01  SUMMER 2025

Sam Warren Miell: Moullet seems to me like someone whose work is very much of a piece. He’s closer to a Chaplin figure in how everything is sort of an emanation of a character that he’s playing. Even his criticism seems to come from this persona.

Jack Seibert: The persona of Luc Moullet might be an interesting place to begin because it’s such an important aspect of his work. Watching these films, I feel like they almost foreshadow this social media world of self-branding. Some of his short films seem like they would work just as well as TikTok videos. He’s so intent on building this brand of Luc Moullet, which I think makes an interesting contrast with some of his criticism, which is against film language. Well, maybe it’s not a contrast. Maybe that’s a question to pose: why does he want to build this brand? Is it a cinematic mission or is it a self-branding mission?

Benjamin Crais: As with his cinema as a whole, the economic and the aesthetic seem inextricable when it comes to the Luc Moullet persona. I’m thinking of the great cover of the DVD Luc Moullet en shorts (2009). That persona is defined by the fact that he predominantly makes short, cheap films. These films are also less well known than those by other Cahiers du cinéma critics who went on to become filmmakers — the subject of Le Prestige de la mort (2006), the film that pivots most on the ‘Luc Moullet persona’. Before we started recording, someone mentioned Woody Allen and I think that might be an interesting point of comparison with the somewhat self-deprecating persona Moullet presents.

Matt M. Hare: Moullet is not neurotic in the way that Allen is. With Allen, there’s a real performance of his tortured psyche, whereas in a weird way Moullet is very open as a figure, especially in the later films. Of course he’s taking the piss out of himself, but he’s not bemoaning the world being against him. It’s an interesting difference of ego, especially in something like Toujours moins (2010). Think of him struggling passively with the car washing machine — it’s a sad scene, but we’ve all experienced that sad scene. He’s not making a point out of his unique incapacity to do this, which is maybe what a more traditional comic actor would do. It’s just a totally quotidian struggle, which is the kind of figure he wants to represent.

Thomas Delahaye: The neurosis in Woody Allen also comes from how he can’t help but place himself in his movies, because he feels like he’s the one person who must do the movies, so to speak; whereas it feels like Moullet is definitely able to estrange himself from this need. Even if the Moullet persona is neurotic, this is a neurosis that generalizes itself. Moullet is always a participant in this eccentricity such that his persona, unlike Allen’s, acts like a centrifugal force with respect to the film.

MMH: I assume this is partially because they’re cheap films. With say Essai d’ouverture (1988), my assumption is that it’s not that he’s producing a Chaplin or an Allen clown character, but that the cheapest and easiest way to make that movie is at home with yourself as the only prop.

Levi Butler: Woody Allen’s neurosis concerns his feelings of inadequacy, as well as a certain nostalgia: he has to excuse himself for not being as good as past figures that he values. It’s not that way with Moullet. He’s not trying to excuse himself. He’s trying to be as honest and transparent as possible. He reminds me of Buñuel’s comment: ‘We do not live in the best of all possible worlds.’ In Moullet’s films, it constantly feels like the world is not built for us. It seems like it should be, because we made it, but at every moment there are all these things that don’t seem to fit with who we are. Putting himself into the film is actually more of a universalizing gesture. He’s not trying to embrace his particularity so much as showcase his humility.

SWM: Even though there’s a clear link between Moullet and a Chaplin or a Tati in the films that he acts in himself, he’s more genuinely self-deprecating, in the sense that he shows himself in a more pathetic light. The Luc Moullet character of Luc Moullet’s films is often at an extreme of dysfunctionality — not being able to swim, not being able to open a bottle of coke, or in Anatomy of a Relationship (1976), where the whole premise is that he can’t bring his partner to orgasm. There’s a particular joy in being the king of being pathetic. At the same time, there’s something interesting with Moullet whereby the quintessential Moullet character, if there is such a thing, is someone who is both constantly coming up against obstacles in the world and also quite good at outsmarting the world, often in ways that aren’t really relevant and don’t really make sense. Like in Brigitte et Brigitte (1966), where they rub out the prices of all the books they’re buying, or in Les Contrebandières (1968) where the banknotes are soaked so that they weigh more. There are always these little ways of getting around things or ways of gaming the system. But at the same time, there are all these pathetic failures to operate properly.

TD: Yes, the insurmountable world. And then the attempts of the humans to do things, and they try every single variation of jumping over the bars or biking up the mountain.

JS: The word ‘system’ comes up all the time, like in The Zsigmondy System (2000). There’s this interesting line in an article about Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini,1950) by Fred Camper, where he says that Rossellini has no system to his filmmaking — he’ll do a pan and it doesn’t really mean anything in particular, it just works for that moment. ^[1] He doesn’t establish a pattern of meaning via his mise en scène, and I think that’s a key thing for Moullet as well. He has patterns, for sure, he has structures within which he makes things, but they’re not structures of meaning. That’s also reflected in his article on film language. ^[2] What’s important is not only what he does, but why he does it, and to me that involves an element of transparency, which I think is the key to a lot of his films. What’s a way to portray the world or myself or anything with as little in between as possible? Which makes him stand out from Tati or Chaplin or Jerry Lewis, who are kind of obscuring the world in favour of a joke. The Jerry Lewis character also always falls flat on his face, but he always gets the girl. Or he’s a genius even though he messes everything up. And there’s something very obscuring about that. There’s transparency and system, and I think Moullet does see a fundamental incompatibility between those two things.

TD: That’s a good word, because transparency feels very central in the way that he doesn’t fix on the single character, but always has several people negotiating and creating the scenario. There’s a simultaneity about it. And that’s what’s interesting in the geographical aspects of his movies. For example, that one location on the cliffside in Les Contrebandières that he goes back to twenty years later in The Comedy of Work (1988). He found a particular location that worked in multiple ways, in multiple films, decades apart.

BC: Geography is also very important for Moullet’s character. Although he was born in Paris, he continually emphasizes his familial and recreational relationship to the mountains. To the extent that there’s a critical or aslant relationship to the ‘system’ (that is, to modernity) in his films, it’s often grounded in an identification with the countryside—not unlike Straub in certain ways.

