Once was fire by Courtisane festival

Once was fire António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro “I envy all of you, now about to discover these treasures. As it happened to me more than thirty years ago, I know you’ll ‘stop breathing, suddenly’ as the screen lights up with the children of Trás-os Montes, with Jaime’s nightmares, with the face of mother Ana. Those evenings, I’m sure a lot of dazzed, happy creatures will be wandering the streets of Gent.” - Pedro Costa “For me, this film reveals a new cinematographic language. As far as I know, a director has never committed, with such obstinacy, to the cinematographic representation of a region: that is to say, to the difficult communion between men, landscapes, and the seasons. Only a foolish poet could produce such a disquieting object.” - Jean Rouch on Trás-os-Montes

In the midst of the end of the world Serge Daney

Where are we in Ana? In Portugal, since the filmmakers are Portugese. But this small country is still too big. In the North of Portugal, in the region of Miranda do Douro, where Reis and Cordeiro have already shot a film a few years ago, another wonderful and unclassifiable film called Trasos-Montes. Here and nowhere else. Here and anywhere else. Because the strength of Ana, which discourages in advance all lazy classifications, is just that. It’s been a while since a film has reminded us so clearly that cinema is at the same time an art of the singular and the universal, that images float so much better if they dropped their anchor somewhere. Ana-fiction? Ana-documentary? This distinction is really too crude. Documented fiction? Not even.

Originally published as ‘au milieu du bout du monde’ in Libération, June 1983.

Nothing is lost. Beyond the beaten track of the media and the summoning appeal of presold films, still occur a few aerolites. One every year, that is not so bad. The year 1982 was that of Paradjanov’s Sayat Nova, 1983 could well turn out to be, by way of dazzling surprise, the year of Ana. Completely unclassifiable, this second feature film of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro; how wonderful this journey into the world calmly pierced from our perceptions, between the accuracy of dreaming and the inaccuracy of waking, all through the vertigo of the present. Perhaps there are not enough films left that make you want to whisper, in delight, “Where am I?”. Less of fear for being lost or astray, then to recover the emotion of the sleeper who, while waking up, does not know where he’s coming from, in which refuge he has just rested, and which world he’s waking up to. Out of gratitude for this disoriented moment and the pleasure to be able to say this archaic formulation of an archaic emotion: “where am I?”. For the verb “to be” that comes before this little overestimated name: “I”. For the awakening.

Fiction means putting oneself in the middle of the world to tell a story. Documentary means going to the end of the world not to have to tell. But there is fiction in documentation as there are insects in fossile rocks, and there is documentation in fiction for the good reason that the camera (it cannot help itself) records what you put in front of it, everything that you put in front of it. Ana-end of the world? Ana-midst of the world? There’s a strange scene in this film. In the family home where Ana lives (and where

she will die), a man (her son) talks incessantly, just as an academic on holiday would do to try out his course on a familiar public. He speaks of what he knows: the strange matches between his country (this part of Portugal) and ancient Mesopotamia, between two cultures of fishermen, two ways of moving in the water. “What is Mesopotamia?” a child asks. The father might say: it’s next door. The filmmakers might say: it’s the next shot. Already in Tras-osMontes, the same question was asked (by another child): “Where is Germany?” he asked his migrant working father. There, said the man. And we could feel that for the child, “there” started next door, at the next bend in the river. It was at the end of the world and in the midst of the world. It was a child. And in Ana, when Reis reads – off screen – a poem by Rilke in the shot in which the sick little boy stirs in his sleep, this is not an coquetry, it is this idea of a poet (Reis has written poems, they were published) that there are rhymes here below in this world. Touching, embracing, intertwining. And that cinema is still adequately local (and not provincial) and universal (and not Esperanto) to let them occur. That is why Ana risks to be disorientating: by making color the Euphrates in the Douro, it makes us lose the orient, for real.

Ana is a woman too and she falls ill. Or rather, she doesn’t fall. There’s a wonderful moment when, wearing a cloak trimmed with ermine, she passes through the countryside with the muffled elegance of a Murnau character. The version of Bach’s Magnificat we’re hearing is at the right height of the beauty of this advent. The old lady, from the back, cries out a name: Miranda! Blood then comes to her mouth, she looks at her reddened hands, she knows she will die. Miranda is the name of a small village nearby and it is the name of a cow that has strayed and that we find again in the next shot. There are always many things to respond to a word. There is a risk of dying, crying out alone in the countryside. Always poetry.

Trás-os-Montes: An Interview with António Reis (excerpts) Serge Daney and Jean-Pierre Oudart Originally published in ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’, May 1977. Translated by Kelsey Brain, Ted Fendt, Bill Krohn.

“ I can tell you that we never shot with a peasant, a child or an old person, without having first become his pal or his friend. This seemed to us an essential point, in order to be able to work and so that there weren’t problems with the machines. When we began shooting with them, the camera was already a kind of little pet, like a toy or a cooking utensil, that didn’t scare them. So using their lights in their homes or setting up reflectors in the fields to have indirect light wasn’t a problem. It was a sort of game at the same time. So it was possible to insist on certain things, most often with tenderness. And if we were having a problem, they understood very well. A very important thing: they were able to confirm from our work that we were also “peasants of the cinema,” because it sometimes happened that we were working sixteen, eighteen hours a day, and I think that they liked seeing us working. And when we needed them to continue working with us, even while leaving the animals without food or the children without care, they didn’t feel, I think, it was a constraint. It was admirable to see this. You know, I don’t have a tautological conception of people, but I believe that in the Northeast, they have a very special way of treating people. If you arrive – suddenly – they greet you, they open their door to you, they give you bread, wine, whatever they have. At the same time, they are not “kindness personified” because they are also very hard. Only they go abruptly from gentleness to violence.”

