Her most notable works include the 1996 short film La Bouche de Jean-Pierre and the 2004 feature-length film Innocence, for which she. Movie Reviews AN INTERVIEW WITH LUCILE HADZIHALILOVIC What made you decide to adapt the short story 'Mine-Haha, or The Corporal Education of Young Girls'? Innocence (2. 00. Summary. In a subterranean boarding school, hidden beneath a forest in some other time and place, six year- old Iris emerges out of a coffin and is introduced to her new home where she is to stay forever. Iris very quickly discovers the rules of the school, where . Lucile Hadzihalilovic was born on May 7, 1961 in Lyon, Rh. She is a writer and director, known for Enter the Void (2009), Innocence (2004) and . See full bio » May 7, 1961 in Lyon, Rh She became the first woman to win the Stockholm International Film Festival annual Bronze Horse award for best film for her 2004 film Innocence. Rising to fame with her feature debut, Innocence (winner of the Best New Director Award at San Sebastian in 2004, the Bronze Horse at Stockholm, and the Fipresci and Audience Awards at Istanbul, among others), the talented and. Tag Archives: Lucile Hadzihalilovic. Innocence (2004) Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Zo. Prepare yourself to be either infuriated or fascinated by this French film. The line between cinematic art and exploitation has rarely seemed finer and nervier than in the French film 'Innocence.' A parable about the lost paradise of. Manohla Dargis reviews movie Innocence, directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic. Young Girls and Their Bodies, All for the Sake of Art. In this fantastical yet real world, young girls learn about the world through dance, physical education and biology. Sure enough, I had never previously found a text that presented everything I wanted to recount on screen in quite such an incredible way. What I liked most in the story was the way the school was set up: an enclosed space where young girls live in autarchy, the elder girls looking after the younger ones, the importance of dance and physical exercises, and the essential relationship with nature. But there’s also something very mysterious about it all. I immediately dismissed the hypothesis of a sinister background that might evoke a form of child prostitution; I saw it more as a kind of utopia to educate children by liberating their bodies, with all the negative totalitarian aspects that can have. The school is a paradise and a prison at the same time. But many questions remain. Even the departure of one of the heroines doesn’t provide any certainties. Then there’s the underground world, the train that travels beneath the school, the strange little theatre.. What changes did you make to the short story?- When writing the script I realised that above all I shouldn’t try to explain anything. Any expla- nation brought the whole edifice tumbling down like a house of cards. The changes I made aretherefore factual. For example, in Wedekind’s text we follow the same girl through all her years at the school. It would have been difficult for me to find several different children to play the same girl at dif- ferent ages, so I split the heroine into three characters: Iris, the youngest girl, who arrives at theschool, Alice, who has already spent several years there and rebels, and Bianca, who is at theend of the school cycle and represents a young girl shaped by it. During the film, there is a relayfrom one to the other. What’s more, this enabled me to maintain a certain unity of time by fittingthe story into one year, marked by the rhythm of passing seasons. I also made the eldest girls younger to keep the story plausible. In his short story, Wedekind sug- gests that they are 1. I reckoned that beyond the age of 1. This age suited me all the more for being the time when menstruation firststarts, the end of a kind of pre- adolescence. In the original text, none of the girls try to get away. In the film too, most of the girls seem to haveforgotten everything about the outside world. It’s almost as though their minds have retracted intothe confines of the school. But for dramatic reasons, I invented the characters of two girls whotry to run away. I also added natural science classes to the physical education imagined by We- dekind, again for reasons of realism. This meant I could develop a relationship with nature, which. I found very important, and stress the theme of bodily metamorphosis. Nothing overly dramatic happens, so how do you explain the rising tide of anxiety the film provokes? Nothing dramatic happens on a sexual level, but there is still the risk that the story could veer into another dimension at any moment. And then there’s the anxiety of knowing what Bianca, the eldest girl, is going to find outside. I tried to transcribe in the film what I felt when reading the story. Starting with questions about what all this means. The further the story progresses without giving any answers, the more the anxiety builds. And then there’s the oppressive underlying notion that the girls are in fact primarily being prepared to reproduce. From the natural science classes insisting on the cycle of life to the physical exercises to make them pretty and graceful, everything points to this idea that they are being educated to perpetuate the species. Isn’t it paradoxical to prepare them for reproduction without them ever seeing any boys?- Exactly: in this exclusively female world, what could these little girls want more than to meet boys? At their age, relationships with boys are often conflictual, and the idea of a place where they can blossom far from boys is quite conceivable. But this complete absence of male characters becomes stifling. Half the human species is missing from this world, not just for the girls but for the adults too. The old maids and the two young teachers are deprived of all relationships with men. A closed space like this, with only girls in it, evokes a convent and its opposite, a brothel – without being one or the other, of course. I particularly wanted to keep any religious elements out of the film and develop a kind of pantheism instead. One of the very original things about the film is the balance between realism and fantasy. The fantasy element is in the setting: the coffin, the train, the underground tunnels and the existence of an enclosed site like this in society. On the other hand, the girls’ feelings and relationships with each other are entirely realistic, from the fear of getting lost in the forest to the anxiety of being all alone at night or the apprehension of performing on stage in front of strangers.- If I had set the story in an ordinary country boarding school, something would have been lost. I needed this dreamlike dimension which was already very present in my first film, 'La Bouche de Jean- Pierre'. There are strong bonds between the worlds of childhood and imagination and I find that using the form of a fable is appropriate for telling children’s stories. Do you think that your film will be received in the same way by both men and women?- I think that for women it will be easier to identify with the girls; they won’t ask so many questions about the meaning of all this. The absence of male characters will probably be more unsettling for men, who may be left with more of a focus on the way they view these young girls. I haven’t tried to convey any particular message. I portray the way this school works without saying whether it’s good or bad. Just as there are no answers to the questions, there’s no moral to the story either. What do you hope for from audiences?- This film is like a small theatre that I’m inviting people into. I hope they will be charmed and en- gaged and that they’ll enjoy remembering it afterwards. The idea was to make an appealing work,for people to be able to slip into the girls’ worlds and create their own film. As a spectator, I likefilms that take you into a particular physical world by playing on sound and sensorial perception. Similarly, I wanted to offer audiences an emotional experience. During the screening, two others films came to my mind: Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA and Peter Weir’s PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.- I’m delighted by these two references. In fact, Dario Argento apparently based SUSPIRIA very loosely on the same short story by Wedekind. I didn’t know it when I was shooting my film and I didn’t really have SUSPIRIA in mind. But I discovered cinema at the age of 1. Dario Argento’s films and their very sober eroticism. The reference to PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is more conscious, even though I haven’t actually seen the film again since it was released. I especially remembered those young white- clad girls out in nature, with a sensual and very mysterious side to it all. Like mine, Peter Weir’s film asks questions that aren’t anecdotal. I would also add THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE by Victor Erice, for its underlying fantasy aspect linked to the world of childhood. Nevertheless, these are secondary references and I never had a specific film in mind when I was making INNOCENCE. Much of the emotional experience which INNOCENCE proposes is conveyed through the remarkable cinematography. What made you choose Beno. And of course his work on IRREVERSIBLE, which also led him to do Dario Argento’s latest film. He is capable of working fast too, which is essential when you’re shooting with children. On set, he was even better than I’d hoped. What were your main options, image- wise?- To counterbalance the dreamlike elements, I wanted the lighting to be as realistic as possible. Apart from the theatre scenes, which for obvious reasons had sophisticated lighting, we restricted ourselves to daylight or light sources within the frame, without ever using a single spotlight. To that extent, it could be said that the film’s lighting was co- signed by the production designer, Arnaud de Mol. I was also lucky to be able to count on Jim Howe, an exceptional gaffer full of inventive solutions. One element, however, was not realistic: the evening scenes were shot in broad daylight as day- for- night. The digital grading we used enabled us to work on the evening effect in a way that would have been impossible with traditional grading. In the end you have an impression of an endless twilight, something that’s neither day nor night; it contributes to the dreamlike feeling of strangeness by erasing the passage of time. The other very important thing for me image- wise was colour intensity. I wanted a rendering close to Technicolor. The images we shot were initially very colourful, but we upped the intensity during grading to make this world even more attractive: the greens in the park, the whiteness of the uniforms, and the different colours of the ribbons in the girls’ hair. For both the colours and the visual themes I had two pictorial references in mind: the Symbolists (notably Belgian) and Magritte. Why did you shoot in Cinema. Scope?- It’s a format that allows you to frame several characters at once, yet it can also be very oppressive: it encloses while appearing to open up. For budgetary reasons, however, I couldn’t use real Cinema. Scope, but Super 1. How easy was it to finance the film?- It actually turned out to be much harder than I thought. Ten years ago, you could easily propose atypical subjects that didn’t fit into the dominant genres. Innocence 2. 00. 4 Lucile Hadzihalilovic - You. Repeat. Home. Top Videos. Gifs. Make a Gif // Terms Of Use. Privacy. DMCAContact Us. All rights reserved . Our product has no affiliation with You.
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