Cannes 1984: Twice Upon a Time in America

Our favourite text of the Cannes 1984 series (Laurent and Sri).

Twice Upon a Time in America

Wenders recounts that during a recent trip to Osaka (Japan), he discovered a “Wim Wenders fan club”. They had only seen three of his films but they wanted to know everything about him. “I had the feeling,” says Wenders, “that distances were abolished, that Osaka was the suburb of another place, which itself was… It’s incredible to what extent cinema is a country, a family, a language.”

Leone discovered that there was a mythology about him in the USA, that UCLA students in California have dissected his films. “They have analysed the final duel in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly frame by frame, just to understand the play of glances!”, laughs Leone who, ever since, has believed in youth’s love for cinema.

By a lucky and objective coincidence, Paris, Texas and Once Upon a Time in America, two of the most eagerly awaited films of the 37th Cannes film festival, succeeded one another this weekend. And since they are both beautiful films, not only did they not disappoint but they also reminded festival goers (tired, blasé, sometimes sinister) that they too were a large fan club of eternally spotty-faced teenagers. With a lot of seriousness, these two films brought a lot of pleasure. You could see yourself in the mirror they held. The applause that welcomed Paris, Texas right from the opening titles is a clear sign. It’s cinema that’s coming home. Which means that we drop by America once again. It’s only logical; the dialogue between the Old and the New World can have no better mediators than these two: Wenders and Leone. 

America for them is always at the beginning. Sergio Leone wanted to make Once Upon a Time in America even before Once Upon a Time in the West. He kept at it for fourteen years. And if De Niro plays the role of Noodles, it’s because Leone had already talked to him about it when the little-known actor played in Mean Streets! This persistence is somewhat heroic: from obtaining the rights for Harry Gray’s memoirs (The Hoods), to Grimaldi, the Italian producer, acquiring them, to then buying them back from Grimaldi (when the latter was about to give up on the project owing to financial difficulties). Leone even took the Americans (Arnon Milcham for Alan Ladd Jr.) to court before showing the film. 

And this is just the part of the legend that can be told, the admissible tip of the iceberg: the genesis of Once Upon a Time in America had become a myth even before the shooting began (lasting eight months, in various places in Rome, New York, Montreal, and costing close to twenty million dollars).

As for Wenders, he didn’t spend fourteen years wanting to make Paris, Texas, but when he began painting, before shooting films, he took inspiration from the deserted landscapes of the Westerns that he had enjoyed as a child. “I was somewhat indebted to this landscape,” he says today. It’s strange how cinephilia is related to debt. Did the Cannes audience feel it? In any case, it applauded the first shot of Paris, Texas: a camera flying low over a Fordian canyon. It’s magnificent. 

But there are two Americas: real and imaginary. It is the place that makes it possible to dream, but also the corner of reality that dreams crash into. Even Leone’s. Once Upon a Time in America is not the film he had dreamt of and, if the version seen at Cannes is the one closest to it, the US version will be the one furthest away from it. Leone hopes to show the entire film one day, on television. You can’t sell Americans a European view (even one struck by wonder) of their mythology without risk. “Over there, I am respected,” he confesses, “but not liked”. Why would they like him when he tells the story of two losers in a scrambled chronology, when he sets his story in the Jewish community of the Lower East Side of the 1920s, and especially when he “invades America” with his 45-member Italian crew? Unions didn’t like him and the wily Leone had to play their rivalries against one another, pay American technicians to remain idle, and be criticised by the press for doing so (“Reagan wrote articles against me, so did Ted Kennedy…”).

Unions were a problem for Wenders too. Paris, Texas is the first Franco-German co-production filmed in the USA. He has had to pay teamsters to do nothing and face threats of strike.

For in the end, it’s time that decides, i.e. duration. Leone originally intended the film to be shown in two parts (4½ hours in total) before he was told that it is impossible in the US where no film is longer than three hours. With a heavy heart, he agreed to cut one hour, but it was still too long. Today, the film is in the hands of Warner Bros., ready to be edited all over again (it will be a carnage) and Leone is ready for another trial (and to remove his name from the credits). To be dependent on the US market is tragic. Wenders knows about this since he was employed by Coppola on Hammett. This (naturally bitter) experience is now behind him. 

It’s a never-ending paradox. On one hand, Leone as well as Wenders have a vital need for America, as if even the most universal stories were credible only when they unfolded there. On the other, they have a vital need for Cannes (or the Osaka fan club), awards and reputation which are their only currency when confronted with the American idea of the market of images. This contradiction is inexhaustible. Wenders lived in the USA, today he prefers traveling across the country, without settling down. “America fascinates me,” says Leone “the more I know it, the more I like it and the more I feel light years away from it.”

Why do they need America so much? Big question. Leone is an Italian filmmaker who has never filmed modern Italy, but has Italianised everything that has passed in front of his camera. Wenders is a German filmmaker for whom Germany only inspired meandering, melancholic and meteorological stories. “In France, in Italy,” Leone told me in Paris, “there is only France or Italy. In America, there is the whole world.” “In Europe,” he added sourly, “there are no contradictions any more, only the bitter logic of survival”. To Benito Craxi who encouraged him to make a film on Garibaldi’s life, he answers: no, because he would then have to make “Once Upon a Time There Was Italy,” but since Italy still hasn’t come into being, it would be “Once Upon a Future in Italy”. Is Europe already too jaded, or perhaps not furious enough, to really produce stories (other than cultural ramblings)? Wenders clarifies that a “story” is quite different from a “succession of events”. He has no problems stringing events together, but not so with telling a story. 

It’s long been Leone’s dream to narrate the siege of Leningrad and the two million that sacrificed their lives there. Is it because there are more stories coming from the East? Evidently so (see Skolimowski and Zulawski this year). Or because in the East, even in its putrescent state, there are still myths? Evidently even more so. Wenders, for his part, has an Australian project close to his heart. That’s only logical: it’s a country that emerged from nothing, therefore fit for myths. 

Both know (Leone always did, Wenders does more and more) that a story (in the banal and technical sense of a script) is a poor thing when it doesn’t stem from a myth that has imploded (or exploded). And since myths from defeated countries (Italy and Germany with its Macisti and Übermenschen) were also defeated, only the myths of the victors remain available. “What is useful in the long run,” Wenders told me in Paris, “is to believe in myths and not question them.” This is why we must drop by America (even at the risk of being ragged). This is why Paris is in Texas and not in France. 

“A man comes back. It took him a long time. He was in an unknown country. He comes back from the dead, like Ulysses. And this man, believed to be dead for four years, appears in the desert. He doesn’t speak. But he has a goal, we can feel it. He wants to find something again. First, he finds his brother who helps him find his son, and with the son, he begins to search for his wife, and he tries to recreate his family again.” That’s the story of Paris, Texas as summarised by Wenders (written with the probably decisive help of Sam Shepard). Now, imagine Harry Dean Stanton in the role of the “man” (Travis), and around him, Dean Stockwell as the blond child, Nastassja Kinski and Ry Cooder’s music. Let them roam everywhere, from Los Angeles to Houston, on the road or in the Mojave Desert. Immerse them in Robby Muller’s lighting and Wenders’ mise en scène (which, yes, you already like) and you have a very beautiful film whose beginning, incidentally, reminds us of Sergio Leone. 

In Leone’s film too, an old man comes back (from Iowa to the New York of his early years, so from faraway) to get over with a story that he thought he was the hero of, before the story left him behind. 

Once Upon a Time in America is the tangled tale of two petty Jewish criminals from the Lower East Side over a century: Max (James Wood, very carnal) and Noodles (Robert De Niro, very nuanced). They are inseparable, more than they think. When Max, in a bout of self-destruction, gives in to the violence that comes with power, Noodles betrays him to save him from the worst. Then Noodles disappears, anonymous and defeated by his gesture. But when he comes back, much later, like a Henry James character or a Shakespearian ghost, he discovers Max isn’t dead, but he too is a defeated man, albeit a rich, powerful and corrupt one. 

Now, add three hours and forty minutes of action, plot twists, bravura set pieces, a moving chronicle of Jewish New York at the beginning of the century, then the classic episodes of prohibition, with speakeasies and shady unionists, time passing strangely on the faces of women, an opium den as epicentre of this story full of dupes and fury, a decked up De Niro, magnificent and hunched over, and you have Once Upon a Time in America, another very beautiful film.

Myths, Mircea Eliade explained, are almost always stories that answer the question: how does something (or someone) come into being? Ex nihilo. How does it return from nowhere? Leone’s and Wenders’ heroes return from nowhere. There is a “hole” in their lives: four years for Travis, more than thirty for Noodles, a total of thirty-four years of which we will know nothing – an “absence to themselves” that forces them to rebuild everything, patiently. 

For we are no longer in the era – a rather naïve one in hindsight – where it seemed so desirable and so easy to “demystify” everything, starting with America. We don’t even believe psychoanalysis to be our last means of getting a grip on ourselves, thanks to our neuroses, to myths (Oedipus and company). 

A few years ago, we would have analysed Travis’ itinerary (a prodigious Harry Dean Stanton) as a puzzle-like reconquest of the ego in struggle with a repressed id and an inhibited superego. Wenders would have probably done it too. That was Kings of the Road. That was Once Upon a Time in the West (the great flashback, “keep your lovin’ brother happy!”). Stories of traumas and cures that unfolded like testimonies of patients undergoing analysis, with digressions (opera, wanderings) and ellipses. Knowledge about myths is useless today. What alone counts is the desire to lay out stories propelled by their myths. And there, we can say that Leone sums himself up and breaks free and that Wenders gathers himself and has a lot of fun. 

