THE STORY OF 'N' starts out with a deep focus shot of an empty Paris Street. This shot is held for 10 minutes as we see the neighborhood waking up - dogs marking their territory, men with baskets full of baguettes, gendarmes directing clusters of uniform-clad schoolchildren, and grips, PAs and befuddled passers by. This scene ends with the offscreen nasal beep of an out-of-control Citroyën, as the camera and the viewer are propelled forward in a sickly lurch. The next shot introduces the character 'N', played by faux-American Johnny Halliday, dickering at a Chinese laundry over the matter of an unstarched collar. The launderer is entirely hidden behind a wall of carefully wrapped laundry, and consequently is unseen and unheard. As 'N' stalks offscreen, the camera reveals he has been complaining to a drying shirt. Then, in a brief homage to John Ford, 'N' mounts a horse and gallops though the markets of Les Halles. In a brief homage to Orson Welles, he burns a sled. In a brief homage to Frank Tashlin, he crosses his eyes and flaps his arms like a chicken. Then - in a scene which consigned this film to Art Houses - 'N' visits what he thinks is a church but is instead the stage door of the Folies Bergere.
Behind this simple plot, Smithee wove in a texture of self-revelation as microphones, electricians, caterers, collection agents, and other members of the production team made improvised on-screen appearances. These come in so often that one wonders if in fact 'N' is actually acting a role or merely captured in his normal routine. When Van Cleef passes 'N' a cigarette, it's as if the imaginary has made contact with the symbolic. In many scenes, the camera lens is smudged, partially obscured by a thumb, or covered with a lens cap to ring attention to the filmic process.
Certain leitmotivs appear throughout the two works - the autodidactic revelation of 'Camera' as a major player, the natural soundtracks, and even the appearance of M. Cabal, the bill collector in both films. One of my graduate students did a breakdown of each of these films and counted more than 150 cigarettes being lit, roughly one a minute. Each cigarette, its association with oral fixation and inspiration, acts as a pacing device - a metronome forming a ground of time to toss frames upon. Another recurring motif: several times, Smithee invokes Plato's cave by panning to a wall and having the action, such as it is, played in shadows and objects thrown at the wall. Less trained eyes would assume that he had not properly directed the shot, but with a Smithee at the helm, the smoke and the shadows form a new, distinct language of filmic icons. His work can physically affect his viewers in that they can develop muscle strains in their neck and back, eye strain from the exceedingly low contrast and sometimes overexposed footage, and, as in even his more accessible works, a general sense of disorientation and malaise, affecting the limbic and digestive systems.
-- nemo