"...(cinema) is such a strong mirror of the passage of time or, as Cocteau says, death at a gallop.

Now that I think of it, from the first shot of VITALINA VARELA, of those who participated in that procession, there's only one person still living. I can't see that. The other day I saw the shot for one, maybe two seconds, and I had to turn away. From there, only Ventura is alive."

"...(cinema) é um espelho tão forte da passagem do tempo ou, como diz o Cocteau, da morte a galope.

Agora que penso nisso, do primeiro plano do Vitalina Varela, das que participaram naquele cortejo, actualmente, há apenas uma pessoa viva. Não posso ver aquilo. No outro dia, no sítio onde estava a passar, vi um, dois segundos talvez, e tive que voltar as costas. Dali, só o Ventura está vivo."

ENTREVISTA PEDRO COSTA,17 DE OUTUBRO, 2024

*

ANGELS GAMBOL

WHERE THEY WILL:

JOHN FORD'S INDIANS

By Tag Gallagher

Film Comment, September 1993

John Ford’s last film, 7 Women (1965), is about Christian missionaries in China, and to some Chinese it is an offensive film.  The white characters show contempt for the Chinese and use racist terms; the story’s details contradict historical fact; its Chinese speak the wrong languages; and its Mongolian bandits are played by a Ukrainian (Mike Mazurki) and a black (Woody Strode).  

What can be said in Ford’s defense?

Primarily, it can be said that Ford did not intend an authentic China.  His China is fantasy, like Kipling’s India, a background for the whites’ story.  Its authenticity is token and suggestive, not a moral imperative.  As is the case with most art.  

Authenticity as a moral imperative is a recent obsession.  It was accorded relatively little importance, during most of the last hundred thousand years, even (and especially) by historians.  Authenticity was thought unachieveable.  And for good reason.  The past, after all, does not exist, except in our individual imaginations, and no two of us can imagine even yesterday in the same way.  Thus what we call “history” is what we ourselves create, our story.  History is not written by the hand of God, nor by Nature (and dialectical materialism has no hand).  The past’s only relevance is what it means to us today.  This is why Renaissance paintings of the Crucifixion or Nativity set biblical events in contemporary contexts, with medieval villages in the background, and angels gamboling where they will.  

History—in prose, verse, picture or object—once had no illusion that it was anything but myth.  Nor did it aspire to be.  Only recently has it been primping itself as a science; always before, myth was its highest aspiration.

To the Chinese offended by 7 Women, however, such arguments are confirmation of Ford’s racism, his cultural centrism.  Ford is therefore not the myth we want today.  And do we not have every right to choose our myths?  By such choice human reality is created.

Yes.  Yet the question now comes:  Is not racism or centrism inherent in any profoundly human utterance?  Who of us can claim to be pure?  Is it not impossible, no matter how hard we try to speak for the whole human race, to shed our family, tribe, language, religion and cultural tastes?  Is it not impossible to  shed our self?  And if what we speak will have any truth at all, do we not first of all have to speak the truth we know most intimately: the truth of our self? 

Isn’t great art always conscious of the limits of understanding?  If art is so often—one might even argue, always—religious, is it not because it stares at what it cannot see?

There is a moment in 7 Women when a white missionary preaches to Chinese children.  We see their faces staring back with total incomprehension.  The movie’s theme is people—white and yellow, white and white, yellow and yellow—staring at each other uncomprehendingly.  In rare instants, an I-thou moment breaks through. 

 

We can trace a similar theme through the highpoints of most of Ford’s hundred-and-more films: characters staring into space, after people who have gone, or are leaving, or are right in front of them.  They are beautiful images, compelling.  Always there is alternation of community and privacy—and the intolerance, the racism, the non-recognition of our neighbor.

