III. “IT’S A WAY OF LIVING, CINEMA.
AND I SEE MY FAMILY, I DO THIS AND THAT, I TRAVEL.
IT’S A LONG PROCESS TO LET IT HAPPEN.”

BLVR:Why be an artist? Why do you make films?

AV: To share a lot of ideas—not ideas—emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator. I think, in emotion, we have that. So even though I’m different or my experiences are different, they cross some middle knot. It’s interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves—not so much to learn about me. There’s nothing special. I know people could tell incredible stories. People have been in concentration camps, or women being raped, or a man going to war and not recovering from it. People have been robbed and beaten. A lot of people have had strong events in their life, which I didn’t. I had a life of work and emotions. So I asked myself, Is it interesting to tell?

BLVR: And how did you decide that it was?

AV: It was an organic process. In the beginning I didn’t dare speak about me. When I did the first edit of Les plages, it was very dry and very square in a way. I was just saying the minimum. I said, Well, if this is the minimum, I don’t make it. So I tried to make it more refined. I tried to find images, allegorical images, that I could use to express things that I didn’t want to say or didn’t want to show or I was not able to find how to show. I started to look for images, including paintings, that would relate to my own feelings and experience. Which is a contradiction of the film—I want to be shown, I want to be hidden.
 
BLVR: You said you would shoot one day and edit one day—

AV: Not by day, by weeks. There would be weeks of editing and weeks of shooting. I did the first weeks of shooting, then I edit and I think about it, because the writing is everywhere—in the shooting and in the editing. When the editing needs it, I fix it. I say, OK, we go back, we shoot another three days. Then I do the narration. This changes the editing, then the editing needs—there’s something missing. Up and down and back. It took me six months. It’s a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It’s a long process to let it happen. It’s a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.

BLVR: One of the themes of Les plages is memory, people losing their memory, like your mother did. Is that something you fear very much for yourself?
 
AV: Yes. I think I’m on the way. I have to do it the way she did. She told people, Don’t worry if I say it wrong—I’m allowed to do so. My sister was suffering from it. She said, It’s terrible—she gives us the names of her brothers and sister! I said, But she’s free, let her enjoy that—and I laughed. And I teach my children, who were there, laugh! I mean, she does nothing wrong. She’s liberated from truth, in a way, from being right.An old woman I loved very much when I was young—the wife of Jean Villard—she’s just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That’s all she does—she almost doesn’t recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We’re the ones who are suffering. She’s not.

BLVR: There’s a real generosity on the part of all the people in your film, like they are expressing love for you by being in it, rather than for any other reason.

AV: The couple I met in Los Angeles that were married on the beach, with the minister who had a yellow sock and another brown sock—I found that hilarious—and the only witnesses were the birds on the beach. I love that couple as an allegory of a dream of love that they accomplished with kids and grandkids. They are real friends of mine, so they came into the film naturally. I tried to have the film grow naturally with things that I love, and to tell things that I love, and always in a parallel way to speak about what I feel through other people’s feelings.

BLVR: You like ordinary people.

AV: I call them real people, because they have in themselves an incredible treasure—stories, a way of speaking, a way of sharing, an innocence and a perversity which I find very interesting to discover little by little.

BLVR: It is beautiful how you end the film by showing your extended family on the beach together. It reminds me of the end of One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, where you had a very similar ending. All the generations come back—

AV: Yes, but in this film, it’s the real family. It was so nice for them to agree to do it. I said, Please come and dress in white. They said, Why? What is this? My older grandson, he is twenty-two, he says, This is ridiculous! I say, Please do it for me—be in white and just move to each other—don’t dance, just move a little. And they did it. They did it in the ocean and they did it on the beach. And it was cold! The little one says, It’s so cold today! I say, Do it! Do it! It’s the tyranny of the filmmaker who wants to have the shot. And they did beautifully.

