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100 different ways to say I LOVE YOU.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) is one of those rare movies that has become more relevant with the passage of time. Set in West Germany during the early 1970s, the film deals with the potential political consequences of a one-night stand in a society where everyone is under observation. Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler), an average citizen who works as a housekeeper for a wealthy lawyer, attends a party where she becomes enchanted with a mysterious man, Ludwig Goetten (Jurgen Prochnow). At the end of the evening, she takes him back to her apartment.

The next morning, a squadron of police dressed in riot gear raids her apartment, searching for Goetten, a suspected terrorist. Blum is taken to police headquarters for a grueling interrogation session led by Kommissar Beizmenne (Mario Adorf). These scenes pack an unsettling power. An average, politically unaware citizen is subjected to an intense scrutiny over her possible motivations for sleeping with a terrorist. Her purely instinctual act ? and to Blum's way of thinking, a pure and honest response to a romantic scenario ? becomes perverted and denigrated. In the mindset of the police, where any citizen is a potential terrorist or collaborator with terrorists, there is no room for romance or "love at first sight" encounters like those found in fairy tales. There are no chance encounters or motive free decisions. Furthermore, in the eyes of society "good women don't invite strange men into their beds. Therefore, Blum has either known Goetten longer than she has let on, or she is a whore and sleeps with many men." There are no other alternatives, no shades of gray.

Katharina Blum's ultimate crime turns out to be that she doesn't play their game ? she doesn't submit meekly to their authority and doesn't allow them to set the parameters of her life as a single woman. When the interrogation group takes a break, she refuses to converse with them. In Blum's eyes, they have not only upset the order of her life, they have violated her. In the eyes of the police, they are "just doing their job, not making a personal attack." Ironically it is Beizmenne who takes her rebuff personally. When Blum refuses to converse with him over lunch, he orders her to be taken to a prison cell. He also sets out to destroy her credibility.

Beizmenne leaks "information" to a journalist, Werner Toetges (Dieter Laser), that he suspects Blum has been collaborating with Goetten for two years. Upon her release from the interrogation, Blum sees headlines in the paper proclaiming her as a terrorist collaborator. From here on, the press dogs her every step, interrogating employers and friends about her past. Even Blum's mother, hospitalized in an intensive care ward, is not off-limits from the press. Toetges, posing as a doctor, sneaks into the ward to ask her a few questions about her immoral daughter. His careless and callous disregard ultimately causes the mother's death.

When they don't get the answers they want, the press makes up the facts, creating a notorious public persona for Katharina Blum devoid of any connection to the real person. This very real campaign of terror breaks Blum down emotionally. It robs her of a private life and ultimately forces her down the only avenue she feels she has left to re-establish control in her life ? an act of murder. The government and media have warped her into a monster, no trace of which existed before. She is a creature of their making.

Based on an incident in the life of Heinrich Boll, who was accused by the press of being a terrorist sympathizer, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is a chilling depiction of unchecked power and a thought-provoking analysis of the responsibilities of the police and the press to the private lives of citizens. For co-directors and co-writers Schlöndorff and von Trotta, this sordid collaboration between the police and the media to publicly humiliate and destroy an individual poses more of a threat to democracy than any terrorist. The film espouses the idea that both the press and the police should be accountable for their actions, and that the unchecked power of these institutions cause greater violence to society and the individual in the long run than any terrorist threat. Because of the film's frightening parallels to the current political situation in the United States, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum would do well to be required viewing for every U.S. citizen.

The Criterion DVD offers a generous selection of special features, including lengthy interviews with Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, and cinematographer Jost Vacano. The highlight, though, is the half hour excerpt from the documentary, HEINRICH BOLL, which thoroughly covers the political situation in West Germany during the late 60s and early 70s, and covers the incident between Boll and the Springer press. Highly recommended.

Coup de Grace (1976) is a different affair altogether. For a number of years, Schlöndorff and von Trotta had wanted to adapt Marguerite Yourcenar's novel for the screen. The time never seemed right. The husband-and-wife team believed it was more important for them to focus on the current political situation rather than a story that felt remote or distant in time. After the success of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, the team agreed it was time to finally bring Coup de Grace to the screen. The film was also to be a swan song, for von Trotta had decided to give up acting to pursue her directing career. She wanted her last role to be substantial, nuanced, and challenging. The character of Sophie fulfilled that demand.