In this sense, Ford’s treatment of Indians is profoundly racist.  And it is Ford’s Indians that I am coming to, via Ford’s China.  His storyworld is still the white man’s.  He is not telling the Indians’ story, he is looking at them from the sensibility of his whiteness, they are his symbols.  Perhaps Ford could not have done otherwise; apparently he chose deliberately not to try.  For that matter, it is difficult to think of any white person’s film that has not made the same choice. [1]

    Probably (although I cannot judge) Ford’s depictions are superficially accurate; he read a great deal, spoke some Navajo, and, partly because he provided good jobs, had been adopted into a tribe with a Navajo name, Naat’aani Nez—“Tall Leader.”  But, if the depictions are accurate, so what?  We have seen letter-perfect depictions on television for decades of Palestinians, Japanese, and Reaganities, of pro-choicers and pro-lifers, and all these decades of accuracy have not contributed much to understanding, have not therefore really given us faithful renderings, have not permitted us to see what these people would regard as the essential aspects of themselves.  Perhaps, sometimes, we know them better even from depictions that are blatantly racist; for the point of view is less synthetic, less unconscious.  Mechanical honesty—the camera’s honesty—is insufficient.

I am thinking, for example, of a startling photo I saw of President Reagan in a European paper in the mid 1980s—startling because Reagan’s expression was so untypical, so horrific, so menacing: here certainly was a man more beast than man.  “It’s not accurate,” I objected.  “He’s never shown this way in the United States.”  

“This shows the real Reagan!” my host retorted.

But of course every photo of Reagan showed “the real Reagan.”  The choice of photo was a choice of which reality to emphasize, of which story to tell.

“Nasty Reagan,” I wanted to argue, was misleading historically, even if Reagan were Hitler, because Americans never saw this Reagan.  As Louis XIV observed, one rules by appearances, not by the true nature of things.  So we have to understand the appearances, or the true nature of things will be murkier than ever.  If today we understand why there was enthusiasm for Stalin, but do not why there was enthusiasm for Hitler, it is partly because we still know Stalin through the images contemporary Russians saw of him, whereas we experience Hitler through images that bear little relation to what German Nazis saw, which were images of a patriarch of peace and righteousness.  By “correcting” Hitler’s image, we may have served valid goals, but we may also have doomed ourselves to finding Hitler inexplicable, and to repeating “history.”

Thus art and history have preferred myth and fantasy.  

Ford sacrificed accuracy willingly.  His Apaches smoke pipes, not cigars, and his Comanche don feather bonnets to ride into battle.  Were I to learn that his Comanche chief’s make up and costume correspond to no actual Comanche’s, I should not be surprised.  Even when Ford made The Quiet Man (1952),  about Ireland, which he knew intimately and by blood, he preferred myth.  And some Irish were indignant.  “I cannot for the life of me see that [Ford’s Ireland] has any relation to the Ireland I or anyone else can have seen or known,” one critic complained. [2]  So naturally Ford’s Indians are equally mythic, inspired less by the reality of the Indians he knew or the scholarly books he read, than by the reality of Winslow Homer, Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, of the dime novel and hundreds and hundreds of movies, and before them of the Puritans, Rousseau, Chateaubriand and Cooper, and the thousands of imitators they spawned.

It is awesome to contemplate the sheer quantity of European and American images of the Indians, to consider the constant fascination and inspiration these images have held for five hundred years, and to recognize how terrifyingly irrelevant this overwhelming hoard of images has been to what individual Indians actually were, and therefore how relevant these fantasies became to forming white attitudes toward those individuals, to forming the prisms, the icons, through which we perceive Indians—and how responsible these fantasies are for what was done to those individuals.  This is what Ford is about. 

