Agenda

“The world in an hour and a half.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“There is a truly astonishing moment in the film, one where Balthazar arrives at the circus and stops four times in front of the cages, where a lion, then a bear, a monkey, and finally an elephant are locked up: each time Balthazar looks at the animal who looks at him. What is astonishing is that the reciprocity of looks constitutes for us an indecipherable abutment: that they have an exchange, a recognition that testifies to the thoughtfulness or the screams of animals, is perceptible but always inaccessible. It is, for us, without symbol, without the possibility of transmission... This suspension of all possible meaning, appropriate to these looks, redistributes its force throughout the rest of the film.”

Philippe Arnaud1

“Precision rather than beauty – each shot shows only what is absolutely essential, each sequence has been compressed to its most concise form and briefest duration possible. Even so, the length of the shots and cuts are – even for the period when the film was made (1965) – unusually calm. Never do pauses create room for sentimentality, in its simplicity everything gives the impression of having developed naturally and, while being in the service of a rigorous aesthetic concept, is never the victim of the latter. Bresson reportedly intended to personify the seven deadly sins in his characters – but against a declaration such as this can be placed a sentence from his Notes sur le cinématographe: ‘Hide the ideas, but in such a way that they can be found. The most important will be the best hidden’.”

Michael Haneke2

“Bij het lezen van de beschrijving van het begin en het einde van de film kan bij een lezer, die de films van Bresson niet kent, de indruk van ‘poëzie’, van gezochte schoonheid, van pretentieuze stilering binnensluipen. Niets hiervan in deze film: documentaire eenvoud in de kadrering, een bijna manische weigering van het ‘mooie’, namelijk aangename beelden (zoals men ze in zijn eerste films af en toe kon vinden en zoals ze de huidige arthouse cinema ook beheersen, net als in Amerikaanse A-films en reclamespots) – men zou scherp kunnen stellen dat Bresson de uitvinder is van het ‘vuile’ beeld in het domein van de kunstfilm. Naast het altijd voelbare verlangen om de dingen zo duidelijk en eenvoudig mogelijk te tonen, redt een onfeilbaar instinct hem van de gevaren van steriele stilering. Ondanks de nauwkeurige kadrering werken zijn beelden altijd als uitgerafeld, open en paraat voor wanneer de werkelijkheid de regels breekt. Zijn beroemde gevechten met cameramannen, zoals De Santis, bekend om de schoonheid van hun beelden, hebben waarschijnlijk daarin hun oorzaak, denk ik.”

Michael Haneke3

“Films zoals die van Bresson, die afhankelijk zijn van de kracht van suggestie en dus in extreme mate afhankelijk zijn van het reactievermogen en de reactiebereidheid van de toeschouwer, die een kluwen van verbanden, referenties en krachten verbeelden, laten zich onmogelijk herleiden tot een eenduidige, lineaire en onomkeerbare verhouding tussen oorzaak en gevolg. De vrijheid die Bresson zijn publiek laat, stemt overeen met zijn houding als kunstenaar ten opzichte van de werkelijkheid. Wat hij met de vorm van zijn films vastlegt is slechts reliëf; wat men niet ziet is cruciaal en pas in de stilte en sprakeloosheid achter wat men hoort, komt in de eenzaamheid het eigenlijke drama van deze film boven.”

Frieda Grafe4

• 1Philippe Arnaud, “Robert Bresson,” Cahiers du cinéma n° 198, 62–63.
• 2Michael Haneke, “Terror and Utopia of Form: Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar” in Roy Grundmann (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 565.
• 3Michael Haneke, “Terreur en utopie van de vorm: Verslaafd aan waarachtigheid: Robert Bressons Au hasard Balthazar,” Sabzian, 2013 [Vertaald door Marie Claes en Gerard-Jan Claes van de originele tekst “Schrecken und Utopie der Form - Süchtig nach Wahrhaftigkeit: Eine Kinoerzählung über Robert Bressons Au Hasard Balthazar,” Frankfurter Allgemeine: Zeitung für Deutschland, 6-7 Januar 1995, Nr. 5-6, Bilder und Zeiten, s.p.)
• 4Frieda Grafe, “Au hasard Balthazar van Robert Bresson,” Sabzian, 29 januari 2020.

“We blijven het verlangen koesteren om ons meester te maken van het lichaam van een film. Zelden zal de foute stelling die cinema als fotografie in beweging beschouwt zo juist geweest zijn. Want de zo vloeiende dynamiek van de shots van Elephant, tegelijkertijd verbonden en naast elkaar geplaatst, vertoont een combinatie van pure beweging en trilling van het kader, met de zweefeffecten die erdoor ontstaan. We begrijpen dat Gus Van Sant verwijst naar Chantal Akerman. We denken aan haar zo sterke gevoel voor onbeweeglijke duur, aan de wijze waarop zij erin slaagt om die duur te belichamen tot banen waarbij waarden van onveranderlijkheid lijken voort te duren (van Hôtel Monterey tot haar grote recente documentaires over het Oosten en het Zuiden). Het fotografische, dat niet te herleiden is tot de foto, hoewel het er wel schatplichtig aan is, zal een van de modaliteiten met de meeste mogelijkheden geweest zijn en blijven, zodra we het opnieuw uitvinden, van een nieuwe periode van het moderne beeld, en het intreden van een echt denktempo. Getuigen daarvan in Elephant, tussen duur en beweging, zijn de amper geschetste en erg fijngevoelige vertragingen die Gus Van Sant had willen ontwikkelen en die doen denken aan de analyse van Godard in France/tour/détour/deux/enfants en Sauve qui peut (la vie), maar dan veel zachter. We denken aan wat Deleuze schreef in een aantal lijnen die al te zeer zijn laatste geworden zijn en die lijken te antwoorden op de verschillende virtuele niveaus die Elephant op diverse manieren bijeen blijken te brengen, vanuit de illusie die wordt voortgebracht door zijn kalme waarneming; alsof de levendige hallucinaties van de helden van Gerry naar de kant van de kijker gesmokkeld werden: ‘Een actuele waarneming omringt zich met een wolk van virtuele beelden die zich verdelen over bewegende circuits die zich verder en verder verwijderen, groter en groter, en die gemaakt en gebroken worden.’

Op die manier is het een soort experimentele film die verbazend genoeg beloond is in Cannes, niet alleen met de Gouden Palm en de prijs van Beste Regie, maar ook en van tevoren al met de Prix de l’Éducation Nationale. Het bewijs, als dat überhaupt bestaat, van zowel zijn verondersteld reële effect als van een mogelijke verandering in de beoordeling van cinema. Spreken over een ‘film met een absolute urgentie, radicaal in zijn schijnbare neutraliteit en zijn esthetische strengheid’ is veronderstellen dat de vorm die hier gevonden wordt een eigenschap bezit die beantwoordt aan ‘de intensiteit van de mediaverslaggeving’ die volgde op het bloedbad van Columbine en waarvan Gus Van Sant het bepalende belang heeft onderstreept voor het losmaken van zijn wil om deze film te maken. We denken ook aan de beelden van 9/11 waarover we hadden kunnen schrijven dat ‘ze één enkele keer getoond hadden moeten worden, zonder commentaar, en vervolgens vernietigd of achter slot en grendel in een kluis gestoken’, beelden waarop Elephant eveneens lijkt te antwoorden door zijn zwijgzame circulariteit te laten contrasteren met de hysterische circulariteit van de publieke machine.”

Raymond Bellour1

“I remember when [Columbine] first occurred thinking that dramatists should get in there and do something right away, as opposed to waiting 10 years. That’s against convention – whenever something intense happens, the dramatic pieces usually wait until there is more perspective. I was pitching it around, trying to go immediately. I wanted it to be a TV movie because that’s where all the mainstream media is. I pitched it to a couple different people who were in power and who have broadcast stations. I just went to the top guys and said, ‘I need you to back me on this and tried to gain their trust for something that would “agitate the information.”’ And I very quickly learned that the broadcasters] had problems of their own. They were flying to Washington to have censorship meetings and stuff with [the Clinton administration]. They didn’t know if they were still going to be able to film their cop shows, much less make something that refers to [Columbine] itself. It was such a big incident that these guys were saying, ‘No way, we’ll never do that.’

