January 8, 2024








                                                                                                                                                    


(...)

DOMINIQUE VILLAIN:  On Corneille-Brecht (2009), for example, how did this work with these texts come about?

JEAN-MARIE STRAUB:  It was an actress — Cornelia Geiser — who had seen Sicilia!. I think it was the first film of ours she'd seen. She knew that we work on texts before making a film, and she wanted to do this work, independently of the cinema or a film. She had no idea for ​​a text. I ended up accepting when she insisted. One fine day, after five or six years, I said to her "Here you go".

And then suddenly, I found myself in the hospital, because I was run over by a Vespa while crossing the Caulaincourt bridge at half past midnight. The result was four small pieces. In the hospital I didn't know how to occupy myself. She sometimes came to see me, I said to her: “Sit down, we will finally do the work together”. 

I offered her two little monologues by Corneille, and after we worked on them a bit, after a few weeks, I liked her because her mother tongue is German. She's from the Munich region. I thought it would be nice to give her a text in German as well. I remembered a sentence that was going around in my head, which I had, moreover, changed around. It was the sentence: "Rom, Rom, Rom, Was ist das Rom?" I knew it was by Brecht and that I'd heard it at the Berliner Ensemble in the fifties. I didn't even know which Brecht play it came from. I wracked my brain, and I found where it appeared: in what's called in French “Le Procès de Lucullus” ("The Trial of Lucullus"). Which is both a Dessau opera, a radio text and a play.* I found my sentence, but it wasn't my sentence, it was "Rom, Rom, was ist Rom?" 

The first two texts in French that we had worked on were about Rome, I wanted to settle accounts with the city of Rome, which I hate, although I had a certain love for it at the start. I learned to hate it. The first text ended with: "Voir Rome etcetera... moi seul en être témoin et mourir de plaisir" ("Take Rome etcetera... I alone will be the cause of it and die of pleasure"). It was Horace, which I barely knew, I'd read it fifty years before, in high school. The second text is a little monologue that I took from a play that dates from 1667 (Othon), by the same Corneille, written more than thirty years later. So, we saw different layers. We had the work of a relatively young man, and the work of the same man thirty years later. And who, in the meantime, had translated thousands of verses from Latin and The Imitation of Jesus Christ. It was important, there were two stages, two strata by the same author. And it was about the horrors of the Roman Empire. 

While working on these texts, I thought of Brecht's phrase, the origin of which I'd forgotten. I found it, and I told this actress that we could work on that too. It got a lot longer, even though it's not a very long movie. The two texts in French caused a third. We worked on this text by Brecht. But I was far from the cinema. I was interested in this young lady, who wanted to work. I was interested in seeing what she was capable of, and what she would be capable of if pushed or held back. 

She was seated in front of a white wall. I was lying on my hospital bed sitting next to her. We talked a bit. And after two months, I said to myself that what she was doing, after all, it would be interesting to film it. It would be a film that wouldn't be a film, but what we would film would be interesting, and ninety percent different from other films. 

At that moment, I was kicked out of the hospital. Social Security stopped paying. I ended up at my house, rue Cavallotti near Place Clichy, and instead of having a white wall, I had strange things. I filmed where I've lived in Paris since 1954. The Corneille passages,  in front of an open window. She turns her back to the street. For the other text, she's seated in a crumbling armchair with a red throw cover. Between the blocks of Brecht, we introduced punctuation. Each time there's a break, and between each shot, she changed her costume. With Danièle, we always made fun of contemporary French films made by Fémis students or by more famous people. Real fashion shows, where the main actress changes her costume with each shot. We said to ourselves: “Another fashion show, dull as dishwater." Here, I wanted to do that squarely. She changed her blouse and skirt with each shot. With violently different colors. As it's in semi-darkness and the colors are violent since everything isn't illuminated, this creates violent shocks. But anyway it's a beautiful fashion show. (To Dominique Villain) Is that what you wanted to know?




DOMINIQUE VILLAIN:  Yes, can you talk more specifically about working with the actress?

STRAUB:  It's the work anyone should do with any text. Whether their name is Straub or Tartampion. We read a text, we see that some people have introduced punctuation that didn't exist, or have falsified it. We try to dynamite the punctuation by returning to a form of oral culture. You have to know where you breathe. After dynamiting a comma, a period, we continue, and we go to the next line only later, after such and such a speech, a word, a verb, a complement. To give the text a dynamic which corresponds to the individual who says it, to their personal breath.

