In quick succession, Ted Fendt has sent us another translation of one of Serge Daney's radio broadcasts (Microfilms). After Jacques Rivette, here is Jean-Marie Straub. He joined Daney on 19 July 1987, for the release of The Death of Empedocles and an upcoming presentation of films at the Avignon Festival. Technically, Dominique Païni is also a guest to the show but he stays mostly silent. You can enjoy Straub's combativeness and listen to the broadcast here.
Microfilms: Jean-Marie Straub
Serge Daney in conversation with Jean-Marie Straub and Dominique Païni
July 19, 1987
Serge Daney: Microfilms. Good evening. A little impromptu event: someone who has often been brought up on Microfilms, who has returned again and again in our conversations, whose name has often been evoked. And now, today, completely unexpectedly in our studio: Jean-Marie Straub. There are circumstantial reasons for this. We’ll say which ones. And then there is very simply the importance for a long time, at least for me, of his films. And then the habit of talking quite a bit from time to time when he comes to Paris – because he lives in Rome – which means that over time we’ve lost the desire to do so in front of a microphone. Therefore when I say it is unexpected, it is both a rather old, rather consistent dialogue and one of those dialogues that, in general, the media does without. So we will attempt to mediaterather than mediatize something that is, first, concrete. We are joined by Dominique Painï, who is going to quickly say why there is a mini Straub news item this summer in Avignon, which is also a Stroheim news item.
Dominique Painï: Yes, this year, Avignon’s project, as in past years, is focused, of course, on cinema. The Festival d’Avignon has opened up to Jean-Marie Straub’s films for their latest film, The Death of Empedocles, based on Hölderlin’s text, which will be released in September. And for the occasion, the Festival d’Avignon asked Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet to program a certain number of movies which say something, on the one hand, about their own films, and which could also be commentaries on or pretexts for them to talk about their own films. And we also asked them to choose a major filmmaker from film history and they chose Erich von Stroheim in order to talk, again through the detour of Stroheim, about their own films. To wrap up this announcement, there will be Othon, Not Reconciled, Too Early, Too Late, The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp, which accompany a film by Straub, his latest film, The Death of Empedocles.
S.D.: So this takes place in Avignon. What are the dates?
D.P.: It starts on July 24 with the opening of the “cinematic encounters.” July 24 at 10 p.m. in the usual gardens where the film screenings are held. And it ends on the 28th, if I recall correctly.
Jean-Marie Straub: To start off, I’ll already protest, if you’ll allow me, because, firstly, our film doesn’t need an entourage and, secondly, Stroheim doesn’t need our films. And you said you asked us to choose films. That’s right. But then you said you asked us to choose a filmmaker. That’s not true! It’s precisely because you asked us to choose films that we refused to choose films, because we suggested a filmmaker, who was Stroheim. That’s not exactly the same.
S.D.: The major subject in The Death of Empedocles – I saw it in German, so I didn’t understand everything, far from it – is coquetry. We’ll talk about that when the film is released in Paris. What this means is that it is very important to know who is asking what, who is proposing what, the meaning of words, what is the most rigorous expression. Therefore, we are already in Straubian territory and we have barely opened our mouths. But for me, there’s one thing that interests me far more than all this...
J.M.S.: I protest again! With regard to coquetry: the major subject in Empedocles is not coquetry. Your story about coquetry is very interesting. It must be said because you’re speaking for yourself. He means that Empedocles is being a coquet with his suicide. That’s what he is calling coquetry.
S.D.: And with the audience.
J.M.S.: But that’s not the film’s subject. That’s a quaternary theme. Empedocles is about how we need to finish with all this. For once we made a film that has a... Horrible word: a message. And the message is very simple. It comes at the end of the film’s second third or even the third quarter. Suddenly, we see Etna or we sense it is there. And we see in front of Etna a wide meadow with trees. And to the left, a somewhat red, extinguished crater and above, a small strip of sky. And there is a message there. That’s the subject of Empedocles. It’s not that a man of a certain age is going to commit suicide and would still like to live and the earth and breathing and the nice smells of the flowers, etc., and who doesn’t go gladly. That’s what you’re calling coquetry. But the subject is this sort of message. We’ve never had a message.
