Human Flowers of Flesh (2022).
In Helena Wittmann’s first feature, Drift (2017), two women holiday in Sylt, the northernmost island in Germany. Theresa and Josefina return to the port city of Hamburg temporarily and then, across a cut, Theresa appears alone in Antigua. Soon afterward, she sails across the Atlantic, via the Azores, back to Hamburg—but before she sails, Theresa stops at a beach in Antigua, where she gathers shells and dried coral.
Within the first ten minutes of Human Flowers of Flesh, Wittmann’s follow-up to Drift, a woman hands another woman a piece of dried coral—“from Antigua,” she says in French. She is not Theresa and the film does not return to Antigua. Ida, played by Angeliki Papoulia, nonetheless shares with Theresa the experience of a trip there, where she came across a shoreline “like the cemetery of a coral reef.”
Human Flowers of Flesh shares a few things with Drift—dried coral from Antigua, a languorous slowness in which pleasure comes of patience, a woman voyager with an attraction to the sea—yet it does not return to any harbor, island, or sea visited by the former film. With Human Flowers of Flesh, we follow Ida and a crew of five men across the Mediterranean, from Marseille to Corsica, from Corsica to Algeria, in a journey directed by no more and no less than Ida’s curiosity toward the world and toward the French Foreign Legion in particular.
While Ida is drawn to the French Foreign Legion more concretely than Theresa is drawn to anything in Drift, both films—and both characters—tend toward wordlessness. Quiet Ida and Theresa function less as anchors for the searching spectator than as drogues: stabilizing the look from time to time, but never mooring it to one point of interest altogether. In both films, Wittmann leaves us to look with these women, yet without instruction: we are able to realize gradually and independently why this or that thing may be of interest—or otherwise, we are allowed to be carried away elsewhere, in distraction, dream or sleep.
Drift (2017).
In the height of August, I watched the premiere of Human Flowers of Flesh at Locarno with a friend. At the sight of Denis Lavant walking through the North African streets towards the end of the film (our patience rewarded with cinephilic pleasure), he turned to me. “Is that…?” And it was. Fascinated by the French Foreign Legion and taken, inevitably, by way of it back to Claire Denis’ Beau travail (1999), Wittmann recast Lavant as Galoup for Human Flowers of Flesh, recalling the legionnaire from the grave.
Wittmann crosses borders of various kinds: aesthetic, geographic, mortal. That Wittmann expressed, in a conversation after the screening, the belief that it was entirely possible for Galoup still to be alive after the closing credits of Beau travail roll—and to stroll into another film by another director twenty years later—is wholly indicative of her tendency towards vitality and imagination over finitude and separation.
When I think of the way in which Wittmann takes from other texts—Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) at the end of Drift, not only Beau travail but also Marguerite Duras’ Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952) in Human Flowers of Flesh—I think of the orchids that appear here and there in the shared apartment of her fourteen-minute film, Ada Kaleh (2018). Epiphytic rather than parasitic, orchids are sustained less by soil than by air, rain and snow, by dew, mist and fog. Approaching influence by way of orchids allows us to conceptualize it as atmospheric, diffuse—not subterranean, but out in the open. This is how Wittmann borrows. When she borrows, it is not a sly wink at a clever spectator: it is there for us to see or to feel, imposing no sense of shame on anyone who misses the reference. When she borrows, it is creative rather than coming from a stance of critique or fatigue—and the thing that is borrowed grows to become a gift in itself.
Human Flowers of Flesh and Drift are preceded by shorter works that consider domestic space—The Wild (2013) and 21,3 °C (2014), as well as Ada Kaleh—and also various installation works surrounding the production of Drift, such as Look! The Sea! (2015), Tender Noise (2017), Tender Noise At Night (2017), and Wildness of Waves (2018). Her interests, cinematic quotations, and training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, where Angela Schanelec holds a professorship, all help to illuminate the restrained, minimalist formalism from which Wittmann’s explorations arise. Papoulia, on the other hand, is best known for her collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos in Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011), and The Lobster (2015)—though Wittmann works with Papoulia to less extreme ends.
On a terrace by the lake in Locarno, I spoke with Wittmann and Papoulia about collaboration, generosity, looking at men and looking at the sea. In the spirit of sharing, present throughout the film and its production, Wittmann offers me a small, spherical chocolate before we begin.
Angeliki Papoulia in Human Flowers of Flesh (2022).
NOTEBOOK: Thank you for the little chocolate. How much was sharing part of the process of making Human Flowers of Flesh?
HELENA WITTMANN: There are numerous gifts in the film and behind it. I was sitting at a table with a friend and he put forward a few titles for films. Human Flowers of Flesh was one of them and was in fact longer: Human Flowers of Flesh, The Petals Have Fallen. Human Flowers of Flesh stayed with me and I asked him whether I could have it. He said he would be happy for me to take it. It was generous. There is so much generosity in the film. Ida brings a coral fossil to the woman at the bar, one of the men in the crew brings a terrarium to the boat, and the poem read aloud in the film is a gift from a friend, Ivana Miloš. She is writing about the sea and I love her poetry, so I asked her for a poem. She gave me three.
NOTEBOOK: In Drift, characters take the names of the non-professional actors who give life to them: Theresa is played by a woman called Theresa George, and Josefina is played by a woman called Josefina Gill. How did you arrive at the fictional name Ida, who is played by Angeliki, in Human Flowers of Flesh? Is it also a gift from a friend?
WITTMANN: This is not exactly a gift—but there is an anecdote. After deciding on the name Ida, I met a woman in Madrid who was thinking about Drift for her Ph.D. She had a baby when Drift had just come out. She used the song “Baby” [by Donnie and Joe Emerson] from the end of the film as a lullaby: every night, she would listen to it and her baby would fall asleep. And her baby was called Ida! When she read about Human Flowers of Flesh and found out that the protagonist was called Ida, it was strange.
Going through the process of finding the name, I wanted something short and clear. Ida is precise, although there is also an openness to it. Names can be a sign of where someone is from, but with Ida there is some ambiguity. Ida is apparently also “the one who works.” So there is some strength to it too.
NOTEBOOK: What was it like to work with both former collaborators and new collaborators? What was it like, in addition, to work with Angeliki and Denis, having worked in the past with non-professional actors for the most part?
WITTMANN: With Nika Son [Nika Breithaupt], it is a long-term thing. Since 2009, we have worked together on every one of my films and we have a deep understanding of each other. I am really thankful because you cannot plan for this. As for new people, I wanted to spend time with them because they interest me. I wanted Denis for the role of Galoup, but other than that I was not interested, first of all, in working with professional actors. Then I met Angeliki, but I was interested in her less as an actress and more as a person.
ANGELIKI PAPOULIA: With Helena, it is not about acting. I like it: I prefer to be in the moment, rather than bringing something which was constructed beforehand.
WITTMANN: Exactly, for instance at a certain point Gustavo [Jahn], who plays Carlos in the film and is an amazing filmmaker himself, became like a second camera assistant. Everyone was helping out. Everyone was there to participate.
PAPOULIA: While we were far away from any coast and in an isolated world, we were doing everyday stuff: cooking, eating, sleeping. Within two or three days, we became like a family.
NOTEBOOK: People in Drift and Human Flowers of Flesh share space and also share stories. In Drift, there is the tale of the crocodile. In Human Flowers of Flesh, one of the men in the crew narrates to Ida the Greek legend in which blood from the Medusa’s head spills into the sea and ossifies into coral. Why does storytelling figure so prominently in both films, in which dialogue is sparse? How do you see storytelling functioning in interactions between characters?
WITTMANN: I do not really have an answer as to why this is. For Human Flowers of Flesh, I shot more dialogue than there is—not much! [Laughs.] But I left these scenes out. Even if the dialogue is open, it still leaves little space for the spectator to look and to think. Showing a man bandaging the hand of another man, however—this tells us a lot about tenderness that dialogue cannot.
Human Flowers of Flesh (2022).
PAPOULIA: We shot the scene of us eating breakfast a few times. Sometimes, Helena said, “Okay, you can talk,” and we improvised. Obviously, Helena chose the one where we were silent. [Laughs.] People can communicate without having to talk.
NOTEBOOK: When you did talk on set, how was it to converse with a set of people with such diverse native languages, from Arabic, to German, to Portuguese?
PAPOULIA: Most of the time, we spoke English. With Ferhat Mouhali, who plays Farouk, we spoke French. That we spoke so many languages was a gift: we would ask one another how to say words in our different languages and we started to create a new tongue with the combination of those.
NOTEBOOK: That speaks beautifully to the way Drift and Human Flowers of Flesh are rich with references to other films, literature, and music. In the constellation of texts around Human Flowers of Flesh, Beau travail is one of the most obvious; that Denis Lavant reemerges here, reprising the role of the legionnaire Galoup, is remarkable. Along with the recycling of Wavelength in Drift, it is another moment when you make a cinephilic commons of a cinephilic canon. How do you think about influence, quotation, and the relation of your films to other films?
WITTMANN: I see these things as having influenced me in giving me something, moving me, and taking me somewhere. This is how knowledge is formed for me. We collect things. When these things connect to an observation we make or an experience we have, they come back to the surface. So you don’t need to know Beau travail to see Human Flowers of Flesh, but it adds something. Similarly, I know people who hadn’t read Le Marin de Gibraltar and then took it out after seeing the film.
NOTEBOOK: That’s nice. That’s like another gift, from film to spectator. What is the importance of Marguerite Duras to you? There is Le Marin de Gibraltar here; you have written briefly about India Song (1975) for Notebook and you have mentioned Agatha et les lectures illimitées (1981) in relation to Drift.
WITTMANN: I am actually not into the end of Le Marin de Gibraltar—it starts to be a love affair that is kind of boring to me—but the first half is stunning. Maybe I am more like Chantal Akerman than Duras when it comes to cinema. All the same, Human Flowers of Flesh has something novelistic about it.
PAPOULIA: You didn’t like the fact that the woman in Duras’ book abandons the ship for the man. Due to the lockdown, we had a lot of time to prepare for the film. I read Duras’ book, and we also started exchanging long emails because we were not able to meet. And this was a novelistic method of creating a character.
Ida is extremely independent: she has chosen a way of living and she will not change it easily for another person, even if she is open to receiving the world and she doesn’t impose herself on others. While she is the owner of the boat, she and the crew are equal. In the script, there was one line in which Ida says, “There are no rules.” And this, of course, is totally different from the Foreign Legion.
NOTEBOOK: Helena, tell us about your interest in the Foreign Legion.
WITTMANN: I was surprised that the Foreign Legion still existed. I am not at all interested in judgement and it is not about moralizing. I was interested in it as a part of contemporary society that is excluded from visible reality: it is pushed to Europe’s borders.
Women are excluded from the Foreign Legion. Yet being excluded, looking at something from the outside, is not the worst thing for imagining. And then there was the question of transgression and how close to get. I had to decide whether or not to work with the legionnaires. In the end, I decided anything other than working with them would feel wrong. I couldn’t just look at them from the outside: that would be too easy.
NOTEBOOK: Perhaps it would be voyeuristic? Compared with Beau travail, there is a very different erotics at play regarding the bodies of the legionnaires in Human Flowers of Flesh—less athletic, less dynamic and less sexualized.
WITTMANN: Absolutely, and all of it has to do with the gaze. I enjoy looking and I loved what I was seeing, but I don’t think Human Flowers of Flesh is voyeuristic. I couldn’t cast the legionnaires myself, because the Foreign Legion has strict marketing and they choose the models. I was lucky with Nikola, the legionnaire who makes the bed in the film. Nikola asked me what to wear—“I have this, and this, and this”—and he proposed these super short shorts! So we can see his legs and also his tattoos, which play a big part in the Foreign Legion in terms of identity.
NOTEBOOK: How did filming on the Mediterranean Sea compare with filming on the Atlantic Ocean?
WITTMANN: Well, the Atlantic is bigger—and you feel it, as you move differently on the water.
PAPOULIA: Vlad, Mauro and I were getting seasick almost all the time. Some days, it was so difficult because of the wind. When it was calm, it was a gift. Each day was a surprise; it created an existential instability.
WITTMANN: I was surprised to rediscover the Mediterranean. When I go into the water there, I am immediately relaxed as it is warm. I was interested in immersion this time. When you are in the sea, your body becomes very light. I look at the land differently, my perception of sound changes… The film is so much about this kind of fluidity.
PAPOULIA: Ida is driven by curiosity and this brings some sort of fluidity. She is always on the move. She is always wandering and wondering.
NOTEBOOK: Drift closes on a photograph of the sea and Human Flowers of Flesh on an image of the desert. Is this a sign of withdrawing from ocean to land in future films? Or does the sea still have a hold on you and your work?
WITTMANN: I think it does. I think the desert mirrors the sea, though. It was the first time in my life that I had been to the desert. In one way, it is the complete opposite. In another way, there is a kinship or a resemblance. Like the sea, it is ever-shifting because of the wind. Light moves across the desert exactly as it moves across the sea, too. Humans cannot exist in the desert or the sea. Like the sea, the desert is a space for imaginative projection, also with a violent history… So there are many parallels. I want to go further into both the desert and the sea. In Germany, for instance, there is the Wadden Sea with a strong tide. For twelve hours, there are vast, moon-like landscapes where water was before. And then, the sea comes back.
Drift (2017).