Steve Finbow reviews Sumarsólstöður by Amélie Ravalec – Part One
Argonaut, aeronaut, astronaut, cosmonaut, tempunaut, cybernaut, psychonaut, internaut – “naut” derives from the Greek naútēs (meaning “sailor” or “navigator”). In an essay I wrote on Caravaggio and D. H. Lawrence in Taormina, Sicily, I used the term chrononaut to describe the methodology I used to connect the two artists separated by 300 years. In Sumarsólstöður and Le Métro de Paris – the first two episodes of the Solstice series, directed by Amélie Ravalec and written by Vincent Ravalec – we have another two variations: artonaut and synchronaut. The opening dialogue in both films operates on a variation of “I expect you like stories. You’re right, they make mysteries worthwhile. Some of them appear to be true, when in fact they’re just fantasies. And others, though very real, seem impossible.” As readers/viewers, we are scoponauts travelling through the book and the film, so let’s take a voyeuristic voyage into these episodes of Solstice.
Standing on the edge of the shore, the space between realms, where two words drift toward one another like drowned sailors in a Théodore Géricault painting. They never quite merge, forever signing the erasure of the margins of their mutual love: nautological and narratological. At first glance, their separation seems almost self-evident, a neat partition of the watery map. The nautological insists on the sea – the vessel, the tide, the chart, the vast and indifferent horizon, the physical drift across salt and water. The narratological claims the story – the sequence, the framing device, the shaping of time, the train line between stations, the artifice that turns chaos into sense. In cinematic terms, despite divergent Latin roots – the voyage and the voyeur provide us with our critical compass – they form the way to look.
In a review of Star Wars – ‘Hobbits in Space’ – republished in A User’s Guide to the Millennium, J. G. Ballard wrote, “science fiction is the true literature of the twentieth century, and probably the last literary form to exist before the death of the written word and the domination of the image. S-f has been one of the few forms of modern fiction explicitly concerned with change – social, technological and environmental – and certainly the only fiction to invent society’s myths, dreams and utopias.”
Sumarsólstöður – Episode 1: 2025, released in 100 festivals, won 40 awards.
The first episode in the proposed series of ten articulates a dream narrative through historical trauma in which art-researcher Miho discovers a multidimensional war and oneirically unites with global artists to channel their creativity to heal a fractured universe. As we set out, we must remember that – even in dreams – there is a beginning and an end, a port(al) of departure and a territory where we land and wake. Likewise in literature and film, there is always at least one foundational sentence/scene, a beginning and an end. Sumarsólstöður opens with images of conflagrations, eclipses, a Monet-like pool (a glimpsed refuge from war), an Alice among hallucinatory fungi, and bizarre children’s puppets. The dialogue concerns myths and legends, making it impossible to reduce to a point or an atom a certain narrative fulcrum, the imagery evokes the changing acts of a fabulous or mythic performance, a cerebral circus featuring neurons instead of trapeze artists. The annulling of this singular story, a reduction to the inarticulate simplicity of a name or a thing, is made all the more impossible in that the story itself insists forever upon the space of its untellable impossibility – it contorts, it convulses, it prestidigitates.
The assertion that over history – compacted cinematically to an Icelandic-saga rock fast forwarding to the Shibuya crossing out of Alice in Borderland (2020) – tales have proliferated questions the mapping of structure and confronts a fundamental shift in how cinema constructs myth. Where Structuralists like Algirdas Julien Greimas, Gérard Genette, and Roland Barthes sought to reduce narrative to an actantial grammar of functions and codes, in The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, Christopher Booker proposed that there are only seven archetypal situations in the entire history of fiction. Solstice bypasses these rigid frameworks, proving that the image exists independently of the written word, that plot is whatever we make of it in whatever order we desire – Jean-Luc Godard famously declared that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, though optional in their sequence. The narrative design of Solstice operates as a mosaic of fractured visual phrases – linguistic units to be decoded, yet simultaneously shifting through distinct temporal phases.
The sea, the screen, the mirror are all porous entities, for as soon as there is a mark, a trace carved into the image or the wave – and this does not await human speech, only the divisible trait that splits the moment – there is already a sea-lane, a narrative manoeuvring. This hyperplasia, a replication of viral and synaptic imagery – a labyrinth, a science-fiction elephant, a space rocket launching – metaphorises the neurogenesis and viral load of the stories. This dynamic also foregrounds the non-linear, the truth that, in all narratives, in all voyages, there are relays, delays, anticipations, alternative destinations, a telecommunicating network of salt and light, and with it, the fatal necessity of going astray, of the missive drifting off course, of the map erasing the territory – this is when the tale becomes the lie – after all, fake news was what Homer traded in.
