11. Dialogue with Isabelle Huppert

December 15,1993

Buried speech

Shapeless speech

Silent speech

With Antoinette Fouque

Speech acquires a body

Ideas become clear

This is the generosity of listening

The pleasure of understanding

—Isabelle Huppert, Cahiers du cinéma

 

ISABELLE HUPPERT: I’ve been wanting to meet you, just as I wanted to meet Nathalie Sarraute. I’ve wanted the issue of Cahiers du cinéma that I’ve taken on to be open, not just about film.

ANTOINETTE FOUQUE: First of all, let me thank you. I found your offer very touching. Give or take a few years, you could be my daughter. Feminists of my generation have often been criticized for not having passed anything on. Your wish to meet suggests to me that it has been possible to pass something on, that something has been transmitted. I’m grateful to you for that.

I would also like to say how honored I am to find myself in the company of Nathalie Sarraute; in terms of writing, she is my heart of hearts—I’d like to see her get the Nobel Prize—and I had a youthful passion for her. When I was an adolescent I would have done anything to meet her.

IH: Nathalie Sarraute has probably told you that she doesn’t like to be defined as a woman writer. You must have talked to her about that.

AF: She’s right. It seems to me that the source of her writing, or the stratum she mines, if we take a geological section of the terrain where a writer finds her raw material, is a presexualized stratum of absolute pre-figurative and prerepresentable narcissism, a sort of nebula of drives. I’ve always thought that Nathalie Sarraute was the writer who took writing from the figurative to the nonfigurative. It’s the same revolution as in painting. I don’t know if this revolution will ever come about in cinema. Perhaps Malina gets away from figurative cinema and attempts some kind of cinematographic abstraction. It’s very difficult. Nathalie Sarraute’s writing is a writing of the drives, of what Freud would have called the elementary passions; we might say that it is presexed and, at the same time, constitutionally female and/or embryonic. It is on the side of gestation, of the embryo or the gestatrix. It is concrete writing, a writing of the flesh, of something living. Nathalie Sarraute snatches this reality away from the impossible, the unsayable, the improbable; she brings it into the realm of meaning and offers it to the world to read. As Rilke did; as Hofmannsthal did. But she doesn’t handle it in a poetic way; she handles it in a narrative way, as a woman novelist.

IH: Do you think she is the only woman who does this?

AF: I think she’s following in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, but that she goes much further than Woolf. The extraordinary thing is that she is not mad, if we can say such a thing.

IH: Yes, she works on the edge, on the border of madness. The bridges between her work and her personality are, unlike those of Virginia Woolf—who drew on her own life, on incidents in her life—completely invisible. In Sarraute’s work there seems to be nothing that has to do with her life. What she makes visible in her work is what is invisible in her personality. For me, that’s a completely mysterious zone. That’s her secret.

AF: She is a woman who explores the real. She has confronted what I call the archi-unconscious, which lies below the unconscious, below its figurability. This is a shapeless, amorphous zone. In Childhood she reveals her defense system, shows how she organizes the framework, the scene of writing; how its stage is furnished and what its protocols are and how she resolved, or did not resolve, her relationship with her mother.¹ This is no écriture féminine, but it so happens that, in literature, it is a woman who has accomplished this beautiful tour de force.

No one seems to have wanted to base a film on Martereau or The Planetarium . Do you think there are some literary forms that can’t be transposed into film?

IH: On the contrary. From my point of view as an actress, I think that the states she transmits through her figures of speech could easily be turned into films. I would even go so far as to say that they could be turned into films much more easily than the so-called figures that are restricted by the way they usually sketch out characters. She tracks life to such a point that it strikes me as representable. As you were saying, what she writes has to do with flesh.

AF: I saw both Malina and Après l’amour again, and I said to myself that you were a writer in both films, but of two very different sorts. We need to find cinematic equivalents for the categories Barthes gave us, though they may have become a little hackneyed: the écrivant and the écrivain.

IH: Yes, like actante and actrice. For me, being an actante would mean playing an active part in transmitting a role. I have often wondered whether I was a subject or an object in my films. I have always felt myself to be more of a subject than an object, even though I am well aware that there might be a hiatus between being a subject and being an object and that the gap might be unbridgeable. Isn’t it often said, isn’t it a cliché to say that an actress is supposed to be just an object? I like being both subject and object in my films, in other words, being able to create a space in which I can stand back. As it happens, that is both a freedom and a constraint, to the extent that I cannot help but have that double gaze. Why do I say double? In theory, it should be the director who stands back and looks on. When I adopt this analytic approach, I adopt the position of the writer rather than that of the actress.

AF: That displacement toward the author’s creative space is quite perceptible in your work. With you, the actress is more important than the character. The transference takes place inside the actress’s body rather than the actress getting into the character’s skin, clothes, or costume. The character is forced to come and live with you, to submit to the ordeal of a transference onto you.

The first time I saw you in The Lacemaker and Les Indiens sont encore loin you immediately reminded me of Ingrid Bergman. My unconscious compared you with her. When I was a girl I saw Spellbound, in which Bergman plays the role of a psychoanalyst who saves Gregory Peck from his guilt. My first contact with psychoanalysis took place in that film and my first transference was onto Ingrid Bergman. Her role, which is decentered with respect to the codes of woman-as-object—and this is Hitchcock’s genius—allowed me to discover the transferential function. Throughout the film she is trying, from a completely active position, to undo the knot of a neurosis. The actress has turned out to be the site of a real psychic transformation, of unconscious work on the viewer’s part.

An actress is in fact always available for a transference, unless she is a pure Narcissus and therefore an object. What you did from the outset in The Lacemaker and Les Indiens sont encore loin was to introduce a gap between the woman who is caught up in the perverse space of the world as it exists, the woman who is being hunted, and yourself. That gap produces a cathartic effect. The viewer, male or female, can analyze what is going on even though, in most of the films of yours that I’ve recently watched again, the heroine is hurtling toward destruction; she goes to prison, dies, or goes mad.

If directors always put women into the same structure, the actress can make this explicit; by remaining in the gap she creates and introduces as a supplement she can spell out in what respect the world is out of joint or perverse. This gap is very perceptible in all your creations. This is the creative part that you take on; this is your writing. It’s very modern. You are definitely the most resolutely, absolutely modern actress, because you maintain the gap within a divided subject in your films. Were you aware of this when you made The Lacemaker?

IH: No, not at all, but I was aware, or rather I knew intuitively, that for me being an actress did not mean being completely an actress in the classic sense of being seductive. Being an actress was a live experiment, not an imitation. It was a total commitment on my part. And that inevitably meant anticipating the mystery of the truth.

AF: Do you have a relationship with psychoanalysis?

IH: I went into analysis when I was twenty, at about the same time I started to act. I very quickly sensed that there were certain images, certain clichés that were associated with the actress function and that that was not the way I was going to experiment with the fact of being an actress. I thought, to begin with, that being an actress meant expressing something to do with pain. Perhaps what I called pain was the gaze.

AF: Whose gaze? The other’s, or your own?

IH: Mine. Seeing the truth. Perhaps that’s what I called pain.

AF: Violette Nozière is both “looked up and down” by her father, as she puts it, and a voyeuse. So is the heroine of La truite. You have surveyed all these aspects of exhibitionism, and they are almost compulsory for an actress.

IH: I think that, right from the start, for me it was a question of working on the truth. Actors often say that they love surrendering to their characters, lying, dressing up, or thinking that they have other lives. That discourse has always been completely alien to me. I have never believed that being an actress meant going to live in someone else’s life. On the contrary, for me it’s always been a tireless exploration of myself. It means moving to somewhere deep inside me and not being swept away into the outside world; it’s a verticality. Which brings me back to what I was saying to you a moment ago, ultimately, I don’t go toward the characters; it’s the characters who come to me. And it’s in that sense that I tend to compare the job of an actress with that of a writer. I should say autobiographer, because a writer can also write fiction, novels. Right from the start, being an actress was never a way of ceasing to be myself in order to become someone else; on the contrary, it was a way of finding out who I was. And never finding out who I am was, of course, the whole idea.

But since then, I have also discovered that the truth is not always the painful truth or the truth behind the tragedy. It can also be the truth of lightness or well-being or, quite simply, the truth about the wish to be.

AF: You’ve just outlined what might be called “the actress’s paradox”: seeking the truth means getting rid of what analysts call the “false self,” the “as if” personality, and it may seem paradoxical that one way of getting closer to your true self and getting rid of the false self is to embody characters and use your body to get them across.

IH: Yes, it’s paradoxical, but dressing up is the best way of revealing yourself.

AF: That calls for almost a twofold effort. Freud, borrowing an expression from Michelangelo, says that there are two possible ways of creating art: “un per via di posare, un per via di levare.” The painter adds matter and the sculptor takes it away. You tend to adopt the sculptor’s approach: taking away matter in order to give shape to the ego, the true ego. Which may seem something of a paradox, but it seems right to me. Seeing through falsity, flashy rags, imported or pasted-on identities is an extremely contemporary attitude. The artist wants what is true or what is real. Your approach is that of an artist or a creator rather than an actress.

IH: I’m not sure whether it’s an artistic approach.

AF: Someone who’s trying to transform reality. You don’t like the word artist?

IH: Let’s say that I don’t recognize myself in it. For me it’s very much tied up with the idea of the artiste maudit. And artists are no longer maudits. Too many people would like to be credited with that curse, which would legitimize them.

AF: I’m using the word in a categorical sense. After years of work, practice, and theorization, I am trying to see how women can not so much escape the structure in which they are trapped as transform it, how they can emerge or speak as women. They can use several types of discourse: a discourse that cannot be spoken, the discourse of mutism or that of the primary female homosexual who sinks at one point or another into blankness, complete depression, nonexistence, foreclosure, and drops out of the symbolic, out of speech, or that of the actress, the hysteric who is inhabited by the discourse of the master and who is in drag; and then there is the discourse of the woman I call the artist, the writer. This is the discourse of Virginia Woolf, aching, in pain, in danger of dying. This is the discourse of Clarice Lispector, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marina Tsvetaeva, of all the women who try to express themselves by writing and who often commit suicide or descend into madness. They do not want to be just actresses or to be vehicles for the text of the other, as though they were its spokeswomen.

IH: I think it’s a matter of occupying the field in a different way. It’s a rather tangential power, not the usual power of comedians or actors, which is more frontal with respect to director.

AF: In order to create your own field, your own territory; it’s almost animal or perhaps it is actually very human.

IH: You were talking about the alternative for women: being silent, always being in drag, or …

AF: Yes, I still think the world is topsy-turvy. There are two sexes, and all the laws that govern us take only one of them into account. It begins with monotheism: there is only one God. Woman does not have divine status. The Virgin is nothing more than a saint; she is holy, but not divine. There is no possibility of women identifying with something maternal, something matricial, with a female divinity, and, conversely, all the values that women contribute are subordinated to this structure of the one. There is only one God, there is only the father, and this world overlooks the fact that there are two sexes; it denies reality and it is perverse. Men can come to terms with this generalized perversion. The husband in La truite is homosexual. If he isn’t homosexual, he commits adultery or incest. According to Freud, a man who has daughters has to be adulterous to avoid being incestuous; his wife is not enough for him. Women are therefore caught up in this perverse structure. And they have what I call a derivative perversion. Violette Nozière and Madame Bovary are roles for echo-women, for women with a derivative perversion, one that echoes Narcissus’s perversion, because Echo reproduces Narcissus’s law.

But I’d like to ask you: who are you? How do you write what comes next? There is nothing realistic about your acting. There’s an “un-acting” (déjeu), a decentering that makes it difficult to pin down.

IH: That’s true. In Orlando I explored something very special. Bob Wilson is the very opposite of a realistic, concrete director. With him one is in an abstract world, and yet I have never felt more in touch with myself. It’s a bit like what you were saying about Nathalie Sarraute. Not so much abstraction, perhaps, but it is nonfigurative, it produces life, flesh, because the absence of identifiable figures was totally liberating. All I did in Orlando was just be completely myself. Then there was the discovery of androgyny, my own androgyny. And yet I had a tendency to say that roles did not teach me anything about myself because they just confirmed what I already knew. I was just thinking a moment ago that the first two stories to fuel my imagination were two of Anderson’s fairy tales: The Little Mermaid and The Little Match Girl. One dies of love and the other dies of cold, but the idea of androgyny is also present in The Little Mermaid. That fishtail is the absence of a sex. I think that what I discovered in Orlando was androgyny, not defined just as a sexual disorder or the possibility that an actress might appear in drag, but in the deeper sense of the difficulty of choosing between activity and passivity. Virginia Woolf captures that difficulty. Nathalie Sarraute reminded me that Virginia Woolf said that the writer is androgynous, as though there were a sort of subversion, an in-between, between man and woman, where she is neither on the side of power nor on the side of passivity.

AF: She’s on the side of play. Don’t you think that this is very much bound up with childhood?

IH: Absolutely. Everything in Orlando takes place under the sign of play, all those explorations, all those ramblings and substitutions are very closely bound up with childhood. So expressing an androgynous femininity means both taking refuge in childhood and rebelling.

AF: It is true that, in Orlando, childhood rediscovered, or “childhood clearly formulated,” as Baudelaire says of genius, is very present. And because you and Bob Wilson are so demanding, you give it a formal perfection that allows all the drawers to be opened. That kind of androgyny is as rich as childhood. That’s more or less what Nathalie Sarraute has done. It is no accident that one of her latest texts is called Childhood. We get back to where it came from. It is one way of creating, of producing. How do you relate this androgyny to your life as a woman, to the fact of having children?

IH: I don’t know. I don’t relate the two. My life is one thing, and these projections of myself are another. They probably do meet, but I don’t know where. Everything seems to be in separate compartments.

