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Making a Film - Anne-Marie Miéville (english)
Diary Excerpts - Dominique Païni (english)

Making a Film - Anne-Marie Miéville

The first shots...

How to enter into the heart of the matter, starting from the first image, the first sound, with only a few clues? With “My Favourite Story” for instance, I asked myself: “But how does it begin?” There are all those shots of Agnes walking, that forty-year-old woman, halfway between her mother and her daughter... who goes on, who has to continue. Then there is her first encounter, during a funeral service – because in “My Favourite Story” there is death, birth, death, birth. How does the idea emerge, how does the process start? How to cut into the fabric, how to begin? How to present something explicitly but without being heavy-handed, while at the same time quickly establishing the context? That is more or less the idea of the “prologues”; in other words, the way in which I put together the
opening sequences of my films. In “Lou Didn’t Say No” those sequences provide clues about the characters of Pierre and Lou, about their personalities – clues that have to do with psychoanalysis.


The music...

In the case of “We’re All Still Here” I handled the question of the music afterwards. But in all my other films, the music came at the same time as the research and the development of the script, and certain sequences were actually born out of a piece of music. In “The Book of Marie” the little girl dances to a movement from a Mahler symphony, and there is also the Chopin concerto which she listens to with her father and which leads to an exchange, to a scene. Similarly, in “Lou Didn’t Say No” there is Rossini’s “Petite Messe solennelle”, which Lou and Pierre listen to after a night of discussion, confrontation and finally reconciliation, before they leave on their trip to Rilke’s tomb; it was the music that made me write those scenes. When I heard that “Little Mass” which is so stirring, I got up from my chair and started to move. The music had brought me the idea for that sequence. It’s true that the music has always come of its own accord, or does me the honour of joining me during the planning stages of the work. I have never used music like a spice to be added afterwards, in the sense of, “This is a sad passage, let’s use some violin, and that passage is upbeat, so we’ll add a fanfare.” No, the music is always there right at the start and during the development of the project, and at times it has even given birth to certain sequences.
I have a passionate amateur’s knowledge of music and lyrical expression. During my childhood it was a way of expressing myself. In that petit-bourgeois milieu, people did not express themselves, didn’t really talk to one another. For me, discovering physical self-expression and singing was very important. I did a lot of singing in my childhood and in my youth, I even made some records, but I never dreamed of being a lyric singer like Angèle. My daughter used to sing as well; in fact, in “My Favourite Subject” she sings the very beautiful song she wrote herself.
It’s true that I am very sensitive to women’s voices. Even if one cannot forget men’s singing, men’s voices – I am thinking of Corsican singing, for instance. There are forms of masculine vocal expression which are more poignant, but women’s vocal expression has a much greater quantitative presence. Women talk a lot, scream out their pain while giving birth, and their vocal expression generally has a greater presence; men, even if they talk, don’t do it the same way, and I myself am more sensitive to women’s voices. I hear not only the beauty of their voices, but also something feminine which emanates from them.


The dialogue...

In general it’s a rather long and painful process. In constructing a film, you have an idea of what you would like to express using certain movements, certain characters. Then you look for a title, and try to develop a structure out of a number of different sequences which begin to come together and form something. I already have a notion of what should be said at those moments, but finding the way to say it, well... I know that many critics often find my dialogues too literary, too psychological. But since dialogue is a form of writing, I find it physically difficult to write the way people talk in everyday life. Still, what I write is going to be put into the bodies and mouths of the actors; so it should more or less fit. For example, with “Lou Didn’t Say No” I was criticized because “people don’t talk like that in real life.” But if it’s all about copying what happens in real life, we could just film ourselves at home and watch ourselves on Sunday evenings. In order to develop a thought expressed as dialogue, it is always necessary to use a form that displays a certain respect for language. Our language gets poorer by the day. I feel that I have a task to accomplish, and this seems to me like a good occasion for carrying it out.


A laboratory...

