The Seventh Art

[From Luc Moullet’s book with Emmanuel Burdeau and Jean Narboni, Notre Alpin Quotidien (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

In the introduction to the collection of your articles, Piges choisies (from Griffith to Ellroy), you state that your best critical texts are the most recent ones, but that for your films the evolution has not been the same: your best period would cover the years 1976-1989, from Anatomy of a Relationship to Les Sièges de l’Alcazar.

I don’t know. Whether my critical writing is good or not is not very important, at least not as important as it is for my films. The quality of my writing has undoubtedly improved over time; for films I don’t know. Those from 1976-1989 are generally held in higher esteem. And I don’t think there has been a step forward since those years. It’s rather up to you to tell me! I don’t care that much, but well… it’s a feeling. Filmmakers whose work extends over a long period of time often experience a setback at the end of their careers.

In a text from the special issue of Cahiers on John Ford, “The Slide of the Admiral,” you suggest on the contrary that the last shot of his last film, Seven Women, is his most beautiful.

Ford is atypical; Americans generally flag at the end: Hawks, Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann, Griffith and many others. There is longevity, circumstances…

Piges choisies also reproduces your unorthodox answer to the Libération survey “Why do you film?”: “To make big bucks, to go on big trips and to meet pretty girls.”

If there is a questionnaire, there necessarily has to be a winner. I wanted to have the best answer. I received a lot of phone calls; my answer made a lot of readers laugh. I think I won. At the time—1987—I was an ascetic figure; I was almost seen as another Straub. I am still seen today as an unadulterated filmmaker who does not compromise. Jansenist, even.

It’s true that I don’t make many complacent films. In order to depress my interlocutors, I often have fun saying that I was forced to make a film to put food on the table. “Ah my poor fellow! What is it called? – Origins of a Meal.” So my reputation for integrity also has a playful side.

I think the answer would have been even funnier had it been given by Straub or Bresson. I had phoned Bresson to suggest it, but he took it badly.

My answer, moreover, corresponds to reality, or at least to certain aspects of reality. It was not for nothing, for example, that my first films always had two actresses in the lead roles. I was single, my chances were multiplied by two. I have to admit that it was a very bad calculation.

Did you put them in competition with each other?

I didn’t go that far, but two chances are better than one, or zero.

When you were writing at Cahiers, Rohmer once made this strange remark, which you also recall in Piges choisies: “Moullet, I know why you love Buñuel. It’s because you’re both slackers.”

This is the most beautiful compliment I have ever received. Rohmer put me in the same boat as Buñuel, without kissing up to him for all that, since he presented his comparison as a kind of insult. He didn’t realize the compliment he was paying me, I thought. I don’t know if he would repeat the compliment today, even if his appreciation of Buñuel has become more positive.

“Slacker” in what sense? The rejection of rhetoric, mannerism, everything that makes cinema?

A certain zero degree, once again. That’s what Rohmer meant, in a sense. Buñuel didn’t have a visual structure like Murnau or Eisenstein. He is therefore a slacker. And so am I…

Do you consider yourself a slacker?

Of course. That is, in any case, the evolution of cinema. In the silent era, everything was structured around the frame. With talkies, filmmaking became more subtle, more composite, less determined on the level of pictorial construction. The composition of a discreet whole, chiselled in the manner of Murnau’s genius, became outdated. Those who want to make films like Eisenstein today are, moreover, admen, or very retrograde directors.

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[From Luc Moullet’s book with Emmanuel Burdeau and Jean Narboni, Notre Alpin Quotidien (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

Brigitte and Brigitte (1966)

There are no hard-and-fast rules, only useful guidelines. Every law must be bent, that’s the only obligation—and that’s precisely what can be great in cinema. Nine times out of ten, what is taught in film schools today is in fact the opposite of what was taught sixty years ago.

Two illustrations as a preamble and a warning:

• It was once forbidden to move directly from a wide shot to a close-up. This rule is palpable in a film I like very much, Children of Paradise: it systematically uses an annoying—and seemingly forced—gradation between the shot sizes. Today, however, the transition from the wide shot to the close-up works magnificently, provided it is well managed, even if some filmmakers abuse it, starting with Sergio Leone.
• The 180-degree rule prohibits crossing the shot-reverse shot line so that the viewer isn’t disoriented. But the truth is that it all depends on the actor. With Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot or John Wayne, you can blithely cross the 180-degree line, because the actor is known and well placed, like a pillar: he or she serves as a visual reference. It is much more difficult with beginners whom no one knows, lack as they do a stable facial reference in the frame.

Like a majority of the technical rules in use, this is also a strictly western law. The Japanese constantly break the shot-reverse shot line; for them the problem does not arise. Imagine: had Japan won the war, that would have been the end of 180 degrees!

This is true of almost all laws: they are dependent on history or geography. None of them is indisputable or eternal. You just have to be aware of the risk you are taking when you decide to apply them. Or not apply them! Conscious of this risk, I have chosen to include in the vade mecum that follows the objections that have been made or that could be made to me. Also those that will be made, no doubt.

