Interview with Claire Denis, 2000*
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34(1/2) Didier Castanet 4/22/04 12:16 PM Page 1 Journal of European Studies Interview with Claire Denis, 2000* DIDIER CASTANET What motivated your Beau Travail project, beyond the idea of a fiction set in a strange land? I don’t know. I remember that Rivette once said that there were unhappy films. Beau Travail was unhappy. You can never tell, perhaps in ten years, I will consider it with tenderness, perhaps even with gratitude. But it was born of upheavals, and I had the impression that I had to make it in order that all the energy that was being spent on it should not be lost. By telling myself: ‘I have to take this upon myself, I have to be positive, because doing is always better than not doing it.’ Films are always dependent on particular harmonies, or dis- harmonies which must become harmonious. From the very beginning one finds oneself in a state of financial and organizational insecurity. For me, it gets to be terrible. In the end, the doubt one has as a – I hate to use the word creative, I was going say as a foreman. Team captain? I prefer to say foreman, because, in the end, the team, it is pretty much me. A building site, with all the risks that are implied. Doubts are always on the increase. How do you look upon your production, your creation? The film that I am just finishing is not a good example of how I work because I kind of forced myself to do it. But usually – and this is a good thing, even if I had many doubts – I only produce films that * Originally published in Barca (November, 2000). Translated by Julia Borossa. Journal of European Studies 34(1/2): 143–160 Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com [200406] 0047-2441/10.1177/0047244104044247 34(1/2) Didier Castanet 4/22/04 12:16 PM Page 2 144 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 34 (1/2) already existed in my inner self. I already had the feeling of having established a connection with that film. Was that the case with S’en fout la mort? Absolutely. S’en fout la mort was a sad film – it made me cry when I looked at the rushes – but incredibly harmonious for me. The film is certainly full of defects, but I lived it as a real rapport with cinema; as something which brought me face to face with a true cinematic project. I could have doubts here and there, but I knew, with that story, I had achieved a cinematic rapport. In Beau Travail, the emphasis is on form. Is that why reality does not seem pre-eminent? In other words, your film is not beholden to reality, we do not have in front of us an identifiable world. And so how would you situate your work in a social and political dimension through this fiction? In ‘Billy Budd’, I don’t understand. I never had much to do with Christ- like figures. That particular young man did not interest me. And Captain Vere only interested me in as much as he was ambiguous. I had the impression that in Melville’s text, he was loved as a father, but that the ambiguity was not certain. In Benjamin Britten’s libretto, there was that ambiguity, because at the beginning of the opera it is Captain Vere who cries: ‘My God, what have I done?’ In Melville’s text, I am not sure. He loves that man of duty, but treacherously; after all, he makes him take on the role of a Pontius Pilate, who does not want to admit it to himself. And I told myself that I had to look towards Claggart, because I thought that Claggart was a true Melvillian character. But this became clear only after I read Deleuze’s text where he speaks of ‘nasty’ characters in Melville’s famous or not so famous texts. For example, I especially like Melville’s story ‘Benito Cereno’, where there is the captain of the Spanish galleon, the captain of the American ship, and the black man, the damned one, who is hanged, and who will haunt the Spanish captain and drive him mad. It is the slave who has taken the captain into slavery. We know very well that it is an erotic bond, but that aspect is never made clear. He is never described; he is part of what remains obscure in the story. He is only sketched out, never confronted like a real character, but he is there nonetheless. In the end, the Spanish captain, in retirement, says ‘He is there, he looks at me, like Cain in his tomb.’ Exactly like a living reminder. I had the same rapport with the rebel slave in ‘Benito Cereno’ and 34(1/2) Didier Castanet 4/22/04 12:16 PM Page 3 CASTANET: INTERVIEW WITH CLAIRE DENIS, 2000 145 with Claggart. I would like to have adapted that story for the cinema for that ambiguous character. And with Claggart, it was the same thing. So I turned to Galoup. I went for Galoup in a subjective way. Galoup, c’est moi. I chose that principle, and from that point Jean-Pol Fargeau and I worked on a text that was no longer the screenplay, but Galoup’s memoirs, his journal. We called it ‘Galoup’s notebooks’. Pierre Chevalier told me at one point that I had to produce a screenplay. But I did not know how I could do so and still stay with the idea of the journal. So we made the journal into the beginning of a screenplay, and we produced a second part in counterpoint. This counterpoint was the screenplay as such, where scenes were narrated, or described with a little bit of dialogue, where relevant. So with this screenplay in two parts, with two valves, like an oyster, I ventured into the rehearsals. I think that this screenplay enabled me to stay at all times in a subjective space towards Djibouti. That is to say, I could be Galoup and, at the same time, identify with the position of the prostitutes in the bars or with the gaze of the Djibouti people when they looked at the soldiers. But instead of seeing the soldiers as exotic, I considered them as Galoup, a long-time legionnaire, might have done. He was able to accept that gaze. And in his own gaze there might well have been a little bit of mockery or curiosity. There is one particular moment that I am thinking of, when Galoup is about to leave Djibouti. He is sitting on the terrace of a café with his cap, and we hear the noises of the city. I think that it is a quite a political shot, because there he is in the centre of Djibouti, a French soldier in uniform in a city that is no longer the least bit French. And the people around him pay him no attention at all. And there is also another shot, which is an important one for me – the one with the checkpoint with the Djibouti soldiers. There we have the Djibouti army looking upon the French army, without hatred, but also with an unasked question. A soldier looking at other soldiers – I think that this exchange of looks between the Djibouti soldier and Galoup and the others means something very interesting for me; it makes the film enter brutally into reality. We go from Galoup’s off-screen voice in the Marseille metro, and we are projected into this scene with the brutal look of this man who is looking at the French soldiers. And then the off-screen voice which takes the film back to Galoup. With this look, there is something that cannot be said, and which brings us back to the real. And there is also the packed minibus which passes the soldiers as 34(1/2) Didier Castanet 4/22/04 12:16 PM Page 4 146 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 34 (1/2) they are digging the road. It is the end of Britten’s music, it is almost harmonious to watch them dig, and suddenly the little minibus arrives and that puts paid to the harmony. Suddenly, the fact of these people driving by and looking at them working disrupts the magic of the working bodies. I really like the gaze of the people on the minibus, because it is not hostile, only curious. This question – this unspoken question – is broader than the film: it is something that is relevant to all Southern countries. I don’t want to make too much of this metaphor, but nevertheless, I am sensitive to it. The Djibouti soldier and the people on the minibus have this questioning and non- aggressive gaze, it is just like this interrogation we feel when we ask ourselves how it is that the world could be split into two economies that are as different as can be from one another, and how is it that there is so little aggression in the South. There is a text by Sartre which has been foundational in my work. It is pretentious to say foundational, let us just say that it is a text which helped me to express something. It is the preface that he wrote for L’Anthologie de la poésie nègre, by Léopold Senghor. Sartre says that, for a thousand years, we Westerners have contemplated the world, and one day perhaps we will be confronted by the look of others, who will in turn contemplate us, and then we will feel ashamed to have looked on calmly, without ever asking ourselves just who it was that we were looking at.