In general, professional actors do not know how to breathe. Even those from the famous Schaubühne in Berlin. We worked with them for three months. After three months, I said to them: “But nobody taught you how to breathe?" They said no. They have piano lessons every day, but they didn't understand when we told them to make an arc until there, to stop only after such and such a word, to start again at the next line, to breathe three, four, or five times... We make bars. A bar at the end of a line, or two bars, or five bars. This means: 1, 2, 3, 4, at 5 we go to the next line. Once it's decided, depending on the logic of the text, the syntax, and the dynamic that we're trying to capture or produce, it becomes a kind of score that each actor is obliged to exercise, instead of improvising. It involves preventing them from emptying their heart and soul and trampling on the text, from using the text as a springboard to express their personal petty bourgeois sentiments.

I should have brought you the text of the latest film, which is not this film, but a little after, in Italian. You would have seen that the text is retyped horizontally. Already, it's an attack on Mr. Gutenberg, because the book, obviously, must be vertical. Even among Arabs or Hebrews who read the other way. We make the page horizontal. To have room for longer lines. A line consists of several small sentences or a very large sentence that makes up several lines in the book. You need something visual, for the actor. At the end of the line we put bars, as I said. Then we put signs. The actor discovers the text, there's a key word in the middle of the text. He says this key word as if it didn't exist. So, we ask him shyly: “Do you know what this word means, do you know the weight of this word?” He replies: “Ah! I didn't think about it!" or he says nothing. We then say to them: “Without any intention, or without emphasizing, think of the weight of this word, and re-read the text to me." And there the word exists. Without vocal effect, the word has passed through the brain, through the heart, and through the nerves, and, by the grace of God — donnée par surcroît — it gains weight, it has its weight. That's the work. So, we mark a red line or a green line, gradually there are layers. There are blue, brown, black, purple marks. It becomes a score that needs to be exercised, exercised. Like a musician practices a score.



Horizontal pages from 
IL GINOCCHIO DI AREMIDE (2008)
and UN HÉRITIER (2011)



A STUDENT:  For the texts by Corneille and Brecht, did you give the actress any indications as you worked on the rhythm, the intonations, the musical punctuation, the breathing? Do you also happen to say the text aloud yourself?

STRAUB:  No no. I am careful not to tell them: “Listen to me, you are going to imitate what I am going to do.” It comes slowly, unconsciously. For example, when she begins to sing a small block three times in a somewhat bizarre way for an actress, it was found slowly. Neither she nor I had the idea of saying, "Here, we're going to start singing."

Everything is born 
par surcroît. Or by chance... Great art comes from chance, it does not come from intentions.

But there is a construction, when you make a film. The minimum work that one must demand of oneself as the so-called author of the film, even before working on the text, before filming, before discovering places and taming them, is to discover a construction. Without construction, nothing exists, in art even less than elsewhere. No more than there is a soul apart from a body.

A STUDENT:  Do you sometimes remove certain sentences or certain passages?

STRAUB:  No no. When I censor in the middle of a text, it's very rare, it's to prevent the author from putting on a bad face. In a letter from Schoenberg to Kandinsky, I took the liberty of removing the sentence: "There will always be wars, we can't do anything about it, we just have to let it happen." I said to myself that it was a cliché unworthy of Schoenberg, so I cut it. 

I hate theater directors who put on a play by a famous author, and who remove all sorts of little phrases here and there that they don't like. The work on a text must precisely consist of understanding it slowly, and in discovering, even after having understood or while understanding it, things that at the starting point shocked you, provoked you, and which did not please you. Which were not pleasant or which were even unpleasant. Above all, there should be no censorship. 

The only censorship permitted is Stalinist censorship.

DOMINIQUE VILLAIN:  Based on this film, I would like to come back to the idea of ​​construction. Is it the montage of the two texts that you call the construction? Could you have built a film from a single element, for example, Brecht's text? Or must there always be two or more elements...

STRAUB:  In this case, I can't answer this question, because it was not a film at the start. So, I didn't do my job beforehand. I only did it at the last minute. I did it before filming, but I didn't do it three months, ten years, or three years before, since I had no intention of making a film. It happened like that. She was happy to have worked on these two little blocks by Corneille, and when I found the Brecht text, which had been like a ghost in my head for twenty years, there were three blocks which, without yet being a construction, formed a subject for a possible film, which may not be a film. It's different from our other films.