Making a film is like a laboratory for a whole thought process, a place where one can take stock, not only of one’s own personal development, but also other people’s. It’s a very privileged creative space where something can be grasped that might otherwise drift off like smoke and disappear. However, at times I have dreamed of doing something completely different, because filmmaking is the work of sublimation, as they say, and therefore restrictive. Afterwards there isn’t necessarily an exchange or a return which could keep things alive. You have to start over and begin creating again immediately. If you stop, things get very quiet.
The cinema is a form of artistic expression that is also an industry. Like a busy beehive, a group of people try to assemble their skills and their efforts, in the course of one day, to bring one shot, or a few shots, into existence. That moment, even when it’s plagued by difficulties and pitfalls, is an ideal image of sharing in creating something.
When a film is finished, you continue the process of distribution and presentation. You enter into a system – which, at least for the kind of film I make, is constantly shrinking and will soon cease to exist. It’s a circuit of mostly unchanging traditions: you take the train; you go, for instance, to Lyon to present the film; you go to the hotel; you meet five journalists; you are interviewed on the radio; you have dinner with a city dignitary; you are propelled into a theatre in the midst of spectators who have just seen your film and who must ask questions in order to play their role, and you must answer them.
However, real moments of encounter are rare. For me, they only occur with those people who talk about what they felt and who are brave enough to express it in a sentence or two... I wouldn’t be able to travel with a film for a year or more, as other filmmakers do; after a while, I feel that the film now belongs to the others, that they can make of it what they will. You have to cut the cord, or you go crazy. It usually happens after a minimum of two years of work – a long time, in other words. What is sometimes painful with the cinema (because it’s an expensive form of expression) is not being able to start over again right away. You are a little worn out, and you need to replenish yourself with real life, in order to find ideas and build something anew. You are stimulated, you want to begin again right away, and it’s impossible: you have to write, produce dossiers and papers... There are empty moments, where I regret that there isn’t more contact between filmmakers.

Interview by Danièle Hibon

Translated from the French by Marcy Goldberg

Diary Excerpts - Dominique Païni

Watched “Lou Didn’t Say No” again, together with the festival jury. I am participating in a film-festival jury for the first time. It’s very likely that I will not repeat the experience. Too unbearable not to be able to impose one’s own tastes and preferences on the others.
During a first viewing of the film, I was curious and impatient about each sequence and each shot. This time, my attention was caught by completely different things. Still, it’s a film that I can’t watch with complete detachment. I had seen AMM’s previous films, and was particularly amazed by “The Book of Marie”: an absolute success. The actors just right, the mise en scene and editing equally so, such a fragile, essential, secret subject. With “Lou” I was more concerned right from the start, for several reasons. As I already knew the short film which Lou, the woman filmmaker in the film, shoots at the Louvre, I was interested in the way in which AMM was going to integrate “the little into the big”.
I amused myself by giving the characters the names of real people. Was I being caustic, or was it vanity? I prefer to call it caustic. Many of the film’s shots made me feel melancholy: already three years since I’d left the Louvre museum.
“Lou Didn’t Say No” is an elegant film, as elegant as its predecessors. The characters come to life through polished, sometimes deliberately literary dialogue. (What I mean to say is, very “written” – a rare thing, these days). And for the most part, the characters themselves are simply beautiful. Marie Bunel is very attractive but perhaps a little too distanced. One wishes, as is the case with Aurore Clément in “The Book of Marie”, it were possible to come closer to her body, that her ample clothing concealed her less. But this is pure voyeurism on my part, since all that does not detract from her touching presence: a little destabilized but determined nevertheless, available for seduction, not always saying... no. In the film I recognize the personality of the actress I had met during the shooting.
The couple is the “favourite subject” of the film, and not one sequence deviates from the scenography of intimacy. Sometimes the subject is pursued with humour: such as the absolutely hilarious Louvre guard whose round, mustached face appears within a series of ideal marble faces, and who remarks to the learned (and handsome!) curator that a couple is not a group. Here we have, at the same time, the theme of sculpture chosen by Lou, the subject of the documentary within the fiction film, and the subject of the fiction film itself, which incorporates and weaves together the whole. From this point of view, “Lou” is a “modern” film – Chinese-box structure and mise en scene of intimacy – which extends the 1960s cinema of Rossellini, Antonioni and Resnais, the Godard of “Le Mépris”. The favourite subject of these filmmakers was precisely the couple on centre stage – in the double sense of being both the main characters and in a state of crisis. The disputes, the tensions, the confrontations, the “scenes” made by Bunel/Blanc, irresistibly evoke the mythical relationship scenes of modern cinema, from “Viaggio in Italia” to “La Notte”. AMM takes the risk of confining her film to one couple (another one breaks up in the face of both banality and the sad symbolism of ritual acts of marriage). Words are cruel weapons, even if their excesses and the “inflation of thinking” to which they lead are forgiven and forgotten in caresses. But the confrontation between bodies is violent. The unfolding of the shots and the links between sequences do not occur calmly. One has the impression that each part of the film, even the most insignificant, was conceived independently yet is also incontestably linked with the ones preceding and following it – but without the smoothness which too many filmmakers today pursue at all costs, including the violence of what their images literally represent. For lack of formal harshness, contemporary filmmakers settle for mediocre ugliness. AMM’s films are the radical opposite and, perhaps paradoxically, that is why they are shocking. Because her art empties the depiction of relationships – often so boring in others’ work – of all naturalism, of all obscene indulgence for the ugliness of words and gestures. When bodies collide, they are carried by an unquestionable choreography. Perhaps the best example is the long dance scene borrowed from Jean-Claude Gallotta: an admirable pas de deux which recreates, almost indecently, erotic brutality and carnal tenderness.


