ARTIST IN FOCUS: Philippe Grandrieux

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ARTIST IN FOCUS: Philippe Grandrieux
In the context of the Courtisane Festival 2012 (Gent, March 21 – 25).
Additional screenings at INSAS on March 26.

Cinema as a sensual experience: this understanding is the basis of the extraordinary work of Philippe Grandrieux (FR, 1954). The French filmmaker, who studied at INSAS in Brussels, has made quite an impression during the past decade with feature films such as Sombre (1998) and La Vie Nouvelle (2002), but his idiosyncratic oeuvre also includes documentaries and video art works, many of which have never been shown in Belgium before. His cinematic vision is clearly inspired by the modernist ideas of artists such as Antonin Artaud and Jean Epstein, who saw in cinema the potential to grasp the essential power and brutal beauty of reality. As very few have, Grandrieux succeeds in inscribing the most archaic and primitive sensations in the materiality of the medium. This is a cinema that vibrates and shimmers: cinematic space is transformed into a plastic mass of light, sound, colour and movement, in which form and content, figure and ground, body and matter, the abstract and the figurative fuse. At the occasion of the festival, an extensive selection of his work will be shown in Ghent and Brussels, including the first part of the film series “Il se peut que la beaute ait renforce notre resolution”, which celebrates filmmakers who in the course of the last century dedicated their work and life to resistance and emancipation.

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SAT 24.03 15:30, SPHINX

Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution – Masao Adachi
FR, 2011, video, colour, stereo, Japanese and French spoken, English subtitles, 75’

“A to and fro between politics and cinema, between Trotskym and Surrealism, between armed struggle and screenplays, between Palestine, Lebanon and Japan, between the day-before-yesterday and today, between beauty and resolve, between the art of eating and that of being a father, such is the risky and precise life of Masao Adachi, the monsieur with the white hair glimpsed in his delusions. And this is just how Philippe Grandrieux, faithful to his way of doing things, decided to suggest his portrait, with no a priori, without interrupting speech, filming him and listening to his words without at first understanding them, framing him in a tight close-up that is sometimes underexposed, other times overexposed, to better abandon him later for: cherry trees in blossom, the streets of Tokyo swarming with cars and passersby, familiar objects and lactescent celling light. And from time to time, Grandrieux lets speak a few shots from his earlier films, from where suddenly crops up the phrase, Genet-like, given in the title: a paradoxical program that hesitates to connect one shore to the other”. (Jean-Pierre Rehm)

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SAT 24.03, 22:30 SPHINX

Sombre
FR, 1998, 35mm, colour, French spoken, English subtitles, 117’

“There is something profoundly new about Grandrieux’s plastic exploration of violence, but also something very contemporary. His approach is not based on such editing and framing effects one finds and admires in Hitchcock and Ray, nor in an exploration of excess as in Tarantino. He works on the inside of an image, on the special relation between the luminous content and the vibrant and fragmentary figuration. Grandrieux may ‘tell’ the story of a serial killer in Sombre, but the violence is both removed from the story and heightened: it descends with its hero into the dark, in scenes of a carved-up female body, captured with a hand-held 35mm camera. As Raymond Bellour observes in his eulogy and lively defence of the film, ‘Pour Sombre’: [the camera places us] among the bodies, into situations of unmitigated suffering, in order to confront us, despite the brutality of the acts, with ambiguous content, in a constantly disrupted fusion”. (Christa Blümlinger)

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SUN 25.03, 13:30 SPHINX

Un lac
FR, 2009, 35mm, colour, French spoken, English subtitles, 85’

“Instead of the heavy 35mm camera painfully held on the shoulder for Sombre, it’s with a small DV camera (and all that it involves) that Grandrieux has shot Un Lac, with a freedom of mastered improvisation which is felt throughout the entire film (…). And thus the camera’s most directly sensitive recording capacity accompanies a will of great abstraction in the way that Grandrieux treats each of the components of the film, in the editing and the sound design, which is entirely constructed, as well as in the decision of lowering the level of light sensitivity, carefully respected from the shooting to the digital colourgrading and the blowup to 35mm. All of this seems to suggest that we are in front of a new way of negotiating the relation between the ‘two biggest trends in cinema, the design-tendency and the recording-tendency’. Serge Daney added ‘two ways of engaging the inhuman in the human’, explaining that it would be ‘in the middle, the ‘scene-tendency’ (…) that the inhuman is kept at a distance’.” (Raymond Bellour)