Excerpts from an interview 
with Jean-Marie Straub, 
Le Travaille du cinéma I 
by Dominique Villian
PU Vincennes, 2012.
Translated by Andy Rector.





*Brecht wrote The Trial of Lucullus quickly, in two weeks while in exile in Sweden in 1939, as if out of historical necessity. Later, in 1951, when he and Paul Dessau were working on the opera version of the play in East Germany, they ran into production delays when the GDR Ministry for Popular Education accused their libretto of formalism and pressed for revisions to counter its perceived elements of pacifism. Brecht wrote: "i'm against this (delay). the subject is important just at this moment, when the americans are issuing such hysterical threats," referring to Truman's order of American troops into Korea in '50-51 under cover of the U.N., after North Korea's invasion of the South, while General Douglas MacArthur was advocating for the use of atom bombs against Korea. The opera was retitled The Condemnation of Lucullus.     ––A.R. 

Barbara Brecht-Schall quoting Brecht on the GDR: 





"I have my opinions not because I am here; 
rather I am here because I have my opinions."  –b.b.

October 11, 2023




*


WHERE ARE WE GOING TO LIVE?


A Film Series 

on Housing Problems

programmed by Andy Rector


dedicated to Beatriz Duarte



OCTOBER 12 - 18

CINEMA IDEAL - LISBOA

One week, 17 films

All programs begin at 9pm 

5 € admission



*


Series will travel to Porto, Casa das Artes, November 4 - 12. 

Supported by OPTEC FILMES upon their upcoming dvd/streaming release of the film AS OPERAÇOES SAAL (OPERATION SAAL, 2007, João Dias). 

Introduction and small summaries of each program are below (em português, ligeiramente truncado, aqui)More material (articles, notes, news of guests) will follow as the series develops. 


*



Introduction

A series of films about the betrayal of the right to housing, a right unborn. Not meant to be a sociological event, but simply a selection of films––seven nights at the movies––on the housing problem, the eviction problem, the exploitation problem, pulled from the history of cinema, internationally.

Films made on the side of oppressed people, the cheated, the evicted, the harassed, the repressed: elderly pensioners, unemployed youth, strikers, house builders, miners, bricklayers, piece-workers, alcoholics, post-war villagers trying to rebuild, cafeteria cooks, security guards, immigrants, mothers, sisters, hobos, temporary workers, people without homes.

Films showing the economic continuity and human toll of the housing problem over decades––the absolute lock on property relations, the dictatorship of the market over people, then and now.

Here we see legal intrigues, corruption, speculation, theft, eviction, police––the basics of an unchanging capitalism. Invader, redeveloper, kidnapper, exiler, swindler. Orphan-maker, widow-maker. "Che farsa!" an Italian villager yells when being newly told of market realities. “A lot of departed spirits walk with me…” says Cape Verdean Ventura, standing in the aftermath, in Amadora, eating the one small soup his friend Pango can spare.

A group of films that hold, like a silo, historical and human detail on the monstrous inequities. The life and death involved, the solidarity needed. As José Sinho Baessa de Pina (community representative in Casal da Boba and organizer with the agit-group VIDA JUSTA) says: "The spirit of unity and solidarity is a process," one torn apart precisely when “everyone is worried about their home”. Many souls in these films survive through some kind of solidarity: fellow workers prevent an eviction; a snitch threatening a Hooverville shantytown is thwarted; a mother's memory of "back home" is shared for strength; a warning is passed on before it's too late; the simple twist of a screwdriver of a telephone company worker restores the unpaid line of a desperate man…

Classical film, B-film, epic, questing documentary, horror film, propaganda, melodrama, music film, student film, silent film, militant film, plus the unclassifiable. Many of these films are of the popular cinema, if not “becoming-popular” (as Bernard Eisenschitz wrote of Dudow/Brecht, Straub/Huillet).

In the love and hate, dream and nightmare, hope and despair that cinema projects, one finds it has always been concerned with housing, seen from the bottom (and sometimes the top––rarely the middle). 
Chaplin’s Tramp was a so-called “homeless”. Pedro Costa: "Cinema was always here to serve the defenseless. We risk forgetting that. (...) Perhaps these scenes in which respect is shown towards them can make us see the injustice."




