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History is the Enemy of Art: Philippe Garrel on Les amants réguliers

By Stefan Grissemann

If there’s a place that film history has reserved for Philippe Garrel, it’s to be found somewhere beyond the neat gardens of French mainstream auteurism and far away from the hip dreams of the nouvelle vague and its contemporary beneficiaries. Most film encyclopaedias, even the more specialized ones, shun Garrel as if he were a ghost that only appears every now and then, quietly endangering established histoire(s) du cinéma. Pretend he’s not there, for heaven’s sake: What you don’t acknowledge will never exist anyway. Garrel has thus become something of a phantom, an artist condemned to splendid isolation on the very fringes of personal filmmaking, a director on the outside of everything: a lone master working on the backside of fame, fashion, and the film industry.

But life on the margins has its advantages: the chance, for instance, to develop a very special aesthetic, a unique world view without much interference. Garrel’s wildly personal cinema, its violent intimacy comparable only to the films of Jean Eustache or Maurice Pialat, has given rise to indispensable works: from his early lyrical underground films such as the very alien—and strangely beautiful—landscape musical La cicatrice intérieure (1972), a counterculture version of Cocteau’s orphic visions featuring a radiant Nico, to more narrative productions like L’enfant secret (1982) or Sauvage innocence (2001), a highly self-reflexive tale of cinema. At all times Garrel’s films—as simple materially as they are complex intellectually and aesthetically—seem to open up to worlds as yet unseen. In an article for Libération in 1983, Serge Daney claimed that with L’enfant secret Garrel had “succeeded in filming something we have never seen before: the faces of actors in silent films during those moments when the black intertitles, with their paltry, illuminated words, filled the screen.”

It must have already seemed clear back in 1973, when Garrel was only 25, that this was a filmmaker for the lucky few, a visionary only for those who knew exactly where to look. It must have been obvious that the fragile masterpieces Garrel had directed by then would be hard to be seen by anyone’s, even a connoisseur’s, standards. In a cursory homage to Laszlo Szabo 32 years ago François Truffaut took Garrel’s initial works as supreme examples of cinema’s sensitive nature. Films, Truffaut stated, were like babies—it just wasn’t enough to bring them into the world. Will anyone, he wrote, ever be able to see “beautiful and inspired” films like Marie pourmémoire (1967), La concentration (1968), or Athanor (1972)? Truffaut was right, of course. Nothing has changed in the three decades since: those films—and most of the others Garrel has managed to bring forth since—remain inaccessible, almost invisible, repressed like some dangerous, contagious truth.

With Les amants réguliers, which premiered at the Venice film festival, things are a little different. Its subject alone would seem to guarantee a certain, if limited, amount of attention. Garrel’s unflinching look back at the events of (and after) May 1968 in Paris offers a more generally political topic for public debate—taken very personally by the filmmaker, however. In Garrel’s minimalistic reconstruction—he claims to have based it on his own lost documentary footage of the nightly street riots of 1968—there’s no romanticism, no sentimentalism whatsoever. This revolution is born out of sadness and it’s fought by a wavering, prematurely disillusioned youth. How much this film is, almost uncannily, in keeping with the times can be seen at a glance: the emblematic images of burning cars and embittered immigrant kids of the Parisian banlieues in 2005 shine through Garrel’s unknowingly premonitory recreations of 1968. The director’s son Louis plays the loner François, a poetic, unhappy soul who winds up in the midst of a revolution that he cannot fully understand—and with his life going down the drain. The conditional love of the girl he meets, Lilie (Clotilde Hesme), only hastens his personal decline. Les amants réguliers carries the weight of a chef d’oeuvre with its epic, three-hour length and the precious, serene, high contrast black-and-white photography of master DP William Lubtchansky. The assured mise en scène, subtly blending autobiography and literary fiction, makes for a dreamlike quality, a fascination that is prototypically Garrelian. History is never simply repeating itself, and tragedy does not return as farce—it comes back as a melancholy love letter to those who vanished with it.

Cinema Scope: In Les amants réguliers, a very subjective, very personal take on May 1968, your son Louis plays a 20-year-old guy getting caught up in an unexpected revolution. You were 20 in 1968 as well. How autobiographical is this film?

Philippe Garrel: It’s autobiographical only as far as the period is concerned. The love story on the other hand is more Romantic, very literary. But formally the film is of course very personal: the scene in which Louis meets the girl crossing the street is deliberately shot like a newsreel. I did shoot a lot of documentary footage of the events of May 68 myself in 35mm, but unfortunately I lost all the negatives of that material. So I tried to reconstruct those images now, three-and-a-half decades later. I tried to shoot them exactly the same way again. In that sense, Les amants réguliers is less autobiographical than a reproduction of the films I shot at that time. That is as far as the autobiography extends: it concerns the period, the climate, the morale of that story. The romance part has more to do with Proust, though, and other literary references. I am now 57 years old, this is my 24th film, and I did in fact already create films that were a lot more autobiographical—films like L’enfant secret. In Les amants réguliers, the love story needed to be more universal, more classical, so that it would make identification possible.

Scope: Your gaze back at the Parisian May of 1968 seems quite pessimistic—or maybe more precisely, skeptical. You are not romanticizing the period at all, the film is completely unsentimental. It also seems very honest, as you focus on the uncertainty of your protagonists, on their uneasy mix of emotion and ideology. The revolution that you describe is quite often based more on accident than on heroism.