Ford’s most extensive essay in this vein, on Indians, is The Searchers (1956).  The Indians are mythic apparitions, appearing repeatedly and always suddenly out of nowhere, icons of savage violent beauty dread, and so entirely projections of white fantasy, that Ford himself termed The Searchers “a psychological epic.”  For the white Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), the Comanche Scar is the “Other” that he can stare at but cannot see, worse, he is Ethan’s Doppelgänger, everything in himself that he despises.  Specifically, Scar has raped Ethan’s brother’s wife, for whom Ethan himself nursed desire so obsessive that, before the picture begins, he has been wandering for seven years in order to escape her allure.  Thus Ethan must kill Scar in order to destroy the complex of violence within himself, and will spend the picture’s storytime—a second seven years—searching to do so.   “A man will search his heart and soul, go searching way out there,” goes the movie’s title song, alerting us that Ethan’s physical search is only a search for himself, to come to terms with his own solitude.  And the search will resolve not with the death of Scar (whom Ethan finds dead and thus cannot kill), but with a transmutation of Ethan’s violence, solitude and racism into love, community and (the antonym of racism?) fraternity.

For this drama the Indians are basically props, so much so that the fact that Scar is played a white actor (Harry Brandon), rather than a red actor, seems entirely appropriate.  Ford’s “psychological epic” makes no claims to realism.  Quite the contrary: it identifies the myth-evoking landscapes of Arizona’s Monument Valley in 1955 as “Texas 1868” in an opening title card, and then goes on from there to a series of Charles Russell imitations and painterly compositions bathed in expressionist light.  This movie is a myth based on other myths based themselves on still other myths, without beginning.  It is an attempt to write “history” to serve to clarify the subjectivity of the historian, the myth maker—who, from colonial times, has sown the ideologies that have prescribed how Indians would, in actuality, be treated by American authorities.

It is because of Ford’s evident consciousness of this fact that his treatment of the Indians is “profoundly racist,” that is to say, not racist at all, but confessional: a confrontation with the limits of understanding, the sin of solitude, the intolerable violence wreaked by our callous adhesion to ideology (myth: ideas of what other people are, rather than I-thou contact): evil in Ford is always good intention gone astray; and tradition, which sustains us, is always the humus where evil has its roots. Thus to the whites, in The Searchers, the violence done by  Indians is too terrifying even to be imagined, but also it has the allure of archetypal fire, of the raw reality that ideology expels from our consciousness.  In contrast, violence perpetrated by whites is a Biblical romp: “O Lord, we thank You for what we are about to receive,” prays Ford’s Shakespearean fool, as he aims his rifle to start slaughtering Indians.   And although the violence and ideological myopia in Ethan are transmuted eventually, they are not recognized by Ethan, still less so by his white community, who would exterminate an ant colony with less moral inhibition and much less jubilation.

Myths sustain societies in Ford, but poison them as well.  They define the limits of understandings, but are seldom perceived.  They rule and regulate our lives.

The tragedy of the American Indians for Ford is not only that they themselves were virtually exterminated; it is also that their story is lost, or rather, that their story stays with them.  Their story has not become part of our story.  It is a story that, as the images of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) capture so movingly, passes momentarily across the horizon, like yesterday’s herds of buffalo and virgin forests.  Hence it is nature that destroys the Custer-like cavalry regiment in Fort Apache (1948), rather than merely the Indians, who are at one with land, rocks and dust.  In both pictures, the dramatis personae are white, never red, and Ford’s interest is, as in The Searchers, with the traditions and community values that render otherwise decent individuals into willing agents of imperialism and genocide.  

An Indian story in the middle of The Searchers depicts the limits of understanding.  It is about an Indian named “Look” whom none of the whites can see, whose story is smothered by white stories.  It begins beside the fireplace of a white home, when a girl gets a letter from her fiancé, whom she has not heard from in two years.  There is much play between her agony, the opportunism of a rival courter, her father’s insensitivity, her mother’s distress.  The boyfriend writes he has gotten a squaw, and then in flashback we see that John Wayne and the boyfriend inadvertently purchased Look, a plain, chubby girl, when they thought they were just buying a blanket.  Wayne makes fun of her and the boyfriend kicks her out of his bed.  Both the flashback and the letter-reading are played as comedies, dependent on indifference to the suffering of the two girls.  Audiences, identifying with Wayne’s humor, identify also with his racism.  Then Look is found dead, a victim in a cavalry massacre, and we are jerked into consciousness of Wayne’s morality—and our own morality.  Look’s story, scarcely perceived by the six whites from whose perspective it is told, has been only a joke for them, a foil in the drama of their insensitivity toward each other.  No one sees Look. 