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MON 26.03, 18:00 INSAS, Brussels

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Retour à Sarajevo
FR, 1996, video, colour, Bosnian spoken, French subtitles, 70’

“Initially, this film was commissioned by Arte. The idea was to return to Sarajevo with Sada, a Bosnian woman who had spent the war in exile in Paris. As the work progressed, I realized that it was not that simple. That war had escaped me a bit, I was interested in how it could be done from Paris. It was a week after the Dayton Accords and the situation was definitely not stabilized, Sarajevo was still surrounded by the Serbs. At the same time, I’m not predisposed to be a war reporter, it’s not my story, this kind of fear does not excite me. We took one of the first busses that went back to Sarajevo and the trip was incredible. We crossed completely devastated landscapes: 300 kms of ruins between Split to and Sarajevo; a trip of countless hours through a piece of history that was absolutely shattered. We were arrested and controlled all the time, without any idea by whom. I’d never been physically in a war landscape. The film was an incredibly strong experience because it faced me with a certain responsibility, a commitment. If I had not been affronted with all these questions, with my own story and my relationship to history, perhaps I would have never embarked on a feature film. In that respect, this film seemed decisive. “(PG)

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La vie nouvelle
FR, 2002, 35mm, colour, English and French spoken, French subtitles, 102’

“There was an extremely simple, basic narrative premise: a young man meets a young woman and wants her for himself, in an Orphic way. Little by little the film was constructed in terms of intensity – relations of intensity between characters who could inhabit or haunt the film. There’s the impression that everything is moving all the time, like a kind of vibrant, disturbed materiology. That’s what we were looking for: a disquieting film, very disquieting, very fragile and vibrant. Not a film like a tree, with a trunk and branches, but like a field of sunflowers, a field of grass growing everywhere. Here’s the biggest rupture: in the way the film was conceived. It was conceived and developed on questions of intensity rather than psychological relations. My dream is to
create a completely ‘Spinoza-ist’ film, built upon ethical categories: rage, joy, pride … and essentially each of these categories would be a pure block of sensations, passing from one to the other with enormous suddenness. So the film would be a constant vibration of emotions and affects, and all that would reunite us, reinscribe us into the material in which we’re formed: the perceptual material of our first years, our first moments, our childhood. Before speech. That’s the impulse – the desire – which led to the film.” (PG)

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Carte Blanche to Philippe Grandrieux
SAT 24.03, 17:30 SPHINX

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Edmond Bernhard
Dimanche
BE, 1962, 35mm, b&w, 20’

Too often forgotten and ignored, this is the master piece of Belgian filmmaker Edmond Bernhard, one of Grandrieux’s teachers during his studies at INSAS.
“Dimanche was supposed to be a didactic film, intended to evoke the problem of leisure. Bernhard diverts the order and outwits the trap of the ‘thematic’ film. Without resorting to any form of commentary, making use of extraordinary images sublimating common spaces (the boredom of Sundays, the changing of the guard, children playing, a runner in the woods, a football match, …), he constructs with a nifty montage an exceptional work dealing with the sense of void and the fossilisation of the world.” (Boris Lehman)

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Stephen Dwoskin
The Sun and the Moon
UK , 2007, video, colour, 60’

One of the most personal and intimate films by Stephen Dwoskin. A radical portrait of lust, pain and melancholia, at the same time lurid fairytale and autobiographical essay. “The Sun and the Moon, a film fairy tale, is about two women’s terrifying encounter with ‘Otherness’ in the form of a man, abject and monstrous, and for them to either to witness, accept or partake in his annihilation. All are caught in their own isolation and are fearful of the menace that has to be met. The film, as a personal interpretation of Beauty and the Beast, enciphers concerns, beliefs and desires in seductive images that are themselves a form of camouflage, making it possible to utter harsh truths.” (SD)

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Deutschland im Herbst (episode)
DE, 1977/78, 35mm, colour and b&w, 26’

Fassbinder’s contribution to the omnibusfilm Deutschland im Herbst, which attempted to portray the political climate in Germany in 1977 after the kidnapping and assassination of Hanns-Martin Schleyer by the Red Army Faction, and the subsequent “suicides” in Stammheim prison of three members of the Baader-Meinhof group. Exposing himself with frankness and brutality, Fassbinder conveys, in the words of Wilhelm Roth, “the feeling of powerlessness experienced by a left wing intellectual. It is not the political discussions that give this half hour its importance, but the brutality and honesty with which Fassbinder deals with himself as a man and a director.”