There is strophe in every sense: the turn of the tide, the apostrophe sent across the water (always addressed toward you, my love), the inevitable catastrophe of the shipwreck, where every filmic postcard turns back on its own address – I hope that someone gets my autotelic metalepsis in a bottle, yeah. There are scenes of nuclear disaster, environmental catastrophe, technology used for evil rather than good. The dreamers enter labyrinths in search of answers, ways to map the powers of myth, identity, and art, but not to dissolve their differences into a single metaphor of the voyage, “She is not expecting answers.” Rather, it is the use of dream and other dimensions (the porous imagination) to investigate the technical, political, and phantasmatic machinery that governs how dispatches from the rest of the universe are sent, deciphered, misconstrued, and lost.
After a series of stylised postcard-like shots of world cities, one of the narrators informs us that the artonauts will embark on, “A journey into the world of dreams, where they’ll be given an explanation of the wrong direction the civilization on Earth had taken.” Like the sponge that absorbs the proper name only to yield its own fluid back to the text, the filmic image does not choose between the voyage and the telling. The sea is a drifting network, on its surface and in its depths are unreadable traces; every story is an embarkation onto a pressurised abyss where the subject – the hero, the artist, the viewer – is continually deferred, deformed, misdirected, and reshaped in the compression and impulsion of its own representation. We do not set sail to tell a story; we tell stories simply to survive the beguiling sea that was always/already written inside us – as T. S. Eliot well knew, “Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past / Into indifferent lives, or into any future; / You are not the same people who left that station / Or who will arrive at any terminus, / While the narrowing rails slide together behind you; / And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you, / You shall not think ‘the past is finished’
Or ‘the future is before us’.”
The entity called the Architecture, the Transmitters who enable the entity’s plans, and the human race who will find happiness and enlightenment instead of war and disease, are set on a narrative trajectory – a nautological route – that will always encounter sunken rocks and treacherous whirlpools. The synesthetes make the fantastic world logical, their interconnected senses decoding the symbolic and the imaginary into the real – or what they take for reality – but the story becomes prescient and imposes itself on the realm of vegetal innocence – the serpent in the tree, the worm in the apple, the Caterpillar asking Alice “Who are you?”
Tzvetan Todorov’s reading of narrative engines cuts across our drift: as Todorov demonstrates through the “narrative-men” of classic frame-tales, the story is constructed precisely as a craft, an engine where speech is exchanged to stave off death, and where narrative structure becomes the very hull keeping the subject afloat – see Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘The Fish.’ The two fundamental stories of Western civilisation are concerned with war first and voyages secondly; crafts – the Trojan Horse, the hollow ship – are means of keeping the story dynamic. War is the limit of the human, the tipping point of a retreat to the primal violence of our primate ancestors, or a means (through technology and existential dread) of progression. The voyage (the dream) is the escape, the endless quest for a destination and an answer that will take us to the next level of being – a place that is a synthesis of Ballard’s inner space, “an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind, meet and merge,” and William S. Burroughs’s plan for humanity, “Our research is directed towards effecting biologic alterations in the human artifact. The human body is much too dense for space conditions. However, we have a model to hand that is much less dense, in fact almost weightless: the astral or dream body. This lighter body, a ‘body of light,’ as Crowley called it, is much more suited to space conditions.”
Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics hovers over the filmic craft on its voyage – a bolt-riven albatross: narrative time configures what would otherwise remain an unnavigable chaos of lived experience, transforming temporal discordance – the dream, the synaesthetes – into the vessel of an identity. The film reel or the printed book is never a passive container; it is a floating enclosure, a cinema-vessel launching into the telecommunicating abyss – “Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea!” Any interruption in the transmission devastates the real of the sign, yet – like bacteria, like the witches in Salem, like the arbitrary bar that does and does not separate the signifier and the signified – the reel/real incorporates its own chaos and destruction – Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the albatross. The moment the hull of this communicating vessel hits the water, it becomes a drifting postcard, an ancient mariner – a vehicle whose ultimate arrival is never guaranteed, carrying identity across the waves only to risk losing it in the transmission.
