people Klotz and Perceval met on the streets, and Gérald Thomassin gives a bravura performance as one of the young men, a performance reminiscent of a gentler Franco Citti in Pasolini’s Accattone.
 
 
Again with a mainly non-professional cast, The Wound centers on a group of African immigrants and asylum seekers in Paris.  Blandine arrives at the airport from Brazzaville under an assumed name, and although her husband is eagerly waiting for her, she never appears.  Instead, she and a dozen others are herded into a small holding cell and denied entry into France.  The brutality of the immigration police is depicted in vivid detail, as is the protracted wait of the family and community.  Finally Blandine is allowed entry, with a huge gash on her leg due to the officers’ callous treatment.  Once at the squat where her husband lives, time distends and folds in upon itself, and we enter the limbo of a different waiting: waiting for the physical wound to heal, waiting to see if the psyche can adapt, waiting to feel if this life is worth living.  A palpable tension is manifest throughout the film, due to its slow pace and multiple digressions.  We think the film will focus on individuals, but in fact its concern is with a community.  We cross paths with dozens of lives in the midst of accomplishing the tasks of everyday life (cooking, cleaning, moving, fetching water in the nearby cemetery), and the “plot” is interrupted by monologues of those who pause to tell us how and why they are here.  Like this film itself, these are stories of continuous journeys without apparent beginnings and certainly without ends.

With La Question humaine, Klotz and Perceval have moved into new territory, not only in terms of the social milieu, the focus on a central character, a more linear narrative, and a more complex mise-en-scène, but also with the incorporation of well-known actors such as Amalric, Lonsdale and Castel.  Nevertheless, while the principal and secondary characters are professionals, they continue to work with non-professionals, including a group of young managers-in-training for many of the non-speaking parts, and their attention to the gestural and spatial language of bodies is still as strong as ever.  Also as in the previous films, the friction between a forward-advancing narrative and moments of digression, quasi-Brechtian distancing, and musical release continues to unsettle our viewing experience.  
 
 
Whereas the bodies in Pariah are tense and agitated (the film begins with an amazing “dance” of a drunk or stoned adolescent, pitching along the ledges and walls of a subway hall), or broken to the point of motionlessness, and those in The Wound are mainly heavy with listless waiting, bodies in La Question humaine are choreographed to reveal—or create—an aesthetics and ethics of corporate-chic.  Brief scenes in men’s bathrooms, elevators, corporate hallways, and waiting rooms have no narrative function other than to show how these bodies move, interact, mimic, and control themselves and others with the subtle coded gestures of a certain class and attitude.  The excess of order and controlled restraint of the elite are countered in scenes of a nightclub and a rave where they go to relax, or in the less tidy movements of more ordinary folk.  This choreography is also embodied narratively in the character of Simon, and Amalric does a superb job of manifesting complacency, misgiving, frenzied release, and the inertia of extreme distress in his posture, gestures, and ways of inhabiting space.  
 
 
Klotz has said that the idea of making La Question humaine came to him when, during the shooting of Pariah, he heard François Emmanuel reading extracts from the novel on the radio.

The film he has made is as much about listening as about seeing, and the timbre and tone of Amalric’s voice play a crucial role in how we experience it.  Evoking assurance or disquiet in his first-person narration and in his reading of technical texts of corporate management and the Third Reich, Simon’s inner voice periodically takes over the film.  Finally attempting to resist one kind of language with another, he utters a melodious litany of his own, a naming that evokes a multitude of stories, feelings, and lives over the film’s final black screen.  This endeavor poses the crucial question as to how language can engender imagination and care as well as serving to enhance organization and control.
 
 
The 1942 letter that surfaces at the climax of the film (and novel) is one that will be familiar to those who have studied the Holocaust or who remember parts of the same document as read, also in voice-over, by Claude Lanzmann at the end of the first part of Shoah.  If one considers La Question humaine’s inclusion of this text primarily as an indictment of corporate capitalism, then one will judge it as inappropriate, perhaps even unjustifiable.  But I see it rather as the most extreme case of a certain use of language, the ultimate archetype of de-humanization in the interest of a technical efficiency that sees nothing other than itself.  It is this horrifying use of language that the films warns against, forcing us to listen to it, asking us to consider when we should, or would, react. American audiences of the film, perhaps less affected by rising unemployment and unfamiliar with recent suicides associated with the French workplace, might consider how our own language gets perverted by political and military establishments in terms such as “collateral damage,” “friendly fire,” or “interrogation techniques.”  Klotz and Perceval are asking us to listen to, and question, the languages of the word and of the body that inhabit us as we inhabit them, and that, at least in part, determine what we accept as the “normal” course of events.