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Masterclass
MON 26.03 13:00 Sint-Lukas Brussel

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Avec le soutien de l’Ambassade de France en Belgique

About the “insane horizon” of cinema

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By Philippe Grandrieux

“A segment has been cut out of the back of his head. The sun, and the whole world with it, peep in. It makes him nervous, it distracts him from his work, and moreover it irritates him that just he should be the one debarred from the spectacle.”
Kafka, January 9th 1920.

The future of cinema is to be free and great and strong, to transmit some of that “windy chaos” that we tend to protect ourselves from, as if we desperately wanted to believe that the world is ordered, reasonable, possible, when it’s exactly the opposite: chaotic, delirious, untenable, driven by the unstoppable force of desire. Beyond will and morality, the world is what we desire, absolutely. Terribly. And cinema should be considered commensurate with this excessive horizon. Its projected desire impressed upon the film strip. That is what filming is, to make possible the movement from the self to the others and from the others to oneself. That is what light is, precisely that, the movement of the desire reflected from the face that stands quietly in front of me, and it looks at me, and I feel invigorated by its breathtaking beauty, its unchangeable otherness. That is cinema, to film that presence, the being-there of things, to film trees and mountains and the sky and the mighty flow of the river. That is what it is to be an actor, to be able to carry the weight of reality, its gushing, hallucinating vibration, to embody it (very few succeed), and in the time of a shot, the space of a take, to become sky, mountain, river and the stormy mass of the ocean. And then cinema is immense. We are won over and forget ourselves and we forget what we carry, and what we don’t know, what we can’t know, although it fascinates us and brings us to life, to a life that is lived, and so it unfolds. This rhythm, this way of framing, of lighting the body, of interrupting the take, it comes, it’s there, and cinema closely touches its essence, a sensorial experience of the world, whose destiny is to transmit through sensations, the only means which are its own, to convey a fraction of the passing world, the sensitive world, soon dissipated, lost, carried away by time, a part of time, and that feeling of “inevitable solidarity” may resound in each one of us. It is a far cry from the narrative labour to which most filmmakers submit to, without resistance. Far from psychology, from categories that have been abused by morals. No, the future of cinema is its childhood, its brilliance, its brutality, the world that begins again, it’s an image that is larger than life, in front of which we placed ourselves one day, this vibrating, silent image, for the “infans” is the one who doesn’t speak, who stands aside from social conventions, in front of the chaos, outside of language, of sense, without distance, suddenly captured by colour, and it’s the big red flowers and the field and the woods, and it’s the river and the water that is too cold and their hands rubbing their back, warming their small bodies, and it’s the breath against one’s neck and the wet soil under one’s feet. That’s infancy, to be entirely swept away by sensation, overwhelmed by one’s emotions, subjected to the almightiness of one’s affections. And that is cinema, its future, that time silenced of images, that heroic time, poetic, that time of childhood, where we can all be transported to by the sole force of desire through the body and its stories. And eyes wide open in the dark, and it scares us so much, so much, but also we laugh we cry, and it has held us, breathless, in front of this big face with sealed eyes and with the heart knocking against our chest, we have run along the way, and we have cried out from the dunes : “Johannes…”, and we have waited, and hoped, so much, and against the wind, and against the great cloudy sky, shouted again, with him, with the father, “Johannes…Johannes…” and for a moment we have become, without knowing how, that father looking for his child, his lost son, and then that trampled grass and then the entire moor. That is cinema. Its destiny, its future, is to stand, unfailingly, before the world, to its eternal return, facing the high noon, to the sacred “yes” of the child.

In the beginning, movement analysis. Chronophotography. Horse, birds, man, woman. It runs, it jumps, it flies and it starts again.

And immediately, the pornographic use, for cinema is the industry of the bodies. Our great-grandmothers suck and are humped in the kitchen. The smell of soup and fuck, that is the smell of the century of the locomotive and the unconscious. Men are muscular and have moustaches, they pose for our great painters, they pose with a hard-on for the camera. An assembly of bodies, mise en scène, a litany of sequences, the script of cinema was de Sadean from the beginning. In the meanwhile, Degas brushed bodies, women in the bath, with their backs curved, with their fleshy bottoms in the dark shadow of the greasy ink, available bodies, the flabby bodies of whores, legs wide open, pot-bellied, the exhausted bodies of the brothels, of the dark rooms. Degas worked on the black-coated zinc plates with his hands. With his fingertips, with his palm, he stamps, tears, scratches, removes the dark night. He brings in the light.

His eyes suffer, he touches the image. He photographs absolutely. Tiny, astonished dancers fluttering in the footlights, with long brushed hair, an opaque mass flowing along their backs, crouching women with painted faces, legs in the air, gaping sex, sprawled bodies, rigid bottoms, inscribed by Degas in the thick glue, in the mischief of the ink, the truth of his time. He’s in the room, in the dark. He’s fabricating, blindly and slowly, cinema. And he invents it just as de Sade did before him. He shows us the way: cinema is made (above all) with the hands, with the skin, with the entire body, by fatigue, by breath, by the pulsations of the blood, the rhythm of the heart, by the muscles. Body and sensation, that is the machine, its absolute power, its obsession. That is its becoming. Invented bodies, comical, grotesque, obscene, the improbable bodies of the stars and the monsters, and light, its palpitation, and the beating of shots, and in us, fear, joy, hope, sadness, the obscure deployment of human passions.

What do we seek, since the first traces of hands were impressed in rock, the long, hallucinated perambulation of men across time, what do we try to reach so feverishly, with such obstinacy and suffering, through representation, through images, if not to open the body’s night, its opaque mass, the flesh with which we think – and present it to the light, to our faces, the enigma of our lives. Bodies and thoughts, bodies and sensations, those are the same profound arrangements of cinema. In 1927 Antonin Artaud writes Witchcraft and the Cinema, a seminal and visionary text. “To use cinema to tell stories, exterior actions, is to deny its best resources, to go against its absolute object. I think the cinema is made primarily to express matters of the mind, the inner consciousness, not by a succession of images so much as by something more imponderable which restores them to us with their direct matter, with no interpositions or representations”.

Artaud is delirious. Surely, but not only. What is this imponderable thing? What would the nature of cinema be if it rendered images directly, without interruptions, without representations? Artaud the magician called for the transmutation of cinema, it must be of another substance in order to express the matters of thought, the interior conscience. Such is the insane horizon of cinema, improbable, the secret that haunts it. Such is the energy that animates it, that pushes it forward. One must close the gap between oneself, one’s body, and the source of sensation. Cinema desires a wrapped body, taken by the instinctive material. All projection devices (large screen, 360°, glasses, stereo, Dolby surround, headphones…) increasingly place us inside the cave, at the centre of illusion, in what is already our reality, a cyberspace. Without a doubt, our body will soon be directly connected to the film. A hybrid device of technology and flesh – science-fiction imagines it and science produces it. A cinema in the “folds”, inscribed within the body, in direct contact with the organs, a nanocinema, molecular, contagious, indispensable, will be the next step. But what Artaud foresees is even more insane, more unheard of. Cinema is no longer only “a psychic cinema… a subcutaneous injection of morphine… The cinema is an amazing stimulant (which) acts directly on the grey matter of the brain”, it demands henceforth another body.

In 1947, precisely, the world gets back on its feet, stunned. Artaud launches his programme: the body must now “by placing it again, for the last time, on the autopsy table, remake his anatomy”. Sperm, Americans, synthetic products. His paranoia is fully operational. Vision, inspiration. That is his pace. That’s what he’s made of. He throws out sentences. He whispers, screams, smashes. Under the pressure of his breath, Artaud dictates the order of things, he draws the bodies of tomorrow, he announces the reign of “synthetic products ad nauseam”. The time has come for the actual fabrication of bodies. The voice is hoarse, acute, in overdrive, accelerated. It announces our future. Man will finally accomplish the endeavours demanded by de Sade. He will confront his definitive materiality, absolutely, without deviation. Fabricated, machined, modifiable, transformed into a commodity, he will be a “living currency” (Pierre Klossowski). The exact opposite of virtuality. Bodies will be the simulacrum through which we will experience and experiment the power of our desire, its “voluptuous emotion”. Will fiction be embodied, carnal, made of blood and muscles? Is this the “imponderable thing” which Artaud dreams of, through which we will access our interior conscience without interruptions, without representation, is this the transubstantiation of images in a body? Of course this is an hallucination, but beyond the improbability of such a development, Artaud’s delirium and Klossowski’s fable seem to sketch the destiny of cinema, of this cinema that I love, the one that connects us to the most archaic forces, to what’s more inherent and instinctive in each one of us, inextricably weaving image and body, the very stuff of our affective relationship to the world, by placing us under the threatof the astonishing emergence of what can neither be seen nor heard.

