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Guy Gilles Filmmaker

 

 

Looking for information on filmaker Guy Gilles after seeing his advanced La Claire de terre (1969) this evening I ran into a post at writer Dennis Cooper's blog. From Dennis Cooper's Blog:

‘An unclassifiable filmmaker in 20th century French cinema, Guy Gilles is the director of a little-known body of work, melancholic and poetic, that combines nostalgia for the past with a haunting evocation of the present. His work was a passion of many of the most respected French actors and actresses, and it remains a favorite of film buffs, who love his films for their acute literary references and close attention to private emotion.

From Love of the Sea (1965) to Nefertiti (1996), Guy Gilles developed his films on the sidelines of the New Wave, his work sometimes colliding painfully with the contemporary trends, and often facing the indifference of a public confused by the precious uniqueness of his vision.

‘It is in precarious conditions – three years of work and a more than limited budget – that, in his first film, Guy Gilles turned to the sea for a romantic love story of two protagonists who do not live with the same intensity. Already, in the film’s many obsessions (thematic and aesthetic), we see the lifelong interests of its director. We meet for the first time the actor who would become his favorite (Patrick Jouane) and number of stars attracted by the enthusiasm of the young filmmaker. He will always convince stars to volunteer their contributions to his cinema: Jean-Claude Brialy, Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Greco appear in his work repeatedly, contributing to their poetic strangeness a sense of timelessness that one can already see clearly in as early a work as Love of the Sea.

‘This atmosphere is also reflected in Au pan coupé (1967), starring Patrick Macha Meril Jouane, who created his own production company, Machafilms, in order to enable the film to be made. The charm of this sensitive film rests on the memory of a lost love. It shows none of the indifference of the work being made and celebrated at the time, by such as Jean-Louis Bory or Marguerite Duras.

‘While Gilles hoped to shoot his next film, Le Clair de terre (1969), in his native Algeria, he was forced by circumstance to do so in Tunisia. This delay forced him to replace Simone Signoret in the central role of the retired teacher. Edwige Feuillère accepted the role, and brings much to the film’s character and its imperial, faded elegance. Considered Gilles’s masterpiece, Le Clair de terre is a concentration of all of his art, lingering between nostalgia and modernity.

‘He would never again find this delicate balance, even in Absences répétées (1972), despite winning the Prix Jean Vigo for the film. Darker than his previous films, Absences répétées follows the deadly process of a young man isolating himself in a haze between drugs and a desire to commit suicide. Apart from the very impressionistic Jardin qui bascule (1974) starring Delphine Seyrig, Guy Gilles made no feature films for the next decade.

‘Le Crime d’amour (1982) is a flawed film situated between a police investigation and the story of a crazy and tragic love affair between a young man and an older woman (Macha Meril), and it exudes a strange and powerful latent homosexual drive. The film’s staging rarely succeeds in articulating these various levels. This failure is even more obvious with Nuit docile (1987) which was met with general indifference from both critics and the French public.

‘Although he was already very ill, Gilles then began to make the film Nefertiti, an ambitious international co-production that exhausted him and was considered a fiasco. In 1995, an unfinished version was shown very quietly on television. On February 3, 1996, Gilles Guy died from complications from AIDS. His brother, Luc Bernard, later devoted a documentary to Gilles’s work in 1999: Letter to my brother Guy Gilles, filmmaker too soon.

‘Parallel to his achievements in film, Guy Gilles was a prolific director for television. He directed a very highly regarded documentary about Marcel Proust (Proust, art and pain, 1971) and another successful documentary about Jean Genet (Holy martyr and poet, 1974). He was also a cultishly beloved photographer and painter, and he wrote several books, most of them as yet unpublished.’ —

Alessandra Leao and Orito

Today's good music video between Brasilean and Colombian musicians.

