André S. Labarthe (in English)
The Gaze of André S. Labarthe
Interview by Jacques Henric
art press 346
This year, the 17th edition of the Côté court film festival (in the northern Paris suburb of Pantin (June 11–19)
is presenting a retrospective of André S. Labarthe, with 22 programs and 70 films. This is a great opportunity
for younger spectators to discover one of France’s most iconoclastic and unusual filmmakers, and for those
who already know him—some, perhaps, since his days at the young Cahiers du Cinéma—to unearth new
treasures from among the (roughly) 600 films credited to this director. Below, Labarthe discusses his career
and idea of filmmaking with Jacques Henric.
Note, too that Pantin will be showing a first version of Le Sommeil continue n’importe quelle idée…, Estelle
Fredet’s film about Labarthe. And that on October 17 the FEMIS is putting on a non-stop, 48-hour projection
of the films in the Cinéma de notre temps and Cinéastes de notre temps collections, under the title La Saga
de cinéma, de notre temps. Finally, a volume of texts entitled Happy End (Accords perdus n° 2) has just been
published by Limelight.
How did you come to meet the people at Cahiers du Cinéma?
It was very indirect. I was interested mainly in literature, and especially in Surrealism. I was just coming out
of eight years frequenting Jesuits followed by military service during which I read the first issue of Cahiers
du Cinéma, which had just come out. For me, André Bazin’s articles were the first to approach movies in a
way that suited me. One day, I was at the Cinémathèque with a friend, Jacques Siclier, and we met Truffaut,
who was then hands-on at the Cahiers. This was the mid-1950s. Truffaut asked me to champion The Night of
the Hunter by Charles Laughton in the Cahiers, a film he had just slated in Art. That was one of my first
articles in the Cahiers, and I became the specialist for a certain kind of film, like those of Luis Buñuel and
Josef von Sternberg, films ignored by orthodox critics at Cahiers, where American movies took pride of
place. I should add that before I started wri ting for the Cahiers, in the early 1950s, when I was still at the Henri
IV lycée, where I was taking Jean Beaufret’s courses on Heidegger, I used to go to the Ciné-club du Quartier
Latin. This was a totally chaotic film club (the director ended up in jail) frequented by people I got to know
later, such as Godard, Rohmer and Rivette… There were other film clubs in Paris, but this was the liveliest
and most exciting one.
There was also the Cinémathèque, of course: three films a day. But my contributions to the Cahiers didn’t
stop me from going over to the rival magazine, Positif, from time to time. It was edited by Losfeld at Terrain
Vague. And it was at Terrain Vague that I met Hans Bellmer. I had reviewed his Anatomy of the Image in a
journal called Bizarre. He was looking to sell his doll, but he wanted so much money that he couldn’t find a
buyer. He had decided to burn it. I offered to film the scene, but it didn’t happen and the piece landed up at
the Pompidou. This was a very exciting period, one that lasted into the early 1960s, when the New Wave
people started making their films. Truffaut: Les 400 coups, Godard: A bout de souffle, and Rohmer with those
little films he put together on his own. We spent our days in movie theaters and in the evening we met at
the Cahiers talk about what we’d seen. What with the three daily films at the Cinémathèque plus the ones on
theatrical release each Wednesday, we had the feeling that a day would come when we would have seen it
all, every film. We quickly realized that we would have to make choices. Often based on abstract principles.
Possessed by cinema
Who at the Cahiers did you feel closest to?
Godard, I think. In fact that’s still the case today. He had a freedom of judgment and, above all, a kind of
irreverence, something that Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette possessed in large amounts, too, but with him
there was also a unique offhandedness. And I loved that, as I did that way he had of slipping in quotes from
authors he had read when he was 18, just after the war: Malraux, Musset, Giraudoux… But to come back to
the Cahiers, we admired the same people. For example, and I think everyone would have agreed about this,
we thought the greatest direct in the world was Renoir. Jean Renoir. From Bazin to Chabrol, from Truffaut to
Rohmer, Rivette and Godard. But did we have the same vision of Renoir? I’m not so sure. You only have to
look at the films made over the years by Rohmer, Truffaut, Rivette, Chabrol, etc., to realize that each one had
his own vision of Renoir. It would be fascinating to analyze all that.
You were quick to oppose what was called “auteur policy.” You were, and still are, against the use of written
screenplays and against the idea of mise-en-scène.
Auteur policy, which had been a fantastic instrument for establishing cinema as an art form, ended up
paralyzing thinking about movies (and it’s still doing damage—just look at the press). The whole thing went
pretty far. I remember Truffaut in the Cahiers trumpeting the masterpieces we would only be seeing later that
year. Can you imagine coming out and saying in advance that the best book of the year will be Sollers’ new
novel? Of course, I can see that these excesses were the price you had to pay for the tremendous critical
work being done at the Cahiers. One idea led to another, and an intuition was raised up us a law. All these
fetishes were rooted in that wild love of movies that gripped us, there’s no denying that: fetishism over
sequence shots, fetishism of crane shots in musicals that Astruc, Douchet and Domarchi was lyrical about.
