DIESES INTERVIEW WURDE AUF ENGLISCH GEFÜHRT
Christiane Büchner: I understood that you shot a very long time, exploring this area of the city. How did you start this film?
Malaury Eloi Paisley: I often start with why. I wasn't living in Guadeloupe in 2016. When I did the Atelier Varan documentary workshop, I was living abroad – Paris, Canada, New Zealand. I was lost. I often define myself as if I have no country, because our context is almost an anomaly. How to explain it? Because we have French citizenship, but at the same time we are in the Caribbean. France is like a foreign country for me. I was in that particular situation where I didn't know where to live, in which country. I came back because I wasn't feeling well and I had missed this very strong relationship I have with my island. I felt like I had no choice.
There was this documentary workshop for five months: A good alibi to come back. I never thought that filmmaking would be a path for me. I came back, I had no house, no place to live, no money, just the workshop. I was living in a kind of shelter for young people. I started the workshop with Guadeloupian filmmaker Sylvaine Dampierre, who is part of Atelier Varan in Paris. She said, “You have to choose a subject. You have to work on something for the remaining four months. I know that you have a lot of ideas, but please choose something.” Working in the city I saw this social housing project where my auntie used to live when I was a child. I wanted to see what it was like then, because most of the people had left or the city had told them to move out because of the asbestos and all the demolition that was taking place.
There was slavery, then freedom, and then…? What to do with that freedom or that so called freedom, because we are not free.
There I had this strange feeling, and I kept coming back. One day I took the camera and I started filming. The building, it was very dirty, with rats and rubbish. I remember Sylvaine Dampierre and Alice Diop asked me: “What do you want to do? Because we don't understand what you're showing us.” I felt this strange, almost postapocalyptic atmosphere, as if everyone had left suddenly. I did this short film, CHANZY BLUES [2017]. You can see the images of this film in L’HOMME-VERTIGE. CHANZY was for me like a first draft, to tell something about this solitude, the decomposition of the bodies and the city the same time, and how the state of the city is like the state of the bodies.
I first met this man Eddie, who appears at the beginning of L’HOMME-VERTIGE, when filming CHANZY BLUES. I remember I heard this voice. Someone speaking, but with a very poetic voice. It was as if it were echoing in the whole building. I followed the voice, and it led me to him. Later on, I learned that it was actually a rehearsal for a play, because he was part of an insertion project for people living in the streets. He was doing spoken word, he was a poet and he was also head nurse of a psychiatric unit in a hospital. And when I met him, he was on the streets. He was very thin, using crack.
I was almost obsessed by this character. I couldn't understand how this had happened to this very clever man. Apparently it can happen to everyone, especially in our context, and I started to think about specifically why. What is the meaning of those bodies specifically on this island? Because I've always seen people walking late at night on the national highway. You see them even in the city. Sometimes people say they are like the walking dead. And I learned that there are not only drug addicts, but it's also a problem of untreated mental health issues. We don't have a lot of infrastructures in place for this.
That's where I started my reflection. Asking what it means to be errant in this particular postcolonial context. There was slavery, then freedom, and then…? What to do with that freedom or that so called freedom, because we are not free. A lot of people think – and I think as well – that we are still a French colony. Almost nothing has changed – it's still the same structure, the same society. I say that the sons of the sons of the sons of the slave masters are still the owners of the land and 80% of the economy. Everything we eat, we buy, it's in their hands. At this time I was feeling that oppression very strongly, and I wanted to leave the island because I was at a loss of what to do here. We have no art centre, no functional museum, no conservatory, no nothing.
At the Varan workshop I met my producer Sophie Salbot, who was very supportive. At the time I felt like I didn't have any role models. Of course, there are a lot of filmmakers that I admire, but in this area in the Caribbean I didn't know who to look up to, what kind of examples, to find aesthetics… And also how to access this cinema – as I said there is no art centre or cinema library.
We’d spend time together, sometimes we would just stay there. And at some point he would ask me suddenly, “Oh, today you're not filming?”
