Media Sample Essay | Water Of The Hills
The idea that every person is pre-programmed, fated, to act as he or she does act raises many questions in the Water of the Hills films.
What are the sources of destiny and of destination in these films? Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” is governed by a structure; Berri’s films are also governed by a structure, and the structure in both of these texts centres on a letter whose trajectory is delayed.
The Water of the Hills is about a very real material letter that goes missing, and about a failure of communication. It is therefore a rich text to which to apply the “letter-centric”[1] thought of Lacan and Derrida.
First, I will explain the Oedipal elements in Berri’s films, and will begin with an overview of Oedipus’ fate in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. The Oracle predicts that Laius’ son will kill him, and that Laius’ son will plant his seed in his own mother.
In his Footnote to line 713, Gould points out that Aeschylus in Seven Against Thebes, and Euripides in The Phoenician Women both suggest that Laius’ fate is a punishment because Laius had already committed a crime at the time he was given the oracle. Laius’ crime was the abduction and seduction of King Pelops’ son, Chrysippus.
The condition of the oracle is that if Laius has a son, then the son will fulfil the prophecy delineated above. Sophocles does not mention this earlier crime and seduction, but is there a parallel with this detail of an earlier crime being committed, with the Water of the Hills story?
Is the Oedipal tragedy in the Water of the Hills a result of an earlier crime? Is the Oedipal itinerary of the human subject a kind of punishment for some earlier crime?
Twice in the film, the line “It was almost a crime” is uttered: by Ugolin when calling to Manon on the mountain; and by Delphine when she speaks with Cesar about not replying to Florette’s letter (which he did not know had existed).
In the “Seminar”, Lacan observes that after the Minister notices the Queen’s letter and her distress (in the primal scene), “from then on everything transpires like clockwork”.
The words “like clockwork” suggest an inevitability to the following sequence of events. Is there then, an unavoidable balance involved in the outcome of events? In Berri’s films, events certainly appear to run “like clockwork”, according to the mechanism of the film’s logic.
- Involving the “letter” on a variety of levels.
- Gould’s Translator’s Footnote to Sophocles, Oedipus the King, p. 92.
- Sophocles, line 742.
- Sophocles, line 18.
- Ugolin, Jean de Florette; Delphine, Manon des Sources.
- Lacan, “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” in The Purloined Poe, p. 30.
