Agenda

EN

“Broken View doesn’t shy away from the ambiguity and appeal of the hand-coloured photos which were used to impose the racist discourse of the Belgian colonial nightmare. Instead, it captures the diabolical essence of the latter, conveying its mind-numbing complexity, in an accumulation of quotations and overexposure of images and texts which turn it into a jam-packed and painful essay, as well as an aesthetically exhilarating film.”

Roberto Oggiano1

“Both the essayistic montage and the collage, the poetics I turned to in this film, bring together elements that often have little to do with one another. They do this, as the writer Brian Dillon wrote about the essay form, ‘in such a way that the scandal or shock of their proximity arrives alongside a conviction that they have always belonged together’. So, these images must be accompanied by other images, brought into relation with other, maybe even seemingly unconnected images. These relationships are not comparisons or equations, but the threads of an unfinished fabric, a continuous work of de- and reassembly, a broader, perhaps speculative contextualization. Assemblages are formed in which the figures are brought into each other’s orbit, within a wider frame and into another timeline than those of the photographs they were taken out of, inserting them into new constellations, trying to find new rhythms. In doing so, I hope to make visible some of the brushstrokes with which they were originally made, the power relations these images texturized and helped (helplessly) to fabulate, the purposes they were to serve. The film is an essay, an atlas of sorts, or an album where fragments of images and language exchange their shortcomings, what words can show and what images can say.”

Hannes Verhoustraete2

• 1Roberto Oggiano, “Review: Broken View,” Cineuropa, 30 June 2023.
• 2Hannes Verhoustraete, “Broken View. Congo and the magic lantern,” FORUM+ 30, no. 1-2 (2023): 68-79. 

EN

“A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal world, in unreal misery – and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core.”

Werner Herzog1

Paul Cronin: You have a reputation as someone who goes to extremes.

Werner Herzog: If you give a piece of an unknown metal alloy to a chemist, he will examine its structure by putting it under great pressure and exposing it to great heat; this gives him a better understanding of what that metal is composed of. The same can be said of human beings, who often give insight into their innermost being when under duress. We are defined in battle. The Greeks had a saying: “A captain only shows during a storm.” Shooting under a certain amount of pressure and insecurity injects real life and vibrancy that wouldn’t otherwise be there into a film. But I wouldn’t be sitting here if I had ever risked anyone’s life while making a film. I’m a professional who never looks for difficulties; my hope is always to avoid problems.

During filming on Mount Erebus in Antarctica, I wanted to be lowered down into the live volcano with a camera, but quickly realised how stupidly dangerous it was. However curious I was personally, I knew there wasn’t any good reason to get those shots when it came to the film I was making. I don’t believe in fate and destiny, but I have great faith in probability; I make sure that whatever I do puts me firmly on the side of safety. Perhaps mountaineers are motivated to seek out the most difficult routes, but not me. As a filmmaker, such an attitude would be wholly unprofessional and irresponsible, and being my own producer means it’s especially in my interests to work as efficiently as possible. When it came to Fitzcarraldo, I knew there would be certain inevitable problems to overcome, which meant it was inevitable I wasn’t going to shy away from them. Some challenges can’t be shirked. But in heading directly into such things, I’m only doing my duty. I have never gone out seeking inhospitable terrain to film in, nor have I ever taken idiotic risks, as a blind, stupid daredevil would do. I’m aware of my reputation of being a ruthless madman, but when I look at Hollywood – which is a completely crazed place – it’s clear to me that I’m the only clinically sane person there. As my wife will convincingly testify, I am a fluffy husband.”

Werner Herzog in conversation with Paul Cronin2

“We must ask of reality: how important is it, really? And: how important, really, is the Factual? Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges. If only the factual, upon which the so-called cinéma vérité fixates, were of significance, then one could argue that the vérité – the truth – at its most concentrated must reside in the telephone book—in its hundreds of thousands of entries that are all factually correct and, so, correspond to reality. If we were to call everyone listed in the phone book under the name “Schmidt,” hundreds of those we called would confirm that they are called Schmidt; yes, their name is Schmidt. 