Set in the Baltic Provinces near Riga amidst a civil war during the 1920s, Coup de Grace opens as Konrad von Revel (Rudiger Kirschstein) returns to his ancestral home, the castle Kratovice, now a stronghold for soldiers fighting against radical Bolsheviks. Accompanied by his childhood friend and fellow officer, Erich von Lhomond (Matthias Habich), Konrad receives a warm welcome from his sister Sophie (von Trotta) and his Aunt Praskovia (Valeska Gert). Unbeknownst to the soldiers, Sophie secretly sympathizes with the Bolsheviks, often crossing firing lines to visit with the collaborators.

One night, Sophie declares her love for Erich von Lhomond. He receives her declaration coolly, questioning whether he has time for love. Some time later, after Konrad and Lhomond return from a trip to headquarters, Sophie overhears gossip among the soldiers that Erich kept close quarters with a loose Parisian singer. This emotional bombshell ignites a twisted contest between Sophie and Lhomond to see who can probe deeper beneath the other's skin. Sophie begins a career of drinking and carousing with the boys, evolving into a regular party girl. She sleeps indiscriminately with many of the soldiers, even becoming engaged to several just to see the look on Lhomond's face. Lhomond cruelly taunts her, telling her that she could never be the woman for him. When Sophie learns from a jilted suitor that her brother Konrad and Lhomond were really the ones who kept close quarters during the trip to headquarters, she runs off into the night to join up with the Bolsheviks. The two are fated to meet one last time, when the dissident group has been captured. As she is sent to the firing squad, Sophie requests Lhomond as her executioner. Lhomond indifferently obliges.

Despite the high incidence of emotional mind games, Coup de Grace is a colder film than The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. The emotional terrorist attacks launched by Sophie and Lhomond do not evoke the heat of outrage, as does Blum's abuse by the police and press. At times, Sophie and Lhomond's antics verge on annoying. Despite its cooler level of emotional engagement, Coup de Grace proves to be the more difficult film. Gaps of the narrative are left out or implied too subtly, causing disorienting jumps in the flow of the film. The motivations of Sophie and Erich are inscrutable. It's a mystery why one of them doesn't simply leave. Compounding the mysteries, the viewer never comes to a resolution whether Erich is using Sophie to get to her brother Konrad, or vice versa. What does keep the film's momentum flowing are the powerful performances by von Trotta, open and passionate, and Habich, detached and icy. Because of the solid performances and the prevalent ambiguity, Coup de Grace sticks in the mind long after the final scene.

Only one special feature is included with this Criterion DVD, a rather lengthy interview with Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. Running about an hour, the interview is more of a documentary than a question-and-answer session. The questions are interspersed with clips from the film and archival photographs. Of special interest are the passages where Trotta talks about the changes she made in the screenplay ? in particular, increasing the presence of the war and enlarging Sophie's role in the story. The documentary also includes the alternate ending to Coup de Grace, which was shown only in France. In a voiceover, Lhomond ponders over Sophie's motivations for asking him to pull the trigger. Taken word for word from the last paragraph of Yourcenar's novel, this passage goes a long way towards clearing up some of the ambiguities of the film. The irony is that von Trotta, who fought against showing this ending outside of France, now concedes that the ending does work, and probably for the better. Coup de Grace is recommended for those who won't mind the challenge of working through several viewings to come to terms with an enigmatic film.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)




German revolutionary leader, journalist, and socialist theorist, who was killed in Berlin in 1919 during the German revolution. Rosa Luxemburg saw herself as a citizen of the proletariat. She lived the international life of a Socialist 'pilgrim', believing that only socialism could bring true freedom and social justice. Luxemburg was the advocate of mass action, spontaneity, and workers democracy, but her criticism of the "revisionists" and their ideological leader Edward Bernstein is considered her most important legacy to European political thought.
"Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat." (from 'The Junius Pamphlet', 1916)

Rosa Luxemburg was born in Zamosc, in Russian Poland, into a Jewish middle-class family. At the age of five she became seriously ill. After recovering she walked with a limp; sciatic pain caused her much trouble for her whole life. Luxemburg was educated at the Warsaw Gimnazium. From the age of 16 she participated in revolutionary activities. during these years her favorite writer was the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, whose patriotism and life in political exile influenced her deeply. In 1889 Luxemburg moved to Switzerland to continue her studies. But she was also partly forced to flee from her home country because of her political activities.

