Discover Top Posts Tagged with #la salamandre

"John Berger: The Screenwriter as Collaborator" (1983)

From: The Cineaste Interviews: On the Art and Politics of the Cinema, pp.298-306.

Interviewer: Richard Appignanesi

Cineaste: How did your collaboration with Alain Tanner begin?

John Berger: I first met Alain Tanner in the mid-fifties. I was living in London at that time, working as a journalist and an art critic, when Alain came to London to make his first film under the auspices of the British Film Institute. Alain and another Swiss director—Claude Goretta, who is now as well-known as Tanner—made Nice Time, a twenty-minute film about Picadilly Circus in the center of London at night. They filmed continuously, from about 10:00 p.m. ’til about 4:00 a.m., when the last prostitutes went home. I was very impressed by the film when I saw it. Lindsay Anderson, a friend and supporter of Tanner’s, suggested that I meet him, and that’s how I first met Alain.

In later years, although he had no possibility of making more films, Alain used to come back to London. I remember one time he was working in the shirt department of Harrod’s, one of the most fashionable department stores in London, selling shirts. In the evening he would come to our home and have supper with us, and we used to talk about poetry, because Alain is really interested in poetry, as well as films.

Some six or seven years later, when I had left London and was living for a while in Geneva, where Alain lived, we used to meet and talk. At that time he occasionally was making films for Swiss television. One of these was a thirty-minute film about the architecture of Chandigarh in India, which had been built by Le Corbusier, another Swiss. Alain asked me to write the commentary for this film, which I did. The kind of commentary I wrote, although we didn’t realize it at the time, was perhaps a little prophetic of some other things we were going to do. Instead of writing a descriptive commentary about the architecture, what I used were quotations from poets and political theorists which were placed in juxtaposition—sometimes ironic, sometimes confirmative—of what was seen on the screen.

Later, Alain had the opportunity, aided by French television, to make his first feature film, Charles: Dead or Alive. He discussed it with me quite a lot, but I didn’t actually collaborate with him on it. Since that film was relatively successful, he was able to raise more money from producers to make his second feature, La Salamandre. I collaborated with him on the scenario, and that’s how it all began.

Cineaste: Can you describe your role in that continuing collaboration?

Berger: It’s very difficult to answer that kind of question, because in the answers there is always a mixture of natural modesty and a kind of loyalty. When two people have collaborated on, let us say, three-and-a-half films, in addition to being very old friends, that question is a bit like asking a married couple, “What is your role in your marriage?” It’s possible to do so, perhaps after you've had a divorce, although even then it may not be the truth.

The best I can do is to very briefly describe how we work. First we discuss an idea together, and then begin working on a scenario. I suppose that most of that work is mine, although what is fed into it is also Alain’s; but in the writing of the scenario, in a purely physical sense, I play the major role. When it comes to turning that scenario into film, it is certainly Alain who plays the major role. I’m not usually present at the shooting, because I would have no function to serve, and, in such circumstances, the fewer people hanging around doing nothing, the better. When he arrives at the rough cut of the film, I see it, and then sometimes we discuss how to improve it—perhaps it means cutting out a sequence, or shortening a sequence, or changing the order of the sequences—and at that moment I make a small contribution.

Temperamentally—and I suppose this comes very near to that marriage question, so I hesitate really—but Alain has a very strong sense of film style, and, in cinematic terms, a strong sense of imagination. What perhaps I offer is a strong sense of form, of how all the parts must fit together and add up to a totality. I think that is a fair description of our two characters in relation to one another.

Cineaste: Tanner’s films reflect a sense of bittersweet, disappointed promises, or, at best, very small gains in consciousness. Do you share Tanner’s disillusionment with political panaceas?

Berger: Well, I think what you have described as Alain’s disillusionment with current politics applies to the last film, to Jonah, but I don’t think that particularly applies to La Salamandre, and certainly not to The Middle of the World. Jonah was a film about what happened to the generation of sixty-eight during the seventies, and it is not possible to take such a theme without—I would rather reject the word “disillusionment”—a certain re-examination of hopes that perhaps, marvelous as they were, in retrospect appear too facile.

