Meanders

In June 1994, the Vue sur les Docs international documentary film festival in Marseille organised a retrospective of my films. We really worked on the presentation and on informing the public. For the closing ceremony, I took part, in a warm atmosphere, in a debate with the public led by Marie-Christine Perrière and Bernard Favier, whom I would like to thank. I then had the desire to rework these words into a text, which I call ‘Meanders’, because I’m familiar with moving along an angular, winding trajectory from one thing to another. This movement often determines the form of my films: I turn corners and negotiate bends.

So: the filmmakers who have influenced me are both fiction filmmakers and documentary filmmakers. At that level, the difference never mattered. It was simply cinema that interested me. It was at one time, Hitchcock, for example. In some of my films, I work with shot/reverse shot, one of the classic procedures of narrative cinema. Sometimes there’s a certain coldness in my films, for example in Het masker [The Mask] (1989, 55’), which might remind you of Hitchcock. I’m thinking of certain shots of Marnie (1964), marked by a state of uncertainty: is this reality or a dream? In The Mask, there is a scene in which the central character, Philippe, a young homeless man, has his hair cut at the hairdresser in order to achieve the much-desired bourgeois look. Then, in the play of mirrors in a fashion boutique, he puts on the suit that is to serve as his social “mask”. These transformations are made on his own body, so they are “real”, but they are belied in the next scene, in which we find Philippe in the Salvation Army dormitory, looking like a galley slave. This ambiguity, this uncertainty about the how of these images, leads us astray, away from the marks and markers of the documentary.

There’s also the pleasure, in making films, of surprising myself, of making films that perhaps I won’t understand until ten years later. A little film like On Animal Locomotion (1994, 15′), for example, is interesting to me because it reveals something that surprises me completely. But the need to film it, in detail, seems to me also this: it makes sense thematically, it has a certain force, even if the reasons for filming me like this, holding the camera in front of me – fragments of my body, my buffoonish face – are irrational. There’s an obvious link here with the work of Eadweard Muybridge (Human and Animal Locomotion, 1887), the photographer and pioneer of cinema who analysed the movement of the body. By turning the camera on myself, I become my own Muybridge. But even more importantly, I needed a counter-movement to the images rushing at me, a counter-current to everything coming from the outside. The interior is the filmmaker’s space, his eye, his head, and I would say that every exterior needs an interior. These are the visible, identifiable reasons. Behind them are the more intimate motives, which we often only glimpse much later.

For the opening night of this festival, we had planned to show Sarajevo Film Festival Film (1993, 14’). I was told that this little film had touched a lot of people, that it made people feel, without any obvious violence or bloody images, what it can be like to live under these circumstances of siege and war, better than any documents could do and, in a way, more powerfully. In this case, we can say that the reception of the film has stabilised, so to speak, which is not always the case. That’s how my films have to be presented, they have to reinforce each other and tear each other apart. They have to have an unexpected, mysterious aspect to them, so that they can be seen somehow frame by frame. For example, On Animal Locomotion is a second film about Sarajevo, of which the reception is completely unstable. It’s always a question of destabilising the way we see things, in order to be able to reach, if only for a moment, the experience.

When I was very young, I was influenced by a Dutch photographer, Ed van der Elsken, whose first photo book Een liefdesgeschiedenis in Saint-Germain-des-Prés [Love on the Left Bank] (1954) is organised as a false narrative: a sort of photo-novel about certain marginalised, so-called “existentialists” in Paris in the early 1950s. The photography is very black and raw, very painterly at the same time. He was more or less the one who “discovered” me, when he saw the photos I’d taken since I was fifteen he encouraged me, and practically authorised me, to undertake and publish my first photo book: Wij zijn 17 [We are 17] (1955). It was then that I glimpsed a whole new world, a freedom outside the middle-class world from which I’d come. I dedicated Face Value (1991, 120’) to this photographer, and filmed a portrait of him shortly before his death. He talks to his wife as he is dying, formulating a kind of religion about material life that I find wonderful: “This illness is my private sorrow, which I will try to carry elegantly to the end. Everything happens in a totally logical way: you grow, you blossom, you deteriorate, and that’s it. But life is so incredible that it already includes its own Paradise. Those people who ask: why are we here on earth? We’re here to enjoy the Creation, for God’s sake! And if you can’t see that, you’re a piece of rubbish!”

