MERCURE INSOLENT passe en SUISSE :
lecture-présentation de F.J. Ossang
. 15 Octobre 2013, 18 heures, librairie LE RAMEAU D’OR à GENEVE
. 19 Octobre 2013, librairie HUMUS à LAUSANNE
+ Rétro des films de F.J. Ossang au LUFF de LAUSANNE du 16 au 20 Octobre 2013
Sunset Boulevard avec William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim… Splendor Films
Il existe bien des façons d’éprouver un film. La meilleure, si l’on est captif, semble de le revoir indéfiniment afin de vérifier quelle « vision » nous hante réellement. Peu d’entre eux survivent à telle méthode. Sunset Boulevard en fait partie. A la fin, on ne sait plus si l’on préfère la jeune chair, ou celle qui perdure au fond des plus vaines mythologies…
Histoire : alors qu’il tente de semer ses créanciers sur Sunset Boulevard, un jeune scénariste sans solde et criblé de dettes (William Holden) trouve refuge dans la villa décrépite d’une vedette du muet sur le déclin, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). C’est la voix off du cadavre de Holden flottant dans la piscine qui conte son aventure née du pur hasard…
Mais l’histoire ne compte pas tant que son dédoublement. Face à Holden, la créature Gloria Swanson lance ses derniers feux, et ses lames : « Ah, ces films à dialogues! » clame-t-elle pour décrire le contraire de l’art. Erich von Stroheim mobilise son impeccable statuaire, et l’incunable Buster Keaton darde le mauvais sort de son regard fixe. Cecil B. DeMille tombe le job las de la continuité, tandis que l’on ne cesse de s’interroger sur la validité de l’impermanence – la chair défunte des rêves serait-elle supérieure à la mort!
Tout n’est qu’étiolement, présage mortuaire, réification hâtive – dans un costume neuf pour l’homme, sous la torture esthétique et la chirurgie, pour la femme… Quoiqu’il en soit, ils TOMBENT – sur le boulevard du Crépuscule. Y eut-il une aurore, ou une feinte d’aurore ? On s’en moque : une issue possible à tout l’ignoble sort de la durée court dans ce film. Sunset Boulevard est atroce, dans la mesure où précisément il feint de nous éconduire d’où l’on ne revient plus : dans le giron d’un être femelle qui fit revoir le jour, pour mieux le tuer…
A présent l’on survit dans l’espace de petits films où l’on compte, alors qu’autrefois même l’ineptie sut faire montre de GRANDEUR– tout est mesuré, besogneux, on taille les dialogues comme fait sa coupe un tailleur, quand les cinéastes embrasaient la toile du studio pour y styliser le risque humain… Sunset Boulevard évoque de façon ambiguë cet âge fugitif où tout fut possible, la dépense excessive des êtres comme des formes, et leur consumation labile et subite – leur disparition, leur dissipation complète dans une mythologie décalée…
Dés lors tout le FAUX devient un autre versant du VRAI à tel point que loin de suivre la pente du scénario, tous nos affects gisent dans la chair déclinante ou fatiguée de la star défunte bien plus que dans l’attrait de la jeune scénariste ambitieuse (Nancy Olson). William Holden choisit la mort, et on le suit exactement : le cinéma, c’était AVANT – pas le grand œuvre consumériste, mais les poignets coupés qu’on lie de bandages à l’égyptienne – érotique de momies-suicide qui s’éveillent et enlacent contre tout avenir… L’avenir est inepte – social, comme un amour fonctionnel, sans vrai devenir, tandis que l’amour d’une chair morte, ou d’un art défunt, promet tous les ravages, trois balles dans le corps, la fin dans une piscine, et un ultime travelling funèbre…Tout est fini – nous ne serons jamais faits pour les petits logements de l’ambition… Nous préférons la mort, l’attrait de la douleur, l’addiction d’une dépense à l’abandon.
La force magnétique du film relève du documentaire affectif plus que d’une vague documentation sur l’envers du décor des studios : Hollywood Babylon de Kenneth Anger n’est pas loin. Ses fantômes scabreux rôdent autour de l’acuité des regards que lancent Buster Keaton ou Erich von Stroheim. Sinon comment entendre l’extravagant masochisme de Stroheim, réalisateur-découvreur de Norma Desmond, converti en majordome… Buster Keaton (« le plus beau visage d’homme que j’aie jamais vu », selon Louise Brooks) devait perdre avec la fin du muet, situation, famille et santé… Quant à Stroheim, il tourna effectivement à l’initiative de Gloria Swanson, le fameux Queen Kelly (inachevé 1928), dont elle fut aussi l’interprète et la co-productrice. Sans doute cette dimension de « réel qui rêve du réel » contamine-t-elle tout le film au point de transcender l’amour ou la perversion de ses miroirs pour nous conduire au-delà des situations, et annexer tout l’affect des personnages…
Certains films reconduisent la mémoire jusqu’à une jeunesse inadvenue : Agent X27 et Shanghaï Express de Josef von Sternberg sont de ceux-là. Quand les a-t-on vus pour la première fois – dans un ciné-club obsolète, ou sur une vieille tv noir et blanc, un dimanche pluvieux à 17 heures…Toujours est-il que leurs images, leur monde, l’irréductibilité fatale de leurs conflits sont entrés dans les gènes de l’inconscient… Bien plus tard, on remonte dans le temps, pour découvrir l’origine objective de telle attraction.
A présent je revois la couverture d’un livre : « Sur le Cinéma » de Jorge Luis Borges – textes de cinéma édités et commentés par Cozarinski, et crois me souvenir que Borges finit nombre de ses articles en affirmant en substance qu’en dépit de toutes les qualités, le film évoqué n’atteint pas à l’acuité d’un von Sternberg! D’autres lectures – et pas des moindres : Eisenstein, ou Welles, me téléportent jusqu’à Shanghaï Gesture (1941) avec Ona Munson (l’inouïe Mother Gin Sling!) et Gene Tierney, film revu tant de fois, et qui partage avec Pandora d’Albert Lewin, l’exception d’un rare motif initial : un quatrain d’Omar Kayyam!
Agent X-27 et Shanghaï Express ressortent sur les écrans…
Leur auteur, Josef von Sternberg est un génie : son premier film, Salvation Hunters (1925) préfigure déjà le minimalisme de Jim Jarmush, Underworld (Les nuits de Chicago, 1927) invente le film de gangsters, avant le « Scarface » d’Howard Hawks! De 1930 à 1935, il crée la légende Marlene Dietrich, et nombre de ses admirateurs deviennent ses contempteurs. On dénonce la conversion du réalisateur en photographe – la vitalité du cinéaste en hagiographe du décadentisme…
L’homme est compliqué, si l’on examine la salve psychanalytique affichée par tout le cycle Dietrich : ambivalence des relations et des affects, dérive d’une inspiration réaliste jusqu’aux rivages versatiles du maniérisme et d’un mortifère exotisme colonial. Ne dira-t-il pas lui-même qu’il cessa de faire du cinéma en 1935 quoiqu’adviennent les chefs-d’oeuvre de Shanghaï Gesture en 1941, et de Saga of Anatahan en 1952, lequel est intégralement tourné dans le difficultueux Japon d’après-guerre, en japonais et avec de seuls acteurs japonais en 1952 – scène primale et cène primitive s’il en est pour ‘vrai’ dernier film… Sans renier leur admiration, Eisenstein ou Welles décrivent, le premier un snob hanté par un complexe cuisant, le second un génie photographique dévoué au kitch civilisationnel ultime… Les réalisateurs sont généralement méchants entre eux à défaut d’être stupides…
Sternberg fût avec Chaplin l’un des rares supports d’Eisenstein, lors de son débarquement improductif à Hollywood – une belle photo de SME avec Josef et Marlene l’atteste, sauf que Sternberg eût le tort de reprendre l’adaptation de « An American Tragedy » après l’envol de SME vers Que Viva Mexico…
En 1961, von Sternberg (qui n’a plus tourné depuis 9 ans) livrera quelques secrets de mise en scène lors d’une confession dédaigneuse pour « Cinéastes de Notre Temps » : – je ne comprends pas la tautologie du cinéma actuel – la caméra, les dialogues, la musique appuient pesamment sur le même dessein quand chacun devrait accentuer une attaque différente!
Revoir X-27 et Shanghaï Express est essentiel pour soigner l’incrédulité : Sternberg y passe miraculeusement du cinéma muet au sonore, comme seul Fritz Lang le fît avec M le Maudit puis Le Testament du Dr Mabuse : minimalisme et figuration des bruits comme personne! Imaginez que le mixage se passait en DIRECT! Noir et blanc étincelant pour X-27, dont la
la bluette aventureuse atteint à si réelle miniature d’Occident : charme et désastre d’un monde perdu qui s’ouvre et se ferme par le déroulé d’un bas – ce trottoir de Vienne sous l’averse, puis le peloton d’exécution dans la neige où le jeune officier refuse de tirer sur Marlene – bien sûr on le remplace… Mystère d’espaces excessivement étroits et bondés pour « Shanghaï Express » où la vie d’un Chinois ne valait rien (« No Future for A Chinese ») qui résonnent de 1932 à 2012 plus que somnambuliquement… Sans parler de la réincarnation visionnaire de Warner Oland, le colonel autrichien qui informe les Russes dans X-27, en métis eurasiatique oscillant du tuxedo à l’uniforme de chef révolutionnaire chinois … ou von Seyffertitz passant du commandement des services secrets autrichiens 1915 à un infirme allemand cacochyme trafiquant l’opium entre l’Inde et la Chine dans « Shanghaï Express ».
