The Durassian universe is static and stifling. It’s a confined space that not even the reader feels he can escape. One only has to think of the area bounded by the mountains and the sea in The Little Horses of Tarquinia, the forest in The Sea Wall and Destroy, She Said and the bare rooms in many of your novels where the lovers express their desire.
The humanity I speak of finds our world hard to bear. They are only able to get beyond the neurosis paralysing them by an extreme act, like Alissa in Destroy, or, like everyone else, by renunciation. The places where that happens reflect that anxiety they feel.
Nothing of what happens outside, far from the chasms of the characters’ minds, from their silences and the random character of their remarks, seems to concern them.
As regards the outside world, except for some exotic aspects (the Indochina of your first novels) or a vague historical context (the colonial question which shows through in The Sea Wall, the war that forms the backdrop to Hiroshima mon amour or the student protest in Destroy, She Said), you allude to it only vaguely.
The outside world interests me only by its effect on the minds of my characters. Everything happens, irremediably, in the stifling microcosm of the ‘self’.
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• • • CINEMA • • •
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Do you often go to the cinema?
Not much any more. In the films I watch on video with Yann, nothing seems very striking, there’s nothing life-changing. You see quite a few good film-makers, excellent technicians but they’re incapable of inventing a new language, even at the risk, perhaps, of getting some things wrong.
If, as you say, ‘people go to the cinema to feel less alone and to be told stories’, what do you think of dependence on television?
Television is required watching. You have to watch it every day, as I do closely, even though I know it’s hollow chatter, flattened reality. To watch the news broadcasts, the variety shows and the sporting contests is to stay in among other people and overcome the distance from parts of our age which one would otherwise never know about. Clearly, there are passive viewers. Who watch to spare themselves the effort of reading or speaking.
When you arrange to meet friends in Paris, it’s invariably for at least a week ahead—all you have to communicate with at night is the telephone.
The television is often on in your flat. You and Yann follow the sport, don’t you?
In May 1985, when there was the bloody riot at the Heysel Stadium in Belgium,1 I was watching TV and saw the whole thing live. I thought I was going mad watching that convulsive whirl of images. I was there, but to no avail. I started shouting.
Two years ago in France there was quite a lot of talk about a meeting you had with Michel Platini,2 an interview which you published in the sports pages of Libération (of 14–15 December 1987).3
I’d followed Platini for years, in all his matches. I liked and admired him. I find that football has that power—it triggers in the player, and perhaps in the spectator, that strong sense of humanity, that slightly childish truth that even now I find affecting in men.
And now let’s turn to your films. La Musica in 1966 was your first.4 What do you remember of your beginnings as a film-maker?
From the start I wanted to define a Duras-style cinema—a language that would be my own, without any fear. And that couldn’t be seen as derivative of any of my masters.
Did you believe in the possibility of a new cinema?
Of a different cinema, certainly. In the sense of it being a medium that remained, in part, to be explored.
What were your first concerns when it came to trying to translate your written evocations into film?
I wanted to render silence. A rich, living silence. Like something you might have been able to hear.
Do you still endorse what you wrote some years ago about your film-making? ‘I make films to occupy my time. If I had the strength to do nothing, I wouldn’t do anything at all. It’s because I don’t have the strength to do nothing that I make films. There isn’t any other reason. There is nothing truer I can say about my enterprise.’5
Yes.
Almost twenty films and as many novels.6 What are the differences between your activity as a writer and as a film-maker?
By its ‘external’ nature—being a collective work, a way of being in life, with other people—film doesn’t have that urgency, that obsession that there is in writing. It might be said that the film distances the author from her work, whereas writing, woven out of silences and absences, throws her irremediably inside it. No one is as alone as a writer.
I’ve often made films to escape that frightening, interminable, unhappy work. And yet I’ve always wanted more than anything else to write.
Could your writing be read as an ‘infinite text’, that is to say, a text that burgeons out from itself and from your memory, that spills over beyond its own context—in other words, from the page to film?
It was as though the word I wrote already contained its image within itself. To film it was to pursue the discourse and amplify it. It was to continue writing—on the image. It wasn’t a question of betraying the sacred halo of the text but heightening it, discovering the whole of its physical presence.
How can your cinematographic work be characterized?
The reality reproduced by classical cinema has never been of any interest to me. Everything is said too much, shown too much—an excess of meaning in which, paradoxically, the context becomes impoverished.