SWM: On your point Thomas, about where he returns to film, I knew there was something about this in the memoir and I just found it. ^[3] He calls it his ‘alpine Yoknapatawpha’, referring to Faulkner’s fictional county in Mississippi: ‘a flat passage embedded in a vertical rock face, known as the “sentier des Bans”, which became the only place where I would shoot four times.’ He also uses it in Au champ d’honneur (1988) and Le Prestige de la mort. I think he takes real pride in being Alpine and knowing things about that world that perhaps the Parisian people who he’s around in the film world don’t know. When he recounts stories of shooting, he almost takes pleasure in the accidents these crews and actors that he takes to the Alps have because they don’t know how to mountaineer, and he talks about how he never gets lost in mountains, and so on.

SWM: To return to the subject of transparency, Moullet has always been extremely transparent about the way his films are made. He will say what the budget for all of them was, how many admissions all of them had, how much money he made, whether he made his money back, who he sold the film to. So there is an element of demystification, I think, in his relationship with cinema. He doesn’t want cinematic objects to be separated for too long from the economy that sustains them, especially given he sees himself, I think, as having occupied a unique place in relation to that economy and having been able to consistently make extremely cheap films from the early sixties up to his retirement, basically by exhausting every way in which someone in his position may have been able to make films. I think there’s a sort of glory of being the king of the anthill in Moullet, like he’s triumphed in a way. But it’s a knowingly pathetic triumph. It’s a triumph whose glory is on such a small scale. So few people care about it at all, but that almost makes it better because he did it on a terrain where nobody else even cared to find if it existed. But he made it happen.

TD: What was the highest budget movie that he did?

BC: The Route 17 movie, right?

SWM: Yes, Les Naufragés de la D17 (2002), which Paolo Branco produced in the period where he was producing about eleven films a year. The film that had the most admissions was Brigitte et Brigitte, which I suppose has to do with the moment it came out?

JS: That makes sense.

SWM: There’s a constant return to the theme of outsmarting and making do. For example, in that film, for the scenes that are filmed in the lecture theatre at the Sorbonne, they would film from 57 past the hour to 3 past the next hour, which is when people were changing class, so they never had to get permission. And for almost every film, there’s a story like this. It almost seems like more important than the making of the film was the fact that they got one over on the world by doing it.

BC: He has that story about selling A Girl is a Gun (1971) to foreign markets as an action-packed Western starring Jean-Pierre Léaud — he describes it as a kind of smuggling.

SWM: He talks a lot about being able to persuade foreign TV channels into buying the films and using strange accounting anomalies to his benefit, and things like that.

BC: Like the bank error that funds Anatomy of a Relationship.

SWM: Yeah.

TD: I really admire that sort of tenacity.

JS: I know a lot of people who run sort of similar schemes in the Hollywood world now, funding features through short film grants and shoddy accounting and shooting where you’re not supposed to. But I think it’s so unique in his case because the movies that I see this being done for are just bad versions of Hollywood movies, whereas Moullet really does it as part of his whole ethos. As Sam was saying, it’s as important as actually making the film itself or even as important as the content within it. My favourite joke in Up and Down (1993) is when they’re all wearing the number like they’re pretending to run the marathon, in order to steal the food and the water from the desk, but then the guy with the same number shows up and there’s a moment between them. It’s so funny because it’s such a minor thing: why would anybody be mad at them for taking water from this desk? And, with the bike race, they’re already doing something that’s equivalent to running a marathon. It’s the same thing with Barres (1984). It’s a tiny amount of money at stake — obviously it adds up over time, but the fare evasion is more about sticking one to the man… Although that almost makes it sound trite, I don’t know…

BC: It’s a kind of peasant cunning, I think.

MMH: Moullet’s films are extremely attentive to — almost obsessed with — the real cost of things. That makes them unusual with respect to Hollywood cinema, or really most cinema, because in another film even if it’s part of the scenario that the characters are poor or struggling or whatever, what’s at stake is not the specific difference of whether the machine steals your coin, and what that means in terms of your weekly budget. But with Moullet, that is the fabric of the film. When you watch Toujours plus (1994) or Toujours moins, and many other films of his, such as Les Contrebandières, what you’re seeing is a precise economy, what the difference of ten francs means. That’s often what you retain after viewing them: bargaining over money and a kind of annoyance at the things that have been taken. This is very specific to Moullet.

TD: Numbers are also central to The Zsigmondy System: the number of the little hovel you sleep in, and the number of the dinner that you receive. I slid into a bit of a rabbit hole around that movie because I felt like he was talking about something mathematical. There’s a Zsigmondy theorem and I was trying to figure out what the Zsigmondy theorem was, but then I realised the film had nothing to do with that, it has to do with the alpinist Zsigmondy, who is related to the mathematician… In any case, there are a lot of numbers involved in the movie and it feels like this impersonal sort of structure, like humans are just creating an impenetrable system for people who just need a place to lie down in the middle of the mountain.

BC: This kind of disproportion seems totally central to both the form and subject matter of Moullet’s films. As with the titles of the movies Matt just referenced — ‘always more, always less’ — two forms of disproportion in relation to the scale of the human body (and particularly that of Luc Moullet).

MMH: Or in Barres, where the matter of proportion and disproportion is central to the joke, of course. The question is ‘How much can you fit through this hole?’, and so you build a barrier that’s designed to block the body in this specific way, but maybe the body can move in an unexpected way, and once on its side it can fit through the hole, at the loss of some dignity.

BC: Exactly. It’s also the source of the gags in Ma première brasse (1981). He says he doesn’t know how to swim because he doesn’t like to be out of his depth: a bathtub is fine because his feet touch the floor, but the ocean is far too vast.

LB: Based on what Thomas was talking about, I was thinking about the focus on numbers and running up against specific material limitations. Because I feel like in so many cases, even if you’re a Jerry Lewis or a Jacques Tati, where ostensibly your character is low status, the audience is still kind of aware that the entire world around the character is constructed, and that this person is actually a god or a master of the universe. But with Luc Moullet you never get the sense that he has control over his world, and it’s actually more about, how do I find comedy within an existing world that is contingent, which has all these aspects that don’t make sense, that seem random and not necessary, how do I navigate those existing spaces? That’s actually rare for comedy, unless you’re talking about really early Chaplin where he’s out in a park somewhere, before he had the budget to create a whole universe around himself. In that way, Moullet is almost more like the Marx Brothers or W. C. Fields, where the comedy comes from a lack of interest in constructing the world as this perfectly immaculate thing. It can be kind of disjointed.