We had a small message at the end of a previous film called Moses and Aaron. At the end, when Aaron is condemned, when only Moses is left and Moses has made the Golden Calf disappear, only the people are left, when Moses will be vampirized himself, he says to him: immer wenn eure Gaben euch zur höchsten Höhe geführt haben, whensoever your gifts had led you to the highest summit, immer wieder heruntergesturzt werden, you were ever hurled back, vom Erfolg des Missbrauchs, as a result of that misuse, zurück in die Wüste, into the wasteland. That was a little message that sharpened people’s ears. That’s why Moses and Aaron was what Truffaut called a failure. Because people didn’t want to hear that, it was too early. Now, with this film, we’re taking a big step forward thanks to Hölderlin who, 200 years ago, had a nose for what Wilhelminian society would bring us: progress and the whole bazar, science. We’ll come back to that later. That’s the message. It’s Etna and it’s what we see at that moment. And the text is: Ihr dürstet längst nach ungewöhnlichem, you have thirsted very long for the unusual, Und wie aus krankem Körper sehnt der Geist von Agrigent sich aus dem alten Gleis, and as from a sick body the spirit of Agrigent longs to leave the old track. It’s a track, like a train track from which one cannot escape. So wagts!, so venture it!, was ihr geerbt, was ihr erworben, what you have inherited, what you have acquired, was euch der Väter Mund erzählt, gelehrt, what your father’s mouth has told you, taught you, Gesetz und Brauch, law and custom, der alten Götternamen, the names of the ancient gods, vergisst es kühn, forget it boldly, und hebt, wie Neugeborne, die Augen auf zur göttlichen Natur, and raise, as newborn, your eyes to godly Nature. That’s it. Then it continues.
The shot is long, the longest shot in the film until then, in which something is explained which is the only way left to escape from where we are. We’ll talk more about that later. I’ll stop myself right now. That’s already too long. Because then it gets a bit more complex. What I said is the beginning. Then it is complicated, contradicted, completed, and it becomes a slightly complicated fabric, but it is something that is very easy to do. It’s what they call communism. And that’s it. It’s not at all coquetry. Now you can say what you want. Your idea about coquetry is fascinating, it’s very interesting, but don’t let people think it’s the film’s subject.
S.D.: In any case, in general, the most mysterious thing in a film is its subject. Besides, I wouldn’t even say that it’s a subject. For me, it’s a theme, it’s a motif. It’s a motif which is in quite a few of your films. I think that in Empedocles it is rather central, but as a motif, nothing more, not even the subject or the content. That the content is communism, that’s your business. That the subject is what you said, that’s up to you to say. That I think there’s a motif which is related plastically, aesthetically, musically to seduction and coquetry – I find that amusing at the same time, in the sense that seduction is something that has become very important in the general consciousness over the past ten years. There are books about it whereas ten or fifteen years ago the word seduction could not be found in anyone’s discourse. Today, we find it a bit everywhere, a bit too much. Besides, in my opinion, we’re more in the post-seduction. And in Straub’s cinema, we come to a film which has to do with seduction, too. So simply put, it is a way of saying that you have a manner that may seem out of place when considered superficially. You are absolutely in sync with what is happening in your European environment. End of parenthetical. But what I’m more interested in...
J.M.S.: Explain that to me. I find this all interesting. Firstly, you say “everywhere,” which means in Paris. I don’t live here, so I have no idea. I don’t know this city.
S.D.: No, no, no, no, Jean-Marie, because the major theorists of seduction are Italian. They are where you live.
J.M.S.: I live in the Roman suburbs.
S.D.: I know, but still, the Roman suburbs aren’t far from Rome.
J.M.S.: I don’t go to the center anymore. I don’t spend much time anymore at the...
S.D.: What I mean is that even living in the Roman suburbs, you are part of the same, very general, very global movement.
J.M.S.: Okay, explain to me what it is. Namely, concretely with regard to this film, beyond Empedocles’ coquetry and his suicide.
S.D.: I’m annoyed about talking so quickly about Empedocles because I was thinking we could pass by Stroheim to talk about seduction. Because he is someone who talked about it in a very sharp and hard manner in the silent era. Now that things are launched, I’d like us to take a detour via Stroheim. First, because I know from a reliable source that it was only a few years ago that Danièle and you suddenly had a kind of Road to Damascus with regard to Stroheim, right? There was suddenly something very, very strong. Where, when, how, and why? Voilà: Stroheim. When did he become so important to you? To the point that when someone says to you, come with old films, you say immediately: Stroheim.
J.M.S.: Road to Damascus? No idea. No, well, it’s the luck of viewing and the luck of possibilities too. In Rome, not only in our suburb, but also in the center, you can’t see any films. There was a Stroheim retrospective, I don’t know, ten years ago. There were four people in the theater. Everything was on Super 8. We re-watched everything. We were among the three or four people. From time to time, Moravia was around. That’s all. But in fact, it was in Super 8 and Stroheim in Super 8... No, I think it was luck. At the Centre Pompidou, we saw a film which it seems is not by Stroheim, which is called Hello, Sister!... Go Down Broadway.*
S.D.: Yes, Going Down...
J.M.S.: Go Down Broadway. That’s all, it was luck. We knew Stroheim a little, but you need to have made a few films to discover Stroheim. I think you need to be old to discover Stroheim.