Luxemburg entered the University of Zürich, where she studied natural sciences and political economy. In 1892 she changed to the faculty of law. Two years later she researched at the major Polish library in Paris. She started her career as a journalist and became one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. In 1898 Luxemburg completed her doctorate. The dissertation was entitled The Industrial Development of Poland. Between the years 1892 and 1919 Luxemburg produced almost 700 articles, pamphlets, speeches, and books.

In 1899 appeared Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution, her defense of Marxism. It opposed Edward Bernstein's reformist position and criticized Bernstein's revisionist theories in Evolutionary Socialism (1898). Bernstein had published also in Neue Zeit a series of articles, in which he had attempted to disprove some of the basic doctrines of Marxism. He rejected Marx's theories of class struggle and concluded that revolution was unnecessary. Luxemburg believed that her work would make the "old guard" of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) to view her as a serious political thinker and leader. "Since the final goal of socialism constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing the social democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and from bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming the entire labor movement from a vain effort to repair the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, for the suppression of this order - the question: "Reform or revolution?" as it is posed by Bernstein, equals for the social democracy the question: "The be or not to be?" In the controversy with Bernstein and his followers, everybody in the party ought to understand clearly it is not a question of this or that method of struggle, or the use of this or that set of tactics, but the of the very existence of the social democratic movement." (from Reform or Revolution)

To obtain German citizen, Luxemburg married Gustav Lübeck, the youngest son of her friend. Luxemburg became in 1898 a leader of the left wing of the SPD and participated in the second International and in the 1905 revolution in Russian Poland. After insulting the Kaiser, she spend in 1904 a short period in prison in Zwickau. In the same year Luxemburg also drafted SDKPL (Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania) party programe What Do We Want?

During the 1905 Russian Revolution she developed the idea that socialism is a revolutionary process which transforms political and economic relations towards ever greater democratic control by the workers themselves. In 1906 she was arrested in Warsaw but released finally on health grounds. She returned to Germany where she taught at SPD party school in Berlin until 1914 and developed ideas about general strike as a political weapon. In 1912 appeared her major theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital, in which she tried to prove that capitalism was doomed and would inevitably collapse on economic grounds. After differences with moderate German socialists, she founded with Karl Liebknecht the radical Spartacus League in 1916. She also drafted the Spartacists programme Leitsätze. Two years later the organization became the German Communist Party.

During World War I Luxemburg spent long times in prison, writing her Spartakusbriefe and Die Russisce Revolution, where she welcomed the October Revolution as a precursor of world revolution. In 'The Junius Pamphlet' (1916), written under the pseudonym of Junius, she argued that the choice of Socialism or Barbarism is a world-historical turning point which demands resolute action by the proletariat.

However, Luxemburg participated reluctantly in the Spartacist uprising in Berlin against the government. The uprising, which failed, was a defining moment among others for Adolf Hitler. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested in 1919. While being transported to prison, she and Liebknecht were murdered on the night of 15/16 on January 1919 by German Freikorps soldiers. Luxemburg's body was thrown into the Landwehr canal and found on May. She was buried on June 13 in Friedrichsfeld cemetery, where the graves of Liebknecht and the other killed revolutionaries situated. Her burial became a mass demonstration, witnessed by a number of correspondents, including the American screenwriter Ben Hecht.

Luxemburg's lover Leo Jogiches was murdered in 1919. However, their affair had already ended in 1906 - Leo had gone too far in his infidelity. Just before his death, he had decided with Clara Zetkin and Mathild Jacob to publish Luxemburg's collected works. The project proceeded slowly because at that time Lenin's critical opinions of Luxemburg's thought were not easy to ignore. Lenin saw that she underestimated nationalist ideology, underrated the role of the Communist party, and emphasized to much the power of the mass action. Luxemburg was critical about Lenin's acceptance of the idea of national self-determination. In 'Organisationsfragen der russischen Sozialdemokraten' (1904) she criticized his theory of revolutionary vanguard centralism. Luxemburg argued that there could be no real socialism without democracy. Later Stalinist study was not very happy about her - her unorthodoxy was nearly as dangerous as Trotsky's. Luxemburg's collected works did not appear until 1970-75 in DDR.
"The list of people with whom Simone Weil was politically associated reads like an almanac of the French Left. Thévenon, Guérin, Battaille, Serret. Simone saw in Rosa Luxemburg (d. 1919) a kindred soul. 'Her life, her work, her letters affirm life and not death,' wrote Simone. 'Rosa aspired to action, not to sacrifice. In this sense, there is nothing Christian in her temperament.'" (from The Left Hand of God by Adolf Holl, 1997)

Thoroughful reevaluation of Luxemburg's work started in Germany in the 1970s. Her theories were considered as an alternative to Communism or Social Democracy. When Marxist study lost its attraction in the 1980s, Luxemburg arose still interest among feminist theorist. Luxemburg herself did not participate into women's rights movement; women's liberation was for her part of the liberation from the oppression of capitalism. However, she saw that socialist emancipation is incomplete without women's emancipation. Raya Dunayevskaya argues in her study Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (1981) that Luxemburg's years after the break-up with her lover Leo Jogiches were not "lost years," as J.P. Nettl presents in his large biography (1966). Dunayevskaya documents Luxemburg's myriad activities and theoretical work including Mass Strike. In the 1980s Margareta von Trotta's film Rosa Luxemburg (1986), starring Barbara Sukowa, gained commercial success. The film was partly based on Annelies Laschitza's studies. However, feminist critic objected Trotta's conventional (melo)dramatic narration.
For further reading: Rosa Luxemburg by Paul Frölich (1904); 'Some questions regarding the history of Bolshevism' by J. Stalin, in Stalin, Leninism (1933); Rosa Luxemburg. Gedanke und Tat by Paul Frölich (1939); Rosa Luxemburg by J.P. Nettl (1966, 2 vols.); 'Notes of a publicist' by V.I. Lenin, in Collected Works, vol. 33 (1966); 'The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg' by G. Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness (1968); 'Hands off Rosa Luxemburg' by L. Trotsky, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (1970); The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg by N. Geras (1976); Rosa Luxemburg, Woman Liberations and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution by Raya Dunayewskaja (1981); Rosa Luxemburg. Ein Leben für die Freiheit by Fredrich Hetman (1987); Rosa Luxemburg. A Life by Elzbieta Ettinger (1988); Rosa Luxemburg. A Life for the Internationale by Richard Abraham (1989); Rosa Luxemburg - Die Rote Demokratie by Peter Bierl (1991); Une Femme rebelle by Max Gallo (1992); Philosophia: The Thought of Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, and Hannah Arendt by Andrea Nye (1994); Eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal. Die Ermordung der Rosa Luxemburg by Klaus Gietinger (1995); Im Lebensrausche trotz alledem by Annelies Laschitza (1996); Rosa Luxemburg and the Noble Dream by Donald E. Shepardson (1996); Sozialismus oder Barbarei by Virve Manninen (1996); Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary for Our Times by Stephen Eric Bronner (1997); Rosa Luxemburg und Leo Jogiches by Maria Seideman (1998); Die Welt is so schön bei allem Graus by Annelies Laschitza (1998); Rosa und Karl by Manfred Scharrer (2002) - See also: Luxemburg and Mass Action ; Rosa Luxemburg and German Social Democracy by Ernest Mandel ; Rosa Luxemburg, Polish Marxist Revolutionary

Isabelle Huppert in Malina (Werner Schroeter, 1991). Photo. Thomas Klaussmann.

This interview is an excerpt of a long conversation in public between Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Michel Frodon, which took place at the cinema Café des images at Hérouville Saint-Clair, March 2, 2005. It was part of a series entitled ?Seeing together (?Voir ensemble?) devoted to the métier of acting and organized by the association L?Exception, the Comédie of Caen, and the Café des images. Some of the questions are those of Jean-Michel Frodon, while others come from the public.
What information on a film and on your role do you need before beginning a shoot?

A script, even it differs from filmmaker to filmmaker, never tells the whole story; there are always elements that need to be invented. As soon as one decides to take a role after having read the script, the various elements begin to fall into place. A character begins to take shape. And regardless of whether the information given is ample or not, it appears to one, strangely, as an apparition. From that moment, one knows whether or not this figure will be able to pass through one; if there is a meeting point.
Chabrol has said that with the actors there are invariably power struggles, while with actresses the rapport is more one of seduction.


I think being actor is more difficult for men. The very best actors are not afraid of playing with their own femininity and leaving aside power struggles with the director. Because there?s no getting around it: on a film set, it?s the director who has the power. This fact is often more difficult to accept for an actor than for an actress.
In an interview, Chabrol commented: ?Actors are often technically very astute; thus with Isabelle Huppert all I need to do is to say where I am going to put the camera for her to guess how the scene is going to be shot and what will be her place in the frame. With her, I never have to explain anything.

