Interview of Gilles Pastor
by Cathy Bouvard, co-director of Les Subsistances, june 2005
How originated this project about Derek Jarman ?
It was born from two things. I felt like keeping on working on intimacy, on the body and its weaknesses; as well as pursuing my reflexion about stage direction as a writing process. Derek Jarman produced an eclectic work of art; I was much influenced by it. Words and language were essential in my theatre; now I am looking for a new way of writing with video, dance, music and actors. I build links between people, human beings, I do not assemble a troupe.
What particularly interests you in Jarman’s world ?
His cinema has often shown the English contemporary society as violent, sick, in decline, apocalyptic.
Eldorado and Golden Age were represented in Jarman's mind by Elisabethain time; he saw in Margaret Thatcher the virus of English contemporary society. Once he knows he is HIV positive, his body itself becomes a ravaged field of creation.
Your world seems quite influenced by cinema.
Mostly by video, because it is cheap ! I like this kind of pictures that anybody can do. It is our contemporary “Super 8”, anybody can get a camcorder; that is why video is so present in my work. Two major filmmakers have influenced me : Syderberg and Jarman, who both have a singular way of working with pictures. Jarman shot in Super 8 and in video for a long time; pictures have then been altered, edited, etc. Syderbeg and Jarman have witnessed the cultural change in their country and composed their movies as you compose a painting, while breaking the rules of narration.
Beyond the aesthetic aspects of Jarman’s work, what kind of man was he ?
He was a poet, an eccentric man, politicaly engaged, a queer artist.
“My generation was infected by the lack of knowledge, and the next generation will be infected by the lack of information” he said. In 1992, he was right. Nowadays, more than 20 years after the virus' first appearance, we are exhausted. I am really fascinated by two movies from Derek Jarman : Jubilee and The Last of England. The Last of England dates from 1987. The country is lead by Thatcher. These are the last days of England. The Thatcher virus is on while Jarman knows he is ill from 1986. Jarman shoots the last days of a man condemned to death, the last cigarette. This film is not dead-ended : it is a political movie.
How would you define yours links to autobiography or to autofiction ?
Proust wrote a marvellous sequence in “La Recherche du temps perdu” (In search of lost time), about his grandmother’s death. This death was simply his mother’s ! I went to Dungeness, in Derek Jarman’s house, I met Keith Collins, his friend and colleague. In my work, I visit the history of this house, I go through it with Jarman’s friend 10 years after his death. I am interested by the distance between me and him; it is a search, a journey between Eden and Getsemani.
What about your links with this intimacy on stage ?
Fermez vos yeux, Monsieur Pastor (Close your eyes, Mister Pastor), was a mixture of materials, which were related to my own intimacy. I like this kind of violence, when the body reappears brutally. In Fermez vos yeux, Monsieur Pastor, I was totally free because I was talking about my own reality : the reality of an epileptic. This new performance is not autobiographical. I am not sick. But when I choose to talk about Jarman, I choose to tell the story of a body damaged by AIDS.
