Inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay ‘L’Intrus’ (The Intruder) from 2000, in which the philosopher reflects upon his own heart-transplant and subsequent treatment for cancer, Phillip Warnell’s Outlandish: Étranges Corps Étrangers/Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies is a twenty minute film made with Nancy’s participation.

The film is divided into eight separately titled parts, many of them featuring Nancy’s voice disarticulated from the image of his body. At other moments, Nancy’s voice appears to emanate from within his body as – speaking in French – he addresses the camera directly, reading from a text written with Warnell, titled ‘Strange Foreign Bodies’.

This co-written text theorises the ‘substance that is specific to the outsider’ through reference to foreign bodies such as a surgical instrument accidentally left behind, or a malign tumour that occupies the body like a ‘hostile guest’. The outsider is also framed in political terms, through reference to ‘spontaneous’ and perhaps unavoidable processes of division, separation and sharing:

That the foreigner is threatening or at least disquieting is an old story, as old as the notion of the outsider, which goes back to the first clan no less, the first group, and therefore precedes humanity itself; which goes back to any kind of communal life, of given or elective affinity, and thus back to almost any kind of life, if we think that life is rarely lived without a spontaneous division into relations, correlations, heritages, separations and sharing.

Warnell uses various strategies to articulate a poetic sense of the ‘substance specific to the outsider’. Prior to the introduction of Nancy’s voice, and unfolding of the film’s eight-part narrative, Outlandish opens on board a boat seemingly adrift upon sunlit open water, with a rocky coastline visible in the distance. This image returns later, but a close-up reveals a passenger in the form of an octopus contained in a glass tank, half-filled with water, its fluid contents sloshing from side to side. At another moment, in part two, medical footage depicts a human organ illuminated on a surgery table, manipulated by many hands in preparation for a transplant. If this organ is suspended somewhere between life and death, then the status of the octopus is equally open to question. Apparently dormant in the sequence titled ‘Siren’, the creature later swims vigorously from one end to the tank to the other, as though attempting to escape the camera.

Paralleling the continual motion of the boat upon the water, and of the octopus within the tank, Nancy’s voiceover questions the self-sufficiency of ‘a body’. As the octopus pushes and pulls against the surface of the tank, notions of autonomy and concreteness give way to an understanding of ‘body’ as folded surface, as outside: All the way down to its guts, in its muscle fiber and through its irrigation channels, the body exposes itself, it exposes to the outside the inside that keeps escaping always farther away, farther down the abyss that it is.

A sense of this ‘abyss’ is suggested by a sudden unsettling cut to blackness, with the screen punctuated only by a tiny point of light, which glows and gradually fades to nothing, while Nancy states, Any body is an out-sider for the other bodies: the being-outsider is inherent to its bodyness. More than anything, a body is an extension, and this extension shields it from the unreal condition of being a dot. Ultimately, however, the notion of body as exposure to outside, is most compelling articulated in Outlandish through the collaboration between filmmaker and philosopher, which extends beyond the frame of the film into the text co-authored by Nancy and Warnell. Both film and text dramatise the ‘inside’ of philosophical thought as its outside, so that the body of the philosopher is encountered as written corpus, as actor and as assemblage of organs.

Jean-Luc Nancy with Phillip Warnell, ‘Strange Foreign Bodies’,

Translated from the French by Daniela Hurezanu, in Phillip Warnell and Jean-Luc Nancy, Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies, London: Calverts Press, 2010: 17-23. All subsequent quotations taken from this text.

Credits

Directed & Produced by Phillip Warnell

Executive Producer: Meroë Candy
Director of Photography: Samuel Dravet

Sound Composition: Vladimir Nikolaev

Female vocalist: Valentina Ponomareva

Editors: Anne Lacour & Phillip Warnell
Camera Assistant: Baptiste Chesney

Underwater Film crew: Cinemarine, Toulon

Sound Recordists: Pierre Armand, Andrew James

Production: Molly Rogers, Cindy le Templier, Amine Merabet, Alisa Terekhova
Strange Foreign Bodies: English translation, Daniela Hurezanu
Adapted for screen by: Phillip Warnell & Elisabeth Ritter
Shot on location in Strasbourg and Marseille
Supported by The Wellcome Trust

© Big Other Films, 2009