A ‘dirty story’ told by Deceased Artiste Michael Lonsdale

With Michael Lonsdale’s death, it’s like three performers have died — the Lonsdale that appeared in mainstream, commercial films (usually international coproductions), the one that always made time to act in experimental films where the directors trusted him to develop his character (and sometimes improvise or alter his dialogue), and the Lonsdale that forged a stunning list of appearances on the French stage (performing in works by Beckett, Ionesco, Pirandello, Stoppard, Albee, Anouilh, Handke, and his good friend Marguerite Duras).

The second of those three identities interests non-French auteurists the most, and so, since I’ve already written about the films of Marcel Hanoun that starred Lonsdale and Out 1, the mega-masterwork of improvisation by Rivette, I want to focus here on just one film, Jean Eustache’s very unusual and incredibly significant Une Sale Histoire (A Dirty Story, 1977).

The film is one of the most important pictures of the Seventies for several reasons. Among them the fact that the notion of documentary offers the “truth” of a situation, that the film offers a sleazy but entirely valid metaphor for moviegoing (or theatergoing, for that matter), and that it explores sexism in its purest state — men who view women solely as a set of genitals.

The later, hairier
 Lonsdale.

I’ve discussed the film with people who were entranced by it and others who were disturbed by it, although it should be noted that nothing graphic is ever seen. It’s simply a film about a man telling a story.

In fact, the film shows two men telling the same story. Une Sale Histoire is comprised of two shorts Eustache made from the same material. The first features the great Lonsdale — as suave as he could be — telling a group of people at a party in an apartment a story about a weird “ritual” he took part in.

A group of men in a Paris cafe are aware that there is a hole in the ladies’ room door in that cafe’s basement. If one kneels on the floor in front of the door (curiously like the Muslim prayer ritual), one can see the women using the toilet — not the woman herself, just her vagina. Lonsdale’s character tells the story with an odd sort of reverence and a philosophical bent, describing how this ritualistic act of voyeurism became a habit for him that took the place of having sex.

Once he finishes his story, we see the second short film, a 16mm documentary chronicle of another man (Jean-Noël Picq) telling the same story. He is sleazier-looking than Lonsdale (with a front row of quite awful teeth), and one quickly realizes that this is the man who ultimately went through this experience.

Picq’s telling of the story goes quicker. The 16mm film is six minutes shorter because it is told more quickly (although both Picq and Lonsdale say the exact same words), contains no introduction, and the questions asked of the storyteller at the end are fired at Picq, while the actresses quizzing Lonsdale ask their queries in a slower way.

The ideal way to read this piece would be to now watch the film if you haven’t seen it already. It is currently available on YouTube, with English subtitles in the Closed Captions.

The Lonsdale version:

The Picq original:

Going back to the three themes mentioned above, it can now be revealed that Eustache’s decision to contrast “fiction” (an actor telling a story) against documentary (a real-life individual, with the bad teeth to prove it) is a brilliant one, but is not as clear-cut as it seems.

The signs of the two modes of filmmaking are there: the Lonsdale film was shot in 35mm, is most clearly an acted piece, and is more elegantly made. The Picq version is on 16mm, it has the spontaneity of a documentary (esp. in the brisk way it moves), and is more raggedly shot (one of the women listening to Picq is left out of camera range, even when she’s asking him a question).

So, Eustache’s purpose in making the Lonsdale film appears to have been to contrast the “real” telling of a story with a staged “fiction” version containing the exact same dialogue (including the same questions and answers at the end). It’s a brilliant conceit and one of the reasons Histoire is indeed a landmark of Seventies cinema.

There’s just one problem with the above description of the film — namely, that Picq’s story never happened. But before we get into that matter, let us find out what Lonsdale himself thought of the film. In the invaluable interview book Michael Lonsdale: Entretiens avec Jean Cléder (François Bourin Éditeur, Paris, 2012), he offered these thoughts. [This and the quote below are loosely translated from the French by yrs truly.]

“First, the distance came from the fact that [Eustache] invented half of things. It’s physically impossible for a man to put his head on the ground in the hall outside the toilets, especially in La Motte Piquet, where it’s very busy. In reality, it wouldn’t be very clean if one knelt on the floor to look through a hole at the genitals of women who are urinating! One would have to be pretty crazy… People asked me, ‘How could you have done that?’ And I responded, ‘Listen, this stuff exists, there are people like that! They have the right to be heard.’

“As I had never worked with Jean Eustache, who was for me one of the great filmmakers, I accepted the role. Before that, with no budget, he had already filmed with his friend the ‘dirty story,’ where Jean-Noel Picq had the lead role. But he wanted to make a “cleaner” version (if I can put it that way) in 25 minutes, with a good camera and good film.

“As for the characterization, he let me do what I wanted. He filmed three reels, in three shots, so we didn’t need to stop to load the film. I thus recounted my story calmly, without interruptions or direction.  When he asked me, ‘Do you want to see what Jean-Noel Picq did?’ I answered ‘No, certainly not!’ I noticed later that we had the same inflection on certain words, curiously….

