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Your movie A Woman Kills
- in a few words, what is it about?
A Woman Kills
is a film with several themes. Here is the subject: After the execution of a woman who repeatedly killed prostitutes, similar
murders are committed again. The police are tracking down a mysterious
stranger whom the press has named the Sadist of Pigalle...
Finally, the inspector in charge of the investigation discovers that the
serial killer is in fact a transvestite man, beset by his demons. A long
chase begins in a Paris in destruction.
Serialkiller movies
weren't exactly common back when you made A
Woman Kills - so why choose this topic for your first feature
film? My generation saw the
perpetuation of systematised mass crimes. As whole societies were turning
into serialkillers, I was able to imagine an orderly, organised
individual who methodically repeated his crimes. Moreover, in portraying
my hero, I wanted to create a character who was incomprehensible, just as
the great programmers of massacres are incomprehensible. In reality, the
perverse hero of A Woman Kills embodies a society in a state
of decomposition. Moreover, after my first professional short film, Sadness of the Anthropophagi, I had a feature film in the
works that was stopped by the censorship that had struck. This film,
entitled Boram s'arrête, was about a character who took power
in an imaginary country and ended up committing atrocities. I had
summarised my synopsis with the phrase: "All power leads to the abuse of
power." So in the spring of 1968 I began A Woman Kills
quite
naturally. Other sources of inspiration when writing A
Woman Kills? I
am an heir to the surrealist movement and the collage arts. But above all,
regardless of the subject itself, what interested me was breaking down
boundaries. Thus, I wanted to abolish genres, I wanted to cross
cinematographic categories, so that one can see in A Woman Kills
a thriller as well as a psychological or even political film,
a film that could be seen as a tragedy or as a comedy, a film that could
unfold as a news item or as a long poem. This desire to break away from a
specific genre is illustrated by the hero who becomes neither male nor
female. This was the first sentence of the script: "It will be a
character who is half man, half woman."
What can you tell us about A
Woman Kills' approach to the thriller genre? I'm
not sure I wanted to make a thriller. I rather imagined filming a parable
of a sick society. If I shot the final scenes of the film in a district of
Paris that was being destroyed, it was to imitate the idea of the fall and
the collapse. I wanted to make a film outside of realism and outside of
fantasy. The problem with the fantasy genre is that it takes us away from
the mystery of reality, because only reality seems like a mystery to me.
And if, on the other hand, I reject the expression realist in its
crudeness, it is because realism as a genre translates reality without its
wings. The realist school does not know what reality is, because reality
is also what we cannot perceive. This wave that carries radio signals, you
don't see it, yet it is real. These reflections led my approach. I wanted
a raw camera that could film the apparent and at the same time a camera
that could in some way film the "inside". A
few words about your overall directorial approach to your story at hand? Staging
is a grand word considering the meagre means at my disposal. Nevertheless,
I was concerned to concentrate my gaze on what had to be shown without
artifice, as close as possible to the subject. The camera had to behave
like a reportage camera, often hand-held, preceding or following a
character. And, as with all my films, I try to film what can be seen in
order to evoke the invisible. I am very much inspired by this sentence of
the philosopher Anaxagoras: "Every image is a vision of the
invisible." This is reflected in my direction by a certain insistence
of the camera and by the choice of settings. The only tricks in this film
are editing tricks where heterogeneous elements interact. These diverse
elements are: the songs which intervene as annotations on the film itself.
The cold, objective commentary. The action that continues. And the chase
at the end of the film, which is implausible, a chase that never ends,
which I made to stretch time, like death that never ends.
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Do
talk about A Woman Kills'
key cast, and why exactly these people? The
casting was complicated, especially for the hero. I first tried to find an
actor among the men who disguised themselves as women in real life, but
the tests were not conclusive. Perhaps there had to be a certain distance
between the real character and the role I was proposing. As soon as I met
the actor Claude Merlin, I thought he could be my hero, and in retrospect
I think I was right. For the female characters, I chose them from among my
friends at the time: Solange Pradel, Catherine Deville, Jackie Raynal... they are very much of their time:
Free, fighting and beautiful women who
assume their femininity. What can you
tell us about the shoot as such, and the on-set atmosphere? The
team was composed of seven young professionals. It was a very fragmented
shoot, since most of the film was shot during the events of May '68. With
the operator Gérard de Battista and my partner Mireille Abramovici
(script and precious assistant) we were shooting two films at the same
time: On the one hand, our fiction film A Woman Kills
and on
the other hand, the documentary Le bel émoi de mai on the
revolutionary events. In other words, the shooting of the fiction was done
as entertainment, our preoccupations being mainly with the upheavals in
the street. It was a buddy film where we shared everything. We had no
money, we managed, we were confident, we didn't know what film would come
out of all this footage, but history was on our side. A
Woman Kills took about 45 years until finally being released - any
explanation why that is?
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In
fact, there was a kind of bad fate that accompanied my films. It was such
a marginal production, so far away from the requirements of the film
industry, that it is not surprising that the film was scorned, ignored.
Even my friends, at the time, despised the film... since then their
opinion has changed and, on the contrary, today they support and
appreciate this same work. I think that at the time, they didn't like the
mixture of genres that made the film look like a draft. But this
unfinished aspect was important to me. I thought that only the unfinished
was alive, and I said this during a screening: "You have to know how
to leave your life in a state of draft!" Today, my work is better accepted.
For example, the idea that there can be masculin in feminin and feminin
in masculin, that there can be comedy in tragedy and comedy in drama, is
accepted. Also, we allow more creation outside of a pre-established genre.
It is easier to imagine that a film dealing with an imagined news item can
also be, in a way, a political film.
