Time Images

We have no difficulty in discerning the three stages of ennui or boredom: a feeling of imprisonment, escape through sleep, and finally anxiety, as though we were guilty of some awful deed which we have not committed. The Abbot’s cure for this is not a million miles from what today’s entertainment experts say is the right thing to keep people alert at the workplace: distract distraction by means of distraction, use poison to heal.

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Back in his cell, he’s astonished to discover that traveling has only made things worse. He’s even more bored than before and now his boredom has ontological weight. We will call this dangerous new sentiment melancholy. […] Soon the cell itself, his brother monks, and even communion with God becomes an illusion. His world has been emptied by entertainment. Some one thousand two hundred years later, in France, Blaise Pascal, in the chapter of his Pensées devoted to entertainment, warns «All the evil in men comes from one thing and one thing alone: their inability to remain at rest in a room» — be it for no more than an hour. So perhaps boredom is a good thing.”

I remember the first statement of the theory: a story begins when someone wants something and someone else doesn’t want them to have it. From that point on, through various digressions, all the elements of the story are arranged around this central conflict. What I immediately found unacceptable was this direct relation between will, which to me is something dark and oceanic, and the petty play of strategies and tactics around a goal which if not in itself banal, is certainly rendered so.”

When advertising people explain that advertisements are the poetry of the modern world, this shameless proposition forgets that there is no art which aims to compose or reveal a product which corresponds to public expectations. Advertising can shock or want to shock, it corresponds to a presupposed expectation. An art, on the contrary, necessarily produces the unexpected, the unrecognized, the unrecognizable. There is no commercial art; it’s a meaningless phrase. There are popular arts, of course. There are also arts which require more or less financial investment, there is a commerce of arts but no commercial arts.

What seems to complicate everything is that the same form serves creative and commercial aims. We can already see it on the level of the book-form, it’s the same for the Harlequin collection and for a Tolstoy novel. You can always put airport books and great novels in competition with each other, it’s inevitably the airport book or best-seller which will win in a single market of rapid rotation, or, worse, they themselves will lay claim to the other’s qualities and take it hostage. It’s what is happening on television, where aesthetic judgement becomes ‘it’s delicious,’ like a little snack, or ‘it’s a breakthrough,’ like a football penalty. It’s a promotion that uses the lowest standard (une promotion par le bas), it’s an alignment of all literature with mass consumption.

‘Auteur’ is a function which refers to the work of art (and in other conditions to a crime). For other products, there are other names, which are just as respectable: editor, programmer, director, producer… People who say ‘there are no more auteurs today’ assume that they would have been capable of recognizing yesterday’s, at the time when they weren’t yet known. It’s very conceited. There is no art which can live except on the condition of a dual domain, the still-current distinction between the commercial and the creative.”

Juliet Berto: I couldn’t really answer that. It is hard though to find actors who bring original ideas to film. They somehow aren’t interested in innovative research and challenge. Secure in their social position, they refrain from taking too many risks. Women have nothing to lose and it is from our socially deprived position that we emerge as powerful individuals in the film. It is a unique situation and one that is reflected by the fact that men are inevitably weaker in their profession as actors. Male actors possess an ambivalence, since acting for them implies the exposure of a narcissistic and feminine side of their personalities.

Dominique Labourier: We are certainly interested in expressing ourselves as women in the film. In fact, the first thing we wrote about the characters was derivative of Bergman’s Persona. For the first few days he was constantly on our minds.

Interviewer: I gather then that the film was ultimately rewarding for you both as individuals and as actresses.

Juliet Berto: For me it wasn’t only a positive experience but a complete one as it closed a whole cycle for me in my profession as an actress.

Dominique Labourier: It was a very happy experience for me as well. As actresses and women in films dominated mostly by male criteria, we emerged as powerful individuals and creators in our own right.