Issue two: Lucile Hadžihalilović & B. Catling Interviewed
Earwig, the new film by award-winning French director Lucile Hadžihalilović, was released in US cinemas this weekend. It concerns Mia, a girl whose teeth are made of ice, and her caretaker Albert, whose job it is to replace the melted teeth each day. They live in a sparsely furnished, secluded apartment in an unnamed European city lost somewhere in the middle of the last century. Their life is spent in stasis. Mia plays alone, and never leaves the apartment, Albert only rarely, to run errands or drown himself at a local bar. His sole interest is in his collection of coloured glassware. One day he receives a phone call from the sinister, anonymous organization that employs him to look after Mia. He is instructed to begin acclimatizing her to the outside world, in preparation for a train journey they must take. The call precipitates a new, frightening phase in their lives.
This is Hadžihalilović’s third feature, following Innocence in 2004, and Evolution in 2015. The American film historian P. Adams Sitney once said that Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist film Un Chien Andalou “achieves the clarity of a dream.” It’s an accurate description of Hadžihalilović’s work too. Her films have an oblique relationship to horror and science fiction, in the way that dreams rather than movie genres do. She uses dialogue sparingly, letting her slow syntax of images raise meaning and conjure emotion. Her stories take place in claustrophobic worlds adjacent to our own, governed by unseen powers. They are gothic, occasionally delicate, often unsettling.
Earwig is adapted from a novel of the same name by British artist, poet and novelist Brian Catling. (A recent documentary on his singular career, made by Geoff Cox and Earwig producer Andy Starke for the BBC’s long-running Arena series, is currently streaming on iPlayer.) Catling published his debut novel, The Vorrh, in 2012, at age 61. Featuring a supernatural forest, a cyclops, the surrealist Raymond Roussel and the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, it became an almost instant cult hit. Alan Moore—author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta—called it “the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy.” Tom Waits and Philip Pullman number among its fans. Catling’s latest, Hollow, came out last year. Set in a medieval Europe ruled by religious zealotry, Hollow is gripping, lyrical, and dashed with dark comedy. It tells the story of a group of mercenaries attempting to deliver their cargo—the mysterious, monstrous Oracle—to a monastery at the edge of reality. Chaos spreads across the land, for which the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch may or may not be to blame.
This week, I interviewed Lucile and Brian about Earwig, literary adaptation, and whether pictures can be poetry.
DF: Lucile, how did you first come across Brian’s novel Earwig?
Lucille Hadžihalilović: I was introduced to it by Geoff Cox, who is a friend of Brian’s. I’ve known Geoff since my film Innocence—he was one of the British co-producers of the film—and I worked with him on the script for Evolution and other projects. Brian had given him the novel to read before it had been published and Geoff immediately thought that it was for me, and that I could make a film out of it. He was right! It happened that Brian knew my previous films and liked them. So he was enthusiastic about doing an adaptation.
The novel is deeply mysterious and ambiguous, with a lot of room to explore and to find my own path through it. Very cinematic too, with strong visual and aural elements, probably because Brian is also a painter, a sculptor and a performance artist.
DF: What was the adaptation process like?
LH: When I first met Brian in Oxford, where he lives, he immediately said that he would not give any explanation about his story, nor would he be willing to participate in writing the script. I told him that I would probably betray him with my adaptation, and he answered “I hope so!” So, he not only gave me freedom to do what I wanted, but he also encouraged me to do so.
DF: Did you feel betrayed, Brian?
Brian Catling: After the cast & crew screening of Earwig, I said to Lucile, “I now want to write a sequel, but not to my book, to your film.” So I felt that she had seen into my characters and given them life, purpose and existence. Not to mention the backdrop of place and time. Her film isn’t an adaptation, it’s a transmutation.
DF: Lucile, what was it about the story that caught your imagination?
LH: I felt I was on familiar territory with the character of the girl, Mia, and the gothic and surrealist elements of this tale. Its Mitteleuropa mood reminded me of Kafka and Walser. But I also found myself in more unknown land. I wouldn’t have been able to invent this man, Albert, and his strange life, and it was an interesting challenge for me to tell the story from the perspective of an adult for once and not from that of a child’s. There was also more explicit violence than in my previous films and I was interested in that aspect too, even if I used this sparingly. The non-linear narration was also very exciting to work on, and with both Geoff and the editor, Adam Finch, we played with the timeline as much as we could.
DF: Can you talk about this macabre image of Mia’s teeth made of ice?
