neither/nor 34


de la mort. We went to Switzerland to meet Jean Ziegler, who wrote Les Vivants et la Mort... For me, in our civilization, we’d lost a lot of our connection to death; it had become a taboo, not as much a part of our daily lives as in other societies, where death is not hidden. We had that idea, a kind of proposition. It was not meant to be an opposition between good and bad, but something more complex. We felt that our Western civilization had lost a lot of humanity by putting the idea of death away, while there were other societies that put death at the center of life, and I believed they were more human. Tis was my idea, it changed a little, but it’s still my idea. I think it’s important to have those two poles. I could say in other words that there are some societies in which “to be” is the most important, and other societies in which “to have” is the most important. It’s too simple, that, but you understand, you see the idea. And I hoped maybe we could change our way of life, thinking of that. But it was very, very difficult to get the money to produce the film. Because we are in the movie business, you have to go to producers, and they tell you it’s a good idea, maybe, but it will lose money. People won’t pay to see images of funerals and corpses in a theater.


I can imagine that being a very difficult pitch: “We want to fly around the world and film funerals.”


TZ: Yes. But fortunately we had support from the Belgian Ministry of Culture, and also managed a co-production with the French company Les films des Losange, with Marie Menegoz. So between my production company and Les films des Losange, we succeeded to have enough money. But in fact the film was a commercial failure. In Belgium and France we had a distributor and showed the film in theaters, but the distributor just had enough money to pay the laboratory fees. It also showed in several festivals, and we made a little money selling


mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


the version of the film to television. And it also had some nontheatrical distribution, in schools, universities, and hospitals where, many times, we were invited to show the film and discuss it. But I would say that the film was a commercial failure.


How did you choose the particular destinations that you visited in the film?


TZ: In order to raise the money for the production we had to write a script—not a fiction script, but it came to something like 100 pages, explaining what we wanted to show, what we wanted to film, and why. It was necessary to show the Western world and its attitudes, and we thought it was very important to go to the United States, because of the way—especially in California—that the funeral industry works, it’s very characteristic of the Western countries. Concerning the Eastern countries, we had a lot of choices, and it was through reading books that we made our decisions. Sometimes we chose the topic of a sequence when discovering a country or a region but we generally chose the place because of the topic we wanted to have in the film. We wanted to film behaviors that often opposed. For example: Death serenely accepted, as seen in Asia, and the denial of death, as in the US. “Natural” death, as seen in Asia, “accidental” death, as in Mexico City, and incurable disease, as in the hospital in Los Angeles. Significant collective ritual, as seen in Asia and Belgium, absence of any ritual, as in the US, or an attempt to find new behavior facing death. As a location scouting, we visited some countries—for example Mexico, US, France, Switzerland, Japan—to meet people, journalists, ethnologists… “professionals” of the death. Tose travels helped us to write our script and we decided to go back to some of them. When we finally got funding to start shooting, we bought airline tickets to fly from Paris to Mexico, then to the


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