The person who did actually see a way to do it was [HBO Films president] Colin [Callendar]. He referred to Elephant, the original Alan Clarke film, as a way to address the issue. Clarke had addressed the issue of [violence in Northern Ireland], which was as heated an issue in Britain when he made his film. And he hadn’t done it in a traditional way, and that’s what I think Colin was referring to. Harmony [Korine] had told me about Elephant – he claimed it was his favorite film and had explained every shot to me – so even though I hadn’t seen it, I understood what Colin meant. It wasn’t necessarily the style of Elephant; it’s that [the film] wasn’t specific – it wasn’t called The Columbine Massacre, it was something else. [...]

Alex [Frost, who plays ‘Alex’] was playing the piano in the school [during production]. He was wearing his combat gear and taking a break [from shooting]. He wandered over to a piano, played the song, and I thought, wow! It had this really spooky element to it, and he was really good. I said, “We should at least have a piano in your room,” and he said, ‘Yeah, and I can play ‘Moonlight Sonata’ too.’ So we rushed the piano over to his room, and [playing music] became something he did in the film. The music came out of what he knew on the piano as opposed to music coming from what kids listen to or what I might have wanted in a score. Musique concrete I’ve used before in Good Will Hunting during the fight sequence, but I never really got to use it to my liking. Some [pieces used in the film] came from a collection that was made for Good Will Hunting by Richard Francis, who has a radio show here in Portland, [Ore.], on KBOO. I put them in under the football scene – the guys walking across the football field to the office – and I really liked it. To me it was sort of an amazing thing, and I would show it to people and everybody liked it, so I used it elsewhere. [...]

As for the sound, since everything was in long takes, we were able to mic in MS stereo, where you use two mics and can dial the stereo in and out when you want it. There was always a stereo mic right above the camera following us around. So whatever we were doing, we were recording the real stuff that normally you try to get rid of, like traffic, camera noise and stuff like that. The wheels of the camera sounded cool, so I just left them in. Every [scene] literally had stereo sound right where you were. You don’t usually do that in a film where you are cutting back and forth because the sound will shift, but in this case we were able to do that.”

Gus Van Sant in conversation with Scott Macaulay2

• 1Raymond Bellour, ‘Het standpunt van het reële,’ Sabzian, 2004/2017.
• 2Scott Macaulay, “‘Agitating the Information’: Director Gus Van Sant on his Long-Take Columbine Drama, Elephant,”Filmmaker, 2018.

Three separate stories about the same thing: pleasure.

“A few main themes mark Maupasant’s life and work: money - war - peasants (from his native Normandy) - water (rivers, the sea) - ghosts - superstition - we chose: ‘pleasure’.”

Max Ophüls1

« Cette éclatante charretée de femmes qui fuyait sous le soleil… » : lorsqu’Ophüls fait coïncider dans Le Plaisir cette phrase de Maupassant avec les images d’une carriole qui s’éloigne sur les chemins de Normandie, il accomplit sans doute l’une des plus belles transpositions que le cinéma ait effectuées à partir d’une œuvre littéraire. Apparemment, rien n’est ajouté à la description de l’écrivain, rien n’a été gommé, retranché, édulcoré de la situation (si on excepte la contrainte du noir et blanc, décisive en l’occurrence) ; et pourtant dans cette courte séquence, c’est « la fuite sous le soleil » qu’Ophüls met en scène, alors que tout Maupassant est dans l’éclat de la « charretée de femmes ».

Vincent Amiel2

• 1Max Ophüls, “Maupassant wäre Heute Filmautor,” Kasseler Post, 1953. [Sabzian’s translation]
• 2Vincent Amiel, « Le plaisir : l’évanescence et la forme accomplie », 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, 2001, 34.

Cinema Scope: In Les amants réguliers, a very subjective, very personal take on May 1968, your son Louis plays a 20-year-old guy getting caught up in an unexpected revolution. You were 20 in 1968 as well. How autobiographical is this film?

Philippe Garrel: It’s autobiographical only as far as the period is concerned. The love story on the other hand is more Romantic, very literary. But formally the film is of course very personal: the scene in which Louis meets the girl crossing the street is deliberately shot like a newsreel. I did shoot a lot of documentary footage of the events of May 68 myself in 35mm [Actua I, 1968], but unfortunately I lost all the negatives of that material. So I tried to reconstruct those images now, three-and-a-half decades later. I tried to shoot them exactly the same way again. In that sense, Les amants réguliers is less autobiographical than a reproduction of the films I shot at that time. That is as far as the autobiography extends: it concerns the period, the climate, the morale of that story. The romance part has more to do with Proust, though, and other literary references. I am now 57 years old, this is my 24th film, and I did in fact already create films that were a lot more autobiographical – films like L’enfant secret (1979). In Les amants réguliers, the love story needed to be more universal, more classical, so that it would make identification possible.

Scope: Les amants réguliers cultivates a very austere, very painterly kind of beauty. How did you work with William Lubtchansky? Did you let him do what he wanted, or did you have any say in the camera work?

Garrel: That depended really. William and I belong to the same generation, as does my editor, Françoise Collin. This film truly is a generational movie. We all identified strongly with this story. So we decided to exchange ideas often. And since we all have definitely reached the second half of our working lives, it depended very much on who was most awake at a given morning, and who liked to direct things. At our age we tend to group together more easily than we used to do. So in the film there are camera positions that are typically mine, and other framings that are more characteristic of William. We worked together like musicians, really: we had dialogues, like a jazz band that keeps improvising on what had been written. Whoever felt like playing, played first.

Scope: It’s been four years since your last film, Sauvage innocence (2001). Has it become even more difficult to finance your work lately?

Garrel: You know, every cent in Les amants réguliers has come from the political left, even though it’s a production funded by private and public money. That’s not a joke, it’s true. It had to be that way. There was no way you could tell this story that offers a radically left perspective with right-wing money.

Philippe Garrel in conversation with Stefan Grisseman1

“Garrel’s work is less ‘first person cinema’ than something more collective – a ‘family romance’ based on ages, generations, transmissions. Regular Lovers brings everything to a peak in its three-way dinner table scene of son-playing-father (Louis Garrel), ex-wife (Brigitte Sy, Louis’s mother) playing his own mother, and Maurice Garrel as now the somewhat dotty but hypnotically appealing grandfather.

With Regular Lovers, at last, the great myth of origin underlying the entire Garrel œuvre is revealed, re-created, and directly depicted: 1968 and the riots, the life-and-death struggles with police at the barricades... And now, the paranoia, the sense of being an eternal outsider to society, the fragility of sanity and the anxiety of ever holding onto a glorious moment, all this suddenly make perfect sense in the light of that momentous origin in a divided Paris of ’68 that resembles nothing so much (in Garrel’s retrospective depiction) as a Bosnian war zone.

Back in the bedrooms, there is sleep. Garrel is a poet of sleep to rival, even surpass, Murnau. From its first moments, Regular Lovers shows us its characters supine, laid out on couches or on the floor, relaxed as they suck on the opium pipe. Among his silent, abstract, experimental portrait-films of the Seventies, Les Hautes solitudes (1974) with Jean Seberg concentrates mainly on the Warholian spectacle of sleep – because what event could pose for us, more acutely, the ‘paradox of the actor’ (as Denis Diderot once dubbed it), whether he/she is ‘performing’ or simply ‘being’? There are two types of sleeper in Garrel’s films: dead sleepers and light sleepers. Dead sleepers zone out, escape all torment and misery for those blessed moments of sheer unconsciousness. Light sleepers are those disturbed souls who suffer every kind of night terror – and perhaps the single most terrifying sight in any Garrel film is the glimpse of a child who cannot sleep. Garrelian sleep is the gateway to death – its prefiguration, for death, as Regular Lovers calls it, is the ‘sleep of the just’ – and to the realm of dreams. We should never overlook Garrel’s attachment to Surrealism: dream sequences appear prominently in Regular Lovers [and many of his other films].

It is the world itself – in its most seemingly 'regular' faces, bodies, gestures, spaces and places – that comes into being as we watch his work. Love is truly a mystery in Garrel, and it happens between people who (as in Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night [1948]) have ‘not properly been introduced to the world we live in’; the yearning to understand this mystery permeates these films, finding its richest expression in those early scenes between François and Lilie in Regular Lovers: two people standing or sitting together, just looking, or being silent, or exchanging a few words... an intimate spectacle which returns us to the very heart of Garrel’s poetic cinema.”