S.D.: What happens when you’re old and discover Stroheim? Are there things you couldn’t see before? What can you say?
J.M.S.: What characterizes Stroheim is that he has imagination. Nowadays, 99% of filmmakers have no imagination.
S.D.: That is very interesting.
J.M.S.: That is, they make images with nothing in them because they show things they have never seen. Whereas Stroheim is... For me, the definition of imagination in cinema is a shot in... Well, to change subjects, we’ll go from Stroheim to Ford. It’s a shot in The Wings of Eagles. What’s it called in French?
S.D.: L’aigle vol au soleil.
J.M.S.: It’s Steward who falls down the stairs.
S.D.: It’s Wayne.
J.M.S.: John Wayne who falls down!
S.D.: Who falls in his home.
J.M.S.: It’s terrifying because you know that John Ford knows what it means when a man falls down the stairs, he breaks his bones, etc. It exists. For thirty years, I’ve had an imaginary bruise when I see people running down the stairs to the metro. And one time, I saw an old woman, twenty years later... I thought about this all the time because I know very well that’s how filmmakers should be. They should be people who only show things that frighten them or that they love, that they know about so that it exists. That’s all. And that’s Stroheim. If Stroheim shows... Now we come back to Go Down Broadway. The most beautiful shot in Go Down Broadway is a little dog, a little poodle... I don’t even remember what kind of dog it is. It’s very serious to have forgotten. The poodle gets hit by a car into the gutter next to the sidewalk. We don’t know if he is dead or not. I think he isn’t dead because Stroheim had no desire to kill a creature. Coppola would have done that. That’s also why Stroheim is important. Here, we feel the terror of a little creature in the traffic on Broadway, in a city. That’s Stroheim. It’s not big stuff.
S.D.: But what you’re describing is not really what one calls imagination. It’s more bits of experiences.
J.M.S.: Absolutely. But the experience needs to be pass into the image. That’s what you call imagination.
S.D.: The dog’s experience, for instance, is a limit case.
J.M.S.: Why?
S.D.: Because nobody was ever a dog.
J.M.S.: Here we’re back at the subject of Empedocles. Nobody was a dog, nobody was an ant. That’s why we’ve made a world in which dogs are hit on the highway – cats, deer, toads... That’s it, let’s continue that way. If that’s cinema, then Stroheim is the opposite and that’s what interests us.
S.D.: What I meant was: you say “imagination” means the passage of an experience into an image, therefore turning experience into an image. In general, when people say “imagination," they mean instead somebody who dreams, somebody who invents, who has visions, etc. When they say “imagination,” they’re thinking of Fellini, they’re not thinking of the dog in the traffic. And that’s important because I think a lot of filmmakers...
J.M.S.: But why not Fellini? He would have imagination if his dreams passed into the material. It often does not go that far.
S.D.: It happens more and more, I think.
J.M.S.: Good, let’s hope. I don’t think it’s Fellini...
S.D.: He’s a handsome old man, I think.
J.M.S.: Allowing that I don’t know Fellini...
S.D.: Yes, because he talks about Cinecittà in the last one. And I’ve come to like Fellini more than before...
J.M.S.: For me, the definition of imagination... The man with the most imagination among people making images is Cézanne. I’m sorry for repeating myself, but that’s how it is. That’s the definition of imagination. But of course, Cézanne... The imagination you just defined, which would be, supposedly, my sense of imagination, presumes the common meaning. One cannot arrive at the imagination you’re talking about without having first had dreams and dreams come from experiences and vice versa. There’s the shuttle, as they say.
S.D.: I completely agree. And I’m not at all – you know as well as I do – the apostle of the major dream-visionaries. That all ends up in Ken Russell and others, Beinex... That’s not it. The thing is, I asked myself about imagination in a way because recently I realized that many filmmakers who counted the most for me – and many of them are the same ones who have counted for you – were people who were rather lacking in imagination, unless they gave imagination the exact meaning you’ve just given it. In which case, there is another problem that soon arises, which is that of transcribing an experience, making it pass into an image, something that has to do with common experience in the sense of communism. In that sense, if you will.
J.M.S.: Oh dear!
S.D.: I prefer that. To make it pass into a scene or an image or a moment in a film is already extraordinary in itself. It can even be enough to justify making films and loving to love them.
J.M.S.: That’s the only justification.
S.D.: It doesn’t account for something else, which is that it is very hard to find more than three or four of those in a film. That is, it raises the problem of the story and fiction. And I think that all the filmmakers who counted for the people at Cahiers, for you, for me, they share a major difficulty in telling stories. And this does not at all need to be considered a horrible inevitability. Maybe it is the point beyond which there is a piece of raw experience which is absolutely conveyed and which is not transitive, which is not naturally linked to another.
