Month: April 2013

By Thierry Lounas

Interview with Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, conducted on 6 July 1999, with the participation of Pedro Costa. Originally published as ‘La sorcière et le rémouleur’ in Cahiers du cinéma no. 538 (Septembre 1999). Translated by Ted Fendt and Stoffel Debuysere

Whether or not by chance, the road that led to Rome passed through a small town in Tuscany called Pontedera, where recently was held a retrospective of the films of Pedro Costa, a great admirer of the Straubs. Chance in any case that the director of the event, Marco Abondenza, made us discover the village of Buti, which is atypical and artistically committed. A man, whose son played in Dalla nube alla resistenza twenty years ago, mentioned that the village theater would show the next Passion of Christ, adapted from Pasolini, in Cape Verde. He also remembered the presence of Godard at one of the presentations of Sicilia ! that the Straubs had organised in preparation of their film. He then invited us to see the Landi house where the Straubs lived during the rehearsals and where the central scene in Sicilia ! had been shot. In front of the fireplace, a discussion unravelled with Marcello Landi and his wife. Once arrived in Rome, still in the company of Pedro Costa, we had a little taste of the Italian mythology surrounding the Straubs. Some not without contempt, others with tenderness, gave them the nickname “punkabbestia”, which usually refers to the hordes of vagrants roaming the streets of Rome, flanked by their dogs. They are not vicious, they say, just a little cumbersome. Indeed, the Straubs may be punkabbestia, punk filmmakers with a love for animals, and capable of violent assaults themselves. We then headed to Borgata Petrelli, on the outskirts of Rome, where the Straubs live. It is there that this interview took place, in all tranquillity, in the presence of a score by Bach and a painting by Cézanne. During this time, a large fire was burning not far away, which, having attracted the televison cameras, inspired Jean-Marie Straub to remark: “What they’re ignoring is that nothing is more difficult than filming a fire.”

Sicilia ! is about 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 libretto imposed the duration. For Sicilia !, there was a much vaster work, Conversazione in Sicilia by Elio Vittorini, that you have only used part of. How did you adapt the novel?
JMS: We have left more than half of the novel aside, mainly things that could have yielded a Visconti or Fellini film, especially the last part which is completely metaphorical. But it’s already been thirty years since I’m completely wary of metaphors, even before I got to know kafka’s expression: “Metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing.” Films can’t be made 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 passages that interested you, I suppose you needed 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 or descriptive reflections. Additionally, there is an entire part of the text written in indirect style. But it’s 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 who we see getting 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, more than sixty percent of it is written in indirect style. About Not Reconciled (1965), I said it was a film that was lacking something. The same goes for Sicilia !, but in different way. One should never overdo it on the pretext of having a two-hour film. There is a scene in Mon Oncle that I must have mentioned already twenty times, in which a man who is missing an eye is painting white lines on the tarmac. Suddenly he sees a crushed-raspberry, olive-green Buick pull up, with a playboy and a beautiful girl inside. He follows it with his eye, then raises his brush and says? “Do you want another coat?” Cinema is the opposite. Otherwise it’s Tchaikovsky: there is nothing breathing, everything is crammed in, sealed off. It’s exactly what Brecht has 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 as much as possible, leaving enormous spaces and then make extreme constrictions. That’s the whole difference between Tchaikovsky and Bach, Beethoven, Schönberg or Webern, who leave in silences. That is aesthetic responsability: take a maximum risk with maximum caution.

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

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

(Pedro Costa) 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 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 afraid. But in this sense only.
DH: You’ve seen Della nuba alla resistenza. You remember this shot with the oxen 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, one will see that it is at least as strong as the dialogues.

How does this thing that you finally decide to keep become necessary?
DH: What bothers or moves people is feeling that it is necessary without knowing why.
JMS: I come back to Vittorini: thanks to a story like his, of which we have left 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 material of the film. It is not in the foreground, it is cited, suggested. In that sense, it is completely different than Du jour au lendemain, which is theatre.
DH: An intrigue that is there without devouring the rest: that is also true of a film like Jean Renoir’s La nuit du Carrefour. If the film is impressive and we’re not completely dissapointed at the end – as is almost always the case with police films – it’s precisely because it’s not wrapped up.

In regards to the “story”, Sicilia ! is much closer to Not reconciled, with its different layers of time and history.
JMS: I’ll leave you the responsibility of this parallel. In 1965 I said, about Not reconciled, that I had risked making a film that was lacking something. But there is not only Not reconciled. Without looking to make comparisons, there is a film which is very related to Sicilia !, that it picks up from all while trying to do something else: Class relations. There is this similar desire to refuse to make a historical film which is dated in the images. Moreover, Sicilia ! and Class relations have another point in common. Class relationships was meant to be a twenty minutes film based on Kafka’s The Stoker, and Sicilia ! was initially meant to be composed only of the sequence with the orange vender, which correponds to a personal experience. During our first trip to Sicily in 1971 or 1972, at the time of Moses and Aaron, while driving around with the 2CV of Danièle’s mother, we discovered, near a river, mountains of oranges that had been thrown away to prevent the prices to fall. It is also the story that you hear at the beginning of Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe, with which Sicilia ! also has something in common, without it being premeditated by us. The other title of Kuhle Wampe is “To Whom Does the World Belong?”. And we amused ourselves, after the fact, by giving Sicilia ! the subtitle male offendere troppo il mondo (too evil to offend the world)