JS: Or in the piece about Fuller, there’s the section heading ‘Anti-Tati’. ^[4] He doesn’t really expand on that at all, but I think it works for Moullet, absolutely for the reasons that you’re saying: Moullet’s world is disordered. Jokes are very ordered things, and Moullet’s jokes are interesting in that they don’t set up a perfect punch line; they are anti-narrative in that way. With a traditional joke, you in some sense need to expect the punch line in order for it to be funny. But I don’t sit there dying of laughter when I watch Moullet’s films, because each moment is totally unexpected. That’s what’s so amazing about Barres: you expect it to be very ordered, but it isn’t. I think if Tati or Jerry Lewis had made it, each scenario, maybe each shot would have been from the same angle, or something like that, and you would establish a system. But what’s amazing in the film that Moullet made is that each one is totally different. It’s not like a knock-knock joke, where the repeated form and the changes within that form are what make it funny. Here, there’s no form really. That is what’s interesting about his films and kind of the whole point.

SWM: They’re definitely not funny in the way that a Jerry Lewis film or a Marx Brothers film is funny. They also don’t have what in Anglophone comedy and probably also in a lot of French comedy is considered the most important thing, which is timing. They’re not rhythmically tight. He doesn’t parcel out the time between the jokes or even the scenarios in a way that really makes sense or emphasises the humour. The films just take the time necessary for an idea to happen before it’s onto the next one. And sometimes, as you say, the punch line, so to speak, the actual material of the joke will arrive rhythmically at the wrong moment in the sequence for it to actually function as a visual gag, but it doesn’t really seem to matter to him very much.

JS: I’m just thinking about this now because I recently rewatched Up and Down, and I had a memory of that joke that I just described with the bib numbers and the fraud at the runner’s table. In my memory it was really funny and perfectly timed, like you’re saying, and the guy with the same number comes out at the right time and everything. So I went into the movie really expecting to laugh at that moment. But it was so not funny! It had become much funnier in memory. There’s a work with memory here — which is a classic thing to talk about in cinema — where Moullet gives you the raw material for a joke, but sometimes describing the films makes more sense than actually watching them. You can describe Barres to someone really easily, or Essai d’ouverture or A Girl is a Gun. You could describe all these films, but when you actually watch them, the experience is very different. And that does remind me of a lot of his criticism and the things he looked for in movies, which are the things that don’t line up, the things that only exist in the moment of watching that get polished over and become ‘better’ in memory. But again, we’re back to this exactitude of counting up every cent.

MMH: Do you think that is what interests Moullet with his criticism: those moments that are evanescent, but then retain their value in memory? If I remember correctly from his essay collection, Piges choisies, he boasts about his good memory for cinema facts. The other Cahiers critics were impressed, and the reason he got a job is that he had this incredible encyclopaedic capacity for putting together lists of films when other people didn’t necessarily have access to that information. He also says something like, ‘I simply made the innovation that no one else did, which was to go to the library.’ When we think of critics from that period, it’s crucial to remember that they often didn’t have access to the films. That’s perhaps an obvious thing to say, but we’re discussing a situation in which as a critic you’re writing about films that maybe nobody has seen, and you’re remembering the scene you’re writing about, perhaps from years ago, but you can’t go back and rewatch it. When it comes to something like Moullet’s Fuller piece, I don’t know if he’d just been to a Fuller retrospective, but presuming that he hadn’t, then he’s recounting scenarios from about fifteen movies, seen over a long period, and attempting to crisscross them and remember exactly what order all of the events happened in, and build a certain story around that, and that’s really a central role that the critic occupied. That’s something that we’ve completely lost as a generation. It’s interesting that you say that Moullet is looking for moments in the film which shine specifically in memory, because that is also in part how his critical writing functions, as a catalogue of what he was able to drag back and recall. And he presents you with such moments — that was interesting, that was good, those moments didn’t play so well. The critical texts, the early ones anyway, are often catalogues in that way.

JS: I think to him what’s interesting are the moments that other people would forget, which is exactly what you’re saying: the moments that, when you describe something abstractly, you would skip over. But he is so attuned to those details, which corresponds with his messy editing, or his mistakes in timing. Those are things that you abstract over when you describe a movie, and a lot of his fellow critics at the time were often writing in these crazy abstractions.

SWM: He says he was called ‘Monsieur Filmographie’ because he could remember filmographies, and he could also read English better than most of the Cahiers critics because he studied English, so he would go to the library — he says that Truffaut didn’t know that libraries existed — he would go to the library and really quickly bone up on things. So he would know more than anyone in Paris about a certain filmmaker because he’d read through American newspapers really quickly. I think his relationship with the idea of the young cinephile is quite funny, because obviously it’s what he’s lampooning in Les Sièges de l’Alcazar (1989), but he’s sort of lampooning it from the position of having been the greatest ever example of the young cinephile who knows everything and has seen more than anyone else. For example he mentions that he was actually the first person in Paris who liked Losey, or I think it’s also important to him that he was basically the only person, as far as I can tell, besides the Mac-Mahon people, who already liked Cottafavi. So there’s a dichotomy between being this self-deprecating, pathetic figure — because there’s something pathetic about being a teenager who’s memorized the filmography of Edgar Ulmer — and the fact that he’s actually kind of really proud to have been that; ‘I’m actually better than anyone else at it and I’m the only guy who’s seen every DeMille film and remembers them.’

MMH: There’s another weird dichotomy here. On the one hand, Moullet is so clearly a cinephilic director. He’s also a very cinephilic critic, and part of his later work is reckoning with this. And it’s absolutely the canon of classic Hollywood cinema at stake, to a certain extent. Of course it’s his own version of that canon — the canon that those critics from the fifties and sixties had — but it’s still founded on figures like Fuller. Yet on the other hand, his films are not, at least as I see them, very cinephilic movies. If you picked all of the major French directors in that period, and if you compared A Girl is a Gun or Les Contrebandières to the other New Wave films that are being made in the sixties — obviously in the seventies things get weirder — I’d say that they seem less haunted by cinephilia than you would expect. For example, Les Contrebandières is named after Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955), that’s the French title. So you assume, okay, this is going to be a very self-referential film. But it’s not. Moullet’s imaginary, to me, is not primarily or exclusively cinephilic.

