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A version of Godard and Trinh Minh-Ha discussing filming the last story of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Godard: So here we are. Adapting a story written by a U.S. fictionist. Never saw this day coming.

Trinh: Then I suppose it’s a good thing that none of this is real. Let’s just start. I want to talk a little about the story first. And I don’t mean its fatty Wallacian syntax and moral gymnastics. Just what it is, as a piece of lit. There’s no denying that it’s a devastatingly beautiful and unsettling… thing that practically gives itself up to many interpretations, cinematic or not. What sort of bothered me, initially, was the absolute, merciless lack of a female voice: our Ms. Granola Cruncher, the heart of this story, only exists in the semi-confession of the anonymous “hideous man”. We don’t know what happened to her in the end, but at this point I’m pretty sure it was something terrible. Also, I believe it can be gathered from the totality of these Brief Interviews that our interviewer, whose questions are not even presented, is also female—in fact, in John Krasinski’s earlier adaption of this book, the interviewer becomes the main character, Sara Quinn, a doctoral candidate in anthropology…

G: Adorable.

T: Well… I suppose adorable is one thing you can call it. Anyway, like I said, the lack of female voice bothered me for a while, and then I realized something: the Cranola Cruncher in B.I. #20 is not simply the moral parallel bars like many other faceless women in these interviews. Her anonymity throughout the story—and the disappearance of her entire personhood at the end of the horrifying rape—serves an essential purpose. And I don’t think we can begin filming anything without figuring out what that is.

G: I believe it’s rather simple what it is, no? Or, what she is. The absence of personhood, as you put it—I don’t think it’s to serve anything, I think it is the final goal.

T: I agree. Although it does result in certain consequences—it’s through her abandonment of selfhood that—here I’m just going to write this down—

      It’s through her abandonment of selfhood:

1. that we as viewers of the story achieve empathy for the narrator, then the girl, then somewhat for the killer, then in the end towards some sort of sad mixture. Whatever it is, it’s our immediate response towards the story as literature. Through the hypodiegetic.

2. that the narrator guy achieves two different kinds of empathy: one for the girl and, eventually and horribly, the other for the serial killer, and that further results in his “becoming” of the killer. Whether literally or not. This is the intradiegetic level.

3. that the Granola Cruncher, the supposed victim of the story, miraculously achieves the third and highest kind of empathy, the total supreme demolition of the self, her becoming the world and everything… But really, this “becoming” itself is the sole purpose and I think it transcends the literal diegesis. How to convey “the couvade” that is not just between the characters but also between the story and us, reality and us. That is the true porousness of boarders. It opens up everything else.

G: Yes, yes. Expansion of the self, force field of awareness and focus… Sounds good. Who doesn’t love that? But if we were to adapt a story that is by definition written in spoken language, how would you break the picture theory of meaning?

T: How do you mean?

G: I mean the theory that the relation between reality and language is only referential, which means image of you and me, image of this fake conversation we’re having, image of the Cruncher are merely representatives of the “real stuff”. This piece is the author’s inner responsible philosopher at work, no? Sadly this narrator’s hyper-awareness is only of his own language, he is all but obsessed with how he sounds, how he appears, and so he generates this horrible field of consciousness around him. It’s the opposite of the girl’s, which seems to be of the real thing—but we have no way to imagine that realness through anything but the guy’s words. The tragic loop closes. Through his narrative all I can say for sure is that he cannot handle this level of focus and the real, outside image, outside language, the real thing. I think it destroys him as a person. I don’t know if it’s the sadness or the love or the horror that destroys him. And I don’t know if he hurts her or now in the end. I have no intention for a narrative ending anyway. Or a narrative in general. It’s not what’s important here. If there’s anything in this story that matters to me it’s—can I have a look at what you just wrote?—what matters is how the spectator makes meaning outside the illusion of this relation between image or language, and make a choice within (0) based on the intertextuality of (1) and (2).

T: I agree with most of what you said. We share similar intention when it comes to the representation or rather, dissolvement of diegesis to some degree, on both literal and cinematic levels. Because the story contains an extreme setup, even by American standards. And all is retold to us by a guy who at the beginning believes none of this. Interpersonal porousness is the obvious crux here, though I for one would not entirely abandon the plot—not all narrative is evil. So maybe now is a good time for us to get into the specifics. My question is what is the “intertextuality” and how do you plan to achieve it? Would you do another “collage” of a film?

