1. Adieu au langage [Farewell to Language / aka Goodbye to Language]
by Jean Luc-Godard
1. Adieu au langage [Farewell to Language / aka Goodbye to Language]
by Jean Luc-Godard
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The Best Films of 2014
1. Adieu au langage [Farewell to Language / aka Goodbye to Language]
by Jean Luc-Godard
↧
The Best American Movies of 2014
Actress by Robert Greene
"Actress" as archetype, "actress" as manipulator. Like the title card (and marvelous poster) reads: "Brady Burre is: Actress", and any name might be substituted, either that of one who acts by profession, or that of anyone otherwise. A major work that examines the relationship between camera and subject, the relationship between director and document, motherhood, place, and domestic partnership. Essay forthcoming.
Approaching the Elephant by Amanda Rose Wilder
Captivating mind-reeler document of the inaugural year (2007-08) of the Teddy McArdle Free School in Little Falls, New Jersey, and a chronicle of the faculty's and students' attention to the freeform, occasionally "democratic" arrangement of the day's lessons and activities. I wrote about it previously here.
The Cosmopolitans by Whit Stillman
The 26-minute Amazon Prime pilot episode of Stillman's follow-up to his outrageously underrated 2011 masterpiece Damsels in Distress. The most beautiful, and funniest, and wittiest, American-depiction-of-Paris since the studio era. As of this writing still available for free viewing over at Amazon.
Dipso by Theodore Collatos
I can't remember whether this is a 2014 film proper or actually had a premiere in 2012, but whatever, the movie and its maker deserve to be better known. The best movie about brotherhood since Brad Bischoff's Where the Buffalo Roam from last year and Harmony Korine's Gummo. I wrote about it previously here.
For the Plasma by Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan
The American debut of the year, and like no other picture ever made. A film about plots, nature, the nature of narrative plots, and Maine. With the performance of the year, besides Jason Schwartzman, Jonathan Pryce, and Bene Coopersmith, given by newcomer Rosalie Lowe. I wrote about it previously here.
L for Leisure by Lev Kalman and Whit Horn
A sensual, sensorial, hilarious, and psychodramatic masterpiece – one of the most exciting films in all of recent cinema, American or otherwise – about the nightmare of The Loss of the Innocence of the '90s. I wrote about it previously here.
Listen Up Philip by Alex Ross Perry
Possibly the single greatest American film I've seen this year: a comic masterpiece of deviltry-in-the-details: from the nuances of the expert ensemble performances, to the thrust and twists of Perry's dialogue for his avatar/not-avatar Philip, and on to the graphic brilliance of Teddy Blanks' jacket-covers. Within the swinging frames of Sean Price Williams' camera, Schwartzman-as-Philip attains operatic heights of verbal violence (for comedy and emotional violence cannot be extricated from one another) that makes him, for me, the most likable character in recent memory, pure venom and spite, the rarely-depicted interior fully unleashed in barbarous words and fuck-yourself actions. I'm proud that we're releasing this theatrically in the UK, and on Blu-ray and DVD as part of The Masters of Cinema Series, in 2015.
Louie: Season Four, especially "In the Woods" by Louis C.K.
The unstoppable brilliance and beauty of Louie permuted for the third time across seasons into yet another new shape, another new set of rhythms. The feature-length "In the Woods" alone inspired awe. I recently started going back to Louie from the first season all over again; what Louis has achieved in this project across four seasons so far is unbelievable and unprecedented.
Memphis by Tim Sutton
The images seem "made,""aesthetic,""pictorial," crafted by a definite author, but they are strong and not simply "pretty" or "arty" because they bind tensely the urban/exurban world (it's right to say that Memphis is a "city" but we need a broader conception of that word) with nature in discrete frames over and over. I wrote about it previously here.
The Mend by John Magary
At wits’ ends with their mutual drifts the lifelong opposites Alan and Mat go down, down together in a haze of alcohol and vapes and, intoxicated, as day turns to night and back, slide into new personas whereby these two brothers kind of get along. Time mends all wounds? or (Lennon): Time wounds all heels? I wrote about it previously here.
Person to Person by Dustin Guy Defa
Defa gets better with every film, and this narrative follow-up to last year's outstanding Lydia Hoffman Lydia Hoffman is perfection. A great portrayal of the character and characters of New York City that with every new month are slipping away. Person to Person is the concentrated portrait of Bene Coopersmith, for whom the old cliché "an axiom of cinema" should, must, surely apply. Now available for free viewing via The New Yorker, here.
Boyhood by Richard Linklater
Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater by Gabe Klinger
The Eric Andre Show: Season Three by Eric André and Kitao Sakurai
Gary Saves the Graveyard by Todd Bieber
Going Out by Ted Fendt
The Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson
Happy Christmas by Joe Swanberg
Joy Kevin by Caleb Johnson
Life in Between by Stephen Gurewitz
Lucy by Luc Besson
Tim and Eric's Bedtime Stories: Season One by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim
Whiffed Out by Jason Giampietro
Appropriate Behavior by Desiree Akhavan
Christmas, Again by Charles Poekel
Ellie Lumme by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
(seen most of an early version, but not the final cut)
Heaven Can Wait by Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie
Inherent Vice by Paul Thomas Anderson
It Follows by David Robert Mitchell
I Wasn't There by Skye Hirschkron
National Gallery by Frederick Wiseman
Obvious Child by Gillian Robespierre
Sabbatical by Brandon Colvin
Summer of Blood by Onur Tukel
Thou Wast Mild and Lovely by Josephine Decker
Top Five by Chris Rock
Trouble Dolls by Jennifer Prediger and Jess Weixler
Uncertain Terms by Nathan Silver
Wild Canaries by Lawrence Michael Levine
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2014 Films Seen
Two years ago a friend made a list of everything he'd seen in the course of a year, so I thought I'd do the same, for 2014. Of little mass interest. Results.
2014 Films Seen
==============
35 rhums [35 Shots of Rum] [Claire Denis]
The 39 Steps [Alfred Hitchcock]
42 [Brian Helgeland]
Accusée… levez-vous! [Defendant… Rise!] [Maurice Tourneur]
Ace in the Hole [Billy Wilder]
Actress [Robert Greene]
Actress [Kate Freund and Kyle Reiter]
Adam and Joel [Theodore Collatos]
Adieu au langage [Farewell to Language] [Jean-Luc Godard]
Aller au cinéma: Post-face à ‘Boudu sauvé des eaux’ [Going to the Movies: Looking Back on ‘Boudu sauvé des eaux’] [Éric Rohmer]
Aller au cinéma: Post-face à ‘L’Atalante’ [Going to the Movies: Looking Back on ‘L’Atalante’] [Éric Rohmer]
All the Light in the Sky [Joe Swanberg]
The Alphabet [David Lynch]
Amarcord [Federico Fellini]
The Amputee (Version 1) [David Lynch]
The Amputee (Version 2) [David Lynch]
Analog Goose [Andrew Bujalski]
AP & AK [Ahmed Khawaja and André Puca]
À propos de Nice [On the Subject of Nice] [Jean Vigo]
Are We Not Cats [Xander Robin]
Ars [Jacques Demy]
Art History [Joe Swanberg]
The Assignation [Curtis Harrington]
At Berkeley [Frederick Wiseman]
Bad at Dancing [Joanna Arnow]
La Baie des Anges [Jacques Demy]
Bampton Broom and Morris Dances [filmmakers unknown]
A Beautiful Mind [Ron Howard]
Die beispiellose Verteidigung der Festung Deutschkreutz [The Unprecedented Defense of the Fortress Deutschkreutz] [Werner Herzog]
Bérénice [Éric Rohmer]
Bernie [Richard Linklater]
Beyond the Law, alias: Bust 80, alias: Gibraltar, Burke and Pope, alias: Copping the Whip, or: A Fantasy of the Angels the Downtrodden and the Dispossessed, Otherwise Known as: The Velvet Hand and The Iron Tongue [Norman Mailer]
Il bidone [The Swindler] [Federico Fellini]
Bigger Than Life [Nicholas Ray]
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb [Seth Holt and Michael Carreras]
Boomerang! [Elia Kazan]
Born to Be Bad [Nicholas Ray]
Boyhood [Richard Linklater]
Broken Specs [Ted Fendt]
Brick [Rian Johnson]
The Buddy Holly Story [Steve Rash]
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.] [Robert Wiene]
Capitalism: Child Labor [Ken Jacobs]
Charlie [Jason Evans]
Chef-d’oeuvre? [Masterpiece?] [Luc Moullet]
The Chicken [Roberto Rossellini]
La chienne [The Bitch] [Jean Renoir]
China Gate [Samuel Fuller]
Le ciel est à vous [The Sky Is Yours / The Sky’s the Limit] [Jean Grémillon]
Cinéastes de notre temps: Carl Th. Dreyer [Filmmakers of Our Time: Carl Th. Dreyer] [Éric Rohmer]
Cinéastes de notre temps: Le celluloïd et le marbre [Filmmakers of Our Time: Celluloid and Marble] [Éric Rohmer]
Cinéma, de notre temps: Georges Franju, le visionnaire [Cinema, of Our Time: Georges Franju: The Visionary] [André S. Labarthe]
Ciné Regards: En répétant “Perceval,” un film d’Éric Rohmer [Cine Glances: Rehearsing “Perceval,” A Film by Éric Rohmer] [Jean Douchet]
Civilisations: L’homme et la machine [Civilizations: Man and Machine] [Éric Rohmer]
Civilisations: L’homme et les frontières: I: La notion de frontière [Civilizations: Man and Borders: I: The Border Notion] [Éric Rohmer]
Civilisations: L’homme et les gouvernements: II [Civilizations: Man and Governments: II] [Éric Rohmer]
Civilisations: L’homme et son journal [Civilizations: Man and His Newspaper] [Éric Rohmer]
Cloak and Dagger [Fritz Lang]
I clowns [The Clowns] [Federico Fellini]
The Color Wheel [Alex Ross Perry]
Comédies et Proverbes: La femme de l’aviateur ou “On ne saurait penser à rien” [Comedies and Proverbs: The Aviator’s Wife, or: “You Can’t Think of Nothing”] [Éric Rohmer]
Comédies et Proverbes: Le beau mariage [Comedies and Proverbs: The Perfect Marriage] [Éric Rohmer]
Computer Chess [Andrew Bujalski]
Contes des quatre saisons: Conte d’été [Tales of the Four Seasons: Summer Tale] [Éric Rohmer]
Copie conforme [Certified Copy] [Abbas Kiarostami]
The Cosmopolitans [Whit Stillman]
Dances by Ilmington Teams in the Grounds of Peter de Montfort’s House 1220 A.D., Fiddler Sam Bennett [filmmaker unknown]
Il Decameron [The Decameron] [Pier Paolo Pasolini]
Les demoiselles de Rochefort [The Young Girls of Rochefort] [Jacques Demy]
Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans [The Young Girls Have Turned 25] [Agnès Varda]
The Descendants [Alexander Payne]
Design for Scandal [Norman Taurog]
The Diary of a Chambermaid [Jean Renoir]
Dipso [Theodore Collatos]
Doll & Em: Season One [Azazel Jacobs]
Dracula [Tod Browning]
Du skal aere din Hustru [Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife] [Carl Theodor Dreyer]
L’eclisse [The Eclipse] [Michelangelo Antonioni]
Écrans Noirs [Black Screens] [Claire Denis]
Elia Kazan: An Outsider [Annie Tresgot and Michel Ciment]
En pleine forme [Feeling Good] [Pierre Étaix]
En profil dans le texte: Entretien sur Pascal [Reading Between the Lines: Interview on Pascal] [Éric Rohmer]
Eraserhead [David Lynch]
Et dixit le mage [And Thus Spake the Mage] [Haydée Caillot]
Une étudiante d’aujourd’hui [A Modern-Day Co-Ed] [Éric Rohmer]
Europe ’51 [Roberto Rossellini]
Evolution of a Criminal [Darius Clark Monroe]
Faces [John Cassavetes]
The Fall of the House of Usher [Curtis Harrington]
Fermière à Montfaucon [Woman Farmer in Montfaucon] [Éric Rohmer]
Feu Mathias Pascal [The Late Mathias Pascal] [Marcel L’Herbier]
Films Taken from Kinora Spools Made in 1912 [Barry Callaghan and Mike Heaney]
Il fiore delle mille e una notte [The Flower of the Thousand and One Nights] [Pier Paolo Pasolini]
The Floorwalker [Charles Chaplin]
For a Good Time, Call… [Jamie Travis]
Foreign Correspondent [Alfred Hitchcock]
For Ever Mozart [Jean-Luc Godard]
For the Plasma [Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan]
Frances Ha [Noah Baumbach]
The Fugitive [John Ford]
Gideon’s Day [John Ford]
Un giornalista racconta: Agenzia matrimoniale [A Journalist Reports: Matrimonial Agency] [Federico Fellini]
Going Out [Ted Fendt]
The Grandmother [David Lynch]
The Grapes of Wrath [John Ford]
God Bless America [Bobcat Goldthwait]
The GoodTimesKid [Azazel Jacobs]
Le grand amour [The Great Love] [Pierre Étaix]
The Grand Budapest Hotel [Wes Anderson]
Le Grand Méliès [The Great Méliès] [Georges Franju]
The Great Gatsby [Baz Luhrmann]
Happy Christmas [Joe Swanberg]
A Hard Day’s Night [Richard Lester]
Harold and Maude [Hal Ashby]
Hellaware [Michael M. Bilandic]
Henry: A Basic Film [Lindsay Anderson]
Heureux anniversaire [Happy Anniversary] [Pierre Étaix]
Hit Man [George Armitage]
Les horizons morts [Dead Horizons] [Jacques Demy]
Höstsonaten [Autumn Sonata] [Ingmar Bergman]
Hôtel des Invalides [Georges Franju]
Human Geography [Misha Spivack]
If.... [Lindsay Anderson]
i hate myself :) [Joanna Arnow]
The Immigrant [James Gray]
Impolex [Alex Ross Perry]
Ingmar Bergman, om liv och arbete, ett samtal [Ingmar Bergman: On Life and Work: A Conversation] [Jörn Donner]
It Felt Like Love [Eliza Hittman]
Jalsaghar [The Music Room] [Satyajit Ray]
Je vous salue, Marie [Hail Mary] [Jean-Luc Godard]
Journey to Italy [Roberto Rossellini]
Judex [Georges Franju]
Jules et Jim [Jules and Jim] [François Truffaut]
Khan Khanne, séléction naturelle, 2014 [Khan Kanne: Natural Selection, 2014] [Jean-Luc Godard]
Killing Me Softly [Andrew Dominik]
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie [John Cassavetes]
Kohayagawa-ke no aki [Autumn for the Kohayagawa Family] [Yasujirô Ozu]
Körkarlen [The Coachman] [Victor Sjöström]
Kumiko the Treasure Hunter / Treasurehunter Kumi [David Zellner]
The Lady from Shanghai [Orson Welles]
The Last Detail [Hal Ashby]
The Last Hurrah [John Ford]
Let’s Get Started [Azazel Jacobs]
Letzte Worte [Last Words] [Werner Herzog]
L for Leisure [Lev Kalman and Whit Horn]
Life in Between [Stephen Gurewitz]
Lightning Strikes Twice [King Vidor]
Like Someone in Love [Abbas Kiarostami]
Listen Up Philip [Alex Ross Perry]
Liv & Ingmar [Dheeraj Akolkar]
Le Livre de Marie [The Book of Mary] [Anne-Marie Miéville]
Living and Departed: Roberto Rossellini: ‘Voyage in Italy’ [Tag Gallagher]
Lola [Jacques Demy]
Long-men Kezhan [Dragon Gate Inn] [King Hu]
Louie: Season 4 [Louis C.K.]
Love Is Strange [Ira Sachs]
Lucy [Luc Besson]
Lumière d’été [Summer Light] [Jean Grémillon]
La luxure [Lust] [Jacques Demy]
Macbeth [Orson Welles]
A mãe [The Mother] [João César Monteiro]
Maidstone [Norman Mailer]
The Man Who Knew Too Much [1934 Version] [Alfred Hitchcock]
Die Marquise von O… [The Marquise of O…] [Éric Rohmer]
Massnahmen gegen Fanatiker [Precautions Against Fanatics] [Werner Herzog]
Me & My Ramadan [Ahmed Khawaja]
Memphis [Tim Sutton]
The Mend [John Magary]
Men’s Thanksgiving [Tom Levin]
Mieux voir: Nancy au XVIIIe siècle [Seeing Better: Nancy in the XVIIIth Century] [Éric Rohmer]
Mogambo [John Ford]
Momma’s Family [Azazel Jacobs]
Momma’s Man [Azazel Jacobs]
A Most Wanted Man [Anton Corbijn]
Moon Over Miami [Walter Lang]
The Mud [Nigel DeFriez, Kira Pearson, Rob Malone, and Brooke Bundy]
mulignan(s) [Shaka King]
My Darling Clementine [John Ford]
Nadja à Paris [Nadja in Paris] [Éric Rohmer]
The Naked Kiss [Samuel Fuller]
Nashville [Robert Altman]
La natation par Jean Taris, champion de France. [Swimming by Jean Taris, Champion of France.] [Jean Vigo]
The Night of the Hunter [Charles Laughton]
North by Northwest [Alfred Hitchcock]
Notorious [Alfred Hitchcock]
Now, Voyager [Irving Rapper]
On the Edge [Curtis Harrington]
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg [Jacques Demy]
Paris vu par: Place de l’Étoile [Paris Seen by: Place de l’Étoile] [Éric Rohmer]
Passage de la Vierge [Haydée Caillot]
Pays de Cocagne [Land of Cocagne] [Pierre Étaix]
Perceval le Gallois [Perceval the Welshman] [Éric Rohmer]
Perfect Thoughts [Doron Max Hagay]
Persona [Ingmar Bergman]
Petites notes à propos du film ‘Je vous salue, Marie’ [Small Notes Regarding the Film ‘Je vous salue, Marie’] [Jean-Luc Godard]
The Phantom of the Opera [Rupert Julian]
Pickpocket [Robert Bresson]
Il poliziotto è marcio [The Officer Is Crooked] [Fernando Di Leo]
Les ponts de Sarajevo [The Bridges of Sarajevo] [Jean-Luc Godard, Vincenzo Marra, Isild Le Besco, Ursula Meier, Cristi Puiu, et al]
Possessed [Clarence Brown]
Présentation, ou Charlotte et son steak [Presentation, or: Charlotte and Her Steak] [Éric Rohmer]
I racconti di Canterbury [The Canterbury Tales] [Pier Paolo Pasolini]
Rain building music. [Azazel Jacobs]
Rat Pack Rat [Todd Rohal]
Rear Window [Alfred Hitchcock]
Red [Simone Louise Smith]
Red River [Howard Hawks]
Relief [John Raftery]
Remorques [Towings-In] [Jean Grémillon]
Rise of the Planet of the Apes [Rupert Wyatt]
The Rising of the Moon [John Ford]
Roma [Federico Fellini]
The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film [Richard Lester]
Rupture [Break-Up] [Pierre Étaix]
Le sabotier du Val de Loire [The Clogmaker of the Val de Loire] [Jacques Demy]
Safety Not Guaranteed [Colin Trevorrow]
Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma [Salò, or: The 120 Days of Sodom] [Pier Paolo Pasolini]
O sangue [Blood] [Pedro Costa]
Sayonara [Joshua Logan]
Schuhpalast Pinkus. [Ernst Lubitsch]
See You Next Tuesday [Drew Tobia]
Shaft [Gordon Parks]
Shock Corridor [Samuel Fuller]
Short Term 12 [Destin Daniel Cretton]
Le signe du Lion [The Sign of Leo] [Éric Rohmer]
Six contes moraux: 1: La boulangère de Monceau [Six Moral Tales: 1: The Monceau Bakery-Girl] [Éric Rohmer]
Six contes moraux: 2: La carrière de Suzanne [Six Moral Tales: 2: Suzanne’s Career] [Éric Rohmer]
Six contes moraux: III: La collectionneuse [Six Moral Tales: III: The Collector] [Éric Rohmer]
Six contes moraux: IV: Ma nuit chez Maud [Six Moral Tales: IV: My Night at Maud’s] [Éric Rohmer]
Six contes moraux: V: Le genou de Claire [Six Moral Tales: V: Claire’s Knee] [Éric Rohmer]
Six contes moraux: VI: L’amour, l’après-midi [Six Mortal Tales: VI: Love in the Afternoon] [Éric Rohmer]
Six Men Getting Sick [David Lynch]
The Sixth Year: Episode 1 [Rick Alverson]
The Sixth Year: Episode 2 [Loretta Fahrenholz]
The Sixth Year: Episode 3 [Alex Ross Perry]
The Sixth Year: Episode 4 [Nick Mauss and Ken Okishii]
The Sixth Year: Episode 5 [Dustin Guy Defa]
Smart Money [Alfred E. Green]
La sonate à Kreutzer [The Kreutzer Sonata] [Éric Rohmer]
Le soupirant [The Suitor] [Pierre Étaix]
Stromboli [Roberto Rossellini]
The Sun Shines Bright [John Ford]
Susuz yaz [Dry Summer] [Metin Erksan]
Swamp Water [Jean Renoir]
Sword Dances in North Skelton, Handsworth, Sleights, Westerhope and Grenoside [filmmakers unknown]
Take a Knee [Andrew DeYoung]
Tant qu’on a la santé [As Long as You’ve Got Your Health] [Pierre Étaix]
The Tender Trap [Charles Walters]
Tears of God [Robert Barnett]
Terri [Azazel Jacobs]
This Land Is Mine [Jean Renoir]
Three Installations [Lindsay Anderson]
Thursday’s Children [Guy Brenton and Lindsay Anderson]
Timbuktu [Abderrahmane Sissako]
Too Late Blues [John Cassavetes]
The Tragedy of Othello, Moor of Venice [Orson Welles]
Transes [Trances] [Ahmed El Maanouni]
Travel Plans [Ted Fendt]
Two Lovers [James Gray]
Two Rode Together [John Ford]
The Typewriter the Rifle & the Movie Camera [Adam Simon]
Uncle Kent [Joe Swanberg]
Veredas [Pathways] [João César Monteiro]
Véronique et son cancre [Véronique and Her Dunce] [Éric Rohmer]
Vers l’unité du monde: L’ère industrielle: Métamorphoses du paysage [Toward Unity of the World: The Industrial Era: Transformations of the Landscape] [Éric Rohmer]
Visions of Joe and Hanna [Brian Tran]
Vlogger [Tyler Rubenfeld]
The War Lord [Franklin Schaffner]
The Whole Town’s Talking [John Ford]
The Whirled [Ken Jacobs]
White Dog [Samuel Fuller]
White Material [Claire Denis]
White Reindeer [Zach Clark]
Wild 90 [Norman Mailer]
Wings [William A. Wellman]
The Woman on the Beach [Jean Renoir]
The Wormwood Star [Curtis Harrington]
Yajû no seishun [Youth of the Beast] [Seijun Suzuki]
Yô-kihi [Imperial Concubine Yang] [Kenji Mizoguchi]
You’re Next [Adam Wingard]
Yoyo [Pierre Étaix]
↧
Actress
Sections: (1) motherhood (2) Beacon (3) actress etc.
"Brandy Burre is: ACTRESS"— a fill-in for any name. Given both profession + woman. A non-household-name actress to begin with: small role in The Wire.
– Issue of camera vs. performance ('the acted non-awareness' of the camera).
– Kitchen 'aesthetic' shots — less Sirk than Jeanne Dielman.
– Tim as a bump-on-the-log — what's not shown can only be speculated upon — selectivity of 'creative nonfiction'— document shapes and creates characters just as much as any 'fiction' feature, cf. Wiseman, and A. R. Wilder's Approaching the Elephant, on which Greene worked as editor.
– Suspension of time — slow-mo shots (calculated at shoot, not post — camera must be set to higher frame-rate): suspension of time for Brandy's acting career on hold...
– ...Of the holidays and the elongation/prolongation of the family unit.
– The chance town-name of "Beacon," a coax-away, a place for retreat, promise of respite, but also a siren's song.
– Small role in the The Wire: scenes that are unrepresentative of the drama?
– After Tim's discovery of her indiscretion, he leaves; she keeps the house. — the invitation to speculate on the nuances of a couple's relationship.
– "Actress" as archetype; "actress" as manipulator.
– Friends who indulge her.
– The mixture of guilt and non-guilt.
– Auditions: a kind of soup, based on either wholly, arbitrary factors or very specific factors/traits that go undisclosed in the casting call — right face? right 'look'? — etc. — rolling the dice of the universe.
This is one of the best movies of 2014. I wrote at the end of the year:
Actress by Robert Greene
"Actress" as archetype, "actress" as manipulator. Like the title card (and marvelous poster) reads: "Brady Burre is: Actress", and any name might be substituted, either that of one who acts by profession, or that of anyone otherwise. A major work that examines the relationship between camera and subject, the relationship between director and document, motherhood, place, and domestic partnership.
↧
Bad at Dancing
The following short interview with Joanna Arnow took place during the run-up to her new film's premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, where last week it won the Silver Bear Jury Prize for the Best Short Film (Narrative).
KELLER: Your first film, i hate myself :)— which you assert must be spoken as "I Hate Myself Smiley-Face"— struck many viewers in the last year or year-and-a-half since it came out. Had you expected the kind of response you received — not only for the nominal shock-factor of the content — which responses are already documented within the film itself — but also for the praise and support provided by the cinephile community?
ARNOW: Thank you, yes, I do insist on pronouncing the smiley face – it’s crucial to the film’s meaning and I am very taken aback whenever people leave it out!
I didn’t know what kind of response to expect, although in my rough cut screenings it became clear people were divided about the film. Some were incredibly enthusiastic, but others, when pressed, said they would have walked out if I wasn’t in the room. It took a year of submissions before the film was accepted at any festivals, so I was happy for it to be more widely seen and to hear the different responses.
KELLER: Did you receive any correspondence or praise/press from overseas for the film? France, etc.?
ARNOW: The film hasn’t played in France yet, but we did have a great response and positive reviews in Germany and Canada. We screened in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich thanks to Unknown Pleasures Film Festival.
KELLER: Before going into Bad at Dancing at length, what were your wishes for the film that would follow up i hate myself :)?
ARNOW: I guess it’s something of an oxymoron, but I really loved making i hate myself :). And if it’s not too self-congratulatory to say, I loved how that film turned out too! I just hoped I would feel nearly as strongly about my next film, and I wanted to make a piece worth sharing with others.
KELLER: But you've got to say a bit more than this. "A piece worth sharing with others"? Your film Bad at Dancing is a grenade. Do you actually consider it just a piece-of-work?
ARNOW: The film portrays the complexities and sexual intrigue within the off kilter friendship of two women – especially because there are not enough films out there with multi-dimensional stories about women, my hope is that Bad at Dancing will add to the conversation. I'm happy with how B.A.D. turned out and feel lucky to have worked with such a terrific cast and crew.
KELLER: You had to know that i hate myself :) was going to be a divisive work. And that invitees to its rough cut screenings were perhaps not going to anticipate what the film ends up being. Let's assume the default setting for invitees is: "Oh cool, I want to see this person-I-know's film that will be projected... It will be fun."— Further, you had to know that you were going to be judged for the on-camera behavior of the nominal boyfriend; viewers would perhaps be projecting themselves, potentially, into the situation of, I don't know, having to interact with him at a Thanksgiving dinner or something.
ARNOW: In making the film, I hoped that others would be able to relate to the story, and that it would cause people to think about their own relationships. i hate myself :) also explores questions about gender and sexuality, and follows my experience as I learn to be more open about aspects of my identity that I previously found shameful. By exposing myself in this way, my aim was for others to be able to connect with what is universal in all of us. In making the documentary, I also hoped to show the complexities in the film’s characters – of course everyone will interpret the film how they want, but I don’t see it as a story that invites any kind of black and white judgment at all. I want my films to challenge, excite and push into new and uncomfortable territory. Divisiveness is not my goal, although it can be a side effect of having those aims for my films. I admire Caveh Zahedi's work and his films are often divisive, but I’m interested in them because they are innovative, uncomfortably humorous and [they] subvert norms of filmmaking, not because of their divisiveness.
KELLER: How do you feel, in general, about the acceptance and rejection of the film, vis-à-vis festivals etc.? All of my cinephile friends know your first film, and it has been a touchstone, even, at the least, conversationally, for us — much more than many movies we might have seen at Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, SXSW, etc., blah blah. The year-end best-of's come out, and it's all a load of shit, of course. I want you to answer this question directly, and don't hedge: What is it like knowing in your heart of hearts that you have made a film more substantial than Under the Skin?
ARNOW: I feel moved when I think about all the support the film has received, and how generous people have been along the way. The film didn't play at Cannes or Sundance etc, but the festivals we did screen at were all special and felt very personal. Rooftop Films and LES Film Festival were the first two where the film was accepted – they're both independent-minded champions for radical cinema and I'm glad i hate myself :) first found a home with them. I of course wish the film could have screened more widely, but feel grateful it has reached many in the film community - thanks to you among others!
KELLER: On the topic of Bad at Dancing: I have a lot to ask about this, but to begin: Did you start with the idea of the film/scenario by way of the actors, or were they only cast later after the idea?
ARNOW: I did have Eleanore [Pienta] in mind when I wrote the film, although the character in the film is not based on her actual character.
KELLER: Do you think it's easier to direct a (fiction) short rather than a (fiction) feature because there is less commitment required from the actors, purely due to the compression of time filming?
ARNOW: It’s less of a time commitment to act in a short film rather than a feature, but I don’t see it as any less of an artistic commitment.
