Check out this week in French theaters this new film by Lucia Puenzo (Luis Puenzo’s daughter -he made The Official Story), which was awarded the International Critics Prize in Cannes this year. XXY is touring right now prestigious film festivals such as Rio, Toronto or Edinburgh and will open in most European countries in the next couple of months.
XXY stands out as the first film to broach in a frontal yet sensitive manner the question of hermaphrodism with a genuine cinematographical approach. Young Inés Efron performs remarkably as she acts with subtlety the physical and psychological torment of the 15-year-old heroin, which immediately throw us into the heart (and body) of the subject. Argentinian star Ricardo Darin is very convincing too as the young girl’s father, who has no clue how he can help his sibling, while young Martin Piroyansky goes through a complex and painful love experience.
XXY is an attaching film, the emotions of which are so genuine –while in turn violent, unspeakable and refrained- that one can only be deeply moved and disturbed given the extreme complexity of the subject yet directed with utmost delicacy and intelligence by Lucia Puenzo.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) by Carl Th. Dreyer.

“This is an extraordinary outstanding film that gathers all arts. Its images have an uncommon strength. Even though it is silent, we have to listen to the way it speaks.”

The story: The Passion of Joan of Arc, soundly evokes the passion and resonance of France’s heroine, the soul of her country, who was burned at the stake in 1431 for being a heretic and then in 1920 was made a saint… After being thought lost, the film survived the years in an Oslo mental asylum, and was restored to its original breathtaking beauty thereafter.
The film was never released on DVD in France yet. Only a US import exists -a magnificent DVD edition published by Criterion. To learn more about the film and the DVD, click here.

Read the interview

How did you come to cinema ?
I began by studying music but I was already fascinated by cinema: I saw in it the greatest work of art of the century, an art that gathers all artistic media -dramatic art, music, literature. Always with a special feeling toward painting, I studied theatre because there were no school of cinema and little by little I naturally began to direct short films.

Did your path in music influenced the way you broached cinema?
Of course, I owe a lot to my musical studies, which gave the possibility to systematize a structural conception of cinema. The musical composition was very useful ; moreover, I feel musical rythms in cinema and I try to incorporate music as soon as I begin working. Sometimes even before shooting, I know the different themes I’ll need during the film.

What about your projects?
I’ve just finished Argentina Latente which follows A Social Genocide and The Dignity of The Nobodies. I’ve also almost finished the shooting of my fourth feature, Men who are alone and waiting –with a bit of luck, it should be ready in August or September. These are essays, testimonies for which I’ve used some elements of fiction. I also already have the idea for my fifth movie, about some resources in the country, of which the citizens ignore the existence. The more I travel and I shoot, the more I discover what my subjects will be, the more I discover extraordinary things. The five films I’ve made are the synthesis of all of that: some things in Argentina Latente have been shot in 2002 or 2003. In documentary, you don’t repeat scenes. When you look for strawberrys and you only find bananas, you’re picking them anyway!

How are your films welcomed in Argentina?
Very well by those who agree with my critical look but also hated or passed over in silence and despised by the right-winged medias. In Argentina, I’m a public figure and I think I’m pretty much appreciated by the majority. But a minority of people hate me because I’m still denouncing things. My movies have been declared “of educative interest” by the government, so the teachers can bring their students to see them during school time. A Social Genocide has been seen by more than 50,000 students of secondary school.

Christmas tale, capitalistic myth, politic motto, romantic shout, popular dream and cause of so many tragedies: cinema often embodies social climbing in a much more serious way than politics does. Our monthly feature examinates the way the conquest of social hierarchy has been and is being represented in cinema, from fiction to documentary, from silent movies to the latest releases -from the States to Japan through France where Annie Gonzalez, who produces journalist-documentarist-activist Pierre Carles’ films -which rather praise on the contrary for a state of non-work- tells us about her and her work as a producer of activist films.

Read the feature.
Read the interview with Annie Gonzalez.

Like any creative art, cinema is not separate from, and shouldn’t try to be separate from, the world in which it exists. At a time when work has become a mere synonym for effort, and when some people feel we must “make work more worthwhile” -a simple expression that belies the vagueness of its meaning- it is interesting to note how much the cinematic vision of work and of individual accomplishment differs from one continent to another.