Adrian Martin2

• 1Philippe Garrel and Stefan Grisseman, “History is the enemy of art: Philippe Garrel on Les amants réguliers,” Cinema Scope, nr. 25, 2006, 29.
• 2Adrian Martin, “A Cinema of Intimate Spectacle: The Poetics of Philippe Garrel,” Cineaste, nr. 4, 2009, 37-41.

“It is necessary to understand with what vigor certain ideas seize certain men, who have passed through certain things and have occupied certain stations, in order to understand that a mission to the Ranquels [a tribe in northern La Pampa] can become, for a moderately civilized man like myself, a desire as vehement as a Paris embassy’s secretariat can be for a civil servant.”

Lucio V. Mansilla1

“Jauja, the latest film by Lisandro Alonso, was a surprise for many critics. That’s not because it’s so different from his four previous features, but because it demonstrates that his cinema has a much broader range of possibilities than many previously assumed, and obliges you to look at the entirety of his work, as you would the work of any filmmaker of grand aesthetic ambitions.

Don’t be fooled by the fact that Alonso’s filmography can be described in just a few words: all five of his features deal with solitary men in desolate lands, though the hidden dynamic between a majestic landscape and a society off-screen provides the tension in each story. Alonso’s narratives exist in opposition to those that are articulated by means of a traditional script; he has always found it tough to write a treatment, that almost mandatory instrument for obtaining funding and ensuring that a project becomes a film. Until Jauja, his films had virtually no dialogue, much less any that advanced the plot or defined the characters. The primary needs and desires of Alonso’s characters (food, sex, freedom of movement, family) are on full display, but their inner lives are opaque even to the filmmaker, and that’s what gives rise to the atmosphere of these films, so seemingly simple and yet so difficult to interpret. [...]

Jauja also features one Colonel Zuluaga, an army deserter disguised as a woman who leads a band of natives dedicated to looting. Like Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Zuluaga faces the horror of barbarism by merging with it, switching sides and even gender. But unlike the solemnity of its European and North American antecedents, Jauja adopts a tone of humor and farce in order to portray the dilemmas of a civilization faced with the unknown. The comedic aspect is clear enough in the scenes at the fort, with its lecherous officials obsessed with Inge, or the theft of Dinesen’s horse and rifle as he sets about the killing of his daughter’s abductor. But it’s also evident in the whole civilizing enterprise, which is tinged with enormous confusion: to begin with, the white soldiers, being mestizos, are not so civilized in the eyes of the Europeans. This confusion corresponds to the particular history of Argentina. As in the case of Masilla, a certain duality existed in the psyche of the ruling class, who looked as much to France as to the Pampa for their sense of identity, never quite knowing where they belonged, while regarding the natives as gaucho barbarians – much as cinema gazes disconcertedly into the abyss between high art and popular entertainment.”

Quintín2

“Working with Timo Salminen, a Finnish cinematographer best known for his hyperrealist lighting, Alonso crafts saturated, fine-grain images of the Patagonian wilderness. Jauja is set almost entirely outdoors, in bright daylight, with the 35 mm stock – still at an advantage over digital when it comes to direct sunlight – registering every fluttering moss, wisp of cloud, and wind-stirred tide pool. There’s no empty space in its deep-focus compositions; when the camera moves, it’s in awkward, swiveling jerks that recall the first decades of filmmaking. Again, there’s that sense that a birth is being re-staged, and we’re returning to the days when just filming and projecting something constituted a kind of miracle. Except that this something is imaginary and, not to put too fine a point on it, imaginative. A bare horizon is like a black-box stage; it invites the viewer to accept the unseen, and treats every intrusion – a flayed body, a stray dog, a hand creeping into the frame out of nowhere – as an event.”

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky3

• 1Lucio V. Mansilla, An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).
• 2Quintín, “Into the Unknown,” Film Comment, September 2014.
• 3Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “Jauja,” AvFilm, March 2015.

“Peggy and Fred is sometimes spoken of as ‘science fiction’, accurately to the extent that it’s a speculation of the fate of tomorrow. But the genius of the project aligns it more happily with an essay in natural history, like, for instance, Fabre’s insect census, but minus the template of moral metaphor. Peggy And Fred narrates a moral history of dystopia informed by cinephilia as the master science.

[...] Indeed, by conventional standards of narrative, nothing happens, or, rather, the minutiae of childhood play and reverie needs to be viewed and heard closely, and honored. In any case, the origin and the goal is that of history-to-come, not yet recorded. It will be, then, a history of the species’ illusions, the shards of the race’s cultural/genetic memories, and a knowledge of tribulation but not of shame, all carried through in the bodies of two people approximately adolescent. It is an interesting, patient, aspiration.”

Bill Horrigan1

“Peggy and Fred wordt soms beschouwd als science fiction, en dat is, voor zover het een toekomstspeculatie is, juist. De geest van het geheel komt echter meer overeen met een natuurhistorisch essay zoals bijvoorbeeld Fabres opsomming van insecten, maar dan zonder morele metafoor. Peggy and Fred vertelt een natuurlijke historie van distopie, gevormd door de cinefilie als meesterwetenschap. Maar het is een geschiedenis in delen.

[...] Er gebeurt inderdaad naar conventionele maatstaven niets, of, liever gezegd, de kleinigheden uit de jeugd spelen een belangrijke rol; er moet goed gekeken en geluisterd worden naar dromerijen en deze moeten op waarde geschat worden. In ieder geval is opzet en doel de geschiedenis die nog komen gaat, die nog onbeschreven is. Het zal dus een geschiedenis zijn van de illusies der mensheid, van de brokstukken van haar culturele/ genetische herinneringen, en een weten van rampspoed, maar niet van schaamte, en dit alles volvoerd in de gedaante van twee bijna adolescente mensen. Het is een interessant, geduldig streven.”

Bill Horrigan2

• 1Bill Horrigan, “A Note on Peggy and Fred in Hell,” Mediamatic, vol. 4 (1989).
• 2Bill Horrigan, “Adolescent Junglebook overschrijdt Scenic Paradise,” Mediamatic, vol. 4 (1989).

“I wanted to make the movie because I wanted to show books in difficulty, almost as if they were people in difficulty,” […] “I wanted the audience to suffer as if they were seeing animals or people burning.”

François Truffaut1

“Half the film is strictly visual, which makes me really happy. In almost all films, the footage of acted dialogue scenes tends to increase during shooting whereas the mute part (action scenes, scene of violence, love scenes, mute reactions) diminishes becase there’s never enough time to shoot all the scenes intended. Spurred on by all the silent films of the 1920s I have seen and seen again in the last two years, I cling to my ‘privileged moments’ so that they don’t get whittled down.”

François Truffaut2

• 1Quoted in Sanche de Gramont, “Life Style of Homo Cinematicus – François Truffaut,” New York Times Magazine, 15 June 1969.
• 2François Truffaut in his journal of Fahrenheit 451, which was later published in Cahiers du Cinéma in French and English.

“Unlike The Birth of a Nation, Battleship Potemkin, or Triumph of the Will, I Am Cuba is not a nationalist call to arms. It is the work of foreigners, misty-eyed with naive romanticism, determined to glorify what they presumed to be a relatively bloodless revolution that was souring before their eyes.”

“The only resolved opinion about I Am Cuba is that it did for cinematographic bravado what, say Fred Astaire did for dance, and is just as pleasurable. […] The star is Kalatozov’s camera, which, though almost exclusively handheld, seems at times to have a mind of its own as well as supernatural means of mobility.”

Garry Giddins1

“Kalatozov’s fancy shots are not limited to the opening extravaganza. There is a sequence later in the film that begins with the streets filling with demonstrators and then seemingly floats, in an unbroken take, into a high-rise cigar factory. His technique seems somewhat at odds with his purpose (you won’t find shots like these in Italian neo-realism), but then the movie itself alternates between lyricism and propaganda. Along with the scenes of evil Yankees and brave Castroites, there are astonishing helicopter shots of Cuban landscapes, and poetry and prose are read on the soundtrack (Columbus is quoted: "This is the most beautiful land ever seen by human eyes").”

Roger Ebert2

“Kalatozov’s artistry is obvious: many dizzying shots, seemingly impossible camera angles, fluid long takes - all of these make I Am Cuba a tour de force. In fact, the later film is much more political than some of Kalatozov’s usual Soviet films, alternating (as Ebert suggests) ‘lyricism and propaganda.’ Nonetheless, one culture’s propaganda. can be another culture’s social realism.”