This kind of symbiosis occurs when there is a real trust with the director. I would go so far as to call it a kind of belief. An actor, perhaps, will have more difficulty to let himself go with such a pact, which is almost spiritual in nature. You might say it?s the same kind of pact between the spectator and the film. Such strong words (?belief,? ?pact?) are not meant to frighten. There is a scene in la Dentellière that illustrates this relationship. A young man pushes me along on the edge of a cliff while I?m blindfolded. It?s only once that he removes my blindfold that I know where I am. That?s how an actor advances with a director, in just such a state of blindness. An actor must have total confidence in the director, or not take the role.
In the cinema, the frame can at any moment fragment the body, just the opposite of the theatre. Are you conscious of this fragmentation when you act?


No, one isn?t aware of it consciously. Body language in the cinema is thus very particular. The screen can transmit an image very different of the body. In life, we see each other by facing each other. In the cinema, one is astonished to discover oneself from another angle. But at the same time there is no obligation to look. Serge Daney used to say that the work of actors is the make movies, and the work of the spectator is to look at them.
When there is a difficult scene to shoot, do you sometimes give advice between takes to the director as how best to shoot you?

No, if I have some suggestions to make, I give them while acting. There is not much to say between takes. You simply have to do them and sometimes re-do them. Of course, the strategy vis à vis the number of takes required varies enormously between filmmakers, from Chabrol who is often content with two or three takes to Haneke who made me do as many as forty-five. Jacques Doillon also does a lot, which provokes a certain fatigue and then it starts all over again. When the cinema is looking to seize an unfathomable nuance, you find something else. Maurice Pialat used to say that the best films are never seen, because they?re composed of what the camera never records, before ?action? and after ?cut.? He wanted to abolish the ritual surrounding each scene: clapperboard, action, etc. I rarely felt such a sentiment again. For instance, on Loulou, Gérard Depardieu and I both felt the moment when the scene should begin. Once the camera switched on without our being told. One morning, we were discussing in a café when the camera began shooting. It was extraordinary to switch over so abruptly into the scene with no forewarning.
What role does screening the rushes have for you? Do you intervene in the choice of more than one take of a scene?


Rushes are history! Ever since practically everyone started edited on video, there are no more rushes, and consequently this daily ceremony no longer exists, with its variable side effects. On the other hand, actors/actresses are always uneasy about the choice of takes in the editing; we find ourselves good in one take and ridiculous in another. We bargain with the continuity person so that she will retain the take that we prefer. Renoir used to say that if a film were to be re-edited with other takes, it would still be the same film. That?s rather a worrisome, don?t you think! (laughter). And Chabrol isn?t very far from thinking the same thing. Occasionally, I?ve asked him to redo a take: ?Oh, my chérie, if you insist!? For him re-shooting such and such a scene doesn?t seem to change much.
Do you find it important to shoot scenes in their chronological order of the story?

Oddly, on a shoot, one always knows where one is. A two-hour film demands an enormous amount of shots, and in each shot it is not a question of rehearsing the entire film. In fact, the down times that are acted out of order are easier. The role is already in one?s head. It?s not a question constantly performing the whole role, but it nevertheless remains present overall, like a thread unwinding from a ball inside oneself. I feel intimately inside myself where the role belongs. It all happens easily, like having a baby! If I do not localize the role within myself, it?s impossible for me to find it in the course of the shoot.
How do differentiate between acting in the theatre and acting in front of a camera?


In fact, I like to think that there is no great difference. In my work as an actress, I don?t even pose such a question. For the last few decades, the theatre spectator is identical with the cinema spectator. In the theatre, it is the spectator who, mentally, composes a close up, an establishing shot, and a close shot. Nevertheless, there are obvious differences. One of them concerns the voice: in the theatre, you have to speak louder. The spectator would be able to hear us speak more softly, if they listened closely, but the old convention in the theatre demanding that actors speak loudly, declaim, remains strong. Another important difference: in the cinema, one is able to assume new roles, more unsolicited, without thinking about the spectator. It?s easy enough to make believe that they have been invented. While in the theatre with Medea or Hedda Gabler, one enters into mythical realms, already performed many times over. It is in response to this phenomenon that I told myself that I had to be indifferent to all that. Medea is me. Hedda Gabler is me. No one knew her. We don?t know what she looked like. There?s no claim to say: ?It?s me.? One can recognize oneself in an individual but not in a character; I play individuals, not characters. A character is an obstacle, an arbitrary contour. Afterwards, you need a director who understands, who doesn?t impose a pre-established vision, who remains open to my own interpretation.
You said: ?It is because I have the capacity to watch the one watching me that I am able to create a space of resistance in which I am able to absent myself and exist as an actress.?Did this working method establish itself unconsciously or is it the result of years of work?

