Take One (Jul-Aug 1971)

few months before Tout Va Bien. The two films are dealing with the same subject, but in completely different ways, and we thought it good that these two films should be made and shown. The collective that did Coup Pour Coup followed the path of Biberman in Salt of the Earth, while our path has been an attempt to find a new kind of realism. So far, all the critics have rejected our film and praised the other one, and we feel that a certain polemic has been raised by this. People are more willing to accept films following the tradition of Salt of the Earth, the tradition of bourgeois critical realism, than our films. Well, history will be the judge. At least we've tried. But as long as we’re talking abstractly about political film, or revolutionary film, we should say that there’s no such thing as a royal path to revolutionary film. The form of political cinema must be fluid and changing. Still, there is a very obvious fact that we’ve been unable to make people recognize: you can’t express revolutionary content through traditional forms. The films we’ve made are considered aberrations. People are violently against them — there’s a real ideological hatred surrounding those films. In one way, this is good, but we Can't continue to be satisfied with just that. Our problem is to reach more people, and to prove that the path we've opened is a valuable one. The main difficulty is to convince people that there is a need for analysis through images and eos For now, we must say that people are refusing this idea. | ran across a book, some kind of dictionary of cinema, and there was a short note on Jean-Luc that pointed out that all of Jean-Luc’s films have been learning processes for him. \n a way, the films we've made together have intensified that process. But people refuse to allow that possibility — that a film can settle some problems and contradictions for the filmmaker. We wrote a text for Tout Va Bien that we didn’t use, in which Yves says to Jane that “It’s not too difficult to know where you're going. The difficulty is to know where you are starting from.” This is our problem too, and it’s led to our being accused of individualism, petit-bourgeois thinking, and so forth. The point about films being learning processes is a very good one. But this is a problem, because audiences want the filmmaker to pretend he has all the answers. Yes, that’s true, but this is only a reflection of the way movies have been made traditionally. We are rediscovering things that Dziga Vertov discovered in his own time. Movies haven't operated as effectively, in a revolutionary way, as literature has. Movies are still working with narrative forms that were exploded in literature half a century ago. This isa revolution. Jean-Luc’s earlier films didn’t achieve that revolution. They began to set some of the explosive charges, but it was just a beginning. Some of his earlier films, like Pierrot Le Fou, appear now as highly traditional narratives. But in their time they had a real revolutionary function. In a sense they are still revolutionary, because people should be producing more of these films, and they’re not. But that’s assuming general audiences are ready for films of that ideological density. All of Jean-Luc’s films, and now your films, necessarily limit their audience by their very rigorousness. We've not been elitists, or aristocrats, of our own will. We don’t despise people. Ina way, we're very modest. When we were touring in the States last time, when we did the long interview with you, our difficulty with English was one of the things that made people think we were dogmatists, and so on. We’re not, and we don’t want to be. It’s true that sometimes we attack certain people and ideas very strongly, but that’s because the ideological contradictions are sometimes very clearly antagonistic. There are some problems that you can’t avoid, and you have to stand and fight. But there is a huge problem in trying to preserve our option for a revolutionary form, while trying to reach more people. 24 We are still working from the quotation of Chairman Mao that says: There are two possibilities. Someone is starving, SO you can catch a fish for him. But tomorrow what will he eat? He doesn’t know how to fish. The problem is to teach him how to fish. Maybe there are no fish in the river, but at least he will be obliged to see exactly what happens when you fish. Making films the way we are making them is partially to suggest that films are very simple and complex at the same time. Anyone can make a film. Jean-Luc has this fantastic power to help you free yourself from any kind of Hollywood complex, which is the complex everyone suffers from when he picks up a camera. A film can be made out of two stills, and you don’t need a plot. What comes after Tout Va Bien? There is still the Palestine movie, which has changed a lot. It's been through three or four versions, and now it’s going to be done in still another way. We can’t do a film on Palestine any more, because the situation there has changed so drastically, so it will be a film on how to film history. It will include all the Palestine footage, along with fictional stuff, newsreels, material on the French underground in the Second World War... We have a book to finish, which will be called, ‘Down With Cinema,” or maybe “Up With Cinema”. We have four or five other projects. But frankly, | don’t know exactly what is going to happen. The Dziga Vertov group has been living and working for four years now, and maybe it’s at its end. As long as it is only Jean-Luc and me, we need to make our own films as well as making films together. How about the audience? Does the community for which the Dziga Vertov series of films were made still exist? That’s the main problem, the splitting of the movement. The probiems we're experiencing now are largely coming out of what you're pointing to, the splitting of the movement. There's a lot of fatigue. The same things that are happening here are happening in France, and the political landscape has changed a lot. The main child of May '68 is some kind of workers’ leftism, about which very little can be said so far. It will develop itself in the years to come, and we have to relate to it in a new way. So things are going to change. But we are not in a desperate mood at all. We are on the offensive — more so than ever. We’ve been making films as very few people have been making them — a lot of them, seven films in three years — and we will continue as long as there’s any possibility to raise money. One of the things that Jean-Luc has taught me is that you must work knowing what kind of economic base you have. The proper method of working is not to do a script and then try to raise money, but to raise money first and then do your script with the money you've raised. If you get two bucks, you make a two-buck film. Young filmmakers often refuse to face that reality, and knowing that they won’t be given the money to make Cleopatra, they still build a Cleopatra script. And then they’re puzzled when they have to cancel the scene where the snake makes love with hundreds of Legionnaires. It would seem that you’re moving toward more traditional forms in your films. Do you agree? There is a.need to complete the work we've done by making other types of movies than we have in the past, at least for the moment. Can you be more specific? | don’t think we’re in a ghetto, and we're not going to let people think we are. Tout Va Bien is no different from any of our other films in terms of the way politics are built into it, but it’s definitely a step in the direction of materialistic fiction. We are going to continue to work on that path. It has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of retreat. | have been telling Jean-Luc lately that as long as we are people who read both Raymond Chandler and Mao Tsetung, we have to make a link between the two. And you need to make it also.