01  SUMMER 2025

‘Ça ne sert à rien de se référer au Dow Jones…’ explains the cyclist at the start of Luc Moullet’s Parpaillon ou à la recherche de l’homme à la pompe Ursus d’après Alfred Jarry. And presumably there would be no point of reference for this specific financial instrument in the middle of an exhausting bicycle race in the High Alps. The opposite proposition prevails in Le système Zsygmondy, another of Moullet’s Alpine-set farces of the 1990s, where the particular details of an abstract system become entirely the point of the ordeal.

Shot at the real-life Zsygmondyhütte — a mountain refuge located in the Sexten Dolemites and named after noted alpinist Emil Zsygmondy — Le système Zsygmondy is based on Moullet’s own experiences of mountain refuges around the world. He explains this in the odd preface to the film, where he is standing in an extremely bright room dressed in a red trekking outfit, noting the overtly fastidious rules and regulations of these refuges: ‘According to the category we are assigned, there is a specific date and time before which we must re-enter the refuge, often whether we are members of the Alpine Club or not, and everything proceeds according to those in charge, when we go to eat, when we arrive, indicated by our number.’ The isolation of these buildings, with their attendant ‘system’ of rules, transforms the disparate associative materials implied by the opening lines of Parpaillon into a formidable set of hospitality principles, one irreconcilable with the predicament of Moullet’s characters.

A central facet in Moullet’s films is the relationship between sociality and systems. With all its political valences, subterfuge and sensuality, a particular sociality becomes the real constraint, whereas inanimate systems have full license for the varieties of their indifference. In Le Système Zsygmondy, the rules of the Zygmondyhütte are like an arcane lore known only to members, who make up an exclusive club that takes itself very seriously. A resemblance can be discerned here to another ‘Zsygmondy system’, a tooth-numbering notation device developed by Adolf Zsygmondy, a Viennese dentist and the father of Emil the mountaineer. This Zsygmondy system — in which the teeth are divided into quadrants oriented towards a midline between the front incisors — is primarily meant to resolve referential ambiguities for fellow dental practitioners. The main feature of the system is that the teeth are numbered according to the dentist’s point of view, but only with respect to the patient’s orientation of right or left. An article on this system wryly notes this lone caveat: ‘Confusion is pretty much limited to the novitiate’s need to remember that the codes refer to the patient’s left or right side.’ ^[1] It appears the systems of the father have returned to invest the son’s mountain fortress with needless abstraction, adding difficulty upon difficulty. The practitioners of hospitality have no sense of creature comforts.

That neither inertia nor vitality can ever be enough for the animate and the inanimate alike is how the farcical form in Moullet is brought about. But it’s difficult to see the point of Moullet’s Zsygmondy system other than as a convenient way for the refuge employees to assert a degree of power (to do what?). And the tension is that only odd or prime numbers are at issue — for the lockers, couchette space, the entry code for the refuge itself (‘1789’, surely a memorable number for the French). Even the number of available slippers becomes prime when one of the two protagonists is too broke to purchase a membership card to obtain an even number of shoes. So this character, played by Iliana Lolic, is summarily cast out of the Zsygmondyhütte by way of this ridiculous numerical mishap (1 slipper, the locker 11, the dinner at 7pm, the cramped couchette spot 29, with room for only 1 person). Certainly, the 4 tourists who waltzed right in had very little trouble securing their places. And when the dejected Lolic notices the passing family, she immediately deduces that she’ll be able to get a ride down the mountain. For any given group of 3 people in a sedan, by necessity there must be an extra seat.