Sicilia ! seems to me more ample, more vast in what it evokes than Du jour au lendemain. We could say it’s more generous.
DH: This is mainly because Du jour au lendemain takes place in only one space. It’s like something set on a bus: it’s always heavier.
JMS: In Sicilia ! there is a completely different social reality. Du jour au lendemain stages a petit-bourgeois family constructed from two cultural machines, the male singer and the female singer. In Sicilia !, it is no longer an affair of cultural machines. The actors had never set a foot on a theater stage, and most of them didn’t know what grammar was. And their jobs were also different: there were several plasterers, a tiler, a seller of neckties. The mother had a life that was very similar to the one in the film. When you see what these people have managed to do in Sicilia !, one understands how shameful the controversy in Cannes about non-professional actors was. The Italian newspapers have not stopped talking about it. There is one thing I discovered during the Cannes festival: the Italian press is just a notch below the press of Dr. Goebbels and Goering. And this happened in only four years time. You could read things like: “What’s with these films that have received awards and feature non-professional actors who in any case are bad and won’t make any career in cinema?” I read this in good democratic, liberal and bourgeois newspapers, which are nevertheless no flesh-peddler magazines.
DH: Bresson worked in this way his whole life. He never called on professional actors. Dreyer, despite everything, took on actors. Obviously, at the time there were fewer Le Pen-like arguments such as “They won’t make a career, they received an award, it’s a shame.”
JMS: This goes way back. Do you know why all Italian films are dubbed? It comes from a law Mussolini made to protect the Italian language. That’s where the parasitism of dubbing started. And when they dubbed Renoir’s Toni a few years ago, the Italian actors arriving in the south of France, Toni in particular, were dubbed by Milanese voice-actors imitating the Sicilian accent, so they wouldn’t be confused with the other actors dubbed in Italian. All of the sudden, the Italians who landed in the south of France became Sicilians arriving in the north of Italy. That is what they are capable of in Italy … Andreotti, as leader of the Christian Democracy, once wrote a letter to Filmcritica, at the time when it was still a small magazine, to explain that one had no right to make films like the Bicycle Thief, that dirty laundry shouldn’t be aired in public.

Are there for you advantages in shooting with non-professional actors, rather than with professional ones?
JMS: Renoir said that he could have made a broom act.
DH: Undoubtedly there is less need to play tricks with non-professional actors.
JMS: It’s true, but we did have some difficulties with the mother in Sicilia !, with whom we started working three months before the others.
DH: Because she played tricks on us.
JMS: When Danièle brought up the text I wrote, based on Conversations in Sicilia, in 1992, and proposed to make it into a film, I answered yes, on the condition that we would rework it using the same method we used for Antigone (1992), meaning that we would have to recruit actors on the spot. The theatre of Buti had written to us ten years before, saying that they would be delighted if one day we could make something with them. So I proposed the Vittorini to them, explaining that it would allow us to prepare actors of Sicilian origin in view of a film we wanted to make. They accepted right away, very kindly.

To continue to compare your two last films, in Du jour au lendemain there is a kind of dispute, a violent reaction of the woman against the confusion that has befallen her husband. She ends up using the same spectacular means as her adversery, in order to win back her husband. We could say that this reconquest is a war machine. In Sicilia !, it is no longer necessary, as the Great Lombard says, to be content with being good citizens, one has to find new responsibilities in order to be at peace with men. So it isn’t irrelevant that, in Du jour au lendemain, love inscribes itself in the interior of the couple and the discourse while in Sicilia ! it was born from an extramarital affair, from a subversion.
JMS: This women in Silicia !, i can tell you what she is: a witch. Him, the son, behaves like all men of the inquisition. Do you know how many witches the Inquistion burned? Thirty thousand. As many as Communards were executed. In Sicilia !, a gentle son cares for his old mother. Little by little, he starts to ask questions like an inquisitor. He judges her, then he realizes that as a woman she had her freedom and took it. A witch is revealed. That is what the Inquisition did not allow.
DH: It is at this moment that we understand why she gets angry when her son says to her “But did it not matter to you to no longer see the track, did it not matter to you to no longer hear the train” and she answers “But what does it matter…” You understand why. It is the fault of the railwaymen who let the police pass, it is the fault of this railroad that the strike was crushed.
JM: The woman in Du jour au lendemain is also a witch in her own way, because she takes on all the sorrow of the world in her machination. But she is a petit-bourgeoise who plays the witch, whereas the other, one fine day, is struck by lightning, by the arrival of this man. This wife of a railroad man suddenly reveals herself as a witch. It’s something completely different.

Sicilia ! is more vague than your other films, as if in the end there has to remain some uncertainty regarding the morality, the struggle, the couple. It’s a matter of movements and surges of politics and love that overtake whatever we might say about them, and that, in the final analysis, constitute a risk of which one doesn’t know, to come back to something you said earlier, if it is supported by a strong caution. One has 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, the way in which the mother says of her father: “He had a head for a thousand things.”
JMS: If Sicilia ! seems more open than Du jour au lendemain, if it actually is, it’s because it’s a film in which there are many blanks. And to make a film of more than 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 endured from eighty percent of her classmates, he finds himself on the bridge with Robert, who asks, 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 science-fiction effect. What is this strange world in which being Jewish could 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 an entirely different film. We had foreseen to to do as in the Kafka film: to avoid, contrary to what Forman does in his Hollywood films, showing old cars that point out the periode we’re in. 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 weren’t historically dated, and the same for the costumes.

