In her own time

ArtForum, April, 2004 by Miriam Rosen

Now it's a little harder to get money. Now I'm obliged to write screenplays because otherwise I won't be given money. Because otherwise I'll be told that it's literary, it's theatrical, I don't know what, but not cinema. Which is too bad because writing a screenplay--"Summer, a small bedroom at night"--doesn't offer the same pleasure. You write the most succinct descriptions possible and then dialogue and that's it. Before, when I wrote texts, I at least had the pleasure of writing a text.

MR: The text is like a mark in time, while someone's reading, and afterward.

CA: When you read a text, you're on your own time. That is not the case in film. In fact, in film, you're dominated by my time. But time is different for everyone. Five minutes isn't the same thing for you as it is for me. And five minutes sometimes seems long, sometimes seems short. Take a specific film, say, D'Est: I imagine the way each viewer experiences time is different. And on my end, when I edit, the timing isn't done just any way. I draw it out to the point where we have to cut. Or take another example, News from Home: How much time should we take to show this street so that what's happening is something other than a mere piece of information? So that we can go from the concrete to the abstract and come back to the concrete--or move forward in another way. I'm the one who decides. At times I've shot things and I've said, "Now this is getting unbearable!" And I'll cut. For News from Home it's something else, but I have a hard time explaining it. I'm in the middle of writing a book about all this, and I'm finding it very difficult to explain. Today I'll write about time--I write more or less every day because I have very little time to do it--and it's too soon.

When you're editing, something happens that tells you this is the moment to cut. It's not theoretical, it's something I feel. Afterward, explaining it is always very difficult. In the beginning, especially with Jeanne Dielman, a lot of people thought I was a great theoretician. Quite the contrary. Later, when people would meet me, they'd realize that. Everyone thought, for example, that Jeanne Dielman was in real time, but the time was totally recomposed, to give the impression of real time. There I was with Delphine [Seyrig], and I told her, "When you put down the Wiener schnitzels like that, do it more slowly. When you take the sugar, move your arm forward more quickly." Only dealing with externals. When she asked why, I'd say, "Do it, and you'll see why later." I didn't want to manipulate her. I showed her afterward and said to her, "You see, I don't want it to 'look real,' I don't want it to look natural, but I want people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes." But I only saw that after Delphine did it. I hadn't thought of it before.

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That's for gestures, actions, let's say. There's also the case of static shots where nothing happens, like in Hotel Monterey [1972], where you see a hallway and nothing else. How long will we hold this shot of the hallway? In the montage, you can feel it. Obviously, it's very personal, because someone else would have held it half as long or three times as long. How do you explain that? You have to be very, very calm. When I edit, when I sense that I'm at the quarter mark or halfway through the film, I begin to screen it for myself, with my editor, Claire Atherton, with whom I've worked for years--almost by osmosis. We close the curtains, take the phones off the hook, and try to have a floating gaze, as an analyst might call it. And we say, "That's it!" Why? It's inexplicable. And that's why it's difficult for me to talk about it.