I think we need to have a nest of something which is family, and whenever it goes very well—some families don’t get on that well—but we need the idea of family—the concept more than this one and this one. It’s peaceful to think about the family as a group. I totally believe in extended families, and the good friends I have—I see them all the time. We choose our family—the family of what we believe in, people who share our opinions—it can be political, it can be artistic, it can be a position, as feminism. I quit seeing some people who were saying bad things about women; I don’t even want to meet them or see them.

IV. “I DIDN’T GO TO FILM SCHOOL.
I WAS NEVER AN ASSISTANT OR TRAINEE ON A FILM.
I HAD NOT SEEN ALL THOSE CAMERAS.
SO I THINK IT GAVE ME A LOT OF FREEDOM.

”BLVR: Can you tell me about one of the artists who first inspired you?

AV: Well, Picasso really changed my life. It’s strange to say so, but I started to see some Picasso paintings very early. I was very young, and he was not so much known. The first exhibition was organized by the communist party, can you believe this?—because of his position during the war and all that. But the freedom he gave himself to work and change shape and change ideas and work all the time with joy—you know, the joy of painting was in Picasso, which I found beautiful. I never met him. I took pictures at the Festival d’Avignon, but I was too shy to ask to go in his studio. It does not look like me now, but I was very shy, and shy of men also. I think there was a world that frightened me totally.

How can I meet these guys when they are on another—? Plus, I’d been educated stupidly, I knew nothing about nothing, that’s part of being shy. The way younger people are educated now—but if you know nothing, it could be like an enemy in a way.I think that’s the way I felt when I was young.You understand, I was eighteen, this was back in ’46, so we also had these very frightening images of soldiers in the streets of Paris. So the effect of war, plus my shyness, plus my lack of education—I was afraid of men, really. It changes later, but it took me a certain time to adjust, yes.

BLVR: You were given the name of “Grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague.” How do you feel about that?

AV: I love that! I was thirty. I remember my photograph in the magazine and it says: “Ancestor of the New Wave.” And I looked OK at thirty, eh? So I thought, If I’m an ancestor and grandmother when I’m twenty-five, I should go peacefully to the real time when I’m an ancestor and a grandmother. No, I love that. I don’t care. I was not looking bad so it didn’t hurt my appearance, as I would say.

BLVR: You said that you were intimidated when you were young, entering the world of men, and I wonder, you mention Chris Marker and Resnais—were they more open to you than, say, Godard, or were you more curious about them, or—

AV: They impressed me. I didn’t feel they were humans I could approach or touch. They’re very bright and they were already. They were slightly older than me, but it’s very important when you’re twenty-five. People are four years older and they know much more than you, and they’re both very bright, and Renais told me a lot of things. In the editing he told me I should maybe see films: You know there is a Cinémathèque in Paris? And he said to me when the editing was done, he said, There’s Visconti. I said, Who’s Visconti? I had no knowledge at all, no knowledge of films. I’d seen few films. I knew nothing. I was interested in painting and theater at the time.

Then I learned and I went to see movies. Sometimes I say, If I had seen some masterpieces, maybe I wouldn’t have dared start. I started very—not innocent, but naïve in a way. So that’s a big freedom, you know? I didn’t go to school. I didn’t go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom. I see all these students, and I admire them—they’re trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help. I’m sure they learn a lot, and some of them, it makes them aware of what they wish to do. I was—that’s the way I was—autodidact.

BLVR: Speaking of Chris Marker, is he standing behind the large cardboard cat in Les plages?

AV: I asked him permission to have his cat as my friend and interviewer. He hasn’t seen the film yet—the film was just finished when I ran to Venice, but he came to have lunch. He saw the cat in my garden. He knows the size of the cat. We meet, we speak, he sends little cartoons by mail almost every day. And using Guillaume-en-Egypte—I think it’s a nice way to speak about him. He didn’t want to be filmed, he doesn’t want photos, but we are friends, so I thought he should be in the film as Guillaume-the-cat in Egypt.

BLVR: Did he actually ask the questions?

