Adapting Julio Cortzar: Interview with

Nicolas Humbert on Lucie et maintenant

Journal nomade
By Andreas Wutz
Published in:
Senses of Cinema
Conversations on Film
Issue 50
April 2009
In May of 1982, the Argentinean writer Julio Cortzar and his wife, the Canadian photographer
Carol Dunlop, undertook a last and very unusual road trip from Paris to Marseille, described in
their collaborative novel, Los autonautas de la cosmopista (Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, 1983).
Based on this novel, Simon Frbringer, Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel made a film titled
Lucie et maintenant Journal nomade (2007), which was shown in several European film
festivals and on the European television channel ARTE. The filmmakers are widely known for
their films Step Across the Border (1990) and Middle of the Moment (1995).
At a festival in Munich, I had the opportunity to talk with Nicolas Humbert about the film and
the motives behind adapting the work of Julio Cortzar to the screen.
***
One of your former films was about the poet Robert Lax. There was also a film project
about the poet Paul Celan. Now Julio Cortzar. Why?
NICOLAS HUMBERT: An interest in other arts, especially in literature, applies to all of our
films. Cortzar was always important to me. I am strongly influenced by Surrealism and the texts
by Cortzar were always like a bridge into the present time for me, because they have a lot to do
with Surrealist art and, at the same time, they are borne by an elusive humanity. Thus, Cortzar
became a constant companion.
In Lucie et maintenant, however, we worked for the first time using a text which was specially
written for the film and became its major structural element. For our film, Three Windows
(1999), about and with the poet Robert Lax, the text was also important, but there the text came
from his side and already existed.
Cortzars short story La autopista del sur (The Southern Thruway, 1966) served as a
model for Jean-Luc Godards Week End. At one point in Autonauts of the Cosmoroute,
Cortzar speaks of this parallel thruway we are looking for. Like Week End, is Lucie et
maintenant also an anti-road movie?
This anti-road movie is already arranged in the book. It is an experimental framework that
attempts to take a space that is originally meant for acceleration that is, the freeway and to do
the opposite with it to decelerate and to reclaim your own time with it by creating frictions

with the site. In this sense, Lucie et maintenant can be called a road movie, but a road movie in
which pausing is more important than moving.
How familiar were the two actor-protagonists of your film with the book Autonauts of the
Cosmoroute?
In the beginning, we spent a lot of time transforming the novel into a screenplay. But, during the
planning phase for a second research tour on the freeway Paris-Marseille, we suddenly had the
feeling that we wouldnt seize the essence of the book if we continued to try to convert it into a
sort of literary pre-form for a feature movie. So, we asked ourselves how it would be if we
would bring two people, Ocane Madelaine and Jocelyn Bonnerave both are writers and a
couple as well into the situation of novel and make the tour together with them. We started
from Paris in two Volkswagen buses and, already from the very moment of us arriving at our
first highway rest area, there was this spark in the air that this journey would now become the
film. This feeling continued until we arrived with them, and approximately 30 hours of filmed
material, in Marseille.
The book is put together with very differing elements: by a logbook with detailed
travelogues, but also more reflexive texts by Cortzar or by Dunlop, who also documented
the voyage in photographs. How have her photos influenced your film images?
There is a kinship between the sthetics of these photographs and the film. Some objects were
purposely quoted in the film image, such as the photo with the traffic cone on the top of
Cortzars head. Other pictures are quoted in the sound. Larks can be heard and you can see
caterpillars in the same way as they are described and photographed in the book. An additional
sthetic equivalence comes up by the extreme slowing down of things we create, which changes
your perception. The turn towards the banal and simple, which one can see also in the photos by
Carol Dunlop, you can also perceive in the film. In this turn towards the banal and simple, any
hierarchy is dissolved. You dont say anymore this moment is more important than the other.
The image of the caterpillar creeping along the table is as important as the simultaneous
philosophical digression. This suspension of hierarchies of perception finds its counterpart in the
aesthetics of the film.
The voyage of Cortzar and Dunlop had a very personal reason, but was embedded in a
more general context as well. Before they got to know that, they were seriously ill. They
had engaged themselves with a big part of their work for a new Nicaragua, and the
copyright of the book was transferred by Cortzar to the new Sandinista government. Did
this political context also become an issue for your film?
The concreteness of the political situation, which was a fact for Cortzar and Dunlop at that time,
doesnt exist anymore, of course. However, the political context comes into the film in another
way. By the presence of [Donald] Rumsfeld and the war in Iraq, by television images which
could be seen at a highway rest area or anywhere else in the world. But this act of situating
yourself within a political context, which still was so present in the time of Dunlop and Cortzar,
cannot be found anymore in our time.
I think this is painful, because as an artist you like to find yourself embedded in a larger context.
The reality were situated in, the complex global structure, is making it much more difficult to
involve and engage oneself. Where it could be most possible now is in Latin America, where a
kind of concept of humans-with-one-another, liberated from ideology, is reappearing and
making itself noticeable as a new force.

The original voyage of the book follows certain rules: for example, dont approach more
than two resting places per day. Which kind of rules happened during the shooting?
We stuck to the rules as far as Dunlop and Cortzar probably did. The rules are a structure of
reality, but a metaphor as well. But the most important is that they were creating the game. The
metamorphosis of the highway stream into Caribbean waves, as it is described by Cortzar,
actually happens. You get quite quickly into a sort of trance. This is caused mostly by the soundnoise level and by the structure of the situation, which results again from the rules of the game.
Both reminded me of my stays in a convent, because spiritual experiences depend a lot on
structures. In this sense, the voyage also has been a wisely arranged pilgrimage.
When your film, your road trip, starts, it is accompanied by music. Later, the movement
falters, delays and something emerges that is akin to Gilles Deleuzes concept of the timeimage. In comparison with your former films, the use of music in Lucie et maintenant is
quite sparing and selective. Instead, sounds and noises are pushed acoustically to the fore.
Do you see a connection here?
I think this sensation is associated with the basic experience this film is about: the experience of
deceleration, by which your own perception is born. The music is put very delicately in reference
to specific things. There is music that corresponds to the sound effects, because in that sense it
represents a live event as well. For the black-and-white sequences, a leitmotiv by [Franz]
Schubert is used, which works more like a window opening onto the book, in which Schubert
also appears, but opening to the archetypical side of this voyage as well. After all, it is a love
story and recalls other romantic couples like Orpheus and Eurydice or Tristan and Isolde. The
treatment of sound, however, has to do primarily with the transformed perception of reality.
The sound of the film, the noises of the highway, are not original recordings, but were
reconstructed in the studio. Were there any sounds that were spared and not used for the
reconstruction or did you try to recreate the sound as naturally as possible?
We had a wonderful sound designer, Marc Parisotto, who on top of that had a very special
relation to the sound material, because coincidentally he had grown up right beside this highway.
As a child, he was already always fascinated by the different sounds of cars, the different
engines. He searched in his sound archives, edited existing material and reconstructed the
highway sound piece by sound piece.
Many sounds in Lucie et maintenant were made by a foley artist: the noise of the leaves; the
picking of a raven, which you normally never would hear over the cars; the atmosphere of bouleplayers out of Marcs archive merging with a group of French senior travellers; the buzzing and
whirring of transmission lines which are normally inaudible. It is this sound universe that creates
the actual narrative space.
At the rest areas, as it is described in the book, Dunlop and Cortzar also got to know
other people. Once, they even felt persecuted by a truck driver. Did you have similar
experiences on your movie trip?
We have been asked already a few times, Why do so few people appear in this film? In the
book, however, something similar happens. The essential point is not due to the field research of
an ethnographer, who likes to explore the species highway passengers. The main experience,
which Dunlop and Cortzar were also searching for, was to recreate as a couple once again a life

situation in which nothing would distract them and thus allow them to visualize their own
history. This experience we followed together with Ocane and Jocelyn.
Cortzar has written another book about the highway, but also about night walks or the
metro. He writes that as soon as you enter the metro you enter a system in which
everything follows a different logic. Is there any distinct figure or route you have traced in
your films?
It is always the challenge that, on one side, we are interested in the most open form and, on the
other, this form needs structural elements to actually achieve this openness. Within a fluid
movement like a voyage, the primary task is to point out the single moment but to make a gift of
time as well. It is very much related to waiting. On the highway, we spent days and days in
which we did nothing, no filming at all. Waiting. And the critical moments that arise out of
waiting are mutually dependent. This is the actual source of friction.