Méditerranée (1963)
★ — Méditerranée (1963)
Watch a sunset instead. It's free, shorter, and about as meaningful as Jean-Daniel Pollet's Méditerranée, and I say that having sat through all forty-odd minutes of this sun-bleached exercise in self-congratulation. Some films dare you to dismiss them; this one barely notices you're there.
The setup, if you can call it that, is simple enough: a camera drifts along the Mediterranean coast, taking in crumbling ruins, lapping waves, weathered faces, a bull in an arena, a woman on an operating table. The images float past without context or consequence. Over the top of them, a voiceover murmurs about time, death, and memory in the vaguely oracular tone that certain experimental filmmakers seem to mistake for depth. It mistakes volume for profundity. Turn the sound off and you'd lose very little.
I'll give it this: the cinematography is often genuinely striking. Pollet and his cameraman Volker Schlöndorff, yes, that Volker Schlöndorff, have a painter's instinct for light and texture. There are individual frames here that are quietly beautiful, the way a postcard can be beautiful, the way a screensaver can be beautiful. And that's precisely the problem. A screensaver doesn't ask for forty minutes of your attention and then bill itself as art. Méditerranée does, and the gap between its self-regard and what it actually delivers is enormous.
No story. No structure. No emotional anchor. No characters, no argument, no coherent thematic thread to follow even loosely. The narration gestures at grand ideas but never commits to any of them. It's as if the film is afraid that finishing a thought might pin it down to a meaning, and meaning might be judged. Better to stay vague, to stay atmospheric, to stay mysterious. Except mystery requires something withheld. You can't have mystery with nothing behind the curtain.
I've got genuine time for formally radical film-making. formally radical work from 1966 can still shock and provoke sixty years on, because it's always doing something, always pressing on a nerve, always making a demand of you. Méditerranée makes no demands. It barely acknowledges you're in the room. There's a difference between a film that is genuinely meditative and one that is simply inert, and this lands firmly in the second camp. And even thinking about travelogue-style documentary film-making that actually earns its rumination, something like Letter from Siberia (1957) shows what this mode can do when there's a real wit and intelligence behind the camera shaping the material, finding the friction, letting ideas actually collide.
Perhaps in 1963, in a particular Parisian context, surrounded by a particular conversation about what cinema could be, this felt like a provocation worth having. I can just about imagine it. But watched now, without that context to prop it up, it feels inert and oddly smug, a film more besotted with its own atmosphere than with the viewer on the other side of the screen. Patience is not the same as reward. Some films ask you to be patient and then pay you back. This one just takes the patience and walks off.
One star, and the one is for Schlöndorff's light.
Rating: ★ | Year: 1963 | Watched: 2026-03-17
Related on Movies With Macca
More from France: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
More documentary: Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Style Wars (1983) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