Self-Made Men

There are fundamental and recurrent themes. The place of the individual in a society defined by his or her profession, and his or her rise or fall, is the ideal basis for a screenplay, allowing for a snapshot of social life in a specific country or for the creation of a tale or a fable from scratch. With the beginning of talking movies, American cinema established a double-edged model of fear of upward social mobility. The historic foundation of the United States gave rise to the archetype of the self-made man, a natural extension of the myth of the pioneer leaving the Old Country with nothing and creating a new life on a virgin continent. Much of American cinema has approached individual accomplishment via social mobility in this way. The gangster is probably the most emblematic figure; but from Capra to the Yuppies, different models exist.
Consider Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). A British butler is “lost” in a gambling bet by his employer, a Lord, and must follow his new master to the U.S. He is torn between his new boss, a sort of cowboy, rough at the edges, who has become a successful businessman, and the mistress of the manor who dreams of importing the European art de vivre to her American hometown and of making her husband a civilized man. In a struggle to stand apart, Ruggles ends up opening a business and gives a brilliant lesson to the natives by reciting the Declaration of Independence. Ruggles is the archetype of the individual who, by breaking the class barrier, attains freedom at the same time he becomes a success. The American persona is built for success.

Naturalism and Farce

While American movies are marked by the myth of the conquering pioneer, European cinema broaches the subject of breaking through class barriers from a completely different angle. Upward social mobility is not such a fundamental theme as it is in American cinema. With a vision inherited from feudalism, and with class struggle as a reference point, upward social mobility is considered in French, Italian and English cinema as impossible, or even as a personal defect. Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu (1939), to take the most famous example, depicts French society in the stranglehold of a caste system. European cinema, from Italian neo-realism to English working-class cinema, has long praised the dignity of the working class imprisoned by its social status. The Italian proletariat suffers from its social status, but doesn’t wish to join the bourgeoisie, described as superficial, out of touch with the genuine pleasures of life and tainted by money and power. The goal is not to change camps, but to promote the value of the living conditions and the work of an entire class. In Italy, the bourgeoisie is ridiculed, in line with the great tradition of the commedia del’arte, and neo-realism tried to point out the hermetic nature of social classes, as in Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy, where a wealthy couple vacationing in an Italian villa decide to separate, and the wife is driven into the tumultuous reality of the people.

Asian Monsters

While literature from the industrial age still has a lasting impact on Western screenplays, with Dickens and Zola as critical influences on French and English cinema, Asian culture is based on a continuous vision of history, and less affected by epistemological shifts. The caste system in China and the feudal state in Japan are still present in the minds of movie heroes in Asia. In Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi and his screenwriter, Yoshikata Yoda, recount a potter’s thirst for recognition: when he is highly praised by a rich woman, he doesn’t realize that she is a ghost. In this adventure, the potter eventually abandons the dead woman and child he finds when the illusion vanishes. Respect for one’s condition is a critical factor and hubris is systematically sanctioned in fables. Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern is the perfect example: one of a powerful man’s four wives punishes her servant for decorating her own apartment with the ornaments of a veritable concubine’s.
Without going so far as to effacing the individual within the State –a method specific to propaganda cinema in certain totalitarian regimes–, characters in Asia are often so remote from the structures of power that decisions seem to come down upon them from nowhere. In The President’s Last Bang, by Sang-soo Im, the last days of the Korean president in 1979 are recounted as a farce, a chain of grotesque and incomprehensible decisions, since such a distance deforms reality. In this way, economic self-sufficiency and injustice in the spheres of power may, in cinema, be comparable to no-law zones. Capitalism is even more savage in Asia than elsewhere and the tendency in American film to present upward social mobility as a cutthroat, predatory sport is found in Hong Kong and Japan as well. One recurring word is often uttered by Asian filmmakers when characterizing the empire built by their forefathers: monstrosity. Blood and Bones by Yoichi Sai, for example, relates the growing influence of a Korean immigrant in a Japanese neighborhood, as he slowly becomes a loan shark, striking fear with his erratic behavior and violence. With power being mingled with the symbol of the father, upward mobility is often impeded by a violent and unfair state of affairs.

