L’arbre, le maire et la médiathèque

EN

“The Tree, the Mayor and the Médiathèque is a marvelous satirical tract, with a mordant irony that bites fairly. It is directed precisely against the socialists, the technocrats, the environmentalists, Parisianism, parochialism, wheeler-dealers, political mores, the electoral campaign, the development of the territory, and a mayor’s ambitions. Beneath its outward appearance as an amateur film and its acknowledged lightness of tone, this is perhaps one of Rohmer’s most ambitious films, the only one in which his involvement in his time is expressed.”

Antoine de Baecque

Cahiers du cinéma: In The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque, your actors speak “naturally” about politics or philosophy. How can you hold together these things which seem so contradictory: the naturalness of the acting with the stilted soundbites of politicians or the abstractions of philosophical principles?

Eric Rohmer: It’s not the content that matters here, it’s the way of saying it, the gestures if you like. Whether someone is talking about politics, philosophy, or love, the first thing I look for is authentic gestures. I don’t like actors using deliberate gestures, that simplify expressions in contrast to life’s richness, on the other hand I study unconscious, natural gestures very carefully, such as scratching your back while talking about philosophy, or crossing or uncrossing your legs, or any other example. You’ll have noticed that all my actors, whether it’s Arielle Dombasle or Fabrice Luchini, move well and have a natural sense of gesture. I don’t like gestures that act like a language that comes from actors who overdominate their bodies, but I like gestures that escape conscious control and thus, quite simply, lead us to the truth about a person. Bresson tried to fight this gestural language through a hierarchy and the non-gesture; I try to fight against it through the overuse of gesture, the disturbing or unconscious gestures that arise spontaneously. Unlike most directors, I never tell my actors what gestures to perform, but I try to capture their own gestures and record them almost without them realizing, against their will. If an actor becomes aware of their gestures, we have to abandon everything. I prefer it when an actor is so taken with their text that they have spontaneous gestures. Physically they are very interesting gestures, as well. When I’m choosing actors, I talk with them and see how they move their hands. And that’s why I prefer filming in a 1/33 ratio, the format of my last film, with a 16mm camera with an almost square frame, because that allows me to show off an actor’s gestures more effectively.

Eric Rohmer in conversation with Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse1

• 1Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, “The Amateur: An Interview with Eric Rohmer,” in: Eric Rohmer Interviews, ed. Fiona Handyside. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 131-132. This article was originally published in Cahiérs du cinéma, no. 456, 23 February 1993.