Quand on m’a proposé d’écrire sur La Chevauchée des Bannis – DAY OF THE OUTLAW,
autant dire : je n’étais pas si chaud. D’André DeThot, je ne connaissais que The Stranger Wore a Gun (les Massacreurs du Kansas) aperçu après minuit à la tv en dormant à moitié…
C’est alors que DAY OF OUTLAW s’est allumé dans l’obscurité – my God! Que dire…
C’est l’un des plus grands westerns statiques! Le mot n’est pas forcé : Chefs d’Oeuvre de cette fameuse année 59 qui voit la naissance de RIO BRAVO de Hawks, KISS ME DEADLY de Aldrich et… DAY OF THE OUTLAW de André DeToth! Les préceptes du cinéma ‘moderne’ sont jetés – rien ne sera plus pareil…
DAY OF THE OUTLAW est déjà un landscape movie… Un film du Paysage… Les acteurs ne jouent plus, ils éprouvent, et incarnent… Les scènes les plus violentes – la bagarre, ou la danse, ne sont pas répétées, mais improvisées – et filmées comme une performance…
DAY OF THE OUTLAW partage d’ailleurs avec Rio Bravo l’excellent opérateur Russell Harlan…
Quand tout commence, on est dans la neige, en plein Nowhereland. Une bande d’abrutis mesquins et procéduriers (les farmers) emmerdent le héros, joué par Ryan, un pionnier du Wyoming, avec leur manie de poser des barbelés, pour fixer leur propriété, bloquant la transhumance des bêtes semi-sauvages de Robert ‘old school’ Ryan…
Là-dessus, 7 desperados déboulent dans ce terminus enneigé, commandés d’une main de fer par Le Captain Bruhn, anciennement de l’Armée des United States – Formerly! – alors même que Ryan se prépare à liquider en duel le représentant des farmers, un nommé Crane, qui manque aussi notablement d’instruction dans le maniement des armes que de testostérone, mais dont l’irrémissible fierté de propriétaire venu de l’Est, fait croire que c’est arrivé – comme ça! Sauf que lui rappelle Starrett-Ryan : « – Quand Dan et moi on est arrivés ici, Bitters était le refuge de tous les voleurs et tueurs du territoire. La vie d’un homme ne valait pas le prix d’une balle (…) Et maintenant vous vous amenez pour planter vos sales racines!… »
C’est un véritable crépuscule des enfoirés qui apparaît sous nos yeux, ils sont tous ignobles! Si Crane est d’abord prêt à mourir pour ses droits qu’il prend pour des idées, les affreux de Brunh ne tardent pas à le rappeler à la réalité. Seul Ryan partage quelque chose avec eux… Un ancien adultère couve sous cette trame de prise d’otage et de fin de la route. On rêve que les tueurs l’emportent, mais ils perdent, ce n’est que justice. L’Ouest est terminé, liquidé…
Dans le cercle de montagnes de DAY OF OUTLAW que DeThoth bombarde de panoramiques circulaires, on songe à un inventaire avant liquidation – tour du monde rapide afin de provisionner les possibilités : les seuls êtres humains, le Captain Bruhn, Bob Blaise Ryan et le Mestizo cheyenne n’ont plus d’avenir – vont-ils jeter le gant ou rendre les clefs…
DeToth dut se battre pour imposer le Noir et Blanc qui seul permet cette épure du trait, des conflits, des caractères… « Comment raconter ça avec le vert des sapins, et le rouge des chemises? C’était tout de suite ‘Joyeux Noël’. Non, je voulais la dureté contrastée du noir et blanc, pas la joliesse de la couleur », commentera DeToth…
Cinquante ans plus tard, on filmerait identiquement un eastern, puisque c’est déjà un eastern, bien plus qu’un western contemplatif – le monde de l’Ouest n’avance plus, il stationne et récolte la contamination spéculative. Derrière les montagnes d’Oregon et le Pacifique, on imagine déjà les enjeux de la Sibérie, la Chine…
Mais il est difficile de parler de ce film extraordinaire qui provisionne effectivement 50 ans de cinéma à venir – les primitifs et plus-que-modernes sont déjà là : inutile de modifier le script, dit encore DeToth : on change la place d’un mot du dialogue, modifie la focale, et c’est une autre histoire – un autre film… Formerly!
Il tourna les extérieurs dans l’Oregon – où ils captèrent en quelques jours tous les états du ciel, brumes, soleil, tempêtes de neige! DeThoth roulait à fond sur les éléments après avoir repéré le site en avion – même si le monomoteur offert par son ex-épouse Veronica Lake avait été réquisitionné par la Lokheed Airport, pour non-paiement des frais de garage! Ce type, le dernier Borgne d’Hollywood, dit la Légende – avait l’oeil de l’Aigle! 50 ans d’avance – après quoi le cinéma, loin de créditer la 3D de House of Wax (Le Masque de Cire) – doit tout reprendre à zéro s’il veut survivre…
NOUS Y SOMMES – Il n’y a plus d’Ouest, ni d’Est – juste un cercle de montagnes…
LADY FROM SHANGAI – un film de Orson WELLES (pour TRANSFUGE, 9 Juillet 12)
Formidable nouvelle : “La Dame de Shanghaï” ressort sur les écrans. Il est de ces films qui nous lavent les yeux pour plusieurs années, où l’on est frappé soudain par la conviction que le cinéma est encore à naître, et qu’il a d’infinies possibilités. Même si ce n’est pas l’oeuvre de Welles que j’ai vue et revue plus de trente fois, une mystérieuse fraîcheur me couvre lorsque le mot FIN apparaît. C’est pratiquement le dernier film hollywoodien de son auteur. Ensuite, il n’y aura que La Soif du Mal, retour en grâce fugitif aux Etats-Unis sous les auspices de Mister Charlton Guns Heston… Avant et après, et pour notre plus grand salut, la dérive wellesienne entre la France, l’Italie, l’Espagne et le Maroc – moissonne des chefs d’oeuvre ultimes… En attendant : “La Dame de Shangaï “– l’assomption finale du glamour caribéen d’Amerikka! Rita Hayworth, belle, énigmatiquement opaque, et sublime comme jamais! J’adore ce film : il est d’une insaisissable ambiguité – 2, 3, 5 films se révèlent en palimpseste dedans lui… Vous croyez le voir : faux! Tant d’évocations divergentes, de perceptions déviées, d’éplorations de la pavanne occidentale défaite courent dans ses veines… Le rêve court durant sa projection sans que l’on puisse fixer l’attention sur l’histoire suscitée – à la fin, c’est un bombardement de miroirs qui mène de Shanghaï à Frisco, Pittsburg, Madrid, Mexico, Saigon, Paris… Feu sur le Palais des Glaces, le Train Fantôme, la Galerie du Crime…
Outre que l’on sort déchaîné de tel film, comme de Touch of Evil, Othello ou Arkadin – aussi buté que Luke La Main Froide face à ces mornes adversaires, dévoré par la froide vengeance contre ce qui se donne pour le cinéma dominant ou prétenduement progressiste, une chose est sûre : si l’audace de Welles vous a touché, vous ferez des films!…
L’école du montage descend droit d’Esenstein – où sont les 25 lettres qu’ils échangèrent?…
La matière photographique et machinique est idéale, moins démonstrative que dans Touch of Evil, mais idéale! On bout, furibarde, et fulmine l’anathème quand on entend une cinéphilie invertie proclamer que Welles, tout de même, est surestimé!! Où trouver plus anachronique invention, faramineuse perspective, déportation du sujet, friction nominale des tableaux que chez Welles! Ce type nous a prémunis contre l’innocence plus qu’Abraham des Tables de la Loi – c’est l’unique connexion incestueuse d’Eisenstein en Occident – pour son malheur, il manqua le désavouer, sur la fin…
Dans Welles, le cinéma jouxte la promesse infinie d’une Parousie Cinématographique, sauf que c’est lui-même qui embrouilla mythologie fondatrice et professionnalité de l’amateur – au fond, nous sommes tous des ‘professionnels’, tuer l’objet demeure la seule mission de l’artiste… A lire ses entretiens (“Moi, Orson Welles”) on ne comprend plus rien : comme l’histoire des gros-plans à éviter – “La Dame de Shanghaï” en est bourré! Fustiger l’amateur dans le génie de Jacques Tati (!), démolir ses propres films au nom de l’incurie ou du démontage, d’accord Hollywood a tout fait pour le tuer! mais nous soustraire au plaisir de voyager ses mondes, et leur déconstruction – non, jamais!…
Orson Welles demeure envers et contre tout Le Maître des Situations…
Courez voir Lady From Shangaï – c’est impressionnant, vos états d’âme, lassitude, cynisme, rectitude cartésienne, libido argentique ou autres créances n’y résisteront pas : Glamour caribéen final, amérikanisme ultime, borgesisme européen des sangs-mêlés d’une forme à venir – tout est là : Rita Hayworth est une tueuse céleste et chinoise, et l’on s’en fiche!
