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audacity. Bataille’s work ought to be read, studied, critiqued but
staged and put through the rack of Hollywood artifice? Fog machines? Amplified
wind effect? I don’t think so. And yet I clearly see that smutty
laughter of Hélène, the quintessentially “bad”
mother of 20th century literature. Like a breath, my mind’s camera
follows her when she loses ground and staggers into her son’s arms.
Hence, a camera could seize and put into shape this impossible
story of a liminal incest. In my defense, I bring to the bench Louis Malle
whom I interviewed for the re-release of A Murmur of the Heart,
a light comedy about a mother-son bond. After I ever so off-handedly drop
Bataille’s name, the director confesses that initially, yes, he
intended to use the material in Ma Mère
but quickly realized it couldn’t be done: too heavy, too impossible,
to reiterate a Bataillean episteme. Thus this draft, this ébauche
of a film script. How strange that the French put into close quarters
a rough outline and debauchery as if to have a go at something, a stab,
were already debauched, perverse.
Translating My Mother into cinematic language
puts me into the untenable position of traduttore/traditore which inscribes
a treason, an infidelity to the original which is assumed and taken for
granted. On one hand, you struggle to render the novel’s movement
and its characteristic moral inversions, leaving its key scenes intact
—
on the other, you know that your choice of words, camera positions and
angles are echoing much more than the core text and are in fact writing
over and beyond the source. A visual palimpsest of sorts. In this we take
comfort for, as Walter Benjamin says, “no translation would be possible
if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For
in its afterlife — which could not be called that if it were not
a transformation and a renewal of something living — the original
undergoes a change.”
To illustrate: in the four scenes posted here, I follow the plot line
but invent one scene (scene 16) which functions as a shorthand for the
charged emotions where the work of mourning is seen both as real and theatrical.
Like a forger painting a Dali which does not exist, I’ve written
several “fake” scenes, mostly for Pierre, to endow him with
a life apart from his mother’s torment: Pierre in a café;
in the street with some prostitutes, Pierre coming out of a college building
after some finals. This difference, this sea change is what I believe
will travel across.
Not being in the habit of writing film treatments, I initially went a
little wild with the cinematic signifier, probably scaring off any serious
folks who like to invent their own language. Be my guest, put that dolly
shot where you want, see if I care. But this being said, I’m
endowing the camera with a discourse beyond focalization and positionality.
It becomes the site of knowledge, a place which registers that which can
be shown, but also the ghostly absence of an image or that which is en
route to being filmed, maybe to foreground the imaginary realm (in the
Lacanian sense here). What, of course, needs to be avoided at all costs,
is a tawdry vaudeville of a dissolute mother and her innocent son, since
the wound of knowing gives the maternal subject a scandalous otherness.
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