In my films I don’t gloss over or suppress those things that aren’t functional or organic to the expressive unity of the fiction—they are made up of a material that’s lacerated, superimposed, offset in time; there are gaps and breaks—that whole imaginary that’s meant to render the heterogeneity and irreducibility of life.
There’s a passage in The Man Without Qualities that sums up the sense of what I’m saying here:
[I]t struck him that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one’s life, the basic law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that enables one to say: ‘First this happened and then that happened . . .’ It is the simple sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented, in a unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated ‘thread of the story,’ which is, it seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say ‘when,’ ‘before,’ and ‘after’! . . . It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.7
Your films have been criticized for being excessively literary. It’s a cinema, they say, that concedes too much to the slow indeterminacy of each sequence.
The inner time I want to recreate on film has nothing to do with ‘narrative’ time as it’s normally understood in a film.
Because of the extensive use you make of sequence and panoramic shots, of fading to black and the stillness of each separate scene—all determined by a certain immobility of the camera—your films have been described as ‘non-cinema’ or ‘anti-cinema’.
The static nature of the scene is merely apparent. Like the whirl of currents beneath the still surface of the sea or the murmur of voices hidden behind silences. They say that cinema is movement. Fine, but some
words, some looks, some silences move as much as two men fighting or walking.
What is ‘true’ cinema for you?
I believe its essence lies in archaic, spare, elementary forms. This is why I’ve tried to bring cinema back to a zero degree of its expression, to an almost primitive state. To suggest, not to define. Without impoverishing cinema, by making it akin to certain artistic outcomes that were already achieved by silent movies in the time of the Lumière brothers or Marcel L’Herbier.
At the dawn of cinema, black-and-white film, for example, had an intensity—take [Carl Th.] Dreyer or [F. W.] Murnau—that colour will never have.
I’d like to get back to these blanks, these dramatic contrasts. As for colour, I’d like to use it to characterize certain aspects of reality, not to embellish that reality in order to gain a greater hold over the viewer.
You’ve always made ‘low-budget’ films. If you’d had more funding, would you have changed register?
No, meagre resources—thirteen million old francs for Le Camion, seventeen million for Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert8—sit well with the nature of the reality I’ve described. A reality that’s ragged and hollowed out. I believe the beauty of the films also had to do with the small budgets and the very small amount of time I had available (sometimes as little as a week) to make them.
As on the page, then, the operation was aimed at paring or stripping down the narrative material?
I confined myself to eliminating the superfluous, what are called the ‘hinge events’ which normally serve to connect the different sequences together in a film, giving the whole context that sense of ‘naturalness’, that illusion of reality. By contrast, it was always my aim to stimulate the spectators’ minds by forcing them to make an effort to put together those things which had previously been offered up to them as something unified and, as it were, pre-digested.
For what type of spectator did you make your films?
For the fifteen thousand people who like my cinema. There’s a precise category of infantile filmgoers I’ll never reach, who regard cinema as a pastime, as escapism.9
You yourself have experienced the intolerance of many viewers during the projection of your films. Have you been affected by that lack of popularity?10
Destroy, She Said was the first film where I realized, twenty years ago, that I wasn’t interested in consensus. The producers wanted to dissuade me from putting my neck on the line once again: ‘Are you sure what you’re doing?’ they asked. A lot of friends, though liking me as a writer, couldn’t bear my film-making. They asked me why I needed to do it.
I didn’t even reply. People can’t understand that you can do something while knowing it’s not worth the trouble.
And if the press ignored me, students are still writing theses about my cinema.
On the back cover of two of your most recent books, The War: A Memoir and Blue Eyes, Black Hair, you urge your readers to read the text as something absolutely true.
By contrast, when your highly controversial film L’Homme atlantique came out, you published an article in Le Monde aimed at deterring people from going to see it. Provocatively, you demand from them a total, unconditional participation—a sort of devotion to, or faith in, your work.11
I did, in fact, want to dissuade people from seeing that film. It wasn’t worth it. They were going to be bored to death. For almost its entire duration (thirty minutes out of forty-five), the screen stays black.
How did you use the camera?
As though it were my own gaze projected outwards—remaining faithful to the subtlest little movements of that gaze. Just as I reject the role of classic novelist, omniscient and omnipresent, so I reject this invasion of the camera which dominates, imprisons and objectifies the action from above. The camera must be flexible, privileging the multiplicity of events; it must take different, interchangeable roles, moving with the same imperceptible mobility as the eyes of the characters. The camera is there to follow them, not to replace them.
What role did the editing phase have for you?