In my film Fitzcarraldo, there is an exchange that raises this question. Setting off into the unknown with his ship, Fitzcarraldo stops over at one of the last outposts of civilization, a missionary station: 

Fitzcarraldo: And what do the older Indians say?
Missionary: We simply cannot cure them of their idea that ordinary life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams. 

The film is about an opera being staged in the rainforest; as you’ll know, I set about actually producing opera. As I did, one maxim was crucial for me: an entire world must undergo a transformation into music, must become music; only then would we have produced opera. What’s beautiful about opera is that reality doesn’t play any role in it at all; and that what takes place in opera is the overcoming of nature. When one looks at the libretti from operas (and here Verdi’s Force of Destiny is a good example), one sees very quickly that the story itself is so implausible, so removed from anything that we might actually experience that the mathematical laws of probability are suspended. What happens in the plot is impossible, but the power of music enables the spectator to experience it as true.”

Werner Herzog3

• 1Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless. Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
• 2Paul Cronin, Werner Herzog - A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin (London: Faber & Faber, 2002).
• 3Werner Herzog, “On the absolute, the sublime and the ecstatic truth,” Arion, 2010. Translated by Moira Vogel.

EN

“We keep a-comin. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out. They can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever Pa, ‘cause we’re the people.”

Henry Fonda as Tom Joad

“After being overrated in its time as a social testament, it is now underrated both as a Hollywood movie (not glossily mythic enough) and as a Ford memento (not purely personal enough). What does stand up to every test of time, however, is Henry Fonda’s gritty incarnation of Tom Joad, a volatile mixture of prairie sincerity and snarling paranoia. […] His physical and spiritual stature is not that of the little man as victim, but of the tall man as troublemaker. His explosive anger has a short fuse and we have only his word for it that he is tough without being mean. Indeed, it is mainly his awkwardness in motion that suggests his vulnerability. His putatively proletarian hero becomes ominously menacing in that shadowy crossroads where social justice intersects with personal vengeance.”

Andrew Sarris1

“Zanuck has more than kept his word. He has a hard, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly it has a hard, truthful ring. No punches are pulled – in fact, with descriptive matter removed, it is a harsher thing than the book, by far. It seems unbelievable but it is true.”

John Steinbeck2

Peter Bogdanovich: What attracted you to the The Grapes of Wrath?

John Ford: l just liked it, that’s all. I’d read the book – it was a good story – and Darryl Zanuck had a good script on it. The whole thing appealed to me – being about simple people – and the story was similar to the famine in Ireland, when they threw the people off the land and left them wandering on the roads to starve. That may have had something to do with it – part of my Irish tradition – but I liked the idea of this family going out and trying to find their way in the world. It was a timely story. lt’s still a good picture – l saw part of it on TV recently.

Gregg Toland did a great job of photography – absolutely nothing but nothing to photograph, not one beautiful thing in there – just sheer good photography. I said to him, “Part of it will be in blackness, but let’s photograph it. Let’s take a chance and do something different.” lt worked out all right.

Had you planned to end with Fonda going up over the hill?

That was the logical end, but we wanted to see what the hell was happening to the mother and father and the girl; and the mother had a little soliloquy which was all right.

John Ford in conversation with Peter Bogdanovich3

• 1Andrew Sarris, The John Ford Movie Mystery (London: Indiana University Press, 1975), 97.
• 2John Steinbeck, “Letter, 12.15.39,” in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, eds., Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (New York: Viking Press, 1975).
• 3Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 75-78.