Deja Vu

By luck or lack of it, I became acquainted with the films of Hong Sang-soo this new year even though the filmaker has been busy putting out films almost monthly for the last 15 years. And what films! My favorite director has always been Eric Rohmer and I find a strange similarity with Hong Sang-soo's work where so much is dependent on the words that the characters utter. There is an element of narrative disruption in his films that just delights me. Here's an article by Romain Lefebvre I found that talks about his method and his madness:

Several weeks before the start of Cannes 2016 – where she was due to present Elle by Paul Verhoeven – Isabelle Huppert was contacted by director Hong Sang-soo, who asked her whether she had any free time to film with him. The actress agreed. And although the festival lasts a “fortnight [quinzaine]”, it would only take nine days for a small team, gathered around the director, to wrap up a new film, and one day to edit. The genesis of Claire’s Camera offers a fresh example of the rapidity with which Hong Sang-soo shoots (Grass, his next film, apparently only took three days to shoot); a rapidity which does not cease to amaze, evoking jealousy in colleagues or serving as fuel for detractors. It makes sense to use the upset of the release of Claire’s Camera to better understand the production process of a director which can, as we shall see, be structured into three indispensable stages: (1) the preparation or the conceptual base; (2) the intuitive decision or chance; (3) the composition or the structure. Along the way we shall see in what way this process, even when disdainful of any notion of “intention,” responds to a permanent project of the director: to combat ready-made images.

It’s a notorious fact: Hong Sang-soo does not write screenplays. Or, rather, the practice of scriptwriting melted away as time passed: meticulously drafted for his first three films, scripts were subsequently reduced to mere treatments or increasingly scattered notes – from about thirty pages for Turning Gate to an estimate of five for Hahaha1 to nearly nothing for Claire’s Camera. The act of writing, if it takes place at all, is worth little more than as an initial impetus:

“I do not want a scenario in which 95 percent of the elements are fixed in advance since, in the end, the rest of the creative process would be about working on details, the remaining 5%. What I do want is to find an approximate 30 to 40 percent of the elements in the treatment, 30 percent in the casting and dialogues, and the rest during the shoot. During the editing process as well, where I sometimes end up cutting out thirty minutes of the film.”2

This evaporation of the screenplay corresponds to the privilege granted to the fragmentary and to discovery. Indeed, Hong Sang-soo distinguishes himself by a way of thinking about his films in a mode of fragmentation. For him, making a film is not the same as unrolling a narrative thread, but rather organizing “surfaces” or putting “fragments” to use within a given structure:

“Organizing surfaces? By that I mean my desire to show that everything, every event, even the most insignificant episodes in our lives, contains everything inside of it. Something very concrete, with a banal appearance, always harbours more. A little episode of our lives can obscure an ensemble of symbols and meanings which pile up as layers, a series of superimposed surfaces. Afterwards they form into a block, a structure, which gives the impression of an entity. But this entity never contains just one idea!”3

“I believe that my films are not made to express a story, but to feature some fragments. I don’t think I have any other option. I take those so-called fragments and, with them, derive a whole structure centred on everyday situations. And within that structure, I select an appropriate rhetoric. And when I go into the shoot, a new process of discovery begins.”4

These declarations raise several remarkable points. Firstly, that structure for Hong Sang-soo is always derivative; it is secondary to the units which make up that very structure. Subsequently, that the point is not to achieve an unexpected structure by organizing parts which are determined in advance, but rather a process of discovery which comprises both the parts and the totality. The director expressively puts an emphasis on the necessity for each stage of the process to be a creative stage, as well as his interest in events that go beyond it.5 These various disclosures of Hong Sang-soo allow us to grasp the principal traits of the process during which fragments are discovered, determined and organised – even if it might seem paradoxical to define such a process, given the degree of fixity this would presuppose.

First, there would thus be – pitted against “the intention” or “the message” – the privilege granted to “the situation.” The projects are truly launched from the moment when Hong Sang-soo runs into a certain “incentive,” which could be a formal idea as much as a narrative situation – in a sense, this will be the nodal point around which other elements will be clustered and distributed.6 Some examples are in order here. In the case of Woman on the Beach, the incentive is the fortuitous encounter of a woman on a beach who happens to resemble one of her acquaintances, an encounter which drove a curiousness in Hong Sango-soo on the possible relation between physical and inner resemblance. For Tale of Cinema, it concerned the state experienced when leaving a film screening, when we are still under the influence of what we have just seen.7 For Yourself and Yours, it was about the conflictual relationship between the love we feel for someone and the evil others can speak of that person. These situations-slash-incentives, particular in their relatively ordinary nature and “encountered” by the director in his own experience, can serve as a concrete starting point: Hong Sang-soo does not seek to develop them on a conceptual or abstract level, but rather to deploy these incentives and to embody them in other derivative situations which imply a group of characters and their actions.8 In this way, intentions do not regain the upper hand once the first situation has been put in place, but rather its primacy is reaffirmed with the arrival of each new narrative situation. The first question the director asks himself is never “what do I want to say?” but always “what is going to happen?” And the answer is never given in advance, since it will be decided in accordance with a given place.