TD: What stuck out to me about the Fuller piece, and sort of always has from when I read it for the first time, was not only his recall of what happens in Run of the Arrow, but something he says about the way that the political discussions are filmed — something like, ‘I keep waiting for the reverse shot, it never comes.’ It’s as if Fuller has no interest in creating something if it isn’t theatrical, or connected to theatre. In my head, this is a very small aspect, almost a miniature move that Fuller has made and that Moullet as a young cinephile is attached to. In some ways the thing that makes Moullet less burdened with cinephilia is that it is these small things that he sees in movies that he wants to reproduce, or at least to find those small things in his own movies, the interest in the small and in the minutiae of something. There’s an alternate universe where The Zsigmondy System is an hour and a half long Hollywood buddy movie, but it’s just this extremely tiny and discrete movie.

SWM: It’s interesting to me how he seems to be much less haunted by American mise en scène of the fifties than the others, despite having, with Rivette, maybe the best understanding of it, having grasped it so completely in some of his articles. When he talks about his own films, he makes a virtue of the fact that he’s only ever filmed four tracking shots, partly because he’s famous for a line about tracking shots. When he’s talking in his memoir about Les Contrebandières, he says he settled on making every shot forty to sixty seconds because that means they’re not so short that you have to do loads of setups, but they’re not so long that if something goes wrong, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve been shooting for three minutes.’ With any of the other New Wave people, if they said something like that, you’d think they were sort of bluffing, in the way that Rivette often bluffed about removing control from himself or being more blasé because it was a way for him to get over this sort of obsession and intellectualism about mise en scène that he’d nurtured. But with Moullet it actually seems to be the case. That is how he would think. He wouldn’t be on set and be thinking about Hitchcock and Fuller and all these things that he’s seen, that he knows so well, and thinking, ‘Oh, but I’m just shooting a shot where the camera isn’t doing anything.’

He even talks about his preference for a ‘1910 frontal camera’ over angles and things. This is an important part of Moullet as a filmmaker — I think he’s maybe the one who is the most influenced by early silent cinema. When he’s talking about the things he’s seeing as inspiration for his films, it’s very often DeMille, 1910s or ’20s DeMille. I didn’t realise that for Le Prestige de la mort, the starting point was a remake of a DeMille film from 1918, where a guy tries to switch his identity with a dead body. It makes sense because there’s something about those DeMille films from the early part of his career, and also a lot of other films from the teens, where these problems don’t necessarily exist so much because they’re just happy frontally filming things. And this is maybe an idealisation, but it’s the least neurotic moment to look at as a moment of inspiration because it’s a moment where everything’s up for grabs and it’s impossible to have an anxiety of influence yet. So it makes sense to me that he would align himself with that period of Hollywood more than any of the other members of the New Wave, who are much more aligned with post-war cinema, because I think for him, filming is almost a return to what you could imagine the feeling of being Cecil B. DeMille in 1917 was. You don’t have all these things on your back, all this knowledge. You just want to film something. You just want to keep making films and filming things.

LB: He also takes influence not just from early silent film, but also really abject movies like Don Weis and also Harry Revier, the Child Bride guy, stuff like that, movies that anyone else would ignore. The difference between DeMille and Hitchcock is that DeMille is a director who is ostensibly prestige, but who’s actually abject, and Hitchcock is ostensibly abject, but he’s actually very prestigious, and so I think that something of Moullet’s love for people like DeMille has to do with that termitic quality of the work. Same with The Black Scorpion, right?

BC: While we’re on the subject of the films or traditions informing Moullet, I think it’s worth mentioning that many of his shorts evoke explicitly documentary genres: the educational film and the travelogue. Films like Essai d’ouverture and Ma première brasse are almost mock educational documentaries — how to open a Coke bottle, how to swim — and numerous shorts ape the form of the travelogue (e.g. Foix (1994)). For a filmmaker so informed by Hollywood, the documentary form seems very central for him.

JS: I totally agree, and that’s something that I’d love to ask the group: why does he make these? What is the point of them? How are we supposed to watch them? Who’s supposed to watch them? And what are you supposed to get out of them? Obviously that’s a huge question, but I do think it’s almost easier to imagine these films being like the TV that they wheel into your classroom and show something on, that that’s more understandable than seeing them in a theater. There was a Moullet retrospective here in LA. I only made it to one of the showings. It was very strange, just an odd feeling. It was pretty crowded because the tickets were free, but there weren’t many laughs, you know? And it’s just an odd feeling. I don’t know why he made these. Who’s supposed to watch them? I’m shocked there were admissions at all. And I think it’s interesting to tie this back to the cinephilia question — he may be the least haunted, but he is by far the most ‘for cinephiles only’ of all the New Wave directors. So to me, that’s a contradiction, and I wonder what he thought of it. And what we think of it: what role do these films play in the world? Because even though Godard is haunted by cinephilia, he’s touching more people. You could ask a random person, maybe they got something out of Pierrot le Fou (1965). I don’t think most people would get anything out of Essai d’ouverture.

MMH: I don’t know about that. I think if you screened Toujours moins as ‘a political film’, it’s perfectly actual. It’s a piece of agitprop in a more effective and less dialectically overcoded way than something that Godard would produce. It’s very direct in its political propaganda, in a certain sense. It’s not how they circulated, but I don’t think that Moullet’s films are obscure. There’s something interesting here, which I’m stealing from my friend Jack, a different Jack. We’d been reading Mourlet, and this goes back to DeMille actually. There’s a part in ‘On a Misunderstood Art’ entitled ‘DeMille superior to Hitchcock’. ^[5] More or less Mourlet says something like — I’m probably misquoting this — that cinema ought to focus on magnificent or exceptional objects, by which he means the body of the exceptional actor, and not on ‘mediocre’ objects, which he thinks aren’t worthy of cinematic exaltation, which can’t be an object of ‘fascination’. And my friend Jack said, well, if you wanted to pick out the filmmaker of the mediocre object, it’s Moullet. Moullet is choosing to film objects which from a ‘Mac-mahonian’ perspective can’t be heroized; they’re not really what you’re supposed to film, if you’re filming ‘cinema’. That’s quite a political gesture.