LH: It was fascinating to work with. Everyone working on the film dreamed about these teeth. But when we did some preparatory tests we discovered that ice teeth would just look like normal teeth, except that they would melt. I was very disappointed, and I even thought that the whole film would collapse. But then I realized that the story was more about a man trying to make the little girl “complete” and never succeeding in that. These teeth he has to make several times a day are his burden, but also his reason for life. I found this idea interesting and moving. Maybe deeper than these phantasmagoric teeth by themselves. That strange, silent yet harmonious life in semi-obscurity that Albert and Mia have was a great source of tension and emotion.
DF: Earwig appears to have a strong thematic relationship to Innocence and Evolution. These films explore the relationship of institutions to bodies under the guise of ‘care.’ They strike me as strange allegories of power. In both Evolution and Earwig, there are acts of escape or revenge by those who have been exploited or hurt. What draws you to these themes and images?
LH: I don’t really know why. Maybe because I grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s, with all their talk of utopias, but during that period I also lived in Morocco, a traditional and quite oppressive society. The idea of bodies—and in my case especially the bodies of women and children—being shaped according to social rules seems to me an eternal and universal theme.
DF: It strikes me that in Brian’s novels there is a similarly uneasy relationship towards institutions. The Bethlem Royal Hospital, or Bedlam, appears in The Erstwhile. The world of Hollow is dominated by the Spanish Inquisition, and the monastery at the heart of the story stands guard over The Gland, a strange zone that regulates moral order in the world. You seem to use art to take on institutions of control, moral or medical. Would that be fair to say?
BC: That’s more than fair to say about institutions. Also there is an overpowering fear of such places. Machines that live on their own momentum. With their own rules, language and creed.
DF: Lucile, how did you and cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg go about making the translation from word to picture?
LH: As soon as the script had been written—and the script is a reduction, or, as Brian very generously called it, a “transmutation” of the novel—I tried to forget completely about the book and the words. From that moment, it became about finding actors, locations, props, as it is with any film. It was about images and sounds, framing, lightning, pace, colours, shots, repetitions and variations of visual and sonic motifs. In Earwig, we tried to create abstraction through emptiness—for example, in Albert’s apartment scenes, using as little furniture as possible, or in the empty streets—but also through texture, lack of depth field, fog. Some ideas came directly from the book. I loved the theme of glass for example, and I tried as much as possible to use it. It brings beauty and abstraction. It’s a window to memories and dreams. Others were a challenge, especially the closed-off world of Albert’s apartment.
DF: What about the use of music in your films?
LH: Usually I’m reluctant to use a score. Instead, I like to use sounds and silence in an emotional and dramatic way. I also prefer to use music coming from sources within the film, if possible, as an element that belongs to the universe of the film.
I usually try to keep an out-of-time quality in my films, so I have to be careful with the choices of music. Classical pieces are easier to use. I tried to avoid contemporary electronic instruments but in Earwig we made use of unusual old instruments such as Ondes Martenot or Cristal Baschet.
DF: Brian, Earwig takes place at some point in the middle of the last century and a number of your novels have period settings. What does the past allow that the present does not?
BC: Mid-century Europe is big in me. An impossible memory, where all that is in shadow or does not fit, lives. In it all fictional events are possible even if they are real and vice versa. By letting the imagination free in a time that already existed, and in a past that cannot be true but is already used, a kind of parallel enigma escapes. In the past we have to rearrange substantial images, rather than invent cardboard versions of what might be in the future.
DF: In the film version of Earwig, the theme of loss is strong. Each of the characters has experienced some kind of grief. The world in which you set the film—this grim, fog-shrouded city—seems heavy with mourning; people sit alone, the lights are off, curtains are closed. It’s as if the loss your characters have experienced is also triggering new cycles of exploitation. Was that something you were interested in looking at?
LH: To me Earwig was above all a story of loneliness, repression and madness. It’s a story or a portrait of someone who has lost his love, his references, his memories. The novel has many themes I had to make some choices. I decided to focus on Albert’s loss of his wife and his guilt regarding his abandoned child, because that was the part of the story I could relate to the most, rather than the parts about the Second World War.
Without realizing it—but maybe because I knew that Brian was an adopted child, or maybe because it’s an obsession I have in my films where children are always without family—I turned the Albert of the film into an orphan. For me that resonated with the child he has abandoned and with the character of Mia; Mia and that child being an echo of each other, maybe the same one. So, they are all linked together, perhaps as doubles of some sort.
Celeste has lost a child, and she lives alone. Laurence has lost his mother, he is also alone in the bar. This is what unites them with Albert. This loneliness is something that makes Albert really moving in spite of his weirdness.
