Garegin Vanisian
“On peut vivre sans richesse, Presque sans le sou. Des seigneurs et des princesses, Y’en a plus beaucoup. Mais vivre sans tendresse, On ne le pourrait pas. Non, non, non, non. On ne le pourrait pas” (You can live without wealth, live without a penny, Lords and ladies, there aren’t very many. But to live without tenderness, it just can’t be done. No, no, no, no, it just can’t be done). Garegin Vanisian’s film opens with Marie Laforêt’s well known song La Tendresse. Love… love wounded by the breakup experienced by the film’s character. How do you express the gaping void left when a loved one has gone? It’s through a second loss that the director dramatises the romantic breakup: the departure of the actress who refuses the role and forces the film to reinvent itself. Instead of the sequences, described in a voiceover, the gaps in the story are filled with images devoid of the character’s body, or using pictures from the storyboard, amazing miniatures in watercolour. By interweaving this into the filming, and displaying the artifice – the mock-up of the backdrop, the dolly track, even the actress’s audition – the director explores the drama’s structures and breaks away from the melancholy register of his film. Like the beautiful Jasko Fide’s tattoos, Garegin Vanisian skilfully sketches a stippled film – without masking his inspiration, from the posture borrowed from Marina Abramovic in Nightsea Crossing to the “Chantal Ackerman sequence”, from Goethe quotations to the one from Guy Gilles, “I used to think life was a poem”. All the beauty and sadness of living seem to be contained in this phrase. But although it resembles a film about romantic – and artistic – disappointment, The Heart Through Deserts Runs – Working Title impressively comes back to life as the film develops, like the woman who appears at the end, triumphant and resilient in the long grass. To the repeated absences of the narrative, Vanisian responds with presences that are constantly updated and permanently in progress.
(Louise Martin-Papasian)
- Flash Competition
- 2021
- Flash Competition
- 2021
DAS HERZ DURCH WÜSTENEYEN RENNT – ARBEITSTITEL
THE HEART THROUGH DESERTS RUNS – WORKING TITLE
Garegin Vanisian
Interview with Garegin Vanisian
At once the story of a break-up, a reflection on filmmaking, a tribute to cinema, and an essay on breaking the fourth wall, your film has different entry points and levels of interpretation. What first made you want to do it?
The actress or actor often is the starting point for my films. A film feels all the more private to me the more it is private to the actress or actor. The performer Jasko Fide was the initial inspiration for this project. The first outline for the film was very different from its final form. The many changes of the concept are reflected in the film’s polymorphic structure.
The film opens with the song La tendresse, by Marie Laforêt, placing the film under the banner of love, but behind the initial innocence soon appears the harshness of disillusionment caused by the break-up and the absence of the loved one. Why did you choose this song and this rendition?
Apart from it being a simply beautiful song and from my admiration for Laforêt’s chansons, I chose it for the lively dichotomy it creates in regard to the film. It corresponds with the mood and diffident hope which the main character bears in her heart (“Mais vivre sans tendresse/On ne le pourrait pas”; “Pour que règne l’amour,/Règne l’amour/Jusqu’à la fin des jours“), but there is also a certain sweetish nature to the song which creates an opposition to the film’s images.
Your character has just broken up with a woman, and she is reading Renée Vivien’s Une femme m’apparut, the autobiographical story of a passionate relationship. And abstract is read by a voice-over. How is the book involved in the film? Is it the starting point?
At least one lasting influence which I received from the films of François Truffaut is that each film of mine must feature a person reading a book and a close-up of the book. I discovered Renée Vivien as an author just a few months before the filming started (through her exceptional short story collection La Dame à la louve). The film’s narrative owes very much to the passionate turmoil and deep erotic despair of her prose.
Your film seems to be following a dotted line. Gradually, the break-up is coupled with a break in the structure of the film; instead of seeing all its frames, we get to see elements from the making-of: beautiful storyboard plates, a model of the set, the track of a camera dolly, and even the casting at the end. Why did you choose this approach?
In an essay from 1965, Pier Paolo Pasolini reflected about the screenplay of a film as a “structure which wants to be a different structure”, the “desire of the form to be a different form”. To me, this seems a natural impetus and process. Over a long course of time, I experimented with different possible ways of bringing together and narrating the different ideas I had for this film. And then I remember saying to Johanna Meyer, the set and costume designer who also designed the story boards, upon the completion of her drawings that we don’t need to shoot the film anymore because it is already “made” now. This feeling was crucial to open the structure of the film to an intertextual one.
In the end, the actress’ body, its presence or its absence, seems to be the real heart of the film. While she appears on screen as the main character, she withdraws from the film, thus creating through her very absence the conditions for the present film to be. Can you comment on this apparent paradox?
How can one convey with words or images what it means to be possibly forever separated from your deeply beloved person? I decided I could better express the feeling of this loss by creating a second loss.
“The Heart Through Deserts Runs – Working Title”: can you comment on the title that you chose for the film?
The first part of the title quotes a line from a beloved poem of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published in his collection West-Östlicher Divan which is also quoted in the film’s off-narration. I connected it to the film’s narration already from an early stage on. The “technical” addition to the title was an intuitive necessity to me.
A frame hanging on the wall reads: “I too thought that life was a poem”, a quote from the film Absence répétées by Guy Gilles, to whom your film is dedicated, together with Marina Abramović. Can you tell us about their influence on the film?
Absences répétées is among the films which had the strongest influence on this film of mine. I discovered it only a few months before the filming, showed it to the set designer, to the lead actress, we even directly quoted a frame composition from it. The wistfulness, the poetic atmosphere and the playfulness of Guy Gilles’ film were a revelation to me and to many who worked on the film; this particular line (in Gilles’ film it is spoken by a character at the very end) tenderly evokes the beauty and sadness of living. As for Marina Abramović – Nightsea Crossing, the series of performances by her and Ulay, was, for different reasons, one of the first working titles of the film and also one of the first visual inspirations.
Interview by Louise Martin Papasian
- Flash Competition
Technical sheet
Germany / 2021 / 15’
Original Version : allemand.
Subtitles : English.
Script : Garegin Vanisian.
Photography : Hanife Koch.
Editing : Maja Tennstedt.
Music : Thorsten Hoppe.
Sound : Thorsten Hoppe.
Set design : Johanna Meyer
Casting : Jasko Fide, Pierre Emö.
Production : Garegin Vanisian.
Filmography : Erbarmen mit den Liebenden (Pity for the Lovers), 2012. Fünfminutenfratzen (Five Minute Antics), 2012. Fernsicht (Distant View), 2009.
- Autres films / Flash Competition