The Latest Rung

Today, American cinema is turning somewhat back to models of the 80s: easy money and immoral golden boys, and successful women, working girls who can be mothers and highly-trained agents, as in Renny Harlin’s delightful The Long Kiss Goodbye. But the 80s are not the only reference: cinema since 2000 draws heavily on its first century of existence. Scorsese’s The Departed brings back the 30s mob film, Ridley Scott’s American Gangster recalls gangster flics of the 70s, Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can resurrects the archetype of the 60s smooth talker, …. But cinema this decade does not recycle and parody its ancestors as it did in the 90s, with a suspended moral, historic and esthetic lightness. There’s no more need to mimic the wear and tear of time and the corniness of former codes. Cinema in the 2000s re-reads the masters of the last century not to impose a moral judgment, but rather, for the time being, to find new fathers, new heroes and new devils. As for French cinema, many have accused it of abandoning the working class and of privileging the malaise of upper-middle-class –and mostly Parisian– society, but it too is moving further away from the naturalist tradition and towards alternative outlets, whether they be aesthetic (by establishing a connection with American cinema that is not mere imitation –see the article about Angels and Predators) or political as with Pierre Carles’, who proposes alternative models -read the interview of his producer: Annie Gonzalez- or especially as specific ‘world’ cinemas that are so deeply rooted in realities, whether political/economic/social/geographical/cultural, that their destinies seem to be doomed to an ‘alternative’ model way ahead (The Take by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, Me You Them by Andrucha Waddington, Tinpis Run by Nengo Pengau, Qiu Ju by Zhang Yimou, Atanarjuat by Zacharias Kunuk or The Lip by Christian Rouaud).

Bastien Hader & Francis Chérasse

As far as the theme of work is concerned, fictional films have focused on individual destinies: social classes are the mainspring of success stories. Let’s take a look at the fiction of social climbing in American and French cinema, where it is seen as either a tragedy or a fairytale.

Bolts, angels, predators and mullets

1. Bolts. There are plenty of workers among cinema’s first heroes. In France, there were those from the Lumière Factory, filmed as they left the workplace of their illustrious bosses. In the United States, workers from American slapstick were given a central position in industrial society. Charlot from Modern Times is a cog in the production system, a grain of sand in the machine, a regulating element as well as the threat of complete deregulation. Burlesque man is an insider and an outsider. When he is both a worker and a tramp, he makes society run like a machine, attracts policemen like a magnet, heightens political awareness in the streets and the workshops and provokes riots for which he becomes the spokesman despite himself. In the era of silent movies, no individual voice was really heard. Burlesque man shook up the whole social schema. Perhaps it took the talkies for an individual to make himself heard and push his way through the crowd. Singin’ in the Rain is a memorable illustration of this, when Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) relates the pitiful career of movie stuntman prior to his glory. It is as if his story alone gives dignity to his past; as if no legend is possible without a voice.

2. Angels. There is an increase in great tales of social climbing with the arrival of the talkies. Two voices can be heard in American cinema. The first is Frank Capra, who, from the 1930s, along with his scriptwriter Robert Riskin, systematized the genre of the social fable that was personified by two great actors, Gary Cooper and James Stewart, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Meet John Doe. It could be an edifying tale or more simply a magic trick: in Lady for a Day (1933), an apple seller who lied to her daughter about her miserable living conditions is taken for a sumptuous night out when her daughter comes to visit. Fiction offers an ordinary character the fleeting opportunity to access the highest spheres, even if it is only an illusion: return of wizardry and magic, the chance for the viewer to imagine being transformed into Cinderella. This conversion is reversed two decades later in It’s a Wonderful Life, where in one of the most beautiful scenes in cinema’s history, an heir thinking of suicide is shown by his gardian angel the hell his hometown would have become without him. All Capra’s heroes (he is still wrongfully criticized for it) are helped by passing angels, unless they become angels themselves. Even when heaven sends its blessings, James Stewart/Mr. Smith or Gary Cooper/John Doe seek the common good rather than personal profit.

3. Predators. One year before Lady for a Day, Scarface by Howard Hawks defined another type of fiction: social climbing described as a murder instinct. Even when the psychological portrait tempers his thirst for profit, Tony Camonte is described as a predator. Social condition and family concerns are such burdens that only murder allows enrichment. Murder is necessary. It drives the hero while at the same time signaling his end: this tragic movement is perfectly embodied in White Heat by Raoul Walsh, when James Cagney exultantly says to his mother, “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” While the Capra vein did not spread through American cinema without taking on a more complex and less fiercely utopian appearance, the Scarface vein has not really changed. There are simply more murders and psychological portraits are less sketchy. An Oedipus complex is no longer enough to explain the temperament of Tony Soprano in the series created by David Chase, of Tony Montana in De Palma’s Scarface, or to take the most recent example, of Frank Lucas the drug barron in American Gangster (Ridley Scott), whose ambition was to create an African-American counterweight to Mafia networks.