A film by poets, but also by geologists, anthropologists, sociologists, by all the possible -ogists. Reis and Cordeiro are Portuguese, but not from Lisbon (it is a much too provincial capital city), not even from Porto. They situate their films in this North of Portugal where the tourists never come (they invade the Algarve in hordes, the fools). Beautiful and abandoned landscapes, which have to be perceived as sumptuous ruins; a countryside that is filmed as if it were a city. In Ana, the trees, the roads, the stones of the houses almost have names. Everything is a junction; nothing is anonymous. The film is a consoling buzzing: the sound of the wind causes the images to swell and shrink like a sea. There is emptiness in the heart full of sensations, the way there is an emptiness in this part of Portugal. The films by Reis and Cordeiro record a disorienting situation of emigration, caused by the exodus: the men have left, the children are now left to their games and the elderly are left to guard the places. There is no supervision from the parents here, only the guardianship of grandparents, in a game of glances, fleeting and tender, surprised and serious. And the story? There is one, if you want. But you do not have to want to. Ana is the name of an old woman who’s staying in her house, right as an emblem. Her face is worn-out and proud, her body heavy and noble. Ana is a little more than a grandmother and a little less than a symbol. Certainly not the symbol of the earth or the roots.

“I believe that the ethnographic way of seeing is a vice. Because ethnography is a science that comes afterwards. Similarly, we did not see the people of the Northeast from

a picturesque or a religious point of view. We were obviously very interested in the anthropological problems posed by the region, in Celtic literature, etc. We read all of your Markale (the French writer -Ed.), because the Celts are still there. We studied Iberian architecture because the architecture of the homes there was not born by spontaneous generation. But it was always with the aim of choosing, of intensifying. Because if we read a landscape solely from the point of view of “beauty,” that’s not very much. But if you can read at once the beauty of the landscape, the economic aspect of the landscape, the geographical-political aspect of the landscape, all that is the reality of the landscape. The integrated land, without any transformation, the cultivated land, etc. So, on the subject of the Northeast, we treated dialectically everything we knew, everything we learned from the people, everything we discovered ourselves. Because it was also possible to discover things. Margarida was born in the most violent part of the Northeast. Even today, she remembers the taste of the wine, the childhood legends and the nightmares. All this became material, with a certain depth.”

about a village is that if you are there, you see only the golden dust, animals at the spring, etc. But if we can go from one house to another, then to a river, then through a door, things become so complex that you can no longer talk simply about fiction and documentary. In this house, you can hear, precisely, that mother telling the story of Blanchefleur orally, while working. And the children of the middle ages are like Blanchefleur in images. What you understand with these Portuguese villages is that it’s a vice to separate ancient culture, the civilizations that came after, and everyday life today. It is there precisely, in this refusal to separate, that I find a progressive and revolutionary element. Because I think that the masses there know how to assimilate from a critical point of view of the forms of life that owe nothing to the city. Because these people aren’t inclined to always lose. They begin to realize, seeing their sons returning from Europe, that that doesn’t make up for anything. The sons who return from Europe build a house “next to” the others, fence it in, and the parents think, “My son has gone mad!” And so it arises that the old disagree with their own children. They know very well that they have a richness and that there is a genocide against them. This is why, at those times, they can say, “We’re going to cut off all the supplies, the food for Lisbon.” It’s not only to be reactionary; it’s that they want their hands and their heads to still have value.

“I’ve already said that Margarida was born there. As for me, I was born in an already eroded province lacking force, lacking beauty, lacking expression, 6 km from Porto. So inside me I had the desire to be reborn somewhere else. And the first time that I went to Tràs-os- Montes with an architect friend, I felt that I was born there. So, I’d known the province for several years and, in working with Margarida, in going there often, I said to myself that it would be nice to make a film there because everything came together in a cinematographic sense. To the point that when we began shooting, a lot of location scouting had been done long before. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t plan things, but it was a flexible plan. In many scenes, for example, it is very difficult to distinguish what was filmed en direct from what was not. The dialectic of these two aesthetic positions was hellish for us. But we believe we’ve succeeded in making, not a synthesis, but a confrontation of contraries. Even en direct, on the one hand, we needed all the speed and all the surprise but, at the same time, we cleaned up some parasitic things that didn’t make sense or that were gratuitously populist. And for that, we needed an insect’s eye.”

Going back to what you said: in fact, there is a turning point in the film. This turning point is the lyrical quality that is always threatened. Even when the children amuse themselves at the river, they discover death with the frozen trout. The big dusty house or the deaths or the child who plays with the top (who is the one who goes to the mine), it is always a threatened world. I believe that the film is always transforming. The so-called “finale” has to act like a boomerang: viewers need to be compensated by the lyrical space and time of the first part in order to support what follows. When the blacksmith regrets that people are leaving the village, this refers precisely to the mutilated children and the deaths from the colonial wars, these are them. Those who are going to come to Lisbon, to Europe, in the slums, in the factories, etc. That’s why we treated these young children with so much intensity. If you go there, you’ll see, they’re like that, there’s no naturalism, they’re still sort of angels.”