A mi-chemin des pique-niques de Xanadou et des conspirations sino-autrichiennes de Arkadin, il y a The Lady From Shangaï, où Welles promène malaisément son corps, et dont les yeux ne s’éveillent plus d’un sommeil européen ou chinois, on ne saura jamais : le Cirque Futur est en marche… Adieu, brouillages géographiques américains, les duplicités chinoise, inca, européenne sont en marche!
SOMETHING CAME OVER ME!
D’où provient le scandale qu’Amerikka ait pu occulter l’assomption wellesienne depuis Citizen Kane! Bogdanovitch a raison : (après Citizen Kane) “plus il va, plus il va loin sur le plan technique et intellectuel de ses films!”
F.J. OSSANG: PUNK CINEMA AND THE SUBVERSION OF FILM NOIR
How does the subversion of noir works for a filmmaker like FJ Ossang? The tangible vortex of ambiguity and violence of the genre, that chiaroscuro and expressiveness of black and white does not only set a confined mood in which his story develops; the codes and resources (from the camera angles to the stylized dialogue) devoid from the off-balance setting of his mise in scene do not just represent tension and claustrophobia, they are expressive methods of a language of revolt, of the punk mentality, a back set for the redemption of the apocalypse, of the sci-fi adventure, of the industrial wasteland. Noir gets represented as a post traumatic experience.
by José Sarmiento Hinojosa
Et le film dans tour ça, virtuel comme le reste – près de s’effacer dans l’orage magnétique qui survient… pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu, tu parles! C’est trop tard… Là où ça sent la merde, ça sent l’être! F.J Ossang (1)
Into the eternal darkness, into fire and into ice. Dante Alighieri –Divine Comedy
The saying goes “no man is an island” but FJ Ossang could be easily an archipelago on itself: Poet, musician, filmmaker, and actor; the expressive capacity of Ossang has transcended beyond the blurry lines of genres and disciplines, not digressing in each one of his attempts, but achieving a magnificent articulation that projects the identity of his art: a post-apocalyptic sci-fi punk noir universe, a classification that, paradoxically, defies any classification. Ossang’s subversion of the concept of film noir is as revolutionary as the poetic recitative cadence in the lyrics of Messageros Killers Boys (his band) and the punk prose/diary/manifesto style of his poetry. The synergy or interaction between music, poetry and cinema is undividable here. Everything belongs to one another, everything merges and dialogues: Part diary, part manifesto, a work of curiosity and rebellion.
To experience Ossang is to take part of a cinematic tour de force: from the “noise n’roll” industrial/new wave overtones of Terminal Toxique (the first M.K.B. LP) to the manifesto that is Mercure Insolent (his last poetry book), everything in his art exudes cinema, like oozing black matter coming from the insides of the earth. It could all well be a revision of the entrails of German expressionism, taunting and haunting the celluloid as concealed ghosts from the past, forcing the closing of the iris throughout several takes, being reinvented in a sci-fi nightmare that exposes the darkest obsessions of mankind.
To talk about Ossang is to venture in an ocean of references, of erudite expressiveness, of metaphoric machines, to become part of a revolution. From Throbbing Gristle, to Russian sci-fi, to Jules Dassin on an acid trip, Kyro’Corp, Bruce Satarenko, the Bitch Islands, the Dharma Guns… few auteurs have maintained such a consistency on their universe, in a flood of characters and places, of apocalyptic anxiety, of the end of the world… Ciel Éteint!
The sky blacks out in the movie theater.
ZONA INQUINATA: A POLLUTED UNIVERSE
It all started with literature, but it was music which was a first preface to his film career. Listening to M.K.B Fraction Provisoire’s Terminal Toxique (1980), one immediately gets transported into the post-industrial punk climate that would imbue all of his creation. Kyro’ Inc. opens to a psychobilly guitar and relentless strumming bassline, while European Death Winners is a prophecy in itself for all that was to come:
And now, this is Dada and Rock’n Roll Guerrilla.
This was the setup for Ossang’s first student film, La Dernière Énigme (1982), a political manifesto about state terrorism inspired by Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s On Terrorism and the State:
As for us, the subversives, who support the opposition of the workers and do not support the State, we will prove ourselves to be so, above all and on every occasion, by continually unmasking all the acts of terrorism perpetrated by the secret services of the State, to which we willingly leave the monopoly on terror, and by making the State’s infamy more infamous by publicizing it: the publicity that it merits (2).
This essay quickly became a primary headstone that Ossang would revisit constantly, a manifestation of a punk movement which also was a driving power for his first’s attempts on film: the apprehension of the tyrant concept, the revolt or escape against repressive powers, state terrorism, conspiracy theory, big brother, All-Seeing Eye: Ettore, Ponthans, Angstel, Stan van der Decken, are all rebellious characters, brought from noir cinema with a baggage of demons, imperfections, obsessions, violence and anxiety. From visiting a toxic wasteland to get ahold of a new energy power source, to be involved in a network of art forgery, science fiction, crime, the apocalypse, again, the end of the world, the revenge of the earth on its habitants.. An implosion and explosion of genres, colliding into a massive black hole, a universe of its own: maintenant, maintenant, maintenant! (3)
Shot using two cans of Kodak XX 16mm film, La Dernière Énigme (a pamphlet film) feels like a student film but carries so much compromise in it, the potential of a future career that would give birth to masterpieces such as Le Trésor Des Îles Chiennes. An appearance of public protest in shape of poetic manifestos also gives place, an element that will reappear in L’affaire Des Divisions Morituri, with the long monologues of Ettore, the lead character. This realm of recitation, of public discourse, of universal declaration is an element of punk that Ossang drives to perfection in the monologues on Morituri… and Dernière Énigme. It is a call to anarchy, a political stance, an anti-establishment cry, a search for the self. In his next films, this kind of discourse would find a proper narrative stance, as shown in the relentless antics of dialogue in Docteur Chance.
A year after, a second short emerged like a resurrection of sorts. Zona Inquinata (1983) already showed thesilent film resource of intertitles which worked not as a mere resource, but as a poetic affirmation of what was projected in the screen. Poetry is inserted into the bowels of Ossang films almost as an unwanted transplanted organ, as intruder that feels out of place but belongs to the same filmic creature, as the parallel made by Jean-Luc Nancy which inspired Claire Denis’ L’Intrus: There must be something of the intruder in the stranger; otherwise, the stranger would lose its strangeness: if he already has the right to enter and remain. (4)
Of course, expressionism takes place here and it’s fundamental. As an influence on noir, and as a spiritual influence on Ossang films, which also feed and disembody noir into a mythical creature of its own. The resource of intertitling as a poetic manifesto serves its expressive means and contributes to the overall experience of watching. Thus intertitles carry no narrative weight but a subliminal and sensorial space, a metaphysical weapon to help us understand the apocalypse, ripped fragments of a poetry book which land in a desolated space, devoid of images or inserted despite the images.
Zona inquinata (Life is nothing but a bad cowboy story) was Ossang’s student first year film. Shot in three days, it’s a low budget effort, a guerrilla film with a guerilla mindset. Nicole Brenez, one of the great minds of her generation, a close friend, admirer and colleague describes it beautifully in this text commissioned for Rotterdam Film Festival: La Zone: the poor, dangerous quarters of Paris (George Lacombe, 1928); the administrative zone where Orpheus looks for his lost Eurydice (Jean Cocteau, 1950); Interzone – the working title for William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959). In 1983, Ossang created a synthesis of all these territories of unrest under a banner of dead colours.(5)
Before anything, L’Affaire des Divisions Morituri (1985) is a consolidation of whatever was hinted in Ossang first short films: A story about underground punk gladiators led by Ettore, a messianic figure who threats the stability of a repressive state utilizing “sensory deprivation” methods. Morituri is also the M.K.B. Fraction Provisoire last album (before merging into Messagero Killer Boy, or Messageros Killers Boys –there isn’t a consensus) and it links perfectly with the film. In fact, Morituri shares with Bitch Islands two of the most fantastic soundtracks ever recorded for film. If it was Messageros Killers Boys that made the fantastic sonic experience (very close to a drug experience session), in here we get Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, among others, setting an hallucinogenic stance for celluloid. There’s no sonic archetype here: It’s a fluorescent mass of pure industrial sounds set against the backdrop of the Armageddon. Ettore loses his mind and decides to inform to the press about the gladiator business. He seems to be unaffected by repression, even when cracking down, as if the punk spirit that dwells within has consumed him entirely: Pure detachment, no deliverance, eternal damnation, while gladiators perform dance rituals and a journalist runs away in a car chase scene dripping down from the fountains of film noir, a futuristic noir, the Alphaville of punk.
Intense yellowish and green colors open the palette of black and white for expressive means. In Ossang, the color is elemental in dividing universes of conscience and time. This method is recurrent in Dharma Guns, which gives the setting for an exploration of two parallel universes unfolding together. But we’ll get back to that later, in here; color serves a purpose by alienating the spectator with the image, a sense of rejection which connects with Ettore’s own sense of detachment, the color palette of a breakdown.