“Because showing it meant projecting the two films, it was a novelty: the program was made up of the old version with Jean-Noel Picq, then the new version with me. For distribution, it was interesting, because each film was too short for a normal screening at a movie theater.” [pp. 48-49]

The oddly assembled but also invaluable book le dictionnaire Eustache, edited by Antoine de Baecque, (Editions Leo Scheer, 2011), includes a statement from Picq written to journalist Jean-Luc Douin.  Picq wrote to Douin in 1993 that the original short was “autobiographical because it was fictitious.” To double-down on his wonderfully Gallic wordplay he also claimed the short was “an imaginary autobiography, like all true autobiographies.” He added:

“This autobiographical fiction is perhaps about voyeurism, but it is also about the insurmountable differences between the sexes, which don’t allow … either gender to have a discourse about sex that transcends differences and reaches an agreement. Except to stammer something that is not readily understandable, as it goes down to the gutter and lowers the debate.” [pp. 298-299]

The juxtaposition between fiction and reality bleeds into the second theme of the film — the notion that Picq’s story is a metaphor for the act of moviegoing. The “ritual” described has a religious aspect to it (with the reference to praying in the Muslim style), but there is clearly also a peep-show, fetishistic element, as the voyeur sees only one body part. And the act of storytelling itself, which always encompasses embroidering a tale, is akin to seeing a performance onstage or screen. The storyteller in both versions in fact mentions his desired audience — he notes that he prefers to tell his story to women to get their reactions, since men will “understand” what he’s saying from the first.

The odd prologue to
American Boy.

The Picq short in fact prefigured Scorsese’s American Boy (made one year later, in 1978), in which Scorsese’s friend Steven Prince tells a series of stories that are immaculate — but seem too honed to be entirely true. Scorsese takes much more time to set the stage than Eustache does (one gets the impression that Prince’s storytelling session was augmented by, um…. a certain powder). But the two filmmakers allow their seedy friends to take center stage, and they and other friends assume the role of onscreen audience and interlocutors. Eustache let himself be seen as a listener in the Picq version of the material, but he is only seen briefly on camera and never asks Picq a question. Scorsese, on the other hand, is an active participant in American Boy. (The presence of both filmmakers on-camera serves to make their friends’ stories seem more “real.”)

Picq’s tale also contains unknowing “performers” (the women being “peeped,” who are being victimized without even knowing it — until the storyteller lets the last woman in on the “act”) and an "audience" (the sleazy men at the cafe). Thus, we as viewers watch an onscreen audience hearing a story from a man who declares that he ended up preferring seeing unknown women’s genitals (read: being a spectator) rather than having sex with a partner (being an active participant in a performance).

… Which leads us to the third and most overpowering theme: sexism. Une Sale Histoire would never have been made in the U.S., even during the “maverick” period of the Seventies (when a film like John Byrum’s Inserts could indeed be made but had to be shot in England). The current state of American film finds sex completely missing from mainstream films of any kind, as dealing with it bring up topics that are (that most abrasive and prevalent of phrases) “problematic.”

Jean Eustache (in a Rocky shirt!)
and Lonsdale.

Here Eustache tackles the male libido at its most base and crude. The storytellers in both short films are quite matter-of-fact about the story they tell, while the women who hear it are very receptive, to the point of asking a bunch of questions. These questions are fired off in the Picq version, which makes them seem like real subjects of curiosity. The slightly slower pace of the Lonsdale version makes the questions seem more like a part of a certain storytelling ritual.

The most important element of this exploration of sexism is indeed the fact that the storyteller states he got to the point where he preferred “peeping” to sex. (Thus foreshadowing Internet cam-culture?) He says, quite pointedly, “… the desire wasn’t to fuck her afterwards, not at all. It was only in the pleasure of seeing. Just seeing. That’s all.”

From the Picq version.

Picq’s story includes the fact that the forbidden thrill he got from the act of voyeurism was that it gave him “direct access” to the woman’s private parts — he didn’t have to go on dates, go to the movies or dinner, find common points of interest, or otherwise relate to the woman in question. He could just cut to his desired chase and see what he wanted to see.

He laments that women will now (in the late Seventies) discuss their orgasms and that the vaginas of the woman he’s involved with on a romantic or sexual level are “domesticated.” This part of the story synchs up quite nicely with Eustache’s 1973 masterpiece, The Mother and the Whore, where the male protagonist (Jean-Pierre Leaud) talks and talks until the moment where the quieter female lead (Françoise Lebrun, who conspicuously appears in the Picq film as a listener/questioner) finally delivers a monologue, which changes the whole focus of the piece and makes it more of a film about relationships (and the need to listen rather than talk), whereas up to that point it is an account of the adventures of a cool young man who never stops talking.

Picq and Eustache.

Our storyteller pines for the Victorian era at one point, saying the sexuality of the Seventies is “disillusioned.” This goes back to the theme of worship in Picq’s dirty story. He knows that what he is doing is unhealthy (and quite ugly, as he is essentially bent over, kneeling on a piss-laden floor). But he is able to justify what he did because of that same aspect of sleazy idolatry.

The film’s best dialogue in fact comes when he discusses how the world changed for him when he got addicted to his peeping ritual. He began, he says, to believe “the hole came first!” and that a defect in a door (which he acknowledges must’ve been created on purpose when the door was designed) became the center of his universe. The door, the cafe, the streets, the city — all of it existed because of that sacred hole.

And the grace note of this look inside the mind of a voyeur is when he declares that his peeping was a kind of “work” that consumed him for a period of time. The last line, delivered differently but emphatically by both Lonsdale and Picq, is “I had my dignity while doing this!”

Legends, allegories, and fairy tales: the later work of Ermanno Olmi (Part 2 of two)

The last three and a half decades of Olmi’s career were comprised of a fascinatingly diverse array of work. The only problem was that once he was able to make whatever he wanted, thanks to the tremendous success of The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), he made at least a few thoroughly bizarre choices and, while still using non-professional performers and real locations, he decisively moved away from neorealist (read: modern, urban) plotlines in favor of period pieces, allegorical dramas, and fairy tales.

The first project after Trees was the equally epic but far less absorbing Keep Walking (1983; out of print on DVD), a reworking of the tale the Magi. Olmi’s retelling is framed by the notion that the story is being told by a local church group as a Christmastime play.