I think I said this in a somewhat overly convoluted manner, but it?s true that I have a natural tendency to establish a distance, both with the person who is looking at me and with the role I am playing. This space creates a blank, a space wherein, perhaps, the spectator?s imaginary can be swept up. Creating such a space is useful for my work and it protects me: the person I am playing is me but not completely; fortunately, otherwise I?d end up in a psychiatric ward! It all remains a game, even if it is possible to push very far the appearance of truth. The disturbing confusion that can take place between a role and an actor, in the cinema as in the theatre, lends a certain force to the game and its appeal for the spectator. But an actor must himself avoid such confusion if he doesn?t want to lose himself.
Has it happened that you refused a role that seemed too far away from you, even though you appreciate the director and the script?


Yes, for example, Haneke?s Funny Games. I wanted to work with him, but the script seemed to me a demonstration of the manipulative power of the director on his audience. He pushed the exercise so far that the characters exit the fiction and enter into an experimental process, which was extremely demanding to watch as well as to act. The terrible reproduction of a news item where a couple is tortured while a child is put to death. I didn?t accept the role. I had the impression that in this story without fiction, the actor would remain stuck in a sacrificial function similar to that of the person. I could have played this role, but I didn?t want to.

To be together you need to be (at least) two. But here, no body becomes a couple. And certainly not with the camera. Filmic divorce. Isolated, the unique can only succeed in division, in the same way that filming can only be the fierce attempt to deny separation. If Mograbi?s cinema tirelessly undertakes to get involved with that which wants nothing to do with it, it is more and more difficult for him to film Israeli citizens who tolerate less and less being filmed. It remains to be asked if such is not the reason for his relentless pursuit to film them. The return of an undeniable malaise: malaise of the spectator; because there is something unbearable to see filmed what doesn?t want to be filmed, a fortiori if this reticence makes the movie. We see at work the naked violence of cinema, the gesture of bringing the film into the world, the narrative going uphill all the way, to the zero point of representation. The direct violence of a cinema that would begin by revealing how it can or cannot be made. The body of the film appears thus exhibited on the screen like a body (an organism) with a thwarted future. This is what I can expect as spectator. A film in suffering of which I suffer in my turn. All this rhetoric of orders and gestures that tries to prevent the filmmaker from filming, that jostles his camera, leads to a tearing of the spectator from the tranquility of a representation exposing itself ideally to him, if I dare to say, with no missteps. Here the cinema has become problematic.