Let’s return to their films in greater detail later. For now, let’s talk about them as we have found them: together in the same festival. Creative stylists, Leone and Wenders quickly found a “form” that was the spontaneous answer to essential questions that they couldn’t yet ask. Questions about myths. Once Upon a Time in America is less brilliant, picaresque and pyrotechnical than the first Spaghetti Westerns. The hour edited out is cruelly missing. The actors are not all good. The central section (the 1930s) is slightly banal. But there is something that we were wrong to think Leone was incapable of: recreating a period, a risky genre if there was one, that he masters with unexpected freshness, transforming each object into a character, daring to reference Chaplin, filming a New York never seen before – especially by Americans. As for the modern section (the 1960s), I will only say that the scene of Noodles’s return toFat Moe’s restaurant is worthy of Ford. 

And Wenders manages the tour de force of transitioning, almost seamlessly, to linear storytelling, progressing step by step, neither boastfully nor vainly, of using his style instead of being led by his style, and of managing to film “the right things with a wide angle” (Leone’s words). And wide angle is not a question of format. It is the privilege of a filmmaker sufficiently confident of his know-how to hazard a few steps in a direction that he was avoiding until now. For Wenders, the pitfall was always women. He has never really known what to do with the women characters in his films. In Paris, Texas, if the relationship between the father and the son is perfect, making Jane (Nastassja Kinski, formidable) the object of the quest is one way of solving the problem (even if the much anticipated peep show scenes are a bit disappointing). In front of her, there is finally a man “with a goal” and who storms ahead. 

In the beginning, finally, there is desire. Well, Wenders remarks: “Americans are very good when it comes to moving in a single direction.”

First published in Libération on 21 May 1984. Reprinted in Ciné journal 1981-86, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: Skolimowski: at any Cost

Second text published in Libération on 19 May 1984.

Skolimowski: at any Cost*

The English title of the film is Success is the Best Revenge. It says a lot about Jerzy Skolimowski’s morals and ambition: this new film carries the auteur toward glory… at the cost of a few shortcuts. 

Alex, a Polish playwright, is looking for funding to produce a show on Poland, the country he has left. He lives (slightly above his means) in London with his wife and his two boys. At the start of the film, he’s in Paris, receiving an award from a minister of culture who looks like Piccoli (the film is a co-production, so there’s French money). Alex (Michael York) looks like the auteur of the film (Jerzy Skolimowski). Like him, he coaches a team of amateur Polish footballers. His eldest son Adam (sixteen years old) is in the team. Adam looks like a brother to Skolimowski’s son (in fact, that’s him).

Blissful though it is, this exile is not exactly perfect. In fact, Alex owes something to this unbearable martyr-country, his country: Poland. So, he recreates it everywhere: on a “stage” and on the giant lawn of a football ground. That’s his job. There are many episodes, all charming, handled like sketches. They help us imagine the unease (the nervousness, rather) in the life of the Rodak family. These episodes are often very funny, with an outsider’s point of view on Thatcher’s England. A broken chronicle, a cracked family painting, a portrait of the artist as a father, as a half-crook, as a beautiful soul. A portrait of his son as a new type of rebel, as a stranger already. 

For, as the father reconstitutes Poland in vitro (and that’s the irony of the film), the film stealthily moves East in vivo. The film ends at the Warsaw airport. Adam, with red hair and punk-style make-up, has chosen his freedom, that of seeing what Poland, real Poland, looks like. A short, blond provocateur, he suddenly resembles the Jerzy S. of the 60s a lot: the gifted artist of the “young Polish cinema” (now dead). 

Moonlighting was one of the most beautiful films of the last few years and, in 1982, the cinephile favourite at Cannes. Autobiographical, sarcastic and logical, Moonlighting was even more than that: a miracle. A story which, from A to Z, was both realistic and allegorical, physical and metaphysical. One of those films – we thought – that a filmmaker only makes once in his life (like an incredible scoring opportunity in football). Were we right? Skolimowski probably thinks that we weren’t. Success is Moonlighting at high speed, on steroids, with a great ambition. Skolimowski has clearly decided to take his rightful place as a great filmmaker (a place that was already his), as the best English filmmaker (paradoxically acquired during exile), and as a great Polish soul (finally). Until now, he demurred owing to modesty (Wajda having already assumed the role). He has taken over it with pride now. Success is therefore the testimony of a defeated Pole, with something of the joyful heathenism of Gombrowicz still in him, but with the required seriousness already to figure more than honourably in the prize list of major international film festivals. 

How can we be angry with him? That would be petty. But the title says it all. Success is the Best Revenge. Seventeen years after the complete ban of his last Polish film in his own country (even after Gdansk), Skolimowski has obviously felt that his (immense) talent can’t be satisfied with a critical half-success anymore. But the cost to pay is evident: no more signified, no more fine words, no more amplification of the things that he was doing so well for so long. The result is almost an advertising prospectus, superb but a bit cold, where an artist shows all his eggs and all his baskets, anticipates his “8½”, summarises all that he knows, all that he knows how to do and all that he intends to let us know. 

The result is strange. On one hand – “strictly on a cinematic level”, as is said in circles that don’t really love cinema – Success is well ahead of almost everything that is currently being produced (and that we have seen until now at the festival): a pure and simple genius of scenography, a ballistic conception of cinema as a weightless space where everything regains weight in falling, a razor-sharp irony, nervous actors and irreverence. On the other hand, the film comes across a little like a cinema version of a high-speed train, the “Skolimowski Express”, and the wide-eyed viewer watching it suddenly realises that it isn’t certain that this train will stop very long for him to hop on. 

Slightly out of breath, we recognise all the chapters already written of the Skolimowski saga in each carriage. There is a Polish carriage that reminds us of The Barrier with its shady crowds that trot around silently and aimlessly. There is an English carriage coming in from the interchange at Deep End with its cold and normal teenage eroticism (it’s the part with Adam, written by Sko Jr. himself). And there is the international carriage reserved for the theme of the international artist. And an engine that spits fire. 

Success is superb. The next train could be brilliant. 

* Translators' note: The French film title is “Success at any cost” (Le succès à tout prix).

First published in Libération, 19-20 May 1984. Reprinted in La Maison cinéma et le monde, vol 2, Paris, P.O.L, 2002. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: Vertigo

Another two texts from Cannes 1984 published in Libération on May 19th. First up, a Huston / Skolimowski combo. 

Vertigo 

Does a parallel stand up between the two films of the day, by Huston and Skolimowski? No, of course not. Unless we question the question itself. Unless we take the cinema as an art of standing up and a technique of falling. Caught between vertigo and equilibrium. A tightrope walker. 

If Under the Volcano is the wait for the final fall of one body, the body of the consul riddled with bullets at the door of the Farolito, a shady Mexican bar where he should never have set foot, Success Is the Best Revenge is by contrast the spectacle of an endless number of things “falling apart” (a roof, illusions, projects, football players, a teddy bear, a cup). Yet Huston and Skolimowski have something in common: they behave themselves. The former at the twilight of a long, prestigious career, and the latter on the cusp of international (that’s to say non-cinephilic) recognition, are all too aware of the ridiculous courage of their peers to let themselves be overwhelmed by even a pinch of sentimentality. Pathos is their enemy, intelligence their strength. That’s about all they have in common. 

As for the type of cinema they are practicing, they are quite clearly very different from one another. Any interest in the upright position (erectus), in vertigo and in falling, varies according to whether you are one of the last great classical directors or a leading figure of modern anxiety in cinema. 

Let’s start with alcohol. Alcohol constitutes a permanent exile. For the one constantly boozing, it imposes a kind of surplus labour: that of standing up, of composing his “character” in complete semi-lucidity, but “from the outside”. The real alcoholic is less someone who lets himself go than someone who watches himself holding on. This is why scenes of drunkenness, so frequent in movies because they look so “easy” to act, are seldom convincing. Actors hiccup, stammer and reel about with no regard for what is serious in the depths of drunkenness, and without reflecting the comic aspect of this seriousness (keeping composure, searching for words, talking in earnest etc.). The labours of the dipsomaniac are the hardest of all to act. 

Let’s make it clear right away: Albert Finney is a tremendous actor. He doesn’t play the consul like a wreck or a crazy man, but like a body watching over its own demeanour, in spite of the deficiency, the vertigo and the imbalance. You have to look at his face, decomposing-recomposing itself every instant like a video mask; you have to see his grimaces changing into words, his drooping body wedging itself into place in the image. You have to see him, shortly before his death, saying something like: they say the earth is round, so I’m going to wait for my house to come around once again so that I can go home. The alcoholic can have such raving insights, remembering that the earth turns too, and deciding to regard himself as the sun. What does Huston do? He puts Finney at the heart of each image, without any fuss, merely observing him, again, “from the outside” (no subjective or blurry shots here, thank goodness) and recording the actor’s motionless vertigo on the only surface available: a face. Classical, you will say. Well yes, this is (was) classical cinema: a camera dedicated to detachment and compassion, protected from vertigo, too static. That’s why there were stars. 

Let’s end with exile. Exile is a situation that cinema, owing to its own evolution, records all the better as time goes on. This situation can as well spawn “cosmopolitan fools” as produce an acute sense of the precariousness of everything and of the organisation of one’s survival. And of energy. If anything, there is too much energy in Skolimowski’s film. The film’s form feeds off it: its momentum, its surges and ricochets. And this is why, even more so than in Moonlighting, objects keep falling and bodies keep picking themselves up. This produces a graceless kind of burlesque against an English background. But this time, vertigo isn’t the disorder that grips one individual, but the movement which seizes all of cinema, head on. There aren’t any actor’s showpieces in Success, because there are already so many other showpieces: the pulsating sound, the upside-down image, the double, not to say triple narration, the jokey dispersal of all the different elements, and the figure of the auteur “in person”, equally mishandled. Skolimowski turns himself into a tightrope walker and the title of his film has a lot to say about his desire to do away with any safety net – at any cost. 