Indeed, Hong Sang-soo does not look for locations to shoot what he has already written out, but he rather imagines his scenes, whether at the time of preparing his treatment or during a shoot, based on these places. Situations are thus located, and the films incorporate some traces of this method, if one judges them by his instruction plans or the signs which intersperse them, delineate the sequences and indicate where the characters are to be found: the sequential unity often rhymes with the unity of a place.

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Here is a link to the excellent film publication which carried the article above-it is from Belgium and called Sabzian - articles relating to Hong Hang-Soo

Photographer Raymond Cauchetier Gone

From an online self-portrait that he authored, photographer Raymond Cauchetier, who recently passed away at the ripe age of 101, writes about his work in the 50's:

In 1954, just when I’d been promoted to the rank of capitaine after Dien Bien Phu, I left the army. The war was over. I stayed in Indochina and tried to embark on a career as a photographer. I knew a little about photography itself, but nothing about the world of photography. At the beginning, though, things went well. My first album, Ciel de Guerre en Indochine, was very successful. The 10,000 copies printed were all sold on subscription, and all the royalties went to Air Force charities. Also, to my great surprise, the Japanese, who had just discovered my photos of Saigon, hailed me as one of the greatest photographers of the time. The magazine Asahi Camera gave me sixteen pages. One of the top American museums, the Smithsonian Institution, organized an exhibition of my photos of Vietnam, Faces of Viet Nam, which travelled around the States for several years.
came back to Paris full of hope. I dreamed of working for Paris-Match and of learning my new profession at last. I managed to get an interview and arrived with my published albums and a selection of my best photos. The editor rejected them disdainfully. “Nowadays, Monsieur, everyone takes good photos. The only thing that matters is who recommended you!” I wasn’t recommendable, so I left.
And yet I wasn’t forgotten in Japan. When he came to Paris, the most famous Japanese photographer, Ihei Kimura, mentioned me to Henri Cartier-Bresson, who suggested I work for Magnum. I was just about to leave for Indochina again, and gladly agreed.
I arrived in Saigon during the elections. The Americans were plotting to make sure their favourite, Ngo Dinh Diem, would replace Emperor Bao Dai, who was too favourable to France. My photos show the various phases of the campaign, which was violent and pitiless. I sent them to Magnum straight away, but received no answer. A little disappointed, I left Saigon and went to Cambodia, where the Angkor temples still awaited me.
It was only much later that I found out why my photos did not find favour with Magnum. It wasn’t because they weren’t good enough, but because they had been taken with my old 6X6 cm Rollei, whereas the Magnum lab, sponsored by Leica, was only equipped to process 24×36 mm photos. They were eventually published, but I was kindly but firmly urged to get a new camera. I refused, and that’s why I only really worked for Magnum for a day.
So I went back to work in Angkor. That’s where, in 1956, I got a telegram from the producer Jean-Paul Guibert, who asked me to take photos for the film Mort en Fraude, which Marcel Camus was about to make in Indochina based on a book by my friend Jean Hougron. It wasn’t because I was (possibly) talented, but because it was cheaper than bringing over a photographer from Paris.

That’s how I started working in film, little knowing that I would later, in my own way, illustrate the revolution of New Wave cinema.
At the time, set photographers were technicians with ill-defined jobs. They were mostly asked to take a photo from the spot where the movie camera was standing at the end of a scene, and then to make themselves scarce. They got in everyone’s way and cost the producers money as every minute had to be used profitably. Their role as button-pushers brought them a meagre salary that was aligned with that of junior machine operators. Besides, nobody really knew what to do with the photos, which only really interested the script girl trying to get the continuity right.