Actor, sound engineer, cameraman, director, citizen: with each new film the figure of ?Mograbi? overdoes it, while at the same time the gesture of auto mise-en-scène proliferates. From the heart of the documentary approach comes an extraordinary fictional dimension. Tied to a story that is urgent (each of the films is attached to a historic moment, to a political present: something rare and painful), but that is also linked to the cardinal points of cinematographic ambivalence, this endless turnstile of ?true? and ?false,? of ?performance? and ?reality? (as in Lubitsch?s To Be or Not to Be). Documentary evidence and fictional strength are here embraced.
How? In August, Mograbi?s answer passes by two mechanisms of repetition: on the one hand, the insistence of a request (he doesn?t give up) and on the other, one a deconstruction of hysteria. How to be just in a world where all is false? Pain, anger, rage are simulated. And the feelings, false. To leave hysteria and go towards cinema, Mograbi returns to the true inscription of documentary. It is the series of trial takes with the actresses, filmed (they as well) very frontally, performing or repeating sufferance and rebellion. These sequences function like a laboratory of the experimental impossibility of sorting the true from the false, otherwise in referring them to the correctness of the performance.
Because hysteria here is not something private: the entire society has gone mad. This general disturbance doesn?t spare the body of the film: sped up, reversed editing (those who should come near move further away; those who were together pull apart; those who were headed somewhere now only retreat: anti-cinema), split screen, grotesques citations from archives... Mograbi enters into a rhetoric of rage. The film stock (here the strip) is a sensitive skin that bristles when what is shown doesn?t work. The symptom affects the film?s form, its surface, its breathing. The film as a sensitive organism displays something of the prevailing malaise.
In Avenge But One of My Two Eyes, Mograbi filmed by Mograbi is no longer exactly the same. When he telephones (again) about the film in progress, it is in a wider shot and with a sole interlocutor (whom we understand to be a Palestinian). A faceless voice insisting coldly that death is worth more than a thousand humiliations. Mograbi hears without flinching this external voice that becomes a dialogue with himself. The contrast is great with the violence that he meets at each confrontation with these Israeli soldiers filmed in spite of themselves. In these ferocious showdowns, the world filmed by Mograbi seems however to become again coherent, that is divided: the ordinary barriers resume their position, each in his bubble more or less armored, not in the shelter of the other but in the shelter of the menace that there would be to think the other. Just as the soldiers want neither to see nor to hear, the tourist guides comment on the collective suicide of Massada or of Samson?s heroic gesture killing himself with the Philistines, without comprehending how much these gestures rhyme, whether one likes it or not, with those of the suicide-bombers. It is truly a question of looking and hearing: to the guides who ask one of their flock to close their eyes in order to see, to blind Samson who asks god for the strength to kill again, Mograbi contrasts the logic of cinema - seeing in spite of everything which prevents seeing, hearing what one doesn?t want to hear.
On this point, and with a gentleness of which one wouldn?t have believed him to be capable, Mograbi doesn?t give up; it is the choice of life against death - the choice of cinema. He says it timidly to his Palestinian interlocutor. And his film says it strongly to those Israelis who teach the cult of death, obviously heroic, to their children. I don?t bring up haphazardly the question of heritage and of filiation. It is certainly the profound framework of Avenge But One of My Two Eyes. And the filmmaker Mograbi always appears as the son of his father, the director of Mograbi cinema, a name known all over Israel. Fathers, sons. Transmission will be accomplished by cinema rather than by war.


In November, l?ACRIF organizes on the Ile-de-France numerous screenings of Avi Mograbi?s films. For further information: call 33 (0)1 48 78 14 18.

NOTES

1. The title comes from the biblical passage where Samson addresses the Lord: ?Lord, God, remember me and strengthen me, only this once. So that I may avenge but one of my eyes, avenge upon the Philistines.? Tr. note.

2. This is the problematic of ?filming the enemy.? What Mograbi does with Sharon, Michel Samson and I refused to do with Jean-Marie Le Pen; we refused to continue accompanying him, to film him in the very fascination that he exerted (1992-1993) on the media.

3. In Happy Birthday, the identities divide the subjects and the film itself: with the producer Segal always elsewhere, Mograbi vacillates between all the positions and the film itself, divided into three films simultaneously underway. In August, the figure of Mograbi splits into three agencies. He is his wife (pink towel knotted into a turban), his troublesome sponsor, and himself. This triplicity results in a series of quarrels that irresistibly become the body of the film. When these three characters meet up in the same scene, a split screen tears the screen asunder, isolating the bodies in the interior of a same unity of time, of place, and of action. The torn screen redeems the solitudes. The quarrel is the center of the film become form.

4. The author here capitalizes on the double meaning of tourniquet in French as both turnstile and bandage. The former meaning exists in English, but has become rare. Tr. note.

5. Feelings attributed to the widow of the Israeli terrorist settler Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Muslims in the shooting attack in the Cave of the Patriarchs at Hebron, February 25th, 1994.

6. The Zealots, the last resistants to the Roman invader, decided to kill themselves rather than to surrender, in the year 73 AD.