Given that frame, it’s not surprising that this saga has little resemblance to the “three wise men” tale told to Christian children. In this version, the wise men each travel with a caravan and meet each other on the way to see the Messiah. Their eventual encounter comes about almost randomly, as a woman in the camp just happens to see the famous star heralding the birth.

Here is the meeting with Joseph and Mary and their newborn (with English subs):

And Olmi’s conclusion is very different from the happy-go-lucky version of events in standard theology — here, the caravan is terrified of Herod’s order to kill them, so they flee back to their respective homelands. In the process, they bury bread that they were given by Joseph. This causes the tribe’s translator to tell off the high priest — in his rant, he condemns the priests for cowardice and also for concentrating on death rather than celebrating the Messiah's life (clearly Olmi’s central message about the Catholic church).

The most surprising element about the film — besides its outsized running time — is the strain of humor that runs throughout it. There are (mostly mild) curse words, some bits of physical shtick, and a light tone in certain sequences — until we witness Herod’s slaughter of innocents, and the conventional dark side of the tale returns for the finale. The conclusion of the film is here, without English subs:

Very much the opposite of Walking, the oddball allegorical comedy Long Live the Lady! (1987) is a low-key, very Bunuelian satire of bourgeois etiquette. The film centers around a formal dinner party thrown by “Her Ladyship” in which corporate affairs will be reviewed and celebrated.

The cast of characters is comprised of the strange-looking dinner guests — including a priest in a body cast and a young “angel” of indeterminate gender — and the young wait staff, for whom this dinner is a baptism by fire for their future careers.

Olmi could be a very funny filmmaker when he chose to be, and here he invests the dinner with a number of amusing and outlandish elements. A rather creepy old woman is the person who welcomes the young people to the castle in which the meal is held (this lady happens to look quite like “Her Ladyship”). A plague of frogs occurs at one point; at another a gigantic fish is served to the diners. And a fleet of TV sets are rolled into the dining room to show how well the corporation has been doing.

Olmi was clearly intent on changing his style from film to film in the Eighties and Nineties, and Lady is one of his bolder, more entertaining experiments. The finale finds the geekiest of the wait staff (whose working-class dad visited him at the castle in an earlier scene) doing what we’d want to do — he bolts from the premises, seeking to get away from Her Ladyship and her castle full of rich and powerful weirdos. His flight looks to have succeeded, after a set-to with an angry guard dog, as the film ends.

The beginning preparations for the wait staff and the memories of our geeky antihero start here (clip without English subs):

The best of Olmi’s post-Clogs films is The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988; available on DVD from Arrow), an impressive picture that didn’t get U.S. distribution at the time of its release in Europe. It broke with his usual method, as the leading characters were played by professional actors; the supporting characters were played by non-pros. (The only previous occasion on which Olmi used professionals was a film he renounced, A Man Named John (1965), where Rod Steiger starred as Pope John XXIII, opposite a cast of pros including Adolfo Celi.)

Novelist Joseph Roth, an Austrian Jew who fled to Paris when the Nazis came to power and converted to Catholicism while living in Paris, wrote the novella on which the film is based. Roth was an alcoholic, and Holy Drinker is without doubt a film that is about self-ruin through alcohol, among other topics.

The plot hinges on a fairy tale occurrence: A homeless man (the late, great Rutger Hauer) living under the bridges of Paris is given a “loan” by a helpful stranger (Anthony Quayle). The stranger requests that, when he is solvent again, he repay the loan to a statue of St. Thérèse during a mass in a local church.

Thus, begins a pre-Groundhog’s Day trope in which Hauer’s character struggles to pay back the loan and, for various last-minute reasons, continues to miss mass over and over. In the first half of the film, this occurs because he meets benefactors; in the second half he is fleeced by malefactors.

Holy Drinker is a tale that can be interpreted in a number of ways. The two themes that seem to apply whether one views the film through a Christian lens or a secular one are these: in our world good luck seems to beget more good luck and bad luck only bad luck; and that it is incredibly hard to sufficiently pay back a person who has done you a live-saving good turn.

The whole film is currently hiding in plain sight on YouTube. This is the English-language version – the film was shot in English, with brief French exchanges left intact in both the English and Italian versions:

In the supplements found on the Arrow DVD, Rutger Hauer says that he was told by Olmi that Holy Drinker would be an action film (Hauer’s specialty), but that “the action will take place on your face.” Hauer is indeed terrific in the lead role, which is surprising, since he is playing a homeless man but is still the same physical powerhouse he was in genre films.

Given the chance to play a meaty role (something he was rarely given, outside of the work of Paul Verhoeven and Blade Runner), he excels here as the clochard, embodying him with a  sense of both solitude and sadness. Olmi was always a master at filming dialogue-less scene that are things of beauty, and there is one here, in which Hauer and other homeless drinkers stay inside a café for an entire evening during a torrential rain storm.

The Secret of the Old Woods (1993) is the second Olmi epic after Clogs and perhaps the most disposable of his “personal” works. An eco-parable about a man intent on having trees cut down that contain spirits, Secret is an extremely lightweight idea that goes on too long.

Still, anything Olmi made is better than, say, the best works of Ron Howard (damning by faint praise, I know). But live-action films with actors supplying the voices of trees, birds, and forest animals, wear out their welcome at any length over 90 minutes (and Secret runs 134 mins).

This is the original Italian trailer, which gives a flavor for the weirdness of animals and trees talking:

Genesis: The Creation and the Flood (1994; available on DVD from Shout! Factory) was a work for hire, but one that Olmi approached in his usual way, by using non-professional Bedouin actors, shooting in real Moroccan locations, and by presenting the action in a low-key, non-Hollywood manner.