When I arrived in Paris in 1956, I discovered an extraordinary book: William Klein’s New York (album Petite Planète n° 1, éditions du Seuil, 1956). When I returned to IDHEC, I took it as a real blow in the face, something immense. With this expression, these forms, something of the cultural barriers seemed to break down, opening the way to something else. And then, towards the end of my studies at IDHEC, when I was twenty, in 1958, I saw some of the films of the Nouvelle Vague. The long run on the beach, at the end of Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups [The 400 Blows] (1959), was perhaps the first time I saw a film resolutely leave the narrative context behind and settle into the poetry of a palpable duration: what a shock! Godard’s À bout de souffle [Breathless] (1960) was even more powerful: he cut where he wanted, in the middle of shots, composing his film like a series of jump-cuts. He allowed himself an entirely new freedom. The era of the wheelchair dolly was beginning, with the impression that cinema was discovering new means, a permission to do everything that wasn’t taught at IDHEC. From then on, as my photographic work progressed (with a project for an album on Paris,1 I was walking around with my camera in my hand), the idea and the desire for a totally physical cinema, for a “direct” cinema, began to haunt me. Then came the question: what kind of narrative could we incorporate this into, and what formal apparatus could we use?

The early films of Resnais, in this sense, fascinated me: the search for structures for a counter-world. In the evolution of my work as a film composer, I’m more influenced by Resnais than by Godard, even though it was Godard who gave me that liberating moment, against all academicism, and which had such an exalting impact on me that I couldn’t sleep at night. Finally, there was the freedom of Godard, and the composition of Resnais: Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Muriel (1963), L’année dernière à Marienbad [Last Year at Marienbad] (1961), which I still watch again with emotion. On the one hand Hitchcock, on the other Leacock. In painting, Mondriaan and Pollock, or Mondriaan and Van Gogh: the Apollonian and the Dionysian, I want both, I’m always in between. But when it comes to developing the structure of a film, there’s perhaps more to learn from Mondriaan: Resnais, Hitchcock, Ozu especially, are on the Mondriaan side. Ozu’s work is very strong. His films are like assemblages of more or less fixed points of view on perpetually recycled elements: the little alleyway, telegraph wires, poles, houses partitioned by wood or paper. Fragmentary and coded spaces: vital spaces born of the relationship between spatial elements. It seems like nothing much is happening, and then suddenly there’s an intense emotion. That’s when I felt we were touching on an essence of cinema. It’s not just because of the actors, for all their talent and emotion; it’s not because of the story either, which always more or less follows the same pattern: the loss of someone, which one eventually comes to terms with, because of the inevitability of loss, however hard it may be. In the end, it’s about learning to live, with what there is or what there isn’t any more, sometimes through very painful moments, but with great tenderness. The setting is rather stark, with an arrangement of space that is both physical and mental. As in Hitchcock’s films, it’s both the space of the action, the space of the suspense of the story, and an interior, mental space. Ozu does this with restraint, humour and finesse. In Sanma no aji [An Autumn Afternoon] (1962), he tackles the question of modernity, which intersects with that of loss. It’s the transition from sake to whisky. When I had the pleasure of staying in Japan for a short period of time a few years ago, I looked from the high-speed train avidly at the urban landscape, recognising Ozu’s shots. The alleyway, the mattresses hung out to dry in the windows of small houses. It’s a space where the nourishment of our gaze is reconstituted. My work in relation to reality is part of this double movement: a back and forth between fictionalisation and a return to the world. A look of recognition on/of the world, in both senses of the word. The word recognition applies very well to Ozu.