4. Mullets. France has welcomed and showcased these two types of fiction, but without ever forgeting that they were part of the American Dream, i.e. inaccessible or false. Some people still vehemently regret French cinema’s inability to access this fairytale. But the response is often unconvincing, complacent, American-style cinema. There are a thousand possible reasons for this incapacity: a certain documentary tradition that leaves workers at the mercy of a point of view instead of giving them the opportunity to become legends; a realistic and literary current that condemns characters to pay the price of their ambition sooner or later. Etc. After L’Esquive (Games of Love and Chance), Abdellatif Kechiche’s new film, La Graine et le Mulet (The Secret of the Grain), is a rare example of a cross betweeen the temptation of Hollywood and a French model. The title identifies the ingredients of couscous as well as two charcters whose destinies come together in the final scene. On one hand is an old unemployed worker who has the daring, impossible idea of opening a floating restaurant with the help of only his family. On the other is his mistress’ daughter, who helps him with the project and makes the customers wait while a cargo of missing couscous is replaced. A Capra-style tale with a touch of Zola, but whose vitality takes it beyond a tragic dead-end. France does not have a magic wand but it has found the formula: sweat and impurity.

Bastien Hader

How did you get into film production?
I’ve watched a lot of movies, which I like doing. Other than that, basically, I’ve done a lot of graduate studies, which I enjoyed: literature, arts, cinema, fine arts…. I had some fascinating classes, some less fascinating -Rohmer, Rouch, Noguez, Gajos, Ciment Gette, Le Bot, Torock,…–, all of them men, actually, who developed practice and criticism at the same time. Before and with them, I tried quite a few things. I’d already done quite a few movies and some local exhibits in Super 8, written a lot of non-published work, and done some public reading, sometimes as a part of performance art. One day, I got quite a bit of money for the screenplay for a short film I’d written really quickly, and naively, with a lot of energy, one I wanted to direct. So it was time to find a producer, and I didn’t know what that entailed. It ended up a whole affair. I had to go with some husky friends to get back money the producer had swindled. He’d cashed in the grant from the CNC (French National Center of Cinematography), but wouldn’t write a single check when I needed to rent equipment for the shoot. I eventually made the film (Teresa, 1986) a couple months later with another producer; it did rather well, won a few awards and was shown quite a bit. I came out of all that wanting to create my own structure, and created Le Jour/La Nuit Productions. The structure was flexible and reliable. And inevitably, a structure like that is of interest to filmmakers. I produced several short and medium-length films, including my own, some documentaries, including a film co-produced with Arte by Wiswanadhan, whose work I had followed. He’s a painter who had done wonderful work with cinematic investigation in several (very long) films about the Elements. I also produced Philippe Harel’s first feature, Un éte sans histoire(s) (French Summer). That adventure allowed us to make a feature length film “on the fly,” in extremely successful conditions, and got things moving in terms of production, because with very few other films, it allowed “self-produced” movies to change the rules of obtaining CNC approval.