The first in a series of Bible TV movies, the film has a frame device in which a grandfather tells his grandchildren the stories of the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, and Noah’s Ark. Paul Scofield’s narration for the English version is stirring and perfectly “guides” the events, which are, again, at their best when there is a minimum of dialogue and the faces tell the story. The soundtrack blends an original score by Il Maestro, Ennio Morricone, and anachronistic pieces like a tune played by Max Roach. (Footage from the Iraq War is seen in a passage on war.)

Here is the DVD trailer, from Shout! Factory:

The Profession of Arms (2001) is a period piece that thankfully is not of epic length. It involves the “military de’ Medici,” Giovanni. It’s one of the more staid Olmi films, plotted and shot in a very straightforward, old-fashioned style. Giovanni, however, remains one of the most singularly unlikeable leads in Olmi’s work. 

Olmi worked best in humanist drama and light comedy, but here he does a fine job with a period battle scene:

Profession and Olmi’s next film contains sexuality, something he had to that time veered away from. (Holy Drinker contains several sequences when Hauer’s character has sex, but we see none of the “action” and only oblique views of the performers’ bodies). In Profession, there is a sequence with a topless woman being nuzzled by her lover. This is, of course, a film set in the Renaissance, so Olmi clearly felt he could bend his own rule for the de’ Medicis and their scheming contemporaries.

The full film is up on YT with English subs, in pieces:

Even during his “experimental” phrase following the success of Clogs, Singing Behind Screens (2003) was most certainly a major departure for Olmi — a retelling of a Chinese legend, acted by a primarily Asian cast and shot in two very different “modes.” Just in case that isn’t a strange enough prospect, Singing is narrated by a pirate played by none other than Bud Spencer, star of many an Italian action movie with his partner Terence Hill.

The film’s plot revolves around the widow (Jun Ichikawa — no relation to the director) of an infamous Chinese pirate, “Admiral” Ching (Makoto Kobayashi). When he dies, his wife takes over his ship and battles the government – which is actually fond of pirates in this tale because they keep the economy moving through the process of acquiring “trans-shipped goods.” (A great politician-speak term for stolen booty.)

The widow’s message to her crew of rapscallions is a very modern one — making this an odd feminist revamp of the conventional pirate movie that just happens to be made by an old Italian filmmaker. The widow makes it clear that she will not only not deal with the government (as her husband had started to do), but that all of her sailors are forbidden to mistreat women, of whom there are a number on her ship.

In his most atypical film, Olmi made a very unusual choice — to vary the action on the pirate ship between a patently artificial setting (as a play staged in a seemingly enormous brothel) and on location in a real ship on a real body of water. The latter sequences adhere to Olmi’s neorealist approach, but they don’t work when counterpointed against the sequences that are shot in the artificial setting. 

In the brothel, the film makes a bit more sense and resembles Seijun Suzuki’s later, deliriously artificial Princess Racoon (2005). In the real outdoor setting, the film resembles little more than an Italian approximation of a Shaw Brothers film. Here is a sample (with English subs):

One very interesting thing about Singing: the film features nudity in the artificial sequences. One assumes the farther Olmi moved away from Italy, Catholicism, and neorealism, the more comfortable he was with sexuality.

Here is the trailer for English-speaking audiences:

Olmi's last three films deal with big themes, but return to his strengths: working with non-professional performers, crafting small-in-scope character studies, and editing films down to reasonable running times. The first of the trio, One Hundred Nails (2007), is the most curious, as it begins as a whodunit and quickly becomes a murky parable about the loss of human communication.

The opening scenes offer a good approximation of TV police procedurals, as a crime is discovered — giant nails have been driven into 100 priceless books in a Catholic university library. The crime is so esoteric that one is immediately drawn in, but Olmi solves it in short order by revealing the culprit, a handsome, bearded philosophy professor (Raz Degan) who wants to go back to nature.

Olmi directs Raz Degan.

He abandons his sports car (a philosophy prof with a sports car?), tosses his phone in a river, and gets rid of his i.d. cards. He keeps his laptop and one credit card, which becomes necessary later in the plot. He then begins to rebuild a small hut to live in near the beach area outside of a small town.

He bonds with the townsfolk and becomes their advocate in a battle against a corporation that wants to build on the land they live on. He is summarily found and arrested for the "100 nails" crime. The rest of the film consists of him explaining his crime — he feels that books and received wisdom teach us nothing about life, and that having a cup of coffee and chatting with a friend creates a more profound connection with humanity than studying old, dusty volumes of philosophy and “valuable” knowledge.

Here is the crime (subtitles are not needed):

Bibliophiles will certainly take issue with the main character’s choice of protest, but Olmi clearly had something specific to say, and this dreamy prof (who scores a nice relationship in the small town with a rebellious young woman) serves as his mouthpiece, given the prime placement of his final speeches — which sound both thoroughly reasonable and overly simplistic, in a Unabomber fashion.

Our antihero is likened to Christ by the townspeople, and the film's poetic but curious conclusion (in which the townspeople wait for him to come back, and he never does...) reinforces this comparison. Ultimately it’s a shame that Olmi didn’t work with a coscripter, as there are two very interesting films at war here and the collision produces a major head-scratcher of a drama.

The whole movie can be found here. Here is the trailer for the film (no English subs):

The Cardboard Village (2011) is a tight, moving character study that tackles important issues in a subdued way. An old priest (the always superb Michael Lonsdale) won’t accept that his church is being closed down. As his superiors confront him about the impending closing, he has other visitors – illegal immigrants from Africa — who build a “village” of cardboard boxes in one part of the church. The priest initially rejects the outsiders but then begins to protect them from the authorities.

