Long Pauses

Tag: Notebook

  • High Life and the Idea of “A Claire Denis Film”

    High Life and the Idea of “A Claire Denis Film”

    This essay was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    The Beau Travail Effect

    When Film Comment surveyed nearly 120 filmmakers, critics, and programmers for its “Best of the Nineties” feature in the January/February 2000 issue, only four people mentioned Claire Denis. (Manohla Dargis, Atom Egoyan, Jonathan Romney, and Amy Taubin, if you’re curious). A year later Beau travail topped the magazine’s poll of the best films of 2000. The only evidence I’ve been able to find of a complete Denis retrospective in the English-speaking world during the 1990s was one organized by Linda Blackaby at the 1997 Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. Whereas between 2000 and 2003—following Beau Travail’s festival tour of Venice, Toronto, New York, Sundance, Berlin, and on and on—Denis was the spotlight of retros at the Cinematheque Ontario (courtesy of James Quandt), the National Film Theatre London, the Dublin International Film Festival, and the Northwest Film Forum. There were certainly others.

    This is not to suggest that Denis was unknown before Beau travail. Her first four narrative features—Chocolat (1988), No Fear, No Die (1990), I Can’t Sleep (1994), and Nenette and Boni (1996)—all screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and variously at Cannes, Locarno, Rotterdam, and elsewhere, and all four found American distribution. Other projects of note, including her contribution to Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge, the small masterpiece US Go Home (1994), and her documentary portrait of Jacques Rivette, Le veilleur (1994), aired on French television. And that summary only accounts for her career as a feature director, which didn’t begin until she was in her 40s. In an excellent 2009 essay for Reverse Shot, Leo Goldsmith traces Denis’s path from the prestigious film school, Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (now La Fémis), to the European film community of the 1970s, and speculates about how her career and style were shaped by fifteen years as an assistant director to the likes of Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch.

    Denis, then, is an interesting example of a filmmaker whose status as a leading auteur was confirmed quite suddenly, but only after nearly three decades of highly accomplished work: she was 53 when Beau travail bowed in Venice. Pedro Costa, whose debut feature, O Sangue (1989), premiered a year after Chocolat, had a similar experience in 2006, when Colossal Youth was presented in competition in Cannes. Retrospectives soon followed at the Cinematheque Ontario (again organized by Quandt), the Harvard Film Archive, and the Tate Modern, and his critical reputation in the States was finally secure enough in 2014 to land his first slot, at age 55, in the New York Film Festival. Angela Schanelec is having her well-deserved moment right now, at 57, after screening I Was Home, but… in competition at Berlin and securing American distribution for it, both firsts for her after more than two decades as a feature director.

    Costa is a useful point of comparison as well because, along with festival exposure and critical accolades, his place in the contemporary canon was cemented by the release by The Criterion Collection of the DVD boxset Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa in 2010. Denis now has two films released by Criterion, too, but I mention the significance of home video because her post-Beau travail renaissance coincided with the boom in mail-order DVD services such as Netflix and GreenCine, the corresponding re-release of catalog titles by distributors of all sizes, and the growth of new online publishing and discussion platforms. As a cinephile in East Tennessee, with no access to eclectic repertory programming and little in-person film community, I was suddenly able to have copies of Chocolat, I Can’t Sleep, and Beau travail delivered to my door. The opportunity, finally, to see contemporary world cinema beyond the sparse selection at large chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, combined with the rise of newsgroups, listservs, forums, and online film journals, gave me, and many others like me, new points of entry into the critical conversation. A decade-and-a-half before Claire Denis fans found their way to “Film Twitter,” she was a staple of the blogosphere.

    By one more significant measure, Denis’s critical reputation was secured in June 2004 with the publication of the first book-length study of her work, Martine Beugnet’s monograph for Manchester University Press’s French Film Directors series; Judith Mayne’s for the University of Illinois Press’s Contemporary Film Directors series followed a year later. They remain the only single-author studies of Denis in English. Mayne’s book ends with a July 2003 interview with Denis that includes a brief, vague description of The Intruder (2004)—“it’s inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s book . . . It’s based on the idea of intrusion”—otherwise, both monographs discuss her career up to and including her first two films of the 2000s, Trouble Every Day (2001) and Friday Night (2002). Our collective sense of Denis, then, coalesced during the roughly three-year period that followed the premiere of Beau travail and was formed around the seven narrative features that a majority of viewers were seeing then for the first time.

    “A Claire Denis Film”

    From the vantage of 2019, Friday Night is now the midpoint of Denis’s career as a feature director. However, what we talk about when we talk about “a Claire Denis film”—the language we use to describe her image-making, her staging of actors (or “bodies”; it’s always “bodies” with Denis), and her artistic preoccupations—hasn’t kept pace in the interim. I’d argue that, while that language remains useful and necessary, it is increasingly insufficient for a filmography that was never as uniform as the popular critical conversation suggested and has become even less so in recent years. What does it mean, for example, when long-time champions of Denis’s work suggest, as I’ve heard more than once, that had her name not been on Let the Sunshine In (2018), they would not have known it was a Claire Denis film? Implicit in that reaction is a certain bias, a predetermined sense of what each new film should be.

    This situation owes somewhat to the oft-mentioned constancy of Denis’s creative collaborations. Jean-Pol Fargeau co-wrote ten of the thirteen features, Agnès Godard photographed or operated the camera on every film except White Material (2009) and High Life (2019), and Stuart Staples and Dickon Hinchliffe of Tindersticks scored nine of them. Denis’s loyalty extends to other departments as well. Judy Shrewsbury has costumed every feature since Beau travail; Jean-Louis Ughetto and Jean-Christophe Winding recorded and edited sound for six films each. Nelly Quetier edited five of the six features between 1994 and 2004; Guy Lecorne edited four of the five since then. Denis is likewise famous for her fascination with certain actors, especially Alex Descas, Grégoire Colin, Michel Subor, and Nicolas Duvauchelle. To revisit her first seven narrative features, then, is to watch Denis gradually assembling that team and developing her signature way of working.

    Indeed, the established idea of “a Claire Denis film” might be partly understood as a constellation of formal choices resulting from a particular mode of production. For another project, I broke down Denis’s and Fargeau’s scripts for I Can’t Sleep, Nenette and Boni, and 35 Shots of Rum (2008) and discovered nearly identical structures. I’m curious, also, about the influence of Arnaud de Moleron’s production design and art direction on our notions of her style. A long-time collaborator with François Ozon, Moleron designed all but one of Denis’s films between 1994 and 2008, and my sense is that a broad polling of viewers would result in a top 5 Denis canon made up entirely of Moleron-designed films: Beau travail, The Intruder, Trouble Every Day, US Go Home, and 35 Shots of Rum. (My personal canon would include I Can’t Sleep and Nenette and Boni, also Moleron films.) When critics describe the sensuality of Godard’s images and the subjectivity of Denis’s perspective, they are more often than not also referring to a hallmark formal expressionism that is especially heightened—occasionally to the point of camp—in their work with Moleron.

    The colors of I Can’t Sleep

    The relationship between film style and the practical realities of production is a thick and complicated subject. More to the point, there’s a book to be written about how the careers and styles of acclaimed auteurs who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s were reshaped by the combined forces of the 2007 economic recession, the broad adoption of new digital technologies, and the resulting shifts in global film markets. In hindsight, those years were a historical turning point on par with the end of the studio system and the rise of blockbusters. The most extreme example is David Lynch, who only recently returned to television after a decade without a major directing credit. Tsai Ming-liang, who made ten narrative features between 1991 and 2009, has released only one since. The Assassin is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s sole post-recession feature.

    By those standards, Denis has had a remarkably productive twelve years, completing five features and a number of short films. However, she’s done so within a new economic reality. As one objective measure of the shift, Denis’s first eight features averaged five production/financing partnerships, while her five post-recession films have averaged twelve. Following the acclaim of Beau Travail, Denis has received consistent support from Centre National de la Cinématographie, Canal+, and ARTE France Cinema, which is a useful reminder of the benefits enjoyed by established filmmakers in France and other countries that offer robust state financing. The relatively small budgets of her post-recession films have otherwise been assembled from more than 40 different sources. The most glaring example of this industry trend is Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2018), which credits 31 producers and 21 production companies. Not coincidentally, Zama is the only narrative feature Martel has released since 2008—this after making three highly praised films over the previous seven years.

    This is all relevant to discussions of the second half of Denis’s career because the packaging of financing has determined not only what films she could make and when she could make them, but has also influenced certain creative decisions. When Louis Trebor visits Pusan, South Korea in The Intruder, we can assume he does so in part to appease the Pusan Film Commission, who helped to finance the film. Likewise, Lionel and Joséphine’s brief trip to Hamburg in 35 Shots of Rum and the Poland-shot flashback sequences in High Life exist, in part, to meet contractual obligations. In a recent interview with Paul Dallas for Filmmaker, Denis explains that she’d originally wanted to shoot those flashbacks in New Orleans and that one reason Godard left the project was because she would not have been allowed to use her own team: “Yorick [Le Saux] agreed to work with a German crew, and that was important for the coproduction.” If one notion of “a Claire Denis film” is that it should be concerned with borders and intrusion, then several of her films demonstrate that idea in their very form!

    Late Denis

    For her part, Denis claims to not care in the least about how we receive and theorize her films. While promoting Let the Sunshine In, she told Jonathan Romney:

    If there are theories about me, I’d rather not know. Astrophysics—now that’s fascinating. String theory, worm holes, the expanding universe, the Big Bang versus the Big Bounce—those are the kind of theories that make you feel like living and understanding the mystery of the world. Film theory is just a pain in the ass.

    When I interviewed her in 2015, she laughed when I asked a variation on the “bodies” question. It was only after following up with a specific example that she would even entertain the idea.

    DENIS: This is a mystery to me, I have to say, because I never thought that I was filming bodies. I’m filming characters, you know? And I always think, if I am not, like in No Fear, No Die, walking with them, if it’s a static shot, then I must have space to see the movement. I don’t see why I do more bodies than other directors.

    HUGHES: There are definitely recurring shots. You’ve certainly filmed more shoulder blades than any other director I can think of.

    DENIS: In Bastards, it was almost a caricature of a woman looking at a man. Certainly, Vincent [Lindon] also when he was in Friday Night naked, I was amazed by his shoulder. Nakedness I’m not interested in but the body is always very emotional.

    And yet, despite her protests, Denis is actively engaged in conversations about her work—visiting festivals, giving masterclasses and public forums, sitting with critics, mentoring younger filmmakers. Her efforts go beyond the requisite work of promotion and advocacy; she is compelled, in her own words, by a “need.” My 2015 interview took place in Toronto, where she was participating in TIFF’s Talent Lab and screening her short film, Voilà l’enchaînement, but had no major projects to publicize. When I asked her why she agreed to my interview request when it would have been so easy to say no, she told me she feared “overlooking” her work:

    I prefer to dig, to dig, to dig blindly, you know? It’s not pretentious what I want to say. I never could organize myself as a professional with a career. One film was finished and there was this sometimes painful feeling [afterwards], so the source of the next one was in this pain. There is a hope always of doing a better film, for sure, even the hope of being acclaimed as the best director in the whole world, but this hope is not as strong as it should be. Need is there, and need is driving me. At the Talent Lab, I told everyone that I feel like them, like a young filmmaker. My experience is not the experience of someone who has tamed filmmaking. No. Not at all. For me, it’s still a mustang or a wild horse. It’s true. Each time, I try. That’s all I can say.

    Still a mustang. If I’m too quick to take Denis at her word, it’s because, after watching and re-watching her films for nearly twenty years, I’m still thrilled by the feat. In one brief span, she premiered Beau travail, Trouble Every Day, Friday Night, and The Intruder—as wildly diverse, inventive, and psychologically complex a five-year run of films as any in decades. What we can say, at the very least, is that Denis is a fiercely independent artist, and one who has proven herself capable of realizing a vision within whatever restraints are posed by a particular production. (In thinking through this piece, I corresponded with a number of critics and programmers who have wrestled with Denis’s work for years, and this sense of her as a strong-willed creative force was a recurring theme.) To wit: twenty years after I Can’t Sleep, and working for the first and only time with Michel Barthélémy (production design), Ambroise Cheneau (art direction), and Claire Vaysse (set decoration), Denis and Godard still convinced us that a late-night visit to a hospital in Bastards (2013) should be bathed in rose-colored light—which I’ll admit isn’t nearly as memorable as the red naugahyde fuck-ottoman.

    The colors of Bastards

    I think we can begin to complicate our sense of “a Claire Denis film,” then, by acknowledging the shifts that took place in her career and the industry around the time of The Intruder and by foregrounding the effects those changes have had on her “late” films. We can treat her expanding roster of associates as creative collaborators—just as we do Godard, Fargeau, Descas, and Tindersticks—and try to identify and describe their contributions in an effort to better understand Denis as an auteur. And we can intentionally put aside some of the critical vocabulary that has become diminished from overuse.

    In 2008, when Denis was promoting 35 Shots of Rum and in post-production on White Material, I asked her if working with Isabelle Huppert presented any new challenges as a director.

    HUGHES: She’s one of the few actors or actresses who I think of as an auteur herself. She can command a film.

    DENIS: She’s not commanding. She’s a very intelligent actress. She is guessing and she’s inventing a relation with each director that creates an addiction to her. She’s not commanding because that would be too easy. She creates a need for her, when she’s an addiction. Somehow the film becomes … her.

    White Material marks a significant transition point for Denis in that it’s the first film made without Fargeau and Godard (cinematographer Yves Cape and editor Lecorne are both long-time associates of Bruno Dumont) and her first time directing an actor with international standing, who brings with her to the screen decades of memorable performances and strong associations for audiences. When Denis has spoken over the years of needing to hold and possess her actors, of jealously wanting them to work only with her, she is hinting at a new dynamic in her work with Huppert, Juliette Binoche, Robert Pattinson, and Mia Goth. Generally speaking, too little attention has been paid to the performances in Denis’s films (otherwise, Valérie Lemercier’s in Friday Night would be on every best of the 2000s list). That sense of White Material “becoming” Huppert—of celebrity personas and more traditionally psychological acting styles infecting Denis’s images and pacing—is an especially rich subject for study.

    Denis’s late films also expand her career-long and precise analysis of capital, from the colonial economies of White Material, to the working-class alienation of 35 Shots of Rum (René’s post-retirement death deserves an article of its own), to the blistering rage of Bastards, which I can now barely stomach in this age of Trumpian cruelty and kleptocracy. I’m eager for more people to see Voilà l’enchaînement when it’s included on Criterion’s release of Let the Sunshine In, both because Denis’s relationship with screenwriter Christine Angot has introduced a very different voice to her films and because the two-hander form of the short has much to teach us about Denis’s directing of actors. High Life also challenges simpler notions of “a Claire Denis film,” and I’m convinced it’s among her finest work. The remainder of this piece is my first attempt to better understand why.

    A Signature Moment in High Life

    Near the end of High Life, after a key character jettisons herself into space, Monte (Pattinson), a man who has spent most of his life in prisons of one kind or another, chooses to continue living. Given the context, it is an absurd and heroic act. It’s also one of the purest philosophical expressions to be found in Denis’s work. Five years into a deep-space mission and with no hopes of returning, Monte decides, like Sisyphus, to once again push his rock up the mountain, or, in his case, to log a computer report that will keep the ship’s life support systems operating for another 24 hours. “Time to feed the dog,” he sighs when the daily alarm sounds, an act of will straight out of Camus:

    By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide. I know, to be sure, the dull resonance that vibrates throughout these days. Yet I have but a word to say: that it is necessary.

    Over its long gestation period, High Life attracted the attention of several name actors, including Daniel Craig and Patricia Arquette, and Denis has mentioned several times that she imagined Philip Seymour Hoffman playing a middle-aged, more despairing version of Monte. “Then this great actor died,” she told Dallas. “He was a star, but he was someone I really thought I could work with, had he accepted the role. But the suicidal thing really frightened me.” She has also spoken often over the years, and always with great affection, about film producer Humbert Balsan, who committed suicide months after their collaboration on The Intruder. (Balsan is the inspiration for the main character in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Father of My Children.) Which is to say that the question of suicide—what Camus famously called “the one truly serious philosophical problem”—is far from an academic exercise in High Life.

    In a film already renowned for its sudden explosions of brutality, its flirtations with transgression and taboo, and its images of a nude Binoche writhing on a stainless steel dildo, Monte’s salvation is High Life’s true reason for being. I use that word, “salvation,” with only a hint of irony. While the film draws on any number of sci-fi and prison film conventions, High Life is classic speculative fiction in that all of the narrative mechanisms—cosmology, astrophysics, violence, reproduction, the ethics of crime and punishment—are interlocking pieces of an ontological/theological puzzle box.

    “We invented rituals,” Monte says in voiceover while scraping shavings from his beard into a pile. When he and his shipmates prepare a crew member for cryogenic storage, one of them tosses a handful of dirt onto the dead woman’s chest. “It’s what she wanted!” her grieving friend cries. Tcherny (André Benjamin) sits with Monte in the Edenic garden where their food is grown, his bare toes touching the soil, and espouses a kind of vague, secular mindfulness: “This little garden is teaching me to enjoy the present. That’s all that matters.” Another character mimics the motions of Christian prayer that she glimpses in random transmissions from Earth because she wants “to know what they feel.” Monte is compared with a monk; Dr. Dibs (Binoche) is a witch and a shaman. The drive to understand the universe and humanity’s place in it, and the compulsion to ritualize that understanding and build tribal identities around it, is inescapable it seems, even beyond the edge of our solar system.

    Monte’s salvation is precipitated by a child. The idea for High Life has been with Denis since the early-2000s, when she first envisioned Vincent Gallo traveling through space with only his infant daughter. This configuration of the family unit—a protective father figure and a dead or distant mother—is as foundational to Denis’s imagination as it is to fairy tales. The archetype runs from Chocolat through Bastards, but my favorite example is the “Tiny Tears” sequence in Nenette and Boni, when Boni’s onanistic fantasy about the boulangère morphs into an image of domestic bliss: a husband and wife happily holding their newborn child. He doesn’t want to fuck her so much as he needs a hug. High Life, in fact, opens with the word “daddy” and a seven-minute sequence that recalls the prologue of Denis’s “father and daughter” masterpiece, 35 Shots of Rum. In both, Denis crosscuts between the two characters before bringing them together in their shared domestic space, establishing a particular tenderness in their relationship, and then putting a button on the sequence with a killer music cue, Harry Belafonte’s “Merci, Bon Dieu” in 35 Shots of Rum, the first appearance of Tindersticks’ “Willow” in High Life.

    Father figures

    Monte’s moment of crisis isn’t quite like anything Denis has filmed before. She claims to have spoken very little to Pattinson about his character’s psychological makeup. Instead, she gives him room and trusts his decisions. There’s a highwire energy in his performance, especially when he’s sparring with Goth, another uncharacteristically spontaneous Denis collaborator. With a few notable exceptions—Denis Lavant in Beau travail, or perhaps Gallo and Béatrice Dalle in Trouble Every Day—performers in Denis’s early films, as a general rule, are composed and self-contained. Alex Descas, in particular, is a constant, immovable moral force, absorbing slaps from Dalle in I Can’t Sleep and quietly internalizing every indignity in No Fear, No Die. Monte adopts a similarly stoic pose during most of High Life, but Pattinson is a different kind of actor, and at the turning point for his character, standing alone near the airlock, he punches himself repeatedly and violently in the face. Denis watches it all from a distance before cutting to a close-up, where we see a bulging vein in Pattinson’s forehead and splotches on his skin. The existential battle has become written on his body (forgive my one use of the word).

    And so Monte makes his report, choosing to live for at least one more day, and then finds his way to Dibs’s lab, where his infant daughter is waiting. Denis composes them in a tight frame, with Pattinson leaning toward the incubator and her small hand gripping his finger. She holds the shot for nearly a minute and then cuts to Monte, who has made his decision. “I’ve got tears in my eyes,” Denis told an audience, as she described that moment. “Suddenly his life is changing forever.”

  • “There are Miracles”: A Conversation with Hong Sang-soo

    “There are Miracles”: A Conversation with Hong Sang-soo

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    Hong Sang-soo has a reputation for being a tricky interview, and he knows it. In Claire’s Camera, one of his three films that premiered in 2017, a Korean director who’s in Cannes to promote his latest movie tries to back out of the two press engagements on his schedule. “You need to do that much,” his sales agent cajoles him. “It’s not that much.”

    Hong, likewise, has been known to cancel or reschedule interviews and to give terse and seemingly disinterested answers. He tends to talk about his production methods in the most straight-forward terms and dismisses questions about authorial intent. Asking him to interpret his own work is a fool’s errand. “I get up at 4:00, I smoke, and something I didn’t expect comes to me,” he told me. 

    I met Hong in the bar of the Loews Regency on October 9th, the afternoon after his other two new films, On the Beach at Night Alone and The Day After, had their first public screenings at the New York Film Festival. He was tired from a late night but amiable and generous. My strategy was to begin by raising an under-discussed aspect of his career—that Hong’s early training in interdisciplinary art programs, rather than an industrial film school, had set him down this road of unconventional production techniques. From there he took the discussion in a few unexpected directions. There are miracles, indeed.

    On the Beach at Night Alone opens November 17 in the U.S. Read our review and interview from Berlin. See also our reviews of Claire’s Camera and The Day After from Cannes.

    * * *

    HUGHES: I’ve heard you tell a story that you stumbled into filmmaking as a college student, that you were bored and decided to transfer to the film department on the advice of a friend. Is that right? 

    HONG SANG-SOO: I was in limbo. I didn’t take the entrance exam. And then this playwright and theater director, my mother’s friend, came to our house. They had a small party. Everyone left except for him because he was drunk. He was sitting on the sofa alone. This was around 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., and I was cleaning up. I was fond of him because he was a character. I was sitting next to him and he said, “What are you doing?” “I’m doing nothing.” [laughs] He said, “Maybe you should try the theater? Maybe you can do it?” He was just saying it. I don’t know if he really meant it. He was drunk. But when he left, I started thinking, “That sounds very nice.” So I prepared for the entrance exam for a couple months and then I entered the theater department. But unfortunately I had a problem with the senior students, so I couldn’t go on being in the department.

    HUGHES: What do you mean “a problem”?

    HONG: We had a severe problem. [laughs] In those days, especially in the theater department, there was a hierarchy between senior students and junior students. It was very strict. But it happened to be a theater and cinema department, and when I looked at the film students, they didn’t have the same hierarchical relationships. So I thought, “Maybe I’ll try film.” 

    HUGHES: Was it just film production or did it also include film history?

    HONG: Production. There were film history courses, too, but I never meant to become a scholar. 

    HUGHES: Were you a cinephile before then? 

    HONG: I only watched movies on weekends on TV. Hollywood films.

    HUGHES: You eventually went to the California College of the Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which are both interdisciplinary film programs. 

    HONG: Yeah, they encourage you to study the other majors. That was another accident. One day I saw this newspaper article about how they’d just allowed a student to go abroad even though he didn’t fulfill [his compulsory] military service. He could study abroad, come back, and do the military service afterwards. I was in my second or third year in the Korean university when I saw this small article. I started looking for funds that I could use for going abroad. First I went to some institution that helps you find a school and I said, “I want to go abroad and study film. Any college is fine as long as it’s cheap!” 

    And then I went to this person I knew who is a friend of my mother. He’s another character. He was a monk and then became a film producer. He was also a writer, and I liked him, and I had this feeling that he might help me out. So I went to him and said, “I want to go abroad and study film, and if you help me now I will help you later. Can you do that?” And he said, “Yes.” So I got funds from him for studying abroad.

    HUGHES: Why is your mother surrounded by such interesting people? 

    HONG: Because she likes interesting people, talented people. [long pause] Anyway, I was very lucky to get the answer “yes.” 

    HUGHES: Most film schools in America train students to play a part in a larger production machine. The schools you went to …

    HONG: Had nothing to do with that.

    HUGHES: Did you meet filmmakers in those schools who showed you other kinds of production models? 

    HONG: In both departments, most of the teachers were filmmakers themselves. It was good to see that. During vacations they would make their own films. Most of them were experimental filmmakers. I liked them and I really enjoyed talking to them. They were a great help. They encouraged me a lot. I was lucky again.

    HUGHES: Did you see that as a model to follow? Could you imagine yourself teaching and making films during vacation? 

    HONG: No, I never thought of becoming a teacher. Now I’m teaching at a university, but at the time I didn’t have any concrete plans.

    Until I was 27, when I saw Diary of a Country Priest, I never thought I would make a feature-length narrative film. I always thought I was going to make experimental films, very short films, strange ones. [laughs] That was the vague plan. It was all I had. And then I saw Diary of a Country Priest and thought it was so beautiful. That film was something, really. It gave me hope: If a film can do this then I can learn how to make a narrative film. 

    HUGHES: Where did you see it?

    HONG: In Chicago. In a seminar.

    HUGHES: Was it a Robert Bresson seminar?

    HONG: No. They were showing many films. This was one of them. And so I started reading about how to write a script. 

    HUGHES: When did you first see Luis Buñuel’s films? 

    HONG: Also in Chicago. Richard Peña, who used to be the director here of the New York Film Festival, was a lecturer there and taught a course about Buñuel. I was Pena’s graduate assistant for the course, so I saw most of Buñuel’s films and really loved all of them. 

    HUGHES: Years ago, after a screening of Claire Denis’s L’intrus, I was discussing the film with a friend and he said, “This is what I learned from Buñuel: It’s pointless to ask, ‘Is it real or is it a dream?’ Who cares? It’s cinema.” I think about that often when I watch your films. At the end of part one of On the Beach at Night Alone, Kim Min-hee’s character is abducted by a stranger, with no explanation. I assume you don’t care how that’s interpreted. 

    HONG: It doesn’t matter. As long as I feel it’s okay, it’s okay. Everything is illusion, realistically speaking. Everything, everything we see, we feel, we imagine, everything is real and at the same time is fake. It’s an illusion. The distinction is not that important.

    HUGHES: Do you mean in life? Or just in cinema?

    HONG: Okay, when you deal with practical things, we all have to speak the same language, so we pretend to [share the same reality]. But really, really, really [laughs] realistically speaking, everything’s okay, is how I feel. Know what I mean? Everything is illusion, everything is grace. But when you deal with everyday life you have to speak the same language in order to communicate and get what you want. It’s dualistic. 

    HUGHES: Did you intentionally just quote Diary of a Country Priest? “Everything is grace.” 

    HONG: Oh, yeah, yeah. Maybe one of the reasons I liked that film when I saw it for the first time was because of that dialogue at the end. It touches me deeply. It’s what I keep saying to myself every day. 

    HUGHES: It is all grace.

    HONG: Everything. Whether we acknowledge it, it is grace. 

    HUGHES: This is a dumb and obvious question, but is that what your characters are seeking? 

    HONG: Kim Min-hee’s character [in On the Beach at Night Alone] says something about this, about praying to God. Except for that character, I’ve never written someone who says this, my attitude, directly. I was being careful. But now I’ve changed, I guess, a little bit. With Kim Min-hee I thought, “Maybe it’s okay to say these things directly.”

    HUGHES: You talk often about how you begin each film with certain actors in mind. You see some quality in them that you think you can work with. As I’ve watched these recent films, I’ve tried to figure out what it is that interests you about Kim Min-hee when she’s on screen. In that first long scene in Claire’s Camera, when she’s being fired by her boss, her body language is beautiful. She rolls her shoulders forward and leans into the conversation.

    HONG: Yes, I find it very beautiful too.

    HUGHES: Do you stage that? 

    HONG: No, no, as long as they are faithful to the dialogue I gave them, each take is their own. They are free to interpret the dialogue. I try to give them a minimum amount of instruction. Only when they are going in the wrong direction [laughs], I tell them, “No, no, that’s not the way to go.” Otherwise, I let them do whatever they want to do.

    Each take is very different, usually. Each take is a small universe. That’s why I want to have unbroken takes, because each one is very different. So when they finish [a great take] I don’t even want to talk about it. They do these small things. There are miracles. I don’t want them to repeat that from a reverse angle. 

    HUGHES: With that shot, though, you’ve chosen where to put the camera. 

    HONG: Yes.

    HUGHES: And it’s slightly behind Kim Min-hee. We don’t see her entire face until the very end of the take, when she turns toward the dog on the ground. Much of the drama is in her stooped shoulders. 

    HONG: Yes. 

    HUGHES: I was also struck by another long take in Claire’s Camera, when the sales agent is talking to the director in a cafe. Midway through the scene a bus or a truck passes by the window. We don’t see it, but it briefly blocks out most of the natural light. It’s an exciting moment for me as a viewer. The image suddenly becomes charged in some new way.

    HONG: I plan few things but I expect—secretly, all the time—that something will happen during the take. Could be a noise, could be the change of light from a truck passing by. [The actors’] interpretation of each take is always fresh for me. Sometimes they emphasize this line but the next take they emphasize another line. They’re in harmony. I really love watching these changes between the different takes. I allow all of these things to happen, and if I like the result I keep it. 

    HUGHES: Is there ever any doubt about which is the right take? Or do you always know immediately? 

    HONG: I kind of know. I usually have one or two takes that I keep, that I think are okay, and when I return to my office I look at them and decide. 

    HUGHES: I saw Claire Denis’s new film, Let the Sun Shine In, yesterday, and it felt like her version of a Hong Sang-soo film.

    HONG: [laughs] Another interviewer mentioned that. I haven’t seen it yet.

    HUGHES: I only mention it because in an interview for the film she said she told her screenwriter, Christine Angot, “We don’t have much time. We don’t have much of a budget. Let’s film your words.” That approach is out of the ordinary for her but pretty typical for you. Especially in the recent films, your characters barely exist outside of conversation. 

    HONG: I always have a few scenes of a character alone, walking. I like them because there’s a different light outside, or trees are moving. Even if the scenes are short, they’re very precious. I’ll have long conversation shots and in between there’s a small insert or they’re walking on the street. Just that much is precious to me. 

    HUGHES: Is that rhythm designed ahead of time?

    HONG: No, I just keep shooting in chronological order. I write based on what I wrote the day before. 

    HUGHES: There are several beautiful images in the new films. For example, the shots of Kim Min-hee on the beach. You could have shot those scenes somewhere else, in a cafe or in front of a brick wall. How important is beauty when you’re designing a scene? 

    HONG: If the image reminds me of a cliched “beautiful image,” I try not to use them. When I decided to [make a film] in Cannes I knew I wanted to shoot something on the beach. Cannes is known for the beach, so I knew I would shoot something important there. If it turned out to be a beautiful scene, that’s okay. I’m satisfied with it, but I don’t aim to repeat what others say is a “beautiful scene” intentionally. It has to come naturally and out of necessity. 

    HUGHES: Would a clichéd image break your films?

    HONG: I make a joke to my cinematographer all the time, “Maybe this is too beautiful?” [laughs] I guess my frame, my cinematography, is neutral. I don’t know if this expression is exactly right, but I want to contain what is going on in the most economic frame. Following them in the most economic way has a certain beauty. That’s all I’m aiming for. But sometimes it happens that the scenery is so beautiful [that it necessitates that I] shoot at a low angle to show [Kim’s] back on the same level, and it’s beautiful. That’s okay. I can handle that. But I don’t aim for a so-called beautiful scene. Never.

    HUGHES: Because your films follow that long take/short aside rhythm that you described earlier, I’m always intrigued by the images that break the pattern. There’s a shot in Claire’s Camera when Kim Min-hee and Isabelle Huppert are looking at a large mural. They’re both quite small and cut off at the bottom of the frame. 

    HONG: That’s the place where we always stay together—the crew, everyone. I noticed the mural has three ladies and I wondered, “Maybe this has something to do with my films?” [laughs] 

    HUGHES: Since you’re now shooting mostly in long takes, do you ever regret not getting to use some of the other tools of the trade? Do you miss close ups? 

    HONG: I have a close up! I can zoom in any time I want. 

    HUGHES: I don’t remember seeing a tight close up for some time. 

    HONG: [smiles] You will see it. The one I just shot. 

    HUGHES: Do you feel that you have to preserve those shots for particular occasions?

     HONG: It just comes naturally. I’m not aiming for any effect. I’m just following my instinct. 

    HUGHES: The final, long conversation in On the Beach at Night Alone is staged as a group scene, but because it’s a dream, presumably it could’ve been written as a conversation just between Kim Min-hee’s character and the film director. 

    HONG: It just came out that way.

    HUGHES: It’s interesting, though, because the presence of other people changes the dynamic. She wants validation from the director. He wants validation from everyone at the table. 

    HONG: It shows who he is. Maybe we have hints of why the relationship didn’t work. All of these things can be perceived by this group of people—how they interact with each other, things like that. But when I wrote the scene, I didn’t intend that. It just came out like that. 

    HUGHES: Are there still moments when you’re surprised or especially delighted by something that, ten minutes earlier, you’d had no intention of writing?

    HONG: Every morning I’m surprised! Every morning, after one or two hours, something really fresh comes to me, and I’m surprised. “Wow!” [laughs]

    HUGHES: Is that the fun part? 

    HONG: Of course. It’s the most intense part. I enjoy it so much.