EN

“Under the Sun of Satan is an extraordinary film, a religious drama with a carnal ferocity. Whereas Bresson’s naturalistic religion condenses a vast force into an infinitesimal gesture, Pialat expands spiritual power to a large-scale struggle that bursts out in physical and emotional violence. Depardieu plays Donissan, a priest whose intense physical self-punishment is rendered all the more terrifying by the actor’s manifest physical strength and appetites. The fury of Donissan’s religious devotion, an utterly non-amiable, relentless quest for Christian suffering, alienates his parishioners even as he seems to sense the presence of the Devil more clearly than that of God. Pialat is an obstinately worldly director who films a miracle as he’d film a bad romance, a shattered family, or a criminal plot, as a brute fact that unleashes its energy without winning his assent. He casts himself as Donissan’s superior, and reveals onscreen his power over Depardieu, as well as his utter admiration for the wild inspiration of actor and character alike.”

Richard Brody1

“Under the Sun of Satan was another eyebrow-raising departure for Pialat after Police, regardless of Pialat’s outspoken reverence for writer Georges Bernanos. (Robert Bresson, one of the few masters Pialat truly revered, had also adapted Bernanos in Diary of a Country Priest.) After all, what could Pialat possibly expect to do with this hallowed literary material—a story of God and the Devil, whose metaphysical dimensions were worlds away from his usual earthly concerns – which could place it in the register of À nos amours or Naked Childhood? As it happened, the pressure of the text would engender a chaos and a paranoia all its own. On one occasion, producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier arrived on set to find the cast and crew effectively held hostage, as Pialat had locked himself in a room and forbidden anyone to leave: his door was forced open and he was dragged out. As always, Pialat had made his actors and crew suffer, but also, on this occasion, himself. The sacrifice made by Depardieu’s priest, Donissan, in the service of the salvation of a young girl, Mouchette (Bonnaire), was being mirrored in the sacrifice Pialat was making of his own health, for the good of the film. As a matter of record, he had decided to make the film because he saw in it an opportunity to win the Palme d’or at Cannes, which he duly received, under a rain of catcalls and whistles. Stung by this cruel reception, he addressed the crowd: ‘You may not like me. But you need to know that I do not like you,’ and raised his fist in defiance.”

Julien Allen2

“Maurice Pialat was one of the toughest, most bullish, tenderhearted, pugnacious filmmakers to ever work in Europe. He made 10 feature films, many shorts, and one television series in 35 years. Each is uncommonly spare, love-filled, banal, and brutal, as difficult to experience as their maker reportedly was to contend with on set. Together they form an oeuvre that exemplifies rigor and gracelessness and a total lack of fussiness about good taste, wherever it might land on the high-low spectrum. His movies are routine and explosive; they lurch between emotional polarities in the space of a minute; they are stuffed with odd-ends and anti-climaxes. His actors flip wildly between dramatic registers and the characters they play are thrown together out of flagrantly contradictory material. His work is riven with ellipses, regularly shifting uncomfortably, seismically past essential plot points and character beats – he was said to cut instinctively chasing the ‘truth’ of a given scene. None of which is to say that Pialat was ever imprecise; he was simply scrupulous – pig-headed even – in following a well-developed, natural bullshit detector.”

Christopher Small & James Corning3

• 1Richard Brody, “Booed at Cannes,” The New Yorker, 7 May 2013.
• 2Julien Allen, “Maurice Pialat: Moments of Truth,” 16 October 2015.
• 3Christopher Small, James Corning, “Video Essay. Pialat: Tough Love,” MUBI Notebook, 18 September 2017.

EN

“After a rather slow beginning, this prosy film turns poetic; and when that happens, we’re no longer passive bystanders but active participants, along for the ride morally as well as physically. It’s questionable how much of the credit for this belongs to director Ridley Scott, whose production company made this movie. So far Scott has turned out one eye-popping cult movie, Blade Runner, which was substantially altered from his own cut, and several more or less forgettable features: two respectable genre exercises (Alien and Someone to Watch Over Me), a so-so literary adaptation (The Duellists), a fluffy department-store Christmas window display (Legend), and an offensive anti-Japanese thriller (Black Rain). He’s not exactly an auteur–this former director of commercials brings a stylish sense of lighting, framing, and monumentality to a variety of visual subjects, but he needs a good script as badly as a musician needs an instrument. He seems to have lucked out this time. Callie Khouri’s screenplay (her feature debut) and the performances of Davis and Sarandon provide him with both an engine and a body; he provides the snazzy paint job. In other words, without the stellar work of these three women, he’d be lost. [...]”