What a time! And of course all this was delivered in a peremptory tone that awed the general cinephiles.
Among these sacred cows there was mise-en-scène, but with capitals everywhere. And so we went from the
idea of the auteur to the cult of the mise-en-scène, and it occurred to me that this term mise-en-scène wasn’t
able to convey the reality of movie-making as a practice. I remembering writing an article about this in the
Cahiers, “Death of a Word.” But Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and Rivette had already started making the first
films of what would be called the New Wave.
When did you get the idea of making films yourself?
Never. You have to think back to the situation. The late 1950s. Truffaut marries the daughter of a producer who
enabled him to make Les 400 coups, his first feature. Chabrol’s wife inherited some money that enabled
Claude to shoot Le Beau Serge and found a production company. And one thing led to another. Boosted by
their success, Truffaut and Chabrol helped Rivette and Rohmer to complete Paris nous appartient and Le
Signe du lion. And when Godard made Georges de Beauregard a rich man with A bout de souffle, the entire
New Wave piled in after him, because Jean-Luc introduced Beauregard to the whole Cahiers group and
associates like Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda and Jacques Rozier. And me. And they all made films for
Beauregard. But not me. I had no ideas for a film, no script, nothing. I thought the New Wave would last
forever, that I had plenty of time. I just loved movies, it’s as simple as that.
But there surely was a first time, when you held a camera, presumably when you started the series on
contemporary directors.
No, it was Janine Bazin who had the idea for that series. At the time the Cahiers was doing big interviews,
with Buñuel, Renoir, etc., and the original, very simple idea, was to add a camera to our mikes and offer the
results to television, and more exactly to the ORTF, because in those days, 1964, there was still only one
channel. But I didn’t hold the camera. I have never held a came ra in all my life. Janine and I would choose
the directors we talked to and the directors who struck us as best equipped to make the films. It was only
later, when I started going into cutting rooms, that I felt like shooting films myself. I had just discovered the
fact that cinema is also a science of effects. The series was broken off after a few years, but it was revived
by Arte in 1989, under the title “Cinéma de notre temps.”
The art of representing nothing
Out of the six hundred films you have made, there are ones on filmmakers, dancers, writers, painters and
children… Are you capable of filming absolutely anything, as one of your friends suggested? What is the real
subject of your films? In the one on the Kanaks [of New Caledonia], one of the characters says, “They are ghosts
looking for living people.” Are you not like a living person looking for ghosts?
Yes, I am looking for ghosts. I don’t think that Lumière’s cinema is an art of images. The image is simply the
necessary medium for reaching out to ghosts. Bresson had another way of putting this: “Cinema, an art—
with images—of representing nothing.” What is at stake is something other than the image.
“Making films with the filmable, how wretched!” What did you mean when you wrote that?
It’s the same idea. When I make a film, when I edit, I force myself to cut off all the reflexes that are triggered
by the things I film. Cinema is a weird machine that is, ultimately, capable of making films all on its own.
There is no need for a director. Just a few technicians to press the buttons. I can really feel that: if I let myself
be carried along, I obey a few simple rules that we call “professionalism.” What a joke that is. No thank you.
I try not to confuse the filmed object and the film object. People think you only have to put your camera
down in front of something that moves, terrorizes or upsets you for that to be immediately and miraculously
communicated to the spectator. In fact, it’s not that like at all. Cinema is not capture, simple recording. Artaud
saw that clearly enough. It’s all about shattering reality into tiny bits and then recomposing it. How? By
means of artifice. That is to say, by means of three things: manipulation (mutilation), speech (commentary)
and chance (luck).
Imagine for a moment. I film a glass as best I can and project the shot on a screen. What do I see? The image
of the glass. But the glass won’t be there. I will have the representation of the glass, its image, but not the
feeling of the presence or existence of the glass. Imagine now that when I take the shot—the camera’s
running, etc.—the glass falls and breaks. The camera records the disaster. I project the film and, at the
moment when the glass breaks, there on the screen, we have the very strong feeling that the glass is there.
That means its violent disappearance will have been required to affirm its presence. But it’s too late. Yes, I
think that cinema needs to be introducing death at every moment if it is to talk a little bit seriously about the
world. You need to have seen an old lady being run over by a bus, not to know, but to have the feeling of
what a bus really is.
That’s why you are interested in the incidents or accidents that occur during shooting, like that flooded studio where the choreographer William Forsythe is seen rehearsing.
Chance is a fantastic thing. The effects I get are always much more powerful and convincing than the ones made with imagination and work.
