[The Miscarried Might-Have-Been] on Truffaut's [Two English Girls, 1971]

by Dontrell Lovet't
from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]







In the stylism so akin to the French New Wave Film revolution, Truffaut's 1971 romantic drama, [Two English Girls] is a film adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roche's 1956 novel of the same title.

The film sets in Paris around the turn of the 20th century, when Claude, the male lead portrayed by Truffaut's "artist fetish" Jean-Pierre Leaud, is invited by Anne (Kiki Markham), an old family friend to spend the summer with her family on the coast of Wales. But in quick succession and turn of events, Anne is not interested in Claud as a lover for herself, rather one for her introverted, bashful sister Muriel (Stacey Tendeter). The match becomes a fit, Claud and Muriel becomes closer, begins to grow on one another and with hopes of being married, both Muriel and Claud's mother agree that the couple should spend a year apart, Claud returning to Paris and Muriel remaining in Wales.

Now this is where Truffaut takes shape with his adaptation, do due-in-proper justice to Henri-Pierre Roche. Claud begins to meet very attractive women and begins to stray, which eventually led him to the bed of Muriel's older sister Anne, who came to Paris to study art. Claud then becomes hopeful of a relationship with Anne, until she leaves him for a publisher, going on a vacation with him to Persia. Muriel then learns about the betrayal of her fiance and her older sister (the responsible party which introduced the two initially), which whom Muriel forgives, once Anne is returned home by the publisher, as she dies in Wales.

Muriel, who had since accepted a job in Belgium, spends a night with Claud and upon waking, revealing to him that now they must part forever, only to later write of her pregnancy. Claud, believing now the door for a happy life with Muriel again open, is shocked and despondent when a second letter arrives from Muriel, confessing of the miscarried fetus and that she would not be returning to him again.

The film leaves Claud, just Claud, no wife, no child, a writer with only dreams, shattered ideals, scuttled hopes and fanciful fantasies never to have bore fruit. He, Claud, is a representation of all of humanity, of most who have lost and wondered on the "What ifs."

For Claud, as is for most today, the sunken dream is one swallowed by irreversible timescapes, scientifically improbable revivals. A single mistake by Claud set off the chain reaction, a rattle of senses to once and for all set in stone Muriel's aforementioned disposition of introverted aloneness, untrusting of anyone other than her own interior.

Truffaut, together with Roche, are two artist brought together by novel and by film, by sentiments and by personal experience, the Auteur Theory in full measure as the pen of the writer in full, broad stroke. What cannot be taken from the experience, the love triangle and deception between Claud, Anne and Muriel? One thing we can truly count on is that our actions tend to inflict upon us consequences we are seldom ready for and most of which we spend the entirety of our lives yet trying to endure.

[Environmental/Elusive] a poem

The dungeon of this heart
has been molded
from the dungeon my heart
has retreated to
Imprinting is unavoidable,
a natural by-product,
as one who hates themselves stray
into aggressive mimicry for everything
they even, if only to elude their reflections

According to the sea,
the calm & the storm occur
within the same life form;
what I am is now what I am,
what I may have been all along,
trapped in a modeled ruse , forever condemned

If be the burrow,
if not the reclusive,
a sea swallowing the poison of a
disregarding species,
it can be said how splendid it is
to see one accept their sentence,
walk unaccompanied,
without shackles,
into a cell designed,
a cell chosen to house what will
become an eminent insanity


Dontrell Lovet't
from, [The Failed Writer]

[Anthropogeny] a poem

[Anthropogeny]


A story of
origins is but a
story of survival,
searchers themselves
consecrate all memories of
the frantic tale of searching
sensible fluttering
register wonderfully in prose,
polished the terrible
into a luminous tact,
software of subliminal context
& pieced up in times of almost no
leisure,
Is a brief decay of an individual,
word exchange,
inaction almost flawlessly maintained,
uplifted nonetheless,
by none other,
than a man whose shaken
the adornment of traditional chains
only to negotiate a bargain deal
for the latest trend of self-imposed shackles



Dontrell Lovet't
from, [The Failed Writer]