A tribute to silent cinema (more precisely German expressionism) is to be found in the closing of the camera iris, not just as a romantic tribute but also as a way of reinvent the genre: Ossang uses the iris without discretion, as a plastic element, as an emphasis of emotion, but overall, as an extension of the eye which focuses on the elemental. The camera as the human eye, as the extension of the body.
LYSERGIC ROAD MOVIES: DUST ACCUMULATES IN OUR WINDSHIELDS
Le Trésor Des Îles Chiennes (1990)is Ossang’s masterpiece. A film about drugs, about the representation of the female as an object of desire, a catastrophic post-atomic nightmare, a trip into the guts of the underworld, of an island that signifies their doom, the Bitch, the woman, the perdition of men. A film about intrigue and treachery, about desolation and desperation, charged with static electricity in every moment, a delirious ride into oblivion, a trip of five men led by a contemporary Ulysses (which carries the same name) and driven by blind ambition into an island that is doomed with catastrophe. A film about a mega corporation. A tarkovskian sci-fi film on speed.
There’s a metallic aftertaste when watching Bitch Islands, the same sensation that comes from licking a dusty coin, something filthy and disgusting, alien to the taste. Ossang mise en scène is so powerful that the movie becomes a synesthetic journey: one can smell and feel the texture of the images, feel the dust accumulate in the throat and become part of that drug induced experience that is the trip of its adventurers. There’s no treasure in itself, no wealth, no real “money”: there is the island, the drug shots, the white pills, the quintessential femme fatale of film noir, in form of a quiet woman, or of an island that oozes lava and sulfur in the middle of the Azores. Ossang says: Cerberus being bitches, the guardian of underworld… So it’s a bit of a descent into hell.(6) This descent into hell, a confined space, knocks down the players in the board of chess that is this film. The final check mate comes when king and queen disappear into the rocky landscape. Earth devours them, takes what it’s hers and ends the cycle. The strategy was unimportant, since The Bitches claimed their victims as Cerberus did in the gates of hell.
The soundtrack by Messageros Killer Boys deserves an analysis of its own: Welcome to the Bitch Islands beats hard with industrial repetition, as if a violent and old train was coming to greet the new inhabitants of hell. A minute and twenty six seconds later, Helicoptère Ducal plays as a Throbbing Gristle experiment, and now the new machine morphs into a helicopter, a vessel for the entrance to Kyro Corp. It is indeed an industrial album per excellence, but when Pièces Du Sommeil kicks in, one is immersed into a string quartet that plays a sad litany, a piece that mourns the future dead (as in the fantastic Rumeur Du Grand Large). Métropole Du Chaos returns to industrial repetition, a nightmarish drone which serves as background for a film dialogue. From them on, drones and industrial rhythms are our musical Virgil into the seven circles of hell, with the majestic Steppes De La Grande Chienne on full synthesizer glory and Le Chant Des Hyenes closing the film with the whole ensemble on board, a thing that happens also in the magnificent, recitative Soleil Trahi, a screen for Ossang magnificent poetry. It is impossible to imagine Bitch Islands without its soundtrack, which is without a doubt, one of the essential ones in the history of cinema and music.
Seven years after, Ossang returned with Docteur Chance (1997), which wasn’t supposed to be a color film (problems with supply of black and white film) This event was a blessing though, since the development of the celluloid reels gave as a result a gamut of colors that any noir film would envy. Thus, the chromatic spectrum gives a unique expressiveness to the film, something that black and white wouldn’t have achieved otherwise. The color in Docteur Chance allows it to be of an expressionist nature (the hints are clear: one of the character´s called Georg Trakl), whether we’re located in the streets of Portugal or in the desert of Chile, a miserable wasteland, or a territory of doom. Docteur Chance is also an ouroboros film, where head and tail unites in a cyclic narrative that begins and ends in a flight among fleeting lovers, Ancetta, the prostitute (a first appearance by Elvire, Ossang’s muse and a true force of nature), and Angstel, a trader of forged paintings which is forced to leave the country and embark in a journey in which the noir films mutates into a road movie, only to finally meet not other than Joe Strummer (Vince Taylor) in his private bunker. On whom Joe Strummer (or Vince Taylor) is, and the significance of his presence of the film, we will not say anything that doesn’t speak on its own other than the obvious huge nod to punk culture. Strummer is Vince Taylor, a deceased famous rock n’roll singer, driven into obscurity for drug abuse, a character taken from reality portrayed by a character taken from reality. A rockabilly legend portrayed by a punk legend.
Docteur Chance is also an orphic journey: the snake biting the ankle of the dame in distress. A girl and a gun. The orphic nature of Ossang’s films is more present here, in Sky’s Black Out! and reaching its apex in Dharma Guns. This is a manifestation of an obscure romanticism, and Ossang is a punk romantic, a decadent romantic who merges with the shadows. Here, the conflictive nature of the relationship of both leads plays like a dance with death, a reconfiguration of noir codes, in dialogue, narrative and intention. How does the film become a Road Movie by configuration? When lovers are expelled from its territory, the personal journey begins: This abstraction of the path becomes parallel with the inner journey of its characters. Thus the setting (the desert) plays an effective analogy for the psychological desolation, the desperation of the travel. Both lovers escape, become hooked in drugs, get persecuted and disappear into the atmosphere, this time the sky devours them, not the earth, as it happens into Le trésor des îles chiennes. Coincidentally (or not) lovers are devoured by the sea in Dharma Guns. The earth has its way of claiming back what belongs to her, no matter the element.
Coming back to Strummer, the effectiveness of his performance lies in the fact that Strummer had just to be Strummer to make things work: A power of nature, a punk icon, he makes his presence in the last part of the movie a pivotal one for the film: He is part friend, part savior, part underground anti-establishment fighter. This makes a fantastic contrast with Marissa Paredes character, which lands a memorable role as Elise von Sekt, Angstel mother. Paredes is the antithesis of Strummer, a burgoise woman, art collector, millionaire, the figure of power that has to get knocked down: Tectonic plates colliding, an earthquake of sorts, shaking of the bodies, of the landscape, poetry in a Richter scale.
THE LANDSCAPE TRILOGY: SILENCIO, VLADIVOSTOK AND SKY’S BLACK OUT!
“The Landscape Trilogy”,as Ossang calls it, are a series of short films that came between Docteur Chance and Dharma Guns, and that signals a new phase in the filmmaker’s oeuvre. This territorial trilogy starts with Silencio (2007), scored by Throbbing Gristle, a nuclear apocalypse experimental short of monoliths, a journey through a vast landscape, a road movie of sorts. Silencio is a meditation on Ossang’s favorite subjects, a contemplation of the catastrophe, of the end of the world. He isn’t preaching the apocalypse anymore; he is simply contemplating it, watching the aftermath like a wise man who predicted it. A masterpiece of a short, Silencio marks both an end and a beginning. Vladivostok! (2008) is a commissioned film for the Vladivostok film festival. Openly experimental, it owes much of its pulse to expressionism and silent cinema (maybe even more than his other films). A voyage, a death, a contemplation of disjointed fragments, Vladivostok! Is Ossang’s gift to the Russian, a poetic film magnificently photographed, a film that carries old nitrate in its veins, a tribute of sorts, a manifestation of love for cinema. Ciel Éteint! (2008), a love letter for detached lovers, is a sonata drawn in a landscape of sorrow, a film of wondering in the depths of distance. The earth is frozen, the hearts are frozen and again, the setting conveys an analogy of human emotion. Sky’s Black Out is a proper introduction to what Dharma Guns would become, the new stage of Ossang’s work, and a new level of masterful cinema.
DEATH AND LIFE AS PARALLEL DIMENSIONS
Dharma Guns (La succession Starkov) (2010) is FJ Ossang latest film and it is a dantesque descent into the underworld. The questions of what is behind death, and beyond consciousness merge. What is reality and what isn’t? A magnificent opening shot switches color to black and white and traces the line between two open universes. Dante himself could’ve written the liner notes of Dharma Guns: The man who lies asleep will never waken fame, and his desire and all his life drift past him like a dream, and the traces of his memory fade from time like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream. (8)
Stan van der Decken (Guy McKnight), an heir to Professor Starkov, is a scriptwriter trapped in something he can’t start to comprehend: Part of a clone experiment, Lazarus resurrected, tortured poet, guinea pig. Délie (Elvire), his girlfriend, who was killed in a water ski accident resurrects and appears again in Van der Decken life. Is she also a clone of Professor Starkov cruel experiment? Clues are again in the chromatic spectrum: colored flashbacks of life past and a black and white odyssey into the inferno, oneiric sequences of a daydream fever. A conspiracy sci-fi film with orphic strata, Dharma Guns is the feverish counterpart of Docteur Chance, a hallucination which is reflected in the low shot of the stairs in hotel Splendor, the portal gate to Dante’s hell.
Ossang’s characters are often on the verge of insanity: Their primal impulses drag them through the story as mere consequence of a higher determination. In that matter, they are all victims of fate, uncharted heroes, mythical beings whose fate is set, who revolt against the inevitable. Dharma Guns is a masterpiece of a film because it carries this level of insanity in the same structure of its narrative construction: Reality/not reality realms collide with each other relentlessly, sepia crashes with black and white, black and white crashes with color. Flashbacks, consciousness, and abyss, absoluteness: it’s a disorienting experience of transit from life to death, the opposite experience of emerging from a coma.