The black and white plays 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 that 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 after 1917, with in the background the war in Spain, and 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 too close to us.
DH: the silent moment, at the end of the train scene, ends up making our head spin. It becomes completely dreamlike. In color, the sky would have been blue…
JMS: Blue, not really, because it was grey… Even it there was the Sirocco blowing. But it’s true that with color the landscape wouldn’t have had this lunar quality. The black and white, in correcting the science-fiction effect, also allows to make things more abstract.

It’s not only the black and white or the lunar quality of the story that gives Sicilia ! its wide openness: there is also the undeceidability of place, a continuous movement that makes the film pass by without anything – the speech and the perception we have of the characters – ever concluding or freezing. Let’s take for example the scene between Silvestro and his mother, their movements, the fact that they occupy, in turn, the same place and that the space is very cut up. The geometry of the space keeps escaping us. The other day, seeing the house in Buti where this scene was shot, I was surprised by its smallness, while for Du jour au lendemain the space seemed more imaginable.
JMS: Let’s be more down to earth. Du jour au lendemain is simply a film with one single setting decor, and for the first time for us, a studio decor. It came from a challenge and the desire to amuse ourselves shooting between three walls, with one open wall and the orchestra in the back. Consequently, it’s a film that says what it is. Sicilia ! is a film starting in Messina, going up to the centre of Siciliy. That’s all.

Still, in Siclia ! we find ourselves, more than usual in your films, at odds with the space, with the off-space, especially in the train with the Great Lombard.
DH: When the Great Lombard is filmed alone in the train, it corresponds to a moment when he himself forgets the people around him. The risk is then knowing if you can succeed to get across the fact that, when he is shot alone in the train, he forgets what is around him. What remains of the off-space – and it’s something very strong that can’t be obtained in theatre – are his eyes looking through the window and in which you can see the light from outside.
JMS: But that should be any filmmaker’s strategy, small or great, young or old. It consists in playing with distance and space. We have gone through a lot of trouble with this compartiment. It was a matter of three centimeters to isolate it from the others. In reality we had to cheat a little. If we would have chosen a compartiment in second class, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. In first class, we won the fifteen centimeters that made the movement possible. At first, Willy Lubtchansky wanted us to take out a seat each time the camera changed places. I was against. So we filmed from each side of the seats, camera on the shoulder, except for the shot of the two cops, for which the camera was mounted on the level of the compartment door and turns towards the hallway.
DH: Jean-Marie was stubborn and he was right. Let’s say the material is much stronger because the train, Willy and the camera are moving at the same time.
JMS: As soon as we had chosen a lens, we couldn’t move an inch anymore. We didn’t have a zoom, and the lenses were fixed focal length. As soon as you choose a strategic position, you start doing things you had never done before. Thirty years ago, I would have been horrified to make a shot like the close-up of the great Lombard. The first time I used a 100mm lens was for The Death of Empedocles (1987). Before that I had only went up to 75. To return to the house, what made me decide to shoot this way was the black wall inside the fireplace. We lived in this house in Tuscany during the two months of rehearsals. We’d done quite a few explorations in Sicily, seen a lot of houses. Finally, we decided to shoot there. The wall in the fireplace is the only part of the house that is three centuries old. That was even worse than in the train. There are two camera positons in the whole sequence. There is one where you see him at the door and her at the fireplace, a position that is kept to film them both at the table and the window. The camera is close to the fireplace. And here it becomes exciting because all the shots are the result of a space that is not made of rubber. One feels very well that we haven’t tried to correct the perspective to make a more beautiful shot. You can play with the focal lengths but the perspective is correct, it’s always the same. It’s what we did with the Kafka, even if it was a bit more complicated then because we had to show solaridarity with Karl Rossman and, during the trial, be a bit closer to him than to the others. If you constantly change the perspective to make this or that shot, a close-up for example, then that close-up is of no importance at all.

In Class relations, we basically 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 more possibilities to exist, to breathe, than in the previous films … But there is not only the dignity of the grinder, the canons etc… It all the same ends with dynamite and that’s not nothing, especially if you think about certain 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 another contradiction. When the grinder puts his hat back on and salutes, you 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 about healing and sickness. What is interesting is what is experienced at that moment. If you get to a point where humanity needs dynamite, it means that the world is sick. So there should be a convalescence. That, for me, is taken up by Beethoven… What the Great Lombard says is something typically Italian, which, twenty years ago, would have made me red with anger. But this time, I took it seriously. I said to myself “here is someone who is searching 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 grinder who says “troppo male offendere il monde.” Reading this when I was eighteen, I would have shrugged my shoulders. But here, all of a sudden, it takes on a certain weight. It’s also in this sense that I say that this is a old people’s film. This is a film that could be called After the deluge.

There are other films that are set after the deluge and that, in the same way as Sicilia ! , advance following individual or collective memories, as well as their contradictions, defining some kind of space of the present by way of the past. I’m thinking of Hiroshima Mon Amour or other films by Resnais.
JMS: Let’s consider that as a compliment, and it sure is one. But let us rather talk of one of the people I like the most in contemporary cinema, Otar Iosseliani. I really loved Chasing Butterflies, but I think that his last film is a film armored by the story, the meaning, a desire not to leave holes or gaps. What can you do, cinema is not a language. Rivette and Moullet, a long time ago, reacted against the pornographic cinematographic writing. From my side, I arrived at the same conclusion. Cinema is not a language, in the way that Lenin said that bourgeois politics was pornography. Referential films, cinema becoming its own object, it’s dreadful.