*


A small contribution to the fight against the grotesque rent and food prices impoverishing and displacing the majority of us now. 
In solidarity with the upcoming VIDA JUSTA-organized protest in Lisbon (Rossio), October 21, demanding:  "End the rising costs, we want houses to live in, transport for all, wage increases, no police repression in our neighborhoods."




*


OCTOBER 12, Thursday


AS OPERAÇÕES SAAL 

Operation SAAL 

 2007, João Dias. 127 min. Portugal 

*Director João Dias in attendance* 




A dream… Operation SAAL was the April 25th,1974 Carnation Revolution’s most important reply to the housing problem: the people would take into their own hands the building process of their own homes, working in close collaboration with architects. What happened? João Dias's documentary is a jocular, sometimes bitter, revisiting of the plan, the sites, and people involved, 30 years after the Coup, energetically told with a dialectic of past and present voices: tenants associations, workers and architects. More information.




OCTOBER 13, Friday


LES MAISONS DE LA MISÈRE 

Houses of Poverty 

1936, Henri Storck. 29 min. Belgium

Francês com legendas em inglês


MISÈRE AU BORINAGE 

Misery in Borinage 

1934, Henri Storck, Joris Ivens. 34 min. Belgium

Francês com legendas em inglês 


KUHLE WAMPE ODER: WEM GEHÖRT DIE WELT? 

Kuhle Wampe or: To Whom Does the World Belong?

1932, Slatan Dudow, Bertolt Brecht. 70 min. Germany 

Alemão com legendas em inglês

*Portugal Premiere of 2020 Restoration* 


Sessão: 2 horas 15 min, mais intervalo 








Three films in which dismal living and working conditions, eviction and dispossession do not come with the inevitability of an earthquake or flood, but are seen critically and agitated against, cause and effect relations unmasked. Films which intended to intervene on reality.



OCTOBER 14, SATURDAY


THE GOLDEN LOUIS 

1909, D.W. Griffith. 7 min. E.U.A. 

Filme mudo, legendas em inglês sem acompanhamento musical 


THE USURER 

1910, D.W. Griffith. 17 min. E.U.A. 

Filme mudo, legendas em inglês sem acompanhamento musical 


ONE IS BUSINESS, THE OTHER CRIME 

1912, D.W. Griffith. 15 min. E.U.A. 

Filme mudo, legendas em inglês sem acompanhamento musical 


IL RITORNO DEL FIGLIO PRODIGO –– UMILIATI: CHE NIENTE DI FATTO O TOCCATO DA LORO, DI USCITO DALLE MANI LORO, RISULTASSE ESENTE AL DIRITTO DI QUALCHE ESTRANEO (OPERAI, CONTADINI - SEGUITO E FINE) 

The Return of the Prodigal Son –– Humiliated: That Nothing Produced or  Touched by Them, Coming From Their Hands, Proves Free from the Claim of Some Stranger (Workers, Peasants - Continuation and End) 

O Retorno do Filho Pródigo –– Humilhados: Que Nada Feito ou Tocado Por Eles, Nada Saído das Mãos Deles, Resultasse Livre do direito de Algum Estranho (Operários, Camponeses - Continuação e Final) 

2003, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet. 64 min. Itália, França, Alemanha

Italiano com legendas em português


O NOSSO HOMEM 

2010, Pedro Costa. 26 min. Portugal 

Português e crioulo com legendas em português 


sessão: 2 horas 3 min, sem intervalo 













Five fables. Three by D.W. Griffith on the evils of the economy, accumulation, corruption, the tenuousness of charity and class reconciliation; with forms of montage that seem to express outrage that rich and poor coexist at all. One by Straub/Huillet, HUMILIATED: No sooner does an impromptu commune in post-war Italy establish itself and begin to overcome its internal challenges, does a zombie of the cadastre, possessed by propriety, arrive and declare that everything they've cultivated is already owned: the land, the water, even their wills (to clear the forest of landmines, to produce wheat non-industrially...). And finally, Pedro Costa's O NOSSO HOMEM, about the struggle of a Portuguese-born child of Cape Verdean immigrants to gain an ounce of peace, under threat of expulsion, as if not a citizen, alongside the story of a bricklayer, possibly beaten to death by racists in Amadora.



