NB: You often set bodies in states of pure survival, what they do when cold, when hungry, when threatened, where they get the resources to bear it physically. Your films often gauge the concrete strength of bodies.
CA: Yes, but also the joy of expending energy; I love to dance, it’s like a drug, a liberation of all the bonds of pleasure – yes, as you say, definitely related to sexuality, but not only sexuality.
NB: However, that’s not what your film on Pina Bausch is about.
CA: No. At first, I had been dazzled, I only saw the beauty, the aestheticism. But in making a film on her, I understood that in fact she makes you take pleasure in her sadism through formal beauty. But she’s a great artist.
NB: Isn’t the very principal of mise en scène intrinsically sadistic, to put bodies at your disposal and take pleasure in them?
CA: No, it’s not the same thing because it goes through the image. On stage, we see the body in real life. And in the same moment. The cinema is both at the time now, the day when you’re watching the film, but also the moment when the film was made. No, it’s not the same thing at all. And moreover, for her, the actors fall down, throw themselves against the walls, for instance – but it’s through the form, her aestheticism, that we take pleasure in it.
She talks with a soft, gentle voice. She’s a guru, nobody dares to say anything. For each show, she takes notes, she bandies words, the dancers give themselves over to improvisation. And she works up a montage, an assemblage of what interests her. She dominates completely, with a sweet voice that’s worse than a fistfight. In 1973, ‘Psychoanalysis and Politics’ with Antoinette Fouque – it boils down to the same thing. She would psychoanalyse you savagely and almost kill you. Many mistaken ideas held reign after May ’68; for example, there were many Jewish Maoists, I don’t know how it was possible, I never believed in any ideology. After Stalin and the camps, you know for sure that an ideology leads to the worst. Even if it seems beautiful and good and like just a theory.
Semana passada conversava com um amigo sobre o Pina do Wenders, filme que tanto eu como ele nutrimos pouca simpatia, quando ele me perguntou se eu conhecia o média que Chantal Akerman rodara sobre Pina Bausch. Fui atrás de ver o filme este fim de semana e Un jour Pina m’a Demandé faz um contraste muito forte com o elogiado filme do cineasta alemão. É algo que fica claro nesta longa passagem de uma entrevista sobre a carreira de Akerman que Nicole Brenez realizou com ela ano passado, especialmente quando Akerman aponta que a experiência de realizar um filme sobre Bausch transformou seu olhar sobre a obra dela, uma experiência que presume de principio que exista um olhar algo que o Pina de Wenders dispensa por completo (Wenders a muito deixou de olhar imagens para somente consumi-las). Un jour Pina m’a Demandé mostra coreografia de forma muito mais recortada, mas a nele uma atenção para o corpo e sobretudo para o esforço de cada membro da equipe de Bausch para realizar cada movimento pedido por ela que a torna muito mais expressiva. Uma atenção ao processo, uma admissão de que a beleza tem um custo, que nasce de algum lugar (na visão de Akerman, o sadismo de Bausch) que a torna muito mais que uma série de imagens bonitas para bom consumo da plateia do Reserva Cultural. É a velha questão de ponto de vista: Akerman oferece um olhar, Wenders somente um produto cultural.