Sicilia ! is much more beautiful and stronger for its dialogues being simple and yet dense. that’s what is undoubtedly at the origin of the impact and the surprise it produces. At once short and simple.
JMS: It’s very difficult to write texts like these ones. It’s what I told Otar when he asked me, ten years ago, “But why don’t you write your own texts?” I prefer to take them elsewhere because I know those texts will be richer than those I’m capable of writing, that they’ll resist me, and that I’ll have the courage to impose them on the actors for two, three, four months.

What is the meaning of the grinder’s enigmatic line: “one sometimes confuses the pettinesses of the world with the offenses to the world.”
JMS: Piccolezze, the small things of the world.
DH: Pettinesses! The grinder, who should have given this service for free, given the pleasure that he got from meeting Silvestro, apologizes for having tried to extort two francs more. He says to Sulvestro: “What kind of thing is that one, isn’t that a man who offends the world?” And the others says “Ooh” with a smile implying “Don’t exagerate, it’s all the same not serious.” The grinder answers him “Thanks you my friend, one sometimes confuses the pettinesses of the world with the offenses to the world.”
JMS: Moreover, I have to say that the word pettiness is well chosen, because in Italian it’s also a noun, even if it’s a bit forced. Probably, if we would have translated Piccolezze by small things, we would have translated inaccurately.
DH: No, that’s not true, it corresponds to narrow mindedness. Stop, in this domain you can’t beat me.
JMS: Ok… But I would like to add something about this thing (showing the press dossier) that I’m not unhappy about. There are three texts by Vittorini here. There is one very short one on Hölderlin, and another, even shorter, on color in cinema, and a final one, a bit longer, on Dreyer. I want it to be known that before making the film and even when we were editing it, I was completely unaware of these texts. One should give César his due: it was François Albéra who sent them to me. Why are they interesting? You see that Vittorini was interested in Hölderlin, which I would have never imagined. You also learn that he wrote about a film by Mamoulian: “Can color ever replace the innumerable shades of black and white?” It’s something important. In regards to the text on Days of Wrath, I’ve put it in there for one reason only: because of this witch. I also want it to be known that that I have never thought about Days of Wrath while working on Sicilia ! But I have to confess that when I arrived in Paris in 1954, the film that I knew the best, besides two films by Grémillon, two films and a half by Renoir en three films by Bresson, was Days of Wrath, which I must have seen at least seven times on 16mm, in my attic. So, consequentely, if there is something, in the scene between the mother and the son, that makes on think about Days of Wrath, it’s not surprising. A film that you see at that age leaves traces. In addition, I want Pagnol to be cited in regards to Sicilia ! I want that to the extent that I don’t really know Pagnol. But one day I discovered that images don’t exist for him. He does an enormous amount of work on the sound, and besides he bragged about it. Everyone was saying “You see, when the sound is right, the images are right”. But it’s not true. Pagnol locked himself in his sound-studio and, actually, he didn’t want to see anything. Of course, that’s not why the images don’t exist. But it happens that they don’t exist. One has to admit that, even is there is something in common between Toni and Pagnol, politically Renoir and him have nothing to do with each other. Pagnol is a bit tiresome. Bazin admired Manon des sources because of the priest’s long speech. I have never seen the film again. One would have to see if it stood the test of time. There are for example two filmmakers whom I admired a great deal when I was young and who irritate me today: Murnau and Rosselini. Their cinema ends up chasing its own tail.

You often talk about Dreyer, Bresson, Renoir, Ford, Stroheim, Lubitsch or Chaplin, but not a lot about filmmakers such as Hitchcock, Antonioni, Vertov or Ozu. Should we assume that you don’t have much sympathy for them?
JMS: It wasn’t Bresson who taught me about space, it was Hitchcock. When, in the course of a dialogue, there is a close-up and then a low-angle shot in close-up, it’s never fanciful. Even if I have slowly grown tired of Hitchcock’s stories and his roman-photo side. The first text I have written was sixty pages long and was about Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore. It was about the film without really being about the film, based on Dostojevski’s The adolescent and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. I showed it to Bazin who told me that he wasn’t sure if the film would support this pyramid. For my part, I found it to be a synthetic and new cinema, particularly in regards to space. Bazin sent me to Marker, at Esprit, to try to publish the text. But nobody wanted to. After that, I went to Germany and I burned it. I also wrote a text about Rear Window that Doniol, Bazin and the others had even put in the layout. I did some proofreading but then they decided that the special issue on Hitchcock would only take in account the films made up until Dial M for Murder. It was just a small analysis of the spatial relations in Rear Window. So, if I learned anything on space, it comes from there as well. Ozu I discovered very late. When we arrived in Berlin with Not reconciled, an old German was always saying to me: “Ozu, Ozu”. I told him I didn’t know Ozu, and answered “Mizoguch, Mizoguchi”, because I had seen his films before leaving Paris, and I knew Sansho, O’Haru and Street of Shame very well. You know what Mizoguchi said to Ozu? It’s the most beautiful compliment a filmmaker can give to another filmmaker. Responding to someone who was critisizing Ozu, Mizoguchi said “Yes, but what Ozu does is perhaps more difficult than what I do.” The other beautiful compliment was made by John Ford. An American journalist asked him which filmmakers he admired. And he said “Renoir, for example.” And the journalist: “Ah, Renoir, La Grand Illusion, but what other Renoir films? – But all of them!” He certainly hadn’t seen them all. To come back to Mizoguchi, if I have something in common with him, it’s a certain anger that you don’t find in Ozu’s work. Mizoguchi is all the same the greatest Marxist filmmaker. There are other films I admire a lot, like Monsieur Verdoux, films that have certainly left traces. In Limelight, in the big number with Buster Keaton, after a few seconds Chaplin cuts the sound. At the beginning there is off-screen applause that is perfectly cinematic, reconstituted, invented. But Chaplin had such an experience with theaters and audiences that, abruptly, he cuts everything. And each time the movie theater takes over.

