Alain Resnais: Memory and Fiction

Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (Directed by Alain Resnais)

‘There is a great deal to be moved by in ‘Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime’... The true subject is not what we know about the hero’s life, but what we can never hope to learn. Like the mouse that accompanies [Claude] Rich for part of his time journey... he is locked into a past that is inexpressible and irredeemable, and the beauty of the film resides in its capacities to convince us of this. The emotional conviction of this intensity is felt behind and between the images more than within them, but we cannot deny its palpable presence.’ 
– Jonathan Rosenbaum

The great French director Alain Resnais was a major figure in the French New Wave. Resnais started making feature films in the late 1950s and established his reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Muriel (1963), all of which utilized bold and unconventional narrative techniques which explored themes of problematic memory and the imagined past. 

Resnais' first came to prominence with a documentary on the Nazi concentration camps, Night and Fog (1955). Utilising stock footage with a voice-over commentary by Jean Cayrol, who was a survivor of the camp, had powerful results, and the film gained widespread recognition. 

Resnais then turned to a narrative fictional film, a love story set in the aftermath of the devastation caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Historical footage mixed with lyrical imagery, as well as personal accounts, combined to provide an innovative and poignant film Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959). With the critical and commercial triumph of “La Vie Est Belle,” Resnais moved to the forefront of what critics dubbed the French New Wave. 

Resnais worked with renowned avant-garde author Alain Robbe-Grillet to create an intricate and complicated mystery thriller Last Year at Marienbad (L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad, 1961). In place of a traditional story, the  viewer instead experienced an intractable mystery that constantly cycled through lines and scenarios within s a surreal, unreal setting in which memory is fallible; the characters see the same events in differing ways, demonstrating that there is no absolute truth when it comes to what transpired. The picture won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Cinema Festival and exerted a significant influence on the film industry. 

Another reflection on time, location, and memory, followed with Muriel (1963). While both the mother and her son regret decisions and behaviours from their past, they have the will to strive and make things better for themselves. Their disjointed story reflects their inner experience of feeling removed from both the past and the present. A new and more humanistic style may be seen in the more traditionally structured La Guerre Est Finie (1966) and Je T'aime, Je T'aime (1968). 

Resnais most notable feature in the following decade was Providence (1977), which stars John Gielgud. Resnais explored some of his favourite themes such as time, memory, and place in My American Uncle (1980), a documentary-style discussion of animal behaviour, and a powerful emotional drama called Life is a Bed of Roses (1983), which follows characters in different time periods on a quest for their own version of Utopia. La Vie est un Roman (Life is a Novel, 1983) follows characters in different time periods searching for their own vision of Utopia, while Melo (1986) and I Want to Go Home (1989) each challenged the boundaries of what cinema should be about.

The following interview with Alain Resnais was conducted during the production of the director’s witty sci-fi adventure Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (1968) – a major influence on Michel Gondry’s sci-fi romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). 

Written in collaboration with Jacques Sternberg it tells the story of a suicidal writer Claude Ridder, played by Claude Rich, who agrees to become a guinea pig for scientists exploring time travel. But the experiment goes wrong and Ridder’s relived memories give rise to seemingly random fragments of the past that center on a haunting point of romantic guilt.  

What are the major problems you find in Claude Rich?

Claude Rich’s quality is to always act in a kind of haze. I’m very moved by that, meaning that he knows what the text means, of course, that he can speak it, but he knows exactly how to find the kinds of repercussions there are behind the text. It’s never just the words, we can feel that there’s a series of states of the soul he can embellish when he wants to with an extraordinary suppleness. For me, he’s a really great actor.

I’ve been able to see, on some sets, directors who look worried and restless. What struck me about you, when I saw you working, is your surprising calmness. You seem to have an Olympian calm and to really know in advance that everything will work out.

That means that I’m always trying to control myself and to think. It’s all about getting what you want. At most, you have to keep your composure and make the shoot something enjoyable because if it becomes a kind of homework or if you don’t do it in a happy atmosphere, well, I think that’s dangerous both for oneself but also for the film. I like the story René Clément told about Cocteau one day. Cocteau was seeing a film with Clément and said to him, ‘You see, this film, it’s terrible because the camera is a very dangerous animal, because the camera films not only what is in front of it, but it also films what is behind it. And, you see, in this film, they were so bored while making it that their boredom is onscreen.’ What he said really struck me and it’s maybe why I try to be as calm as possible.

How does a filmmaker come to attach himself to a story, to choose this story out of so many others?

Sometimes I say we’re a bit like peasants or hunters. I think that I prefer the peasant comparison: we meet a screenwriter. We talk a little about the kind of grain we could plant and then we move ahead a little. Days pass, to not say the seasons, and then a film is born or withers. Sometimes we try to do real grafts and then the grafts don’t take hold, it’s very strange, and the film falls back into a kind of oblivion and decay. But I’ve never been able to tell why some bloom and others shrivel.

But are there any stories that you wouldn’t want to film for all the money in the world?

I wouldn’t want to make a sadistic crime film, well, violent films and things like that. That would disgust me enough.

Since ‘Hiroshima mon amour’, you’ve been a strong influence on a whole aspect of new films, are you aware of this influence?

No, I’m not very aware of it. Sometimes I’m reproached, if I can say that, for some films, saying, ‘Here, it’s because of you that this type of film has been made.’ But I’ve never really felt it, I feel like these are films that would have been shot in any case. Moreover, I don’t think one can truly be influential since ideas are a bit in the air. I feel like a director (this might not be true for an auteur) is a kind of catalyst. Someone else would have done the same thing in a slightly different way but in any case I believe in a kind of inevitability in the history of art, or let’s say in the history of performing arts in any case.

There are styles that are in the air.

Exactly. That’s why I don’t believe in plagiarism, for example, except in very, very specific cases. But in general, when someone says, ‘He stole my subject!’ I don’t believe it at all. That subject was in the air. And then, it was the first person who shot it who was right to do it.

But, for yourself, do your own previous films not bother you a bit sometimes when you’re undertaking a new one?

Yes, sometimes that’s true because you’re always afraid of repeating yourself. When you suddenly realize that this shot has already been done, it’s sort of a discouraging feeling, so you have to work twice as hard to try to avoid it.

With ‘Hiroshima mon amour’ and now with ‘Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime’ it’s fairly extraordinary to see the number of films, notably French films, with the word ‘love’ or ‘live’ in the title.

Yes. People today feel so overcome by information. What I find really striking, in 1968, is the terrifying bombardment an honest man receives in a day and the amount of information his brain must filter through, at every level, be it cultural, political, public interest stories, sports. And I’m not sure my brain is really ready, at the moment, to react to this amount of information, so what’s happening? Well, to try to find a balance, he tends to withdraw into itself, maybe to try to find some kind of balance in a more active love life.

Could you give us an idea of the general tone of ‘Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime’?

The tone is kind of a mix, a little bit of Chekov and science fiction. It’s a kind of coming and going between sensations, above all. I think it’s a very sentimental and very romantic film, in the end. But the sequence of the scenes is the difficulty, it’s maybe also what’s interesting about the undertaking, the dramatic architecture is going to be based on a series of emotions. You know, the iridescence on the sea when there are layers of gas. I’m not talking about oil slicks, I’m just talking about sort of rainbow layers, like this, that float on top of the sea. I hope audiences can feel that.

– Alain Resnais: Interview During Production (courtesy of http://thefilmdesk.com)

  

Bergman: On Writing, Demons and Childhood Secrets

Fanny and Alexander (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Ingmar Bergman's swan song Fanny and Alexander was a sumptuous epic of the bourgeois family. At once charming, unsettling and colourful, it challenges the director's reputation as a gloomy, doom merchant, and makes a wonderful introduction to the great director. However, it also was conceived as Bergman’s last film, in which Bergman made peace with his demons and looks back, through the eyes of children, on the great themes of his early masterpieces.

It is the story two siblings who are raised in a dysfunctional environment. Alexander struggles against his stepfather's coldness  and in certain places, the film is as dark and as terrifying as anything you encounter in Cries and Whispers or Through a Glass Darkly. By the time the film reaches its finale Fanny and Alexander feels like his most mature, insightful, and well-realized film. 

Bergman was notorious throughout his early career of facing the consequences of a world without God, only to conclude that everyone is God, and that humanity builds God in their own image, for better or worse. It is significant to note that the God that appears in the closing moments of Fanny and Alexander is shown to be a cheap dummy, whose puppet-master sets it in motion. 

Bergman gives central focus to a boy grieving over his father's death, the source of the hate and anger that he turns outwards onto the universe. Then he is implicitly his own director; a boy who manipulates the world of theatre, its characters, puppets, to make sense of the meaningless of the universe. 

Bergman's own youth provides the contrast between the two worlds of Fanny and Alexander, the vibrant theatrical family and the severe order of the bishop's residence. On the one hand, his youth was distinguished by 'good humour, plays, songs, music, and poetry reading'; on the other hand, it was defined by 'austerity, moralising, denial, rigidity, and violence'. 

The film's autobiographical elements, characters based on family members, the Ekdahl residence being a replica of Bergman's grandmother's Uppsala residence, and the likeness between Alexander and the young Bergman is undeniable, along with his interests in the puppet theatre and the magical lantern. 

Fanny and Alexander is often viewed as a distillation of Bergman's career, and it indeed has clear echoes from his earlier works: a concern with religion, family, the role of the artist. In addition, Fanny and Alexander takes place in a theatrical setting, with several allusions to dramatists dear to Bergman. Fanny and Alexander is a film infused with a love of the theatre. It is no surprise that in his final film, then, and despite his considerable accomplishments as a filmmaker, Bergman places the world of the theatre at the heart of the story.

Jörn Donner was Managing Director of the Swedish Film Institute between 1978 and 1982 during which he produced Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander (1982). In 1984 the movie won a total of four Academy Awards including the award for best foreign language film. The following dialogue is taken from an interview Donner conducted with Bergman in Stockholm during three days in November, 1997. Aged 79 at the time, Bergman reflects on his writing method, his childhood and the ‘demon of suspicion’. 

Ingmar Bergman: When I am going to sleep at night, I can walk through my grandmother's apartment, room by room, and remember everything in the most minute detail, where different things were, what they looked like, what colour they were. I can also remember the light, winter light or summer light, through the windows, the pictures on the walls. The apartment was furnished before the turn of the century and contained a huge number of things. That was the bourgeois style of the day, not a millimetre was to remain uncovered; there had to be things everywhere. It's really strange. My grandmother died when I was twelve and I haven't been there since I was about perhaps ten or eleven. But I remember it in detail. The things there in the apartment, they still have a magical content and significance to me. I made a lot of use of that in Fanny and Alexander. If any conclusions are to be drawn from that, Jörn, then it may well be that in that way, the whole of my creativity is really tremendously childish, all based on my childhood. In less than a second, I can take myself back into my childhood. I think everything I've done in general, anything of any value, has its roots there. 

Or dialectically, it is a dialogue with childhood...

Jörn Donner: Quite often, you’ve been considerably more experimental in films than in the theatre.

Ingmar Bergman: Films demand their form, and staged plays theirs. I’ve never simply decided that now I shall experiment, but everything has just been given the form I’ve thought it ought to have. I’m not at all interested in whether I’m experimenting or not.

Fanny and Alexander (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Jörn Donner: But is it some kind of intuition? Who the hell would be crazy enough to write a script such as Cries and Whispers?

Ingmar Bergman: [laughter] It’s like this: it was necessary to write it in that way, or Persona, or the one I’ve just written, Faithless. They’ve found their form simply because it was necessary to write them in that way – to do them in that way.

Jörn Donner: You didn’t think about the drama...

Ingmar Bergman: No, in general I wasn’t thinking about anything.

Jörn Donner: That’s not what I meant. But to go back in time, to Sawdust and Tinsel or Prison. Didn’t you think them out either?

Ingmar Bergman: No, I didn’t. Well, not Sawdust and Tinsel, but Prison – I suppose that was the first time I wrote my own script. I was quite crazy with delight and had to get everything that I had been walking around and thinking about into it. Without my really making any effort, it became... peculiar.

Jörn Donner: I suppose you don’t want to say you’re an intuitive writer.

Ingmar Bergman: But wasn’t it you who said that when you begin writing, you don’t know how it will turn out?

Jörn Donner: That’s right, of course, yes.

Cries and Whispers (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Ingmar Bergman: It’s just intuition, and it’s the same when I start writing, I have a kind of basic scene, a beginning. I usually say that in Cries and Whispers I went on for very long, and had a scene with four women in white in a red room.

Jörn Donner: And that was all, generally speaking.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, it was only that. And then I started thinking about why they were there and what they said to each other, that kind of thing. It was mysterious. It kept coming back again and again, and I couldn’t get that scene to come out right.

Jörn Donner: A kind of dream image.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, you know what it’s like. Then you begin winding in a long thread that appears from somewhere or other, and the thread can suddenly snap. That’s the end of that, but then all of a sudden, it’s a whole ball.

Jörn Donner: Have threads often snapped for you?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, lots of times.

Jörn Donner: But not the kind of threads you’ve spent weeks working on, or in manuscript form.

Ingmar Bergman: No, not once I’ve started writing. By then I’ve already done my working books. In them, I’ve written endless things, masses of stuff, but once I’ve started on the script, then I know what I’m doing.

Prison (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Jörn Donner: What are your working books about?

Ingmar Bergman: Absolutely everything.

Jörn Donner: So the script grows out of the working book?

Ingmar Bergman: Exactly. Well, it’s unfinished, completely. Keeping working books is fun.

Jörn Donner: Have you always done that?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, always. At first, I didn’t really have the time. But when I did have the time, yes. Often when I was younger and had to earn money for all my wives and children, then I had to begin on the script, so to speak, bang, directly, I mean. But now I can lie on the sofa and play about with my thoughts and have fun with them, looking at images, doing research and so on. All that’s great fun. My working books are also quite illegible to anyone else but me. But then the actual writing begins out of these notebooks.

Jörn Donner: And it goes quickly?

Ingmar Bergman: Relatively quickly because it’s so boring. It’s hellishly boring, just like when you do a theatre performance and sit there sketching out the scenes, how the actors are to move and stand, when they’re to say what, and all that – hellishly dreary. When I’m writing the script, I write a certain number of pages a day.

Sawdust and Tinsel (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

 Jörn Donner: Would you consider writing in any other way but by hand?

Ingmar Bergman: No, never.

Jörn Donner: Why not?

Ingmar Bergman: I can’t type. [laughter] I’ve tried.

Jörn Donner: Is it a physical thing?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, it’s a physical thing, profoundly unsatisfactory. I use a sort of notepad to write on. They existed when I was employed as a slave scriptwriter at Svensk Filmindustri in 1942. You were given a kind of lined yellow notepad. Then you had to write by hand and with a broad-nibbed fountain pen. Since then, I’ve always written on that yellow paper and those notepads.

Jörn Donner: Where do you get them?

Ingmar Bergman: About twenty or so years ago it turned out that they weren’t making them anymore, so I had them make eight-hundred pads especially for me. And I’ve still got a few left. I think they’ll just about last me out.

Jörn Donner: I should damned well think so.

Sawdust and Tinsel (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Ingmar Bergman: I write with a ballpoint pen nowadays, but not just any old damned pen. It has to be a very special ballpoint with a very fat tip. It’s the actual writing, although my handwriting is so difficult to read, that gives me pleasure. I like writing by hand. It is very satisfying. In that I always write on the same kind of pad, I know how much I’ve written, you see. And I never write for more than three hours. When the three hours are up, even if I’m in the middle of a scene or wherever the hell I am, I stop working. I stop for the day. Because it’s so boring. But the working book is fun. That’s the actual creative process. Writing the script is just the arranging process.