[Composites] on the Documentary & Documentarian

by Dontrell Lovet't
from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]






 Nothing in history escapes memory; misadventure, happenstance, mirrored-images, bliss- this is the stain upon memory in which we want to escape, or savor. But the human brain, as effective as it is in its 10% functional capacity, it is fragile, plagued by degenerative disease, fractured by communicable disease, compromised by retrograde amnesia. So we photograph every inch or moments that are memorable to us, those we know we may never forget and those we know we may and in someday, be in need of a reminder. The Documentarian is the photographer evolved....and their art,doomed star-crossed lovers, destined to wonder for eternity.


....this evolved artist has gone from the still images formed in our minds far before the camera has capture an instance and transmogrified the stillness into motion, transgressed the black and white to color and regressed once again to black and white. As an adult in stress of their lives, regression is pertinent to the origin as the origin is the axis of the celestial sphere of art itself.

Subtle art demands only subtle attention; art must become radical if its demands is to be the same. With the documentarian, everything exists around memory, around what happens in our human history that needs to be remembered and brought to light. Figurative or abstract, it painstakes its claim to the documentarian in a haunting manner, until no longer they can ignore that the dream demands to be born from idea, from ideal.

 We confront time as we do the object, and the independent , intervening distances flowing from event into lens is not missed; every moment capture is captured intentionally, as in the dream, nothing is a mishap. If the documentary is to capture what the dream has, then both the composition and the documentarian must become a double of it, the devout agent who carries out a task and analyzes and asks not why it must be undertaken. In one form or another, silence comes over the auteur, a disquieted spell that removes them from actual time. The dream then is no longer the dream, there is no more dream. It has now become, stained itself in motion for the next thousands years. If it is not dreamed then it is no recorded, if it happens in the dream, then it is from an authentic, aesthetic stance that it must become, upright past the crawl, an embryo develops without chromosomes. The documentarian who lives in art is privy to the beginning and end of a dream, a specific dream, as one who lives in art becomes aware of their own demise.

 It is not clear whether the documentarian can explain the dream or the documentary can fully capture the dream as it becomes reality; what is clear is that the documentary is savors the integrity lost upon the major motions film. And slowly, a cult audience is eroding the mainstream zealous, bringing limelight
to a truth that some embrace while most deny and prefer their complacency in denial.

[The Missing] a poem

All is dead;
All remains to be dead,
of no use other than replenishing
dust beneath our feet,
the aura with spirits jacketing
our lack of perception
The deepest philosophy
is a dangerous foe
which does not kill us
but mangles
& leaves us at the mercy of
the merciless scavengers



Dontrell Lovet't
from, [The Failed Writer]

[Shared Tragedies] a poem

Yesterday,

I asked Orpheus the very
sensation of being torn apart by wild women;

and all he said was,

“It’s an empirical experience; all men take their turn.


Dontrell Lovet't
from, [The Failed Writer]

[Suffer the Little Children] on Apolo Torre's [Girl on Side the Building]

by Dontrell Lovet't






            Street art can be defined as everyday reminders and representative of the beauty we can easily lose in melancholia during our everyday monotony. Perhaps the most fulfilling of mention, too, one of the most hideous of street art able to be found the world over, is Apolo Torres’s [Girl Reaching Above the City].

            There are skyscrapers, a sea-set in the sky above the city, an adorable child on the tip of her toes, extending herself, a backpack on her back representing growth in intellect and education. At the base of her feet, there is a snack she’s unaware of, winding around her legs and a Pit-Viper impishly looking up at her. We cannot assume but we can establish what snakes have always represented since biblical times and how childhood, that moment where the future generations grows, learns and blooms, are ensconced in potential victimhood, surrounded by a jungle of predators seeking to prey upon their naivety.

            Apolo Torres’s depiction, which can be found alongside an apartment building housing families, is a necessary image, a frightening image, the sort one has no desire to see yet find themselves unable to turn away when the event unfolds. If ever there are any visions the masses should take in, it is the art, representing life, representing danger, representing a will for longevity in the form of caution.