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Translated by Stoffel Debuysere (Please contact me if you can improve the translations).

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts

By Serge Daney

Originally published as ‘au milieu du bout du monde’ in Libération, June 1983. ‘Ana’ will be shown during the Courtisane Festival (17-21 April 2013), as part of the programme “Once Was Fire”.

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.

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 Tras-os-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.

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-os-Montes, 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 pokies free online 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.

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. 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.

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Translated by Stoffel Debuysere (Please contact me if you can improve the translations). Thanks to Laurent Kretzschmar.

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts

“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

Interview with Yann Lardeau. Originally published as ‘A propos de Ana’ in Cahiers du Cinéma nº 350 (August 1983). ‘Ana’ will be shown during the Courtisane Festival (17-21 April 2013), as part of the programme “Once Was Fire”.

It took António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro six years to construct and collect the images of Ana in their minds, and to finally make them into a film. Both Tras-os-Montes and Ana are the work of a lifetime, in the sense that all its experience is the summarization and culmination of a solitary creative experience, unlike anything else, entirely linked to a region, a land – an insular creation. If a couple of artists such as Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis are so important to us today, it’s because at a time when the industry seems to unanimously choose for a blunt return to serially produced films, they admirably maintain the exigency of an artistic creation, of the production of a singular language, an exigency unmistakably inherited from the great tradition of painting and the Renaissance arts, one that can hardly be found anymore in the film industry, except for the Straubs or Bresson. They are undoubtebly the last ones to sustain this history, to testify to it in a lively way. This interview has been conducted in Berlin, after the screening of Ana at Forum. More than an interview, it became a conversation in which Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis responded to each other, echoing one and the other.

It is not easy to talk about your film: it’s not a narrative film, nor is it a documentary, and there are not so many films in the history of cinema that can be compared to it, except for singular films without antecedent, such as Vertov’s Enthousiasm, Eisenstein’s Besjine Louj – which doesn’t exist – or Murnau’s Tabu. It’s a film about a defined region, Tras-os-Montes, but also an inner look at the self of this region. Perhaps we can start with the way the films was concretely made, how you chose the actors, the costumes, the places, how you found the locations, with its color and light.

M. Cordeiro: I can not answer your question. I can only say that we ended up with this result. The moments of choosing, of working, I don’t remember at all. It has been a bit difficult, at times a bit rough, at other times calmer – but I don’t remember those times. The result is close to what we dreamed of making, but sometimes, often, we are far from what we intended to make.

A. Reis. Very far, although not really in the esthetic sense, I think… There are some things that we expected. There have been problems and then we arrived at other things that were as important and intense as those that were foreseen. And we have never tried to block off whatever mistake. We are terribly demanding. What has surprised us, is that when things were transforming, we found something else as powerful as what we expected, something that could replace it completely. And for us it was fantastic because this was the life of forms, a spiritual movement that was very genuine and profound. We have never been blind, but we have never felt programmatic either.

M. Cordeiro. We were guided by what we did.

A. Reis. It was terribly painful because we shot new and intense things, things we have lived through, that had to function as an articulation, a construction between what we had already shot and perhaps other things that we knew we could shoot as well. So, something like a real montage had to be found on the spot, in an attempt to relate all the dimensions: affective, chromatic, temporal, spatial, etc. It’s actually hard to find the words to resume and explain the cinema and the creative moments that we have lived through. Sure there are sequences that have been completely developed, but they are integrated in function of the subject. They were so rich that at the moment of shooting, we reconstructed them again. The editing was for us like an a priori architectural plan that was subject to moments of creation.

There are similarities, analogies, or even a progression positioned inside the shots. The red light inside the house, the peppers, the stain in the landscape, the strawberries the villagers are eating at the entrance of the church, the drapes covered with blood… There seems to be a very rigid progression of colours, notably of the colour red.

A. Reis. You have pointed out something very important for us. The ellipses in the film are constructed with simple colours, complementary to the interior of the shots, to what starts or what is before. Or else by the extraordinary leaps in the space. And if the light is universal, it sometimes introduces an elliptical movement. You know when it is spring, summer or winter because of the light. In regards to the decors and the light, we very much like the plastic arts, but we consider them as our enemies in cinema. These elements have to be bound with an umbilical cord to painting. Because I think that cinema technically doesn’t represent a different approach than what happened before in painting, for example. What would be absurd is that painting would come to look for the colours of cinema. There is all the same a family in regards to the figuration of colours, but our images are not plastic or pictural, because we think that painting and the plastic arts – just like the social sciences raise questions about the factory – are our enemies. We like them, we integrate them in our films, but as other materials and without subjecting ourselves to their expression.

The modern world is completely absent in ‘Ana’. Its features are not imposed on the landscape. The people never talk with others of the same age, it is always a generation addressing another, and in general, adults addressing children, like Ana with her little girl.

M. Cordeiro. It’s a modern reality because there are currently not many people in Tras-os-Montes, and there are a lot of elderly people.

A. Reis. We can almost say there’s a sort of geological reservoir in regards to the habitants of Tras-os-Montes. There is a wealth of different types. The different ages are like geological sediments. It’s a sort of cut in the geology of a social terrain. It’s very violent. Not as information, but as an expression. Things are gently marked by seasonal modulations. There are not many people. Immigration has in fact redefined the density of ages. But it subsists just as if one makes a cut in a terrain. It’s a fantastic wealth. At the same time it’s a desert. We have pushed the mise-en-scene to its extreme because we know the social life there very well. There is a sequence in which we push what we just spoke about to the extreme: the scene where they come out of the church. It’s sunday. The men are eating strawberries. There are three generations in the shot, sitting or situated in the space, in a composition that is not artificial. They see for us. But what do they see? I think that this shot is very meaningful. One day the sun made a sort of eclipse, it disappeared. And in counterpoint to this there is the eclipse the grandmother is talking about, creating a legend, appealing to the memory of the child. And we wanted exceptional conditions for this shot – looking for the location has caused us many problems. For three days we had all the equipment installed to shoot this panorama with that particular light, very clear, very limpid. For three days we stayed up there with the equipment, the whole team, and the actor. We filmed a few clouds in the sky, it was nice, but we found that it was not the spirit of the scene, despite what the cameraman said. For three days, in the terrible cold… It was only after three days that we managed to find what we wanted.

M. Cordeiro. You forget that we had tried to shoot this scene before.

A. Reis. A few months before, we had not managed to shoot this scene. So we went back. According to the camermen we had to shoot anyway, and we’d say, “No! No “. When the old woman speaks about the eclipse, it’s amazing, it’s so unique, because there is a very violent dialectic. We have never given up on this point. Working like we do, this inevitably brings very painful costs with it. Like when we stop for three days to wait for an image.
This is not to talk about ourselves, but just to give an idea. We supported the whole organization. I took 50% of the production on me. I kept all the clothes in our room because we couldn’t afford mistakes: in the mountains, we could not afford to forget anything. We received only 12,300 contos from the Portuguese Institute. It is very little, about a third of what they are giving to a movie these days. And the Gulbenkian Foundation gave us 1,500 contos. 14,500 contos for a two-hour movie filmed in the mountains for three seasons, with interruptions and inflation, I think this is a movie for free. With professional actors, can you imagine how much it would cost to play the grandmother Ana? She herself doesn’t earn a penny. We paid the professional technicians of course. But the actors did not get anything. And what we have personally earned we invested in the work we did for five years.
All what we earn, we spend studying. Studying for us is to live as well. For English or Americans, this is incomprehensible. Everything you see – fabrics, clothing,… – all this has been researched, designed and purchased by Margarida. Margarida sought out the extras. All this was done without money. We have spent nothing for the decor. This is a job that usually pays very well. But pellicule on the other hand, that we used at will. The film has one hundred twenty-five shots. However, for night shots that were complicated, we did six or seven takes. We usually do two takes just to be sure.

So you worked with a very small team?

A. Reis. A cameraman, an assistant and a sound engineer, a boy who gave a helping hand here and there. We had this huge advantage that Margarida could rigorously control the composition of shots. This is the first time we had the possibility. It was possible to frame as if the camera was a microscope – me with my eyes, Margarida there, on the spot. So, immediately after we would exchange impressions about what we felt, about the effect of a shot. Luckily there is some terrible complicity between us. We could not see the rushes there. We only saw them fifteen days after. We didn’t have any script or photographer. We did all these things ourselves. I do not say that out of megalomania.

M. Cordeiro. Instead, it was misery.

A. Reis. It’s misery. Those are the working conditions to be accepted. Never give up, accept to make bread with sand. Even if the film is stopped, better a film that is stopped.
We shot for seventy days. We did our scouting during the holidays. Knowing about these forms and events there beforehand helped us to advance a lot in little time and in bad conditions. Margarida has a very precious memory. Other filmmakers who go there serious risk to fail because they do not have our background. They may behave a bit like bad anthropologists: they arrive, they shoot, they return. When we are there to work, we do not survey, we do not waver, Margarida and me. Margarida was born there and I have known the province for thirty years. It’s as if I was born there.

This is a project that you have been carrying with you for several years. Shooting concretisises a period of research. In regards to the conception of the film, it represents very little time.

A. Reis. We consider ourselves as maniacal and slow. But in fact we are very incisive and very fast in creating. As we have complementary sensitivities, we act as one person. But we are working with two. We do not know what we will find or what we want, and I mean that in the positive sense. But we still have some certainty, we are certain of ourselves in the course of filming, so we are very fast. We can have doubts about the form, never about the team.

M. Cordeiro. We are not very rational while working. We are very sensitive. We work with our sensitivity. We were forced to work quickly because we had a very low budget.

A. Reis. There were days when we did 500 km to make only one shot. The shot of the prairie, you remember, that day, we had to do 600 km. In the course of the whole film, we did about 80.000 km.

M. Cordeiro. Tras-os-Montes is a big province!

A. Reis. Well, for example, there is the fox. We got him when he was small so that the child could familiarize with it for four or five months. For the ducks, you know, we had brought eggs from the village, me and my friend. They were placed in an incubator, but one day when I was in Lisbon the electricity was cut off to the north, and the eggs, pff … I had to drive the two thousand kilometers all over again with my friend to buy two ducklings of the same mother. We gave the ducks tot a shepherd who could prepare them to do what we wanted. And the most complicated shot was when the grandmother comes to the window at the end of the film, just like in the beginning. This shot was made in the first take.

M. Cordeiro. It was a family affair. The girl really lived that scene. She was a little shocked too.

How is the work divided? What is the share of each, and is this visible in the final product?