TD: Do you think that Moullet thinks that? I’m not as versed in the debates around mise en scène, but do you think that he sees mise en scène in itself as something of a mystification of some sort of thing that he’s trying to make transparent? Or is there something else going on with his relationship with mise en scène? Because I’m curious how he does relate to that, because that is such a striking point you made, Matt. Godard would not make that kind of political film. It’s the complete opposite in some ways.

MMH: The demystification aspect is interesting. When Moullet films things, it’s a very first-order operation. This is another way of putting the transparency point. When Moullet films the pizza machine, he’s really trying to ask: how does the pizza machine look, and what is it, and what does it do now that you’ve replaced the guy that makes you a pizza with the automat that produces a pizza? What is that? And he’s trying to set up the camera in such a way that you see the pizza machine as a pizza machine, not as an absorbing cinematographic spectacle in which the pizza machine is a beautiful element. And that’s a totally different gesture, you know?

SWM: I do think there’s a real feeling in the short films, the ones made for television, the travelogues and the Toujours plus, Toujours moins films, of ‘I want to show you these things, because if you could see these things, you would see how crazy these things are.’ The shot that always stands out to me is one in Foix, the aerial shot of the prison and the cultural center, and he tells you it’s the cultural center, tells you it’s the prison, then it pans and it’s the cemetery. And they’re all in a row. What stands out is the phatic quality, if you like, of a shot like that: ‘Look, I mean, come on, look at this.’ With respect to mise en scène, there’s much more of a feeling in Moullet of not being so worried about being able to just show and get people to look, to direct the eye towards this and then you will see something. Maybe an older idea that goes right back to the beginning of the cinematograph, of filming as a way to just be able to show people things. He mentions that the most important thing he learned about making documentaries is that you need to have quiet shoes, so that people don’t notice you turning around and seeing them. I think it’s almost like he films these things because filming them is an opportunity to look at them and then to be able to say to other people, ’look at this.’ The camera is not so much a way of interpreting the world as it is a way of being able to record things that can then speak for themselves and create this picture of the insanity of some sort of situation, the lack of sense.

JS: I do agree with that in the sense of his approach to mise en scène, or actually in terms of his approach to composition and framing and angles and things like that. But he does often comment and feel the need to comment on everything which I think is interesting. You think of The Belly of America (1996), which ostensibly should speak for itself, but there’s a voiceover, and I wonder what the function of that voiceover is. I mean, it’s present in a lot of his films, to interpret what we’re seeing, and he even has this comment — I think it’s in the interview he did that’s on the MUBI website — that he says he likes doing the short films because he can fully visualize the entire mise en scène beforehand, or the entire découpage, actually, which is essentially saying he’s storyboarding the entire thing before he’s even gone to the location to film these ostensible travelogues or documentaries. So I think there is this element of fiction in there, but I don’t think that takes away from the idea of transparency. It’s a marriage of the two, for sure.

MMH: This is potentially a dangerous thing to get into, but you could consider Moullet as a découpage filmmaker more than a mise en scène filmmaker. That is, if you think of découpage and mise en scène as in a sense the same operation, but orientated in opposite directions: from the world to the shots, and from the frame to the world.

LB: I would say Moullet is more of a presentational filmmaker than a representational filmmaker. As Christian Metz put it, a shot of a gun is not equivalent in meaning to the word ‘gun’ but instead the phrase: ‘here is a gun.’ And I think there’s a spectrum of how much filmmakers trust that precept that the shot on its own can present you with something, and that’s enough. Some feel that in order to actually get to the sense of what it is, we have to cut it up into a bunch of little pieces to give you more of an evocation or an effect. Moullet trusts the object to speak for itself.

BC: ‘Presentational’ is a nice way of getting at this notion of transparency we’ve been circling around. It’s been hovering in the background of our discussion about economy and transparency, but obviously Genèse d’un repas (1978) is totally central to this, especially the final minutes when Moullet turns to the economy of filmmaking: where and how celluloid is produced.

SWM: I definitely agree. The amazing thing about Genèse d’un repas to me is that it shows you what he could have done if he’d had the inclination to do that every time — which I don’t think is a better thing than what he did. That film has an incredible amount of information and numbers. He’s so precise about everything in that film, every detail. He wants to make sure that he exhausts the economy he’s talking about in all of its relations, and even though it’s two hours, I find that movie too much to take in on a single viewing. There’s so much information, it’s so thorough and it’s unimpeachable in how it’s made so that none of the people who are implicated in it could take him to task for not having said something because he says every side of it, which is really extraordinary. There aren’t very many documentaries that are like that. I think there’s a side of him that relates to that, and also to what you said, Levi, about a sort of transparency and a trust in the image. I think one of the miraculous and unique things about Moullet is that he’s more of an empiricist than the other French critics, and this relates also to his quite anti-theoretical line — he has this article that’s a very scathing criticism of Deleuze, ^[6] and the famous article against film language, which according to him scandalised Roland Barthes and Christian Metz when he delivered it. But he manages to do that without in any way falling back on something pre-theoretical — on what you could call naivety, if you’re being pejorative.

MMH: The way the French use the word ‘empiricism’.

SWM: Yeah, exactly, the kind of dismissals that you also get of theoretical material in elements of Anglophone film criticism and other kinds of criticism. But Moullet’s problem with theoretical language is not that it’s obscure, it’s that it’s wrong, and he’s going to explain why it’s wrong by talking about the films it doesn’t work for, and he’s going to do it really clearly. And I think he’s almost unique in that position of opposition, where it comes from, ‘Well, let’s actually put this up against the material itself and see if it works with these examples’, instead of attacking it on the basis of obscurantism or what have you.