G: Why don’t you start by telling me some of your plans?

T: So far the least of my concern is the placement—or even the existence—of any ana/prolepsis. I don’t really care what is told before what once I get past the beginning. I think the shots will find their own places. But I will say that I want to start with this scene, simply because it’s my favorite:

Nor would I even begin to try to describe what she looks like as she’s telling the story, reliving it, she’s naked, hair spilling all down her back, sitting meditatively cross-legged amid the wrecked bedding and smoking ultralight Merits from which she keeps removing the filters because she claims they’re full of additives and unsafe—unsafe as she’s sitting there chain-smoking, which was so patently irrational that I couldn’t even bring—yes and some kind of blister on her Achilles tendon, from the sandals, leaning with her upper body to follow the oscillation of the fan so she’s moving in and out of a wash of moon from the window whose angle of incidence itself alters as the moon moves up and across the window[…]

In “When The Eye Frames Red”, an interview with Akira Mizuta Lippit, I have mentioned that the spaces between image, sound and text remain spaces of generative multiplicity, in which the function of each is not to serve nor to rule over the other, but to expose, in their tight interactions, each other’s limit […] Something that seems recognizable in my work and can only be realized intuitively with each film, is this tendency in pushing the limits, to lead the work, just when its structure emerges, to the very edge where its potential to return to nothing also becomes tangible. I believe in the porous boards between arts, though in this case I don’t think I can add anything textual—scripted—to Wallace’s writing. It has a distinctive fluidity of its own. Whenever the mind is attracted to a specific still, whenever a thing begins to take form, he immediately shifts your attention to the next, the structure of the scene is formed by not the specific shapes but the process of “coming into”. When we employ the similar philosophies in filming I think it’s important to start visualizing form as an instance of formlessness.

G: And formlessness as an instance of form.

T: Exactly. On that note, I’d start the scene fading-in on the silhouette of her sitting on the blanket. In total silence, we see her gesturing and her mouth moving. Oh and I should probably have mentioned this earlier: there will not be a shot of the girl’s face in its entirety. Nor will we ever hear her voice, even if this is a scene of her telling the story. I will only present fragments of her features… Anyway, total silence, in which I'd introduce close-ups of her removing the filter, then the fan oscillating. Now this is his gaze. I wouldn’t say it’s much sexual—at this point the narrator’s just about to be completely captivated, and I think at the moment his gaze is somewhere between Scopophilia and the extreme focus. A gaze that’s about to transcend onto another plane. He is not simply viewing her as an object, that part of their relation has just ended and now she’s about to destroy him with a trueness that he can’t possibly fathom. Still, we can sense from the narrative that he is still romanticizing her physicality, there is a gross tenderness to his tone. So in the very beginning of the film, what I present is still essentially the man as the bearer of the look of the spectator, as Mulvey mentioned in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. The semi-erotic look on what he once believed was “a strictly one-night objective.” But the illusion of omnipotence will soon shatter as I introduce the next shots.

G: So, no voice-over narration in all of this?

T: Of the guy? No—no so far I don’t plan to introduce any kind of voice narration, at least not in the first half of the film. Maybe in the end, when the narrator’s power has been completely neutralized—

G: You mean obliterated.

T: Maybe. Yes. So his actual voice—if ever heard—is to be placed in contrast with his helplessness and hopelessness in the end. Meanwhile, following her "protofeminine contraposto", I introduce objects under subjective treatment—we’re still seeing through his gaze—“the toile skirt, hair that nearly reached the blanket, the blanket dark green with yellow filigree and a kind of nauseous purple fringe, a linen singlet and vest of false buckskin, sandals in her rattan bag, bare feet with phenomenally dirty soles, dirty beyond belief, their nails like the nails of a laborer’s hands.”

G: And this was… right before he confesses, “Have you ever heard of the couvade?”

T: Yes, a key moment that pretty much defines the story. His focus on her telling of the story—that impossible level of attention on her image—of her own focus of every little detail during the rape. In accordance I’d accentuate the color of the interior—then of the blanket—yellow, green and purple and the dirtiness of her soles and nails… these are extremely detailed, structured, you can say, within the narrative and I think it’s appropriate to dramatize texture and light with artificial saturation like I did in A Tale of Love—in which the space is also fabricated with this almost humming tension, I want the viewer to acknowledge the untrueness through what Deleuze calls hapticity—between vision and tactility, the visual becomes “felt”. And hopefully through the “felt” the viewer will sense that truth is about to be addressed in the next scene, which is from the girl’s perspective. But between the two scenes I’d like to include an aural bridge of “stridulating crickets” and the largo tick of the cooling auto”.

