Your film takes its title from Michel Surya’s novel The Eternal Return. Could you tell us about its origins and how the project came into being?
Before The Eternal Return came my reading of Georges Bataille, la mort à l’œuvre, published by Séguier in 1987, a book that fascinated me, both for its writing and its iconography. When I discovered that its author, Michel Surya, was one of my neighbours, I went to meet him and his wife, Catherine Hélie. We became friends. It was then that I read The Eternal Return, the novel he had come to write here, in Vaucottes, a hamlet of Vattetot-sur-Mer where I live. I wanted to make a film with him ,an interview, which I intended to call Even Nietzsche Would Have Been Saved by Love, the final sentence of The Eternal Return.
Before that, the film begins beside a tennis court, or more precisely, in front of a practice wall against which you film yourself playing, not alone but with your dog. What led you to make these shots, and how did they find their place in the film?
Around the same time that I met Michel Surya, I found myself returning, I couldn’t really say why, to the tennis courts in Fécamp where, as a child, my parents had forced me to play. It was an unhappy memory. The place itself, very beautiful, almost wild, had not changed, and I became completely captivated by it. I started playing there again, alone, against the wall, as if trying to move beyond something painful from my childhood. But this time, in order to break the rules, I played with my dog Tobie. I think there was the idea of return, the return of the ball and the return to a place that had remained unchanged. This opening sequence also announces the monologic form which is the form of the novel itself.
After the wall comes the sea, the swell is filmed from inside a house, over which we hear an extract from Léo Ferré’s song La Mémoire et la mer. Could you speak about the relationship between this place, this view, and the song?
The sea we see through the window of a house in Vaucottes is as much the sea of the film as it is the sea of the novel. It is the sea Michel Surya looked out upon while writing The Eternal Return here. It is also the sea seen by Boethius, Dagerman and Nina, the novel’s characters. Later, while editing, I remembered that La Mémoire et la mer, Léo Ferré’s song, had had a profound impact on Michel. He told me he had first heard it when he was fifteen. Love and anarchy forever. It is a song we both share.
At the heart of the film is a reading by Mathilde Girard of a short passage from Michel Surya’s novel, in which Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return is interpreted as a tragic conception of love. Why did you choose this particular passage? What drew you to the ideas it expresses? And why did you ask Mathilde Girard, a long-time friend and collaborator, to read it?
Michel Surya was not at all keen on the idea of me making a film “about him”, an interview. I insisted, and he finally agreed, on the condition that the interview should be conducted by Mathilde Girard.
I first met Mathilde when I filmed her, we immediately became accomplices and friends. It was she, after preparing extensively for the interview, who chose this passage: “Love is not made to console us, perhaps - it is made to save. But, as we know, one is only ever saved once. And only for as long as that one moment lasts.”… It is a passage that lies at the very heart of the novel.
Another long-standing friend, who has appeared in many of your films, then takes over the reading in voice-over: Françoise Lebrun, whose unmistakable voice we later hear again, this time much younger, in an excerpt from Marguerite Duras’s La Femme du Gange. What were you hoping to carry across from one film to another, from one period to another, from the view of the sea to the black on which the film ends?
La Femme du Gange is probably my favourite film by Marguerite Duras; I also felt there were echoes between it and Michel Surya’s novel, between S. Thala and V.-sur-Mer. I imagined bringing back Françoise Lebrun’s voice reading the final three pages of The Eternal Return. Then her voice (off) fifty years younger in La Femme du Gange: “From every past, from every love, I remember.” There was also the story of the dead dog, since my own dog Tobie had died in the meantime. (The sea swept him away.) The black at the end of the film, over which Françoise’s voice returns, is in fact a cinema projection screen descending in front of the window overlooking the sea.
The dog Tobie and the cat Bataille are also recurring presences in your films - as are the animals who share your life or cross your path. They appear together, clearly very close companions, in shots that intercut with those of Mathilde Girard reading Michel Surya and you slow down their movement. Could you comment on these images?
When my dog Tobie (whom I briefly considered crediting under the name Nietzsche) died, my cat Bataille disappeared. He returned three years later. Once again, a story of return. When I decided to resume, together with Mathilde, the film about Michel that we had begun ten years earlier, I found these images in the project folder, somewhat to my surprise. I don’t really know why the movement is slowed down, it happened during filming, I must have been experimenting with the image, though I no longer remember.
Around ten years separate the shooting from the completion of the edit. Could you explain this interval, this long maturation of a film whose themes (love, death and the return beyond death) seem to touch a deeply personal point in your work as a filmmaker? Was there something particularly difficult about this film?
When we watched the rushes of the interview I had just filmed with Michel and Mathilde, Michel was horrified, I think he found the very idea of an “author portrait” unbearable. He asked me to leave the project there…It took me ten years to discover the form the film should take, it eventually became a tribute to The Eternal Return, almost a portrait of the novel itself. The time it took for Boethius, Dagerman and Nina, the protagonists of The Eternal Return to return in The World of Lovers, the novel that follows ( two books forming one*). Michel appreciated this film for its silence, thanks to it, we were able to find one another again.
Is this a film about love? About cinema? About what binds them together?
L’amour aurait suffi même à Nietzsche is a film made so that everything comes back.
The Eternal return / The Word of Lovers (2006-2022) was published by Éditions de l’extrême contemporain.
Interviewed by Cyril Neyrat