KELLER: The black-and-white provides a sculptural quality to the naked bodies fucking at the outset, which is beautiful while at the same time being farcical. Please tell me about this, and whether you think the relationship portrayed in the film by Eleanore Pienta and Keith Poulson stakes out any kind of real-world observation.
ARNOW: The story’s narrative has absurd and surreal elements – I chose to shoot the film in black-and-white, because it immediately signals a layer of separation between the film’s world and every day reality. I also barely had any budget for art, so it was a cost-effective way to stylistically accomplish this separation as well. Because the film is not naturalistic, I wanted to minimize the feeling of ordinariness or casualness in the images – the black-and-white look gives Bad at Dancing more of a cohesive and formal stylization.
KELLER: There are moments in your film where I feel that it's almost a kind of sitcom, but without a laugh-track. Maybe this is the new given (none of us like laugh-tracks) but I can still feel the moments in which the introduction of such would underscore a kind of ironic take on the action. I feel the same when I watch '80s Godard.
ARNOW: I was avoiding signaling to viewers how to feel about the material by not using any non-diagetic music, sound bridges etc. – it’s a more comfortable viewing experience when you’re told what to think, and I wanted people to be more off-balance while they’re watching.
KELLER: What necessitates the end credit for an acting coach? I vaguely remember you putting this out there months and months back. Was this because you felt you needed an acting coach?
ARNOW: I’ve collaborated with Hye Yun Park on a number of projects. She is a performer-director who was great to work with as the film’s consulting producer and as my acting coach. I can’t fully direct myself while I’m acting in a scene, so it was helpful to have her perspective on set. We also had an extensive rehearsal process together, and you can check our her awesome web series Hey Yunhere. (I was just a DP on season 2.)
To me, the film is a surreal manifestation of the jealous rivalry between the two women – it takes the idea of being a third wheel and pushes it to the extreme in order to more fully explore the dynamic. I did not want the sex scenes to be realistic or overly graphic, but more a recurring element of the set which adds humor and tension because it is so minimally acknowledged. One film that was a reference was Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive l’Amour.
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Message de salutations: Prix suisse / remerciements / mort ou vif
Jean-Luc Godard's new five-minute film. Arthur Mas transcribed the French sound-track, and I translated it into English, here at The Notebook at MUBI.
UPDATES: 3/21/2015:
– A commenter at The Notebook, wrote: "The opening is taken from Ramuz’s text from Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale [Histoire du soldat, 1918].
– Another Notebook commenter, Dmitry Golotyuk, wrote: "Fernandel is for sure: it’s his line from Regain[Harvest, 1937] by Marcel Pagnol."
– Martial Pisani emailed me today, writing: "Another thing we can take for certain is that Chiens perdus sans collier refers in Godard's mind to the 1955 Delannoy film. Truffaut couldn't stand it, and wrote about it in Arts. There are details about it in the book by de Baecque. We can see the kids in Les mistons [The Mischief-Makers, François Truffaut, 1957] tearing up the poster of the film and, apparently, Truffaut later said that the film wasn't so bad but his hatred for it was the reason he wanted to make Les quatre cents coups [The Four Hundred Blows / Wild Oats, 1959]...
"The links between all the references stay quite mysterious. Since the poem by Pasolini (VI part of Les cendres de Gramsci) is said to be the description of his childhood landscape, we may think that the film is an evocation of Switzerland the way Godard used to see it as a child: Ramuz's text seems to be well known by Swiss schoolboys at the time, as were the historic figures of the country... and last but not least, Erwin Ballabio was a famous Swiss goalkeeper!
[Ballabio is also a commune located in Italy between the west-east points across the Swiss border of Denges and Denezy in the canton Vaud. –CK]
"There is still work to do!"
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Monica: Season 1
The cinema has always counted among its attributes a capability for inducing Mass Hypnosis, a result of its stimulative excesses. Take as example a film I saw recently again for maybe the seventh time: Fritz Lang's enthralling Frau im Mond. It's got action, SFX, extraordinary set-design, and incessant variations on the size of the subjects in relation to the shape of the frame, a variation that in relation to the montage, sets a rhythm, and in relation to the découpage, embodies an unusually elastic pacing — a trait of Lang's films throughout the silent period, particularly in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler., Spione, Frau... (The three films which make up his Here-and-Now Trilogy.)
With the goosebumps comes an inattention, perhaps, to the undercurrents of the picture and the prophetic details — in the case of Frau: the rocket project, the hairstyle of Mr. Turner, the seizing of gold on the moon (from die Mondgebirge) before "anyone else" does... — all 'signs' of the Nazi enterprise already, in 1929, underway.
An especially auspicious viewing, then, given its vicinity to the 70th anniversary of the week of Anne Frank's proxy murder by illness in the Bergen-Belsen infirmary from which no-one escaped healed and alive. And given its vicinity within the weeks following the English-language translation in The Nation of Stéphane Delorme's lengthy editorial in the Cahiers du cinéma regarding the massacres at Charlie Hebdo and the immediate after-events inside Hyper Cacher and the printing plant. To quote from Delorme (English translation by Nicholas Elliott): (passages underlined for emphasis by me):
"To block the rhetoric of terror, we must also be able to analyze images. The terrorists’ scheme is to introduce images of war so we speak of “war” rather than “attacks.” How remarkable that Friday’s double assault on the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly, shown through cross-cutting, was aimed at two similar buildings, two big gray or black cubes, reminiscent of a barracks and a bunker. The anchors who don’t look at what they are showing did not see that the Hyper Cacher supermarket is a dark green bunker relaying an image of “war” to dazed television viewers. Western journalists are tremendously naïve when it comes to the instinctive power of sound and images. On BFM TV, Christophe Hondelatte dared to proudly announce, “We are broadcasting Coulibaly’s recording with the propaganda passages deleted because it is out of the question that we be complicit.” But doesn’t he realize that, by contradicting the “fanaticism” argument, the mere calm of Coulibaly’s voice is as effective as any propaganda? We need journalists better equipped to face these images, or we’ll be heading for disaster. Sometimes it’s not so serious; we can force a laugh, as on the day of the march, when TF1 reporters started talking about the crowd of “anonymous people,” as opposed to the group of heads of state. Since when are demonstrators “anonymous”? Was everyone supposed to be called “Charlie”? Cahiers had been thinking about returning to media critique for a while. We begin this month.
"There’s no need to be sorry that the irreverent Charlie has become a “symbol,” for symbols take on great significance in an archaic war of images. If the word bothers you, just tell yourself that Charlie Hebdo has become an idea: one of courage, liberty, and conviction. But don’t forget other words: intelligence, impudence, irony, warmth, generosity, joy. And perseverance. Charlie Hebdo had asked for donations last November because it was in financial peril. The paper moved forward alone until finally there was this amazing recognition. Do not be bitter: this is how it is; important things are achieved alone, at night. Perseverance bears its fruit, even if this time fate interfered in a fashion too cruel. For our part, we have a model. Those men sitting around a table, we see them alive. Let us hope it is possible that this mental image will structure the political ideas of tomorrow."
I'm retaining that last paragraph in the quote because it's the last one in Delorme's piece and the content of the final sentences, even if perhaps somewhat more tangential to the surface of this entry, deserves reflection and general bearing in mind. Moving backward from there, the mention of symbols taking on "great significance in an archaic war of images" is apposite and appropriate dove-tail from the discussion of the preceding graf, wherein we learn from the television presenters about "the propaganda passages", and that the marchers were "anonymous," in contradistinction to the heads of state (the U.S. president, of course, missing from the défilé).
The U.S. president, of course, missing from the defile: see Jessica Bennett's New York Times profile of March 19th, "Monica Lewinsky Is Back, but This Time It's on Her Terms", in which Lewinsky still copes, not merely to overcome (which implies a triumphant survival, a ready-made trope of the media-narrative variety) or succeed (in the positive and implicitly condescending* Mary Tyler Moore ditty of "You're gonna make it after all"**) but to explode her trauma and control her narrative. We learn about her preparation for her debut TED Talk: we read of the speaking coach, the rehearsals in the living room, ways of arching one's back, moving one's hand, to project and, consequently, control. All of this is predicted in Doron Max Hagay's brilliant and hilarious web-series Monica, from Monica's meetings with HBO to the publicist (Jacqueline Novak) who controls the control. A view of the Lewinsky after-math of the circumstances which, from where I'm sitting, came to be perceived as a Camp Event which in turn transformed her into a Camp Icon of the late '90s until today. Every new photo portrait as corrective to the now iconic security-badge image (or if not security badge image, could have been) which latently contains a posthumous Warhol.
unfortunate + fortunate thing is that you can never go forward, nor should with the jaw-bat in tawny hue (cf. VB - Sen Cruz images) + -> Eugenides bit about */feminism of the '70s/
**/throws Marnie's purse/ Monica Friends / Mambo No 5 /
Distinction: Lewinsky vs. the Monica of Monica
FPO / IN-PROGRESS
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Passe ton bac d'abord...
(I wrote this in 2009 for the booklet accompanying The Masters of Cinema Series' UK DVD release, which I also co-produced, designed, and edited. The original booklet pages are interspersed with greyscale versions of frames from this film and others which illustrate points raised in my text. I'm posting this here on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features [and the Turkish shorts] that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.)
Although it's a color film, the frame reproductions below, taken from the MoC booklet, appear in greyscale.
Watching a film by Maurice Pialat can be a pleasurable experience. That this should be so might depend on whether you’ve seen the picture once or twice before, on which film it is, on whether you’re at a stable point in your life and the threat of What’s Depicted — in Pialat, total emotional warfare — no longer lurks immediately beyond the edges of the frame (as far as one is ever aware). We can be honest here: art is not always enjoyable business. It’s a channel for emotions’ mess; a magnification on life’s buckminsterian braid; that which precipitates the recognition of another intelligence. This last definition explains why one might keep coming back to Pialat — at first the compulsion for recognition, then recognition alone — esteem for the organising Articulator, and the familiarity that allows one to cross the phantomed bridge of admiration over to the realm of gratification. Recognition, familiarity. La (re)connaissance. Watch the films more than once. Get to know them, when you’re able.
Multiple viewings will neutralize the pain of a particular Pialat movie — one might say, will detonate the mines — but they’ll do nothing to rectify the scarring of the landscape. For me, L’enfance-nue [Naked-Childhood, 1968] has been declared secure territory — also À nos amours. [To Our Romance. / Here’s to Love., 1983], and even La gueule ouverte [The Slack-Jawed Mug / The Open Trap / The Gaping Maw, aka The Mouth Agape, 1974]. Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble [We Won’t Grow Old Together, 1972] is still too dangerous. Passe ton bac d’abord... [Pass Your Bac First..., aka Graduate First, 1979] — I was at war for some time with the film...
It’s unwieldy, jagged, at initial glance seems a little free-form — later viewings will reveal its elasticity and its order. You read an article once that cites the fact thirteen editors worked on the film and you grumbled: “This explains everything.” You saw the film twice and the same fact explained nothing. At first you wrote the kids off as bastards, because they’re kids, as opposed to the adults of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, or of Loulou [1980] — or to Léotard and his ‘behavior’ in La gueule ouverte. You saw the film twice and the kids came across as natal elements, the conditions of themselves as (Pialatian?) adults. Always these indirect challenges, in Pialat’s films. A challenge to the spectator, this push against the normal contours of dramaturgy, that nevertheless retains a classicism — the mystery of the novelistic approach. A challenge to the acceptance of ‘behavior’ as cut-or-dry, and thus a provocation and a wake-up call to the viewer — some way to suss out the short-sightedness of his or her moralities, to bring attention to the boundaries and limits of his or her own conception of the world while also, mysteriously, emphasizing and pleading for a morality by example, by acceptance, by forgiveness. An expiation, then — moreso than in most cinema (or any) art. Trial by fire.
We learn things about life from Pialat’s movies — we see it treated with a documentary precision or, we might venture, a psychological precision — and in saying such we’ll emphasize (and not only for the sake of saving the revenant Pialat from chafing, spinning on the final shrink’s couch in the Final Session) that it’s documentary without the vérité trappings; that it’s psychology preceding nomenclature and psychiatric dogmas and the infrastructure of rationalizations and, fundamentally, control.
When Passe ton bac was still my enemy, I had it out for those kids. They behave like bastards and whores. (Another challenge of Pialat, a trap even — his provocation of daring the viewer to overlap ‘behavior’ with class, as in: the behavior ‘expected’ from a class, from a ‘certain’ social subset — a danger that extends as near into the present as the narratives of indolence in gangsta-genre American movies, or the Fontaínhas films of Pedro Costa). Of course the problem was my own, one reinforced by recognition: that the boys wear facial hair again like in the current era... — that most if not all the wardrobes of Passe ton bac have equivalents in present-day styles... So there in Bernard was the bad-mannered son-of-a-bitch of any age who seduced away from me the pretty girl I knew once but only from afar. There in Elisabeth, the Twittering fille of weak identity in thrall to corruptibility. Fictional examples, I have to admit and, therefore, doubly extraneous, but they serve to highlight one more Pialat-devised challenge — the test of going beyond writing the film’s characters off, or denouncing them only because they’re young, knowable, easy to feel superior over with their motives so been-there-done-that... maybe as a counterweight to some envy. But nestled in Pialat’s gambit lies a paradox: the freedom evident in the kids’ ‘lifestyle’ neighbors an acknowledgement, on the director’s part, of the looming obstacles erected by Such Behavior and by, yes, the prevalent Social Conditions. Back to square one: right’s inextricable from wrong. Let’s borrow a formulation from 2009 and call Pialat post-ideological: “That’s just the way it is” — understood here as the Natural Order of Things. How we ‘feel’ about this is, ultimately, our own problem — and our own individuality. For Pialat, as for Renoir, art is a mirror, and the inner content’s created, realized, only by that which stands before it — it, in turn, stands in indifference.
And still more content gets produced by way of an imposition upon the artwork. Let’s return again to the notion of the group in the film as lacking a clear sense of the future, but now by virtue of their position at the tail-end of a generation who have not yet witnessed, before their very eyes, the completed aging of their ‘freest’ paragons — those pop-cultural icons that mixed up ‘sex’ and ‘death’ and ‘cool’. I recently saw the film that struck me as the companion piece to Passe ton bac— Andy Warhol’s Screen Test: Lou Reed [1966], the one with Lou drinking a bottle of Coke. Here he is, 24 or so, at mass-media’s break of dawn — not knowing, clueless in the moment, that he belongs to the first generation of whom we, any members of the future-present youth culture (something like ages 15 to 45 in 2009 years), will see at once in his 1966 image the resemblance to we-ourselves (same get-up, haircut, carriage pitched to ‘cool’ and bluffing poise), and from which we will be able to extrapolate the full feeling of senescence. For we in 2009 see this shot — of ‘ourselves’ — with the image already present in mind of what Lou Reed has become — physically, artistically. And the shock’s like a thunderbolt: WE WILL GROW OLD TOGETHER. The lark of youth is a delusion; the destiny of our media recordings (films, digital photos, YouTube clips), no matter their clarity, is one of artifacts. And it’s all there on the screen, and the gestures of ‘cool’ and youth will only make the viewing of these records at some future point all the more more painful. Lou with his dumb shades, pivoting the Coke bottle so we can better eye the label (his gestures reading as: “See? How it’s a product? You dig? Check me out acknowledging it — I’m too cool to be unaware of the fact”). With his talon-nails... — appropriate flourish now that they signal time’s latent vampirage. Nosferatu ’66 morphs into Nosferatu ’21. Warhol’s movie ultimately became, and becomes, the baggage time and the spectator drop before it: and the film now says there’s no more power, no more cool, in ‘waiting for your man’ — you’re just a kid.
And your freedom is a performance. And time will have its revenge. Passe ton bac became my friend when I realized Pialat, granting the kids their libertinage, already knew all of this (of course he did). He was making a movie that would meet its latter-day on-disc featurettes. It took Warhol’s film, and seeing Pialat’s more than once, for me to feel at last the intelligence of Passe ton bac, its muteness, its neutrality, and to accept it, at last, as my neutralized object.
All this is present, dormant, in Shot One. For the film’s characters there’s no future — indicated by one of the movie’s temporal markers: the Sex Pistols — because there’s only an ever-unfurling present-with-a-past. Can this history even be read? The signs are there: hence the carvings on the desks in the opening shots, made by all the students of philosophy bac-prep classes past, presented by dissolves-in-montage — Pialat films the carvings, the graffiti, as hieroglyphs. They’re the testimony of preceding generations, of groups, loves, stories, events, boredoms. How to interpret this cosmos, this web, this complex tangle? The voiceover that sounds across the sequence essays order — is at once at complete odds with the chaotic marks, and a key to the crazy-code in front of our eyes, a kind of god’s-eye assurance or avowal (the very authority of which will, later on in the film, be subverted — but more on this later). The teacher’s voice intones: “The problem with philosophy is you all come with preconceived ideas about it. That’s what bothers me. Lots of things, including literature, inculcate you with ideas and you come here with ready-made notions. I think our first task in these philosophy classes will involve unlearning, forgetting everything you’ve been told. That’s the best way to proceed. The other thing I want to say to you is that, particularly in philosophy, if there is no real need, no real desire for philosophy existing between us, between me and every one of you, nothing will happen.” The words essentially represent the thesis, or the moral, of the film; of course the kids we’ll meet in the next 80 minutes will prove to have no discernible familiarity with any governing system of Philosophy or canon of Literature — in place of these terms, as used in the teacher’s speech, we understand we have to substitute the word “Life”, or some other clichéd, but all-encompassing, analogue. The speech registers like moral mandate, or activation key that might have brought the desk-artists to the point of progress. But the movement is forwards and backwards, temporal flux, and there resides in this same sequence a hidden ‘structuring’ of history, one we, the spectator, as cinephile, or as someone who buys into the continuities prescribed by terms like Philosophy and Literature, might already know, from a familiarity with the previous work of Pialat: the film takes place in the town of Lens, in Pas de Calais — the same region in which the director set his debut feature, L’enfance-nue. There’s a history ‘off’ (off-screen, off-film) — and the two films, superimposed in memory, resolve into a line of pedagogical questioning directed at Passe ton bac’s protagonists: Did you see what happened? Was this you? If so, have you made good on the previous lessons? If you haven’t, do you recognize you’re caught in a present just like the one before? Against the outset’s relief of linearity, of logic’s entreaties, the film will unreel over the next 80-odd minutes into more uncertainity, and resolutions indiscernible. Rudimentary presents, only. No future.*
[*But no nihilism either. In contrast to L’enfance-nue, with its dropped cats and daggers brandished. In Passe ton bac d’abord..., emotions get hurt — not bodies. If the Golden Rule doesn’t apply, it’s because the kids barely care what happens to themselves emotionally.]
The prevailing motif of the film isn’t chaos so much as constant flux, dialectic like promordial goo. Look closely at two of the initial cuts in the picture. #1: From the desktop-hieroglyphs to the gym-class handball match. The color palettes of the frames in both sequences ‘rhyme’; the wooden materiality of each makes a second match. And although existing on an opposite track, we might count a third rhyme in the pairing of the desktop close-ups’ shallow frontality with the deep-space vortex of the handball court. Fourth rhyme: two teacher-figures declaim instruction. (On a first viewing the temporal vicinity of the philo and gym teachers might lead us to expect a heavy indoctrinational quality in the proceedings — maybe some ‘rougher’ version of a dead-poets society — but, with the exception of the philo teacher’s ritorno near the end of the picture, theirs remain the only two instructional voices in the film.) #2: From the handball court to the Caron café’s interior. No surface-rhymes whatsoever in this instance — but look more deeply and discern shared notions of opposing sides, of switched alliances, of boundaries and their transgressions, of diagonal advance, of ‘victory’ as an arbitrary demarcation. Pialat moves our emotional response like a game-piece, taking us from the adjacent spaces of the workdesks and the gleaming court into the farther reaches of a café milieu like a Bosch painting — garden of earthly delights. (A painting that Jean Eustache, incidentally, would investigate brilliantly on film the same year as the release of Passe ton bac.)
Pialat’s great talent was that he could aestheticize anything, even if it was already, documentarily, there in the world — and he did so purely by cutting. In the football scene that succeeds the infernal café, one experiences a sense of exaltation purely by re-discovering, by way of the cinematographic miracle, that the colors of the spectators’ hats, dispersed at random among the heads in the crowd, match the colors of the home-team’s uniform. Of course they do! We all know that you go to a sporting event, and you flaunt your team-spirit — with apparel, jerseys, hats, whatever. But Pialat shows us something new: in his cutting from the pitch to the stands, the colors carry over across the shots to make a link between the two elements, thus shifting the drama from the action of the match (word now infused with double-meaning) to the rapport between the spectators and the players: harmony, brotherhood, sympathy for the ensemble. And yet (incessant dialectics)... it’s shortly after this scene that the film begins to fix upon Elisabeth (whose actress Sabine Haudepin is, in any case, listed first in the opening credits) as a central locus — both a structural anchoring point and (in the elaboration of her relationship with Philippe) a dramaturgic mechanism. Correspondingly, the editing-schema develops in the manner of a musical work, or prosodic arrangement: Group / Elisabeth / Group / Elisabeth ( A / B / A / B ), and so on.
What started out as a random hook-up solidifies into something regular and familially acceptable. We’ve already seen Elisabeth, following the opening café scene (where she can be observed making out with a boy who, in the context of the film, will never progress beyond the status of an extra) getting fucked from behind by Patrick in the backyard of her house — an iteration of the old ‘caught-in-the-headlights’ saw, upended by Pialat when he has the girl walk into the house right afterward to greet without timidity the father who spotted her. Her dad’s only remark: that that’s not gonna help her pass her bac. Mere minutes later in the film’s running-time, she has moved on to Philippe — who, nearly as quickly in the playback, has ‘graduated’ from walking into Elisabeth’s parents’ house for the first time with his hair snow-wet, to being told by Elisabeth’s mother in the family dining room (Elisabeth’s not even around) that she’ll help him find a job with the deputy mayor. As of this moment (which precedes a scene of Philippe helping Elisabeth’s father muck about with a busted appliance), it’s clear that some kind of destiny — or throughline — is being arranged.
Appropriate, then, that the wedding of Agnès and Rocky should trigger the rupture between Elisabeth and her mother — or rather, reinforce the larger generational divide. The sequence starts with Elisabeth’s father singing at full-throat on-stage — a ‘coming out’ for the man whom, before the appearance of Philippe, we’d only witnessed inside his own household as a relatively reticent figure. As the central set-piece of the picture, the wedding-reception solidifies the motifs of community (and P.S.: note the size of the community here: it would appear that all of the friends’ parents are also friends or acquaintances), of the ensemble, of the universal in the specific, and, most acutely, of continuity. In another resonance with L’enfance-nue, Pialat presents a wedding-party as the place where families at last converge, and ceremony and tradition allow them, if only temporarily, to set aside their mutual grievances. (Listen closely in Passe ton bac to hear strains of “La java bleue”, so movingly performed during the party scene in L’enfance-nue.) Young and old meet on square terms — a conference that makes possible one of the most powerful, most touching moments in the movie, as a few of the young people at the reception question an older gentleman, seated next to his wife, about his own marriage. “Were there any others after you got married?” — “Too many.” — “Did you love them?” — “Never. Oh no. No. Never.” Yet the gulf between the generations is never far off — in one respect is located, ironically, at the level of the music performed at the event, seemingly chosen purely for the enjoyment of the older attendees and completely out of synch with the kids’ and newlyweds’ sensibilities... which gravitate (as the film informs us later on) more towards Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, and electro-pop. (Savor that magnificent scene further on in the picture when the caddish Caron proprietor — the overt comic presence of Passe ton bac and, in his total tonal disjunction with the rest of the film [trademark Pialat grace-note, in harmony with the film’s discordances], the embodiment of the ‘sore-thumb’ — attempts to ingratiate himself with the group on their holiday by joining in on the impromptu dance-session at the restaurant. Here’s the precursor to the late-night trance bash in which Charlotte Rampling haltingly participates in François Ozon’s rather less-than-masterful Swimming Pool [2003].)
On a dramatic level — that is, in its function of igniting the blow-up between Elisabeth and her mother — the wedding scene might appear to exist primarily to get all parties sozzled, then to move Elisabeth into Bernard’s arms, and Philippe and Bernard toward blows with one another. A crux moment of the film, to be sure, but I would propose that the most important element of this section is perhaps Elisabeth’s dress. The dress — a bizarrely out-of-place, almost rustic, or (more insidiously) cultic piece — habit-like — prepares us for the outcome of the film (and I’ll return to this a little further down) as much as the fight prepares us ‘naturally’ for the next scene: the dining-room confrontation between Elisabeth and her mother. On the surface, the fight erupts because Elisabeth has behaved like ‘a whore’ at the wedding with her shameless dancefloor nuzzling of Bernard. But of course neither this, nor the undercurrent of impropriety in such a sacred, tradition-governed space, can account entirely for her mother’s rage. The shame is her mother’s shame because her daughter has, effectively, been carrying out the role of the proxy lover of Philippe whom she herself cannot have. The complacency her mother shows toward her daughter’s future — and the attention she lavishes on Philippe — say as much about the mother’s ‘expectations’ as her desires and vicarious wish-fulfillment — Elisabeth has fucked up everything. Why else dissolve into tears and desperately grasp at downing a bottle of pills after an event that would seem, away from any context, somewhat less than consequential to the immediate mental bearing of the parent of a confused teen? It’s in this same dining room, by the way, that we recall Elsabeth’s mother first ‘propositioning’ Philippe with the offer of a job at the deputy mayor’s, whereupon she notes rather intimately: “[Elisabeth]’s had plenty of guys — before you, I mean... My husband doesn’t say much... It’s not his style to show his feelings... Now you’re here, he’s happy...”
The fact of the matter is that between Elisabeth and her mother, there exists a compact — spiritual, sexual, magickal — the initiation of which is observable at the moment the young girl first brings her new boyfriend home, his hair snow-wet. Look at the kiss, from nowhere, that Elisabeth plants on her cheek, and then at the smile and the glance that signals a complicity which might only be fully understood in hindsight, though its ‘uncanniness’ is immediately apprehensible; the ley-lines of bloodline are stronger than we or she might have consciously supposed. By the time of the final scene, and the kiss that bookends the initial one and seems to indicate the pact’s completion (‘Our destiny is made’), the pregnant Elisabeth, looking dazed, enchanted — the smile having drifted across to the face of the mother scissoring wedding preparations — has been revealed as a vessel in a kind of rite, or movement. Her pregnancy-smock — habit-like as her dress at the wedding, which can now be understood as a preliminary signal on the magickal throughline, and/or like something out of Dreyer — telegraphs the completion. These garments have been chosen for her— she who shows little resistance by the end, who lies ragdoll-flopped on an armchair, clutching a textbook titled Enterprise and Men, adrift as a blanker Ophelia. And who knows whose baby it really is, this child of a child-bride-to-be.
Elisabeth like forest-spousal nymphet contrasts with Frédérique — she whom Bernard essentially ‘picks up’ exiting a church, and who shares roughly the same age as Elisabeth but whose bourgeoise upbringing has cultivated in her an aggression not so much id-resplendent as ego-clear. She’s got her leopard-face one-piece swimsuit ‘at the ready’ beneath her clothes, beast’s maw stamped across her genitals with its eyes emblazoning her little breasts. Leonine totem and reward — promised and captured by King Bernard. And to continue hollering the hallali, we’d note another predatory parallel in the philosophy teacher who displays a fascination for elfin Elisabeth (and which actor we learn was Sabine Haudepin’s real boyfriend at the time of the shoot). Passe ton bac reminds us that in the case of Men v. Women, age difference can be used like a gavel. When the teacher next appears in the film after his attempted seduction of Elisabeth (whose eyes are open and corruptible) and their brief encounter in the supermarket, it’s when Elisabeth, by now pregnant, sits in his prep class: all is rote repetition. He intones the same speech we took in during the opening credits, which now has been uncovered not so much as the articulation of some wise ethos as a stump speech— (Endless repetition of presents.) — while his pronouncement of “congratulations” at Elisabeth descends like the most bitter and summary judgment. — (No future.)
And that’s the cinema. Films play back the same way every time. We return to them over and over again, even when they reveal unpleasant truths — or pose insolent questions, the answers to which it’s up to us to formulate (not regurgitate), to construct with our own battered material. The movies are mentors: we keep coming back out of admiration for their moxie. They’re a conversation, a sitting for a self-examination. The ‘characters’ don’t have a destiny because they don't need one. We do. For better or for worse, we are the cinema.
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Passe ton bac d'abord... — Dossier
The following originally appeared in the booklet for the 2009 Masters of Cinema UK DVD release of Passe ton bac d'abord... which I co-produced. As far as I'm aware these interviews had never appeared before in English translation. I've made some minor alterations in the translations presented here.
I'm posting these Pialat pieces on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features (and the Turkish shorts) that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord...— "The War of Art"— can be read here.
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
There are films like [Passe ton bac d’abord...], whereby the fact that it arrives by way of accidents does not damage the quality of the film — as though it were even supposed to arrive like that. La nuit du carrefour [Night at the Crossroads, Jean Renoir, 1932], for example, with its burned-up reel of which Mitry speaks, — it’s not clear that the film would have been better.
Yes, but it's got to be one of the films by Renoir that’s been seen the least. I have to tell you: I have many ideas in common with Daniel Toscan du Plantier — of course I’m kissing up to him since he produces me — he has information that I don’t have: for example, what he taught me about French cinema’s neo-Pétainism (which is not to speak of the Centre [National du cinématographe], which is a Vichy creation!). For example, when he says that the best films are the ones that do the best business. For him La grande illusion [The Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir, 1937] is better than La règle du jeu [The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir, 1939] — for my part, these days, I haven’t spent any time thinking about it. I liked La règle du jeu when it was released, but I like it a lot less now.