When we talked about Jonah, before the script was written, we described it to ourselves as a film about individual dreams of transforming the world. The image we used was that we would try to show this dream like a large colored square of silk on the ground, and then the air would come in under the silk and blow it up, so it became almost like a tent or a canopy. Then, we said, we must take that tent down, bring it back to the earth, at its four corners. In a way, that is the movement, the melody, of that film. We continually are seeing a colored hope rise, and then pinned back onto the earth—the earth here functions as a kind of reality principle. This melody, this counterpoint of hope and realism, is what the film is about, but I don’t think that quite adds up to disillusionment.

Cineaste: Would you describe the films you’ve done with Tanner as Marxist?

Berger: I think that’s for the viewer to say. All I can say is that I think both Alain’s and my own attitude to the world and to contemporary reality are enormously influenced by Marxism. The way that we see society, and individuals in society, is continually illuminated by the Marxist analysis of society and history. I don’t think there is very much political difference between us. We might, I suppose, take a different attitude to some particular event. I haven't, for example, talked recently to Alain about Iran. Maybe we would find we are not in total agreement about an interpretation of recent events in Iran; I don’t know. But I don’t think there are any essential differences between us.

Cineaste: Tanner has described his own political views as those of an undogmatic Marxist. Does such a formula describe the predicament of the non-activist or the artist?

Berger: Marxism has contributed, and still contributes, a great deal to his vision. At the same time, he is certainly undogmatic and unsectarian in his Marxism, so I would agree with that definition of Alain as a person and as a thinker. Whether his view of the world would be different if he were an activist—yes, clearly it would be. And, if his films were primarily films which encouraged political activism, they would be different films. The films that we have made together are more reflective films.

If one thinks of films whose aim is to politically activate, although not in a crude way, one obviously thinks of Godard, especially later Godard. Alain and I share an admiration for Godard, and we follow his work with great interest. My own formulation about Godard is that he is the great film critic of our time, but, unlike most film critics, instead of writing his criticism in words, he makes films which are criticism of film. Alain, on the other hand, is essentially a storyteller—it’s a different function.

Cineaste: Tanner’s films seem very marked by a consistent sense of the absurdity of human behavior. There’s a foolishness, even a lot of clownish behavior, which seems very important to him. Do you share this preoccupation?

Berger: In La Salamandre, for example, that scene in the forest when the two friends suddenly break into an absurd kind of song and dance, is a very obvious scene of the type you must be referring to. But I’m not sure that the function of that scene is simply to show the absurdity of human behavior. It seems to me that that is actually a lyrical moment. It is a lyrical moment about hope, but also about disappointment, and I think hope and disappointment can exist together perfectly without adding up to absurdity.

In fact, one of the great illusions of the left is the belief that everything can always be resolved, that one doesn’t actually often have to live perhaps a whole lifetime with contradictions, that one has to at one level live a kind of dualism. With the left’s impatience about this—from which many things spring, including sometimes absolutely disastrous things—there is a tendency to think that, when those contradictions are allowed to exist in a story, one is talking about absurdity. I don’t think one is talking about absurdity, I think one is often just talking realistically and maturely about life.

This particular aspect, however, does point out one difference between Alain and me. You see, all of Alain’s films, up to now, have been set in Switzerland. Alain has a particular view of Switzerland, one which I would almost define as a love/hate relationship. He is compelled, again and again, to come back to the Swiss experience. The history of Switzerland and the nature of Swiss society, seen within the confines of the Swiss borders and with an awareness of what is happening beyond them, leads to a certain sense of the absurd.

Let me give just one example. It’s very easy to knock Switzerland. Everybody knows all the jokes about the Swiss and their cuckoo clocks, their bankers, the gnomes of Zurich, and their quite cynical international monetary policy—no more cynical than any other capitalist country, actually. At the same time, Switzerland’s army is a civilian army, in the sense that every man is conscripted and must serve in the army for one or two months every year, depending on his age, and he keeps his rifle and ammunition at home. And this works! There aren’t any incidents; these arms aren’t used; there are no insurrections, no protests.