M. Cordeiro. There is no leadership, I think we start from dissimilar places. Sometimes. But when we start shooting, we have already agreed. During the work itself, we never disagree. We debate a lot, we talk about. But when filming, we have already reconciled – even when there are widely divergent positions.

A. Reis. When there are small differences without consequence, we have enough awareness of the creative activity of each other, so we don’t need to explain our point of view.

M. Cordeiro. We are very different. António says that we have very different personalities, very complementary. When we work, it is as if we were a single individual. But our sensibilities are very different.

A. Reis. There is a contradiction that defines us well. In Portugal we say: “What in me feels, thinks.” I think Margarida and myself think what we feel, feel what we think.

M. Cordeiro. We made two films, I think if there will ever be a third film, the conditions would be the same. Because we won’t be alone, fortunately. I would not be able to work alone. We have the same goal, the translation of the same emotions, the same memory, so we work together.

A. Reis. It remains stable up to the grading. The complicity continues during the montage. Sometimes when I think about it, I do not know how other filmmakers, like Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, work together. But I think in a sense, it is a collective creation that reunites. If we can speak of collective authors, it is in this sense that they become one for a collectivity.

M. Cordeiro. I think it’s stronger when you’re with two.

A. Reis. And when you see our films, you can not say that this is Margarida, this is Reis, this is masculine or feminine. The synthesis was carried out there.

There are many children in the film. I’m thinking of the scene in which we see a little boy playing with a prism and projecting light on the wall, as if it were a movie screen. There is another shot in which we see him explore an image, a reflection in the mercury. As if it pointed out a privileged position of the viewer, a priviliged look on the story of Ana, which is the one of childhood.

M. Cordeiro. I do not think so. Those scenes also have other meanings. These are simply children’s games. A privileged viewer can see other meanings in it, in cinema, in the light itself. But I think those scenes are worth only what they are worth. These are fragments of time, moments of childhood, first and foremost.

A. Reis. It is also, I believe, a development of the popular imagination. Because children, in a certain historical period, were amused or delighted with vegetable things and extracted a particular poetics from this. And we ourselves have the same fascination for other objects that are equally magical. We find it amazing that children enjoy seeing a burst of light in the water.

M. Cordeiro. Same thing in dark houses with a ray of light.

A. Reis. We believe that these children who discover the world like trees growing, may then have the same astonishment when discovering a new substance, such as mercury, or a prism decomposing the light from the sun. But these elements always have an independent existence for themselves in the film. Because precisely in this scene the father cuts glass with a diamond. There are also oppositions in the materials: wool, silk, mercury, milk, outdoor light …

M. Cordeiro. All that was on purpose.

A. Reis. And … the inner light. Even in the scene with the prism, there is a cinema screen. But there is a tableau in the dark. The final light is brought in by the father, when he opens the window. However, there is a dialectic of light. That of physical light, the light of the school, when that light is imposed on the child who has to learn. There is something living there, a poetic phenomenon. Upon hearing about Mesopotamia, children are delighted with this distant history – which for us was imposed, but there it isn’t. There is a tradition that continues in a good way. Progress in a good sense means that a worker can marvel at a form that he doesn’t understand, like a tractor, just like he marvels at a horse, when in reality he can not marvel at all: it is impossible because he has to pay the debts to the bank. Children have the chance that they have nothing to pay. They prefer that parents to take care of that. It is so beautiful only to enjoy the earth during the first years on the countryside. But Margarida’s right, these scenes are only worth what they are worth.

Mr. Cordeiro. I think we are giving literal images, images of a vision that is at immediate and sufficient. Then the viewer gives back what he has in him.

There is no continuity from one scene to another, as if there is no action fully developed. There are rather fragments and moments. At the same time each of them is full, whole. It seems to me that this kind of emotion is more specific to a child than to an adult, that these images belong rather to the time of memory, then that of the present or the past, that this really inherent of cinema and that narrative continuity stemming from a scenario is an effect derived from literature.

M. Cordeiro. This also what we wanted. There certainly is continuity, there are many continuities which Antonio has already spoken about: shapes, colors, fabrics. But there is no classical narrative continuity.

A. Reis. All of this is deliberate. You know very well that, in that sense, there is a liberation of cinema. There are narrative masterpieces, but always with something else as well.

M. Cordeiro. Things are never situated on the level of events.

A. Reis. There is no psychology in the film. There is no symbolism. All that is in the frame forms a texture. If we consider a narrative as a tissue, then our film is narrative. If we consider that there is narration only when there is a history between people, then our film is not narrative. Yet we have narrative sequences. Obviously for the construction of the final sequence, we chose a dramatic register because a tree like Ana can not fall like that.
The film actually only speaks about succinct things. In this sense, the colors, the trees, the light, the time of the film, the duration, are narrative elements just like the things that people do, their attitudes.

M. Cordeiro. In real life, I also believe that events do not involve linearity or occur linear. I think they overlap. For me, it’s like that and, to simplify, we just summarize a line among others, and I think the film has to do with how we look at life.

A. Reis. Obviously we are in a microcosmic world. Men, women, etc. But personally, Margarida and myself, we try to compose a dialectic between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic in cinema.

Mr. Cordeiro. It is always a way of investigating, of understanding for us. Why are things like that? Why did things in our childhood happen like that? There are many issues that you and I have encountered in our childhood, that we are still searching for. Cinema is a means of understanding for both of us. The film is a result that others can see, can love or not love. It’s secondary to me.