AF: Playing with androgyny is surely very important for an actress because otherwise she’s heading for disaster. It’s like Greta Garbo or Martine Carol. Perhaps Garbo did what you were saying; she used splitting mechanisms to save her own life. Why does no one say that her extreme beauty and her captivating charm had to do with her homosexuality? She used splitting mechanisms, and so she did not commit suicide. I believe that there is a certain symbolic homosexuality and that it plays a very structural role for women. This really is not the lesbianism that is experienced or illustrated by transvestites, but something completely internal; the relationship with the first love-body, and that is the mother, for both girls and boys. A trace of that intimacy remains.

IH: Perhaps that allows me to understand more about why I venture into androgyny. Why do you say it’s a form of survival for an actress?

AF: It’s the same as it is for a writer, because bringing the masculine into play allows her to play with gender difference rather than being completely trapped by a sex that is hers but that isn’t entitled to exist.

IH: Perhaps androgyny is a form of protection against a certain image of femininity that is perceived by the woman who embodies it as a threat.

AF: I was also thinking of Bergman and Persona and of Cassavetes and A Woman Under the Influence or Opening Night. Cassavetes went a long way toward giving an almost entomological description of the trap in which women are caught. “A woman under the influence” is ultimately the theme of all those films about women who are trapped by a sort of derivative perversion, a secondary perversion that echoes the perversion of men. I find it very hard to see how the scene of women’s madness can be transformed in films. I always wonder where the great directors are going and what women directors could offer that would be different.

IH: Garbo was the emblematic embodiment of that paradoxical moment, of the opaque zone that lies between withdrawal and the moment of appearing. I think that, for an actress, that’s what it’s all about. How to be visible and invisible at the same time. You were asking me how I write what comes next. I don’t know, but I think I’ll always try to be at the heart of things, at the heart of the projects.

AF: Keeping ahead of people and things, being active. Have you ever thought of directing?

IH: No, not for the moment. I’ve thought about doing it much later. The much later will come closer one day. For now, I feel like an actress through and through, even if I do feel I’m both a subject and an object, and I would find it very hard to give up my object status, this state of seduction. I feel I’m an actress from head to toe.

AF: How does your career as an actress interfere with your career in life, your career as a woman?

IH: The opposite is also true; the career of living interferes with the actress’s career. But being an actress is also a way of relating to the world, of being there and not being there. We embody states, drives.

AF: It has to do with passion. In Latin, a passive verb with an active meaning was used to express that state. A deponent. You might say that a state is a passive act or an active passion, which does not stop at one moment or another, which comes back in dreams that haunt you. How does this sort of permanent transference between you and your characters come about? Between you and the body’s guests, the guests of the unconscious, the guests of thought? What do they mean to you, your body’s guests, those of your unconscious or those of your thoughts?

IH: I think all three were there in Orlando: the unconscious, thought, and the body. In the theater it’s more the body’s guest because the body is much more involved, especially in the way it was in Bob Wilson’s play, with a whole memory coming back in the gestures, the attitudes of childhood, dancing the way little girls dance. I watch my daughter dance for a moment, and I find myself using the same gestures. All I did in Orlando was play, play make-believe. What I did not know about myself was, perhaps, that capacity to rebel, that will to set myself free, to be freer, and Orlando allowed me to discover it. Even if you believe you are free, you always want more freedom, don’t you? You’ll tell me that a film actress has achieved a certain degree of freedom, but actually there is always the fantasy of having greater freedom. As the various parts I’ve played have always allowed me to glimpse different possibilities, different states, I always feel that my life is somewhat in danger, that I’m always standing on the edge of a cliff.

AF: When you find yourself standing on the edge of a cliff, as you put it, don’t you have the feeling that, having come as far as you’ve come, you have a body of work behind you? That something has been built, perhaps despite yourself, that there is something you can lean back on?

IH: No, not really. Actresses also feel that they are both everything and nothing. That’s their form of hysteria!

AF: Do you feel you’ve opened all the drawers, got your ego in a complete state, so to speak? What are the female egos or emotions that might not have been expressed?

IH: Probably the egos of freedom …

AF: There are of course little boys in a little girl’s world too. Like Tom Thumb, who saves his family: his majesty the child. Those roles aren’t on offer where we’re concerned.

IH: I’d like to move toward states like that in the future. I wanted to give Emma Bovary a certain arrogance, a certain understanding of what she was doing. I think that arrogance made her more modern. Like Flaubert, I gave the viewer the opportunity to understand the mechanisms that are at work in history, and outside history. As I was making the film, I kept thinking that Emma was the first great feminist heroine in literature, that she was, to the best of her abilities (and God knows they were limited!), fighting a battle that prefigured the great battles women would have to fight in the future.

AF: Ingeborg Bachmann says, in Malina and in all her books, that women learn to play chess and always lose. Whereas a certain feminism would have us believe that there is a liberty, or a liberation, to be found in feminism.

IH: You don’t think there is?