Tom Zaniello3

• 1Garry Giddins, Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010.
• 2Roger Ebert, “I Am Cuba”, Chicago Sun Times, 8 december 1995.
• 3Tom Zaniello, Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Expanded Guide to Films about Labor, Cornell University Press, 2018.

“Watching [his films] brings to mind a comment made by John Ford to a collaborator who was complaining about the miserable weather conditions somewhere in the desert when they were trying to shoot a picture. The guy said, ‘Look, Mr. Ford, what can we shoot out here?’ and Ford replied, ‘What can we shoot? The most interesting and exciting thing in the whole world – a human face.’”

Martin Scorsese1

“In 1954 I was an assistant stage manager in New York and in the same year l finished my first film, The Night Holds Terror. In 1955 I acted in thirty-seven live television shows; in 1956 l did five; in 1957 I made three movies, including a good one called Edge of the City. At the end of 1957 we began filming a picture called Shadows, and that kept me busy until 1960. That was the year my wife had our first baby, and the year l did a TV series, followed by a quickie movie in Ireland. In 1961 – that was a bad year – a lot of waiting. In 1962 l directed my first Hollywood film, then signed a big contract with the same studio for some more punishment. In 1964 l left that studio and made my second Hollywood film, which wasn’t exactly a Hollywood film to start with. In fact it had a chance of being a very good film. But somehow it became a Hollywood film under the guidance of Hollywood people. This was especially painful because it was on a subject I cared about – retardation. From 1964 to 1965 I stayed home, looked at trees, at my family, wrote several scripts, and learned patience. In 1965 I took a job running a company – a TV package company – in partnership with Screen Gems. After six months of that, I looked back at my accomplishments and could find only two that l considered worthwhile – Shadows and Edge of the City. All the rest of my time had been spent playing games – painful and stupid, falsely satisfying and economically rewarding. Then at the end of 1965 Faces was born, out of friendships and mutual dissatisfactions.”

John Cassavetes2

“What, in our view, is so fine about Cassavetes’ film is that it makes us aware of one of the weaknesses of the cinema: its right and proper inability to explain the inner world, since all it can literally grasp are external signs, as being not unrelated to inner turmoil. [...] What we most admire about the film is that it has borrowed from the effects of alcohol – heightened awareness and lucidity, moments of emotion and flashes of insight – the very form, unsteady and rigorous, of its poetry.”

Sylvie Pierre3

“We are presented with ‘dead time’: an expenditure of energy and film stock that in narrative terms contributes little to our understanding of the characters, their motivations or problems. It is at this juncture, when, to borrow a phrase used by Antonioni, ‘everything already seems to have been said,’ that [...] reveals itself as a deliberate attempt to open the performance of character up to resonances, questions and points of view which cannot be answered or contained by the narrative.”

George Kouvaros4

“Caught in the film as in the very trap of their existence and subject to its rhythm, the characters in Faces are not stock characters: they are not predetermined, or put there once and for all, arbitrarily, at the beginning of the film; rather, they define themselves gesture by gesture and word by word as the film proceeds. That is to say that they are self-creating – the shooting is the means whereby they are revealed, each step forward in the film allowing them a new development in their behaviour, their time span coinciding exactly with that of the film. Once that is the case, cinematographic realism is out of the question: called into being by film, moulded by the peculiarities of the shooting and of the project in general, the characters – who are the one and only source of the fiction – no longer refer to some plausible reallife situation, of which they would be the more or less respectful representation; they are coherent and plausible only in relation to themselves, and in the context of the film itself. Certainly, there is nothing we see on the screen which has not also happened ‘in real life’, but ‘in real life’, in this case, means in front of the camera and through the camera. Cassavetes and his friends do not use the cinema as a way of reproducing actions, gestures, faces or ideas, but as a way of producing them.”

Jean-Louis Comolli5

“You start out extremely young and make an extremely young picture. As you get older, you make pictures about the way you feel at the time. You don’t think logically. You think in terms of mysterious elements of your life. I’m interested in middle-aged people because I’m in that generation and share their concerns. I’d feel completely incapable of making a film like Shadows about young people now. It’s not a question of being indifferent towards young people’s problems, but their experience of life and their goals and ambitions don’t connect with my own personal preoccupations. I’m only interested in what I am interested in. That’s what makes the film what it is. The minute it becomes a professional film, it is exploitative. It’s trying to sell you something. It’s trying to get you to buy it. A lot of bad movies are made because people are trying to make a living. The good ideas are the things that mean something to you. There’s plenty to say without having to be dishonest and make a movie you don’t care about.”

John Cassavetes6

• 1Scorsese on Faces in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995)
• 2John Cassavetes, ‘Introduction to Faces,’ New York: New American Library, 1970, 7-9.
• 3Sylvie Pierre, Jean-Louis Comolli: « Deux visages de Faces » (Translated as ‘Two Faces of Faces,’ by Annwyl Williams), Cahiers du Cinéma, October 1968.
• 4George Kouvaros, ‘Where does it happen? The place of performance in the work of John Cassavetes,’ Screen, 39:3, 1998, 251.
• 5Sylvie Pierre, Jean-Louis Comolli: « Deux visages de Faces » (Translated as ‘Two Faces of Faces,’ by Annwyl Williams), Cahiers du Cinéma, October 1968.
• 6John Cassavetes in Ray Carney, ‘Faces (1963-68),’ Cassavetes on Cassavetes, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2001, 134-135.

“Emblematic of Hollywood’s output of films dealing with the nation’s emerging gender problematic was United Artist’s realease of The Children’s Hour as the year came to a close. The Children’s Hour is a cinematic distillation of a number of the era’s social contradictions involving generational, gender, and class conflicts.”

Barry Keith Grant1

“There are no favorite settings or landscapes for Wyler. At most, there is an evident fondness for psychological scenarios set against social back­ grounds. Yet, even though Wyler has become a master at treating this kind of subject, adapted either from a novel like Jezebel or a play like The Little Foxes, even though his work as a whole leaves us with the piercing and rigorous impression of a psychological analysis, it does not call to mind sumptuously eloquent images suggesting a formal beauty that would demand serious consideration. The style of a director cannot be defined, however, only in terms of his predilection for psychological analysis and social realism, even less so here since we are not dealing with original scripts.”

André Bazin2

• 1Barry Keith Grant, American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations, Rutgers University Press, 2008.
• 2André Bazin, William Wyler, ou le Janséniste de la Mise en scène, Revue Du Cinéma, 1948.

“Jancsó developed the mise en scène in his strenuously physical way, pacing the terrain back and forth in all directions to work out the movements of the performers and those of the camera. Such actions lent themselves to Jancsó’s roaming long shots over people scattered in geographic space – his photo-tography and choreo-calligraphy. It’s an intensely processional film, as groups move in varying formations around, towards or even through one another. When individuals move, it’s always in relation to a group or groups (defying, inspecting or linking them ... ). As brusquely and strictly as he controlled the actors, he kept a sharp eye open for unexpected details, towards which he might, in mid-take, redirect the camera. Since the film was shot silent for subsequent post-synching, Jancsó could talk to the actors throughout the takes. Often, the actors had no idea if they were in shot or not, and whether to act ‘smaller’ because they were in close-up, or ‘larger’ to be legible in long shot. Jancsó shot very fast, averaging a shot a day – no mean feat, since the film has only twenty-eight shots.

The mise en scène interweaves six kinds – or dimensions – of space, movement and change. 1. Most unusual, of course, is the ‘walking choreography’, with its changing body-language (heads bowed thrustingly, impassivity ... ), its changing rhythms, its shifting vectors. 2. There’s also a strong ‘pictorialist’ dimension – the landscape ‘pictures’, often revealed gradually, by the camera shifting around them. 3. The camera movements themselves become a focus of attention, with their own kinesis, as does the apparent movement of the zoom. They’re ‘calligraphic’ in the true sense: the camera lens seems to ‘move across’ the scene as a pen moves across a piece of paper. (Most calligraphic camerawork doesn’t quite do this; unless its movement is especially intricate and persistent, it simply changes the shape of the scene.) 4. The meticulously wrought soundtrack, as when overlaid sounds add ‘aural space’ to visual space, or add a new texture. 5. The words (sparse, piecemeal, oblique), and their ideas, which ‘enlarge’ these local actions to wider patterns of history. Finally, 6. The music, with its moods, suggestions and kinaesthetic tensions.