    HUGHES: Do you think that process has helped to teach you how to recognize grace around you? 

    HONG: I think it’s all connected. I want to create something right now, in the moment, spontaneously. Sometimes I think about why I do this, writing in the morning, and I’ve come up with this explanation: it’s my temperament. I remember even when I was young, I would have a good time with my friends and then one would say, “Let’s meet again this weekend.” I’d say “no.” I didn’t want to have a preparation period. It’s my temperament.

    HUGHES: The way you describe your writing process sounds not like prayer, exactly, but like a kind of spiritual practice. 

    HONG: I get up at 4:00, I smoke, and something I didn’t expect comes to me. I hurry to finish everything, I retouch it, print it, and call the actors to set. And after two hours I can see them acting what I wrote. 

    HUGHES: It’s a miracle every day. 

    HONG: It’s so nice.

  • Better Than Wages: Chloé Zhao Discusses The Rider

    Better Than Wages: Chloé Zhao Discusses The Rider

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    Midway through The Rider, Lakota cowboy Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) takes a job at a local grocery store. Forbidden by his doctors from ever riding again and with few prospects near his home on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, he’s humiliated to find himself wearing a name tag and waving a barcode scanner. Brady, the actor, later told Chloé Zhao that filming those scenes was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. Like the character he plays, Jandreau had recently survived a near-fatal skull fracture during a rodeo, and the painful prospect of giving up his cowboy life was still fresh. 

    The Rider is the second feature film Zhao has made at Pine Ridge, following Songs My Brothers Taught Me in 2015. “I wanted to make a movie about the cowboys I met there,” she told me, “but I didn’t have a story until Brady’s accident.” Working quickly with a small crew and a small budget, Zhao assembled the cast from Brady’s everyday life, including his father (Tim Jandreau) and sister (Lilly Jandreau), the pack of cowboys he’s lived and competed with, and Lane Scott, a young rodeo champion who was paralyzed in an accident and is now confined to a rehabilitation facility. Zhao and Director of Photography Joshua James Richards made the most of the South Dakota landscape and natural light, shooting as often as possible during magic hour. The results are, to borrow Zhao’s description of the location, “majestic.”

    The Rider is like The Misfits (John Huston, 1961) as re-imagined by Claire Denis, an archetypal story about the knotty tangle of work, masculinity, identity, and the natural world, told in a subjective and sympathetic formal style. Clark Gable’s weathered and wandering horse trader Gay Langland haunts this film, with his mantra, “It’s better than wages, ain’t it?” finding a new resonance in the 21st century. Zhao, a Chinese immigrant, is herself ambivalent about the ties that bind men and women like Brady to their land—shutting them out of other economies in the process—and The Rider likewise presents a conflicted, observational portrait of their cloistered and enviable world. 

    This interview took place on September 10, 2017, the morning after The Rider had its first screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. When I introduced myself, I explained that I was visiting Toronto from Knoxville, Tennessee, where I live on a small horse farm, and that before buying our place we’d boarded our horses for years at a rodeo stable. I asked if we could talk horses. Zhao agreed happily and said she only wished Brady could’ve joined us. 

    * * *

    CHLOÉ ZHAO: What kind of horses do you have?

    HUGHES: A Tennessee Walking Horse and an Appendix Quarter.

    ZHAO: Ooh, the Tennessee Walking Horse is amazing to ride. Some of these horses you see in the movie are rough, but Walking Horses . . . 

    HUGHES: Ours is getting old, but when he gets into his full gait, it’s beautiful. 

    ZHAO: They’re amazing.

    HUGHES: I appreciated your attention to the details of horse life. There’s a scene in which Brady considers pawning his saddle, and you step viewers through the entire exchange. Brady says exactly what he paid for the custom work and the guy in the shop explains that they usually offer 25 cents on the dollar. There are more saddles on the wall behind him, so we know immediately that horse tack is a kind of currency in this community. And the same with horses. You show them being bought, sold, and traded throughout the film. The horse world is like a separate economy. 

    ZHAO: That’s Brady’s saddle. Every day on set he’d ask, “Is my saddle in back?” “Yes, Brady, it’s in back.” Or once I put his hat on the dashboard [for a shot]. “Chloé, the hat needs to be upside down. It’s going to collapse!” I thought, “I don’t have a production designer. Leave me alone!” [laughs] These things are so important to them. 

    I’ve spent so much time with rodeo cowboys, so much time. Two years. After Songs, my first film, I met these Indian cowboys on the reservation and went to my first rodeo. I knew nothing before. I’d only seen images [on TV]. And you know how with “extreme sports,” once the sponsors come on, everything becomes much fancier? I’d never seen a backyard, “let’s just have a rodeo” type of thing. These kids, every day they grab a couple bulls and put them in the corral and have a bullfight. I would watch this and think, “Oh my God.” But it’s the heart of it. They live so close to the animals and the land. It’s such a part of their DNA. I became fascinated with it. Obsessed. All of these little details you’re talking about are just the accumulation of my experience watching and listening for two years.  

    HUGHES: In my experience, there’s a real generosity baked into the ethics of rodeo culture. People take care of each other. 

    ZHAO: That’s what I’ve seen. Again, we’re talking here about the reservation, and a lot of these kids didn’t have their parents when they were growing up. Or they do but the parents have a lot of kids and they have their own stuff to deal with. So a lot of these young people raise each other. Lane, Brady, Tanner, James, those boys have been together for so long on the road with rodeo. They spent all of their free time together as kids, climbing trees, hunting. There’s a brotherhood before anything else.

    HUGHES: Brady has “Brother” tattooed on his arm, right?

    ZHAO: Yeah, it says “Brothers” if you look at it one way and “Forever” if you turn it. At Telluride, Lane said we all needed to get a bald eagle feather on our calves and it was going to say “The Rider” at the bottom. “Chloé, you’re going to do it too, right?” “No, I’m not going to have the name of my movie tattooed on my calf.” [laughs] 

    HUGHES: Earning that trust and building those relationships must have been 90% of the work. In my experience, along with their generosity and religious faith, which The Rider touches on occasionally, rodeo culture can also be a bit leery of outsiders. And a bit macho. 

    ZHAO: Pine Ridge is like my second home, so they all knew I existed—this weird Chinese woman making films on the reservation. It’s such a tight-knit community. Everyone is sort of related. That all makes it easier for me to convince them I’m not an outsider.  

    Other things were hard. It’s hard to get them to be vulnerable. It’s hard to get Brady to cry. And it was hard because we had a six-person crew. Just wrangling them was hard. “Can you please just be there at this time? Just do it!” And then the dad would be, like, “I’ve got a horse in Montana. I’ve gotta go pick it up.” I literally hid his keys [laughs]. “Where’s my truck?” “I don’t know. I think Tanner took it.”  

    You’d be surprised by how maternal horse people are, even though the stereotypical image of the cowboy is very misogynistic. Even Brady’s dad is a big softy. I have to not be defensive. I have to be open. And then very quickly you can tap into that soft side.

    And they’re rodeo cowboys, so they’re used to having cameras on them all the time. They’re performing. As you know, in rodeo, how do you judge a winner if both people ride eight seconds? Especially saddle bronc? It’s all about how you spur, how you throw your hat. It’s all a performance. They have to make a good show for the audience. They know these things. During the Q&A yesterday Brady said, “Even when I’m training horses, I’m performing. I have to project a certain character of myself to manipulate a horse.” That stuff came quite naturally. 

    HUGHES: In the scene where Brady’s coaching his younger friend, I thought, “He would be such a good teacher, of any subject.” 

    ZHAO: Brady is a kid who loves to learn. That’s how he approached acting. “This is a job. I’m going to learn this craft.” So by the end, he was an expert. He’d say, “Chloé, you need to edit that out.” And I’d have to say, “Do you mind? Can I do my job?” He’s such a quick learner. That’s one of the things that gave us confidence at the beginning, when there were so many unknown factors. This kid had incredible focus. That’s the only way you can train wild horses. He’s very adaptable. 

    HUGHES: In Songs, there’s a scene where a teacher goes around the classroom and asks everyone, “What do you want to be doing in four years?” And they all have the same answer: ride bulls and own a ranch. It’s obvious from watching the film that Brady is a fast learner and curious and has tremendous potential in any number of career paths. But the economic and cultural situation you’re documenting in these films doesn’t readily facilitate those other paths.

    ZHAO: We’re talking about that even now. “What opportunities do you want, Brady?” That’s something I had to wrestle quite a bit, coming from the outside and having only lived in big cities. Going in there, I wanted to say, “There are so many other lives? Why don’t you leave?” In my first film I kind of explore that. It’s one of those questions that’s not black and white. Because when you’re out there, after a storm, and you’re riding a horse near the Badlands, you understand why someone wouldn’t trade anything in the world for this. There is a sense of groundedness there that I never really had growing up. I was searching. All of the anxiety, all of the constant thoughts in my head, just washed out when I settled into that pace of life.

    Those kids in the classroom, I didn’t tell anybody how to answer the question. It was what they really want. And the question is, “Is it better to be working on Wall Street? In that box?” I think we all look at others and wish we had some of that. Some people want to have their house and livestock and get away. Meanwhile these kids are on Snapchat, looking at life in cities. One is not better than the other.

    HUGHES: Part of the story of the American Dream, though, is that we’re born with the potential to pursue any goal. Which, of course, isn’t true. 

    ZHAO: Because we forget about the psychological conditions. 

    HUGHES: And the economic conditions. 

    ZHAO: Which are linked. Again, we’re talking about the reservation here rather than the “heartland” of the country. People own the tribal land but don’t have the capacity to fully use it because of the complicated history with the US government. They get onto the system of welfare and government support, and the kids are raised in that mentality. They know they can work off this land, they can start a ranch, they can have a farm, they can do anything on this land, but some of them will sell it back to the tribe because in their minds it’s just easier to make the quick money. They’re all on social media, so they [feel peer pressure] and think, “I need money right now.” It’s heartbreaking to see how that connection to the land is being cut off for this generation. 

    So when I meet someone like Brady, it’s incredibly encouraging. He went to college, you know. This is someone who could go get a job at Wal-Mart, be a manager there, or work in an insurance company in Rapid City, but no. “I’m gonna fish every day in the White River. And I’m gonna eat that fish. And I’m gonna go hunting in the winter. That’s what I’m going to be.” So how do we celebrate that without sensationalizing it? A lot of kids get stuck. They need to see a different perspective. 

    HUGHES: How did Brady like college? 

    ZHAO: He didn’t finish. A lot of kids do that. I know this one girl who got a Gates scholarship, went away to a school in Omaha that has a rodeo team, and after a couple years went back home because she missed her horses, her ranch. Maybe you understand?

    HUGHES: As I was walking out of the film yesterday, I was trying to explain to a friend why I was so overcome with emotion. I finally said, “The single most beautiful thing I have ever seen is a foal running for the first time.” Watching Brady work a horse in a pen moved me in the same way. 

    ZHAO: I remember driving at certain times of the year, when all of the babies had been born, and they’re all running next to their mothers. It’s just… And Brady’s probably out there somewhere. He treats them like they’re his children. That cannot be taken away.

     HUGHES: You mentioned earlier that you had a six-person crew and no production designer, but did you paint the walls in Brady’s room?

    ZHAO: [Smiles] Yes! You got that one! [laughs] Me and my DP went to Wal-Mart and picked it out. That’s the trailer that Brady’s dad and Lilly and Tanner and all of those cowboys live in. It’s on the ranch where I met Brady and spend a lot of my time. So I asked, “Can I paint the walls?” Because it was all still the original colors. 

    One of the things we talked about was honoring nature exactly the way it is. That’s a big contrast in reservation life. They live in these government houses that have stripped away their connection with the land for generations. They’re stuck in this man-made, fluorescent, industrial-looking world. It’s claustrophobic—like, eighteen people per house. And then you go outside and it’s just majestic. That contrast is quite confusing. It says everything about what we did to the Native Americans. So we wanted to use colors that are found in nature in the house: blue for Brady, pink for Lilly. And then use a lot of fluorescent light.

    HUGHES: I asked because you talk often about how you’re not making documentaries. You want your films to be cinematic. So, the obvious follow-up question: what’s the difference? Does painting those rooms fit into that strategy?

    ZHAO: I was talking to someone last night from True/False Festival about how we have these films like The Act of Killing and Tangerine and Heaven Knows What and The Rider that are all over the spectrum. I think it’s human nature to need both truth and poetry. We gravitate towards both of them, and we all arrive at different shades of gray in the middle, even if we start on different ends [of the spectrum]. A documentary filmmaker can’t help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand. 

    HUGHES: I’ve heard you say that you were glad to find Brady because he has a great face for the screen. I want to ask you about Lilly’s and Lane’s faces too. Lane’s has been transformed by his injury. And Lilly’s gentle expression and the tenor of her voice are sweet and pure in a way that couldn’t be scripted or performed. [Note: Lilly has Asperger’s Syndrome, which Zhao intentionally avoided addressing. “She’s just her. It doesn’t need to be about autism. It’s just part of our community.”] I wonder if they each bring a kind of poetry to your film.  

    ZHAO: That’s the truth. How you film is the poetry. I’ve found that if you go to that part of America, we already have a lot of preconceived notions of what these images mean, and you have to unlearn that. It’s really hard. To just point the camera, like the media do, that’s actually not the truth. The emotional truth is what’s hard to capture. When you’re having a rough day with all of these boys in your face, and then Lilly comes and sings you a song? You can’t get that feeling with just documentary.  

    And Lane… these people are part of the landscape. Nature isn’t perfect. You see an actor who is perfect, all made up, perfect hair, who lives on a ranch in South Dakota? I don’t buy it. If you really are part of the landscape, part of nature, you’re going to be imperfect. There will be scars.

  • The Man With No Hands: Lucrecia Martel and Zama

    The Man With No Hands: Lucrecia Martel and Zama

    This interview was originally published at Mubi. I collaborated on this piece with Daniel Kasman.

    * * *

    Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a man out of time. Trapped in Argentina, the land of his birth, and serving at the whims of a foreign crown, he embodies the role of colonizer as a middle-aged, corporate functionary—bored, horny, witless, and incompetent. He waits and waits for a promised transfer to reunite with his wife and child, and then waits some more. When he finally does take action, volunteering to join an expedition to find and kill the notorious bandit Vicuña Porto, this adventure too is folly that ends only in further humiliation.

    Lucrecia Martel’s Zama resolves few of the episodes she selected to adapt from Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name. Instead, she ensnares viewers in a similarly unnerving stasis. Characters enter Zama’s life—three lovely sisters, a visiting merchant called “The Oriental,” the local noblewoman Luciana (Lola Dueñas)—and then vanish again. Throughout, Martel keeps her camera fixed on Cacho’s endlessly fascinating expression, which articulates Zama’s growing frustration, exhaustion and self-hatred. “All the close-ups of Zama with all those surrounding voices created that idea of his interior monologue,” Martel told us. It’s the maddening voice of our demented world.

    This conversation between Martel, Daniel Kasman, and Darren Hughes took place on September 13, 2017, soon after the North American premiere of Zama at the Toronto International Film Festival. Special thanks to TIFF programmer Diana Sánchez for translating.

    * * *

    KASMAN: Last time we spoke, I asked you if The Headless Woman was a horror film. I’m wondering if you see Zama as a comedy, as a comic tale?

    LUCRECIA MARTEL: For me, it’s more about absurdity. There may be a little bit of dark humor, but it’s not about solemnity. It’s not a solemn vision of the past.

    KASMAN: I feel like part of the levity of the film is the presence of animals everywhere.

    MARTEL: [laughs] That was not expensive, because we were shooting in a place where it was to easy to contract animals, to get animals.

    KASMAN: But difficult to direct—to have the llama do what you want?

    MARTEL: That was a miracle, that shot with the llama was a miracle.

    HUGHES: Because I’m an English speaker, every word of dialog gets reduced to a subtitle. Is there any context that I’m missing, in varieties of accents, varieties of voices, in languages?

    MARTEL: That loss, when you’re writing a script you know that some things are going to get lost in translation. Those particularities of the Spanish language we knew were going to be an “only child” for the Spanish-speaking community. I knew this from when I was very young, that when you’re making a period piece you have to re-invent, because there’s no register. Everything that you have written doesn’t help you imagine what the oral language would have been like, because there’s nothing recorded. So I didn’t use the typical Iberian Peninsula Spanish. For the language, what I used was a kind of neutral Spanish that was invented in Mexico for soap operas, so that they could sell soap operas. So it’s an unaccredited Spanish, it’s not a cultured Spanish. On that base I added a lot of linguistic particularities from different areas of Argentina. For every actor that had a speaking part, I would send them a long email explaining the language of the film. And after that we would rehearse.

    This is problematic for us because in Argentina, the representation of the past is very solemn and very heroic, very macho and masculine. It was really important for me to get away from those prejudices, and find a language that was almost humorous, and more close to the general population, because there was a lot of turns-of-phrase in the novel that I really, really liked. I had to shift them so that they wouldn’t be so different from ordinary everyday speech. There are also the indigenous languages that are in the film: Qom, pilagá and mbyá guaraní.

    KASMAN: Where was this shot? Was it in Salta, like your previous films?

    MARTEL: No, it’s an extensive region in the northeast of Argentina. They’re plains. They’re large plains, part Bolivia, part Argentina, part Paraguay. It’s a very hostile environment that hasn’t often been filmed in cinema. Very few films have been shot there, and it’s a place of very big rivers.

    KASMAN: Speaking of an Argentine history often seen as heroic and masculine, I know Zama’s story comes from Antonio di Benedetto’s book, but why did you want to tell the story of a man and a colonizer from this era of history?

    MARTEL: There’s a subtext in the film that really talks about how women are much more prepared for failure. That’s something that men, at least in Latin America, are not so prepared to face. This idea of “somebody that’s waiting” is somebody that is affirmed in identity. They have a strong fixed identity and a self-awareness. In masculine culture, the idea of failure is just a lot more tough and difficult. While for women, we are in the margins of power, and the idea of failure is just something that we’re much more used to. So, in feminine culture, failure also is a means to change your path, an opportunity to change your path, and not get stuck in that situation.

    That’s a subtext through the film, it’s a reflection on that, but it’s also something that happens to both genders, it’s not only men that experience it. And I think this was true for Di Benedetto. I think that this reflection is not just my idea, because the image [at the film’s end] of a man without hands is an image of a man who can’t grab onto anything. When we were developing the script, this was an idea. You have to surrender. Everybody that lives near the Paraná River knows that when you fall into it you have to let yourself be taken along in the river, because if you fight against it or if you try to swim, you’ll drown. And that concept, for the whole film, was a guide for all of us, for the actors, for everyone in the film.

    HUGHES: In an interview for The Headless Woman you said that you imagined the camera as being like a 10-year-old child who is just sitting in the room, being curious. Did you stick to that same approach? I love that metaphor.

    MARTEL: [laughs] So in this film it’s a child who… I’m not sure if he’s grown up or if he’s sick, and he’s a little bit more still.

    HUGHES: How does that work on set? For example, I love the scene with the three sisters, who are walking around Zama in his bedroom picking up coins. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a long time.

    MARTEL: The sound in that scene was like a music box. I did a lot of staging that was very similar, in order to generate that feeling of déjà vu in that scene. There’s a lot of similar shots throughout the film that I did on purpose because it generates a sort-of paralysed time.

    HUGHES: The novel is very episodic. As you were reading it, how were you deciding which episodes to include, which stories to resolve?

    MARTEL: When I was making the choices…there were so many it’s honestly really difficult to remember now because there was an infinite amount of choices. But I did twist some of the ideas. Also, as the novel’s a monologue, a soliloquy, when I was shooting it I didn’t want to just have one voiceover of Zama, I wanted to have a lot of voices that appear to be the voice of Zama. All the close-ups of Zama with all those surrounding voices created that idea of his interior monologue.

    KASMAN: I was curious about the film’s decision to have such subjective sound in key moments, this ringing that gets louder, and that singular moment where we suddenly enter a secondary character’s head, hearing his inner voice talking about the death of a notorious bandit. It’s already quite a subjectively told story, why did you want to take the film’s subjectivity further?

    MARTEL: That was an important way to slow time. I didn’t have a lot of material at that point and I wanted to create this idea of slowing down time. So it was a choice for rhythm, and with that sound we got to that change of rhythm. From the very beginning, since the first cut, the duration of the film was always the same: 2 hours. So what was the most challenging to adjust, to really get right, that I took 20 weeks to do, was getting the rhythm I was looking for.

    KASMAN: You’ve said in the past that when you start a film, you don’t start with an image but you start with a sound. What was the sound that sparked Zama?

    MARTEL: The first one was the Shepard tone. It’s a description of an auditory illusion that someone described in the 70s, that is a series of descending scales.

    KASMAN: It sounds like it’s always going down, but then it just keeps going…

    MARTEL: [mimics the Shepard tone] It’s continually falling. There’s a lot of insects that actually do that naturally. And frogs. So that was a decision that we made with Guido Berenblum, the sound designer. For the soundtrack we got all the sounds of insects, birds, frogs, that sounded almost electronic. And that’s interesting because these are natural sounds, sounds that occur in nature, but they give the film a kind of modern sound. It’s interesting, because it helps us reflect and think that those people living in the 18th century were surrounded by electronic sounds.

    KASMAN: Since we’re talking about sound and music, I have to ask about this modern tropical soundtrack…

    MARTEL: So a lot of those sounds I found on YouTube, because I’m addicted to YouTube, as I think we all are. Don’t go on it… [laughs]

    KASMAN: You’ll never leave!

    MARTEL: [laughs] At first, I wanted to use Paraguayan music that became popular in Paraguay in the 1950s called Guarania, and while I was looking for Guarania, I found the Tabajaras Indians, who have these incredible record covers. These were indigenous Brazilians, from the north of Brazil, they played guitar, and their dream was to triumph in Hollywood. They played a lot in Europe, in hotels and they also worked a lot in the United States.

    In the ‘50s there was a real tropical idea of what Latin American was, a tropical identity that the rest of the world had, and Rio was the image of all of Latin America. I like this idea of this Latin American pretentiousness, of wanting to triumph in Hollywood. And I like the resonance of the guitar, I thought it was perfect for the film. There’s also that element of humor, because I think there is humor when they play, but it’s also very funny that they wanted to be Hollywood stars, they had Hollywood ambitions. A lot of the aesthetic decisions in the film were taken to distance ourselves from this painterly idea of the past. That’s why I’m very happy it’s my first digital film.

    KASMAN: That really changes the image texture, with digital the past looks like the present.

    MARTEL: I like that about the film, that a lot of the decisions about light and color are taken from ‘60s and ‘70s TV shows.

    KASMAN: From Argentina?

    MARTEL: Yeah, from ‘70s Argentine shows. A lot of the ideas we had we took from Brazilian TV from the ‘60s.

    KASMAN: Did you see this TV as a child?

    MARTEL: Yeah, our family got color television in the mid-’70s.

    HUGHES: You’ve said in the past that you want to desire your actors, you want to enjoy watching them, you don’t want to be bored watching them. Is it possible to describe what you’re looking for, what is it that attracts you to a face?

    MARTEL: That’s actually something vital, it’s not so much being “in love,” but if you’re not fascinated by your actors it’s very difficult to know how to shoot them, how to film them. What’s interesting about that fascination is that it doesn’t have moral barriers, so if the protagonist is an awful person or a really good person, it doesn’t matter, and I think that’s something positive. It’s important because you self-limit yourself and don’t fall into prejudices and judgments, so beauty trumps morality.

    It’s a way of controlling myself for that time. What was important to me with the indigenous and African actors was not to put them in gestures of extreme submission that are common in other films about colonization. I thought that would make the oppression seem more obvious. That was a way of reaffirming the oppression, which is something that I didn’t want to do. It would be like filming a rape, to be filming something that’s an awful image but at the same time you could be fulfilling some fantasies that a lot of people have. It was really important not to reaffirm that oppression.

    KASMAN: In the scene where a colonizing family is asking for their land rights, and Zama gives them 40 indigenous natives, there’s this amazing portrait of an actress who has no lines of dialogue. What do you say to the actress of such a role?

    MARTEL: That poor actress, so that the dog would lick her we had to rub salami on her! [laughs] On her hands, on her face… No, what was important for me to show in that scene was just the frivolous way some decisions are taken. Zama wanted that woman, he was hot for her, and he was ready to give away these 40 Indians. What I wanted to show was the way big historical decisions are often just these…it was just to lower this image of the colonizer, this brute. Because this film talks a lot about power, if you portray someone like that as powerful, then they continue being powerful. That was a crucial point for our Latin American cinema.

    KASMAN: The first half of the film is quite sensual, although Zama is ultimately very sexually unfulfilled.

    MARTEL: That’s an important point, because it defines Zama’s stay in that colony for the whole time. In the book, there was a rape scene that I did originally have in the script. There were two sexual scenes, but in the end for budget reasons I had to take one out, and I ended up taking the rape scene out because I had no desire to film a rape. The idea of not having any violence in cinema is, of course, crazy too, but right now in Argentina every 16 to 20 hours a woman ends up dead or raped, and I just had no desire to film that. Right now, I don’t have any desire to see a dead or raped woman, or film one. I think that’s something that those of us who make cinema really have to think about, because when you’re filming a rape scene, filming a violent scene, filming a racist scene: sometimes you might be contributing to some sort of fulfillment, even though what you’re really doing is denouncing that. It’s a problem that we have to think about a lot.

    HUGHES: How would you characterise Zama’s condition? Some critics are calling it “madness.” Or is it malaise, is it paranoia? How would you describe it?

    MARTEL: For me, being part of our culture implies being in a state of craziness. Unless you are actually in a state of insanity, it’s impossible to accept the idea of “work” and the time we lose at work. The things that we’re preoccupied with, the things that we worry about…when you lose someone you care about, that’s the moment when you realize how ridiculous the things that worry us are.

    And this formidable state of dementia has allowed us to make death something that’s far away from us, not something close. And it’s the only thing we can absolutely be sure will happen to all of us. It’s possible that one might not fall in love, it’s possible that one might not get married—but it’s impossible that we’re not going to die. And so for me our culture implies a state of dementia, and its most obvious symptom is language. The immense power of language is to sustain that dementia.

    HUGHES: Are you saying that we use language to convince ourselves that we’re not demented?

    MARTEL: No, on the contrary. [laughs] Language holds up this whole facade. That’s why poetry is almost like a code, like a code that you would find on a safe that could reveal that insanity, the madness.

    When I think about my characters, I think about a monster—I find it much more useful than thinking about psychological states. I think about the idea of the monster. Because the monster reveals an unstable naturalness. It’s an unnatural being. Because the idea of the monster is much more applicable to the human being than any other idea. And I‘m using a very classical idea, the idea of “monster” as something that appears as exceptional. It comes from the Latin monstrare “to reveal”—and a divine message is revealed. In Greco-Latin cultures, when an albino child or a Siamese child would be born, they would think that that it brings a divine message to the communities. So that’s why it’s very important to watch Trump, because that hair is definitely announcing some sort of important catastrophe.

    KASMAN: Does this relate to the character of Vicuña Porto in Zama, how everyone has a different story, a different picture of him? And when we meet him he’s just a normal guy, he’s committed some sins, no big deal—his legend is somehow constructed through language, through rumor.

    MARTEL: Yes. At first, he seems like a kid, but he’s capable of cutting somebody’s hands off.  So he’s both things. A lot of times in Zama what’s important to see is people will announce who they are—“Yes, I am this person,” “Yes, I am that person,” “Yes, I have this function”—and the state of Being is really an accumulation of words, of language, of self-affirmations—but verbal ones, not a state of physical being. When I give film courses, I do 3-hour classes, and what I do is base it all on dialogue, because dialogue is the key to discovering the perception of the film. Not dialogue in the sense of explaining what’s happening in the film, but dialogue in that codified sense, the sense of being a code.

    KASMAN: Do you relate to directing differently now, because of this gap that you’ve had since The Headless Woman and transitioning to digital filmmaking?

    MARTEL: It was not really important to me to shoot analogue. I don’t have that nostalgia for celluloid and I’m really interested in new technologies. For me, it’s more important to have control over things like the editing, to be able to experiment more, than having nostalgia for this beautiful image. That is not so important for me. For me, right now because sound technology has improved so much, that to me has much more importance. If I have to lose a little bit of image and gain so much in sound, to me it’s a good trade-off.

    KASMAN: You haven’t made a film in nearly ten years. Have you yearned to make cinema in this time since The Headless Woman?

    MARTEL: I did, I was working on a script from 2008 to mid-2010, a science-fiction comic. That didn’t get filmed. But I’m not such a huge fan of cinema. I like it, but what I’m really passionate about is making plans, and organizing stuff, making plans to shoot things. I have been continually working in that time. Excel sheets I like very much. [laughs] Since I was very young I’ve always been the one making the plans, the schedules, organizing, even when we played cowboys when I was a kid I was the one with the maps.

    HUGHES: Do you leave room on the set for freedom? For improvisation in the sense of framing or action, or is it all meticulous and planned?

    MARTEL: There’s liberty, but it’s all before. Once we get to the set, everything should be prepared, all the thinking should have happened beforehand. But of course, there’s always things that you don’t account for, like the llama, that just happened. So we put the llama in that room but no one knew what it would do.

  • Guilt as Madness: An Interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

    Guilt as Madness: An Interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    The Unknown Girl opens with a handheld close up of Dr. Jenny (Adèle Haenel) examining a patient. “Listen,” she says, handing her stethoscope to Julien (Olivier Bonnaud), a medical student who is interning at her clinic. Never ones to shy away from a glaring metaphor, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne announce in that brief exchange their film’s driving thematic and formal concerns. When Jenny later learns that her decision to not allow a late-night visitor into the clinic might have contributed to the young woman’s death, she puts her skills and training to new purpose: listening for clues that might help solve the murder.

    The Unknown Girl differs from the Dardennes’ previous fiction films only in its more obviously generic plotting. This seems to have contributed to the uncharacteristically mixed reviews that greeted the film at its 2016 Cannes premiere, where it was faulted for failing to embrace the conventions of the classic policier. The main character, in particular, has been deemed an unconvincing and unmotivated detective. In fact, like all of the Dardennes’ most compelling heroes—Jérémie Renier’s Igor in La promesse (1996), Olivier Gourmet’s Olivier in The Son (2000), and Thomas Doret’s Cyril in The Kid with a Bike (2011)—Haenel’s Dr. Jenny is first and foremost an object of physical fascination, conventions be damned. Bodies “react before they speak,” the directors told me—a fitting description of their film style, generally, and of The Unknown Girl, specifically.

    This interview took place at the offices of Cinetic Media on October 13, 2016, the day after The Unknown Girl had its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival. 

    * * *

    HUGHES: Am I right in remembering that the character Samantha in The Kid with a Bike was originally going to be a doctor?

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: Good. Right.

    LUC DARDENNE: That’s exactly how Samantha meets the little boy, in a doctor’s office. Originally, we thought the doctor would save the kid, but we changed it because we thought it might be a little too cliché, because a doctor is meant to save lives. In [The Unknown Girl] we returned to the idea of a doctor, but put her in relation to a death that she feels responsible for.

    HUGHES: Is that typical for you? That you have a character in mind and then work to find an appropriate or interesting scenario to drop him or her into?

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: This is the first time. This is our first adventure. We got fixated on the doctor issue and wanted to find a story that we could fit her into. The doctor escaped us the first time, and so we tried to figure out why, find a place for her. But we’ve never done that. And even in the screenplay for this one, it was originally an older doctor, and we couldn’t make it work until we decided on a younger doctor. It was a character who resisted us.

    HUGHES: Why does the character work as a young doctor but not an older one?

    LUC DARDENNE: The older doctor was not that old, she was about 40, but when we wrote the screenplay with the older doctor in mind, it kept taking us in the direction of a detective story. She was someone who had more life experience. When we saw the younger actress, she looked more candid and naïve. With her, we thought that when she meets people, her candor and naïveté might incite them to talk to her. She might free the truth. It was a gamble.

    HUGHES: So you conceived of her as a listener. You’ve said about your early career that one of the pleasures of making documentaries was the opportunity to sit with people, to ask questions, to hear them tell their stories. Is that still a part of your writing process?

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: The short answer is yes. For the kinds of films we make, we have to have our ears open to what is happening in the world, what is happening around us. And we also have to listen to our characters. When we create characters we do not watch them from above. We try to be in tandem with them while they’re going through the experience. Our characters are not puppets that we’re manipulating from above.

    HUGHES: The doctor serves a similar function in the film. She’s a witness, and within the context of the film, that is a moral act.

    LUC DARDENNE: We constructed this film with a lot of silences, notably when Jenny is doing medical procedures. Bodies exist, you hear them breathe, you hear them make other noises. Even when she simply touches someone’s body, we hear it. We constructed the film knowing that these silences would encourage people to talk, which would advance us toward discovering the identity of the unknown girl. Dr. Jenny is an instrument for revealing the truth. She’s there to be at the birth of the truth. That’s how we saw her, which is why we didn’t invent a private life for her. She’s on a mission.

    HUGHES: Making your main character a doctor—someone who observes and listens to bodies as a profession—makes explicit something you’ve done in many of your films, yes?