I also think there is this very interesting kind of English side to Moullet. He’s a lover of English literature, he was a student of English. I mean, I think he must be the only person in France who’s read all of Hardy. French people do not care about Thomas Hardy. I don’t know if it’s to do with not feeling like he’s from Paris and not really identifying with that intellectual world so much, but there is this blunt empirical side to him that does certainly put him at odds with people around him. You couldn’t get further apart in the idea of documentary between Genèse d’un repas and any documentary, if you want to call them that, that Godard ever made. It’s the opposite idea of how to deal with reality in film, even though Moullet is a massive fan of Godard and has written beautifully on him and completely understands him. And that’s what’s amazing to me about him, how he can kind of play on both sides without loss. For example, the thing he wrote about Puissance de la parole (1988), the Godard short, which although very beautiful is a difficult and dense work. Moullet wrote better on that than anyone’s written about Godard’s video work, but then in his own work and in his criticism, you have this very straightforward approach to film, without it being reductive or blunt-minded. I think it’s at odds with other things in Cahiers, even with less theoreticist people who are maybe coming from an older tradition of French literary criticism — someone like Rohmer, for example. Moullet is totally unique in that sense.

LB: A big difference between him and Anglophone naive empiricists is that he doesn’t appeal to common sense. But as you were saying, he’s not taking these theorists in bad faith and talking about how obscure they are, and saying ‘why can’t we just get back to the movies?’ It’s not like that.

MMH: It’s a good category to bring in, common sense. What Moullet doesn’t have is common sense. That brings us back to the character that you’re presented in his films, precisely that nothing is obvious to Moullet the character, which is kind of interesting given his focus on transparency. It’s as if the thing is there, but in its being there, it presents a barrier, it’s actually confusing.

SWM: There’s a radical, almost Lockean or Humean element of having to discover the world through investigation, from the point of view of the tabula rasa, that I think he probably takes more seriously than most critics or filmmakers have. You actually have to build stuff up from the evidence of the senses, and what you build up is not a world that makes sense or is properly encapsulated by common sense or the way in which people are expected to move through the world. In fact, what you find through the evidence of your senses is that none of that works or makes sense.

JS: I’d love to ask people what they think about The Ghost of Longstaff (1996), because it doesn’t really fit into anything we’ve talked about and it’s great. What do you do with a shot like the one of Longstaff standing in the shaft of light in the church, compared to the rest of Moullet’s work? On the one hand, there is a transparency to it. He’s filming a ghost, so it kind of makes sense that it would be in this fog and this light — this spotlight, these candles in the foreground, that nice cross in the background. But the whole thing is a straightforward fictional film. There’s no catch. There’s no gag. There’s the element of memory, which is something that we just talked about, and his love of English literature for sure. But why did he make it? And what do we get out of it in comparison to the rest of his films?

SWM: One thing I like about Longstaff is that it has a dryness to it, and a directness to it, that in a way relates to the other films, even though it’s nothing like the other films in a lot of ways. The ending is I think the most obvious example of this bluntness.

JS: Totally.

SWM: I guess the miracle of that film is that it does have this element of him that’s very straightforward, but because of how it’s presenting the story strangely, with ellipses, there are things that you’re not quite caught up on. Suddenly she’s in love with Longstaff, but the narration only tells you that some time after you see the evidence of it. So it’s interesting in terms of its presentation of the information, but at the same time it’s done with this dryness that serves the material very well. And again, like with Genèse d’un repas, it’s this glimpse of how he could have made films if he wanted to. He could have made amazing period films if he wanted to be a period filmmaker and wanted to play by the rules.

MMH: ‘By the rules’ is a bit of a stretch. It’s a very weird way to make a period film in the nineties.

SWM: No, I don’t mean in terms of the film itself, I mean in terms of having the resources to make period films. Because the reason he chooses that story is because he can do it cheaply, right? And the thing about doing period adaptations is that you always need money because you need costumes and fancy locations, and in that one there aren’t many locations and there’s not that many characters.

MMH: What strikes me about Longstaff is that it’s the film of Moullet’s with respect to which I had most strongly had the thought that ‘this is a “silent film” film’. Now that you said that he’s influenced by early silent cinema, that makes a lot of sense, because its mise en scène feels like it comes from a much earlier cinematic era. I had the thought while watching it that maybe he chose to do this Henry James film because its subject matter is closer to the time of something like early Griffith, as if he’d chosen a story that is somewhat continuous with the world of those early silent films in order to be able to enact something from them. The shot that Jack is describing is of course a bit more stylized, and its aspect ratio is for a TV film, but if you put it in black and white and gussied up the image and imagined that that’s a still from a Griffith picture, you wouldn’t be so shocked. I mean, maybe not the overdramatic, more expressionist lighting. But it’s interesting that you, Sam, talk about ellipses, because in a way that’s another commonality between Longstaff and the cinema of the teens. One of the rhythmic aspects of silent cinema that always affects me — and which I’m ambivalent about, but find interesting — is that because you have the black and white intertitles, you have this feeling of processing the image in ellipses. The film stops for a second, and you’ve seen something that moved too fast for you to process it, and then you have this rapid recuperation of the image in memory while you’re paused in the intertitle. And then the flash resumes, and you have to continually negotiate with these trails of the body halting in mid-movement. Perhaps Longstaff is also thinking about that, in that there you have the sense that the different blocks of the film trail past their narrative conclusion. I’m being a bit loose here, but do you see this, that he’s doing an early silent drama? It seems very obvious that that’s one dispositif for the film, even though he’s nominally against them.

JS: Yes. Isn’t that funny, though, given we’ve talked so much about him never wanting to emulate his cinephilic predecessors? I guess there’s more ways than one — you were talking about Le Prestige de la mort ­— and he does update it. It would be one thing if he made something that truly looked like a Griffith film, sort of like what The Artist (2011) tried to do (which I’ve never seen). Longstaff is a different thing, right? It’s for a modern audience in some ways: it’s in colour. And Moullet is certainly always very willing to try things. There’s almost an element of his self-effacingness in even trying to do this, in saying ‘can I do this?’ in the same way that he says ’can I learn how to breaststroke?’ He’s putting himself out there, which is very admirable.