Here is a scene between Lonsdale and an immigrant boy (no English subs):

Olmi crafts a thoroughly involving work while avoiding the sentimental clichés that would’ve made a Hollywood version of the same scenario nausea-inducing. The non-professionals playing the immigrants are excellent, while Lonsdale is the emotional center of the film as a man who can’t let go of the past — physically (the church) and mentally (his memories of the one girl he clearly loved, long before he became a priest). “Holy Drinker” Rutger Hauer also returns to Olmi’s universe as one of the priests trying to convince Lonsdale’s character to leave the church.

Olmi explores Christian theology again by introducing characters for whom the church is a literal refuge. A discussion that Lonsdale has with one of the immigrants impresses because of its sheer simplicity – Lonsdale asks the most eloquent of the immigrants “Why are you doing all this?” The immigrant answers, “You’re a priest, you should know better than me.” And, of course, the notion that places of worship make a perfect place to store refugees and society’s cast-offs gets right to the root of the concept of Christian charity.

A scene featuring the immigrants (with English subs, in the Closed Captions):

Olmi’s final film, Greenery Will Bloom Again (2014), was a typically modest tale of WWI, based on stories that Olmi’s father had told him about his experiences in that war. It’s a fitting conclusion to a career that went in several directions thematically — a story about young men in in a fatal situation, told by an old artist who heard it from a survivor of “the war to end all wars.”

The film successfully recreates the claustrophobic atmosphere of a bunker occupied by Italian soldiers who are quantified at intervals by their appearance at mail call. Lighter moments – an Italian soldier singing on a hill, applauded and cheered on by Germans soldiers, who can hear him across the trenches — are balanced by moments of war psychosis (soldiers suffering panic attacks in their bunks).

The soldiers are depicted as capable of rebellion, as when one soldier refuses to comply with a command (which he aptly calls a “criminal order”) and desperation, when a soldier shoots himself rather than expose himself to fire from the Germans or being taken prisoner. In the last third of the film, it becomes apparent that the bunker will soon be destroyed, as not only are the Germans bombing them laterally, but they are also digging underneath it to explode its foundations.

Greenery showed Olmi taking on new challenges in filmmaking at the age of 83. He shot the film on 4K video and made sure that it was extremely small in scale. The result was a work of pure cinema that was of a piece with the best of his previous work.

The great humanist went out on a perfect note — an anti-war drama that has both documentary and fantasy elements (the latter occurs when a soldier sees a tree that has turned gold) but is also all about memory. Not a bad place for an immaculately emotional portraitist to conclude his life’s work.

Here’s the Greenery trailer, with no subs (but they’re not really needed for this kind of drama):

At this moment in time it’s hard to find online interviews with Olmi that are subtitled. One that is (for reasons other than film scholarship) is at 10:30 in this video short about how the set of Greenery was part of a protocol by the Edison Company (Olmi’s old employer and a sponsor for the shooting of the film) to be more ecologically chaste:

It was indeed difficult to find any English-subtitled interview clips of Olmi while assembling this piece. I did find this “triple whammy” short interview with Olmi, speaking in Italian, Rutger Hauer, speaking in English, and Michael Lonsdale, who is fluent in English but here chooses to speak in French because he says he “lacks the vocabulary” in English.

The three men are together for a screening of Cardboard Village at the Venice Film Festival in 2011, but the questions they are asked are more generic. Lonsdale says he was happy to work with Olmi because his film united all races. Hauer declares that his jump from action cinema to working for Olmi is a simple one: “You take on another coat, and you dance…”

Michael Lonsdale in The Cardboard Village.

Olmi talks very seriously, as one could expect. He is asked if he would make a film about politics and he says that the current Italian government doesn’t’ “deserve” a film about it. He is also asked who his favorite filmmakers are, and he notes that, if he were forced to watch the best films, he would “see a few minutes of” Rossellini, Fellini, Pasolini (“and that’s only Italian cinema”), and Elia Kazan, Orson Welles, and others (I wish he had kept going with his list).

It’s an interview that finds all three men seated, but it clearly was done on the fly at a film festival and would’ve been amazing if there had been more time for all three to gather their thoughts (and there had some translation done for each of them, since one gets the impression that each gent is not fully aware of what the other is saying).

Some notes on the Marcel Hanoun festival at Anthology Film Archives

One of the nicest things about the admittedly small film repertory scene in NYC (four theaters, two museums) is the fact that various retrospectives are held celebrating filmmakers whose work would never be seen otherwise in the U.S. These festivals become a little unwieldy for the attendee, since he/she has to rearrange their life for a few days or weeks to take most of it in. The result, though, is in most cases an overwhelming “ride” into the imagination of an artist whose work has basically been hidden from American viewers.

I've attended a few of these retros over the past few years and have noticed that, after a time, the memories of these events start to blur at the edges. I recently did two episodes of the Funhouse TV show about the 2013 Howard Hawks retro at the Museum of the Moving Image, but for the most part I haven't written about the retros or presented episodes about them on the show, since I am only able to comment on them *after* having sat through the films, and there are usually other things on the menu for the show and blog.

Thus I missed out on documenting on festivals that I became addicted to, including the amazing comprehensive Werner Schroeter retro at MOMA a few years back, as well as several terrific festivals of European directors' work at Anthology Film Archives (including Jean-Daniel Pollet, Carmelo Bene, Ulrike Ottinger, the “Zanzibar group,” and the actor Pierre Clementi).

While immersing myself in the latest festival, a retro of the work of French filmmaker Marcel Hanoun at Anthology, I thought it would make sense for me to “document” my opinions about the films I've seen. Yes, these are highly personal capsule reviews of films that are indeed pretty damned hard to see (written by memory shortly after seeing the films — thus, the aspects of plot mentioned here are 80% certain, rather than 100%). But I post them here to simply record a viewer's opinions, and also to “situate” the filmmaker in question.