Since the Indian story cannot be told, no individual Indian can emerge as  a rounded character.  Ford’s strongest, most communicative, images of Indians are iconic, which is why they stir us: they are images constructed by the myths that we, the whites, have constructed. [3]

I know of no white film that has tried to assume an Indian’s point of view.  Perhaps the effort has always looked doomed to failure—and indecent.  As Ford observes in Cheyenne Autumn (1964), it is white words, white language, that have been our most potent weapon against Indians.  Are we, the descendants of their destroyers, now to presume to tell their stories in the language that destroyed them?  Is it time, yet, to acknowledge the responsibility to make their stories part of our common heritage?

Tag Gallagher

notes

1. One common device is to have an empathetic white character take up a semi-Indian style of life, by marrying into a tribe, for example—Broken Arrow (1950), Run of the Arrow (1957), Dances with Wolves (1990), Little Big Man (1970).  But such films do not tell an Indian story; quite the contrary, they specifically look at Indians from the white characters’ point of view and interpret Indian life in terms of European concepts.  In such films, the Indian characters are foils for a white drama and do not themselves emerge from stereotypes as rounded human beings; the roles played by Chief Dan George in Little Big Man  and The Outlaw—Josey Wales (1976) are excellent examples—all the more so as George’s role is probably the richest part any actual Indian has played in a white film, and yet is nonetheless purely iconic.  Indian roles are more usually played by caucasians or orientals, particularly if the parts are substantial: for example, Apache (Burt Lancaster, 1954), Taza, Son of Cochise (Rock Hudson, 1954), The Savage Innocents (Anthony Quinn, 1959).  I would argue that here again it is a white point of view that is being presented.  The Savage Innocents  possibly comes closest to a non-white point of view of any film by an important filmmaker (Nicholas Ray); it goes out of its way to render the strange and bizarre as normal, and succeeds so well in inducting us into the alien sensibilities of its eskimos that, by the time a whiteman shows up, we feel him as the abnormal one.  

A true Indian film would be one made entirely by Indians in their language—and, in the sense intended here, by Indians whose sensibilities are substantially formed by pre-contact heritage.  Such a film would also require a genuine artist whose style was not derived from American, European or Asian models.  

Unfortunately I have not had an opportunity to see any of the films made by Indians.

2. Hilton Edwards, “An Irish Film Industry?” The Bell, January 1953, p. 456; cited in Brian McIlroy, World CInema: 4. Ireland (Wiltshire, England: Flicks Books, 1988), p. 40.

3. Such too is the case with Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964), which, rather than foregrounding Indians as individuals, as in Mari Sandoz’s source novel, turns them into a Greek chorus to highlight a white drama of encroaching awareness.  How the film would have been different, had Ford been in better health, is impossible to say.  Ford, prematurely aged at seventy, depressed, and much under the influence of medications, accepted a bad script and actors and music he did not want.

*

See Tag Gallagher's site for more texts and video essays (Ford, Renoir, Ophuls, Ulmer, Dreyer, Vidor, McCarey, Ferrara, Fuller, Walsh, etc.), and in an update coming soon, several feature films with his custom restorations and subtitles (Rossellini, Straub/Huillet, etc.).

*

Next week, Sept. 23-27, Tag Gallagher will give a series of talks on John Ford as part of the Histórias do Cinema cycle at the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon. Tag's first public speaking engagement in over a decade, it launches Monday evening (18h30) with a screening and discussion of his seldom seen video essay "John Ford: Introduction" (62 minutes). STAGECOACH, HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, THE LONG GRAY LINE, and THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE follow. Happy trails, Tag.