But that was when Jean-Luc Godard appeared, beginning to film Breathless. The wind of change was starting to blow in the world of cinema. The producer was indignant when he saw Godard writing dialogues in a café and sending the film crew home because he didn’t have any ideas that morning. The sacrosanct rules of traditional cinema had been thrown out of the window.
I covered this upheaval from day to day, but I was careful not to talk about how successful my work had been in Indochina. I still had everything to learn about the world of film, where I was still unknown. Besides which, I bothered people. I was severely criticized for my initiatives and my ‘reporter’ style that was so far removed from standard set photography. One day, in 1961, they stopped using me to please a cameraman who was eager to give the job to one of his friends. Nobody’s perfect.

As for my pictures, which belonged to the production company, they stayed in boxes for fifty years. When they’d finished filming Breathless, Jean Seberg introduced me to Romain Gary. We got on really well and talked a little about film and books, but a lot about aviation. He had been in the Air Force in the Middle East, as I had in the Far East. We would often compare the attractions and dangers of our respective air missions.
But I had to get another job. I offered my services to François Truffaut, who welcomed me with open arms. I took part in the filming of some unforgettable films. But the set photographer’s salary was set by the trade unions and remained as low as ever, and I became tired of this and ended up leaving the cinema world altogether.
The publisher Dargaud gave me what seemed like a golden handshake after the paltry salaries in film: they asked me to edit a series of photonovels – a format that was very popular at the time. I learned the technique from Hubert Serra, one of the people who created the genre in France. I was thrilled: I could write the storyboards, select and direct the actors, and do the lighting for the shots myself. I adapted Balzac, Maupassant, Zola and Chekhov. It was like film, except that there were no movie cameras or sound engineers. Instead of spotlights, we had flashes bouncing off walls. This lighting method was used faithfully in the New Wave films, and the critics, who had never opened a photonovel in their lives, proclaimed it as a stroke of genius.
Within a few years I was back on an even keel financially, until Dargaud sold the thriving magazine to a greedy Belgian publishing house, which ruined its distribution and killed it off within a few months.

There was nothing to keep me in France any more. In 1967 I was able to go back to Indochina, where Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, who loved the photos in my Saigon album, asked me to take photographs of his country as part of a tourist promotion. I was given everything I needed: cars, planes, helicopters. It was like a dream! For two months I travelled the length and breadth of Cambodia, without a single day’s rest. I was a little worried, because I had never taken on such responsibilities before. But when the King saw my work he loved it, decorated me with one of the highest Khmer honours, and asked me to set up a National School of Photography in Cambodia.

Ryley Walker & Kikagaku Moyo Live in 2018

This is the live set of Ryley Walker and Kikagaku Moyo that is just been released on Riley's label-it's a solid pairing of the type of improvised rock that I still enjoy for its surprises. Enjoy everyone.

Jean-Paul Civeyrac's A Paris Education

Yesterday we saw Jean-Paul Civeyrac's A Paris Education, a sober and realistic tale of the intellectual and personal travails of young artists. I was taken back because its very realistic, un-romanticized review of the slow progress of a young person's thinking regarding their life and education as they make their way slowly through the typical obstacles of creating and thinking. Especially how it works with those around you who encourage and hamper your way. This black and white film is shot in a very straight forward fashion but that is what makes it more compelling and visually attractive. Though you think you will see lots of Paris but what you see is more of the run of the mill Paris and interiors of apartments, bars, and classrooms. Sounds like an Education. The acting is very strong and the side critique of film is edifying as the name dropping makes a lot of sense to those who love film. Only part I fault is the use of music-both pieces (Bach and Mahler) are a bit overused throughout the film but it is a minor quibble.Here is an interview by Civeyrac on the film:

No Film School: Why make a film about film school?

Jean-Paul Civeyrac: I didn't exactly want to make a film about film school. What I tried to do instead is to make a film about young people's desire for cinema, and these are people who meet each other at a university where they study film. I tried to capture the intensity and the seriousness of this desire for cinema that takes place at a time when studying is very important, as well as the work of artists—whether it's filmmakers or poets or painters or writers who fill us up. This is a time when these choices are really essential in a life. 

NFS: Some of the students in the film grapple with the idea that modern cinema is somewhat rehashed or contrived. Do you take that stance on modern cinema?