You prefer La grande illusion?
Oh, no, I don’t like La grande illusion that much either... I like Renoir less than I used to, too...
That’s complicated!
What I mean to say is that an artist doesn’t have any fun making things less good, provided he has talent, when he has some money for it compared to when he’s making things in private. So the films that do good business are still the best films.
That’s completely untrue nowadays.
No it isn’t. The films that don’t do good business are rather less good than the films that do... for example, Claude Zidi is much better than Marguerite Duras.
Is he better than Eustache, for example?
Zidi? No, because that’s not what Zidi’s supposed to be. Zidi is versatile, whereas Eustache isn’t. And if Zidi or someone other than him was pressed by demanding producers, they’d take the risk of being very interesting. But when a producer takes a look at the rushes and accepts to show L’aile ou la cuisse [The Wing or the Thigh, Claude Zidi, 1976], you can’t hope for much more... What I’m saying doesn’t seem serious to you?
No, it’s enough to see the number of interesting films that end up with less than 10,000 ticket sales.
Take the year 1977 — the best film, for me, was L’hôtel de la plage [The Hotel on the Beach, Michel Lang]... well, it’s the one that did best at the box office.
That doesn't mean a thing!
Basically, it’s Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot [Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Jacques Tati, 1953] made by a French reactionary who doesn’t have Tati’s talent, in 1976.
That's saying something!
I mean, of course it’s a shit film, but at least it has certain things that no-one does in France.
You are, in fact, dreaming of a production system that doesn’t exist anymore, and you’re talking like it did exist.
No, but I tell myself that maybe we’re coming to the end of an era that belonged to the cinephiles. You can't know what the cinema was like when you went into a neighborhood on a Saturday night and the curtain opened up and the whole theatre was in suspense (as much over whether it would be a turd of a film or something great). But when we create an ‘art et essai’ [‘arthouse’] category, everything goes downhill — I for one detest it. It’s elitism and snobbism, the worst... But maybe saying all of that’s not very original...
No, not very — it’s the discourse of all the right-wing has-beens who repeat that the cinema’s dead because of Duras.
No — I’d prefer to say it’s because the cinema’s dying that Duras is able to exist.
If the films effectively resemble one another, it’s certainly got nothing to do with cinephilia. It’s the result of a well-defined production-distribution system. And in any case, you yourself, you’re a total cinephile...
Of course. Everyone at one moment or another in his life (in his childhood, for example) is a cinephile, and I think that the film that sparked everything off for me was Renoir’s La bête humaine [The Human Beast, 1938], around the age of 13 or 14. I went to see it five, six times in a row (that’s cinephile behavior), but at that time everyone did that — typists went to see and see again the same film several times in a row. They’d get a hold of the script and photos from the film (there were popular magazines that would publish them). Today you make films at the cinema for people who have a certain culture and who love being an argumentative minority inside of a vaster majority — these are the people who have nothing to talk about and you can’t talk about anything with people who have nothing to talk about. A filmmaker is supposed to be like his audience, and I don’t feel like the actual audience for the cinema. Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble [We Won't Grow Old Together, Maurice Pialat, 1972] did well, I think, on the basis of a misunderstanding, and also because it was made to do well... Sometimes I say that ever since, I would have had to make ten films that would have been able to do as well, but it’s never certain — I wonder where I’d have been looking for them, ‘my audience’, as Jeanson would have put it. Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble is a film that pleased the older section of the audience.
That’s the segment of the audience that’s a bit less critical: the older audience members.
There’s also segments of the audience for Bruce Lee... For those films, there’s an audience that still exists, and then of course there’s one for pornos. They’ve got a certain purity. And what’s remarkable is that those films, more often than not made in three or four days, are technically pretty close to the level of the average French film. Ever since I’ve been watching porn films, I say to myself: All French films should cost as much as pornos. We should be capable of telling a story in the same amount of time it takes to shoot a porn film. It’s a little too fast for getting the acting down... but I’m sure there are amazing things that can be done with porn stars. Of course the big drawback with porn is the misogyny, and that’s unacceptable...!
These days, to say something to that audience (which includes immigrants, young people), you’d have to be able to do the actual equivalent of what was once a B-film, and that isn’t possible with the production-distribution system in France.
But it’s not impossible. Maybe if I were less isolated, I’d have been able to do it three or four years ago. You’d have to have a [Roger] Corman in France... and theatres would follow.
Let’s go back a bit to Passe ton bac d’abord...— it involves a group of young people, and yet the choice of each one is extremely precise, one doesn’t have any impression of a group that’s just been slung together: each character is completely singular. I’d like to find out how you chose these young people since a lot of them aren’t professional actors.
We started shooting the first script and we found different actors whom we needed to keep in mind, by way of a video recorder.
You use a video recorder to make tests?
Yes — before, I didn’t make tests, and I realized I was wrong not to. Not that video tests are any insurance, but all the same you find out a little bit about where you’re heading. This might last for a shorter time than it seems, though: I noticed this on Loulou [Maurice Pialat, 1980 – at the time of this interview Pialat had just completed the film], in which I hired people who made fantastic video tests, and who were very disappointing in the film.
For Passe ton bac d’abord..., I met a group within which almost every one of the young people was good. The selection went a little differently: those who were best had a longer role — that’s all there was to it. It was up to us to switch the scenes around. For example, this girl who replaced another who was introduced to us as being part of the gang, who just happened to be sitting in the café next door, was excellent and yet she was very bad in her tests.
It’s because a lot of elements have to be taken into account at the moment you’re shooting the scene that inevitably don’t crop up during the tests: primarily the interest in the scene, a certain emulation, or even a rivalry, a sort of confidence, that can come after a certain amount of time and which doesn’t pop up right away. Often when you have bad tests it’s because someone’s uncomfortable or they have the jitters — it usually doesn’t mean they’ll be bad on the set.
It’s very important, the contact established on the set with the actors. Afterwards too, I really like to follow the people I’ve made the movie with, the ones who stood out, to do something again with them. It’s no accident that the story that kicked off everything with Passe ton bac is something that happened to a girl who was in L’enfance-nue [Naked-Childhood, Maurice Pialat, 1968]. On Loulou too I reused some of the people from Passe ton bac. It’s because you always have the impression of knowing people well at the end of production, so you want to start again with them ‘in full knowledge of the facts’, if you can put it that way.
And basically it doesn’t have to do only with non-professionals. I think by the end of Loulou too, with [Isabelle] Huppert, we got to know each other well. And I think if we hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been as good as she is in the film. However, [Gérard] Depardieu cleared a path for himself on Loulou, as he does in all his films; he’s like [Philippe] Léotard or Macha Méril — it’s not that they’re bad, but that they’re not really there, and there’s no contact with them. Rocky, the boy who was the truck driver in Passe ton bac d’abord... and whom I used again on Loulou, is someone who completely blows away all preconceptions about professional vs. amateur. That kid, the first second he stepped in front of the camera he became an amazing professional. On the level of unbelievable details that aren’t always visible on the screen but which have a tremendous importance on the set: knowing how to shift his position while being conscious of the possibilities of the framing, of the requirements of the lighting, etc. On Loulou, he practically improvised the ending to a scene by shifting a millimeter closer to us. He’s really an exceptional actor. And then there was something very strong between us. This doesn’t happen all the time — Macha Méril or Léotard, whatever their qualities might be as actors, nothing interesting happens with them, and it shows in their films. There are things you can no longer ask to have actors say. In Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, for example, Méril was supposed to say some naïve things, things a little girl would say, essentially. We shot those scenes, and she was impossible. We had to reshoot them with different dialogue. The original was no doubt too naïve for the cinema of now: those phrases, they were unspeakable, as my co-scenarist, Arlette Langmann, would have put it. And in the end Macha Méril created a female character of the present day, whom you think of as being less a character of the nineteenth century, than the one I wanted her to portray. You could no longer do La porteuse de pain [The Bread-Girl, Xavier de Montépin, 1884] these days; there’s no longer any place for melodrama, and that’s a shame. Jean Yanne also made a total switch-around of his character in the film. But there I expected as much; I knew him, and he wasn’t going to do a melodramatic role for me; there was no way he was going to be crying over a woman. Anyway, in the movies men aren’t supposed to cry — it’s what I had him say in Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble. Except in Ordet [The Word, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955].
Passe ton bac d’abord... was shot in 35mm?
Yes, and I can assure you that technically speaking it’s at the level of a film made for 3 million francs. [Earlier in the interview Pialat mentions that the film was made for 50 million francs. —ed.]
The color makes one think of the latest film by Godard for the cinema, Comment ça va [How’s It Going, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976].
I don’t go to see his films anymore.
At the level of the writing, do you see a difference between Passe ton bac d’abord... and films like Rozier’s Adieu Philippine [1962] or Doillon’s Les doigts dans la téte [Fingers in the Head / Touched in the Head, 1974]? In Rozier it’s obviously more improvised, and in Doillon it’s written a lot like you. We could say of Passe ton bac: it’s Adieu Philippine ’79; this wouldn’t be off-base, and yet your film’s unique, different. What do you have to say about this?
I think in Adieu Philippine there are qualities missing from Passe ton bac d’abord.... You know, I personally think that Rozier is the only French filmmaker who has any talent. I’d like to produce Rozier, and I think we should be able to pull it off, even at this particular point in time.
From this point of view [that of coöperative/communal filmmaking] too Godard is interesting, as he’s staked out a relative autonomy with regard to production — he’s started up his own small enterprise Sonimage... Maybe you’d have some things to say about this; it’s a shame that you detest him so much.
I don't even want to look at him. It’s a shame he’s stronger than me, as he’s one of the rare people that I’d jump on top of if he walked into this room, right here right now. Unfortunately he’s pretty strong — he knows how to walk on his hands. He did it in front of everyone on Le mépris [Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard, 1963], in front of Bardot. In any case there’s something I can’t deny — it’s that his films age very poorly. A long time ago À bout de souffle [Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard, 1959] made me die of laughter, but I’m pretty sure that Pierrot le fou [Pierrot the Fool, Jean-Luc Godard, 1965], which I found middling, has also aged pretty quickly.
Godard becomes truly unique after Tout va bien [Everything’s Going Fine, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972], and everything he’s made since then is really exciting.
This often happens: someone makes things that aren’t very good for ten years and then he starts making things that are good. That proves you don’t have to get discouraged! And then again, with him at least, he has imagination. You know, I wanted to be part of (I’ll say it clearly: I wanted to be part of) the Nouvelle Vague — it’s true and it’s thanks to him that I most wanted to be part of it, as he was the most interesting one of all the others combined. But I don’t like his Swiss spirit. And then there’s the fact that he’s someone who’s been copied a lot. It’s the opposite with me — I’m accused of plagiarism and have already been sentenced with regard to Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, the only film I’ve made that did any business. I hope there'll be someone around when it goes up for appeal. What I had to shell out in the way of legal fees — 80,000 francs — was my pay for the film!
You’re never happy with your films, especially once they’ve been released. When Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble came out, you said it was your worst film. You say you’re not satisfied with Passe ton bac d’abord....
I think you should never say your latest film is the best — if you do, you’re dead. It’s more valuable to say it has no value. But in all seriousness, what I can say about Passe ton bac d’abord... is that if it had had the budget it required, we could have made a film on the level of I vitelloni [The Fellas, Federico Fellini, 1953]. And I’m furious at not having had the budget to do that (even if I don’t have enormous admiration for I vitelloni, at least it tells a story, and was able to define an entire era, and this film won’t do that because we hadn’t been able to engulf ourselves in the same way). And yet I think it’s better than La gueule ouverte [The Slack-Jawed Mug / The Open Trap / The Gaping Maw, Maurice Pialat, 1974] for example, a film I got a little burnt-out on...•
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
You just finished Passe ton bac d’abord..., and now you’ve got another film in progress?
Loulou would have been released before Passe ton bac d’abord... but Isabelle Huppert was signed-on to work on something else, so we had to interrupt the shoot. The film will be finished a few weeks from now.
Did you use non-professional actors in Passe ton bac d’abord...?
Actually, the notion of ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ is completely arbitrary; everything depends on the direction of the actors. In Passe ton bac d’abord..., there’s one family made up of professional actors, and another of people from the region and ‘amateurs’. Among the six professionals, four performed for me again in Loulou, and I had wanted to use one of the non-professional girls in a sequence with Depardieu — but the parents were opposed to it. Working like this, you come across some amazing people; if I could come back to the area, I’d make a film with them...
Rocky, in any case, the young husband, has a role in Loulou that’s much too small for my tastes, and the truck driver, a Northern kid, will be acting in the film I’m preparing which takes place in the Auvergne. So, what’s an amateur actor?
Why did you choose Lens as the setting of the film?
The North is a region well-known, and loved, by me. You speak well about what you love. The film could have been shot anywhere. But in a town like Lens, for the film’s preparation, for the production, affinities matter... In the Parisian suburbs, it would have been practically impossible; the people are evasive. Of course, ten years on in Lens (from the time of L’enfance-nue), people have changed, obviously, but there are still some interesting folks, who aren’t completely devoured by daily life. Half the actors are Polish; I love the Poles, immigrants, I’m no xenophobe... They’ve come here looking for something, they’ve tried to make a life for themselves; it’s interesting.
It seems that in Passe ton bac d’abord... the group takes precedence over individual characters?
It was done with sincerity; there’s authenticity there... maybe, even, it’s more a group than individuals. Given that there are so many of them, they’re more interesting. I would have been able to shoot for a longer time, I would have tried going further; the group is the kickoff to the whole thing, you don’t see them on their own — that’s the film; it was supposed to have a sequel... This isn’t a group that exists in real life; two or three of them know each other, but it’s a group put together as a function of the scenario, as a function of the film.
This isn’t cinéma-vérité. That doesn’t exist. Everything is always reconstituted. The only truth of the cinema is what’s filmed with sincerity; there’s authenticity there. The scenario was written with young people in mind, the dialogue was entirely scripted, but there’s a sort of interaction that brings about some alterations; the film ‘leans’ towards the group.
For the dialogue, at the last minute, a phrase can be modified. I chose their way of speaking instead of my own... But they both signify the same thing.
Why this theme: adolescents?
The kids in L’enfance-nue were supposed to act in a film whose scenario was written: Les filles du faubourg [The Girls of the Faubourg]. Is there any essential difference between adolescents in the Sixties and those of today? Adolescence is the age of telling lies, of mythomania. This is why you have to take them at face-value.
I have the feeling that the adolescents in Passe ton bac d’abord... are, in part, mired in a kind of lassitude, of disillusionment...
Yeah, but do you think they’re aware of it?... These are spoiled children, brought up like petits bourgeois. Bear in mind that in real life, some of them had come to Paris (when a film is finished, the relationships I’ve formed don’t really come to an end) — Patrick and Bernard. The room we found for them, they didn’t show up to move into it until three months later, completely astonished that we didn’t hold on to it for them. I took them out to dinner at a girlfriend’s place — the ride to La Défense seemed long and boring to them... They only took the white meat from the chicken that was served... And then they left again... They weren’t capable of dealing with life in Paris.
In the film, I never push — and I could have been harder about this — to show the ones puking all over the ones who slave away in a factory, “fight tooth-and-nail, hell, no need to study to get to do that.” And yet it was a pilot plant. There were people there who had left school, and done nothing else. Certain forms of leftism get unclogged when you’re pimping yourself out. They’re in total contradiction with themselves — Maoist, and rejecting all discipline...
There’s a general deficiency; familial ‘paternalism’ still exists in the region, but it’s been given a pounding by obligatory schooling — why go to school? Why get your bac? Our culture hasn’t appropriated life... What adolescent isn’t aware of his own worth? He receives a certain ‘off-hours’ education that belongs neither to the present era, nor to the past... This echoes inside of him: he’d like to do things, he’s ‘almost’ given the opportunity to do them, and, in fact, he’s more stripped away of potential than he was beforehand. Once, the maréchal-ferrant [‘blacksmith farrier’] for example, had his pride, he knew how to do something... But them, these young people, almost every worker’s son is privileged, and never has anything in his hands!
I’m clear about these matters, but I’m pessimistic — the truth of the production is to show authentic adolescents; you have to see things, people, like them. They were born into an era where they can’t be anything else. Our culture makes children fat — they’ll be eating through the others... slim pickings!
Which pertains to the construction of the film: there are very few close-ups.
Close-ups are interesting sometimes, even exciting — in Bergman, for example. But in certain instances they’re useless for ‘underlining the text with red ink’. Lumière filmed togetherness, that is, life. Ozu did it just as much. The sharp montage that belongs to me, the short sequences provide movement, life, and Pierre-William Glenn's brilliant, deep colors provide the warmth of that life.•
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
Do you have a definition of realism?
That’s a pretty tough question. More often than not, realism gets confused with miserablism, or the picturesque, or else something gets called ‘realist’ because it’s shot with direct sound in improvised locations that haven’t been scouted out beforehand — but it’s only a question of budget, it’s not a question of conviction.
However, what can be called my ‘realism’, is the fact that I want to depict people, places, classes I’m familiar with, and depict them as sincerely as possible while taking off from a concrete reality.
You’ve been a painter — what sort of painting did you used to do, and has it got any relation to your cinematographic style?
I’m figurative. Abstract disgusts me. Even as an ‘amateur’, I’d be hard-pressed to move toward abstraction. The same with music, in any case. Serial music holds very little interest for me.
In cinema I detest what gets called ‘gorgeous photography’. Of course, Glenn or Almendros are talented cameramen. But my dream is an unnoticable photography.
What really matters is what you have to say, the story you’re telling. People everywhere have the tendency to talk about ‘tone’, to privilege this or that ‘tone’ — but tone isn’t everything...
Not very long ago you were very harsh about French cinema.
Oh, I haven’t changed my tune on that. It’s a bad cinema. Let’s be clear: I’m part of this whole mix. It would be too easy to critique and then to go and feel all nice and secure about yourself.
French cinema wasn’t always bad. I’d place its decline at the appearance of the Nouvelle Vague.
There are several reasons for this: all those auteurs were from the margins, people who loved the cinema but who didn’t know how to make it. The success of their very small-budgeted films did considerable harm to the French cinema.
I know I’m hardly going to please your team here, but I think Godard has done enormous harm to the French cinema.
Don’t you think that it’s the framework that the Nouvelle Vague gave birth to that has allowed the belief that anyone can make a movie?
Yes — I’m going to cite Renoir. Of course, it’s said that he became a reactionary toward the end of his life... It’s true that he lived in America, and even that he died there! Put crudely, I’d say: “If you have a nice bottle for six it’s a celebration; if you’ve got thirty, you serve liters and liters of water and nothing more than that.”
I wouldn’t want to be an elitist, and I’m not one in the choice of my subjects; I don’t want to prevent other people from expressing themselves either. But budgets aren’t indefinitely expensible. The government’s support (via the CNC) is divvied up into little packages to allow unknowns to make a movie.
At times I’d rather they give support to Clément or Franju, who know how to work.
I know it’s neither democratic nor socialist to make such a remark, but it’s a mistake to believe that everyone has the right to make a movie. Everyone has the right to express himself, of course, but not to squander public funding.
The people in the Nouvelle Vague never really had any power (I mean money; they never had big budgets); there was this gap between intimist cinema and the other kind.
Godard has sometimes had big budgets. Rarely, actually. But, for example, with Le mépris, he succeeded with the miracle of making an intimist film with a very big budget.
You have the reputation of being a man of the Right.
Oh! là là, where do I stand? I know, I’ve supported a certain list. I was wrong. And anyway, I should have minded my own business...
I’m on the Left. I’ve always voted Left (when I’ve voted) except for that mistake referenced above. But when I found out that the people on the Left could be as shit-sucking as the people on the Right, it was a hard truth to swallow...
You have to watch the films I make...
The newspapers are full of lovely declarations about the population. But there’s an anti-popular racism at play.
The reviews (especially the ones from newspapers on the Right) are bad for Passe ton bac. But it’s not me they’re attacking. It’s the film’s protagonists; they say they’re good-for-nothings, that they’re just hanging around, that their region is ugly... They’re attacking them, with maliciousness and stupidity.•
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
[The June 1981 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, no. 325, contained the continuation to a series that posed a survey of twenty questions to a diverse array of French, and francophone, filmmakers. What follows are Maurice Pialat’s responses.]
1. François Truffaut recently said: “What makes me happy in movies is that it provides me with the best possible schedule.” Have you been happy with your schedule over these last ten years?
One may think François Truffaut only made movies to have the best schedule possible. Are you happy with your schedule (as a filmmaker) when you haven’t done anything for such a long time, or done so little?
2. How did you learn your craft as a filmmaker? What place do you give to technical know-how?
Like many others, in the movie theatres. Which means that when you’re making your first film you don’t know anything. This contributes to the degeneration of the cinema.
3. Do you have the feeling that one should conform to a model in the French cinema?
?!
4. Are you the auteur of your films?
For the most part, always. 100%, sometimes.
5. Are you reaching your audience?
For ‘my audience’, I’ll send you to Henri Jeanson.
6. Do you think that critics have been fair towards French cinema over the last ten years?
Critics say every film is a masterpiece, and taken as a whole — they’re nothing.
7. Which French film since 1968 has left the biggest impression on you?
L’hôtel de la plage by [Michel] Lang.
8. What for you has been the event missing from the past decade?
Outside of movies, I guess the rise of Southeast Asia and what it had to give, for sure.
9. What part of your cinephilia has made it into your films?
Lightness.
10. At what moments do you most feel like a French filmmaker?
Never. You are one, you don’t feel it.
11. Which part of French cinema’s heritage do you feel you have the most in common with?
Lumière. Pagnol. Renoir.
12. Many filmmakers act in their own films. Do you?
———
13. Are there areas of film craft that you find particularly stimulating?
The studio. Dolby.
14. Are there any stories that French cinema could tell the rest of the world?
Stories of schmucks and cowards.
15. Are there any subjects inaccessible to French cinema?
Subjects that involve more than two extras.
16. Are there things you forbid yourself from filming?
Nick’s Movie. [aka Lightning Over Water— the 1980 film made by Wim Wenders with Nicholas Ray, chronicling Ray’s last days of life in 1979 as he was coping with terminal cancer. —ed.]
17. What represents today’s American cinema for you?
Italians, Jews, and special effects. Not much America.
18. What link do you see between your work in cinema and in television (if you’ve made anything there)?
———
19. What is your dream project?
The war in Vendée. A chronicle of a French family from ’36 to ’48.
20. Have actors changed?
They buy châteaux (the stars) and wine chez Nicolas in place of living, like before, like free spirits.•
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Sequence: Four Short Stories
James Alexander Warren's 4-Short Anthology
James Alexander Warren's (aka Alex Warren's aka @alericanflag's) collection* is an anthology film, an extended-play, a slim volume — four short films adapted from four short stories written by Warren a couple years back. The title speaks to the sketch-like nature of the individual pieces and, simply, to the back-to-back linking of one 'sequence' to the next. It carries another suggestion: "Sequence: Four Short Stories" is the sort of title you might find attached to what's called an avant-garde or experimental film, and it invites the viewer both to identify elements common to the four sequences, or, what's more, to accept their sequencing as, to use a-g lingo, "chance".
What is the purpose of the short film? — which I'll propose as 'its own form' only on the basis that it's certainly considered such by the majority of global festivals when they're soliciting submissions or programming lineups. Is the short film — lasting, say, under 25 minutes — a calling-card? Neither Warren, nor his young-and-indie contemporary Dustin Guy Defa, wholly conceive it as such. Warren: Shorts can be assembled into a single collection. Defa, whose body of short work was just presented in sequence at a single screening in the New York Film Festival: "I make short films to figure out the kinds of features I want to make." Shorts can be financed discretely across time; can be slipped in at the front-end of a big-screen feature presentation; can be uploaded to online platforms that accommodate the bite-sized (pay-to-stream/DL, gratis embed); can be assembled sequentially into a feature-length or overt anthology and, provided no out-standing contractual obligations with the principals exist, can be sold to a distributor or distribution platform as a single license.
The stories of Sequence are set in and around Jackson, Mississippi, but don't belong to that category of U.S. Southern cinema a friend of mine told me he can't stand because so much of it "is about guys with their shirts off."
*Although Sequence has screened publicly at Cinefamily, Anthology, and seven other venues, Warren currently plans to present the stories separately.
The 'sketch'-est of the four stories, Yazoo Women involves three guys transporting a John Deere riding mower back to its owner from the yard where it underwent repair. They set out in daylight and arrive in the evening at the owner's house only to find the scene is a gals-only happy-divorce party. The host invites the guys inside, and a one-sided-awkward collision takes place between the three blue-collar/odd-job Gen-Y'ers-or-Millennials and the done-up blouse enthusiasts who gyrate beneath the pulsing party bulbs. A 180-degree pan reveals the yardbirds as wallflowers, before a few of the revelers coax them to engage, the music transforming from uptempo kitsch to a late-night soul-jam. Unforeseen couples embrace swaying in languid slow pans across turning torsos and chins nestled in shadows between heads and shoulders. The fluidity of the camerawork (operated by Azod Abedikichi and Robby Piantanida, who plays one of the guys alongside Arrmon Abedikichi and Dau Mabil) and sound-design (Chase Everett) sets a precedent for the other three stories: voice-over and sounds that lap over cuts (which at times can also, conversely, be dry, abrupt, and ironic), music tracks that mix one-into-the-other, ambient aural interludes between the sequences; most of the 'stories' can be apprehended with eyes closed, like radio- or podcast-plays à la Joe Frank...
As in all four of the shorts, another car-ride, another party. Jamie (Jamie Granato) and Roshada (Chasity Williams) lover-spat after the latter's ex, Jake (Jermaine Harden), ran into her at a grocery store and landed a lip-kiss. Jamie thinks Jake's purporting to play for the Harlem Globetrotters is bullshit. The couple head to Jake's house-party later that night, and Jamie confronts the 6'5" host. A coda finds a new-age therapist guiding Jamie through a lesson in "dreamscaping."
The lessons of Dreamscaping include economize totally, get in and get out, deliver a comic combination in every scene. Warren demonstrates himself a more than "capable" director of comedy, with more than "ample" gifts in timing the cuts and giving the actors their freedom to be funny. (Maybe in a few years we'll just shorthand him as JAW?) Jamie Granato's a more amped-up Kevin Corrigan, beleaguered and fearless. When he follows Jake through the crowd at the party, JAW's camera tracks from behind in a low-angle that ridiculously monumentalizes the Globetrotter; a high-angle in the ensuing shot-reverse-shot kitchen convo also brings much mirth. Ditto re: the copy of Cassavetes on Cassavetes in the background of (left jab) the therapist's office in this film which (right hook) does not aspire to replicate any po-faced Cassavetes stylistics. JAW's covered.
"Temperature" as a slip for "Temptation" in this, the comic-dramatic crucible of the Sequence shorts, wherein Father Martin (David Aaron Baker, perfectly calibrating the character to every encounter), an Episcopal priest, hosts a dinner party for a group of friends on the occasion of dispersing the cremated ashes of deceased Robert. Father Martin chatting on his cell with his mother and father while practicing one-hand free-throws on the church basketball court (a single three- or four-minute shot with the camera craning from on high earthward before closing in on the character). Audio Japanese lessons in the car back from the liquor store before a suburban gang eggs the windshield. ("Pussy.") Swing between drunken emotions, reminiscences of the priest's and guests' dead friend, a chanced kiss, and a spine-tingling final shot.
A brilliant compact study, and the only modern American film to examine the priestly calling for what it so often is: a means of erecting defenses and mitigating the corporeal world.
Struggling actor Jeffrey (Thom Shelton) goes fuck-out for the role of a generic gangster at an audition inside a recording studio, while director Warren (credited as "Alan Warner") looks on from the booth and offers the suggestion: "Feel free to add your own spin to it." Afterward Jeffrey accompanies his wife Rayah (Akua Carson) to her gig as a party-clown at a children's library. (Nod of solidarity to Altman's Short Cuts [1993] and the Carver short-story source material.) One of the attending kids' dads chats Jeffrey up about what it's like to fuck his wife before a kid punches him in the dick. From there, it's off to a fundraising party for the film Jeffrey and his "beat-poet" friend Richard (Landon Whitton) are prepping to make, provisionally titled It's Never Cold in Vegas. In a full-circle to Yazoo Women Rayah and Jeffrey get drunk and slow-dance; Rayah blows across the lip of a beer bottle to make the sound of a ship's horn as waves lap at the soundtrack and the film cuts to their bathroom faucet. A grand tracking shot through the rooms of the couple's cavernous, labyrinthine life- and work-space/-loft suggests the internalized chambers of inspiration and experience within and by which art and life commingle. Jeffrey wheels a spotlight over and aims it at Rayah, regal at her decks, intones processed words over electronic hum. From a high shot, the camera pans upward. End-cut to black.
One senses It's Never Cold in Vegas as the most explicitly personal for Warren of the four works, and that in any case it's the one Richard Brody will praise most. Yet the sequence is the thing, and it grants us an early survey of the broad scope of Warren's concerns, proving the writer-director, moreover, talented enough to address the lot of them with eloquence and a cogency to match their complexity.
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À nos amours. - Dossier: The Pialat Code + Pialat/Godard
Acknowledging first the death of Chantal Akerman. June 6, 1950 – October 5, 2015. Her new film No Home Movie is set to screen tomorrow night as part of the New York Film Festival, and a Q&A with Akerman was to follow. RIP.
The following originally appeared in the booklet for the 2010 Masters of Cinema UK DVD release of À nos amours. [To Our Romance. / Here's to Love., 1983] which I co-produced.
Dan Sallitt's brilliant must-read essay on the film which appeared in the booklet has just been posted at his blog, here.