AF: At the outset I wanted to find an ethics, that is, a form of thought that went beyond feminism. I wanted to work on the experience of thought and its limits, and that is what I did. I was accused of being an antifeminist. When we started this movement, in 1968, we had the means to go beyond feminism. In France especially we had intellectual tools with thinkers like Lacan and Derrida, with ourselves, with our own experience, that allowed us to get beyond feminism, which is basically a form of hysteria. My project was to succeed where feminism and hysteria had failed.

The risks were enormous. I asked myself a lot of questions. Reestablishing the specific link between daughter and mother means trying to blow up the fortress of the One, of monotheism, of “there is only one God” and monodemocracy. In Athens only the men were citizens; ultimately, it is the same here. I was trying to reveal the perversion of a world that forces on us patriarchy, gold, language, and a logic of the one, when in fact there are two: there are two sexes, and the two are not only different but dissymmetrical in the work of procreation. A woman can do anything, or almost anything, a man can do, but she is also capable of gestation. This may be where I distance myself from the problematic of Virginia Woolf and what we might call pregenital androgyny. Pregenital androgyny is perfect for an actress. For a writer, it didn’t keep Woolf from committing suicide. Mrs. Dalloway is saved by her daughter. Virginia Woolf could never have a daughter because her husband and her doctors forbade her to, decreeing that she had to choose between creation and procreation. Perhaps if she had had a child or children she would not have committed suicide.

I think that this feminine genealogy of the transmission of women’s practices—of what women have learned and are capable of doing—from mother to daughter and from daughter to mother, which is by no means a return to maternity, is perhaps the bearer of something other than the old model, the bearer of what philosophers such as Levinas call an ethics or as the welcome given to the other. Women have a capacity to welcome the other, a capacity for active containment that is bound up with gestation. And, given that we are human beings with the gift of speech, this is not merely a biological capacity; it is imaginary and symbolic. That is what happens with a fertile actress. She does not slip into her characters; she hugs them to her breast, welcomes them into her heart, into her body, and—why not?—into her uterus. A woman’s pregnancy, gestation, is the only natural phenomenon of bodily—and therefore psychic—acceptance of a foreign body. It is the model for all grafts.

Some men do have this capacity to welcome, of course. As I was watching Orlando, I said to myself that Bob Wilson had acted as your matricial container. You say unconscious to unconscious, but it is almost flesh to flesh. It is as though he had brought you into the world. All at once there was a new birth, an event. At the same time, it is not impossible that, having given Orlando a body, you engendered in him something his fecundity needed. This is an interrelationship, because he certainly has female capacities within him. Androgyny is transmitted in a presexual mode, but it might also be transmitted in the mythological or mythical mode of a twofold fecundity.

For your part, you have the experience of a woman who has had children and the experience of being an actress. That is why I am interested in the question of being a container for characters rather than being contained within them. It is the same in analysis. A real analyst is generous, acts as a container and brings you into the world. I think that the whole of Freud’s theory is haunted by his desire to have a uterus. Uterus envy in men is as important as penis envy in women, and perhaps more important. While his wife was making a baby, Freud was, by his own admission, giving birth to The Interpretation of Dreams. In 1973 I made a film about his “Psychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality.” In all the cases of female homosexuality that he analyzed he thought he was the site of the transference to the extent that he was a father; he failed to see that the girl’s transference was to the mother, to a woman. In the particular case on which the film was based, the homosexual woman was in love with a film actress. So what exchange is taking place here between psychoanalysis, the young homosexual woman, and the film actress? How did the actress act as a screen for the dream and a screen for the transference? How did she embody both the difference between the genders and the difference between the sexes?

Someone like Lou Andreas-Salomé stopped short of procreation. She theorized elements of the symbolization of feminine qualities or values, but she remained a mystic. A mystic embodies, makes herself flesh and then burns, bursts into flames, or, as in The Little Mermaid, becomes a cloud. She spiritualizes herself and does not pursue her experience to the end, which would mean transmitting what you call the invisible. Ultimately, the invisible is the flesh, the inside. It is matter itself, the thinking matter that is at work in dreams or the drives. Perhaps it was not the Word that was in the beginning, but the flesh, the substratum of the unconscious, the prenatal unconscious.

Biological exchanges and psychic exchanges between the fetus and the genitrix do take place. We still don’t know everything about them. We don’t know, for example, to what extent the pregnant woman and the fetus share their dreams. But at all events many exchanges do take place between the two, and those exchanges are the model, the paradigm, of transference. And, besides, a pregnant woman does more than dream; she listens to the fetus and talks to it. For me, this is the scene that inaugurates language. I think women were the ones who invented articulate language by trying to communicate with the fetus and then with the child. Women are anthropocultivators .

