Blueberry: Searching for Your Inner Soul
When a French filmmaker decides to shoot a western, you can be certain that his take on the genre won’t be traditional. Indeed, Blueberry has more to do with Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980) than with Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1958). The film draws its inspiration from a popular graphic novel series published in France since 1965 under the supervision of legendary artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud.
Mike Blueberry (played by French star Vincent Cassel) is a lonesome, troubled marshal who confronts his arch-enemy (Michael Madsen) in a fight for the freedom of the Indian tribe in which he grew up. In order to find the answers he’s seeking, Blueberry submits himself to a series of shamanistic rites that open him to a new level of consciousness… and to painful, long forgotten memories that will ultimately decide his fate.
Blueberry was directed by Jan Kounen, a provocative filmmaker who initiated a huge controversy in France with his previous outing, the ultra violent Dobermann (1997). Although the Blueberry series never covered shamanism, Kounen came upon the idea of including the theme in the movie after experiencing shamanism himself while filming a documentary on the subject. The experience left him deeply shaken, recalls Rodolphe Chabrier, visual effects supervisor and co-founder of Mac Guff Ligne, the French company that created the film’s ambitious effects. “After each [shamanstic] experience, he would come back more and more changed. It got to the point where most of his friends thought he was getting crazy,” says Chabrier. “At one point, he even wanted to give up filmmaking altogether. Eventually, he started looking for a feature film project in which he could integrate the theme of shamanism, and Blueberry, with its Native-American characters, was ideal in this regard. Draft after draft, he kept enhancing the mystical aspects of the script. Originally, there were only six minutes of shamanistic trances in the movie. In the end, we have more than 15 minutes!”
A Life-Changing Experience Most people have misconceptions about what shamanism really is. They often associate it with spirituality, while a shamanistic trance is basically a deeply personal journey. Chabrier adds, “It’s difficult to explain shamanism in a few words, but Jan likes to say that, as NASA takes humans into space, shamans take you to your inner self, to your deepest levels of consciousness. When you live this experience, you never make the same journey twice and two people never make the same journey, which makes it very difficult to describe. Still, the incredible thing is that there are some visions that everybody experiences: spiders, snakes, fractal forms, perception of the immensely small and the immensely large… These similarities allowed us to find a common language to describe and share what we had experienced.”
Chabrier realized very quickly that he wouldn’t be able to put Kounen’s visions on screen if he didn’t try it himself. Thus, one day, he flew to Peru with Kounen and Cassel to meet a master shaman. “The experience had a profound effect on me, although not to the extent of what it had done to Jan,” admits Chabrier. “However, after my first trance, I was convinced that there was no way this experience could be shown on film. To me, even if you filmed it in IMAX and projected it at Showscan speed (60 fps), it still would only represent 1/1000th of the real thing! I couldn’t see how we could possibly do it.”
Printer-friendly version
I just wanted to thank you for this excellent look behind the scenes.
I guess I'm a little slow but I just recently even heard about this film and I eagerly searched it out and found a copy and watched it just last night. Stunningly beautiful work overall.
I enjoyed the movie but, being honest, the plot was a bit thin, which is made up for by the rendering of the spiritual experience. But I can easily see how people who haven't had some kind of deep, psychedelic experience would be hard pressed to really "get" the film since so much of it is really just hinting at a much deeper, ineffable experience that simply cannot be shown on screen.
As the write-up says, this is 1/10000th the real experience and this is only the superficial visual and auditory components. You cannot put deeply felt emotions, or a true sense of the oneness of everything, or the breaking and formation of your very soul on the screen. Much like love, the filmmakers can only hint at the truth of the underlying experience and the audience has take it from there.
Post new comment