Huston has built numerous films on the mythology of failure. Very early on, Skolimowski told the story of a “defeat by forfeit” (this was in the sublime Walkover, a boxing story). For one as for the other, every round counts. 

First published in Libération on 19-20 May 1984. Reprinted in Ciné-journal 1981-1986, Cahiers du cinéma, Paris, 1986. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: Counting Your Chickens...

 Another short text from Cannes 1984. A filler?

Counting Your Chickens... 

The immortal Geneviève Tabouis used to start her radio broadcast editorials by yelping: “Expect to know that…” This was both a threat and a promise. We felt involved. Today, walking along the light grey concrete of this “rambla” that is the Croisette, leafing through the coated pages of Film Français, or browsing the stands of the Marché du film aimlessly, you come across large posters all going “Expect to see” (implying “and to get your money’s worth”). Films in competition already belong to the past, and those that haven’t been released, finished or even made yet are already on the bill. This is the moment when we really feel the festival happening. 

Is that Adjani scratching her head on a purple background? It announces Zulawski’s Mad Love (with Huster). Can you see two hands in cosmic darkness opening a sort of shoebox emerging out of which are the claws of a space panda? It can only be Gremlins, presented by Spielberg and directed by Joe Dante. Is that a beautiful man in a white dinner jacket, surrounded by a race car, a yacht and a hang-glider? It’s Belmondo on the Croisette already wishing us a Happy Easter, the film he is shooting at the moment in the Victorine studios, directed by Lautner (with Sophie Marceau playing the background). Seven copies of Lino Ventura’s stiff and uncomfortable mask, progressively smaller (and paler)? That’s clearly Pinoteau-Dabadie’s The Seventh Target. Ranxerox (yes, the one by Liberatore and Tamburini) holding a luscious redhead against him and the two, laughing, surrounded by a constellation of white stars on a blue background? That’s another project by Zulawski. A globe with a yatagan cruelly planted in the middle of the Nile delta? It’s one of the most eagerly awaited films: Youssef Chahine’s Adieu Bonaparte (with Piccoli and Chereau). A comic-book Aztec palace in pale Hergé-like colours, with a monkey and Coluche with yellow hair in the foreground? That can only be Gérard Oury’s re-reading of D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent. 

Finally, Noiret (in a brown leather jacket) and Thierry Lhermitte (in black leather) ominously emerging from a fiery red circle under a stormy sky can only prefigure Zidi’s upcoming film. Title: My New Partner [Les ripoux]. There is something rotten in… 

First published in Libération on 18 May 1984. Reprinted in Ciné journal 1981-1986, Cahiers du cinéma, Paris, 1986. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: Dial G for Georgia

 Daney's shortest review ever?

Dial G for Georgia

Depressing presence of a Soviet film in the official competition yesterday evening: Day is Longer Than Night. Those that selected a Georgian film directed by a woman (Lana Gogoberidze) may have thought it would disarm the critics. They were wrong. Synopsis: “Life in a tiny Georgian village from the beginning of the century to present day. The heroine, Eva, is a simple Georgian country woman whose destiny mirrors the changes happening in the village. Her life, filled with drama, is shaped by a tireless quest for justice and truth…!”

You don’t want to hear more about it, right? You couldn’t bear it. Moreover, unlike what is generally the case with these made-for-festival Soviet-films, this one is not even polished! It falls below the minimal technical standards! Quick, boycott, everyone!

Published in Libération on 18 May 1984. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: The Karma of Images

This text was published in Libération on the same day as Daney's first review of Leos Carax's Boy Meets Girl.

The Karma of Images 

The Cannes Festival is a rite. It also used to be a celebration. Every year, international critics used to discover the geopolitical map of the world (of images) through a selection of unreleased films (at least in France) that they were the first to see. Things were fresh and there was even a small thrill: that of being the first audience of a film, to have rights and duties toward the film. That of relating what they had seen, to create the desire to see what they had liked, to criticise what had disappointed them – or what had shocked them (the scandal of L’Avventura in 1960!). I have not known this era but everything tells me it existed. 

But what happened over the years? More images were consumed ever more quickly by fewer people. The world of cinema (film rotas, news, ideas, trends and people) accelerated and then started to race. Although still a rite, the Cannes Film Festival is less a baptism of fire or a crossing of the line for films than a sort of test or confirmation, a second chance or a rematch (I’m speaking of the official selection of course). The Americans send in films that have already missed the Oscars, but which, because of their strangeness, may attract European audiences (Coppola, Cimino and, this year, Leone), while large distributors kill the goose and the golden eggs by releasing the film in theatres at the same time as the festival, or right after, transforming the opening night gala into a mundane preview. In short, the festival goer is losing his cinephilic privilege, that of coming back to Paris, with a tan if possible, and answering the feverish questions of his friends wearily and enigmatically: “So, how was the…?”. And when a film from the French selection (always a ridiculous State affair every year) has already been released in theatres, the talk is about a “César effect” of the festival: the rite hesitates between redemption and intensive medication. 

One must be a cinephile to feel these things, but one would be naive to think it only concerns the world of cinema. This loss of the feeling of the present is obviously the great phenomenon of the media. We aren’t facing things anymore, yet we are unable to shake off their image, as if it were a friendly ontological glue. The urgency to see a film is reduced, and it may eventually result in a reduced urgency to make films. We’ve entered the era of recycling. The karma of images is to be reborn. They will bury us all. 

What happens to the film critic who comes home, late and tired, to his small hotel room? He switches on the TV on instinct and discovers – joy of joys! – that beyond the end of daytime programmes and the embarrassing “bonne nuit les petits!” that the announcers use to send to bed the good (working) people of France, there are still images! Not everywhere, sure, but on a thousand TV sets that play Sygma’s “Star 84” show after midnight. And there, in spite of good sense, with neurons fried and retinas on fire, the film critic continues to watch! Because after midnight on Sygma, there is the “Gaumont film club”, there is yet another film. 

It’s a strange (and slightly revolting) experience that consists of watching large extracts of, for example, City of Women or Identification of a Woman, when one should be sleeping. An amazing sensation of floating in which old acquaintances come nourish our REM sleep. Last reflexes of the critic (does the film still hold together?), remnants of daytime lucidity, strange gratitude towards these images which needn’t be written about or discussed the day after. This is how, every evening, images cure us of images. 

This loss of the feeling of the present also leads to an indifference towards the future and a forgetting of the past. All images are suddenly equal. Recycling counters are reset to zero. The day before yesterday, barely managing to watch Identification of a Woman, I had to make an effort to recall that this film was in competition here at Cannes in 1982 and that we had to fight (for the film, and even to see it, to enter the film theatre, to convince those that snubbed it, to improvise two pages for the newspaper). Was that which was true, or this discrete return of the film two years later, already as an object for film clubs? 

It is becoming harder every day to identify with films. Because we no longer come across them (like shooting stars) but because they begin to resemble us: in reserve, taped, waiting, in TV listings, vaguely present and always ready. 

First published in Libération on 17 May 1984. Reprinted in Ciné journal 1981-86, Cahiers du cinéma, Paris, 1986. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: Leos Carax, First Time

Daney knew Carax who attended his university lectures and wrote in Cahiers but this is Daney's first text on Carax the filmmaker. 

Leos Carax, First Time

Boy Meets Girl. Libé meets Carax. Yes, there are still filmmakers proud enough to talk about themselves in the first person. This is why, yesterday, we really liked Boy Meets Girls by Leos Carax, 23.

A frail ghost haunts the whole festival – Cannes as much as any other – that of the first film of a young and (perhaps) brilliant filmmaker. The “revelation” as the press says, the “hope”, the guarantee that cinema will continue, that it will produce its own Rimbauds and seven-year-old poets come hell or high water, that it can start again from scratch, that it doesn’t die. That everything has been processed, and yet, everything is left to play for. 

But at the same time, because we have praised too many talents that have not kept their promise, because we have called “young filmmakers” late beginners that stopped being teenagers long ago, because producers lacking new flesh have burnt up young talents with budgets too big, too quickly, this haunting is no longer mentioned. We are satisfied being grateful to young filmmakers today for merely carrying along the sensibility of the 1980s and for “resembling” their era (sociologically), even if it has (obviously) nothing to do with their merit. They arrive after the fact, very mannered, often nostalgic, aggressive out of necessity, ignorant and extremely cinephilic. They know that it’s harder for them to cause a scandal as easily as their elders, that they have been deprived of a revolt. But they are arriving, and necessarily so. 

Yesterday we saw Boy Meets Girl, Leos Carax’s first full-length film. It’s a real first film and he is (let’s bet on him) a genuine auteur. But like one is at his age, meaning at 23 years. The film is uneven of course, not well-controlled, precarious and riddled with impasses, but it oozes cinema (and not just love for the cinema) and it is made in 1984. The actors are of the same age as the director, the hero, Alex, resembles Carax like a brother, and they only talk of what’s around them and what interests them: their unease with life, the desire to have got it over with already, to have a body of work behind them, both a taste and a disgust for the world, reticence, dark ideas and a rock-solid ego. Carax also has a rare talent for poetry.

Telling the story of a film like Boy Meets Girl doesn’t help at all. Not because there is a mystery to protect here: it’s the (Bressonian) story of a young boy, on the night before leaving for military service, caught between a girl that left him and a girl that he meets, already “between sorrow and nothingness”. But because the mystery is in every instant, in the confident mise en scène when it conveys this unbearable feeling of precariousness, in the beauty of the monologues delivered in a flat voice, with no safety net. 