Around this six-line counterpoint, each landscape in turn becomes an arena, like a theatrical space. (Jancsó went on to adapt Red Psalm for a Budapest theatre.) ‘Theatrical space’ is created not, as often supposed, by a stage or some equivalent enclosure, but by a ‘body of actors’ whose relations assert a visual and diegetic unity. In this respect, Jancsó anticipates Theo Angelopoulos, another figure-in-landscape artist. [...] The generally idyllic picture of rural life, if left to itself and its fertility-ritual religiosity, rather parallels Pasolini’s contemporaneous reflections on popular-traditional rural thought as pre-rationalist and pre-bourgeois. Thus Red Psalm, too, would be nearer Gramsci than Althusser.”

Raymond Durgnat1

• 1Raymond Durgnat, “Red Psalm,” Rouge, 2006.

During a preview tour, a theme park suffers a major power breakdown that allows its cloned dinosaur exhibits to run amok.

Dr. Ian Malcolm: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.

Dr. Ellie Sattler: Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth.

“Spielberg is de Walt Disney van de Nieuwe Film. Hij zorgt voor het family entertainment nieuwe stijl. Hij maakt films die het verlengde zijn van pretparken, die op hun beurt het verlengde zijn van nieuwe filmsensaties. Het medium vormt het lichaamsbeeld van de kinderen, hier worden de psychische patronen uitgezet waarop een later leven zijn ficties zal enten. Beelden functioneren hier niet als beeld, maar induceren fysieke sensaties en verhalen die drijven op ambivalenties. Want de ongehoorzame kinderen van weleer hebben nu volwassenen naast zich voor wie verantwoordelijkheid onbelangrijk zijn. Spielberg laat zijn personages en de toeschouwer in dat potje sudderen. De volwassen bezoeker herkent zich moeiteloos in zowel de klacht van de kinderen als in de krasse beperkingen van de volwassen. Goede gezinstherapie!”

Dirk Lauwaert1

“When Sophie Fiennes approached me with the idea to do a “pervert’s guide” to cinema, our shared goal was to demonstrate how psychoanalytic cinema-criticism is still the best we have, how it can generate insights which compel us to change our entire perspective. The “pervert” from the title is thus not a narrow clinical category; it rather refers to perverting – turning around - our spontaneous perceptions.

The usual reproach to psychoanalytic criticism is that it reduces everything to family complexes: whatever the story, it “really about” Oedipus, incest, etc. Instead of trying to prove that this is not true, one should accept the challenge. The films which are furthest from family dramas are catastrophe films, which cannot but fascinate the viewer with a spectacular depiction of a terrifying event of immense proportions. This brings us to the first psychoanalytic rule of how to read catastrophe movies: we should avoid the lure of the “big event” and re-focus on the “small event” (familial relations), reading the spectacular catastrophe as an indication of the family trouble. Take Steven Spielberg: the secret motif than runs through all his key films - E.T., Empire of the Sun, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List - is the recovery of the father, of his authority. One should remember that the family to whose small boy E.T. appears was deserted by the father (as we learn in the very beginning), so that E.T. is ultimately a kind “vanishing mediator” who provides a new father (the good scientist who, in the film’s last shot, is already seen embracing the mother) - when the new father is here, E.T. can leave “go home.”

And the same story goes on and on. Empire of the Sun focuses on a boy deserted by his family in the war-torn China and surviving through the help of an ersatz-father (played by John Malkovich). In the very first scene of Jurassic Park, we see the paternal figure (played by Sam Neill) jokingly threatening the two kids with a dinosaur bone - this bone is clearly the tiny object-stain which, later, explodes into gigantic dinosaurs, so that one can risk the hypothesis that, within the film’s fantasmatic universe, the dinosaurs’ destructive fury merely materializes the rage of the paternal superego. A barely perceptible detail that occurs later, in the middle of the film, confirms this reading. The pursued group of Neill with two kids take refugee from the murderous carnivorous dinosaurs in a gigantic tree, where, dead tired, they fall asleep; on the three, Neill loses the dinosaur bone that was stuck in his belt, and it is as if this accidental loss has a magic effect - before they fall asleep, Neill is reconciled with the children, displaying warm affection and care for them. Significantly, the dinosaurs which approach the three next morning and awaken the sleeping party, turn out to be of the benevolent herbivorous kind... Schindler’s List is, at the most basic level, a remake of Jurassic Park (and, if anything, worse than the original), with the Nazis as the dinosaur monsters, Schindler as (at the film’s beginning) the cynical-profiteering and opportunistic parental figure, and the ghetto Jews as threatened children (their infantilization in the film is eye-striking) - the story the film tells is about Schindler's gradual rediscovery of his paternal duty towards the Jews, and his transformation into a caring and responsible father.”

Slavoj Žižek2

“Jurassic Park is not an obvious nostalgia film and may be a puzzling choice as such for Americans. The film is oriented largely to children, who are not known to be nostalgic. It has neither Proustian moments of individual longing for a lost place and time, nor total Disney-style recreation of small-town life with period-clothed teenagers kissing on the spacious back seats of 1950s cars. The film exemplifies a different kind of nostalgia, not psychological but mythical, that has to do with a heroic American national identity. This kind of mythical nostalgia has geopolitical implications, since the dinosaur is a creature of global popular culture exported all over the world. What might appear as an expensive children’s game, innocuous and universal in the United States, strikes viewers in other parts of the world as an exemplary staging of the American myth, the myth of a new world that forgot its history and recreated prehistory brand-new-.”

Svetlana Boym3

“Phenomenologically, our social and cultural experience of watching movies has been irreversibly transformed by television, video, the computer, and computer networking. Has the medium of motion pictures also changed? And if so, what are the consequences for the study of film? The enormous popularity of Jurassic Park (1993) and the effect it had on mainstream filmmakers marked a turning point in this respect wherein the relative positioning of the photographic and the digital was reversed. From this moment forward, the major creative forces in the industry began to think of the photographic process as an obstacle to creativity, as something to be overcome, rather than as the very medium of cinematic creation. In a previous era of cinematic creation, the physical world both inspired and resisted the imagination; in the age of digital synthesis, physical reality has entirely yielded to the imagination. In this state of affairs, celluloid filmstock continues to persist primarily as a distribution medium because of the installed base of projection equipment in movie theaters and worries about piracy. But this may not continue for long.”

D.N. Rodowick4

Gerard-Jan Claes and Nina de Vroome: You are translating a world of words to a world of images, which is always exterior. You are also writing a story in which characters are performing actions and are placed in specific situations. Are you indicating the director how he is supposed to translate those words back into images? For example, in Jurassic Park, you have specifically paid attention to the way things are revealed. The first time we see the dinosaurs, there is an elaborate build-up to the moment the spectator actually gets to see them. We first see the expression of the characters discovering the creatures, the impact it has on them, before discovering them ourselves. Is this procedure of looking and revealing part of the script?

David Koepp: Yes, the screenwriter has a responsibility to describe all the images, to conceive all of them. With Jurassic Park, Steven [Spielberg] was working on the project before me. The great filmmaker that he is, he had of course brilliant visual concepts, so he contributed extensively to the development of the script. But in any script I still think it is the writer’s responsibility to take the first crack in any action or adventure sequence, and describe it in ways that make it seem visually come alive. When I started working on Jurassic Park, Steven already had a clear idea about certain sequences. So I was lucky in that regard. But normally I am always writing my first path of how I think the action scenes should be. You need to write in such a way that you are invoking images in the reader’s mind. Not just particular images, but mainly the rhythm in which you want them to occur. If the scene is going faster, you provide more space on the page because the person will start to read faster. Then their mind will be creating the movie as they read. I spend a lot of time with that, because it’s an essential part of screenwriting and I think too many writers just fall back on the lumps of descriptions, saying “the director will figure out the action scenes.” No, you have to figure out the action scenes first and you have to present it in a way that not just the director, but everybody that reads it, can see it. For example, I use a lot of white space on the page, break sentences midway through to imply that there’s a cut, any other tricks I can use to arrange the words on the page. That it flows like an action scene and not just a dead splotch of indecipherable action. Writing an action scene is a very particular skill. It’s craft.

