Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Half a century ago.
1958.
"La tete contre les murs".
A film that is half a century old makes an impression...
...especially seeing as no one wanted to make this film to begin with.
It was going to be a very tough film about psychiatric homes.
It was the first of its kind in France.
In America, there had been "The Snake Pit"...
...but there hadn't been many like it in the history of cinema.
Mad people are frightening.
They appeared in detective films...
...where they were serial killers...
...but psychiatry itself...
...was a dreaded subject for filmmakers.
"La tete contre les murs" was based on a novel by Hervé Bazin...
...who himself had been incarcerated in an asylum by his parents...
...because they found him to be too unruly.
That's often how the scandal breaks out.
A family member ends up being sectioned to get rid of them...
...often in collusion with the doctors.
And once they're incarcerated...
...they have terrible trouble getting out, it's virtually impossible.
So it's the story of the life of a young man...
...who has been incarcerated by his family and tries to get out.
To begin with, no one wanted to make this film.
I was going to direct it myself...
...but at that time in 1959...
...just before the Nouvelle Vague, before Truffaut, Godard and all that...
...it wasn't possible for me to direct it myself.
So I approached Georges Franju...
...a great documentary-maker in his 50s who had never made a feature film.
And I asked him to take my place...
...having done the screenplay, found the location...
...and more or less hired the actors...
...giving myself the leading role...
...instead of the role of director.
For a long time after the film came out...
...it got rave reviews and everyone thought it was wonderful.
But on a commercial level, it didn't work at all.
And then there was this generational divide.
I was 20 and Franju was 50...
...which meant that in some scenes...
...like the party scene and other scenes with young people in them...
...I had the young jet set in leather jackets...
...which wasn't at all Franju's scene, given his age.
Franju injected his sense of poetry with the doves.
Lots of things you see in the film really came from Franju.
There was an extraordinary mixture, and while he was directing...
...Franju, who was very sensitive...
...and took pills...
He was partial to drinking so he was given pills...
...to keep him going during filming.
One day we were shooting in a real psychiatric home...
...at Dury-les-Amiens near Amiens.
And when he turned up to film...
...Franju witnessed this terrible scene.
A patient, who had supposedly been cured...
...was given the job of barber and cutting another patient's hair.
He cut the patient's throat with a razor blade...
...and blood spurted out practically all over us...
...because we were crossing this path next to the barber's.
It sent Franju into a terrible depression...
...and he got ill.
My assistant was Jacques Rouffio.
Franju's assistant, rather, but mine to begin with.
Together we finished off some scenes in the film...
...while Franju was in hospital for a few days.
That gave me a taste for direction...
...which I later pursued with Les dragueurs.
So together with Rouffio and Schuftan...
...the great cameraman in Fritz Lang's "M" ...
...and American and French hits such as "Qual des brumes"...
...I shot some scenes in the film.
So there was a controversy which lasted for years...
...about the real affiliation in "La tete contre les murs".
Was the film 100% Franju's?
Was it 80% Franju's and 20% Mocky's and Rouffio's?
And for a long time it was left to the public to decide...
...compared to the films I made subsequently...
...just how much creative input I'd had in the film...
...because I had written the script and chosen the sets and the actors.
In this film, I reunited actors from the previous generation...
...Paul Meurisse, Pierre Brasseur, Thomy Bourdelle...
...and many other actors from the '30s.
And at the same time, there was Anouk Aimée...
...who had already worked a bit and who I was in love with.
I had huge difficulties playing the role and kissing her.
She was in love with someone else...
...which was a serious problem for me.
I even sank into a bit of a depression following the film...
...because she went off with another actor...
...which I found painful.
On top of that, I created an opportunity...
...for Charles Aznavour, who was a singer, not an actor.
For his role as a mentally ill patient...
...who hangs himself at the end of the film...
...I was lucky enough to get him an Etoile de Cristal award...
...which at the time was the equivalent of a César award for best actor.
This film wasn't a success in 1959...
...but it gradually became a classic.
Now it gets a three - or four - star rating every time it's shown...
...and it's considered a real masterpiece.
Whenever a psychiatry conference is held...
...they use this film.
I get a phone call requesting to hire the film.
So psychiatrists have used it a lot.
What was the subject of the film?
The subject of the film was the confrontation of two theories.
The first, presented by Pierre Brasseur...
...was that lunatics should be kept in an asylum all their lives.
They shouldn't be let out...
...in case they do any harm.
The other doctor, played by Paul Meurisse, thought the opposite.
He said that when the mentally ill are on the road to recovery...
...they can resume normal life without any risk.
And the argument persists today...
...since the release of certain psychiatric patients...
...has led to the *** of nurses in the south-west...
...and many other bloody incidents involving discharged patients...
...who have ended up still being a danger to society.
So "Head against the wall" remains...
...half a century on...
...the only example of a film about psychiatric homes.
There have been virtually no others anywhere in the world.
There was "Shock corridor" by Samuel Fuller in the United States...
...but that was much more romanticised than our film...
...which was a very accurate documentary...
...on psychiatric homes.
I should say, to finish, that there are 84 psychiatric homes...
...supposedly one per "département" in France.
Only they're often run a bit like prisons.
There's controversy around prisons...
...but a psychiatric home can be like a prison...
...in the way in which patients are treated.
At the time I was filming...
...patients were sometimes put in cells with straw...
...to absorb any calls of nature, a bit like animals.
For a while now...
...the services have been improving.
When there is no separate building designated as a psychiatric home...
...in some départements, the service is only available in hospitals.
In big hospitals, there is a psychiatric ward...
...acting as a psychiatric home, if you like.
Usually patients are better treated there...
...because it's part of the hospital.
When the psychiatric hospitals are separate...
...they're much harder to manage.
For some reason the film was given an 18 certificate.
I don't know why since it would have shown everyone...
...what asylums were like.
My sole reason for making this film...
...was that, coming from a Polish family...
...some of my cousins had been incarcerated in concentration camps.
Some were fortunate enough to escape, others weren't and died.
But those who escaped ended up going mad...
...and were literally imprisoned in psychiatric homes.
That's what decided me, in my vocation as a film director...
...to launch my career with a film that dealt with this problem...
...that l could relate to.
Enjoy the screening.