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.
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2007 - Examine Caesars
2018 - Straub/Huillet/Talking (interview)
2019 - Born May 1st. . .