Garrel: Yes, well, historically May ‘68 has been a great defeat. What makes my film optimistic, though, is the sheer fact of its existence. It is positive to know that you cannot censor this era at last. Art always finally tries to re-establish different truths of events; there’s never just one truth to an event, after all, but always many. So my film provides an alternative, a personal truth of the time of May 1968. I was able to make this film from a participant’s point of view, like someone who directs a movie about a battle that he himself actually fought. I am an eyewitness of that time, and I can show what I have experienced through cinema without any economic intervention or censorship so typical of all industries. I could relate my truth on May ‘68 despite the fact that I had very few means, very little money to do so.

Scope: Two years ago, Bernardo Bertolucci also made a film on May ‘68, The Dreamers—a radically different film. Les amants réguliers almost seems to be the opposite of everything Bertolucci tried to do.

Garrel: The Dreamers is very classical, whereas I consider my film more of an avant garde work. It is shot in a way that is actually characteristic of cinema in 1968. And, by the way, my film cost about a tenth of what Bertolucci used for The Dreamers. In that sense also I think Les amants réguliers is very modern: it makes the most of very limited means.

Scope: Did you have the feeling you had to tell this tale once more—also to revise dominant views on those historical events?

Garrel: In France , for a long time many truths about May ‘68 were withheld because De Gaulle was still around. The role he played during the fights was of course less than glorious, but since De Gaulle to this day virtually embodies the Resistance, which cannot be touched in France , ever, many facts have been denied regarding May ‘68. But since I was there and since I also happen to be a filmmaker—I had already released my first film, Marie pour mémoire, in 1967—I can finally tell my version of that era. That in itself is positive. Other than that, May 1968 has been a serious defeat. And now one of those who lost the battle tells that story once again. It’s a loser’s film really.

Scope: To me Les amants réguliers is much more than just a film about the specific history of May ‘68. It is also about film history, about personal history, about history proper. Isn’t this film in its essence also a tale about the mechanics of history in general, and about the impossibility to recreate history on the screen?

Garrel: No. I think my film somehow resembles Stendhal’s novel, The Charterhouse of Parm a , in which the two Romantic heroes occasionally leave their story by crossing history. No, I have a different dialectic: For me, history is the enemy of art. Usually when artists touch history, they are always prisoners of time, because every time is ruled by history. But it’s impossible to recreate history itself. Cinema is what we have learned to mistake for history, but cinema is only mise en scène. For instance, we think we teach students about the history of Napoleon Bonaparte, but what we really teach them is Abel Gance’s very romanticized movie about Napoleon. When we think about the revolution of 1917, we immediately think of Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925). Even newsreels from World War II have turned out to be fiction, manufactured by directors after the war. I believe that cinema is an integral part of history itself, also in its symbolic function. Cinema is by now a part of our memory. It is an attempt to rebuild our imperfect memories. In that respect it can be fiction. I do not think art represents history, I think it is a part of it. Even if it’s fake and mythological sometimes.

Scope: Les amants réguliers cultivates a very austere, very painterly kind of beauty. How did you work with William Lubtchansky? Did you let him do what he wanted, or did you have any say in the camera work?

Garrel: That depended really. William and I belong to the same generation, as does my editor, Françoise Collin. This film truly is a generational movie. We all identified strongly with this story. So we decided to exchange ideas often. And since we all have definitely reached the second half of our working lives, it depended very much on who was most awake at a given morning, and who liked to direct things. At our age we tend to group together more easily than we used to do. So in the film there are camera positions that are typically mine, and other framings that are more characteristic of William. We worked together like musicians, really: we had dialogues, like a jazz band that keeps improvising on what had been written. Whoever felt like playing, played first.

Scope: How do feel about your position as an artist working at the very margins of the French film industry? Is that position self-chosen, or was it really forced on you?

Garrel: It has always been like this. Since my very first film. I did not choose to be marginalized. I was literally put outside. I remember my first film, it was a short movie I made in 1964, Les enfants deésaccordées. I shot this film when I was 16 years old. It was shown on television together with another short film that somebody else did. This other director was interviewed for the occasion, and when it was finally my turn, I was told they were not going to interview me since I was so different and just too original. They were not interested. That’s the way I started. I was always considered different from anybody else. So this forced me to make cinema outside of cinema, so to speak. It was only when I met Andy Warhol in 1969—that was after he had been injured—that I realized it was not so bad to be an outsider. To work outside the established art world. In my case this is not a pose at all: I was forced to work that way. Now I’m used to it, so I don’t feel frustrated any more.

Scope: It’s been four years since your last film, Sauvage innocence. Has it become even more difficult to finance your work lately?

Garrel: You know, every cent in Les amants réguliers has come from the political left, even though it’s a production funded by private and public money. That’s not a joke, it’s true. It had to be that way. There was no way you could tell this story that offers a radically left perspective with right-wing money. So yes, it was particularly difficult to finance this film. But I am not the only one. It is becoming more and more difficult for other filmmakers as well to get their productions together. I used to say that I only do movies for myself, but people kept asking me if I was crazy, why I was making films at all then. It has become so difficult—and almost paradoxical—to make true cinema in a period that’s invaded and ruled by industrial images. Had somebody discovered and supported me back in the mid-60s as a great classical filmmaker, my career might have been different. That said, I did have strong supporters in my life: one was Henri Langlois of the Cinématheque française.

Scope: Since your films always seem to constitute their own category, hasn’t it been strange to submit Les amants réguliers for competition in a big festival like Venice ?

Garrel: For a painter, you mean? It’s true, it did feel bizarre, yes.

Scope: Why did you agree then?

Garrel: It’s a tradition of big film festivals to have one work of the avant garde, to include one black sheep. In Venice in 2005 that was obviously me.

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