I started making my own films with a camera that my parents gave me when I left IDHEC, where I didn’t want to stay until I graduated. It was a little Bolex that could shoot 24-second shots. You had to wind the spring all the time. I shot all my first films with it, from 1960 onwards. In 1965, I got another Bolex, with large chargers, a motor and a Pilotone generator, which allowed me to shoot with synchronous sound. That’s how I made Beppie (1965, 38’). From then on, I started combining sequences with synchronous sound and asynchronous sound. You have to remember that before the development of cinéma vérité, documentary film was pictures with separate, non-synchronous music, sound effects or commentary. Over time, the need arose to have more colours on the palette, and the element of synchronous sound became important.

When Jean Rouch’s films Les maîtres-fous (1955) and especially Moi, un noir (1958) came along, it was another shock. Suddenly, the idea of a “cinematographic syntax”, about which I already had a lot of doubts, was swept aside for me in favour of a “syntax of the body” that dictated the sequence of images and sounds. Later, it was above all Eddie Sachs at Indianapolis (1961) by Leacock, Drew and Pennebaker that impressed me. The film literally went round in circles for two hours, following the laps of a car race. This circle was the graphic form of a scenography drawn directly from the contingency of reality.

So I had two Bolexes, the small, spring-wound one, with which I kept shooting a lot of shots, and this cobbled-together Bolex, which had a habit of getting stuck in the middle of the reel. I incorporated this shortcoming into Herman Slobbe / Blind kind 2 [Herman Slobbe / Blind Child 2] (1966, 29′), where the film getting stuck becomes a metaphor for the difficulty of making cinema, and an invitation to capture the tremors of the world. The alternation of these two cameras pretty much sums up my position in the sixties: between the language of montage, which had dominated avant-garde documentary (and which had led to a kind of pictorialism-plus-commentary), and cinéma vérité, which fascinated me by its ability to follow the duration of events, but which lacked the formal means to describe “the world of things”. I worked with both, while making forays into different narrative or experimental fields.

At the end of the sixties, I got an Arriflex BL, a real synchronous camera, quite heavy, but with which I nevertheless kept shooting until the end of the seventies. Then I inherited some money and was able to swap my Arriflex for an Aäton. With the Arriflex, because of the weight, I couldn’t perform certain movements, for example getting up from a crouching position. With the Aäton, filming is much more dynamic.

In between, I made a number of 35 mm films: Een film voor Lucebert [A Film for Lucebert] (1967, 24’),2 De snelheid 40/70 [Velocity 40/70] (1970, 25’), and Beauty (1970, 25’). Here I was able to explore colour, compositions with wider frames, more variety in depth of field, and asynchronous, detached sound, which I applied in layers, like a painter. Today I still have the feeling that it’s the sound work that brings cinema closer to painting.

I always kept my Bolex for special takes. In De platte jungle [The Flat Jungle] (1978, 90’), I filmed all the minute things with the Bolex. The Bolex allows some interesting manipulations, which I still use in some of my films: changing lenses, superimpositions by rewinding the film in the camera, slow motions or speeding up. I currently co-own it with one of my sons (Stijn van Santen, son of my wife Noshka from her first marriage, who has lived with me since the age of three), who has become a filmmaker. He did some marvellous, very daring things with this Bolex, and that made me want to use it again for On Animal Locomotion. At a seminar in Hamburg with Artavazd Pelechian in February 1994, we had a lot of fun with it: we rethought certain aspects of editing – my point with Locomotion, where I also commemorated the work of Jonas Mekas. Thanks to Alf Bold, who was a programmer of the Arsenal cinema in Berlin until his death in 1993, I was able to see Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972). At first, I thought it was rubbish: these jumping images... But Alf Bold said to me: “You have to reconsider your judgement. It’s really good.” I haven’t forgotten that. It’s precisely this almost perpetual trembling of the image that makes it exist, between freedom and uncertainty.

