Original subtitles

A FEW COMMENTS ON THE CREATION AND PRODUCTION OF THE FILM

I was in the middle of working on my typewriter

and something surprised me.

I didn't realise right away.

I was working horizontally,

as we do in Western writing,

and I was working on the text that you have read.

And what surprised me, it came a second time.

And then I realised that it was the sudden appearance of the image.

The image, like in Resnais' film, Statues Also Die

with his mouth wiped away by the IBM ball

as if there were some things better left unsaid.

But I continued to write

and I was intrigued by the sudden vertical emergence,

like something rising to the surface.

And I thought about

Japanese and Chinese writing,

and about pictograms, ideograms.

And I thought

that this was how I should be able to write,

vertically or horizontally, not always horizontally first.

Which is to say, death first.

SLOW MOTION

To write standing up, so to speak, with words that follow the image.

As this one dives in with her feet together,

she dives in the opposite direction of the meaning.

In the opposite direction of the writing.

She moves further away,

whereas Isabelle will do the opposite. She will move closer to the meaning,

in the opposite direction to Denise's movement.

And he will try to fly over everything,

to jump higher, but he will lose his footing.

Denise, however, will continue her...

her opposing direction.

She wants to see what happens beyond,

what happens beyond the border.

She dives into the unknown, so to speak.

Whereas

Isabelle breaks out of the...

She comes out of the darkness and rises to the surface.

It's not "every man for himself", but "a life spared".

She is seeking the light.

Her movement, therefore, goes in the same direction as the writing.

And she would like to put a...

There is common ground with Denise, and she would like to find closure.

But in the same way as everyone else.

A house, a family or a boyfriend.

From the periphery, she returns to the centre.

So she says to Jacques, "If you want to survive, stay with me.

"I will support you."

He will ask, "Support me with what?"

Because, like Denise, but three or four years after her,

he also wants to leave the city, the big city.

And he realises, since he copies it, what Denise's movement has been,

and he understands it.

But he is slower than her

and he will fall back...

But I realise that when I speak to you...

while seeing... Not images,

but the start of images, embryos...

that you might think that I am trying to show you images from the film,

how they will be.

But I am actually trying

to show you how I will organise them, the system.

If we were to compare it to biology, it wouldn't be a human body,

but rather the system

will create the forms.

And, of course, creation will happen during editing and shooting.

What I'm trying to show you

is how I see things, so that you can judge

whether I am able to see, and what I have seen.

I want to show you the relationships between images and then you would be

as in a court of law

where you are both the defendant and the prosecutor.

Or you would be

Gallimard at the end of his life, Rimbaud at the beginning,

or Durand-Ruel and C�zanne.

You are both at once, with me,

and you can see if I see something.

I show if there is something to see and how I see it.

And you can say,

"No, he's wrong. There's nothing to see."

So, what I would like to show you is a way of seeing.

For example, superimposed images, cross-fades.

And slow-motion.

Using slow-motion, either during superimposed images or a regular shot,

to see if there is something to see

about which something can be said,

which might then alter the story arc.

The arc should take off from what has been seen, what has happened.

The plot should flow out of what has happened.

And there's the music, too.

I'd like to say something about the music that will be in the film.

I don't really know how.

And also,

the lead actor, the primary action,

and the supporting actors, the secondary actions,

which all seem important to me.

The camera should pan from one to the other

and create the primary action

of the so-called supporting actors,

who are not the focal point, in the foreground.

SUPER IMPOSITIONS

I reread notes that I made.

I wanted to take a thriller.

So I read a book...

Existence is due to a chain of events,

both internal and external.

The cross-fade is not so much a matter of filming this or that image.

It's not this superimposed image that creates the links.

I can start with that.

Starting not just with one image,

but with a sequence as an image.

The image of a sequence.

A moment in a chain of events

dragging this person into something.

This person and this thing

that slips over the person.

I can then have an idea of this thing.

I don't write a dialogue and then ask the actors to act it out.

For example, "I hate you",

or, "You bore me", and then she acts out boredom.

No, there is something, perhaps, to which, for a moment,

the phrase, "You bore me" corresponds.

So, at that moment,

the dialogue helps to find

the images and the dialogue within these images.

There is no, "I hate you", followed by an image of this hate.

Cross-fading images enable us to see

if there is something that will open or that closes.

So the idea is similar to that of a door,

of letting someone pass through a door.

A chain...

as a moment in the chain of events we will create.

A cross-fade as an idea for a script.

Those are all the models of cross-fades,

which you can see, for example, on the television screen.

And we see that it is really about the passage of time.

