The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Ten years ago, in 1998, Philippe Sollers, who had not seen the article when it was published, discovered ‘The Curate of Uruffe’ and to my immense pleasure, reprinted it in L’Infini. The article found new readers, many of whom were as struck, forty years after the event, as the original readers had been. It has not become outdated any more than my films Shoah or Pourquoi Israël. I do not eviscerate women, do not put out the eyes of newborns, nor do I consider myself, in any sense, a man of the Church. Yet I remember that I spent the whole trial as close to the curate of Uruffe as possible, two metres behind him, staring fixedly at that scrawny neck that, I was sure, was destined for the guillotine. I did not simply watch, I listened, taking in every one of his words, rare and invariably trite, and of course listening to the testimony of the victim’s parents, of his parishioners from Uruffe and from Blâmont and Rehon, other villages in Lorraine where he had served, listening to the evidence of the policemen and detectives who had interviewed him. I can attest – though this can only be understood by reading the article – that I slipped into the skin, the belly, the heart, the mind of the murderer. When she finished reading my article, Castor expressed her astonishment at how I had penetrated the dark soul of this apparently model priest, a man capable of throwing himself into his parochial duties right after being masturbated, his cassock hiked up, by girls of thirteen, ejaculating hurriedly in the sight of God; capable of raising the alarm after he committed a double murder, a mad monk swinging from the bell rope, as he attempts to divert the legitimate concerns of his parishioners. I laughed, and parodying Flaubert, told her, ‘Le curé d’Uruffe, c’est moi.’ Of course he is not me, but the quip had some substance. A year later, I wrote the long article for Elle I mentioned about the flight of the Dalai Lama. I worked on these articles in the same way I worked on my films: in-depth research, distancing myself, forgetting myself, entering into the reasons and the madness, the lies and the silences of those I wished to portray or those I was questioning, until I reach a precise, hallucinatory state of hyper-alertness, a state that, to me, is the essence of the imagination. It is the one rule that makes it possible for me to reveal other people’s truth – to flush it out if necessary – to make them real and alive for all time. It is my rule, at least. I consider myself a seer, and I have recommended that anyone who wants to write about cinema integrates this concept of ‘foreseeing’ into their critical arsenal.

  One evening in January, shortly before the trial in Uruffe, I heard from Armand Gatti, whom I knew slightly and liked enormously: for the way he rolled his eyes like Harpo Marx, for the extraordinary range of his talents as playwright, filmmaker, poet, for his history as a militant anti-Fascist and the suffering he endured, for his talent as a leader of many, his ability to mobilize vast projects, whether theoretical, practical, social, revolutionary, literary or all of these combined, creating spaces in the suburbs of Paris or Marseille for every Iliad and Odyssey that welled up in his child-like mind, for his infinite capacity of wonderment and the self-belief that made it possible for him to ignore cultural institutions or use them only to subvert them. Gatti rang me to ask whether I would consider joining the first Western delegation to North Korea, five years after the end of the Korean War. I enthusiastically accepted: because it meant travelling far away and I had never been to Asia; because after Korea we were to spend a month in China and it was an unhoped-for opportunity to understand what the war had been about. We were due to set off at the end of May, a month after the publication of ‘The Curate of Uruffe’. In addition to filmmakers such as Gatti, who, with Bonnardeau, planned to make a film there someday, and Chris Marker, who had been to China with Gatti the year before to make a short film called Sunday in Beijing, the delegation included a singer, Francis Lemarque, a sweet Jewish boy of Polish origin with a cheeky Parisian wit who had first become famous in dancehalls of the banlieues rouges – the Communist-controlled suburbs – for songs he wrote and performed, accompanying himself on the guitar. The delegation was led by Raymond Lavigne, a journalist from L’Humanité, and also included a freelance journalist from Le Figaro and three others from left-wing provincial papers, of which I remember only the Courrier Picard. It was a baroque and disparate group, the result of Gatti’s whims and the PCF’s policy of openness – neither Gatti, Chris, Bonnardeau nor I were members of the Party. We had two meetings to prepare before the trip at which Gatti and Chris, who had already been to China, advised us to bring presents: exchanging gifts was a customary obligation in the factories, Party secretariats, military posts, universities, schools and theatres likely to be on our itinerary. I asked what sort of presents and was told: large rectangular postcards of the monuments of Paris – the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, Concorde, the Louvre – and small books about French painting, especially the Impressionists. I didn’t much like this idea; it felt a little like giving beads to native tribes. It is true that globalization was still a long way off. Chris Marker approached the matter differently, which I only realized after we had arrived. Having edited a book entitled Giraudoux par lui-même [Giraudoux in His Own Words] for a series published by Les Éditions du Seuil, he simply packed a hundred copies of this annotated anthology, which he liberally dispensed to factory workers after our visits. It hardly mattered, the staunch Korean workers could not read a word of French and, had they been able to, it’s far from certain they would have appreciated Giraudoux’s stylistic affectations!