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: I wouldn’t quite say that. But it’s true that because she’s a doctor, she’s able to move forward [toward solving the mystery] because the bodies she’s dealing with react before they speak. All of the people she meets—either before or after she’s with them—they have a visceral, physical reaction. The bodies talk.

    HUGHES: I like that: “bodies react before they speak.” In your films, you seldom use classic formal techniques such as eyeline matches to create a subjective point of view. But I wonder if you achieve another kind of subjectivity by being so attentive to the bodies of your actors.

    LUC DARDENNE: That’s correct. Hearing is passive as opposed to looking, which is more active. Jenny, from the first take, is listening to a body. And that’s what we try to do. We film her in profile, not head on. We tried to make it so there was something passive that would create an expectation for something to come into the take—speech or words that don’t always come.

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: That’s why we created all of those silent moments. We take the time to really film the bodies. They’re not pretexts for something more important. They’re it.

    HUGHES: One standard critical line on your work is that you brought the techniques of documentary filmmaking to the narrative world. You’re often described as “realists.” But the films are also formally expressive. I’d like to better understand that balance by asking about your collaboration with Igor Gabriel, who has been your production designer on every film since Rosetta [1999].

    LUC DARDENNE: We work together from the get-go. We find the initial locations, knowing that they will be modified somewhat with Igor. We often cast at the same time, but we go around with our little handheld camera and film so that we can see how the actors will be able to move around in the locations. And then we say, “It might be good to have a wall right here. Or maybe here we should have a door. And maybe the door should open this way rather than that way.” Then we bring Igor and say, “Come and look at all of this with us.” We look at it from an architectural point of view. We’re not looking yet at color tones or that type of thing.

    Igor does come in with his own ideas about the mise en scène, but most of what he creates has to do with our intentions. For example, the clinic is, in fact, a social services office. Outside the doctor’s office there is a wall—the wall you see behind the unknown girl when she’s ringing the buzzer. We didn’t know how we were going to handle it, but we knew it was an important wall for us. All of the accessories—the buzzer, et cetera—all have to be on the side of the door that works for us. So there’s a little bit of handiwork that has to go on there. Or the work site where the unknown girl died? Igor completely built that. Igor dug the hole that Jenny falls into, but we told him exactly where it needed to be because the camera would be coming in from this angle, et cetera.

    Igor is a very important partner. We don’t always agree, but that’s a good thing. He likes to come in and create a story in the location that relates to the people who might be living there. But we might say, “No, no. We’d rather have nothing on this wall so that the color is somewhat similar to her doctor’s office.” Because then you’re staying within Jenny’s mental universe, within her guilt.  

    HUGHES: That last example is exactly what I was hoping to get at when I described your images as expressive. When I revisited Two Days, One Night (2014) recently, I noticed during the final act that the hospital, the laundromat, and the locker room are all strikingly similar designs. Or, in The Unknown Girl, Jenny goes to buy a cemetery plot, and the yellow accent color on the gray wall behind her matches exactly the yellow in the flowers she’s carrying. I guess my question is, why is that important? What does a designed image like that offer a viewer that strict “realism” can’t?

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: In that case it was kind of haphazard. In all public buildings they use the same colors, a kind of yellow. We had flowers that Igor had found, but we saw at the cemetery that there were some nicer ones—that were luminous. We wanted Jenny to be making a larger gesture.

    HUGHES: But I’m curious about the effects of those small design choices. As another example, you’ve said before in interviews that you spend a great deal of time choosing the wardrobe of each character. Eventually, though, your main characters always end up wearing plain blue, purple, or red shirts, with slight variations. As a viewer, I’m moved deeply by the sight of Cyril’s red shirt in The Kid with a Bike.

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: It’s only afterwards, when we’re looking at the rough cut, that we notice the effect that some of the colors have. For example, with Cyril and Jenny, it isolates the character. Jenny’s bulky coat has a pattern on it, almost like bars. But only when the movie is finished do we see the strength of the colors or patterns.

    HUGHES: I asked Philippe Garrel about the blue and red walls in his film A Burning Hot Summer, and he said he’d learned the power of primary colors from Raoul Coutard and Godard. I don’t know if it’s intentional or not, but I think you do something similar.

    LUC DARDENNE: I’m trying to think of what we say when we’re in the middle of the work process, what we say to the costume designer, the set designer. [pause] What pushes us to those choices? [pause] Of course, we’re the products of the films we’ve seen. The choice of the costumes takes a lot of time because during the rehearsal process the actors try on a lot of different clothes, we try all kinds of things. The thing that really obsesses us? The faces of the actors. The clothes they wear, we don’t want them to look as if they’ve been costume designed.

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: It’s true. [pause] We do try to pick primary colors. We liked to see Jenny dressed in blue and burgundy—simple, basic things that didn’t overpower her face.

    LUC DARDENNE: And that also give her a certain softness. Because you know Adèle. In other movies she is really strong and aggressive. So here we said, “Easy. You need to pull back.” We felt that blue and burgundy made her hospitable to the patients. It attracted them rather than repelled.

    HUGHES: This is an odd thing to notice, I know, but in several scenes, her shirt has a wide neckline, and because you shoot her in profile, we see more of the soft line of her shoulder and neck. It’s like the tank tops Marion Cotillard and Cécile De France wear in the previous two films.

    LUC DARDENNE: Yes. You’re right. We really liked seeing the softer image of her neck.

    HUGHES: One of my favorite scenes in your films is when Cyril hugs Samantha in The Kid with a Bike and says, “It’s warm, your breath.”

    LUC DARDENNE: Ah, yes.

    HUGHES: It’s one of the many beautiful embraces in your work. They’re often moments of epiphany. The Unknown Girl also ends with another unexpected embrace.

    JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE: When Jenny hugs the sister, first of all she doesn’t do it without asking. We saw two things there that cross each other. The first is that this young woman allowed Jenny to complete her mission. Now, the unknown girl, even though she is dead she has a name. The second is that this woman, the sister, went all the way. She admitted everything, as far as she could go. Not only did she give Jenny the name, she also admitted it was because of “my guy” and then went even further and said, “I’m the one who’s responsible. It was because of me—because I was jealous.” The woman is transformed by admitting this. She is finally free.

    HUGHES: That brings us back to the idea of listening as a moral act. Jenny seeks advice from two older doctors and they both attempt to assuage her guilt with legalistic responses. Those scenes make for an interesting contrast with all of the conversations in Two Days, One Night, when Sandra’s colleagues repeatedly ask her, “How many votes do you have? How is everyone else voting?” Their morality is fluid and under the influence of social pressure. You’ve said Jenny is motivated by “not a supernatural possession but a moral possession.” How would you describe the moral framework that drives her?

    LUC DARDENNE: Speaking from a legal point of view, Dr. Riga is correct. “You can’t be convicted for this, so you should continue along the rising path of your career. Come work for us.” We prefer Dr. Habran’s point of view. “You should have opened the door. You can’t be convicted, but if you had opened the door, she wouldn’t be dead. Ultimately you are responsible.” What interested us was how the wheel could begin turning for her, where she tries to repair what she did, and in order to repair that she has to find the name of the girl. It’s a fiction. Reality is different. Here, it seems that Jenny’s guilt is almost a kind of madness. The unknown girl has gotten into her head. She has another person inside her—it’s a kind of psychosis.

    HUGHES: The implication is that we should all suffer a similar moral psychosis.

    LUC DARDENNE: Exactly. That is our hope. If the unknown girl can travel between Jenny and the people she meets and talks to, then she can travel to the audience’s mind as well. Jenny is all of us.

  • “A Dance of Her Whole Life”: Zhao Tao on Mountains May Depart

    “A Dance of Her Whole Life”: Zhao Tao on Mountains May Depart

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    Midway through A Touch of Sin (2013), Jia Zhang-ke’s violent and reality-inspired account of China’s seismic economic shifts, a massage parlor receptionist played by Zhao Tao is attacked suddenly by a non-descript businessman, who beats her with a fistful of renminbi while shouting, “Isn’t my money good enough? Not a prostitute? Who is then?” Jia documents the assault in a two-minute, unbroken closeup, whipping the camera from side to side with each blow. By the end, Zhao’s cheeks and neck are flush from exertion and physical contact, which is an interesting intrusion of documentary into such a fantastic scene. She reaches for a hidden knife and then, with a swift slash to the man’s chest, becomes transformed into a wuxia warrior.

    A Touch of Sin seems to have marked a shift in Jia’s filmmaking, away from the contemplative, docu-realist style that characterized much of his previous work and toward something more closely resembling genre. As a consequence, Jia’s longtime lead has notably expanded her range as an actress. In the aftermath of the beating in A Touch of Sin, Zhao walks cautiously, blood-soaked and sobbing, toward the camera in a manner that would be unthinkable in a film like Still Life (2006), which treats her and the other performers primarily as expressionless faces wandering through landscapes. What little optimism there is to be found in A Touch of Sin is born of Zhao’s performance, which, as Jia told me in 2013, represents a kind of redemption, suggesting a path “through this period of darkness and violence.”

    In her latest collaboration with Jia, Mountains May Depart, Zhao plays a woman, Tao, at three different stages of life: a 20-something beauty in 1999, who must choose between two love interests; a middle-aged mother in 2014, who has become separated from her only child; and an older woman in 2025, who has found a certain contentment but still suffers the pangs of nostalgia. For longtime fans, the first section is uncanny, as Zhao herself first appeared in front of a camera in 1999, when Jia discovered and cast her in Platform (2000). Her performance in Mountains May Depart has earned much-deserved praise since the film’s premiere last year at Cannes.

    When I spoke with Zhao, Jia was sitting just a few feet away, giving an interview of his own. I mention that only to illustrate a certain quality—“tension” is too strong a word, perhaps—I noticed at the time and again when transcribing our conversation. Zhao defers to Jia on all matters relating to the style and content of the films they’ve made together but doesn’t shy away from expressing her preferences, both in the specific choices she makes as an actress (in the moment of filming) and for the type of performance she’s given in the two most recent films. Her response suggests a depth to their creative partnership that is too often glossed over in critical appraisals of their work.

    This interview took place on September 15, 2015, soon after Mountains May Depart received its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

    A quick note about the photo: At the end of the interview I asked Zhao if I could take a picture. She agreed and then glanced at the lighting in the room, shifted in her seat, and tilted her head slightly to one side. When she looked into my camera, she was a movie star. It was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.

    * * *

    HUGHES: Have you watched Platform recently? I wonder what it’s like to see yourself on screen in 1999 at a time when you’re preparing to play a character in 1999?

    ZHAO TAO: Cannes just gave our director a lifetime achievement award this year, so after the ceremony they showed Platform. It was the film version, not the digital version. That was the second time I saw Platform on a big screen. The first was in Venice [where it premiered in 2000]. This year in Cannes we invited a lot of our old partners, for example the actor who played Chang Jun [Jing Dong Liang] and the sound editor, Zhang Yang. The three of us sat together, watched the film together, and [revisited] the time when we met and started working together.

    I was really, really excited when I saw the film. When the music started, I got goosebumps. So many wonderful memories came back when watching the film. For example, I remembered that scene where I was sitting on the bed, and I was trying to pretend that I didn’t know how to smoke [laughs] even though I was a smoker at the time. There’s also the scene when I was dancing in the office. I didn’t look at it as if I was dancing; it was Ruijuan [the character] who was dancing in the office. I thought it was beautiful and was very moved by the scene. When I saw the truck come, and everyone was on the tour, I completely lost it. I was so moved. I really love that film.

    HUGHES: Did you like your performance?

    ZHAO: [laughs] It’s okay.

    HUGHES: Often Director Jia tells his stories through images of relatively expressionless faces, but in the last two films, you’ve given more traditional performances. For example, in Still Life, there are none of the emotionally-heightened scenes that we see in Mountains May Depart and A Touch of Sin. Is there any particular cause for that shift in style?

    ZHAO: Perhaps that question could be answered better by the director, but from the actor’s point of view, my understanding is that the plot of A Touch of Sin requires it. It’s a very sudden, emotional event. It’s very, very direct. The character would naturally have a clear emotional response that demonstrates how the event affects her.

    With Mountains May Depart, I think the intent of the director is to represent life and to represent the evolution of human emotion through this character. For example, the scene when Tao goes to the hospital to claim the body of her deceased father—before we filmed that, the director had a discussion with me, and his approach—what he thought would be most beautiful—was to not have a lot of emotion outwardly expressed. He didn’t want hysterical crying. From my understanding of the character, she was at that particular point in her late-30s, she has a son who she hasn’t seen for several years, and her only close relative is her father. He was the only person she was close to. She doesn’t have any other outlet to express emotion, and I would imagine this would be an appropriate opportunity for her to let those emotions out. I toned down the emotions, according to the director’s wishes, but I had the character crying the whole time, with tears running down her face.

    HUGHES: Is that performance style more pleasurable to you as an actor?

    ZHAO: If you compare the two characters, Shen Hong in Still Life and Tao in Mountains May Depart, I think it’s easier to play Shen Hong. A character like Tao is a wonderful opportunity as an actress—to play her in her youth, in middle age, and when she’s older. How do you do it so that it’s convincing for the audience? How do you perform so that the audience can feel the passage of time? In Still Life there isn’t much time dedicated to Shen Hong’s everyday life. We don’t know what her marriage was like. Most of the time she was just wandering. It’s easier to portray her wandering. With Tao, one must create three different ways of acting.

    HUGHES: We only see Tao very briefly in 2025, so you had less screen time to reveal that version of the character. Director Jia said during the Q&A that he was inspired by a vision of an older woman dancing alone, and I’m wondering how you felt about the character in that moment?

    ZHAO: That is the kind of work I need to do as an actor. The director chose to show a month in 1999, a week in 2014, and a couple days in 2025. As an actor, I have to use my imagination to fill in the blanks because it’s not a continuous biography. It’s obviously a very emotional scene for me, so as we were filming the director kept reminding me, “Do not show too much emotion. Do not cry.” I put on the clothes of an older woman, I had a little dog and I was walking through the snow, and I heard this music—it was very moving because I thought, “I’m not dancing; the character is dancing, and this is a dance of her whole life.”

    There she is, in her 50s, and she hears this piece of music from her youth, as if it’s floated through the air and drifted to her. It reminds her of her youth and of where she is today. It’s very complicated, but it’s the music that brings these feelings directly to her.

    I wrote a full biography of the character—when she was born, when she went to kindergarten, all the different stages of her life. So when I act a certain scene—when she met Zhang Jinsheng, when she got married—I’m acting a particular segment of that life.

    HUGHES: For fifteen years now, you’ve been part of Director Jia’s project, which for me—and for many other film critics and audiences in the West—has been, among other things, an important document of the recent transformation of China. Is that something you’re aware of? Or perhaps even proud of?

    ZHAO: I’m not really aware of that. In fact, I’m a little surprised to learn that people’s understanding of China, and the changes happening in China, [have been shaped by] the films I’m in. That’s surprising to hear. [laughs] So many films are made in China, and the films I’ve made are such a small part of the films that come from China.

    My life before Still Life basically consisted of three parts: make a film with the director, do the actual filming; go to festivals with him to present the film; and teach dance at the Taiyuan dance school. Right after Platform I went back to being a teacher. At that point I didn’t think I should get an agent or plan my acting career. At the time I thought my normal life was as a dance teacher. Making films and going to festivals was something extra—and wonderful. Quite often I think, “I didn’t choose to be an actress. The career chose me.”

    Even after I went to festivals and saw that so many people liked the films, I didn’t act for a particular audience. I act to what I think the character should be. I’m sure the director didn’t make Mountains May Depart to show it to an American audience, and he didn’t make Platform to show it to a European audience or Still Life for such-and-such audience. He just wants to make what he thinks are good, quality films that make creative sense for him. I think the reason his films are well accepted in the West—and in the world, in general—is because film is a medium with a lot of common ground. If he presents quality films, he will continue to have a place among the world’s filmmakers.

  • Philippe Garrel in Conversation

    Philippe Garrel in Conversation

    There’s no exact equivalent in film history for Philippe Garrel’s “family cinema,” as he calls it here. To immerse oneself in his work is to watch Garrel and those he loves (parents, partners, children) be transformed by age and experience, while their passions and preoccupations—that particular Garrelian amour fou—persist.

    After several decades during which Garrel’s films saw limited distribution and exhibition in North America, he’s now experiencing something of a revival. Over the span of three days at the Toronto International Film Festival I enjoyed an impromptu Garrel family retrospective. In the Cinematheque program, TIFF debuted its recently-commissioned 35mm print of Jacques Rozier’s first film, Adieu Philippine (1962), which features a middle-aged Maurice Garrel in a supporting role. Actua 1 (1968), Philippe Garrel’s long-lost short documentary of the May ’68 protests, screened in the Wavelengths section, also in a new print. And Philippe’s latest feature, In the Shadow of Women, with an appearance by Louis Garrel as disembodied voiceover, had its North American premiere. In the Shadow of Women begins its U.S. theatrical run this week, courtesy of Distrib Films.

    It was also at TIFF that I heard rumors Garrel would be making his first trip to the States in more than a decade for the New York Film Festival. Rather than conduct a series of brief interviews, Garrel instead requested a three-hour, wide-ranging discussion. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to join Eric Hynes, Vadim Rizov, and Nicholas Elliot at that table. Garrel spoke at length and with great humor and enthusiasm, noting with a laugh when comments were off the record. It would be impossible to overestimate Nicholas’s skills as a translator.

    We agreed as a group to publish the entire interview with only a light edit so as to maintain the flow of the conversation. See also: Part 1 at Filmmaker Magazine and Part 3 at Reverse Shot. The interview was conducted on the morning of October 7, 2015, the day after the NYFF premiere of In the Shadow of Women and soon after news broke of Chantal Akerman’s death.

    * * *

    Part 1

    Edited by Vadim Rizov at Filmmaker Magazine

    The interview begins in response to a query from Garrel to Hynes as to whether he’d passed along a message to a filmmaker; then he explained who he was talking about.

    Garrel: He was at Cannes, I was showing La cicatrice intérieure. At a crossroads at Cannes, he caught me — I was with Nico — and said “I know who you are.” And I said, “Who are you?” “I’m Jim Jarmusch.”I said, “I don’t want to speak.” And he said, “It’s a pity!” I always remember that scene, that I refused to talk with a young filmmaker from my generation, because I was afraid he’d take my wife!

    Hynes: He was a good looking guy in those days.

    Garrel: Yeah, exactly. He’s not presentable nowadays?

    Hynes: He’s very presentable.

    Garrel: His last movie was fantastic. I thought it was a low-budget movie. It’s not.

    Hynes: It’s not super low-budget.

    Rizov: And he got tax breaks by shooting in Detroit.

    Garrel: Like $4 or $5 million. Not a one-million budget.

    Hynes: But I think that he often goes to Europe for financing.

    Garrel: Ah, that’s why. Because ten years ago, a lot of people said, “[There is] no more money” — during the subprime crisis — “in New York. Everybody has gone to Detroit,” like you said. Nobody wants to — can, not want — put private money into a movie like before, so I thought it must be a low-budget movie. Why the movie is great is because it’s one of the good films in digital. If you look, in general, the photographic artistic level has dropped except for Jarmusch and Blue is the Warmest Color, which is a fantastic film.

    Hynes: Is there anything about seeing those films that makes you curious about trying it yourself?

    Garrel: I’m like this group of Hollywood directors who went to see Kodak in Manchester and said, “We’re still going to shoot film. Even if our films are distributed on digital, we’re going to shoot on 35mm.” And I was one of the first in Paris to say, “I’m going to stop shooting if there’s no more 35mm.” It’s like what Henri Langlois said — Henri Langlois, who is one of the five major friends of my life. We were friends in the ’70s. He said — at one point people were saying black and white was going to disappear — “It’s impossible. Black and white cannot disappear, because cinema was invented in black and white.”

    And it’s true: for ten years it was very difficult to make films in black and white, but then it came back. So now, I think it’s a similar thing. People have said that 35mm is finished, it’s over. I don’t think it’s true because it’s the same thing. Cinema was invented in 35mm. So I think this is just a passage we’re going through, even though distribution has been generalized to be in digital, because it’s easier. But I’m sure I’m right, and I’m like these Hollywood directors who will keep shooting in 35mm. And in France, they’re even now shooting advertisements on 35mm, so it will continue.

    Hughes: How do you decide between black and white and color?

    Garrel: Many directors are frustrated actors or writers, and some are frustrated painters. Me, when I was a child, I was a painter. I went to a public state school at one point that was at the Louvre. It was called the “Arts Decos’” [the Decorative Arts School], and I was in a specific workshop that was for people under 15. That’s what really brought me to art, this workshop for people under 15. I was very good at pencil drawing, and I was good at gouache, but when I first tried oil painting, I found my painting very bad and I broke it, I destroyed it. That’s when I decided I would make films.

    For me, black and white is like a pencil drawing, color is like a gouache, and it’s because of that moment, with that first oil painting — when I was maybe 13 or 14 — I realized it’s very, very, very hard to do oil painting. It’s not like gouache. Mixing colors with oil is much more complicated. If you put a blue and red together, it won’t be a violet like it would be in gouache. It would be a brown. So, I’m scared of color, and I make three black and white films for one color film. Overall, I’ve made four more black and white films than color films.

    Hughes: When I think of your films, I think of a close-up of a face against a white background, or a white-washed window. When I saw A Burning Hot Summer a couple of years ago, it was shocking to see Louis’ face against those blue and red walls in the apartment.

    Garrel: Yes. There’s also an economic aspect to this. For me, to make a film in color is twice the cost of black and white. That’s not really because of the cost of buying the film or the lab work, that’s about the same today. The reason is that for me to shoot color, I need not only a DP, I also need a costume designer and a set designer. This is something that I learned from Raoul Coutard. Raoul Coutard told me this about Godard and he also told me this regarding Antonioni — where you find emotion in the red, for instance, regarding Antonioni. The thing with color photography is that it’s not only about lights, so you don’t only need a DP, it’s also about the color tones that you use. That’s why you need more money. When you’re shooting color, you need to change the sets, you need to change the walls, you need to change the costumes.

    What Coutard explained to me — Coutard, who is alive but he’s no longer shooting, and he’s the greatest French DP — he explained to me that in Godard, and also in Jacques Demy, the range of colors that would be used was decided beforehand. Godard uses the three primary colors: red, yellow, blue, and also green. Antonioni is the same thing: you don’t have pink, violet, etc. I think that’s where you get the special chromatic effect that I find emotional.
    Demy is the opposite: you have violet, pink, etc. But if you want to avoid having colors clashing, the way they do in life, you need to make sure you have a harmony of colors, and for that, you have to transform every set, every costume. You need to put paper up on the walls that you’ve made in special workshops.

    The reason I’m talking about economics is that if you look at Jealousy and In the Shadow of Women, for example, these are real low-budget films. They’re about a million, a million and a half each, so really low budget. I pay the bottom union rates. It’s very quick, they’re made in 21 days. Another thing about black and white is when I shoot black and white, I don’t use make-up. The women don’t wear make-up, not even their own personal make-up. They’re not allowed. But if I shoot color, immediately I have to have make-up, because otherwise that means the skin will be red. That means more lights, you have to have a make-up person, so you’ve got a heavier, bigger crew.

    Another reason I shoot black and white is so that I can make low-budget films, and that’s the condition of my freedom. That’s how I stay free. If I make for one or 1.5 million, I demand, in exchange, total freedom. I get final cut, no one has any right to have any influence on the cut of my film or anything — the distributors, the financiers, they can’t say anything. But I couldn’t request, or be able to get, that kind of freedom, if I wasn’t less expensive than the other directors.

    That’s something that I understood from Godard. I understood that Godard was the most avant-garde director of the French New Wave because he was a little less expensive than Truffaut, Chabrol, and the others, and it’s similar to how I am now vis-a-vis Desplechin or Carax. My films cost about half the price of their films. I understood that about Godard, that he was more avant-garde through being less expensive. And it wasn’t by exploiting his crews, it was about being faster. He shot in less time, he edited in less time — that’s the condition of my freedom, that’s how I can keep my freedom, and it’s something that’s very rare in the US today.

    Hynes: This is related to something you and I talked about last year, about working with single takes for the most part, and there being a practical reason for that. But then there’s an actual effect of that too. Hearing you talk about all the reasons you work in black and white — financially, logistically, and in terms of your own control — there’s also an effect from that. So you make a practical choice about make-up, and yet seeing your actors on screen in that manner has an effect on us as an audience in terms of how we approach them as people. How do you see the value in that as an effect?

    Garrel: When I made my first films — Marie pour mémoire, Les hautes solitudes, L’enfant secret… I’m talking about the films that I produced myself, which here were probably only seen by cinephiles. I made these films with no money at all. That’s how I’m different from the New Wave, because I made films like a painter painting. I took some money that I got from patrons to buy paint and canvas, what painters would do. Now, the New Wave, they made inexpensive films, but industrially they weren’t working like painters. So that’s a difference that I have from the New Wave. I was my own producer for 15 years, and I don’t mean a painter with an office.

    What I would do is, I found this idea of asking for the leftover, unexposed film on a roll that was taken out. At that time, when stars acted, as soon as the star had been shot, they would change the roll of film, because they were afraid that the roll would run out if the star was doing something else. So I invented this idea of making features by going around and asking people to give me their leftover, unexposed film. There was so little film, therefore, to shoot, that I couldn’t shoot two takes, it was impossible. So all my films were made in this way. Then in 1983, when I started working with producers, I kept this one-take method. And, in a sense, it’s a lucky accident, a lucky coincidence, because now, if I hadn’t done that, the producers could have forced me to shoot digital.

    My first films were shot in 35mm using this method, and when people switched to digital, the argument was that digital is so much less expensive to shoot. So if I didn’t have the one-take method, I could have lost that argument. Now, I make a film with maybe five hours of exposed film. It’s very different from Abdetallif Kechiche, who for Blue is the Warmest Color shot 600 hours. Jealousy, I had five hours of rushes. In the Shadow of Women, four hours of rushes. That’s a huge difference from digital, and, in my case, it’s a method that I’ve had from the beginning.

    Hynes: But there’s substance in what the artwork is too.

    Garrel: There’s no doubt — unquestionably, this one-shot method leads to a specific genre of film. As I’m the son of an actor who died four years ago now, I’m very, very sensitive to the question of good acting. I work like the theater does. I rehearse long before the shoot, let’s say about 25 days. I rehearse with the actors, and that’s where I do all the directing, in rehearsal. Once we’re on set, I do only one take, and that one take works because of everything that I’ve done before. If I used the traditional method of cinema-making — coming in in the morning and starting to direct the actors at that point — it would be extremely, extremely difficult. It’s thanks to the fact that I added the theater rehearsal before the shoot that we can do this.

    And to be specific about it, it’s actually more than theater, because what we do is we work for 25 Saturdays. That’s nearly a year, let’s say about eight months, if you don’t work on holiday, and that allows the role to mature in the actors’ minds [and] the actors to act together. A lot of times now there’s this absurd risk that actors meet on the set for the first time and have never acted before. If only for the chemistry, as they say here, it’s so important for them to be together. So, what I have the opportunity of doing, starting with the casting in these rehearsals, is to match the actors together, to see different people together and see how it works. That’s how my method has evolved.

    Many, many French films — not as many American films, but still some — are simply bad because there’s no chemistry between the actors. Directors see an actor, they see an actress separately, they say they’re great, and it’s like they’re putting two photos together. But it doesn’t mean that they can act together, it doesn’t mean that they’ll have chemistry. Hollywood knows that, I think. In France, you can’t test stars together. If you want a star, you deal with the star separately. You can’t test them together. I’m told that in Hollywood, they have readings with stars and actors together so you can see how they go together. You see films where actors may be very good, but organically, they’re not meant to play together; they don’t play together.

    My second career is as an acting career. I spent eight years teaching at the Conservatoire in Paris, the national school, also two years at the National Theater School in Strasbourg. When my films don’t make enough money for me to make a living, I sign up to teach acting. It’s there that I saw this business about chemistry — that though actors may have the talent, they don’t fit together. That’s something that you have you to look at in casting. Apart from the Actors’ Studio, in cinema we’re very, very primitive about this question of the association of actors.

    Rizov: One of the things I associate with your films is a shot of a face or a whole body in the moment before the actual dialogue and argument of the scene starts. These can go on for a long time. I was watching Liberté, la nuit last night and saw that some of the reaction shots of Emmanuelle Riva are much longer than you let them go on now. This also relates to your work in the ’70s, such Le berceau de cristal, which is a lot of portraiture, which relates to your interest in the screen test. Could you talk a little bit about how long you allow them to get to this point, whether it’s up to them to decide when to enter the dialogue, and how you’ve changed your compression of these moments?

    Garrel: Like the New Wave, what I liked best when I went to the Cinematheque was the silent films. For instance, I think that Sunrise by Murnau is one of the greatest films ever made. My three top films are Godard’s My Life to Live, Bergman’s Monika, Munrau’s Sunrise. Why? Because of the faces, the silent shots of faces. Now, when I wrote scripts by myself in the period you’re referring to, the dialogue was very, very short. That’s because I’m a paranoid type. Paranoid types don’t talk very much. It’s like Warhol. I think it’s very useful in art to be paranoid or schizoid. The most paranoid person I ever met, the most paranoid artist, was Warhol. I met him through Nico. He never talked. You would see him standing there all pale in the Factory, never talking, and he made these long, hours-long silent films with no talking. To me, that’s the work of a paranoid man, and I’m paranoid too.

    So at the time of Liberté, la nuit, the entire dialogue of my film was three or four pages long. Once I started with co-scriptwriters — this started with Marc Cholodenko, who is also a novelist. This started with Emergency Kisses. He’s more of a schizoid, so my cinema started to talk. There were pages and pages of dialogue. My original thing, though, comes from who I am, and the silent films that Henri Langlois showed me. At the time, the silent directors that people really liked were Murnau, Fritz Lang and — now he’s a little bit out of fashion, young people don’t know him so well — but I loved Erich von Stroheim. These films of von Stroheim’s, you would see them in a kind of half-waking state. It was like a dream, these films were like opium to me. And I think that left a trace on me, aside from my personality, which is to not talk very much, at least not in art, not to declare. This combination of the paranoid and the silent films is what had an impact. Now, today, things have really changed because I work with co-screenwriters.

    Hughes: My favorite moment in In the Shadow of Women is when Pierre and Elizabeth are sitting on the bed together. I think he’s fixing a coffee maker, and he hurts her feelings, and she leans forward. She’s so delightful before he makes the hurtful comment, she’s just staring at him and admiring him, and then when he hurts her she leans forward, toward the camera, and makes this gesture with her hand. It’s really lovely, and I’m wondering — you talked about 25 Saturdays of rehearsals, and I’m wondering what the scene looked like at the beginning of those 25 days versus the one when the camera’s finally rolling and you get that one take. Where does that gesture come from? How are those choices made?

    Garrel: All the young people in my films since Savage Innocence, which is 2001, have come from the Conservatoire, the national conservatory of acting Paris where I teach, like for example Lena Paugam, who you’re talking about. In my work as a professor with an acting class, it’s not at all a magisterial lesson. It’s a workshop class. I have a camera man, I have a sound person, I have a small camera, and I get the actors to do scenes in front of the camera. My work is to deblock the actor, to free the actor, to give him the freedom that’s been taken away from him by being filmed. Because being filmed paralyzes him, my job is to remove that paralysis.

    So that for example, for that gesture, my responsibility is simply to free the actress. She invents it, she makes the gesture in that moment that you’re referring to where he’s hurt her feelings and she’s repulsed and slightly traumatized. My only responsibility for the gesture is to free her, to be free on the set. Now, some good directors will push the actor. They’re like, “Let me show you what to do,” and then the actor imitates the director. I stay behind the camera. I don’t ever get in front of the camera, I don’t show them what to do, I don’t say what to do, I free them. Now, that takes a very long time, which is why it’s useful to have these many rehearsal days that I use. All my recent films — Savage Innocence, Regular Lovers, Jealousy, etc. — have actors from the Conservatoire, either people from my own classroom or, because I’m a titular professor there, people who I see at the graduation exercises in the new classes.

    So the level of acting is reached by the level of freedom; the actor has to be himself and to act only like he would. And that’s what’s touching about it. In Regular Lovers, for instance, the May ’68 riot scenes, all of those people — 45 actors — come from the Conservatoire. So what you have behind that is six years of work in my class. School nourishes the set for me. And my son has been my student too in class, so he knows very well what the other students have done. It’s not like he is only my son, because he’s just a student like the others.

    Part 2

    Edited by Darren Hughes at Mubi’s The Notebook

    HYNES: I’d love to know for you the relationship between teaching and directing. Is there a real overlap in those two jobs? And more specifically for this film, did your directing start well before the shoot? Do you think of it in those terms? Or are there points when you feel you’re primarily teaching? How do those two jobs evolve over the course of a project?

    GARREL: It’s the same thing. It’s like playing tennis. The tennis match is the shoot, the training is the classroom. The only difference, I would say, is that when I’m on the set, I only talk to the actors separately, secretly. I don’t let the others hear. Whereas, when we’re in the classroom, I do let everyone hear so that they can learn from it. That’s the only practical difference.