Madeleine Bernstorff: That's quite a journey. There's one sentence in your film which struck me as a motto about this dérive or this drift you perform through the city. Your protagonist Kanpèch says: “My body is the compass”. In your film there is this strong connection of the city and the bodies. You have a very special relationship with all these people, and it’s so much about trust. Even the guy who is just washing his clothes, he speaks these deep sentences about sharing, a wonderful dialogue or monologue. You develop a lot of precious relations with people. Some of them are sick, maybe addicts, all very vulnerable. Like the wonderful old man Ti Chal who has this background of the liberation struggles of the sixties. He is speaking about death, and he's so sick. But there is this moment, where you catch this beautiful smile in his eyes. Maybe you can speak more about the form, as you said it developed while editing.
MEP: I had to find a way to film each character, a proper approach for each person, because they have different rhythms. Kanpèch has no phone, no house. It was very instinctive, and for me you make cinema how you live. Cinema is not separate from life. I think I would like those people even if I wasn't making the film, maybe the film was an alibi. I see this man. I want to talk to him, but I'm so scared. But the film becomes my excuse to approach him. I observed Kanpèch over three years before being brave enough to ask him his name. And I think this is a character that I was seeing even when I was a child because he is very known. I have to speak in the past tense now, because he died.
There is also something for me about the disappearance of the bodies that I'm talking about in this film. I know that sometimes he's there, and sometimes he's at the fish market. I wait or I walk. Most of the time I could find Kanpèch and film. With him it was different, because sometimes he was living in the ‘50s, sometimes he was in the present. The consent is something you have to negotiate each time, because the last thing I want is to do something that he's not willing to do. We’d spend time together, sometimes we would just stay there. And at some point he would ask me suddenly, “Oh, today you're not filming?”
With Ti Chal, the old man with the oxygen, it's not the same because I knew him since 2016, since CHANZY BLUES. It's not just cinema – he was like my grandfather. I would cook for him, buy groceries, take care of administrative details, because he moved into another apartment in front of the building when Chanzy was demolished. He moved maybe 10 meters but he was alone, he had no family. And Ti Chal was like my – in French – "oracle". I will share my life with him, my relationships, everything. I could go there and just sit. Sometimes I was tired, I would just go there and sleep on the couch. I was sometimes living with him. Now he's in a retirement home, because he was malnourished and began to lose his memory. He kept saying everything is circular. Since I've known him seven, eight years now, he's always telling me the same things over and over. I had to find what is meaningful in all of it, as Ti Chal is for me the past, which is trying to survive. It's the same with all the memories that we have also forgotten. He says with his friends in the film, “the Guadeloupian Negroes have no memory.” And that's something we have to be aware of on this island, because we’ve forgotten a lot about our history, about the literature, the art. That's why I wanted to excavate the text “Quelque part sans connaitre” [“Somewhere without knowing”] from Joël Beuze, the writer, which is an unfinished novel. It’s all part of this desire to show what is already there.
MB: And then there is also this text by Amílcar Cabral about fear. Can you speak about the approach to montage, and how you found this specific form?
MEP: Maybe Marie [Bottois] could say more about it than me. But it was clear at the beginning that I wanted to start with Eddie, because I filmed him in 2017, and then he disappeared for three years. I wondered if I would treat those images with Eddie as if it was the present, or rather representing the passing of time. But then one month before the end of the final shooting, I found him again. I filmed something like 10 hours with him. Then I had all these sequences with Kanpèch. I had a lot with Eric, the poet. I thought about them like tableaus. It wasn't like a story A-B-C-D. I wanted circulation between the characters, the buildings, the city. I wanted to show the passage of time, and also to talk about the riots – it was very intuitive. Show the rhythm of the characters first, and then I want to show the rhythm of the city. Everything is shifting and changing, at least in term of demolitions. But nothing is changing with the politics, the people. It remains static, and we also had to show this. With Ti Chal, it was more obvious, I would say, because I had images over time. Also his health: you can see that his body is degrading, and he's talking about death at the end. But it was also a metaphor. Someone I met in a coproduction meeting asked me: “But where is the light?” I responded, “There is no light, there is no escape. It's an island. We are in this situation. The light is within the people.” Right now I see no future. It will sound very pessimistic, but we feel that we are locked in this. And I wanted the film to represent this sensation, where there is no possibility to escape, even if we finish with this opening. It's almost like a cry: Hey, we are here, Guadeloupians. We are on an island somewhere, and this is what is happening.