Cinema as a method of deciphering the world and ourselves?

M. Cordeiro. I believe that if we make more movies, we will continue on this path.

A. Reis. I thought we had a kind of trauma of beauty.

M. Cordeiro. Not beauty: intense things that have affected us.

A. Reis. It’s is still a trauma. The shot that seems to be the calmest is sometimes the hardest to shoot because there is no defense, and for us it’s a terrible responsibility. It is terrible to be there with the camera at this time, because the usual defenses vis-à-vis the viewers are just not there. And yet, we want that when the viewer sees this shot, that it is so important … It is difficult to explain. Even now, while speaking, we are seeking. We still learn a lot from our film, Margarida and I. And during the tenth vision, we saw things of which we thoughts that they are perhaps the most important in the shot, as we did not see it at all before… There is a huge reservoir in the forms, in the organization of the shots. We believe that our film is composed of a partition of images and a partition of sounds. During the screening here, the sound was amazing … I could hear it like never before. I told Margarida: “Finally, we have our sound in the film.” The images are changed, just like we wanted, by the intrusion of the sound, and vice versa. If we fail to obtain this result during projection, we feel that the public can not love our film.

Who are the filmmakers who influenced you the most?

M. Cordeiro. Me very little. Because I don’t go to the movies, because I have a life a little more difficult.

A. Reis. I can not say that we were influenced. There are filmmakers that we like, as we like many things in life. There are filmmakers we love intensely, but who are so contradictory, like a haiku or the Odyssey, and who we love primarily as filmmakers, not because they are close to us, to what we do.

M. Cordeiro. Because they have very strong personal visions.

A. Reis. Because, for example, for us a haiku is as fantastic as the Odyssey or the Iliad. We have no particular influences, but what we feel is that there is poetry with shapes of varying complexity. It’s like music. For example we like Pierre Boulez, but we like the contemporary dodecaphonic music as well. What is important for us is that these musicians are creators. I just think that for cinema it’s the same. We like the most contradictory filmmakers, in regards to genre, by style, form. In this sense, if you want to talk about influence, we are influenced just as everyone is influenced by the things one likes. As a direct result on our work, I think we have no influence, because, for us, it would deprive us of any reason to create, if we think of one person or if we are to do as others. We create precisely because it is a desire and a risk. And to provide to others the pleasure of seeing original creations living.
Perhaps because of this, we create very little, very slowly. But time for us is not a matter of chronology, it is a matter of enunciation. When one speaks of our relationship with the Portuguese contemporary cinema, we absolutely refuse this kind of categorization. It is normal to say it or try it, but it repels us so much. There is a requirement of cataloging everything.
I think we are crazy filmmakers. You have this saying in France: “une personne alambiquée” – “a person convoluted.” Our relationship with cinema is more or less disturbing and especially convoluted. It is obvious that we are alone. We have already said that when Tras-os-Montes came out. Not because we are egocentric. It is also true for historical reasons. We do not feel like isolated individuals, but we feel that we are not heading in the wrong direction with the fashion and the big crowd. It is a historical situation and not egocentric.

You spoke earlier of geological types, which presided over the selection of actors. There is also a a geography of names.

A. Reis. Names are especially euphonious. They were chosen for their euphony. Their musical expression is, let’s say, their first expression. The euphony is luckily a source of enchantment. For example, “Alexander” is a Roman name. And it is obvious that the Romans were there. “Ana” is a name with a deep etymology in Europe, with specific connotations.
In this place, there is a crossover from civilizations as you know. We did historical research on very distant names. It’s nice to have spoken about Mesopotamia in opposition to Ana or Miranda. These are very pretty names. Miranda means “see”, “look”, in Spanish. In the film, the name of Miranda, when it is pronounced, should create a sense of expectation. When the grandmother is at the lake, the name Miranda resounds a bit like a muffled cry rises, in a form of an opal. There is an intellectual direction in that choice, but they are, as Margarida said, common names. These are names that you find in Portugal, so mixed, with this great historical weight, and so far apart. The names of Tras-os-Montes, you will see that some are of Celtic origin, other Arabic, other Roman, etc.. and that they give a historical topography of occupation of the region. That is why we have a kind of pride – “le cheval d’orgueil” – not in the rural sense of Bretagne, but Tras-os-Montes is copper, tin, salt. The words in the film, it is music first, already by their absence …

M. Cordeiro. They stand out better.

A. Reis. And the name of Ana is the balance and imbalance. A-A is the balance and the N is not yet imbalanced, but it can already make everything unstable. N is the dialectic return of plants back to the beginning.

M. Cordeiro. It is one thing and its opposite.

A. Reis. It is not a symbol of course. It is a very small, quiet name. The journey with words, speech – you remember the processing of words, speech, names, and it’s always different, and I think we pushed these means to their final end in this film, with all their possible wealth, without indication, and this in a very rigorous construction.

What are your plans?

M. Cordeiro. Starting for us is always a bit slow.

A. Reis. We do not sit at the the table and make plans to make our films, it’s material from our own daily life.

M. Cordeiro. So far we have not adapted any book. It is easier to adapt a book and working on it. It is a little more difficult for us.

A. Reis. Margarida does not mean that it is easy to adapt a book. But it is customary to do so. I think maybe it will happen to me one day, but for us it will be a very serious problem. The imagination works on a foreign experience. This is so the opposite of what we are constructing.

Mr. Cordeiro. It is a work without a net. For me, it is more difficult.

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Translated by Stoffel Debuysere (Please contact me if you can improve the translations).

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts