Dinner with Renée R. Lettres retrouvées
An interview with Lisa Reboulleau, director of Renée R. Lettres retrouvées
How did you work to make Renée R. Lettres retrouvées? With regard to the images, were they a mixture of real images of different origin, or were they all from the same couple/family?
The film is composed solely of archive film from the 1950s and ‘60s. They are from the time of the writings left by Renée R., her letters and her personal diary, which were written between 1958 and 1959.
The archive work and the search for images took a long time. In total, it took 4 years to complete the film. The color images are from my family; the others in black and white came from the INA repository (mostly current affairs magazines) and from Cine-Mémoire, a Marseille film library composed of amateur family films. I chose the most ordinary and anonymous images possible. The idea wasn’t a slideshow of the period, but instead an aesthetic assembly that plunges us into the universe of the ‘50s and ‘60s, into the universe of the character, how I imagined it in any case.
How did you work on the image? Which part is made from film? The film had sequences that were deteriorated. Were they already damaged or did you apply a process to create that effect?
In the making of the film I loved the aesthetic challenge: how to mix different kinds of images, and assemble the puzzle piece-by-piece. Finally, the film was constructed as a fictional work. I looked for shots that linked up with others, which wasn’t easy with the archive footage because the shots are often very short. The difficulty was also to link up very short shots with long text, Renée R.’s romantic and expansive letters. In fact, long texts don’t appear in the film, it was impossible. We tried to find the most representative and significant sentences. In her writing, I love the tragic side of the end of a love affair, the heartbreak, but also the simple and precise style. It is powerful to describe dramatic emotions in this way. Finally, it was an incessant back-and-forth between image and text. The text carries the image, the image replies to the text. This is one point in particular that we worked on: how does the text bring on the image? The text puts us on the trail and the image is supposed to tell us the rest. Either the image illustrates the words of the voice-over that is reading the letters, or it comes in counterpoint. The image thus expresses the opposite of what is being said and leads us onto a tragic path despite the hope in her words: the archive footage is damaged, and disintegrates.
I didn’t use any special process to create the effects (except for the deceleration) but I played with time effects in the film. On the other hand, we had to do a lot of work calibrating the archive films to make them uniform and create unity.
Do you think that the images of the beginning of a love affair, the simple and playful happiness that is shown in Renée R. Lettres retrouvées, are universal?
Feelings of love and the pain of the end of a love affair are evidently universal feelings. Renée R.’s experience, it seems, can therefore speak for all of us. This experience is represented in the film by the sequence where Renée R. and her husband are in a narcissus field. The sequence repeats itself, and each time takes on a different meaning, like different variations on the theme of love from the beginning to its end.
During the introduction, the sequence is realistic, we are in the present. Love exists. In the first part, the same sequence evokes Renée R.’s memories, the happy times while she is bored in Limoges. Here, she puts us on the trail. Then, as Renée R. becomes more and more suspicious, the memory of the narcissus field takes on a different meaning. It is a re-evaluation of the past: was that happiness really perfect? In the 4th part, it is the separation. Is her husband abandoning her and her children? It is accompanied by a sentence, “That happiness, I tried to persuade myself of it.” So, happiness will never exist again.
The sequence appears one last time when she calls him and begs him to open his eyes on the happiness they once had . At that moment, the images become the symbol of Renée R.’s lost paradise.
In Renée R. Lettres retrouvées, we hear reading that doesn’t seem to be addressed to anyone in particular. Are these truly letters, or more a personal diary?
The film material consists only of extracts from her personal diary and Renée R.’s letters. These writings begin in November 1958 upon her arrival in Limoges, and end in November 1959, the day of her death in Marseille. Renée R. kept a daily journal during that period as well as active correspondence with her mother and her best girlfriend Ray. It is this writing that helped Renée R. make it through this critical time in her life. It was essential for her to write, to describe what was happening in her life at that moment.
Renée R. also ponders the need for children to appropriate parents’ past. Why did you want to address this question?
In fact, Renée R. is my grandmother, and I have the same surname. However, the choice to give just the last initial in the title was my desire to “anonymize” this story, because what I found interesting was above all the life of a woman of that period, and not the life of my grandmother. I didn’t want to focus on that link and create a film based on kinship. In the end, the film simply tells the story of the last year of a woman’s life.
Renée R. Lettres retrouvées shows daily life in 1958 and we perceive the suffering from not having much free time after work hours. Do you think that in 2015, the lack of free time after work still causes suffering?
The end of the ‘50s is a complicated period when it comes to the question of women, but something happens in her story and, without knowing it, Renée R. becomes for me a pioneer in the great female equality movements that took place after her death. Renée R. is a modern woman, and it pleases me to imagine that if she hadn’t died, she might have been a figure in the feminist movement, who knows?
In any case, the film shows how she faced the obstacles of that era. The central theme is love and betrayal and, underneath, the weight of the family and social context of the era. Therefore, one of the key questions of the film is, “How to balance the life of a mother, a worker, and simply being a woman, or how to manage a single parent family life?” This question is of course still present today but during the life of Renée R., it was a relatively new question for women.
Renée R. Lettres retrouvées was produced in France. In your opinion, what does French short film production have that the others don’t?
The French are very sensitive to intimate questions. We are often seen, especially by the English-speaking world, as too indiscreet. So yes, I think the production of this film (in France) allowed us to develop that intimate aspect.
Programme for viewing Renée R. Lettres retrouvées: National Competition F5.
More info Other programming:
2 February: Festival Doc en Courts, Lyon
6 February: Les Rencontres Cinéma de Manosque
6 February: 15th Journées cinématographiques dionysiennes