Men cannot go back to the experience of gestation. Women can, and they actively relive what they once lived in a passive way. They were once contained, and they can be containers. This is quite exceptional. I think that is why we are persecuted. I think that God and the monotheisms are substitutes for gestation. Genesis is an imaginary, illusory form of gestation, and God is a son who dreams of taking the container’s place. He, noncreated, creating man and then taking woman out of man. This is an inversion, and, so long as women do not put the world the right way around, everything will be upside down. There is an investigation to be carried out into how women live this inner experience, this experience of moving from inside to outside. Psychoanalysis has yet to look into this. Psychoanalysts talk about the mother, about the child who is born, but never about the prenatal period. But why do women who know about gestation allow themselves to fall into the trap of feminism?

IH: Of feminism? That takes the cake!

AF: I think that feminism has sought to dissociate creation from procreation and to force women to choose between making films, for example, and making children. It has condemned women to sacrifice part of themselves. And when women did both those things, they did so by maintaining a gap. I think that in the twenty-first century we’ll find a way to build a bridge between creation and procreation.

IH: I have experienced, very deeply and personally, what you have just theorized. At a very young age I was obsessed with the idea of having children. I was very much aware of the fact that being an actress and having children was the same thing, that it was a comparable transformation, the same waiting—and we do in fact “give birth to a role”—or at least I understood that the two things were not antagonistic.

AF: I was very naive when I was pregnant; I knew in any case that it was what I wanted and I was haunted by certain landscapes, as when you go back to someplace in a dream. We speak of “being” pregnant, it’s a state, like a dreaming state. At the same time, you are working twenty-four hours a day.

IH: I don’t know if you’ve seen Jack Clayton’s film The Pumpkin Eater. It’s a very good film in which Ann Bancroft is perpetually pregnant. In the film, being a container is portrayed in more negative terms than those you describe; there is also the idea that a container is by definition empty if it is not filled.

AF: No, because it is a container that transforms. It’s not a vase.

IH: You said something about the woman writer that evoked a void for me, and that is something I have experienced very powerfully. I often think that an actress is empty, that her function is just to be filled, that she is waiting, and that this emptiness can often be painful.

AF: Your work as an actress often makes me think of a writing that allows blanks to appear in the sentence, or silence. It has to do with a certain gaze, a coloration or a transparency of the skin, a mask that can appear on the face of the actress, but that has nothing to do with make-up or lighting; it gives the event a new opacity or transparency or something in between the two, something opaline. Perhaps a little amorphous, even, as in a certain nonfigurative art. It is very concrete, as though the flesh or the drive, something from inside, was breaking through the surface. It seems to me that this is an unconscious that is more fleshly than Freud’s unconscious, an elementary unconscious. I have always thought that the flesh was the fifth element. You have water and air with the Little Mermaid, fire with Joan of Arc or Malina, and you have earth—you’ve often been compared to a peasant woman. In reality, in human beings, these four elements are one and the same: flesh, which is their quintessence. And flesh thinks. It is primary thought, primal or archi-archaic thought.

IH: You are in fact expressing in very clear terms what I feel, sometimes in a confused way. I’m in a somewhat awkward position because, while I do feel I have the ability to think abstractly, I don’t necessarily have the ability to formulate that abstraction. That’s why I’m an actress. I would find it hard to write, for example, to work with the concreteness of words. I think I exist in the zone of nonformulation, which you need to be an actress. Or rather, being an actress is the only possible way to express that nonformulation. You were asking me if I’d ever thought of being a director; it seems to me that being a director means formulating things. Perhaps I exist in what you call the preunconscious, but I am also involved in the analysis of this nonformulation. I exist both within thought and within nonformulation.

AF: But you formulate it very well. Thought is preverbal too. Real thought, not philosophy, not theory. Psychoanalysis is brilliant in that it allows us to think with the drives, within the preverbal, and yet it becomes organized, becomes ordered, becomes clear. All at once we can perform an act that is not an acting out; an act that has been thought through somewhere else, something intimate that can be “excarnated,” expressed outside the flesh. Something is elaborated as though in a dream. It’s extraordinary to follow Colette through all her transitions: adolescent, androgynous homosexual, then actress, artist, writer, and then her relationship with her mother and her daughter as she transmits a particular experience, her relationship with the real, with the materiality of things, with nature and with animals. Children love her. I used to read Dialogues de bêtes to my daughter. Colette relates to the living-speaking. And yet the fact that she never took any historical stand bothers me. She does have a blind spot, after all.

IH: I’d like you to repeat what you were saying about feminism.

AF: During the feminist years, when everyone was a feminist and when everyone thought I was a feminist, Simone de Beauvoir loathed psychoanalysis—even though one of her heroines (Anne in The Mandarins) was a psychoanalyst, albeit a very oedipal one, very father-oriented—and had a horror of what she called motherhood. De Beauvoir could not see the ethical dimension of gestation, the narcissistic experience of the fact of being pregnant and producing something with her body. In those feminist years, when everyone thought everyone was a feminist, there was one model: one man in two is a woman, and two men in two are men. The only possibility for women was to become men who were like other men.