Could you tell us about creating C-P Productions? What is the company’s editorial policy?
That’s when I met Pierre Carles, who had nearly finished editing his film Pas vu pas pris (literally: not seen not caught). He was trying to make the movie exist and get it released. I first suggested he create his own company, considering everything he’d already managed to do with the film, and he thought I was just copping out (I think quite a few people had already copped out with this project). And then we thought, it would be a good idea to put something together to make the film exist, and to continue the work alone. With everyone who had participated in the film, we created C-P Productions. We were all the more encouraged by the fact that we had a distributor, Cara M., who believed in it. So I created another structure around this sole film, which I saw as an original comedy with at last a new critical point of view, and I also saw in it another way of doing things in an independent and creative manner. And then the film did well, we didn’t get sued, the audience really supported it. It should be mentioned that people not only came to see it in the theaters, but also beforehand, many contributed to a group fund that allowed it to be finished under good conditions and make it to the theater.
Then we decided to keep the company and see if we could make another movie together. Pierre Carles wanted to do something on Pierre Bourdieu, he had begun with VF Films, but it had reached a dead end. We revived the project, the writing and development, and then we got the confirmation that it was impossible to finance a project by Carles via any co-production or advance purchase agreement from a TV station. But La Sociologie est un sport de combat (Sociology Is A Fighting Sport) is now the benchmark movie on one of the greatest French intellectuals of the 20th century, which is still at the theaters and is being shown abroad.
Being forced to produce without backing from TV means that on the one hand we have great editorial leeway, but also… little money. Success at the box office (between 55,000 and 163,000 tickets sold) –even if it doesn’t allow to pay off the film– generates support fund to begin new projects, which is fundamental for French independent cinema. And it especially encourages us to go on. The network that supports this work –the audience, the theaters–, and also thanks to box office receipts that allow people to see the film afterwards in other ways, means that we have a sort of tacit contract, as though someone told you “OK, we’re willing to see what else you can do.” It doesn’t give you carte blanche, and is in no way a professional endorsement, but it increases the pressure even more; we say to ourselves, there really are people who want to watch something different. The editorial policy is therefore determined by what we want to make and by knowing that certain doors are closed to us.
Which means that we have to accept these specificities, which make up a sort of “C-P label”. While I have several films by Carles in development, it has also made an opening for other filmmakers, with Christophe Coello and Stéphane Goxe, with whom Pierre co-directed Attention danger travail (literally: Beware of Work) and Volem rien foutre al païs. Moreover, I’m developing their next project together. We’re also finishing production on the sequel to there investigation on work, which will be released next year, entitled Qui dit mieux?, and I’m co-producing Christophe Coello’s next documentary.
With C-P, Pierre and I are developing and co-producing Thomas Bardinet’s third feature length movie, Les petits poucets, a work of fiction, with, notably, Christophe Alévèque, which we’re releasing in April 2008. It’s apparently the film the most removed from C-P’s usual spectrum to date because it’s fiction. But it also corresponds to our independent way of working and offers a unique look at its subject. All these films are prototypes, unique works that need time to come to light. My possibilities for getting backing to develop projects can’t happen for a lot of films at the same time, despite all the desires and requests. It’s a bit improvised.

What’s different about Pierre Carles’s work?
That it’s been blacklisted by some? … but has plenty of ideas…

How did the projects for Attention danger travail and Volem come about?
It’s atypical in terms of production, but typical in the way we want to go about it: extensive research, rigorous and at the same time with a desire to allow leeway for spontaneity, a simple relationship with reality and proposing important things, open for discussion, without taking ourselves too seriously. For that, we’re taking the luxury –without luxurious means– of time, time to think and to work with others. These two films bring together collective stakes put into practice: several directors, several film editors, several layers of shooting and a long relationship with the topic. The project for Volem was launched knowing that there would be a rather long time of development and investigation. The film was released four years after the “foundations” were begun, longer than we’d planned, but this was due to the fact that during their research, the directors had pulled together extremely rich material that brought about another film, Attention danger travail, one stage in their investigation that seemed important to make public if we wanted to go further with the reflection on a critique of the wage system, precisely with the public itself. And we released this state of their reflection in the theaters.

How do you go about getting such works distributed? Does it require special means to get them circulated?
In a more and more difficult economy for fragile films, of course you need a specific reflection, which also resembles what I do in production: painstaking groundwork and a close follow-up for the duration. But it’s not particularly original, since all independent producers have this same desire to create a true link, to go into the theaters, towards the audience. Which isn’t necessarily legitimate: the movies should be able to exist on their own as well. But one of our only strengths against promotional machines is to have a true exchange with the moviegoers, in theaters, but also elsewhere, and there is a close working relationship, which is sometimes stormy, with the directors, reactivated sometimes by contact other than in the theater (e-mails, mail, group meetings, “non-commercial” projections, various means of piracy…). There’s a sort of dialogue. The need increases when the film is released in the theaters, or on DVD, because this is the only way of seeing our films… which aren’t always bought by French television.
In fact, that’s what Qui dit mieux? is about. This film was shot during numerous debates (about 100) when Attention danger travail was released. It could be seen as a homage to art house theaters, which remain a forum for non-conformist debate, where non-formatted discourse can be heard on the screen and in the room itself. It will especially be a populist film showing the faces you never see on TV, and rarely in movies, of people expressing themselves outside of habitual venues, and interacting. It’s a wonderful dialogue with multiple voices, were those in many different theaters in France answer each other, surprise one another, insult each other, express doubts and give proposals, and share in the rare pleasure of thinking together.
But for this dialog to exist, you need the time to make the films visible. Theaters must make a commitment to support this approach, and while it’s not easy for them, with the quicker and quicker rotation of movies, it’s essential for me, who comes along with films that aren’t completely paid off, nor even have complete backing.
Box office results for these “little” movies, original films with a particular approach, are rather disturbing, even when they get very good press. Many of these movies only sell between 10,000 and 30,000 tickets. These movies are different, often consistent in their mode of production and distribution, and are always offer something unique. And they don’t do all that well. On the one hand, the audience’s and the theater owners’ level of curiosity is sometimes dispiriting, as are the economic sources for developing new things. But on the other hand, the sign of resistance is encouraging: it’s great that in France we can still have so many theaters, so many moviegoers, so many films, inventive directors and… have films with only 10,000 tickets sold. The rest is like the other things, because with fiercer and fiercer single-product consumerism, you can no longer give simple lip service to resistance. And all participants need to imagine how to do things differently. That’s what we try to do with each movie.