The preface of Zsygmondy befits a tendency in Moullet’s mise en scéne towards the literal facets of broad daylight, as if light, and its exposures, were physical, a kind of mechanism that in some sense deals with the characters. Scenes are often exceedingly well-lit and almost unnaturally bright, devoid of silhouette. Even the night scenes are lit akin to a day for night effect, like the episode in Zsygmondy of ‘a good night’s sleep’ outside the refuge. One might also note the darkened movie theater in Les sièges de l’Alcazar, where the critic Guy Moscardo sits with a sleep mask on, waiting for ‘the documentary to finish’ and for Una donna libera to begin. Cottafavi’s film is the only kind of light this cinephile can tolerate, apart from the tiny light on the pen with which he hopes to further his critical reputation. Blunt as the visible may be, this is a configuration of space where more ineffable forces are liable to show themselves alongside the actors. We feel keenly the taut considerations of Moullet’s lighting decisions in the pitch black tunnel at the summit in Parpaillon; it’s in the switch to complete darkness that the larger sight gag overtakes the innumerable smaller ones.

Perhaps it’s not that abstractions are fundamental here, but that they are relegated to a strictly filmic consideration. Unlike alleged predecessor Tati’s endless tribulations between shots, we find in Moullet a kind of centrifugal pressure from within the shot that annihilates reality, or at least makes it falter somewhat. There is no need in Moullet ‘to reinvent the world and tailor the film to describe this world, where the gags become tools in the service of a pedagogy’, as Fabien Boully writes. ^[2] The tribulations that come about in Moullet’s work are located exactly where universal forces that radiate from within a shot come into contact with the motley particulars constantly circling that central axis (gears on a bicycle). Or the odd numbers in Zsygmondy which denote an intolerable tension where the even ones represent an absurd declaration of total equanimity: see the shot where the four tourists simultaneously take a picture of the same piece of scenery. And in Parpaillon, the generalized difficulty of the Alpine bicycle race is made up of a very large number of different personal problems; by necessity, all of these must soon converge in the same procedure.

Of course, this central axis is constantly changing, like the numbers in Le Système Zsygmondy, like the merchandise and routes taken in Les contrebandières. Moullet’s work furnishes many examples in which a single shot can deploy a maximum of associative data — where dramatic vistas such as the Dolomites in Le Système Zsygmondy are depicted both as props, or ideas, and literally, as real physical constraints, with actual effects on the person, whose difficulty in scaling them is exacerbated. It’s not only that these same vertiginous spaces reappear frequently in his work, but that the characters might well have a poor sense of direction and must always return to the same landmarks. The rocky outcrops in the Gorges de Trevans are unmistakably the site of both the absurd ‘edited’ chase sequence in Les Contrebandières and, twenty years later, the place where the unemployed mountaineer Sylvain is first seen, soundly asleep, in La Comédie du travail.

So what feels less and less (Toujours moins) like a strategy of confrontation in Moullet’s work reappears as an iterative scheme of contact between elements, light and darkness, wealth and poverty, cinema and the world. But insofar as these elements are able to interact directly in the image, it’s the scam that provides the discourse that proves the legitimacy of the image. The scam in Zsygmondy is purely the method of contrivance through which an even number is brought out of an ‘unlucky’ set of odd ones. Or one can think of the turnstile jumpers on the Paris Metro in Barres, who contrive a variety of methods to confront the limitations of a single physical barrier in their way. Such conceits feel like a distillation of Moullet’s discretion on the question of filmic visibility. A larger constellation of desires concentrates itself exactly inside the variations of jumping and squeezing through the constraints of the locked turnstile, as they do in Moullet’s frame. Similarly, we’re never actually led into the inner sanctum of the Zsygmondyhütte. And the lore, or what is meant by the numbers, is hardly explained to us but for how it marshals the characters into Moullet’s fable, whose simple lesson is that, when the weather is nice, ‘it’s better, ultimately… to sleep outside the refuge than to sleep inside.’ The brief action of Le système Zsygmondy — the conflict between the refuge and the frustrated trekkers — seems to refer obliquely to the cross-purposes between patient and doctor. The prolific and unstable nature of human needs virtually ensures the fact that they will itemize themselves, and not necessarily with the consent of the animate, who are completely immersed in sociality. So in some way, for the hapless characters in Moullet, the luck of the draw is not a matter of who is looking into whose mouth, but whether there is even a dentist.