Since winning the Special Jury Prize at Doclisboa with his first feature, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011), filmmaker and artist Éric Baudelaire has been a regular presence at the festival, which has presented his films Un Film dramatique (2019), Also Know as Jihadi (2017), Letters to Max (2014), and The Ugly One (2013). The 20th edition of Doclisboa features Baudelaire as an Invited Director in Riscos, screening his two most recent films, When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories (2022) and Une Fleur à la bouche (2022), alongside Louis Malle’s Humain, trop humain (1973), which Baudelaire has chosen to programme as his carte blanche.
Two projects developed in parallel
I usually work on several projects at a time. It helps me never feel stuck. If an idea dries up or feels wrong, I switch to a different project and problems often resolve themselves on their own in the back of my mind. The Pirandello play is my very first cinematic desire. I discovered it when I was in my early twenties and have wanted to adapt it for the screen ever since. I finally had a chance to develop, shoot and edit it in the middle of working on When There Is No More Music to Write. The fact that the films are radically different in form and process made it joyful to work on them at the same time. That range of experiences is what makes filmmaking so fascinating to me.
Fiction
I enjoyed the dynamics of pure fiction once before with The Ugly One (Doclisboa 2013) and have been eager to return to dialog, working with actors and mise-en-scène ever since. The original Pirandello text is brutally moving. But it is short and very theatrical. Bringing it to the screen required some kind of transformation. Anne-Louise Trividic adapts texts beautifully. I liked Intimitée [Patrice Chéreau, 2001] which she wrote by combining elements from several short stories by Hanif Kureishi. I made a proposition to Anne-Louise: work from the original Pirandello text and imagine that it is preceded by a 30-minute sequence of pure observational documentary material I had shot in an immense flower market. She watched the footage and completely re-wrote the first half of the Pirandello text, preserving the second almost verbatim. The result is a documentary/fiction diptych that confronts, or rather brings together two cinematic languages, two filmic possibilities that are often thought of as separate.
Oxmo Puccino’s character
There are many ways of observing the real and relating this experience to an audience. The man with a flower in the mouth, played by Oxmo Puccino, wanders the streets of the city all day watching people work, observing, in minute detail, their gestures. The film catches up with him at night, in a train station café where he finds a lonely soul waiting for the morning train. The man holds the traveler captive with his account of what he has seen, and the intensity of his awareness that time is running out. With each of these day and night cycles, the man seeks to hold onto life and delay the inevitable. To me, Pirandello’s play is an allegory for cinema, in its essence, and our adaptation of the text was guided by this premise.
Topicality
Pirandello wrote the play in 1922, shortly after World War I and the devastating Spanish flu. When I first had the idea of adapting the play, in the early nineties, the deadly disease the film would have evoked was the AIDS epidemic. When I finally got to work on the adaptation, in late 2018, I had climate change on my mind – which is why I filmed an industrialized flower market that attests to the beauty and calamity of globalized economic optimization. When we started actually shooting, an altogether different pandemic was raging. Somehow, this feeling of ‘end times’ has been with us for a century. But the beauty of the text is that it remains timelessly precise with each variation of man-driven destruction the world is submerged in.
Alvin Curran
While in Rome for an artist residency in 2018, I began researching a film about 1978 and the twilight of a decade-long period of struggle symbolically marked by the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro. I wanted to make a film that would close a chapter that began with my first film, The Anabasis, about the struggles that boiled over in 1968. While in Rome, my friend Maxime Guitton introduced me to the work of Alvin Curran and somehow the project morphed into something broader, a loose ‘roman’ trilogy. The life and times of Alvin Curran, the end of musical composition and the urgency of invention through improvisation became metaphors for the political history I was researching at the beginning of the project.
Free composition
All films are compositions, of course, but in these credits it felt important to underline the way in which materials were brought together during the editing process by Claire Atherton. Most of the sound in the film is music and field recordings by Alvin, but Claire took a lot of liberty in layering multiple strands together, creating altogether new sounds, and associating them with words from my interviews with Alvin, images I had shot on Super 8 in Rome and various archives I had accumulated following an intuitive process rather than an illustrative logic. This way of working was unscripted and free, a kind of improvised composition in the spirit of Alvin’s musical process.
Art and politics
The Anabasis draws connections between avant-garde film and revolutionary movements in late sixties Japan. This new film draws more subterranean connections between avant-garde music and revolutionary movements a decade later in Rome. But to me it is about something more important than tlinking political and artistic movements in a particular time and place. It is about thinking through the present moment with this kaleidoscopic archive in mind. It is about imagining new paradigms when it feels like “there is no more music to write”. Looking at the decade that spans between 68 and 78 is not nostalgic—it is about our future and the forms of invention that will take us there.
Humain, trop humain
I am part of a generation that has explored, probed, put in crisis the relationship between images and reality, renewing the essay-film genre. But I have also become concerned, over time, that this process has reached its limit, we have made our point very well, and I wonder whether we have not, inadvertently, ceded too much terrain to the flaring populist right by incessantly excavating the space between ‘images’ and ‘reality’. Erika Balsom says it very clearly in her essay The Reality Based Community: “In asserting the indiscernibility of fact and fiction, the panicked statement that reality has collapsed at times accomplishes little but furthering the collapse of reality. Proclaiming the unreality of the present lifts the heavy burdens of gravity, belief, and action, effecting a great leveling whereby all statements float by, cloaked in doubt.”. There may actually be a politically important (and riskier) task of thinking about new forms that propose a simple, resolved relationship between the images we make and the badly bruised reality that surrounds us. That is why I wanted to watch and discuss Humain, trop humain (1973). The film is Louis Malle’s only documentary made without voice-over or commentary of any kind. Just direct images shot in a car assembly plant and an automobile sales show. When the film was released, there were voices for whom the film was successful at revealing something about the conditions of the French working class and consumer society, and there were voices, mostly on the far left, who
argued the film lacked an explicit, articulated, militant analysis of auto working conditions. For them, the images were not enough. Half a century later, I want to see what these plain, direct, commentary-free images tell us about 1973, and open a new discussion about present possibilities for making images that affirm their relationship to actuality.