Civeyrac: This is the case for many young people who are starting out in cinema or are students in film. They find that contemporary cinema, whether it's commercial film or auteur cinema, somehow does not correspond to their expectations. It is this feeling of being unsatisfied and looking for something else. These unsatisfied young people have to look toward the cinema that does speak to them, and that can be both in works from the past, but also in works from the present.

In the film, we have this character of Eloise who makes films that are very artistically demanding and who Mattias recognizes as a very interesting filmmaker. I think that's what's at stake with these people's relationship to cinema—they're on a deep quest to find what speaks to them and what they identify with in cinema.

NFS: Many critics are saying that this film is, at least in part, an homage to the French New Wave. What of the style or aesthetic did you bring to this film?

Civeyrac: I think the essential contribution of the French New Wave was that it did not bury itself in commercial mechanisms of cinema. What the French New Wave filmmakers did is they tried to film or capture something that they themselves had lived. In fact, I have to say, I don't think that it's only the French New Wave. It's all the New Waves of the entire world throughout the 1960s.

If my film is close to the New Wave films, it's in this way of trying to capture something of my life experience. I tried to film something that is close to me—something that I know—and to do it outside of the machinery of the screenplay and so on. I wanted the film to discover its own style in doing so.

NFS: Can you talk a bit about your aesthetic approach to the film in terms of shooting in black and white and keeping your camera movement simple?

Civeyrac: I'll start with black and white. I felt like black and white allowed me to add a little bit of fiction—something novelistic to what ultimately was quite close to a chronicle of contemporary students' lives. So, the black and white added some feel of a story. Black and white also allows one to capture the subjectivity of the protagonist. 

In terms of style, I've made films where the camera was practically a character in the film. In this case, I did the contrary, which is that I attempted to have the camera basically just record what was going on in front of it: the dialogue. The camera is not trying to make things more beautiful than they are. I think the camera is at the same level as what's going on with the characters. The camera takes what the characters are going through very seriously, and it's not trying to create anything other than that particular thing.

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Myriam Alter's New Album

Alter's music is always so basically elemental and poetic in the best sense of those words. Here, in her new album, she is paired up with a superb bassist  who manages to integrate his sound into her pensive compositions extending their meanings. The disc is exceptionally recorded providing an intimate presence to the listener. Let's hope more musicians interpret her compact compositions in the near future as they are better than just about anything else out there. Here is a link to Alter's site and additional commentary about her new disc.

The Lovely and Thoughtful "La Flor" & its Incredible Women in Charge

In this last week I've spent 14 hours viewing Mario Llinas extraordinary La Flor, a film about films and about how they elicit meaning. Yes, I understand that this is merely a single reading but its a treasure trove of this against time as the film took 10 years to complete and almost the same amount of time to view (sic). For me though there are numerous genres employed in the vast narrative, the fact that there are no resolution to the complex plots that are launched throughout the film's duration makes it obvious that traditional storytelling may not be its prime objective. The intrusion of the filmaker and his accomplices into the film adds another layer for rumination. Everyone cites Rivette's classic Out1 with its long duration and cast of thousands, including several group of actors but the truth is that Llinas also has literary antecedants, writers who love to playfully diverge a narrative into autoreflection or some narrative digression that may serve no plot purpose. And its among those writers-some Argentinian, Cortazar and Macedonio Fernandez, and the collaborative nature of the story telling (Borges and Bioy Casares). Then there are the 4 actresses who create a landscape of women in charge-way to much for me to write about but let me emphasize that this is a film to see and experience if you run across it. Anyway, the long and the short is that here is a good overview of this landmark of a film that few have actually noticed. An article at Mubi site that aired it over the last month:

In the Argentinian film La Flor (2018), a certain kind of sight and a certain kind of sound predominate—spread right across its roughly thirteen-and-a-half hours and six major parts.