G: So I gather you’re about to shift to her “almost hallucinatory accentuation of detail”?

T: Yes, the noises are abrupt; so are the cuts. Now onto the next scene:

She could decoct from the smell of the gravel in her face the dank verdure of the spring soil beneath the gravel and distinguish the press and shape of each piece of gravel against her face and large breasts through the leotard’s top, the angle of the sun on the top of her spine and the slight swirl in the intermittent breeze that blew from left to right across the light film of sweat on her neck. … She could hear the largo tick of the cooling auto and bees and bluebottle flies and stridulating crickets at the distant treeline, the same volute breeze in those trees she could feel at her back, and birds—imagine the temptation to despair in the sound of carefree birds and insects only yards from where you lay trussed for the gambrel—of tentative steps and breathing amid the clank of implements whose very shapes could be envisioned from the sounds they made against one another when stirred by a conflicted hand. The cotton of her dirndl skirt that light sheer unrefined cotton that’s almost gauze.

Some of these are visual but some are very anti-image. How to convey the tactical and the aural? Because in the middle of all this, her being able to sense this vital and verdant beauty of the nature in the middle of this brutal crime can only be explained as "the L world at function". The sublime and the mystical lie in the portraits of the world becoming almost molecular for her. A simple close-up of fingers-on-grass would include tactility, temperature, and even smell. I’ve talked about this unmaking in another interview, “Shifting The Borders of The Other” with Marina Grzinic: The self-in-displacement or the self-in-creation is one through which changes and discontinuities are accounted for in the making and unmaking of identity, and for which one needs specific, but mobile boundaries. It is a question of shifting them as soon as they tend to become ending lines. Back then I was talking within a cultural context, but I think it applies here also. The sensations are no longer images perceived outside of her body. I wouldn’t focus on each shot for too long and would cut the ambient noise somewhere during the scene, right about the viewer is about to get familiar with this synesthetic cinematic sensation. Now for a moment I was thinking about including close-ups of eyeballs, then there’s the whole thing “round phallism”. So maybe not. Anyway, this is just a simple example of how I’d represent the porousness between two scenes.

G: I see. Thank you for sharing.

T: And what about you? Feels like I’ve been talking for quite a while now.

G: Hmm… these are just off the top of my head, more intentionality than execution… I’m thinking about having multiple actresses to play Ms. Granola Cruncher.

T: Excuse me?

G: Like I said before, by the time this guy does this interview he is deeply trapped in language. A pathetic mess. I don’t see how he is in anyway reliable. I need to show that.

T: OK.

G: His voice is preoccupied with the relationship between his own image and reality; this further prevents him from recognizing his hideousness. He claims a similar transcendence—he dares to call it love and sadness—as the same kind the girl experiences. I don’t see it. I think he is simply a monster whom Wallace uses as one of his many surrogates to express deep fears for hypocrisy and post-modernist traps. Loud and clear is the message “None of this is to be trusted!” So why shouldn’t the audience know that?

T: And how do you plan to reveal it?

G: His hideousness is rather self-explanatory. I'm not worried once this character opens his mouth. Now I’ll see if I can find footage of the author reading this story himself. Maybe I’ll insert clips of Wallace doing that interview with Charlie Rose… Perhaps some audition clips for the characters, where I also ask actors to fill in the blank “Q”s themselves. Maybe I’ll do this one in 3D, too, explore more editing software with Fabrice Aragno… Or maybe, with your permission of course, I’ll include this conversation we’re having—I put a camera in the corner of this room when I walked in.

T: Oh… there it is. Okay… But how is any of this related to the story?