(One of the best disc supplements of all-time can be found on the Criterion DVD release of the film: Jean-Pierre Gorin speaking about the movie.)
I'm posting these Pialat pieces on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features (and the Turkish shorts) that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord...— "The War of Art"— can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.
by Craig Keller
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
[This interview was published in its complete form in Le Monde on February 16, 1984. The editors’ note that prefaced this interview, excerpted in the special issue of the Cahiers du cinéma (no. 576) in February 2003 devoted to Pialat upon his death, read as follows:
“Recently, Jean-Luc Godard expressed the wish to do a remake of Jean Renoir’s La chienne [The Bitch, 1931], with Maurice Pialat in Michel Simon’s role. Not the first convergence between the two monuments. Early 1984, À nos amours. and Prénom Carmen [First Name Carmen, Jean-Luc Godard, 1983] have been released in theatres. Given that the films have a connection with one another, certain individuals wanted to see the men connect. And they’ve accepted, at the initiative of Alain Bergala taken up by Claude Davy, to have a discussion in Rolle at JLG’s home, without a “moderator” journalist. Excerpts from a three-hour conversation from these personalities who are as similar to one another as they are opposed. What is an ‘auteur’? What does it mean to be ‘unfair’? What is the connection to the ‘theme’?”]
JEAN-LUC GODARD: [...] I think what gets called an “auteur film” has been a real — in the end every catastrophe is beneficial, maybe — but has been a real catastrophe, and those who get called auteurs [authors] these days in movies, people wouldn’t dare call them auteurs in literature.
MAURICE PIALAT: [...] Wrong or right, those I recognise as having always had something like ambition, that gets closer to the auteur, but the auteur as he’s understood in theatre. In fact, what I have regrets about in all my films has to do sometimes with the absence of the scenario, and even when it’s there, it’s too diffuse, poorly put together, not worked out enough.
And when it comes right down to it, if I continue making films in a certain sphere, and since we’re condemned to intimist cinema due to a lack of access to funding, I’d essentially have to turn into a writer — whereas I don’t consider myself a writer — I have a lot of trouble writing — I’d end up writing a film the way one writes a theatrical play. I don’t think it’s what you yourself are looking to do; you’ve shown as much up to the present.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: Ah! there you have it, I’d really like to be able to — me, who started making films by writing dialogue. Even before the Cahiers du cinéma, I had a column in Arts; I remember a reproach I cast against the French cinema of the time. When someone dropped off a script, he always said: “I’m off.” Whereas I used to say, when you drop off a script, you should say: “I’ll be back.” This was the reality of it. I really liked dialogue. These days, I’d like to be like a theatre auteur [ / playwright], having neither technicians nor actors; just having the subject. And as you can see, I’m not getting there...
MAURICE PIALAT: Yes, but why not then? It’s a question I want to put to you.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: When “auteur” gets said, it conjures up what became of Duvivier, or even Carné in a sense... I mean: the subject was no longer there; you find it more in Guitry, Pagnol, or Cocteau, or in Renoir, who was accused of doing rush-jobs, and we said: No, he rushes things through in the name of a superior interest, and it’s much better, much more rigorous than a film like La symphonie pastorale [The Pastoral Symphony, Jean Delannoy, 1946]. This is what it was, this auteur notion. Today, the difficulty has to do with the relationship to the subject. What I had a problem with in À nos amours.— because one has to criticise himself, so I hope you’ll be just as mean — I think you’ve gotten pretty soft in the last two or three years, I don’t know if it’s the result of politics...
MAURICE PIALAT: No, no.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: ...or because it was in your self-interest, or out of fatigue, or out of going off and having a good time...
MAURICE PIALAT: Neither out of self-interest nor going off having a good time.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: It disturbs me: À nos amours. is much more of a rush-job than Passe ton bac d’abord.... Because of this hodgepodge, if I had to defend it in a piece of criticism, I’d defend Pialat, but I’d attack the film. What’s missing in À nos amours., and what eluded me in Prénom Carmen (maybe it can’t be spotted very well because there’s a subject that is there, in the title, which everyone’s familiar with [i.e., “Carmen”] ), is: What was the subject? We saw it better in Passe ton bac d’abord.... And it seems to me that, in real films, sometimes ones that are a little challenging, when the subjects are new they have a hard time coming across [i.e., via the titles and the films themselves]. La règle du jeu [The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir, 1939], which was a subject more contemporary than La grande illusion [The Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir, 1937], has had a harder time getting itself across.
[...] Our two films resemble each other because they were made in the same era, but don’t resemble each other at all in their approach or the anxiety over the future that they might have, through the idea that they’re made out of cinema. I’d really just like to do dialogue for the theatre, but I’d be incapable of writing the first line, whereas when I think about a film, it quickly changes into something else, but I’ve barely ever written any sentence that leads right into another one. You’ve wanted to make theatre. Doesn’t that have something to do with the actors?
MAURICE PIALAT: To make filmed theatre, I’ll reiterate, due to budgetary matters. If you had a big budget, you wouldn’t make theatre, because what you want to capture doesn’t show up on a stage.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: [...] But you’ve spoken about unfairness, and that’s a feeling I’ve never had. I’ve always heard you say “it’s unfair”, and that you’d like to do something...
MAURICE PIALAT: I’d really like for once to have a budget that corresponds to the film I want to make.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: But are you being serious here?
MAURICE PIALAT: Oh, of course I am!
JEAN-LUC GODARD: Because for me, I realized that whenever I’d say that, actually, it wasn’t sincere. I said to myself: “I’d really like for once to shoot a film on the equivalent of the big soundstage at MGM, or have a big film to make every now and then.” [...] But I see that that wasn’t really me being sincere. Is it that if you had twelve billion [francs] to make Passe ton bac...
MAURICE PIALAT: But at that point I wouldn’t make Passe ton bac.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: Yes, but do you find it unfair to be making Passe ton bac? In the end it’s what you were meant to do, all the same.
MAURICE PIALAT: No it's not! I was forced to make Passe ton bac, because there was a problem with money with the CNC. I came to understand that I was already having problems in the course of production and it would be still more difficult afterward. With the nickels-and-dimes that were left over I’d have to shoot a film, in spite of what I’d been imagining, in place of Passe ton bac, to make something in the way of Le camion [The Truck, Marguerite Duras, 1977], which is to say, one evening, two people, a table, and a camera. I would have been able to.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: For us, that’s a rush-job, whereas for Duras, it’s not a rush-job.
MAURICE PIALAT: But it’s an issue that it gets to that point.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: On Passe ton bac, there’s no pun intended saying you were controlled, but I think it’s one of your most controlled films, too.
MAURICE PIALAT: I accept — and I’m in a better place knowing that it’s true — that À nos amours. is considered a rush-job. But Passe ton bac is much more of a rush-job than À nos amours.. I shot À nos amours. with even less enthusiasm, and surely you can feel it, but Passe ton bac really is a bad memory.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: Do you think you have more difficulties than others do?
MAURICE PIALAT: Yes. On the other hand, I’ve recognized for a little while now that I’m largely responsible for these difficulties. At the time of L’enfance-nue [Naked-Childhood, 1968] that irritated Truffaut, who was co-producer: it was always other people’s fault, I was always the one whining. I had my reasons, but actually it was my way of conducting myself too that made things turn out like that.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: But sometimes do you say to yourself: “Look, if I could have the budget of Fort Saganne [Alain Corneau, 1984]...”?
MAURICE PIALAT: Maybe not at this point. But yeah, I’ve wished for that before. I put a lot of time into mulling it over, and I continue to believe that you have to have a decent budget to shoot. I think the importance, the quality of the means at hand, exert their influence on the merit of the works produced. Not a little bit — a lot. After shooting Loulou [1980] I had the desire to write a book, as objectively as possible, which would have revisited the script pages, the notes in the margins. I let it go because I figured it would put people to sleep. But the shoot of the film had been exhausting. The three lead actors were no longer around at the end of the shoot, they’d all taken off. I had to wait one year before redoing continuity shots.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: This happens on almost every film. On Prénom Carmen, they checked out from the beginning of production, vanished into thin air. Okay, they’re gone, you stop, but that’s big stars for you. For Passion [1982], I didn’t have any. Hanna Schygulla, Isabelle Huppert, Jerzy Radziwiłowicz didn’t fulfill their contract. That said, they were placed in some conditions, difficult for them, and left waiting a very long time. [...] There was a dropping out right from the point of departure that there wouldn’t have been at one point in time, and you find yourself alone again. Especially if you don’t have the typical words, the typical utensils or typical behavior, to have the belief that there’s something that exists, that’s beautiful, that’s worth the pain of investment. My only real connection was with, I believe, the real creators: producer and director, it’s both of them together. But you have to try to do something else. I personally find the fact that you say, “It’s unfair,” unfair.
MAURICE PIALAT: In a certain way, ever since I’ve started making movies, I’ve never had producers, except on certain parts of La maison des bois [The House in the Woods, 1971], and I’m sure that’s apparent in the film. There were people behind me supporting me.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: Happily, I’ve known one or two who’ve helped me out in becoming a producer myself as well, so I wouldn’t be completely alone on a film. What’s lacking everywhere is the relation to the subject. [...] But this business of lacking funds isn’t true. Let’s take the premise “three people in a room”. These days three people in a room, if you have a million francs, you have what you need to pay them and make a beautiful film, as long as you’ve got beautiful ideas. “Lack of funding” always gets said in movies. A man of letters never complains about the fact that there are too few letters in the alphabet.
MAURICE PIALAT: I recognize (and the fact hasn’t escaped me) that I’ve always looked over at my neighbor’s plate if he had more than I did.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: More, but to do what with?
MAURICE PIALAT: Let’s take Loulou, an average budget, 7 million [francs]. The producer who would have allowed me to shoot with more money would have had the right to say: this scenario is too vague, not worked through enough. I’ll be the first to admit it.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: [...] That’s what’s missing these days, but even still it’s relating to the subject. So what do you call “subject”? I’d say that there’s no “object” instead, the object that the film is, like a piece of fruit — and you could say that the subject is the pit of the fruit, to take this comparison into a slightly stupid area. The only subjects are human beings. There are 400,000 tickets sold to grateful subjects, there are 20,000 tickets sold to dissatisfied subjects, as Rochefort once said. That’s all there is to it. I’d rather say: there’s no objective relationship with the subject. [...] I find that in the cinema, the film no longer ever gets spoken about.
MAURICE PIALAT: Yes, it’s amazing.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: When we started out, we were our own producers, if you will, insofar as when we spoke, there was the remembrance of one word coming after the other. And for me, the two or three good producers I had, they were people who at certain points would lob criticism, but there was a relationship. You can’t be alone in cinema, and the auteur is an ensemble. [...] Concerning yourself, it seems [...] that we’ve come to a non-relationship with the subject. In my case too, someone would have to analyze me, in one way or another, but given the nature of critiques, I’m in the role of the one analyzing you. Even the fact of playing the father in À nos amours., unconsciously, psychologically, it must have come from this place too, just like the fact that I acted a little in my film. To provide another piece, something we were missing. To have an excess of responsibility at a certain spot where you were thinking there wasn’t enough of something else.
It comes back to my idea, and you’re not buying it whatsoever. A film of three people in a room, it might cost a billion francs; it might cost 20 billion francs if Redford’s in it. But if it’s only got unknowns in it, and it’s made in five, six weeks... Everything depends on the films. [...] And today, I don’t understand, having seen video, the lighting techniques, a filmmaker would at least be able, if he has the subject, to provide a sampler of it, having the taste of guys like Rohmer, who made a lot of 16mm, but all by himself, and silent. Rohmer shot silent films because he had the desire to shoot them. He wrote because he needed to write.
You, for example, if you don’t have money to shoot, would you even make a film?
MAURICE PIALAT: After Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble [We Won't Grow Old Together, 1972], where I thought I’d brought more money in than I actually did, I told myself: I’m gonna buy a camera, which isn’t necessarily practical — you can always rent one — to finally have some equipment, and if one day a subject comes along, I won’t have to answer to anyone. I’m making a film. Like Reichenbach, at one time, I don’t know if he still does it, but he always had a camera in the trunk of his car. Fine, it’s Reichenbach, with all his shortcomings, but the method’s not bad.
I didn’t do it. It was probably one part laziness, and also the notion that when you go down a certain path, you can no longer come back along that path from the other direction. I don’t know why not, when it comes down to it. There’s this contradiction: how many times did I repeat that I’d like to shoot every day, all year long, on Monday, go to the set like you go to the office or the factory? Why didn’t I do it?
JEAN-LUC GODARD: Maybe we’re worn out by it; this is what you find unfair — we’d like it to be a little more comfortable.
MAURICE PIALAT: No, but at that point, I start making comparisons right away, I get jealous, I start telling myself: I’m an idiot — or rather I must be like one — to do this, and then, next thing you know, and as I found out this morning, some guy who doesn’t give a flying fuck gets tens of millions to make films with some washed-up actress.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: Well, that’s unfair then. Who are you talking about?
MAURICE PIALAT: There are a few examples like this... One day, I’d gone to see Renoir, it was after French Cancan [1955], or The River [1951], at a period when he wasn’t making a movie. He looked old to me, but not much more than I’m looking these days — anyway, it was Renoir, an idol of mine. I was really naïve: I went to him and asked him why he didn’t do anything in 16mm... He gave me a confused response; he got all flustered. Without having Renoir’s notoriety, which, without a doubt, I would never have, I realize that I’m the same way he was. With this difference [now]: I can understand why he reacted that way. I wouldn’t be able to do [16mm] again, I don't know, might be useful, having an encounter like that today...
JEAN-LUC GODARD: I haven’t ever done [16mm] either, but I think I’ve always considered it as a back-up; it’s still possible.
MAURICE PIALAT: I know ahead of time that I’m lazy too, but what stops me from picking up a camera, some 16mm film, and making a movie, is this: if the subject is good, I’d regret having made it under such modest conditions, because it’s worth the trouble of doing it with better means.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: But what is this idea that cinema only gets made with what’s called better means!
MAURICE PIALAT: I already said, between 16mm and 35mm... I personally don’t like 16mm.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: That’s the same as saying that a [Renault] R5 would be less good than a BMW. It’s less good for certain things, it’s better for others.
MAURICE PIALAT: I’m gonna contradict myself, but last night, I watched La femme du boulanger [The Baker’s Wife, Marcel Pagnol, 1938] again.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: That’s one with two people in a room, most of the time it’s just one person, and one set.
MAURICE PIALAT: There are two sets, some exteriors filmed maybe with some trees, some reflectors, whatever, there’s not a huge amount of equipment; and then a script by Pagnol, very literary, very theatrical, that no filmmaker would go through with using, and which requires great timing. That film, if it was budgeted today, made under the same technical conditions, you’d be surprised, in my opinion it wouldn’t cost more than 17 million. I’m not talking about the actors’ salaries. I don’t know how much Raimu cost...
JEAN-LUC GODARD: Proportionally speaking, he’d cost less...
MAURICE PIALAT: You’d be even more surprised if you were shooting — especially since I know how it was done — Partie de campagne [Country Outing, Jean Renoir, 1936]; that’s a film that wouldn’t cost a dime. If Partie de campagnes aren’t getting made today, it’s got nothing to do with budgetary issues.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: There was a real producer, and that was Pierre Braunberger. He produced Partie de campagne, just as much as Renoir did. [...] It’s not true that you have to have a lot of money, you can make films with small budgets, and they can be great films at that. On the other hand, there are certain films that can’t be made without a lot of money. [...] When you rewatch The Birth of a Nation [D. W. Griffith, 1915], or certain Russian films from the time where they had the entire army... You can no longer make a film about the army nowadays; you’d end up getting three soldiers and two tanks.
MAURICE PIALAT: If you want to do a cavalry charge, in France, I don’t know whether with the Republican Guard you’d get a few hundred horses... [...] From time to time maybe you’ll see them pass by a cannon... As usual, I put it poorly earlier on, that’s what I was trying to say. There’s an appreciable portion of the cinema that requires there to be a crowd. Because the crowd is always there.
If in an intimist film, people are in bed — scenes that increasingly abound in our films, and that’s not gonna change — they’re gonna get up, go to the bathroom, or into the kitchen. That’s okay. But if they go out into the street (unless it’s an abandoned village), there’s gonna be tens, hundreds of people. This doesn’t exist in an intimist film, people all over the place. Without speaking of subjects, let’s talk lyricism.
I’m not interested so much in social events, but I could very well include in a scenario conflicts like there were in Nanterre, for example. At one point, I would have thought: here, let’s go, we’re gonna assemble our actors into a cluster. We did things like that. You realize it’s insufficient, you just see the tops of their heads, you have to rearrange their positions.
Maybe [for one event] you’d have an assembly line: because auto factories run so poorly, it would suffice to wait till an assembly line jams up. But there are lots of stories like that, and at what a cost! And without it, you can’t make a film. You show things in fragments, the guy going to talk things over with the union representative at a bistro, two guys sitting behind them at the bar... And yet, that’s no good; if everything’s not there, it’s the same thing as with the battle of Waterloo.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: [...] If films like Papy fait de la résistance [Gramps Joins the Resistance, Jean-Marie Poiré, 1983], or certain American films, are successful, it’s because they just have the funds to reproduce the memory of the average film. Besides, it’s old men who go to see Papy fait de la résistance, to bring back memories. Whereas young people, they want punching in their films, not slapping like in your films — punches, and off-color situations, like it’s some kind of a dance, and it should barely last longer than a trailer for a film.
MAURICE PIALAT: Exactly.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: You can no longer tell Madame Bovary [Gustave Flaubert, 1857], you’ve no longer got the money for it, in the way Duvivier [Duvivier directed Anna Karenina in 1948. —ed.] or Minnelli [Minnelli directed Madame Bovary in 1949. —ed.] would have told it at the time. That era is over.
MAURICE PIALAT: But that’s exactly it, the feeling of unfairness I’m talking about.
JEAN-LUC GODARD: Well fine then! The world is unfair! You can’t do a scene anymore where two people talk to one another in a bistro with forty extras for four hours, while, come noon at any little café in Paris, there are forty-five people. So, you need scenarios like only the Americans knew how to write. It forces us to think things over, to know what we want, and what we’re capable of doing: what we’re capable of giving up, and why we want to do something. And why do we want to spend our time doing it?•
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Police - Dossier: The Zebra's Stripes
The following originally appeared in the booklet for the 2008 Masters of Cinema UK DVD release of Police [1985] which I co-produced.
Sometimes I think Police might be Pialat's greatest film. But then there are all the other ones... Dan Sallitt's definitive essay on the film which appeared in the booklet (and which he considers one of his favorite pieces of his own writing) has just been posted at his blog, here.
I'm posting these Pialat pieces on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features (and the Turkish shorts) that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
Dan's 2010 MoC essay on À nos amours. has just been posted on his blog here. A visual I made for the film along with my translation of the 1984 Le Monde conversation between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard can be found here.
My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord...— "The War of Art"— can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.
I'm posting these Pialat pieces on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features (and the Turkish shorts) that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
Excerpt from an Interview by Alain Bergala and Serge Toubiana (1985)
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
What was your point of departure for Police?
A série noire book called À nos amours [the French title of Bodies Are Dust, P. J. Wolfson, 1931] that we tried adapting for several months. And then I let it go; there were problems of adaptation, but while we did have to sift through an enormous amount of plot-holes, we were still able to continue because the subject itself was a strong one. And when I finished Police, I said to myself that it would have been good to fill in the plot-holes, to reflect upon realism. I sort of understand those who say that my cinema doesn’t have any room to dream.
And how did the script come about?
We worked for a long time, into the normal period set aside for pre-production on a film. Here, you’re pushing me off into weird territory. I know that with [you at] Cahiers it’s not the same as the daily or weekly press, but I wouldn’t want to be shut up inside of realism — we’re going to jump back into the realm of [Raymond] Depardon, whom I find very interesting, but I don’t think that my film has anything to do with Faits divers [Lurid Stories, Raymond Depardon, 1983]; in any case, it especially doesn’t need to be situated on the same plane — naturalism, realism, all that opens the door up to misunderstandings.
Let’s come back to the script.
I began a collaboration with a couple partners who didn’t get very far, some rough-drafts, if you will. We took off on another track, involving high-level cops, and we couldn’t get anywhere past any of it. But we encountered some personalities who served as models — gangsters, cops, a lawyer — and by way of this big hodge-podge, we constructed a very simple story. A long time ago, I’d been tempted to direct scenes that were more violent, more spectacular, where cops got brought low, although in the end we gave up on it. But the starting-point for the script was Catherine Breillat, by way of the meetings she’d had, the people she had been observing afterwards. Then, she went off the rails, and contrary to what she pretends, she’s the one who left — I never fire anyone — in this big grand-guignol-esque manner, taking her scripts along with her, and so we finished with Jacques Fieschi and Sylvie Danton. I was shooting, I was just grinding away. Happily, the theme is simple and those disruptions that took place during production didn’t have much of an effect. This was very critical since William Karel, for example, who worked a few days on the set, made big pronouncements like, “This story’s not interesting, this wouldn’t even make five lines on the tenth page of a tabloid.” I responded saying that it wasn’t necessarily big headlines and spectacular events that make for a good subject. The important thing is getting to know the characters. Of course, the girl in the film, we never met her, but all the other characters exist in real-life, even the lawyer. By contrast, the character that Depardieu plays is a complete creation, a pure invention that he came up with during the shoot. We disagreed with Gérard, who didn’t want to study any cops for the sake of inspiration, not even their gestures, their way of being, working, speaking. In the end, he was the one who was right, we came back to tamping down on the verisimilitude — he’s the cop of that film. Anyway I didn’t seek out what would be the most realistic thing. Cops are all different — some I saw very little, others I was in close contact with for a pretty long time — don’t forget that we stayed in contact with them for three months non-stop. Here again, I’m censoring myself, and I wouldn’t want to say that there are any real cops in the film. Everything is entirely recomposed; it’s true, there are cops in the film, who are more visible than the ones that were in La balance [The Narc, Bob Swaim, 1982], where they were always seen from 20 meters behind, whereas here, they have some scenes, they talk, you’re seeing them, you confuse them with the actors. But having said that, I’m afraid it sounds like we’re making reference to documentary, we’re so hung up on that practice.
You filmed a large portion of the film on sets.
Yes, in the 20th arrondissement, rue des Pyrénées. It was a school for the handicapped, I think, that had been abandoned for a very long time, something like 1500 square meters. We reconstructed the whole thing, except for the restaurant. It was a very interesting experience. To the point that I had difficulty going back on-location. In the end I don’t like that — I don’t like it anymore.
Just to come back to documentary, the sets aren’t that realistic. It doesn’t really resemble a police station.
It’s not a police station, it’s a judiciary police barracks, which up until recent times had been called the “brigade territoriale” [“territorial squad”]. There were a dozen brigades that covered Paris and its perimeter. It doesn’t have anything to do with a police station, it’s not the same kind of work. I’m gonna say this again, because I know in advance that everyone’s gonna be going on about it. It’s not like inLes ripoux [The Crooked Cops, Claude Zidi, 1984]; it’s not a police station. There are commissioners inside of police stations who handle small business, but in principle the squads treat the more overarching stuff.
And in principle they don’t hold on to the people who get arrested — they transfer them really quickly?
They keep them for the custody-period, that’s all. And what I learned in the course of shooting, and what I respected, is the sequencing of time. You’d have to shoot over two days to understand who the “gardes-détenus” are, the ones who guard the detainees — old cops, but also guys who’ve been injured, who work the day-shift. At night, there are cops in uniform. And in theory, the people who are in custody — except of course when there are arrests, or nighttime interrogations, which are rare — are transferred in the evening to the 12th arrondissement. They don’t stay inside the barracks, nor the police stations.
Was this central idea of interrogation in the script?
Yes, in this film, there’s little improvisation, a word I don’t much care for; I’d say it’s automatic writing — in place of writing with a pen on paper, you write by making an imprint onto emulsion, but it’s the same thing; it’s improvisational, if you want to say that, but here it’s been shot in a pretty classical way, the way in which things are done or acted, but the text is still written. Sophie Marceau, at the beginning, really learned her lines for this one scene which, anyway, is no longer in the film. Afterwards, I forbade her from doing it, but she did what she wanted a little anyway, like every actor: you tell them not to learn it, but that’s not to say they’re not learning it, so long as they have their hands on a script.
It’s impossible that the dialogue in the interrogation could have been entirely memorized!
Yes, yes it was. Marceau has some very firm ideas, it’s part of her personality, along with some notions about the direction of actors. She took me for someone who wants nothing to do with actors. I always say: a film is best understood as a document, especially about what’s not being shown — and the finished film is less a document than all the rushes. For example, there was that first interrogation scene, where she wasn’t really at ease, and neither was I in any case — it was the first time we shot a scene together, and it was a very long one: six minutes when we shot it, but still it was Sophie Marceau pretty much how she actually is, how she acts. You go explain all this to her; I can’t. Maybe she’ll understand one day, I don’t know. But I think she could have been able to do better in the film; we didn’t have very warm relations, to say the least. We had a bad relationship, even worse because we almost didn’t have any connection whatsoever. In the end I like [Richard] Anconina better, who there was a three-day crisis with, which was beneficial in the end, since thanks to that he was good in the final scene. He’s worth more than all the people bickering, putting up their fronts, than any of those situations.
Could it be that from the onset she was resisting the role? That it made her afraid?
You know what kind of films she puts out, so on the contrary she should have found this one pretty tame. I told her, and I kept my word, that there wouldn’t be any ass in the film. I don’t want to criticize pictures she’s made, but in the last one — let’s call it by its name, L’amour braque [Love Takes Aim, Andrzej Żuławski, 1985] — you have to admit she’s not being respected within the physical shot, but was just asked to do something and she was all ready to up and do it. Whereas with me, if I had asked her... When Gérard and she are getting ready to fuck, we could have done it in a more trivial fashion, with her clothes going down to her knees, or her ankles. We could have shot it like that, but I think what you see there suffices.
It’s the length of the scene that’s erotic, but in an equal part we sense Gérard’s frustration, that is at once very seductive, very flirtatious, and, in fact, pretty suppressed.
Marceau, I’m not afraid to say, even if I come across as weak, is someone who impresses me, who intimidates me. Gérard understood her perfectly. All question of age aside, he says she’s intimidating. Gérard is a big, shy person. In fact, if she hadn’t said to him in the car, “Hold me,” I have the impression that he would have stayed put, there. She’s the one who took the initiative. It seems to me that here these two are, she’s doing it because she’s envious — I don’t know about those who think she’s a bald-faced liar from beginning to end; when she says, “Hold me,” she’s definitely being sincere. Maybe there was some calculation there because of course she needs protection from this guy, we’re obliged to think that — but at the moment she does so, any calculation fades away. And at Gérard’s place, there’s a very strong, sexually impulsive side, a timidity mixed with courage. That’s how it is for me, anyway.
Sophie Marceau’s character makes one think of a certain tradition in French cinema, certain films by Carné, by Renoir, with that fatality inside of and surrounding her, that leads her to betray those around her. We don’t find this anywhere else in today’s cinema.
Those are films that made such an impression on me when I was young... I had the advantage over you of having seen them at the age where they leave the biggest impression, and not in arthouse repertories or cinematheques, but in those fabulous theatres on Saturday night. The Carnés, La bête humaine [The Human Beast, Jean Renoir, 1938], I make films that keep those pictures in mind — at least I hope that’s what I’m doing, for my own sake.
Before we move on to speaking about the direction, there’s something that impressed me a great deal in the film — the Arabs. They’re very different from the image we’re shown in current French cinema.
In fact, I have that quality — I have to have some, after all — of treating everyone equally; the proof is in the pudding. Same thing with the cops, except with the obligation de réserve, they couldn’t go all the way with their roles, so we confined them to very short, very discreet parts.
What’s impressive is that when a character comes into the picture, his presence is very strong, and he has his backstory: how did you manage to get this out of the actors?
This has its drawbacks and its shortcomings; I think that it has to do with a way of shooting. It’s not by chance that on the second day of production, Marceau was hesitant. Gérard started to get into the habit, he had showed up full of goodwill, decided to be all buddy-buddy with me, and so was I with him. For a moment I even thought that this was dangerous, that it would have been more valuable to get on each other’s nerves a little because it was almost too idyllic. There’s the question of doing a film again together, and maybe pretty quickly even; I hope we move on to a new stage in our relationship. On Loulou, we really went back and forth from the one to the other. Gérard is someone I want to do something else with again. I know that we can still explore some things that aren’t in this latest film. In Loulou, the inexperienced actors, who were nevertheless very good in the preceding film (Passe ton bac d’abord... [Pass Your Bac First..., 1979]), let’s just say they were bowled over by Gérard. When there were group scenes they’d manage to pull it off, but if it was a scene with just him, it was all over, like when a boxer gets in the ring with a little amateur who doesn’t box so badly, but just can’t hold himself together. In Loulou, he wasn’t happy at all to find himself face to face with inexperienced actors, and there you don’t ever even notice it. It’s true that there are moments where he tends to “act the star”. It’s something he’s already heard me say before he reads this issue of Cahiers, and he’ll understand, but when he does a scene with someone who’s good, he has the impression, being the starring-role and all, that the other person is going to steal the scene from him, and right away he gives a typical reaction. Once, while shooting, I made the mistake of saying to him, about a scene that wasn’t working: “Clearly, you’re choking.” So, for two days, he said: “I’m choking, I’m choking.” I told him, he still wasn’t listening: “It’s just good common sense, if you’re in a scene with an unknown actor who’s really good, for the audience, the scene will still always be yours.” What’s absolutely astonishing is that he has such instincts that you can say, without flattery, he’s the most intelligent person on the set; he figures things out more quickly than anyone else, almost all the time. It often happens that my solution is different than his own, but the way he gets it across is always good — he’s rarely off. I have a rather pejorative take on actors in general: there they are, they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, and they’re bored stiff all day long. Then you call upon them, and for a few minutes, they do their scene. Depardieu is his character completely, but he doesn’t piss anyone off by continuing to stay in character: “That’s it — I’m Mangin,” every time you meet him. It reminds me of Lucien Guitry, in particular that famous anecdote: that day he was onstage in the middle of cracking jokes, his back to the audience, spouting the dumbest shit as happens in theatre; then he turns back around, and when he does — his expression's all twisted-up, and it turns out it was supposed to be a dramatic scene the whole time. I think Gérard is someone in that vein. I don’t know why, I think more of Lucien Guitry than Raimu or the people he most often gets compared to. [...]