I had the feeling that, during the whole first part (the one with the children), you were using the fiction to progressively bring out more naked information, more closely related to what one expects from a documentary. “But when the mother is telling the story of Blanchefleur, is it fiction or documentary? It’s both. In a village it can happen that an event is fiction. So what is surprising

There’s also the feeling that it’s them who are the link with the past. The adults are kind of in the background. They appear through the voice over, not onscreen. “Because there are no adults there. The voice over you hear, a little violent, a little oppressed, is the voice of a

character who we see for a brief moment in the film. It’s a miner’s son, an executive. His father spent fifty years at the mine. The voice of this man is traumatized. He speaks of the old community of miners who were former peasants. Never in our film do we talk about the communities of villages, but you have to feel that they exist. We do the dance, we walk in the dark communally. The voice over counterpoints the life of the miners like the train whistle counterpoints Pergolesi’s music that we hear for a moment. There is always a crossing, a dialectic of the sound with the image that interests me a lot more than all these stories of connections, of ellipses and other rules from film manuals.” At one point in the film you quote a text by Kafka which says that people are far from the Capital, therefore from the Law, which they try to guess but which they never manage to do because the Law is possessed by a small number of people, etc. Can we consider that this is shorthand for the historical situation of Tràs-os-Montes in relation to Lisbon? “Yes. We translated the text by Kafka into the subdialect and, as a result, this text became very guttural, very expressive, endowed with an extraordinary force. They have a marvelous word designating the manner in which the nobles use the Law to their benefit: “baratím.” Because the laws of the community are flexible, they are transformed by historical change. These are of course oral laws, they aren’t made once and for all, they are flexible. And it is precisely because of this flexibility that they were liquidated by the written Laws. One day, it is such and such a shepherd who leads all the sheep to graze, another day it’s another shepherd. There’s a sort of primitive communism in this region. And we feel that at times they are closer to the future than people in the city. For example. if

Lisbon lacks water for twenty-four hours, there is a collective neurosis! How, given the toughness of his life, does a peasant face snow, fire, heat, etc. With what endurance. Even when certain peasants were imprisoned by the PIDE (International and State Defence Police), they succeeded at resisting. Why? And how many friends have I known in Porto who spoke a lot and very loftily and who, when they were imprisoned… I don’t want to say that the peasants are more courageous and the other more cowardly. But why, for example, when the peasants of Baixo Alentejo were arrested, did they have an endurance that people from the cities did not have?”

Stavros Tornes & Charlotte van Gelder

Exactly how can a film contribute to helping these peasants who are otherwise so cut off from film? “Of course, there are cinematic language problems. They don’t possess this language there. But there are elements which are very important in their everyday lives, things which relate to the theater of the middle ages. They live in a space, at home or in nature, that is already cinematic. I’m certain that if they study film, they will become filmmakers. A peasant said to me one day, “What? You’re leaving for Lisbon without ever having seen the light which goes from such-and-such kilometer to such-andsuch kilometer? How can you?” With difficulty I find people in Lisbon who talk to me about the light on the bricks or on the streets. So when the peasants saw the film, they recognized these things they liked and that belonged to them, even if sometimes our imagination or our freedom of expression bewildered them. For example, the snow scene. They’ve never eaten snow like you see in the film but they’re affected by snow, by the beauty of snow, by the glare of snow. So, as there are people who eat dirt or straw, I made them eat snow.”

“Cinema is not the spectacle of multinationals. Cinema is not the dictate of specialists. Cinema is not video recording. Cinema is not films with beautiful photography, perfect frames, gorgeous scenography, immaculate and conventional sonorisation. Cinema does not exist without films. But a film only exists on the basis of the visceral decision of who’s making it, regardless of the idiocy of programmers, cultural operators, stupid producers, government officials, bankers, auxiliaries, bureaucrats. Cinema is our films. Cinema is the negation of technicism, semiologism. Cinema is a place where you and I recognize each other, “me” and others embrace. Cinema is all the films not made, yet contemplated in the explosion of existence. Cinema is the domain of fragile and impossible films. Cinema is the liberating application of the margins in search of the proper world (cosmos). Cinema is the space of the accursed and the inebriated. Cinema is the eternal proposition of being. Cinema is the social taking place on one condition; let the being and the temporal (cosmic) transpire behind the facade of the cogito. Cinema is the point of convergence-divergence between the real and the unthinkable, the imaginary and the impossible. Cinema is this promise-threat, the return of the inconceivable, the audacity of the unexpected.” - Stavros Tornes, 1977

“It reminds one, roughly, of Murnau, of Straub, Antonio Reis or the Taviani brothers. Stone is stone, fiction is fiction, ghosts also die, an old man plays like a child, a young man grows old, children symbolize death, one shot succeeds the other with the imminent (and unprovable) clarity of a dream.” - Serge Daney on Karkalou

“I wanted to buy a horse that would take me to places not easily reached by men. I got in touch with the horse-dealers’ world, and I didn’t buy a horse. I began the film with that longing for the horse still alive in me. Kyriakos the horse-dealer is the man who led me to places where the camera cannot easily reach. And so the character of Balamos came into being; as his name denotes, he is a man who flies into ecstasies, who is always on the move. Balamos doesn’t seem to have any specific purpose in mind; he walks around in a dream and gets involved in situations as they come along, without any reservations. Every now and then he comes upon Kyriakos, who appears under several disguises: now as a Magus, now as the Big Boss, now as a Cattle-Dealer or as a Chaldean High Priest; whatever the disguise, Kyriakos exerts an irresistible attraction on Balamos. This kind of progress makes time cease to be a limit. Balamos emerges as a defendant in a medieval court of justice, a slave in the early Christian era; he comes upon the female Yeti, hears the oracle of the Pythoness by the river, kisses the hand of the Prophet who has witnessed the crucifixion of Christ, and finally, on Mount Olympus, changes into a Dracula figure that drinks the blood of horses. He is stripped of the gift he had been endowed with: the ability to continue. He travels by taxi, like everybody else. Balamos is a film.” - Stavros Tornes on Balamos

“Karkalou is a fiction film about fiction. Someone, anyone, but quite mature. The man’s present is extremely limited. He is excluded from the future and even the past is no more than a source of tender recollections. Without bitterness he is trying to play the final card. A card which perhaps doesn’t really exist, but there is some hope for a joker. He leads a young man into the game. A climate of dissimulation is created. Also the relationship between the two is based on their talent to simulate. Various situations can take place, all of them fictitious but verisimilar. The young man, a taxi driver who carries whatever comes up, gets into the game without reservation and manages to give life to a number of scenes from the other one’s past. He identifies, though, with the situations and the individuals taking part in them. In doing so he loses the capacity to play. Here ends the game, which turns out to be as limited as the present of our hero. Is this a film about death? That too, but it is also about the game of creativity as the final card. Once the form has emerged, creativity dies. Not because there is nothing else to say, but suddenly, to our surprise, creativity reappears, maybe like death itself. Yes, perhaps the card Karkalou is playing is only a bluff. But fiction and verisimilitude have made it possible to recover madness and idealism.” - Stavros Tornes on Karkalou

Who was Stavros Tornes?

He was young; 56 is childhood for a filmmaker. But to be the greatest and yet unknown is exhausting. It exhausts quickly and hefty, even if one has chosen to remain unknown in order to be able to continue to make films.

Louis Skorecki Originally published as ‘Qui était Stavros Tornes ?’ in Libération, August 1988.

This man has died. Artists die as well, even the greatest ones. And Stavros Tornes – this is the name of this man, a Greek, we can see him in his 1982 film Balamos , alive and well, even more hallucinating than the crazy horse he’s holding on to – this man has died.

Every second Stavros Tornes was aging one hour. Tormented by the agony of cinema, he was dying of desire – love – to resurrect it, be it at the cost of his own destruction. To give his life to the woman cinema, and die. Exhausting his body by feeding on anything – a poor man’s philosophy. Without asceticism or any other crap. Without alibi. Without support. Excluded, marginal, road companion of all the squatters of the post-industrial society, of all the vagabonds of the urban delirium, friend of the animals because he was one of them, an anomality, a mineral, a landscape all by himself, he passed through this half a century too quickly to be noticed and too slowly for people to realize he was moving at all. Too intense to be loved.

Every death is a scandal, but his was inadmissible. Stavros Tornes did not have the right to die. He allowed himself to. He probably had his reasons, but he should have remained eternal. And the strange thing is, he could have. Stavros Tornes was a filmmaker. A word which today sounds like an insult, a curse, an impudence. This is normal: it is used to point out frauds. This era definitely belongs to television (so much the better), and since quite some time the concept of cinema has been taken over by makers of video-films, TV-films, whatever-films. He was a filmmaker. That was all he was. Poet, philosopher, prophet. But poet in cinema, prophet of images/ messages for the planet. He was today’s greatest filmmaker. He died in the anonymity he had chosen, conscious of being an animal on the way to extinction, survivor of an advanced era in which the words “art” and “cinema”, “artist” and “filmmaker” were not yet swear words.

Four million drachmas is about 200.000 french francs, twenty lousy old million french francs, the average cost of his films. Greek “filmmakers”, the others, taking turns, receive fifty, sixty million drachmas, at least. It often takes them up to five years to make, with emphasis, “films” that cost twenty Stavros Tornes.

The ebriety of the world

Stavros makes a masterpiece within a year while others spend half a decade piecing together their monuments of academism. Papatakis, him alone, perhaps (he loves, admires tornes and tried to organize a homage) escapes this horde of drachma-eaters who killed the old Stavros a bit faster.

The world rather than society, all the way to ebriety: this is the gesture of Stavros Tornes, poet of the real, as devoted as delirious. The Tornesian character appears like a bard. Somewhat ranting, philosophizing, prophesying, singing. Always wandering around the world like a celestial hobo, bare foot, head in the stars. And the pathway brings along encounters, carries along poetic slippings: the parade calls forth the serenade.

Fabrice Revault Originally published as ‘L’Ivresse du monde’, on the occassion of the Stavros Tornes Retrospective at Jeu de Paume, April 2006. Extracts taken from ‘Divagations de Stavros Tornes, Entre réel et surréel’ (Trafic n° 54, Summer 2005).

The very day of his death, a few hours before the end, the Center announced that it would finally grant the four million to Robinson Crusoe.

Here’s a work draught of nature: sound and light, landscapes, elements, animals. It feels like a cosmic panspermia, a animistic, pantheistic, “archaic-peasant” view on the world. This physics is also a politics. Although Tornes willingly took society to task, even if his films are steeped in the beloved little people, it’s here where he proves deeply political: enchanting the world, in the face of the disenchantment of the social.

They didn’t know. Today, perhaps they are sorry. Time will tell. In the images that Stavros Tornes left us, drunks play Rimbaud, grocers make love with the sand, blacks call out to the darkness. It is a cinema before cinema, Homer operating the camera, Heraclitus recording the sound. A chiffonier cinema, Emmaüs whispers, incantations to Lumière: “Why have you left me alone, inventor of the devil?”

Materialism, naturalism, but transcended from within. The real world seems inhabited by a force, a spirit. Tornes plunges into it. Sometimes up to intoxication, up to delirium. But always with a mystery or magic based in nature, a kind of “marvel of nature.” Here there is no gap between reality and imagination, real and surreal. Within documentarised, realist images appear unusual elements, enclosing sur-real images. We glide from one into the other, because the reality as filmed by Tornes soon takes on a strange appearance (allowing timely unreal hallucinations). Emergence of an astounding real. With an art of editing amplifying this. Some shots fall in like meteorites, some come back like a haunting vision. Each sequence seems to ignore the context, appearing like a UFO coming from elsewhere, before joining the others in a carefully in-consistent fashion. Time after time this renders the astonishment of the encounter, the discovery of the world.

Stavros spoke like that, at every moment of his life, with the god Cinema. He was heretic, philosopher, poor amidst the poor. In Why do we film? he cites one of his texts from 1977: “The cinema is the place where you and I recognize each other, where “me” and others embrace each other.”

His films are but his own. Unless you see them (we are waiting impatiently to see an important retrospective at the filmmuseum, real releases in one or two cinema’s, articles, dedications, traces) it is impossible to describe them or talk about them. Is he a Pasolini more Pasolinian than Pasolini, a Straub less dogmatic, a Murnau for the present time?

Love, nothing else.

Stavros Tornes died last Tuesday, 26th of July, 9 o’clock at night. For the past year, he fought with the bureaucrats of the Greek Film Center in Athens for them to finally give him a budget of four million drachmas to make his film. He knew it would be his last. He knew he was going to die (cancer, refusal of hospitals etc.), he simply wanted to use his last energy for this Robinson Crusoe which will never see the light of day.

And yet, somewhere in the world, an orphan is crying.

Stavros has also spoken, lived, filmed with Charlotte van Gelder. Without her, nothing would exist. He is not dead as long as she is there to accompany the films they have made together.

This cinema rambles with beauty. Physical: bodies wandering constantly, traversing the world – freedom. Psychological: the mind drifting willingly, roaming the field – poetry.

Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet

What do you mean by caution? JMS: “Knowing how far one can go too far.”

“Thank you for these moments of clarity and beauty in a dark and foolish world.” - Jean-Luc Godard on Sicilia !

And how far can one go too far? DH: “We decide on the basis of the material. With fear and trembling. If you decide to leave a shot silent, you know it is not without risk.”

an hour is a luxury. I will tell you where all of this comes from. It’s what I call the science-fiction effect. Again there can be found some relation with Not Reconciled: when, after the revelations about the hardship that the young Schrella has edured by eighty percent of her colleagues, he finds himself on the bridge with Robert, who says, looking for an explanation: “What are you? Are you Jewish?” At this moment in the film, there is no sign saying “1934, beginning of anti-semitism”. That is what I call the sciencefiction effect. What is this strange world in which being Jewish can be an explanation? All of Sicilia ! is constructed in this way. For example, when we hear someone in the train saying “Ogni morto di fame è un uomo pericoloso” – each man dying of hunger is a dangerous man, this could have resulted in a different film. We had foreseen to to do as in the Kafka film: to avoid, contrary to what Forman does in his Hollywood films, to show old cars permitting to cleary see in which era we are. For Sicilia ! we went through a lot of trouble to find a train wagon that, without it being state-of-the-art, couldn’t be traced back to a certain period. We saw to it that the images wouldn’t be historically dated, and the same for the costumes.”

Are you sometimes afraid to film? JMS: “No. It has nothing to do with Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. It is a matter of love and respect. We say to ourselves that what we film is something that no will no longer exist afterwards, because it will already be different, and we won’t film it again. So in that sense, yes, we are a little scared. But in this sense only.” DH: “You saw Della Nuba Alla Resistenza. You remember this shot with the ox cart, after the dialogues. While editing, we did not know if we were going to keep it or not. Finally, we chose to keep it in, knowing very well that in doing so we were taking a huge risk. we know very well that some viewers will leave. But we also know that perhaps one day, as it happened with the car rides in History Lesson, we will see that it is at least as strong as the dialogues.”

“Unlike anything else. The films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub are in many ways unique. Somehow, cinema is reinvented. Not only in form, admirably cut, composed of a singular game of actors and an incredible work of voices, but also and above all in substance. Because what Straub and Huillet propose, since almost thirty years, is a criticism “en règle” of capitalism. The most radical imaginable. And that encompasses, of course, the usual criticism of cinematic representation. It is thus not surprising that their films are often boycotted by the big festivals and the main distributors. This is also why it is indispensable to see them…” - Jacques Rancière

The Witch and the Grinder. Interview with Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (excerpts)

or descriptive reflections. In addition, there is a whole text written in indirect style. But this is not the first time this has happened to us. The long text dealing with the death of Thérésa in the Kafka film (Amerika/ Class relations) was also in indirect style. Here, the text of the Great Lombard, who is sitting in the train and stands up to violently close the compartment door before taking his seat to talk about the stench of the two cops, does not exist. In the novel, it is written more than sixty percent in indirect style. About Not Reconciled (1965), I said it was a film which was lacking. The same for Sicilia !, but in another way. One should never overdo it on the pretext of wanting a two-hour film. There is a scene in Mon Oncle that I must have mentioned twenty times already, in which a man who is missing an eye is painting white lines on the tarmac. Suddenly he sees a pink-green Buick with a playboy and a beautiful girl inside. He follows it with his eye, and then he raises his brush and says? “Do you want another coat of paint?” Cinema is the opposite. Otherwise it’s Tchaikovsky: there is nothing breathing, everything is packed, harnessed. It’s exactly what Brecht made Tiresias say in Antigone: “Und mehr braucht mehr, und wird am End zu nichts”, more needs more, and in the end becomes nothing. Aesthetics is the opposite. One must dilate and narrow down to the maximum, leaving huge spaces and then exercise extreme bindings. It’s the difference between Tchaikovsky and Bach, Beethoven, Schönberg or Webern, who leave in silences. That is the aesthetic responsability: take a maximum risk with maximum caution.