FJ OSSANG CLOSING STATEMENT: A PUNK MANIFIESTO
Why cineastes, to what end in this time of withdrawal? (…) When the word devours itself and tears the surface of the brain close to registering what remains visible, obvious, of the symptoms of discomfort or from the insanity of phenomena, the camera records exactly what the writer don’t want to listen anymore: to the pretexting emancipation and to see through the atoms of his own language. But this tongue is contaminated; it loses itself on amends in abstraction, still far to find the tricks necessary for the eyesight, the vision.(9)
This piece is dedicated to Mina Blumenfield and Michèle Collery, who went out of their line of duty to meet and pick the brain of master Ossang.
PUNK INTERVENTION: A CONVERSATION WITH F.J. OSSANG
Maverick, punk gladiator, guerrilla poet, musician, chanteur and filmmaker, FJ Ossang (France, 1956) is one of France’s best coveted secrets, a wonderful talent whose intellect and work in several disciplines of art has given many cinephiles and intellectuals the pleasure of meeting a compromised work of heart. Ossang, a prophet of the apocalypse, met Desistfilm in a parisian coffee shop, where he was thoroughly scrutinized about his work, his influences and life. We bring you the complete transcription what of was our “punk intervention”: an hour (and more) of stimulating, intense conversation.
Comrades:
In Lima: Mónica Delgado
In Paris: Michèle Collery and Mina Blumenfield
June 15th, 2013.Café Le Chantefable, Paris.
Mónica Delgado: In Le Trésor des Iles Chiennes (1990) there’s a correspondence between men and a subtle imaginary of the “great feminine” (a term I want to use because of the name of the film and the only female character). The island appears as this great woman who devours each team member and the story finally comes to an end with the death of the female character, or her disappearance in a vacant lot. How did you establish these relations between open and closed spaces, between men and the female character (the island, the woman) between the climate and the road to extinction?
F.J Ossang : It is difficult to get engaged in over-interpretation. Self over-interpretation is always bad! I think Hobbes said that in general, “It is sad, it sterilizes people.” Directors actually! He said that at the end of a career, of course, having never engaged in this dangerous operation himself.
I do not remember my films by heart!
For Le Trésor des Iles Chiennes I had the desire to make a kind of adventure movie. Which has become an inner adventure movie. And this kind of fantastic minimalism which is still at work…
Then The Treasure… The Bitches Islands! Bitches… Cerberus being bitches, the guardian of underworld… So it’s a bit of a descent into hell. And in the mean time Pachamama, as the Indians call the Mother sometimes, Mother Earth, which is also found in the Babylonian legends, coming after Leviathan. At first there is the female principle, unanimous, then Marduk appears, the male principle, and gets in conflict with Tiamat. Single combat, and from there emerges the differentiated universe. But Marduk thinks it’s not finished, self-immolates and creates the Human Beings! And he said, “I’ll make my blood harden and make bone of it. ”
And then, in my youth, I was very influenced by all those metallurgist mythologies. There is a very fine book by Mircea Eliade called The Forge and the Crucible where he speaks of the two principles of stone: a male stone, which is hard and surfaced and a female stone, soft and… Well all this was a little bit confused…
Finally, the film describes pretty finely something that is, unpretentiously, a kind of conquest of the negative, which seems to be to me the sign of the times. The more they move, the more the expedition moves forward in its conquest, the more it is divided, dented… Which is a little like our own history! At least the history of the West that the more it moves forward… No more food, no more capital… The Earth… Panic on board!
And considering that I’m obsessed with time, we find time, yet. Time discrepancies, as they happen in life, some of those accelerations. And the sleep, haunted, watching out…
I shot the film in the Azores, where Paul Branco, the producer, especially did not want me to go. But I’m so obsessed that I ended up going on! I was obsessed with this small part of the world, which is a volcanic archipelago of nine islands (indeed, the western and eastern islands tend to move away from the other), which is the pressure cooker of the Atlantic Ocean, well one of them. It regularly explodes, this is a very seismically active area, the meeting point of American, European and African plates, so it rubs all the time. It fascinated me because I had the impression of being at the center of the world and that there was a sort of mission, not to make a “movie world” but something like that…
Then we also find all these organic problems, of organicity in music. The group, while I was over there, had prepared some music but it was quite a bit exotic, what was not good at all. So I pulled on things like Tibetan music patterns, a kind of Tibetan-industrial.
During the location recce, I found this area which was the youngest ground of Europe: the Capelinhos. During the eruption of 1959 (1958 Actually), at Faial, 10 km of soil emerged from the ocean. At the same time, all the inhabited part of the island was covered with ashes to the second floor. It lasted two or three months, a local tragedy. And so we trod upon, as it’s a Portuguese area, the youngest land of Europe.
But on the other hand, as it is also a film about confinement, they were areas that were very difficult to use, as we had to descend into the volcano. Actually, in the Black Area. Dragging the military truck, which had to be climbed up every evening -the bureaucratic side of the army! So it had to be tow every night with machines, etc… It was not easy.
And there were also problems with memory… I remember that I said in the press book “Write it down and you’ll live it.” And it’s true that we must pay attention to what we write because the movie is a real setting. Or a real shot of reality. We literally descended into hell. For example, the shooting area was very hard because of an aggressive dust, places where we sank, I still have shoes that are all warped because the soles are burned! There really was the earth central fire, which began in some places to almost emerge straight from the ground, this kind of clinker and black reverberation -not the usual white reverb but a kind of reflection of black- that it was almost hard to even remember…
This movie had been the subject of a reflection, when I speak of an ancient solar expression, one that didn’t come from the Western cinema expression, but as we found it in modern architecture, with this glass stuff, there must have something of an earlier cult of light, that arose in the world …
So then interior/exterior… Many things are elements of decoration, the scenery has always been very important to me. We visited the places where we were going to film but it has nothing to do. Cinema is about putting reality into two dimensions. So, now they have boring 3D, extreme long shot, etc… but to be able to bring reality into two dimensions in a framework, that is still a big problem. This is the first question. Thus, that’s actually sometimes just a piece of setting – even if it was it was very large sets, shot in studios which were reffited barns, it wasn’t even soundproofed. There was a wall that I used but what actually was a piece of farm in Portugal, so the indoor / outdoor, outside/inside…
Mina Blumenfield : I’m surprised that the settings are false because there’s this feeling of… Everything seems so organic, it sticks, it catches, it takes. So it’s surprising to learn that it’s fake backdrops!
FJO: Yes, and then actually, in the other hand, I’m lagging one or two generations behind, but it’s maybe because I was raised by my grandfather, thus I’ve been strangely affected by all the stories of the First World War, during which he was a doctor, and so, for him, it was the end of the world. Only medicine meant something for him, all the human activities were negative, predatory and usurious: at least, medicine is basic, you relieve people, you help as you can. He had this medicine man side… a curious guy, who was very clever with his hands, who drew, spoke Latin… And everything gets lost with me… I found all the activities, all the archetypal activism may I say, that existed a little before and during the war, such as Futurism, Dadaism, Vorticism, and this is, I think, at first in cinema it’s huge, in literature too… and after, everything is late, everything goes wrong, more and more wrong, and the world pays the consequences because it hasn’t been able to adjust its time viewfinder, considering that it gets worse with the Second World War!
Mina Blumenfield: It is true that since this moment, there was no longer this outpouring of novelties, discoveries. Everything resumes to fill the blank with what has already been made…
FJO: Yes, I wrote about it in the book. Silent film immediately finds an autonomous language, to a staggering speed. I remembered not that far, I watched Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922)from Fritz Lang, part I and II, 155 and 115 minutes, that I hadn’t seen since I was very young, in a damaged version, not restored. Toulouse retains many German and Soviet films from before 1933, so this certainly marked me. Whether it be Dziga Vertov, Eisenstein, Murnau, Fritz Lang or Dovzhenko…
So with Darius (Khondji) we tried hard to study how to render this on film, we flooded all the time with smoke to mattify elements of the set that were still made of pasteboard, as the old ones were. At the same time, the softness of shooting conditions were stymied, because at that time people only had 25 ASA film, very hard ones, then we developed on dark film roll, to thwart, to erase this lightness. So there was still an opposition… Soften a lot with smoke, and in the same time, the hardness of negative (or positive), what was the photographic reality of this time, and in the meantime, using the iris in scope, and it becomes an oval iris because of the anamorphic scope -which is actually 35mm – and is deformed at the shooting, is re-deformed during the projection, in the way to keep the 2.35:1 aspect ratio that Fritz Lang used and appreciated, considering that “cinemascope, is not a format for men, it’s a format for snakes”. But at the same time it was very interesting, because with the scope, you got all the first floor, but only the first floor, so if you wanted to shoot a building. It was also problematic because I love close-ups – I’ve been very beaten by those close-ups which shook the world when the Soviets started to use them, as it was forbidden before the Revolution, and exist only in 1.33:1. This means that all of a sudden, you got the mask, the face, and this really is the relationship between the human being and the cosmos. And it only existed in 1.33:1, that’s the reason why some of the sequences match so nicely.
At the opposite, for the sequences with the truck, there were three faces. It becomes enthralling at this moment because you got two faces, then a third one enters the field, you cannot have that in 1.33:1, however the iris countered it and I got my close-up back.