Gerard-Jan Claes and Nina de Vroome in conversation with David Koepp, screenwriter of Jurassic Park5

• 1Dirk Lauwaert, “Spielberg versus Rohmer,” Kunst & Cultuur, nr. 12, 1992.
• 2Slavoj Žižek, “A Pervert’s Guide to Family,” Lacan Dot Com.
• 3Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, (New York: Basic Books, 2001) 46.
• 4D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, (London: Harvard University Press, 2007) 28.
• 5Gerard-Jan Claes and Nina de Vroome, ““I have never been a big fan of reality”. A Conversation with David Koepp,” Sabzian, 4 July 2018.

Are you lonesome tonight,
Do you miss me tonight?
Are you sorry we drifted apart?
Does your memory stray to a brighter sunny day

Elvis

“This film is dedicated to my father and his generation, who suffered so much for my generation to suffer less. I hope they, the forgotten, can be made unforgettable.”

Edward Yang1

“Begin at the beginning. The opening moments introduce the rules, the intrinsic norms, of Yang’s film. During the credits, a hanging lightbulb is switched on. Pulsating light becomes a multivalent motif throughout the film, carried via a flashlight, abrupt power cuts, and in a climax some hours later, a lightbulb smashed by a baseball bat. As the credits continue, a flagrantly uninformative extreme long shot shows a man pleading with an unseen educator. He’s complaining about his son’s grades and asking about the boy’s transfer to a night school. Who is he? In probably the most unemphatic introduction of a protagonist in Taiwanese cinema, we get another extreme long shot of the boy we’ll come to call Si’r, waiting outside. It’s Kuleshov constructive editing at work. There’s no long shot establishing the two spaces, nor can we assume that the first shot is, retrospectively, Si’r’s optical POV. But Kuleshov, who cared about punchy clarity, could hardly have approved of the far-off, information-stingy framings. Throughout the film we’ll see doorways block off parts of the action, extremely distant views frame a few scrubby figures, and shots dwelling on empty zones. This opening teaches us how to watch the movie.

The result is that story motifs – the light bulb, the flashlight, the mother’s watch, a samurai sword, a vagrant snapshot, rock-and-roll tunes, baseball bats – don’t simply repeat across the film but rather mingle and overlap. Tony Rayns speaks of ‘resonances’; we could as easily talk of ‘ramifications.’ Each prop or incident radiates in several directions, becoming a node in several plot lines. The dots we connect fuse in a multidimensional space. The strategy has affinities to Yang’s earlier films, but in none of them do we have this spacious dramatic density.”

David Bordwell2

“In fact, the other writers and I built up detailed psychological profiles and personal histories for virtually every character in the film [There are over eighty speaking parts]. If someone asked me to make a 300-episode TV series about these people, I’d have the material to do it. [...] In structuring the film, we looked for ironies and tried to set up connecting chains of action and reaction. We tried to anchor it by tying characters to particular events, but each strand was designed to contribute to the scope of what we were building up. It took us some time to work it all out. Even though the full version runs four hours, I think it’s very lean.”

Edward Yang in conversation with Tony Rayns3

“When we were hanging out and talking about what we were going to make as filmmakers, one thing we agreed on was that we would make our own stories from our own perspectives and that we would depict reality. A Brighter Summer Day actually came from Yang’s own personal experience, plus a very sensationalized news story at the time about this particular incident. And you can see Chang Chen, The Assassin’s (Hou, 2015) lead actor, in his first film. He was fourteen years old at the time and already very good-looking.”

Hou Hsiao-hsien in conversation with Kent Jones4

• 1Edward Yang, Director's Statement, 1991, Criterion booklet.
• 2David Bordwell, “A Brighter Summer Day: Yang and his gangs,” Observations on Film Art, 16 June 2016.
• 3Tony Rayns, “Lonesome tonight,” Sight and Sound, March issue, 1994.
• 4Hillary Weston, “Hou Hsiao-hsien on the Films That Changed His Life,” The Criterion Collection - The Current, 20 October 2015.

A native of Mauritania is delighted when he is chosen to work in Paris. Hoping to parlay the experience into a better life for himself, he eagerly prepares for his departure from his native land. Although an educated man, he has extreme difficulty finding work and an apartment. He sees racial inequity as blacks are relegated to manual labor while less skilled whites are given preferential treatment. A dinner with a liberal white friend even reveals a continuing attitude of colonization towards third world countries. The disappointed man runs off to the woods where he hears the far off cry of the jungle drums calling him home from a cold and indifferent land.

“God is surely a white man.”

“Unless he’s a negro.”

“Well if he’s a negro then he’s the biggest bastard the world ever invented.”

D’origine mauritanienne, Mohamed Medoun Hondo Abid, dit Med Hondo, est né le 4 mai 1936, à M’raa une oasis saharienne. Après des études dans une école professionnelle marocaine. Il s’embarque un beau jour pour le pays de ses ancêtres les Gaulois.

S’étant initié au cinéma en voyant film sur film, il tourne deux courts métrages en 16 mm, noir et blanc : Ballade aux sources et Partout ou peut-être nulle part.

C’est sans un sou qu’il commence le tournage de Soleil Ô en 1969, avec des amis qui acceptent de travailler en participation. Le devis de ce film de 98 minutes ne s’élève qu’à 18 millions d’anciens francs : les frais de pellicule, la location de la caméra 16 mm (le film a été gonflé en 35 par la suite) et du magnétophone Nagra. Le tournage dure une année.

Guy Hennebelle : Med Hondo, pourquoi Soleil Ô ?

Med Hondo : S’il me fallait définir ce film en un seul mot, je dirais : c’est un vomissement ! Ce qui m’intéressait, ce n’était pas de faire du cinéma, c’était d’exprimer, de crier, de hurler la révolte du Nègre que je suis. Même si j’avais été certain que le film resterait sous mon lit dans des boîtes, je l’aurais fait. Il fallait que je me libère de la réalité oppressante que je m’entourait depuis dix ans que je vivais à Paris. Ce qui m’a guidé prioritairement dans la réalisation, c’est le souci de traduire la réalité intérieure de mon héros problématique. J’ai horreur du « nombrilisme » dans lequel s’enferme une grande partie du cinéma français. Moi, si je fais du cinéma c’est pour dire quelque chose.

La plupart des film africains réalisés à ce jour restent prisonniers d’esthétiques relativement traditionnelles. Soleil Ô, au contraire ; manifeste une profonde originalité.

L’essentiel pour moi était de trouver le meilleur moyen d’exprimer ce que j’avais à cœur, ce qui me pesait sur le cœur. Je tenais absolument à ce que Soleil Ô soit un film violent. J’ai cherché à faire partager par le spectateur le sentiment du héros : il débarque en France et le voilà bombardé de toutes partes par des événements qui constituent autant d’aggressions.

Guy Hennebelle en conversation avec Med Hondo1

« Toutes les scènes partent de réalités. On n’invente pas le racisme, surtout au cinéma. On ne l’invente pas. Ce sont des choses bien précises que vous subissez et que vous enveloppent. C’est une espèce de manteau qu’on vous met dessus et avec lequel vous êtes obligé de vivre. Toutes les scènes un peu anecdotiques, même celles qui sont poussées à l’extrême, partent d’une expérience vécue.”

Robert Liensol2

« Réalisé en France par Med Hondo et les acteurs de théâtre noirs fixés à Paris, Soleil Ô me paraît le film qui jusqu’à maintenant exprime le mieux l’Afrique. Est-ce paradoxal ? Pas tellement. L’éloignement, la nostalgie du pays, l’identité qui se confirme face à d’autres (à nous autres) qui sont différents et se jugent supérieurs doivent logiquement renforcer non pas un Africanisme archaïque et verbal que Med Hondo refuse, mais une Africanité globale (aussi bien, les acteurs proviennent, de tous les coins du monde noir) aucunement anecdotique. Et l’exil doit favoriser aussi le côté visionnaire que développent certaines partie du film.

Mais en outre ce film est un regard sur nous dont nous avons besoin, un regard fier, un peu âpre quelquefois, mais nuancé par l’humour, sur notre comportement à l’égard des Noirs, dans la vie de tous les jours à Paris, un regard sur notre civilisation de gaspillage qui est juste, mais qui est plus perçant venant d’hommes qui leurs origines rattachent aux domaines de notre pillage et (avant ce pillage) à une sagesse, une intimité dans les rapports avec la nature que nous n’avons guère connue à ce point dans toute notre histoire.