Production, Generalities

The plumber principle (choose a title starting with A or B)

Open the phone book, all plumbers have a shop name that starts with A. They all sit at the top of the directory. Being at the top of catalogues is important, because festival catalogues play a big role. All catalogues for that matter. You can’t always do it, but it is recommended, especially for short films. Maybe there will soon be a rush of short films starting with AAA, as with plumbers.

I can already hear the first objection. My first short, Un steack trop cuit (1960), is not exactly at the top of the alphabet: an error of youth, sorry. As for the following ones, Ma première brasse (1981), Essai d’ouverture (1988), Le Ventre de l’Amérique, Le Système Zsygmondy (2000) etc., they are a bit all over; that’s because, with time, I’ve become surer of myself.

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[From Luc Moullet’s book with Emmanuel Burdeau and Jean Narboni, Notre Alpin Quotidien (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

Just as tales—which we’ll come back to later, since the genre isn’t foreign to your cinema—begin in French with “Il était une fois…” (once upon a time…), we’d like to begin with “Il était un Foix…,” In 1994, you made a short film that bears this name, a small town in the Pyrenees. Foix is a film representative of your work; it is built on a geographical principle that you are fond of: to sketch a nearly exhaustive portrait of a place, to wander across it and survey it in all directions until its spatial, comic, dramatic and aesthetic possibilities are exhausted. But in general, you film familiar places, places that you have known and loved for a long time. In Foix, it is the opposite, and that is also why we wanted to start there: you present a completely ugly city, its ugliness accentuated by the laconic irony of a tourist-style voice-over. Foix is therefore a film against something, a negative portrait. It is the exception to one of the rules of your work, a contradiction within a work that has no shortage of them. How did the film come to be?

It must have been 17 September 1973, shortly after Allende’s fall. I was walking in the Pyrenees with my wife. When we stayed the night in Foix, we both had the feeling that we had discovered the most backward town in France. For the next twenty years, I travelled around the country to gather several proofs of this stellar backwardness. I didn’t do just that for twenty years, but I did that. I could see that, yes, this town was the champion in this regard. The script had time to mature: more than twenty years of work for a thirteen-minute short film.

Invited by Toulouse for a conference, I made a detour to see Foix again. It was a painful experience. From Toulouse, I wanted to go up to the Montagne Noire, where I hadn’t been before. I had to leave early, at seven o’clock. At the station, I stumbled on the new pavements, which are a bit slanted. I hurt my foot very badly. I travelled for 30 kilometres with a huge abscess on my toe. The right, I think. I delivered my lecture and then I went to the hospital the next morning to have the abscess removed. In the afternoon, I went to Foix. Because of my foot, I could scout it only slowly. The town was almost in the same state that I had left it twenty years earlier. It was really typical, very impressive. I don’t think it’s possible to go this far into degeneration. It’s quite a nice town in itself: there’s a chateau, it’s well situated. But you can sense that there has been no real town planning. It’s a complete mess.

Based on the photos that I had taken, I submitted a project to the CNC [National Centre for Cinema] for support with the short film. In photos with cars, I scratched out the two digits pertaining to Ariège region. Worried about a leak, I rechristened the project Vesoul. I added that the film would not be shot there, without specifying where. I thought that the people at the CNC would be keen to know where I would shoot, and that they would give me the money to find out. That’s what happened. We got the grant. We did a combined shoot, which is very cost-effective: I shot Toujours plus, which ended in Toulouse, and in the evening, we went to Foix to shoot Foix. The shoot went on for about three days. There was only one minor problem: Toujours plus being a TV film, we shot at twenty-five frames; but my sound engineer continued to record at twenty-five frames for Foix, instead of twenty-four, the normal frame rate for a cinema film.

Many people and institutions are thanked in the credits. Did the production actually involve them, or was it out of caution?

Not out of caution. It was to make the viewer laugh. I asked the town hall and the police for some little things so that I could put them in the credits. “I thank the town of Foix very much…” That’s funny.

Did the city respond?

Not directly, except on the day the film was shown on TV. The town hall phoned the production manager, who acted as a buffer. They couldn’t say anything, I hadn’t asked them for money. The town hall had done only one thing: turn on the little geysers on the ground—these “watering limbs” that make the water come out thirty centimetres from the ground—which only work in summer, whereas the shooting took place in winter.

Was the idea of the fake tourist documentary there from the outset?

The idea was inspired by Georges Franju’s Hôtel des Invalides, a film commissioned by the army that made everyone laugh. Well, almost everyone… As it was a short film, Foix was practically written down to the last detail. It’s tiring to draw up a complete découpage for a feature film. On the contrary, for a short documentary, it’s fun to do it, and it pleases the producer, who incidentally hadn’t invested a lot of money, since there was money from the Centre for Cinema. In these towns, everyone is happy when you come to shoot. No one comes to shoot in Foix. One day, I filmed in Toulouse, in the largest supermarket in the world. There were ninety-four counters. I was warmly received; at the end, we were even offered champagne. It’s rather in Paris that one can feel unwelcome. Everybody comes to shoot there; people are suspicious, they have had it up to here.

Did you go back to Foix?

I saw the city from the train. I’ve bought a Ray-Ban since then, so I might try to go back there. My face has changed a bit, I’ve lost hair. I should stop by the town someday.

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