Jörn Donner: Do you think you have some sort of ritualistic superstition about these notepads and pens, where you work, and those three hours, or is it just a routine?

Ingmar Bergman: No, it’s a ritual. I have very precise rituals. Get up early and eat breakfast, go for a walk, don’t read the paper, don’t talk on the telephone with anyone. Sit down at the desk. My desk has to be tidy, nothing lying about in a mess on it. I am maniacally pedantic when it comes to what it has to look like if I’m to be able to sit working at it. Then when I’ve been writing for about three quarters of an hour, I take a break. I’ve usually got a backache by then, so I walk all through my house, or go and look at the sea, or something like that for a quarter of an hour. Writing scripts is a ‘compulsory exercise’.

Jörn Donner: A kind of battle? Against...

Ingmar Bergman: Against disorder, sloppiness, lack of discipline.

Jörn Donner: You never lacked that.

Ingmar Bergman: Well, no, I’ve never lacked discipline, but if I had, things would have really fallen apart, I assure you. Because I’m constantly battling against my lack of discipline. You just can’t be undisciplined in my profession, you just can’t. That’s why I’ve become so frightfully pedantic, so trying to so many people.

Sawdust and Tinsel (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Jörn Donner: There’s a strange contrast between two things: in both your films and your autobiography you describe your demons with a capital D, while on the other hand in all the pictures of you at work in the theatre and on films, you always seem to be in a good mood.

Ingmar Bergman: I think it’s part of a director’s duty to be in a good mood at work. To create a kind of cheerful atmosphere around the actual exercising of the profession. In the workroom, too.

Jörn Donner: A sense of comfort?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, and security. It’s terribly important. When I was young, I didn’t understand that at all, and took it all with me into my working life, my hangovers and troubles with women, all my shortcomings and stupidities. I dragged them with me into the studio or on stage and raced around like a demon creating hideously unpleasant and uncomfortable situations.
But there’s also something called the educational outburst, that you sometimes have to make use of. These are enormously premeditated attacks of rage. And they are a precision bombing, because that is what’s needed. Things mustn’t be lovely and cozy in a studio, or on stage. And the people we work with, they’re so often tremendously ambitious, so tremendously sensitive, that although we’re playing a game, although it looks like fun – we’re joking and telling funny stories and we relax and so on – they still feel it’s a matter of life and death. And when I say life and death, I actually mean just that.

Jörn Donner: Is it also a matter of keeping up a certain tempo?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, to a tremendous degree. For instance, when you start in the film studio, at nine in the morning, then you start at nine in the morning. The first scene is to be shot at ten. Somehow you have to start punctually. A day shouldn’t start with endless discussion. To me, chatter is largely an abomination, because then there are one or two people, perhaps more involved, while a whole lot of others are standing around, even more in the theatre – should be outside of rehearsals and outside the studio.

Persona (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Jörn Donner: How have you managed to create a distance between what you yourself call your demons and a film studio or a theatre?

Ingmar Bergman: My demons... well, they’ve somehow got to be harnessed. They have to be there, because I suffer from, for instance – how shall I put it – the demon of suspicion. I am an immensely suspicious person.

Jörn Donner: And a hypochondriac, too, perhaps?

Ingmar Bergman: Let’s not keep on counting my demons, for Christ’s sake, but I think they ought to be present. They have to stand at attention, on parade, so that I can convey to the actors how suspicion functions and how hypochondria functions, in gestures, tone of voice or in movements. Obviously the demons have to be brought into it. It would be tremendously risky not to have them with you, but they have to be kept very much under control.

You see, as long as I’m inside the studio, or in the theatre, then that’s a universe controlled by me. Then the demons are also under control. Everything’s under control. But the moment all the lights go off and the camera stops, and I leave by the stage door, or the rehearsal is over, then I no longer have control over the demons. Then it is no longer my universe, so to speak, but the often unpredictable universe that I try to control, but which has constantly bedevilled my efforts...

- Extracted from ‘Jörn Donner: Demons And Childhood Secrets: An Interview’. Translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate. Originally published in Grand Street 17, no. 2 (Fall 1998).