What can you tell us about
audience and critical reception of A
Woman Kills? The
film could finally be seen thanks to the miraculous intervention of
Jean-Pierre Bastid, Grégory Alexandre, Christophe Bier and Francis
Lecomte. And even if the film is not a "mainstream" film, it has
nevertheless met, forty-six years after its shooting, a considerable
number of spectators and excellent reviews. Above all, what is remarkable
is the support of young spectators who see in my approach a great freedom
that they associate with modernity. Several young students and even very
young people quote me in their school or university work, some dedicate
their master's degree to A Woman Kills. Honestly, what's going through your
mind when you watch A Woman Kills
today?
I
can't really be a spectator, it's mostly regrets that I feel when I watch
the film. Regrets that I didn't have the necessary means to make some
scenes more elaborate. But above all, I feel a little bitter when I think
of all the obscurity that has clouded my work as a filmmaker. Seeing this
film today, I say to myself that it has at least one merit, that of being
a cinematic proposition. It was when I rediscovered A Woman Kills
on Parisian screens in 2015 that I decided to return to the
cinema after a long interlude in television. Any future projects you'd like to share? Last
June I turned 80. And in fact, I have never been more creative. Between
2015 and today, I have made numerous video performances, experimental
videos, and four feature films still awaiting real distribution, films
that are still ignored: Thirst and Perfume, Bleu Pâlebourg,
Les Tueurs d’Ordinaire, La Guerre m’a pris dans ses
bras (the latter is in the process of being finished). I also have a
film in the works, the scenes of which have already been shot: 13 Rue Paul Cahier. My big film project is an intimate peplum that I am
writing: Le Péplum déchiré, a film for which I would need
some financing. It must be said that, in addition to film, I paint and,
above all, I write poetry. Between 2020 and 2022, I published three
collections which, despite a limited number of readers, have had the good
fortune to be highly regarded. What
got you into filmmaking in the first place, and did you receive any formal
training on the subject?
I
attended a private film school for six months. Very early on, I felt the
need to get my hands on film. I was first hired as a trainee at the Éclair
film laboratories. Then I was an assistant editor at Franco-London
Films.
Then I was an editor at Actualités Françaises and chief editor of a few
feature films. But what really led me to cinema was poetry. I was really
taken by passion when I discovered the work of Buñuel, and thanks to this
immense filmmaker I realised that a film could be a poem. What can you tell us about your
past film- and TV-work?
I was set aside from the film industry at an early age, placed outside the
system. So my film activity, even though I had wonderful accomplices, was
an individual experience outside the entertainment community. One marginal
activity that was very important in my life between 1962 and 1975 was
activist cinema. I was an active member of the ARC group, created in 1967,
in which I directed Le bel émoi de mai. In 1973, I founded
the Cinélutte group, within which I made five films: Chaud, chaud,
chaud, Jusqu'au bout, L'autre façon d'être une
banque, Portrait and Un simple exemple,
these last three films being grouped under the title Bonne chance la
France. Curiously, unlike the cinema, television has adopted me and
I have been able to make more than seventy films, more or less short,
quite freely. And, even if I suffered some censorship, I benefited from a
certain support from decision-makers such as Sylvie Genevoix and
Pierre-André Boutang. Through television, I have had the chance to tackle
very diverse themes and I think I have touched on almost every subject:
psychoanalysis, sociology, history, literature, painting, ...
As you've been in the business
for quite some time now, how has the filmworld changed over the decades? In
reality, the world of cinema is foreign to me. It is true that new
technologies have revolutionised practices, but paradoxically, all these
facilities offered to filmmakers have led to a homogenisation of the
cinematographic language. It is above all production
that has been transformed. Increasingly, a certain standardisation is
affecting films, which must obey the criteria of mass distribution and the
requirements of television channels, which are becoming essential
partners.
How would you describe yourself as a director? I
don't feel like a director, I wait for the scene to come to my camera. I
can say that I favour fiction, but in reality I am a documentary filmmaker
who films things that do not exist in reality. I am one of those artists
who want to be surprised by what comes up outside their will. The ideal
for me is to capture the unexpected, the unforeseeable. Filmmakers
who inspire you? I
am especially attached to a primordial and already ancient cinema. The
images and atmosphere of Murnau's cinema touch me deeply. The astonishing
efficiency of Fritz Lang fascinates me. Luis Buñuel's freedom, his
fantasy, his way of looking at the world are exemplary in my eyes. Your favourite movies? Sunrise
(Murnau), Der Blaue Engel
(Von Sternberg), M (Lang), L’Âge
d’Or (Buñuel), 8 1/2
(Fellini)… in fact, I think that one must connect with the sources. In the same way that contemporary plastic arts
have referred to "primitive" expressions and even to prehistoric
engravings, I have come closer to an original cinema. Moreover, I
sincerely think that M, for example, is much more modern than most films of today. ...
and of course, films you really deplore?
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I reject films that do not make me react, that do not make me dream. The
list is long, unfortunately. Your/your
movie's website, social media, whatever else?
So far, I have no official website that relays information about my films.
However, I am lucky to have had some nice retrospectives: In Lausanne
(Switzerland) by the Luff, at the Cinémathèque de Tunisie (Tunis), at
the Cinémathèque de Toulouse (France) and soon in a cinema in Brussels
(Belgium). The most complete interview that has been done about my work is
in French on the link: https://www.culturopoing.com/cinema/entretiens-cinema/jean-denis-
bonan-jaurais-puprendre-des-verres-avec-francois-villon/20220207
Anything else you're dying to mention and I have merely forgotten to ask? Yes,
I can add that for me cinema is not isolated in its sphere, that all
artistic expressions communicate. So I persist in being a writer or even a
visual artist and I regret to the core that I am not a musician. But above
all, I would like to say thank you. Thanks
for the interview!
Translation from French by Elli Videau
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