Thierry Lounas Originall published as ‘La sorcière et le rémouleur’ in Cahiers du cinéma no. 538 (Septembre 1999).

Sicilia ! is roughly the same length as Du jour au Lendemain (1997), one hour and five minutes to be precise. For Du jour au lendemain the score and the book imposed the duration. For Sicilia!, there was a much more extensive work, Conversazione in Sicilia by Elio Vittorini, that you have only used in part. How have you adapted the novel? JMS: “We have left aside more than half of the novel, mainly things that could have been used for a film by Visconti or Fellini, especially the last part which is completely metaphorical. But it’s already been thirty years since I’m completely wary of metaphors, even well before knowing this phrase by kafka: “Metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing.” You can not make films with metaphors. To allude to the final part of the novel: it is not possible, in cinema, to film people who are dying, in the dark, of typhus or other things. Even John Ford would not have allowed it.” More than choosing the parts that interested you, I suppose you had to rework what you kept. JMS: “In this novel, there is not a single line of dialogue that is complete. Everything is interspersed with psychological

The black and white has an ambiguous role in regards to this science-fiction effect. JMS: “The black and white is actually a correction of what I just described. There again we find the idea of caution. One has to go very far in making “modern” images but then it’s better to make them in black and white than in color. And when the Great Lombard, in the train, develops what I call his communist utopia, it’s not the great European communist utopia, as put forward by Hölderlin at the beginning of the last part of Empedocles. It’s not a universal communist utopia, it is a communist utopia that doesn’t state its name and is rather particular: it’s the communist utopia of the men that have been massacred by Stalin in Ukraine. A communist utopia that is searching for something, that dreams of something and says: “To arrive at what I’m searching for, I would give everything I own, my land and my horse.” That goes very far. But if we point out that these words stem from just after 1917, with in the background the war in Spain, anticipating McCarthyism and everything else, it doesn’t work in the same way. That is what I call the science-fiction effect. Conversely, when we would have filmed the train in color, the film would have been to close to us.”

How does this thing that you finally decide to keep become necessary? DH: “What bothers or agitates people is feeling that it is necessairy without knowing why.” JMS: “I come back to Vittorini: thanks to a text like his, of which we have let out half, there is the possibility of having a film of which the fiction is very strong without the film being loaded with fiction. Because we do the opposite of what producers do when they buy the rights of a book. They don’t buy the texts, they buy a plot. And from there, they clog the holes. Here, the intrigue is there, if we speak of intrigue in the Cornelian sense, but it does not devour the film material. It is not in the foreground, it is cited, suggested.” Sicilia ! is more vague than your other films, as if in the end there has to remain an uncertainty regarding the morality, the struggle, the couple. It’s a matter of movements and surges of politics and love that exceed whatever we can say about it, and that, in the final analysis, constitute a risk of which we don’t know, to come back to something you said earlier, if it is supported by a strong caution. We have the feeling that the film is extremely open and that a certain truth, whatever it is, is hard to formulate and can only be formulated at the price of multiple contradictions. JMS: “If Sicilia ! seems to be more open than Du jour au lendemain, if it actually is so, it’s because it’s a film in which there are many blanks. And to make a film of more than

In Class relations, we actually witnessed more of a trench war, camp against camp, exploiters against exploited. in Sicilia ! the dialectics, the conflict has given way to the evocation of memories and the world, even poetic and melancholic in the last sequence. It is about satisfaction, dignity, God ...

JMS: “This is a film of old people, that’s all, and it’s an airy film. This is a film in which there is air, in which the viewer or the citizen has the possibility to exist, to breathe, while in the earlier films ... But there is not only the dignity of the grinder, etc… it all the same ends with dynamite and this is not nothing, especially if we think about some recent events. And before the dynamite there is cannoni, cannoni and before that there is talk of sickles and hammers. And after the canons and the dynamite, there is once again a contradiction. When the grinder puts on his hat and salutes, we have the impression that there are two characters who are saying goodbye to each other, each on one side of of an invisible abyss – they’re almost two Fordian characters. Then they begin to speak of healing and sickness. What is interesting is what is experienced at that moment. If we come to a point where humanity needs dynamite, it means it is sick. So there should be a convalescence. That, for me, is taken up by Beethoven... What the Great Lombard says is typically Italian, which, twenty years ago, would have made me very angry. But this time, I took it seriously. I said to myself “here is someone who is looking for something.” And as it was written in indirect style in the book, I put it in direct style, which made it more shocking and substantial. There is also the knife-sharpener who says “troppo male offendere il monde.” Reading this when I was eighteen, I would have shrugged my shoulders. But, all of a sudden, it takes on a certain weight. It is in this sense that I say that this is a film of old people. This is a film that could be called After the deluge.”

father. This is how the shot, basic atom of the straubian cinema, is the product, the “reste” (remainder), or rather the “restance” (remaining) of a triple resistance: texts resisting bodies, places resisting texts, bodies resisting places. One has to add a fourth: the public resisting shots “designed” like that, stubborn resistance of cinema’s public to something intractable, something which renounces it as a public. I will not come back to this. First of all because the past fifteen years we have written a lot about this in Cahiers. Furthermore because what is striking in the Italian Nicht Versöhnt which is Dalla Nuba is something else: the sensuality, the taste of narration, the joy of language and something like a will to elucidate this “be that as it may, we have to follow through” which almost impels me to say that this film has some elements of a psychoanalysis of the Straubs by themselves. As if, after finishing their Jewish triptych (composed of Einleitung zu Arnold Schönbergs Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene, Moses und Aaron and Fortini Cani), after having brandished the signifier “resistance” as an absolute (because, without a doubt, being Jewish means resisting and, most of all, resisting the Book), they pitch into its genealogy. Resistance is the point of arrival of a story that has begun elsewhere, earlier, with the cloud. What is this story that straddles two millennia, entangles men and gods, and then men with the most terrible – and the most modern – of divinities, History? When did resistance begin? Why resist? And what is it one is resisting, exactly? Against the spectacle. But what spectacle?