MAY DAY

MAY DAY

MAY DAY

NO APPEASEMENT 

We are bound to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet for their films that demand everything. These filmmakers, as Louis Séguin recently noted, belong "to a nonhierarchical and frontierless clan of rebels, stateless persons and social misfits and this permanent irreducibility joins the challenge of their cinema." Here Danièle Huillet responds to some questions posed to her by Bernard Mezzadri in 1999. (E.R.L.M.)

BM:  In your films, Greco-Roman antiquity is very present (History Lessons, Othon, From the Clouds to the Resistance, The Death of Empedocles, Antigone...), but the reference is always indirect; it passes through the intermediary of the re-workings of Brecht, Corneille, Pavese, and Hölderlin. Could you clarify the reasons for these dual choices?

HUILLET:  Strata, as in geology.

BM:  What particular discipline did the production of tragedies imply for you (or of an opera like Moses and Aaron)? Why this approach?

HUILLET:  No particular discipline. Variations; but the work with the actors or singers, the taming of space, of objects, has always followed, for all the films, whether in "costume" or "modern", a connected method. And Moses and Aaron, because music always says more than the image, only pushed us to be more prudent: how to leave all the possible paths open that lead outside the clearing in the woods, how to not block the imagination of the viewer by imposing images on him. 

BM:  In the introduction of his Dialogues with Leucò, Cesare Pavese defines myth as "a language, a means for expressing––that is, not something arbitrary, but a breeding-ground of symbols to which is attached, like all language, a substantial particularity of civilization that nothing else can render." Is this expression acceptable to you? If yes, how can such a "performed" discourse be articulated in film language?

HUILLET:  If would be better to have Pavese's text as he wrote it, in Italian... Then it would perhaps not be a formula, but something he felt. Still, that seems, despite the translation, like common sense. As for the articulation, it's easy: the cinema is not a language; it's an apparatus for radiography, a mirror that helps us see... and hear, to discover, under the accumulation of habit and clichés, reality –– the truth?

BM:  Greek tragedy freely stages the conflict between two characters, certain of their right and ready to push it to its logical end; it expresses the impossibility of reconciliation (Antigone is a good example of this). The confrontations are political in nature and are stylized, aesthetically transformed into works characterized, in the words of Jean-Pierre Vernant, by tension and ambiguity. One would be tempted to transpose these remarks to your films in thinking both of their themes and of their structure (tensions between sound and image, text and music, languages or accents similar perhaps to that between a chorus and actors...). Would you agree to a description of your cinema as a whole as "tragic"?

HUILLET:  Sophocles' Creon is perhaps certain of his right, while Brecht's is panic-stricken by power... That you want to call "our" cinema –– our films –– tragic is a compliment, especially as today's society tries hard to eliminate, to erase the feeling of the tragic, even if the earth, and life, remains tragic. But of course, as in Corneille, the tragic and the comic reinforce each other... Happiness, by flashes, horror, all around. No appeasement.

***

***

Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times

by C.

One of the obstacles to Huillet and Straub's work is the cinema itself, that is, the way in which cinema has optimized itself into an extremely profitable activity that begins and ends with ratings: a production defines its type of story (police film, romantic comedy, musical, etc., etc.), huge amounts of financing are arranged, crews are formed (perhaps it would be more accurate to say squadrons?), the film enters a rapid production cycle and, at the end of this assembly line, critics classify it with stars. It's an entirely fictional constellation so detached from what's going on around it that it's rare to find the slightest spark of life in these audiovisual products — if they smell of anything, it's money.

But this is the cinema that people recognize and expect to find in living rooms and on television, on computers and cell phones. A current of images with an incredible force that sucks up everything, it spreads from TV series and advertising, to one-on-one communication on social networks and from there to everyday life — in flameless gestures and fake intonations.

This way of seeing dulls the eyes (and the spirit, it should be said) and people lose the ability to see what isn't subjected to this destructive formatting. And when I say see, that's exactly what I mean: as the dictionary says: to exercise the sense of sight, this comes before understanding or not understanding, liking or not liking — it's exactly like looking at the sea.