You hope you’ll have a big hit with Police?
I stay pretty grounded about it all, because I don’t think you can change anything: “A zebra can’t change its stripes,” as they say. But I’m too associated with art-cinema, the remnants of the Nouvelle Vague, of whom no trace remains, who don’t do anything anymore for the public... It’s often said: “If you make a good film, you can have a big success; but not if you make a very good film.” That said, I think that Police is a good film. So, maybe there’s some hope of having a hit. [...]
The images of the film are very carefully crafted.
I get along very well with [cinematographer Luciano] Tovoli. I don’t know why, we kept getting our lines crossed with one another on all the films that came before — he wasn’t ever free, and I pulled the plug on him at the last minute all the time. But ever since Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble [We Won't Grow Old Together, 1972], which we had already done together, I wanted to work with him again.
From the beginning, he gave his all: we were in this place that was very difficult to light; the light was coming in from the outside, we were on the fifth take, we couldn’t get things right with the spotlights. He found another system that involved neon tubes, which worked so well that almost the entire film is lit with these things — there are practically no spotlights at all. He built tube batteries that we could move around. So the light moved, which is very difficult to pull off because doing this can make it draw attention to itself, and if this is the case, it doesn’t work at all.
Can you describe the set-up of a shot, with one camera movement, that takes place in the police station for example? Do you start out by blocking the actors, and then move on to problems involving the camera?
It was hardly any different from what I usually do, except I had a bigger budget. If I’m taking the scene where Depardieu is interrogating Sophie Marceau (I’m talking about the part with the interrogation that takes place between only the two of them), there were two-and-a-half days of shooting; I shot from two angles, but never using two cameras. The problem that always crops up is knowing who you’re going to start on, Gérard or Marceau. We often start with the one who has the better odds of being seen, so we essentially sacrifice the one who’s out of frame, less present. It’s not from behind, or straight-on, but again this depends on the feel of the moment. “Here, in that scene, it would maybe be better to start on Gérard.” That was the case with the interrogation scene; we started on Gérard.
At the moment you show up to shoot this scene, have the actors already had their dialogue for a while?
Yes. They’ve learned it — they have it on hand, in any case. In the instance of the interrogation, which was very much suited for Gérard, he had files on him all the time, on top of the desk, at which he could sneak a look. As he’s pretty sly with this, you never notice him doing it, but he still had his “marks”. Marceau learned her lines a little better, spot-on. So it was a very laborious blocking process. The first shots, which actually often serve as rehearsals, get filmed nevertheless, and often nothing in them gets used, at least from the first one. But for example, when I was shootingNous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, the first take was almost always the one used. That’s rarely the case, because it’s maybe more refined.
Do you print every take?
Oh, no, we select which ones we want. On this film, we didn’t say to ourselves, “Here, we didn’t print such-and-such a take, but it might have been interesting.” Over time, I make myself do more rehearsals. What I force myself to do are purely technical rehearsals, where the people aren’t acting. But, little by little, as it so happens, I think that I’m going to end up shooting like everyone else. For the moment, let’s stay with this film: rehearsals have their advantages and their disadvantages: what risks getting erased is the blurriness — I mean, the blurriness of the text, not the blurriness of the image — the hesitations, the moments of tripping up, that I never call cut on. One of the big principles of the production is that I don’t call cut, because people often correct themselves. There are two or three passages in the film where the continuity across a cut isn’t quite right. I don’t bother too much with continuity but I still force myself not to cross the line too much, somehow going for a really graceful shot/reverse-shot set-up, and with some motion, with the camera dollying forward “inside of” the scene.
Is there a degree of inspiration that is allowed into the frame at that moment?
Ah yes, Jacques Loiseleux, who does the framing [as camera-operator], really knew his stuff, since this was our third movie together, and he brings an enormous amount to the table. Anyway, there was an operator for a few days, who wasn’t used to this way of working at all, and it didn’t pan out. He didn’t stick with the scene. Tovoli has a way of working that’s very graceful, and whenever he moved back to the other side for the reverse-shot, there was practically no need to tilt the lights; it went very quckly and we could just resume shooting — I’m not saying a few minutes later exactly, but without people having to go back to their dressing rooms. I also tried something, with two or three retakes, that I’d like to try and do more of — it’s what I call “getting back into the cabbage-patch” with the actors, not just acting over top of the depth-of-field, with the camera wisely planted in front of the scene, but advancing forward inside of the scene. I’d like to try to do this more systematically. I know that it will be difficult and that it will draw the time of the shoot out a lot more, because there, there’s a connection to be found between acting and the technical side — for one thing because if you’re set on going back inside of the scene, there are problems that are very hard to resolve. So, we can pretty much say that there will be even longer rehearsals. Anyway, it’s curious — you see it in Dallas, but rarely in a French film: people overtaking the camera, with the camera set up to move backwards and pick them back up again. In France, we generally shoot in wide-angles instead of doing any of this stuff with tracking-shots advancing inside of the scene — because it’s easier, and maybe because it’s a habit from the theatre that’s remained fixed in place.
Afterward, when you come to the editing — let’s say that Sophie Marceau is the focus in this particular scene — are you searching for one scene where she would be good pretty much all the way throughout, and this would serve as the foundation for your montage? Or rather do you move forward editing the scene by one small piece at a time, taking your shots from any given take?
A little of both. In that one sequence, there are actually two takes of Marceau, and there’s one in which she was all discombobulated, not up to the task: Gérard was teasing her, and you see that she had been crying. And then another one where, on the contrary, she’s very defiant: the passage from one take to the next happens just like that, without anything justifying it in the script. [...] And all of a sudden, she drops her defenses... •
“[The title Police] is short, snappy, and commercial... probably the reason why it did so well in France. A pretty good title, really, but not for the film we made. You couldn’t really call it a proper policier— certainly by the second half it no longer qualifies. Lots of people must have felt cheated because what they saw can hardly have matched up to what they were expecting. ...
“Of course [it hurts being called names in the press by Sophie Marceau and other actors]. I went to a local restaurant for lunch and I’m greeted by the ordonnier with ‘Voilà, Pialat, who will shit on us with his bad character.’ And all these people criticizing me without ever having seen one of my films! Or Marceau going around telling everybody how much she’d been slapped in the film, as if I’d ordered the treatment myself. That was all up to Gérard. It’s not nice asking actors to be slapped, but you do ask them in advance, so they know what they’re getting themselves into. ...
“Maybe it’s true [that my films are misogynistic]. The men in my films tend to be more sympathetic than the women, so ultimately there must be misogyny in them. Alas, I don’t want that to be so. It’s not intentional. In my films it’s always the men who are rejected and the women who give them the boot. Just as has happened in my own life. It only needs to happen once to have an effect on you. It’s all a bit obsessional for me, with these women who quit the scene.”
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Hernia
Wow. I never knew I could hate a character as much as I hate Rudy in the new film by Jason Giampietro, Hernia, the most talked-about picture in the shorts program of the current New York Film Festival and the funniest movie of the year so far next to Decker: Port of Call: Hawaii. Rudy's unlikeability is breathtaking. To paraphrase another star of the NYFF, Steve Jobs, I don't mean Rudy is unlikeable in a small way; I mean it in a profound way. With every passing second of Rudy on-screen, my loathing intensifies, as though I am Dante Alighieri, and Jay Giampietro is Virgil, leading me down nine circles' worth of the Inferno that is Rudy's craven mannerisms, his churlish utterances, baffled facial expressions, weakly passive aggression, and incessant fingering of what may or may not be a perforated hernia that at the start of the film appears to vex his midsection and by the end makes its presence felt in the recess of his scrotum.
It's hard to look away. I've seen the movie six times so far, and I'm bracing myself for the seventh and eighth. All credit is due, of course, to Minnesota's Funnyman himself, Stephen Gurewitz, who in cahoots with Giampietro seems to have devised this Rudy as a toxic outgrowth of the Gurewitzian id: gaze upon this mutant Alfalfa in the pleather bomber jacket long enough and you might catch a glimpse of Gurewitz and Giampietro's yet-to-be-filmed Frankie Muniz Story.
When I see hands-free Rudy in the opening shot hop on one leg and shimmy the door at the Apple Store with his other so he can use one of the display Macs to literally bop along to a Rolling Stones YouTube video, I want to go inside the movie, be at that store, and follow Rudy to the men's room to confront him at a urinal. You get the feeling everyone else in the picture experiences a similar degree of antipathy when in Rudy's presence, especially Suzanne (Jennifer Kim) who barely tolerates such Rudyisms as: "It's not a right way to treat somebody.", or: "It's good to know finally how you feel about me. It's the way you treat me. Like the dirt on your carpet. When you don't need me, 'Oh, throw it in the garbage'!", or: "'How's Rudy?' It's not hard to say. Just ask that once and again." His words to her as she draws him a hot bath are utterly risible.
This fool is shot by Sean Price Williams and Adam Ginsberg, and recorded by Ginsberg and Keith Poulson. Nathan Silver makes a cameo as a gum-chewer named Arthur who memorably dispels the Rudester. (Now to paraphrase Morrissey, the way Silver jaws his wad in this scene "rips right through your senses"; it would be great to follow this character too for maybe five minutes or whatever's reasonable.) Giampietro (who also makes a cameo as the dude outside the shop) edits the thing brilliantly and exhibits perfect comedic timing. Of course you should know Jay's work from his NoBudge-featured short Whiffed Out (one of my best of 2014), and from his NYC street-photography Instagram account, which is the best Instagram account in the world.
As for Gurewitz, his eminently hate-watchable Rudy gives Brie Larson a run for her money (not the least reason being only Gurewitz has the courage to fish around for treasure in the front of his pants while a real-life passer-by howls "Degenerate!"). If Gurewitz were on TV this past week, what could Meredith Vieira even ask this actor? "Tell us about Rudy."? I'll tell you about Rudy: he takes three bites in succession from a Papaya Dog and he has absolutely no place in society. He has absolutely no dignity.
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Notes on Pialat's Short Films
The following originally appeared in the booklet for the 2009 Masters of Cinema UK DVD release of La gueule ouverte [1974] which I co-produced.
Dan Sallitt's 2008 essay on Police (which he considers one of his favorite pieces of his own writing) has just been posted at his blog, here. A dossier of my translations of interviews with Pialat about the film has been posted here.
Dan's 2010 MoC essay on À nos amours. has also been posted at his blog here. A visual I made for the film along with my translation of the 1984 Le Monde conversation between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard can be found here.
My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord...— "The War of Art"— can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.
I'm posting these Pialat pieces on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features (and the Turkish shorts) that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
[Isabelle in La Dombes]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Year of Première: 1951
Format: Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Radio
with: Paulette Malan
Congrès eucharistique diocésain.
[Diocesan Eucharistic Congress.]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Year of Première: 1953
Format: Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Radio
Drôles de bobines
[Funny Reels]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Year of Première: 1957
Format: Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
with: Maurice Pialat
L'ombre familière
[The Familiar Shadow]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Maurice Cohen
Scenario: Maurice Pialat
Sound Design: André Almuro
Year of Première: 1958
Format: Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
with: Jacques Portet, Sophie Marin, Jean-Loup Reinhold
L'amour existe
[Love Exists]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Gilbert Sarthre
Scenario: Maurice Pialat
Assistant Director: Maurice Cohen
Camera Assistant: Jean Bordes-Pages
Editor: Kenout Peltier
Score: Georges Delerue
Producer: Pierre Braunberger
Year of Première: 1960
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.66:1 Original Aspect Ratio
Jean-Loup Reynold as the Narrator
Janine
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Jean-Marc Ripert
Scenario: Claude Berri
Musical Score: René Urtreger
Year of Première: 1961
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.66:1 Original Aspect Ratio
with: Hubert Deschamps, Claude Berri, Evelyne Kerr, Mouflette
Bosphore
[Bosporus]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Musical Score: Georges Delerue
Producer: Samy Halfon
Year of Première: 1964
Format: 35mm Color / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
Byzance
[Byzantium]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Texts: Stefan Zweig
Producer: Samy Halfon
Year of Première: 1964
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
narrated by André Reybaz
La Corne d’Or
[The Golden Horn]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Tex:t Gérard de Nerval
Musical Score: Georges Delerue
Producer: Samy Halfon
Year of Première: 1964
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
narrated by André Reybaz
Istanbul
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Producer: Samy Halfon
Year of Première: 1964
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
Maître Galip
[Master Galip]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Poems: Nazim Hikmet
Producer: Samy Halfon
Year of Première: 1964
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
narrated by André Reybaz
Pehlivan
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Producer: Samy Halfon
Year of Première: 1964
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
Van Gogh
(aka Auvers-sur-Oise or Auvers)
part of the series Chroniques en France
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Year of Première: 1965
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
La Camargue
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Year of Première: 1966
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
Janine, the short I made with Claude Berri, was shot with direct sound, except for maybe a few seconds that I had to dub. In addition to that, the film was butchered, but that’s another story... It wasn’t worth getting worked up over — for example, we were shooting in a café, well, we were shooting from the other side of the glass, the camera was outside, or the other way around. And then, you have to recognize that I was doing the dubbing, but on the spot, at the time of the shoot. We’d shoot a scene, there wouldn’t exactly be ‘kilometers’-worth’ of tape, and we’d re-perform the sound right away, sometimes in an approximate manner, not always synchronous. I’ve never shot other than with sound.
In order to make those shorts about Istanbul, we stole a bit of film-stock from Robbe-Grillet. Not an enormous amount, but in the end there was enough of it to easily make a half-dozen short films. I would have even been able to make a feature, which would have been much more exciting. It’s too bad... These documentaries made in Istanbul were silent, given a soundtrack after the fact, along with a commentary. [...] Alright, the crew consisted of four individuals... But I had a topic: it was a poem by Nazim Hikmet, that I used somewhere else in a different short which, in my opinion, is the best one: Maître Galip. But I haven’t seen it in twenty years. [...] Maître Galip is the only one that corresponds to what I would have been able to make at the time within that genre, without the slightly pompous commentary that accompanies it, as I don’t think that this was necessary to make it better. It’s really reportage, but reportage that’s more architectural than documentary or sociological. I was kind of telling stories, recounting historical events like the seizure of Istanbul... •
“Pialat spends three months filming Istanbul with his cameraman Willy Kurant. In an impulse we easily imagine to be obsessive, they make shots, take views in the Lumière sense of the term: it’s a true return to the primitive in the way of working the real: the faces, the stones, the alternation between movement in the streets and images at a stand-still, photographs, almost, in their lumineuse évidence.”
— Clélia Cohen, Cahiers du cinéma no. 566, March 2002
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La gueule ouverte (Pialat) - Essay by Adrian Martin + A Brief Interview with Maurice Pialat
Notes, information, and remarks by Pialat on the director's short films, which span in their entirety 1951-1966, can be found here.
Dan Sallitt's 2008 essay on Police (which he considers one of his favorite pieces of his own writing) has just been posted at his blog, here. A dossier of my translations of interviews with Pialat about the film has been posted here.
Dan's 2010 MoC essay on À nos amours. has also been posted at his blog here. A visual I made for the film along with my translation of the 1984 Le Monde conversation between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard can be found here.
My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord...— "The War of Art"— can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.
I'm posting these Pialat pieces on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features (and the Turkish shorts) that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
by Adrian Martin (2009)
(The frames reproduced below, which refer to points made in Martin's essay and were originally placed within the vicinity of the relevant text of the author's essay in the MoC booklet are here reproduced in facsimile-form from the greyscale booklet. Of course the film and original frames are in color, but were reproduced in the booklet, and here, purely for illustrative purposes. The color originals are somewhere on an external hard-drive in the course of my recent west-coast move.)
A taxi driver once told me, in dry, dispassionate words, the tale of his most memorable moviegoing experience. He was a working class guy, and so the film and the venue in question were a little unexpected: Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives [1988], screened at a lush arthouse cinema in an affluent suburb of Melbourne, Australia. It turned out that a gang of his friends had taken him along to this movie he knew nothing about beforehand. He described watching the film — with its parade of domestic abuses and bad vibes, its unbearable family tensions and harsh silences — with a sort of calm indifference. The film did not bore him, but nor did it engage him particularly. As far as he was concerned, it was just a movie — a bit strange in comparison to the kind of films he normally watched, but still just a movie.
As the final credits rolled and the group strolled to the exit, one of the cabbie’s friends said to him, in a state of some emotional distress: “My god, how absolutely horrible for those people, living in that kind of world!” And then the taxi driver stopped dead still, suddenly plunged into deep thought, as the rest of the audience filed past him. At that moment, for the very first time in his life (this is exactly how he explained it to me), he realised something: his own upbringing had not been like everyone else’s. For what he had seen on the screen in Davies’ film was the exact mirror of what he had himself lived as a child; and he had always assumed — without even giving it a second thought — that everyone had grown up in that same way, in that sort of family and that sort of home. And so the film, in the time it took to watch it, struck him as simply banal: a kind of ordinary home movie. But when his friend alerted him to the fact that every other single member of the audience had been shocked, horrified and disturbed, this man finally felt himself to be different from the rest of the world, some kind of alien, who had suffered what (it seemed) few other people had suffered. In this moment of recognition, he was devastated.
The films of Maurice Pialat are regularly described, by reflecting critics and just-departing viewers alike, as devastating. It’s one of those words that comes easily to the tongue to account for the impact of emotionally intense works: everything from Ingmar Bergman to Ordinary People [Robert Redford, 1980], or John Cassavetes to Little Children [Todd Field, 2006], gets tagged, one time or another, as devastating. But the word fits Pialat in a very specific, very precise way. It is not simply that we appear to be in the presence of raw emotions (however masterfully scripted, rehearsed, performed, staged, edited and reworked they may be); it is not just that the drama (the melodrama, even) is often extreme. Rather, it is the case that Pialat’s films concern themselves, almost single-mindedly, with the fact, the process, the event of devastation. Slow, gradual, irremediable. Devastation of a relationship, a marriage, a family, a community, a way of life.
Pialat’s films lay waste to all of this — not in the spirit of critique (he is not a political filmmaker in that sense), but in the name of a realism, a profound sense that ‘this is just the way it is’. Every anchor, every support system goes, one by one. Characters are, by the end, left alone, bereft, inconsolable, untouchable. But what passionate, angry, violent, grumpy resistance in Pialat to this ‘fact of life’! We won’t grow old together— that is the emblem of the cry of every Pialat character, refusing to 'go with the flow' of irrevocable devastation. But undergoing it all the same. There is no escape from devastation for all in Pialat. Time destroys everything: the slogan rang a bit hollow at the end of Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible [2002] — naturally enough, since the writer-director had rigged the whole backwards-show just to demonstrate his point — but it fits the work of Pialat like a glove. Not that there is any mystery to time, any philosophy of its workings, in his films. Pialat’s time is decidedly singular and brutally linear: many ellipses, but no flashbacks. Straight ahead, like a broken arrow, to its target. And the target is always something like solitude or death or a void.
Pialat’s films have been faulted — often in the past, less so now — for lacking plot, falling down on the storytelling craft skills. Today, when we observe the same artfully disorienting structures and techniques taken over by those artists whose lives and careers brushed directly against Pialat’s — such as Cyril Collard (1957-1993), Patrick Grandperret or Catherine Breillat — and many others besides, we know that he reinvented the business of narrative exactly as he needed to, as he was compelled to. But La gueule ouverte is the one film of Pialat’s whose plot ‘hook’ is so simple, so easily tellable, that it could almost count as the ‘high concept’ of his career. To wit: a woman (Monique, played by Monique Mélinand) goes in for a routine medical check-up, but the problem that is discovered leads to rapid deterioration and death. Meanwhile, every family member around her goes to pieces, handling it badly.
The hook can be boiled down even more purely and starkly, in the deliberately ugly terms of its title: Monique goes from a walking, talking person to a near-comatose or catatonic ‘mouth agape’ able to open only for the purposes of receiving food — except that ‘mouth agape’ is a rather polite and literary rendition of something that is more like a ‘slack-jawed mug’. This is the film in a nutshell: devastation of the human form, the human character, the human being — as concentrated in its most typically, iconically human feature, the face. In this regard, we need to think more along the lines of Georges Bataille or Francis Bacon to get a handle on the ‘figural economy’ of the film, rather than the integral, full-body humanism of Jean Renoir or Juliette Binoche.
How seriously does cinema take sickness? It remains among the last, great taboo topics in most cultures, certainly Western cultures. Most films (including some very good ones by fine directors) erase everything that is painful and awful, protracted and difficult, about the process of being sick, and of attending to the sick or the dying: we all know the facile shorthand film-rhetoric of wise, radiant, bedridden characters suddenly ‘expiring’ with the merest movement of their head or a gentle fall of their hand. There are, certainly, some documentaries, tending to the extreme and/or the experimental, that go in close to this topic — like Frederick Wiseman’s epic Near Death [1989] and Stephen Dwoskin’s Intoxicated by My Illness [2001] — but the fiction films of note are few: Todd Haynes’ Safe [1995] and Tsai Ming-liang’s He liu [The River, 1997] rank among them. Actually, it is curious that these two films, just like La gueule ouverte, while painstakingly recording the physical symptoms, deliberately obscure the rational, clinical, purely medical side of illness and its treatment: the ‘disease’ itself (which seems to be cancerous in the Pialat case) remains unspoken, unspecified, somewhat mysterious; all that really matters is its effects as it gallops through and devastates the human system. As a result, La gueule ouverte manages to be at once realistic-specific and abstract-general, highly physical and implicitly metaphysical, in the same pitiless movement of devastation.
Although this is a film closely about sickness and dying, it is also, more generally as it creeps outwards, a film about malaise. Malaise is an absolute human condition for Pialat — as it is, slightly less absolutely, for Philippe Garrel or Bruno Dumont. In 1975, Patricia Patterson and the late Manny Farber wrote that the essence of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s work was “a nagging physical discomfort” the key to a malaise both spiritual and material; they could easily have been describing Pialat. Look closely at the movements of Pialat’s actor-characters, especially when they have to squeeze past each other to get in or out of a room or a chair or an interpersonal clinch: awkwardness, hesitancy, collision constitute the rule, not the exception. The harm is done with every entry into a kitchen, as Jean Narboni once observed. Every space (at home or work) is cramped, every gesture is pinched, strangled. Pialat seems to have gone out of his way to make nothing easy for his actors: every step involves the negotiation of some difficult gauntlet, whether it’s pulling on one’s pants or fastening one’s bra, lighting a cigarette, or just plain getting out the door. It is all, once again, in the name of a realism — an exacerbated, almost at times sadistic realism — which makes you realise how completely unreal most films (and plays) are at this very small, concrete, most basic floor-plan level of their mise en scène: usually, everyone has the room to move, unless the drama or comedy necessitates ritual, controlled, temporary compression of the spatial coördinates. Cassavetes — the soul-brother in so many ways to Pialat — is among the few directors bold enough to take this scaffolding away from his cast (and crew), to hem us all in with the nagging, niggling discomfort of the everyday world.
Naturally, what goes for the staging in Pialat goes also for the camera, and for what filmmakers call the ‘blocking’ of the scene: who goes where and when in a shot, and how will the recording apparatuses of vision and sound capture it live on the set or on location? One index of this entire process stands out in Pialat: the way he treats the co-existence in a shot or a scene of sitting and standing. This is, once again, normally something so ‘naturalised’, so smooth and flowing, that we rarely or never notice or ponder it in cinema. But it rates among the greatest pitfalls of filmmaking for every beginning, hopeful practitioner: once you have one character who stands and another who sits, together, at any point or stage of a scene, you have a potentially disastrous gaping dissymmetry that demands enormous attention. Attention to set design, to composition, to the choreography of the actors. How do you angle it, transition it, balance it? ‘Amateurish’ films advertise themselves as such through their inability to handle this very real problem of cinema craft. Great classical masters — such as Douglas Sirk and Otto Preminger — based their entire style on constantly working with and varying the dramatic dissymmetry between sitting and standing figures, always using such pictorial imbalance in the frame to arrive, dynamically, at an overall rhythm, form and balance. Others (Godard, Akerman) attacked the matter in their own, eccentric ways.
Pialat, on the other hand, not only refuses to hide this wound, but positively lets it gape. All the awkwardness, all the malaise of his cinema comes from his refusal to smooth out or repair the tear caused by the co-existence of those who sit and those who stand. It’s always a three-way (at least) spatial combat: between characters, and between the camera-eye of Pialat that frames them; no one ever wants to surrender their tiny bit of turf to anyone else. Pialat’s images frequently display the least pleasing ‘negative spaces’ of all cinema: a ragged corner or patch of a frame may sit there for some minutes before, finally, someone bumps out of their seat to fill it — and when they sit back down, that hole just doesn’t go away. Regard the justly famous pre-hospitalisation long-take scene of Monique and her surly adult son, Philippe (Philippe Léotard): of all the ways that Pialat might have shot and cut this remarkable scene, replete with its hundred and one details, tics, silences, instants of rapport — and remember that, according to editor Yann Dedet, Pialat (unlike so many today, he was no fetishist of the long take for its own sake) was always willing to completely restructure scenes in editing — he chose the most awkward and difficult aesthetic path imaginable. Furthermore, from shot to shot, one can observe a curious struggle going on between Pialat and his celebrated cinematographer, Nestor Almendros, noted for the supreme elegance and eloquence of his work with Truffaut or Malick: while control over framing seems to be surrendered to the severe parti pris of Pialat, Almendros takes command of the light, producing and intensifying effects of ultra-iridescence, and of an increasingly bleached-out quality that marks the escalating stations to the woman’s death — a type of effect we find nowhere else in Pialat’s oeuvre.
As the woman dies, everyone else falls apart. This rather bleak and morbid through-line of La gueule ouverte allows for many variations, many digressions, many little ‘folds’. Some are charming — the gruff father of this clan, Roger (Hubert Deschamps), with the proprietors of the local bar, who are obviously the non-actorly real deal — reminding us that Farber and Patterson also wrote, in their little taxonomy of Fassbinder’s ‘moves’, that the “shopkeepers of life [are] treated without condescension or impatience”; surely the same observation applies here, and to much of Pialat. Then there are the details which reveal an intriguingly widespread awareness of popular
psychoanalysis, even among the French working classes of the mid ‘70s: depression and ‘erectile dysfunction’ alike are breezily acknowledged and dealt with as psychosomatic symptoms by the characters. But, although Pialat is often paid homage to as a ‘tender’ artist of the everyday, overt tenderness is in short supply in this film, and indeed in much of his work. Let us return, for a second, to Monique’s mouth, and her face. What are the last comprehensible, discernible words that issue from this fast-disappearing ‘communication-hole’? They are words of marital abuse, the reflex bitterness of a woman (like the general run of Pialat women) who can neither forgive nor forget the philandering of their men, who keep this unfinished business inside them like a knot that can never be released, like some ache, some lump or tumour we need in order to function — in order, paradoxically, to live. That is the existential formula of devastation in Pialat.
In a way that is more neurotic than therapeutic, and deliberate on this plane, Pialat clearly used his films to massage and project his own ‘bad vibes’, on every conceivable level of life. In this regard, Roger is Pialat’s shameless alter ego: not only, in his dealings with customers, is he (from a 21st century viewpoint) a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen, but his propensity for spouting nationalistic racisms exhibits the sort of intractable, fuck-you provocation with which Pialat (who, an inveterate critic-baiter in interviews, was never asked a question he didn’t take irritable issue with) often sprinkled his movies. Ultimately, this ethos is another aspect of the devastation in Pialat, or at least the entrenched gesture of resistance to it: remaining ensconced in one’s bad behaviour is another (somewhat perverse) way of yelling ‘no surrender’ to the ravages of time, and Pialat certainly built both his personal reputation and his professional art upon it.
A cliché of contemporary cinema – including the contemporary French cinema of Assayas (L’heure d’été [Summertime / Summer Hours, 2008]) and Desplechin (Un conte de Noël: Roubaix! [A Christmas Tale: Roubaix!, 2008]): ‘the house is a character’. Often, for a film to sign up for this cliché, it has to heavily mark the states, phases, seasonal conditions, the building, populating, renovating and destroying of said house; it’s all a bit mannered and overreaching, this drive for the estate-epiphany. But in La gueule ouverte, in a completely unmarked, unforced way, the central house that figures in the plot truly is a character. Pialat saturates (the word comes from Jean-Pierre Gorin) this crucial element of the film, showing it in (literally) so many different lights, subject to different uses and different moods, within, between and across its various spaces: shop and home, way-station on the Calvary of illness, uncomfortable guest-room for Philippe and his wife Nathalie (Nathalie Baye) in a difficult phase of their marriage... and, ultimately, the place that records, imprints, all manner of devastations.