The language of the Gwo Ka dance also communicates something about the past that we didn't write down, and that we couldn't write down.
CB: The English title of your film – L’HOMME-VERTIGE: TALES OF A CITY – is split in two halves. I want to ask you, what does the title express?
MEP: "L’homme" – in French we have one word for men and women, it's mankind in general. "Vertige" is vertigo, but it's like a poem, I couldn't translate it. I have “Tales of a City” in English because in French it would sound like mythology. But it's not mythology, we're living with our history. The people that are carrying that history, they are not dead, they are alive. For me, those characters are like monuments. They are the keepers of the memory and the present. The vertigo is inspired also by the poetry of Frankétienne, a Haitian poet – he's still alive, and he created this poetic movement called “Spiralism”. In his poetry he writes about this madness of the city of Port-au-Prince, all the consumptions, the cars, the pollution, the people that only grab and go.
Vertigo is also a state of mind. It's like you are on the edge of madness, but you are still grounded. We have also this word "Bigidi" in the traditional dance and culture here, called Gwo Ka. When we dance we have this movement where we’re about to fall, but we never fall, that’s “Bigidi”. It’s the contradiction of this whole situation, after everything they keep doing to us. We live on a poisoned island, our land contaminated for 700 years with pesticides. We are carrying this symbolically and also literally, carrying it in our blood; you can find the molecules of these pesticides – chlordecone, which was forbidden in the US – as you can find the molecules of colonialism in how we live.
We have this great choreographer Léna Blou. She recently wrote her PhD on Gwo Ka and “Bigidi”, and travels the world to talk about these concepts. It's a rather contemporary subject because we live with it and it's evolving. Blou is making this connection to what remains in the language of our bodies, how you can find history in the body. The language of the Gwo Ka dance also communicates something about the past that we didn't write down, and that we couldn't write down. For the form of the film I had concepts like the “Bigidi”, the repetition, the fact that I keep coming back to the same place at different moments of the day and over the years. In our Creole language we also have repetition when we talk. We can hear it when Eddie is talking, he's repeating, ending the sentence with one word and then starting the next with the same word, and over and over.
Something about repetition is also what happened in the history itself: when Eric is going to the hospital the music we hear is the national anthem, this was written in the ‘60s. I wanted to work on repetition, to show that things are going in circles, but without words. That's also the blues, that’s jazz music, because blues has always been the music of Black suffering. We worked with the musician Magic Malik on that. I told him: think about emptiness, decomposition, something very slow. Because I know Magic Malik has all the Caribbean music influences, but also jazz, African music and all the traditional music. He understood very clearly. He works with a new instrument that he created, with mathematic algorithms. You play a note and when you add something, the algorithm is calculating and creating a new sound with the image. The sounds generate new sounds when you add something, so the music was also an experiment.
And this writer, Joël Beuze. I had no idea where he was, and thought he was dead. I started to look for him and found a very close friend of his. He told me, “I know that you're trying to reach him, but he's not seeing anyone.” Then he called me a few weeks later and he told me, "I spoke to Joël.” Turns out he burns his mail every month, he opens the mailbox and burns everything. He found my note and he told his friend, “Tell the young filmmaker that I agree: she can use my novel”. I am working on video installation in black and white with more images from L’HOMME-VERTIGE that I didn't use, to pay tribute to this text by Joël Beuze.
It's also for me to bring Pointe-à-Pitre – to bring my people – there to this audience in Berlin. It's like showing a hidden part of the world. When you say Guadeloupe or West Indies, people know where it is, but they don't know what it is like, really, except from the beach. My relatives and people here, they’ve started to hear about the news and they're so excited. They're like, wow, you're going to the Berlinale. And, wow, I think you're the first Guadeloupian in the Berlinale. I don't know. It's also only male filmmakers that we see from my island. So I'm very proud to be able to show this film.
CB + MB: Thank you!