First, the sight. There are various directors in cinema history known for their stubborn insistence on using a particular camera lens which becomes their veritable stylistic signature: for example, the 25-millimeter lens for deep focus effect in Jacques Rivette; or the split diopter in Brian De Palma. Mariano Llinás takes the exactly opposite position in La Flor: his lens-weapon of choice is a defiantly shallow one, plunging great expanses of any frame into blur (after a while, you’ll think you need an appointment at the optometrist). Sometimes there’s a relatively traditional bit of focus-pulling back and forth between two points in a scene (between several characters, for instance). Far more often, it’s a mise en scène based on characters slowly walking out of blur and into focus—that is, if they ever make it into focus. Oddly, one of the only “characters” to get a royal, deep-focus treatment is Margaret Thatcher (played by Susana Pampín)!

Second, the sound. La Flor is a vast stream of different languages, accents, dialects, vocal tonalities. Talking, singing, laughing… but a great amount of it is post-synchronized. And the sync is deliberately off, hit-and-miss, like in some B movies (and in Orson Welles’s films, even when he’s doing Shakespeare). The lips and the words are often not matching (not to mention the framing segments where Llinás himself “speaks” to us in images where his mouth is resolutely closed!). It all has the sonic ambience of a studio recording. This sound design is not an accidental, coming-and-going effect: it’s total, from one end of this river-film to the other.

 

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Interview with pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin on Feldman's For Bunita Marcus

 

NPR conducted this interview in 2017 when Hamelin's interpretation of Feldman's piece was released:

We know you have a tendency to root around in the dusty corners of the repertoire, but how did you come across this particular piece in the first place?

In the early 2000s I came across a four-CD set by the British pianist John Tilbury of everything that Feldman had ever written for solo piano. And of course it included this piece. I remember having the score around the same time, but I listened to it independently of the score.

It wasn't until, maybe 2010, that I really sat down and sight-read the music, and I was transformed because then I really started to see all of the possibilities. All kinds of imagery started suggesting itself to me, and I realized what a colossal statement this piece was in its soft dynamics. I mean, it's very simple in appearance, but the intricacy of it is awe-inspiring.

You've described the piece as being "no longer about the performer, the performance, the pianistic display, the social occasion. We're now dealing purely with sound, time and space."

Well, I think the remarkable thing in this case is that he has completely exploded the framework of the piano recital. You cannot include this piece in a traditional recital because I think the actual concert-going audiences are not really prepared for this kind of thing.

But you have played it in concert though, right?

I have played it so far twice: once in Toronto at a contemporary music festival and once in San Francisco.

How were the audiences during those performances?

Blissfully quiet, which is of course what you need. I think I had one person in the front row in Toronto who snored, but that was brief, thankfully (laughter). Although it makes the snoring sound particularly poetic. You almost feel like you're performing a duet with this person with the nature of this music.

Without getting too technical, tell us about the mechanics of the piece and, in broad strokes, how it works.

If I were to prepare anybody for this piece who was not used to this kind of language — and I think this kind of language is pretty much peculiar to Feldman only — I would say be prepared for anything. This is not going to sound at all like what you're used to. But I'm trying to get you into a world that I think is really, really fascinating.

It has many repeated patterns, and one can perceive certain sections which deal with just the same few repeated notes. But just view it as anything you can care to imagine. You can see it as the immensity of space and looking at the irregular patterns of stars. In the liner notes, I referred to it as watching the swing of a four-dimensional pendulum.

One of the most remarkable things about the piece I find is that about three quarters of the way through it starts to become a lot more static and a lot more rarified — just one chord maybe every few seconds, and that more than anything else reinforces the impression of spatial immensity of the piece.

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Demystifying Cinema

I just saw an extremely stimulating film by a Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety-the second full length film released in 1992 call Hyenas whose themes of greed, corruption, and consumerism in Africa are masterfully dealt with. He died before the end of the last century from lung cancer and at the young age of 53. Here is an interview conducted with him after he made this film:

N. FRANK UKADIKE: How did you start making pictures?

DJIBRIL DIOP MAMBETY: I loved pictures when I was a very young boy --but pictures didn't mean cinema to me then. When I was young, I preferred acting to making pictures. So I decided to study drama, but one day in the theater, I realized that I love pictures. That was how I found myself in this thing called cinema. From time to time, I want to make a film, but I am not a filmmaker; I have never been a filmmaker.

When children ask me, "How does one make a film?" I always say that you have to have freedom to make a film, and to have freedom, you need confidence. I tell them to close their eyes, to look at the stars, and look into their hearts, and then to open their eyes and see if the film they want to make is there, in front of their eyes.

