To seek a path between life and death, to make her way through the interstices of things, and to learn on the way how to negotiate with the reality of the world –and, in order to do all that, to subscribe to a metaphysics of the imagination: that is the delicate task to which Delphine Balley has devoted herself since she began her career as an artist.². In this world, exploring the meta –going beyond the physical world– is something she achieves through painstaking mises-en-scène. Her works to date rely on two formats: film and photography. It is reasonable to think that film introduces movement (a bias towards life) while photography helps thwart the death instinct. And this, of course, was the path taken by Nadar in the nineteenth century when he took things beyond the customary wax and plaster masks of the time. Those masks were made to preserve the dead, and cherish their image. How were the dead to be immortalised now? With photography it was all about rays of light, which, as they ranged from black to white, captured aspects of reality. Paradoxically, in order to make an image of the living, the subjects of the photograph had to hold their pose for a long time, while trying not to move –pretending to be dead in order to capture life.

There are three films to think about in the corpus that this text will focus on. Each of them is imbued with magical realism and each deals with death in its own way, whether it is Les Pays d'en haut (2013), Charivari (2016), or the most recent, Le Temps de l’oiseau (2021). While the first and last of these works pick up the thread of the same story, that of the members of one family, the second touches on epic fantasy. In each case, as in her photographic works, Delphine Balley works with members of her own family, or of her entourage, as well as the inhabitants of the village where she lives. Everyone remains what they are in real life (or almost): sisters are sisters, hunters in the films are hunters in real life too, and so on. The work explores relationships between humans, but also between the things that surround us or the settings or landscapes that we generally inhabit. The word mise-en-scène suggests that the process involves a stage of some kind. The word scène is derived from the Greek word skênê which includes the idea of a platform –both a shelter and the space for the audience. It is apparently also related to the Indo-European word skia: "shadow".  This body of work explores the shadowy side of people living together, the unspoken or unacknowledged or unacknowledgeable aspects of existence. Scenery, costumes, music and sounds, as well as words –though not often, unless they are sung– form a backdrop that defines the nature and substance of the environment of the action, along with the gestures and activities of the characters who appear on the screen. Everything, absolutely everything in Delphine Balley's work is a matter of sensitivity. Everything is "situated", as ecofeminists like to say nowadays.³. The gestures, the activities, the settings and landscapes bring to mind films by Duras, Bergman and Tarkovsky. Everything in Delphine Balley’s work is about atmosphere, mystery, ritual and poetry –where the characters seem to evolve in another world; a world, we might say, for which we have no reference points today, or almost none at all, whether it be the wild, primitive world of Charivari, or the faux nineteenth-century world of Le Pays d'en haut or even Le Temps de l’oiseau, even though certain aspects of the latter –the costumes, for example– may lead us to believe that that world still exists. In Charivari and the other two films, the codes and customs of another time are questioned, interrogated, and sometimes even fixed (synthesised) in a sequence or in a shot (and this in direct relation to her photography, as we shall see further on).

Le Pays d’en haut is set in the world of the past, a world that still survives perhaps to a certain extent deep in the French countryside. Everything is in the interior decoration: the repeat-patterned wallpaper, the pieces of china, the mass-produced furniture and lamps that evoke the beginnings of industrialisation.  In that endlessly repeatable world that began with the Industrial Revolution, very little stood out from the mass, even though dresses, hats and hairstyles might add a touch of individuality. The hemlines and bobbed hair of the Roaring Twenties were still a long way off. Certain codes were set in stone, with a predetermined view of life, a life that would run its course through birth, marriage and death.

In this setting, two women exist side by side and pursue their respective destinies. One is reclusive; she is like the ghost of the other. Always in white, covered at times in a transparent veil which will be laid over her on the day she dies. It is a nun's veil, the veil of someone who has chosen to withdraw from the world and from sexuality and to experience metaphysical love. The other, inescapably bound to the earth, tries as best she can to get by. The passage of time, for example, is measured out tangibly as she pulls feathers out of a bag (a long pillow, perhaps), and it goes on and on. Two other women (the sisters) appear, sometimes masked and locked in their identities, sometimes unmasked. We find ourselves in this bourgeois 19th century-inspired interior in which a rite, a ceremony –a wedding perhaps– is being prepared. Men gather in the smoking room, then we see them again, sometimes holding chickens, sometimes holding porcelain objects. They drop them one after the other, thus adding a further layer to the soundtrack of this impossible situation, in which fragility and violence seem destined to meet. When bunches of flowers are present in the image, they emanate artificiality and faded colour, just like the décor. In one room or the other, there is a mirror over the fireplace. You can't see it, but the mirror totally captures the silence of this assembly. Similarly, the chandelier swings on the ceiling, although we do not understand how or why; some of the bulbs are lit, some are not. This is a world of ghosts, of death, infiltrating life, or the little life that survives in the suffocating atmosphere.