On one hand, that is, in a sense, an achieved ideal, because this is a civilian people’s army, in which the soldiers keep their own arms, democratically, in their homes. On the other hand, given what Switzerland is—a super-consumer bourgeois capitalist society—this is also an absurdity.

Now, Alain’s view in these films is, as I say, rather confined to Switzerland. My own view is not confined to that. This is not to say, necessarily, that my view is superior, but Switzerland as a country interests me less. My view is wider, not necessarily deeper, but a wider one, and this means that perhaps I have a view which is far more conscious of the tragic than of the absurd. Naturally, if I collaborate with Alain on a film, I accept his framework; what goes into the frame is different, and at least part of that is my contribution and carries with it my view of the world. But the frame, the essential frame of the location, is Alain’s.

Cineaste: That leads to the question of why you, as an Englishman, born and bred, choose to live outside of England and the United Kingdom?

Berger: [Laughs] Well, that’s a question which is very difficult to answer briefly, because it would require a large autobiographical conversation. I mean, I’ve lived outside of Britain now for about twenty years, and I had the idea of leaving Britain long before that, but I didn’t quite see the opportunity of doing so.

The very simple answer is, I feel far more at home on the continent than I do in Britain. My grandfather came from Trieste, so maybe a kind of atavism is at work here. I very much like being in Slav countries; I think I understand something about the Slav character. But the short answer is that I feel more at home on the continent, particularly in the south and east. Not for political reasons, but just temperamentally, I feel far more at home there than I have ever felt in Britain.

Cineaste: Another persistent feature of Tanner’s films is his preoccupation with the nature of women and men’s relationship to them. For example, the woman in La Salamandre seems to represent instinctual, even nihilistic, rebellion, and the two men, both intellectuals, are enthralled by her, reduced to a kind of acquiescence. Is this view of women entirely Tanner’s, or do you share something of that view?

Berger: No, I don’t think that is really my view. As for La Salamandre, the difference between the men and the “salamander” didn’t strike me as essentially a sexual difference. I saw it far more as a class difference. The “salamander” is a working class girl, the two men are middle class intellectuals, insofar as we know about their past and their background. The story obviously would have been different, but the “salamander” might have been a man, or, for that matter, the two journalists might have been women.

In Middle of the World, once again, I saw the difference between the waitress and the man who falls in love with her as a class difference. There, the difference of class, however, was less direct, because the man was the son of a peasant, and she was the daughter of a worker. The essential difference in that film, it seems to me, was the difference between an Italian culture and an Italian working class history, which applied to the woman, and a Swiss history and a Swiss character, which applied to the man. So I would refuse those stereotypes of women being nihilistic, chaotic, tempting, and men as being sort of rational and ordered. No, I reject that completely.

Cineaste: In Middle of the World, it seems to me that the problem of normalization is portrayed through the sexual relationship between the immigrant waitress and the managerial type.

Berger: Well, that film began with Alain saying to me, “Can we make a film about an Italian waitress”—there are thousands of them working in Swiss cafes, at least in French-speaking Switzerland—“and a Swiss man who has an affair with her?” I think he added that the Swiss man should, in some way or another, be involved (in a career sense) with Swiss politics. That was all, at the beginning. So I began thinking about this very bare skeleton of a story, simply two characters, and this led me to think about the nature of sexual passion.

The first thing I wrote was not a scenario at all, but two letters, one to the actress who was going to play the woman, and one to the actor who was going to play the man. We didn’t know who the performers were going to be, but I wrote a letter to each of them, not really very much about the story, but about the nature of passion, what allows a person to be capable of passion, and what prevents a certain kind of person from being capable of passion. Obviously, not incapable of infatuation, not incapable of sexuality, but, as I see it, of passion.

The story, the drama, was essentially about this. The waitress is a woman who is capable of passion, but in this case, she does not actually commit herself to this capacity. She doesn’t do so, to put it very simply, because gradually she realizes the man is incapable of a similar commitment, incapable of passion.