Ok so we have finished ! (laughs) I don’t remember why we were speaking about that… Well, finally, all of that, the organicity… What was the question ? Does the recording work ?
Mónica Delgado: In this film, it’s inevitable to think of Eastern Bloc science fiction literature, Stanislav Lem, for example: The weight of science over humanity. How did you built this metaphor of the toxic wasteland? How is it that, inside the canon of science fiction in cinema, you build a film with a particular crescendo, with this latent threat that pours from the same worn down nature of the island, her vengeful nature?
FJO : The answer is almost in the question itself ! Questions are very interesting but almost deserve their own development, I don’t know if I’m up to… Yes, as I’ve been marked by all the Soviet movies of the 20s, strangely, people often speak to me of sci fi although I’m not that learned about it. I am much more about comics (Belgian ones), I’m a huge fan of Hergé for example.
But the fact is that silent film has almost found it’s descendants in comics -but that is something else, it’s almost considering the question on its opposite. I mean there is no descendant of silent films except in the relatively new time of the 70′s, 80′s when, suddenly, everything surfaces, mostly through music. People haunted by that are rock’n roll people, whether it be industrial music, Bela Lugosi’s dead, Bauhaus… in one go, there is a come back in the 80s fantasy, which certainly comes from Punk. I remember Punk, we dreamed of the tabula rasa, all the aesthetic of the covers is wildly marked by Dadaist aesthetic, and then, one thing leading to another, Dada, vortex, etc.
Michèle Collery: As you’re speaking about Hergé, there is this image, in Dharma Guns (2011), which looks exactly like a Tintin strip.
FJO: Well, this is interpretation… I was a huge fan of James Bond when I was young. Well, everything explodes in the end but I was such a fan of Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962) which was still, for me, a great movie.
After that, oddly, for example I knew pretty badly Tarkovsky. There are things that became almost obligatory countercultural classics, but that were hardly accessible. I didn’t see the film when it was first released but there were three people to watch Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979)! However, there were 50 people to watch The Bunker of the Last Gunshots (Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1981) in the 90s. But the actual loser, in this case, in terms of audience, was Tarkovsky!
However, Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972) is one of my fetish movies. When I went to Chile, I took two video tapes : Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951) -I have a huge admiration for him- and Solaris, which is an unexplainable film, though I watched it at least 20 times ! It’s a sensual experience, which has an inexplicable form I find, with regards to the stupidity of 99% of contemporary cinema, where we have already understood where they came from, where they go… While this film, I don’t know… I don’t know how it’s done, it’s an astounding film. So I was thinking that if I was lost, I would watch it at the hotel and I never could! It was NTSC so I could not see my videos (my copies were PAL), I took them in vain. But that was later on, in 1996…
I can’t remember what the question was… Oh yes, sci fi.
That is the problematic of the science attacking humans,Witold Gombrowicz also speaks about that -I’m a huge fan of Gombrowicz’s diary. He constantly brings art against science, to overly-scientific litterature, to overly-scientific critic, over-psychoanalysed, the critic of the critic, etc… (with a strong Polish accent) “Anyway, art is the prince of blood from head to toe”. I re-read all the time, when I return in the South of France, The Diary: years of Argentina, which is absolutely amazing. I recommend it, it’s really amazing, especially as it is the story of loser who will win, and who’s the builder of his own victory, which is important in this diary. First he wrote it as a “weekend writer”, because he didn’t have time, he had to work, he was lost in Argentina… But this is, I think, actually his magnus opus. He is in a war against the world, first because to be translated from Polish when you’re in deepest Argentina, then because he’s in a break with the dominant literary world in Argentina and at the end it will finally be French who call and that will bring him to Paris “in this (cultural) breeding ground”. Attacking Borges, he attacks everything that is sublime… Next question please.
Mina Blumenfield: I’d like to come back to the second part of the question, on this world of Bitches Islands you have built, this idea of an emptiness that oozes horror, acid, poison…
FJO : Organic, magentic, this magnetic sexuality, sexual mineralogy, mineralogic sexuality, I don’t know… Everything interacts.
Michèle Collery: But hell, actually…
FJO: Yes. Well, hell is complicated… Finally hell is already behind them. I don’t know how to say that… Hell, it’s like the Apocalypse, they are both revelations… At this moment I had the feeling that the Apocalypse had already happened, but the worst was that we had spent the Apocalypse, the Revelation, and we didn’t see anything! We didn’t understand! So it goes on and on, like another “as it continues, it will be fine” but it will not last as long as taxes and debt.
Because I was haunted by this thing of wasted opportunities: when you see the state of the world at the nineteenth and what happened in two centuries. I think it already begins to degenerate in the sixteenth, the Renaissance is in many ways a seizure…
Michèle Collery: The fact is, at the time of the Renaissance, we find, when you work a little over the devil and all, that those who burned witches were in fact the administration. Finally, in the Middle Ages, witches were more tolerated than the Renaissance.
FJO: Yes, and what’s call Hermetism or esotericism, mean what’s not exoteric, ie overdraft, religion etc… But there were people who had knowledge and there was a passage between the different cultures. Thus I do not know if this is true or false, we can always dream…
Mina Blumenfield : There were very important cultural exchanges.
FJO: There was this tenth century pope, who had rubbed along with Jewish world, the world of Islam through Spain, so he was not that appreciated, it was said he was devil’s pope… And the Middle Ages is very long, thus it means nothing. To call it The Dark Ages is absurd.
So it’s true that there is this “negative cathedral” side this of the film, at certain times in the light. I had this intuition, I can’t remember when, I went into Notre Dame des Victoires, the lights of the church were completely turned off and there was this light that penetrated in, it was like, “I think I’ve found the light for the film!”
There is, in all of my films, this flow of elements. We shot in a water tank of the eighteenth century in Lisbon, the Mae d’Agua. Thus it’s much more adjusting the settings of reality I’ve made, as I had a very little spending limit, it was to deterritorialize, because that what cinema is: to deterritorialize, to appropriate, this is where setting is not used that much in cinema. It’s the occupation, the possession of space. Anyway, light revisits spaces. At the blue hour everything looks fine, even a rubbish tip, even the Defense are becomes something cosmic. So it is true that the light…
Mónica Delgado: Docteur Chance (1997)is your only color film. It’s a stylized film noir, but also a post-punk revelation, a strange and lysergic trip. How did you define that style between the film noir limbo and the road movie?
FJO: Here I was forced to shot in color. We were shooting in Chile, the film’s financing was precarious and the producer wanted us to turned color so we may have a chance to have funds from Canal +, which was apparently very allergic to black and white at that moment. Also in Chile, that laboratories there developed only in color, using French treatment in a small photo laboratory that provided advice for development. At this time, I think it was the only film that was shot in color without bleaching, i.e. while keeping the silver, just to keep the graphic structure. So the colors went crazy, which made ?me very happy. I actually really love color!
All the colors are there, the shades between color and black and white. So I tried my best for with the shot because it was shot at night, either inside, in a room, or in the desert. As John Ford said “God is the director of photography”. It is the sun, the Sun God, we can only raise or lower the f-stop.
At the same time, I think it have to be light, although for the Docteur Chance project, the idea was to make a film noir, a road movie and both a kind of tomb of, or monument to, the twentieth century: painting, poetry, fast cars, fast girls, fast plays… And in this area too, as with the Bitches, Paul didn’t want me to go in the north. Well, it’s true that the Atacama is still a guaranteed Satori! At first I was terrified when I was scouting in the desert, when I was stuck at Mamina, where I finally shot. The local guy cheated me on dates, so we didn’t have a buck in and still had to manage 15 days in this area, which is behind Iquique but at 3000 meters above sea level -and it was amazing. I speak about it in a book called The 59 days.
Then when the Chileans finally allowed me to get in, it was no longer possible because there were great sceneries, but every 500 km or almost! The area it is very large, on Baquedano, to Arica, the last town to the north… And finally, the set designer told me “You just do as you feel” because San Pedro was definitively too expensive for us. So we still shot in a bit complicated areas: Mamina, Santiago, a little in south of Santiago, Cauquenes and then, when editing, I mixed everything… Thus it is a kind of a perfect South America, fictitious, metaphorical and emotional for an European, where there may be some truth, I do not know …
And there is also, as always, this story of time travel that I like – because there is also a question, later, about settings, so I melt everything now then I will have already answer to the last questions!
It’s also true that I’ve always kept this concept I had in The Bitches that, if you look closely, you see that all the characters are dressed in different times. One is nineteenth century, the other is in 1940s, the other is the 1970s and, in The Bitches, it’s all rather equalized with black and white but in fact, if you examine they are all dressed very differently, with for some a little east side like the Turkish doctor, Bormane is really 40s, Rubio is completely 60s/70s… It’s almost a child thing as, I loved Hannibal for example. When I was a child I was mad about Hannibal, and “This is Hannibal’s light!” or the idea of ??saying “This pavement in Toulouse is a pavement in Buenos Aires!” But actually, that what cinema is, a journey through time. As I said once, cinema travels.
