Agenda

EN

“Adopting the generic approach of the fleeing fiancé following the route of the grand tour, we decided not to begin script writing before taking the grand tour ourselves. We filmed this journey in 2020, creating an archive of images and sounds. After viewing this archive footage, we wrote the script. Contrary to what usually happens in films working with archive footage, the images we used belong in the present and not the past. The rest of the film, the narrative studio shoot, that took place in Lisbon and Rome, belongs in the past. The action takes place in 1918.

As in the American screwball comedies of the thirties and forties, the woman is the huntress and the man the prey. But both characters are separated in the space and time of the film. Switching between male and female perspectives is what turns the comedy into a melodrama.”

Miguel Gomes1

“This film began to take shape on the eve of my wedding. I was reading Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930), which is a collection of his travel writing through Southeast Asia. He tells a joke about men and women, men being cowards and women being stubborn when it comes to marriage. Maybe I was sensitive to this question for personal reasons as I was recently married. My name is Miguel Eduardo. I’m not Edward, I hope, but I’m a little bit like him. And Molly is not so different from Maureen [Fazendeiro, his wife and co-writer of Grand Tour which is dedicated to her].”

Miguel Gomes2

“Wedding contemporary documentary fragments with dazzling, painstakingly detailed sequences shot on a soundstage, the kaleidoscopic images toggle eras, cultures, and styles in a bifurcated, wildly ambitious travelogue. Situated between artifice and actuality, Grand Tour is a feat of visionary filmmaking whose sooty expressionism harkens back to the golden age of silent cinema. It’s a magnificent excursion that reminds us of cinema’s singular ability to interrogate and refine our positions in the world.”

Andréa Picard3

• 1Miguel Gomes, “Director’s Remarks,” Grand Tour Press Kit, May 2024.
• 2Dennis Lim, “Interview: Miguel Gomes on Grand Tour,” Film Comment, 31 May 2024.
• 3Andréa Picard, “Grand Tour,” Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), September 2024.

EN

Eamonn Kelly: You shot Pressure in 1973. Why did you make the film?

Horace Ové: I made Pressure because of what was going on in Britain at the time — the whole experience of black people in the country. I mean the rough, brutal experience that they were going through, and what was happening around me. There was the whole Black Power movement that started in the US that came here, with meetings and discussions — the activity and the demonstrations. There was discrimination in education, police harassment and racist attacks in the streets, from various racist movements including the National Front. […]

How important was it to represent black British people at the time?

Very important because they weren’t being represented. No one was dealing with what was going on in that world at that time. You got different things written in the papers, about situations, about clashes, demonstrations and things, but nobody dealt with it. What Pressure tried to do was to portray the experience of the Windrush generation, the kids who came with them and the kids born here.

Horace Ové in conversation with Eamonn Kelly1

“When I got to England I didn’t have any money so I couldn’t get into film school. I had to do various jobs like a cleaner, packer, stevedore and one of the best (smile) was at the National Temperance Hospital working in the morgue cleaning up dead bodies. Sending me down to the mortuary was punishment for flirting with all the foreign European girls. Well I made those bodies pretty for their families and as it turned out I used a scene like that in my first feature film Pressure. I also worked on a trawler with my cousin Stefan (the actor) catching fish in winter. We got hired because the darkies and foreigners were the only ones willing to work in the cold. Eventually I was able to earn enough to keep myself afloat. In between I was viewing films and eventually landed parts as an extra on films in Europe. My first real first job was in the film Cleopatra.

Elizabeth Taylor got tired of her lead Australian actor; fell in love with Richard Burton, gave him the lead and took the film to Italy. I got a part in the movie as a slave. Going to Italy proved to be a major turning point for me. I was lucky to be there at a time when the realist and surrealist cinema went beyond Hollywood. Plus I got all this experience in Europe observing how films were made so it really opened my mind. By the time I got accepted at the London School of Film Technique, I had wracked up a lot of knowledge about European cinema.”

Horace Ové2

“Aside from Pressure’s obvious aesthetic merit, what makes this film important is the bold way it deals with institutional racism and police brutality without ever falling into the trap of treating such matters simplistically. Based on a script co-written by director Horace Ové and novelist Samuel Selvon, the film is nevertheless partly improvised. Pressure’s plot centres on Tony, a young London born school-leaver whose parents and older brother come from Trinidad. Tony has good academic qualifications but can’t find a job. His brother Colin, a black power activist, derides Tony’s tastes in food and music as white and attempts to radicalise him.