Against the grain, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub work as if cinema had just been invented, as if the Lumière brothers had filmed the workers leaving the factory yesterday. As if the cinema were a witchcraft situation that allows us to better see (and keep) what exists, to see deeper, to see all the implications.

— If we can see, perhaps one day it will be possible to do something unprecedented. That's what their films show us, that there is a hypothesis. Eine neue Welt bauen.

***

PAS D'APAISEMENT

Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle, 77

nos. 837-38, Jan-Feb 1999

Translation: Sally Shafto

ANTIGONE

Die Antigone des Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen 

Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht

1991, Straub/Huillet

WIE WILL ICH LUSTIG LACHEN

1984, Manfred Blank

FORTINI-CANI

1976, Straub/Huillet

(excerpt)

OS OLHOS NÃO QUEREM ESTAR SEMPRE FECHADOS

de Cristina Fernandes

Bicho ruim - 30 Nov. 2023

Translation: Andy Rector

SCHWARZE SÜNDE

and KOMMUNISTEN

1989 - 2014, Straub/Huillet

***

Past May Day Dedications to 

Danièle Huillet on Kino Slang 

2007 -  Examine Caesars 

2008 -  Song of Two Humans, But...!

2009 -  This Land is Mine

2010 -  Men Without Women

2011 -  Freedom

2012 -  Small Grasses

2013 -  That's Just What We Intend

2014 -  The Lizards

2015 -  (no post – misery)

2016 -  Complete Animals
2017 -  Huillet at Work (interview)

2017 -  Venez m'aider! (plus Duras on Othon)
2018 -  Straub/Huillet/Talking (interview)
2019 -  Born May 1st. . .

2020 -  We Caught a Political Conscience like One Catches Chickenpox

2021 -  May Night

2022 -  "...progress / away from / the bulk of humanity..."

2023 -  Dialectical at Every Second – Unpublished 1975 Interview with ​​Straub/Huillet by J. Hughes​, ​B. Krohn

                                                                                                                                                    

(...)

DOMINIQUE VILLAIN:  On Corneille-Brecht (2009), for example, how did this work with these texts come about?

JEAN-MARIE STRAUB:  It was an actress — Cornelia Geiser — who had seen Sicilia!. I think it was the first film of ours she'd seen. She knew that we work on texts before making a film, and she wanted to do this work, independently of the cinema or a film. She had no idea for ​​a text. I ended up accepting when she insisted. One fine day, after five or six years, I said to her "Here you go".

And then suddenly, I found myself in the hospital, because I was run over by a Vespa while crossing the Caulaincourt bridge at half past midnight. The result was four small pieces. In the hospital I didn't know how to occupy myself. She sometimes came to see me, I said to her: “Sit down, we will finally do the work together”. 

I offered her two little monologues by Corneille, and after we worked on them a bit, after a few weeks, I liked her because her mother tongue is German. She's from the Munich region. I thought it would be nice to give her a text in German as well. I remembered a sentence that was going around in my head, which I had, moreover, changed around. It was the sentence: "Rom, Rom, Rom, Was ist das Rom?" I knew it was by Brecht and that I'd heard it at the Berliner Ensemble in the fifties. I didn't even know which Brecht play it came from. I wracked my brain, and I found where it appeared: in what's called in French “Le Procès de Lucullus” ("The Trial of Lucullus"). Which is both a Dessau opera, a radio text and a play.* I found my sentence, but it wasn't my sentence, it was "Rom, Rom, was ist Rom?" 

The first two texts in French that we had worked on were about Rome, I wanted to settle accounts with the city of Rome, which I hate, although I had a certain love for it at the start. I learned to hate it. The first text ended with: "Voir Rome etcetera... moi seul en être témoin et mourir de plaisir" ("Take Rome etcetera... I alone will be the cause of it and die of pleasure"). It was Horace, which I barely knew, I'd read it fifty years before, in high school. The second text is a little monologue that I took from a play that dates from 1667 (Othon), by the same Corneille, written more than thirty years later. So, we saw different layers. We had the work of a relatively young man, and the work of the same man thirty years later. And who, in the meantime, had translated thousands of verses from Latin and The Imitation of Jesus Christ. It was important, there were two stages, two strata by the same author. And it was about the horrors of the Roman Empire. 