Your eye reminds me of Dalí. Looking at a photo of Matisse, Dalí homed in on just one thing, that no one else had noticed : one of his trouser buttons was undone. That’s the kind of detail that interests you, the kind that no one sees.
That kind of detail always reveals something. If you stick to the “cinematographically correct” then nothing
happens. What interests me is the irruption of the real, that is, reality when it escapes the law. The granny
run over by a bus is outside the law: a bus isn’t made to run over grandmothers. It’s the same with the
breaking glass. Suddenly, something is there, like an electric current, an illumination. Georges Franju is good
on that. He calls it the out-of-the-ordinary. If you see a guy with a gun in the countryside, you say, he’s a
hunter; if you see the same guy with a gun on the Champs-Elysées, he’s not very likely to be a hunter. These
little discrepancies, which produce a violent impression of the real, are very rare. And that’s fortunate, but
that’s how we manage to live. The real, said Lacan, is insupportable. It’s impossible. Bataille says the same thing.
The real is insupportable
Like Picasso, who dated his paintings, on your images you mark the date and time, the minutes and seconds and
the place where you shot them. In the film about Forsythe there is that huge clock. What are you dating here? What
you’re filming or what you’re experiencing?
When I saw that clock hanging on the studio wall, I had it brought down so that the camera could move back
and forth in front of it. It’s a pulse beating throughout the duration of the film. Cinema, which is a time-based
art, had completely forgotten time. Time very soon became the spectator’s and therefore the director’s
enemy: it had to be eliminated, or tamed. Cinema’s stroke of genius for taming it successfully was to invent
suspense. The film that broke with this system was Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, which caused a
real scandal in Cannes. That film is time in its untamed state, undirectional and therefore insupportable.
Spectators left the theater because time is the spectator’s enemy. Later, cinema went back to the old routine.
Except Godard and Rivette, where you still find shots like the ones in L’Avventura. Janine Bazin once said to
Rivette about a film of his she’d just seen, “It was a bit slow at times.” And Rivette answered: “You’re right
Janine, I must add some more.” Time is a mysterious thing.
Texts and voices play a major role in your films, especially the voice-overs by Jean-Claude Dauphin…
Yes, I like to write on, under, with or against images and sounds. That’s a great pleasure for me. Especially
when I know what voices or what kind of voices are going to carry them. I spent a long time looking for that
voice of Dauphin’s. I wanted a neutral voice, without emotion, sexless. Now, I thought and I am sure that
everyone thinks that a neutral voice can only be masculine. When you hear a man’s voice speaking a
commentary in a film, you don’t say, or you’re not bound to say, “Hey, a man’s voice!” Whereas if it’s a
woman’s voice you are almost certain to say, “Hey, a woman’s voice!” Strange, don’t you think? Anyway, it
took me years to realize that Dauphin’s voice, which after all that time had become my own, was anything
but a sexless, emotionless voice. Today, when I’m writing my texts, I do so with that voice. I slip it on like a
hat. It allows to disappear, to merge with the land scape. I’m just not there, for anyone: you simply have to
manage on your own.
The words “the end” never appear on the screen. Aren’t your films ever finished?
You’re right. For all the variety of subjects—cinema, dance, literature, painting, etc.—I have the feeling that’s
it all the same film. A kind of serial. You mentioned someone saying that I could film just about anything.
Maybe that’s what he meant. It’s not the object that counts, it’s the gaze.
Have you been viewing a lot of old films again for the festival?
They were very difficult to track down. In the coming months several DVDs should be issued, including one
from Actes Sud with my films about writers: Artaud, Bataille, Sollers, Reverdy, Schulz. And, above all, a film
about me by Estelle Fredet. It doesn’t have a title yet, but it should be quite surprising.
What has literature brought to your work?
No scripts, that’s for sure, but words, a texture. I need words. They help me to bring forth the real with greater
intensity. So I’m always in need of literature. Seven years ago I went to film David Cronenberg in Toronto.
He was doing his editing in a big semi-industrial building. I was filming Serge Grumberg, the guy who was
in charge of giving the interview and I showed him in the city in a high-angle shot. I fimed him walking in
the snow. And just as the camera was following him as he reached the building, a car sped out in reverse.
So we redid the shot, and this time the car came out in the right direction and the man went inside. On the
way back, on the plane, I was thinking over the scene and this passage from Lautréamont suddenly came
into my mind: “Reader, turn your heels backwards and not forward, there is still time.” Lautréamont helped
me introduce the film.
You have described yourself as unreconciled and divided. What can these six hundred films do for you?
I’m not trying to resolve my contradictions. If I have several “mes” within me, I don’t want to have to choose.
I am the place of several temporalities. I am at once a supersonic plane flying from one idea to another and
a snail.
There are a lot of naked women in your films.
Yes, why should they always be clothed?
Translation C. Penwarden