Il n’est pas sûre que dans son mode d’expression très personnel, Soleil Ô, plaise à tout le monde, mais il est sûr qu’on doit le voir si on s’intéresse soit au destin de l’Afrique, soit au cinéma. »

Bernard Tremege3

“Soleil Ô, a title that owes allegiance to the old song of African slaves en route to the West Indies, sung to express indignation over their abrupt disengagement from their native land, is Med Hondo’s first feature-length film. Described by the maker in the opening sequence as a ‘pamphlet,’ this film meticulously attacks foreign imperialism in Africa from slavery to the present. It is this colonial-neocolonial paradox that provides the core of Soleil Ô’s complex structure. In it we see a tapestry of history fashioned as an avant-garde essay on racism and the intense sense of estrangement and alienation to which Med Hondo and entire black immigrant communities in France are subjected.

“I make films,” Hondo said, “to show people the problems they face everyday and to help them fight those problems.” Soleil Ô begins with an animated sequence of an African puppet ruler being catapulted to power by foreign military intervention only to have his reign terminated by the same people who installed him. From here, the film’s subsequent episodes revolve around a young African immigrant, an accountant, whose experience Hondo uses to dramatize the frustrating existence of numerous other black immigrant workers (Africans and West Indians) living in France. The accountant goes through unprecedented humiliation as he faces racially motivated rejection looking for a job and accommodations; even when he does menial jobs, cold attitudes greet him. As he meanders through dehumanizing settings, indicative of living conditions for blacks in France, Hondo synthesizes contradictory vignettes of colonial and neocolonial life suggestive of Africa’s relationship with France. Subjected to anguish, mental torment, and internal conflict, the accountant is forced to reflect on his conscience, seeking solace in a hospitable enclave where social and political actions for self-determination and liberation are preferably contemplated. The last segment is a meditative sequence with glimpses of superimposed images of martyred revolutionaries (Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara, Malcolm X) shown as cultural metaphors reminiscent of Fanon’s concept of returning to one’s roots.”

Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike4

“This questioning of aesthetics as a benign sphere without political ramifications is also questioned as a means of distancing the viewer from the visceral impact of depictions of suffering and oppression and figures as another aspect that Third Cinema brings to its criticisms of mainstream media practices. The latter’s slick, almost parasitical use of debilitating images of a suffering that takes place elsewhere (‘blood of others flowing from the television’) can be contrasted to such directors as Med Hondo when, back in 1978, he offered that ‘to depict the objective reality of people… we must live it in the first person’.”

Howard Slater5

« Au-delà de ses défauts de constructions, d’un style souvent chaotique et de passages a vide, Soleil Ô s’impose à l’évidence : rarement première œuvre aura offert une telle impression de force, de bouillonnement, de richesse de témoignage. Moins européen que Désiré Ecaré, d’un humour moins feutré, moins soumis que Ousmane Sembene aux pièges tendus par le néo-réalisme, Med Hondo a réalisé un film dérangeant, qui laisse une brûlure sur l’esprit. Soleil Ô est un film primitif au sens noble du terme comme pouvait l’être, au Brésil, Le Dieu Noir et le Diable Blond [Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol] auquel, par bien des aspects, il faut penser : c’est en effet la même rage d’attaquer, de dénoncer, d’aller jusqu’au bout de soi-même que l’on trouve dans le premier long métrage de Hondo. A travers le portait et les mésaventures d’un Noir qui débarque à Paris et se heurte d’abord à l’indifférence puis au racisme des Français, Hondo s’attaque à un système, à une façon de voir, de comprendre, à une morale. »

Positif6

« Très riche sur le plan thématique, Soleil Ô est d’autre part d’une facture esthétique remarquable. D’emblée, l’auteur a su dépasser les styles souvent surranés dans lesquels d’autres cinéastes africains piétinent encore. Sa mise en scène est délibérément moderne, sans être pour autant d’inspiration occidentale. Tout au plus, peut-on lui reprocher le recours intermittent à quelques tics du théâtre dit d’avant-garde. Le mérite de Med Hondo est, fondamentalement, d’avoir su combiner avec beaucoup d’intelligence, le « discours » didactique et la « représentation » spectaculaire.

On notera aussi l’importance de la bande sonore, le plus souvent en étroit rapport dialectique avec l’image. Deux exemples : après avoir discuté de leurs conditions d’existence en France, divers Africains concluent par intermédiaire du commentaire en voix off qui rien ce chargera jusqu’à ce que … On entend alors un déclic et l’on voit surgir une lame de couteau libérée de son cran d’arrêt. »

Guy Hennebelle7

“It was purely by chance that we ended up being artists ‘of colour’, as is the term usually used. In Paris together for basically the same reasons, Bachir, Touré, Robert and I found ourselves right in the middle of a country, a city, where we had to get by, for a lack of better words, where we had to work: being an actor, a musician, a singer. And where we realized immediately the doors were closed […]. As a solution we thought of creating a theater group and, in the meantime, we all made Soleil Ô. In order to make the film we had to overcome every bureaucratic and material obstacles, in other words, find a producer and tell him: “It’s the best story around, because we believe in it”. Like they say: “If you’re good at talking, you’re good at making film”. And so, we made Soleil Ô without money […]. All the scenes were based on reality. Because racism isn’t invented, especially in film. It’s like a kind of cloak put on you, that you’re forced to live with. Even the confession scene, at the beginning: in fact, in the Antilles, where I was born, they taught children that knowing how to speak Creole was a sin to confess. 

I know that the cinema you called cinéma-vérité has always avoid saying things of the kind. The only thing it has done in this sense is take black faces and mix them in the crowds. To demonstrate that as the West continues to expand itself economically, the more it will need black labor. And so Africa will always be an underdeveloped continent: saying the contrary is a lie […].

The original idea was to show tourist spots packed with blacks only. All of a sudden you would see Sacré-Cœur, and you would see only blacks. It would have had a powerful cinematographic impact. But the idea remained on paper and wasn’t translated into images.”

Med Hondo8  

“So we return to the necessity of knowing what we want to say, and to whom we have to say it. For what public has learned to read, to decode a film? An elite public. But there are other publics. Film criticism does not play its role, or rather, it plays it too well. The handful of critics we know whom I will qualify as “progressive” must then fight in place of all the others. They have no right not to be present, they must reject demagogy, paternalism, quasi-journalism. For if they desert, what remains? Criticism as practiced in the columns of the right-wing press does not interest me. My relations with progressive critics have never been negative. I must say it is thanks above all the western press, especially the French press, that the films which have been seen have been available, an that Africans have been informed about them. For sure, with some inadequacies on some people’s part, but without undue paternalism. Criticism’s influence on the conscious public, on the distributors, is an essential and often decisive support. It is very encouraging and positive that our films are taken into consideration, that they are dealt with on an equal footing, and so with the same rigor as all the other. Sembene, Tawfiq Salah, I myself and many other have been put into the festivals and some theatres thanks to some critics, whose initial battles were sometimes with their own editors.

For me the country where for over ten years film criticism has never yielded up its responsibilities, is France. I don’t forget that Soleil Ô came out in a 64-seat theatre because the critics fought to find a screening space when so many owners were indifferent or suspicious. Today, when an American distributor or journalist wants African films (a rare occurrence), he telephones or writes to a French journalist: it is significant, all the same.

That said, an African film criticism is indispensable. At the present time, very few critics can express themselves in our countries, and they only have a very relative power (to inform, that is) on their national, even local level. The lack of a film criticism is not Africa’s special privilege. But it is a historical given that western film criticism is, today, the only one capable of reviewing our attempts; of informing the public and helping us; of studying and reflecting on African and Arab cinema. We, as African filmmakers, must ourselves invent, in our own, the film language to be spoken to be able to be understood, one day by our brothers. You are witnesses. On this account, you must not make out that our actions are in accordance with our ideas when it is not true. I mean that one does not have the right when defending progressive intentions, when one is a creative artist, a theorist, a critic, to produce or defend a consumer cinema. The public has to be awakened, or re-awakened. That demands courage. A leftwing (or so-styled) filmmaker or critic, then, is only doing his duty; we don’t have to award ourselves “medals.””