    When I chose what my profession would be, what my craft would be, which was after this business of the failed oil painting, I remember I was waiting at the bus stop and I saw a poster of a Marcel Carné film that was playing at the time starring Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan [Port of Shadows (Le quai des brumes, 1938)], and I thought to myself, “I’m not able to act, but I would be able to tell actors how to act well, because I’m the son of an actor.” So, that at first is what I realized I could do. Nine-tenths of directing is directing actors. In school, they put way too much emphasis on camera placement and so on, whereas really that’s just one-tenth of directing a film.

    When I had kids, and I wasn’t as well known then, I was able to make a living by becoming an acting teacher. By thinking that you know something, you’re able to convince other people that you know it, and you become respected for it. It’s kind of like working with a psychoanalyst—by believing that the psychoanalyst is a wise man, you in fact heal yourself. It’s the same with an actor. I can say for myself that I’m a conductor, except that I’m a conductor who doesn’t know how to play any of the instruments.

    HYNES: You talk about your father being an actor, and you felt emboldened in terms of offering that to others, but if I’m not mistaken you father was ambivalent about being an actor. You seem less ambivalent about being an actor and a director than he was. There’s a legacy of acting that you’ve inherited, but you’ve inherited it without the reluctance.

    GARREL: It’s true that my father was like a hidden actor. He was mostly a theater actor, not a film actor, and the reason for this was that during the war he landed—he invaded in Provence and in Italy and he had killed people. This was a huge problem for him because my father was a humanist [yet] during the war he had been forced to do this. He had signed up with the North African Free French troops and he landed, like Samuel Fuller and others. He used to say to me, “There are no murders in war, Philippe,” but still, because he killed, it was very hard for him. At the end of his life, he explained to me that he had hidden himself away in a small profession, the small profession of being a theater actor.

    He also was a puppetmaker and puppeteer first. When I was born, that’s what he was doing—acting with Jean Dasté and Gaston Baty. Gaston Baty belonged to the so-called “Cartel,” which was Baty, [Jacques] Copeau, [Charles] Dullin, and [Louis] Jouvet. My father was a student of Dullin, and my method comes from Dullin. Dullin is someone you might have seen in a few films around the second world war, but he was primarily a theater actor. That’s where most of his leading roles were. So when I was around six or eight I would go and sit alone with adults at night in the theater and watch my father on stage.

    But it’s true he was ambivalent about it. He considered it a small profession. In a way, that’s something that I inherited from him.

    RIZOV: I want to follow up on that a little bit. You talk about the work of unblocking the actor. When you were working with your father—especially regarding his experience in Algeria, which is addressed in Liberté, la nuit—did you have to unblock him in relation to his own experience to then relive it on screen?

    GARREL: Just once. Other than that, I never directed him. He did it all alone. And on the contrary it was me who learned from him.

    But for the last film he made with me, Un été brûlant, which was actually the last film he ever shot, I gave him a supporting role—he was too old to play a leading role—and he was acting with his grandson, Louis Garrel, and he was telling an incident from the war. For the first time I had seen with him, it was reality for him. It wasn’t improvising, it was reality. He started acting not just for Louis, he was acting for the crew as well, as if it were a confession. The crew included great, experienced members like Willy Kurant, the D.P., and he was talking to all of them. So it was the only time in my career that I decided to do a second take with him. I told him, “No, you have to talk just to Louis.” It was the only time I directed him, and it was for his last role. I think it was because he was so old that for him there was no difference between acting and being.

    HUGHES: I’m deeply moved by that scene with your father, partly because as a cinephile I have a unique relationship with your family. A few weeks ago in Toronto, for example, I saw the new restored print of Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1962), in which we see your father in his late-30s. You’ve been working with your family for several decades now. Does that still satisfy your curiosity and bring you pleasure as a filmmaker?

    GARREL: At the moment I’m rehearsing a film with my daughter, Louis’s sister [Esther Garrel], because my family is kind of like the circus. Everyone is in the theater or in film. So right now I’m rehearsing a film with my daughter who’s 23, an actress from the Conservatoire who I found in the recent graduating class and who’s 20, and one of my father’s best friends who’s an actor. It’s very, very important for me that art is grafted onto real, intimate life because a film is a piece of your life. Sometimes it takes a year, sometimes three years. I think it would be hard for me to maintain professional—even emotional—ties with people in cinema if I didn’t have these people from my family around me.

    Sternberg had done it before, but what really interested me in the New Wave was that it was a couples’ cinema, it was a lovers’ cinema. Antonioni did it, too. What I think I invented, with my situation, was a family cinema. It’s very important for me that film remain meaningful, that it does not remain outside of the subconscious. Once the subconscious is expressed on the set—and I think this is very important—the film becomes more expressive.

    At the end of his two books on acting, Stanislavsky comes to the conclusion that one should leave room for the expression of the subconscious. If you can let the subconscious be expressed in the making of the film, then when the viewer sees the film he will have something of his own subconscious emerge. Not through identification. He’ll think of people he loves, for instance. He’ll think of something that is emotionally moving to him. If my subconscious surfaces in the film and comes through, he will be touched because his subconscious will emerge. In this way, cinema heals.

    I look for emotion in truth. I don’t go searching for emotion like some filmmakers do. I think it’s more successful to go looking for emotion through truth because that way the viewer can come to his truth.

    RIZOV: In terms of your work with your son, his relative lack of expression is something that’s been discussed a lot. As an example, I’d like to ask about one of my favorite of your scenes that everybody likes, the “This Time Tomorrow” scene in Regular Lovers. Everyone is dancing around him and you cut to him in the middle of it. He’s very unmoved, in opposition to the spirit of the room. How do you develop that characteristic as you direct?

    GARREL: In that particular scene, it was a choreographer who teaches at the Conservatoire. At the Conservatoire, they also have dance professors. It’s not just theater and films. Anyways, Caroline Marcadé choreographed the Kinks number.

    My set is quite free, and Louis Garrel, in general, is quite inhibited about dancing, so he didn’t want to dance. Since my cinema is free, I said, “Okay, don’t dance. Be a character who doesn’t like to dance.” Then, as we were shooting, I saw that Louis was watching his classmates, because all the others in the scene were people he was at the Conservatoire with for three years. He was watching them, so I told the D.P. to film Louis without telling him. Those are documentary shots that are inserted in the choreography that Caroline Marcadé did.

    By the way, I’m working with her again this year, so it’s not just actors that I get from the Conservatoire. I also take professors and use them behind the scenes. For instance, the person who teaches fight choreography at the Conservatoire, I’ve had him act in the films.

    My father acted like I never could have imagined. And now Louis Garrel is a much better actor than I am. I try to help him, but most often when he’s stoic like that, these are decisions that he has made among his classmates, people he was in school with for a long time, based on what he can and can’t do.

    I try to navigate this family relationship on the set. It can be awkward for people, and I try to avoid that. You have to avoid playing favorites. He and I are obviously very close, but one has to be democratic and not treat him differently. Of course, if we come back to the subconscious, of course I do treat him differently because, for instance, I dream of him more often than I dream of his classmates.

    HYNES: You talked earlier about introversion and about how you’re an introvert and there’s an expression of that in terms of lengths of shots and the quietness, to some degree. It’s interesting to me that that’s how you describe yourself. When I spoke to Louis he also talked about your family as being a circus and he likened himself to being the clown in the circus. So, in that sense he seems very different from you. And yet, in your films there is an introversion that comes through at times, and I’m wondering about your relationship with him in terms of him basically being an expression of you in a deep sense. And also, how do you relate to other actors in that sense? Because actors tend to be introverts. As a teacher and a director, how do you work with that dynamic, bringing actors down to a quieter place? Or at other times encouraging their outgoing aspects?

    GARREL: When I film Louis Garrel or my actors, even if I’ve written a story based on my own life, it’s really them that I’m filming. When I filmed my son or, back in the day when I filmed my father in films like Liberté, la nuit, I wasn’t asking them to play me. I was really filming them, and it’s been like that since the beginning, even when my films are drawn from my own personal life.

    The problem is, for instance, if you’re telling a story that involves sex you can’t talk to your father about sex the way you would with your best friend. What we’re getting to is the problem of incest. In asking my father or my son to be actors, I can’t film my father kissing a woman. I can’t film my son holding a naked woman the way I could with other actors because that would be like looking through the keyhole at my parents or into the children’s room.

    It’s Freud who said that the number one taboo for humanity is incest. It’s the most repulsive point. Everything about our evolution as a society is designed to avoid incest. So if I write, for instance, my love story with a woman, and I ask my father or Louis to act in it I don’t ask them to play me. I ask them to play themselves. And not only that, I have to film a purely spiritual love, because otherwise it’s like going and peeking at your parents or going into the kids’ room. You can’t do that.

    There’s an inconvenience to that, which is that it makes for a certain kind of story; but there’s an advantage, which is that every time the story has to be of amour fou. It’s not just a little love affair. It can’t be that. It spiritualizes the love while taking away the problem of incest or voyeurism of other family members. So there’s both a limit and a kind of luck in this, which allows a transcendence. Perhaps I haven’t completely answered the question.

    HUGHES: You mentioned earlier that you wanted to trigger the subconscious rather than create an identification. When I watched Emergency Kisses for the first time ten years ago, I felt very removed from it. I’m now the same age as you were when you made it. I’m married and have children the same age as Louis in that film. So when I revisited it last week, I identified much more closely with your character, but I was also deeply moved by it because I now understand deep in my bones that the loss of my family would be the great tragedy in my life. I now experience—subconsciously, I suppose—the threat of despair.

    GARREL: Well, I think that’s proof of how art is useful. As we see with great filmmakers like Bergman, his films show that he was an artist, but they also show that films can be as useful for healing as a book by Freud.

    It’s very important. I deeply believe that art can replace religion, like psychoanalysis can help—not replace but help—medicine. Art can supplant religion as far as belief in life. And that’s what’s sad about Chantal Akerman’s suicide. She was an atheist. My father used to say to me, to deal with suicides, “All young people are suicidal and I was, too.” And he used to say to me, “Suicide is two lines in the newspaper.” And we saw as much.

    So, with Chantal it’s a real failure of art, as far as our business is concerned. We can’t get into her private life or the failure of love or any of that. But what we can see politically in her life is the concentration camps, because her mother was in the concentration camps, and we can see that art wasn’t enough for the collective unconscious, as Freud saw the collective unconscious. Not this idea that we have now of a cloud floating above men. Freud saw it as something that’s anchored in our memory and that comes from those who lived before, who came before us, and that makes us act despite ourselves.

    As far as friendship and love and so on in art, that’s what art is good for, as the five of us here who agree that art must be defended in this way, because it helps us to live. But even psychoanalysis fails us. We see that with Primo Levi, who had been in the concentration camps and who, like Chantal, killed himself. It’s very, very complicated to heal the psyche through art, through this search for emotion, for reliving things, for bringing things forth from memory and unconscious when we see art. It’s not like we’ve reached the end point with this. On the contrary, we’re at the eve of the importance in our civilization of understanding that art is essential.

    RIZOV: It would be hard for me to imagine a film of yours that eliminated political aspects entirely. There is an analytical component in returning to, revisiting, and re-experiencing charged political moments, whether through Maurice’s monologue in Liberté, la nuit about the scars left by the Algerian war, a very short eruption like in Frontier of Dawn when the man at the bar suddenly says, “I’m an anti-Semite,” or in A Burning Hot Summer, when a sidewalk conversation is interrupted by immigrants running from the police. The characters are preoccupied by their lives, while briefly noticing what’s still going on around them.

    GARREL: Instinctively, what you’re touching on with all of these scenes is something that I didn’t invent. I didn’t invent this process. Artists have been doing this since the dawn of time. What you’re touching on are dreams that I wrote down upon waking up. Notated dreams. For instance, the murder of the mother in Liberté, la nuit, the arrest of the immigrants in A Burning Hot Summer, these are all dreams.

    Now, many artists have done this. They mix imaginary scenes and dreams. But these scenes are not shown as dreams because I’ve also had scenes in my films where you see actual dreams, you see the hero fall asleep and dream. I like to mix those with reality. What I’m interested in is the search for a method, and that’s how you get an avant-garde style—by searching for something new.

    In Regular Lovers, for instance, toward the end of the shoot, I had a dream, but instead of writing it down I did something like what Godard would do when he was . . . let’s call it “improvising the mise-en-scene” on the set, where he would make something up and shoot it with without writing it down. So, I had this dream. I called my assistant early in the morning and said, “Go to the store, buy some barbed wire, and come to the set. I’ll tell you why.” We were shooting in the forest, and what I was able to do is I noted the dream directly through the camera. I didn’t write it down. It would be hard for you to remember, but it was the scene where the character takes opium and then he dreams. That was a dream noted on camera. You see a young woman wearing old clothes in a small camp with barbed wire. She’s woken by Louis Garrel, who’s dressed as a young prince. There’s a small flame. He takes her out of the camp.

    And that’s how you get to be avant-garde. You try to be the first to make a certain gesture. So, in this case, two or three hours after I’d woken up, I was shooting the dream, noting the dream directly through the camera, while I was still inhabited by it. What I try to do is I take these scenes from dreams, which you’ve instinctually noticed, and I mix them with realist scenes. They’re oneiric scenes by definition, since they’re taken from dreams.

    You’ve instinctively put your finger on all of these scenes that were from dreams that were shown as reality!

    Part 3

    Edited by Eric Hynes at Reverse Shot

    HYNES: I don’t usually think of your films in terms of genre. I think of you as coming out of the avant-garde but continually working towards your own vocabulary. But with In the Shadow of Women, you do seem to be in dialogue with comedy. How deliberate were you in bringing in those elements, and how willing were you to go into that area?

    GARREL: It’s true what you say, but it was not on purpose. In France, when I saw the audience laughing at the movie, they were laughing at it as if it were a comedy, as if I had told it with humor. It was absolutely not on purpose. I did it without humor. What’s possible, however, is that it’s due to the fact that it’s the first time I’ve worked with Jean-Claude Carrière. When I said to Jean-Claude, “Everyone is laughing in the audience,” Carrière said, “Yeah, Philippe. That’s me!” When Godard decided to make industrial cinema again in 1979, I observed that he worked with his wife, Anne-Marie Miéville, and he worked with Carrière, who as you know had written for Luis Buñuel and worked with Godard on two films, Every Man for Himself and Passion.

    The importance is not that I’m avant-garde or a modernist; what’s important is that we say, “It’s cinema,” the way that we can say, “It’s a painting” when we look at a painting. Now, in the modernists that I like—Picasso and Matisse and Max Ernst—you have a figure, sometimes it’s Cubist, it’s de-structured, interpreted, but underneath it you see the classic drawing, you see the construction of the human body. That’s the modernism I like in painting, because the two forms of art I like are cinema and painting. What I’m looking for is how to be modernist in a profound way. But you also have to be classic in a narrative sense. You can’t, with cinema, put the book down and do something else or look at another painting. Only cinema and theater have this thing of imposed time where the viewer must accept to be a prisoner. So, what I wanted to do was be like a painter, to have a classic design underneath (which Picasso could do very well because he was a master draftsman) and on top to deconstruct. I thought Carrière was the ideal person for this because what he had done for Every Man for Himself. What I wanted, in a sense, was a classic script and to do a modern mise-en-scène.

    What you see with Godard—and he’s the only one who does this, and this is why he’s so much better than me—is that ten years later, after the movie, you see that he was telling the story. But because of his modern mise-en-scène, the story wasn’t exposed. It appears over time. And in that way he’s like Picasso, or Einstein. Because he’s searching, he’s searching and he finds. For instance, take Nouvelle vague. I had to see it four times to understand the story. People walk out of Godard movies because they say there’s no story, there’s no logic. But there is a story. It’s just exposed differently. For instance, in a classic film you’ll have an actor who says, “I’m the President of the United States.” In a Godard film, you’ll have an actor saying nothing, and you’ll have a voice coming in from somewhere saying, “Mr. President, do you want a glass of water?” That’s his method of exposition. It’s hard to understand. And you need to understand that logic to be moved by the movie. But with time and maybe one sentence in the program, these movies can touch people. Slowly we’re catching up.

    If we take the example of Nouvelle vague—which was shown in competition in Cannes because Alain Delon was in it—there were many, many walkouts. Which is what happened to Chantal Akerman’s film, No Home Movie, in Locarno. Godard was used to this kind of treatment. When I took Godard as a master when I was 13 or 14, there were maybe six of us in the screening room to see Alphaville, and at the end there were four. But Chantal wasn’t used to that kind of thing. She filled theaters. So maybe No Home Movie is too modern. Maybe it’s hard to understand. It was the same for Nouvelle vague as it is for No Home Movie. But the difference is that Straub and Godard—they’ve always seen this kind of behavior. They’re used to it. Now when I read the Cannes reviews of Nouvelle vague back at that time, the story they described was wrong. They said it was the story of two brothers and a rich heiress. The critics told a different story than was the movie’s actual story.

    When I saw the film a fourth time, I realized that the story was actually of a Machiavellian character who makes people believe that he was killed by this heiress. And then he reappears with another personality pretending to be the first man’s brother. And out of guilt the heiress gives him everything she says to avoid him telling the police about her. At the end, when she nearly drowns in an accident, she realizes who he is. And he saves her. So she says, “But it was you all the time.” And he says yes. And so she says, “But there’s one thing I didn’t understand—why did you save me?” And he says, “Because in the meantime I’ve fallen in love.” Which is very, very moving. But if we don’t understand it, it’s like a math problem.

    So back at that time I wrote to Godard, because I write him quite frequently or I go to visit him—and I was right, that was the story. But no one at the time understood it. Except maybe the top student [smiles]. Now everyone understands it. It’s a great story, but instead of exposing it in the Scorsese style, Godard told it in his modern way. It’s a moving story for the 21st century. It’s told in the avant-garde way of Godard. The exposition is too hidden, instead of being really comprehensible. But that’s why Godard is in my eyes the greatest modernist. Why he’s above all the rest. Like Picasso—Picasso who in relation to the Louvre or classic painting in general, he came along and he broke everything. So that he could come after, and that’s what Godard did. After only 80 years of cinema, he came along and he broke the Lumière and Edison things that we were doing, and he invented modernism.

    HUGHES: When you talked about seeing Nouvelle vague for the fourth time, you said you came to understand the logic of it, which is an interesting choice of words. All critics and viewers have to wrestle with Godard’s logic, but I’m not sure it’s a word that comes to my mind when watching and writing about your films, which are more about unearthing, in that subconscious sense, the emotions generated by your images. You’ve talked about growing up as the son of an actor, being exposed to art and painting as a young child, but I’m wondering about other sources for your images, beyond dreams. Do you still take direct inspiration from paintings? I’m thinking about the images of feet being held and wrapped and washed, which is a trope in sacred art. Some of your earlier work is almost mythological.

    GARREL: The other exercise that I devote myself to, aside from seeing and re-seeing the films of Godard… actually there are two other exercises. One of them is going to the museum. When I was fourteen I lived next to the Louvre, and the Louvre was free once a week. In fact I saw here that on Sundays it’s pay as you wish at the Frick, which I think is a great thing, a democratic thing, to allow poor people to see classic painting. I went to the Louvre every single Sunday. At 25 I counted, and I’d been to the Louvre 147 times. When I shoot, I don’t watch movies—I go to the Louvre. And I look at how they paint things. I don’t look at the dates—I don’t know the history about paintings. I look at the names and I look at the paintings.

    The other practice that I’ve undertaken, which I started when I was 25, is that I read Freud. Whenever I had a problem, I read one book by Freud. For instance, if I had an addiction, I read a book by Freud to get over it. And I would say, in the Freudian sense, this is the this of the illness, and I would work through it by reading the book. And then I would not be dependent. Or if a woman had left me and I felt terrible, I would read one Freud book. And no lie, I think I’ve read more than half of Freud. And I did this without undergoing psychoanalysis while making films.

    Now, not long ago, I started to experience really visceral jealousy over a woman—a very serious problem. And so for the first time I decided to go to psychoanalysis. And I found an old psychoanalyst who is a disciple of Lacan. And I had a very short psychoanalysis with him—six months to get rid of the jealousy. I didn’t get rid of my other problems, but I did get rid of the jealousy. And so I wrote to this 92-year-old psychoanalyst, “I think I can get by alone.” And because he’s a very wise man, he wrote me, “If you think you can get by alone, you should leap on the opportunity.” So I stopped the psychoanalysis, and I also stopped reading Freud. So here, for instance, in New York, I’ve seen zero films, but I’ve been to the Whitney, I’ve been to the Frick. I’m really, truly interested in that.

    So I have classic and modern painting, I have Freud, I have Godard, there’s seeing old films as well. Like recently I discovered some Bergman films that people don’t know very well, from the mid-forties. Like Prison and Music in Darkness. These are all films that I go to see in the Latin Quarter, small movie theaters—kind of the remains of Henri Langlois’s Cinematheque. This is how I make my cinema. It’s something I get from my father. I’m an artist to make a living—I just do it well. I’m not alienated by it, but I’m not a specialist. And that’s why I have a small audience. I like being recognized as a filmmaker, but I don’t need to have a huge audience. It’s much more important to me to fully live my life, and be thoroughly involved with my intimates and loved ones, and my family. Life is more important. I surround myself with art to escape the ambient idiocy. But I’m less of a specialist than, for instance, Leos Carax. Because I prefer life. And I think that’s something that comes from May ’68.

    RIZOV: I would like to go back to your new film for a little bit. What the couple is united by initially is their work in the editing room. At the end, when she’s the first to discover and understand that the film is based on a falsehood, she sees the footage better than he does. This seems to relate a bit to your practice of having female collaborators come in to help you write the female parts. At the same time they’re working with physical film, and he meets the other woman when he’s helping her carry cans of film. It’s a triangle united by celluloid.

    GARREL: Well, even thirty years ago, if you met a woman and you were a director, she would say to you, “Make me a star.” Now, a woman will say, “Make me equal.” So the work has naturally evolved. You see, men court women naturally. Or if they like men, they court men. And by courting I mean in the medieval sense of courtship. So naturally there’s courtship in art, and I want to seduce. In the past, women wanted to be glorified in film. Now it’s different. And that changes the work of artists. Smart women today want to be equals—they won’t be upset if they’re not stars. But if they’re artists, they just want to be having their work looked at as equals, as intelligent beings. So I use that to court women. I want to meet the deepest desires of women today.

    Now, the other thing is that in cinema today—cinema is young, it’s only 120 years old—most women have spoken men’s words. It’s never been an objective vision of women. So even men who are not misogynists, who love women, who see them as equals—it’s still a problem in cinema that all the words that women were speaking were coming from men. So by associating men and women in writing the films, I get to have a more dialectic type of film. More dialect in regarding the human species. It’s like an inner documentary on men and women. Cinema is not only macho, it’s industrially made by men.

    So I’ve just tried to move it forward. Godard did the same thing with his second period. Which you could refer to as the Blue Period, if you’re continuing the Picasso parallel. He wrote a lot of those films with Anne-Marie Miéville. There’s one called France/tour/detour/deux/enfants, which he made for television and which I love, which he wrote with Miéville. And I think to write a film with your wife makes it intelligently gendered. The other advantage is that it’s less dangerous to write a film with your wife than to have her be the star—because you’re less likely to have someone steal her away from you. Which brings us back to the beginning of the conversation, when I was talking about Jarmusch.

    [Laughter]

    HYNES: And then you made an entire film about that—about whether or not a director will cast his partner as the lead in a film written about her.

    GARREL: Emergency Kisses.

    HUGHES: Can I ask a very practical question? In the last few films, there’s a consistent rhythm to the sequences, in that there will be a fairly static shot, like of two people sitting on a bed talking, followed by a shot of people walking down the street—there’s visual movement. I’d like to hear you talk about the design of that visual rhythm. What happens in a walking scene that can’t happen in a quiet, static scene?

    GARREL: I don’t know. It’s like drawing. Those kinds of operations aren’t analyzed by the artist. I have no theory on my own film. You know, cinema is gestural; this is what it has in common with dance or with painting. You take your camera, and people, and you write something with that, that resembles life. That’s why I shoot in order. I shoot the first shot the first day, and the last shot the last day, and I edit during the shoot. I have an editor who edits as we go. So that in the evening, I see the last shot, and the next morning I continue from there. I continue from the previous image—not from what’s in the script. Once all the rehearsals are done, in a sense I could throw the story out, the actors would keep the dialogue, and we would start over.

    So if you would ask me, why do you track backwards when this guy is walking down the street feeling desperate because his wife cheated on him?—it’s like painting. If I have a blue line, I look at it and I put a green line underneath it. I don’t tell myself I’m going to make a blue and green painting. I don’t theorize about that. It’s a blue line, then the green. There’s no intention before the gesture. I do it. I observe. Then I do the next thing. I observe. I do the next thing. I observe the continuity. But there’s no outside definition of what I want to get. There’s no film in my head. There’s no imaginary film I want to make. I organize reality, in the present, on the set. What I’m trying to explain to you is that it’s really gestural. I’m not reconstructing something that was constructed in my mind. I’m constructing something for the first time in reality.

    HUGHES: That’s another advantage of your technique of having extensive rehearsals and then shooting a scene only once. I can’t imagine any other filmmaker that looks at the previous shot the night before, who can feel the rhythm of the movie and then make the decision the next morning based on that.

    HYNES: Right, if you were considering from among fifteen takes, it would be harder to determine, tonally, what should be next.

    GARREL: [in English] Ah, yes, yes. Because it’s no more clear if you make a lot of takes. That’s true. Everything is a method that you’ve invented. Every artist invents his own method. And his own method is his style. That’s why it’s so difficult to teach directing. Except for the fact of directing actors. But teaching the mise-en-scene? It’s very difficult. Because every artist is particular, every director is particular.

    HYNES: But you were encouraged by Godard, your mentor, to come up with your own method. Which is quite different from other directors coming up.

    GARREL: It’s also a question of misunderstanding. I thought that Godard wrote nothing at all, and that his films were entirely improvised. So through all my first films, basically from Marie for Memory to Les hautes solitudes, which is where I started to do something like preparatory work, I thought that Godard came to the set with hands in his pockets, nothing written down. In fact, I later learned that he had a notebook in which there was a story, in a few lines. He didn’t have a script but he did have a notebook, and he would give the dialogue to the actors. But since I didn’t know that, and since one doesn’t know in general how other artists work, I started doing things in my own way. So for my six first films I did absolutely no writing, I just went straight to the camera. And then at the end of the shooting I would write just a few lines of dialogue and I would give it to the actors and say, “This is for tomorrow.” This thing of misunderstanding is specific to art. It wouldn’t work with science. Art can tolerate approximation and misunderstanding. You can still have a work of art that’s based on a misunderstanding. That’s expressive.

  • Further Questions for Hou Hsiao-hsien

    Further Questions for Hou Hsiao-hsien

    This interview was originally published at Mubi. I collaborated on this piece with Daniel Kasman.

    * * *

    div>We can’t get enough of The Assassin, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first film in eight years, his first so-called martial arts film, a film set deep in the past yet bracingly present and heartbreaking. A longtime hero of ours, we sought every opportunity to speak with Hou. Thus, the strange email interview after The Assassin‘s premiere in Cannes. And thus, too, this equally strange conversation between Hou, critic Darren Hughes, and myself, where it seemed as though each participant talked past the other, our words and ideas becoming distorted in translation. We offer it to you as a small addendum to the wealth of discourse that surrounds this very special filmmaker, in general, and this film, specifically, aware of and saddened by its slim inadequacy.

    At the end of our conversation Darren requested a picture. Hou removed his ragged baseball cap, glanced quickly at the window and at the fluorescents over our heads, pushed back the curtain, and then leaned awkwardly into the natural light, giving us the photo above. That split-second gesture was a good deal more revealing of Hou’s technique than the preceding conversation.

    NOTEBOOK: Many of your films are set in the past, but you’re also a strong proponent of realism in cinema. Is there a difference for you when you’re staging, say, a scene between a man and a woman in the past, as in The Assassin, or one set in contemporary Taipei?

    HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: I shoot the films the same way. I give the actors short stories to read to give them a sense of how people spoke in that era, but I want them to figure it out for themselves. When making films in Asia, there is little time to give the actors a deep understanding of an era. The best I can do is a classic presentation: the way they wear their clothes, the locations.

    When you see a stranger, or when you talk with someone for the first time, you’re naturally fascinated by that particular something they have. I want actors to come on set and bring that same thing. I want to capture that essence and describe it on screen. So there’s no rehearsal. The actors know what I expect of them. I allow it to sink in for the actors, but it’s not through discussion. I really want them to feel it so that when it’s time to deliver those lines it is realistic to them.

    If it doesn’t work, I stop the scene and we come back to it later. For example, the scenes between Tian Ji’an [Chen Chang] and Huji [Nikki Hsin-Ying Hsieh] were not quite right [at first], so I allowed them to workshop a bit and come back to shoot those scenes again.

    NOTEBOOK: Did the use of an ancient dialect for the film’s dialog transform that process in any way?

    HOU: It comes down to the actors’ relationship with the language. Again, in the scenes with Tian Ji’an and Huji, I made them shoot a couple more times. But with someone like Shu Qi, who didn’t have too many lines, it was fairly easy to get into the dialect!

    The actors who play the parents are from China, so they have more of a basis in the old language. They didn’t have to workshop at all. It was all very natural for them.

    NOTEBOOK: The Assassin opens with a title card about events from 8th century China, and then the second sentence jumps a hundred years to the “present day” of the film. That jump reminds me of your films Good Men, Good Women [1995] and Three Times [2005] in its juxtapositions of different eras. You seem especially interested in the cinema as a historical tool.

    HOU: The opening titles were not in the original cut. The French distributors told me they didn’t really understand what was going on and asked me to add an introduction. But even after adding it, I’m convinced many people still don’t understand.

    Hollywood is good at telling meticulous historical stories. I’m not that kind of director. I don’t want things to be so clear. Carefully plotting every storyline, as Hollywood does, would distract from the humanity of the characters.

    NOTEBOOK: There’s a moment in The Assassin when Shu Qi walks alone through the mainland countryside, and it reminded me suddenly of the young couples in Good Men, Good Women. When I described you as a historian, it’s because your films are interested in causations: what happened in the 8th century affected the 9th century, what happened in 1940 mainland China affected 1995 Taiwan.

    HOU: You’re looking for a thread running through my films, for similar shots in different eras. For me, there are no connections like this. Because I’ve worked with certain actors many times, I’ve come to appreciate certain aspects of their performances, so perhaps this is the connecting line you see.

    The Tang Dynasty is a very modern era. The way people lived their lives was very modern. For example, the assassin questions what it means to murder. Even if there were a time machine, it would be of no use to me because no amount of detail would overcome our modern eyes.

    As I mentioned, I often work with the same actors. But when I was writing the script, I thought about incorporating other interesting people I’ve encountered. I considered casting actors from the mainland who might better encapsulate the feel of the Tang Dynasty. But I like to write with specific actors already in mind because I don’t want to arrive on set and think, “How am I going to fit your personality into my script?”

    The circle of actors in Asia is fairly small. By casting Shu Qi, I knew I could give her direction and there would at least be a possibility of her changing her performance. Even though Shu Qi is not from deep in mainland China, she plays the role like an assassin, and that’s what I needed.

  • “Something, Anything”: A Conversation with Paul Harrill

    “Something, Anything”: A Conversation with Paul Harrill

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    Paul Harrill’s Something, Anything, which co-premiered recently at the Wisconsin Film Festival and the Sarasota Film Festival, is a portrait of a young woman in crisis. Peggy [Ashley Shelton] has already achieved her “stereotypically Southern” (as she’s described in the press kit) ambitions: a successful career in realty, a husband, a house in the suburbs, and a baby on the way. In the opening moments of the film, however, she’s forced to confront her dissatisfaction with it all. A family tragedy sends Peggy on a sojourn that leads her to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and, eventually, to a simpler life in a small apartment overlooking the Tennessee River.

    Harrill first gained recognition in 2001 when his short film, Gina, An Actress, Age 29, won the top prize at Sundance and enjoyed an impressive run of screenings at international festivals. Starring Amy Hubbard and Frankie Faison (Burrell from The Wire), Gina is about a woman who answers an audition call and soon finds herself performing the role of real-life union buster. Harrill’s second fiction short, Quick Feet, Soft Hands (2008), stars Greta Gerwig and Jason Von Stein as a young couple eking out a living on the minor-league baseball circuit. Harrill also produced Ashley Maynor’s documentary, For Memories’ Sake (2010), and last year returned to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as an Associate Professor of Art.

    I met Harrill a decade ago, when he and I were invited by a mutual friend to present on an academic conference panel. I spoke about cinephilia in the digital age; he screened what was then his most recent work, Brief Encounter with Tibetan Monks, a five-minute documentary that was part of Jay Rosenblatt’s Underground Zero project. We became friends, formed a small cinema club here in Knoxville, and then lost touch when he left to take faculty positions first at Temple University and then Virginia Tech. I ran into him again three years ago at a local screening and was happy to learn that he’d begun pre-production on his first feature.

