Great beauty: Eugène Green on La Sapienza

I tried to contact the French filmmaker Eugène Green for an interview shortly after his fifth feature, La Sapienza, played the New York Film Festival, to where it had traveled from Toronto. Mistakenly, I’d been given the number for his brother, Ron, who returned my call from a Connecticut number, and spoke in the voice of a born-and-bred New Yorker – as, indeed, Eugène once was.

The confusion cleared up, Eugène Green met me at Caffe Dante in Greenwich Village, not far from the former site of the Bleecker Street Cinema, where he’d received his early cinematic education. Green emigrated to France to study in 1968, became a naturalised citizen in 1976, and the following year founded le Théâtre de la Sapience, a troupe devoted to the performance of both modern and Baroque productions, which staged works by Corneille and Racine. He has continued to write for the stage, and is also the publisher of books of poetry and five novels, besides.

In 2001 his first film, Toutes les nuits, won the Prix Louis Delluc for a debut work. His latest, La Sapienza, concerns a utilitarian French architect, Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione), who, unhappy with his work, seeks renewal in the study of the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. With his estranged wife Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman), Alexandre sets off on the trail of Borromini.

In Stresa, in northern Italy, they cross paths with Goffredo (Ludovico Succio), an aspiring architect, and his frail younger sister Lavinia (Arianna Nastro). Alexandre agrees to take Goffredo along on his tour of Borromini’s masterworks, while Aliénor stays on with Lavinia – both the younger and elder halves of each pairing learning much from their new partner. What follows is a film of lyric, rhapsodic tranquillity, possessed of great beauty and mystery, some of which Green endeavoured to help me to understand.

Eugène Green

Let’s talk about Sapience, the word and the concept. It’s an idea that’s obviously resonated with you for a very long time – your theatre troupe was called ‘le Theatre de la Sapience’, and so this is something that has been a part of your artistic practice for a long time. Could you expand on the concept?

I gave the name to my theatre company as a homage to Borromini’s church Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. At the same time the word intrigued me. When I encountered it I started doing research and thinking about what it meant – in French it had been frequently used in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, then afterwards it disappeared. Often you see it said that it means knowledge, or wisdom, but I think it corresponds to the meaning it had: the knowledge that leads to wisdom.

In the film it has a double meaning because it’s a reference to the Palace, Borromini’s greatest masterpiece, but it also refers to the meaning of the word because as Alexandre realises at the end of the film, most of the knowledge that he has is useless. For me the only knowledge that is not useless in the knowledge that leads to wisdom.

As we encounter Alexandre in the beginning of the film, he’s somebody who has practiced architecture based on the precepts of extreme functionality, and then he arrives at an inversion of his idea of what functionality is.

Exactly. That’s why he says that “most of what I know is useless.” He thought his buildings were useful because they were functional, but then he senses that these buildings don’t lead to wisdom, because he says that “the source of beauty is love, the source of knowledge is light,” and since the buildings didn’t give light to people, and they didn’t create spaces which made love possible, his functionality was actually not functional at all, it was useless. And because of the experience of this journey he’s come to another idea of what is useful.

La Sapienza (2014)

I’d like to hear something about the performance style you’ve arrived at. Because of the precision, economy of gesture, there’s a temptation to call it ‘Bressonian’ and leave it at that, but your performers exude a warmth that is very at odds with that definition.

It’s obvious that Bresson had an influence on me… I discovered him when I was still in New York, when I was 19 years old. At the time my cinematheque was the Bleecker Street Cinema, which is now a drug store, I think, or some other horror. For one ticket you could see in the evening three films, and one night – I don’t remember what the first two films were, but the third, which came on towards midnight, was Journal d’un curé de champagne. And I didn’t even know the name of Bresson, but it struck me: I was very moved by it, and I knew exactly what he was trying to do, and then afterwards I discovered all the rest, I read through his Notes sur le cinématographe.