Jonathan Rosenbaum1

“They say Scott is a ‘visual’ director, which is only really half an insult. One could even just about mount an argument on the alternative auteurship of Thelma & Louise for its British cameraman, Adrian Biddle. His vivid location photography (accompanied by Hans Zimmer’s bluegrass-infused score with occasional Vangelis synth-stylings) elevates the film to the level of spectacle Khouri always had in mind. One particular left to right dolly shot, when the women pick up Pitt in the Thunderbird and head off the parking lot, turning left onto the highway, is sensual and magnificent, and it chimes with those numerous passages of the film which place the audience in the back seat behind the fugitives, or in a convoy, cheering them on. The final sequences shot in Moab, Utah, a favorite location of John Ford (Fort Apache, Cheyenne Autumn) but unused in a major Hollywood film since George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told in 1965, have a caramelized, elegiac quality which crystallize the film’s commitment to a myth-making ending. If Scott’s stylistic art direction is largely as one might expect (overly backlit interiors; various plumes of smoke/dust/vapor emanating from somewhere or other; use of rain hoses when it’s clearly cloudless and 100 degrees blazing sunshine), it is as producer that he really succeeds here: incorporating and parsing Khouri’s input (which was, in Scott’s own words, "vociferous") and assembling apposite technicians and actors, all in the cause of making her labor of love a reality. [...] 

[W]hat really emerges from Thelma & Louise after twenty four years is a [...] valuable and potent manifesto, for what might be called ‘bread and roses’ feminism. Khouri doesn’t waste too long on a plea for bread (for women to receive equal treatment and respect) because in today’s world that should be a given. Her protagonists want roses too: to laugh and drink and fuck and misbehave – to share in life’s glories... and just for once, if it’s not too much to ask, to drive the car.”

Julien Allen2

• 1Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Poetry in Motion,” Chicago Reader, 6 June 1991.
• 2Julien Allen, “Drive Angry. Callie Khouri’s Thelma & Louise,” Reverse Shot, 10 November 2015.

EN

“Why/how are the images so gorgeously luminous and cadaverously creepy at the same time, a form of possession and dispossession that seems to match perfectly Akerman’s relation to her movie, which she uses like a mirror? Is that the way that we use it, too?

Eavesdropping on Anna when she confesses her lesbian affair to her mother (‘I wouldn’t dare tell your father–’ ‘Don’t tell him–’), am I moved by identification, sympathy, or voyeurism? What does it have to do with me, in a movie that, as J. Hoberman puts it, orchestrates its shots in a way that renders a musical score superfluous? Is Rendez-vous d’Anna a Buster Keaton film for the 70s without laughs, complete with s-f gadgets, robots, and lonely self-containment, or an old-fashioned European art movie of the 80s? Is it a movie about you (to paraphrase George Landow), or about its maker? All I know is, it looks great and it sure gives me the willies.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum1

“Akerman’s aim is not to distance emotion but to re-channel it: to have it come through not the usual, weeping face of an actor (as Raúl Ruiz once put it), but through the exact shade of a colour on a wall, the precise timbre of an atmospheric soundscape, the concrete line and position of a table or chair. In Rendez-vous d’Anna, there are many remarkable moments, scenes and passages of this sort that conduct such tender and intense feeling: the views from a train, the empty hotel atmospheres, the wonderful shot where Anna walks far away from the schoolteacher into the distance, where yet another train is seen and heard passing.”

Adrian Martin2

Gary Indiana: I’m interested in things you did for money. Jobs you had while making your first films.