  We almost did not go. The French generals in Algeria were in open revolt against the Pflimlin government, a military putsch seemed inevitable and, in the face of this threat, Général de Gaulle sought to return to power: ‘I began the process…’, this was the first line of a speech he made on the radio that signalled his intent. Suddenly, de Gaulle seemed to be siding with the putschists. We were on tenterhooks: the war in Algeria had been going on for four years now; Les Temps modernes was among those supporting the Algerians and spearheading the independence movement; Francis Jeanson, from our editorial group, had gone underground to set up an extraordinarily efficient support network for the FLN; the periodical had been censored several times and impounded on at least one occasion. The putsch brought back de Gaulle, who claimed to be the one to resolve it, this was how ambivalent things were. I attended the famous press conference given by the Général at the Palais d’Orsay where, as he spoke, his long arms hewed the air. It was not so much de Gaulle who was frightening, but those who swarmed around him, the arrogant, triumphant sneering of those who, having been so long in the wilderness, realized their hour had come: the SAC for example, Service d’action civique, a polite term for what was in fact a brutal militia. I remember Claude Bourdet abruptly asking the General how he reconciled his professed democratic values with the fact that his return to power was due to an imminent putsch, and the latter’s evasive answer: ‘Monsieur, it is not my universe.’ It was as true and as profoundly political on de Gaulle’s part as his ‘I have understood you’, said only weeks later to the crowds of Algerian pieds-noirs who, for their part, understood it to mean what they wanted it to mean. But Castor and I and many others thought at the time that Fascism would follow in de Gaulle’s wake; that whatever happened, it would outflank him and prove too strong for him. The last Sunday before my departure Castor and I went for a drive in the country. It was a magnificent May day and we thought that the beauty of the world – the lush green of the meadows so poignant, the fresh scent of the apple blossom so delicate – would never again be the same. We had decided that there was no reason for me to abandon the trip to Korea, my being in Paris would change nothing. Our reaction testifies first and foremost to the violence of the times, our loathing of colonial wars that had begun in Indochina, or even before that, with the Sétif massacre in 1945 and the ruthless repression in Madagascar. De Gaulle was not, and had never been, a Fascist, and he proved stronger than the generals leading the putsch, forcing them to toe the line. I truly believe he was a great man, a great statesman and a great politician; also a
great writer. As I have already said, I read and still reread his books. But this was in May 1958 and the Algerian War was to last another four years.

  Late in the day, we boarded an Aeroflot Tupolev destined for Prague, where we would spend the night, taking off the following day for Moscow, where we would spend a week before the great leap to the Far East. As we landed in Prague, I thought my eardrums would burst. At the time, Soviet pilots – all of them military – did not, as is common in the West, set down a plane gently in a gradual landing procedure, they merely put the plane into a nose-dive, heedless of the fierce changes in air pressure from the sudden loss of altitude that often left passengers screaming in agony. In the cockpit, the pilot and co-pilot permanently wore black oxygen masks: if there was a problem with cabin pressure, they, thanks to their personal oxygen supply, could resolve it by inhumanly diving to a more human altitude. Problems with cabin pressure were common in Tupolevs, which is probably what had led the pilots to behave with such savagery. In Sheremetyevo, the Moscow equivalent of Orly, there was a second violent nose-dive. I didn’t know the city, the weather was warm and beautiful, it was June. On the eve of our departure for Korea, our guides had planned a visit to the USSR Agro-Industrial Exhibition, an immense asphalted area with huge hangars filled with tractors, bulldozers and all sorts of machinery attesting to Soviet might and ingenuity. The tour lasted a long time. In the end, weary of diagrams, of standing around listening to the guides’ explanations, I felt the need, as soon as we were back out in the fresh air, to do something with the eager blood coursing through my veins, so I suddenly said to Gatti, ‘Come on, I’ll race you.’ He was not the type to say no: he rolled his eyes and we ran as fast as we could, neck and neck across the Stalinist tarmac. I was determined to win; so was he, and we pushed and jostled. He fell, fracturing his left forearm. I was mortified and worried, because though he should have gone straight to hospital to have it set, he categorically refused, worried that the doctors might not allow him to fly the following day as arranged. The guides took us to a chemist, then to a doctor who put his arm in a splint, strapped up a sling and gave him some painkillers.

  At last, we finally embarked on the great journey, with me sitting next to Gatti, watching over him like a mother, eaten up with remorse, cursing myself, telling him how wretched I felt. He was in pain, but he was tough. I promised that as soon as we arrived at Pyongyang I would get him to a hospital. It had been 30°C when we left Moscow but on the brief stop in Omsk to refuel when we got out to stretch our legs in our lightweight shirts, it was –6°C. We were at the end of the runway, far from the airport buildings; while the plane was being refuelled, an elderly babushka, completely muffled up, stood under the wing of the plane selling vodka by the ounce and I discovered for the first time something I would later come to be familiar with during the long winters filming Shoah in Poland: the cold-banishing properties of this divine grain alcohol. Shooting a film in the snow and the cold among the standing stones of Treblinka, wearing leaking boots and too few layers of clothing, unable, since the days were short and every hour of daylight was precious, to go back to the cars where I might have found a change of clothes, I was saved from pneumonia for the first time by Pavel, my Polish sound-engineer, a tall, bearded, anti-Semitic and likeable guy who hunted bears in Masuria. He handed me a litre bottle of two-thirds vodka to one-third cognac and, whenever I started to shiver, I took a long draught straight from the bottle, thus holding out until it was dark, having used every second of useful light without losing consciousness or even tottering for an instant.

  After Omsk, there were brief layovers at Irkutsk, on the shores of Lake Baikal, and at Ulan-Ude and Chita on the borders of Mongolia. A plane from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was waiting for us, a little yellow twelve-seater with the hammer and sickle proudly painted on the tail. We were saluted by two young military pilots with very slanted eyes who were to fly us across the Gobi desert and Manchuria, expecting to land in Pyongyang at dusk. It was a very long journey, and I could see that the pain in Gatti’s arm was worse. I tried to re-secure his splint, gave him something to drink and some tablets, but I knew we had to get him to a hospital as quickly as possible. When the plane finally came to a halt on the runway at Pyongyang airport, I saw that a huge crowd was waiting for us, thronging the space between the plane and the main terminal. A multitude of children and teenagers, girls and boys, lined up in concentric circles according to age, pioneers, red scarves, long plaits that came down to their waists, young breasts uniformly compressed by the smocks of their national dress. Pale with exhaustion, we staggered down the plane’s narrow ladder, me going down backwards so I could use my body to protect Gatti should he fall. A dozen beauties, their fiery gaze filtered through the narrow slit of their dark eyes, stood waiting for us, arms laden with flowers. Everyone applauded. There were also officials with hats and brachycephalic faces, helmeted figures that seemed to glide rather than walk as they moved, and photographers, flashbulbs, TV cameras. Our arrival was clearly a much anticipated event and treated as such. A small, slight, smiling man, wearing a hat and a light-coloured suit, introduced himself: ‘Ok, Tonmou. I will be your interpreter.’ He explained that ‘Ok’ was his name, tonmou means ‘comrade’. There could be no Ok without tonmou, we had to call him ‘Comrade Ok’. He spoke a musical, old-fashioned French that I found charming. We left the airport, taking the main roads, which had been devastated in the bombing raids – the neat piles of rubble and boulders on the hard shoulder reminded me of the piles of bricks made by the Trümmerfrauen in Berlin ten years earlier – until we came to a large, newly rebuilt avenue running parallel to the Taedong, the river that flows through the city. This was where we were to stay, in the only hotel appropriate for esteemed foreign visitors, the Taedonggang Hotel, to be precise. I did not take the time to settle in, but explained to Ok that I had to get Gatti to the hospital immediately. Later in this account, we will see the importance of my initiatory journey to the hospital of the capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on my first night in the Far East, crossing the recently inaugurated bridge with its soaring metal arches only to be astonished by an Asian throng that seemed to form and reform as we drove past. Though travelling through the city for the first time, I mentally photographed the route from the hotel to the hospital. This also proved overcrowded, but Comrade Ok worked wonders, and Gatti’s arm was set in plaster. The visit could begin.

  There were two of us to a room. I shared mine with a journalist from Le Figaro who, if I remember rightly, had to leave early, meaning I had the room to myself. Chris Marker shared with Francis Lemarque, but Chris imposed his rules, his universe, plastering the walls and the ceiling with pages torn from the American comics he liked. It may have been an attempt to provoke our hosts, or his way of dealing with culture shock, to place himself at the centre of the world. I would establish which later in Beijing: in order to receive post from France, we had given to those who wanted to write to us complicated addresses with long, pompous names; instead, Chris had told his correspondents to write to him at ‘Chris Marker, Beijing’ and not one letter went astray. By that time he and I cordially hated each other, we never exchanged a word. Prognathism of the lower jaw made it difficult for him to articulate, he spoke through clenched teeth and accompanied his few words with an arrogant, ironic tilt of his head that turned his every pronouncement into an enigmatic maxim. I can say this with a clear conscience because later on our trip Chris and I became firm friends. I admire his films and somewhere in Tokyo in the yakuza district there is a dark narrow bar, called ‘La Jetée’ in homage to Chris’s film, that has a bottle of Chivas Regal with my name scrawled on it. I bought it from the mama-san one night; now it is part of the furniture.