Por aquí dejo algunas de las preguntas recopiladas de la entevista de "Cahiers du cinema" a Jean Luc Godard sobre su película 'Pierrot Le Fou' concretamente quince, para continuar un poco con lo dejado en #49 . He escogido las que personalmente me han resultado más interesantes o que en su defecto pienso que dan un transfondo mayor a la obra o así como hacen referencia a algún otro cineasta.
Disculpadme pero las voy a redactar en inglés. En primer lugar porque me resulta más cómodo para hacer el copy/paste desde el librito que incluía la película hasta aquí y en segundo por que si me pongo a traducir tanta parafernalia puede que se me cuele alguna expresión y cambie de sentido la frase...
De todas formas, para los afectados por este motivo no hay nada que no os pueda resolver Google en pleno siglo 21. Vamos a ello.
Cahiers du cinema: What exactly was the starting point for Pierrot Le Fou?
Jean-Luc Godard: A Lolita-style novel whose rights I had bought two years earlier. The film was to have been made with Sylvie Vartan. She refused. Instead I made 'Bande à part'. Then I tried to set the film up again with Anna Karina and Richard Burton. In the end, the whole thing was changed by the casting of Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. I thought about "You Only Live Once" and instead of the Lolita I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple.
Cahiers du cinema: There seems at times to be an interaction between certain situations that existed at the moment of shooting and the film itself. For instance, when Anna Karina walk along the beach saying "What is there to do? I don't know want to do!" as if, at this moment, she hadn't know what to do, had said so, and you had filmed her.
Jean-Luc Godard: It didn't happen that way, but maybe it comes to the same thing. If I had seen a girl walking along the shore saying, "I don't know what to do", I might well have thought this was a good scene and, starting from there, imagined what came before and after. Instead of speaking of the sky, speaking of the sea, wich ins't the same thing; instead of being sad, instead of dancing, having a scene with people eating, which again ins't the same thing, but the final effect would have been the same. In fact, it happened like that no for this scene but another, in wich Anna says to Belmondo; "Hi, old man" and he imitates Michel Simon. That came about the way you suggest.
Cahiers du cinema: The only real act Belmondo accomplishes is when he tries to extinguish the fuse.
Jean-Luc Godard: If he had put it out, he would have become difeferent afterward. He is like Michel Piccoli in 'Contempt'
Cahiers du cinema: Even more in 'Contempt', the poetic presence of the sea...
Jean-Luc Godard: This was deliberate, much more so than in 'Contempt'. This is the theme.
Cahiers du cinema: Exactly as if the gods were in the sea
Jean-Luc Godard: No, naturem the presence of nature, which is neither romantic or tragic.
Cahiers du cinema: One feels that the subject emerges only when the film is over. During the screening one thinks, This is it, or that, but at the end one realizes there was a real subject.
Jean-Luc Godard: But that's cinema. Life arranges itself. One is never quite sure what one is going to do tomorrow, but by the end of the week one can say, after the event, "I have lived". Then one realizes one cannot trifle whit the cinema either. You see someone is the street; out of ten passersby, there is one you look at more closely for one reason or another. If it's a girl, because she has eyes like so, a man, because he has a particular air about him, and then you film their life. A subject will emerge that will be the person himself, his idea of the world, and the world created by this idea of it, the overall idea that this conjures. In the preface to one of his books, Michelangelo Antonioni says precisely this.
Cahiers du cinema: Perhaps the beauty of the film springs from the fact that one senses liberty
Jean-Luc Godard: The trouble with the cinema is that it imposes a certain length of film. If my film reveal some feeling of freedom, it is because i never think about lenght. I never know if what I am shooting will run twenty minutes or twice that, but it usually turns out that the result fits the commercial norm. I never have any time scheme. I shoot what I need, stopping when I think I have it all, continuing when I think there is more. This is full length dependent only on itself.
Cahiers du cinema: The characters allow themselves to be guided by events.
Jean-Luc Godard: They are abandoned to their own devices. They are insise both their adventure and themselves.