G: I’ll do scenes from the story, too, probably. If the audience is curious about the plot they can just go buy the book. Look, I don’t deny the story’s values as literature. It’s beautifully constructed. Almost too beautiful. But eventually we’re talking about its cinematic value, which to me seems very little. It piles images together but only for the purpose to destroy them. So what’s to be filmed? Everything that should be done has already been done. Besides, at this point I’m also no longer interested in the representational properties of image. It’s more of a disclosing event than an aesthetic for me. Wallace expresses a large concern for solipsism; his ideal is that language is and must be dependent on interpersonal relationships, dependent on, excuse me, “how to being a fucking human being”. That’s his message and it’s great. I’d film that. and I trust the viewer to recognize the differentiation between images to be a tableau rusting silently in its place. Let them investigate the causation themselves.

T: So you think showing how this film is made is a stronger message to send than presenting the porosity within the story?

G: You can put it that way. Earlier you mentioned gaze a lot, but I think it’s time to destroy the gaze instead of analyzing it to death. I think true porosity lies rather in these conversations, our responses to the dissolvement of narrative boarders, and I think this is how Wallace would have wanted it in the first place. I used this Monet quote in Adieu au Langage, and I will end with it, “Paint not what we see, for we see nothing, but paint that we don’t see.”

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In-between Pseudo-Realities:

A (Fictitious) Conversation between Trinh T. Min-Ha and Jean-Luc Godard

It is widely acknowledged that the U.S. reality show has little interest in truth or facts: it is apt in turning image of the real and traditions of documentary into a narcotic commodity to imbibe. For example, the specimen from this line of products, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, operates on the impetus where reality, fiction and voyeurism feed on each other. Below are sections of a conversation between Trinh T. Minh-Ha and Jean-Luc Godard on directing The Kardashians Movie, a documentary on the making of the pseudo-documentary TV show. Taking on an extreme subject, the directors gauge the reality show itself as a subject of reflexive documentary while critiquing each other's proposed approaches.

Trinh: As many reckon the Kardashians’ success as a tragic fall of public decency and the end of privacy in the digital age, I for one am not at all interested in their staged lives as a subject. These women are no different than any other businessman or woman who knows exactly what the consumer needs, except the product they sell is their own images as TV personalities; they are at once the producer and the consensual commercial good. Their production of these images has, therefore, a complex relationship with factual reality. One cannot simply reduce their TV life to “fakeness”. For the very act of selling their image is, in fact, part of their reality. That relationship, as well as that between the spectator and the actor, creates symbiosis in between reality and fiction.

It is certainly worth noticing that in the making of reality shows, the techniques and doctrines of conventional documentary are utilized as a means of familiarization—however absurd the setting is—so the audience can more easily identify with the characters and be absorbed into the plot. This is Hollywood’s original program—what reality shows are selling is no different than any fantasy drama product. And I believe that, in an exaggerated sense, it mirrors certain problems of documentary filming itself.

It has long been a concern among filmmakers that, even serious documentaries that work with the most rigorous of facts still face problems in regard to what constitutes as “the objective truth”. There is no such thing as documentary—whether the term designates a category of material, a genre, an approach, or a set of techniques (“The Totalizing Quest of Meaning,” 90). And this is why the Kardashian Show—not the Kardashians—makes an intriguing and difficult subject because the show is an extreme example of how an expected diction of documentary is manipulated into pure entertaining. With that in mind, I would like to introduce my own voice as narration as I edit the footages of staged interviews, of the actors themselves and of the TV crew. I do not wish to speak for the documentary subject—which is essentially an industry that I am not and hopefully will never be part of—but rather speak nearby it and acknowledge the power of my cinematic gaze to (mis)represent, directly to the audience, for inevitably, my own critique on the U.S. TV industry will affect the film. This would be, in short, reflexive documentary. I am curious as to how you would approach the same subject, Mr. Godard?

Godard: You and I share distrust in documentary as a medium to convey reality. I have myself used what is traditionally viewed as documentary device in fiction works,by challenging the convention that the sheer form of interviews provides an access to truth because it gives an opportunity for the interviewee to, as it were, speak reality—this is a narrative assumption the audience is conditioned to make, and it needs to be broken. I recall some of the other documentary elements I have employed: my own voice-over narration, having the actors to break the fourth wall constantly by asking them spontaneous on-set questions through earphones… I have also noticed similar strategies in your films such as Surname Viet Given Name Nam, where you inform the viewer that the interviews are pre-staged in numerous ways. I admire your attempt at acknowledging the power of filmic gaze in both Reassemblage and Surame. However, what we face now is an entirely different sociopolitical context. Earlier you have regarded products like this TV show as a caricature of documentary, which I agree, but I must disagree with your attempt to detach your narrative from the subject when you are indeed making a documentary instead of only using documentary elements for fictional purpose. Because we are not filming a third world country: this is the U.S. entertainment business; the subject is a privileged system of both consumers and sellers of flat-out poison. The narration on power of cinematic gaze and the lack of objective truth in documentary is only acknowledged but not further actively utilized in this particular context.

