French filmmaker Alice Winocour is making her feature film writing and
directing debut with
Augustine, a film which examines in fictional
form the real life interaction between noted French neurologist Jean-Martin
Charcot, and one of his favorite patients, a woman who is known only by
her first name of Augustine but who is immortalized in a series of
photographs Charcot took to document his studies in hysteria. Blu-ray.com
staff reviewer Jeffrey Kauffman had the opportunity to interview Winocour, who was in Paris,
by phone.
Bonjour. Ça va?
Oh, vous parlez Français?
Oui, je parle un peu, mais j'etais à Paris l'été dernier avec ma famille.
And that's about the extent of what I feel comfortable saying in French, so
let's move on to English. There was a real Charcot, of course, but there's
precious little information on the real Augustine. What can you tell us
about her?
There really
isn't much information about her. There's a fantastic
book called
Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris by
Asti Hustvedt that has some really interesting information in it, and I highly
recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. The real life Augustine
was the favorite patient of Charcot. We know that she was exhibited, as
were many patients in that time, in front of high Parisian society, almost like
a peep show. And we know that she escaped from the hospital dressed as
a man.
So how did you decide to approach this subject, since one of the
characters is kind of a mystery?
I fictionalized the story and got my inspiration from the huge iconography of
the pictures Charcot took—so many pictures. Charcot's studies of hysterics
arrived at almost the same time as photography arrived, and so this was
the first time a naturopathy of photography was utilized. But these
photographs are also why Augustine became so famous. She was really
pretty and was the "big star" of Charcot's photographs.
Do we know what ultimately happened to her?
We know next to nothing about her, unfortunately. It's a really big mystery
and what is most interesting to me. I've tried to imagine the relationship
between Augustine and Charcot and what
could have happened to
them.
What is it that drew you to this material?
I've had a long interest in hysteria. Hysteria is not only a disease, it's kind
of like Pandora's Box and allows me to talk about desire, power, the
relationship between men and women. There are so many subjects
wrapped up in this story. There's the medical stuff and personal stuff, but
also the erotic elements that make things really cinematic.
One of the things that really struck me about the film was the manifest
difference between the seizures that are depicted. Tell me your thoughts
on why these are shown to be so very different in character.
You're absolutely right and that is a very keen observation. There are
three seizures, all of them very different. The first one we wanted to be
very natural, and so we had Soko actually pulled by strings, like a
marionette, so that the movements did not appear forced or fake. I
wanted it to be something like a ghost in the body, with no control over the
legs. Almost like you'd see in a horror movie. The first seizure was really,
really violent, not at all sexual. But the second one you see, which is in the
hospital,
is more sexual because Augustine is inviting,
unconsciously on her part, Doctor Charcot to pay attention to her. It's her
way to express pain, desire with her body. You want to have a public, to
be looked at—it's a way to be loved. The third seizure is totally faked. I
went to a lot of screenings with neurologists and psychologists who were
shocked that the last seizure was faked. They said "she's faking it, she's
acting", but of course that's the whole point. I told Soko to simply recreate
the first seizure as best as she could, hoping she had some memory in her
body. You know, it's very easy to write in your screenplay "seizure", but
then you're in front of an actor and you have to figure out how to actually
make it work.
Since the very word hysteria denotes a gynocentric "problem",
are you trying to address some incipient sexism in the film?
Of course—it's about the way men look at women. Fear and desire, that
kind of mix. But even the photographs and the public displays of the
hysterics plays into that as well. And the ovarian compressor we show
Charcot using on Augustine—that was a very real device. What to me was
so incredible was that everything was so sexual and erotic but the doctors
absolutely refused to talk about that aspect because it was so taboo. I
asked the actors to play the examinations like they were love scenes. And
the exhibitions were like peep shows. Women trotted before men as
objects of desire. And it wasn't only doctors going—it was men from high
Parisian society. It was a show, an entertainment that they attended. And
it was always sexual.
Even for Charcot?
Yes, absolutely. Even if Charcot was a great, great doctor, the father of
modern neurology, for him it was also sexual, but he was embarrassed by
it at the same time. Like many men, he didn't know how to handle the
conflicting emotions.
Tell us a little about your background and the logistics behind funding
Augustine, especially since you're a first time feature director.
I've been studying cinema at the National Cinema School in France. At first
I wanted to be a scriptwriter, but I also directed some short films and
realized how much fun I was having. I had gotten interested in the
Augustine story and had written the screenplay, but didn't want to direct it,
feeling it was too huge, too ambitious for a first time director. But finally I
felt that I had to tell this story, that it was impossible to give it to someone
else. Surprisingly, funding turned out to be not so hard. The writing
process was much harder. I didn't want to just make a biopic on Charcot,
so I had to forget everything I had read and just reinvent everything. I
think the fact that the film was
so different—very different from
most contemporary stories that first time French directors tend to make—
that the funding actually was easier than it might have otherwise been.
Tell me about your decision to film this digitally. Was it an aesthetic
choice or one made for budgetary reasons?
Absolutely only for budgetary reasons. My DP and I were actually really
embarrassed that we had to do this with a digital camera. I really wanted
to shoot in film, but we had no choice as there was so little money. Our
budget was only around four million Euros, which is quite small, though kind
of huge for a first feature in France. I also had to film this in a very dark
atmosphere, as we had no money for sets, and it just was easier to play
everything in the dark. We shot quite a bit in the summer, though some
was done in November, and I decided to have the direction of light look like
a sunny winter.
Some sources state Soko did the music, but the film lists Jocelyn Pook
as the composer.
Oh, the score is definitely by Jocelyn Pook, who is a very famous composer
and worked with Stanley Kubrick on
Eyes Wide Shut
. But I had Soko do the little lullaby over the opening and end credits,
which I wanted to sound kind of like Mia Farrow singing the theme of
Rosemary's Baby.
The film has several really interesting interstitials with women talking
directly to the camera about their mental problems. Were those real
patients?
Yes, those were real patients from a mental hospital. For them, they were
performing, they were acting a character, but they were talking about
symptoms they really had. For them it was a way to have distance with
their own traumas. I worked with them like in a documentary, interviewed
them and helped prepare them for the shoot. They were in a psychiatric
hospital, some were heavily medicated, some were just out of the hospital.
We had no script, I just asked them to tell me their story during the
interviews, then I wrote them the lines and had them perform in front of
the camera.
Merci pour votre temps aujourd'hui. Bonne chance dans le futur.
Merci!