Cahiers du cinema: One feels that 'Pierrot Le Fou' takes palce in two periods. In the first, Karina and Belmondo make their way to the "Cote d'Azur", no cinema, because this is their life, and then, on the arrival, they met a director and told him their story, and he made them begin all over again.
Jean-Luc Godard: to a certain extent, yes, because the whole last part was invented on the spot, unlike the beginning, which was planned. It is a kind of happening, but one that was controlled and dominated. This said, it is a completely spontaneous film. I have never been so worried as I was two days before shooting began. I had nothing at all. Oh, well, I had the book. And a certain number of locations. I knew it would take place by the sea. The whole thing was shot, let's say, like in the days of Mack Sennett. Maybe I am growing more and more apart from one section of current filmaking. Watching old films, one never gets the impression that they were bored working, probably because the cinema was something new in those days, whereas today people tend to look on it as very old.
Cahiers du cinema: with 'Pierrot Le Fou' one feels one is watching the birth of cinema.
Jean-Luc Godard: I felt this with Rossellini's film about steel, because it captured life as source. Television, in theory, should have the same effect.
Cahiers du cinema: Why the quotation about Diego Velázquez?
Jean-Luc Godard: This is the theme. Its definition. Velázquez at the end of his life no longer painted precise forms, he painted what lay between the precise forms, and this is restated by Belmondo when he imitates Michel Simon.
Cahiers du cinema: If 'Pierrot Le Fou' is an instinctive film, one might wonder why there are connections with life and actuality?
Jean-Luc Godard: It is inevitable, since making 'Pierrot Le Fou' consisted of living through and event. And event is made up other events that one eventually discovers.
Cahiers du cinema: What about color in 'Pierrot Le Fou'?
Jean-Luc Godard: When you drive in Paris at night, what do you see? Red, green, yellow lights. I wanted to show these elements but without necessarily placing them as they are in reality. Rather as they remain in the memory splashes of red and green, flashes of yellow passing by. I wanted to recreate a sensation through the elements that constitute it.
Cahiers du cinema: do you feel you work more like a painter than a novelist in 'Pierrot Le Fou'?
Jean-Luc Godard: Jean Renoir explains this very well in the book he wrote about his father. Auguste would go away, feeling a need for the country. He went there. He walked in the forest. He slept in the nearest inn. After a couple of weeks he would come back. his painting finished.
Cahiers du cinema: Why do you think certain scenes are filmed rather than others?
Jean-Luc Godard: The problem that has long occupied me, but which I dont wory aboute while shooting is; Why do one shot rather than another? Take a story, for example. A character enters a room -one shot-. He sits down -another shot-. He lights a cigarette, etc. If instead of treating it this way, one would the film be better or less good?
What is it ultimately that makes one run a shot on or change to another? A director like Delbert Mann probable doesnt think this way. He follows a pattern. Shot the characters speaks; reverse angle, someone answers... Maybe this is why 'Pierrot Le Fou'is not a film but and attempt at film.
Vamos ahora con algunas referencias de algunas de las escenas más icónicas y momentos más marcados de la película.
Escapada juntos por Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo alias Pierrot) y Marianne (Anna Karina) con la banda sonora de Antoine Duhamel; 'The 35 steps' por Alfed Hitchcok (1935).
Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo alias Pierrot) y Marianne (Anna Karina) entrando al agua con el coche; Ruby Gentry por King Vidor (1952).
Las tijeras de Karina y que estas aprezcan en la espaldas de los asesinados; 'Dial M for Murder' nuevamente por Alfed Hitchcok (1953).
Beso y representacion del Ying y el Yang en la playa; 'Tales of a Pale and Mysterious Moon After the Rain' por Kenji Mizoguchi (1953)
Encuentro final entre Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo alias Pierrot) y Marianne (Anna Karina) en la "eternidad" del mar, voces mediante. 'Yôkihi' nuevamente por Kenji Mizoguchi (1955)
El siguiente post que dedique para 'Pierrot Le Fou' seguramente sea ya con mi impresión personal, lo que no quita que si me viene algo en mente que me resulte interesante traspasarlo aquí, lo haga. Ahora voy abrir un pequeño parentesís para traer otras cositas que he visto/leído últimamente.
❤