Locarno, 11 August 1994

I’m still thinking about “Lou Didn’t Say No”. Definitely a rather disturbing film. It also draws its references from other arts, less contemporary, more intimidating, more solemn, like the statues of classical antiquity. In making a short film which “centres” around a marble couple (Mars and Venus embracing), Lou/AMM do not conceal their search for a reflection, an illuminating interpretation of the complexity of emotions. Although it was written by Rilke, the off-screen commentary of the little film made by Lou secularizes the mythological legend (“be careful...”). Inversely, the same commentary generalizes the banality of couplehood on an ethical and universal scale. Ultimately, this double movement may be used to describe the style of AMM’s films: an attraction to “large form” in the service of small but painful everyday discontents. Her use of music and of beautifully written dialogue that sometimes recyles excerpts from great literary texts are not always accepted by everyone, but they constitute the filmmaker’s absolute originality of style. For her, art, the arts, strip bare the obvious, the conformist, the clichés of life in society and as a couple.
Sometimes a character’s monologue seems to display a complete disregard for realism because of the way it is delivered. It is as if the characters are on display: their dialogues are more demonstrated than interpreted or represented, like those bouquets of flowers which decorate both conspicuously and ridiculously. But this disjunction – between filmic reality and the texts the actors are made to speak – lends the film what I would like to call a “critical strangeness” (in the sense of “disturbing strangeness”). There is no development within the characters from sulkiness to well-being: nothing, no detailed psychological process, explains the alternation between the two states. Fortunately, the film’s metamorphoses remain unexplained. As with what we call mood, as in life itself, everything is unstable: anger and incomprehension are the inverse and the echo of passion and emotional secrets. These comings and goings are not only the whims of amorous disorder, but the very mechanism of love between impotence and mastery. All of which is conveyed by AMM even more in terms of the editing than through mise en scene alone – which also reveals her musical sensibility. Evidence of the happiness that breaks out in moments of harmony is everywhere. AMM uses music for those moments when the crisis recedes and the tension dissolves, to be replaced by grace. I remain overwhelmed by – I am still thinking about – Marie Bunel’s beauty and her dancing, almost clumsy and a little stiff like the petals of flowers unfolding, to a sublime composition by Rossini. Piano crescendo, swelling choirs over night-time aerial shots of urban traffic. A musical flight of images to accompany the flight of love fulfilled. The Rossini music is ultimately a key to defining AMM’s cinema. In that short piece, a pretty and graceful piano theme, “without pretension” but vivace (in the Italian style of course: vivatche!), asserts itself, struggles, and is finally swept away by the grand form of the choir with its Verdi-like accents, which sweeps everything out of its path, elevating the images - and the viewer’s soul. That contradiction at the very heart of Rossini’s music seems to me to be the cinematic ideal to which AMM aspires.
During this second viewing I was struck by the film’s lack of modesty, which had embarrassed me the first time. The film’s real subject, beyond the couple, is in fact emotional indiscretion. Its counterpart is Lou’s own indiscretion – Lou, who listens to the existential pain of individuals on the brink of depression or banal social neurosis. I notice that, beyond the film’s formal rigour and the restraint of its narrative structure, AMM has made a film whose lack of modesty disturbed certain jury members. This lack of modesty is echoed by Gallotta’s pas de deux, whose precise theme is amorous, carnal and stupefying intimacy. This “quotation”, restaged especially for the film, eliminates the risk of clumsy psychologizing and instead lends the film’s subject a degree of abstraction. But most of all it is the brutality of the editing, the absence of any transition between the sequences and the shots, which reflects what it is that AMM wants to reveal.
I have kept the memory of the final sequence and its calm: the “friendly” smile of a woman seduced by men who trusted her. A film is finished. The feature-length film is over for us, and a short film concludes it by reminding us that the sound and the fury of amorous passion have not worn down the voice of the silence of art.

Translated from the French by Marcy Goldberg

Cineportrait

Anne-Marie Miéville (english)