The film’s final shots document two odd, beguiling movements or gestures that slowly withdraw us (with some small mercy) from the realm of the all-too-human: the first is the movement, recorded from out the back of a car, of travel away, far away, from this house, into the dark shrubbery along the road; and the second is the simple act of Roger turning off all the lights downstairs in the house. The clunky sounds, the invading (but not total) darkness: these graceless grace notes are perfect for La gueule ouverte, but remind us that Pialat’s legacy to French cinema, like Jean Eustache’s, is a very hard act to absorb and follow, a severe and even pitiless legacy, a non-negotiable gift: a realism that is quietly poetic but never grandly expressionistic, barring (like, again, Cassavetes) all manner of falsehoods and artifices, many (perhaps most) available tricks of filmic rhetoric. No dream sequences, no surrealist apparitions (on this count, Garrel or Brisseau must break off and forge their own path), and only a very attenuated, hard-won lyricism. To be a disciple of Pialat, in this day and age, is a tough, almost inevitably devastating business. •
A Brief Interview with Maurice Pialat (1973)
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
I don’t believe in ‘exploration’, I don’t believe in ‘the avant-garde’; those expressions, for me, are just the blazon of the middle-brow, and it seems scandalous that hundreds of millions [of francs] are disseminated each year in the form of advances-on-receipts to recidivist flop-makers whom we know perfectly well are incapable of making back the tiniest morsel of any of it.
Shooting a film these days is pretty much a desperate enterprise for a director. You have to be fighting on every front simultaneously. You’re wedged in; you never have the upper hand. The fact of being a producer on top of all that solves nothing — far from it.
When I made my first film, I told myself: “You’ve got talent... but no audience!” The second one did well... and yet I had to get up to my neck in debt to make the third one! Truth be told, people who have talent are condemned to make films that just get worse and worse. Example: those in the 'Nouvelle Vague.' They’re well aware of the fact, in any case... if they only dared to admit it, just once, everything could change. That passive mentality is all over our profession, and it’s reflected in the blind acceptance of the way things are done. La gueule ouverte is going to cost around 160 million old francs. If I were free, I would have been able to make it for 100 million... How are bureaucrats able to know how I shoot, and how many people I need in order to make a film?
I’m going to try and finish La gueule ouverte as best as possible... then I’ll wait for the public’s verdict. From experience, I know that certain things about what I’m making at that moment, which aren’t really sitting well with me, can come to take on a different significance once the film gets out there. It’s happened before that reactions from the public have lead me to look kindly upon certain characters that I couldn't stand at the outset. •
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Sous le soleil de Satan (Pialat) - Essay by Gabe Klinger + Excerpts of Interviews with Maurice Pialat and Sandrine Bonnaire
Notes, information, and remarks by Pialat on the director's short films, which span in their entirety 1951-1966, can be found here.
Adrian Martin's 2009 essay on La gueule ouverte, and my translation of remarks about the film, can be found at this blog here.
Dan Sallitt's 2008 essay on Police (which he considers one of his favorite pieces of his own writing) has just been posted at his blog, here. A dossier of my translations of interviews with Pialat about the film has been posted here.
Dan's 2010 MoC essay on À nos amours. has also been posted at his blog here. A visual I made for the film along with my translation of the 1984 Le Monde conversation between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard can be found here.
My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord...— "The War of Art"— can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.
I'm posting these Pialat pieces on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features (and the Turkish shorts) that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
A Close Analysis of a Fragment from Sous le soleil de Satan
by Gabe Klinger (2010)
(The frames reproduced below, which refer to points made in Klinger's essay and were originally placed within the vicinity of the relevant text of the author's essay in the MoC booklet are here reproduced in facsimile-form from the greyscale booklet. Of course the film and original frames are in color, but were reproduced in the booklet, and here, purely for illustrative purposes. The color originals are somewhere on an external hard-drive in the course of my recent west-coast move.)
About twenty minutes into Sous le soleil de Satan, Mouchette (Sandrine Bonnaire), a teenager who has just left her family home to stay with an older man, the Marquis de Cadignan (Alain Artur), strolls leisurely into a room while biting into an apple. In an elliptical moment preceding this shot, it is suggested to us that Mouchette and her aristocratic lover have just been intimate. Hence Mouchette’s casual manner, which implies that she is already quite at ease with her new — albeit temporary — living situation. Distracted, Mouchette fixes her gaze on the Marquis’s shotgun, which sits on a table next to an ammunition belt. Mouchette sets her apple down and lifts the weapon into her two hands, gleefully aiming it into the air, and then setting it back down on the table. Still idly chewing, she decides she is not done with the shotgun, picking it up again. The camera pans into the adjacent room, where the Marquis is putting his clothes back on. In this unbroken shot, the camera follows the Marquis as he heads toward Mouchette (who remains offscreen). He looks at her and asks, calmly, that she put down the gun. There’s no sense of any impending danger from the inflection of his voice as he says to her “You’re a pain.” And yet, just as these words leave his mouth, we hear a blast.
Meditated act or pure misfortune? Without so much as a cut to black or moment of stillness, such as branches of a tree rustling in the wind, or water dripping from a faucet, or any number of other false gestures that would plant ambiguity into this story, or aid us in digesting such an abrupt action, Pialat moves us right into the next, even more devastating image (still the continuation of the same shot):
Mouchette, crying hysterically, continues to grasp the shotgun. She trembles and sets down the gun. In the next shot, she kneels around the Marquis’s body, snorts, and gets up. Cut. Mouchette, looking anxiously around, washes her bloodied slipper in a river. In roughly a minute and a half of screen-time, Pialat has opened up an entire world of associative images that would look and feel contrived in the work of nearly any other filmmaker. He has revealed to us again, with surprising tactile force, the cruel outcome of a random act. It’s the dagger in the wall in Pialat’s debut feature, L’enfance-nue [Naked-Childhood, 1968]; or the ferocity with which the character thrusts layers of paint onto a canvas in his penultimate film, Van Gogh [1991]. These images belong to the same world.
The objects of a still life: a shotgun and an apple; a candelabrum, a large vase. Mouchette ponders the objects, dances beside them. One gets the sense that these inanimate table items will, at any moment, be rendered active in the scene. There’s no close-up or over-emphasizing of any detail; in Pialat, it’s all about the way the actor chooses to interact with her environment. So while one might not think twice about the heavy thumping sound of the shotgun as Mouchette haphazardly places it back on the table, it is an important aspect of the scene for two reasons: first, as an indicator to the audience that this deadly tool does not alarm her; and second, it makes the ensuing discharge of the gun more palpable. This physicality comes from the sound, not from the silent movement of pointing and aiming. The power of the object comes entirely from this clank and the eventual blast.
These sounds may be invisible in Pialat, the same way the circling movement around the room is. The visual eloquence with which we return to the initial point of view of the start of the shot is partly what makes the image of a hysterical Mouchette so shocking. We depart from this...
.... and return to this:
Note the change in the way she holds the gun. The weight of the metal is carefully built into the composition.
In a scene from Pedro Costa’s Où gît votre sourire enfoui? [Where Does Your Smile Lie Buried? / Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, 2001], the filmmakers Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub study a shot from their film Sicilia! [1999]. Freezing the shot on a flatbed, they observe how a woman supports her hand on her waist. They comment on the tension in her wrist. What is it about this tension, which may appear insignificant, that becomes so crucial to the character in that moment? No detail should be wasted, Huillet and Straub seem to suggest throughout the film. Pialat takes a similar approach, sacrificing immediate comprehension for a gesture that, to paraphrase the critic Dan Sallitt, emphasizes the contradictions of a moment. Mouchette goes from holding the gun proudly to barely being able to lift it in her hands. Does Mouchette’s swift change in body language actually relieve her of the suspicion that this was a meditated act? Pialat does not make the Marquis sympathetic enough for the audience to conclude otherwise. And he does not rush to make Mouchette coherent enough for the scene to be simply left alone. He propels us forward to a shady Mouchette occulting the evidence of her act in the woods. In the next scene, Mouchette is seen in the office of Dr. Gallet (Yann Dedet), with whom she is having an affair. It may as well be the same day or weeks since the killing, since the only visual indicator is Mouchette’s change from a white shirt with a bow to a buttoned-up embroidered shirt:
Pialat seems to create this confusion intentionally. He wishes for us to discover the temporal shift only when Mouchette confesses to Gallet several minutes later. After her lucid recounting of what the audience has witnessed in the earlier scene, Gallet shoots back that, true or false, the story might as well be a dream. Mouchette shrieks in desperation. Is it the refusal of her culpability that she cannot accept and finds so morally vile in Gallet’s character? Or is it that she needs to feel, the way the audience needs to feel that this character is real, that the clank of the gun is real, that her actions are real? Pialat decides to cut from Mouchette in mid-scream, leaving any questions that might surge in the audience’s mind intact despite having already learned that the character will likely not suffer any legal consequences for her actions. It’s a way of Pialat stripping the story from such predictable narrative problems and returning it to larger philosophical issues of the characters.
If only this ten minute fragment from Sous le soleil de Satan survived one hundred years from now, one would still be able to derive from it Pialat’s entire approach to filmmaking. A close look at these scenes reveals a complex strategy of accumulating violent eruptions and then burying them for long stretches of time while the film reveals other details. Few filmmakers are able to leave so much unresolved from scene to scene, moment to moment, without losing coherence. Pialat’s relationship with the audience is one of truth, and his deeply intuitive cinema achieves this by avoiding conclusions as much and as often as possible. •
Quotations from an Interview with Michèle Halberstadt (1987)
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
A film is always an egocentric thing. You can’t judge [whether the public will come see a film]. You can just ‘think something,’ that’s it... You sense it. L’enfance-nue, it was clear that, no, they wouldn’t turn out for it. Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble [We Won’t Grow Old Together, 1972], yes, we told ourselves they’re gonna turn out. La gueule ouverte [The Slack-Jawed Mug / The Open Trap / The Gaping Maw, aka "The Mouth Agape", 1974] was a no, and Sous le soleil de Satan is a yes. ....
The text is taken from Bernanos; he’s difficult at times. [...] Okay, maybe there’s one difficult passage: the one with Donissan’s meeting with the Devil. In the novel, the Devil is his double, he looks just like himself. It’s a little dumb, right... What does he see? Not his face, no — what he sees is his life, his own consciousness... Here I am criticizing the book, because that was a very hard sequence to film, and before doing it I said: ‘If we flub this, the film’s done for.’ We shoot it, and I say: ‘It’s flubbed, and the film’s done for...’ Anyway, I wasn’t there when they were editing it, I showed up later on. I took one look and... oof — saved! But we got through by the skin of our teeth. There was nothing else to use from any other takes... [...] It’s a vision he has, it’s subjective, so Donissan shouldn’t be in the shot, but I don’t think it could have been shot any other way. In any case, without this sequence, there’s no film. ....
At Cannes, I said I was an atheist, which makes no sense. The word ‘atheist’ means nothing to me. You can’t be against something you don’t believe in. No, although I’d been into religion up to 14, and had dabbled in and out of it afterwards. For young people, the patronages had two attractions: first, that’s where you went to have fun; second, you could put on amateur theatre. So I stayed close to all that till I was 19. So I mean... If you believe what psychoanalysis has to say, that these are the years that leave the biggest impression on you... Later on, there was rebellion. There’s no-one better than those in the know, for figuring out where you went wrong. I basked in the aforementioned spirituality, but it didn’t mean anything. At Cannes, at [television presenter Yves] Mourousi’s place, he’d invited l’Abbé Pierre [the esteemed priest Henri Marie Joseph Grouès], who’s very eloquent. He said: ‘This is love.’ I responded: ‘It’s a shame no-one ever said that to me before now.’ No, Sous le soleil is a film of resentment. I know the subject well. I don’t milk it, I hope I’m getting beyond it, with more imprecision, lack of foresight... For me, Evil is not the flesh. Donissan doesn’t proselytize, he doesn’t give a damn about knowing that Mouchette has lovers; he tells her: ‘You’re not guilty...’ You can approach the film, somewhat, as belonging to the type of subject where there’s a question, but no satisfactory answer. ....
Oh, the day when everyone understands that [Sandrine Bonnaire] is supremely gifted... Sandrine is always a pro but, at the same time, she changes with every take. She’s always the same, and always different. With her, I’ve always had the urge to keep everything, every take, to use everything. The scene with the doctor, which goes on for eight minutes, six takes were done — for no reason, since she was good from the very first one... Well, I’m not sure if what’s in the film is the best, because every take was a success. [....] She’s even more complete than Arletty. However, when she showed up on the set of Sous le soleil she was distorted by the others. The first take of the first scene didn’t work, she was no good. Which, for Sandrine, doesn’t mean she was bad, but just that she didn’t hit it... •
Excerpts from an Interview with Olivier Joyard (2003)
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
The following excerpts are from an interview conducted on January 18th, 2003, one week after Pialat’s death on January 11th, 2003.
[...] My father really liked Maurice.
Did they know each other well?
Before dying, my father told me: “My wish would be for you to make another film with Pialat.” This was before Sous le soleil de Satan. Their relationship was very strong; Pialat understood the bond between my father and me, something very tender, without its really being spoken. They met one another when my father came with me to the screen tests to find out who this guy was. Our family didn’t go to the movies; my parents never really knew how to speak with him.
You made screen tests with your two sisters.
Yes, at first Maurice wanted all of us together, he liked the way we squabbled in front of the camera. The screen tests went on for several weeks; I thought that my sister Corinne was going to get the role; I thought he was watching her very closely — anyway, it didn’t really bother me at all, that’s how I was. But he picked me, and asked me to make more tests with another girl, very skilled, from the Cours Florent. Then I was told I had the role. The location scouting began in Hyères; I took a plane for the first time. Maurice had brought binoculars — he would show me the countryside like I was his daughter.
Which shoot was the most unique?
Sous le soleil de Satan was the most unique as we weren’t allowed to improvise, at least with regard to the text. I remember these long, meticulous sequence-shots. I kept blanking out, especially once when I was shooting with Claude Berri (in the end re-takes [of those sequences] were made [with Yann Dedet in Berri’s part] ), who was unbearable with me. I had trouble concentrating, he was very annoying, sometimes he would tell Maurice the places he would put the camera, over his reverse-shots — he threw my way of acting into doubt... I was very bad, and I think that if we’d been shooting À nos amours. [To Our Romance. / Here’s to Love., 1983] or Police [1985], Maurice would have used what happened to come out on-the-fly... But on that one he told me to shut myself away and to keep practicing my text. I wasn’t supposed to look for my words, I was supposed to let myself go and recite them naturally.
With regard to you in Sous le soleil de Satan, Pialat said: “I’ve never seen such joy in acting.”
I have the skill of immediate concentration, which relies on my interaction with others. He really liked that instinctive side, which I don’t really have anymore these days, because you can’t remain eternally inside of instinct. But I still think I’m not much of an actress. It’s not a craft that I’ve learned — I do it with the means at my disposal, and with a personal conviction.
Pialat wasn't gonna be the one to give you lessons.
Oh no! He doesn’t give lessons, he doesn’t ‘direct’ — he gives time and space to the actors. If I had made a film with him recently, I don’t know whether I’d have been capable of doing it. I’d have needed a certain amount of time to reacclimate. To accept doing nothing, for example, which isn’t obvious. I think Pialat, his way of directing the actor, is to strip away all their ego, all their pretensions. That’s the reason my two favorite films of his are Sous le soleil de Satan and Van Gogh.
You haven’t regretted having been absent for Van Gogh?
No. After I turned down the role he offered me, he talked about having me play the sister-in-law. But you had to be entirely at his disposal, and yet I’d already taken on a firm engagement for a film with Mastroianni [Verso sera / Towards Evening by Francesca Archibugi, 1991], and I stuck to it.
Did you ask for advice from Pialat when you were shooting with other filmmakers?
It was more like him giving me advice without my asking for it! When we started Sous le soleil de Satan, he told me: “[The projects] you’re getting involved with aren’t good — you’re developing tics, and you’re losing your integrity.” It was irritating to hear that, but not offensive. Because I think he was basically right: in movies, everything’s done to give you what you need, to put you in nice, agreeable conditions. It was the exact opposite with him. Right before a scene, or right after, he said some very rough things. I remember once, he reproached me for crying. The total opposite with À nos amours.. It was on Sous le soleil de Satan. He said: “Cut it out — it’s in Doillon’s films that people cry like that. You come here to make a film with me, but it’s amazing: you’re making a Doillon.” Five minutes later, I’d stopped crying... [...]
How did the ten years go, not working with him?
To begin, he said a lot of bad things about directors I worked with... As though by chance, the one he spoke the worst of was one of the greats: Rivette... In the [massive, career-spanning] interview for the Cahiers du cinéma in 2000, he said I wasn’t bad for two or three minutes in Jeanne d’Arc [Jeanne la pucelle / Jeanne the Maid, Jacques Rivette, 1994] — a six-hour long film! •
Excerpt from an Interview with Jacques Rivette by Frédéric Bonnaud (1998)
Translated from the French by Kent Jones
Pialat is a great filmmaker – imperfect, but then who isn’t? I don’t mean it as a reproach. And he had the genius to invent Sandrine – archeologically speaking – for À nos amours.. But I would put Van Gogh and La maison des bois [The House in the Woods, 1971] above all his other films. Because there he succeeded in filming the happiness, no doubt imaginary, of the pre-WWI world. Although the tone is very different, it’s as beautiful as Renoir.
But I really believe that Bernanos is unfilmable. Journal d'un curé de campagne [Diary of a Country Priest, Robert Bresson, 1950] remains an exception. In Sous le soleil de Satan, I like everything concerning Mouchette [Sandrine Bonnaire’s character], and Pialat acquits himself honorably. But it was insane to adapt the book in the first place since the core of the narrative, the encounter with Satan, happens at night – black night, absolute night. Only Duras could have filmed that.
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Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (Pialat) - Essay by Emmanuel Burdeau + Interviews with Maurice Pialat
Notes, information, and remarks by Pialat on the director's short films, which span in their entirety 1951-1966, can be found here.
Gabe Klinger's 2010 essay on Sous le soleil de Satan, and my translation of a 1987 interview with Pialat, and a 2003 interview with Sandrine Bonnaire, can be found at this blog here.
Adrian Martin's 2009 essay on La gueule ouverte, and my translation of remarks about the film, can be found at this blog here.
Dan Sallitt's 2008 essay on Police (which he considers one of his favorite pieces of his own writing) has just been posted at his blog, here. A dossier of my translations of interviews with Pialat about the film has been posted here.
Dan's 2010 MoC essay on À nos amours. has also been posted at his blog here. A visual I made for the film along with my translation of the 1984 Le Monde conversation between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard can be found here.
My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord...— "The War of Art"— can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.
I'm posting these Pialat pieces on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features (and the Turkish shorts) that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
by Emmanuel Burdeau (2009)
Translated from the French by Craig Keller, in consultation with the author
(The frames reproduced below, which refer to points made in Burdeau's essay and were originally placed within the vicinity of the relevant text of the author's essay in the MoC booklet are here reproduced in facsimile-form from the greyscale booklet. Of course the film and original frames are in color, but were reproduced in the booklet, and here, purely for illustrative purposes. The color originals are somewhere on an external hard-drive in the course of my recent west-coast move.)
“I’m leaving.
“I want to pass through Illiers, Proust’s country, but my car broke down, and I sputtered back to Paris.”
It’s at the close of a chapter that Maurice Pialat sets down this passage. At the time, Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble is not yet a film but a novel — a brief and beautiful narrative of indifference and dejection. From the book to the film, the story remains the same: the interminable end of a six-year relationship between a young temp-secretary and a weak-willed filmmaker fifteen years her senior. Colette becomes Catherine, Jean stays as Jean, which is to say Pialat himself — with the character’s profession, his dour disposition, and the use of the first-person being indicated even more clearly on paper than on film.
After a brief sojourn in the company of the young woman’s parents, Jean leaves once again. Pissed off, crestfallen — once again. He gets in his R8 — once again — and before heading back to Paris means to pass through Illiers, Proust’s country. The car breaks down: a trip for nothing, when all’s said and done. Jean is an obvious failure — he won’t even succeed at paying a visit to the great writer. We don’t know what he might have taken away from this pilgrimage, the intention of which, at least, testifies to an aesthete asleep beneath the brute. On the other hand, it’s hard for us at this point to resist comparing the two expressions, different enough that the one seems to be the inverse of the other: À la recherche du temps perdu, Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble. [In search of lost time, We won’t grow old together.]
It’s thanks to Gilles Deleuze and to Proust et les signes [Proust and Signs, 1964/1976] that we’ve arrived at an understanding that, in reality, Proust’s title contains two meanings. Time lost, then regained, is the domain of memory, of which only writing can ensure reattainment. And it’s the time at which the writer, in his youth, will lose himself in distractions, and which he realizes in time was necessary to his future oeuvre, for without this he would have known none of those signs — worldly, amorous... — which make up the heart of things. Writing retrieves and remunerates them both — the lost time of the past in general, and the lost time of idleness in particular. Can we say as much about Pialat’s expression? Is it possible here to recognize the game of two significations and to deduce from them one definition of his aesthetic?
To pose these questions is already to begin responding to another question while signaling an affinity between writer and filmmaker. Neither one is in the process of making only an autobiographical work in the first-person — for each, art is an explicit concern, too. We know this of Proust, but we know it less of Pialat. We willfully overlook the fact that Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble has a filmmaker as its lead character; that Jean Yanne is shown with a camera and Marlène Jobert is handling sound; that Demy, Chabrol, and Dreyer are a few of the names scattered throughout the dialogue; and that Jean is ironic about the critical spirit acquired by the young woman beside him, and with which she presently seems to contaminate her husband as they watch a film on TV. Without a doubt, this aspect is felt especially in the novel, in which a wider berth is given to Jean’s laments about his stunted career, side by side with the evocation of the Parisian cinematographic milieu. The Cinema nevertheless remains present in the cinema, as theme and as motif.
Here, in effect, is a film that can never be misunderstood as not being a film. It’s customary to bring attention to the repetitive nature, to the countless scenes in the car between Catherine and Jean, to the alternation between break-ups and reconciliations. But taking all of this into account, it’s uncertain that we’ve actually noted how much this structure borrows from the onscreen representation. Catherine and Jean come and go: a drama made entirely of ‘entrances’ and ‘exits’, in the scenographic and psychological sense. Seated side-by-side in the idling R8, they could just as well be in the process of rehearsing their next scene, which they’ll go act out at a location more appropriate to the emotions at play than this old car... The construction of each scene is admittedly minimal — she and he in the midst of discussion, more often than not — but Pialat has enough wherewithal to avoid shot/counter-shot and to find here and there some equivalent of a handrail or a trestle: a balcony, a fence, a guardrail, a parapet, a window... Beneath the guise of ascetism, the wealth of the théâtres de fortune rivals that of Pialat’s ‘old master’, Jean Renoir.
It’s obvious the type of received-wisdom one would like to kill off once and for all: the portrait and the eulogy of Pialat as a filmmaker of transparency and of realist immediacy, auteur of films whose power would result, miraculously, from being ‘like life’. Nothing more false, nor more pernicious. To reject these stupidities would be enough to bring about the unexpected act of a comparison with Proust. Like a writer, Pialat has art’s obsession — do we need to recall he was a painter before becoming a filmmaker? As such he recreates; he remakes.
Yet it’s quite true that everyone goes against their expressions. Past versus future, affirmation of the past versus negation of the future. Momentum versus impasse, momentum of rediscovery versus impasse of the break-up. The lost time of idleness in Proust responds to a distraction of another sort in Pialat: a certain way of grinding the present down to the point of blindness. It’s the first sense of the saying: the present is the negation of the future, repetition and erasure, fabrication of oblivion. Caresses and slaps come one after the other between Catherine and Jean: it would seem everyone’s always at the point of perishing, or of being reborn. The most beautiful words they exchange are to confide to one another with a sigh, a few moments after an argument one would have believed irreparable: “Things are just like they were before.” They get in the car and take the train; Jean shows up several times looking for Catherine at the station; he even has a discussion about the comparative merits of the automobile and the SNCF [the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français — i.e., the French National Railway system —ed.] with her grandmother. Strange fate of lovers, to always be leaving for, or coming back from, some big trip. No refund. One-way, with no return ticket.
Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble is a terrible expression of refusal and deliberate oblivion, by way of anticipation. The opposite of Proustian memory. But how far we are, as well, from a so-called faithfulness to life! The versatility of the humors in the lovers — here joyful, there sad; here romantic, there detesting one another — is no doubt real, but it only becomes realistic under cover of a mise en scène that regards each moment as repetition and as the abolition of what came before. The theatre of entrances and exits, of departures and arrivals, resets the gauges over and over again. Cancelation of the work of the hours and the days that is the good fortune and the curse between Catherine and Jean: the unconsciousness of its disaster, but also its impossibility of genuinely taking its position in the story. Pialat confesses as much in the first lines of the novel: he doesn’t know what it is to grow old, he doesn’t know how to see, how to feel time passing. He ignores what being alive means. Before adding, first lamentation in a long series: “But other people are alive!”
The admission matters. Catherine and Jean keep themselves in precarious balance on a windowledge, a rowboat... Always between two embankments or between two doors, immobile in the car at rest, awaiting who knows what sort of green light or signal to go onward. In the breakdown, they’re no longer alive. Whenever their love story seems to reach its end, after Catherine has told of her decision to leave, Jean and she in effect keep showing up — telling each other it’s over — giving parting gifts — evoking their common past and the future they won’t be sharing: scenes of tenderness, from out of nowhere.
Who would be bold enough to say that the couple’s love doesn’t prove as strong — or that it is perhaps even stronger, now that things seem to be over — as when they kept saying things are just like they were ‘before’? Who would pretend that this love will have been something other than its incapacity, its oblivion and its absence? That its yes hadn’t, by the moment of the encounter, become a no? We say that Pialat is the filmmaker of the unfinished. Of the already-over, rather: that which, closed, could in spite of everything take off once again for another go-round. Nuance.
Unbelievable moments when, without bitterness, Jean confides in Catherine that she could marry a doctor, and she responds: “Yes, I’m going to be married.” Or when Françoise, Jean’s wife, flies to his aid and tries to find Catherine, who has gone missing — this mistress that she should detest with all her might. Pialat, filmmaker of life? Of course not: it’s other people who are alive! The possible, the solid thing lies elsewhere: Catherine’s marriage in the eyes of Jean; adultery in the eyes of Françoise... Life is always something else; it’s on the other side. We make comments, we groan, we dissent... But we aren’t alive. Or are so without knowing it, while forgetting it.
How far we are, once more, from the positivity of a cinema that, in the sound and the fury, would be its own irrefutable evidence. Pialat’s cinema is a hole: that we think of the gaping elisions that have made a legend out of him, or even of the filmmaker’s remarks, always quick to say something bad about his films, when he doesn’t prefer simply to stay quiet. This art does not tell of its genesis, the moment where it is at last discovered. It declares its worthlessness: inexistence and mediocrity.
And yet it announces itself — and does so ironically. It designs itself, as we’ve already said: thematization of the subject of cinema, theatrical effects, frames within the frame... All this to be sure, but one must take care to observe the scenes between Catherine and Jean in the car. The camera gazes at them through the windshield; the doubling is evident, but with it comes a kind of distancing. From Pialat’s point of view, from the spectator’s point of view, it’s they who reside on the other side.
The cinema reveals itself, the windshield acts as a mirror, but all this still goes hand in hand with a renunciation. It gets established with a heightened cruelty when, in the background, passers-by turn themselves toward Jean Yanne or Marlène Jobert, or when the reflection of a boom-mic falls across the R8’s window. Pialat could have eliminated these technical imperfections. If he hasn’t done so, we might think it’s due to coherence: to indicate how much the couple Jean/Catherine, Yanne/Jobert is the film, the entire film, and nothing but the film. In their bubble, alone. At once surveilled and out of reach.
Would both life and art therefore be objects of the same negation? It’s what the ending appears to say, those piercing images upon which Catherine, positioned in the sea up to her midriff, is seeming to struggle as much against the waves as against the orders being thrown her way from off-screen. Impossible to know what she’s saying, the meaning of her gestures, of her laughter or of her annoyance: music drowns everything out. If the film lets a doubt linger on the origin of these images produced in an amateur manner, the novel is clear: on holiday, it specifies, Jean goes to Pathé, reviews the rushes — probably those shot in Camargue — and makes himself a reel from what he shot of Colette/Catherine.
As Catherine addresses Jean holding the camera, Marlène Jobert addresses the cameraman, Luciano Tovoli, or maybe Pialat himself: dubbing and overlapping conveyed in full by the suppression of direct sound. These images are all that will remain for Jean of his love for Catherine: it’s hard to imagine a more insistent figure of abandonment infinitely dwelt upon than an ocean tossing and carrying a woman once loved. The distance between the camera and her is insurmountable: it’s the distance of love rejected from one’s love escaped; and it’s also the distance of the filmmaker from his own images.
The film concludes while making absolute the motif that will have haunted it: loss. Remembrance isn’t time regained, it’s time lost forever: farewell, not reconquered proximity. Just as ‘time regained’ has two meanings in Proust, ‘loss’ has two meanings in Pialat: in the present, and in the future (perfect). It’s the last word of the filmmaker as it was the first word of the writer: point of departure for the one, terminus for the other.
So why make films? That one wants to write in order to reappropriate one’s remembrances is effectively conceivable: the task is admirable, and the promise an enchantress. But that one becomes a filmmaker to record, indeed to confirm a loss — here there is an enigma.
As opposed to Proust, Pialat isn’t ‘one’ with his principal character, although he himself is his principal inspiration. The image assumes a distance not inherent to the word — resulting, perhaps, in the necessity of the passage from novel to film. Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble thus actually signifies two things, the linking together of two types of separation. It signifies that the film recounts the failure of a love, or rather a love that wasn’t ever anything other than its failure, or its oblivion, or its absence, or its bereavement: first negation. And it also signifies that this story is recounted with the same means of loss: a camera indifferent and most often in a fixed position, framings that drift away as much as they call attention to something... The elementary means of an artform — the cinema — drifting away, mummifying at the same time it’s recording. An artform saying: What was mine yesterday is no longer so today. An artform which, as it shows two lovers who won’t grow old together, also repeats this truth to itself, for its own use.