Could you tell us about one or several films that are especially important to you?
They’re movies where an irreplaceable force is at work, with a unique voice, a style, real physical commitment. I use the word commitment intentionally, because it’s often applied to the latest films I’ve produced, directed by Carles, and it means they are identified in a narrower spectrum, one that “only” considers social problems, and at the same time are distanced from movies where you talk only about angles, lighting, depth of field, acting and cutting up the plotline. I like what’s primitive in cinema, with a physical commitment by those who are filming, those being filmed and those watching. That’s the relationship I like because it’s debatable, always physical, human and risky. Those are the films that are dear to me, physically, with direct movies and with fiction. I’m thinking about the body in Jean-François Richet’s Etat des lieux, where the revolt wins me over precisely because it happens through work on bodies violated by “social” issues, which themselves have no body, as well as the apparently foreign bodies pulsating in Claire Denis’s J’ai pas de sommeil or Beau travail, and of the different people in Kramer’s Route One or in Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks. I could go on with a list of movies that, for me, make up this cinema that’s dear to me, where physical commitment gives a unique experience to the moviegoer. Because even though these films are very different, they’re full of meaning, make a statement, they come to you as a whole, weighted down by the filmmaker’s personality. They open up a space for sharing, a place to put yourself, no matter how awkward that place may be. It’s not a window onto the world you can calmly look through from your seat; here, you move with other bodies, you’re shoved, you’ve literally changed places by the end of the movie. And not because you’ve been manipulated by a brilliant plot, but because you follow along with the approach, made up from a narrative of bodies sharing the world.
But the film I’ve worn out many videotapes of is The Misfits, where Marilyn’s body vibrates with each frame, where the horses are unbridled, where everything becomes possible again, even for worn out bodies, while the stars continue to shine in the night.

On the occasion of the DVD release by Warner Home Video of seven of Stanley Kubrick’s films in restored and resmatered versions with brand-new extras, we have interviewed with Jan Harlan in Paris.

How did you start to work as a producer with Stanley Kubrick?
I had know Stanley Kubrick before I started working with him for many years because he married my sister in 1966. I worked in a different profession then as a business planner, in Switzerland, in Vienna and in New York.
When I lived in New York, I got to know him very well because he was preparing 2001 with Arthur C. Clarke. I’ve really done nothing on 2001. I only made a music suggestion -Richard Strauss- and I don’t take any credit for that because I just happened to know it. So, I went back to Zurich, and then, much later, we stayed in touch all the time, he called me and asked me if I would join him to go to Rumania for one year on Life of Napoleon. I agreed and I looked forward to it. I got a leave from my company. My wife and our baby went to England and we intended to go to Rumania six months later. But Dino de Laurentis was preparing Rod Steiger’s Waterloo. MGM eventually got cold feet, pulled out and it didn’t happen. We had already the huge archive we still have, Stanley was a real scholar on this topic.
I thought I’d go back to Zurich but I liked to work with Stanley, I liked England, he liked me, so I stayed on to see what happens and… the rest is history. I learned a new profession through Clockwork Orange and also through Barry Lyndon. I always did job music, and legal and financial, that was easy, but the specifics of the film industry, I really had to learn. And then after Barry Lyndon, I really did what I did for the rest of my life, that is I negotiated, I got things and peoples, commissions and rights, it had nothing to do with what you see on screen. We were not a committee, no committee has ever created a great work of art, a painting, a novel, a string quartet or anything, or a film. It’s a cooperative form of working, that is true. But it was Kubrick’s films and he made all the decisions. Other people suggested things, I suggested music, I never made the decision. I liked this role, I liked it very much and I enjoyed myself.
So, that’s how I started with him and stayed with him and then even after we prepared several films that were never made, not only Napoleon but also a film on the holocaust and A.I. of course -a story he liked very much but after he worked on it for a long time, he decided that Steven Spielberg would be a much better director for this. Steven came right away and he looked at it but nothing happened and only after Stanley’s death Steven finally did it, and did great, thankfully to Stanley’s script, including the Pinocchio’s story about all things exactly as Stanley had planned it but of course he had to make it into a Spielberg’s film -it was absolutely necessary- and he succeeded and I think Stanley would have applauded it. It’s again a typically Kubrick film because it has many layers: it seems to be just a nice fairy tale when it’s a very bitter story. Humanity has disappeared, all gone, it’s not even mentioned why, it doesn’t matter. At the same time, the middle section of A.I. shows how people destroy computers, robots, and Stanley always said nothing can be stupid enough that it couldn’t be real as far as our species is concerned. We are able to do unbelievably stupid things, like that, and unfortunately he’s right there.
While he was a great optimist in daily life, he was very pessimistic about our species and he was convinced that we had no chance of survival. We are wonderfully made, we are miracles, the fact that evolution is possible, it’s the greatest compliment to creation that we can make. Still, it’s our emotions that control everything. That’s why we have no chance.

