“To try and live together”

The Films of Anne-Marie Miéville

14.11.2023
A COLLECTION OF 5 texts, 10 film pages, 1 event, 1 news item
NL FR EN

“The love experience will be reshaped into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman.”

This quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, which adorns the end of Lou n’a pas dit non (1994), encapsulates the essence of Anne-Marie Miéville’s quest, which is driven by a universal, imperishable question: how to live together? The same film illustrates par excellence how her singular trajectory finds its way through art history in all its forms, from the sculpture of the mythical couple of Mars and Venus, which occupies a central place in the film, to an extensive pas de deux from Jean-Claude Gallotta’s Docteur Labus that expresses a broad palette of friction and tension between a man and a woman. Again and again, the possible relationship with another is examined as a constant field of tension between stasis and movement, between silence and speech.

Miéville’s delicate study of the challenges of communication and the trials of love is already central in her first short film, How Can I Love (a Man When I Know He Don’t Want Me) (1983), whose title is extracted from Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954). The theme of Carmen doesn’t accidentally recall Prénom Carmen (1983), a film for which Miéville herself provided the screenplay to Jean-Luc Godard, her companion in life and work since they collaborated on the film that would become Ici et ailleurs (1973-‘76). But whilst Prénom Carmen revolves around the unrequited love of a man for a woman, the roles in How Can I Love are reversed. A reversal, as Alain Bergala has remarked, that changes everything, not in the least as seen in the mise-en-scène that reflects the desire for togetherness as a permanent arena in which men more often than not shield themselves, incapable or unwilling to open up to a possible dialogue.

The figure of the man who has lost his confidence in the potential of discourse returns in Le Livre de Marie (1984-‘85), in which a marital separation is portrayed with remarkable elegance and precision from the perspective of the young daughter, who expresses her resistance to the parental drama with the help of language, music and dance. In Miéville’s first feature length film, Mon cher sujet (1988), the power of word and song is employed by three women of as many generations – grandmother, mother and daughter – to acquire a place in a world where women are expected to share everything while men tend to flee from every commitment to share. Also in her following film, Lou n’a pas dit non, it’s the woman who, by exploring various forms of expression and creation, paves the way for a possible exchange, in a perpetual movement of approach, confrontation and reconciliation.

How to give shape to commonality in difference? In Nous sommes tous encore ici (1996), originally devised for theatre, this question is approached using extracts from the work of Plato and Hannah Arendt that resonate in the life of a couple played by Jean-Luc Godard and Aurore Clément, who unmistakably evokes the presence of Miéville. In Après la réconciliation (2000), Godard and Miéville themselves act as two of the four characters involved in philosophical reflections on the powers and limits of language and the challenge to learn to live together with someone else who will always remain a stranger. Sometimes brutal and confrontational, then tender and comforting, Anne-Marie Miéville’s work continues to trust in “the love we are struggling and toiling to prepare the way for, the love that consists in two solitudes protecting, defining and welcoming one another”. (Rilke)

Stoffel Debuysere (Courtisane) and Gerard-Jan Claes (Sabzian)1

Texts

Anne-Marie Miéville, 1988
ARTICLE
26.01.2022
EN

“When it comes to men and women, I feel like I’m honest, and I think that both worlds need to collide or to circumvent each other in order to try and live together.”

Jacques Aumont, 1998
ARTICLE
10.10.2018
FR EN

The subject of all the films in the world is: I love you-you love me, or rather, I love you-you don’t love me; I and you, distributed among lovers and parents. This film’s subject is the subject of all films: my “dear” subject, my dear “subject.”

Marie Anne Guerin, 2018
ARTICLE
10.10.2018
FR EN

At the edge of Anne-Marie Miéville’s films, even before the story wriggles its toes, with the first breath recorded by the camera, a resounding gust of air initiates a threshold at which to place the spectator. Strictly in the present. One foot outside, one foot inside. We could be under the illusion that we’re attending the making of the film (sometimes even the prelude to the shooting itself) and that what goes on there, the dramatic moment, is also ours. 

Anne-Marie Miéville, 1998
Interviewed by Danièle Hibon
ARTICLE
03.10.2018
NL FR EN

Making a film is like a laboratory for a whole thought process, a place where one can take stock, not only of one’s own personal development, but also other people’s. It is a very privileged creative space where something can be grasped that might otherwise drift off like smoke and disappear. However, at times, I have dreamed of doing something completely different because filmmaking is the work of sublimation, as they say, and therefore restrictive. Afterwards, there is not necessarily an exchange or a return that could keep things alive. You have to start over and begin creating again immediately. If you stop, things get very quiet.

Freddy Buache, 1997
ARTICLE
23.10.2019
FR EN

At the end of Lou n’a pas dit non, Anne-Marie Miéville expressed a wish: “Love will be a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman.” In Nous sommes tous encore ici, she tries to understand the meaning, the tremendous power and the frightening limits of this wish, the realization of which she dreams of seeing in our world. In itself and despite everything, the film title establishes a certain confidence which is explained both by renowned philosophers as experts responsible for clearing up the issue and the life of a couple charged with performing its daily demonstration.

Film Pages

Event

News Item