The introduction of the artist Stéphane Blanquet and the DJ Beethoven creates an alternative reality for Miho (the first of the artonauts) in which she realises that, “The first artists had the power to cross space and time, to create realities by representing them,” and she understands that by “connecting to the Art Dimension, it would be possible to influence the world’s rifts. This is what the Architecture expected of her.” And what the Architecture expected was the creation of a new mythopoesis – linked, of course, with the origin myths – to invent structures of meaning – stories – that behave like myths.
What if we map this current through the lexicon of the narreme and the mytheme – constellation-coordinates on an unfolding navigational chart? As Barthes showed us how to read the text as a phytoplankton bloom of signifiers, these structural atoms of story and myth operate precisely like the glowing grids of William Gibson’s cyberspace – that abstract, non-spatial “consensus hallucination” where data-lines map a landscape that has no physical shore. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima became a narrative axis for civilisation – an anagnorisis for the world and – metonymically – for Miho in the film.
With the introduction of the Japanese avant-garde dance form of butoh and the thoughts of a butoh performer, we can also understand the undercurrents of the film, “I always had a feeling that everything was connected to motion. I understand the world of images and language, but for me, movement comes before everything else.” Narrative drive and nautological voyages (in other words, the story) override the transience of the image and the duplicity of language.
In butoh, every narreme (the tactical advance of the sequence) and every mytheme (the immemorial, recurring mythic atom) become anti-navigational beacons flashed across a luminous matrix, transforming the filmic screen into a digital sea where identity is plotted, lost, and endlessly re-signified in the cold and broken geometry of the normative grid. “The intention of an arrow that reverberates in the folds of fate” – but we all know that the arrow never reaches its destination and that time’s arrow is afflicted by seriality, string theory, hypertime, and superposition – “The interlacing of ropes, weaving inextricable knots that condemn us to evil.”
And what of the screen itself as the looking-glass, the threshold of the dream? Here we must enter Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, radical proto-cinematic machines that operate as primeval blueprints for narratology’s encounter with cinema. Carroll constructed a mechanics of pure visual logic – a mechanics where space falls through its own floor, where scale shifts without transition, and where time is explicitly “out of joint.” Alice’s descent into the rabbit hole is nothing less than the first camera movement, a vertical pan into the logic of dreams, where narrative loses its linear anchor and surrenders to the pure chiasm (chasm) of the image. In Sumarsólstöður, Miho enacts her own Alice fantasies, “I was swept up in the whirlwind, without knowing whether an AI had plunged me into an immersive experience to make me feel the complexity of creation, or whether the roots of the Mysteries were suddenly accessible to me.” Alice uses her own logic to navigate the absurd, while Miho (and the film) use aesthetics (especially the extreme arts of kinbaku and butoh) to unravel the world of myth and fantasy and what posits itself as the real.
Todorov would recognise in Carroll the absolute triumph of the fabulous narrative engine: Alice engages with chaos simply to maintain her presence, exchanging verbal games with Mad Hatters and Cheshire Cats to keep the void at bay. The knots of kinbaku and the convulsive movements of butoh operate in a similar way, providing an alternative (one always asks oneself whether Alice is insane) to the reality imposed upon us by the Architecture and Transmitters of the Lebenswelt (Life-world), hyperreality, and the spectacle.
Gilles Deleuze unlocks the profound, terrifying secret of this cinematic dream-logic. In his taxonomy of cinema, the classic moving image belonged to the sensory-motor schema: cause led to effect, action triggered reaction, and time was merely an indirect byproduct of movement – the world of hyperreality and the spectacle. Early cinema dreamed as Alice dreamed, operating in a state of pure optical presence – what Deleuze calls opsigns. But then came the tragic turn, the moment the classical machine collapsed: the invention of the standardised, industrial flashback – dreams never contain flashbacks. When we watch certain films – and this is one of them – we begin to “speak the language,” we enter “a realm where consciousness and thought appear as the world in front of you.” But the most important narrative sign in this first episode of the Solstice series is to ask two questions which are fundamentally different – “How do we know?” and “How could we know?” The farthest shore is an unknown destination. As C. P. Cavafy wrote, “As you set out for Ithaka / hope your road is a long one, / full of adventure, full of discovery. / Laistrygonians, Cyclops, / angry Poseidon – don’t be afraid of them: / you’ll never find things like that on your way / as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, / as long as a rare excitement / stirs your spirit and your body.”
To be continued…