I would rather rely on the power of film image as ideologies in itself. And since we already have a group of actors as subjects, why not use that and exaggerate the absurdity that is already their daily life? If, say, the current episodes of this TV show operate on the illusion of reality, then I would like to push that illusion until it is distorted into a visual anarchy. I will give you an example. Evidently, it has become a cosmetic trend these recent years for women to “contour” their faces—by putting darker shades in the hollows of one’s cheeks and highlighter above the cheekbones, nose and forehead, this is done so that the face appears slender in front of cameras and in real life. I was informed—by a make-up artist for my last film—that women all over the world, of all ethnicities, are doing this now; and that Ms. Kim Kardashian all but single-handedly created this trend. And there I stood, watching the makeup artist turn an actress’s face into something else in front of my very eyes. Like all filmmakers, I was trained to consider what things appear in front of a camera, but it seems that we have reached a point where people literally fake dimensions of their visages on a daily basis and take photos alone in bathrooms. It is increasingly hard to tell who is the audience. I can already imagine contouring as a visual metaphor in this film. Extreme close-ups of cosmetic application. Through tipped or inverted angles as if the cell phone is accidentally left behind. All is still scripted, but unlike the way reality shows are scripted to mock reality, my editing of these footages would be stripped of a linear narrative or any normative cinema conventions. Ultimately, the audience should acknowledge they are voyeurs peeking into an elaborative scam.

Trinh: There are two things I would like to discuss. First, the image you have just painted is in vivid, conscious violation of Hollywood codes, and I understand it is used to defamiliarize and destabilize the viewer’s senses in order to break them out of the illusion. I have used similar techniques myself and frankly, I would not be surprised if our films came out looking or even sounding somewhat alike. Secondly, while we share a belief in the power of defamiliarization, I am afraid we use similar devices to achieve fundamentally different purposes. Mine is to first dissolve the establishment of totalistic meaning, while yours is ultimately to promote the ideologies you believe in by battling the ones you do not.

My narration is not aimed to detach itself from the subject. It is quite the opposite in this case. I will explain why. It is utterly important to consider that, underneath all the apparent Kardashian Vulgarity, there is a set of self-correcting powers entertainment like this is equipped with. People, including this reality show’s most avid watchers, already know it is utterly addictive, amnesiac junk, but detoxification is not easy. Therefore, despite the attempt in détournement, you would still miss what you might consider the sociopolitical imperatives—what truly fuels the success of shows like this. Which is that the real power of its blatant vulgarity lies not in gimmicks such as employing documentary or quasi-documentary elements, but in its automatic assimilation of any possible criticism thrown at its way. It is by the same impetus that, a critical, anti-paradigm cinematic work always risks becoming the new “norms” that are consumed as aesthetics in the course of time—is a danger that many Western filmmakers have to face. Where is the limit of the truth you are advocating? Because on the “opposite side” is the near comic evil brilliance of mass entertainment: the awareness of its own toxicity, plus the ability of making “inside jokes” about said toxicity in harmless ways so we, the voyeur, feel much less guilty, lonely, disgusting and more comfortable with consuming larger doses of it. That is very intricate self-reflexivity at work—almost a photo-negative of what my narration will try to address. In other words, our subject fuels on people’s obsession and their distain. It is precisely through the layer of irony that it shields itself from any real damage. And this is what I would like to include in my narration. That the Kardashian Film is staged not just the way a normal intelligent person would imagine it is staged, but also in the sense that it knows it is meticulously designed to be an invitation for the viewer to see through the layers of manipulation and vulgarity. Any contemporary audience can discern satire, but in the mean time, they are all-too familiar with the concept to the extent that our attempts—be that your hyperbole or this very reflexive narration—might not serve as much stimulation as we would like them to, and any cynicism or critique it might invoke will probably become a teleological end in itself. Still, it is a risk worth taking, or at least a message worth acknowledging, and that is what I would like the audience to know.