While working on these texts, I thought of Brecht's phrase, the origin of which I'd forgotten. I found it, and I told this actress that we could work on that too. It got a lot longer, even though it's not a very long movie. The two texts in French caused a third. We worked on this text by Brecht. But I was far from the cinema. I was interested in this young lady, who wanted to work. I was interested in seeing what she was capable of, and what she would be capable of if pushed or held back. 

She was seated in front of a white wall. I was lying on my hospital bed sitting next to her. We talked a bit. And after two months, I said to myself that what she was doing, after all, it would be interesting to film it. It would be a film that wouldn't be a film, but what we would film would be interesting, and ninety percent different from other films. 

At that moment, I was kicked out of the hospital. Social Security stopped paying. I ended up at my house, rue Cavallotti near Place Clichy, and instead of having a white wall, I had strange things. I filmed where I've lived in Paris since 1954. The Corneille passages,  in front of an open window. She turns her back to the street. For the other text, she's seated in a crumbling armchair with a red throw cover. Between the blocks of Brecht, we introduced punctuation. Each time there's a break, and between each shot, she changed her costume. With Danièle, we always made fun of contemporary French films made by Fémis students or by more famous people. Real fashion shows, where the main actress changes her costume with each shot. We said to ourselves: “Another fashion show, dull as dishwater." Here, I wanted to do that squarely. She changed her blouse and skirt with each shot. With violently different colors. As it's in semi-darkness and the colors are violent since everything isn't illuminated, this creates violent shocks. But anyway it's a beautiful fashion show. (To Dominique Villain) Is that what you wanted to know?

DOMINIQUE VILLAIN:  Yes, can you talk more specifically about working with the actress?

STRAUB:  It's the work anyone should do with any text. Whether their name is Straub or Tartampion. We read a text, we see that some people have introduced punctuation that didn't exist, or have falsified it. We try to dynamite the punctuation by returning to a form of oral culture. You have to know where you breathe. After dynamiting a comma, a period, we continue, and we go to the next line only later, after such and such a speech, a word, a verb, a complement. To give the text a dynamic which corresponds to the individual who says it, to their personal breath.

In general, professional actors do not know how to breathe. Even those from the famous Schaubühne in Berlin. We worked with them for three months. After three months, I said to them: “But nobody taught you how to breathe?" They said no. They have piano lessons every day, but they didn't understand when we told them to make an arc until there, to stop only after such and such a word, to start again at the next line, to breathe three, four, or five times... We make bars. A bar at the end of a line, or two bars, or five bars. This means: 1, 2, 3, 4, at 5 we go to the next line. Once it's decided, depending on the logic of the text, the syntax, and the dynamic that we're trying to capture or produce, it becomes a kind of score that each actor is obliged to exercise, instead of improvising. It involves preventing them from emptying their heart and soul and trampling on the text, from using the text as a springboard to express their personal petty bourgeois sentiments.

I should have brought you the text of the latest film, which is not this film, but a little after, in Italian. You would have seen that the text is retyped horizontally. Already, it's an attack on Mr. Gutenberg, because the book, obviously, must be vertical. Even among Arabs or Hebrews who read the other way. We make the page horizontal. To have room for longer lines. A line consists of several small sentences or a very large sentence that makes up several lines in the book. You need something visual, for the actor. At the end of the line we put bars, as I said. Then we put signs. The actor discovers the text, there's a key word in the middle of the text. He says this key word as if it didn't exist. So, we ask him shyly: “Do you know what this word means, do you know the weight of this word?” He replies: “Ah! I didn't think about it!" or he says nothing. We then say to them: “Without any intention, or without emphasizing, think of the weight of this word, and re-read the text to me." And there the word exists. Without vocal effect, the word has passed through the brain, through the heart, and through the nerves, and, by the grace of God — donnée par surcroît — it gains weight, it has its weight. That's the work. So, we mark a red line or a green line, gradually there are layers. There are blue, brown, black, purple marks. It becomes a score that needs to be exercised, exercised. Like a musician practices a score.