IH: I have the impression that women are now having children in order to experience the truth behind what you’re describing.

AF: Yes, we’ve now gotten away from the madness of sterility. Fortunately …

IH: I think that I like having children as much as I enjoy playing a role.

AF: Is that because you feel empty or, on the contrary, because you feel you are going to make something?

IH: Because I feel I’m going to make something.

AF: You are going to make a little miracle, a surprise, happen. What event could be more important than a birth? There are also metaphorical births, of course: a part, a play, a film.

IH: I’d have found it difficult to put up with a life in which there was nothing but metaphors. For a metaphor to exist, there had to be some reality behind it. Malina was made in a state of great euphoria, and it was very pleasurable because my children were there. It was summer, and we did everything together. In concrete terms this meant I could play ball in the corridor with my son and then be on the set immediately afterward, even for difficult scenes. And most of the time it’s like that. I’d say it’s a way of constantly displacing the center. You might think that the roles are central, but in fact it’s often the children. Roles and creative life are peripheral. But that periphery exists only in relation to a center. Part of this desire for children is obviously a desire to go back to one’s own childhood, to bring it back to life.

AF: You are very calm in many films, and one has the feeling that it isn’t you who lacks something. You are tranquil in Loulou . When a woman is not in a state of lack, when she is in her body, that’s all it takes for hysteria to manifest itself on the masculine side. One of Freud’s strokes of genius was showing that hysteria is not the prerogative of just one sex. That is obvious in all your roles. I am sure that you’re filled with the thought of something you know, but not necessarily in a theoretical way. It’s a kind of quiet strength, and there’s something right about it. If we worked on all your films we would see the emergence of something that you’ve created, the contemporary contribution you’ve made to the cinema as a woman. Someone could write you a great scenario with a heroine of our time, a woman who accomplishes things.

IH: Yes, I feel as though I’m excavating my own film inside all the films I move through. All these women’s destinies are metaphors for the condition of women, but also for my own life.

AF: The actress has an ethical function. It’s central to her desires. When we’re adolescents, we’re looking for new identifications and we change, not our point of view, but our point of desire. One of the most important things of all is giving girls beautiful thoughts.

IH: And that means running the risk of giving them thoughts that might look like bad thoughts.

AF: Beautiful thoughts, not good thoughts! Form is important too.

IH: What counts for me is rhythm. There is a rhythm to Malina and even things that are funny at times; it’s not a slow film.

AF: That’s what is missing in French films. Dynamics and cadence. They lack rhythm.

IH: In France, we identify tragedy with slowness and comedy with speed. Speed has nothing to do with it. Labiche is one of the funniest of all comic authors, and his plays are never funnier than when they go slowly.

In your view, is cinema primarily about actors?

AF: Actresses have a lot to say about their unconscious, their childhood, their permanent gestation, about the state of being an actress. State is the word you use most often.

IH: Yes. It takes my whole personality into account. What’s more, I prefer being to saying.

AF: Perhaps you are more of a poet than a narrator. A state is the state of being in love, the state of passion, the poetic state. I’d also like to talk to you about the voice in Orlando, which is a magnificent piece of work. In a very fine text that we are going to publish with Des femmes, Ingeborg Bachmann says that the voice, the human voice, has all the privileges of the living (le vivant)—warmth and coldness, gentleness and harshness—and that it supports a quest for perfection, for the truth. Like your voice in Orlando. Sound systems have completely transformed the theater by giving it a real modernity.

IH: It’s only by working on the voice that you can express the movement of the language as, not the expression of thought, but the expression of, well, a state.

AF: The language sprang from different parts of your body, from different strata, and it took on volume. It became three-dimensional.

IH: The signification, the meaning of the text might have come to the fore. However, that was not the point, precisely because the beauty of this language lies in its not being reduced to its meaning, but rather in its being extended to something much more expansive, virtually limitless. That was an abstract approach to the word. The point was to use vocal and sonic forms to show feelings and sensations. With Bob Wilson the issue of what the words meant never came up. That’s how we were able to communicate with each other. That reminds me of something very beautiful that Grotowski once said: acting is not something that happens between you and the audience, not something that happens between you and yourself, it is something that happens between you and something very mysterious that is above you. Something like the unconscious, moreover. In Orlando I had the impression that I was expressing the virtuality of dance. It expressed itself through me, and I am no dancer. Wilson succeeded perfectly in getting it across by going through what I was. I prefer to go through what might be called the lie of a metaphor or the secret of a metaphor. Metaphors can be deciphered, but deciphering one is more difficult than deciphering actual words. And metaphor implies form.