Do you think that sort of defiance towards emotions may explain why Stanley Kubrick’s cinema is sometimes referred to as ‘cold’?
He tried to be as factual as possible. It’s cold only at the surface: look a the end of Full Metal Jacket, there’s these poor boys… In reality they’re twenty years old, they’re boys, they’re not men yet, that’s why they are so good for the marines. We wanted to have eighteen years old actors because an eighteen year old man is almost a child -they just can’t handle it, emotionally speaking- but we couldn’t find them. So we had to go up to the age of twenty five and that was fine. So at the end of Full Metal Jacket you have these poor guys going finally home, singing Mickey Mouse, dreaming of the girls they want to hold in their arms, that’s what it is, that’s all there is.

What was Stanley Kubrick’s opinion about the video release of his movies?
He didn’t like VHS at all nor did he like ‘doublage’ (dubbing). He didn’t really particularly like television. But he would very much like now at least that modern TV [he shows the widescreen TV set of the room], good plasma screens, that format has improved a lot. But he still would like people to go to the cinema. No telephone, no interruption, no food, you know, because it’s a much better focus, particularly since his films need concentration. It’s interesting, for example, on Eyes Wide Shut, that in Europe, I always tell people, you have to see the film twice, it will be a different film. I would never tell this to a Japanese because Japanese people are able to concentrate and they can take everything at the first time. The Koreans as well. It’s an observation I made. There’s total silence, there’s complete focus when you go in a cinema. But in Europe there’s so much noise: popcorn for instance… I talked to many people about that and they said: ‘Yes, you absolutely right. When I saw it the second time, it was a totally different film’.
It took Stanley three years to make Eyes Wide Shut, you know. He found it incredibly difficult to make this film. Such a difficult topic. And have Tom Cruise -very good in this film- playing this permanent loser, whenever he opens his mouth he goes one step further into the hole, and his wife being really the saving grace, she’s like a guardian angel. But you can’t put it like that and he probably wouldn’t even like me saying it like this because it has to be more subtle, much more ‘vague’.

Who supervised the transfer from film to DVD?
The big problem his to determine the ratio. That’s the problem, and of course the ratio now, the new standard is 16/9, all the television sets are like that. So you have to live with the real world and you have to make a compromise and Stanley would have made a compromise. That is the only decision you have to make, the rest is just about cleaning the negative and doing it as well as you can, that’s the technical department’s job, they know how to do that, they don’t need me. So the only decision is the ratio and I’m always trying to really think in the way that Stanley would have decided. And he was somebody who went with the time, no doubt he would have applauded a big plasma screen and high definition. It’s so much better then it was ten years ago, no comparison. I can very much enjoy a film on television as well as on DVD but I also enjoy the theater experience -when I see Harry Potter for instance, I like 500 children in a theater, that’s much more fun! I probably wouldn’t watch it alone…

