Anne-Marie Miéville

4 October, 2018 - 30 October, 2018
Cinematek, Brussels

“The experience of love will be reshaped into a relation between two human beings and no longer between man and woman.”

This quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, which adorns the end of Lou n’a pas dit non (1994), encapsulates the essence of Anne-Marie Miéville's quest, which is driven by a universal, imperishable question: how to live together? The same film illustrates how her trajectory finds its way through art history in all its forms, from the sculpture of the mythical couple of Mars and Venus, which occupies a central place in the film, to an extensive pas de deux from Jean-Claude Gallotta's Docteur Labus that expresses a broad palette of friction and tension between a man and a woman. Again and again, the possible relationship with another is examined as a constant field of tension between stasis and movement, between silence and speech.

Miéville’s study of the challenges of communication and the trials of love is already central in her first short film, How can I love a man (when I know he don't want me) (1983), whose title is extracted from Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954). The theme of Carmen doesn’t accidentally recall Prénom Carmen (1983), a film for which Miéville herself provided the screenplay to Jean-Luc Godard, her companion in life and work since the beginning of the 1970s. But whilst Prénom Carmen revolves around the unrequited love of a man for a woman, the roles in How can I love are reversed. A turnaround, as Alain Bergala has remarked, that changes everything, not in the least as seen in the mise-en-scène that reflects the desire to be together with someone as a permanent arena in which men are more often than not shield themselves, incapable or unwilling to open up to a possible dialogue.

The figure of the man who has lost his confidence in the potential of discourse returns in Le livre de Marie (1984), in which a separation is portrayed with remarkable control and precision from the perspective of the young daughter, who expresses her resistance to the parental drama with the help of language, music and dance. In Miéville’s first feature length film, Mon cher sujet (1988), the power of word and song is employed by three women of as many generations – grandmother, mother and daughter – to acquire a place in a world where women are expected to share everything while men tend to flee from every commitment to share. Also in her following film, Lou n’a pas dit non, it’s the woman who, by exploring various forms of expression and creation, paves the way for a possible exchange, in a perpetual movement of approaching, unfolding and folding back.

How to give shape to commonality in difference? In Nous sommes tous encore ici (1997), originally devised for theatre, this question is approached using extracts from the work of Plato and Hannah Arendt that resonate in the life of a couple played by Jean-Luc Godard and Aurore Clément, who unmistakably evokes the presence of Miéville. In Après la reconciliation (2001), Godard and Miéville themselves act as two of the four characters involved in philosophical reflections on the powers and limits of language and the challenge to learn to live together with someone else who will always remain a stranger. Sometimes brutal and confrontational, then tender and comforting, Anne-Marie Miéville's work continues to trust in "the love we are struggling and toiling to prepare the way for, the love that consists in two solitudes protecting, defining and welcoming one another.” (Rilke)

 

Apart from the films by Anne-Marie Miéville mentioned here, the programme also contains a selection of the work that she accomplished with Jean-Luc Godard, from the films that they produced between 1973 and 1979 under the name Sonimage to Miéville’s collaboration in Godard’s self proclaimed “second life in cinema” and the series of video-essays that they made together from the end of the 1990s onward. 

 

An initiative of CINEMATEK and Courtisane, in collaboration with Le Service de Culture cinématographique (SCC).

On the occasion of this program, Courtisane, Sabzian and Cinematek have collected a series of writings and interviews in a small-edition publication (French/English).

Mon cher sujet

4 October, 2018 - 20:3023 October, 2018 - 21:00
Cinematek, Brussels
talk+screening

Passion

14 October, 2018 - 19:15
Cinematek, Brussels

Détective

22 October, 2018 - 19:00
Cinematek, Brussels