    The plot of Something, Anything fits neatly into a number of American indie genres, but Harrill is slightly out of step with most of his contemporaries. Like the other movies he’s directed, Something, Anything is very much an East Tennessee film, but it avoids the traps of regional cinema. There are no picturesque shots of abandoned storefronts and dusty crossroads (although both can be found a short drive from the film’s locations) and no mentions of Knoxville’s literary and cinematic icons, Clarence Brown, James Agee, and Cormac McCarthy (although McCarthy fans might be interested to know that Peggy’s apartment is straight up the hill from where Suttree anchors his skiff). “Place isn’t about landscape,” Harrill told me. “Place is about values.” It’s a useful distinction, I think, and Harrill takes those values seriously. There’s no nostalgia in his voice. He doesn’t exoticize the South or the people who live here. There’s only affection and a careful attention to the social, economic, and spiritual (for lack of a better word) pressures that determine so much of our behavior.

    In an era when “contemplative” filmmakers tend to evoke Tarkovsky, Dreyer, Malick, and the Dardennes, Harrill’s style is decidedly conventional—old-fashioned, even. Peggy’s appearance might allude to Vivre sa vie-era Anna Karina, but Harrill’s treatment of her owes less to Godard than to American studio directors like Henry Hill (I was reminded more than once of The Song of Burnadette), George Cukor, and, as he acknowledges in our conversation, Frank Borzage and Leo McCarey. Harrill seldom leaves Peggy’s side, typically filming her in medium shots and closeups. The cutting is standard continuity, and the pace, though slower than most multiplex fare, will feel familiar to viewers of classical Hollywood. Finally, though, Something, Anything has the soul of a Bergman film—if not its style—remaining agnostic on questions of God and putting its faith, instead, in human affection. A film about a woman of few words who swallows her emotions and fends off despair, Something, Anything manages, in its final moments, to capture two minor miracles, both of them earth-bound and sublime.

    * * *

    HUGHES: Knowing you as I do, I’m going to assume you sympathize with Peggy’s retreat into her own Walden woods? Did writing this story in any way qualify as a kind of wish fulfillment for you?

    HARRILL: It’s a very personal film on that level. I’ve certainly wanted to give up all of my possessions and retreat and find quiet. You do that as a filmmaker if you’re a writer. It’s so solitary. And writing is the part I most enjoy, which goes along with being an introvert. I don’t like production. I like editing and I like writing. I mean, I hate them both when they’re not going well, but when they are going well, they’re the reason I do this.

    I did a lot of research in preparation for the film. To the point of procrastination, really. Reading and reading and reading, the way someone might research before doing a dissertation. I read a lot of monastic writings, whether it was the early ascetics living in caves or Thomas Merton, and I read Tolstoy’s religious writings. But those ideas, romantic as they are, ultimately don’t appeal to me.

    HUGHES: True monasticism, you mean? Becoming a monk?

    HARRILL: Right. And, you know, Peggy doesn’t become a nun. She simplifies her life and becomes a seeker.

    So the film is not wish fulfillment for me because I already feel like a seeker. I haven’t given up my phone yet, but I think about giving up Facebook everyday. We’ve been trying to put together a social media strategy for the film, and I keep thinking, “What would be appropriate for this film is to have no social media presence whatsoever.” [laughs] People should write me letters and I’ll write them letters back.

    HUGHES: I’ve only lived here for fifteen years, but my sense is that Knoxville, like much of the South, has a real ambivalence about seekers. On the one hand, we are church-going folks and most people I know practice some kind of faith that shapes their lives. But Knoxville is also a very comfortable, very middle-class place that is suspicious of paths that stray too far from convention.

    There’s a scene midway through Something, Anything when Peggy’s old friends confront her about her behavior. I half expected one of them to invite her to a Bible study—and I say that as someone who recognizes the characters in this film, who lives among them. To me, the one questionable moment in the film is when Peggy has to photocopy pages from a Bible because she doesn’t own one. She and her parents strike me as the type who would’ve gone to church every Sunday if for no other reason than out of social obligation.

    HARRILL: First, regarding your comment about one of her friends inviting her to a Bible study, I wrestled with whether to put in something like that. It would certainly be true to life. There was a scene in an early draft of the script where she goes to church with friends, but I eliminated it for two reasons. First, I felt that an audience who knows these characters—and, by the way, people like this certainly aren’t limited to the South—I felt those audiences would fill that in. They already know those women and they recognize that subtext.

    I say this without any judgment, but I think of Peggy’s friends as the kind of women who will accessorize their faith—you know, they’ll wear a gold cross and so on. I wanted to steer away from things like that in costuming because—and this is the second part of it—it makes Christianity into an easy target. To have those two women, who become antagonists, also be “the Christians” wouldn’t be fair. It would simplify the characters, and it would horribly oversimplify Christians.

    I want this film to speak to a lot of people. I don’t think it’s necessarily a film that was made for a lot of people [laughs], but I want it to reach not only the Peggys of the world—the seekers—but also the Hollys and Jills. If you type them in that way it’s too easy for audiences who recognize themselves in those women or their husbands to just check out of the film. That’s where there’s a danger of satire. Or perhaps it’s that audiences have seen those characters portrayed satirically so many times before, they might assume that’s my intention as well. That’s why I ultimately stripped out any overt critique of mainstream Christianity. I felt it would be superficial. And probably unfair.

    As for Peggy not having a Bible, you’re probably right. She would have a Bible, but it would be back at home. Maybe she and Mark [Bryce Johnson] got one as a wedding gift. She probably got one as a kid, too, but it’s at her parents’ house and she never read it.

    But that misses the point, in a way. I think Peggy is doing something pretty sophisticated there. She’s taking those words out of their familiar context—you know, that thin, Bible-grade paper? She’s putting them onto something with more heft, and that helps her look at it critically, and engage with it as something whose meaning isn’t defined or predetermined for her. At least, that’s how I look at it.

    HUGHES: Peggy eventually leaves her apartment, gets in her car, and drives to Gethsemani. It’s a significant moment, I think, because it marks an important shift both in her character and in the form of the film.

    HARRILL: She’s a seeker and, at some point, the road has to become part of her search. On a narrative level, it’s important for her to get out of the city and be in a different space. To take action. Travel is about removing yourself from your surroundings so you find out who you are without them. On a formal level, it’s important because the film has up to that point been such a chamber drama. It’s so interior. And then she gets into the car for the first time and we hit this big blue sky. There’s something important about seeing that openness. The film needs to breathe at that point.

    HUGHES: Something, Anything is shot fairly conventionally, but there are occasional moments where I can almost feel the formalist in you wrestling its way out. When Peggy arrives in Kentucky, the camera watches her approach from the door of the abbey. It’s almost Antonioni-esque. Is that shot about her? Is it about the abbey? Is it about situating her in that new space?

    HARRILL: I think it’s all of those things. I mean, I want it to be all of those things. If I’m not mistaken it’s the widest shot in the film. It’s the longest shot. It’s the smallest we see her. That seems appropriate for where she is—both metaphorically and concretely.

    HUGHES: The scenes at the abbey strike an interesting balance. I especially like her brief exchange with the monk who tells her, “Every day is a choice.” It’s all very warm and human. And at the same time, the film depicts the abbey as a genuinely holy place.

    HARRILL: That’s interesting. You’re talking about it as if it’s a dichotomy: human and holy. Obviously those two things are different but they needn’t be separated.

    Getting access to film at the monastery was a long process. But the monks never asked to see the script, not even the pages that were shot at the abbey. They only asked us what the story was about, in the most general sense. They wanted to get to know me, and once they got to know me, they were very trusting. Our guide while we filmed was Brother Paul Quenon, who is a photographer and poet and who’s been there since he was seventeen years old. Thomas Merton was his novice master. It was really satisfying when we filmed that scene with the monk in the hallway. We were shooting in places where the public isn’t allowed, so Brother Paul was observing, and he really loved the scene. He felt it was true to his experience.

    They’re people. They’re different, but they’re people. You know, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, but there’s a DVD underground at the abbey, and there are a couple monks who are cinephiles who wanted to talk about Ozu! When they found out I had a Region 2 copy of Ruggles of Red Gap, they asked me to send a copy.

    HUGHES: Peggy becomes a seeker in response to her growing realization of just how alienated she’s become. If this were the real world instead of a film, her condition would be diagnosed by those around her as dysthymia or depression. The film resists psychologizing her, though, both in the script and in the form. None of her friends say, “Peggy, have you thought about seeing someone about this?”

    HARRILL: I think there’s value in psychology, in real life. But as a filmmaker, I think it can be creatively deadly. People are mysterious, and characters need mystery too. For me to identify the crisis she’s going through—for me to label it, or explain it in the terminology of psychology—well, at that point I’ve done three things. First, I’m telling the audience how to understand the character, which I think disrespects the audience. Second, I’ve taken away some of the character’s mystery. And finally, I’ve basically said, “I have all the answers, I understand all of this, everything about these characters.” That’s a lie.

    If someone watching the film views Peggy psychologically—if they see her and think “that’s depression”—or whatever, it’s far more powerful for them to do that without my prompting.

    HUGHES: I asked because, getting back to that dichotomy—”What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be holy?”—Something, Anything offers, I think, a real analysis of what degrades our humanness and our holiness. There are, of course, whole genres of film that attack the values of suburbia, but your film is not a portrait of alienation in a generic sense, it’s alienation in a very specific sense. I’m tempted to call it alienation in the Marxist sense.

    HARRILL: Well, first let me say this: I don’t think the film has an answer for what it means to be holy. The question is important, though. Certainly, the main character wants to know what it means to be holy.

    I’ve always admired a sensibility in Raymond Carver’s work. He has a deep affection for his characters while also remaining critical of them. But what’s so remarkable about his writing is how concrete the incidents are. In Something, Anything Mark gets upset because someone dings his car. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood. I don’t have an axe to grind. But the parking lot scene, Mark’s anger—it’s a concrete detail.

    HUGHES: Or the scene in which Peggy meets with a couple who are being foreclosed upon. You open it with a montage of simple, static images of empty rooms—a kind of portrait of the house they’re about to lose.

    HARRILL: Right. We only see them once, but that couple, like Peggy, is in a period of transition. If we were to see that montage before they move into their new home those images would be filled with hope and promise, but it’s obviously the opposite. They’re in trouble.

    HUGHES: Have you seen Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy?

    HARRILL: Sure.

    HUGHES: There’s a scene in that film in which an older security guard who has befriended Wendy recognizes she’s in trouble and gives her some money. Reichardt inserts a shot so that we see he’s giving her seven dollars, but it’s clearly seven dollars he can’t afford to lose. When Peggy goes back to her real estate office, her boss asks her to help out the team: the couple is going to lose $40,000 on one deal so that the company can make an extra $35,000 in another deal. I appreciate the way money is always real and consequential in Reichardt’s films, and it’s real in yours, too.

    HARRILL: That’s true. Money is very much a common thread in the last few movies I’ve directed. It’s not evil, but how people relate to money is important. Albert [Faison’s character] in Gina willingly compromises his integrity to pay his bills. Money is central to the characters in Quick Feet, Soft Hands.

    HUGHES: Near the end of Quick Feet, Soft Hands, Jim tells Lisa, “One of us should go to college,” which is certainly dialog in the Carver vein. And like the couple who are losing their house in the new movie, it’s also a time stamp. These are Great Recession films. My favorite moment in Something, Anything is when Mark asks Peggy if she needs any money and she replies, “I pay my bills.” It’s a gut-kick of a line reading. She’s proud and hurt in equal measure. On the page, I would think Peggy has the potential to become a type herself, but Ashley Shelton seems to always be performing at multiple registers.

    HARRILL: I can’t even remember how many actresses I met with before we found Ashley. It might have been in the triple digits. I met her very late in the game and, especially after auditioning her with Linds Edwards (who plays Tim, one of Peggy’s old friends who has become a monk), knew that she could be vulnerable and strong, which was essential for the character.

    HUGHES: You posted an article at filmmaker.com about your experience with the IFP Narrative Lab, where Something, Anything was workshopped. It sounds like it was a productive experience.

    HARRILL: We thought we were pretty close to picture lock when we submitted the film, but we knew that if we were selected it would be an opportunity for some more feedback, and a different kind of feedback than we’d been getting. We knew on one level, this could change everything. But we were eager to hear that because we wanted to make the best film possible.

    HUGHES: But you’re also opening yourself up to the possibility that the feedback will recommend more than small tweaks. That would be terrifying.

    HARRILL: Yeah, there was this initial burst of excitement for being selected, because it’s very validating to know you’re one of ten projects out of something like 140 that applied. We’d been making this movie in such isolation. For someone to select it confirmed that we were on the right track, that there was something of value here—and not just to us but to others as well. But then day two of the first week was “the crit” and excitement turned to anxiety. What if the feedback is, “You need to reshoot”? In fact, the feedback we got was very focused on what I wanted to hear—how specifically to tighten it up, while maintaining the sense of rhythm, and getting a bit more into the character’s interior life.

    HUGHES: How would you describe the film’s rhythm?

    HARRILL: [laughs] Isn’t that your job?

    I’ve been rewatching Stan Brakhage films lately for a class I’m teaching, and he mentioned in an interview that most of his films are silent because rhythm is such a fragile thing—that putting any sound to his films would inevitably change and redefine that rhythm. Obviously I’m not making films like Stan Brakhage, I’m not making films that I would compare to Stan Brakhage in a qualitative or quantitative way, but I connected with that comment because rhythm is what I think about more than anything.

    I wouldn’t say that the film has a rhythm; it has various rhythms. This sounds pretentious, but like an extended piece of music, it has movements. That’s what I spent so long trying to finesse. For example, the whole film is shot fairly classically, but the beginning is especially conventional; the rhythm is conventional. But it’s a setup, I hope, for something else. You asked about potentially devastating feedback. The worst would have been, “We really love the beginning of the film but then it gets really slow!” Something, Anything isn’t Bela Tarr slow, but it moves into a slower pace before working through a couple modulations.

    HUGHES: Well, since you’re dropping names, I was interested to see in your press kit that you mention Leo McCarey, Frank Borzage, and Robert Bresson. I could draw some connections between those directors and Something, Anything, but I’m wondering how you see them guiding your work?

    Well, I mean, first, I didn’t write that. That’s other people involved with the film trying to summarize some ideas I’ve discussed. But I’m fairly conversant with film history and it’s impossible for me to not at least acknowledge a tradition I’m coming from.

    HARRILL: I fell in love with some of Bresson’s films when I started making films, but I haven’t watched any of them, probably, in 7 or 8 years. The word “Bresson,” I think, is a kind of critical shorthand and I want to be careful about that. It’s become a synonym for “transcendental style.” What Paul Schrader wrote about, though, were the unique expressions of a handful of highly original filmmakers. Bresson, Ozu, and Dreyer are distinct—their stories are distinct, their styles are distinct. But all three made films where composition, sound and, most of all, rhythm can bring the viewer to a place of inner reflection, contemplation and, hopefully, insight and feeling. That intention, the very idea of it, I think, is profound.

    But as a style it’s only profound because some of the works are so profound. Once these sensibilities became identified as an approach, and once that approach could be seen as means to an end, well, it’s a bit like Clement Greenberg’s comment about Abstract Expressionism: first it turned into a kind of school, then into a manner, and finally into a set of mannerisms. I think that has happened a bit with the “transcendental style.”

    HUGHES: Borzage occasionally gets lumped into that style—or, at least, I certainly think he should be mentioned alongside Dreyer—but McCarey seems to be the odd bird here.

    HARRILL: Renoir claimed that McCarey understood people better than anyone in Hollywood. Maybe that speaks to your question about the human and the holy?

    Like I said earlier, I’m trying to create something for an audience where they have this place for reflection and contemplation, and to try still to offer them insight and feeling. But instead of taking the path that, say, Bresson takes stylistically, I realized—for myself—I have to get there through something more conventional, more classical. McCarey and Borzage are the two filmmakers whose work helped me understand that. In the same way maybe that Stromboli was Eric Rohmer’s “road to Damascus,” two or three films by Borzage and McCarey suggested the beginning of a path for me.

    It’s funny, though. To me, classicism seems so out of use these days I think sometimes it can, paradoxically, be strange. Especially if it’s used sincerely and infused with other ideas. Ultimately, though, I just want the story to be conveyed in a way that is confident, that feels intentional, and that helps people arrive at a place of contemplation and feeling.

  • Frederick Wiseman: Reasoned Arguments

    Frederick Wiseman: Reasoned Arguments

    This interview was originally posted at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    Frederick Wiseman’s second documentary, High School (1968), was at the time of its release an unprecedented glimpse into America’s public education system. Throughout his career, Wiseman has bristled at the terms used to describe his style—direct cinema, “fly on the wall,” cinema-verite—but his decision to observe teacher-student interactions from a position of apparent objectivity upended the traditional models of non-fiction filmmaking. Rather than a top-down statement of administrative priorities, High School is a kind of tangential conversation between Philadelphia teenagers and the adults who were charged with educating and enculturating them. As a result High School remains compelling today. The film is a time capsule of a tumultuous moment in American history, to be sure, but it’s too human and too deeply felt to ever become a dusty museum piece.

    Forty-five years later, Wiseman’s influence on documentary filmmaking is inescapable. Yet no one makes films quite like his, and certainly not as well or with as much intelligence and curiosity. In 2010, Wiseman arrived on the campus of The University of California, Berkeley, intent on adding another feature to his on-going series about institutions. He happened to start the project during the darkest days of America’s economic recession, when state legislatures across the country were divesting in public education. At Berkeley is a four-hour, wide-ranging portrait of that moment. He and his small crew spent time with university administrators, with student protesters, and in a variety of classrooms and research facilities. “The movie is what I felt about Berkeley,” he told me.

    I spoke with Frederick Wiseman at the Toronto International Film Festival, where At Berkeley received its North American premiere.

    * * *

    HUGHES: I should start by saying that I’m a cinephile and fan of your work, but like a lot of film writers today, I do this as a freelancer. In my day job, I’m communications director for the University of Tennessee Foundation, where I spend most of my time reminding the people of Tennessee, our alumni, and the state’s legislators about the importance of public higher education.

    WISEMAN: Oh, well, then you’re familiar with all of the issues!

    HUGHES: Yeah, this might be a bit of shoptalk for me.

    WISEMAN: That’s interesting. That’s fine. Get them to show the film in Tennessee.

    HUGHES: Is that an option? Your films typically show in the States on PBS. Do you have other distribution plans in mind?

    WISEMAN: Yeah, it’ll be shown on PBS in January, but it’s not the same thing. It’s much better to see it projected. It’s opening commercially in New York, and it’s being booked around the country. I’m hoping the film gets booked in state universities because the issues are the same everywhere.

    HUGHES: When you were here in Toronto a couple years ago with Boxing Gym (2010), you said during the Q&A that one reason you were drawn to the gym was because the guy who ran it was such a good teacher.

    WISEMAN: Richard Lord, yeah. I thought Richard was a great teacher and a great psychologist because he knew how to deal with the people in the gym.

    HUGHES: I would guess that 30-40% of the new film is teachers in the classroom, which is a rare sight in films—I mean, to really get to watch people do the hard work of teaching and mentoring.

    WISEMAN: I’m interested in teaching, and I’ve observed teaching in a variety of circumstances, not only the high school movies and Boxing Gym but Near Death (1989), where you see the senior physicians introducing the residents and the interns to a variety of ways of dealing with people—and the families of people—who are dying. I mean, it’s an obvious consequence of making movies in institutions where knowledge is being passed on.

    And Berkeley has great teachers, so that was certainly part of the attraction to this subject. I was making a film about a university, so I wanted to show teaching in action.

    HUGHES: Another perk of shooting at Berkeley is that you have very articulate subjects. I assume that was part of the attraction too?

    WISEMAN: Well, sure, because sometimes I’ve had very inarticulate subjects! A necessity for a good teacher is the ability to talk clearly and convincingly on a subject. The faculty at Berkeley is something like 3,500 people and there are 5,000 courses, so there was a lot to choose from, and I make no claims in the film that it is a representative sample, because I don’t know how to do that.

    HUGHES: One of the men in the film—maybe he was a vice chancellor?—says, “The coin of the realm is articulate argumentation.”

    WISEMAN: The provost. Yeah, a crucial statement. Reasoned argument.

    HUGHES: You arrived in Berkeley during the recession, when the California legislature was accelerating its divestment in public higher education. It all felt eerily familiar to me. In 2008, about 27% of University of Tennessee’s operating revenue came from state appropriations. By 2012, it had dropped to 18%.

    WISEMAN: Berkeley was at 16% when I made the film; it’s now 9%. Really, it’s becoming a type of privatization. It’s complicated because the states’ economies are in bad shape, but also I think there’s a . . . you know more about this than I do . . . but I have a sense that there’s, well, two things: One, there’s an effort to apply a cost-benefit analysis to courses, so if there’s only six people taking Portuguese, why offer Portuguese, or if there are ten people in a political science class and 500 people in an engineering class, why do we need political science?

    But there’s also a political . . . there may be, I don’t know if I’m right . . . but there may be a political agenda behind that. In a sense, dumbing down the nature of the education so people aren’t aware of the historical aspects and traditions of the United States, or the way the government is supposed to work, or what the founders had in mind with the Federalist Papers, blah, blah, blah. And that’s very dangerous.

    HUGHES: Pat McCrory, the governor of North Carolina, recently said, “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine. Go to a private school, and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.” In a single stroke, he dismissed the grand tradition of classic liberal arts education.

    WISEMAN: Yeah, it is dismissing it. That’s the point. But the question is whether that’s just for economic reasons or whether it’s a political agenda behind it, and I don’t want to answer that question.

    HUGHES: You’re implying you think there is.

    WISEMAN: I think for some people. I mean, the Koch brothers, for example, have an interest in that sort of thing. I’m not just implying it. I think for some people there is that agenda. How widespread it is, I don’t know.

    HUGHES: Fitting, then, that you would choose Berkeley as your subject. That campus, probably more than any other in America, has a tradition of inter-generational conflict and direct political action. The ghost of Mario Savio haunts your film in complicated ways.

    WISEMAN: See, but that’s interesting, because one of the things I discovered while I was there was that most students, I mean 85-90% of the students, don’t participate in those things. But because of what was going on in the ‘60s, there’s this myth about Berkeley. My guess is that even in the ‘60s most of the students weren’t participating. And certainly not now.

    HUGHES: It’s interesting, though, that the very thing that Savio was railing against nearly 50 years ago—the collaboration between public higher education and the military-industrial complex—is perhaps even more prominent today.

    WISEMAN: And part of that is a consequence of the lack of funding. The state funding has been replaced by research funding—sometimes by large corporations, sometimes by the military. But I must say, my impression was at Berkeley that when they took that kind of funding there were no strings attached. They went where the research led them, not where the funder wanted them to be. They weren’t producing results to support the point of view of the funder.

    HUGHES: Every time you cut away to a construction project on campus, I imagined a new building going up with a donor’s name on it. I was hoping the film would touch on the role of private gift support.

    WISEMAN: I couldn’t get access to it.

    HUGHES: Really?

    WISEMAN: Yeah.

    HUGHES: Interesting. So, what was your process for getting access to the university?

    WISEMAN: Generally speaking, I had access to everything that was going on except insofar as somebody didn’t want to be photographed. But the person in charge of fundraising thought that it would interfere.

    HUGHES: I’m sure it would.

    WISEMAN: So I didn’t have access to that. Despite the fact that the final film . . . they love the final film. There’s a reception this afternoon for Berkeley alumni in Toronto, who are going to be shown excerpts and be told about the film.

    HUGHES: That’s great. Doesn’t surprise me at all.

    WISEMAN: [Smiles] Well, because it came out alright, from their point of view.

    HUGHES: I know you’ve talked about this a lot over the years, but how do you find the shape of a film like this? What are your shooting and editing habits?

    WISEMAN: I just figure it out. I mean, there are no rules. For instance, within a sequence I have to feel that I understand what’s going on, and then I have to decide what I think is most important. Then I have to figure out a way of shaping the sequence, editing it down, summarizing it, synthesizing it in a way that is fair to the original even though it’s much shorter than the original.

    I mean, a sequence in real time might be an hour and a half. Some of those cabinet meetings were an hour and a half, two hours. In the film, it’s six, seven, eight minutes. I have to edit them so they appear as if they took place the way you’re watching it, even though it’s 30 seconds here, five seconds there, and then I jump twenty minutes ahead. But I have to edit in such a way that it looks like it all happened the way you’re watching it.

    So that’s within the sequence. Between the sequences I have to figure out the overarching themes and the dramatic moments. An abstract way of describing what I tried to do is I tried to cut it at right angles so you’re always surprised by what comes next. And at the same time, in terms of the rhythm of the movie, I have to think about quiet moments. I mean, after a dramatic scene I don’t want to go to another dramatic scene, so I may use cutaways of the campus or whatever.

    But when I use cutaways to the campus, I use them for a variety of purposes: sometimes to show movement from one place to another, other times because I need a quiet moment, or it might be that I want to show that everyone has a cell phone. Particularly for those transition shots, there are multiple purposes.

    HUGHES: In those shots, you’re also making very specific choices about how to depict the campus.

    WISEMAN: That’s true of everything.

    HUGHES: Sure. So, occasionally we see people working in corporate-style offices, for example, but you also return often to a large lobby or foyer . . . I’m not sure what it is exactly, but it has beautiful Spanish arches.

    WISEMAN: Right, right.

    HUGHES: And in those aesthetic choices of representation you’re also adding your voice to the film. Is that fair to say?

    WISEMAN: Sure, because I want to show the architecture. I want to show the students sitting on the floor. I like the shot of the light coming down through the arches. I need a transition between two classes. All of those things are elements in the choice of that shot or that group of shots.

    HUGHES: Okay, but a beautiful shot of light coming down through those arches also brings a point of view to the film. Yesterday I was discussing this with a friend who described At Berkeley as very fly-on-the-wall and free of advocacy . . .

    WISEMAN: There is no advocacy. “Fly on the wall” is a term I object to. There was no advocacy going on in the sense that I never asked anybody to do anything.

    HUGHES: Just from talking to you face-to-face, though, I get the sense that you’ve become invested in the subject. Would you describe yourself as an advocate for higher education?

    WISEMAN: I’d describe myself as a filmmaker. I mean, I think I’ve realized as a consequence of making this film—I don’t think I ever thought much about public education before I made the film—but as a consequence of the experience, and having the opportunity to listen to these administrators at Berkeley discuss these issues, I learned something about the issue.

    The project originated because I thought a university would be a good addition to the series I’ve been doing on institutions. It’s a natural consequence of doing High School, and universities are important in American society, in any society. So the impetus for doing the film had more to do with wanting to do a movie that fit into the institutional series. But I wanted to pick a public university because that raised more issues.

    HUGHES: One storyline in the film is Berkeley’s effort to reduce spending through operational excellence and process engineering. It’s probably my favourite aspect of the film—and I’ve never really thought about my own university in this context—because in that sense, the campus becomes a microcosm of post-recession America . .

    WISEMAN: Right.

    HUGHES: Where the lowest wage earners . . .

    WISEMAN: They’re the ones who get . . . yeah.

    HUGHES: There’s a scene where students are discussing the cost of attending Berkeley, and a middle-class girl breaks down . . .

    WISEMAN: She cries.

    HUGHES: She feels the same squeeze experienced by so many over the past five years. Were you surprised to find that connection?

    WISEMAN: I was surprised only in the sense that I was ignorant of the issues. But having had access to so much of what was going on at the university, I’m less ignorant.

    HUGHES: Chancellor Robert Birgeneau is a compelling character on screen. I imagine when you meet people like him, you must think, “This guy will help the film. We have something here.”

    WISEMAN: He’s the one who gave me permission to make it. He was the first person I met. He was the person I contacted in order to get permission.

    HUGHES: Was he aware of your work?

    WISEMAN: Yeah.

    HUGHES: So that helps.

    WISEMAN: Yeah, he was aware of the films, and he was very open. I wrote him a letter, basically saying, “Can I make a documentary of Berkeley?” and explaining the circumstances and the funding and all that, and he wrote me back, “Come and see me.” I went to see him, and I had lunch with him and the provost, and at the end of the lunch they said, “Okay.”

    HUGHES: That was a tremendous risk for them.

    WISEMAN: Oh, it was. We talked about that. But, you know, obviously he trusted me. He told me explicitly at the end, when it was over and he saw the movie, he was glad his trust was not misplaced. The movie is what I felt about Berkeley. If I’d felt something else about it, it would’ve been in the movie.

    HUGHES: He seems to have that rare talent to make very difficult decisions but to do so with tact and wisdom.

    WISEMAN: Well, he’d been a dean at MIT and president at the University of Toronto before he went to Berkeley. He’s a very smart man and had a lot of experience.

    HUGHES: I enjoyed watching his response to the student protestors because he’s sympathetic to them—just like I’m sympathetic to them—but his biggest frustration is that there’s so little at stake for them.

    WISEMAN: Right. And he compares it to his own experience in the ‘60s. I think he’s also concerned, basically, about their ignorance of the real situation.

    HUGHES: Part of my job is public relations, and nothing is more frustrating than when the other side gets the basic, underlying facts wrong.

    WISEMAN: It was amazing to me how badly wrong they got them at Berkeley, because to make a principled demand for free tuition at this point . . . it’s a fantasy. It wasn’t a question of the university withholding. Free tuition just wasn’t in the cards.

    HUGHES: In the film, at least, Chancellor Birgeneau’s heart seems to be in the right place.

    WISEMAN: Exactly! I’m glad to hear you say that. That’s exactly how I felt. One of the interesting things for me about making the film was that I was with a group of people who cared. I think that’s just as important a subject for a film as people who are callous and indifferent.

    HUGHES: Because of where I sit in my job, I’ve seen all sides of those debates . .

    WISEMAN: Right.

    HUGHES: . . . and I can say that it’s very rare to meet someone who has dedicated his or her life to higher education and not cared deeply about it. It was nice to see that on film.

    WISEMAN: I felt the same way. It was nice for me to get to experience it.

  • Jia Zhangke: Confronting the Darkness

    Jia Zhangke: Confronting the Darkness

    This essay was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    “Resorting to violence is the quickest and most direct way that the weak can try to restore their lost dignity.”
    – Jia Zhangke, in the press notes for A Touch of Sin

    Since the 2006 diptych, Still Life (Sanxia haoren) and Dong, Jia Zhangke’s work has tended toward the documentary side of the fiction/non-fiction spectrum, and much of the pleasure of watching these recent films owes to Jia’s clever invention—his playful and curious disregard for traditional forms. (Five years later, I’m still not sure how to even describe a film like 24 City.)

    In that regard, A Touch of Sin represents a noteworthy turn for the director, as the new film is both a return to standard narrative filmmaking (relatively speaking) and Jia’s first experiment with genre: produced by Office Kitano and inspired in part by King Hu’s classic martial arts films, A Touch of Sin is Jia’s 21st-century take on wuxia cinema. As Marie-Pierre Duhamel points out in her essay for MUBI, however, despite the superficial shifts in style, A Touch of Sin “appears so strongly rooted in a set of themes, characters and concerns that run through Jia’s filmography that its most striking beauties may well be in the consistency and strength of his film world.”

    Structured like an opera, with a prologue, multiple acts, and an epilogue, A Touch of Sin tells four stories that were inspired by real acts of violence in China and that span from the north of the country to the south. I spoke with Jia about his “comprehensive portrait of life in contemporary China” at the Toronto International Film Festival, where A Touch of Sin received its North American premiere.

    Special thanks to Aliza Ma for translating our conversation.

    * * *

    HUGHES: I’d like to begin by talking about the fourth story, which is about a young man [played by Luo Lanshan) who drifts between various jobs and towns before, ultimately, committing suicide. It’s different from the other stories in interesting ways. You once said in an interview that Chinese youth don’t know how to communicate. Do you still believe that to be the case?

    JIA: Ever since Unknown Pleasures [2002], I’ve been exploring the disparity between the new generation of wealthy Chinese and those that came before. The rapid growth of the economy and changes in our political structures have expanded the divide between the rich and the poor. The youth I focus on tend to be the victims of these recent changes rather than the beneficiaries. As the economy expands, so does that disparity. And, as a result, more suffering.

    HUGHES: So, then the lack of communication is mostly a result of economic changes and poverty. What about the other institutions that enculturate us? Families? Education? Are they systematically failing this generation, too?

    JIA: The boy in the fourth story was conditioned in the same way that his parents were. When he grew up, his parents were working, so he was surrounded by other children and by elderly people but not necessarily by parental figures. Wang Baoqiang’s character in the second section would have had the same experience.

    Today, there are two kinds of youth who don’t have steady work. The first is people who haven’t graduated from high school. The second group has perhaps finished high school, but the next step, applying for university, is a very selective process, so they perhaps don’t make it there. The impending sense of loss begins early, while preparing for exams in high school.

    HUGHES: Luo and the girl he meets [played by Li Meng] both seem to drift aimlessly, never quite connecting with others in any meaningful way. It’s a recurring image in your work. For example, there’s a beautiful long-distance shot of them walking through a barren landscape, dwarfed by a massive factory in the distance. Ever since Still Life [2006], I’ve come to expect buildings like that to take off like a rocket—it’s such a strange world you shoot.