As in the book, as Mercury told, because for me this that’s what silver film is, the insolent mercury, especially in black and white but also with color, because Docteur Chance was a kind of black and white in color, mutations between salt and mercury. It’s chemical, it’s a real chemical process because it is the sun that corrupts, like acid does, the chemical mixture of the roll, prints it, engraves it. It all comes from black, as with icons, the opposite of Western painting.
Thus, all of this tarentulated me… And in the same time, Mercury being the god of travelers, messengers and thieves: this is cinema! Insolent Mercury is cinema. A machine to transform time, a motionless travel, a psychotropic travel… Cinema is a very strong psychoactive drug. I remember in my youth, when I went to theaters, cinema comes to excitement. This is what I kind of try to explain in Insolent Mercury, but I remember that when I was quite depressed, I have seen three or four times the same movie, drinking two gin and tonics between each, and I came back in.
Michèle Collery: But when you were a little boy, did you watch a lot of silent movies or did you discover them later?
FJO: No, I didn’t have a television when I was a child.
Michèle Collery: You went to theaters?
FJO : No, not that much because I lived in a nowhere land … Thus I discovered it pretty late, finally. What I watched were the 5pm movies at my grandfather’s house, where there was a television. Those are films which impressed me very strongly. There’s one I searched for years, I believed it was called “Maximilien” but it is actually Juarez (William Dieterle, 1939) which was written by John Huston and is a movie that made me cry so much. It’s the story of Maximilian (Archduke of Austria) who gets left behind by the Europeans. He’s the Emperor of Mexico, placed there for tactical reasons and abandoned when things go wrong, denied by Americans who refuse this character. But he’s also the first Westerner to get interested in pre-Columbian culture, who promotes mixed-race people, starts investigations in pre-Columbian sites. This guy is made an idiot in most American films, except this one where he’s curious. So, he adopts the daughter of the first emperor, who was a Spanish conspirator, who had made a putsch against Spain. It is a curious in regards to today’s idiots, he refuses to withdraw, is shot, his wife gets crazy, almost went to the European courts begging for help…
So this was one of those movies that I saw in black and white at the television. But I got interested in them later, along with poetry. Then, it became the arms race, as I said. It was all very controlled, very cultural, almost a bit schizophrenic, there are only poets who read poetry. And rock and roll, so it was a dilution, a contamination of (social) classes, because we were a minority in the beginning. There were punk, proletarian, prolétarial, beheaded aristocrats. It was good and dangerous, everyone hated us. We were “the men you will love to hate.” Someone I also really like is Eric von Stroheim, a great actor but also a great director. And Josef von Stenberg, but these are the Viennese, Hollywood’s Viennese: Jews who added “von” for the sake of doing more true than truth, more germanic than Germans and austrian than Austrians, more aristocratic than aristocrats. some real punks!
Michèle Collery: Especially Eric von Stroheim!
FJO: Yes! He had been completely taken off by Joseph Kennedy. He was more or less produced by Golria Swanson and Kennedy’s father, who said “who’s this insane guy?” and stopped Stroheim’s movie Queen Kelly(1928) – and was actually a Nazi. They completely took out Stroheim who made six huge movies and then became an actor… With Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932), which I may have seen something like 28 times, that was the kind of film I saw at 5pm on TV when I was 12 or 13 years old …
Mónica Delgado: In Docteur Chance you can clearly perceive the circular narrative construction; it ends where it begins, and the characters mention once in a while “the need to finish what has been started”. In Dharma Guns, the trip of the lead character is elliptic, labyrinth-like, and sort of chaotic. However, there are similarities, because both lead characters are in transit throughout the film, but with different narrative codes. Were you aware of that association between those characters in the making of Dharma Guns, which is a later film?
FJO: Well, so… I can’t remember the beginning of the question…
Ah, the beginning is the end, I liked this idea. The end is the beginning, you have to finish what you’ve started, that’s the big problem currently, people really don’t know how to finish what they started, so they all work. And also the idea that destruction generates a creation that generates a destruction, there is no creation that doesn’t generate destruction. It is in literature, to want to destroy literature, people wish they could destroy literature, punks wanted to destroy rock and roll, they resurrected the dead body of rock and roll… And then I like to summon something different -it is pretty usual in writing- different modes of narration, etc… I like to have the ability to get from something that is rather fashionable in the 20s, the 30s to the 60s in the cinema… It seems quite natural to me.
Michèle Collery: But the other common point between the two films, is the love story at the crux. This love story is not incidental, it is important.
FJO: Yes… And all the Orphic way of the link between them… There is a question about Romanticism latter, but Romanticism is the exaltation of the senses. It begins with the return to antiquity -for example, the first time I went to South America, I had fun, rightly or wrongly, trying to find common things between the old Celtic peoples, Gallic people (from whom almost everything has disappeared, because they apparently did not like to reveal their stuff, and thus there’s nothing written down), the multiple tribes… So Romanticism started with Chateaubriand wondering about druid women, etc… And finally sex. The disenchantment of history, the disillusionment of revolution, that’s what actually led to Romanticism, kind of pantheism of the exaltation of the senses, which follows the ends of politics and the helplessness of expectations: Revolution, empire, either from the German or French side… Everything always repeats but differently, whatever it been in the eighteenth or twentieth century… And whether it be love or sex, it’s still interesting. Even if many people do their best to be disgusted by it, it’s still a good stuff.
Michèle Collery: A solid value.
FJO: No, because it’s fleeting, perishable.
Michèle Collery: Yes, but it keeps in good condition! Imagine a world with no love.
FJO: Likewise, for example, all those medieval amour courtois things. I really like the troubadours. I discovered them, surprisingly, through Ezra Pound! Because these people are great poets, acclaimed by Dantes, and completely forgotten by official French culture. People like Arnaut Daniel, Bertrand de Broc, etc… They are in the Divine Comedy – for example Arnaut Daniel who invented the Canzone style. Finally, all the modern Europe comes up with southern Europe, with Arthurian literature. This book is exciting, it’s called The Spirit of Romance by Ezra Pound, and then in his Cantos, he goes from China to Greece… It’s a particular point of the Xxth century to pick up everything, just as before the final liquidation. One can find that in Ezra Pound’s work, with Joyce. One must go faster… But I can not rationalize everything ..
Mina Blumenfield: It is true that, with this interview, we are dealing with passionate researchers…
FJO: With fascinating questions, but they’re, especially orally, pretty difficult…
There are three theoretical books that probably left a mark on me. The first one is TheBirth of Tragedy by Nietzsche, which, oddly, was written to encourage Wagner’s artistic putsch, with hidden musicians, turned off lights, outrageous scenery. In this book Nietzsche tries to rely on (rightly or wrongly, because there are historically researchers who say that there are things which are not quite valid today) linking the Dionysian to the Apollonian, on the origins of tragedy, what tragedy was, and it’s actually an extremely inspirational book for cinema, which is still haunted, like opera, by tragedy. Tragedy grows on three generations, I speak about it in the book, and was played regarding to the sun, there were deliveries on stage, it was, apparently, an incredible thing. So it finally lasted three generations, then moved to a widespread theatrical variety, which may happen to cinema which may be diluted into a very small amount of things.
Another book is Sergei Eisenstein’s Nonindifferent Nature and the third, very interesting one, which is almost dictated by Cocteau to Fraigneau from his deathbed, is called Entretiens Sur Le Cinématographe where he conceptualized the topic that was later resumed by Robert Bresson. I think that Cocteau was intuitively a founder guy of the French cinema of those years, because he still gives substance to Melville and Bresson: what we are missing in today’s cinema. He explains that chance can open new ways of thinking and creating, especially when you have, such as a European or a South American director, small budgets. But we still shot with traditional cinematographic tools, because cinema is still like alchemy, a hyper-materialistic spirituality, because actually, cinema has more to do with the building trade – you still need bricks, etc – than with otherworldly things, even if we spare spaced out states of actors, then see if it works, put together the elements that will comes to consumption. Set on fire or extinguish.
Mónica Delgado: It would seem natural that a character like F.J. Ossang called an icon of punk culture like Joe Strummer. How did he become involved in Docteur Chance, in addition of having a character that almost seem like an extension of his celebrity status?
FJO: Another difficult question… I try to work as an archeologist of my memories and obsessions, but it’s not that easy…
I’ve always been a big fan of Vince Taylor, who has always been the beautiful loser of Franco-British rock and roll -considering he was an Englishman who emigrated to the Unites States and almost became a kind of superstar in France -it was a really bad tactical choice- because rock could still work here, whereas in England, it already turned into cheesy pop. At the time, in the early 60s, it rocked, he was dressed all in black leather, and he was cursed while he became a superstar: at a concert in Paris at Parc des Princes, every chair was destroyed, there was a riot, people were injured… He’s the one who wrote “Brand New Cadillac.” He’s a figure who had never done anything but comes back, I saw him in the late 70s, he could get on stage completely drunk and his voice was still perfect. Thus I contacted him, he was very interested but, he didn’t know how ill he was. He died in 1991, while I was still writing the script. That’s the moment his fan-club asked me to write a small text about him, so I wrote two pages where I speak, notably, of how he inspired Bowie to create the character of Ziggy Stardust and of The Clash who covered “Brand new Cadillac”, and from there grew the idea of Joe Strummer.