Originally published as ‘Sur l’horizon insensé du cinéma’, Cahiers du cinéma hors série: Le siècle du cinema (November 2000). Thanks to Stéphane Delorme.
Translated by Maria Palacios Cruz.

Philippe Grandrieux is one of the “Artists in Focus” on the Courtisane Festival 2012

Reverberances

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Part of Courtisane Festival 2012, March 21 – 25, Gent.

A series of revisitations and reverberations: dialogues between then and now, between different generations and traditions, exploring ways of seeing and thinking cinema, politics, documentary and ethnography.

With works by Robert Gardner, Robert Fenz, Thomas Harlan, José Filipe Costa, Eric Baudelaire, Philippe Grandrieux

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent” (School of Arts/HoGent). Curated by Stoffel Debuysere.

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REVERBERANCE 1

Robert Gardner
Forest of Bliss
US/IN, 1986, 35mm, col, stereo sound, 90’

Robert Fenz
Correspondence
US/DE, 2011, 16mm, b&w, silent, 30’

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“Robert Gardner’s camera scans with precision and feels with sympathy – the objectivity of an anthropologist, the fraternity of a poet.”
– Octavio Paz

“It is apparent that only a certain kind of person will want to make ethnographic films”, is how Robert Gardner (1925) situated his own practice. “It will, above all, be those who sense the profound affinity that exists between the film medium and a desire to understand people.” As often scorned by scholars as applauded by the avant-garde, the work of Robert Gardner is of undeniable influence in the field of visual anthropology. As legendary fimmaker Stan Brakhage, a fervent defender, once put it, the question of whether Gardner is “An Artist, an Anthropologist, or WHAT?” is “SUCH a boring question once one has fully experienced his films.” It was while studying anthropology in the 1950s that Gardner started making films, some in collaboration with American painter Mark Tobey. His international breakthrough would come with Dead Birds (1963), a multi-awarded but controversial portrait of the Dani people in New Guinea. His lyrical and cinematographically exquisite portrayal of non Western cultures would produce many more master pieces in the following decades such as Rivers of Sand (1974), about the Hamar in Southwest Ethiopia, and Forest of Bliss (1986), filmed in the Indian city of Benares. The three abovementioned films are the starting point of Correspondence, Robert Fenz’s tribute to Gardner. Fenz literally followed Gardner’s footsteps in search for the shooting locations of the three films. The result is a poetic dialogue which at the same time pays homage to a way of filmmaking that has become obsolescent.

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REVERBERANCE 2

Thomas Harlan
Torre Bela
PT, 1975, 16mm, color, stereo sound, Portugese spoken, 106’

José Filipe Costa
Linha Vermelha
PT, 2011, video, color, stereo sound, Portugese & French spoken, English subtitles, 80′

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“My works don’t tell political stories. They rather document a political alertness, a clairaudience for certain constellations. My films, each for themselves, are generally useless for the purpose of a position or theory.”
– Thomas Harlan

“I am the son of my parents. That is a disaster. It has determined me”, declares author, dramaturge and filmmaker Thomas Harlan (1929-2010) in the interview book ‘Hitler war meine Mitgift’. Harlan, who grew up in Nazi-Germany, once shared a table with Adolf Hitler, accompanied by both of his parents, actress Hilde Körber and filmmaker Veit Harlan, the director of the infamous anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß. It is a heritage that he could never get rid of and the appalled son would take upon himself the sins of his repent-less father. His whole life Harlan would strive for truth as the only possible justice: he spent years in the Polish archives, looking for proofs of German war crimes; in Rome he joined the radical leftist group “La Lotta Continue” and travelled to wherever the spirit of revolt and revolution emerged. In 1975 Harlan was in Portugal where, in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution, various movements of resistance and initiatives of land occupation were developing. That is where he shot his first film, a documentary about the occupation of the Torre Bela estate, which according to critic Serge Daney represents a condensation of “all the key ideas – materialised, embodied – of political and theoretical leftism from the past decade”. More than 35 years later another filmmaker, José Filipe Costa, revisits in Linha Vermelha the production process of the much discussed film, which Harlan himself once described as in “complete opposition to what documentary should be”: a seemingly pure “observational” cinematographic document that has become over time a controversial historical object.