A Morals of Perception (excerpts) Serge Daney Originally published as ‘Une Morale de la Perception (De la nuée à la résistance de Straub-Huillet)’ in ‘La Rampe. Cahier critique 1970-1982′ (Cahiers du cinéma, Gallimard)

The latest Straubfilm is composed of two separate parts, one mythological, the other modern, without any apparent relation. The Nube part: six of the twenty seven Dialogues with Leuco (’Dialoghi con Leucò’), written by Cesare Pavese in 1947. The Resistenza part: extracts of another book by Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires (’La luna e i falo’), published in 1950, a few months before his suicide. This last part is not a surprise: every Straubfilm is an examination – archeological, geological, ethnographic, even military – of a situation in which men have resisted. To Nietzsche’s claim that “the only being known to us is being that represents itself”, the straubs would respond: only those who resist exist for sure. Resist nature, language, time, texts, gods, God, chiefs, Nazis. Mother and

The six dialogues constituting the first part of the film recount an unique event: the gods separating from men. All proximity between them has been eclipsed, as well as the alliance, the promiscuity, the intermixture. The new law is announced in the first shot of the film by the nymph Nephele, the cloud, while sitting on a tree. “There are monsters”, she says. From then on those who – like the centaurs – have engaged in a dual nature realize they are monsters and go into hiding. Every dialogue marks a deepening of the separation. I summarize: the gods dissociate themselves from men, abandoning them (second dialogue: the Chimera), they separate men from things by giving them a name (third dialogue: the Blind), they separate them from themselves and transform them into animals (fourth dialogue: the Werewolf), they separate some from others by way of sacrifices (fifth dialogue: the Guests) and the separation is complete when they idly content themselves with watching these sacrifices (sixth dialogue: the Bonfires).

This last dialogue marks, at the same time as being the end of the first part, the beginning of the resistance, if not of the revolt, and prefigures the second part – the “modern” part – by way of the theme of bonfires. It’s worthwhile to linger here for a while. To his father who explains him that these fires have to be lit up, a young peasant answers: “I do not want to, you understand, I do not want to. They do well, the masters, to eat our marrow, if we have been so unjust among ourselves. They do well, the gods, to watch us suffer.” Purposely, Straub leaves out the end of Pavese’s dialogue (‘the son adds: “siamo tutti cattivi” – we are all vicious –and the father treats him like an ignorant before renewing his offering to Zeus). In the same way, he has not kept the first two sentences of the dialogue (Pavese began by making the son say “the whole mountain is burning”), instead starting with the son’s assertion that “Our bonfire, nobody sees it.”

lips.” The construction of the Straubian shot comes down to a practice of framing that breaks with this distance, teaching us to “look closely”, bending the homogeneous space of paranoiac contemplation with which the gods-spectators dispossess men (actors) of their misfortune and with which men, while trying to please them, change into histrionics of their lot, which has become fate. It’s this refusal of a backdrop, of a background (arrière-plan) that confers on Dalla Nube this immediate, pathetic sensuality, inclining that the memory of a world “where we could be at home”, of a intimacy with things, has to be entrusted to senses that are better placed outside of the body – hearing, touch. Not the look. True inscription of superimposition? There is no background (arrière-plan), so be it. But is there all the same a shot (plan)? Or else, what is the content of what is called, by convenience, a shot? Content has to be understood literally here. In a short film entitled Toute Révolution est un coup de dés, the Straubs have the actors recite a poem by Mallarmé at the Pere-Lachaise graveyard: the “actors” (each a typographical character) are disseminated – as a lively form of writing – over the slope of a small hill. It’s under this hill that the victims of la Commune are buried. But this is not made explicit in the film. In Fortini Cani, the camera wanders several times through the Italian countryside where, during World War II, civilian populations have been massacred. The content of the shot, stricto sensu, is what it hides: the bodies under the ground. From this we could deduce a sort of necrophiliac piety, conducted by the Straubs against the spectator, summoned to know or to keep quiet in respect for the dead – and those particular dead most of all. Impossible coalescence between the perceived and the known, the content of a perception and the perception of a knowledge. In this sense, the politics (and the morals) of the Straubs is a politics (and a morals) of perception. In this sense, it is materialist, but à la Lucrèce or Diderot. In Dalla Nuba too, the shots have a content. It’s, for example, the wheat-field that the Guest (Herakles) watches and admires (fifth dialogue), although he knows that every year it’s fertilized with the blood of a victim of sacrifice and that he has been chosen to be this victim. It’s the magnificent shot of “the grass and the acacias” in front of which, at the end of the film, Nuto reveals to the bastard that this is the place where Santa was killed, before being burned by the partisans. It’s finally the shot of the werewolf (fourth dialogue) of which the hunters ask what to do because, according to them “It is not the first time that a beast has been killed / But it is the first time that we have killed a man”. These three examples are nevertheless sufficient to instill doubt. Doubt as for what we