I loved very much the ending of the book, which I understood as a kind of nightmarish happy end, in which Albert finally experiences a sort of union with Celeste, which will last forever because now both of them are together inside the painting and out of time.
DF: Staying on the subject of loss, is there a nod to Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now in Earwig? There is a scene near the start in which Mia, wearing her red coat, falls into the water in the park and almost drowns, and I wondered if this was a reference to the frightening opening scene of Roeg's film.
LH: Several people have asked me if Don’t Look Now inspired the lake scene. I love Roeg’s films and this is one of his best. But I never thought consciously about it while writing or making the film. The semi-drowning in the lake was in the book and I would be surprised Roeg’s film would have been a reference for Brian.
Rather, the red coat makes me think of Little Red Riding Hood, and I wanted Mia to wear something both realistic and expressive. I had a red coat myself as a child and this colour brings with it a feeling of potential drama. But it’s true that Don’t Look Now is also about the loss of a child, and about supernatural connections between people. I hadn’t thought of these similarities before.
DF: Are there other filmmakers working today whose work you feel you are in conversation with?
LH: Of course someone like David Lynch has had a great influence on me, especially Eraserhead, which I discovered when it first came out. There’s Bruno Forzani & Hélène Cattet—especially with their first film Amer—and I see Peter Strickland as a cousin in cinema. We share some similar references such as Italian gialli, and a taste for a very visual cinema of sensations. A great revelation of these last two decades, for me, has been Apitchapong Wereseethakul. And in France, recently, I found Atlantique by Mati Diop both really inspired and inspiring.
DF: I've seen the word 'poetic' used to describe to your films, Lucile. And Brian, you make images and write poetry. I am never entirely sure what people mean by 'poetry' when talking about film or visual art. What can cinema do with an image that writing cannot?
LH: As I said, the teeth made of ice were a kind a disappointment, visually. But other elements became more important and rewarding in the film such as the trance sequences with Albert’s collection of glasses, or the train journey in the fog.
Film, like painting, is colour, light, shape, and texture. But it is also more like music than literature or theatre are. Film uses rhythm, pace, sounds. All that can be more evocative, more abstract than descriptive, more immersive than narrative, especially when a film favors picture and sound rather than plot and dialogue. When the characters are immersed in their environment, as the viewer is in the film.
Cinema is by essence hypnotic, and if you let yourself go, you can experience a state of mind that is close to the one that music or poetry can bring you into. Then, as in poetry, the role of the viewer becomes important. For me, it’s exciting when meaning is not given explicitly, and an audience becomes active in elaborating meaning; when a film plays with ambiguity, multiple interpretations, oddness, mystery, even incongruity, all manifestations of the unconscious.
BC: When it comes to the poetic in images it’s always about atmosphere with me. Lucile visually invented the atmosphere of Earwig and saturated it with a twin soundtrack. The poetic is overpowering there. The image depicting the fog-filled train train track is overwhelming because she has established its existence before it is even seen, so that when it does appear on screen, it is full of nameless recognition and relief. Poetry on the page often works like that, creating longing without image, to catch the image when it comes.
She made a classic work of art out of my story, and reversed the accepted sequence of events, that is, her film influenced me before it was made, because I always knew that there was another Un Chien Andalou or another Elephant Man out there. And this was the best one yet.
DF: When a film such as Earwig does not neatly explain itself, it is criticized for being ‘baffling,’ ’confusing’ or ‘not making sense.’ Why do you think this is an issue for people? Why is the responsibility always put on the filmmaker to explain the world, like a parent does to a child? There is a lot of pleasure to be had in using one’s imagination to draw meaning from a film. In a way, Lucile, your films are about the horrors of being told what to do and think, a kind of allegory for a certain kind of artist/audience relationship.
LH: You are right, it is something like the need for a parent or a teacher. Maybe some people feel insecure and need to be reassured. Or maybe they want to be in control. But cinema, and art in general, doesn’t have to “explain,” rather to explore or make you feel. It’s great when it takes you to unknown or at least unusual places, sometimes even disturbing ones. As a viewer I feel easily bored or trapped when everything is explained, verbalized. But when I can use my imagination things become more intimate, they stay longer with me. As Paul Eluard would say, “the poet is much more the one who inspires than the one who is inspired.”
Earwig is currently playing at the IFC Center, New York, USA.
NEXT WEEK: How We Made ‘The Kick Inside’ by Paul Becker, a fictional voyage inside a giant effigy of Kate Bush.
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