Docteur Chance was kind of a film to bury youth, the last film of youth, as I’ve learned, through a stupid survey whose internet is overflowed that the age of reason of a man was 43 years old. I wasn’t this age yet, but it was the movie of my 40s, thus Beckman, Egon Schiele are in the film – quite a fate from my subconscious – then ones say it’s a tribute to the last lights of Austrian Empire, comes Georg Trakl, great Austrian poet, who diedd in 1914 of a cocaine overdose, which actually was a suicide, Egon Schiele, Beckman, everything…
And getting back to the question, the stupid idea came to write Joe Strummer because Vince Taylor was dead, so I sent him a 10 page fax, explaining the project and so saying “I’d like you to give me a PO Box address so I can send you the scenario”. I sent the script. Three days later he replied “I love the script! I can give you some cash, but I think it’s better for actors” Thus I replied, actually, that’s perfect, I’ll be in London next week. He accepted the appointment, we start talking.
Only rockers love poetry and literature – sometimes you wonder! We spoke about rock and roll, I told him that I want to make a film of the classic punk age, haunted by Arthur Craven, the boxer, who traumatized Breton, who was also Oscar Wilde’s nephew . And it all melt between The Clash, the Sex Pistols, Vince Taylor, Arthur Cravan: it all enchanted Strummer. We drank champagne in a pizzeria and I don’t know what and then he said “Now, we go to the pub.” So here we are, the producer drinking vodka on the rocks, I was on gin and tonic, 3 or 4, I don’t remember what he took -we had to order fast because it was nearly last orders – thus, we each had our 3 or 4 glasses, we played darts and he says “Ok Ossang, I’ll do your movie!”
So after that, it took a long time for the film to be made, and at one point, he wrote “We dreamt too much, we will not do the movie… “ and somehow he was right because I saw that the budget was very tight… I’m a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and someday I came across a special edition a literary magazine, and there was a photo from the “gin times”, where Fitzgerald was a little puffed up by gin, a very nice picture, with quite melancholic eyes and a short story, called in French “Sans Daux Départ”. I sent it and he wrote me back “So long, Joe. Maybe you’re right… ” At 5 o’clock in the morning I got a fax – the way we were in touch- traumatized by Scott Fitzgerald, Strummer wrotes” You’re right Osang! Yeah we go! Take on Chile!”And so we made the film.
So it is true that Strummer was a guy with a huge bunch of energy and sensitivity. And then there was the whole pan-Celtic thing , you know, there was this song on the soundtrack about Indians, the Incas, pyramids and fast cars… On the other hand, it’s true that I like to choose… Actually, there is the landscape and the face, and as I didn’t have that much budget nor ties of casting, I could take the opportunity to choose to photograph a person who fascinates me, whether it is a writter, a film maker or a rocker. Well then, of course, it creates a dialogue, as someone said… And then he really played along, even if his presence was relatively short as he stayed only 15 days, but we really got on well.
What often offends Anglo-Saxon by the way! Australians say “How? An Englishman! A British!!” But he was Scottish, what is actually quite different. He was born in Turkey, raised in Cairo, Mexico City, so he wasn’t still the classic Rosbif (Translator’s note: colloquial French term for British people). And it is true that there was a kind of back and forth when he came to Paris. After the concerts, we began to speak from 11pm until morning we talked, we talked…
Thus Autralians say “No, no, this is not possible” but I say “Yes, I did! I made a film with Joe Strummer.” So they answer “You bloody French motherfucker, are you kidding us? There’s no way this happens! Joe Strummer shooting with fucking frenchies! Impossible!” We almost got in a fight! It was with a kind of punk in Auckland, in New Zealand. We got on well then, after I don’t know what, The Clash appear on TV, we speak about it and then… But it is true that in movies, there are often British but they are mostly Scottish!
Mónica Delgado: Dharma Guns appears to be a Dantesque epic poem. It’s a descent into the circles of hell. Someone dies, so we go from color to a stylized chiaroscuro. The black and white allows for the expressivity of the lead character, but not only the perspective which the filmmaker wants us to perceive through an Epstein or Murnau-style expressionism but also an impediment of color. The spectator is banned for color, not just for a stylistic resource but as means to find that transit to death. How is this process of reincarnation that you wanted to show under that visual concept?
FJO: It is true that this is an Orphic film, there is an Orphic element to many of my films. And in this one, there is a flow of elements in the film between water, air, fire than can also be found in the series of short films.
Thus, in this one, I kind of reversed certain things: usually in films, the flashbacks are in black and white and here, in the same way, I tried to avoid reverse angle shots, the arrivals of color are almost a questioning of reality. The film is marked by color appearances, whether by real colors or by monochromatic sweeps, what is almost like a wondering about “Is it true? Is it the character’s fantasy?” That was the more the less the idea, but it’s also true that silent movies were often tinted. That is, there was a code: blue for night, red, yellow… Thus I kind of played with those, in a sort of minimal way. And the black and white is the perfect tool for faces. It means that, in one go, it’s the look of the actor, the dominance of the eyes. We really have the very substance of it. There is so much more meaning in a black and white portrait, and at the same time, it gives me the opportunity to de-territorialize the landscapes, because there’s still a sort of symphony of shades.
That is to say that all of a sudden it is the cross of light, it really has a lot of substance. It has a lot more sense, a portrait in black and white, and at the same time it allows for deterritorialized landscapes, because it is still a kind of symphony of contrasts …
And the use of filters is much more subtle with black and white than with color. It’s still the ideal tool. I think it’s Julien Gracq who spoke about it and said that the ideal tool of the cinema had immediately been invented: it is black and white and silence. And in the late 70s, incredible movies such as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) or Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)emerge,
which give the feeling of silent–soundly films due to an incredible technical sound progress, like a 4 centuries jump. When I started to plan make films, the sound-skill had become so much easier (the technique itself was always the same, but with a very lightweight material) that we finally did less interesting/less good cinematography than our predecessors did with harder technical conditions. Actually, the more the technique gets simplified is not the reason why the rhetoric becomes more subtle. Therefore the idea of ??making sound-silent films…
MC: and what do you think of Philippe Dubois? He is a university lecturer at Paris III, and has written extensively on cinematography. He said that black and white is a track of reality, actually the photographic reallity, while the color comes more from the pictorial.
FJO: Yes, well, no… There are all the colors between the black and the white, first technically, but also in imagination. In the proceedings of gray, all the colors are there, between the black and the white, so very quickly, if you’re not in the best photographic conditions, there appears an unrealistic filter, and as I said with fun, in the early 80s, you got this absurd cinema, more sexual than sex, more stupid than stupidity, flatter than flat, and so you got the feeling to ever stay in the mall after the film.
I’ve been raised in the countryside and thus, photographically, these are obvious things to me. But still today, when you watch all the shades of gray and contrast in black and white, from the the time of perestroika to today, and you think “Fuck, it’s not so bad!”
But it also comes from my culture. Under the Soviets, cinema and photography were glorified. No chance for democracy, or rather bad luck for the cinema, because democracy does not like cinematography, so one virtualizes everything, clear off, closed!
Then the pictorial… I love sculpture and printmaking more than painting. I really love the painting of certain artists, even the painters of second, fourth, eighteenth degree, but today, there’s no really true painters anymore. I was talking with a guy who made ??incredible wash drawings -I like today’s outdated painters- about Nicolas de Stael, I loved him, or guys like Klein. It’s crazy how Klein’s painting is young. But actually in the book, what makes mind bounces are rather poets, while for film theorists or even filmmakers, there are plenty of people who make movies and do not know what they say. Then it is demiurgy! Cinema is still an imperishable vocation but, just as for opera, it’s the story of the elephant giving birth to a fly. Cinema turns easily this way, it can be so infernal, you really have to take care. Even if you don’t have to be afraid to move on!
Mina Blumenfield: It’s a stage which is not that easy to overcome anyway…
FJO: That’s why it’s so funny to come back at the beginning, for the evidence becomes obvious. The close up was forbidden in Russia before the Revolution, because it traumatized people. And it’s true that a face can be of an incredible obscenity, spread over a 30 meters long screen! 25 wide, 4:3… 1,33:1! At least 130 meters long on 100 meters high! Close up is a crazy stuff! Now everything is dull…
But poetry… It can seems weird but in the golden age of cinema, almost every great poet became passionate about cinema, even to spit on it by the way, saying “what the fuck have they done of it! What are they do with it! This is bullshit!” when novelists completely freak out about it, it’s a rival for their cash register! Alain Duhamel is afraid of it, when it’s incredible to see how it fits to the texts of Artaud, Lecmte, Desnos or Cocteau. Everybody is interested in this punk instrument because it is borne from triviality: whether it is from the pornographic use of cinema from the beginning, or in brothels or of zoophilia, or the circus… It’s almost never art one’s interested in. But it becomes, with time, something that enters the culture.
MC: We can see a lot of boats on your films, we follow them more or less faster, very close or far behind, from speedboats to cruise ship. Why?
Yes, because there are cars, lot of stuff. Genres of cinema has always interested me, and I think genres are vehicles, and genres interest me. So it is true that the void, the emptiness of the desert, the emptiness of the plains, the true plain, as we do not know it… I found it in Argentina, I did not like the plain before… And then boats, yes, it’s vehicles… and then the idea of speed which is now virtualized and emptied of itself.
Cruise ships are floating council flats, led by captains without honour.