I've found that the European filmmakers who are commemorated in these kinds of near-comprehensive retros tend to blend in the memory, so if I can help any reader (or myself, in later years, rereading this...) by offering my gut-level reactions to the work of Marcel Hanoun here, it's worth it.

A SIMPLE STORY (1959). (Viewed on DVD-r.) Hanoun's “greatest hit” is indeed one of his best films, if I can judge by the several I've seen in this “binge” viewing of the retro (yes, I'm always fascinated by the folks who argue that current drama series can be easily binged-on because they are “like good cinema”; maybe it's possible just to skip the “like” part there?). It's a very simply-shot fiction feature about a mother and daughter from Lille wandering around Paris trying to find a place to stay and a job for the mother.

It is a film that conjures emotion in the viewer through its storyline and imagery – Hanoun clearly decided to lose the former in his later works in favor of the latter. There's a documentary-like style to the proceedings, but we are taken out of the “real” world by Hanoun's use of a Bressonian technique, “doubling” the action through narration (read: hearing about what we're watching).

So Hanoun has the mother character narrate the film and tell us what she and others said, while enough of the ambient soundtrack exists so we can hear them saying basically the same thing – in some instances they say slightly different things, which one assumes is important for story reasons (why is the mother not repeating it verbatim – is her memory of the event dim, or does she want to alter the story somehow?).

The film's virtue, and one that Hanoun held to for quite some time, is that it runs just around an hour. Thus it draws the viewer in with its emotional storyline and good performances, while also not belaboring its concept.

OCTOBER IN MADRID (1964). This was seen right after I had left work on a Friday night. The film is a non-linear “account” of a director who can't make the film he envisioned. The Spanish locations are picturesque, and the film's b&w cinematography (plus the fact that this was the one blotchy, unrestored print I saw in this festival) made me pass right into the arms of Morpheus. Not qualified to review it, was out cold for more than half of it.

THE AUTHENTIC TRIAL OF CARL EMMANUEL JUNG (1967). Fortified with caffeine, this title had the opposite effect on me. I stayed awake because Hanoun used a grating technique to illustrate his message. The concept is simple: a fictitious German officer who decided which inmates would live and which would die in a Nazi prison camp in the early Thirties is put on trial in France in the Sixties.

The piece is shot like a filmed play, except that Hanoun “un-synched” his sound because, as the opening narration tells us, this trial would be one held in France to convict a German-speaking man. Thus we watch an hour-long film loaded with portentous dialogue which was post-dubbed so it would intentionally not match the movement of the actors' mouths.

I have indeed seen many dubbed films, but the technique used here is the kind that wears one down after 10-15 minutes. Hanoun also decided to not show a verdict for his fictional Nazi, so while the film does work as a taut trial drama (with the un-synched gimmick detracting from the proceedings, in my opinion), one can't help but think of the other dramas that have gone over the same ground but depicted real-life Nazis on trial. (The Man in the Glass Booth stands as the most fascinating attempt to vary the situation with a fictional narrative.)

The main character is named after the famous psychologist presumably because Jung was initially pro-Nazi; the character here is a different individual whom Hanoun made up. The use of the word “authentic” in the title is without question the most intriguing thing about the picture.

SUMMER (1968). Hanoun's “May '68” film is a super-minimalist affair in which an Italian woman stays at a friend's house in the countryside after having been witness to the havoc in Paris. She writes to a German friend (whom we see/hear reading the letters) and thinks of her ex-boyfriend (whom we see in flashbacks and photos – he is named “Jean-Luc.” A reference to Godard?).

Thus one's reaction to the film depends on one's feelings about watching a pretty Italian woman alone in a house, walking in a field, doing cartwheels in a bikini, walking some more, pondering her relationship, and looking at herself in photos taken on the streets of Paris where she is posed against political graffiti.

One thing becomes clear seeing a number of Hanoun's films: the gent loved classical music and thought of rock as some alien business that had to be depicted in menacing or downright silly terms. Here our protagonist briefly enters a storefront rock club (where the insert from We're Only In It for the Money hangs on the wall, along with the pop poster of Allen Ginsberg wearing an Uncle Sam hat), supplying one of the few “youth culture” moments in a film that betrays no feeling for or against the events of May '68.

WINTER (1970). A beautifully shot color variant on OCTOBER IN MADRID set in Brussels. This time the great Michael Lonsdale is the filmmaker who can't get his film made. We watch he and his collaborator talk about what they'd like to do, see ravishing locations in Bruges, and witness the relationship between he and his wife unravel. The result is eye-catching, but sleep-inducing.

SPRING (1970). The film that made attending the festival worthwhile. A terrific minimalist film, crammed with narrative incident and characters one could actually get a handle on. Two plotlines are cut together: a fugitive from the police (Michael Lonsdale), whom we later learn murdered his wife, takes refuge in various parts of the countryside, while a young girl (Veronique Andries) who lives with her stern grandmother (who kills and skins a rabbit in real time on-camera) matures through the absorption of creepy fairy tales, experiments with cursing and smoking, and the arrival of her first period.

All of Hanoun's visual devices are at play here – flipping from b&w to color and back; making the camera into a presence in a room (it serves as a mirror for the characters, or a window, or... you get the idea); his obsession with the beauty of the countryside and its inherent menace. The dialogue appears primarily in the scenes featuring the little girl; Lonsdale has one, possibly two scenes with dialogue.

The element that makes the film so compelling is not only the notion of suspense in the Lonsdale plot, but the fact that the girl lives in a world that is picturesque yet disturbing and somehow alien (in the sequence where she practices smoking and cursing, she puts on a little clay eye-mask when doing so in front of a mirror).