SWM: His account of that film is interesting in a lot of ways. One thing that really stood out to me, which is maybe at odds with the things we’ve been saying so far, is how the actress who plays the main aristocratic woman had to be replaced at the last minute, and Moullet says that the actress she was replaced with had one side of her face that looked very aristocratic and another side that looked more childlike. So he had to redo his staging so he would get the right side of her face. He says something like, there are five actors: the left profile, right profile, from the front, from the back and from a distance. And you never get an actor who’s right for all five, or something like that. That’s an extreme attention to detail, and a sensitivity to specifics that maybe runs at odds with what we’ve been talking about in terms of his lack of extreme fuss over his framing, but I think it also comes back to a feeling that maybe he’s more at ease with the fact that there are appropriate means for appropriate situations. If you’re making a Henry James adaptation and you have twenty minutes, it’s important that you show the right side of your actress’s face because it’s going to matter. Whereas if you’re in a town for a few days and you’re making a twenty-minute documentary, what you’re doing when you’re making shots is different. Maybe he’s not so worried about that forming an inconsistency in his work because they’re different scenarios, they’re different kinds of films he’s making, and to be able to make different kinds of films is more of an achievement than for every film to be branded in an auteur way, no matter what it is. Again, I suppose that’s an ideal that comes from earlier cinema, the ideal of a kind of agility or versatility. He can make films in every style and he actually is making them in every style. He’s not just making lots of films that look like ’Moullet films’, and then pretending that they’re stylistically different or generically different. He can actually do it.

JS: I fully agree. It’s the honest or the transparent thing to do what’s right for the moment, and even the five versions of the actor, that’s the actor as a real person or a real thing as opposed to an abstraction.

MMH: Why Moullet-Cottavafi? We have decided to produce an issue on this, and of course it’s a nice conjunction taken from Les Sièges de l’Alcazar. But the issue also includes Moullet’s criticism on Cottafavi, and I racked my brain for things to say about this and I have to admit that I didn’t come up with anything beyond simply recounting the, let’s say, gossip around what the figure of Cottafavi meant as a signifier of cinephilia, his marginal cum (kinda) celebrated status in France, and the index to Mac-mahonisme, or whatever, which we could talk about, but they’re maybe not the most interesting topics. Did anyone else have a notion concerning this conjunction?

LB: Well, it’s like what Jack was saying: who are these movies for? Why were they made? What Moullet and Cottafavi have in common is that they are filmmakers who would only be interesting now to people who are at the extremes of cinephilia. Straub-Huillet were confident their audience would emerge. That’s a utopianism that eventually the people will catch up with the movies. And I almost feel like by pairing Moullet-Cottafavi, we’re saying: now their time has come, now the audience is here.

TD: My friend, the poet Mark Francis Johnson, was talking to me about the peculiar speed with which fashions change in cinephilia, especially between now and, say, the early nineties when he was an active cinephile. I can clearly see why Moullet would be coming into focus now, given the economic situation around making films these days. People are trying to make what they can with whatever scanty resources (or crumbs) there are, whatever money they have, etc.

SWM: One interesting thing relating to what you’ve all said is that cinephilia was able to get certain filmmakers off the ground, critically speaking. Hawks and Hitchcock originally, but beyond them, there are people who would not have the cachet they have now if it wasn’t for the historical phenomenon of cinephilia. Cottafavi, however, is maybe the great example of a filmmaker that nobody can ever get off the ground. Nobody can ever make more than the number of people in the world who will be interested in Cottafavi be interested in Cottafavi. It’s around 1958, 1959 that French critics start trying to tell people that he’s the greatest, and it still just doesn’t happen, there’s still so few people who care about him. Whereas if you look at everyone else who they’re saying this about, it’s Fuller or Losey, or even Ulmer. A lot more people care about Edgar Ulmer than care about Vittorio Cottafavi.

MMH: Really that’s true for any even marginally 'cinephilic' figure you can name. Say Dwan. More people care about Allan Dwan than they care about Cottafavi.

SWM: Yes. Likewise, Moullet is a product of the New Wave, and over time, everyone in the New Wave gained recognition. It took a very long time for many people to care about Rivette, but now a lot of people care about Rivette and everything is more accessible. It’s sort of happening with Rozier at the moment, I think. But still with Moullet, it’s as though there’s a certain number of people and that there seems to be a limit. There’s never going to be a ‘Moullet moment’ like there is with Rivette’s films now, with at least some of it reaching a wider audience. So Cottafavi and Moullet are parallel in those ways.

What’s interesting to me is how it comes from opposite directions. Cottafavi comes from a scenario where it’s the lowest of the low, so-called ‘women’s pictures’ and then, even worse, pepla, and yet if you read the Présence interview, he’s extremely intellectual and he has this very beautiful sense of cinema, and he’s extremely articulate and deliberate about what he’s doing, creating these incredible works of art at the lowest rung of shitty cinema that everyone thinks is a waste of time. Whereas Moullet is coming from the French New Wave, which has — almost immediately, and certainly by the seventies — this intellectual and artistic cachet, and is thought of as the avant garde of European cinema. And yet he’s piercing that in a way, he’s refusing to play a game of being an avant-garde artist, at least in that vision of it, and he’s really taking it back to Ulmer or the people that you mentioned, Levi, to the B movie, to the homemade, to Poverty Row. So there’s this strange convergence between them that I think ends up fitting nicely with the fact that it may be historically true that Moullet was the first person to really give a shit about Cottafavi. I think he would like us to think that, and it may never be possible to ascertain for sure, but it’s poetically just in a way, to me.

TD: I do think that there’s a reason why filmmakers like Moullet aren’t taken up as widely as someone like Rivette, for instance. There’s something very marginal about certain filmmakers, not in a pejorative sense, just in how they are edge cases, and occupy the grottoes at the margins of wider film culture. And it’s always been kind of fascinating to me how seamlessly someone like Godard has been woven into film culture or at least occupies a more central place in it. So I’m always fascinated by how certain filmmakers occupy this liminal space, such that they don’t end up being taken up by the next generation as easily or as seamlessly as the others. It’s a sign of integrity in some ways, because these are precisely the filmmakers that insist upon the alternatives to the current cinephilic regime.

LB: First of all, I don’t care if things are relevant or not, or part of the zeitgeist. But I do think there is a connection here. The two main movies that competed for Best Picture this year, Anora (2024) and The Brutalist (2024), were both made under conditions of austerity, very low budgets compared to convention. But it seems like the reason why they were celebrated is because, despite the economic limitations, they maintain the appearance of prestige and expense. I think much of academia and criticism is too focused on power. And I like the fact that Moullet and Cottafavi definitely have no power, and are not trying, even in their films, to boost their status somehow, despite their limitations. It’s more about, how do I create within these limitations in a way that’s important for me and doesn’t necessarily have to be important to everyone?