The fact that La Question humaine, like the earlier films in the trilogy, was made on a B-film budget explains some moments of awkwardness in the film, while others are due to the filmmakers’ desire to keep us aware that we are watching an artifact, the imperfect product of human love and labor.  There is also a certain heavy-handedness in the articulation the film’s warning that originates in the novel, but Klotz and Perceval’s additions to it, as well as their eclectic use of diegetic music (Schubert, flamenco, fado, and New Order) and the score by Syd Matters, add flesh, blood, and sensory pleasures to this moral tale.  As in their previous films, uneasiness is inherent to the spectator’s experience.  Shaken by the recognition that what we are seeing/hearing is not always or only fiction, one is inevitably moved to react and question.  What more can one ask from a film?
  Irina Leimbacher

FILM COMMENT (February 2008)


Village Voice

Corporate crimes meet crimes of humanity

by Scott Foundas

Heartbeat Detector

Directed by Nicolas Klotz

The skeletons in the corporate closet of director Nicolas Klotz's Heartbeat Detector are enough to make Enron look like the unblemished patron saint of the Fortune 500. Set in the Paris headquarters of a fictional German petrochemical giant called SC Farb, the film explores the actual and theoretical connections between the company's mandate to increase productivity while ridding its workforce of undesirable elements with the similar business model of an earlier, efficiency-minded multinational: the Third Reich. And if that sounds like a bit of a stretch, you haven't heard the half of it. Before it reaches its end, Heartbeat Detector winds its epistemological way through discussions of historical amnesia, the decay of language, and the soullessness of technology. It's an unapologetic film of ideas—perhaps the headiest of its kind to arrive on these shores since Godard's Notre Musique.

But Klotz's film more consciously echoes early Godard in the way it binds its dense philosophizing to the spine of a pulpy crime fiction. It's so French, the cinemas showing it should require a passport for admission.In a role that relies nearly as heavily on voiceover narration as his one in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but which at least allows him to get up and move around a bit, Mathieu Amalric stars as Simon Kessler, SC Farb's in-house shrink, human-resources honcho, and all-around productivity guru. It's Kessler who evaluates potential hires and leads current employees in morale-building workshops, and whose criteria for separating the wheat from the chaff has allowed Farb to reduce its staff by 800 "unnecessary" persons.

As the film opens, Kessler is approached in strict confidence by his managing director, Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), and asked to evaluate the "mental state" of the company's CEO, Mathias Jüst (Michael Lonsdale, excellent), who has of late been locking himself away in his office for hours on end and sitting alone listening to Schubert in the backseat of his parked car.Just what is eating at the ironically named Jüst becomes the central enigma of Heartbeat Detector, an existential crisis (like the one in Michael Haneke's similarly themed Caché) that grows only deeper and more diffuse with each passing revelation. Along the way, Klotz and screenwriter Elisabeth Perceval lead us down a bread-crumb trail of clues and potential red herrings: Jüst, we learn, was once the violinist in a corporate quartet, the breakup of which affected him greatly. ("Music doesn't tolerate hierarchy," says the group's former cellist.) Or it may be that the old man has never fully recovered from the death of his infant daughter. Or he may be the victim of a conspiracy related to sensitive information he possesses about Rose, whose real name, Jüst claims, is Kraus, and who grew up as one of Heinrich Himmler's "racially pure" Lebensborn children, the scion of Nazi sympathizers.Jüst, it turns out, is not entirely free of the shadow of the Shoah himself—perhaps, the film suggests, none of us in Western society are—though the melancholy that has gripped him is as much ideological as it is personal. How, he asks rhetorically, do you reconcile "the human question" (the film's better French-language title) with the need to make money, to achieve "progress"? And the deeper Kessler tunnels down the movie's sociological rabbit hole, the more he realizes his own complicity in the often inhuman matters of balance sheets and profit reports, the more he comes face to face with the bloody realities of "just following orders." Klotz saves the movie's most disquieting disquisition for last, however, when Kessler encounters another weary historical witness (this one played with poetic resignation by Fists in the Pocket star Lou Castel), who gives him a crash course in the stealth erosion of meaning through the spoken and written word. "We no longer have poor people, only those on modest incomes," says the man, to which he might just as soon add that we no longer have wars, only military conflicts; no more holocausts, only downsizing.For two and a half hours, Klotz walks a perilous tightrope between profundity and pretension without ever tipping into the chasm. His film is filled with strange, discursive digressions, including a violent seduction scene between Kessler and Farb's slinky blonde archivist (Delphine Chuillot, who's like a Gallic Ellen Barkin), and a techno rave sequence that goes on for close to 10 minutes, culminating in the unforgettable image of a young man still dancing to the rhythmic beats inside his own head at daybreak. In the Hollywood version, those scenes would inevitably go the way of so many of SC Farb's employees, just as Kessler himself would turn out to be the audience's vessel of catharsis and healing. But here, knowledge and understanding raise more questions than they answer, and the film ends not in closure, but in openness. It is precisely those qualities that give Heartbeat Detector its epic sense of humanity. Take them away and you'd be left with a leaner but markedly less compelling workaday workplace thriller: Michael Clayton with Nazis instead of lawyers.