There’s a double negative projection in Pialat’s expression, existential and aesthetic. It’s an expression that belongs to a character: I know I don’t know how to be alive and that one day, in spite of this, I’ll have to be fully conscious of the fact. And it’s the expression that a filmmaker addresses to his images. For Pialat, the place of the cinema can only be that of the no-place: separation from separation. If these films provide safe-haven to loss, it’s in order to find a way to circumscribe it, to hurl it back again as far as possible. To send it into the sea, to make it turn up on the other side across from this coast. Cinema of conjuration or of exorcism, as Serge Daney put it with regard to this same title, in his critical piece on À nos amours. [To Our Romance. / Here’s to Love., Maurice Pialat, 1983].
We must therefore overturn the received-wisdom: for this artform, life is the other side, the diametric opposite. On one hand it paints lives of resentment and hate, empty lives, at war with themselves. And on the other hand, by welcoming negation it hopes to conjure it, to negate it. So that, elsewhere, a life at last becomes possible. Elsewhere? Ici, et non plus là-bas.•
by Maurice Pialat (1972)
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
It’s the story of the break-up of a couple, a three-month break-up between a man of 35, 40 years of age, and the girl he’s been living with for six years, without really living with her, since he’s married and refuses to get a divorce — he’s incapable of leaving either one, wife or mistress.
I always thought, for this film, there had to be actors who had a real resemblance to the protagonists of the actual story...
For a very long time since Godard’s Weekend [1967], or even before, I had wanted to make a film with Jean Yanne. If the French cinema existed nowdays like it did before the war, Yanne could be what Gabin was at the time of Pépé le Moko [Julien Duvivier, 1937] or of Le Quai des brûmes [The Port of Shadows, Marcel Carné, 1938]... the actor whom the French spectator can best identify with. Of course, I’m only speaking of Gabin or Yanne on-screen, not in real life. Anyway I don’t think Jean Yanne has the least desire to take on the character of ‘Mr. France’ of 1972.
Marlène Jobert too, I chose her for her resemblance to the real person... I wanted someone very ‘French’, very representative of that generation of girls who've been reading Elle. And in any case I’ve known her for a long time, since 1963.
I don’t like improvising. For me, it’s all about encountering what’s natural. It makes everybody ham it up.
I totally reject cinéma vérité....
As for neorealism, it depends on what we’re talking about. If we’re referring to the first films of Rossellini, I agree; if we’re referring to what came after, then not at all, since for me it’s a retrograde cinema, which has to do with the fact that it’s silent, and I don’t support silent cinema... By silent, I mean post-synchronized. It seems difficult to me to speak about realism when you’re relying on post-synchronization. Realism isn’t just shooting in the streets — realism is direct sound.
I refuse to direct actors — in the classic sense of the term; I had gotten acquainted with the process while I was an actor in the theatre, and Michel Vitold’s assistant. On a film, I don’t ‘direct’ the actors, I don’t like answering the question “what should I do?” posed by an actor, and yet the day I was on the set as an actor with Chabrol [in Que la bête meure (Let the Beast Die, 1969)], I had of course wanted to pose the question myself at every instant. I resisted...
I don’t pretend to be escaping every convention, I know very well that you only escape or reject one convention to fall right into another... but I’m trying to escape — as far as what concerns the actors — a ‘theatrical’ convention, that archaic convention where the actor directed by the master’s hand is the instrument moving the text and the story along... What’s interesting to do with an actor, and what I’ve ended up doing without noticing at the beginning but have become more and more conscious of, is to make him forget the context, the story — I try at the moment I’m filming to preserve something of the life of people at the moment when they’re acting. I don’t make films about the actors’ concentration.
At the start of production, I wanted each scene to be shot in the exact places where the events had occurred — if it happened in three different places, I wanted to shoot in those three places, and then I understood that I needed to preserve the essential thing, not split it up or scatter the scenes around; I needed to sacrifice fidelity to a story written like it had been lived, so as not to lose what might happen — at the moment of shooting — across the shot in the way of emotion... and which I’d no longer be able to recapture.
In France, we live on the idea of the ‘cocu pauvre type’ [‘pathetic dupe/schmuck’], of Molière’s ridiculous dupe, and I wanted to tell things differently... François Chevassu in La Revue du cinéma defined the movies I’m trying to make as ‘a gaze-cinema’ creating and recording its own life.
If I had to define what I’ve wanted to do...
Realism isn’t what’s happening today or what’s happening yesterday. At the point of shooting, there’s no time, there’s no present, or past (in the historical sense) — there’s the moment we’re filming in. You have to get as close as possible to that truth of the moment, in my opinion always the same one, made of very simple feelings...
For me, this is the music of a film. It’s this music which, actually, has nothing to do with realism, with whatever’s said. These aren’t even emotions any longer, feelings, sensations of life, because it’s not true that the cinema reproduces them — it’s something that seems to be happening, but which really isn't. •
Excerpt from an Interview by Stéphane Lévy-Klein and Olivier Eyquem (1973)
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
I speak of Rozier with affection and detachment because he belongs to a period I’m familiar with.... I made my first film in ’60 [Pialat is referring to L’amour existe (Love Exists) — his first ‘professional’ film. —ed.]; we’re in ’73: this makes thirteen years over which I’ve reflected — I’m not saying profoundly, but constantly. My evolution is that collapse. At one moment you might recover, you might become one of them and make the same shit as they do. I went through this around Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble.
It’s obvious that we can’t just leave things be without fighting. If you say: “There’s still a virgin corner on the map, I’m gonna plant my flag over there,” I think you’ve made a mistake. You absolutely have to fight wherever it’s possible, even if that fight leads to failure. You have to fight with the same weapons as everyone else, keep making a crack in that wall knowing that this demands on your part a gigantic, practically vainglorious, effort.
What do you mean by, “I’m on the Right.”?
I have a stance on the Right with regard to my profession, in opposition to those who work there, and who are for the most part syndicalists who belong to the Left. In no instance do I support social injustice. When I make a film, I need order, whereas my entire life is chaos.
Folks in this line can’t ignore the fact that they’re being manipulated by money-men. They serve them in opposition to the director, and therefore place themselves at the service of the ruling class. That’s why I assimilate them to this end.
Supposing, today, I wanted to shoot at midnight or at two or three in the morning, I can do it, but at such a price that I’d quickly go over my budget. If I wanted to shoot according to my tastes and my aspirations, the costs would prevent the realisation. On the other hand, to make my most recent film, I was required to act as my own producer and, in the eyes of the crew, I’m a son-of-a-bitch. For example, when I shoot, I start early in the morning, and it’s customary in the movie business not to start at that time. However, when you show up late, it really cuts into things. Taking into account what these men have chosen to do and the benefits they’re receiving in doing so, they’re unable to tally up their hours like factory-workers — as their jobs require. Year in and year out those constraints only get worse.
Every day I notice that the people in this profession are all impostors. These are people who say: “We’re making a film with you,” so, in fact, they’re ‘putting in hours’, and, if possible, overtime. They’re duplicitous, presenting doctored contracts to the distributors. The production director goes on dedicating the essential work hours to preparing contracts and phony estimates for the CNC. They have lunch, they get on the telephone, they put stuff off, they fudge things. I have the normal need of someone who, naïvely, thinks he’s able to express himself this way, and I refuse the situation.
What can be done? Accept or refuse?
For me, there’s no question of accepting — I’ve said it before: you have to fight. Despite the fact that at this very moment, I’m seriously wondering if I’m not going to end up as a writer. There are the first signs, in any case: the scenario for Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble is much better than the film. In the week in which it was released, I wondered for an entire day: “What good is there in carrying on with this?”
A book doesn’t allow you to live; a film does.
More than this film.
Does it bother you to talk about this?
No, I made this film for [a salary of] 7500 francs which really meant nothing, since in any case I was in debt for 300,000 francs. •
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
One day I turned 45. But I felt 25.
So what did you do?
I made Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble.
For that reason alone?
No, for a bunch of other ones too.
For the same reasons that led you to make L’amour existe and L’enfance-nue [Naked-Childhood, 1968]?
Probably. You’re on to something. Both of those titles are cowards.
You mean traitors?
Yes, they betrayed me. They expose fifteen years of silence... Maybe fifteen years of childhood...
Je n’ai jamais bien su où j’allais dans la vie et je n’ai surtout pas la notion du temps qui passe. Je suis encore comme ça aujourd’hui, et si je remonte à quelques années, je me retrouve semblable, et plus loin encore, semblable... Est-ce une façon de ne pas vieillir? Le temps a peu de prise sur celui qui ne le sent pas passer...
I never really knew where I was going in life and I especially had no sense of time passing. I’m still that way today, and if I go back a few years, I realize I was the same way then, and further back still, the same... Is this a way of not growing old? Time has little hold on someone who doesn’t feel it pass...
Opening paragraph of Pialat’s novel, Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble
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L'enfance-nue (Pialat) - Essay by Kent Jones + Interview with Maurice Pialat
The following essay and interviews originally appeared in the booklet for the 2008 Masters of Cinema UK DVD release of L'enfance-nue [Naked-Childhood, Maurice Pialat, 1968] which I co-produced. This was our first Pialat release, and the film is Pialat's first feature, but not his first film. He made 14 films before L'enfance-nue.
Emmanuel Burdeau's 2009 essay on Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, and my translations of accompanying interviews with Pialat can be found at this blog here.
Gabe Klinger's 2010 essay on Sous le soleil de Satan, and my translation of a 1987 interview with Pialat, and a 2003 interview with Sandrine Bonnaire, can be found at this blog here.
Adrian Martin's 2009 essay on La gueule ouverte, and my translation of remarks about the film, can be found at this blog here.
Dan Sallitt's 2008 essay on Police (which he considers one of his favorite pieces of his own writing) has just been posted at his blog, here. A dossier of my translations of interviews with Pialat about the film has been posted here.
Dan's 2010 MoC essay on À nos amours. has also been posted at his blog here. A visual I made for the film along with my translation of the 1984 Le Monde conversation between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard can be found here.
My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord...— "The War of Art"— can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.
I'm posting these Pialat pieces on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features (and the Turkish shorts) that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
by Kent Jones (2008)
(The frames reproduced below, which refer to points made in Jones's essay and were originally placed within the vicinity of the relevant text of the author's essay in the MoC booklet are here reproduced in facsimile-form from the greyscale booklet. Of course the film and original frames are in color, but were reproduced in the booklet, and here, purely for illustrative purposes. The color originals are somewhere on an external hard-drive in the course of my recent west-coast move.)
French cinema has had a lengthy and fruitful relationship with children, particularly those with tumultuous inner lives, from Forbidden Games [Jeux interdits, René Clément, 1952] through Jacques Doillon’s Ponette [1996] and Le jeune Werther [Young Werther, 1993]. But few filmmakers anywhere have looked at childhood in quite the way that Maurice Pialat did in his feature debut, made when he was 43 years old. Michel Terrazon’s 10-year-old François in L’enfance-nue is no repository for an adult’s poetic dreams of freedom, nor is he a sociological case study or a psychological knot to be therapeutically untangled. In fact, the title of Pialat’s film could be said to address such absences. Of course, it is François’ childhood that is exposed to the brutal elements of an unforgiving world, deprived of the shelter of loving parents; but it is also childhood in general, yours, mine, and of course Pialat’s, given to us for once without fancy alibis, strategies, or hooks. Pialat’s is a remarkable achievement, and by all rights L’enfance-nue should be counted as one of the greatest debuts in cinema, on par with Citizen Kane [Orson Welles, 1941], À bout de souffle [Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard, 1959], Badlands [Terrence Malick, 1973] or The Four Hundred Blows [Les quatre cents coups, François Truffaut, 1959]. That it is not is indicative of nothing more than the overvaluation of progress. Which, as Philippe Garrel, another underappreciated French filmmaker, once noted, has no place in the arts.
Pialat, much more than Michael Bay or Tsui Hark, was an action director. Which is to say that his films give us the actions of his characters within their environments, without any discernible master idea governing their every move. In each Pialat film, and L’enfance-nue is no exception, continuity as we know it is deliberately and continually thwarted if not smashed, in order to expunge just such master-planning. One never knows when a scene will end, or indeed what will constitute a scene, and our tracking of time as some kind of guide (an unconscious procedure in any movie) is thrown out the window — as in a Terrence Malick film, any given scene could be taking place minutes, hours, days, or months after the preceding scene, and crucial moments occur off-camera. There is no time for the film to build up any sort of thematic repository to which the viewer can return for psychic re-orientation, beyond the on-going specifics of these people, as they are seen in this place at this time of year under these skies, and in this light. This is what gives Pialat’s best work its existential pull: there is so little evidence of aesthetic attitudinizing or strategizing that we become genuinely attuned to the film as a series of precious moments, passing before our eyes at 24 frames per second. Many filmmakers before and after Pialat tried to reach this level of absolute proximity between fiction and documentary, actor and character, setting and place. For most, it happened only fitfully. Only Pialat, with his mixture of sublime sensitivity, brute force, and a furious resentment that kept his creative machinery perpetually stoked, was able to sustain such a balance throughout an entire film.
More than any other narrative filmmaker since the early days of the medium, more even than Malick or Cassavetes, Pialat built his films from the life of his footage. And when he was at his absolute best, as he was here and in À nos amours. [To Our Romance. / Here's to Love, 1983] and Van Gogh [1991], he found what was essentially a gestural continuity that, outside of the final section of Rossellini’s Paisà [1946], remains unparalleled. Pialat once said that L’enfance-nue was made under the sign of Lumière, by which I take him to mean that as he was filming, he did not think of a shot as a unit but as an event in time and space observed from a closer distance than in the average film and grounded in an extremely class-specific form of portraiture (this is as true of the soundtrack as of the visuals — few movies are so thrillingly grounded in working class speech). In an appreciation of the movie published in Film Comment, Jean-Pierre Gorin beautifully describes Pialat’s steadfast adherence to an aesthetic form in which the “shapes and looks of bodies and faces, the accents and tones are perfect. And yes, a strong sense of class fuses the whole thing together.” Of course, there are many films that attempt a just portrayal of the working class, but precious few of them are made with Pialat’s sense of solidarity. Gorin notes that M. and Mme. Thierry, the film’s extremely touching old couple for whom François is one in a series of “problem” children to find temporary solace under their roof, were “obviously listened to, patiently and carefully. And then they were asked to gently go through it again for the camera.” The same is undoubtedly true of the child-care workers traveling with a band of orphans by train, of the young bride who leads her wedding party in a song, or the bartender who sells François a pack of Gauloises near the beginning of the film. Film criticism as commonly practiced is ill-equipped to measure, let alone describe, such moments. The bartender obviously feels comfortable “playing” himself, executing what are for him everyday gestures, addressing François with each sentence as “jeune homme” in a manner that is at once affectionate and removed, engaged in a rhythm that is social and business-like at the same time. There is no sign of any overriding judgment-call about the working class — nothing is feigned or professed or proclaimed, thus setting L’enfance-nue immediately apart from the bulk of French cinema in the year 1968. There is nothing but solidarity, of which respect is a constituent part. To understand the importance of Pialat’s achievement, imagine another filmmaker with a more elevated sense of his/her own mission, without the time for such patience, asking the same of the bartender. One can easily imagine the same gestures and words, perhaps even the same fluidity of motion. But one can also just as easily imagine parody slithering into view, the hawklike face, the sweater and carefully knotted tie, the fresh haircut and pencil moustache, presenting opportunities for a chuckle, or a guarantee of sociological authenticity. Of course, there are both sociological versimilitude and aesthetic sophistication at work here, but they take a back seat to the aforementioned solidarity. Again, one has to go back to early cinema, to the Griffith of The Musketeers of Pig Alley [1912] or the Walsh of Regeneration [1915], for an equally formidable vision.
Pialat’s painterly eye is, of course, the other side of his genius. I’ve seen many of his canvasses, and I must say that not one of them is equal to a single shot from L’enfance-nue or Van Gogh. Like Griffith and very few filmmakers after him (Godard, Cassavetes, Scorsese), Pialat had an intimately scaled yet totalizing stereo vision that enabled him to work from the immediacy of documentary yet with the greatest visual precision. As Gorin points out, one can indeed see traces of Cézanne and Courbet in the Thierrys’ kitchen, with its retina-burning blues and yellows (not to mention the wonderfully grey, damp exteriors, which have the weathered severity of Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans [Un enterrement à Ornans, 1849-50]. Let’s be clear, though: these are not homages, but sophisticated cinematographic moves that are a natural extension of the same painterly tradition, in which the artist stays at ground level with his subject, interpreting and filtering his own sensations and impressions and painstakingly synthesizing them as he goes. Pialat films from the same social stance as a painter of an earlier era, observing from up close rather than afar, reserving his inevitable distance from the milieu for the ultimate refinement of the work rather than the strategizing that precedes it. To insist on putting Raoul Billerey in a dark striped blue shirt against a light blue-tiled background isn’t just merely to be artful — it is taking what is already present and rearranging it into a visually comprehensible event in time and space, just insistent enough in its observation of working class life without tipping into oppressive encapsulation.
Pialat is also doing another kind of work here, transforming his material into a dramatically unified whole. As I said, L’enfance-nue does not follow any familiar dramatic progression. There is no “explanation” for François’ violent outbursts, which come at odd and wholly unpredictable intervals. When he sends a black cat plunging several stories to a concrete floor, kicks in the bottom panel of the door to his room in the Thierrys’ house, or throws a railroad tie through the window of an oncoming car, we are taken unawares. There is no cause and effect here of the type that one sees in most dramas about “problem” kids. Nurturing does not place François on the road to understanding and sensitivity toward his fellow man. As with Scorsese’s Jake La Motta or Cassavetes’ Myrtle, there are a million reasons for his behavior; as we acclimate ourselves to the film’s closely observed viewpoint, we come to understand that identifying those reasons is less important than the ongoing spectacle of François’ body language and facial expressions (alternately attentive, reserved, impulsive, sly, skittish), and the vocabulary of movement and voice within the warm, overdecorated enclosure of the Thierry household, with its tiny papered rooms filled with mementos and photographs. Strictly speaking, the film’s emotional climax comes with the smashing of the windshield with the railroad tie and Mme. Thierry’s breathless interview with the childcare worker (“You know, he’s hard, but he has heart!”). But Pialat sees the drama in every scene, the rising and falling of human aggression and affection, the momentary grace of mutual recognition, the poignant sight of an emotionally insatiable boy among genuinely caring adults. How to describe the excitement generated by this film, by the careworn distress on Linda Gutemberg’s face as she watches François leave her home, or the miraculous harmony of the scene where the Thierrys tell the story of their marriage to François and Raoul as if it were an old legend, as Madame sits on Monsieur’s lap drinking her coffee. Or François’ sudden kiss on M. Thierry’s cheek, tenderly reciprocated only after the old man removes his hand-rolled cigarette stub from his mouth. Or the wariness on François’ face as he sits up in bed in his striped pajamas, images of action heroes pinned over the flower-print wallpaper behind him, trying to interpret the clamor coming from downstairs. Few films before or since have been quite as alive to the tangible beauty of life, in all its cruelty and all its tenderness, amidst the unstoppable flow of time. •
Excerpt from an Interview by Dominique Maillet (1972)
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
[...] Where and how would you situate yourself in relation to cinéma-vérité and neorealism?
Although I like Jean Rouch a lot (since he’s the one that set the definition for cinéma-vérité), I don’t agree with your inference at all, and I completely reject cinéma-vérité. There are some very beautiful things in Rouch, some African films that I love — I have an enormous amount of affection for him, and he was definitely an influence for me, but it’s not just that I think I’m going against his cinéma-vérité... I hope I am.
As for neorealism, it depends on what you mean. If you’re referring to the first films of Rossellini, I agree there’s a relationship; if you’re referring to the ones that come afterward, not at all — because for me, it’s retrograde-cinema — for one thing, by the fact that it’s silent, and I don’t support silent cinema... By silent, I mean post-synchronized. To me, it seems difficult to talk about realism when you’re resorting to post-synchronization. And don’t come back to me and say, “Yes, but it’s a technique, because actually you’re still out there in the street, doing real things...” — I don’t buy that at all.
Would you be able to come up with great dialogue in one of your films for some character or other, without knowing exactly who the performer is — without having talked things over with him, having gotten to know what he’s like, what his universe is like, without having studied his reactions, how he carries himself...
Yes — not only can I come up with it but, if there’s no research involved, it’s almost how I want it to be, if anything: to remain undisclosed all the way up to the present, but during that present moment, passing over into helping me come up with better things, and do a better job directing.
I haven’t seen his films — he seems very interesting — but people have compared certain sections of L’enfance-nue with the films of [Pierre] Perrault. I understand very well why, because, basically, in L’enfance-nue I still had to do a lot of preparatory work with the people who were acting in it and, in a certain way, subconsciously, I studied them in the same way Perrault does for his films. But it was really the conditions of pre-production and shooting that brought me to do this. It wasn’t a goal of mine at all, because in reality I prefer a good deal of “jumping into things” straightaway, not getting to know the people, and discovering them while filming. That’s what I hope for the most.
How much of your films are planned out before the shoot? How much is improvisation?
This is a very delicate subject to talk about. Let’s take Godard for example: his films, very literary ones at that, seem very written and pre-conceived. What I mean to say is (and this happens to me, too), he shot while saying: “Okay... alright, the street-corner, there, that’s good. There’s no need to go any farther than that...” — It’s real, but it’s still a choice being made. I’m speaking here of art-direction, but in writing things out, it’s still the same thing. “Improvisation” — this doesn’t mean anything. What you’ve got in your mind, unformulated, is much more precise than you’d think. In any case, there’s a very distinct thing, and I think that hardly anyone will be able to contradict me on this: it’s when, after having made a certain number of films, we reflect upon how what’s bad about them on paper — the things which one hasn’t really thought through enough — are what are least good when you’re shooting, the least good when you’re editing, and what remain the weak aspect of the film once it’s finished. [...]
What are your relationships like with your actors while shooting?
They’re inevitably very difficult because trained actors have a hard time accepting my way of working — that is, allowing themselves to be completely free. Anyway, relationships are always difficult with the crew, and I’ve had the chance to witness this happening even in this latest film [Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (We Won’t Grow Old Together, 1972)], where even though I had an excellent team, they had a certain “hands-off” approach as there was this impression I didn’t care what was happening, when in reality, this wasn’t the case at all.
But as for actors, they’re completely done-in by all this, and it always goes very badly — the first few weeks are really difficult. So I don’t need to tell you that in the case of stars, this all gets multiplied... by the increase in paycheck, we might say.
[...] In [two of your relatively recent films], L’enfance-nue along with La maison des bois [The House in the Woods, 1971] it’s ... a question of children in direct and concrete opposition with the environment that they belong to, an environment which, more than provoking their reactions, imposes itself onto them — it’s therefore the case of the juvenile delinquent of L’enfance-nue who needs to lash out against his foster family, and it’s also the case of the young actor in La maison des bois, the child who’s lonely amidst all his friends, who is visited by their mother, and who experiences, even if he doesn’t belong to them, a certain familial atmosphere... How do you explain this?
Really, it’s difficult for me to respond. L’enfance-nue was my own choice; the second one was a subject imposed upon me that, in any case, I obviously revised... Maybe I’m obsessed with the theme of abandonment... I think that, deep-down, that’s what ends up making me choose, or accept, those subjects.
When you did your first television film [La maison des bois], did you go about things differently than with L’enfance-nue— that is, taking into consideration, for example, the use of what was essentially a TV look?
Not at all, because this doesn’t ever concern me. The only things involved with a “TV look” are the framing and eventually the choice of lenses; after a little while, I stop paying attention to all that. Indeed, on La maison des bois I had two cameramen, of which one, the one that was less good, kept saying to me: “Pay attention to the TV frame... Pay attention to the TV frame...” Well whatever, he was the one who made sure that the desired image sometimes wouldn’t end up inside the frame at all. Likewise, in La maison des bois, I tried to film people from closer-up, because in L’enfance-nue you’d notice that people were filmed from pretty far back: but I gave up on this pretty quickly too.
I heard that you’re preparing a project for television based on Balzac...
Yes, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen any time soon. •
Excerpt from an Interview by Stéphane Lévy-Klein and Olivier Eyquem (1973)
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
Can you talk a little about your early works?
I came to the cinema by way of short films and theatre. In the capacity of director for the former, and as an actor for the latter. Since I have to talk about it, let’s start with the better one. I kind of like Janine [1961], which I directed in collaboration with Claude Berri. The script was Claude’s, the distribution too, and he acted in it. The shoot took place under really bad conditions, over the course of a few hours every night for four nights straight. But this short film already contained, in 1961, everything that’s good in L’enfance-nue. Unfortunately, I gave in to my mania: the woe that is “editing”. I patch up, I revise, I cut. When Janine was all done, the photography was grubby, the sound inaudible but, with background music, the film was presentable nonetheless. Originally, it was around 25 minutes long; once I was done with it, it was no more than 17. After that, I did something that was even more discouraging: made a short film on commission without any money. It was artisanal, actually. I took on the camerawork, the sound, and the editing. In Turkey, I made five or six short films under horrendous conditions. The production kept requiring me to film mosques and tourist sites, whereas I wanted to remake L’amour existe [Love Exists, 1960] in the streets of Istanbul. I shot a short film there with a commission from the prime-minister of Saudi Arabia, but instead of having directed a propaganda film, as had been expected, I showed all the misery I was seeing. After that, for Pathé, I filmed some real-life chronicles about everyday Paris. I remember in one short about Pigalle a long stationary shot of a police raid, in the early morning hours. I would shoot from right in the midst of all the passers-by, with their tacit or explicit agreement — never without authorization. I miss this way of shooting. I’ve always wanted to pick it back up again, but I’ve never gone back out with the 16 and the Nagra. I hope this is laziness, and not a sign of old-age...
One can find this concern with realism in L’amour existe.
L’amour existe suffers from vulgarity and naïveté. [Pialat later revised this comment before publication: “An excessive remark. This is what you always end up saying when it’s over and done with. But I stand by everything else.”] I made it after spending ten years in a depressing job: traveling salesman. The narration, in particular, is absolutely unbearable. Even before getting to the mixing, I already thought it was bad, but I didn’t have the money to do it over. Today, I don’t want to change it. You don’t remake a film. L’amour existe is a crazy film that’s got a few grand truths. [NOTE: This last sentence has been reprinted in a few sources as ‘un film flou’, as opposed to ‘un film fou’ as it appears in this interview — that is, as ‘a hazy/vague film’, as opposed to ‘a crazy film’. –ed.]
And your career as an actor?
It was short-lived. It wasn’t an end, but a means for getting into movies. I put on a few plays in a couple of factories — amateur theatre. In 1955, I wanted to go professional, but my career was cut short because I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin. For an actor, it’s important to be in tune with yourself, even though acting is also being on the lookout for what you’re missing. A failure, then, but one which I don’t hold any big grudge over. These days I act competently enough in simple roles, like that of the teacher in the mini-series La maison des bois. My performance as the police commissioner in Que la bête meure [Let the Beast Die, Claude Chabrol, 1969] is pretty insipid. I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea.
Before making movies, did you write and, today, do you write?
No, I don’t like to write. I’m a filmmaker. I hope never to be reduced to turning into a hack. My scripts are short, just a few lines thrown down on a piece of paper in a frenzy. Later, during production, the first thing to do is forget the text. With Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble I had to shoot, in the strict sense of the word, what I had written. That’s why I don’t like that film. I’ve never had film-school training. I only know a single trade: painting.
Painters turned filmmakers often prefer aestheticism to simplicity. Yet this isn’t the case with you.
Let’s just say I’m a realist painter. As a result, I like the photography in L’enfance-nue for its ugliness and its hardness. I refused to turn this film into a big brown placard getting waved around. I let the walls be what they were: yellow, because it burns the retina. Here again, Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble is something of a failure, because its photography is too aestheticized.
A shoot is a moment I try to hold on to. In the course of it, something is supposed to take place, without which the film is a failure. L’enfance-nue became what it is two weeks in, on the same set, smack in the middle of the shoot. At one point, I’d had enough, and I decided to slap the camera down right in front of the actors. A deeply felt scene is a successful scene; no matter what, you just have to shoot it, right away, with no heed paid to the formal beauty of the frame or the harmony of the colors. Whenever I make artistic gestures, it’s to take my mind off things, because it’s not going well. On La maison des bois I showed up in the morning without knowing too much about what I was going to shoot that day. Finding myself facing a problem with Fernand Gravey one day, I took refuge in the loveliness of a tracking-shot, which is usually carried out based on the instructions of the “master” and actually executed by the hands of the technicians. It was very beautiful; everyone liked it, myself included. [Pialat added before publication: “I don’t take refuge in aestheticism. Let’s say I got rid of an annoying problem, of little interest, working on some technical movements that needed some time to be figured out, which I don’t do anymore these days.”]
L’enfance-nue had a subject that was very difficult to adapt.
I’ve often made big pronouncements that I’ve taken a lot of flack over L’enfance-nue. This isn’t exactly the case. I didn’t really defend the film, because I didn’t believe in it too much. It was made in large part thanks to the assistance of François Truffaut; without him, I would only have made it one or two years later.
The film was saved by the people that I came into contact with; or, rather, there was, around me, this subconscious idea that I was incapable of succeeding, and yet there was so much willpower inside of me that the film was able to become whatever it is now. I realized that the old couple was more interesting than my hero — which is to say myself — which I hated. It’s why I chose them; they represent my grandparents a little bit, the safe-haven of my childhood. The parts they’re not in are less good.