AF: You must know that text by Kleist, the essay on puppet theater where he expresses the view that the most rigorous form can give access to the greatest abstraction, to what is most amorphous. It can succeed in creating a grace that is more than human. It’s both aesthetics and ethics. This is not mysticism. It’s art. The greater the formal rigor, the more we can express the inexpressible, what you call the invisible.

IH: Yes, Orlando was like that. Avery abstract form that made it possible to say everything. But if I try to talk about the inexpressible, I don’t stand a chance. If we concentrate too much on naming things, there is always the slightly anxious feeling that the outcome might be an irreparable loss. I don’t know what of. I was just talking about having the impression that a building is collapsing. I often have a feeling of being in great danger; hence my paranoia about interviews. It’s not capricious; it’s a real anxiety about the spoken word, about giving away secrets, unveiling mysteries, as though it might lead to an irreparable loss. I don’t know what of.

AF: That’s one of the reasons I have such difficulty in publishing. It’s not just the irreparable effect of unveiling things; it is the issue of who I am addressing. Who can you address yourself to when it’s something intimate, something intimately real that you are bringing out into the open, as though you were extracting a precious stone or precious flesh. What will become of it, who is going to do what with it? The world is cruel to the things that women do. It is only within the analytic space that it is possible to believe one will be received and protected. And even that’s not true because analytic theory gives women a rough time too.

IH: When you’re an actress it’s hard to resist both the temptation and the need to be popular, because we also depend on that for our survival. I resist it as much as I can, but with great difficulty. Nathalie Sarraute was saying the other day that she has always walked a lonely road and that it didn’t matter to her. I too feel that I am walking a lonely road, but it doesn’t really bother me!

AF: You feel lonely?

IH: Yes. I get lots of work, but trying to walk a very specific road, come what may, is not always easy. It’s like pursuing an obsession. But, let’s be honest, what matters in this life is choosing, after all, and not just putting up with things.

AF: Why did you want to see me? I can understand wanting to see Nathalie Sarraute …

IH: Precisely because of what we have just been saying about androgyny, about creation, about procreation. I’ve often wanted to talk about the relationship between the state of being an actress and motherhood. Godard has thought about the intimate circulation between life and the cinema. Those are things that lie at the heart of an actress’s intimacy, and I thought I would be able to talk about them with you. I was right.

I was very interested in what you said about the actress as container. I talked about this with Nathalie Sarraute too, but it took a different form. I talked with her about the absence of characters. I’ve been saying for a long time now that I no longer interpret characters (personnages), but that I interpret persons (personnes), and that the more abstract and apparently impossible to embody the substance I embody becomes, the easier it seems, paradoxically, to embody it. When a character is sketched out, dressed, I find it very difficult to get into the role. The more abstract, the more boundless the proposition, the more it can be embodied. Because when there are no limits I can throw myself into it, myself and my different states. When you talk about woman as container, about the way you can welcome a role into yourself, like a child, you’re talking about the same thing. I don’t define myself as an actress who interprets a character, who espouses a role, but as a person who welcomes another person. Talking to Nathalie Sarraute, I defined that approach in terms of form, style, and mind; talking to you, I define this approach in terms of the body. So I finally find myself all together! There is a mental approach to what I do, but that mental, cerebral element also involves the body.

AF: The brain is also part of the body. There are such things as brain hormones. And during pregnancy everything circulates. The child is swimming in brain hormones. We know that, but we also know very little about it; women know a lot of things, but their knowledge is closed off from scientific knowledge, and all my work is an attempt to bring out what we know without knowing it, yet at the same time knowing it. This is not abstract knowledge but subjective knowledge in which subjectivity, flesh, flesh and mind are not dissociated, but in a relation of exchange.

IH: Yes, that’s true. I have the impression of knowing without knowing, but knowing all the same.

AF: What is coming to the surface might be called the unconscious, the knowledge that you call “knowing all the same.” I think that Freud discovered the unconscious and that women have since discovered their bodies and the body in the unconscious. But these discoveries are not heard; hence the difficulty. What is madness? Not being listened to. You send out a message in a language they tell you is inaudible, foreign, hieroglyphic. It is a writing that still cannot be read.

IH: That’s why I became an actress: to decipher hieroglyphs.

AF: The key phrase in Freud’s work is “Where id was, there ego shall be …” I think that where id was, there women’s “I” shall be. It will be on the side of what I call the creation of life. Our future lies ahead of us, not behind; it will grow out of something that has lagged behind and not been thought through, something to which we, unlike men, do not need to return via incest. For women, there is no obsession with the eternal return. The prefix that characterizes women is pro-, that is, forward: procreation, proposition, programming. Pro is women’s preposition par excellence. The promise that, despite anything Claudel may have had to say,² women are now capable of keeping.