From film to film, Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi has constructed an incomparable oeuvre in world cinema. To name but four of his films, which with their echoes and leitmotifs, operate like a musical fugue: How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1996), Happy Birthday, Mr Mograbi (1998), August (2001) and Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (2005). Each film is in the present of the political and military situation in Israel, but also in the affective present, both engaged and old-fashioned, of the Mograbi home, place of political debate, and of the Mograbi house, small family enterprise of cinematographic production.
Each time, it?s about a film to be made, what we conventionally call a documentary, here and now, in the present situation, Israel and Palestine, military occupation and Intifada, religion and politics, colonization and the attacks. But above all, it?s about Avi Mograbi, those like him and the others - different and alternately alike, playing the role of enticing demons. And the filmmaker does battle, via telephone, with these voices, which sometimes ask him to film, and sometimes dissuade him from doing so; he hesitates, to film despite everything/ not to film despite everything? The film that we see is the story of the difficulties encountered in its making, rendering it both indispensable and impossible. Or almost.
All Mograbi is in this almost. Because there will be - despite everything - film. On the edge of renunciation. Or rather on the edges, since there are two borders (at least): from the interior of Israel and from the interior of occupied Palestine. Mograbi is animated by a fundamental instability that pushes him to cross borders, interiors, exteriors, symbolic, mental, but also stylistic, in a series of departures and arrivals captured in the standing around at checkpoints. The explosive mix of agitation and the feeling of marking time that characterizes his films resonates (or reasons) with the well-developed mania, which is born exactly there where Mograbi wants to film.
Let us consider the first of these films, begun several months after the assassination of Itzhak Rabin (November 1995), How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon. Mograbi tells the camera, in a frontal shot, brow pitted against the camera lens, how he gave in, over the course of shooting, to what he calls Sharon?s ?charisma? (at the time in full electoral campaign to gain control over the Likud party - the right- and its president Bibi Netanhayu). During a first period, Tammi, Mograbi?s wife, pushes him to make this film on what they both believe will be ?Sharon?s swan song,? except that the same Sharon doesn?t let him come near; in a second phase, there is a turnaround: Sharon is often encountered and filmed by Mograbi; even better, he opens up with bonhomie to the exercise at hand, while Tammi rebels more and more openly against continuing the film, until finally she leaves her husband; and he, for his part, allows himself to practice stammering hysterical slogans of the radical right, screamed until nausea by rock fans with side-curls.
It is this ?charisma? which leads to the rapport of documentary with ?the enemy? (Sharon is at the helm of the fraction between enemy and adversary). Rapport, i.e. complicity of timetable and performances. Great are the chances that, via the succession of kept or missed rendezvous that is a film shoot, the human dimension is raised and even the very humanity of a political man whose crimes cannot however cease to horrify: the reminder of the Sabra and Shatila massacres haunt the film - as if to prevent us from giving in, when our turn comes, to the Sharon ?charisma.?

Malaise, unresolved contradiction: door ajar by which we enter into the complexity of Mograbi?s cinema. Two tenses govern the course of the film through this itinerary of decline. There is the present of énonciation (Mograbi faces the camera: questions and doubts). And there is the past of énoncé, in a series of backward moves showing the progressive stages of Mograbi?s downfall.
These two tenses intersect and go so far as to become confused. The first, that of verbal narrative, presents itself as the tense of critical conscience: Mograbi distances himself with this past, which will have both ruined his marriage and permitted his film. The second, the tense of narrative in actions and situations, is a prior time, where what Mograbi does and sees and what transforms him occurs only gradually, with each new meeting with Sharon. A tense completed, where all is played out; and a time to become, a destiny not yet accomplished. The customary teleology linked to the flashback (the past confirms the present) is here paradoxically reversed. All is finished, Mograbi tells us, facing us. And yet, the film tells us, it?s all in the process of happening - and who knows? Nothing is played out cinematographically even if all is said narratively. It is that the documentary part of the film (the shoot of an electoral campaign with the ?real? Sharon and some others, equally ?real?) carries the possibility of refuting fiction?s contribution to it, as already played (Mograbi?s downfall, his separation from his wife). The film is presented as a future, within the finished film. Parable for gestation. The mise en abyme is going into labor. Filming separation in order to be done with separation.

This system returns in the following films: Mograbi facing the camera, confides his doubts; he holds several contradictory roles ; there is always a film in the process of being made and always endangered; and the question ?how to hate the one whom one doesn?t stop filming?? becomes ?how to not film those that one can only fight and that perhaps one will not stop hating while filming them??
Questions of cinema. Which take their meaning in the case of documentary, in the measure where this other that one can and cannot both hate and film is not an actor blithely performing a role, but a political animal having the power to change the course of hundreds of thousands, of millions of lives. This responsibility alone changes the filmmaker?s course into a test. Mograbi films himself like the first to suffer from it. The tourniquet of questions is suffering: to film from one side? From another? From both? Together? To want to film and to not be able to? To be able and to not want to? To fulfill the commission or to resist it? Yes, this is an embarrassed cinema. This embarrassment is filmed; it makes the movie. Mograbi?s questions return like a metaphor for the hesitations of Israeli society. The contortions of cinema echo those within the society itself. What is filmed is precisely Mograbi?s obstinacy to make a film of the Israeli-Palestinian War-without-peace. For Mograbi, filming is only to realize a desire of the cinema in so far as it is the this desire to be with, to be tied. Desire less and less bearable to those who are filmed. The violence done to the war, it is the film.