"Earlier, there were reasons for films to be made, or they needed to be made. I feel that is what is lacking today."
Author and award-winning filmmaker Noël Burch, who was feted in
Kerala recently, discusses his convictions and his craft with C.S.
VENKITESWARAN.
Noël Burch was assistant director to Preston Sturges and
Michel Fano, and since the 1960s, has been a film essayist, critic,
director and teacher. He is also the co-founder of the Institut de
Formation Cinématographique. A prolific author and documentary
filmmaker, his books include
Theory of Film Practice
(1973), a monograph on Marcel L’Herbier (1973) and
To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema
(1979).
Burch’s documentaries include
Sentimental Journey
(1993-94),
One Way Ticket
(with Nadine Fischer and Nelson Scartaccini, 1992-93,
Correction, Please or How We Got into Pictures
(1979),
Cuba: Mothers and Machos
(with Michèle Larue, 1997-8),
Red Hollywood
(1995) and
The Forgotten Space
(with Allan Sekula, 2010).
A retrospective of his
documentaries was featured in the Sixth International Documentary and
Short Film Festival of Kerala 2013, which was held from June 7 to 11 at
Thiruvananthapuram. Excerpts from an interview with Burch:
If one looked at your life and work, a certain kind of ‘globality’
marks them. You were born in the U.S., but migrated to France and have
lived there since. Then there is your sustained interest and critical
work about early silent cinema and later Japanese cinema. Your
documentaries too have been about themes and personalities from all over
the world…
True, there is a certain global orientation to my
work, but I think it has something to do with my background. I was born
in the U.S. but, as I grew up, I soon found out that I was out of sync
with the middle class culture around me. I was totally oblivious of the
society around me. I went to France in 1951 because I was fascinated by
French cinema.
There, my life was a series of lucky
accidents. For instance I joined the French national film school (IDHEC)
in Paris. I was interviewed by people like George Sadoul, Andre Bazin,
etc. I could impress them with my passion for cinema. There, I met and
worked with people like Alain Robbe Grille, Godard and Louis Malle. But
it was the events of 1968 that politicised me in a deep manner, and
changed the way I looked at films.
Your film writing, I think, is an extension of your documentaries,
and vice versa. You have pursued the same set of concerns and questions
in both. Most interestingly, you are one film critic who actually
dismissed what you wrote earlier; for instance, in your first book,
Theory of Film Practice
. That is something very rare.
I have the feeling that my first three-and-a-half
books were written by somebody else. They carry my name but I don’t
share any of those fantasies now. I was an American boy who came to
France and knew nothing about anything and thought that art for art’s
sake was the ideal. And I had come to the country where art for art’s
sake was invented.
But there was another aspect to
that country of which I was totally unaware. For instance, the Algerian
war. It took time for me to look around and understand what was going
on. So, I think my first book was totally out of my head. My idea for a
long time was that film was like opera and, in operas as I understood
it, the libretto was just a pretext for music. And similarly, in film,
the script was just a pretext for the form. This is precisely a global
concept, because it takes the world as an abstraction. So, in the first
stages of my film writing, abstraction was king. As a believer in the
formalist avant-garde thing, I used to wonder whether the masses would
be able to understand someone like Andy Warhol.
When did your ideas about film begin to change?
It happened in 1979 when I went back to the U.S. for
two years to teach, mainly because the Left had lost the elections in
France and I was depressed. I was in the Communist Party at that time,
though I held on to my formalist ideas. There, I met people who were
critical about that, particularly the feminists. The feminists had a
huge impact on me, not just politically, but also on my thinking about
films. They were basically concerned about content, about what the film
was about. That opened my eyes. I came back to France and since then
have written a great deal in that direction. For instance, I published a
book with a feminist friend of mine (Geneviève Sellier) about gender
relationships in classical French cinema from 1930 to 1956 (
The Battle of the Sexes in French Cinema
), which has just been translated into English.
The major thematic concerns of your documentaries revolve around
global capitalism, the decades of radical activism, ‘red’ Hollywood and
gender issues. In all these films, you have worked in different
locations and with associates like Allan Sekula, Thom Anderson, Andre
Labarthe etc.
My early films like
Correction Please
and
Life to Those Shadows
were spin-offs from my writing and were directly related to the history
of film language. They aimed at trying to show how cinema was corrupted,
about how cinema began as a pure, modernist art where people looked
into the screen and were not sucked into it like what happened later
with the coming of sound, editing and all that stuff.
The films that came later were made after I was ‘converted’. I made a six-part series —
What Do These Old Films Mean?
— about the social and cultural implications of silent cinema. I am still really proud of that. Films like
The Year of the Bodyguard
and
The Impersonation
(co-directed with Christopher Mason) were attempts at illustrating an idea which is developed in
Theory of Film Practice
— that of the ‘essay film’. I am supposed to be the inventor of the idea
of the essay film. It extended the idea of the documentary film and
freely mixed several things together. After that, I made
One Way Ticket
(with Nadine Fischer and Nelson Scartaccini), a film on migration to
Argentina and Uruguay. Those films and their ideas are still very dear
to me.
This shift from analogue to digital changed the way we imagine
cinema, and also, in turn, writing about cinema. It is also supposed to
have ‘democratised’ filmmaking. On the other it has also created a
culture of excess that trivialises everything. How do you look at it?
It just killed it off. But I am speaking from a
country in the centre like France in Europe. It may not apply to a
country in the periphery like India or in Africa. But, in the last 15
years, the films that really grab my attention come not from Europe but
from countries like Palestine or Korea. I hardly see any Indian films
and am not qualified to talk about Indian productions, which are
enormous and ancient. But as far as the countries in the centre are
concerned, cinema is dead. Now, everything is part of mass culture.
Most
importantly, earlier, there were reasons for films to be made or they
needed to be made. I feel that is what is lacking today. The films that
come from Europe or the U.S., one feels, are made to fill time. And
there is a lot of time that needs to be filled; time created by cable
stations and all that. And one also goes on doing it because it is one
of the biggest export industries in the U.S.
What is the legacy of French New Wave? What is the state of French cinema today?
New Wave, in fact, destroyed French cinema because
it consisted of all those auteur films that were made through a system
of subsidies and no one went to see them. But French cinema goes on in
television with ‘made-for-TV’ movies. I have written a book about this
with a friend of mine. For this, we saw about 400 of these films made
during the last 15 years, and they were extraordinary. We realised that
it was where filmmaking was actually going on, which was a continuation
of pre-New Wave cinema. Nobody looks at them except millions of
spectators! Intellectuals despise them as mass culture. But the fact is
that they are very social and primarily aimed at women, who are the
majority audience. We titled the book
Nobody Liked Them But The Public
because it is like that; no one who writes likes them, but everybody who sees them likes them.
Your last film,
The Forgotten Space
, deals with a larger canvas and I believe it took more than a decade to
complete. It is about maritime trade and, I feel, is a trenchant and a
comprehensive critique of global capitalism.
It happened when Allan Sekula approached me to make a film about his book on maritime trade.
The Forgotten Space
is probably my biggest and most successful film. It got the prize for
the Best Documentary at Venice but most people, including our
co-producers, felt that it was too long, complicated and political. I
think the producers were right, it is so politically aggressive that it
doesn’t get shown anywhere except museums and film festivals. In a way,
it has been taken over by the ‘art world’.
What about your first encounter with Kerala?
Actually I like cities that are a little ramshackle,
so I feel comfortable here. But the most pleasant feeling is the sight
of hammer and sickle everywhere.
Earlier, there were reasons for films to be made, or they needed to be made. I feel that is what is lacking today.
Courtesy- The Hindu
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