Recently I saw a film that totally overwhelmed me: Night of the Hunter. I think it is one of the rare films where there is, maybe in a single film, in a single story which is itself very complicated, five or six bits of universal experience which are conveyed. I think it’s great if there are five or six. When there is one, I think that’s great. In general, there are zero. But the question of how to articulate this... You say Ford. Sure. But in Ford there is a whole system with him, he had mythologies, he had a position in a certain system. It was the cinema, moreover, of the beginning of the end of Hollywood, because the film you’re talking about is almost a minor film. It’s from ’55 or so.
Today, the question of telling a story is more important than ever. I think that with the people who took this cinema of experience very far – I’m thinking rather of Rossellini – it isn’t by chance if at some point they said: I’m stopping with stories. I’m moving on to education. You know this is one of our old debates. Because when you say, I’m fed up with it all, in the past you said, I’m going to Algeria to teach grammar, to teach the basics. At one point, it was teaching grammar because people need the basic elements of their experience, or one tells stories. But when one tells stories, if one doesn’t feel much pleasure telling them and if one doesn’t have the mythological material of a culture to provide them, one ends up pretending to tell them. That’s what happens on TV and in the media. That’s why I come back to the charge saying: how do you think Stroheim would handle this? He’s someone who simply rebuilt in Hollywood, stone by stone, the world of the Habsburg court, knowing full well how it functioned so that it works even if it is a recreation. Is that, for example, what fascinates you about Stroheim? Something that no other filmmaker today could redo, especially not Coppola, even when he remakes Las Vegas outside Las Vegas.
J.M.S.: Stroheim is the only naturalistic filmmaker. That’s all. And naturalism, to go back to the word you don’t want to hear, is like communism, it’s the easiest thing which is the most difficult to do. That’s all. Consequently, nobody has ever made naturalistic films since Stroheim.
S.D.: And Buñuel, right?
J.M.S.: Huh? Buñuel? Naturalistic?
S.D.: Yes, quite.
J.M.S.: No. Naturalistic how? In the sense that the first part of Pasolini’s Salò is naturalistic about the Roman bourgeoisie and the salons? That’s not naturalism. Naturalism is something that develops, something that grows like a tree. Naturalism is the whole scene in front of the cathedral in Vienna up until the horse on which Stroheim bolts in and the girl is touched by the hooves and the ambulance arrives. That’s naturalism. And that lasts I don’t know how many shots. No, naturalism is something else. Naturalism is something despised today. You need a lot of humility for it. People today are swimming in abstractions. That’s why they can’t tell stories anymore, because they make bad experimental films.
S.D.: Yes, it’s true. If we are truly in a period marked by mannerism, it’s clear that the enemy is naturalism. The forgotten enemy, let’s say. But there is a commonality among the major filmmakers who touched on naturalism. Part of Buñuel touched it, part of Renoir...
J.M.S.: But Renoir, he says in Le point... There’s an issue of Le point that disappeared featuring interviews with Renoir. There’s one where he says he saw...
S.D.: He saw Stroheim.
J.M.S.: He saw Foolish Wives several times. And after watching and re-watching it, he said: I decided to found French realism. Renoir is no longer naturalism, it’s realism. In France, naturalism was no longer possible. Renoir is the height of abstraction, which is realism, but it’s no longer naturalism. That’s something else.
S.D.: Don’t you think there is something psychologically and thematically in common among all the films we can call naturalist?
J.M.S.: When you say Buñuel, I don’t at all agree about naturalism.
S.D.: For me, the point in common that I see in all the characters in these films is that they are great predators, people whose desire has no limits. That’s the mark of naturalism, whether it’s Stroheim or certain Buñuels like El, for instance, even if that’s a Mexican melodrama, or in Renoir. It’s much more than “everyone has their reasons.” It’s that everyone will go to the end of their desires and then there will be damage and there is someone who observes it all. It’s true this has completely disappeared.
J.M.S.: But that’s not aesthetic naturalism!
S.D.: No. That’s a philosophical term.
J.M.S.: I’m talking about aesthetic naturalism. In effect, El Bruto can pass for a naturalist film, but naturalism, in Zola’s sense, is something else. I’m talking about aesthetic naturalism, which is something else. It has nothing to do with unlimited desire.
S.D.: And yet, Stroheim deals with that.
J.M.S.: Yes, but that’s just a side effect. And in his films, it comes out of material. It doesn’t come before the material. Naturalism is a labor. And if what you’re saying comes out afterward – unlimited desire which joins naturalism à la Buñuel or à la Zola – that’s something else. The other ones don’t have any material. In this case, if we want to be a bit mean, we can say Buñuel is like Fellini. I don’t mean it’s uninteresting, but I mean he comes to a stop... His naturalism doesn’t become the material. In Stroheim, and this is important, this all becomes material.