[…]

Ové has repeatedly stated that the scenes in Pressure shot in a black church and at a black power benefit were filmed without all those attending what appeared to be ordinary public events realising some of those present were acting out scripted roles. The problems this produced at the church were purely ethical, since the actor introduced as a preacher delivers prepared lines designed to show the way in which Christian discourse can act (often unconsciously on the part of those engaged with it) as vehicle for racism. For example: ‘Drive all black thoughts from your head and replace them with good white holy thoughts.’ With a black actor playing the minister delivering the sermon against pride, of which these lines form a part, and a black congregation listening to it, Ové underscores the way in which using black as a metaphor for sin, and making white synonymous with holiness, is historically neither accidental nor innocent. I don’t know if anyone subsequently complained about having been duped and manipulated with regard to this, but Ové might well argue the stunning results justify the means by which they were achieved. Certainly, the sermon against pride was carefully drafted, and very consciously designed to contrast with another scene in which a political activist delivers a speech on the necessity of black pride. At which point I shall move on to the police raid on the black power benefit, since here Ové credits the realism of the sequence to some audience members not realising that the cameras present were there to record a drama rather than a documentary, and fought back as they would against genuine police oppression. The scene draws much of its tension from a combination of sound and tight shots. Given that it was staged on a shoe-string budget, it is a considerable achievement.”

Stewart Home3

“A scene which I found particularly striking, both visually and thematically, was during Tony’s decision to attend a nightclub with his white school friends as opposed to accepting his brother’s invitation to a Black Power meeting being held that same night. Pale reds, sordid pinks and oranges glow, lights flash, and the camera dizzyingly swings back and forth in motion with the throbbing crowd. The tone is one of ecstasy and escapism, with a hint of shame. The music swells and with it Tony’s realities melt and slip away, reverberating outwards through the speakers. The scene pulsates between the lively club and the more sobering speeches being given at the Black Power meeting, visually illuminating the psychological poles between which Tony is caught. During the course of the film, the audience, like Tony, feels these poles claustrophobically closing in, limiting space and freedom. Pressure, as the leitmotif of the reggae song reminds us, manifests in all forms: mental, physical, societal, economic, domestic… (the list goes on).

Where I believe Ové’s chef d’oeuvre is most commanding of such a title springs from its unique ability to so deftly illustrate the reality of living ‘Black’ in Britain, all whilst maintaining a childlike sensibility towards the cultural formation of identity in its chief protagonist. The political realism and the ‘coming-of-age’ quality of the film do not compete for space; rather, they beautifully coalesce, as Tony’s character progression is both a product of and shaped by the external forces surrounding him. Oscillating between moments of gravity, humour, pathos, and heart-warming togetherness, I believe that Ové captures the Black British experience with kaleidoscopic perspective. The air of the theatre was one of silent community; no one spoke, but through the air floated a feeling of unspoken acknowledgement as the screen held up a mirror to today’s Britain as much as it did the 20th century.”

Faith Owolabi4

• 1Eamonn Kelly, “Horace Ové discusses a film that shocked with politics and technique,” Socialist Worker, 26 November 2005.
• 2Josanne Leonard, “The boy from Belmont. An interview with Horace Ové, filmmaker,” https://josanneleonard.blogspot.com/, 22 March 2009.
• 3Stewart Home, “Pressure,” www.stewarthomesociety.org, 2005.
• 4Faith Owolabi, “‘What’s wrong with bacon and eggs, fish and chips, and Gary Glitter?’: Horace Ove’s Pressure (1976) and the dialectic of Black British identity,” Era Journal, 27 november 2023.

EN

“In 1954, while working as a photographer for theater legend Jean Vilar at the Théâtre National Populaire, Varda returned to her native Sète and shot her first film, La pointe courte.  So Varda’s journey in the world began with a trip home, at least the home of her adolescence during the war. From this small Mediterranean fishing village, she launched a career spanning sixty years and counting, one that has never fit smoothly into the conventional categories of French film history. In the 1950s and 1960s, Varda worked in an industry populated almost exclusively by male directors, and, unlike the directors who began their careers as film critics writing for Cahiers du cinéma, Varda was not a voracious cinephile.

[…]

During the summer of 1954, when Varda shot the film, people in the nearby village of Mèze were trying to get the locals expelled from La pointe courte since they had turned their cabins into homes without official permission. This idea of a clash between official and accepted practices and their unauthorised and spontaneous counterparts runs deep into the film’s script. Many of the questions asked in the film actually relate to whether it is acceptable to do certain things, like to catch fish and establish your home where you want to, or to say certain things such as ‘I want to marry you’, or ‘I don’t think our love is what it used to be’. The only difference is that some of these questions manifest themselves in the domestic arena while others do so in the public sphere.”