Chantal Akerman: With my first film I wanted to make a feature film so I decided to sell stock in the film. I made a stock book and went to Antwerp and sold certificates on the Diamond Bourse, selling the pages for $3 each. By the end I had only $200 or $300, not enough to make a feature film. I made a short film with that. It wasn’t enough to finish the film, so I worked in banks, in shops, sending telexes; Phillips Petroleum telex, American Express telex. Then, when I went to New York, first I worked in a restaurant, La Poulade, in the Fifties. I took care of coats and hats, putting glasses of water and butter on the tables [...] I worked at the New School, modeling for sculpture. I also worked in a photo lab blowing up pictures. Later I worked in a thrift shop, and then on Orchard Street. Then I worked at the 55th Street Playhouse, the porno pictures, as a cashier; and in three weeks I stole $4000, and I made Hotel Monterey and La Chambre (1972) with that. That was the end of it for stealing. I stopped. Then I made Je, Tu, II, Elle (1974); for that I worked as a typist. Then that was finished because I got some grants from my government.”

Gary Indiana3

• 1Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Les rendez-vous d’Anna. Glum is Beautiful,” Take One, nr. 8 (1979).
• 2Adrian Martin, “Les Rendez-vous d’Anna,” June/December 1997.
• 3Gary Indiana, “Getting Ready for The Golden Eighties: A Conversation with Chantal Akerman,” Artforum 21.10 (1983): 57.

EN

“[...] what drew me most to Araya was not its austere, unforgiving beauty but the dignity of its inhabitants. I hope that the love I hold for them shines through in the film. There, in the middle of that desolate, forbidding place, they managed to turn the same elements that made their existence so difficult into their very means of survival.”

Margot Benacerraf1

“[...] The intense and perfect beauty of Araya deserves to be called by name. In order to accentuate it, Margot Benacerraf has made every act, situation, and real-life character into the servant of that beauty... Araya will always be the condensation of an awesome human experience... filtered through the admirable language of film... Great photography, great editing, the inflamed quest for modulated grays amid unforgettable extremes of black and white – that is what accounts for the visual pleasure that Araya offers. A period text and period music accompany a film that knows no period, a definitive work.”

Marta Traba2

“In those days, going to Araya was like going to the moon. After an arduous journey, I caught my first glimpse of Araya one afternoon about five o’clock. I saw a gigantic colonial castle in all its immense solitude, abandoned to those terrible deserts, and illuminated by an intense, glowing light. Then came those enormous salt peaks with their fantastic dimensions. It was as if the five centuries since the arrival of the Europeans had not perceptibly altered Araya’s way of life. The residents of Araya still made ceramics without using a wheel. They still used the same millenarian methods to fish and to harvest salt. Yet, everything was also about to be violently, irremediably transformed. Within six months, the salt operation was to be taken over by machines. I decided that I wanted to tell this story.

When the film was screened no one believed that we had only been a two-person crew. “What about the crane shots?” they asked. We had simply taken advantage of a construction crane that had been left on a building site. We would go up in it together, fighting against the wind. It was as heroic as it was fortuitous. Passion, I think, makes many things possible. We often filmed all day and then went out at night to collect sounds. Each of the families has a theme song. We would record this local music at night, in people’s huts. Or the sound of the sea, because I wanted the sea to have its echo throughout the film so the viewer feels its intensity, which is ever-changing.

There we were, Truffaut, Resnais and I in competition in Cannes with The 400 Blows, Hiroshima mon amour and Araya. The giants were also there: Buñuel with Nazarín and Rossellini with India. Glauber Rocha wrote a beautiful interview and years later told me that while Araya had no real consequence in Venezuelan cinema, in Brazil, it really did influence the Cinema Novo and him in particular. On 15 May of 1959, Cannes festival awarded me, and Venezuelan cinema, the coveted International Critics Award, which I had the honour of sharing with Hiroshima mon amour. Even today, the recollection of those days of anxiety and happiness moves me deeply.”

Margot Benacerraf3

• 1Karen Schwartzman, Harel Calderón and Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “Interview with Margot Benacerraf,” Journal of Film and Video, Winter 1993.
• 2Marta Traba, cited in Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “Araya Across Time and Space,” Nuevo Texto Crítico, December 1998.
• 3Margot Benacerraf, “Araya”.