AV: No, I made them up. Because it’s too simple, because he’s much smarter than that, but I just wanted him to say, Tell us about the new wave—which is not what he would ask. But I needed someone to raise the question so I could tell. I gave him the voice of my editor, so this is fake, but it’s also a testament of my friendship, and my admiration for Chris, who is a very bright man, and hardworking. He’s older than me and he still works like a real worker—he does good things. And he’s a very interesting man, really interesting, aging in a very interesting way. He’s like in the middle of a cave—have you been there? Screens and machines and he does the music and he does the editing and he has piles of books and records and things, and he thinks about other people all the time—all these cartoons about what’s happening in the world, very sarcastic cartoons, you know.

He’s bright. I think he doesn’t want to meet so many people. He doesn’t eat, hehas his protein sort of food, he doesn’t want to lose time in eating so he feeds himself with, you know, raspberries and protein food, and he’s OK. I think people should be different. I love people who don’t go by the rule that you have to be careful because you’re old, you have to do this and that, you have to eat this and that. I try to do nothing. I drink rosemary when I have a lot of work to do. People take coffee, they take speed, whatever. I take rosemary. My company is called Ciné-Tamaris, which is rosemary. That’s my speed. Hot water and herb. But it’s nice to think that we have in ourselves the energy. It’s somewhere, but it’s sleeping sometimes. I try to wake it up when I need it.
 
BLVR: Have you needed rosemary while in Toronto yet?

AV: I could have used some. Yesterday during the screening of La pointe-courte, there was a bench in the hallway—just a bench in wood, that’s all. I lay on the bench. While I started to sleep somebody brought a pillow, but I slept an hour—they woke me up for the discussion. I said, Wake me up five minutes before! Then I went on the stage. I made myself very serious. They should have seen me half an hour before, sleeping like a baby on a bench!

BLVR: I know you think that feminism is out of fashion. Why do you think that is?

AV: Because to advance in society is slow, slow, and slow. To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States—black people didn’t have the right to vote—but we have seen them in France, American soldiers, black, and they come and save us. A lot of them died in France. They were doing the job of the American army. I come to the States and they don’t have the right to vote! Can you believe that? So, society is so slow. A feminist is a bore. [Spills tea] It’s OK, since my dress is tea-colored
 
BLVR: And do you see feminism as out of fashion in France?

AV: People don’t speak about that now! It’s boring. I wanted to speak strongly about feminism in my life, since it’s been a struggle. People again started to be against self-control, against birth control, and against abortion. Even in France where it’s allowed, in a hospital there is a boss doctor for each floor, and if their convictions push them to say no, they can say, I don’t want abortion in my service. Even though it is legal, still they have the right to refuse. Can you believe this? And the young girls don’t even know that some people fought for them to have the pill or the—after-night pill? How do you say that?

BLVR: The morning-after pill.

AV: I put so much energy in being a photographer and then a filmmaker, and meeting Jacques and raising the kids and trying to be involved. Going to Cuba in ’62 was very exciting, and going to China in ’57, when Shanghai was not even recognized by the United Nations, was an adventure. I’ve always been like this—trying to find adventure where it’s still in its first élan—the first spring. The revolution in China was still fresh and people were going to it. And filming the Black Panthers—they turned bad two years after, but I saw them trying to make their own law, make their own thoughts, the body-and-soul theory. They wanted to be the one thinking, the one acting, not be led by white people. All of them were trying to find autonomy. Je résiste. I’m still fighting. I don’t know how much longer, but I’m still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film, you know?

BLVR: Would you say you are a filmmaker today for the same reasons as when you started?

AV: Sure I’m not, because when I started I did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. You know, I started—I made a film. Then when I finished I said, Oh my god it’s so beautiful—I should be a filmmaker!

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Sheila Heti is the author of the novel Ticknor and the story collection The Middle Stories.

She recently appeared as Lenore Doolan in Leanne Shapton’s book Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris.