Original subtitles

Ok, we're already rolling.

You can begin, I wanted to surprise you.

Let me know what you're doing little by little,

the operations you're doing.

Now, it's the foundation.

You must spread it carefully.

No, I don't care about the technical details.

Just tell me the different operations.

OK.

- Is she talking loud enough, Jose? - No.

She must speak louder.

- She needs to speak much louder. - Yes, much louder.

You need to project the voice, Otherwise it won't work.

How much footage do we have left, Jose, so we don't waste any time?

Well, in feet, we have 78 left now...

That's more or less three quarters of the reel.

Now, I'll apply the powder.

My name is Anne and I am an actress.

My name is Anne and I am an actress.

This is how a script written four years ago was to begin

and this was supposed to be, or almost, the first image.

I wanted it to be the first shot in October in Madrid.

Do you think this will take longer than you said?

- I don't know. - You don't know.

Don't forget, put a little more make up on your eyebrows.

You have to speak louder.

Now the eyes.

How many meters?

127 feet.

- Used? - Yes.

Hello. Yes?

No, Marcel is shooting.

Can he call you back?

In fifteen minutes.

This girl is an actress, she lives in Madrid.

This isn't October.

I associated the words Madrid and October for their sonority.

This film is both a film about liberty and constraint.

A film about truth and fiction.

It ended up existing, by becoming true,

through all the difficulties, beyond all the real or provoked difficulties,

all the contradictions a filmmaker can encounter at every moment.

At this very instant, for example, as I try to say this text,

to read this text.

Since I'm writing this text and I'll re-read it later

in front of a microphone in a studio.

Now I'm putting on lipstick.

...I'm reading it.

I was told not to speak over my images,

my voice is too serious, too relaxed, too sad.

It would be a mistake.

I catch these words, make them mine.

I can see someone behind me!

I want to break them, caress them, manipulate them,

let them fly off and take them again and break them.

I want them the way I wanted this film.

- I'm ready! - Ok, thanks, it's done!

October in Madrid.

October in Madrid

I've come regularly to Spain for several years.

I've been here this time for several months.

I loved Spain long before I knew it.

Exile is dear to me.

Exile is a wall one wants to be surrounded by.

My first image of Spain was a bull captured in its solitude.

I followed it through the telephoto lens until it died.

The film is called Death of the Bull.

My second image of Spain was that of Christ.

I filmed a holy week in Valladolid

and in a spot in old Castile.

Christ in the City.

Today I have 3000 meters of film

and a borrowed camera.

But with the constraint of only knowing the results of the shots

upon my return to Paris.

I've thought for a long time about recounting the private life of a torero.

Guillermo introduces me to two young banderilleros.

We begin by filming their training.

We spend a morning at Casa del Campo.

It's not important why this is the only morning

and why the filming is unfinished.

I've just agreed to shoot news reports for TV.

This is Roncal Valley, in the Pyrenees.

French shepherds are presenting a tribute to Spanish shepherds.

I did not film the ceremony itself.

I didn't feel like it after a 36 km walk in the rain.

"El Verdugo," the executioner.

I was asked to do a report on

the shooting of this film directed by Luis Berlanga.

For a week I follow Luis Berlanga and his crew around Madrid.

There I suddenly get the idea for October in Madrid.

One day, Berlanga must shoot Plaza de las Comendadoras.

This setting strikes me with its harshness, its grandeur.

By the strangeness of its details:

an electrical tower planted in the middle of it,

a clock that always strikes 8:00.

I decide this plaza will be the setting of a script

that I haven't yet written.

Later, I have to do a report on Sophia Loren

who is shooting The Fall of the Roman Empire.

I have the script for October in Madrid.

An extra, Sophia Loren's slave,

lives at Plaza de Ia Comendadoras

and every morning goes to the forum, 15 km outside of Madrid.

The opposition of anachronistic demands:

dreams, the daily amazement of this extra, Carmen,

who flees one mediocrity for another, more artificial and fake.

The fall of her dream with the end of the film shoot.

The fall of my own.

It is obviously impossible to realize this idea,

just as it is logical to envisi�n it with the techniques of reporting.

But I have the main character.

It will crystalize, like in my previous films, in a woman.

The woman of A Simple Story,

the one in The Eighth Day,

Anne, the actress for a film that hasn't been seen yet.

Retiro Garden in Madrid, Sunday.

What will Carmen do? Who will Carmen be?

Who will interpret Carmen?

What characters will be around her?

The French tax collector is threatening to arrest me.

Take what from me?

Carmen won't try to escape her mediocrity by exceptional means.

She'll be a saleswoman in a big store.

She'll walk there every morning from the Plaza de Ia Comendadoras.

She will have a fiancé.

She'll dream of children and a well-kept home.

The department store where Carmen will work

will be, for example, Galerias Preciados.

Nadia introduced me to Sempere,

he's a painter and engraver.

He's offering his studio as a set for the film.

It may be the studio of Carmen's fiancé.

He'll be a painter and be named Guillermo.

My name is Carmen.

I live in the Plaza de Ia Comendadoras.

My name is Carmen.

Marcel, your film isn't going to be easy.

I think you've got a very interesting idea.

The problem will be to not tire out the audience.

By telling a story with too many words and not enough images.

Of course it can be done in several ways,

but I think cinema is expressi�n through images.

Speech can add to or counterbalance the images

but it can't be counted on to express the story.

I'm sure you'll overcome this problem

and you'll make a really interesting film.

Keep spreading them out.

What goes through your head about the film

in trying to remember this conversation the other day

when you were watching TV.

I think films can't be linear.

Films must be made like life,

It doesn't go in one direction, there's simultaneity

and lots of directors have tried to do something like this

but there are many who still haven't...

And maybe even sometimes artists manage without knowing it...

Nadia likes the idea of the film.

She offers to help me,

she does so with an extraordinary devotion.

...sometimes consciously and I hope that you're going to do...

Pregnant, and up to the night before giving birth,

she is at my side.

When I get discouraged, she gives me energy.

I film her at home, in her studio.

She will be part of the film.

A few months after finishing the shots,

I return to Madrid to record the things she said during the shoot.

She remembers them almost exactly.

...a way of expressing oneself, and it can be done through images or speech.

With Nadia, I film, one Sunday

the preparation of a religious processi�n, Plaza de Ia Comendadoras.

With the aim of filming, one day, Carmen and Guillermo

so they can be, through editing, witnesses to the processi�n.

Carlos' sister will be Carmen.

Carlos is one of my friends in Madrid.

He's been very helpful to me since my first trip to Spain.

I still haven't found the character of Guillermo, Carmen's fiancé.

Carmen is a brunette, tall and beautiful

I will film her later.

I live in Madrid, Plaza de las Comendadoras.

With Nadia, I shoot documentary footage of Plaza de las Comendadoras,

trying to describe the familiar place where Carmen will live.

It's hard to believe my plaza isn't in a village

and that it's located so close to the store where I work.

Children and old people,

with almost no generations in between.

"We're not beautiful, why are you filming us?"

I tell them they're beautiful. I think so.

I need money to live on until the end of the film,

to put gas in my car to get around freely.

I need to film a boat ride with Carmen and Guillermo,

in the lake of Retiro Garden,

from Carmen's point of view, without ever seeing her.

The sun in the trees, Carmen's finger in the water.

I want Carmen to run into a group of communicants.

I will film these communicants later,

in Montreuil-sous-Bois, close to Paris.

Guillermo will take Carmen home for the first time

and they will make love for the first time.

They have to go to a ball.

Time passes.

I run around Madrid. I look for sets, ideas.

I film everything I want,

everything that presents itself and that I like.

A processi�n, between Liege and Baionnette.

Le Rastro, a kind of flea market.

Would it be too picturesque for Carmen to walk through?

How will Carmen be dressed?

La Castellana, a wide avenue, very busy around 11 AM.

A market in old Madrid.

The tailpipe on my car is broken.

Death.

A campesino on his donkey, lost on the Paseo del Prado,

asks me: The road of four roads?

I give directions and offer him a tip for filming him.

He refuses politely.

A headlight on my car isn't working.

Is the film going to be made?

Is it going to end?

Can I go to the end?

Nestor Basterrechea, one of Nadia's friends.

He suggests I be the cameraman for a commercial short film he is directing.

I accept and am bailed out.

My film will be made.

I write down the general lines in a page and a half.

I now want a more free and different film.

My concierge: she comes from the Asturias, mining country.

Luis, I met you when I was shooting El Verdugo.

I followed you for a week for the TV news.

I did a report on this film.

It's from Berlanga's film El Verdugo

that the idea came for October in Madrid.

One Sunday, I go film Luis Berlanga at home.

I will draw new encouragement from this encounter,

maybe a response to my own problems.

I will record Berlanga's words at the same time as Nadia's,

a few months later.

...what especially prevented me from seeing it

is that I knew there were a lot of cuts.

What sequences were cut?

Excuse me for speaking in Spanish

but I can express myself better in my own language.

The cuts made to my film are obviously not gratuitous.

That would mean the censorship doesn't correspond to anything.

It would be as anarchic and surreal as we are as creators.

The aim of these cuts is clearly absurd

because everything I wanted to say about a society

and the problem of an individual's relation to this society

remains I think, present in the versi�n of the film shown in Spain.

However, the cuts altered the dramatic progressi�n.

The censors' intention was to eliminate the more or less hard and strong image

showing how we execute a man sentenced to death in Spain

and to suppress everything dramatizing the conflict between man and society.

Are you happy with the film you've made?

I'm happy every time I'm making a film. I make them

in a more and more vegetative, spontaneous, somnambulistic manner.

So I'm starting to wonder if we're really making films we like and want,

or if we make them, if we feel them when we're in the middle of directing.

Practically, I give birth to my films.

They're there, they exist. I have a moment where I let myself love.

I go to the point of loving or hating like one loves or hates

a creature at certain moments.

I don't have any projects.

I like doing things, cinema as much as love.

In the most vegetative manner possible.

So it's absurd to talk about projects for a man like myself

who likes improvising everything on the street corner.

I have projects but just by having them,

I already don't like them,

and I don't give them the same tenderness.

What do you think about the young Spanish cinema?

To begin with, I believe in individuals like good anarchists

and in the auteur theory.

I don't believe in schools

or a general definition of what we could call the young Spanish school.

Individually, there are auteurs I like, who interest me,

others who interest me less.

We have to look for our roots.

I may be old fashioned but we must recognize that Spain must first

confront this immensity before it deals with external problems.

We haven't begun to examine ourselves the way the French and Italians can.

We aren't yet capable of introspection in cinema.

With this restriction, the Spanish, by tradition,

not in a pejorative sense but in an authentic sense of Spanish tradition,

must confront everything and cinema.

I don't think any young Spanish directors have thought of seeing what is around them.

They all record a series of foreign outside impressions they find before them.

They think they're reflecting something but this something is not the truth.

They don't throw themselves into other countries, in other geographies,

in search of the violent impressi�n that should deeply move them before a thing

instead of simply reflecting it.

Yesterday, Sunday,

Guillermo took me to the Retiro Garden.

We went out in a boat.

He rowed.

I know Maribelle through Carlos, Carmen's brother.

Maribelle is married to a soldier she hasn't seen in four years.

She has to leave for Rio de Oro where her husband's garrison is.

My name is Carmen. I live in a pensi�n owned by a large, gentle woman.

Her husband works in Paris.

She's from Toledo, like my family.

The woman, foreseen as Carmen's landlord, Plaza de las Comendadoras.

Carmen's family will live in the provinces

and Carmen will be in a pensi�n owned by this woman.

This woman's husband works in Paris, Rue de Ia Pompe.

He sends her money every month

at the price of some flings with Parisians thinner than she is.

I was born in Toledo.

I left my mother in Toledo.

I didn't know my father.

He was killed in the civil war,

a few days before my birth.

Toledo, an old Jewish and Arab city.

A city of calm and balance. A city for escape and getting away.

Architecture, immobile in time.

In a whirlwind like there only exists in Spain,

it seems I can go back in time to reach Toledo.

Augustin isn't the ideal character for Carmen's fiancé.

Oh well, he won't be a painter and the studio where he will take Carmen

will be a studio a painter friend has lent him.

At the same time as Carmen and Guillermo's boat ride

on the Retiro lake,

I film an ordinary side of the garden.

A little girl looks like

she's come out of an 18th century English painting.

I ask her to wait for me to film her

while I go get film from my car.

She's running late and says she'll be in trouble.

It was the first time I went to Guillermo's.

Some of his paintings are mobile, others are lit.

He overlooks Madrid and some terraces where laundry is drying.

There are also iron sculptures.

We went there after our boat trip on the lake in Retiro.

Carmen leaves me. Carmen doesn't want to shoot anymore.

But we did makeup and wardrobe tests.

Maybe I can make her come back since this may just be a mood.

There was a festival in the Plaza de las Comendadoras.

Like every year, a processi�n in honor of the Virgin.

We watched it with Guillermo.

Afterwards, we decided to goto the ball.

Guillermo is a painter,

an artist.

My friend Guillermo Delgado gave me the idea for the name of Carmen's fiancé

and the idea to make him a painter.

Very little daylight and one lamp help me light Guillermo.

Which legend of cinema once said

you need a lot of resources or everything is impossible.

This is a sketch for a correspondence with a French girl across the street,

who for a few mornings has been undressing before him, knowing he's watching her.

Guillermo, while we were shooting your sequence, you asked me a question

that both shocked and pleased me.

You asked me...

- if you like what you're doing. - That's great because you find exactly

the same intonation and it's the sentence I wanted.

Did it seem normal to you to ask this question?

You didn't know me well enough...

...to think that I loved this professi�n.

Speaking from artist to another artist...

It's at the heart of all the ethical questions an artist has to ask...

...love what you do.

Especially in our time which is so... prostituted.

In every respect...

My friend Carlos.

He is the brother of the girl who's supposed to be Carmen.

I will never film Carmen.

Her fiancé forbids her from shooting.

Carlos can't make them change their minds.

She is Spanish and is named Maria Carmen Miguela.

Together, we went to film The Death of the Bull.

I had just met her. It was my first trip to Spain and my first film in Spain.

Five years ago,

five years that have gone by like a storm.

I've lost my actress. I've lost Carmen.

I'm looking for Carmen.

I'm looking for a potential Carmen.

I film randomly in the street.

Will I find Carmen?

Consuelo's garden. Consuelo's mother.

Consuelo's neighbor.

Consuelo has black eyes, a little bit of a gypsy.

I met her in front of the Prado.

I go with Maria Carmen Miguela to ask her mother to allow.

Consuelo to be in the film.

Her mother comes the next day to excuse Consuelo who can't

or doesn't want to come meet me where I saw her for the fist time.

My lights are waiting to light Carmen.

My camera is waiting to grab her reflection.

Jorge is dead. My friend Jorge.

Sleepwalker poet and mine engineer.

He was coming back from gas research in Rio de Oro.

He was interested in the film, he was helping me.

I wanted to film him.

A friend in common tells me the news in a letter from Madrid.

Jose Antonio, poet.

Correspondent in Madrid for a Parisian paper.

He helped me shoot Christ in the City.

The ball I chose for Carmen and Guillermo is almost empty.

It has just rained.

The ball was almost empty. It had just rained.

Guillermo wanted to take me to his place.

I decide to film another ball that doesn't match my characters.

No Carmen, no actors. My friends aren't free.

I film from my balcony, in the rain,

the houses around me, the street.

An accident.

Aranjuez, 60 km from Madrid,

one of the best corridas of the season.

Nadia tells me about it, says I shouldn't miss it.

New York.

"Jump!" cries the crowd to the desperate man perched on the 12th floor.

Niamey.

Rebels are shot on the public square in front of 10,000 people.

Saigon.

A rebel is shot in front of TV cameras for several million viewers.

Atlanta.

White police chase a car and force black students to run several miles.

Before losing consciousness, he pointed out his murderer: his daughter.

Jean-Claude, 19 years old, kills his cousin with a hammer,

the pretty bakery girl who rebuffed his advances.

The Russian-American cosmonauts are at their 33rd revolution.

Two team members take turns in the capsule.

The ball on the outskirts of Madrid.

The ball where Carmen and Guillermo probably never went.

Chonette, actress, sells stamps and butterflies near the main street.

My name is Carmen.

My name is Carmen.

Every morning, I go to work on foot.

Sempere's friends introduce me to Chonette.

Blond, white and pretty, she isn't Carmen.

I like her. She will be Carmen.

The idea of Carmen walking to work every morning

inspires me to capture Chonette with a zoom lens

free in the streets of Madrid.

I try to catch her from a thousand angles,

free of any constraints.

Free as I was, as I am, and as I still want to be.

Carmen won't know this place and the life here

as it was foreseen at the first stage of the script.

She will not have known Guillermo.

I will not have known Carmen.

Empty and useless sets.

My phone has been cut off for several days

I just need to shoot the first and last shots of the film.

Before leaving Madrid, I throw a Flamenco party

in honor of my friend Juan and some other friends.

It's September 26, I think.

The tape recorder I have isn't in sync with the camera.

It's behind or ahead that Jose sings over the images.

It doesn't really matter.

I didn't organize the rolls of image and sound in the same order.

This should be the last image of a script written four years ago.

This is what I wanted the last image of October in Madrid to be.

Chonette takes off her makeup

and makes the gesture imagined for Anne the actress.