    JIA: The premise of the fourth section was inspired by the suicide of a Taiwanese factory worker. The building you’re talking about is in Guangdong, which has the highest density of factories in the world. They manufacture iPhones and those types of things.

    HUGHES: One reason I’m asking about the fourth story is because in the other three sections, the main characters turn to violence, which in a way is a kind of heroic act. I’m interested in what makes the young boy different. Is it the difference between anger and despair?

    JIA: The first three stories are about people acting violently against others; the fourth is about people who act violently against themselves. In the first three stories, you can identify an antagonist; in the fourth, it’s difficult to know with whom the youth can be upset. There’s no direct enemy. Perhaps there are elements that contribute to the formation of his anger—the noise of the factory, his general milieu—but it’s a formless anger. There’s no clear source to which he can direct it.

    HUGHES: I had mixed feelings about A Touch of Sin until the epilogue. In my notes I’d written “L’Argent“—I think because of the scene in which Zhao Tao’s character is beaten by the man with a fistful of money. But the final sequence gives a shape to the film by turning each individual story into a ballad or fable, which rescues it all from cynicism. I won’t call it a happy ending, but there’s suddenly, almost magically, a kind of grace or redemption.

    JIA: I agree! By the end of the film, Zhao Tao’s character has passed through this period of darkness and violence.

    Often in China I’m asked why I choose to depict such violence, and my response is that it would be naïve to think a film can positively affect the violence and darkness of Chinese society, but confronting these conditions is itself an act of courage. I believe it’s important that we do so before the darkness and violence become worse.

    HUGHES: Your characters often show very little emotion, but the violence here, like the musical sequences in all of your films, serves as an expressionistic touch. Does beauty serve the same function? I’m thinking of a shot of Zhao Tao sitting bored at her reception desk, which you shoot through a window. She’s expressionless, but the image itself is remarkable and exploding with emotion.

    JIA: A Touch of Sin alludes to wuxia films, and a defining characteristic of the genre is that the heroes are always on the move. Scenes take audiences from one location to another. The photography in this film, the landscapes you see, span from the northernmost to the southernmost parts of China. I wanted the photography to represent as much of China as possible, because along with the characters’ personal interactions and expressions, their stories are being told by their surroundings.

    My films are interested in the relationship between people and the spaces around them. In A Touch of Sin I explore new parts of the Chinese landscape, places like the airport and high-speed trains, and these spaces become part of the face of China.

    HUGHES: As a western viewer, I often wonder what I’m missing, and I’m curious in particular about the accents and dialects in this film. How does language change as the film moves from north to south, and what do those changes tell us about the characters?

    JIA: Yes, foreign audiences are often attuned to the changes in locale. They notice the gradual transition from the dry minerality of the north to the humid, tropical environment in the south. But language is also an important landscape in this film.

    Each story is told in a different dialect. The first part is in Shanxi, the second is in Chongqing, the third is in Hubei, and the fourth part is a smorgasbord of dialects, including Cantonese. Regional stories—for example, a Shanxi story—should be told in regional dialects. Many, if not most, of the films produced in mainland China conflate them all into Mandarin. This makes me very uncomfortable. It’s unsettling.

    All of the main characters are played by professional actors, but it was very important that each speak in the appropriate regional dialect, so I made them study. It was also important that others who appear in the film be the faces of that specific region.

  • Catherine Breillat: Material Desires

    Catherine Breillat: Material Desires

    This interview was originally posted at Mubi.

    * * *

    In late-2004, Catherine Breillat suffered a debilitating stroke that paralyzed the left side of her body and precipitated a five-month hospital stay. After learning to walk again, she soon returned to work, finalizing pre-production on The Last Mistress (2007). Her next project was to have been an adaption of her novel, Bad Love, starring Naomi Campbell and Christophe Rocancourt, a notorious criminal who, by the time Breillat met him, had already served five years in an American prison for defrauding his victims out of millions of dollars.

    In a 2008 interview, Breillat said of Rocancourt: “He is so intelligent, so sincere, so arrogant. You have to be arrogant to achieve anything in this life. When I first saw him, I knew he would be perfect for my film.” Breillat was, in fact, under the spell of Rocancourt at the time of that interview. Borrowing small sums at first, he would eventually swindle her out of nearly 700,000 euros, a harrowing ordeal that Breillat first described at length in her book, Abus de faiblesse, and now explores again in a film of the same name.

    I spoke with Breillat at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Abuse of Weakness had its world premiere. The film opens with a remarkable, high-angle shot of rumpled bedsheets before panning up to Maud Schoenberg (Isabelle Huppert), who wakes suddenly and grabs her arm.

    * * *

    HUGHES: It’s been nearly a decade since your stroke, and you’ve already written a book about your troubles with Rocancourt. In other words, you’ve had a great deal of time to think about how to depict these experiences on screen. Did you always know you would open the film with the stroke? And did you consider other ways to visualize it?

    BREILLAT: When I first wrote the script I imagined something more complicated with curtains—muslin curtains in the wind, with the titles over them. Later, suddenly, I thought of the sheet. I bought a very, very good quality sheet because you cannot find that kind of texture in simple cotton. It was strange. When we shot the scene I became worried and said to Isabelle, “Oh, no! The sheets are not laying right!” They had to have some relief, like a sort of mountain, covered in snow. And, in fact, viewers often don’t know what they are looking at.

    HUGHES: It’s disorienting, for sure, and then when we see the stroke, terrifying. By opening the film with the stroke, we never know the Maud “before,” which makes her motivations and relationships a bit of a mystery. So much of the film is about trying to understand why she is susceptible to Vilko’s con. [Vilko Piran, the film’s Rocancourt, is played by French rapper Kool Shen.]

    BREILLAT: Because he is her actor! In Sex is Comedy (2002) you see this relationship—how actors become the material of the film. Also, in my case, I was closed up in my house. Isolated. I could not go outside. And he was the person who came, who was always there, who took me by the arm and helped me go outside.

    When I was preparing the movie and found the location [Maud’s home], I fell apart. Wept. Because, in fact, I was very happy in the hospital. I accepted it. I’m very stoic! I was in bed, paralyzed. I made no distinction between me before and me like that. It’s me. I didn’t want to live some other life in my mind, so I accepted it.

    In the hospital, I had things to learn. Rehabilitation is mental rather than physical. It requires great mental concentration because you’re working those neurons that are not dead. It all felt familiar to me from directing films, which also requires great concentration.

    But, at the same time, I also developed a kind of relationship I’d never experienced before: the therapist who helped me to walk was like a god to me. And with Vilko, in fact, it was the same. It began here, the story, because the therapist not only helped me take a first step, physically. It was like a psychological transfer. And the same with Vilko.

    HUGHES: I love the scene when Vilko first enters Maud’s home. She’s seated on a couch, watching him like she’s his private audience. There’s a slight smile on her face and she looks delighted by it all. Kool Shen is such an irresistible screen presence. He walks in, surveys the room, leaps effortlessly onto a bookshelf…

    BREILLAT: [smiles] Yes, yes.

    HUGHES: It’s an incredibly seductive performance, which I assume is why you were drawn to him?

    BREILLAT: That’s also why I chose a rapper for this character. He’s not just seductive. It’s a violent seduction. Tres physique! In my own story, Rocancourt had the same sort of movement and manner. Not beauty but something else. It’s like he’s already taking the power.

    She’s a filmmaker, and she’s looking at him as the material for a future movie, so she is in the dominant position. She’s sitting there, looking at him, not asking him if he wants something to drink. He’s not a person, just a character in her movie. But he takes the power. He has an animal presence.

    HUGHES: A friend who hasn’t seen Abuse of Weakness yet asked me what I thought of it, and I told him that the narrative is relatively simple. There’s an inevitability to Maud’s crisis, especially for viewers who already know about your personal experience. But I also told him that getting to watch Kool Shen and Isabelle Huppert in the same room together—that is what makes it a Breillat film!

    BREILLAT: [smiles] Yes.

    HUGHES: I interviewed Claire Denis a few years ago, soon after she’d finished working with Huppert for the first time.

    BREILLAT: White Material?

    HUGHES: Exactly. I think of Huppert as being an auteur herself, so I asked Denis what it’s like to work with a lead actress who can command a film. She quickly dismissed the notion that Huppert is commanding. “That would be too easy. She creates a need for her, when she’s an addiction…. It’s much more seducing the way she does it.”

    BREILLAT: [laughs] For me it was the contrary. I’m like Vilko. I take the power! With Isabelle, the first four days were a fight, a war. I didn’t want her to be in control, and Isabelle is always in control. She wanted to see replays of her performance, so she walked over to the camera and the assistant obeyed her—showed her the monitor. I saw that happen and shouted, “That is mine! [Breillat pounds her fist on the table.] That is my image, not hers!” She’s the actress. She has a job to do. But me, I am the film. It was a big fight. [smiles]

    “This belongs to me,” I said. “It will be different from your other movies.” After three or four days, she began to see the layers in the film. It’s not just sadness. Not just anguish. There are light sides and comedic scenes. Even Isabelle didn’t understand that would happen in the movie. After that we became very close, we laughed together, we are now like twins.

    HUGHES: You said Huppert was surprised to discover the comedy. Is that part of what interested you in telling this story?

    BREILLAT: Always. In all of my films there is comedy. The journalists and critics who don’t like me think I have no sense of humor. [Laughs] But I always balance my films with light scenes, funny scenes. Always.

    Also, I have to say, for Isabelle’s sake, the character is called Maud. It’s not me. It’s Maud, so Isabelle can play the part, the personage. Yes, she is my twin in some way, but on the set she is Isabelle Huppert, acting and finding a character. It’s not a biopic. It’s a fiction. Fiction is what appeals to me.

    HUGHES: You’ve always been interested in “obscene” subjects, especially female sexuality. Abuse of Weakness is made in a more traditional style but, thematically, it sits comfortably alongside the rest of your work. It occurred to me while watching the film that infirmity is another issue that we often censor from the public view. I’m thinking of that closeup of Maud’s right hand trying to wrestle open the other, palsied hand. It reminded me, oddly enough, of Fu’ad Aït Aattou’s and Asia Argento’s naked, entangled bodies in The Last Mistress.

    BREILLAT: I think that is a beautiful image. It’s strange. I’m an invalid, and I know it is not beautiful to be an invalid. Before, I always talked with my hands [she raises her left arm from below the table]. Yes, the image is indulgent, but it’s beautiful. It’s ugly and it’s beautiful.

    HUGHES: I know that you tend to not shoot many takes and that you like to walk into a setup and demonstrate for your actors how you want them to stand and move. Have you modified your methods in recent years? Are you still able to participate like that?

    BREILLAT: Yes! Always. I thought, when I was preparing to shoot The Last Mistress, that I would never be able to do that again. But an actor doesn’t know how, as the character, to enter the scene. Your body is not the same when you feel desire or power or shame or shyness. You don’t walk in the same manner. Only I can find it, with my body, and I still do.

    HUGHES: I assume non-professional actors like Kool Shen are more willing to allow you to control their performances like that. Was that one of the sources of conflict with Huppert at the beginning of the shoot?

    BREILLAT: Those first four days really were like a war zone. Who has the power? Once she saw that I had the power she began to obey. And she never obeys. [laughs]

    No, really! The fights were awful, terrible. Isabelle said after that nobody in her life has treated her like that. And I said, “Even Pialat?” And she said, “Yes!” [laughs] “Very, very, very, very worse than Pialat!” It was terrible, the furor.

    I think I was wrong. I think I went too far. I didn’t need to be so tough. I was insecure, and some of it could have been avoided. She left the set at times, and we wondered if she would come back. But she always came back to play the scene. And, of course, she was marvelous, so I knew I had to trust her.

    HUGHES: There’s a scene where Maud comes home carrying groceries on her back. She stands at the bottom of the stairs and tries to throw the bag over her head. Instead, she loses her balance and falls hard to the floor. It’s a difficult scene to watch. I was worried for her—for Huppert, I mean, not Maud. It made me wonder about your pre-production negotiations with actors.

    BREILLAT: No, no. I cut a scene where Isabelle had to climb [raises right hand, implying a great height]. She and I both have incredible vertigo, but if it’s written in the script, she does it. And this I can’t show her how to do!

    When we planned her fall at the bottom of the steps, a man prepared a false floor and some protections for her, because she had to hit her wrist on the metal bar. In fact, she fell on her neck. I was stunned because I thought surely she had hurt herself badly. A normal actress would stop the scene and think, “I’m crazy. It’s too dangerous.” Isabelle paid no attention. She’s like that.

    Her gift is to be involved with her character just in the time she is playing it, and without protection. Actors are well paid but it is very dangerous work. Because after the shoot they are not themselves. It’s a stain—this other person, which is the part. They are like fantômes when they return to real life.

    Isabelle is the character just when the scene begins, even if it is the most poignant scene. Acting is not playful. From here [hand on table representing beginning of scene] to here [hand on table representing end of scene], you are the person you interpret. And Isabelle, she can stop! She throws herself into the role, but when the scene stops, she becomes Isabelle Huppert.

    I’ve never seen another actor or actress like that. They usually stay under the influence of the emotion they just played, and that destroys them a little bit. Nothing destroys her, and she knows that, so she can go very, very far. She has such control of her emotions, so she can give way, way more of herself than others do.

    HUGHES: I want to change subjects slightly. I saw The Last Mistress, Bluebeard (2009), and Sleeping Beauty (2010) here in Toronto. All three are period pieces, and in the audience Q&As you seemed to take great deal of pride in the materials and fabrics used to make the dresses and bed linens.

    BREILLAT: Ha! Of course!

    HUGHES: I laughed during the scene in Abuse of Weakness when Maud gives detailed directions for the design of her walking boot because I could imagine you doing just that! So, did you sew all of those pillows on Maud’s bed?

    BREILLAT: [Laughs] Isabelle asked what costume designer I’d hired for the movie. I said to her, “Me!” “It’s not possible, Catherine,” she said. “It’s too tiring. You cannot. You cannot.” And she wanted to give me her costumer, her hairdresser, all that. And, of course, I was her costumer. I make almost all of my costumes. I don’t know why. Sometimes I sign my designs with the name of my mother, Maillon, and this time I decided to sign them myself.

    Isabelle never saw the costumes. Week after week she never saw the costumes. Finally, her agent asked me why Isabelle hadn’t looked at the costumes. In some ways Isabelle is like a child. She was so happy at the end of the shoot. She had sworn she would never weak black, but after the film she wanted to be in black. And she said, “Catherine, you should be a designer in an elite coutourier!”

    For me, all of the set, the color of the set, is also costuming. For example, it was very difficult to find a location for the final scene. I needed a very big table to host the entire family [for when they meet with Maud and her attorney to address her debts]. When I found the location, there were many beautiful objects. But I looked at something like this [points to a window treatment hanging over my head], made of a brocade of silk, and suddenly I knew Maud had to be against that backdrop.

    I called my costuming assistant, because we had to dye a silk shirt to match that color exactly. We had to buy raw silk. I wanted to sew an overcoat, so we went into my wardrobe and picked one out and then he sewed one like it in Isabelle’s size. When it was time to shoot the scene, she tried on all of the clothes that were prepared for her. They were beautiful, but only this one suited her.

    In that final scene, she’s wearing a thin coral necklace, which I think of as being like a crown of thorns. Several of my films include an image of a throat being cut. I call it the “coral necklace.” It’s just a thin red line, like blood.

    And you know the kimono in the film? It’s mine! I found the material with this sort of green and this sort of red and this particular form.

    HUGHES: The one Maud puts on when Vilko visits late at night? She asks him to help her tie it, but he more or less ignores her.

    BREILLAT: Yes, yes. I was very proud of that scene. It’s the first moment when she wants to be beautiful for him. After, she wears only that ugly, ugly robe. She makes no more effort for him. She neglects her appearance.

  • Looking at Women: William A. Wellman’s Style in Frisco Jenny and Midnight Mary

    Looking at Women: William A. Wellman’s Style in Frisco Jenny and Midnight Mary

    This essay was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    Film Forum’s 2012 William Wellman retrospective brought new and much-needed critical attention to a director best remembered today for a small handful of the 80 or so films he made between 1920 and 1958, including Wings (1927), The Public Enemy (1931), A Star is Born (1937), Beau Geste (1939), and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Despite the relatively strong reputations of those films, Wellman has often been overlooked in critical discussions of Hollywood auteurs. In fact, a collection of essays that grew out of the retrospective, William A. Wellman: A Dossier, edited by Gina Telaroli and David Phelps, is the closest thing to a book-length study of Wellman currently available. After reading through much of the Dossier, I was encouraged to give Wellman a serious look myself, and this formal analysis is a small effort to continue the momentum of Telaroli’s and Phelps’s work.

    Made just a few months apart and packaged conveniently on the same disc of TCM’s Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 3, Wellman’s Frisco Jenny (First National Pictures, 1932) and Midnight Mary (MGM, 1933) make for a useful case study of the director’s style. The former is a grand Greek tragedy dressed in gangster clothing; the latter is an interesting trifle, a mash-up of genres that occasionally transcends convention. On paper, the films’ scenarios are quite similar, and Wellman, who prided himself on making fast-paced films quickly (he’s credited as director on at least ten other productions in 1932 and 1933), lifts shots directly from Jenny and reuses them in Mary. The differences between the films’ formal strategies are revealing, though, and they go some way in explaining why Frisco Jenny is the much better film, both dramatically and aesthetically.

    Frisco Jenny stars Ruth Chatterton in the title role as a woman raised in her father’s saloon who leaps willingly into a life of crime rather than allow her young, fatherless child to go hungry. After giving up the boy for adoption, Jenny climbs her way to the top of the criminal world, where she reigns for two decades until being convicted of murder and sentenced to death by her unknowing son, now San Francisco’s district attorney. In Midnight Mary, Loretta Young likewise takes up with a criminal gang out of desperation. During a botched casino heist, Mary meets dapper playboy Tom (Franchot Tone), who offers her a glimpse of another possible future on the straight and narrow. Veering clumsily between romantic comedy and gangland proto-noir, Midnight Mary functions first and foremost as a star vehicle for Young and Tone. Their closing-shot kiss seems less inevitable than contractually obligated.

    Composing Power

    Jenny and Mary are pre-Code heroines who move with varying degrees of freedom through a world dominated by men, and the exact, moment-to-moment status of their power in any given relationship can be charted with a kind of geometric precision. Here, for example, we see Jenny and one of her most trusted allies in a traditional shot breakdown: two-shot / medium close-up / reverse.

    This more intimately staged conversation between Mary and her childhood friend Bunny (Una Merkel) takes the same basic shape.

    Women are allies in these films. There’s no cattiness, petty jealousies, or intrigues threatening to divide them, and Wellman reinforces that solidarity in his balanced compositions. Here, for example, are two typical conversations between women in Frisco Jenny. Note that they’re staged perpendicular to the camera and that, because they sit together or stand together, their eyelines all run more or less along a horizontal plane.

    Relationships between women and men are a different matter. At the most basic level, power can be measured in these compositions as a king-of-the-hill battle for the top of the frame, as in these confrontations between our heroines and the criminals in their lives, Steve (Louis Calhern) and Leo (Ricardo Cortez).

    The most interesting example of this occurs in the third act of Frisco Jenny, when she is at the peak of her powers. Steve enters from the back of the room, towers briefly over her (Calhern was more than a foot taller than Chatterton), and then sinks into an absurdly short chair. I can almost imagine Chatterton sitting on a phone book here.

    At times the calculus gets much more complicated. Of the two, Midnight Mary is the more conventional studio production, with on-the-nose musical cues, rapid-fire montages, and glamour. (I suspect this reflects the differences between First National’s and MGM’s production styles at the time.) Young is seldom king of the hill, yet she still dominates every frame thanks to her key light and those legendary eyes. While often challenged by men, Mary remains composed in a position of glamorous, seductive power.

    Despite the fact that Midnight Mary opens with a jury deliberating over her murder charge, Mary’s fate is never truly in the balance. Wellman’s style makes this much clear: Midnight Mary is not that kind of movie; Mary and Tom will find a way out of this jam.

    By comparison, Jenny is never allowed a moment’s rest. Although she has a child outside of marriage and begins her criminal career as a madam, Jenny is desexualized and denied the same powers that rescue Mary. These two shots are especially instructive.

    In both scenes, the heroine is receiving bad news from someone she loves, but Wellman shoots them as mirror images. The difference is crucial, as we tend to read images from left to right. Mary is acting against Tom; Jenny is being acted upon by her father. If you scroll up to the previous screen captures you’ll see that Mary is on the left side of each frame. Jenny is always on the right. With very few exceptions, this is true throughout both films.

    Looking and Listening

    Something even more interesting is happening in those mirror images, though. In the first example, we look at Loretta Young as she is told bad news. In the second, we watch Ruth Chatterton as she listens. It’s a small but significant difference that exemplifies the perspectives of both films. Midnight Mary is objective (we look at); Frisco Jenny is subjective (we experience through). At the risk of oversimplifying, it’s the difference between comedy and tragedy, as demonstrated in these two nearly identical compositions, below. In the first, we, along with everyone else in the court room, turn to look at Mary, who is casually reading an issue of Cosmopolitan. It’s a nice little gag. In the second, Jenny listens intently as her son attacks her character and seals her fate.

    Looking at beautiful women has, of course, been a defining characteristic of the movies—and of commercial cinema, in particular—since its earliest days. In Midnight Mary, it’s also a running theme. Again, the film is a star vehicle for then-20-year-old Loretta Young, so we should perhaps expect a few lingering shots of those knockout gams. It’s worth noting that in the following example, we participate in the old lawyer’s ogling, thanks to an eyeline match.

    Wellman very seldom shifts the perspective to Mary’s subjectivity, but the film’s most compelling scene is an interesting exception to this rule. Knowing that Leo plans to leave their apartment to murder Tom, Mary first tries to keep him there by seducing him. But when her standard tactics fail, she’s forced to shoot.

    Leo’s body convulses on the floor as the rest of his gang try to force open the door. It’s a grotesque image heightened by chaotic music coming from the other room, all of it filtered now through Mary’s traumatized subjectivity. Note how the camera has shifted to her left, forcing her to the right side of the frame. Her eyes stare in shocked disbelief and her head recoils with each loud knock at the door. The sequence is shockingly perverse, recalling the finale of Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931), when James Cagney’s bound body hits the floor. Leo’s death, and Mary’s horrific experience of it, stain Midnight Mary‘s “happy” ending with an unsettling and lingering ambiguity.

    We seldom look at Jenny in quite the same way we look at Mary. Rather, Wellman co-opts Jenny’s perspective in the opening moments of the film and remains fixed there throughout. As a result, Frisco Jenny is as rich a film, both psychologically and emotionally, as any I can think of from the era. Eighty years later, Wellman’s style is strikingly au courant. His subjective camera reminds me less of Hitchcock’s experiments with suspense than a Claire Denis fantasia. The following two shots, for example, serve simple narrative functions, but the mise en scène transcends the script, granting the viewer special access to Jenny’s inner life. In both cases she steps silently to the foreground while everyone behind her dissolves into a tableau. The image on the right is an especially unnatural moment, as the social workers who have come to collect her son pause motionless and out of focus, allowing us to watch in silence for a few seconds as Jenny thinks.

    Eternal Gestures

    Jenny: Steve said the gods must be out to lunch.

    Amah: No, the gods see everything. Everything in this world is balance.

    That we experience the world of Frisco Jenny through the heroine’s subjectivity is more than some cinematic parlor trick. Wellman’s style turns Jenny’s world into a holy space—holy, rather than just moral—and the critical language necessary to describe it must be borrowed from discussions of transcendental filmmakers. (It’s an odd claim, I know, but after watching it several times now, I’m comfortable calling Frisco Jenny one of America’s mainstream contemplative masterpieces.) Both Jenny and Mary have run-ins with preachers and the Salvation Army along the way, but, as with the courtroom scene, Midnight Mary treats faith and spirituality as one more joke (and worse, a pat symbol) while Frisco Jenny builds a thick, knotted context in which the film’s central tragedy might find meaning and catharsis.

    Frisco Jenny is probably best remembered today for its depiction of the 1906 earthquake. It strikes just as Jenny confesses to her father that she plans to marry Dan, the saloon’s piano player, and is carrying his child. A beam falls and kills her father, but before she escapes to safety, Jenny reaches down and strokes his cheek.

    The image functions as an eyeline match and marks our point of entry into Jenny’s subjectivity, but the gesture itself is significant. This essay isn’t the place to rehash all that’s been written about Bresson’s hand fetish, but I would argue that Wellman’s systematic insertion of such shots, which is uncharacteristic of his other work from the era, moves beyond simple storytelling and symbolism (although it is also that) and approaches the radical style Francois Truffaut describes in his review of A Man Escaped:

    What this amounts to is that Bresson has pulverized classic cutting—where a shot of someone looking at something is valid only in relation to the next shot showing what he is looking at—a form of cutting that made cinema a dramatic art, a kind of photographed theater. Bresson explodes all that and, if in Un condamné the closeups of hands and objects nonetheless lead to closeups of the face, the succession is no longer ordered in terms of stage dramaturgy. It is in the service of a preestablished harmony of subtle relations among visual and aural elements. Each shot of hands or of a look is autonomous.

    Frisco Jenny is in many respects a typical Hollywood production of the early-1930s. Most of the cutting is classic dramaturgy, so I don’t wish to imply that Wellman influenced or even anticipated Bresson’s mature style. However, the film does work on that rare, unnerving plane where the most talented of Dostoevsky’s descendants play. I’d begun to think of Jenny as a compatriot of Fontaine (A Man Escaped) and Michel (Pickpocket), not to mention any number of Dardenne protagonists—one more condemned soul in need of redemption—even before I’d consciously noted all of the hands.

    I’d be hard pressed to make the case for each of these images achieving the kind of autonomy that Truffaut praises in Bresson’s montage. Frankly, two of these inserts are punchlines. However, the shots of hands and the string of subjective portraits of Jenny combine to gradually, imperceptibly, accumulate emotional freight until being unloaded in the final moments of the film. Regarding the finale of Frisco Jenny, I would borrow again from Truffaut’s review, this time without reservations: “What is important is that the emotion, even if it is to be felt by only one viewer out of twenty, is rarer and purer and, as a result, far from altering the work’s nobility, it confers a grandeur on it that was not hinted at at the outset.”

    Absence, loss, regret, love, and uncompromising sacrifice—ultimately, each small gesture and silent expression enacts Jenny’s tragedy, but it’s only after she’s chosen to face the gallows that the gestures are imbued, retroactively, with such grandeur. For example, much earlier in the film, Jenny goes into labor while holed up deep in post-quake Chinatown. The preacher fetches a doctor and leads him through a labyrinth of dark alleyways until they find the right door and knock. (The staging of the scene reminds me of Pedro Costa’s Ossos, another contemplative, Bressonian film involving a baby!) Wellman elides the birth completely and cuts, instead, to a medium close-up of the preacher blessing the child. It’s a sincere moment, with none of the irony that characterizes so much of Midnight Mary. The camera then pulls back through the rubble, watching from a distance as Jenny’s faithful servant Amah carries the baby to her. Jenny reaches for him, and his small hand finds her finger, their first touch.

    The sequence is a small marvel and features Wellman’s trademark tracking shots and two frisson-causing cuts (from the dark hallway to the praying preacher; from the long shot of the dark room to the relatively bright medium close-up of Jenny and the baby). On a first viewing, the sequence signals a shift in the film’s style and ambition. Frisco Jenny suddenly blossoms into something more melodramatic (in the best tradition of the word) and sublime. On a second viewing, it’s devastating, as it anticipates the film’s precise denouement, Jenny’s final contact with her son.

    In the closing moments of Frisco Jenny, Steve threatens to expose the connection between District Attorney Dan Reynolds and his real mother. Left with no other recourse and desperate to protect her son’s reputation, Jenny kills Steve and begs Amah to preserve their secret. As she awaits execution, Jenny is visited in prison first by Amah and then by Dan, who has been troubled by her case for reasons he can’t quite understand. The dialog is serviceable: he offers to stay Jenny’s punishment if she confesses her motives; she quietly refuses. However, Wellman’s mise en scène and Chatterton’s performance elevate the scene to a work of high art and transform Jenny into one more cinematic saint.

    These icon-like portraits from Wellman, Carl Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson, and John Cassavetes are, I think, true objects of contemplation—staggering but glamourless images that invite sympathy, compassion, and deep curiosity while steadfastly resisting interpretation. To borrow a line from Nathaniel Dorsky, they are “manifestations of the ineffable.”

    When Jenny and Dan speak for the last time, she’s reclining on her prison bunk, leaning away from him. However, because she’s now staged on the left side of the frame (this is an especially good example of the precision of Wellman’s style paying emotional dividends), the momentum of the image pushes them toward each other, figuratively speaking, despite her best efforts.

    It’s a rare instance in the film when Jenny is allowed the position of sympathy and authority in a shot/reverse-shot breakdown, and because we have spent the previous hour experiencing this world through her, the chaos and discord of her emotional state are palpable. When Jenny quips about Dan working hard to undo a case he’d just won, he replies, “In court I was sure. Now I’m not. Help me,” and on “help me” Wellman cuts back to Jenny and dollies in to a close-up. However, because he waits to pull focus until the camera has stopped moving, she is left blurry in the interim.

    It’s subjective filmmaking taken to a logical and vivid extreme. The dolly-in last six seconds, the amount of time it might take Jenny to process her son’s cry for help, relive that first touch in Chinatown, indulge the fantasy of embracing him and confessing, choke back her tears, regain her composure, and claim her fate. “Never,” she whispers, as the camera snaps back into focus. Dan stands to say goodbye and places his hand on her shoulder, and she, impulsively and with much grace, presses it against her cheek and kisses it. Absence, loss, regret, love, and uncompromising sacrifice—Jenny’s tragedy climaxes with this, her final gesture.

  • To the Wonder (Malick, 2012)

    To the Wonder (Malick, 2012)

    This essay was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    Where’s all the shit?

    I scribbled this question on page three of my notes, which would put it near the midpoint of To the Wonder, soon after recent emigree and single mother Marina (Olga Kurylenko) returns to Paris with her young daughter, thereby freeing her commitment-phobic lover Neil (Ben Affleck) to pursue Jane (Rachel McAdams), a former flame who’s moved back home to manage the family ranch. It’s my favorite section of the film because it’s Malick at his most malicky. We’re treated to shot after shot of Affleck and McAdams posing poignantly in fields of tall grass, always at magic hour, always just a touch wind-blown. As the music swells, Jane glides toward Neil, her red dress a small explosion of dancing color. It’s as beautiful as anything Malick has ever shot. My next note reads, “Nice sequence. Like an MGM musical.” I’d never before thought of Vincente Minnelli or Gene Kelly while watching a Malick film, but the viewing pleasures are of the same basic stock. He makes movies, but increasingly I’ve come to think of Malick as a choreographer.

    So, really, where’s all the shit?

    I live on a small farm with two horses, which is a small fraction of the livestock on McAdams’s character’s ranch, and I can say with some authority that the shit-to-animal ratio is unnaturally low in To the Wonder. That the crew might have made an effort to minimize the amount of manure in a few shots is hardly worth noting except that this film, to my mind, is a kind of test case for Malick’s aesthetic, which worships beauty to such an extent that he seems increasingly phobic of the imperfect and the everyday.

    It’s an odd complaint to make of Malick, I know. At their best, his films do exactly the opposite, striving to reveal immanence in the natural world. Think of the tree-root cathedral accompanied by the low-frequency rumble of a church organ in The Thin Red Line or the endless rows of sunflowers in The Tree of Life. Make what you will of Malick’s recent evangelizing, but he is most definitely what we used to call in my church-going days a “Psalm 19 guy”–one who hears all of creation proclaiming the glory of the Creator. On a literal level, the voiceover ruminations on God in both The Tree of Life and To the Wonder strike me as doggerel (I try my best to ignore them) but the sound of the whispered lines—like the sound of Arseni Tarkosvky reciting poetry in Mirror—can be deeply human and holy.

    Page 4: For Malick, there is no sin more grievous than fucking an ugly Southerner.

    I’ve repeated this line a few times since the screening in Toronto, always careful to use the word “fucking.” It’s exactly the right word because Malick lives in a world divided by the sacred and the profane, and in To the Wonder sex is the most obvious site of conflict between the two. Near the end of the film, after Marina has returned to America and married Neil in both a civil ceremony and an unofficial Catholic wedding (she has murky divorce issues in her past that preclude her from an official blessing), she meets a local carpenter who is more attentive to her emotional needs (symbolized by a single shot of him bringing her a musical instrument). When they rendez-vous at a motel, Malick chops the sex scene into one of the film’s many wordless montages. The carpenter is played by Charles Baker (Breaking Bad‘s Skinny Pete), who isn’t so much a human being here as an embodiment of grotesque transgression (symbolized by his pockmarked face and the skull and spiderweb tattoo over his heart). Like most of the film, the sequence exists somewhere between an objective perspective and a figment of Marina’s fragile subjectivity. Is this an actual moment in the life of an actual unhappy woman or is it Marina’s nightmarish vision of sacrilege? I’m still not sure—both, probably—but to drive home the point, Malick cuts minutes later to a shot of Marina and Neil’s empty marriage bed.