OCTOBER 15, Sunday


CHICAGO CALLING ! 

1951, John Reinhardt. 75 min. E.U.A. 

Idioma inglês sem legendas 


BUNKER HILL 

1956, Kent Mackenzie. 18 min. E.U.A. 

Idioma inglês sem legendas 


THE FINAL INSULT 

1997, Charles Burnett. 55 min. E.U.A. 

Idioma inglês sem legendas

 

sessão: 2 horas 28 min. mais intervalo 











A concrete focus, in two films, on a specific place, Bunker Hill, downtown Los Angeles. One, CHICAGO CALLING, about a penniless recovering alcoholic who must suddenly find $53 to pay his phone bill, to hear news of his faraway wife and daughter, on whom his life depends. The problem of utility bills must not be left out of any housing rights to speak of. And another, BUNKER HILL, a soft-spoken film on the elderly pensioners who live on "the Hill", now threatened by commercial redevelopment, the demolition of their home and community. Then, a rough video-poem by Charles Burnett on being homeless, living out of one’s car in Los Angeles while working a low-wage job as a “temporary accountant” at Bank of America.



OCTOBER 16, Monday


MAN’S CASTLE 

A Vida é um Sonho 

1933, Frank Borzage. 75 min. E.U.A. 

Idioma inglês sem legendas 

**4K digital copy** 


ANNUSHKA 

1959, Boris Barnet. 89 min. U.R.S.S. 

Russo com legendas em inglês 


sessão: 2 horas 44 min. mais intervalo 











A double bill. One Hollywood film (Borzage), one Soviet (Barnet)––a love story, a family story––on the restless yearning for a decent home amidst war: class war, world war. On the importance of being stubborn, even while living under or fleeing intolerable circumstances.


OCTOBER 17, Tuesday


MINGUS 

1968, Thomas Reichman. 58 min. E.U.A. 

Idioma inglês sem legendas 


EL BRUTO 

O​​ Bruto 

1953, Luis Buñuel 81 min. México 

Espanhol com legendas em português 


sessão: 2 horas 19 min. mias intervalo 








What has eviction achieved? It has ruined Charlie Mingus's dream of a new music school in the Lower East Side, New York. 

Plus, a popular Mexican melodrama by Luis Buñuel, a tale and dissection of the family ties between a landlord, a "Brute”, and a group of tenants organizing themselves.



OCTOBER 18, Wednesday


JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA 

Colossal Youth

2006, Pedro Costa. 155 min. Portugal 

Português e crioulo com legendas em português 

Guest:  José Sinho Baessa de Pina, who appears in the film as the "Gulbenkian Security Guard", and is today a community representative of Associação Cavaleiros São Brás and VIDA JUSTA.





In 2006, Pedro Costa makes JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA (COLOSSAL YOUTH), an unshakeable epic of a people in transition: the relocation of the former inhabitants of shantytown Fontaínhas to the new social housing complex Casal da Boba, in Amadora, outside Lisbon. We follow Ventura––Cape Verdean immigrant, pioneer, builder of Fontaínhas, injured construction worker––who spends his nights reciting a love letter, trapped in 1974––for him, a terror––and his days with “his children” Vanda, Nhurro, Gustavo, Sinho, Paulo, in the new neighborhood, and Bete in the last house of Fontaínhas. “Templo, cabana, deus-lares…” ("Temple, shack, house-diety...") says the Housing Agent showing Ventura his new Boba apartment. “...house's full of spiders,” Ventura replies...


*



*The series title ONDE VAMOS MORAR? - WHERE ARE WE GOING TO LIVE? comes from a song lyric by José Afonso, from “Canção Do Desterro (Emigrantes)” - "Song of Exile (Emigrants)". 


With deep thanks to: João Dias, Abel Ribeiro Chaves, José Sinho Baessa de Pina, Rodrigo Dâmaso, Charles Burnett, Pedro Costa, Aurora Neves, Maria Capelo, José Neves, Mosfilm Cinema Concern, Christophe Clavert, Marta Mateus, Filipe Baixinho, Anna Neher, Sara Jesus, Billy Woodberry, Torpeda, Eliel Santos, Cinema Ideal, Kyriakos Dionysopoulos.



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