Through a languid although mundane mise en scène in a tiny Parisian flat, the film Journey Through a Body by Camille Degeye contrasts the romantic with the banal. Her muse, a Swiss-German musician, is powered by a creative impulse that can’t be ignored, a passion whose two-edged effects are evident even to writer Steph Kretowicz.

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There’s a moment in Camille Degeye’s Journey Through a Body where an excerpt of Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams documentary plays through her protagonist’s MacBook Pro. Werner Herzog describes the wild jungle that surrounds him as having «a harmony of overwhelming and collective murder», clarifying that he means that with the utmost admiration: «It’s not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. In fact, I love it against my better judgement».

Here lies the central tenet of Degeye’s film and its relationship to a notion of creative impulse. The excerpt presages a sequence where the main character, called Thomas and played by real-life musician and the director’s friend Thomas, is in the grip of an artistic burst. The scene is marked by close ups of parts of his half-naked body – limbs, shoulders, a fragment of his forearm, the back of his neck – accompanying an extended musical performance that only grows in volume and intensity.

A Story in Two Parts

The moment marks a clear switch in tone between two contrasting parts of Journey Through a Body. The intimacy and isolation of night-time introspection becomes only more alienated by the bureaucracy that intrudes on this lonely little apartment the following morning, as Thomas listens to a tape player while an inspector arrives at the door unannounced, ready to take away his welfare.

It’s surely no accident that the French-language short film’s English title is identical to the name of the 1981 Throbbing Gristle album – produced for radio in five days with no plan, except that each song should represent a part of the body. In the movie, creative disciplines and mediums are overlaid and entangled. Reality and fiction, analog and digital formats loop and fold in on each other, while the Swiss-German artist’s own story of breaking his leg informs the unscripted side of the twofold film.

The Irrepressible Jungle

There’s a timelessness to the music and its relationship to technology in Journey Through a Body. Thomas watches tutorials for circuit bending noise dolls on his laptop, tinkers with his modular synths and self-made pedals, plays a noisy electric guitar with a stringed bow. The film is shot in 16mm, accommodated by Degeye’s affiliation with French analog lab and experimental collective L’Abominable.

Given she was born in 1990, this choice seems less nostalgic than it is anachronistic – in the sense that time collapses into these various instruments and devices featured in the film from across eras. Its initial dreamlike sequences, where the audience becomes intimately acquainted with Thomas’ body and daily routine, are inevitably invaded by the harsh light of reality.

And yet, the irrepressible jungle of creation and the diverse technological ecology it draws from override any of these practical considerations, whether this is good for Thomas or not. His art is incompatible with pragmatism. As Herzog says in the extended version of his Burden of Dreams monologue, «It just hits back, that’s all. And that’s what’s grandiose about it. We have to accept that it is much stronger than we are».