Horizontal pages from 

IL GINOCCHIO DI AREMIDE (2008)

and UN HÉRITIER (2011)

A STUDENT:  For the texts by Corneille and Brecht, did you give the actress any indications as you worked on the rhythm, the intonations, the musical punctuation, the breathing? Do you also happen to say the text aloud yourself?

STRAUB:  No no. I am careful not to tell them: “Listen to me, you are going to imitate what I am going to do.” It comes slowly, unconsciously. For example, when she begins to sing a small block three times in a somewhat bizarre way for an actress, it was found slowly. Neither she nor I had the idea of saying, "Here, we're going to start singing."

Everything is born par surcroît. Or by chance... Great art comes from chance, it does not come from intentions.

But there is a construction, when you make a film. The minimum work that one must demand of oneself as the so-called author of the film, even before working on the text, before filming, before discovering places and taming them, is to discover a construction. Without construction, nothing exists, in art even less than elsewhere. No more than there is a soul apart from a body.

A STUDENT:  Do you sometimes remove certain sentences or certain passages?

STRAUB:  No no. When I censor in the middle of a text, it's very rare, it's to prevent the author from putting on a bad face. In a letter from Schoenberg to Kandinsky, I took the liberty of removing the sentence: "There will always be wars, we can't do anything about it, we just have to let it happen." I said to myself that it was a cliché unworthy of Schoenberg, so I cut it. 

I hate theater directors who put on a play by a famous author, and who remove all sorts of little phrases here and there that they don't like. The work on a text must precisely consist of understanding it slowly, and in discovering, even after having understood or while understanding it, things that at the starting point shocked you, provoked you, and which did not please you. Which were not pleasant or which were even unpleasant. Above all, there should be no censorship. 

The only censorship permitted is Stalinist censorship.

DOMINIQUE VILLAIN:  Based on this film, I would like to come back to the idea of ​​construction. Is it the montage of the two texts that you call the construction? Could you have built a film from a single element, for example, Brecht's text? Or must there always be two or more elements...

STRAUB:  In this case, I can't answer this question, because it was not a film at the start. So, I didn't do my job beforehand. I only did it at the last minute. I did it before filming, but I didn't do it three months, ten years, or three years before, since I had no intention of making a film. It happened like that. She was happy to have worked on these two little blocks by Corneille, and when I found the Brecht text, which had been like a ghost in my head for twenty years, there were three blocks which, without yet being a construction, formed a subject for a possible film, which may not be a film. It's different from our other films.

Excerpts from an interview 

with Jean-Marie Straub, 

Le Travaille du cinéma I 

by Dominique Villian

PU Vincennes, 2012.

Translated by Andy Rector.

*Brecht wrote The Trial of Lucullus quickly, in two weeks while in exile in Sweden in 1939, as if out of historical necessity. Later, in 1951, when he and Paul Dessau were working on the opera version of the play in East Germany, they ran into production delays when the GDR Ministry for Popular Education accused their libretto of formalism and pressed for revisions to counter its perceived elements of pacifism. Brecht wrote: "i'm against this (delay). the subject is important just at this moment, when the americans are issuing such hysterical threats," referring to Truman's order of American troops into Korea in '50-51 under cover of the U.N., after North Korea's invasion of the South, while General Douglas MacArthur was advocating for the use of atom bombs against Korea. The opera was retitled The Condemnation of Lucullus.     ––A.R. 

Barbara Brecht-Schall quoting Brecht on the GDR: 

"I have my opinions not because I am here; 

rather I am here because I have my opinions."  –b.b.