S.D.: And it’s not because Buñuel said, “man is not free, but his imagination is unlimited”? It is free. Buñuel said that. Doesn’t that sum up what you’re saying? On the one hand, there are material contingencies and, on the other, there is the unlimited side of the imagination?
J.M.S.: That question is too hard. I refuse to answer.
S.D.: It’s not a trap. I’m trying to be clear.
J.M.S.: It’s not that I think you’re trying to trick me. You and I aren’t like that. It’s just too hard. That business, when it’s Buñuel, I’m... I almost want to contradict a statement like that, it’s idealistic. I have nothing against idealism. I’m interested in the idealism of Schoenberg, and Hölderlin, too, if we can talk about that form of idealism. And the absolute liberty of the spirit, etc. But in short, I’ve personally come into the world too late to proclaim things like that.
S.D.: It’s certainly something one could have said in the 1920s, at the beginning of psychoanalysis...
J.M.S.: Even then it was too late because those were already people who were repressed, who didn’t know what was going on elsewhere.
S.D.: When you show Stroheim’s films, I suppose you’ll talk about them in Avignon, at the Verger cinema?
J.M.S.: I’d like to talk as little as possible. First, because Avignon...
S.D.: You’re going to talk a lot, I know you!
J.M.S.: But first, the plan is that we will talk everyday at the end of the morning in the Verger cinema, but they’ve reduced the program. They cut two days out of our program. And instead of three films a day, one by us and two by Stroheim, there are four films a day, the last one at midnight. The consequence is that we are not going to talk about Stroheim’s films that we have not seen immediately before. We’re not imposters. We’re trying not to be. And consequently, if we see a film at midnight and we go to bed at 2 a.m. – moreover, I don’t know, they’re putting us up a bit outside the city – we would have to talk the next morning about... That’s not possible. So there will be as little discussion as possible. Maybe a talk at the Verger cinema on the last day. And besides, that will be very good. That way we will have some time to digest Stroheim. And then a discussion in the evening. We’ll talk a bit more concretely then. There will be a discussion after Empedocles. We need to let Stroheim speak. That’s better than saying stupid things about Stroheim.
S.D.: There is another thing I find really striking. You must be aware of it, even in your Roman suburb. There was an era – I belong to the end of this era – when we began to have cinephile filmmakers, but in the good sense of the term, that is, deeply in love with cinema and knowing what they loved in older films, let’s say. So in short, the New Wave. And then cinephilia became a kind of cultural or commercial triumph. A kind of general label. And almost another generation of filmmakers, post-New Wave, and often even a bit reactionary when a new wave arrives. And what all these filmmakers share is: “We are image people, we make images, we have nothing to say, we have no more discourse. Cinema is a great, wonderful thing. Cinema of the past? Fine. Don’t ask me for any names, don’t ask me...” You can’t imagine Beneix or Besson saying, “No, ultimately, I prefer Sjöström over Stiller.” Whereas after all, if cinema was artisanal or the art in which one is totally in love and impassioned, as one says it is, then it would be entirely logical that, like painters for very a long time, filmmakers would say: “As a filmmaker, I have a score to settle with this or that filmmaker from the past, who I understand better than before, etc.” But that never happens. And when I saw Dominique Painï’s program for Avignon, I said, “Well, that’s good. Straub is bringing out Stroheim. That’s an action.” Because nobody does it anymore, or only rarely.
J.M.S.: We’re doing what they asked us to do. Everyone does it. The carte blanche, it’s awful! It’s awful. “Carte blanche.” That kind of thing even leads to Umberto Eco showing American films dubbed under fascism and saying, “It absolutely must be the Italian dubbed version because that’s my childhood memory.” What does any of that have to do with cinema? Nothing. It’s all just fantasy. Everything you’re telling me about this generation... I don’t know their films, but I’m telling you, it’s the end of the world. It means they are no longer making films. Those are films without any imagination. It has to be that way, it can only be like that, even if by chance there are a few interesting things in them or a few films. I have no idea. It’s really the snake biting its own tail. It’s screwed.
We can come back to Stroheim here, too. He’s the opposite. Stroheim has a subject. He tells the story of a subject, of relations, of situations, a story. That’s it. Today, people no longer exist. They no longer exist! Therefore, they no longer have experiences. They no longer exist and therefore their film no longer exists. That’s all, it’s not complicated. If you don’t exist, the film cannot exist because, moreover, you don’t have the energy to be artisanal. You have nothing to put in your material and, as a result, you make empty material because the material only exists in function of images which made it so man no longer exists. Man no longer exists because he is eaten up by science, images, political science, sociology, machines.
S.D.: I am, alas, rather in agreement with you on this tired Cassandra’s discourse.
J.M.S.: There’s a book that should be read in France nowadays. Instead of reading Lévy and I don’t know who...Finkielkraut. It’s a somewhat serious book called La barbarie.** You just need to read it and then you’ll know all there is to know about the cinema you’re talking about, because it is a just a small particle of the contemporary world, of the civilization in which you live, which is that of progress, the industrial revolution, competition, freedom through competition, monopoly through competition, the free market.
S.D.: In this thing we did at Libération called Why Do You Film?, you were nice enough to say a few words. Out of 722 responses, there was only one – I know it is someone you don’t like, but too bad – there was one single filmmaker who talked about other important filmmakers working at the same time as him. That is, who says: Fellini is here, Godard is there, Bergman is there, with rather...
J.M.S.: Ultimately, to say: And I’m here. Right?
S.D.: Yes. It’s someone very narcissistic. It’s someone who thinks he is the center of the world. It’s someone who you think is a Nazi. It’s Syberberg, but okay...
J.M.S.: No, I’ve never... Don’t exaggerate!
S.D.: I’m provoking you to cut the rug out from under your feet because I want to finish my sentence....
J.M.S.: He saw a lot of intellectual confusion which...
S.D.: Yes, but I found it very symptomatic that out of 722 filmmakers, there was one who considered... He is not totally immodest. He’s an interesting filmmaker, at least, who is in an art that has a history, which is mixed in with the history of the century and he has the good sense...
J.M.S.: What we have in common is that he really likes... He is interested in Stroheim.
S.D.: A lot, yes. And he too dreams of primitive communism.
J.M.S.: Primitive? Oh dear! I don’t know a thing about that.
S.D.: Oh, that’s something!
J.M.S.: We’ll have to see. I don’t know a thing about that.
S.D.: Yes, yes, there’s something about the countryside and simple things which is very German in Syberberg.
J.M.S.: Very German?
S.D.: Late Middle Ages.
J.M.S.: Wait and see where you’ll be when...
S.D.: Pre-Renaissance.
J.M.S.: ...they’ve gone beyond Social Democracy in France, which is at the gates. And then you’ll see if you get to something very German. No, that’s not it. That’s not what I mean to say.
S.D.: Well no, what I wanted to say with the example of Syberberg is that out of 722 filmmakers, there was only one who talked about people who are, let’s say, his associates, his colleagues, his witnesses, his contemporaries, whatever, and who talked about them like... Maybe during the Renaissance, Uccello was able to talk about a painter who was at the neighboring court and say, “I want to do better than him.” Where there was emulation, where he had the feeling of belonging to the same world. What I find regrettable is that...
J.M.S.: Yes, naturally. Racine tried to outdo Corneille and Corneille reused things at the end and said...
S.D.: Yes, but it was good, wasn’t it?
J.M.S.: Fritz Lang and Hitchcock always enjoyed saying, “Did you see that? Did you see that? What I did after, etc.” It’s interesting. That’s true ambition in filmmaking.
S.D.: I found that in the responses...
J.M.S.: Young people have no more ambition!
S.D.: There was only narcissism, stated more or less elegantly by... especially European filmmakers. There was a deep disarray among, for example, the Japanese, who are rather interesting. A kind of silly indifference of a professionalism that has become stupid, which is the Americans’ case, without exception. And then a kind of big cry, more or less fake, more or less sincere from the Third World, saying: “We exist too” and somewhat still believing in the cinema. And then one single filmmaker says: “I think Fellini exaggerates, I think Godard is less good than before.” But in a rather brilliant manner. I mean, one out of 722. The film world is truly completely gutted. It’s been replaced by the statue of God Cinema, a Golden Calf Cinema, if you will, like in Moses and Aaron. And it is a Pyrrhic victory from which we won’t return, because it is not normal that filmmakers have such a degree of memory of their art. God knows if the cinema... You can still see a lot of it, you just need to make a little effort. There are still many places where you can see old and new films, at least in Europe. It’s incredible the point to which it is: “No, I make images.” To the point that it’s old Rohmer who is forced to say: “No, pay attention, cinema is shots, it is not images.” Yes, good God, we forgot! Cinema is shots! It’s a little different than making an image or making looks or selling a rhetoric of seduction that is, beyond 20 seconds, absolutely terrifying. That’s why I’ll loop back...
J.M.S.: That’s why these people... And it started with Fassbinder, all this, to take someone who was a little famous. Fassbinder’s films are made by someone who no longer knew what it meant to hit his head against the wall, because there is not even space in his films. Filmmakers work with space. They make condensed time by using spatial material. You have to know what space is. If you don’t know what it means to fall down the stairs and break your bones or plow into a wall at 120 km an hour or simply hit your head against the wall or slip on a banana peel, then you can’t make films, it’s no longer possible. Those are all films by drug users. I have nothing against drug users, they’re very nice people, but they can’t make films, I’m sorry.
S.D.: Not always. Drug users aren’t always nice.
J.M.S.: They aren’t all nice.
S.D.: But I don’t entirely agree with you about Fassbinder.
J.M.S.: Yes, of course.
S.D.: No, because for example... It’s strange that you say he’s someone who doesn’t know what it means to get hit because I had written in... I think that it was Veronika Voss. It’s one of the last films he made, which I thought was pretty good. I said, here is someone who managed... It took him 20 years and 37 films. He didn’t stop working. He managed to recreate his own furniture store, really his own, in relation to which you no longer bump into things because you know where each object is. There is a bit of an antique dealer, a cleaning lady, a second-hand dealer, something very... And in the history of contemporary mannerism, I think that Fassbinder is rather, in hindsight – maybe like Truffaut in France, we’d need to compare – someone rather honest who handled the passage of: The exterior world exists, it is terrible... The Brechtian side of the first stories...
J.M.S.: There is nothing Brechtian about Fassbinder.
S.D.: The “let’s look at it all with a cold eye from afar” side. I think it’s not the worst out there today, even if we can say it started with him. I think it even started with the people from the New Wave.
J.M.S.: But what you’re saying implies that we go back again on stuff like old moaners…
S.D.: You’re the one who spoke of the end of the world.
J.M.S.: Naturally, since Fassbinder we have done better, that’s all. If that’s what you meant, then I agree.
S.D.: No, we’ve done less well.
J.M.S.: Well, where will we go? We did better means we’ve jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.
S.D.: Listen, there are two solutions. Either we arrive at a kind of impossibility of mannerism itself, in which case art history offers two solutions, or there is a baroque era.
J.M.S.: What is mannerism? Is it decorativism?
S.D.: Mannerism, in my opinion, is redoing...
J.M.S.: It is when you make films that seem to come out from the shop of a second-hand dealer, as you said.
S.D.: Mannerism is exactly what you were saying when you say, “People have no material.” What saves mannerism is having the material that, perhaps, can carry a subject and, perhaps, who knows, content. That’s even more. But when there is no more material, and it’s certain that we are in a world which is dematerializing – the evolution of the image, simulacra medias, accelerations, etc. – the material has ditched the camp. It only remains in a few completely marginal Soviet filmmakers. You need to go look at Paradjanov to see a bit of cinematic material or even Tarkovsky.
J.M.S.: Paradjanov films are like Italian cinema.
S.D.: Yes, in the best sense. Or in the work of some crazy Portuguese like Oliveira. It’s more in the dead-end streets of the modern world that there is material that has remained obstructed and filmmakers sufficiently obstinate to make films that, ultimately, resemble something and that, often, really have a subject because the Portuguese have a subject. They have a really big subject which relates to their history. But mannerism is when there is no more material, but you know how to reproduce from outside effects that were already produced at an earlier time. So you can reproduce a Lang effect, a Hitchcock effect...
J.M.S.: Okay...
S.D.: You simply reproduce it...
J.M.S.: I call that rhetoric.
S.D.: It’s very much connected. There is no rhetoric without mannerism. Simply, you add or remove a small detail that makes this whole no longer the complete whole it was, it is no longer articulated to the world that produced it, but it is articulated to the viewer’s complicity. That is, what defines mannerism is that the viewer, after having truly been a viewer at the start of cinema, then a witness when cinema entered adulthood, has become an accomplice. And it is terrible to manage complicity.
J.M.S.: Because viewers are like the Magic Skin, they no longer exist. And the fewer there are, the more they are what you describe, that’s clear.
S.D.: And the more you need to get them on your side.
J.M.S.: Because viewers are people who make big headlines in the newspapers. These viewers have nothing more than film titles and those are the ones who react the way you say. And that’s 3,000 people in Paris. It’s for them that people make films nowadays. That’s totally uninteresting. Those aren’t viewers anymore.
S.D.: No, they are no longer viewers. They are accomplices.
J.M.S.: Yes, agreed.
S.D.: It’s a complicit audience.
J.M.S.: Complicit, but there are 3,000 complicit people. In that case, we should stop.
S.D.: Which is what the average audience today wants.
J.M.S.: That is also the lack of ambition. If you only make films for those 3,000 accomplices, then why make films?
S.D.: Because it is largely sufficient.
J.M.S.: In that case, long live utopia! We are utopic fools because we dream of an audience that no longer exists.
S.D.: You’re 20 years too early?
J.M.S.: Yes, or 40 years too late because we dream of the audience that went to see Chaplin’s films.
S.D.: Of course. Like him, it’s been dead a long time...
J.M.S.: It died and then the working class stopped going to the movies, the peasants stopped going. The bourgeoisie started to go but stopped. There are only pimps and parasites left. Those are the 3,000 accomplices. That’s not an audience.
S.D.: That’s what we’ve come to. At the same time, it is the only audience left for the cinema.
J.M.S.: No, because what you’re saying applies to art house cinemas. But we would not make one more film if it were not for the release that Dominque is offering us and that we accept, because in spite of it all, we are a little vain. But really, in France, in Germany, with the concerns of French people... But good luck to Dominque. I mean, our only justification is the moment when a film like Empedocles arrives, next fall, it’s programmed, the first German TV station, it will be a bit late, 11 p.m., but people will be surprised. And there are 2,500,000 or 2 million Germans who will see the film. And those are naturally a bit more than the accomplices you’re talking about. When Too Early, Too Late was broadcast by the same German stations, there were people who... We received postcards from people we knew, our friends in Boston who know people in East Germany, who had seen the film without knowing who Straub is, etc. and who said, “What interested us here is that we saw places, villages, the countryside, hills, and there was a relationship between what we saw and what we heard.” The guy who received the postcard, by chance, is a friend. He knows us. The person who sent it – this is just one example – absolutely did not know who Straub or Too Early, Too Late was. She started watching after 10 minutes, she saw a film. That’s what we’re interested in.
S.D.: Yes, I understand that. Besides, in my opinion, for a long time you’ve been more advanced in that area than others since filmmakers who are constrained to grieve a large popular and nice, cultivated, educated, noble audience are constrained to grieve that and they are going to suffer a humiliating defeat with television. Three-fourths of French filmmakers labelled rightly or wrongly “auteurs” know this will happen, hence their current bad mood and bad manners, because the ship is sinking. You have at least one advantage. You took your historical position very, very early and the only way for you to encounter an audience that is still an audience is in the most opaque place in society, meaning television.
J.M.S.: Exactly.
S.D.: So, nobody knows what to do with television. Nobody knows how it affects the body, how it affects the neurons, how it affects the digestive tract. Everyone uses TV as they want, where they want. And besides, television can have astonishing, stunning, or terrifying effects which are not seductive effects because it suffices for television to speak differently and impose a sound volume or manner of speaking different from the usual screams so that, immediately, people decide...
J.M.S.: They simply have a tone, that’s enough.
S.D.: So that people decide that they are going to resist the shock of a difference within the television and see what it is and to the contrary...
J.M.S.: I have to say modestly, we were in fact in advance, as you say, that’s very flattering, but we didn’t have a choice. Because in any case, we were never part of the family, because all our films from the start had to be financed outside the system. So the only escape we had was this one. And consequently, we have... It’s necessity that put us ahead, that’s all.
S.D.: Your drama was to have been partly financed very, very quickly by television. At least, there was always a German or Austrian station.
J.M.S.: Yes, it took ten years to find a station to finance our first project, which was a project from ’54 called Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. And when I say ten, it is not being generous because we shot it in ’67. So let’s not exaggerate. And besides, no television station ever financed one of our films, despite it all. It is always a third of the financing when all goes well, or a fourth, etc.
And in the case of Hölderlin, just as an aside, it is not necessary to do what the program from Avignon did, it is not necessary to write “d’Höderlin.” First, they forgot an L. That’s the French and their arrogance in German and foreign language matters. And then it isn’t necessary to write D apostrophe. No. In German, an H is generally inhaled. So you write “de” Hölderlin and not “d’Hölderlin.”
Hölderlin is already a bit less money than the Kafka because Amerika was a best-seller, etc. And another small example. They showed for the third time, but it was only the third station in Frankfurt, the first film we made really thinking directly about TV, because it was History Lessons based on Brecht’s novel called The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar, and that film is from ’72. When they show it again now at 8 p.m. on the third station in Frankfurt, there are people who send us letters saying, “Who wrote this text?” They have no idea about Brecht, etc. That’s what is important. “What is it? Where can we buy this text if we want to read it after having seen the film,” etc.
S.D.: Well, I think you were very, very radical in the good sense of the term and not it the overly facile sense people credited to you at the time. That means, having a chance over time to be perceived as a different, a rather educational content within the opacity of more or less marginal, uncontrollable, and bizarre audiences of evening TV broadcasts. Thank you Jean-Marie Straub. Everyone go to Avignon, everyone go to Stroheim.
*Walking Down Broadway (1933) was the original version of Stroheim’s film, re-edited and released as Hello, Sister!
** La barbarie, Michel Henry, 1987.
Serge Daney, Microfilms, France Culture on 19 July 1987. Translation and notes by Ted Fendt.