Would you think about any another director who would be able to direct Kubrick’s script of Napoleon?
Very tricky. Because Stanley’s scripts were made to be read by film executives. His scripts were not really a representation of the way he had the film in mind. I know from his others films that the scripts and the end result where very different things. Now, what interested him in Napoleon, is something that is not really reflected in his script and that was this man who was both tremendously talented, brilliantly successful militarist and politician with an enormous charisma and at the same time a fool, who only had himself to blame for the debacle for almost ruining is country, for destroying ‘La grande armée’ -that was the finest army that Europe has seen up to this point and he lost it all in Russia. Totally unnecessary. He took revenge for the tsar breaking the continental blockade, which he stupidly enforced to bankrupt England. He was a terrible statesman in the end and Stanley was interested, again, in the fact that we all are governed by emotions and not by our ability to be intelligent, educated. Knowledge, rational thinking, it’s all very important to have but when it really comes to the test, we are governed by emotions. We are not objective. That’s how we are, that’s our species, it’s a great strength -the fact that we are governed by emotions- and it’s probably the base for all great art but it’s also our Achilles’ heel. And he himslef would not exclude himself from that.

The Thing From Another World (1951) by Howard Hawks.

‘The Thing From Another World is an exemplary movie. Theoretically, this is an anti-communist movie made during the cold war -an anti-communism which is not but can be guessed, as it was shot in 1950-1951. Curiously though, as in many other of his films, the film constantly shows many people acting simultaneously. In each sequence, Hawks shows us the behavior of a small group -five or ten people. The action takes place in a station in Alaska or in the Great North, isolated from the world -it’s a huis-clos film. Each character has a professional and personalized function and the film shows how they react as if each actor was at the same time directed and his own director. This a real orchestration: not only a personal itinerary but one of an entire group, which leads me to say that The Thing From Another World is a communist film -which rejoins the true nature of communism. It’s an example for all directors: most of the time, they don’t want to direct their secondary actors and let them do what they want. Instead, everyone here has his own individuality. It’s fascinating to see all those secondary actors -none of them are really famous- who act as parts of a group would in life. Hawks’ film is a model for every director and a typical example, maybe the most typical, of cinema history.’

About the film: a wonderfully crisp script and quick-paced direction distinguishes this film about an alien creature discovered near an Arctic outpost. Members of a scientific research team cart the frozen pilot back to camp where it thaws out -much to their regret.

To learn more about the DVD, click here.

About Luc Moullet
A former critics at Cahiers du cinéma (from 1956 to 1965), Luc Moullet has become a key figure in French cinema for over forty years with a string of comic masterpieces characterized by caustic humor, occasional gunplay, shoestring budgets, careful attention to landscape and an overall b-movie scabbiness which as yet knows no equal. Relentlessly teetering between rigorous logic and the heights of the absurd, Moullet’s films have earned the consistent praise of critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum and filmmakers like Jean-Marie Straub (who called him ‘the only heir of both Buñuel and Tati’), Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette. . In 2006, her directs Le prestige de la mort (The Pretige of Death), ‘a sort of remake of Le mort en fuite by André Berthomieu or Whispering Chorus by Cecil B. DeMille -the story of a man that takes a dead man’s identity to get away from a tricky situation. Actually, it’s about a filmmaker that wants people to believe he’s dead in order to benefit from the headlines of his own death!’. Luc Moullet is currently developing several feature-length films projects including La terre de la folie (The Land of Madness), ‘a documentary about a region in France that is very impregnated by madness…’

On DVD with English subtitles at last: Sociology is a Fighting Sport (or sometimes Sociology is a Martial Art and in French La sociologie est un sport de combat) by journalist and documentarist Pierre Carles, who’s collected day after day a growing number of enemies by highlighting connivances between politcs and the media. By producing his films on his own, Pierre Carles has nevertheless managed to preserve a total liberty of creation and to continue to present -in a hilarious and dramatic way- his vision of a society prevailed by dominating models through arthouse theaters and alternative networkds.
For Sociology is a Fighting Sport, Carles has followed French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who died in January 2002, with his camera for years. Bourdieu was a very influential and controversial intellectual, whose ambiguous relationship -a mixture of rejection, inhibition and clever use- to the public and to television is widely known. In this context the films of Pierre Carles are a multiple exception: Carles did not work in commission of a television transmitter, but had, on the contrary, the full trust of the sociologist. strong>Sociology is a Fighting Sport is a thorough and sensitive portrait of the working connections and correlations of the actions of Bourdieu. The film shows Bourdieu at work, the kind of work which for him played a central role: on the interface to concrete action.

Check out the DVD now!