Ceremonies and rituals accompany those milestones from which it is almost impossible to escape, especially when you are born a woman. The film features two main characters: the False girl and the Transparent child, one wild, the other docile. The False girl lives, untamed, in the midst of the elements. She is introduced in a scene in which she seems to emerge drenched from the water, wearing a long shift. We see her again in a fog enshrouded wood. The Transparent child is dressed in the clothes of a young girl of her time. She is disabled, with a brace on her leg and a collar round her neck. Every move she makes is hampered by these twin constraints: she picks up fallen lemons with a claw device on the end of a pole. Throughout her life, she will have to find mechanical and psychological ways of coping with life as the transparent, form-fitting, obedient girl, which is her inheritance. Her family is planning to marry her off. The ceremony is being prepared. There is no husband, but the wedding goes ahead anyway until the last scene when the emblematic wedding photo appears: the bride in the middle, father on the left, mother in a black veil (as if she were attending a funeral), sitting in an armchair in the centre. As in a curtain call, all the characters who appeared in the film are present. Bells are ringing; they are evocative of music for a dance. The rituals of marriage and death have been performed in perfect synchronicity. The mise-en-scène dissolves; the play is over.

Then the screen goes black and a final scene unfolds. The child is lying face down on a bare mattress –in an earlier scene, the wild girl, the one who had worked so hard to resist the fate of the other, tears a long strip of cloth from the mattress. The wild girl's body is surrounded by white sheets, reminiscent of a wedding veil. The Transparent child is covered with those same sheets, which have become shrouds. In contrast to the family photo in the earlier shot, this image does not conform to any code. The metaphysics of the imaginary is at work here to full effect. A dead bird has been placed on the girl's naked back, like a poultice for her sufferings. And yet the ending is peaceful, radiant with beauty.⁴

The second film, Charivari, continues this incursion into the wilderness, into the unusual and the unsaid. It is set in the forest, and the deer, a recurring image, is a metaphor for the rutting male. All is dark, sunless and gloomy. The story, too, is gloomy and situated, deliberately and literally, between sense and nonsense. The place is unidentifiable, the protagonists too, although they can be situated. Some are hunters, one is a poacher; there is a woman running, the Horsewoman trying to escape this world. But she is wounded, like the black beast that is caught and killed in the middle of the film. There is a lot of blood: on people's hands and on their faces. The forest is a violent world. The film begins with this woman on the ground, attacked by a man (referred to as "the Poacher" in the credits), then multiple shots of hunters on the prowl. One scene, which occurs towards the middle of the film, is a close-up of a black animal being killed with a knife. At the same time, a strange champagne reception is going on, with women and men wearing furs and large jewels, glancing at each other without any interaction, while everyone keeps to their position, occasionally raising their glass for a toast. Some of them reappear with guns. A woman begins to sing the tune of Des mots tordus. Everything feels upside down in this directionless world; it is all marked by some kind of latent, subdued cataclysm. A wandering, violent, mysterious, unintelligible world without name, which ends with the man from the beginning walking slowly against a backdrop of grey snow until he is off the screen. Nowhere.

Le Temps de l'oiseau is all about this relationship to words (and/or their absence), to language, to violence, and to sex. Everything is in the gestures, the conventions, the etiquette, the ambient sounds that encompass everything and provide a commentary, in drama, movement and action, on everything that happens. As in the first film, the spectator is transported into the ossified atmosphere of a stuffy, upper middle-class world where artificial flowers and porcelain statuettes abound and men get pleasure from smashing them to the floor.

The mother is applying gold paint to women's shoes. These will be given to the guests in exchange for their wedding presents. Shoe fetishism is a well-known fantasy. Gold, too. Power and sexuality are at the heart of this film. Women are like those birds that men chased in their childhood ("whistling at girls" is an image of this).⁵ A particularly remarkable scene, which echoes the end of Le Pays d'en haut, shows the girl in white with a small dead bird on her lap. As she looks at it, she is gently bandaging it. This focused act of care is a counterbalance to the pervading atmosphere of death. By relating the bird to the young woman in this way, Delphine Balley helps us understand that what she is exploring, first and foremost, is what the world might be like from the point of view of a bird.⁶

