Figures et formes de l‘indétermination – De Vase de Noces à Long Live the Flesh

Abstract

Since its release in 1974, Thierry Zéno‘s Vase de Noces has been at the center of many controversies that reveal its marginal character. Although it has sometimes been reduced to a simple surrealist zoophilic love story, this film goes much deeper by undermining a series of paired concepts (e.g., high/low, pure/impure, humanity/animality), requalifying borders and boundaries and disregarding categories. After introducing Vase de Noces as a film of indeterminacy, this article will approach it in a more detailed way by first of all formulating some propositions related to the motif of nausea, which itself brings into play a series of structuring oppositions and brings out an exorbitant principle of oscillation. This introductory step makes possible a conceptual and analytical shift by leading its subject to Long Live the New Flesh (Nicolas Provost, 2009), where the question of the abject is played out on another level. By using the blind perspective of analysis to draw a continuity between these two Belgian films in spite of their absolute difference, the article considers the complementarity of these two objects to elaborate a thought of the fundamental indeterminacy proper to abjection, as it was approached by Julia Kristeva in Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai sur l'abjection (1980).