    In case there were any doubts, To the Wonder confirms that Malick does indeed have a number of grievances with the modern world. He laments the rootlessness of our lives, symbolized by the string of unfurnished homes Neil and Marina inhabit throughout the film. He mourns the devastating effects of commerce and greed on the natural world, symbolized by Neil’s work as an environmental engineer. He regrets the middle class’s flight from small-town community, symbolized by the empty streets and cookie-cutter tract homes of suburbia. He’s saddened by the isolating effects of the Internet, symbolized by a few seconds of smartphone video footage and a too-short Skype conversation between a mother and her child. He weeps for our spiritual alienation and for our ineffectual churches, symbolized by Javier Bardem’s quiet priest who only occasionally musters the courage to visit the poor and has little real comfort to offer them. And most of all he grieves for the decaying, sacred bonds of family, symbolized in so many ways in his last two films but most unambiguously by that vacant marriage bed. The problem is that Malick’s aesthetic, which values beauty and symbols above all, just has no place for the abject and the literal, for the shit.

    I want Malick to make a film about ugly people.

    This note is at the very bottom of page three, after Neil has agreed to marry Marina but before her affair. I had hoped To the Wonder would be Malick’s marriage film or his sex film, but it’s neither, because Neil and Marina aren’t people. Not really. They’re beautiful avatars—models in an impressionistic fashion show far removed from the mundane realities of relationships. Like the “dance” between Neil and Jane in her pasture, Malick represents the most intimate moments between Neil and Marina in what are quickly becoming clichéd (if, admittedly, stunning) images: steadicam shots of them giggling, jumping on the bed, and play-wrestling in sun-washed, sheer-curtained bedrooms, and that ubiquitous shot of a beautiful woman moving away from the camera and then turning back toward it with a direct glance and a longing smile. The closest Malick comes to showing their sex life is a bit of chaste dryhumping with Affleck still in his jeans. We can only assume one or both of these characters have had an orgasm at some point in their relationship. That sort of thing is out of bounds for Malick. The messy mechanics of sex, like the manure, would soil the fragrance-commercial glamour of his images.

    I’m ambivalent about Malick, in general, but I quite like The Tree of Life, in part because it wears its nostalgia on its sleeve. The small town Texas scenes are romantic, sentimental, reaching, idealized, and fable-like, which is a perfect form of representation for childhood memories, and Malick’s shout out to Tarkovsky (the levitating mother) led me to assume this was by design, that he was working self-consciously in a particular tradition of cinematic memoir. To the Wonder actually amplifies that formal approach. For the sake of clarity I’ve been referring to the main characters by the names they’re given in the closing credits, but Neil, Marina, and Jane are representative to such an extent that they go unnamed in the film itself. To the Wonder, however, is also a contemporary story that is grounded, at least relative to Malick’s other films, in of-the-moment reality. Nearly every review I’ve read mentions Neil and Marina’s trips to the Sonic Drive-In (nostalgia as chain retail!), and Malick also recruits a number of locals for small speaking roles and takes his camera into poor communities. The film tries so hard to be about right now but Malick’s gauzy-nostalgia filter makes the place unrecognizable. We normal folk are all just poignant symbols, refracted through some mysterious subjectivity, awaiting illumination.

    Page 2: Seriously? A magical black man?

    Unless I missed something, there’s nothing in To the Wonder that identifies it as taking place in Oklahoma, specifically. When I referred to the carpenter as an ugly Southerner, it was shorthand for the people of red-state America, in general. Everyone in the film except Affleck, Kurylenko, and McAdams looks like my neighbors here in East Tennessee. Demographic data say we’re more likely to attend church, vote Republican, skip college, and be obese. I’m none of the above, but if I’m overly sensitive to how my part of the country is represented, it’s because locals can always sniff out inauthenticity. Malick is a Texas man, and I’m sure he has another good Texas film in him, but the clash of styles in To the Wonder—his crosscutting between ethereal, movie-star meditations on love and the realities of real Americans really struggling to be real—is condescending in ways that recall Forrest Gump and the recent critical dustup over Beasts of the Southern Wild.

    To the Wonder even has a magical negro. Bardem’s priest is suffering a crisis of faith (symbolized by an early shot of him standing outside a ramshackle house, unable to find the courage to knock). Like some Scrooge-by-way-of-Bresson, he’s visited in the film by “regular people” who reflect various aspects of his turmoil. An elderly black man presses his hand against the church’s stained glass and spouts homespun wisdom along the lines of, “Feel that heat? That’s not just the sun there—that’s the Spirit!” A young man with Down’s Syndrome, speaking with “the faith of a child,” offers simple words of encouragement. A prisoner kneels before the priest and recoils angrily at the sunlight in his eyes. A poor woman knocks on the door of his home, invades his private sanctuary, and aggressively pours out her bitter troubles on him. The scenes play out like a Flannery O’Connor story devoid of wit and irony. Juxtaposed against the Hollywood glamour of the central plotlines and starving for social context, the images are grotesque portraits that lack the decency to be self-critical.

    Page 3: Neil has a print of a renaissance painting on his wall?

    Neil isn’t the artistic type. Or, at least I assume he isn’t. Malick has edited Affleck’s performance down to little more than a hardened stare into the distance, so it’s hard to know for sure. But a later shot in the film confirms that it’s Marina who cuts the print out of a book and tacks it to Neil’s bedroom wall. There are generous ways to read this little detail. Perhaps Marina, a dancer, simply craves a touch of beauty in her life and wants to share that beauty with the man she loves. Given my general irritation with To the Wonder by that point, though, it came off to me, instead, as a smug attempt by Malick—again, à la Tarkovsky—to insert himself into a particular and particularly grand artistic tradition. In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky writes at length about his use of Leonardo’s “Ginevra de’ Benci” in Mirror, praising the portrait for its timelessness and inscrutability. The woman in the painting is both “impossibly beautiful” and “repulsive, fiendish”:

    “It is impossible to find in her anything that we can definitely prefer, to single out any detail from the whole, to prefer any one, momentary impression to another, and make it our own, to achieve a balance in the way we look at the image presented to us. And so there opens up before us the possibility of interaction with infinity, for the great function of the artistic image is to be a kind of detector of infinity . . . towards which our reason and our feelings go soaring, with joyful, thrilling haste.

    And there, finally, is the rub. Tarkovsky’s discussion of “Ginevra de’ Benci” is part of his larger condemnation of symbolism. From three paragraphs later: “I am always sickened when an artist underpins his system of images with deliberate tendentiousness or ideology. I am against his allowing his methods to be discernable at all.” In the cinema, of course, an image is never just a symbol; it is always also the real thing(s) being photographed. Marina’s carpenter is also a particular man with a particular body and a particular face. The suburban tract houses are also particular objects with particular plastic qualities. Malick’s montage, however, actively negates this thing-ness, voiding images of their complexity. Tarkovsky’s “infinity” is nowhere to be found.

    I began daydreaming about a Malick film about ugly people during a high-angle shot of Kurylenko curled up topless on the bedroom floor. Critiquing a filmmaker for shooting beautiful images of beautiful women is a fool’s errand, as is critiquing any artist for failing to be Leonardo, but that shot made me hyperconscious of just how dependent Malick has become on the superficial appearance of his actors. Kurylenko, a former lingerie model and Bond girl, emotes shame and disappointment as best she can, I suppose, but it’s finally little more than another simple image of an impossibly beautiful woman. (For the sake of argument, imagine a topless, middle-aged, overweight local being posed in the same position, and imagine how that shot might affect the popular discussion of Malick’s “poetic imagery.”) In an era of directors like Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa, and Bruno Dumont who have thrown off the distinction between the transcendent and the everyday, the beautiful and the abject, To the Wonder is profane in ways Malick never could have intended.

  • Chantal Akerman: Madwomen (and Men) in the Jungle

    Chantal Akerman: Madwomen (and Men) in the Jungle

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    When discussing Almayer’s Folly, Chantal Akerman actively resists crediting the source material. Joseph Conrad’s first novel is set in Malaysia at the end of the 19th century and is a grotesque portrait of a young Dutch trader driven to madness by his own foolishness and avarice. A contemporary, sympathetic reading of the novel might commend it for its critique of the dehumanizing tendencies of colonialism, both on the colonized and the colonizer, but Akerman goes a few steps further. The film is less an adaptation than a loose, dream-like reimagining of its central conflict between a European man, his Asian wife, and their mixed-race daughter. Like Jean Rhys’s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which foregrounds the racist assumptions in Jane Eyre by giving life and a history to Charlotte Bronte’s exotic “madwoman in the attic,” Akerman rebalances the weight of Conrad’s narrative and in doing so finds—surprisingly, perhaps—more sympathy for everyone involved.

    Almayer’s Folly begs comparisons with La captive (2000), Akerman’s adaptation of Proust. Both turn brief literary passages into central visual motifs: a bathtub scene in Proust, for example, and two young lovers hiding beneath a thick patch of fronds in Conrad. But Akerman is working in a different mode here. She seems invigorated by this new-found approach to shooting, which takes the lessons learned from her recent documentary work and applies it, for the first time, to fiction filmmaking. I spoke with her at the Toronto International Film Festival, but this edited transcript also includes extracts from her conversation with Daniel Kasman in Venice.

    * * *

    HUGHES: I was hoping we could talk a bit about Joseph Conrad.

    AKERMAN: My film has almost nothing to do with Joseph Conrad.

    HUGHES: I was just curious if you remember reading him for the first time.

    AKERMAN: Yes. Totally.

    HUGHES: Was it in school?

    AKERMAN: No. It was in my bed. I read the book about five years ago by accident because I was at Cape Cod and the book was there. At one point, there is a scene with the father and the daughter, and the father wants to keep the daughter. I was so moved. The same night we Netflix’d Tabu (Murnau, 1931) and—boom!—electricity.

    That’s where it started, but from then on it was so different. In the book, the girl barely exists. The movie is much more about a woman, a daughter, and a father. Conrad is interested only in the father.

    HUGHES: Like a lot of people in the States, I read Heart of Darkness in school, and I remember being completely enamored with it. When your film was announced I picked up a copy of Almayer’s Folly and read Conrad for the first time in nearly twenty years, and I have to admit that finishing it was a struggle.

    AKERMAN: Well, it’s his first book.

    HUGHES: [laughs] I was annoyed by how . . .

    AKERMAN: . . . masculine it is.

    HUGHES: Very. I was particularly struck by the first appearance of the mother in your film. Just casting that character—giving her a body and a voice—reveals all of the tragedy in her situation that Conrad elides.

    AKERMAN: She’s driven crazy by the loss of her daughter and only regains some sanity when the girl returns. But, in a way, the mother is the one character who is active, which is never the case in Conrad. He is preoccupied by redemption and guilt, but my film has neither. Redemption is very Catholic; I’m Jewish, and I’m not at all interested in redemption.

    HUGHES: It’s interesting that you were so moved by the novel’s description of Almayer’s desire to keep his daughter.

    AKERMAN: Well, I wonder why? Because it’s not related to my life at all. But there was something there. I started to cry. I don’t know why. Really, it was a shock. It was the combination of that scene and Tabu. When we say the film is from Conrad, we should also say it’s from Murnau. Otherwise, it’s misleading.

    HUGHES: Is this the “Paradise Lost” of Tabu?

    AKERMAN: No, it’s that you want so much for those two kids in Tabu to stay together. My film is, in a way, more cynical. The girl tells him, “My heart is dead.” Well, her heart is dead because she had spent fifteen years in a jail! That line came from my mother, who went through the concentration camps. She said the same thing when she came out.

    You know, I went to a similar kind of school. When I was a kid, I was very good. And then, when I was twelve, the director of the school said to my mother, “You have to put your child in a very strict school, and they will make something out of her.” I suffered so much. And I was a total outcast. The school was all girls, and my classmates’ mothers had gone there and their grandmothers had gone there. It was their culture. My culture was from my grandfather—it was Jewish.

    So there is a connection between the girl and me, but also between the father and me, because I hate that situation she is thrown into. I have a great deal of empathy for him even though he’s a wimp, as an American would say. Those two characters, in a way, are both me.

    HUGHES: When the girl, Nina, finally leaves school you follow her in a long tracking shot down a busy street. She walks beautifully, with her shoulders back and her neck perfectly straight. It’s one of those great long-duration images where you let us really watch her. Then, a few scenes later it pays off when she says bitterly that the school taught her to walk “like a real girl.” Did you feel a similar pressure?

    AKERMAN: Well, they never succeeded with me. I still walk like Charlie Chaplin. [laughs] But also, you know, she has a kind of pride [or vanity], which I do not have. When I was casting that role, Aurora Marion read a few sentences, and I stopped her [Akerman slams her hand on the table] and said, “tell me, ‘I am not a white.’” Very flatly she said, “I am not a white.” I said, “fine.” 

    HUGHES: I was surprised, actually, by how sympathetic the film is toward Almayer. The scene near the beginning when he chases Nina—the scene that first caught your attention in the novel—is quite complex. There’s all this visual density to the sequence, so many cuts, and this nearly stream of conscious monolog from Almayer. It’s surreal. In a single long take, he very gradually relents to letting her go. Regardless of his motivations, it’s a moment of genuine tragedy.

    AKERMAN: Yes. Maybe she needs to learn French. And maybe she has to become part of that society. It was not easy to shoot this. We worked a lot on that sequence in the editing, because it wasn’t originally supposed to be like that—dreamy—but we realize he’s out of his mind. He’s ranting and we feel Almayer is totally out of place. He says, “you’ll never have my daughter!” Yet when he finds her and holds her, he hands her right over to the Captain. I have great sympathy for him because that guy is always manipulated and he made all the wrong choices. At the end, it drives him crazy. That last shot . . . I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that last shot. You see him losing his mind.

    HUGHES: You’ve said that you didn’t block many shots for this film, but was that always going to be the last shot? [Almayer’s Folly closes with a minutes-long, static, medium close-up of Stanislas Merhar.]

    AKERMAN: Oh, yes. Because it was not easy for Stanislas to do, I didn’t want to interrupt him. I wanted him to have the whole space, mentally and spiritually. Usually I’m more specific. But this time I said to myself, “If I don’t let him be free, it will never be moving.”

    HUGHES: I could have watched it for another hour. How did you decide when to cut?

    AKERMAN: Well, you know, the take was much longer, and there was much more text. In fact, what happened during the shot, when we were slowly pushing his chair into the sun there were birds and he was listening to what was happening around him. And I told him that watching him listen was more interesting. It told me more things than all the words, which were more obvious. So there are only three or four words he says now, something as simple as “sea is black . . . I will forget her,” and we understand.

    HUGHES: Stanislas Merhar is very boyish, very young looking, and of course by the end of the film he’s made-up to look older, but he still has that…

    AKERMAN: Adolescence. Yes, he has an adolescent quality, yet at the same time he knows so much about suffering. You know, Almayer loses what is most important to him, so why go on living? Why fight to survive? Then Nina returns and he says, “Okay, I will do it. I will survive. I will do it for her.” But she doesn’t give a shit. He projects his dreams onto someone who doesn’t have the same dreams at all. And that’s no way to love someone.

    What is great about Stanislas as a man and as an actor, is that he’s not afraid to show his weakness, which in an American film doesn’t exist. When I showed the script to a friend of mine who’s a screenwriter she said that to have a weak guy as the lead in an American film cannot exist. Look at Matt Damon. He has more and more muscles, but he started by being a more frail creature. When you see him in the Gus Van Sant film, he’s boyish and you feel he has some weakness. A man has to be a he-man, but there are a hundred different kinds of men. Yet for some cinema we must see it as a man and a woman and nothing in between.

    HUGHES: When you say Almayer lost the most important thing to him, he would say that thing is his daughter. But isn’t it also the money? The dream of returning triumphantly to Europe? Is that a cynical question?

    AKERMAN: I think the girl is more important. Of course, the Captain put it in his mind that one day Almayer would go to Europe with money and that he would make his daughter a princess. But when Almayer loses his daughter, the Chinese man says, “This is a dead place now.” Almayer keeps hoping someone will come with money but by then he is already fucked up, already destroyed.

    HUGHES: How do you see the Captain? He’s fascinating because he’s a bit unreal, always lurking in the shadows, not quite devilish but with a fantastic quality, and he’s always showing up in formal wear.

    AKERMAN: That’s why I put him in a smoking jacket—to show he was in fact probably playing cards, going to the casino, and was not at all like a real captain, like in the book, where he was admired as a fighter. I wanted someone else, someone who was not a captain, someone different yet had so much influence on Almayer, this poor guy, and destroys his life. In the book we hear that he’s dead but there’s no scene of him dying.

    HUGHES: You described Almayer’s home as a “dead place,” which is reflected in the set design. This a modern-day adaptation of a late-19th century novel—kind of. It feels like a place out of time.

    AKERMAN: Well, maybe. We shot the city, Phnom Penh, as it is today. And to build Almayer’s house, we took two old houses and put them together. We didn’t shoot the village, but if you had seen it, it would look just like that house. So it is now.

    What is very, very strange is that you can’t imagine that two million people died there. Okay, again, as Jew, I was born in 1950, and my mother came back from the camps in 1945. She was destroyed by it. But those people [in Cambodia]—maybe it is because they’re Buddhist, I don’t know—but they were smiling. They seemed to be happy, full of energy. It’s hard to know they’re age, so I kept thinking, “One generation is missing, but I can’t see it.”

    HUGHES: Is that historical resonance with the Holocaust one reason why you shot in Cambodia?

    AKERMAN: No, first we tried to go to Malaysia, which is where the book is set, but I didn’t feel it. Then we were invited to Cambodia and I found the place I had imagined. I love Phnom Penh. The city does not appear in the book, but when I visited Phnom Penh I knew I had to put it in the film.

    HUGHES: That’s interesting, because the book hews so closely to Almayer’s perspective. By expanding the film’s world to include the city, you’re again shifting the emphasis to Nina’s story. Which brings us to the opening scene, when Nina’s lover, Daïn, is murdered and Nina sings.

    AKERMAN: Yes! And in a kind of bordello, which is incredible. You discover later in the film that her teachers didn’t let her sing, and you also learn that she has a talent. To sing the “Ave Verum Corpus” of Mozart, it’s great. It’s also a displacement, everything’s about displacement. That girl will find her way. 

    HUGHES: How did you direct that shot?

    AKERMAN: Nina had to dance like she was in a trance, like she was hallucinating and didn’t realize that something had happened because she’s so much into her thing. When the Chinese guy says, “he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead,” there’s a kind of a shock. I said, “Approach the camera, stop here, and start to sing, but start to sing with more and more feeling.”

    HUGHES: At what point in your process do you decide a scene or sequence is going to be a long take? For example, that marvelous scene of Nina smoking under the tree. The camera dollies back and she talks to Daïn for five unbroken minutes…

    AKERMAN: It comes from the set and is totally improvised. For the scene you mention, I was thinking of breaking it up, showing some of him and some of her, but then I wondered if that was totally necessary. It would have cut the relationship. I didn’t prepare anything; usually I prepare a lot but with this film I didn’t even know what I was going to shoot the next day. After two or three days I felt like I had to make the film in a kind of freedom that I’ve never had, more the way I do my documentaries. I was writing to a friend, “Oh my God, I’m taking a big risk, but if it works it will be great.” It was very risky.

    HUGHES: When you shoot a film like Là-bas yourself on digital, you can have a lot of freedom but now you’re shooting on 35mm in a jungle…

    AKERMAN: I had such a good crew. The guy doing the image and the guy who did the sound were from my documentaries. They were all so into it. For example, while we were rehearsing that tracking shot of Almayer in front of the river, we set up the focus so that he’d stop here and there. Then when we shot, Stanlislas did something totally different. He never stopped at the same moment, so you know the guy doing the tracking shot and the focus-puller were so much with him, and it was such a challenge for everybody. It was so exciting. Each shot was an adventure.

    HUGHES: The film certainly feels that way. Some sequences have a profound sense of depth—the shots in the room with the river behind the house and the curtains blowing—and then you have sequences with no depth, shot in the densest foliage, no space, and everything’s in your face. This visual flow of the film seems very organic and natural.

    AKERMAN: That’s what I tried to do. I said it was risky but I had fun doing it. To work like this was such pleasure. To have that challenge with almost every shot made you so alive. When you do it conventionally, you know what you’re doing and you try to do it the best you can. There are always small challenges—the film has to be well shot—but it’s not the same as what we did here.

    HUGHES: You made your reputation with very structured . . .

    AKERMAN: . . . No, I wanted to make something much more fluid.

    HUGHES: But it’s fun to see your older, more formally controlled style injected into this film, like the last, long shot of Almayer.

    AKERMAN: It’s a mixture. This new style liberated me from what I had been doing. I’m tired of doing the same thing, and I think the film is stronger because of that. There’s more power in the images. 

  • James Benning: Naked Repose

    James Benning: Naked Repose

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    “The guard is down and the mask is off, even more than in lone bedrooms where there’s a mirror. People’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway.” —Walker Evans

    “So, have you ever smoked?” I laughed when James Benning asked me this question at the end of our conversation. “Honestly, I’ve probably smoked about twenty cigarettes,” I told him. “I’m a child of the 70s and 80s. Nancy Reagan told me to say ‘no.’” That was almost the full extent of our discussion of smoking, despite the fact that Benning’s feature-length video, Twenty Cigarettes, is constructed solely of portraits of smokers. The duration of each of the twenty shots is determined by the length of time it takes each subject to light, smoke, and discard a cigarette. Benning composed each shot, staged the person in front of a flat backdrop, and then walked away from the camera.

    We didn’t discuss smoking because, as Benning is the first to admit, the cigarette is just a gimmick—the excuse he needed to get people in front of a camera long enough for them to relax, lose their self-consciousness, and reveal their “real faces.” There are precedents for this kind of thing. Jon Jost does something similar in Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses) [1987] when he invites strangers to pose for a photo and then asks them to wait patiently while he pretends to fix a problem with the camera. Walker Evans was likewise on the hunt for the “real face” when he took his hidden camera into New York subway trains in the 1930s.

    In “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” Susan Sontag calls Evans an heir to Walt Whitman’s “euphoric” humanism. “To photograph is to confer importance,” she writes, and Evans’ photos, or so the argument goes, democratize their subjects by leveling the playing field—”leveling up,” Sontag notes. I suspect Benning shares Sontag’s faith in the transcendent image. There’s a kind of prelapsarian nostalgia in Twenty Cigarettes.

    I spoke with Benning the day after Twenty Cigarettes played in the Wavelengths program of the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. See also Neil Young’s excellent essay about the film, “Tobacco Roads“.

    * * *

    HUGHES: Last night during the Q&A your expression changed when you began talking about Twenty Cigarettes as a tribute—both to the people in the film and also to your own accomplishments. You looked proud.

    BENNING: That didn’t occur to me when I was making the film. It only occurred to me after it was finished. There’s a black woman from Milwaukee in the film, and that just wouldn’t have happened when I was a young boy. That might seem like nothing, but to me it’s like going to the moon. There’s no analysis of poverty when you’re growing up at the edge of poverty yourself. Poor whites and poor blacks were played off against each other. All of those fears I grew up with came true: The neighborhood became degraded because we all had the same problems but we all fought each other rather than trying to make each other better.

    I was aware that I was trying to bring diversity to the film because I wanted to sort of map the world into a package of cigarettes. The last time I watched it, I thought, “Well, there’s such diversity but everybody has similar gestures and similar anxieties, no matter whether they’re young and old.” The boy gets a little more playful. You see youth in him.

    HUGHES: He holds the pose a bit longer.

    BENNING: Yeah, although he quits. He couldn’t stay with the smoking as long with the camera in his face. He quit after about half the cigarette and walked off. [laughs] I kept that one exit in the film.

    HUGHES: You end Twenty Cigarettes with a running scroll that names all of the smokers and the locations where you shot them. It’s another gesture toward the film as a tribute. I assume you never would’ve imagined as a child that you’d travel the world like you have.

    BENNING: Absolutely. My parents never traveled farther than northern Wisconsin. We took one trip to Chicago, but otherwise they were always within just a few miles of their house. That’s just the way it was.

    HUGHES: Are you at a point where you’ve begun to measure your accomplishments? Are you taking stock?

    BENNING: I began taking stock twenty-something years ago in the late-80s, early-90s when I came up with a new way of working: I would make films that would take me to places I enjoyed being. I’d make films that would make me understand my life better. Since that time I’ve come to understand my own history through really looking and paying attention. These films are continuing that, of course, and I think Twenty Cigarettes does that well. It makes me feel like I got somewhere.

    HUGHES: There’s a woman who reminded me slightly of my mother, and it made me realize that I’ve never stared at my mother’s face for five minutes without interruption. It’s a very intimate experience. It was the woman who is standing in front of an orange door. I think I could hear Al Michaels on the TV in the background?

    BENNING: It’s actually poker.

    HUGHES: Really? [laughs]

    BENNING: Yeah, Texas Hold ‘Em. She shouldn’t have been smoking. She’d had heart failure and bypass surgery not too many years before that. And she died about three weeks later. She was older than she looks. 74, I think. She looks like she’s in her early-60s to me. She lived near me up in the mountains. She was a postal worker in Bakersfield for many years. Very funny. I live in a poor white mountain town with a lot of prejudice, so she also reminded me of my parents. She had a blind prejudice against Mexican people, and then ironically her best friends were Mexican. [laughs]

    HUGHES: Sure. [laughs]

    BENNING: They were different. [laughs]

    HUGHES: The “good kind.” [laughs] Sounds like my experience of the South.

    BENNING: [laughs] It’s strange.

    HUGHES: I assume it’s a very personal film for you. You seem almost sentimental talking about it.

    BENNING: Yeah, I think I am, actually. I like all of those people.

    HUGHES: I recognized a few of the faces in the film, but I’d assumed that a few of the subjects were strangers who you’d just invited to participate.

    BENNING: No, the person I knew the least I’d met only a few times. I feel like I know them all well now. It’s a funny thing. When I watch it now there’s a point in each shot when I feel the person. Thom Andersen is a good example. He controlled his image the whole time and tried to not give you who he is. He was able to act. But he’s like that. He was very cool. I like that shot.

    HUGHES: It’s a slightly different composition from the others, isn’t it?

    BENNING: He’s leaning back against a wall, so, yes, he has a more comfortable stance rather than standing up like the rest. He’s in his house and the roof is at a slant, so that also makes the space seem more confined.

    I put them all in awkward positions. You generally don’t smoke that way unless you’re on a smoking break and you’re standing outside by yourself, quickly getting the nicotine you need. But most people sit down, read a book, or they’re on the phone or drinking coffee or sipping whiskey.

    HUGHES: There are obvious pros and cons, structurally, to flattening the visual field to two dimensions.

    BENNING: I wanted to have a space behind them that would give you clues as to who they were but not a space that would divert your attention. I wanted the person to be the center of focus, so the backgrounds are all pretty minimalist. The guy in his workshop has a lot behind him—it’s kind of busy and there’s a lot to look at—but he’s so captivating you don’t really look beyond him. He just takes over the frame. He’s the only one who needed to talk, to change the rules. I mean, I didn’t tell him he couldn’t talk. [laughs] He’s a pretty wonderful guy.

    HUGHES: The flat visual field certainly opens up the space outside the frame.

    BENNING: He calls the dog over. The dog starts growling and biting at him. So you become very aware of the off-screen space. Janet Jenkins in Chicago is the woman smoking in front of elegant drapery. That was shot in a high rise next to the train tracks and you can very lightly hear trains going by. In Dick Hebdige’s there were some gunshots that went off at quite a distance, which adds to the paranoia in his face [laughs].

    HUGHES: When I saw RR here in Toronto three years ago, I thought, “This would be the perfect film to show art students who are learning about perspective.” My mind never stopped racing through the variety of ways you carve up geometric space in that film. Twenty Cigarettes strips away those possibilities.

    BENNING: Again, I wanted the portrait to stand out against the flat backdrop. But I’m also very aware of how sound works in off-screen space. The woman in Houston is actually looking off to one side, watching somebody work outside, but I later recorded the sound of dishes being washed, so it looks like she’s looking over at the servants.

    HUGHES: Last night you said the picture and sound had both been touched in post-production, that “films are never what they really are.” I assume the cover of “Ghost Riders in the Sky” was one of your additions? [laughs]

    BENNING: [laughs] Yeah, that was kind of a joke. A friend of mind collected 120 versions of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” I used the Deborah Harry one. The guy in that shot is Dominican, and it looks like he’s in front of a warehouse, and I thought, “Well, it’s kind of like he’s the doorman at a disco.” [laughs] I created my own narrative in a few places. But I also wanted to refer to work in the film—that he could have been working there rather than being staged.

    HUGHES: Smoking is the excuse you needed to get your subjects in front of the camera, but it obviously has an iconic history in the cinema too. I can imagine one or two of the women in your film picking up the habit after watching Anna Karina and Jean Moreau smoke on screen.

    BENNING: Yeah, just like the railroad has a history. Some of the first filmed images are of trains. Smoking in the 30s was portrayed one way, and today I don’t know if it’s even portrayed at all. It’s hidden. Today, maybe it’s the villain who’s smoking, whereas it used to be seductive. I grew up when four out of five doctors smoked Camels, which isn’t an ad you’ll see anymore [laughs].

    HUGHES: Is finding the “real face” a new interest for you? Is it a problem you’ve been trying to solve?

    BENNING: Over the last ten years, I’ve had very few people in my films. I remade One Way Boogie Woogie (1977, 2004) and found the same people I’d filmed 27 years earlier, and that got me interested in looking at people again. But also I remade North on Evers, which was a film I made in 1990 when I went on a motorcycle trip and filmed landscapes and made portraits of 65 people. In that film there’s a hand-written text that runs through the bottom of the frame that is a diary from the year before, when I made the same trip. On that second trip in ’90 I rode on the same motorcycle and went to the same places and met the same people, some of whom were friends and others who were just acquaintances, but I would find them on the same barstool a year later. [laughs]

    Then, two years ago I saw the Warhol Screen Tests again, and that got me thinking about what portraits I had made. So I reshot North on Evers with my digital camera. I just shot the portraits. Each was about ten seconds long, and I slowed them down six times so that they became a minute long. I made an hour-long film from those portraits. I showed that in Berlin two years ago, and then I read the text that ran through the whole film, which took another 45 minutes. The 1990 film became an hour-long silent film with a 45-minute performance. And that got me interested, really, in filming people again. I’ve only done that film twice—one in Berlin and again in LA at my school—but it was so successful I should probably try to do it a few more times.

    HUGHES: Was slowing the speed of those 65 portraits essential to the experience?

    BENNING: What I liked about the Warhol Screen Tests is that there was time to look at the people. Warhol looks at them for four minutes. He shot them in hundred-foot rolls and at silent speed so he got almost four minutes out of each roll. I’m not sure how much direction he gave, but they don’t have anything to do, they’re confronted by the camera, so they become more playful. They want to act. And I think it’s because it’s in The Factory, which had this zany quality—a tinfoil-covered nightclub, in a sense. The people who would drift in then were rather hip, so you had this hipness to the whole thing. I tried to stay away from that.

    When I made North on Evers I didn’t have a tripod with me—the whole film was shot hand-held and it has 650-700 shots in it, which is probably more than all of my other films put together. [laughs] The camera was spring-wound and I was doing editing in the camera, so each portrait is like a still shot, maybe with a slight pan or a little movement. When I slowed them down, it just gave you more time to look at the people. They didn’t go by so quickly. Slowing down and being silent is a very different experience. Plus, I just liked the idea of having a silent film for an hour and then doing a reading for 45 minutes in the dark.

    HUGHES: Oh, it’s not simultaneous?

    BENNING: No, it’s after, so it become retrospective. You retrospectively come to know the narrative that those faces have created.

    HUGHES: Interesting. So then the viewer also reworks the material through memory.

    BENNING: Yeah, you think, “Now, which person was that?”

    HUGHES: I grabbed some pizza with friends after the screening of Twenty Cigarettes last night, and we did the same thing—trying to remember who was who.

    BENNING: That’s why I like the scroll at the end. It makes you re-remember what you watched.

    HUGHES: What is the current status of your old films? They’re being archived, right?

    BENNING: I gave away all of my 16mm work to the Austrian Film Museum, and they are slowly archiving it all. This November they’re finishing the first two films. They made 35mm protection copies of American Dreams (1984) and Landscape Suicide (1986), and they’re putting out a double-box DVD of the two. I’m hoping they’re going to make hi-def copies so that I can release them on Blu-ray.

    We’re going to hopefully archive everything that way, but it’s a huge project and it’s very costly, so I don’t know how many we’ll get through. They chose to start with two middle works, and then I think they want to do the California Trilogy (El Valley Centro [1999], Los [2000], and Sogobi [2001]) and then some newer works. At least those two will be available soon. Otherwise, they won’t be seen. The prints are wearing out and fading, and it’s so hard to get good 16mm projection, which keeps destroying the few prints I have left.

