Cinema Canada (Apr-May 1974)

Baltazar/Koller Gilles Carle in his Place Bonaventure office But do you talk about it to teach, or simply because you have to talk about it? “Just because I have to talk about it, because I like to talk about it. Because it’s my way of being. If I talk about it, I can — maybe — reach something else. So I’m really going for one film after another after another. And I’m always trying to reverse the situation from one film to another, not trying to make the same film. It’s not a coincidence that the True Nature of Bernadette was the first film I did while living at Place Bonaventure, which is the most artificial part of the city. Seeing all this and living here, I started to see the country in a different way. Fresh air, pollution, everything. So a question came to my mind, what’s natural and what’s artificial? Am I better in here with unpolluted air than outside with polluted air? What’s happening to the country? You don’t ask yourself this when you’re in the country, but you ask that question between white walls, like here, with no windows. So Bernadette is a reflection of all this, my life, but I don’t try to put my subjectivity into my films, do you know what I mean? I try to get rid of myself and be out of myself when I think of my film. “I think there are too many problems in the world today. Every film is seen through the ‘problem-optic.’ If there’s a problem, you need a solution. I want to leave my subjectivity out and try to look at myself as one of the many people who are working. “‘There’s one thing which Bob Dylan said about Lightning Hopkins which I like very much. He said, “he’s in his songs and out of his songs at the same time.” I think this is maturity and this is what we have to reach. He talks in a very simple way, and it’s perfect and it’s global. You feel his wife is there in his songs and you feel all women at the same time. If you leave your wife out and talk about womanhood, it’s no good, you see? So Lightning Hopkins is in and he’s out of his songs. That’s what I like about the blues. It’s music I’m very close to. So I try to do this. “At the same time I’ve reached a point where I believe that you must show the world as something which you can do George Csaba Koller E> gvaraae” > Sraga.pvase something about, something that can be changed. I finally got to thinking that some revolutionary films are not revolutionary at all, because they show the world as an unchanging and fixed structure. They don’t say don’t try to change it, but they never show what one can do about it. It’s important now that every film should try to say: you can change something about your own life, and at the same time, maybe change something about the world. So you must show the world as a changing structure, something that can be changed, something that can be transformed, that the world can be something else. That will be my next film, in a way. To try and say to people that you can do something about your own situation. To me, that’s the most important thing now. Films should deal more with ethics, than aesthetics. “You don’t have to say it in an intellectual way, because if you just make a slogan out of it, it’s nothing. You must show how it can be done in real life. If it’s just another slogan, you’re in competition with corn flakes and coca-cola. You must be deeper than this and show how life is constructed not out of models but in trying to reach something. How it can change, how it can be transformed. So I’m trying to get characters together for my next film. It starts with a woman, and she decides that she has nothing to do and so she will stay in bed. She won’t get up out of that bed for forty-five or fifty minutes. Then once she gets up, it will be like the world is passing through her, rotating once again. I’m trying to get the new feeling of being born again. Going back to being an animal and being reborn as a human being, and what it involves. That’s what I’m working on right now, because I would like to do it myself, you know. “But ’m worried, because the industry in Canada is reaching and striving ail the time to make films which are just films, and to me making a film that is just a film is no excuse for having an industry. So let’s consider all that we have already done as shit, and start all over again. Even The Heavenly Bodies. Yeah, you must scrap your own film, and say: I tried to make this, and I tried to say that and it’s no good, so I’ll try again. It’s hard to be free and do really the film which you would like to do.” Cinema Canada 49