Week 24/2024

EN

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: “When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever their diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle.” – Rama Krishna

Title card opening the film

“The script of Le cercle rouge is an original in the sense that it was written by me and by me alone, but it won’t take long to realize it’s a transposed western, with the action taking place in Paris instead of the West, in the present day rather than after the Civil War, and with car instead of horses. So, I start off with the traditional – almost obligatory – conventional situation: the man just released from jail. And this man corresponds pretty much to the cowboy who, once the opening credits are over, pushes open the doors of a saloon.”

Jean-Pierre Meville1

“I believe in this kind of romanticism. […] The romantic values of friendship and brotherhood expressed in this movie are almost impossible to find today. […] Jean-Pierre Melville was the coolest, most stylish auteur of his time.

I have never fired a gun in my life. I learned how to hold a gun, and subsequently taught my actors, by watching Alain Delon in the films of Melville.”

John Woo2

• 1Jean-Pierre Meville, cited in Rui Nogueira (ed.), Melville on Melville (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), 155-156.
• 2Filmmaker John Woo quoted in the press kit of 2002 restoration of the film that he initiated.

EN

“In France, Lacan’s rock star status owed much to his popular public seminars. The charismatic iconoclast had been giving free public lectures for decades, and those lectures were usually packed with students, colleagues, skeptics, young radicals… and fans. The video gives you an idea of what the fuss was all about. Even at 70, Lacan still owns the room, and he has the presence of a stage actor, complete with dramatic pauses, ironic self-reflection, and pitch-perfect storms of emotion. [Suddenly,] a politically inspired heckler tries to ambush him. It’s a moment right out of a comedy show, if the comedy show were chic and grainy and edited by Jean-Luc Godard. Note the grace with which Lacan neutralizes the poor guy, lights his cigar and then concludes the lecture, even though the fallout from their encounter is still stuck in his hair.”

Sheerly Avni1

“On October 13, 1972, the charismatic and controversial French theorist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is giving a lecture at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, when a young man with long hair and a chip on his shoulder walks up to the front of the lecture hall and begins making trouble. He spills water and what appears to be flour all over Lacan’s lecture notes and then stammers his way into a strange speech that sounds as if it were taken straight out of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. The 71-year-old Lacan never loses his composure. (His cigar appears bent out of shape, but it was that way from the beginning.) The audience, too, retains a certain Gallic nonchalance.”

Mike Springer2

“A few minutes in, we see a young (somewhat unsteady) kid approach Lacan’s desk, dunk his hands into a pitcher of… something, pour that something all over Lacan’s materials and then start making grand proclamations in the idiom of The Situationist International. Not content to simply soapbox on Guy Debord, the Situationist wackadude flings the formerly pitcher-bound residue on his hands directly into the face of the much smaller Lacan, apparently in an effort to prove his “authenticity”. Over 70 years old at this time, Lacan continues talking. And Lacan continues smoking.”

Amber Frost3

“Perhaps it’s because the young student knows how difficult a target Lacan will be that the student crosses the line from intellectual argument to a gesture of physical confrontation, a gesture of touch. The act of physical protest is also a perfectly valid form of communication, as any fashionable semiotician must know, and Lacan coolly accepts it as such. He says, ‘I understand’. A few others in the room jump to Lacan’s aid, and the young man wishfully asks if he is going to be “roughed up”. He’ll have no such luck.

In fact, the young protestor’s nervous demeanor as he explains the purpose of his protest makes him so easy a target for the 71-year-old master that Lacan’s attempt to respond calmly and without rebuke begins to appear condescending. He asks, ‘Shall I carry on from here?’, inviting the young man to sit down, and the audience laughs.

The young man, realizing that he is in danger of becoming a comic figure of inarticulate youthful intensity, refuses to play along, and soon attacks Lacan a second time. Unlike the first act of physical confrontation, which Jacques Lacan tried to gently laugh off, the second seems to make him angry, perhaps against his will. As the mood in the room intensifies, the intellectual coherence of the confrontation between Lacan and the young protester begins to dissipate. Nothing has been decided or debated, but perhaps something has transpired.”

Marc Eliot Stein4

• 1Sheerly Avni, “Charismatic Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan Gives Public Lecture (1972),” Open Culture, 21 March 2011.
• 2Mike Springer, “Jacques Lacan’s Confrontation with a Young Rebel: Classic Moment, 1972,” Open Culture, 4 September 2013.
• 3Amber Frost, “The Single Most ‘French’ Moment in all of 1972: Jacques Lacan accosted, but no one stops smoking,” Dangerous Minds, 7 August 2023.
• 4Marc Eliot Stein, “Philosophy Weekend: Tactile Philosophy, from Helen Keller to Jacques Lacan,” Literary Kicks, 13 July 2013.

EN

Nicole Kidman: There is something very important that we need to do as soon as possible...

Tom Cruise: What’s that?

Kidman: Fuck.

Last lines of the film

“There is also a novel by Arthur Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, which I intend to do but on which I have not yet started to work. It's a difficult book to describe – what good book isn't? It explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage and tries to equate the importance of sexual dreams and might-have-beens with reality. All of Schnitzler's work is psychologically brilliant, and he was greatly admired by Freud, who once wrote to him, apologizing for having always avoided a personal meeting. Making a joke (a joke?), Freud said this was because he was afraid of the popular superstition that if you meet your Doppelgänger (double) you would die.”

Stanley Kubrick1

“As an actor, you set up: there’s reality, and there’s pretend… And those lines get crossed, and it happens when you’re working with a director that allows that to happen. It’s a very exciting thing to happen; it’s a very dangerous thing to happen.”

Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise’s wife at the time2

“In some of the scenes, the backgrounds were rear-projection plates. Generally, when Tom’s facing the camera, the backgrounds are rear-projected; anything that shows him from a side view was done on the streets of London. We had the plates shot in New York by a second unit. Once the plates were sent to us, we had them force-developed and balanced to the necessary levels. We’d then go onto our street sets and shoot Tom walking on a treadmill. After setting the treadmill to a certain speed, we’d put some lighting effects on him to simulate the glow from the various storefronts that were passing by in the plates. We spent a few weeks on those shots."

Cinematographer Larry Smith3

Chantal Akerman: I find that La captive (2000) is not far from Kubrick’s film. His last film…

Dominique Païni: Eyes Wide Shut

Akerman: Exactly. In the fact that when Richard Gere discovers... 

Païni: No, it’s Tom Cruise.

Akerman: Yes, Tom Cruise discovers there’s something about his wife that he doesn’t know and that he’ll never know. And maybe it’s something that has to do with the early 20th century. I’d say Freud. Because those were things we didn’t ask before. 

Païni: Really an early 20th century question. 

Akerman: And also one which refers to women.

Païni: Discovering that the other has an unconscious. It’s not only his unconscious, but the fact that the other has one. 

Akerman: And that the other is the other. And that we’ll never know everything about the other. And he [Tom Cruise’s character] is both obsessed and romantic. He has this idea that loving someone means becoming one with the other. She [Nicole Kidman’s character] tells him: “We’ll never be one. We’ll always be two.” I don’t know how old that idea is. I think all teenaged kids think about the love of their lives. That they’ll become one. But even if we dream about it, we find out that’s false. 

Chantal Akerman in conversation with Dominique Païni4

• 1Stanley Kubrick, cited in Michel Ciment, “Interviews with Stanley Kubrick: A Clockwork Orange,” Kubrick (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston), 156.
• 2Nicole Kidman, cited in Robert Kolker & Nathan Abrams, Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the making of his final film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 90.
• 3Larry Smith, cited in Stephen Pizzello, “A Sword in the Bed: Eyes Wide Shut,” American Cinematographer 33 (1999).
• 4Chantal Akerman and Dominique Païni, "Conversation: Chantal Akerman and Dominique Païni." On La Captive. DVD. Directed by Chantal Akerman. Gemini Films, 2004.