SWM: Yeah, I think there is — not to get too doe-eyed about cinema and cinephilia, but nevertheless to indulge that slightly — there is beauty in how both these people made these things against the odds. If there’s any value to cinephilia, if it exists and if there’s a value to it as a continuing social phenomenon, there is a far edge of it, which is where you find yourself saying, ‘You have to watch this film where a strongman throws a little person around. I’m telling you, it’s beautiful.’ And maybe also, ‘You have to watch this film where a guy tries to open a coke bottle a series of ways over fifteen minutes. You’ve got to watch it. It’s beautiful.’ It’s the moments where you find yourself out on a limb that can only really be defended by falling back on confidence in cinema. There’s nothing else you could appeal to.

MMH: This setup that you’ve just given, Sam, about both Cottafavi and Moullet being resistant figures to film cultural success… There’s a kind of schema — someone like Bruno Andrade will use it, and I don’t reject this schema — that the moment of the sixties was that of the transition from cinephilia to criticism. So you have a generation that are 'pre-criticism' and have to establish it for themselves, and who come up just simply being in love with cinema, and then you have the generation that has to start developing a critical relationship to it. It’s clear that Moullet is thinking about that moment when he makes Les Sièges de l’Alcazar. It’s very pointed when he chooses to set it; it’s a film about that historical transition to some extent. But it absolutely doesn’t choose to do what you might expect from a film that’s set up as a retroactive eye on that moment, which is to mock the naivety of this unmediated relationship to cinema as a fantasy. Les Sièges is simply a film about people going to the movies. It’s a completely first-order film about people that go to the cinema, and what remains is cinema, just going. If you want to put a flag on Moullet and Cottafavi, that’s what they stand for, to me. They’re weirdly not cinema-historical figures.

TD: There is something kind of perverse about The Brutalist and Anora being prestige movies made under conditions of austerity, and then there’s a movie like The Substance, which is the A-list of Hollywood using B movie tropes to create a Best Picture nominee film. There is this industrial voice that comes out of all of this and it’s almost like you can only hear the voice of the industry speaking. Moullet and Cottafavi can also hear the voice of the industry speaking, but they add a layer of crosstalk to it.

JS: All of this stuff is against the odds, for sure, but also, I don’t think either of them would have it any other way. We just talked about how Moullet could have made The Ghost of Longstaff his whole life, or could have made Genèse d’un repas. Even if with Cottafavi he’s a little bit of an Ulmer figure where he seems a little bit bitter that he’s forced to make these things and would probably want to make his melodramas more than his Hercules movies, I believe Moullet and Cottafavi are both happy in these conditions because they can approach things straightforwardly. Cottafavi has an element of transparency as well. For some reason I always think about this shot in Hercules and the Captive Women (1961) of this wall falling down. I don’t remember at all what’s happening, but I was just really struck by how it was filmed — it was not filmed in a very beautiful way. So it’s funny that you use that word, Sam, to describe both of their movies, which of course is what our criticism often turns to, and I feel that way as well. But you know, somehow the conditions of their production allowed them to make something that just tried to take the world as it is, and that wall falling obviously looks very fake: it’s not a good special effect, but it’s not a bad special effect in the way that maybe Godard would have done something to draw attention to the artificiality. It’s an interesting interplay where there’s — and I think this goes back to our Moullet discussion as well — there’s one way to be transparent, which is commenting on how the camera is always lying, or something like that. That’s a very straightforward criticism of it, and I think both Cottafavi and Moullet fall somewhere in between, where they are not commenting on the unreality of creating art, but they are also… I’m now talking circles, but I guess what I would say is that I think they both are really trying to portray the world in a straightforward way, which is admirable.

BC: I really like what Levi said earlier. I often return to this Garrel quote from the 1970s: ‘My goal is for the films to be more modest and their grasp on life to be more just.’ We’re publishing this magazine at a time when the infrastructure for filmmaking has really collapsed in many ways. Moullet presents not only an example of making films on a shoestring budget, but also an ethos for comporting oneself with good humor.

TD: Bringing up poetry again might be tiresome, but may be demonstrative of something we’re trying to get at. The history of poetry is very much oriented around central figures and their fellow travelers, the ‘minor poets’ that come into focus every so often, and it’s sort of a crapshoot of which of them retrospectively becomes a ‘major poet’ or the central node of a certain school and so forth. And so I think it’s interesting to think about Moullet’s place in the Cahiers milieu and his subsequent marginality. He was in the right place at the right time to be a conventionally successful director, and instead he just has a very specific way of doing things and particular things he wants to do. And also just the sense of wanting to see things, wanting to film things. I feel like there’s lots and lots of filmmakers who just want to tell a story, or they want to create a beautiful shot, but I think that there are also filmmakers who simply want to see things and want to show people these things, and like Sam said, I think that’s an extremely important activity. Mark [Francis Johnson] was telling me about how the poet Gerald Burns told him that poets are only poets because they can’t write prose. They don’t know how to create prose or have the discipline to write it. And it’s very true in a lot of ways. I’m not saying that’s a mark against poets, because obviously I think that way of writing is a good, necessary detour to make. In a similar way, I feel like Moullet’s approach is a necessary detour from how cinema is done.

JS: I love the way that you bring in the word ‘detour’, not because of the Ulmer film, but because of the map-related element which you wanted to talk about and I think finally did. Moullet is self-consciously a detour filmmaker. At least in America, there are signs that say ‘Detour’ when there’s construction, and they send you in another direction. I feel like he would make a film just about those signs. He would be the kind of person who, when there is a detour in the road, would not try to cover it up. He would just show it. So I feel like detour is a pretty good word for him.

TD: I was arguing with Mark about this a little bit. I was saying, well, a poet needs to be a poet. They need to take these random detours around this inability to write prose. And then later on, as long as they keep writing, whatever sort of writing they’ve done in the interim, the way that they’ve used language in that time, all of this will prepare them to confront the form of the sentence (or paragraph) once again. And I feel like Longstaff, as a film, is a very solid piece of prose, but in a way that is connected to all that Moullet learned making his body of work. Or at least one could read it that way, Moullet tackling Henry James. Basically it says, yes, Moullet could do this if he wanted to, but he had to do things his own way, follow certain impulses for a few decades, just to be able to be familiar with the cinematic language that he was using. And then you figure it out. It’s just like any other kind of skill.