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Jun 26, 2009
Huillet-Straub : pay two, get one. (2/8)
Are Huillet and Straub con artists ? The question seems legitimate, when Jean-Marie Straub gleefully recalls how Musée d’Orsay financed, then rejected, upon screening it, their 1989 film, « Cézanne, dialogue avec Joachim Gasquet ».
Jean-Marie Straub brags about the film rejection like Michael Cimino about « Heaven’s Gate » -a great film in the director’s cut, but far longer than the two hours he had agreed to by contract- and like a « majority cinema » director about a « Palme d’or ».
His implicit message is clearer than most of his films : « Our work was so good they had to reject it ». Musée d’Orsay’s curators probably told the other side of the same story with matching self-righteousness and advertised their decision to reject the film like war veterans exhibit the medal pinned on their chest for uncommon bravery under enemy fire.
Huillet-Straub apparently won the war and the last laugh fourteen years later, in 2003, when Musée du Louvre accepted delivery of « Une visite au Louvre » : the text for the film consisted of several extracts from « Ce qu’il m’a dit -what he told me-, dialogue entre Cézanne et Joachim Gasquet ».
It took time -less than for Cézanne to achieve recognition- and no doubt changes, but their work about the painter eventually made its way to a Musée National and Huillet-Straub probably got paid twice in the process.
The fifty-one minute long « Cézanne, dialogue avec Joachim Gasquet » represents a substantial screening investment : you choose a Huillet-Straub film like a wine in a restaurant, by looking at its price, i.e. its duration.
Time is money, and fifty one Huillet-Straub minutes may be far more costly than many « majority cinema » hours and a half.
But how boring can a film about Cézanne be, particularly one refused by Musée D’Orsay and its probably very « rachâchant » curators ?
Viewer’s concern has more to do with Joachim Gasquet, with whom the painter is supposed to dialogue : the viewer knows nothing about him and the film shall tell him nothing, because it is a Huillet-Straub movie and he is deemed to know.
Left to doing his own research, the viewer finds out Joachim Gasquet was the son of a friend of Cézanne’s, who grew up to become an art critic and publish a book about the painter, in a chapter of which he recalled their conversations.
Cézanne died in 1906, Gasquet’s book, including the « Ce qu’il m’a dit » chapter, was published in 1921 : hopefully, Joachim Gasquet’s memory was good and his dialogue with Cézanne was not a disguised monologue with himself. Nowadays, most art critics agree Gasquet probably « magnifia » -embellished- a bit his « conversations » with the painter.
Huillet-Straub’s film opens with a very slow pan in which a not very attractive city, lying behind a speedway and uninspiring blocks of low income housing, progressively gives way to the country and a looming mountain in the background.
The soundtrack is mostly filled by car engines, there are no titles or voice over ; it is up to us to guess the city is probably Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne was born in 1839, and the mountain Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which he painted so many times, as if under its spell.
The film mixes additional contemporary shots of the Aix-en-Provence countryside and Montagne Sainte-Victoire -filmed in colour by Henri Alekan-, black and white photographs of Cézanne, and full-size -the camera never moves forward to explore their details- colour shots of his paintings.
Cézanne speaks through a woman’s voice : Danièle Huillet ; Gasquet through a man’s, Jean-Marie Straub’s. As opposed to the couple’s interviews, Huillet, as Cézanne, does most of the talking ; like a complacent journalist, Straub-Gasquet only asks the odd and welcome question that ushers a new stretch of the painter’s eloquence.
The conversation sounds as contrived and unbalanced as Socrates’s dialogues with his students and we can only hope its reconstruction by Gasquet is as faithful as it is painfully laborious.
While Cézanne’s near monologue plays mostly while photographs of the painter and shots of his works fill the screen, the contemporary views of Montagne Sainte-Victoire are blessed with the sound of wind in the trees and bushes.
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