Put like that, it sounds very simple, over-theatrical. As the story unfolds, however, the man proves himself capable of a kind of madness. He sacrifices his career and marriage; he is, as they say, “mad” about this woman, and yet he is incapable of giving himself up to the unknown, which seems to me to be the very eye and heart of passion. Passion is a surrender of the self to the unknown. Everything about that man had conditioned him to reject the unknown, to not allow even the category of the unknown to enter either his mind or heart. This wasn’t so with the woman, however, and so their affair ends.

So, when you ask, “Is the film about normalization?”, I don’t know. I see it as a film about passion, or, in this case, about a passion, or a mutual passion, which is not born. Of course, in a certain way that does fit into various social norms, because one could obviously say that our culture as a whole—our positivistic, empirical, opportunist but highly calculating culture—tends, in its own terms, to reject the unknown, to reject mystery. Insofar as this man is a fairly direct product of that culture, and insofar as the continuation of that culture within these rather narrow positivistic terms can be called normalization, it’s a film about normalization. But first and foremost, for me at least, it is a film about passion.

Cineaste: Can you discuss the differences between what you imagine or visualize as a film and what Tanner actually puts on film?

Berger: La Salamandre is very close to my original conception of the film. That is also true of Jonah. I think the one film which differs from how I had visualized it is The Middle of the World. But I really hesitate to talk about what those differences are, because I don’t want to criticize that film unilaterally. Also, after talking to many people who have seen it, I think that my initial disappointment in that film was, to some degree, unfounded. In other words, I now think it is a better film than I thought it was when I first saw it.

Perhaps I was disappointed simply because it did not coincide exactly with my first vision of the film. All I would add to that—because it’s something Alain and I have discussed together, more or less publicly—is that the casting of the Italian waitress did not seem, to me, to be exactly right.

Cineaste: Has your collaboration with Tanner now ended and, if so, why?

Berger: Although at the present time I’m not working with Alain, our collaboration has not necessarily ended. I think we both conceive that we might do another film together. What is true is that I have not been involved with Alain on the last film he made, Messidor, or on the one he is planning to make now, in the United States or Canada. This is by mutual agreement, although I think it was actually myself who first formulated the idea that it would probably be better for us not to work together for the moment.

The reason for this is as follows. Basically, we made three films together—La Salamandre, The Middle of the World, and Jonah. There was another film, in between, called Return to Africa, which I didn’t collaborate on, although in actual fact I did tell Alain the story upon which it is based. It was a story that more or less happened to two friends of mine, and I told it to Alain one evening in some detail, and that was the origin of that film. So we actually made three films together, and the fourth one during that time was a kind of unrecognized or unformulated collaboration.

Now, in those three films there is a kind of development. It’s not easy for me to define that development in very precise terms, but I think that from each film we learned something which we tried to apply to the next. I think the development reached a peak with Jonah. In other words, I don’t think we could make that kind of film better, and if we made another film together, there was a danger that we would merely repeat ourselves. So it was a question of beginning again from a new base, or making another journey, and at that time, after Jonah, we found ourselves in somewhat different positions about this.

Alain, I think, was more interested in making films of a looser structure, films which, in a certain sense, were more experimental in their narrative, whereas I, because of my experience in writing stories not for the cinema, had come to a different position.

Several years previously, you see, I had written the novel G, which is an experimental work in terms of its narrative. But after G, the next major fiction work I wrote, Pig Earth, was about peasants, and in writing this I found it necessary to return to a much more traditional form of narrative. Therefore, when this moment arrived after Jonah, my current thinking about narrative was tighter and more traditional, just the opposite of Alain’s.

We both recognized this, with mutual respect, and therefore decided that it wasn’t possible for us to make a new beginning at that moment. That’s why I’m not working with Alain right now. But we’re still very good friends, and sometimes we discuss his films, but in a very different way, just as friends, rather than as active collaborators. And, certainly, the possibility of our future collaboration still remains.

#john berger #alain tanner #The Salamander #La Salamandre #The Middle of the World #Le Milieu du monde #Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 #Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000