The individual as environment: watching Jean-Claude Rousseau’s La Vallée close with Lucretius and Simondon’

Over a ten-year period, the experimental filmmaker Jean-Claude Rousseau visited the Fontaine de Vaucluse, a natural spring in southern France. The result of Rousseau’s encounter with these landscapes, La Vallée close (1995), explores three processes of becoming. The first is cosmological: the director films the valley and its spring, bringing to life the landscape with its river, vegetation and grotto. The second is meta-filmic: the film thematises its very singular production process, discreetly showing how images combine without any cuts being made. The third is (auto-)biographical: towards the end of its 143-minute running time we understand that the film is a reflection on Rousseau’s childhood, and a semi-fictional chronicle of the break-up of a relationship. This chapter draws on Henri Bergson’s commentary on Lucretius’ De rerum natura (explicitly featured in the soundtrack to the film), Félix Guattari’s late ecosophical writings, and the process-oriented philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, in order to analyse Rousseau’s exploration of the relations between ontology, perception and subjectivity. From Simondon’s work, the chapter imports the concept of the individu-milieu [the individual as environment]. Simondon’s concept helps to explain how worldmaking and filmmaking connect in an individual, bringing it into being, pulling it apart, eventually renewing it. The chapter concludes that the individu-milieu is a thoroughly ecological concept with a relevance for ecocriticism that far exceeds the particular case of La Vallée close