I began to make Hyènes when I realized I absolutely had to find one of the characters in Touki Bouki, which I had made twenty years before. This is Anta, the girl who had the courage to leave Africa and cross the Atlantic alone. When I set out to find her again, I had the conviction that I was looking for a character from somewhere in my childhood. I had a vision that I already had encountered this character in a film. Ultimately, I found her in a play called The Visit (1956) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I had the freedom and confidence to marry his text with my film and make his story my own.

NFU: Many critics are amazed by how well Dürrenmatt's play has been adapted--they never imagined that anyone could do it so well. Hyènes follows life in an African village, so it relies heavily on oral tradition, stories, and song. But there are elements of European drama and cinema as well. How did you bring all these sources together?

DDM: Earlier, I focused on the notion of freedom, which includes the freedom not to know. That implies confidence in your ability to construct images from the bottom of your heart. When artists converge on these images, there is no longer room for ethnic peculiarities; there is only room for talent. You mustn't expect me to cut the patrimony of the mind into pieces and fragments. A film is a kind of meeting; there is giving and receiving. Now that I have made it, Hyènes belongs as much to the viewer as to me. You must have the freedom and confidence to understand and critique what you see.

NFU: But what are these images that rise from the bottom of your heart? What are you giving to the viewer?

DDM: I am interested in marginalized people, because I believe that they do more for the evolution of a community than the conformists. Marginalized people bring a community into contact with a wider world. The characters of Touki Bouki are interesting to me because their dreams are not those of ordinary people. Anta and Mory do not dream of building castles in Africa; they dream of finding some sort of Atlantis overseas. Following their dream permitted me to follow my own dreams, and my way of escaping those dreams was to laugh at them. Mory and Anta's dreams made them feel like foreigners in their own country. So they were marginalized people, in that respect.

If we think of Draman Drameh in Hyènes, we find that he, too, is marginalized, although he is a well-known character in the city of Colobane; he is marginal even though he owns a market. Everyone comes in--to buy food, or to have a drink--so Draman Drameh has the key to the "tree of words." Yet he is marginal. Notable, but marginal: the fact that everyone confides in him sets him apart. But this aspect of his character allows me to investigate every aspect of his society. Perhaps a marginal person can give you an accurate vision of a society because he varies from its norms. Linguère Ramatou is also marginalized, because she is exactly the same person who crossed the Atlantic to go to Europe in Touki Bouki. She dared to lift up the moorings of the vessel and sail out. She is a rich foreigner. The people of Colobane feel they need her money; you could say, in the language of the World Bank, that she is a marginal person "we want to have." So Linguère Ramatou gives me a measure of my existence in relation to other things.

NFU: I noticed that Linguère Ramatou has an Asian bodyguard in Hyènes. How does she fit into this schema?

DDM: The point is not that she is Asian. The point is that everyone in Colobane--everyone everywhere--lives within a system of power that embraces the West, Africa, and the land of the rising sun. There is a scene where this woman comes in and reads: she reads of the vanity of life, the vanity of vengeance; that is totally universal. My goal was to make a continental film, one that crosses boundaries. To make Hyènes even more continental, we borrowed elephants from the Masai of Kenya, hyenas from Uganda, and people from Senegal. And to make it global, we borrowed somebody from Japan, and carnival scenes from the annual Carnival of Humanity of the French Communist Party in Paris. All of these are intended to open the horizons, to make the film universal. The film depicts a human drama. My task was to identify the enemy of humankind: money, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. I think my target is clear.

While Hyènes tells a human story to the whole world, I also wanted to pay homage to the beauty of Africa when I made the film. For me, part of that beauty is the fact that it is not very difficult to make a film in Africa. The abandoned bags of rice that the people of Colobane wear at the end of the film did not cost much; it was only the equipment for the production that was a little expensive. I have a great desire to demystify cinema--especially the financial aspect of cinema. Africa is rich in cinema, in images. Hollywood could not have made this film, no matter how much money they spent. The future belongs to images. Students, like the children I referred to earlier, are waiting to discover that making a film is a matter of love, not money.

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Djibril Diop Mambéty (left) with actor Mansour Diouf shooting Hyenas (1992)