I only began to make films 30 years later, so it’s something which was assimilated, and I had I had gone my own path. Perhaps what is similar is that for me – but I think it’s the same for him – what interests me when I film a human being is his interiority, what is hidden in normal everyday life, and which the cinema has the possibility of making apparent and conceivable to the spectator. But I work with professional actors, whereas he used only nonprofessional non-actors, which he called ‘models’.

Another thing differentiates you is the sense of humour. Watching La Sapienza with an audience in Toronto, there was quite a bit laughter at the beginning – partly because of the unfamiliarity of the style, the incongruousness of someone introducing themselves and delineating their thoughts and feelings so directly… There’s a potentiality for deadpan humour that’s intrinsic in your style, and that’s not something you’ve ever avoided.

On the contrary, I develop it. Recently I saw again The Portuguese Nun, and realised that half the time I was smiling. They’re not jokes that make you slap your thigh, but there’s a sort of irony or something, and that comes naturally to me. When audiences saw my first film, Toutes les nuits, sometimes in the Q&A afterwards they’d ask me if they had the right to laugh, and I told them yes they did, it was intentional, the humour. That’s a difference with Bresson – but there’s no real humour in his films.

La Sapienza (2014)

Yet running through Toutes les nuits, Le Pont des arts, The Portuguese Nun and La Sapienza there’s a deadly serious concern with depression, isolation, long dark nights of the soul, and the ability, through commiseration with others or with works of art – which are really one and the same thing – to lighten the load.

Absolutely. In La Sapienza, it’s perhaps more explicit: I make a sort of parallel with an important element of the sacred, which is the sacrifice. All religious traditions contain the idea of a sacrifice, and in most religious traditions, at least in their earliest stages, it’s a literal sacrifice, a living thing – in certain cultures even a living being, in any case an animal – which is sacrificed, what could be called the bloody sacrifice. The originality of Christianity is the idea that God himself was incarnated and became the sacrificial victim, which put an end also to the bloody sacrifices, and through the Mass, which is a form of sacrifice, the faithful can experience a spiritual experience without bloodshed, but with a direct contact with the sacred.

And there is the idea in La Sapienza that in a certain way the real artist – like Borromini, as opposed to Bernini – who lives only for his art, he becomes a sacrificial victim. That’s the idea when Alexandre sees a vision of the death of Borromini – I don’t specify if it’s a dream or if it’s the text that he’s writing – but when he sees this vision, he realises that it’s a sacrifice, and that’s why he says afterwards “We’re saved, we’re saved.” The artist becomes a sacrificial victim, in the same way that the death of Christ afterwards enables the faithful, through the ritual Mass, to experience the sacrifice without bloodshed. The artist leaves his work of art, which becomes a way for the people who enter in contact with it to know a spiritual experience, to be able to open up to others and experience commiseration and love for other through a work of art.

It’s the same thing, actually, as in Pont des arts, though perhaps the spiritual aspect or religious aspect is more explicit.

Borromini’s last night is almost a short film within the film, and filmed in a way that’s quite distinct from the rest of the movie, as a string of fragmentary impressions…

Actually, the idea of making a film about Borromini goes back, for me, to the 1970s, when I still dreamed of becoming a film director. Afterwards I gave up that dream and then it came back as a reality. I had the idea of making a film after I discovered his work when I was studying art history in the 70s, and at the time I imagined it as a historical film with costumes, using his architecture, but the architecture would have been placed in a historical context, as if we were in the 17th century, when he was building it.

When I started making films I realised I had no desire to make historical films because, for me, if you put an actor in a historical costume, his body has to move another way, he has to try to feel in a way which would correspond to the costume, and you begin doing theatre. And I don’t want the actor to do theatre, in the same way I don’t want him to do a psychological interpretation, to think about his character’s motivations and all that, I just want the spiritual energy to flow. That’s how I got the idea of this film, which would be a film about Borromini, but it’s no longer a historical film, it’s about Borromini in relation to today’s world.