We have spoken too much about the Straub’s meticulous respect for texts to not notice how they violate them here. Because these cuts haven’t been made haphazardly, nor is the fact that the theme of looking is privileged. The resistance begins at the moment when, once their separation from the gods is complete, men imagine themselves as the spectacle in which the gods take pleasure, from afar. Beginning of the resistance and also beginning of the pose, of theater. There is a taste of antique theater – toga and tunic – in Straub’s work that refers to Cecil B. De Mille as well as the situations of Terror it connotes. Beginning of indulgence, of aestheticism, of a “m’as-tu-vu” reserved for the human body. Between the carefreeness of Ixion who doesn’t take what the nymph says very seriously (first dialogue) and the first No! (sixth dialogue: the camera zooms in on the boy’s hand, a hand hesitating to clench itself into a fist), the distance between gods and men, in growing larger, has become the space of aesthetic contemplation. “Son: They are unjust, the gods. Father: If it were not thus, they would not be gods. One who does not work, how do you want him to spend his time? When there were no masters and people lived with justice, one had to kill someone from time to time to let them enjoy themselves. They are made thus. But in our time, they don’t need that any more. There are so many of us in a bad way that it is enough for them to watch us.” So the misfortune of men is one and the same as their transformation in objects of esthetic pleasure for the idle gods. Of course, the gods are also the chiefs, the spectators – all those who don’t work. And resisting them is first of all refusing being looked at. This means, for example, turning your back on them. Refusal of spectacle, shame on the spectator-god, this spoiled brat. Describing the gods to Ixion, Nephele says: “They feel everything from afar with their eyes, their nostrils, their

see. Because what happens in this “passage” from polytheism to monotheism – which interests the Straubs a great deal – if else than that we are less and less able to make out what is metamorphosing? Blood in wheat, man in wolf, woman in fire, etc.

shot. The other is the black (or empty) screen. In Moses und Aron there was the bedazzlement of an empty shot, of a non-image. In Dalla nube, there’s something else, there is a disclaimer: whatever you are looking at, a cultivated field, a hill, an animal, don’t forget that what you see is always human. If seeing a film, in the Godard-Miéville version, is about equating dad with the factory and mom with a landscape, in the Straub-Huillet version it’s about equating the factory and – more and more – the landscape with mom and dad. Humanism then, in the sense of a prevalency, of a pregnancy of the human image in all things. It is in this sense that these films “are watching us”: someone is watching us in the depth of each image, in an impossible superimposition. Cinema is what permits to suspend the enchantment which makes us think that we see all around us other than human things, while they are only cultivated fields, cut down trees, unknown cemeteries, animals-who-might-be-human (thus forbidding to kill them). Old Marxist humanism as well, in the sense that Brecht said that a picture of the Krupp factories taught us nothing about the Krupp factories. What is missing? The work of men and men at work. And what is there to learn? Always the same thing: men create gods (or the workers create chiefs, actors create spectators) and in return those gods bereave them of their world, turn them into strangers, alienate them. Because it’s clearly about alienation and re-appropriation, experience and bad experience, an entire existentialist problematic to which Straub’s cinema clings to. All of the sudden we understand their horror for the already-made esthetic categories: finding a shot of a landscape “beautiful” is bordering on blasphemy, because a shot, a landscape, is, in the end, someone. There is no beauty if not moral. It’s not about anthropomorphism. There is pregnancy of the human figure in all things, but not the other way around. If we consider a filmmaker important in so far as one studies, from film to film, a certain state of the human body, then the Straub’s films are but documentaries about two or three body positions: sitting, bending over to read, walking. It’s already a lot.

So there are two limits to the Straubian shot. One, internal, is what it contains – the shot as a tomb. The other, unrepresentable, undecidable, is that all things filmed, framed, risk being something else as well. Lycaon, the crying werewolf, wouldn’t be this upset if the hunters wouldn’t refer to him as being a man (“He defended himself as an old man, with his eyes”) and if their embarrassment wouldn’t stem from a more profound doubt, a doubt related to their own identity (“Are you so sure of yourself that you don’t sometimes feel Lycaon like him?”). Sudden risk of being one and the other. In this sense, if we take up the issue of “true inscription” again*, we can say that there is certainly something that inscribes itself materially, indisputably, hic et nunc, in the film and on the magnetic tape, except for we don’t know what it is for sure. That’s why this idea of resistance is at this point essential for the Straubs. It also has a conjuratory value: resistance is the only indication that doesn’t deceive, that attests to some reality or other, to a node of contradictions. It is, in the Freudian sense, a symptom. Where there is resistance, one has to film. But one doesn’t know what one films and the more one can describe it, the less one knows. In the true inscription, there are only traces of inscription of which we are sure of. The rest is metamorphosis, avatar, double identity and double appertaining, error, betrayal. It’s this suspicion, better: desire to voice this suspicion, that can be perceived for the first time with such exemption in Dalla Nuba. A shot without image or two images in a shot? There are tricks the Straubs never use – and even seem to be the negation of their cinema – such as superimposition or cross-fading. Every time an image overlays another (unless one image contains the other), every time an image prefigures another (unless one image is already the other’s memory). The time of superimposition is that of the active work of forgetting: a voice tells us: “you will forget, you have already forgotten”. This infringement of an image on another is one of the two limits of the Straubian

Texts assembled and translated by Stoffel Debuysere, except where noted. In the framework of “Figures of DIssent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)” (KASK/HoGent). More texts can be found on www.diagonalthoughts.com