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HBO: Hugues, when Gary first approached you
about doing the film, what was your initial
reaction?
Hugues de Montalembert: I was not interested.
HBO: Why?
Hugues de Montalembert: I thought I had said everything in my book,
Eclipse. And I wanted to turn the page. But I
was myself a filmmaker, and I know how
difficult it is when you're a young filmmaker,
and I thought, why not give him this chance?
HBO: You two spent a great deal of time together.
This didn't happen overnight.
Hugues de Montalembert: It was a slow process, and I think Gary didn't
have a precise idea at first. But then the
project exploded in his hands, you know?
Gary Tarn: When I started this I was forty. Before then I
was working as a media composer based in
London, and I was writing a lot of music for
commercials and doing some short films. But
I very much wanted to move into scoring
longer films, and so I decided to put some of
my own money into a film project. I wanted to
make the kind of film that I would like to see.
I remembered the story about this painter
who had been attacked and blinded. And I
read Hugues book Eclipse. And it was just
one of those stories that made an impression
on me and I wondered what happened to that
man. I managed to track Hugues down
through his publisher. I kind of lied-I said I
was a British filmmaker and wanted to
discuss the idea of making an experimental
documentary with him.
So we met a few weeks later in Paris and I
outlined the way I thought we should go
about it. And Hugues was incredibly open
and had a lot of immediate sort of faith, and
said, well it sounds like a good idea, let's have
a go. And then he started to tell me a story
and I said, can I turn the machine on? And
he said sure. And we literally started on that
first day, and we spent just a couple of days
really just talking and recording interviews in
a very simple way, in a room on a sofa and a
chair, just talking.
HBO: You talk in the movie about this idea of seeing
in a different way as a blind person.
Hugues de Montalembert: I'm always amazed when you ask people to
describe something, they see nothing. So it's
a long topic, in fact. To see as a sighted
person is already a task. To see as a blind
person is another sport. Vision is a creation. I
think I say it in the film, vision is a creation.
Some people, they use their ears to listen to
noises because it gives them information.
Some people use their ears to listen to music,
and for other people, music is just a noise;
sometimes a disturbing noise. Many people
use their eyes like that. They use their eyes
to avoid obstacles, not to look at the world or
to understand something. In fact they are not
really interested in looking at all.
HBO: It reminds me a little of the American Indians
and how they speak of being in touch with
nature, and listening with your ears peeled.
Hugues de Montalembert: It's strange you say that because talking just
now I was thinking of the vision of the
aborigines in Australia, which is a vision that
we have no idea of.
Their reality is not my reality. Your reality is
not mine. The reality of the aborigines, they
live...further away. You see when you enter
that field, it's really extraordinary because
perception is one thing, it just an image which
is not formed in the eye, it's formed in the
brain. And that's where it becomes quite
creative.
HBO: What kind of reactions have you had thus far
from audiences?
Gary Tarn: If you put something out there that's a little
bit edgy, some people will just not get it at all
and some people will absolutely get it. Black
Sun is not an investigative film. It's about
poetry. I've seen it at many, many festivals
now and watched it with many audiences,
and watched people walk out and have their
lives changed, which is great. But many
people want a literal explanation for the film.
People hear this man talking about being
blind and making films in his head and they
say, Okay, so what you're showing is what
blind people see. And I say, well, you know,
honestly I never thought about that when I
was out with my camera. I was just looking.
And I thought, I'm sort of tracking my
journey. I'm going to these places--New York,
Pakistan, India, Paris-- as a sort of echo of the
places Hugues' had been to twenty years
earlier, but I'm gonna try and find my own
kind of language for it.
The way I see it is that there's sort of three
films. There's Hugues de Montalembert's
spoken story. There's Gary Tarn's visual
journey around America and India and
Europe. And then there's an orchestral
musical interpretation of a kind of
psychological sense of the whole film. And
they're three sort of points of a triangle that
pull between each other as the film goes on.
And you'll find that sometimes you're drifting
into the images and drifting away from the
story. Then sometimes you're drifting back
into the story, and sometimes you might drift
away from both of those and you're just
caught up in the emotional intensity of the
music. Well, that's what I rather hoped. In a
way this whole thing is an experiment to see
whether I could make a very simple, very low-
budget film but a big idea behind it, which is
to reawaken in people the beauty in the world,
and to see it in a different way.
HBO: You speak about your blindness, and how it
changed your life, without an ounce of self-
pity or bitterness.
Hugues de Montalembert: I would say that when something like that
happens to you, either you are beaten by it, or
you use it in a positive way. It doesn't make
you a saint. I remember once a blind person
making a lecture, and he said that since he
became blind he became so much better. And
it irritated me like you can't imagine. And I
stood up and I said, why don't you cut your
leg off? You will be even better. And I was
thrown out. [LAUGHTER]
I suppose if you cannot look out the window
to distract yourself, you better build the
window inside of you. And I think that's what
I built in the last years. It's to have a window
with which to put things in your head. I'm
deeply into writing, and I think that is a
world. I'm into writing and gardening for the
moment [CHUCKLES].
And somehow this hatred that is infused with
this kind of religious madness operates on
that same level. And at first it's hard to
accept, and at first you think only ignorant
people would ever believe this. And obviously
some of it is fear and ignorance and
scapegoating and blaming someone else, and
all those are part of it. But as I also
discovered, and I was shocked, there are
intelligent people that buy into this stuff.
And so I think we're always going to have hate
in the world, I mean, we know that's just part
of the equation. There's love, there's hate, but
this zealotry, this kind of fanaticism goes
beyond the Jews. The very definition of what
a Jew is has become totally plastic.
HBO: In the film, Hugues, you say, If you find a way
to dance with people, to dance with life,
nothing wrong can happen to you.
Hugues de Montalembert: You have a lot of stories in old Chinese Taoist
texts or Indian Buddhist texts of those people
going in the forest, in the jungle, and they
meditate, and suddenly the tiger comes and
does nothing. It's very much about the scent,
the perfume you exude from your body, which
is in tune with everything. And nobody feels
aggressive and everything goes well. I
experienced it very strongly in India and
absolutely it was sort of madness, but in fact
it was the proof that, no, if you are full of
peace, nothing wrong happens to you.
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