Reflections on a Dead Diamond — A Conversation with Bruno Forzani

“Death in Venice with James Bond”. This, according to Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, was the original idea behind their Reflections on a Dead Diamond, a film featuring an old man (former agent John) in a white suit and Panama hat (like Dirk Bogarde in Visconti’s classic) reminiscing a life of action adorned with the unmistakeably colourful and stylized visuals, fabrics, forms and textures of 1960s-1970s euro-spy genre.

As a dying man, John’s memory turns back to ever more fictionalized versions of his life. Was it worth it? Did such destructive and violent means justify the end of keeping afloat a world (the then-expanding, postwar-booming, materially thriving world of the “glorious thirties”) that is now even more dead and gone than he’d soon be?

Unlike in Death in Venice, death here is not beauty. Death is not embodied by the youth of those with longer years ahead of them. Visconti’s Tadzio is called, here, Serpentik, a masked heroine, a black silhouette with only the eyes visible.

Somebody who can watch but cannot be watched in return: that is the definition of death for Cattet and

Forzani, craftspeople exceptionally well-versed in the theory and especially the practice of the cinematic gaze, the one you learn less in books than by consuming sizeable amounts of giallos. The exorcism of that kind of death is what John has pursued all his life, to no avail – and mostly to make up for his inability to look squarely in the face those, hidden in plain sight, by whom he was actually manipulated. He is, after all, the descendant of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, not of Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe.

Similarly, one should not expect the elegantly thin stream of blood trickling down Dirk Bogarde’s forehead. Not so much because the film is violent (and it certainly is), but rather because death is, here, kaleidoscopically displayed. There’s a whole spectrum of ways of dying, and they are in no sense accidental: bombastic, quirky and operatic in the imagined past, straightforward, dirty and raw in the prosaic present. They all (including, and especially, that most tellingly fictional of deaths: the fake car accident) respond to what one would call the “logic of genre”, if genre were, in this film, something separable and distinguishable from History, Gender, and Life itself.