Med Hondo9

• 1Guy Hennebelle, « Entretien avec Med Hondo, » Ecran (11), 1973. Republie sur Sabzian.
• 2Jean Delmas, « Soleil Ô. Entretien avec Med Hondo et Robert Liensol, » Jeune Cinéma 48 (Juin-Juillet 1970). Republie sur Sabzian.
• 3Bernard Tremege, « Soleil Ô,» Jeune Cinéma (67), 1972.
• 4Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
• 5Howard Slater, “Unparaphraseable Life – Notes on Third Cinema,” Datacide, June 2017.
• 6 « Soleil Ô de Med Hondo, » Positif (119), 1970.
• 7Guy Hennebelle, « Soleil Ô, » Ecran (11), 1973.
• 8Med Hondo, Jeune Cinéma (48), 1970, quoted at Il Cinema Ritrovato.
• 9Med Hondo, ‘The Cinema of Exile,’ in Film & Politics in the Third World, edited by John D.H. Downing (Autonomedia: New York, 1987).

“And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.”

Revelation 6:1

Elem Klimov: Come and See was fully shot only on Belarusian soil. The events with the people, the peasants, actually happened as shown in the film. Come and See doesn’t have any professional actors. Even the language spoken in the film is Belarusian. What was important was that all the events depicted in the film really did happen in Belarus.

Ron Holloway: The stylistic elements in Come and See are striking. It goes from realism to surrealism. It gradually unfolds into an horrific visit of war. What were your aims? To make a war film? Or something entirely different from other war films?

Klimov: On the one hand, Come and See is a memory about war. A people’s memory about the war. And it was meant to be a people’s film. That is, the recollections of the most horrible moments of the war. On the other hand, the main thrust, the main point, of this film was directed towards the present. Come and See is both an antifascist film and an antiwar film.

Holloway: How did you achieve the stylistic colours in Come and See? It seems that even the film laboratory played an important role in the film’s stylistic conception.

Klimov: We wanted to be realistic to the maximum. It’s almost like making a documentary, but our method was not to copy the documentary style or even the process of making a documentary. That’s why we decided not to make a black-and-white film. Our position, on the other hand, was that the war, and life as it went on during the war, were both full of different colours. I even found a German newsreel documentary – titled Signal – that had been filmed on colour stock. In fact, I viewed many war films – all fascist war films made by the Germans – that had also been filmed in colour. But at the same time we didn't want to make a colour film, strictly speaking. We only wanted it to be colored – that is, of a darker colour, or a kind of softer colour. So the cinematographer, Alexei Rodionov, did everything he could to present on the screen a colour film but made in black-and-white. And at the same time not making use of black-and-white film stock.

Elem Klimov in conversation with Ron Holloway1

• 1Transcript from the documentary Klimov (Ron Holloway, 1988).

The film portrays the journey of two children in search of their father, whom they believe lives in Germany. On the way they meet many people, including a troupe of actors (a reference to Angelopoulos' early movie The Travelling Players), and encounter dangers.

“Before I saw Angelopoulos’s film, I, who had been brought up without a father, would never have thought that I would discover him in the image of a tree. This last scene of Landscape in the Mist was a revelation for me. It is a unique, one could say ‘Japanese’ moment, which surprised me, because I had always thought of the Greek tradition as exclusively one of stones, rocks, and gods. I saw in that scene a challenge to every inhibition and authority. This is why I would use Bergman’s words to say that the goal of cinema is to bring the dream back into our life, and thus help us to confront life’s difficulties.”

Dusan Makavejev

Serge Toubiana and Frédéric Strauss: The “landscape” in the title of your new film seems to carry a particular significance. One could consider the two children who are the protagonists ofthe films to be a kind oflandscape which you observe as ifyou were watching from a distance a place that is not familiar but you would like to get acquainted with.

Theodoros Angelopoulos: Yes, it’s what I refer to as human geography. It often happens when you look at a film where you feel you know everything there is to know about the physical aspect of the persons on screen and there is nothing more for you to find out about them. Landscape in the Mist is a kind of fairytale in which I was trying to preserve the delight and wonder of an initial discovery.

Serge Toubiana and Frédéric Strauss in conversation with Theodoros Angelopoulos1

• 1Serge Toubiana and Frédéric Strauss, “Landscape in the Mist”, in Theo Angelopoulos. Interviews, edited by Dan Fainaru (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001). Originally published in Cahiers du Cinema 413, 1988, translated by Dan Fainaru.

“This sense of unrootedness and disorientation may stem largely from an aesthetic dissonance between Fassbinder and Genet [whose novel Querelle de Brest was adapted by Fassbinder], both in terms of agenda and the times in which they were working. Genet’s novels allow the reader no ironic distance (though they employ irony in its various forms); even when they are explicitly self-referential they are intended to envelop the reader, to overwhelm him/her with perverse beauty and extravagant wordplay. In Genet’s Querelle [...], homosexuality is equated with crime and perversion not so much, as Fassbinder scholar Wallace Watson claims, because Genet was ‘homophobic’, but because Genet was writing within a tradition of transgressive literature in which depravity and degradation are presented as potentially transcendent, even utopian [...]. As such, even while it’s important to acknowledge the political underpinnings of much of his writing, Genet’s novels were very much about transgression and homosexuality.

By contrast, Fassbinder’s ‘gay’ films that predate his Querelle are never about homosexuality; they merely focus on gay characters. These characters are no more or less moral, no more or less perverse, than their heterosexual counterparts in the same or other films. When his characters seek transcendence or wax utopian, he nearly always maintains an ironic distance and signals well in advance of actual events that their attempts to transcend are doomed by their own near-sightedness, or inarticulateness, or selfishness. Similarly, his films seldom reward the violence of his characters. He does not present physical violence as ecstatic: while his characters sometimes find a kind of ecstasy in their own masochism, they neither transcend the limits of their personalities nor succeed in transforming themselves. For Fassbinder, these self-destructive desires are entrapping, not liberating. Perhaps most significantly, Fassbinder’s plays and films share a consistent distrust of anything that smacks of utopianism, which he seems to equate again and again with fascism.”

Frank Episale1

Throughout the film the figure of Querelle remains unaltered. He does not seem to suffer from the pressure of events, nor does he bow down to the demands of social life: in the brothel, at the police station, on the boat, facing his superior, he always appears in a pair of cloth trousers, his torso in a tight vest that sets off his muscles. Feline and sure of himself, Querelle’s poses glorify his body. Querelle carries his body erect, statue‐like, never slouching or bending, no matter what the circumstances. This permanent refusal to bow to the demands of the system is a sign of an identity that escapes any normalization. But once again in Fassbinder, the cost of resistance to outside determination – the cost of otherness – is solitude. In fact, Querelle is a being entirely apart; he is on the margins of a community whose rules he rejects. Murder and betrayal underpin his identity and guarantee his total separation from the group and its codes.

Claire Kaiser2

Querelle produces a queer male community that appears to be organized around sameness yet is not, its group irreducible to a single identity. Scarcely characters, or even gay characters, these male figures seem to embody tensions and charges that move in a number of different directions at once, directions not adequately covered by categories of sex. (According to Genet’s biographer, Edmund White, Querelle de Brest was ‘a violent story of homosexual love among heterosexual men.’) Fassbinder, who consistently minimized the importance of identity politics even while dramatically staging the obstacles experienced by people of those very identities, averred of Querelle: ‘It is not a film about murder and homosexuality. It’s a film about someone trying, with all the means that are possible in society, to find his identity.’”

Caryl Flinn3

Each man kills the thing he loves…
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with a sword.

Each man kills the thing he loves…
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the bands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold.

Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ which is set to music in Querelle

More than just being adept at artful provocations of the right and left (sometimes simultaneously), the particular transgressive nature of [Jean] Genet’s writing – inverting identities, or featuring those that get stuck halfway – shaped Fassbinder’s work just as much as Sirk’s use of space.

Violet Lucca4

• 1Frank Episale, “Genet Meets Fassbinder: Sexual Disorientation(s) in Querelle,” Bright Lights Film Journal, August 2006.
• 2Claire Kaiser, “Exposed Bodies; Evacuated Identities,” in: Brigitte Peucker (ed.), A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Oxford: Wiley & Blackwell, 2012), 108.
• 3Caryl Flinn, “Declined Invitations. Repetition in Fassbinder’s Queer ’Monomusical’,” in: Brigitte Peucker (ed.), A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Oxford: Wiley & Blackwell, 2012), 325-326.
• 4Violet Lucca, “Fassbinder Diary #3: Querelle,” Film Comment, 3 December 2014.