L’enfance-nue springboarded from some research I undertook, in the course of which I was struck by certain specific details. Hence the way those children are portrayed in the film. I did a follow-up afterwards, and I came away pretty upset by what I found, but I didn’t show any of it because it would have reduced the film, and would have made me look dishonest with regard to Social Assistance, thanks to which L’enfance-nue was able to have been made.
The backing for making a social film is important!
It’s a shame that L’enfance-nue should be considered a social film. It’s because it’s lacking something that it’s turned into a social film. Without all that, it would have been twice as great. I didn’t want to make films engagés; I reject Manichaeism. In real life, not everything is in black and white; why would you want it to be that way in the movies? I say without any shame: I’m a man of the Right. The victory of the Left in the most recent elections would have brought about a catastrophic, socialistico-communist tsunami. The program of the Left, applied to the cinema, would have thrown open the doors of mediocrity that were already pretty much ajar. In order for our cinema to change, you need a revolution — but not that one.
I said it on TV, and I’ll say it again today: if L’enfance-nue had been made by someone else, I wouldn’t have gone to see it. We’re lying when we say we’re concerned by other people’s distress and that we’re not concerned only with ourselves in a difficult time.
In fact, it’s the subject that’s important! When you’re filming, this is what rears its head, and creates a kind of music for the text. I’ve always had the impression of being a composer making an opera based on some libretto. When the libretto is undeniably bad, as it is in the case of La maison des bois, it doesn’t matter too much. Also, directing commissioned subjects doesn’t bother me.
During the sequence on the train, is there a critical distance with regard to Social Assistance?
No, because that scene was run past some other people who hadn’t been involved. The film, at the outset, was divided into two sections. At the end of twenty minutes or so, — of which only one part still remains, today — I set forth a pretty didactic explanation of the problem. Maybe all that disequilibrium that was happening in those days makes it seem like a critique, but it’s just an explanation. All the more reason that this sequence that’s too demonstrative isn’t realistic at all. That “tour guide” was only a ruse for addressing certain questions in a rapid manner. It was dangerous, and I understand your criticism very well.
You say that realism was important to you. Doesn’t this aesthetic forcibly cast an eye upon society?
What I mean by realism goes beyond reality. A little before going into production on L’enfance-nue, I watched some of Louis Lumière’s films. They were a revelation. This cinema that existed for a brief moment before quickly dying, suppressed by the commercial constraints of show-business, should once again have its day.
It’s not being modest to say that L’enfance-nue was directed under the influence of Lumière. But that’s exactly how it was. While shooting L’enfance-nue, I was thinking of Repas de Bébé [Baby’s Meal, Louis Lumière, 1895]. Did Lumière film reality? I don’t think so. In his films, men and women, captured by a machine they know nothing about, gave up a moment in their lives, and, ever since, every actor has been doing the same thing. In the “fantastic” shot, Lumière outstrips Méliès. Those people, without knowing it, are watching their lives take place. All of cinema is there, in this seizing of existence, in this exorcism of death. This is dream-like cinema. The exiting from the Lumière factories hurls back into the distance the coarse stupidities of someone like Fellini. This aesthetic provides the definition of cinema: an alchemy, a transformation of the sordid into the marvelous, of the common into the exceptional, of the filmed subject into the very moment of its extinction. This is what realism is for me. Put simply, I’d say: “Cheap oneirism: I know nothing about it. The simple event of pushing a button on the camera is oneiric.”
But oneirism, fantasy, etc., are pretty precise genres practiced with talent by directors like Fellini.
Fellini is afraid of reality because he hasn’t got the strength to confront it, which, artistically, is a sort of impotency and vulgarity. Fellini betrayed Rossellini, his master. Dishonest direction in films is that which stages what’s technically unrealizable. In the scene in the metro in Roma [Federico Fellini, 1972], the camera is placed such that you think it incapable of having recorded what it is the spectator is seeing. In the cinema, one has every right, except that of being an impostor. •
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Van Gogh (Pialat) - Essay by Sabrina Marques + Words from Pialat + Godard's Letter to Pialat About the Film
The following brilliant essay and accompanying pieces originally appeared in the booklet for the 2013 Masters of Cinema UK Blu-ray release of Van Gogh [Maurice Pialat, 1991] which I produced. This was our last Pialat release to-date, and the film is Pialat's penultimate feature, considered by many perhaps his greatest.
Kent Jones's 2008 essay on L'enfance-nue, and my translations of accompanying interviews with Pialat can be found at this blog here.
Emmanuel Burdeau's 2009 essay on Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, and my translations of accompanying interviews with Pialat can be found at this blog here.
Gabe Klinger's 2010 essay on Sous le soleil de Satan, and my translation of a 1987 interview with Pialat, and a 2003 interview with Sandrine Bonnaire, can be found at this blog here.
Adrian Martin's 2009 essay on La gueule ouverte, and my translation of remarks about the film, can be found at this blog here.
Dan Sallitt's 2008 essay on Police (which he considers one of his favorite pieces of his own writing) has just been posted at his blog, here. A dossier of my translations of interviews with Pialat about the film has been posted here.
Dan's 2010 MoC essay on À nos amours. has also been posted at his blog here. A visual I made for the film along with my translation of the 1984 Le Monde conversation between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard can be found here.
My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord...— "The War of Art"— can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.
I'm posting these Pialat pieces on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features (and the Turkish shorts) that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
by Sabrina Marques (2013)
– Vincent van Gogh,
letter to his brother Théo about the painting “Bedroom in Arles”
In one of his famous art history books, Gombrich portrayed Van Gogh as an artist who crossed art by faith with a “sense of mission”. He fought with his brush, he battled until the last consequences. He remained a painter even when absorbed in a desperate loneliness. He kept his freedom as few like him had. He was a “society’s suicide”, as Artaud put it. He attacked conformism and conventions with “incendiary mixtures and atom bombs”, and he became an outcast. Madness? Or an active lucidity that any medicine might have helped? A clairvoyance that his time couldn’t understand, maybe?
By the end of May 1890, Van Gogh withdrew to Auvers-sur-Oise to consult Docteur Gachet. The three months that followed were his last. Those are the humble times in the south of France we watch through Pialat’s fiction. In fact, the director had always preserved a special interest for the Dutch painter. Almost thirty years before, he had already directed a documentary short-film named Van Gogh [1965] included in the series Chroniques en France. And in À nos amours. [Here’s to Love. / To Our Romance., 1983], Pialat (playing the role of the father) quotes what’s assumed to have been Van Gogh’s last sentence – “La tristesse durera toujours” [“Sadness will go on forever”] – before commenting on it: “I thought Van Gogh was talking about himself, about his misery, but no. He was trying to say that the battle will last forever. It’s you who are sad.”
The simplicity of Van Gogh’s life is inscribed in the depurated surface of the film. Its main feat is its concision. Historical reconstitution has been wrested away from its usual elaboration. In fact, the accuracy of historical reconstruction doesn’t interest Pialat – we can see, for example, how the famous question of the chopped ear (even though it is mentioned in the film) is ignored by the physical characterization of Van Gogh. Pialat is focused on the presentation of a man and the battles within him apart from his name (thus, we rarely see his paintings and, even more rarely, his most iconic ones).
In spite of its apparent simplicity, the production difficulties grew and the diminutive budget of forty-five million francs was not enough. The shooting had to be interrupted. However, at the time of its première in 1991, the film was enthusiastically received both by critics and by the public. Pialat had surpassed himself and this was to be his masterpiece. And still a film of a painter about a painter.
A detailed attention to cinematography, a skillful mastery of perspective, and a regard to composition construct, in this film, images of a persistent beauty – both in episodes of immense genius and of immense squalor. But it isn’t Van Gogh’s vivid chromaticism that provides the film with its colors. Actually, Pialat is inspired by the incipient palette of the Impressionists, the sovereign canon in Van Gogh’s days. We therefore see his world as Van Gogh didn’t see it. We could never access with any exactitude his genius, his vision, his mind. This is one of Pialat’s triumphs, in permanent insurrection against academicism. The formal aspects of Van Gogh are a demonstration of this liberty. The shots bloom with fluidity. If in one moment, the studied fixity of the camera holds the actors’ movements, in the next zooms and pans it coordinates the speed of a chat at the table. Everything exists naturally. The characters exist within reality, they converse with a sincerity that is sometimes brutal. And the beauty is there, raw, inherent to the layers of life in pasty smudges of small precision.
This permanent sensation of Beauty – beautiful fields, beautiful colors, beautiful girls, beautiful songs – comes with an intoxicating monotony. This is Van Gogh’s portrait of inadaptation, he whose troubled personality couldn’t be contained within pleasant conventions. His painting doesn’t reproduce reality, it rather interprets it; it interprets itself. Sky and land are mixed up, water and sky are mixed up, detail is absent. He discovers the affectivity of solid colors, he relates forms and colors hoping to alter the world by altering the look of the things in it. The feverish energy of the brush continues. The noisy strength of the spatula attacks the canvas. The furious convulsions of the hand are intuitive. The strokes don’t detail. As the urge rises, the secret reality of the eyes is born in solid colors. The style is impulsive. The style is the message. As the “eye is a great heart that sends the camera hurtling” (Jean-Luc Godard, in his letter to Pialat), the fingers of the painter are his heart too. Van Gogh painted the world he wished others saw. In a letter to his brother, he describes his urge to cleanse form and color, “giving by its simplification a grander style to things”.
These paintings are raw wounds of color. Van Gogh had the vortical need to invent his own mirror. All is free there, all stands beyond the order of the visible. Expression is emotion. This rush carries the strength of life. One lives his life for art until one loses his life – but art remains. In the end, isn’t the overcoming of time the ultimate aspiration for any artist? And Van Gogh and Pialat arrived there through incomparably different paths.
Pialat’s state of struggle was of a different kind. Famous for his unstable posture, he has always interpolated the most prodigious moments with the most irascible words of resentment. Like Van Gogh, Pialat was an outsider, rambling among schools, movements, groups. Having dedicated himself to other arts such as painting (which he declared his favorite art of all) and theatre (admittedly without vocation in this field), it was through the cinema that he had formulated the deepest dialogue with himself. If with this Van Gogh the mastery of his cinematographic art overcomes itself, it is also here that the confrontation of the artist against incomprehension is portrayed, in the figure of a Van Gogh that is (also) Pialat.
To read the letters of Van Gogh to his good brother Théo, an art dealer, is to unveil the confessions of a spirit in doubt, which alternates a fierce faith in his own work with a profound disbelief held by a sense of failure, doubt, and guilt. In Pialat’s film, the painter never theorizes, debates, explains, or legitimizes his own art, contrary to what happens with Minnelli’s Van Gogh in Lust for Life [1956]. Dutronc encloses himself inside a body of permanent tension. He seems incarcerated in a mutism from which he frees himself only through excess: the rip of the brush, the verbal fury, the sexual promiscuity, the frenzy of the dance, the physical confrontation. One senses the ultimate abyss where, in desire for the absolute, his destruction will arrive. This rupture is inscribed in the simplicity of that moment of so much interpreted symbolism: Walking with Jo, Van Gogh throws himself suddenly into the river, noisily, staging a suicide. It is the calm perfection of the Impressionists that is shattered by the impetus of Van Gogh, at the same time that, in a cynical and almost burlesque tone, it foreshadows what is to happen. Art is not splendour, art is not dazzle – art is something else. It exists in the soul alongside brutality.
This is a film about a slow end, almost voiceless. Loss is everywhere. It is the process of a body untying from itself, falling into a secret madness and letting go at the mercy of a mind without sovereignty, in the margins of society. He belongs nowhere, he belongs to a time that hasn’t arrived yet (and that he won’t live to experience).
We will remember the sore sight of madness in that mute and dry body folding inside itself. This Van Gogh with his “eyes fixed in the land and never in the sky,” as Serge Toubiana wrote in “Il s’appelle Van Gogh et il n’en a rien à foutre” [“His Name Is Van Gogh and He Doesn’t Give a Damn About Anything”], constantly alternates between contention and emotional outburst. Jacques Dutronc knows how to depict the calm intensity of that sadness, in a virtuous interpretation that deserved the César.
Maybe the social inadequacy of Van Gogh, who has failed in his plan to create a brotherhood of artists in Auvers-sur-Oise is in the first place inflicted by the successive exclusions among his peers. In deep disbelief, he carries his sorrow into all the other worlds he passes by. A blockade, he rejects everything and everybody. Van Gogh is the extreme personification of that old idea (very recurrent in Pialat’s heroes) that we are ultimately utterly alone and forsaken. There is not a person in the film who doesn’t feel incomplete or betrayed. Not even the couple, apparently happy at first.
Pialat’s camera accompanies the fading of hope. Pialat is the filmmaker of solitude but never leaving behind the quiet dream of integration. Even under a melancholic shade, hope doesn’t cease its flow, close to life. The film is crossed by the torrent of an overwhelming energy. And in these moments of ephemerality, all evil seems to be overcome. A brief instant... A cheerful lunch with the Gachet family, where everybody has fun without fearing the ridicule of contributing somehow to the general laughter... An improvised song at an outdoor ball... The relief of frenzied dances in pairs... And the most remarkable of all moments: that frantic collective dance in the brothel, an organic whole wonderfully filmed and choreographed, reminding us of John Ford or Jean Renoir.
The idea that, in Pialat’s Cinema, women are “positive heroes” (the exact expression is by Laurence Giavarini in her article “Hommes et femmes” [“Men and Women”], Cahiers du cinéma, no. 449, November 1991) is crucial to this movie. There’s the old hostess and her teenage daughter with their motherly attention; there’s the red dress dancer-prostitute ready to love him one day without any money being involved; but the most relevant of all the characters is Marguerite (Alexandra London), the bored young bourgeoise who is fascinated with the distinct personality of Van Gogh. Introduced as a soft, candid being, she will evolve into his antagonist. She will affirm that he can’t paint (after he paints her portrait), she will insist that life is more important than art, she will accept and love him as he is. Van Gogh would obviously dedicate himself as a whole to his art (in his last letter to Théo, unmailed, he would write "my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half-foundered because of it..."), admirably trusting his destiny to art until the end. He resists; he carries on painting even when nobody, not even his own brother, believed in it, even when not having sold more than one painting in his entire life.
Away from romanticism, both Marguerite and Vincent travel a transformative path. Marguerite initiates a ritual of emancipation, against the conventions of her own class, against the feminine privations, against the patriarchal authority, against what she used to be. In spite of the hours spent with Marguerite in light and company, Vincent’s tension confines him as the resistance vanishes. And in that memorable close-up in the final scene, when Marguerite assumes that Van Gogh used to be a close friend of hers, in her triumphant face the apprenticeship she owes him is complete. She recognizes him now as, more than an intermittent lover, a unique being who she had the privilege of meeting and, somehow, understanding. The artist stayed alive.
Pialat and Van Gogh: How many eyes don’t owe them their fortunate corruption? •
by Jean-Luc Godard (1991)
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
My dear Maurice, your film is astonishing, totally astonishing; far beyond the cinematographic horizon covered up until now by our wretched gaze. Your eye is a great heart that sends the camera hurtling among girls, boys, spaces, moments in time, and colors, like childish tantrums. The ensemble is miraculous; the details, sparks of light within this miracle; we see the big sky fall and rise from this poor and simple earth. All of my thanks, to you and yours, for this success – warm, incomparable, quivering.
Cordially yours,
– Jean-Luc Godard •
excerpts translated from the French – of Pialat in conversation with Michel Ciment and Michel Sineux – by Pierre Hodgson (1992)
What happened on this film is what happens on all my films. I don’t like always being the scapegoat, but it keeps happening. It was the same on this film, but I suppose someone had to take the brunt – it’s symptomatic of today’s cinema. The film was halted because it was costing too much, because it was under-budgeted. Some of the costs could have been avoided totally, and others reduced. It should have cost about 40 million francs, whereas we spent over 60 million francs. About 15 or 20 million went up in smoke, spent on sets, things we didn’t even use. As a result the film was stopped, to save 3 million francs and three weeks of shooting. It’s not very logical, saving 3 million on a film that’s costing 60 million. The 3 million that were then found, and now represent three quarters of an hour of the film. I am partly responsible, but it all seems odd, I didn’t believe it was going to stop and leave everyone in limbo, with no one making any decisions, least of all the decision to put a halt to the enormous sums of money being swallowed up in set designs that were finally never used. We even had to finish the film twice. We resumed filming knowing that we couldn’t go through to the end, and then filmed again a month later. All this enabled people like Dutronc to claim that we filmed for eight months, although in fact it was only four, which was already a lot. He said other things as well, while claiming it was nothing to do with him. I realized that, out of the ten films I’d made, five have been stopped during filming, one of which, Loulou [1980], was stopped for over a year. Can you imagine making a film, all the time knowing that you’re almost bound not to finish it? With Loulou, it wasn’t my fault. Isabelle Huppert left for a year to go rollerskating with [director Michael] Cimino [in the scene in Heaven’s Gate (1980)]. Then the producers went bankrupt, so for months we screened the film with chunks missing. So, all in all, ten films, five of which were filmed in two parts. You must admit that it’s sod’s law that it always falls on me, who has a reputation for causing trouble. Do you believe that for one minute? It’s masochism, it doesn’t make sense. Right from the start I had problems, as I was up against the wall, I felt like a reject. One day, when I’m calm, I should write all this down like a police report, objective and without bitterness. [...]
A team of set decorators spent a month doing nothing. Twenty people being paid. Did you notice that you don’t see any exteriors in the film? That’s another thing, critics who know everything. Like at school, when you did something, and then someone, who was usually ignorant, took your hand and told you what you were trying to do. For instance, I was told it was intentional that you saw nothing of Auvers. Or that you don’t see Van Gogh painting. In fact, I had no choice in these matters. But I cracked it. I work best when everything is going wrong. [...]
[The film] shouldn’t be as it is, there’s so much missing. It’s okay, but you don’t see all that should be in it, and isn’t there. [...]
[In the film] I cut some shots in which he was simply holding a paintbrush, not even painting. I find it all so false. Sadly, in some scenes, such as when Marguerite is posing for him at the piano, we see him painting outside. It’s dreadful. Resorting to using the hand of a real painter is awful too. To make it credible you need a look, a feel. I just had to let the piano scene ride, I was so stunned by the child’s performance, and I thought that if I said “Cut!”, she would think that she wasn’t doing it right. Anyway, no one sees anything. I could have put in some link shots, but putting separate shots into a sequence like this is very unsuccessful.
[Regarding most people only seeing a film once and not noticing the worrisome details, that’s] something interesting about movies. It’s worth thinking about. There is no reason why people shouldn’t see films several times, but fewer and fewer people are really capable of, or interested in, discovering things. Those who have this awareness and knowledge, this desire, and who go back again and again to see a film – these are the people we should primarily be making films for. [...]
When I started to paint, I was twenty years old, I adored Van Gogh. I grew to like him less and less. A long time ago, I wanted to make a film about him, not out of admiration but because the story his sister put together was good raw material. Otherwise, I’m more interested in, say, Seurat’s last year. Just as, other things being equal, if I was going to adapt Bernanos, I’d have been better off doing L’imposture [The Fake, 1927] than Sous le soleil de Satan [Under the Sun of Satan, 1926, which Pialat adapted into a film in 1987]. To return to Van Gogh, I’ve just mentioned Seurat. What beginners like about Van Gogh, is the ease with which he works. You couldn’t buy pictures like that at the time, it would have been unimaginable. [...]
In the first place, it would have been hard to find an actor to play Seurat. [...]
Listen, [producer Daniel] Toscan du Plantier has many failings, but he’ll do anything. The proof is Sous le soleil de Satan. That was looney. You’re probably going to say I’m obsessed with the box office, but Seurat would have sold thirty thousand tickets, no more. Anyway, films about painters never work. Though, for the first three weeks, we had a feeling Van Gogh was going to do well. [Editor’s note: Van Gogh sold 1.4 million tickets in France.] I am disappointed in that I expect a great deal of my audiences, I am too demanding. People are facile. Like it or not, cinema needs commercial success. [...]
In 1964, I made a short I could show you. It lasted six minutes. At the time, I was making Chroniques en France for television, short programs for French-language broadcasts worldwide, not shown in France. I made about ten of these bread-and-butter projects. One of them was a little film called Auvers [i.e., the 1965 Van Gogh], which was not just about Van Gogh but about Daubigny too; there were landscape shots of the area, a little rostrum work, not much, in black-and-white. [...]
[The actor Daniel Auteuil] met Bernard-Henri Lévy and wanted to shoot his Baudelaire [Lévy’s 1988 novel Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire, or The Last Days of Charles Baudelaire]. [...] I started to read the thing, but I didn’t get to the end. I couldn’t see myself doing a period piece with all those top hats. I didn’t feel like doing another costume drama, even if I did end up doing exactly that with Van Gogh, though in this instance we were fairly restrained. The exception is the two dance-hall scenes, which were a bit hasty, a bit “let’s get it in the can”.
I’m giving you a psychoanalytic interpretation here, though it may not seem like that. You’re the one on the couch, but I’m the one suffering. This is how I make a film. I meet a nice guy who commissions me, but doesn’t put money on the table. He does bring a bit in though, because with his name someone like me can get a bigger budget. So I say, “I’ve got something I want to do.” [...]
[Opening the film with a shot of Van Gogh painting, and the hand actually being my own, is] an admission that something is missing. There’s so little painting in the film, we had to start with that.
[Regarding costume and dialogue, and focusing on the most concrete aspects of everyday life so that there is nothing anachronistic] – As far as the dialogue is concerned, the reason is really simple: I didn’t think about it. The language is not really contemporary. What people forget when they make museum films, the huge anachronism, is that people never speak old-French. I believe that if you start using period terminology, you might as well give up. As far as the costumes are concerned, things are even simpler. There are plenty of photographic records of the period and it would have been easy to use them. But I wanted to avoid stiff collars and top hats. I was haunted by that. We had some made in London, which were okay but – surprise, surprise – they're not in the final cut. But the really ridiculous things – the ones we rented – do appear a couple of times. [...]
This may sound immodest, but I think one of my talents is turning fuck-ups to my own advantage. Which isn’t to say I seek them out. When something goes wrong – and this is part of my theory that the real true moment in filmmaking is the shoot itself because what counts is what’s in the can – then I always find a way out. I believe I steered the film towards those comic moments, to the extent of my ability to do so. I’ve been wanting to make a comedy for a long time now, but I wouldn’t know how to write it, I have neither the wit nor the sense of dialogue to write the screenplay. People like Woody Allen, even Audiard, know how to do that. I’d need to shoot someone else’s writing, though with that person’s permission, I’d have to stick my nose into his work. It’s true that this is one dimension of Van Gogh, but then the expectation is of something heavy and dramatic. I wanted to inject some humor, some fantasy, without – I hope – being too heavy-handed. [...] I steered the movie in that direction to make it more fun to watch. Basically, the natural audience for Van Gogh are the people who never went to see it. Anyway, I don’t think life is all that dramatic. We’ve all seen people die. Well, to the very end, life hangs on in there. Just because someone’s a painter, it doesn’t mean they have to go around with this inspired, affected expression on their face. Painting is technical, you do it as well as you can.
I do think that Van Gogh was more driven than my depiction allows. That’s a weakness in the acting. Just think of all he managed to paint in those seventy days! I read in [Stefan] Zweig’s bad book about Nietzsche [Nietzsche, 1925] – it could only be bad, given what Zweig is like – that Van Gogh painted really fast. That sounds right, I’m sure it’s true. Actually, it’s something he could be criticized for. The idea that painting is about gesture came later. It’s in a different class. Some of his contemporaries, like Seurat, went on preparing their canvases and meditating. Cézanne needed up to sixty sittings for a portrait and redid the picture from start to finish at each sitting. In terms of portraiture, the result is not always as good as Van Gogh’s portraits, even if purely in terms of pictorial achievement there is more to it. Van Gogh, on the other hand, could do up to three pictures a day. [...]
I may express opinions through the character [of Van Gogh]’s mouth but he's quite unlike me. I exercised restraint in the remarks about critics, I could have gone much further. As far as I’m concerned, the best pieces are demolition jobs. I prefer negative criticism of my own work. When someone who is reasonably silly and not very well-educated – I mean critics in general – decides to lay into a film, he turns quite nasty, he seeks out the flaws and often gets it right. Whereas praise... [...]
Perhaps I had to wait till I reached an advanced age before I could show men and women in a relaxed relationship. Before now, I've just depicted the bitches I've come across in my life. [...]
We had a meal in a good restaurant that recently closed, unfortunately. One of the waiters had seen Van Gogh, like quite a few people who know me personally. Well, there was one thing he didn’t really get and that was the death scene. He wasn’t sure if he’d followed it properly or not, but he thought that the prostitute had sent one of the men to kill him out of jealousy. When you hear that, you know he’s right. Audiences that know nothing about Van Gogh are accustomed, because they watch TV series, to know exactly who kills whom. And if there’s a mystery, it’s always solved at the end. The funny thing is that I was going to call the film Who Killed Van Gogh?. I also liked Dr. Gachet’s Daughter. It wouldn’t have made much difference. [...]
I’ve got a cuttings book from the [1991 Cannes] festival. The press is bad, which is incredibly unfair. I don’t mind telling you that by the end of the edit, I thought Van Gogh was the best film in France since the war. When a film is released, you need to believe in it and the fact is that, to an extent, Van Gogh was up to my expectations. But now I know it’s not good enough. If I were the only judge, but I'm not. There are lots of reasons why no one can make the best film in France since the war. In any case, those kinds of competitions are a bit like the Tour de France. I don’t care much for them. I really feel that you can’t let the kind of press coverage that we had at Cannes pass — it’s unforgivable. Editors should fire critics for writing that kind of article; that’s assuming editors are any better than their journalists, which is often not the case. Usually they’re worse since they have to play the watchdog. I hear that one female journalist got canned, but I don’t think that was the reason. [...]
When we stood up for the applause [at the Cannes screening], at the end, I knew there were a few alterations that needed doing, childish little things. We went up to the actors, kissed them, shook their hands. That way, you get the clapping to last a bit longer, there are always people timing these things, though the timings they get are always off. I like playing that sort of trick. I’m a bit of a ham, really. A big ham. •
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In Memoriam: Ron Benson (17 October 1943 – 19 October 2015)
My boss and friend Ron Benson passed away on early Monday morning after a long struggle with cancer and ensuing complications. I'm grateful to have last heard from him by email this past Thursday, and to have spoken to him on the Thursday prior over Skype. We had a nice chat. Although he was speaking from his hospital room, he was in good spirits and sounded lively.
Some very brief remarks: For the nearly ten years I knew Ron, after being brought in by Nick Wrigley to work on The Masters of Cinema Series in early 2006, I was ceaselessly gob-smacked by his individuality, which zig-zagged over the course of years, months, a single given day: one half of a 10-year conversation that found room for more hilarity, warmth, exasperation, agreement and disagreement, football club updates, industry gossip, gut-instinct green-lights and red-lights, and filthy jokes goyishe/yidishe than any collaboration should rightfully anticipate. I will treasure the many trips we made together to do business at the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals, the excellent meals we shared, and the time that friends and I were able to have spent with him and his wife Marion when the couple visited New York. To have witnessed, and often been the recipient of, his extreme loyalty, empathy, generosity, and general kindness: I'll never forget this.
Rest in peace Lord Benson.
The following is the eulogy read at Ron's funeral by his daughters Denise and Ruth, and reprinted at a JustGiving fundraising page set up in Ron's name to help raise awareness and money for his favorite charity, the Teenage Cancer Trust, here.
Ronald, Ron, Ronny, RB, Dad, Grandpa, Bubbie and of course Lord R. Benson born in Bishop Stortford 17 October 1943 was a people person and took his personality into both business and home life. Dad could light up any room and would speak to anyone in any company at any time – and was ‘definitely’ more than happy to have an argument with anybody at any time about anything – but as everybody in this room will agree, Dad often made up, argued some more but managed to maintain friendships over many decades. He was generous in spirit and was at his happiest when he could do things to help people including his dedication to charity work in particular the Teenage Cancer Trust.
Dad was literally a self-made man from beginnings that were not that advantageous. Dad’s parents came into this country as immigrants escaping war and persecution.
From difficult beginnings Dad built a successful career, qualifying as an electrician and then running his own businesses. Always forward thinking and aware of what was happening in the world – after reading an article in the FT, he got very excited and with his passion for film he started up the video rental business (Mr Benson’s Video Collection). He was then one of the first people to enter the mail-order business (Mr Benson’s World of Home Entertainment which later became Bensonsworld), building a successful company working with all the main studios and distributors. Being the forward thinking man he saw ahead and moved on to owning intellectual properties (Eureka Entertainment) whether it be the amazing cult classics or the unseen wonders!
Although Dad’s body was riddled with cancer he put on a brave fight. Right up to the end he was determined to keep working and running his business, every second always on his phone, checking his emails, organising everyone.
Family was always very important to Dad; he would do anything for his wife of 49 years - Marion, children Denise and Ruth, his six grandchildren James, Nicole, Samuel, Matthew, Anthony, Adam and his sister Eva.
Dad was always a strong man both physically and mentally as proved by running a number of London marathons. Whether it was medical science or sheer will power – with only three months to live he managed to keep going for another year to attend and enjoy and dance his way at his Grandson Sam’s Bar Mitzva.
To sum up our Dad – A quote from an email we received yesterday from his consultant:
"It was a privilege to be Ron’s doctor - what a character! I shall never forget him. His humour shone through right to the very end. I will also treasure the copy of iPlot he gave me..."
He will always be remembered in our hearts and will never be forgotten.
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