mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


other when we had different points of view on a shot or a sequence. I would say that a good collaboration is a collaboration where you merge the sensibility, and a bad collaboration is one where the sensibility is divided. And sometimes we had to divide the sensibility. But what is important isn’t how we made the film, but the film that we got, what you see on the screen.


What sort of conflicts came up?


TZ: For example there is a part in the film—I don’t know what version you’ve seen, in fact, but it was in the first editing of the film—where you can see a Philippine rebel being killed by the army. One of the subjects we wanted to approach was the death penalty. At the time, when we were preparing the film, the abolition of death penalty was being discussed in France. It divided public opinion and politicians. We were struck by the speech of those who defended the death penalty. It seemed to us that showing the brutality of the death penalty in our film could convince the viewer of the barbarity of this act. As we would never be willing to film such a sequence ourselves, we bought a few minutes of stock shots showing the execution of a soldier in the Philippines’ guerrilla army. Gradually, in reviewing the film, we realized that the context of this choice and our motivations were not understood because there was no commentary. Tese shocking images gave a false idea of our approach and sometimes even caused the rejection of our entire film. Dominique and I decided to cut it in later edits, because it was contrary to our idea of the film. But most of the time we weren’t fighting, we were very much collaborating.


So you were coming out of a fiction filmmaking background— how did you change your approach in making a documentary, did you change your approach?


TZ: In fact it was not my first documentary; before


neither/nor


making Vase de Noces I was very interested in documentary film. One of my teachers was Henri Storck, a Belgian filmmaker. He was a very cultured man, passionate about cinema, literature, painting, music. He loved to laugh and enjoyed surrealist jokes. As a filmmaker, he directed a feature-length fiction,


experimental shorts and


documentaries. I was also very influenced by the films and ideas of Jean Rouch, who was a very good friend of Storck. I met him when I was preparing Des Morts. I used to go to Paris two or three times a month, just to attend his film course at the French Film Archive. As with Henri Storck, he was humorous and very cultured. He taught me that we must be with the people we are filming, not in front of them. Filming and living was only one thing! Before Des Morts I made two short documentaries. Te first was about a man who, at the beginning of the film, looks just like a painter making a commentary on his work. Little by little we understand that he is locked in a psychiatric hospital, and that his work has been created during twenty years of silence, confinement, and hope. Tis man, who was much older than me, became a friend and partly influenced the script of my feature film, Vase de Noces. Te title of the film, Bottomless Mouth Open on Horizons, was the title of one of his paintings.


You mentioned that the idea was to make another film dealing more or less explicitly with death, but how did you get from that concept to the film that we have?


TZ: In fact I was also influenced by some writers, particularly anthropologists and sociologists, in the ‘70s, who’d written books about death and dying—some more scientific, others philosophical. In the United States, for example, there was Kübler-Ross, who wrote a book called On Death and Dying. We went to France to meet Louis-Vincent Tomas, who wrote Anthropologie


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