I’ve sometimes triggered tremors in my films, like a punctuation effect or an emotional reaction. For example, when I film Le Pen, I feel like kicking the camera, shaking the image to the rhythm of his whining invectives. Some people find this effect too large in Face Value, but it corresponds to a thoughtless need I felt during the shoot. Good taste or bad taste, it’s my way of being involved in the film. The trembling differs very much from that of Marker’s Sans soleil (1983). In the latter, there’s a kind of dissolution of the frame, a kind of dance of the image: a sequence of ideas, phrases, puns, but also connections of luminosity and pure movement. This floating effect is probably due to the fact that Marker shot by hand, with a camera so light that he couldn’t stabilise it, especially with a rather long focal length. But he was able to turn it to his advantage. It’s a great piece of musical work, the music of the image. I came to appreciate this way of working through Mekas. It all circulates. And the Bolex is back on the agenda.

Artists generally have no difficulty in saying that, in the past, they have been influenced by this or that person. But it’s more delicate to say: today I’m influenced by. It’s more delicate and more subtle: influences become a means of updating oneself, of rejuvenating oneself. Without denying that we’re getting older, we can appreciate that we’re part of a young cinema. You don’t have to get uptight about doing the same things you did twenty years ago. You’re not as strong physically, and you have to take that into account. You have to watch yourself do things and let your achievements evolve. In my case, it’s an evolution with recycling. In the past, when I was trying to move away from the “documentary” label, I looked at the concept of “thematic cinema”. The films I was making were situated somewhere between documentary and fiction, between “truth” and montage, between frontal filming and oblique-angle composition, and above all they could be seen as a set of dynamic relationships between recurring images that could be considered as themes, subjects, of which could you could make a list: markets (there are a dozen or so in the films in this retrospective), the killing of animals, raw meat, fruit; windows, facades, boundary stones marking the limits of a territory; schools, teaching and learning; portraits, hands, tactile contact with things, tools; walking feet, contact with the ground; eyes looking at the eye of the camera; blocked eyes, blind people, blocked senses, physical handicaps, bodies that get tired during repetitive movements; water, fire, stone, metal, air and its luminous and tactile qualities; sleep; screens.

So there is a memory of images recorded in the past that functions in the present. As the years go by, the films become agglutinated. But despite this activity of memory, each time we have to rediscover the freshness of “filming for the first time”. You have to be open to the “direct”, that is, the unique and ultimately uncontrollable nature of each situation, if you want the film to survive the thematic catalogue. So this concept of “thematic cinema” is also too restrictive. It’s true that we are in dialogue with the same aspects of life. That’s how we “recycle”, by becoming a little more demanding in the long run about the second take: the other take, the other movement, the other angle, to be invented. So you consume more film. Shooting with the Aäton, the ratio between the amount of film consumed and the finished film has evolved for me over the years, from 1/7 to 1/10. With On Animal Locomotion, I’ve reduced it to 1/5, because of the Bolex: with the constraint of very short shots, you waste less on filming, and you increase editing time, while condensing the filmic tone.

It is therefore the specificity of the means that determines the paths to be taken, towards partially unknown goals, and in a progressive articulation of the film. Style is not a homogeneous characteristic. It’s a set of wanderings, perhaps tics, through which the author’s person is barely holding together. The last moment of unity before the collapse, the last moment of a “vision of the world”, as we used to say: the search for this last moment begins over and over again.