There is one difference between this and the other Hanoun films I've seen: the script is credited to Hanoun and Catherine Binet (who is fourth-billed in the film as an actress; I believe she plays the girl's teacher, who imparts creepy fairy tales to her students). Binet was a scripter and editor who was the partner of novelist/filmmaker George Perec (Life: a User's Manual) and appeared as herself in the documentary “Les Vamps Fantastiques” (!). Binet's contribution clearly made SPRING a very different film from Hanoun's others. The result is a compelling and involving work that still adheres to Hanoun's minimalist approach.

AUTUMN (1972). Hanoun made this film alone, and we're back in concept-land. The actors, playing two filmmakers (a director, played by Lonsdale again, and his editor, played by an actress known simply as “Tamia”), stare into the camera because we, the audience, are the film they are watching on an editing machine. For some reason, though, these filmmakers are watching a film that seems to be pretty much finished, since they stare at us for long (lonnnng) periods of time.

What Hanoun does to reinforce his concept is to turn off the visuals (a blank screen) whenever Lonsdale or Tamia turn off the editing machine. (At that point we listen to phone calls.) When they are not editing, but the machine is on, Hanoun plays with overdubs on the soundtrack, gives us all-too-brief glimpses of the characters' fantasies, and quick-cut sequences of the couple talking.

There is a random quality to what happens throughout – a factor that often is transformed into visual poetry in the works of Godard, but in Hanoun seems to indicate that he took what had happened to him before the film shoot and would try to shoehorn it into the production. Here Lonsdale talks about shooting home movies, and we then see what are clearly Hanoun's own movies of a family outing. At the film's end we see footage of autumn in the woods, first in real time, then as fast-forwarded through by an editing machine – then the "countershot," the editing machine itself. The filmmakers are evidently done with their project.

All in all, the film isn't the ordeal that it could have been, but pretension appears throughout, primarily in speeches Lonsdale gives his editor, dispensing what we can only imagine are nuggets of Hanoun's own wisdom (a major one being that “cinema is the art of subtraction”). Perhaps the most noteworthy thing here is that Lonsdale's character declares that his fave filmmakers are Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer, Visconti, and one he claims not too many people know, Chris Marker.

Considering where the film was being shown, it was noteworthy to see an Anthology Film Archives schedule hanging on the wall behind the two actors throughout the film.

THE GAZE (1977). Anthology's description of this film wisely mentioned to potential viewers that it's a film about sex that is not pornography or erotica. This is true. The actors have real sexual intercourse on-camera, but here is the “plot,” such as it is: a woman in bed with her lover in a hotel in Belgium leaves the room to visit a local museum to see a collection of paintings by Bruegel. A second woman, with fuzzy hair that matches the man's curly mane, comes into the hotel room and the two fuck for the rest of the picture, while the woman at the museum stares at us (the audience in this case standing in for the Bruegel painting she is obsessed with). We study details of the painting, as well as the lovers' bodies as they have sex. 

The sex is indeed depicted in an unsexy fashion (and a lot of their anatomy winds up being hidden beneath their partner's hair); Hanoun does add short images of the man's erect penis, presumably to show that the couple is indeed doing it for real. The study of the painting — and the truly oddball images where the woman staring at it is joined by others who slither up and down into and out of frame behind her —is far more interesting. The film's one bravura moment only lasts a few seconds: the figure of Icarus in the Bruegel painting "comes to life" via animation, and we see his legs kick in the water.

There are times during THE GAZE that one could easily take the film for a parody of an “art film.” This I believe comes from the fact that Hanoun didn't like to display a sense of humor. There is a playfulness about Godard and Marker's work, a wildly dark humor in Fassbinder's, even glimmers of humor in the "transcendent trio," Dreyer, Ozu, and Bresson.

Hanoun took his work very seriously, and thus when the fuzzy-haired girl here is suddenly seen wearing wings while fucking (relating to the Bruegel painting, which depicts Icarus) or a black man suddenly appears in place of our hero (thus paralleling the constant play between b&w and color), we want to laugh but Hanoun doesn't want us to (which of course makes us want to even more).

LA NUIT CLAIRE (1979). (Viewed on DVD-r.) Offering the other side of the unsexy sex that appeared onscreen in Gaze, this film is more concerned with love and passion. It tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, plus another mythological couple, and a modern-day equivalent. The style is very much that of (natch) Cocteau and the avant-garde filmmakers of the ‘20s and ‘30s.

There are surprises in store, though, as the film begins with much walking in barren landscapes (a visual trope in Sixties/Seventies experimental cinema), but the last third truly is a mind-bender. After Orpheus screws up and loses Eurydice forever, the women warriors known as the Maenads kill and eat him and another man (I assume the other man is the male member of the modern-day couple; then again, I have given up on truly getting a handle on the characters in Hanoun’s work).

At this point the film becomes a savage weird outing along the lines of Sweet Movie or Pollet’s Le Sang (another French rarity seen only at the Anthology). The women feast on the two men at a giant banquet table (aided by a hungry cat). The actresses savor the meat and viscera for several minutes, until the leader of the group takes Orpheus’ head and ventures into the water with it, swinging it around wildly.

Definitely a departure from all of the other work in the festival, the film is the strangest damned thing I saw in my hours of Hanoun-watching. He counterpoints his mythological material with the rehearsal of an opera about Orpheus, thus the reversion to gore, viscera, and painted warrior-women comes as a major surprise.

CELLO (2012). Hanoun’s last feature, made when he was not in good health, is a digital-video project that finds him and two actresses reading a text he had written. Their voices are overlaid at points, and we see them working with the camera crew on the shoot. For their part, the crew isn’t i.d.’ed on credits, but instead introduce themselves on-camera in this manner: “sound engineer on ‘Marcel asked me.’ ” (Evidently the crew liked working with M. Hanoun.)