  • Jose Luis Guerin: Rediscovering the Quotidian

    Jose Luis Guerin: Rediscovering the Quotidian

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    “I am not an ideologue,” José Luis Guerín says matter-of-factly. “I need characters.” Judging by the lukewarm response that has greeted his latest film, Guest, it’s a dicey stance for a director of art house cinema to take these days. Early reviewers have praised Guerín’s images but questioned the structure of the film, which often finds him wandering through Third World cities and inviting conversations about hot-button topics like immigration, colonialism, and religion. That he does so without any pretense of deep sociopolitical analysis makes Guest something of an anachronism: it’s a politically-interested film in an observational mode, more humble and curious than didactic.

    In 2006, after premiering his previous film, In the City of Sylvia, Guerín decided to spend a year traveling the world by accepting every festival invitation he was offered. He carried a consumer-grade DV camera with him wherever he went and very gradually built a “recording journal” of his travels: Venice, New York, Bogota, Havana, Seoul, São Paulo, Cali, Paris, Lisbon, Macao, Jerusalem. (Fans of Sylvia will recognize the return of one of its signature shots: a close-up of journal pages blowing in the breeze.) Along the way, he encountered a few familiar faces—Chantal Akerman and Jonas Mekas make memorable appearances in Guest—but spent the bulk of his time in public spaces, talking to locals, visiting their homes, trying, as he told me, to be a traveler rather than a tourist.

    By his own admission, Guerín approached this film with few preconceptions and was content, instead, to discover leitmotifs and organizing principles in the editing room. What emerged in the process are general themes: homelessness (both literal and metaphoric), mythmaking, melancholy/nostalgia, and alienation—specifically, the alienating effect of the cinema. Guerín aspires with Guest and with his work, generally, to counteract this tendency, to make the workaday routines of life new again. That’s one reason for Guests’s black-and-white photography. “Color is not neutral,” he said after the first screening in Toronto. “I wanted the film to be a series of portraits.” It’s Guerín’s Modernist bent, I think—his commitment to form—that gives Guest its heft.

    Guerín’s English is slightly better than my Spanish and French, so we spoke slowly and laughed a good bit. With his encouragement, I’ve expanded some of his answers without, I hope, losing his cadence.

    * * *

    HUGHES: In the Cuba section, there’s a homeless man who’s very upset about the homeless problem, and he says that all the Cuban government cares about is tourism. The word “tourism” can have negative connotations, while “guest” is more positive.

    GUERÍN: Well, this was my situation. For that year, I was just a guest. I went where I was invited. This was the pact I made. Each time I arrived at a festival, I would see on this small table beside my bed my credentials with my photo and the word “guest.” A guest is nothing—maybe it’s positive, maybe it’s negative. You can be a guest traveler or a guest tourist. Maybe I’m also a tourist, but I chose for my movie to try to be a traveler—to concentrate on faces, on humans, on characters.

    The great benefit of traveling is that it gives you the capacity to recreate your own street, your own space, your own city—to rediscover the quotidian. Ordinary life! This is the essential material of cinema. Usually, you walk down the same street each day; eventually you cannot see your own city. But when you travel and walk an unfamiliar road, there are constant surprises and small discoveries. These discoveries exist on your own street as well, though. For a filmmaker, this change of perspective is important because it’s the opposite of exoticism. A tourist is looking only for the exotic. A traveler is looking for something singular that is also recognizable from their own life.

    HUGHES: You’ve cited the Lumière Brothers and Italian Neo-Realism as this film’s heritage. Are Chris Marker and Agnès Varda also part of your heritage?

    GUERÍN: Of course. Chris Marker is very important to me, but we are very different. Marker is a worker of words. His voice-overs confront the image in a dialectic. It’s his own genre. He’s a poet and an ideologue. I am not an ideologue. Marker is concerned primarily with ideas; I need characters.

    In this sense, my heritage is closer to King Vidor and the Italian Neo-Realists. But like all filmmakers, or like anyone who loves the cinema, in my everyday life and when I travel, there is a constant dialog going on between my imagination, which has been formed by books and movies, and life. This is a great function of art—to help you rediscover life. Too often it’s the opposite: cinema creates alienation.

    For example, when I first arrived in New York, I realized I could not make an image of the city. I was already carrying an accumulation of cinematic images and imaginations. I didn’t see New York; I saw the image of New York. This is why I included the scene of Portrait of Jennie. [In Guest, Guerín watches William Dieterle’s 1948 film in his New York hotel room.]

    HUGHES: You’re obviously not an ideologue like Marker, but you are a Spaniard who is traveling through the Spanish-speaking Third World and choosing to take your camera into public spaces and into homes. So the film might not be arguing from a particular ideology, but it’s still explicitly political.

    GUERÍN: Colonialism, you mean? Of course. Yes, of course. What most interests me is the legacy of Spain on the imagination of these countries. “Print the legend!” {laughs} The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance! “Print the legend.” There are so many ideas and stories about the influence of Spanish people. The past, finally, is a legend.

    HUGHES: I love the man who points to the statue of Simón Bolívar and says, “He’s Roman from the neck down.”

    GUERÍN: Yeah, yeah, yeah! And he even remembers the size of Bolívar’s shoes! {laughs} This is important, though, because it points to the idea of a popular culture [the unique culture of a particular people], which is disappearing in Europe. It’s finished in Europe. All of these incredible people in Latin America evoke the Europe of my childhood. In them you see the characters of Rossellini and De Sica, the films of the ’40s. Or the American Great Depression. You see people from Vidor, William Wellman, and John Ford.

    It’s a curious thing. I know the good Cuban cinema of the ’60s but nothing of, say, classic Chilean film. But these European and American films help me to see the people of Latin America. Do you remember this film, Human Remains, with Spencer Tracy and directed by Frank Borzage? [Human Remains is a direct translation of the Spanish title given to Man’s Castle (1933).]

    HUGHES: No, I don’t know that one.

    GUERÍN: Oh, it’s a very good movie. Spencer Tracy plays a man who is out of work and walks around wearing one of those signs [a sandwich board]. You can see that in Brazil, in São Paulo—a lot of men out of work and trying to sell gold [jewelry]. It’s too long a story for now {laughs} but this Borzage film is very good, with a social perspective.

    HUGHES: I love his silent films. Such beautiful melo…

    GUERÍN: Melodramas, yes. {laughs}

    HUGHES: One of the leitmotifs running through Guest is the work of daily life. We see women chopping onions, making bread, washing clothes. The struggle is similar from country to country.

    GUERÍN: There are different levels of poverty, though. For example, in Bogota, where there are storytellers and poets in the street, this is quite different from the people who have been evacuated from war. In Palestine, a specific political situation has provoked this poverty.

    That’s true, though. When I’m looking for a composition, I’m looking for a complimentary relation. For example, the second part of the film focuses mostly on women. And in these women you can see a sequential development. You see a homesick and lonely Philippine immigrant working in Hong Kong, and you see in Columbia a woman who is dreaming of immigrating, maybe to Spain. These are different relations with immigration, but there’s a unity here also.

    I’m looking for similar qualities, similar gestures. For example, the women making bread—this is a visual unity across cultures. This is the structure of the movie. It’s this diversity, these fragmentary parts, with a corresponding sense of narrative evolution, sometimes more secret, sometimes more evident.

    HUGHES: One visual unity you create is with a particular composition. You shoot the groups of women evangelists in tight closeups with their faces overlapping. It’s the same composition you used at the café and tram depot in In the City of Sylvia.

    GUERÍN: It’s like a collage—a lot of faces in profile but, finally, it’s one face. This is a very powerful visual solution discovered by the Renaissance painter Giotto. Two faces: the face of Joachim and the face of Anna, organized as a single head. It’s a very good idea—the repetition and opposition of faces. The visual discourse of In the City of Sylvia is in this image.

    HUGHES: Your films make me very conscious of something that is basic and fundamental to the job of a director: choosing where to put the camera and what to point it at. In Guest, Jonas Mekas talks about “chance.”

    GUERÍN: Ah, yes, yes. Choice versus chance. Jonas Mekas is the film’s Oracle. I need to explore, every time, this limit between control and chance. This, for me, is the most important aspect of cinema. I think the history of cinema revolves around this idea: How much is control? How much is chance? In the Lumière Brothers? In Jean Renoir? In Hitchcock? In Ford? One function of contemporary cinema is to go further with this conflict.

    All of my cinematographic ideas are born in this dialectic. For example, in In the City of Sylvia—and maybe this is naïve and too simple—but I wanted to shoot a fictional movie on a streetcar. I love streetcars in the cinema. Murnau’s Sunrise, for example. I would organize a sequence by writing dialog and working with the actors, but then there would be a confrontation with chance. Absolutely. Chance. I shot on an ordinary tramway. One part of it was for ordinary people, one part was for the shoot. {laughs} I hadn’t the money to take over the entire tramway.

    Now, for me it’s a big revelation to see my work in the script and with the actors confronted by this other movie—this real window. You might see one moment of the scripted scene when the tramway stops, or you might get one phrase or one word of the dialog. You might see the actress’s face in darkness or in light. All of these elements change the essence of my mise-en-scene.

    One side of this is control, and I love this tradition in the cinema—Murnau, Hitchcock, Ozu, filmmakers who controlled the elements in a studio. But I also love Flaherty and the direct cinema and the Maysles brothers. The tramway is emblematic of my illusion of the cinema. I need to be the first spectator. Cinema is a site of revelation. If I knew everything about my movie while writing the script, I would lose my desire to make it. It should be a revelation.

    HUGHES: Those are the most exciting moments in Sylvia—those very brief glimpses of faces in the windows, all of them possible Sylvias. It’s a classic spectator experience. They remind me of Bernstein’s story in Citizen Kane.

    GUERÍN: Yes, yes, although that story is even more like the other film, Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia. I remember those moments very well. {smiles}

    HUGHES: One last question. The old man in Cuba, “Don Quixote,” you met with him twice? [“Don Quixote” is an aged, homeless Cuban man who still carries his original Communist Party membership card.]

    GUERÍN: Yes.

    HUGHES: Did you ask him to bring photos the second time?

    GUERÍN: No, no, no. He always carries with him all of his objects or belongings. That’s a curious question. These men represent something very human. They’re poor and in a problematic situation. But I see something more in them, something deeply human. Chaplin is maybe the best portrait of the human condition? And in this man I came to see something of the same sense.

    Usually, the characters in Guest are people who came to the camera. It’s not me who came looking for them. It’s very curious. They are complicit. They want to speak. They probably need to communicate. They want to make something together. They’ve lost their original land. It’s a sign of the times, the end of rural life—which comes back to that loss of a popular culture. They’re outsiders, between spaces, unable to integrate into city life.

    “Don Quixote” remembers all of the people he’s left behind, his lost home, like John Wayne in The Quiet Man. {smiles} There are metaphors in my status as “guest.” I’m very comfortable, bourgeois, but I’m also complicit with them. These are the people I prefer.

    HUGHES: He’s very noble, “Don Quixote.”

    GUERÍN: Yes, yes, yes. It’s curious. Like many of the men in Guest he carries a memento of a woman. The film is filled with men who are alone and women who are alone. Maybe that’s why they want to talk to the camera. {laughs}

    HUGHES: Nostalgia?

    GUERÍN: And melancholy.

  • Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978)

    Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978)

    This essay was originally published at Mubi.

    – – –

    Dir. by Chantal Akerman

    The Image in Question

    This is the fourth shot in Les rendez-vous d’Anna. Aurore Clément stars in the title role as a young filmmaker who, as the movie opens, is arriving in Germany to attend a screening. In this shot she is checking into the first of the three hotel rooms in which she’ll stay during her trip back to Paris. Like Akerman at the time, Anna is in her late-twenties, a Belgian who is attempting to make a home in France. The autobiographical parallels are difficult to ignore, particularly because Les rendez-vous d’Anna is so much of-a-pair with Je, tu, il, elle, in which Akerman herself plays the lead character, Julie. Julie’s encounter with the truck driver, and the long, unbroken monologue he delivers, serve as a kind of structural template for Anna, in which Clément acts as a mostly-passive sounding board to the friends, family members, and strangers she meets along the way.

    Broken Symmetry

    Although it’s only the fourth shot, the image of Anna at the hotel comes nearly five minutes into the film (if we include the opening titles in the run time). Les rendez-vous d’Anna continues the trend in Akerman’s early work of combining long shot durations with static, precisely symmetrical compositions. The following are the first three shots and their durations:

    Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)

    The medium shot of Anna staring just beyond the camera is startling, first of all, because it breaks two “rules” Akerman establishes in the shots that precede it. While Anna appears in each of them—and at progressively nearer distances—the 90-degree cut to Anna’s face brings us closer (in every sense of the word) to the character than we might have expected, especially given the self-consciously long (duration and depth) shot that opens the film. Even more striking, though, is the sudden break of symmetry, which is the visual equivalent of a time signature change in music.

    To continue the music metaphor (and I think it’s a useful one), Akerman’s attention to symmetry is a rhythmic theme that she varies playfully and with remarkable complexity throughout Les rendez-vous d’Anna. I especially like these images, which are two of only a handful of shots that move off of the 90-degree axes. Here, we’re at about 45 degrees, and Akerman has used the physical space to neatly divide the frame.

    Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)

    Subjective Structuralism (or something like that)

    My enthusiasm for this film began with the realization that I was so emotionally involved with it because of Akerman’s formal control. I occasionally have exactly the opposite response with narrative filmmakers who so precisely stage each frame (Roy Andersson comes to mind; Kubrick can also leave me cold). A friend suggested that the difference is Akerman’s anthropologist-like curiosity—that each composition illustrates her genuine and affectionate attempt to better understand what she’s looking at. That’s certainly true, but I think the more important factor is that when Akerman cuts to that shot of Anna’s face for the first time, we enter a subjective space. It’s quite a trick. Only rarely does Akerman employ classic techniques for establishing a character’s subjective point of view: there are three or four cuts on eyeline matches when Anna looks out the window of her train car, and in her first hotel room, the sound of the radio gradually becomes drowned out by the noise of passing traffic, despite Anna having already closed the window (presumably we hear the sounds Anna is more attentive to).

    Akerman’s trick is maintaining that subjectivity throughout the course of the film, while simultaneously standing at a distance and pulling the strings. Scroll back up to the first image and note the man in the background. Note how his body is leaning into Anna and how he’s staring at her.

    I’m not prepared to argue the case for “Anna as a feminist text,” but the move to a subjective perspective clearly colors that first sequence of shots: 1. Anna walks alone through the hotel doors, 2. Anna has a typical exchange with a hotel clerk, who is as far as we know, the only other person in the lobby, 3. Anna is being watched. Given the composition of the shot, we read the stranger as forcing himself into Anna’s space (they are battling it out for the center axis), so we expect her to feel his gaze, which she soon does. She turns toward him, causing him to avert his eyes, lean forward to grab his drink, and relinquish a bit of breathing room to her. When Akerman cuts next to a medium-long tracking shot, we discover that the stranger is one of several men who are watching her.

    Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)

    This double-ness—this sense of being both inside and outside of Anna’s perspective—can be felt throughout the film. One of the more interesting examples comes soon after the first monologue. Anna has been invited home by a man she met the night before. He wants her to meet his mother and daughter; he tells her a brief history of his family home and explains how and why his wife left him. Akerman literally centers the frame on Anna and expresses the character’s uncomfortable aversion to domestic life by eliding in a single, nifty, 180-degree cut everything that happens inside the house.

    Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)

    This is a Horror Film, Right?

    The doubled perspective also lends Les rendez-vous d’Anna a quality that I can only describe as…well…creepy. The standard critical line on Akerman is that she is a poet of transience and displacement, that her rootless characters are haunted by the always-present specter of historical trauma. By those standards Anna could be Exhibit A. Made barely thirty years after the end of World War II, and taking as its central plot device a train journey between Germany and France, the film struggles to make sense of a post-Holocaust world. Order is too unstable, rationality is not to be trusted, the horror is always just right there. History dissolves completely during Anna’s late-night trip to Brussels, when, by stepping from one train car to another, she seems suddenly to have become a passenger bound for the camps. It’s a terrifying sequence.

    Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)

    The strangeness of that first shot of Anna’s face, then, can also be attributed to her entrance into a liminal space. The hotel lobbies, hallways, train stations, and platforms where we most often see her are all public, nondescript, and well-traveled places. I’m reluctant to stretch this idea too thin, but I think the case could be made that Anna is a vampiric figure. She enters only one home during the film, and it’s at the owner’s invitation. (It’s interesting that Akerman also elides Anna’s film screening, which would have been a kind of home away from home.) The majority of the movie takes place after dark, and Anna’s most intimate and revealing moments—her conversation with her mother and the song she sings to Daniel—both occur late in the night and seem to be forgotten and alien to her the next morning. When she finally returns to her apartment, it’s dark, lifeless, and unnaturally silent (this is, as I recall, the only scene without ambient noise of passing traffic).

    Like I said, the vampire analogy snaps pretty quickly, but it’s a useful model for the not-quite-fully-present state in which Anna seems to exist. “Anna, where are you?” Akerman’s voice asks in the penultimate line of the film.

  • Nathaniel Dorsky: Manifesting the Ineffable

    Nathaniel Dorsky: Manifesting the Ineffable

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    As he writes in his short book, Devotional Cinema (2003), Nathaniel Dorsky aspires to discover in film a way of “approaching and manifesting the ineffable.” In recent years that has meant fixing his camera on the world around him, usually his adopted home town of San Francisco, and finding in its mundane details images of extraordinary wonder. His work counters what Peter Hutton, another practitioner of devotional cinema, calls the “emotional velocity and visual velocity” of our times. Dorsky’s films manage to shift our perception, making us more alive to the strange beauty of the physical world we inhabit.

    Dorsky’s latest films, Winter and Sarabande, premiered last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, where they were screened on a program with Jean-Marie Straub’s Le Genou d’Artemide. Dorsky took the stage for a brief Q&A following the screening of his films—but before the Straub—and, frankly, it didn’t go particularly well. The first question was a back-handed compliment that set an unfortunate tone for the session. He did, however, offer a few insights into his process. Rather than beginning with a particular subject in mind, he instead shoots from “a certain aspect of [his] psyche” and trusts that a through-line will emerge in the editing. Titles come much later, “when desperate.” And he described himself as a “corny” guy who has seen and internalized more than10,000 films and wants, most of all, to discover and share something new.

    Sarabande and Winter will screen Saturday as part of the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde program, and Dorsky will also be in attendance for a week-long retrospective of his work at Anthology Film Archives.

    I spoke with Dorsky immediately after the screening in Toronto. As we were walking across the street to a coffee shop, I asked if he knew Pedro Costa’s films.

    * * *

    DORSKY: I’m very weak on contemporary narrative film. I mean, I just don’t know that much. There’s one or two people I like, and I love their films, but I don’t know how to begin with other filmmakers.

    HUGHES: Too much to keep up with?

    DORSKY: Yeah, I think it’s the starvation and gorge thing. You don’t see someone’s films for maybe 12 or 15 years and then you see 20 of them in two weeks on double bills. I do go, though, when someone says, “Please, go check out these films . . .” Like, someone said, “Please go see Apitchatpong,” and I loved it.

    HUGHES: Which ones did you see?

    DORSKY: The first one I saw was Tropical Malady.

    HUGHES: That was the first of his I saw, too, and it’s a very strange film to see with no preconceptions.

    DORSKY: I had no preconceptions. All of his films fold in half. I love the way it echoes without echoing too specifically. Very LSD, that film. Deeply primordial.

    HUGHES: In Devotional Cinema you say that, ideally, watching a film should be like an intimate, heart-felt conversation. I have to tell you, I’m so grateful to hear a filmmaker talk about the cinema without speaking in terms of commerce. You treat film as a transformative experience without being pedantic about it.

    DORSKY: Yeah, I’m sorry if I was so off-putting on stage. Sometimes I get off on the wrong footing when the questions seem so deeply ungenerous. Usually I’m generous no matter how ungenerous people are. Maybe it’s just the situation. People in the audience are forced to perform before the Straub. I didn’t feel that the evening was mine. I thought it would work, and then I realized it wouldn’t work. It’s like interrupting lovemaking for a Q&A session.

    HUGHES: Did you stay to watch the Straub?

    DORSKY: Yeah. I read it and watched it.

    HUGHES: I’ve only seen a few of his films.

    DORSKY: Have you seen Moses and Aaron?

    HUGHES: No.

    DORSKY: It’s wonderful.

    HUGHES: They’re difficult to get a hold of.

    DORSKY: This one seemed a little . . . Well, you know Mouchette by Bresson?

    HUGHES: Sure.

    DORSKY: It ends with the Monteverdi over the credit. There’s no music for the entire thing. I felt it was a gesture [in the Straub] going to the Heinrich Schutz, who’s kind of the next generation Monteverdi. I felt that was so worn. That gesture is so accomplished in Mouchette that here, I go, “Ooooh.” That’s what I mean about being corny. That’s why I don’t want to have to think up anything clever [to say about the new Straub].

    HUGHES: It actually helped me being primed by your films. I read about half of the Straub and then became much more interested in the ways light was hitting leaves in the background and the shifting shadows cast by clouds.

    DORSKY: Yeah, that was nice.

    HUGHES: When watching your films, the conscious part of my brain battles constantly to interpret and assign meaning to your images, but my mind slows down a bit when it encounters something closer to pure abstraction. How do you balance abstraction with more traditional, narrative-like images like the cute puppy in Winter?

    DORSKY: Well, the puppy is a being. That shot is preceded by a series of car headlights. So then with the dog’s two black eyes, which are like negative headlights, there’s something interesting to me there.

    HUGHES: I’m a little surprised to hear you say that. Do you have an intellectual justification for each of your cuts?

    DORSKY: I would say that, primarily, the justifications are the actualness. Along with that actualness, the nature of the human mind is such that it tries to build concepts out of each moment, and so, therefore, if I think the concept it can build is interesting and poignant, then I’ll stick with it. If I think the concept it builds is reductive, then I won’t do it.

    HUGHES: I saw a really bad film today that ended with a shot of a pet turtle swimming back into nature. It was such a great example of how an image becomes a symbol for an empty idea to the point that it can function as nothing else. It’s not even a turtle anymore.

    DORSKY: It’s like the last shot of Scorsese’s The Departed, which has this $30,000 trained rat walking across a window sill. This is what I mean by these gestures. You know Pather Panchali? One of the last shots is the snake taking over their house. I feel like my films come from knowing films well and wanting to find fresh and adventurous territory.

    HUGHES: In Devotional Cinema you write, “One’s hand is a devotional object.” I’m fascinated by Lisandro Alonso’s film Los Muertos, which observes the body and behavior of its protagonist in really beautiful ways, but it also adds an interesting narrative quirk: This guy has just been released from prison and he’s a man capable of great violence. So, Alonso is using the formal tropes of contemplative cinema but he’s infected the narrative with dread and sin (or whatever you want to call it).

    DORSKY: I’d love to see it.

    HUGHES: Given your desire to, as you said tonight in the Q&A, “touch the heart” of your viewers, is there room in your cinema to touch on the darker aspects of our nature?

    DORSKY: The world seems so violent to me, and the media seems so violent, maybe I’m a bit reactive to that.

    HUGHES: I’m grateful to hear it.

    DORSKY: Maybe I don’t have to bring any more fearful adrenaline onto the planet with my work. That’s one answer. With Sarabande I was trying my best to make a film that – I don’t know how to say this – it has struggle in it. It has struggle and release on a more subtle level. To me it does. The film at times opens up and contracts, it opens up and contracts.

    I don’t know how to answer your question. There are so many people with a lot of money and power making films about society. If someone gave me the opportunity I could do anything.

    HUGHES: Are you interested in “doing anything”?

    DORSKY: I’ve done a lot of different kinds of films, in terms of my life and making a living. I’ve even made a film about cheerleaders. [Dorsky frequently edits PBS documentaries and won an Emmy in 1967 for his work on Gaughin in Tahiti: Search for Paradise.] The only way I can answer your question is to say that perhaps it’s something lacking in my self. I’m too much a person in my hermitage of quietude.

    HUGHES: I didn’t mean at all to suggest that you should, but I think it’s an interesting question. For example, in Catholicism there’s a tradition of meditating on . . .

    DORSKY: Sadism?

    HUGHES: {laughs} That’s one way of putting it. Or meditating on suffering. Does your concept of devotional cinema leave room for that?

    DORSKY: Of course. Diary of a Country Priest is a kind of Passion. I love that film. Voyage to Italy is about a couple having a horrible argument, and I love that film. I wouldn’t know how I’d do that on my own, you know? Unless I made something up. What am I gonna do? Make a film about a slaughter house? {laughs} I love people who do that, but I don’t know. My films are homemade films. I can’t answer you so much as to just say your question is inspiring.

    HUGHES: One reason I ask is because in Devotional Cinema you write a bit about Dreyer, about The Passion of Joan of Arc and Ordet. If I were asked to name two great works of “devotional cinema,” even without knowing your concept of it, I would name those two films. And like you I’m also not as fond of Day of Wrath.

    DORSKY: No one would ever put that film down. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed that it was so outrageous. But I’ve questioned it. I think there’s much to question about a lot of films that have a good reputation.

    HUGHES: I think in the book you questioned Dreyer’s direction rather than the subject.

    DORSKY: Yeah, that it wasn’t present, that it was literary because of the nature of the cross-cutting. That it fell into a literary form. Once you have a B plot that you’re cutting against an A plot, then you’re gone.

    HUGHES: As opposed to Ordet where there are multiple plots being threaded together but not at cross purposes.

    DORSKY: Yeah, you don’t have the second plot in order to relieve the pressures of the first plot. Now, in theater that works. In Shakespeare it certainly works. But there’s something about film I don’t think it works, because film is a solid, plastic form – a solid piece of time form – and there’s something about breaking that time form. In Ordet the point of view is actual. We’re actually some place rather than the point of view being images from a more literary form of cinema.

    HUGHES: Ordet is one of my favorite films, but I find it almost impossible to write about.

    DORSKY: Have you seen Silent Light?

    HUGHES: I have.

    DORSKY: I haven’t seen it. It’s coming New York when I’ll be there. I hear different things.

    HUGHES: I’ll be curious to hear what you think of it. I saw it here last year and immediately wanted to see it again. So, I assume you’ve heard . . .

    DORSKY: I know that it has something to do with Ordet. That’s all I know.

    I’m sorry I’m a little tongue-tied, but I feel like Devotional Cinema is complete. Complete and pithy.

    I’m the kind of person who doesn’t take life for granted. I don’t even take the premise for granted. I love not even taking the premise for a moment for granted. Like, let’s say, even knowing what this is, us talking to each other. This is a common experience for filmmakers. There’s an interviewer, and, say, we’re doing an interview for some puff piece after a screening. But that’s never been my sense of reality, of getting absorbed in the societal belief of things. I’ve always felt a little out of it, a little bit like a ghost. So I’m like a ghost and society is a phantom. They’re phantoms but somebody made them. I’m a ghost and I’m not even here. At a certain point I decided, “Well, I’m going to make films from my point of view. What would they think if I started to express my point of view? Would it mean anything to anybody?” So I decided to make films about my point of view. How I feel and see cinema. And then it turns out I end up being invited to Toronto.

    HUGHES: Have you ever run into Caveh Zahedi?

    DORSKY: Sure.

    HUGHES: That is a very Caveh-like approach to reality.

    DORSKY: Do you mean his interview in Waking Life?

    HUGHES: Well, that, and I spent an evening with Caveh once and we had a long talk.

    DORSKY: Okay, well this is presumptuous on my part and this could be wrong, but I think that conversation he had in that film came from a conversation I had with him over coffee once.

    HUGHES: {laughs} Really?

    DORSKY: It was very familiar. I was watching the film, I like the film very much, and suddenly this guy walks up – I didn’t realize it was him – and I think, “This conversation is awfully familiar.” I’m watching it and thinking, “This is weird. It’s like deja-vu. Why is this conversation so totally familiar?” And then at the end the character says, “Thank you, Caveh.” That’s all I know. I know it was like a deja-vu of a conversation I’d had with him. He likes Devotional Cinema quite a lot.

    HUGHES: I’m not surprised. It seems right up his alley. {Laughs} When I had dinner with Caveh, he said that the very last scene, the one where Linklater is playing pinball and talking about Lady Gregory’s visions – Caveh swears Linklater stole that conversation . . .

    DORSKY: . . . from him. Oh, sure. {laughs} It’s a mean world. It’s a thieving world. But, you know, we all grow up with these ideas, or we wouldn’t even be able to talk to each other.

    HUGHES: So, since switching over to making films from your own point of view, do you have a particular viewer in mind.

    DORSKY: Yeah. Here’s what it is: Usually sound films and character-based films are a social experience. I don’t know how else to say it. And my films are about being alone. And if they had sound, they wouldn’t be alone. Someone would be holding your hand.

    I grew up as an only child, and I’m a poetic type person. I don’t mean that I’m unsocial or that I don’t have a lot of friends, but in my aloneness I feel the ultimate kind of poignancy and the deepest sense of mystery and, generally, a not knowing – like, the idea that you and I are two beings speaking to each other. And so, like anything that you feel with great tenderness and with great heart, you want to share it. Like you’re alone and listening to something and you think, “Oh, I wish someone was with me.” A loved one or someone you care for a lot. So it comes from that. It’s made with that spirit.

    I would like to offer somebody some poignancy of my aloneness. Or, not mine, because I don’t want to get in the way, but some poignancy of aloneness that happens to be mine. So in a way I’m offering something quite intimate. The things that work about my films are quite intimate. They touch your mind, do you know what I mean?

    HUGHES: There’s a moment in Sarabande. I don’t know what I was looking at exactly, but it reminded me of when I was a kid and we would go on family vacations. I remember laying in the back seat of the station wagon, looking up through the window and watching . . .

    DORSKY: {smiles} . . . the passing wires? Yeah, I love that.

    HUGHES: That’s what I loved about the films – the moments that tweak a very personal impression. It’s not even memory.

    DORSKY: It’s something primal, right? It’s a moment that has no purpose, except that it’s pure is-ness. So, I make films that way. There’s still more to do. I feel like I’m only slowly getting better. Sarabande is better than Winter. Winter is a little better than Song and Solitude. I think they’re a little better. Maybe they’re just different. I still have places to go with my films.

    HUGHES: Do you shoot constantly?

    DORSKY: Not when I’m editing. And then after I edit I usually need three months of nothing.

    HUGHES: Really?

    DORSKY: I’m pretty done for a while. I have to wait for my psyche. What happens is, I finish a film – I’m into it, I like it, I worked hard on it, everything seems to be right about it – I finish it, and then it’s dead and no longer needs me. It’s like one of your children, and you realize they’re not all you wanted them to be. {laughs} So I look at the film and I go, “Ewwwww, that could be better.” And then I think, “I gotta fix that.” And so I begin work on another one. {laughs}

    I used to turn against the films and think they were generally awful, but then I realized you go through a little rite of passage. You finish your work and then you are done. It’s like a snake skin. You’re done with that snake skin that slides off, and then people look at the snake skins you leave behind.

    HUGHES: So in your frustration with the previous film do you come away with a new problem you want to solve?

    DORSKY: Yeah. Like in Sarabande, for the first time I feel the nature of the images work together in a way that’s more of a unified braiding of shots and time, rather than the film as a montage of images. It’s getting more musical.

    HUGHES: Hence the name Sarabande?

    DORSKY: Yeah.

    HUGHES: This is when it would have been nice to see the film a couple times before speaking with you. I don’t want to pin you down, but can you think of a moment in that film that you knew worked, or that surprised you, as soon as you found it in editing?

    DORSKY: Well, the second cut. You see extremes – winter trees and sun, and then clouds and sun, and then a cut to a very still shot on a diagonal, and then a cut to a very dark shot where the camera is moving past some trees. They’re actually trees in a store window at Christmas time. There’s something about the whole screen imploding into darkness and then your eye finding the image in that darkness. It’s moving, while the other one was completely still.

    And then you cut to a grey shape. You can’t tell what it is. I don’t even knpow what it is anymore. It’s sort of quivering in the light. And then down to these other colors. It’s a journey: You’re welcomed, but then it’s undercut into a deeper, more interior sense. And then you’re taken along. I think it’s all becoming more in union with itself. The nature of the shots and cuts are getting more in union with their multiple purposes.

    HUGHES: The camera was moving more in Sarabande.

    DORSKY: I think so, yeah. And right now I’m working on one and I’m moving the camera a lot more. What’s important is that the film doesn’t break down into a dualism. It’s not a camera looking at something. It’s a unified movement: the screen is becoming something, as well as the camera is moving. It doesn’t break down into, “I’m taking a picture of that,” which is when cinema collapses.

    Out of a certain kind of self-hatred, I was afraid to include my body more – not shots of my body {laughs}, but moving my camera more. So I feel that I’ve done enough quietude in the key of quietude, and I’ve become much more interested in seeing how much movement and activity I can get into the film and still not break the quietude.

    In the film I’m working on now, I’m being much more energetic with the camera. I want to see how totally visually active I can be and still have this essence be still – the spiritual essence be still. Whereas before I felt like I had to be still. But that’s only logical. It’s how anyone would learn to walk or anything. First you learn to be still by being still, and then you start to take risks. I think risk and adventure is the key to good filmmaking. You have to go on adventures – be where you haven’t been before.