(See also ‘The militant ethnography of Thomas Harlan‘ By Serge Daney)
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REVERBERANCE 3

Eric Baudelaire
The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 years without Images
FR, 2011, Super8 to video, colour and b&w, English, japanese, french spoken with English subtitles, 66‘

Philippe Grandrieux
Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution – Masao Adachi
FR, 2011, video, color, stereo sound, Japanese and French spoken with English subtitles, 75′

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“Shooting a gun or shooting with a camera, it doesn’t make a difference to me”
— Masao Adachi

“The revolution has been continuously my main subject” says Masao Adachi (1939). “People Said: Revolutionary Cinema. I said: No. It’s Cinema for Revolution.” Of all the filmmakers that would be inspired by the spirit of resistance and utopia of the 1960s and 1970s, Adachi is without a doubt the most radically and perseveringly militant. Armed with a camera or with a gun: it made no difference to him. To him, both weapons served as possible intervention tools in the fight against political and social oppression. With his surrealistically tinted and politically provoking experiments he inscribed himself rapidly as part of the so called “new wave” currents that shook Japanese culture of the time. In 1971, after visiting the Cannes Film Festival, Kôji Wakamatsu and Adachi travelled to Lebanon to make a propaganda film in support of the Arab fight against Isreali occupation. In 1974 Adachi returned to Palestine, with the idea of making a second film. He would end up staying 26 years, at the service of the Palestinian cause. In 1997, under the pressure of the Japanese authorities, he was incarcerated in Beirut. He was extradited to his country three years later, where he remained in prison for two more years. Two French filmmakers have recently made, independently from one another, cinematographic portraits of the Japanese filmmaker. One from a distance, the other on the skin. Eric Baudelaire confronts landscape images from Beirut and Tokyo with the recollections of Adachi and Maya Shigenoby (daughter of Fusakao, one the leaders of the Red Army). Philippe Grandrieux translates a brief meeting into an intuitive and sensory combustion of image, sound, light and colour.

The militant ethnography of Thomas Harlan

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By Serge Daney

Originally published as ‘L’ ethnographie militante de Thomas Harlan’, Cahiers du Cinéma n° 301 (June 1979)

Torre Bela is first of all an extraordinary document, of a type that emerges occasionally from the heart of a struggle or from boundary situations, when the determination to “keep on filming” surpasses the ideas – whether common or not, committed or not – of the person who films. Enthusiasts of the “real” and cannibals of the “direct action” (among which we count ourselves) will be flabbergasted by the film of Thomas Harlan. Rarely have we so clearly seen the making and unmaking of a a singular collectivity, itself composed of singularities, caught in a political process through which it is the blind truth, the point of utopia.

But there is more. Torre Bela shows – materialized, embodied – all the key ideas of political and theoretical leftism from the past decade. “As if we were there” – but precisely, we are no longer there: no one is. We see the flesh which ostensibly nourished yesterday’s discourses, the images in which the sound was “turned up too loud” (1): voices speaking up (chaotic: one day the film will be used for the study of farmers’ jargon and the Portugese language), popular language (and its stammering), people in arms (the strange soldiers of the MFA (2)), popular memory (with its tales of bitterness), the fabrication of a mass leader (Wilson) and the distrust of heroes (Wilson again), contradictions among the people (men/women … ), cynical and silly discourse of the enemies of class (amazing interview with the Duke of Lafões), etc..

Of course, all of this arrives late. In all of this we have believed, but it has come undone, and suddenly, this film appears, in hyper-realistic precision, both as a sonogram of the heart of what has been and as the hallucinatory spectacle of what we believed in (the people, autonomy, revolt). Surely, one doesn’t have to blindly believe in it to begin to see it, just as one didn’t have to see it at all to continue to believe in it. This “gap” between what is believed in and what has come undone – “le cru et le cuit” (3) – is perhaps the truth of the few “good militant films.” One had to wait until the mottos and slogans stopped reassuring before the images finally arrived… though to a devastated landscape. The experience of the popular commune of Torre Bela (1975-1979) ended the year when the movie was finally finished and “released.” We – neither us nor Harlan or anyone else – no longer have a relationship to these images except one of ethnographic cannibalism (and isn’t ethnography our cannibalism of us?) or of perverse aestheticism (Torre Bela as utopia, another utopia).