It was fundamental. The dark room in which you cut up the film and where it’s reassembled in solitude and silence, painfully slowly, resembles the process of writing itself. There’s the same ceremonial. With cinema, as on the page, the key thing is to delete. One should film little—just what’s necessary. Giving the viewer as little to see as possible, and as much as possible to understand and listen to.
Listen to?
I sometimes realized, as I was filming, that everything my actors were saying was less important than the timbre of their voices.
You put your own voice on the soundtrack as a voice-over.
Bruno Nuytten, who was in charge of cinematography on a great many of my films, argued that it was very attractive on account of its tonality in G.
In the short films you made in 1978–79—Césarée, Les Mains negatives, Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne) and Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver)—a text read by yourself provides a commentary on images shot outdoors, which, in many cases, don’t correspond at all to what’s being said.
Often in your films there’s a discrepancy—if not, indeed, a dissociation—between image and text. A constant slippage between shots, backgrounds and perspectives. Instead of illustrating dialogues or monologues, the visual content of the film might be said to evoke other meanings. Words themselves have lost all function of explanation or commentary.
It’s as though the voices don’t know the content of the images. Hence the narrative will never be immediate, direct. It will be up to the viewer to reconstruct it.
The screenplay, enriched with these syntactic jumps—from the present to the conditional, to the simple past—which don’t sit easily with classical narration, emphasizes just this distantiation.
Le Camion is perhaps the best example of what you’re talking about here. The cinematographic event—the screenplay that you and Depardieu are content just to read—subsists and can be described simply as a support that ‘shows’ the words, free of any concession to the novelistic.
Initially the film was supposed to be interpreted by actors playing roles. If I remember rightly, I had Simone Signoret in mind. But I wasn’t entirely convinced by the idea. One night, I decided to tell the film rather than making it, reading it as it would have been if I had made it.
In films like L’Homme atlantique and Le Camion, you used a black screen as an interruption—and, at the same time, a dissolution—of the meaning of everything that had been narrated to that point.
I didn’t want any pleonasms between text and image, but simply stretches of black, exactly like those blank spaces I put into my written narration.
What advice would you give to a film-maker who was starting out?
To find their own path without following any model or reference that would merely serve to conceal their own fear. In Italy—at Rome, at Taormina—I’ve been on the judging panels for many prizes. It’s important that people in the film world make themselves seen; at any rate, these are regenerative places to meet and find stimulation. I must admit, I’ve found a lot of first films boring. An individuality only emerges at around the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. A film-maker only acquires it with his second film. Anyone is capable of making a first film.
What do you think of contemporary French cinema?
It’s not possible to speak of a ‘new French cinema’ in the same way as people have talked of a ‘new German cinema’. There’s a sort of prevailing neo-romanticism and there isn’t the innovativeness there once was . . . I suspect the latest generation of directors have lost the taste for reading. They don’t read anything but screenplays and they read those in a reductive, superficial way, with an eye to the film they want to get out of them. And then there are auteurs of the Jean-Pierre Melville type, which is a relatively fashionable genre at the moment—
‘very French’, as they say in other countries. It’s an—entirely calculated—cinema based on ‘look’, based entirely on appearances.
French cinema for me is still the wonderful jokes and comical expressions of a Jacques Tati—and then Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard. Godard is one of the very greatest. We are friends, even if we argue a lot. We have a high regard for each other, but are, I think, very different. That’s why I refused to take part in his Every Man for Himself/Slow Motion and I didn’t allow him to make the film of The War: A Memoir, which he would have liked to do. I’d have preferred it to be done by John Huston. With Bresson, frankly more than with any other film-maker, I feel the same emotion, the same intensity of pain as though each time I saw a film by him, it was the first one I’d seen. As for Jean Renoir, despite his dealing with subjects close to my heart—love, India—I find him too sentimental.
What about Italian cinema?
In France, there’s still the myth of a certain neo-realism, à la [Roberto] Rossellini. Agreed, he was a great director, but I’ve never shared all that enthusiasm. I prefer those films of his that no one ever mentions, such as The Rise of Louis XIV. Have you seen that?
It might be thought there’s something in common between [Michelangelo] Antonioni’s films and your own.
If we’re thinking of the opening shots of L’Avventura, then yes, I agree.
Do you know [Pier Paolo] Pasolini’s work?
I’ve always been irritated by that aura of mysticism and all the rhetoric surrounding him as an individual. As for Salò, I found it downright revolting. That’s why I’ve never had any desire to read his books.12
The Suspended Passion Page 7