Sexual education, world domination. The father leads the way. He features as prominently in this film as the daughter; it is he who orchestrates the key moments of the action. When the mother dies, it is the sisters who deal with her. The father persists in his obsessive desire to marry off his daughter. Here too, as in Le Pays d'en haut, there is no bridegroom. What is portrayed are the rituals of marriage rather than love. The sisters wear hats with veils; they are black like their dresses. As the father welcomes the guests and their wedding presents, he is holding a stuffed bird. The smell of death is present. A woman appears wearing a gold half-face mask. The aunt, or perhaps the godmother? Or maybe a reappearance of the injured Horsewoman, the girl who had been trying to escape from this circus and has now been blinded in order to keep her under control? And since then, she has worn this golden mask –it is like those found in the sarcophagi of lost civilizations. Unless it is the kind of mask that beauticians would have us believe are a super-effective beauty aid.

In the middle of the reception, a woman sings Larmes de cire. The father, a glass of champagne in his hand, proposes a toast as feathers fly through the air. He walks around a statue of Venus. The bird is married.

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937), who lived in the period in which Le Pays d'en haut is set, was one of the first women to write about sexuality. In an essay entitled "Die Erotik" (1910), she states:

Two facts are characteristic of the problem of the erotic: First of all, that eroticism should be considered as a special case within the sphere of physiological, psychical, and social relations, rather than independently and separately as is often the case. But secondly, that it once again links together these three kinds of relations, merging them into one, and making them its problem.⁷

This essay is followed by a final one with the title “Psychosexuality” (“Psychosexualität”, 1917). In addition to the physicality of sex, which she discusses extensively in her texts, Salomé cannot resist exploring its meta dimension; she seeks to understand the psychological aspects of sexuality. She posits sexuality as being linked to other things that affect people living together, and sees it as a determining factor in an individual's life.⁸

The photographs give a different take on the world we see in the films.⁹ They are mostly portraits of the same characters: the daughter, the sisters, the mother. They are linked to objects: bunches of (artificial) flowers, plaster casts of hands (like ex-votos of the time), one of which holds a lemon/breast. Young girls are sewing the bride's dress –or is it her funeral shroud– and are gilding pumps. The Horsewoman gazes at a box, perhaps containing the relics of her past. Then the images become more abstract and take on the appearance of monuments; veils and ex-votos are seen side by side, as in the work Portrait sur le vif. In the triptych entitled Cérémonie, the three parts of which are le vase, l'image and les kakis, Delphine Balley has assembled other types of "portraits" in which red curtains, columns, vases and funeral artefacts are placed alongside the last signs of life –next to persimmon fruits, whose freshness is diminished by the funereal surroundings.

Paysage de pierre, sel et ombres leads us away from that funereal atmosphere. This still life is a monument in which a lump of salt sits among pieces of marble, along with stone balls and dried fruit. A black egg, discreetly placed to the right of the monument, seems to be floating (reminiscent of the black egg we see at the beginning of Le Temps de l'oiseau). This photograph suggests a cosmic dimension; the abstract quality of that mineral, lunar landscape could be a synthesis of the three films.

Two sculptures sit among this work; the artist has disengaged from the image and plunged into the materiality of the world. The viewer is faced with a Marquina marble base (hard and elegant, but veined with white, as if it had cracks running through it) and a block of wax –a "base" material, malleable, vulnerable, and liable to disappear, depending how it is used. Contrepoids (2021), as the work is called, translates the weight of stone into a mass of wax. What we see is not wax as the memorial material formerly used in funerary rites; it is the raw materiality of things. The artist’s departure from the image here invokes a focus on life itself, its bio-geology. And it calls on the bodies of any living person present to come forward and measure themselves against these concrete objects in all their rawness. Beyond the history of "physiological, psychological and social" bonds, there is the matter of the world, which enables change through the metamorphosis of beings and things.¹⁰

And, linked to the final moment of this corpus, a last photograph (over two metres-long and in diptych form), Représentation (2021): a grey-blue cloth (the colours of an undecided sky) lies on a green surface, the whole thing contrasting with a black background. The green and the black are both stable, uniform colours, whereas on the fabric there is an interplay of light. The surface becomes painterly and vibrant, while the shade confers a certain shimmering, life-like quality on it. Theories of mourning tell us that the dead live on in us (and some say that the living do too).¹¹ The diptych could give the idea that life and death are things apart. But no: the cloth seems to breathe; the gestures that placed it on the table (its plinth) have left their imprint where the folds, which are all different, perform the music and rhythms of life. This dance of life and death was widely expressed in the folds and drapery of Baroque religious painting. When all is said and done, Delphine Balley, an artist rooted in her own time, has also captured that dance.