Delphine Bénézet1

Pierre Uytterhoeven: Let’s talk about La pointe courte, that you directed in 1954. Do you still think today that the two themes of the film, treated in such very different styles, can’t be mixed and shouldn’t be? 

Agnès Varda: I had a very precise idea when I did La pointe courte and that was to propose two themes that weren’t necessarily contradictory but which, placed side by side, were problems which were mutually exclusive. They were: a couple coming to grips with their relationship and, on the other hand, a village trying to resolve certain problems through a collective process. The film was divided into chapters, so the two themes were never mixed together but I left open the possibility for the spectator to confront them or superpose them. I’ve always thought it was very difficult to integrate one’s private problems with public issues. In Hiroshima, Mon Amour Resnais succeeded beautifully in giving the audience an impression forged from the mixing of these two levels by having the French woman experience a passionate encounter with the Japanese man in Hiroshima. The violence of their encounter resuscitates her memories of her first passion for a German man. In this way the larger social issues are integrated with the private problems of the couple.

But in La pointe courte why did you choose to separate these two problems? 

The construction of the film was inspired by Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. If you remember, there’s no connection in the novel between the couple, Charlotte and Harry, and the old ex-con from Mississippi. It was neither allegorical nor symbolic, just a feeling you get from reading which moves back and forth between these two stories. It’s up to the reader to be able to reorganize these feelings. […]

What I hoped to show in La pointe courte was the paralysis of the couple who can’t seem to shake free of their intellectual and emotional problems, and hence can’t manage to think about their affinity to any group. I wanted my audience to understand that there’s no connection between social issues and private problems. Of course, there does exist a level of understanding where these antagonisms disappear. But in La pointe courte, I presented a couple in crisis and not only between themselves, but in terms of their inability to connect with others.

Agnès Varda in conversation with Pierre Uytterhoeven2

• 1Delphine Bénézet, The cinema of Agnes Varda. Resistance and Eclecticism (London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2014).
• 2Pierre Uytterhoeven, “Agnès Varda from 5 to 5,” in Agnès Varda: Interviews, ed. T. Jefferson Kline. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 4. Originally published in Positif, 44 (1962). Translated by T. Jefferson Kline.

EN

“The story hinges conventionally on a romantic couple who are separated by tragedy and circumstance, then reunited after the birth of their illegitimate baby, yet the film refuses to conclude with this couple — refuses to use them as a summing-up of what the picture is really about, as almost any American movie would. Eerily, these characters are dwarfed first and last by their awesome physical surroundings, and by the nurturing community they come from, which looms second largest in Powell’s sense of a natural order.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum1

“I don’t want to make a documentary. Documentaries are for disappointed feature film-makers or out-of-work poets.”

Michael Powell2

• 1Jonathan Rosenbaum, “The Communal Balancing Act,” Chicago Reader, 9 June 2000.
• 2Michael Powell, A Life in Movies: An Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1987), 241.

EN

“Shooting Rope was a little like unpuzzling a Rube Goldberg drawing.  A long time ago I said that I would like to film in two hours a fictional story that actually happens in two hours. I wanted to do a picture with no time lapses — a picture in which the camera never stops. In Rope I got my wish. It was a picture unlike any other I've ever directed. True, I had experimented with a roving camera in isolated sequences in such films as Spellbound, Notorious, and The Paradine Case. But until Rope came along, I had been unable to give full rein to my notion that a camera could photograph one complete reel at a time, gobbling up 11 pages of dialogue on each shot, devouring action like a giant steam shovel. As I see it, there's nothing like continuous action to sustain the mood of actors, particularly in a suspense story. In Rope the entire action takes place between the setting of the sun and the hour of darkness. There are a murder, a party, mounting tension, detailed psychological characterizations, the gradual discovery of the crime and the solution. Yet all this consumes less than two hours of real life as well as "reel" life. (Actually, it took us 35 days to wrap up the picture.) The sight of a "take" under these conditions is something new under the Hollywood sun. It's like being backstage at one of those madhouses that comedian Joe Cook used to devise when he was explaining why he couldn't imitate the four Hawaiians.”

Alfred Hitchcock1

• 1Alfred Hitchcock, “My Most Exciting Picture,” Popular Photography, November 1948.