We superimpose or cross-fade images

to express time.

I think instead we should impress it onto the film.

Time cannot be expressed.

It can be impressed or imprinted.

Sometimes we shouldn't use shot/counter-shot,

which stems from the idea of a dialogue or ping-pong,

this idea of a match as opposed to an event, actually.

This shows that there is no ping-pong match

between the characters.

So, first, to make the image

and images of images.

Second, to create dialogues, but only those

that have been verified as possible once you have all the facts.

And third, to recreate, during the shooting...

FINDING MEMORY

the images which will be supported by...

Which will be linked to one another.

Sometimes, we should try to see if we can

pass through images by digging deeper,

like we dig deeper in the story,

the story of something in the body.

MORE SLOWLY

We often say that events move too quickly.

It's impossible to see the beginning of an illness

or of happiness. So, slowing down in order to see.

And to see not just what is there,

but, first, to see if there is something to see.

That's why football was something

that allowed us to see

if Denise could be

something

besides the bicycle.

And

that she would leave that and have to find it again.

She could be connected to Jacques,

who would be the coach.

And who is actually looking to be coaxed into something.

And there was also,

in sports...

At times, in sports, we love to see slow-motion shots

It's because we see the work

and the emotion in the work.

We have the time to see.

And so, maybe in one scene,

there are things to see.

See that it's not dialogue that necessarily creates movement,

but that there must be movement,

and dialogue is somehow separate.

It doesn't create a chain of events. The linking of dialogue to movements

in this face,

in the slowness of this face...

Basically, it's the silence of speed.

So, we see how we can find

a change in the direction of the story,

and how to direct the story.

EARLY FRAGMENTS OF SHOTS

An image of the return.

Hell for Brother Jacques

is going back to the beginning.

And so

an image on the road.

I think in terms of photography.

This story of the cinematographer that I told you about.

The one who can talk, make reports,

compare colours,

compare landscapes, even see a film.

Lighting like we never see anymore.

Or take a Polaroid photo

and compare it.

I saw a film,

an image from an American film that Wim Wenders is making,

and the documentation that he had

about a painter from the period that interested him. I saw this...

superb lighting.

While looking at this image and its lighting, all of a sudden I thought

of the client and the girl who

is waiting for the client.

And so, Isabelle's character.

I started with...

I started with that, the framing and the body movements.

Like Bonnard.

And then I saw a film

by a young filmmaker who went to the photography school in Vevey.

I thought the framing, the image, was amazing.

And I thought of it because

I thought the movements reminded me of Dreyer's Joan of Arc.

And I thought of the scenes

when the body is being used as a factory,

where we are consumed and the work burns

and we see death

in pleasure.

Anyway, something mortal.

There was something

like in The Passion of Joan of Arc to be done.

In films, we often see fighting between women or men.

I feel a little like...

I saw these

primitive struggles.

So I thought about it, I drew

a woman and a man who were fighting like that.

But, in fact,

it's the primitive world

that we feel is surfacing today, everywhere.

Denise, as soon as she crosses the border of the forest,

she is able to get beyond.

She goes beyond things. Not through the mirror, beyond things.

And she comes upon this game

that we still find in the canton of Bern

in the small villages: Hornuss.

A completely crazy game.

You throw a little wooden ball, like in baseball,

and the opposing team has to stop it

by throwing these paddle things in the air.

And in the forest, she will meet Werner Herzog.

So here is a still image

that will introduce...

The German craziness that will introduce into the world

the world behind things.

Well, all of this is not very clear.

I might have bored you a bit,

but that doesn't bother me. I mean, that's creation.

We're in the servants' quarters, and we're far from the masters,

and that at least was something.

For the music, I had the idea that we would see, at one point...

At different moments, we hear the music, like film music,

at dramatic moments

when it accompanies an emotional moment.

But sometimes the characters wonder,

"What is this music that we're hearing, that is always following me?"

And then they say that it's next door or it's the radio.

It happens once in a while, a supporting character or a leading actor,

someone says that from time to time in the film.

They say, I don't know, "There's an orchestra on the radio."

And at the end, when Denise leaves, Isabelle stays,

and Jacques gets on the train,

that might be one of those times.

Jacques took the train.

On the left side of the road, Denise leaves on her bicycle.

And then there's the music.

And then the camera pans and we see the orchestra,

the 120 musicians from the Amsterdam Orchestra

or the Boston Philharmonic, who are in the field.

And again, that's when...

It's as if we were seeing the inside

of the countryside, of that place,

that place where we have faith.

And this will introduce

the descent into hell.