That is how it goes with cinema. Cinema is never on time. Let alone the cinema of intervention: the only one that, in order to exist, must take time establishing its material; the one that is never finished fast enough. The filmmaker finds himself in an impossible, even seamy situation in which he can dwell, in spite of the conventional piousness of his discourse. Whether it is Moullet paying himself the luxury to finally pull off a militant-didactic-and-third-worldist film at a moment when nobody knows what to do with it (whereas before, everyone wanted to but nobody knew how) (4); or the strange temporality of the Ogawa experience, redoubling the atrocity of the real with a neverending and equally atrocious film (5), or Godard spending five years editing a film on Palestine (6). It’s the same point of arrival, the same Pyrrhic victory, the same Parthian arrow, the same revenge of the artists on the political chiefs and the militants: here is the flesh of the ideas you thought you had, here is the referent to the words you have misused, the proof that what you talked about (without having seen it) has indeed existed: it is shown to you only because it’s over. This perverse dialectic of what is believed in and what has come undone is today the last word of so-called “documentary” cinema (from Flaherty to Ogawa, from Rouch to Harlan, from Ivens to Van der Keuken): a look all the more acute – even abrasive – for it establishes the trace of that which has no future.

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Translated by Stoffel Debuysere and Charles Fairbanks (Please contact me if you can improve the translation).

Torre Bela will be shown at the Courtisane Festival 2012, together with José Filipe Costa’ Linha Vermelha

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

translator’s notes
(1) Here Daney is probably making a reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s Ici et ailleurs (1976), in which the filmmaker denounces images – used not in the least in his own militant work from the Dziga Vertov Group period – in which “the sound is turned up too loud” and the soundtrack “insists on one voice dominating another.” In the film he states: “Why have we been incapable of seeing and listening to those quite simple images and have said, like everybody, something else about them? Something else than what they said, however. Probably we don’t know how to see, or to listen. Or the sound is too loud and covers up the reality… To learn to see in order to hear elsewhere. To learn to hear oneself speaking in order to see what the others are doing. The others, the elsewhere of our here.”
(2) Movimento das Forças Armadas
(3) On several occasions Daney has played with the multiple meanings of the words “cru” and “cuit” in reference to cinema. “Le Cru et le Cuit” is also a book by Claude Lévi-Strauss, but its English translation, “The raw and the cooked”, is incomplete. “Cru” is also the past-participle conjugation of the verb “croire” (believed / to believe). “Cuit” does not only mean “cooked”: it also denotes “done”, not necessarily referring to food.
(4) Luc Moullet, Genèse d’un repas (1978)
(5) Shinsuke Ogawa, Sanrizuka Series (consisting of 7 films, made between 1967 and 1974)
(6) Jean-Luc Godard, Ici et Ailleurs (1976)

Figures of Dissent: Thomas Harlan

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Figures of Dissent: Thomas Harlan

Programme 1: 16 February 2012 19:00, KASKcinema, Gent.
Programme 2: Courtisane Festival (21 – 25 March 2012)
introduced by Stoffel Debuysere

“My works don’t tell political stories. They rather document a political alertness, a clairaudience for certain constellations. My films, each for themselves, are generally useless for the purpose of a position or theory.”
– Thomas Harlan

“I am the son of my parents. That is a disaster. It has determined me”, declares writer, playwright and filmmaker Thomas Harlan (1929-2010) in the interview book ‘Hitler war meine Mitgift’. Harlan, who grew up in Nazi-Germany, once shared a table with Adolf Hitler, accompanied by both of his parents, actress Hilde Körber and filmmaker Veit Harlan, the director of the infamous anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß. It is a heritage that he could never get rid of: the appalled son would take upon himself the sins of his repentless father. His whole life Harlan would strive for truth as the only possible justice: he spent years in the Polish archives, looking for proofs of German war crimes; in Rome he joined the radical leftist group “La Lotta Continue” and travelled to wherever the spirit of revolt and revolution emerged. In 1975 Harlan was in Portugal where, in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution, various movements of resistance and initiatives of land occupation were developing. That is where he shot his first film, a documentary about the occupation of the Torre Bela estate, which according to critic Serge Daney represents a condensation of “all the key ideas – materialised, embodied – of political and theoretical leftism from the past decade”. His following film project started as a reaction to the “German Autumn” of 1977. Wundkanal explores the relation between the events in the Stammheim prison, where several members of the RAF died in suspicious circumstances, and the logic of Nazi terror. The shooting of the film, in which war criminal Alfred Filbert played a hardly fictionalized version of himself, appears in Robert Kramer’s documentary Notre Nazi, revealing a staggering portrait of a filmmaker who, in an attempt to come to terms with his past, takes on the methods of the enemy and in doing so becomes his own worst enemy; and thus an old sin is replaced by a new one.