In any case, I’ve never been one of those people who first shoot a mass of shots and then assemble the film on an editing table. Nor have I ever been one of those people who say: “I write the film, I edit it, and I edit it accordingly”. For me, it’s neither. Editing begins with the viewing of all the material, which already allows you to assess the elements shot: “This is good, this is bad”, and to interpret them: “I was off track here, I wanted to do this, but that’s not it”, or “Something comes up here, much better or more important than what was planned”. Then you have to find, or rediscover, the links, little by little: the hidden programme that is already inscribed in the filmed images. In a largely improvised cinema like mine, things get programmed semi-consciously. Naturally, there is a minimal premeditation of the elements required for shooting and editing, and immediate, instinctive decisions, in a constant return to oneself: remembering what one has already done, what has happened, and above all who one has been oneself. I mean, not just one person, but several persons, with varying relationships within the self, according to different conditions and requirements at each moment of filming. To know the nature of what you have filmed, it is important to know who you have been, and in this moving triangle, programmes and schemes get drawn up and defined, as well as the direction and sense of the journey.

The important thing for me, in two films as different as De tijd [Time] (1984, 45′) and I Love Dollars (1986, 45′), is the journey. These are methodically opposed films. One is based on artificiality: a series of long dolly shots in an enclosed world where people and things have been put in place. The other is a “live” journey through four cities around the world, full of unexpected encounters and confrontations. But both are working towards something that will make the end a little different from the beginning. To arrive at a point where, as a filmmaker and as a viewer, the way we look, or the way we feel, has changed over the course of the film, no matter how long the journey.

I Love Dollars can be seen as a quest for a composite and compact image of the world seen through the prism of money. A quest of which the abstract side must stand out. But this abstraction will still touch people’s physical and mental lives, and the quest for the abstract becomes the quest for an image that is suddenly alive and important. With Time, it’s the same thing. At the end of these tracking shots in these enclosed spaces, we have to see with a new freedom what is happening outside. The looks towards the camera, those of the solitary actress and those of the child playing with his parents and staring at the camera as it moves around him, I wanted them to be innocent of fiction, so that they would break the circle. My desire, my gamble, was to return here to something very immediate and to let people grasp a real moment. I Love Dollars has something to do with a little erotic story from my youth. I was twelve and in love with a girl in my class. Through the editing, I wanted to establish a relationship between her and this world of money where the body doesn’t exist, is evacuated, evaporated. I wanted to bring together this memory of my youth with the memory of two little fountains in Amsterdam, near the monument to General van Heutsz – a sort of colonial destroyer, an executioner in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the century – thus establishing a relationship between a personal world and a topography of my youth: “Two little fountains where a child could drink”. This scene from my youth is moving for me, it travels throughout the film. But wherever it was placed, it became unbearably self-indulgent. When the filmmaker puts himself in his own film, you always have to be wary. There was no room left for this scene, it almost required an extension of the film. There’s also a scene where I confront the director of the Bank of Hong Kong, and one senses that I’m not at all up to the task of withstanding the strength and power of this guy. He immediately goes on the offensive, while my voice goes up an octave, and I barely dare say to him the hard things and ask him the awkward questions I had in mind. It’s a key moment in the film. The sequence is over-edited: too much has been put into it. The image of the piece of meat that we wanted to throw in the guy’s face, trying to impress him with the camera by filming from a low angle: but he doesn’t flinch, he remains incredibly strong. I was so distraught that it subsequently made the youthful scene come across much better and without complacency, as well as the idea of the fragility of the filmmaker’s character, that has acquired its fictional dimension by rubbing shoulders with reality. Its “frictional” dimension, if you like.

The film is a journey within the journey, with many elements travelling in turn. Because the journey is also about memory: looking forward to the unknown, backwards to the road already travelled. What interests me in cinema is not only memory as an element outside the film (as in Marienbad: “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”), in a fictional universe independent of it, but also the memory between shots in the film and others, similar or close, by association. My films have a consistency that has to do with retrospection. There is the immediate experience of each image (we should say of each sound-image), the experience of each transition between two images, and the formation of small series, groupings, amalgams. So it’s only at the end that we can see the whole, as an object that suddenly emerges from a system of temporal relationships, immobilising itself in a condensed object that would be for me the moment of truth, the pure documentary moment, where this composite object exists through its duration, to be experienced and seen, in a visionary way so to speak. Maybe that’s what the document of reality is all about. Not the primary reality of all these events or images, nor their fictionalised nature, but the final materialisation of this composite object, in our heads.

Pelechian proceeds in somewhat the same way: activating the memory to bring it all together, at a given moment. When I saw his films, I was very enthusiastic, although I had a few reservations about his choice of music, which we, moreover, discussed at the Hamburg seminar I mentioned earlier. I’d read that Pelechian was all about “montage-at-a-distance”: which is precisely what I’ve been doing, for a long time. And he, a fortiori, since we saw his films twenty years later. Things can emerge simultaneously, it’s well known. But I think there are a few differences between him and me. In Pelechian’s films, there are cosmic tones, a search for the immutable laws of the Cosmos. He gives an example that I find striking: he has placed two matchboxes at a certain distance from each other, and he makes this sort of bet, in the absolute, that if he moves one of the two boxes, the other will also start to move, as if the universe were directed by an immaterial, or sub-material, force. The wager is on nothing less than a law that would govern the entire universe. It’s a thought that goes from matter to magic. While, where I’m concerned, it’s more a question of small magic: there’s no doubt that there are incredible things out there, and the world is more magical than we think, richer in possibilities than the small part of it that is revealed to us.

Pelechian proposes the idea of making links between large blocks of images (the most beautiful film I’ve seen in this respect is Mer dare [Our Century] (1983), which is exactly about space and cosmonauts) with whole blocks of sound. Large ensembles of images combined with ensembles of sound. As if the real was made up of blocks, subject to re-editing. Which is very powerful, because it leads to the idea of questioning all that has been seen before. But in Pelechian’s work there are no conflicting relationships between these blocks of images, whereas in mine there are many. In my films, movement needs to escape the rigour of the frames in order to join up with other movements, through a system of vanishing lines, and to become, eventually, a generalised movement, but one that is not obligatory. In Pelechian’s films, on the other hand, movement has primacy: it takes over everything, nothing withstands it. Nor do we have the same conception of the frame: mine seeks to impose its rigour, or its balance, on everything that doesn’t move, but isn’t at rest either. So, it’s a question of an ephemeral balance, and a rigour that’s threatened by nervousness. In Pelechian’s work, on the other hand, the frame is perceived only as a possible state of movement, a possible state that is self-sufficient because of the lyrical force at work within it.

Basically, my research concerns all the possible relationships between images and sounds. The images between themselves, the groups of images, can be affected by the greatest proximity, or by extreme distance, or even travel from film to film, in a cyclical movement. Each shot in one film may encounter each shot in another film. In terms of hierarchy, none pre-exists the one that is established both in the process of making a film and in the act of its unfolding before the spectator. All assonances, all rhythms are possible, all harmonies, all conflicts. Conflicts are very important to me because they are proof that the experience of reality is never definitive. I remain a materialist filmmaker: the world exists outside us, and our dream collides with it. The work of cinema is this relationship between the two: work in progress, always.

• 1The album Paris mortel was published in 1963.
• 2Lucebert (1924-1994) is one of the greatest poets of twentieth-century Dutch literature. In 1948 he joined the Dutch Experimental Group and subsequently the international Cobra movement. Lucebert’s language is visionary, although it relies entirely on the material aspect of words. He creates the image of the seer who looks at a world on the brink of the abyss and continues to laugh. From 1960 onwards, Lucebert made a name for himself as a painter, with a huge pictorial production. I made three films about him: Lucebert, dichter-schilder [Lucebert Poet-Painter] (1962), Een film voor Lucebert [A Film for Lucebert] (1967), and Als je weet waar ik ben zoek me dan [If You Know Where I Am, Try and Find Me], shot entirely in his studio, which remained untouched after his death (he had still been working a lot before he died). This last film, shot in May 1994, I brought together with the previous two to create a triptych, Lucebert, tijd en afscheid [Lucebert, Time and Farewell] (1994), which thus covers a period of thirty-two years, and which I hope to present in Paris in March 1995.