Two friends talk on the banks of the Seine, at night, and one throws himself at the other, there are sexual confidences, both daring and sweet, as a voiceover, a pinball machine that flashes even when opened up, a child that launches into a devastated monologue in the metro, the blinding light of a photocopier, a mute man who tells off young people for “not speaking”, abandoned children who cry in a room at a reception, music records stolen out of love, a maid’s room lit up by the light of an open fridge, the pride of love’s labours lost, and almost no adults whatsoever. 

A young auteur (Carax?) is someone who knows that he has already seen a lot of films, experienced few things (but already some difficulty) and that there is no time to waste to begin – calmly but immodestly – talking about them. Not because they are of value in themselves,  but because one makes film with what one has. An autobiography and exalted programme of a (dazzling) life ahead, followed by moments of aphasia where the tribute to silent films is not a cinephile’s vanity but a rough time to get through. The terror of wandering all night in a world “already seen” but “not yet experienced”. A young codger who can only become younger. 

There is something contemporary about the stubborn gaze of Alex and Mireille, two teenagers not even lost, merely “added” to the world that surrounds them: the confession of a revolt necessarily repressed. And there is something of the past in the way they live their life as fate, but in the future perfect, like in a nineteenth century novel. On the pale wall of his bedroom, Alex has drawn a rough map of Paris where he carefully writes down the place and date of everything that has been “a first time” for him. A beautiful image for a first film: birth, first kiss, first murder attempt etc.

There is also something contemporary in the way Carax restarts the autobiographical films of the New Wave (from Godard to Garrel, but also from Skolimowski to Bertolucci), no longer in a Paris freed from film studios that Coutard filmed, but in a nocturnal Paris, obscure, at dusk, full of neon and low lights, the Paris of all the filmmakers of his generation.

Who is Leos Carax? Alex’s double, but what else? Leos is not very tall, he wears oversized jackets that make him look even younger. He doesn’t say much. He has made a short film (Strangulation Blues). He lives only on cinema. He resembles the Léaud who stole pictures of stars in The 400 Blows. He’s the one who often comes to ask a saleswoman at a large film bookshop in Paris if she has “new stuff” about Godard. Posters or photos. For – the reader will have guessed it – Godard is a god for Carax. 

First published in Libération on 17 May 1984. Reprinted in La Maison cinéma et le monde, vol. 2, Paris, P.O.L, 2002.

Cannes 1984: Angelochronopoulos

Day 6, 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

Angelochronopoulos 

One day, in Hong Kong, during a sino-cinephilic conversation, I was horrified to discover that, for my Chinese interlocutor, European films were not “European”, not even “western”, but simply “slow films”. He was surprised that such a film genre existed, nothing more. He was far from suspecting that there was a time where European filmmakers didn’t hesitate to shake up habits and cause a scandal with very long films: two, three, four hours, or more. And that it was important for them that the audience didn’t just see the film, but had a sort of experience of duration. For where there is experience, there is duration, that of the too short or the too long. Experience being always a personal thing (and not a collective one), it is not surprising that it has never been accepted by mass audiences. What happens next is well-known. 

Today, the “too short” has clearly won. Just look at the growing taste of cinephile audiences (even among the ex-purists) for the thousand and one tricks of TV adverts, or more recently for film trailers or music videos, to realise that we all agree on this point: for lack of new stories to pretend to tell in two hours, better summarise all the old stories in twenty seconds, in an evocative and funny skeleton. 

But in a film festival like Cannes, we also know that each year, reliably, there will be the film-fleuve in which many – less and less Heraclitean – would rather avoid stepping in twice. The adjectives used are “long”, “boring*”, “beautiful” and there is only one conjunction to link them: “but”. A film is “long but beautiful”, “beautiful but boring”, and for those who can’t take it anymore, “long and boring”. Since those films often deal with noble and dignified themes, one rarely dares to spit on the reel, but it’s true – let me attest – that even veterans of “film as an experience of duration” struggle to repress an abject sigh of relief – almost of joy – when they learn that the film they are about to see is only ninety minutes. Great filmmakers are not the last ones to keep things short (Bresson last year, Bergman this year). 

Voyage to Cythera, Theo Angelopoulos’ sixth full-length feature, is one of those long films; it is “slow” as well. Everything has an air of beautiful stiffness and bored stateliness. Actors are sleep-walking through complex itineraries that the editing doesn’t attempt to shorten. The subject of the film is, of course, time. Time that is passing and time that has passed. An old Greek resistance fighter comes back to his homeland after thirty-two years abroad (in the USSR, where he has rebuilt his life). The man is a cross between Zorba the shepherd and an aphasic Nosferatu, a gangly man that no close-up shots will make us feel closer to. There is his family in Athens (his wife Caterina who has waited for him, and his children who have never known him), and in the countryside, there are memories of the maquis, the wetlands, and peasants that are leaving. At stake in the story is this: will he adjust to his old life again? Will he even talk? Throughout the first hour, and even after, the answer comes in slow motion: no. And the audience, also on board to Cythera, observes with despair that Angelopoulos is faithful to his manner as a hardworking and melancholic calligraphist. So yes, the film is beautiful – beautiful but boring. 

And then no. Suddenly, we are less bored, we watch with more attention. Since it’s clear that Spiros will not adjust to modern Greece again (the film’s main point), it no longer matters how things will end, for Spiros or for the film. There are no more stakes once we’ve understood the “lesson”. We even understand that the film was slow only because it was taking too long to impart its lesson, that suddenly it is no longer long, slow or boring, and that it is often beautiful. We thought we were crushed by a steamroller, but we find ourselves intact, and curious. 

It is as though, once the story has been told, the theme dealt with, and all the great clichés on meditation pertaining to this type of story reviewed (the return, the exile and the passing of generations), Angelopoulos had finally deserved to make a film. Freely, without stake. As though the characters, painstakingly drawn for our eyes by the script, refused to disappear straight away and, like tenacious puppets and familiar ghosts, obtuse bodies freed from their signifying duties, managed to touch us in the same way as Tati’s films or Antonioni’s epilogues, with sinister comedy. In these moments, we forget to find the film “long” or “slow”: image by image, it improvises itself. 

What happens in the last part of Voyage to Cythera? First it begins to rain (like today in Cannes), then the authorities decide to deport Spiros, and finally a tragicomic dance begins between the distressed family, the old man, port authorities, the circling of boats, a barge in international waters and a café where a music band – here to celebrate an unlikely docker festival – takes shelter. It’s good. 

Like many modern filmmakers, Angelopoulos maintains an ill-fated relation with History (and to the story as well). He spends a lot of time getting it over with (that’s when he’s slow), and then, where a Hollywood film would end for good (with fanfare), he claims for his actor-figurines, one or two more rounds, a surplus of reflex-activities, extra time, time to do anything at all “once everything is over”. His film – unfortunately – only begins at the end of the story. 

* Translators' note: Daney uses chiant in the French text, throughout. 

First published in Libération, 16 May 1984. Reprinted in Ciné journal 1981-1986, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: Auteurs: High and Low

Tavernier / Zulawski combo from the 1984 Cannes festival.

Auteurs: High and Low 

When the French film industry got organised to recapture markets (ten years ago), it inherited a new reality: auteurs. Those of the New Wave are over fifty years old now (they’re doing fine, thanks for asking), but to get the revamped machines going, one shouldn’t really count on them. They are too tenacious, too singular, too “auteur” basically. 

Then there was the next generation of cinephile filmmakers in their forties: very cultured and quite divided, between the cinema they had loved growing up (classic cinema) and the cinema they inherited (modern cinema). How many auteurs among them? Very few (Doillon and Garrel are specific “cases”). Sooner or later, Corneau or Tavernier had to accept this simple fact: the machine needed them and – propelled by their success – they would end up loving the machine in return. It was only logical. 

Unfortunately, in the meantime, the slogan “auteur” really took off: a sales pitch for distributors, almost a union benefit for young filmmakers (“the right to…”), a temptation for patron-producers to “reconcile money with talent”, assured billing at every major film festival, etc. 

The end result was predictable. In the current, modernising realpolitik of the French film industry, the idea of the auteur, vague but still unavoidable, becomes cumbersome. One only has to look at the selection of French films for the 1984 Cannes festival for proof. The official film (A Sunday in the Country) and the unofficial film (The Public Woman), in addition to their equal badness, have this in common: they caricature the notion of auteur. Broadly, downward with Tavernier and upward with Zulawski. 

Those who don’t like A Sunday in the Country find it old-fashioned, soppy and academic. But what struck me when seeing it yesterday in a multiplex on the Rue d’Antibes is rather that, behind the little Chekhovian music and this terrible “old traditional France” look that instantly recalls Gérard Lenorman’s song in praise of France, there was some of Tavernier’s “poetic art”, that behind the character of the old solitary painter was a plea for his own cause. Monsieur Ladmiral, we are told, isn’t a great painter. And even if he has realised right away that there was something new and strong about Cézanne or Van Gogh, he has continued to paint as he has been taught: perhaps he lacked courage. The character is rather moving, sincere, etc. And since he is making this melancholic confession to his own daughter in an outdoor country café worthy of Renoir, we really can’t be cross with him (how could we be upset with such a nice old man?). But the sense that it is Tavernier who speaks through him is enough to make us twitch. 

Why go through the trouble today of answering questions that, visibly, no one is asking any more? Why pretend to willingly endorse the rejection of the modern when you only relish the old? Why try so hard? Doesn’t this trick mean that Tavernier, despite being promoted as an “auteur”, thinks it is still his duty to redeem himself from this ungrateful role but still expects to reap the emotional benefits of this move? Keeping a low profile isn’t necessarily the same as being humble. The humility of the true labourers of auteur cinema was commendable. But this was a while ago, a long while ago. 