The title Cello turns out to be a nickname Hanoun was given as a young man, a diminutive for Marcel. To further tie the phrase into the feature, he shows a woman playing a classical instrument but admits it’s a viola de gamba, not a cello.

The effect of this film is elegiac, as could be expected from an 83-year-old man making his final project. As I noted recently on the Funhouse TV show when giving the “U.S. TV debut” to scenes from Fellini’s Voce Della Luna, artists’ last works may not be their best (in some cases, very far from it), but they do contain much insight into the person’s view of life and the creative process, as well as offering much in the way of genuine emotion.

Here Hanoun uses his favorite techniques: nature shots punctuate some of the very long passages of the actors reading, and the performers do acknowledge the camera, but in this case we are given the “countershot” throughout and see the small video crew of young people “asked by Marcel” at work.

CODA (posted 6/6/14):
After I did my Anthology blitz, I searched the Internet (you know, this thing that everyone is so gaga about) to see how Hanoun was represented on here. It turns out that he authorized people to post many of his films on two sites, YouTube and Vimeo, and that there are also helpful articles on him in French and a very well-written one in English.

I was most interested in seeing his "Jesus film," a 1977 feature called La verite sur l'imaginaire passion d'un inconnu, one of his few vintage features shot on film that was not included in the Anthology retro. The film is indeed on Vimeo, albeit with no English subtitles. The picture was indeed another surprise, as it is seemingly, despite its "blasphemous" union of modern elements with the Christ saga, a solemn, almost reverent retelling of the tale.

In Autumn, Lonsdale singles out Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew for praise as a very special, beautiful film. Hanoun followed along similar lines in inconnu, although he did include an element not tried by any noted filmmaker (that I'm aware of): casting a woman (actress Anne Wiazemsky, in all of her pouting beauty) as Christ. In fact, she alternates the role with an actor (Michel Morat, right), so that there are two Christs in the film.

Here, a woman finds Christ on a crucifix by the side of the road and we backtrack to see his life, from John the Baptist on. Hanoun described the plot this way: "At dawn one morning on a wooden cross, a girl, stupid or visionary, discovers a dead crucified man at the entrance of a small village in the South of France. We are in 1977. Is it possible to listen to Jesus' Word and hear It in 1977? What possible options are there for the Suffering Man who uses the Word as a weapon?"

Hanoun switches between his he-Christ and she-Christ, having them alternate lines and at points speak with each other's voices. At one particularly odd point, Morat is shown looking "at" Wiazemsky. As noted throughout this piece, Hanoun eschewed the shot/countershot method of depicting a conversation in favor of both characters speaking directly to the camera.

The one truly odd element (unless I missed a stray French line, most of the dialogue seems to be "dialogue" taken directly from the gospel of St. John) is that Lonsdale plays Pontius Pilate as a TV newsman, seen in a darkened TV studio. Later on, he interacts with both Christs, each in their turn. The entire film can be seen on Vimeo (without English subs, thus the importance of the Anthology retro!).



Hanoun definitely did want his work, especially his later features and videos, available for free on the Net (except the "season quartet," which is supposed to appear on DVD). He had not one but three official sites: marcelhanoun.com, marcel-hanoun.com, and macinematheque.com.

Hanoun's official YT account is here. And here is a very clear print of A Simple Story. All of the embeds below are unfortunately unsubtitled.



His one mainstream production, The Eighth Day, with Emmanuelle Riva:



The Authentic Trial of Carl Emmanuel Jung:  



The Vimeo account containing his work is far more inclusive (probably because YouTube is run by Americans, and thus has a moronic attitude toward nudity). Here one gets a clear look at the later work that wasn't included in the Anthology festival (and, again, will most likely remain unsubtitled for a long time to come). That account can be found here.

Although I didn't wind up becoming as obsessed with Hanoun's work as I did with Moullet, Pollet, Clementi, and Schroeter, I'm very glad I took the time to attend Anthology's Hanoun retro. The AFA programmers again excelled at finding rare films and presenting them to the NYC viewing audience (which was, naturally enough, quite small, except for THE GAZE). The projectionists and the young man who did a particularly fine job of keeping the "soft-titling" in synch with the films deserve special commendation (the titles were in synch even when the print of OCTOBER IN MADRID tore at two different points).

"Soft-titling" is a process whereby we watch a pristine print of the film ("sans titres"), and the English subs are put below the screen on an added piece of cloth (or polyvinyl, or whatever film screens are made of). The titles are on a computer program that is "paged through" by a person in the theater or projection booth who moves them ahead via a laptop. It's an invaluable and important process that I have only seen at the Anthology and at Film Forum for the "Tutto Fellini" fest back in the early Nineties.

The former main film curator of the Museum of Modern Art once told me in correspondence that MOMA will never use soft-titling because the audience members (many of whom, remember, just wander in from an exhibition in the museum and don't know what they're watching) "don't like it." I had mentioned the process because MOMA was showing several films in different festivals at that time without English subtitles, including one Bunuel film that had played with soft-titling at AFA a few months before.

Thus, it is all the more important that Anthology (whose budget is much, much, much smaller than MOMA) does use the technique to subtitle extremely rare foreign films that will probably never, ever be subtitled on the Net (even in the veritable fount of amazing material that is "the Torrents") or on DVD.
 
But back to Hanoun: The surprises in the retro, and the two superb films, were worth the moments where his techniques seemed gratingly transparent, or where mine eyes just decided to shut down for a while. Simple Story and Spring are indeed terrific, and his work is worth a look for all fans of French and avant-garde cinema.