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PROGRAMME 1
16 February 2012 19:00, KASKcinema, Gent. A Courtisane programme.

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Thomas Harlan
Wundkanal
1984 – RFA/France –107’

Robert Kramer
Notre Nazi
1984 – RFA/France – 116’

“My film is perhaps another fiction: the story of a certain T., son of the greatest Nazi filmmaker, and himself a film director. All his life he has tried to undo his past. Today he is shooting a fiction film, he has given the main role to a Nazi war criminal who is more or less the same age. By this act T. releases a whole torrent of unforeseeable energy which sweeps the set and even more than the set.”
– Robert Kramer

“For the first time in the history of cinema, said Louis Marcolles in le Monde (30 August 1984), two films were shot against each other; the first being fiction, the second unmasking this fiction; the first mystifying its subject (crime), the second outrageously unveiling its methods of manipulation.
Yet, both films were produced by the same producer, both in the outskirts of Paris and with two directors who are complementary to each other: Thomas Harlan, The German and Robert Kramer, the American.
Wundkanal by Thomas Harlan is a fiction film about a killer. Notre Nazi by Robert Kramer kills the fiction.
But the Killer is a real-life killer, and never before in the history of cinema did an audience get so intimate with a murderer like doctor Alfred Filbert, did an audience get so close to his face and to his skin.
Indeed, Alfred Filbert – the archetypal gentel German grandpa – belonged to the inner circle of nine men who in Hitler’s terror state planned the Holocaust; so in the film he appears as an actor and as himself, playing his own part in history.
In Wundkanal – a quiet oratorio of long sequence shots – four terrorists interrogate a war (and peace) criminal they kidknapped in Alsatia, trying to drive him to commit suicide.
In Notre Nazi the actor playing a part in a fiction film becomes a real human being again, of flesh and blood. The members of the film crew discover their sorrow and their pity as they live through unimaginable moments of violence and despair.
Two inseperable films – lashing out against each other as ruthlessly as a couple divoring publicly – “the scandal”, as Il Messagero put it, “of the 1984 Venice Film festival.” (Editions Filmmuseum)

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Note: There is actually a third film in this series: Dorenavant tout sera comme d’habitude by Roland Allard, a documentary report on the making of Wundkanal and Notre Nazi. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to track down a copy.
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PROGRAMME 2
Part of the Courtisane Festival (21 – 25 March 2012)

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Thomas Harlan
Torre Bela
1977 – Portugal – 106’

José Filipe Costa
Linha Vermelha
2011 – Portugal – 80′

“Torre Bela is the complete opposite of what a documentary should be. The film is a film that we, in fact, did not conceive as a film, but as reality. The reality was provoked, intentionally created.”
– Thomas Harlan

“In the revolutionary Portugal of 1975, a group of peasants occupied the vast manor and estate of Torre Bela owned by the Duke of Lafões and founded a cooperative there. The events were recorded in the film Torre Bela (1977) by the German director Thomas Harlan, son of the director Veit Harlan.

When I first started filming Red Line I asked a woman in a village near Torre Bela if she had been involved in any way in the 1975 occupation. She immediately replied that she had not and that I should ask that question to another villager who was on the other side of the street. When I asked him, the latter was extremely surprised by his neighbour’s denial: since it was even possible to see her in the film, amongst a crowd shouting slogans! After this episode I became increasingly aware of how an observational documentary had become a controversial historical object: for some it was even proof of a “crime” committed during the revolutionary period of 1975. In one of the most controversial sequences of Harlan’s film it is possible to see the squatters breaking into the palace on the estate, opening drawers and trying on the Duke’s jackets, as they play joyfully with these symbols of power. Red Line questions how the film Torre Bela played a role in how these events are viewed and examines how Thomas Harlan intervened in the flow of the events, himself becoming a squatter. Drawing on testimonies, recently discovered sound rushes and other documents, Red Line explores the complexities and ambiguities of a filmed revolution, in which the camera helps people to play new roles: “Are we actors or occupiers? If we are actors, we’re actors…” says one occupant while waiting for the camera to start filming before the group broke through the door of the palace in 1975.” (José Filipe Costa)

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

See also ‘The militant ethnography of Thomas Harlan‘ By Serge Daney