Because even recently, it was all about modern cinema (breaks, discontinuity, etc), with the romantic reign of the auteur, his readymade vision of the world, his tantrums and sufferings, his fundamental dissent. Andrzej Zulawski, in this sense, arrives a bit late. He’s unlucky. At a  time when there’s a lot of talk about him on the Croisette and in the media, when his film is pitted against Tavernier’s, when he finds himself in the role of the great, sweet enfant terrible, it is obvious that he has become the minstrel of his own cause. That of the Auteur, and more precisely, the auteur who came from the cold and who has to succeed in the West, at any cost. And the cost, in The Public Woman, is high. Those who don’t like the film find it narcissistic, artificial and academic. But what struck me when seeing it from the last row of the Louis Lumière auditorium, and when reading and listening to Zulawski’s interviews, was how terribly, suddenly old this hysterical demand for a visionary artist, deus ex-machina and professional dissident had become. 

In the film too, the character of the film director reels off cliché after cliché and one only has to close one’s eyes for a moment and listen to the soundtrack of the film to feel overwhelmed by the desperate evocation of all the platitudes that we have learned – since philosophy lessons at school – to take with a pinch of humour. 

The low-profile auteur and the high-profile auteur. Both doing too much – a sign that there is something rotten with the word (I do say the WORD) auteur. 

First published in Libération on 15 May 1984. Reprinted in Ciné journal 1981-86, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: Herzog with the Abos

Daney reports on day 5 of the 1984 Cannes film festival. See our footnote about the title of the article. 

Herzog with the Abos*

It’s been a long time since a film by Werner Herzog, always on the road and never missing a thing, brought so much pleasure. This time, he has gone to Australia.

At the press conference that immediately followed the screening of Where the Green Ants Dream, Herzog was asked: “Is making films a mission for you?”; “No, just a duty,” Herzog replied with a smile. He was also asked if he believes in God. “I’ve had a very religious period. I’ve converted to Catholicism. But I no longer believe in God, I only believe in the Church” (surprised laughter in the audience). Herzog is one of those filmmakers who is asked these kinds of questions. He attracts them. With him, big words are called upon.

After the Fitzcarraldo disaster, one may have wondered what Herzog’s mission across the world would look like. Herzog, a great documentarist, had proved himself a poor narrator in heavy and overblown productions. Shooting the film was akin to the labours of Hercules, but in the end, there was no emotion. Those who thought that this man, because he was haunted by faraway countries, the strange unity of the human race and a taste for initiation rites, was – for this reason – well-equipped to thrill audiences with great adventure films got it clearly wrong. They confused – silly ones! – fiction and narration (two very different things). Herzog’s world is that of pure fiction and the only stories that interest him are of cosmogonic nature: they deal with the creation of the world. 

This is how Where the Green Ants Dream begins, a film that he had wanted to make for a long time and which he shot last year in Australia, in the centre of the country. A mauve sky, 16mm film grain, a dark tornado that seems to join the sky with the earth, and suddenly, in colour, a bit of desert, a yellow tractor, “Abos” (i.e. Aboriginals) lying prostrate, a young geologist, tall and naïve: all this is laid out so clearly that we are immediately reminded what we love in Herzog’s filmmaking in the first place: his capacity to make, if not films, at least shots, one by one, which have an impact on us. 

The story is both beautiful and ordinary. Beautiful for us, ordinary for the Australians. A mining company is running blast tests. Thousands of small gravel cones create an endless lunar landscape in broad daylight. A handful of Aboriginals, dignified and a little absent, calmly protest: this land is “where the green ants dream”, and in their mythology, these ants play a fundamental role. From there, the film unfolds like an unpredictable news story, since the Aboriginals are unpredictable. There are even some funny things. The case goes to the Supreme Court in Canberra where, despite all the tact deployed to avoid shocking the “Abos”, the final verdict goes against them. The young geologist, in the process of gaining ecological awareness, leaves the mining company. 

The story is all the more muddled, funny and calmly disconcerting since the two logics at play – that of the whites and of the Aboriginals – almost never cross. Here are two worlds with different geographies. There are collisions but no encounters. In a supermarket, a small group of Abos hog an aisle without buying anything, only because – and they are the only ones to know this – it was the location of the only tree in the region. 

In the serene modesty of the film lies the implicit observation that ours is the time after all the dreams of universal reconciliation, and that the world (the earth, in fact) is already made of several overlapping levels (some of them invisible) inhabited by different beings (some of them dead). Herzog has always wanted to film characters who only appear to be sharing the same space and who in fact coexist light years away from one another. That’s the cross he bears as a missionary and his reason to film. With real persistence, he manages to transform these images into proofs that it’s not men who share histories, but that it’s mythologies that share people. 

The “paradox” is that the image becomes clear as a result, a little dry, with no sentimental glue; as it happens every time a filmmaker settles for simply showing. 

* Translators' note: The French title of the article is “Herzog chez les Abos” (in La Maison cinema et le monde). Daney uses “Abos” another three times in the text, the first two times with inverted commas. We can’t pinpoint where the word comes from (the film, the French subtitles, Daney) and although Daney uses it with some caution, he doesn’t seem fully aware of how racist it actually is. We translated it literally to present an accurate record of the text. 

First published in Libération on 15 May 1984. Reprinted in La Maison cinéma et le monde, vol. 2, Paris, P.O.L, 2002. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: Valérie Kaprisky, Eulogy of the Nude

Two texts on Zulawki's The Public Woman published on the same day in Libération: one by Daney on Valérie Kaprisky and a "unanimous review" by all the films critics. 

Valérie Kaprisky, Eulogy of the Nude

Things happen too fast in The Public Woman for us to have the time to think anything of the actors’ performance. Bodies are in such a state of acceleration that we cannot perceive in them anything other than condensed energy ready to be unleashed in each shot, to tip over in an atmosphere, to flee in wide angle and to knock props off. Zulawski is too full of his own torment to share anything other than hysteria and nervous breakdowns with his actors. 

Yet, of the three characters in The Public Woman, the only one that – strictly speaking – keeps up, is the woman, Valérie Kaprisky. And among the countless images where she is pushed to the limit and left to her own reflexes, the only ones that stay afloat are the ones where she has the time to be visible. Visible and naked because she is dancing for a few banknotes from a photographer-voyeur who snaps away looking mean in an equally naked setting. Visible and naked because in these moments, she exists despite Zulawski’s pyrotechnics, playing the role of the object in the most naked expression of the relation between actor and auteur, when the object is reduced to a bulging eye on one side and a wriggling body on the other. Valérie Kaprisky conveys something rare in cinema: the nude. Not “in the buff” for a bit of starry flesh, but the nude, in the sense that a painter might see his model come alive, charge toward him, and risk performing threatening movements. An unchained Matisse, a feminine Bacon, with heavy ankles bound to the floor, a head that says no, a back scarily arched. It’s beautiful.

A person capable of inventing such movements isn’t an ordinary one. That’s the word on the Croisette. Cinephiles know Kaprisky because they saw her as Jean Seberg’s remake in Jim McBride’s sweet film (Breathless). They are mostly unaware that she also appeared in films such as Men Prefer Fat Girls (1981), Une glace avec deux boules (1982), Aphrodite (1982) and Légitime violence (1982). They are unaware that she was born Valérie Chères, in Neuilly in 1962, and that she almost played in One Deadly Summer (1983). But they weren’t completely wrong. Valérie Karpisky is among those actresses that arrive at a point where they need to both create an image and stick to it (in commercial films), and not refuse the role of a guinea pig in an art film experiment that may crush them, harden them and perhaps get them noticed. With The Public Women, Valérie Kaprisky seems to have managed this successfully. 

Of course, when listening to what she says about her work with Zulawski, one must make allowances for the obligatory discourse inherent to this kind of project. “I believe that I’ve really pushed my limits. I gave everything in the first days for the dance scenes, and by the end of the first week, I decided to give even more.” To which there is nothing to say except that this conception of the work of an actor as a gift and a therapy suddenly comes across as dated (like the film, by the way). As for her relationship with Zulawski: “He was often affectionate and fragile, and we were capable of not giving him anything, in self-defence. What interests him is to work with actors who have an inner richness but who are also manipulatable, whom he can fashion in different ways.” That, we certainly got.  

First published in Libération, 14 May 1984. Reprinted in La Maison cinéma et le monde, vol. 2, Paris, P.O.L, 2002. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Our unanimous review

Everyone is free to think what they want of the media bluff that sucked up to the trumpeting presentation of The Public Woman. They can even salute, without irony, the marketing performance. If all this noise had been at the service of a masterpiece, we could have possibly even been cordially pleased or complicit in it. But The Public Woman is wide of the mark, to say the least, and the bluff of the film vastly overshadows the bluff of its promotion.

Zulawski enjoys a certain reputation: the man who loves women, who makes them suffer and derives films from it (remember the ultrasonic Adjani in Possession). Here once again, he relies on a woman (Valérie Kaprisky, rather deserving) to tell his story: a modern young girl who hesitates between being a whore, a child-woman, and the main character in a remake of Demons directed by a mad Franco-German director (Francis Huster). What else? Nothing, for all this is a necessary but not at all sufficient smokescreen at the service of some pretty over-the-top ideas about cinema. For there are messages here, and what messages they are! That the creator gives birth to his art through suffering, that auteur cinema is hell, that to film actors is to grant them immortality. In short, the whole “Shush, I’m creating!” shebang that no one wants anymore after Fellini’s 8 ½.

What’s left? A certain virtuosity in making the camera and images run around, but at the service of the discourse just explained above, therefore empty and neutralised. Valérie Kaprisky is kind enough to tolerate what Zulawski makes her go through but often acts a little forced; Huster is hysterical as a fake blond, Lambert Wilson rather convincing as a drinker of dirty water; Jean-Paul Farré remains in completely nutty nirvana. What a disappointment!

Signed: all of us.

Published in Libération, 14 May 1984. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: English TV Goes to the Movies

Second of three reviews of films shown over the first weekend of the Cannes 1984 festival.

English TV Goes to the Movies 

The opening of Another Country, the first English film in competition this year, is superb. In a dingy eighties Moscow apartment lives an old man named Bennett. A sort of arrogant dwarf, very British, prognathous queen in a wheelchair. A journalist has come from the West with a little tape recorder to capture his confessions. “I’ve always wanted to go down in history,” says Bennett. “Even as a spy in the pay of the Soviets?” asks the journalist. 

One can tell that Bennett is a double for Burgess, MacLean, Blunt or others, who, in the thirties (in their youth), chose Communism, spied, then rotted in the East and died there. with their secrets. How could one become a Soviet spy back in 1932 as a member of the ruling class, the class that sent its children to be knocked into shape at public schools? Alan Marshall (the film producer), Julian Mitchell (the author of the play) and Marek Kaniewska (the director, who came from TV) have asked this question very seriously. 

The answer is to be found in the English public school system, with its rituals and ragging, the childhoods of its humiliated ruling-class, its organised repression of all by all, this machine manufacturing repressed little monkeys ready to serve the Empire, fearing God and loving cricket. And this machine, as is bound to happen, has its failures, its extremists, its real idealists. 

In Another Country, they are two: Bennett and Judd. Bennett’s tragedy is not that he is homosexual, but that he can only assert his desire in a society which lives off sublimated homosexuality like immoral earnings. Bennett is brilliant, nonchalant and dreams of becoming an ambassador. But when he loses face, all he has left is to be an ambassador in his own fashion: a spy (but the film doesn’t tell us about that, it only covers the genealogy of a choice). As for Judd, Bennett’s best friend, he has other reasons for rejecting the taming machinery: he is a Communist and a serious one, furtively reading Marx, and will die a few years later in Spain. The double exclusion of the faggot and the bolshie from the “English” tribe (the tribe that produced the two Lawrences, D.H. and T.E.) is the angle that the film-makers have adopted in their approach to their subject: class treason, no less. 

A big subject then, and intelligently elaborated. What about the film? There isn’t any film. For a long while now, thanks to their origins in television, English directors have brought to their films the seriousness of their scripts and their lack of visual imagination. Few across the Channel still believe in the specific power of cinema. A film like Another Country has no style, just “craft”. It gives us time to notice the good performance of the actors (Rupert Everett, Colin Firth) and to take pleasure in the frequently deceptive feeling that we are suddenly wonderfully intelligent and able to talk for hours – in a pub or a club – about the serious things that the film is about. 

What does this triumphant infiltration of TV drama into cinema finally come down to? It comes down to the world being seen in medium shot (and medium, mediocre, media is all the same thing). In retrospect, we can really understand what cinema was: an adventure in perception, a way of seeing the world from too near or too far, an art of adapting the gaze, of inventing the necessary distances to locate your subject; an art somewhat on its last legs, short of subjects. For, to be frank, this has to be said: as far as the treatment of the aforesaid subjects is concerned, English directors are the best in the world, much superior to their French colleagues. 

So, movies on the one hand and TV on the other? That would be too simple. The boundaries are never as distinct. Nowadays, making movies often comes down to the most conspicuous possible demarcation from TV, from TV-perception. The only “subject” for today’s cinema is its rejection of the TV gaze, of the world seen in medium shots. This leads to a wearisome mannerism (see Beineix) or prematurely worn-out histrionics (see Zulawski). But on the other hand, TV directors go on being dissatisfied with just being TV directors, serious handlers of big subjects, excuses for film debates and jammed talk show switchboards. They too would like to belong to the great sinking continent of Cinema. At the press conference for Another Country, the film-makers said that this wasn’t a film on Communism, homosexuality or the English education system, but that it was, first and foremost, a film! A pity, because it was exactly a film on all those (serious) things. But a film is something else, it is never “on”, it is always “with”. TV leans on things. Cinema deals with them. 

First published in Libération on 14 May 1984. Reprinted in Ciné journal 1981-86, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: Bergman, After the Competition

The first of three films reviews by Serge Daney published in Libération on Monday, May 14th, 1984. 

Bergman, After the Competition

After the Rehearsal is a beautiful telefilm talking serenely about the theatre of words and the fatigue of bodies.

In the final scenes of Fanny and Alexander, the women of the Ekdahl family laughingly decide to restage a play by Strindberg, “that old misogynist”. It’s this play – A Dream Play – that Henrik Volger is in the process of staging in After the Rehearsal. Except, this is the fifth time he is staging it. Henrik is an old man who has loved women and theatre a lot. He’s at the centre of this 70-minute film that Bergman has shot for the Swedish television and that Gaumont had the smart idea of distributing. Erland Josephson plays Henrik: white hair, sharp eyes, wrinkled face, clumsy body. He is the one who played the role of the cabalist Isaac in Fanny and Alexander. Here, he’s very obviously Bergman’s alter ego, and we’re grateful to the latter for not pretending that he isn’t the vicarious hero of his film. This honesty allows him to get to the heart of the matter quickly.

One may recall that Bergman had announced – rather jokingly – that Fanny and Alexander would be his last film “for the cinema”. The press still in shock, he was already in Stockholm quietly shooting a play (with three actors on a single set) he had written himself: After the Rehearsal. Check-up, assessment, self-questioning: a man decides to talk about his trade. One day, ”after the rehearsal”, Henrik Volger is woken up from his nap by a young woman, his actress, who, in all senses of the term, is after him. A scene starts between them. And very quickly, the truth comes out: theatre is not a trade, it’s a way of being with the other, to listen to him talk, to love him and to be at his mercy, to take turns playing all the roles (Henrik is therefore a severe master, an ideal father, a possible lover, a playmate, a perverse theoretician etc). To do theatre is to ensure that the other is always responding, whatever we tell him. 

Coming from Bergman – it’s the first thing that comes to mind – this kind of digression-manifesto-trick is not surprising. It’s even thanks to him that we know quite a bit about truth and falsehood, sincerity and subterfuge. Yet, After the Rehearsal is a short, diabolical and surprising film. Why? Because the subject of the film isn’t the stage but the noise of the stage that has always been with us, when we talk, when we confide, when we believe in our own sincerity. And this particular noise (theatricality) never goes away. 

So Anna, the young actress, ill-at-ease, curious about everything and dissatisfied with herself, forces old Henrik to talk, to confide. 

Anna then doubles down on her confessions: she agreed to play the role even though she was pregnant by the director, a certain Johan whom we will never hear about again; she has (already) had an abortion; she is jealous of her mother, an actress as well, who died five years ago and whom Henrik loved; and – of course – she’s in love with Henrik. In the meantime, Rakel, one of Henrik’s former mistresses, an alcoholic and pathetic has-been (Ingrid Thulin), comes to see him and makes a scene that we imagine to be a ritual (laughter, tears, sarcasm, demand for love). Anna, frozen in her armchair, is there without really being there. It resembles Bergman’s earliest high-society comedies (like A Lesson in Love), and it is, of course, unforgiving.

The cruel thing is that it never stops. If theatre is life, it is immortal. It’s only actors that die. But they are never more alive than when they suspect this truth. It’s still true of Rakel and it will be true one day of Anna. How to make her understand this? And what about the audience? Once Rakel leaves, Anna picks up the interrupted dialogue and offers herself to the old man. He panics. It’s the most beautiful part of the film. Let’s imagine, Henrik says, that we let ourselves go through with this, let’s foresee what would happen: the highs and the lows, jealousy and predictable failure. Anna plays along, the image closes in on them, on their faces, on Anna’s ever more childish face (Lena Olin, very beautiful), on the excitement of giving tit for tat, on the madness of “what could be”. The complicity that binds them as they imagine themselves squabbling becomes a squabble. So much so that it is no longer a game between truth and falsehood, but between a present already over and a future already there. For at least twenty minutes, with the sole intensity of faces and words, Bergman almost proves that the wise thing would be to experience everything in the present, if possible, playfully. 

But something – obstinately – says “no” to this tightrope walker’s wisdom, and that’s the body. Rather strangely, at the beginning of the film, we sometimes hear Henrik’s voice over, a voice beyond the grave of the one who sees himself from very far, without complacency. The theatrical babbling then fades away and the voice tells the truth: not that of words (which have little truth in themselves) but that of the body (which knows only one truth: fatigue). This voice over isn’t an easy trick. It’s a formidable proof of courage. As if the filmmaker, knowing himself to be virtuoso, serene and masterful enough, capable of dissecting a face like no other, had – despite everything – no illusions. When Henrik fears a sexual fiasco or when he notices that, having become partially deaf, he no longer hears the church bells, he knows that the only “off-screen” space that remains is the one that announces his own death, in his own voice. 

This beautiful film goes beyond optimism and pessimism. It is both cheerful and sad, calm and light, and very simple. Few filmmakers in 1984 can take the liberty of making a “divertimento” right after a saga. Such freedom was so unwelcome at Cannes that After the Rehearsal went almost unnoticed. Out of competition, really. 

First published in Libération on 14 May 1984. Republished in La Maison cinéma et le monde, vol. 2, Paris, P.O.L, 2002. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: Fort Saganne, Three Hours Without Drinking

Third text of our Cannes 1984 series. First film review. 

Fort Saganne, Three Hours Without Drinking 

First French film shown (out of competition) for the opening of the 37th Cannes Festival, Fort Saganne by Alain Corneau. A big budget chasing a big subject. The camels are full of talent.

Fort Saganne, a French film out of competition, was without a doubt the film of the day. Because it was the only one. It’s an honest film, decently made and rather bad. Let’s say “not entirely bad, but inexistent” to be kind. Otherwise, it’s the most expensive French film (says the advertising for the film): both “Saganne of Arabia” and “Apocalypse Yesterday”. Yet – every cinephile knows this – the more expensive a film manages to be, the more it is condemned to be but about one topic: failure. 

Fort Saganne is the story of Charles Saganne, a small peasant from the Ariège region who becomes a hero of the conquest of the Sahara Desert between 1911 and 1914. Like any hero, Saganne is manipulable and empty, driven by the sole logic of being ever more heroic even as the reasons for heroism go missing. The making of Fort Saganne, the film, naturally reflects this scenario: the idée fixe of a producer (Albina de Boisrouvray) leading to a gamble on an actor (Depardieu as Saganne) and the know-how of a safe pair of hands (Alain Corneau). The era where films were “big” by virtue of the importance of their subject (from Griffith to Cecil B. DeMille) is long gone. Today, big films exist only to deploy incredible logistics for our very eyes at the service of no particular thought process whatsoever. One could even say (not without some sadness) that if Corneau were like Hawks (or Hathaway, let’s say), meaning a filmmaker nurturing no bad conscience in regards to the role of the white man in non-white continents, his talent would be given free rein and the battle scenes – which he manages best, by far, in Fort Saganne – would take on their full meaning. It is the paradox of left-leaning Americanophile cinephiles when they become filmmakers. 

This film lasts three and a half hours (it’s long). So we had plenty of time to ask ourselves: what’s its genre? Watching Fort Saganne, I found, one after the other, a retro film on the French colonial saga, a meditation on the theme of the desert, a film on military propaganda and a (Conradian) reflection on the idea of failure at the heart of any human endeavour. 

I saw them pass one by one, and I saw clearly that Corneau and Depardieu would be sad at the idea that one might believe them incapable of dealing with these subjects. But in the end, there is nothing. And “nothing” is very difficult to film.

We feared the return of the colonial saga; with Spahis, Méhari jeeps, fraternal tribes, French flags and all this barely repressed fantasy, with its hot sands, scarves flapping in the wind and never satisfied camels. But it’s clear that the filmmakers have bypassed such a film and introduced some psychology (the relationship between Saganne and Colonel Dubreuilh, played by Philippe Noiret as a hardened dinosaur), whereas a reassertion of the old colonial good conscience of France would have shocked. 

We feared that the theme of the desert would be sprawling; surpassing oneself, experience of the limits, endurance and solitude, truth at the corner of every oasis. All this tempting mythology is set aside, reserved for secondary yet credible characters (R. Dumas, H. Girardot, etc). Saganne’s earthy roots prevent him from getting lost in metaphysical sands, and during his African adventures, he discovers no truth. He is not an intellectual like Colonel Lawrence but a courageous soldier who wages war where he is told to wage war, without ambitions (he harbours some for his younger brother, but will be disappointed), simply confronted with other soldiers, some with a lot less integrity than him. 

We also feared that a film on manipulation might be a bit facile. Destined to serve, Saganne also serves strategies that he doesn’t know how to use to his advantage. When Dubreuilh sends him to Paris as a “hero” in order to influence public opinion and continue the war in the Sahara, he understands that he is being used and ridiculed. But the film is not in the vein of post-modern Westerns (Altman) or post-spaghetti Westerns (Leone) with their sarcastic reflection on heroism that becomes legend, legend that becomes an image, and the image that becomes a mere pawn on the political chessboard. 

Remains the Conradian meditation on failure. It doesn’t really happen. Saganne, in the end, obtains many things (the woman he loves, the Legion of Honour) and when he dies in a bomb crater in July 1914, it is without a sense of fate or irony. Moreover, it’s clear that if Depardieu hasn’t yet reached a point where he can wink at the audience (like a Morfalous-style Belmondo), he cannot be seen playing a character with suspicious or negative values anymore. At this level, it’s the film’s budget that decides this.

So there is an alignment between the way Corneau films, the way Albina de Boisrouvray produces and the way Depardieu “composes” his character. The only risks they take are related not to the subject of the film, but to shooting conditions (that we imagine to be epic, complex, heroic, in beautiful, faraway and natural Mauritanian settings). Otherwise, there is nothing. Nothing to report. But I did say that “nothing” is difficult to film. This “nothing”, this profound indifference of academic filmmaking towards anything it touches, this way of controlling everything but filming nothing, sometimes works as it is. Obviously not in the ridiculous episodes with women, rarely in the desert landscape (the desert is not always that decorative), but a lot in the battle scenes (Omar’s well-defended attack and the war trenches at the end are beautiful pieces of filmmaking) and infinitely with the camels. 

These beasts, often handled cavalierly in cinema, are in themselves film enigmas. With their pitiful screams, their painful tendency to fall on their knees, their rolling hump, their phallic neck and their general appearance of a global gag, they sow the seeds of trouble and irony that Saganne and his fort so sorely lack. 

First published in Libération on 12-13 May 1984. Reprinted in La Maison cinéma et le monde, vol. 2, Paris, P.O.L, 2002. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: Cannes-speak

Serge Daney's playful intro to Cannes 1984 in Libération. Note: in the French text (see picture), this Cannes glossary is in alphabetical order. The translation simply follows Daney's article.

 

Cannes-speak 

Over 12 days, the small town of Cannes (in the Alpes-Maritimes department of France) becomes the world capital of an imaginary country: Cinema. And during these two weeks, the natives of this temporary principality talk, more or less fluently, an appropriate language, Cannes-speak, a living dialect of cinema as alien as any other with its own syntax, lexicon, grammar and accents. Whatever this tribal Esperanto is, it develops a plain-speak each year of its own specific vintage. 

Poster  

A cute one. Designed by Trauner. Blueish. Unlike last year’s poster cruelly designed by Kurosawa and the one from two years ago by Fellini, it alludes to a slightly retro, Carnéphilic imagination, (Les Enfants du Paradis are here, somewhere). Does it anticipate a similarly serene festival? 

Bunker 

Far from squeaking, we will make do with the “bunker”, even slightly improved. In 1983, Robert Favre Le Bret, the president of the pinkish building confessed that it wavered between a cavern, a museum and a cathedral. As true Platonists, and friends of myths, we clearly come down in favour of a cavern as the future of the bunker. 

Cannes 

Let one thing be clear: the Cannes film festival stopped being a great celebration of cinema a long time ago. Instead, it is the harsh capital of an imaginary yet very real country: Cinema. Every capital has its officials, its ambassadors, its offices, its administration, and of course its dissidents. Dreamers, stay away. 

Christians 

(“Away with them to the lions!”) We are thinking specifically about a female colleague who, not so long ago, ruined a private screening by eating Bounty bars nervously. We are talking of course about The Mutineer on the Bounty (out of competition). 

USSR Consulate 

If you want to protest against the boycott of the Olympic Games, here is the address you need: 3 avenue Ambroise Paré, 13000 Marseille, tel: (91)77 15 25. 

In a constantly evolving audio-visual world… 

Mandatory introduction to any speech by the powers that be. 

Gaffe 

Some metaphors may bring bad luck. Example: Favre Le Bret comparing Cannes and the Olympic Games: “For films, Cannes is the Olympic Games every year!” What a scatterbrain! 

Big 

Only one “big one” this year, Sergio Leone. We can already say that Once Upon a Time in America is a beautiful film. Long live the big ones! 

Gulag 

The title of an American superproduction, produced by Lorimar and shown at the Marché du Film. With Malcolm McDowell, ex-Caligula, as the main actor. Must see. 

Out of competition 

The plague of recent festivals. Any film not willing to risk the embarrassment of not getting a reward features at the Cannes film festival “out of competition”. That’s cheating! Fort Saganne (Corneau), Broadway Danny Rose (Woody Allen), After the Rehearsal (Bergman), Once Upon a Time in America (Leone). 

Innovation 

The word strangely comes back again and again. It seems that there was no choice. The 37th Cannes film festival is not rich in cinephilic monuments. Many auteur films, not quite ready, will likely feature in Venice. The organisers were left playing their last card: that of discovery, meaning first films and lesser known national cinemas. We shall see. 

Jury 

There’s no head or tail here. Still, at the head, Dirk Bogarde. Then: Isabelle Huppert, Michel Deville, Stanley Donen, Franco Cristaldi, Istvan Dosai, Arne Hestenes (a Norwegian from Dagbladet!), Ennio Morricone, Jorge Semprun and the handsome Vadim Yusov. 

The masses 

Let’s not give too much heed to what Nadave Silber, in charge of the alternative official selection that is Un Certain Regard (“You have beautiful eyes!”), when he says that the festival has instilled “a taste, a love for the cinema” among the masses. We know that few Cannes locals have access to the screenings open to the public. It’s really a festival of professionals, which gives it, unlike Berlin or Venice, a stuffy, tribal and uptight ambiance . 

Marché du film 

The largest in the world (we can never say it enough!) 

Recent Palmes 

For the forgetful, let’s recall the Palmes d’or of the 1980s (already a few years into it): 1980: Kagemusha (Kurosawa, Japan) and All That Jazz (Fosse). 1981: Man of Iron (Wajda, Poland). 1982: Yol (Guney, Turkey) and Missing (Costa-Gavras, pass). 1983: The Ballad of Narayama (Imamura, Japan). 1984: ? 

Palais Croisette 

Last year, this old ugly building became friendly again by hosting screenings from the Directors’ Fortnight. A cinephile wind brought some warmth to it. What will happen this year? Everybody at the Blue Bar! 

French selection 

Scandalous, once again. Reduced to two films (two!). Bertrand Tavernier’s already released and expired A Sunday in the Country and Jacques Doillon’s eagerly expected The Pirate. Clamour about the good health of the French cinema industry seems contradicted by this weak choice. What will they think of us abroad? 

Victorine 

Jack Lang inaugurates the Victorine Studio renovated just before the Lautner festival,  Belmondo uses them to film Happy Easter and everybody suddenly remembers that it is here—yes, here!—that Carné shot Les Enfants du Paradis. So many emotions! 

Celebrities 

A major player is missing! Alain Delon, the hero of Bertrand Blier’s Our Story wasn’t deemed Cannable. Too bad. Remaining, among other shooting stars, are Depardieu, De Niro, Deneuve, Birkin, Gibson and many others that we already love. 

Published in Libération on 11 May 1984. Co-written with Gérard Lefort. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Cannes 1984: Introduction

The Cannes Film Festival will take place in July this year (it's traditionally in May but there's a pandemic going on). While we wait, and over the next two weeks, this blog will publish translations of all the articles written by Serge Daney while covering the 1984 Cannes Film Festival for Libération. 

They will be published "in real time, thirty-seven years later", meaning on the same day of the year that they were published in 1984, giving a sense of Daney's  writing rhythm and (varying) quality. The twenty or so texts will go live on the blog shortly after 12 noon UK time. On some days, several texts will be posted (up to three).

A very special mention to Srikanth Srinivasan of The Seventh Art blog without whom these translations wouldn't have been possible. 

We begin with Daney's introduction to the chapter on Cannes 1984 in his book Ciné journal. In this series, you will find the texts from this chapter along with others from the volume 2 of La maison cinéma et le monde as well as some other pieces written for Liberation.

A Cannes festival

For the one for whom Cannes remains, above all, a film festival and that nothing should be “news” except films, the task is increasingly difficult. Maintaining the fiction of “instant criticism” and “on-the-spot reaction” is a gamble particularly strange since “on-the-spot” nothing happens apart from predictable and pre-sold things. Controversy has become rare and few of the “eagerly awaited” films have not already been seen in Paris private screenings before the festival. Yet, if the plight and raison d’être of the daily film critic is to write as best he can with his back as close to the wall as possible, in Cannes this plight becomes a little-known feat and a luxury on the verge of masochism. Thus, from 1982, when Libération decided to dedicate several daily pages for the Cannes Festival, the Cinema team has gotten used to seeing the return of the month of May as a test of their sporting abilities. 

A festival also has its advantages: for want of enjoyment of the films that one must report on and for want of witnessing the reaction of a real audience, it is still possible to measure the temperature of what flows in between the films and what gives a “state of things” in official world cinema. It is even tempting to keep a sort of public diary, made of speculative moods and theoretical hearsay, in short to take up the immodest project of a chronicle, and to name it “From the last row” in order to take a step back, even forcibly, from the feigned frenzy of the festival.

Introduction to the Cannes 1984 section of Ciné journal 1981-86, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Ludwig: Viscontians, One More Effort

Slightly revised version of Liz Heron's translation for the abandoned Cinema in Transit project. One of the few texts by Serge Daney on Visconti.

Ludwig (Luchino Visconti) / Viscontians, One More Effort

An uncut version of Ludwig is on Paris screens. We will never see an end to the guided tour of this unclassifiable monument. Neither to Ludwig, about which everything is known. Nor to Visconti, who remains, whatever might be said, a director as little known as he is famous. 

First condition: a German version two hours ten minutes long (by all accounts a real slaughter). Second condition: an English version three hours long (it’s this half measure that came out in France, ten years ago now). Third condition: an Italian version four hours and five minutes long (released today). Viscontians, one more effort if you want to take the tour of this Ludwig, in the disarrayed condition it is, always changing language, lineaments and length without ever ceasing to be your favourite monument. The long version, a “work of devotion” for which we have to thank Ruggiero Mastroianni (the most famous Italian editor) and Suso Cecchi d’Amico (one of the most famous Italian screenwriters), is no doubt more “in line with the original”. Except that the original version of a film that is already so original (to put it in a nutshell, a monster) doesn’t mean all that much. In her – sadly, bad – hagiobiography of Visconti, Monica Stirling alludes to half a dozen scenes which the maker of Senso ended up cutting out. Among them was a private performance of Tristan, the death of Wagner, the reaction of Elisabeth “Sissi” of Austria to the news of her cousin’s death: “They’ve killed him! Traitors! Murderers!” she exclaimed. 

Nothing stops us from imagining all the additional pictures which Visconti could easily have inserted into his Chinese box fresco. Nothing stops us from suspecting the truth: that in Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886), Visconti the man (1907-1976) had found his perfect “subject”, Visconti the painter his fondest motif, Visconti the engagé artist his favourite anti-hero. Had the result been a short, a two-part film or a twelve or seventy-two-hour-long series, the effect would have been the same. This film is infinite like the infinite patience of the man who, having made you his guest, honours you with hospitality and is your guide in his (great) small world. We shall always visit Ludwig for the nth time. All we had seen to begin with were the ceremonial rooms, there suddenly encountering a coronation filmed as if in a kitchen. Then we discovered the key to the keep where the master of the house has his childhood memories. Sooner or later, we’ll come across sealed up doors, forbidden apartments, sauna vapours in a Wagnerian grotto, a stud farm in a corner of this baroque garden, a farm boys’ bordello filmed as if in a palace. We shall never be surprised. We’ve got our minds made up (about Visconti). 

Domesticity, promiscuity, prostitution are the key words of the Visconti universe. It’s not so much that he has made films about love, more that he has filmed every desire as sexual (in its essence) and as economic transaction (in its form). Remember Romy Schneider, the wife who sells herself to her husband in Il Lavoro, an admirable, though short, film. Visconti is less a witness to class struggle than an entomologist with an unimpeded view of promiscuity between classes. And yet, if we forget for a moment the painful clichés about the contradiction of the engagé aesthete or the queer Marxist prince, if we wonder what a Visconti film “is like” (as old Sam would say), we come up against one of the most hermetic styles in the history of the cinema. With the effect of a stationary monument, with the tedium of guided tours, with the feeling of not counting for much in this spectacle which unseeingly tolerates us. 

For there are directors who demonstrate and directors who show. They are seldom the same. Visconti has long had a weakness for demonstration (in The Damned for instance). Not for showing. Which is what, I dare say, makes him a monster. For when all’s said and done, the cinema is “giving to have”. Except that the manner of giving is sometimes more important than what is given. When the Visconti camera frames, de-frames and re-frames, zooms, de-zooms and re-zooms, when it crosses the space of the scene like a thick pencil line (you can almost see the arrow, like in a Veličković painting), hacking through the extras who trample across the shot in full harness, it is not the eye of the master who sees for us, or we who see thanks to him; it is not even the gaze that moves back to judge (there is never any judgement with Visconti, only condemnation, silently and without appeal); it isn’t a matter of vision, it’s a hand. Yes, a hand. The hand of the painter who already has the whole painting in his head and is (furiously) touching up a detail or (hastily) layering a coat of extra colour across a slow-moving scene. The hand of the master of the house who takes advantage of the guided tour to dust his collectors’ items in passing, as if he were discovering them along with us, as if he didn’t know, as if he knew no longer. Always courtesy, always the hand. It is to the painter’s hand that we owe Senso (but then Visconti was, as they say, more engagé with History). It is to the proprietor’s hand that we owe this disarrayed Ludwig. For that’s the oddest thing; Visconti isn’t the inventor of his world (its auteur) more its proprietor. He doesn’t express this world (that would be in distinctly petit-bourgeois bad taste), he takes us round it (that’s the minimum courtesy). He lets us see it, he doesn’t show it. 

Paradoxically, in this orgy of sumptuous sets, and costumes to turn Louella Interim pale with envy and real live castles, there isn’t an ounce of fetishism. Oddly, in this story of kingly extravagance, there isn’t a milligram of surprise, nor any room for suspense. And yet this monster-film is no stone cold alter or disused cathedral (as in Syberberg’s version). You only have to know how to look at it and, for that, to move a little to the side in relation to the unshifting picture and the hand at work drawing. What do you see in the end? Redrawing the ineluctable decline of the king of Bavaria, Visconti opts for no romantic treatment (Ludwig alone, patron and builder) but for a decidedly clinical approach. 

Each scene in the film always plays out the same little scenario: a character “of sound mind” converses with the mad king, demanding something of him, and each time the king yields. He yields to everyone about everything (except to the expensive tart paid to deflower him). To the ambitious Von Holnstein (Umberto Orsini) who asks him to give up his throne, to Durkheim, the noble spirit (Helmut Griem) who reminds him of his kingly duties, to Cosima von Bülow (Silvana Mangano) who asks him to settle Wagner’s debts, to the minister who proves to him that Wagner is an adventurer, to father Hoffman (Gert Fröbe), who dissuades him from ceasing to be a virgin king, and above all to his cousin Elisabeth (Romy Schneider, more Sissi than ever) who asks him not to love her. To all of them, he yields; the rest he pays (the travelling player, the valet-lover, etc). 

This is where Visconti catches us out. Either you choose to look at only Ludwig in the image, or else you look at the gallery of “others”. It’s hard to do both. It is a comic situation, a cruel comedy, worthy of Molière: the master is raving, for sure, but the representatives of “good sense” are hardly any better. There’s an Orgon in Ludwig and a Tartuffe in Wagner. So much so that when we look at the others, what we see is painful: not just their toadying faces or their hypocritical demeanour, but also the slack indulgence of those who have realised that, in any case, given the king’s autistic exaltation, there’s no longer a need to feel uncomfortable. What we then see, by anamorphosis, is pure obscenity. On both sides. 

First published in Libération on 6 July 1983 as "Viscontians, One More Effort". Reprinted in Ciné journal 1981-86, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986.