01  SUMMER 2025

It’s been over 30 years since Luc Moullet’s text ‘The twelve ways of being a filmmaker’ first appeared. ^[1] Twelve ways, one for each Zodiac sign: Moullet proposes a cinema history by way of astrology.

Like all cinema histories, however, it has become outdated with time. In the last thirty-plus years new directors have come along, old directors have made new films, new directors have become old directors and old directors have died. Old directors have been rediscovered… And, besides, like all cinema histories, it was fairly incomplete to begin with. We expected the absence of Naruse and Shimizu, but certainly not of Ozu. So we thought it was time to write a new one.

* * *

Moullet begins his text with a reference to Rohmer and then, for some reason, doesn’t discuss him in the context of his sign. How do we explain it? Rohmer is an Aries; in Aries Moullet finds ‘pioneers and innovators’: Tarkovsky, Duras, Garrel, Epstein, McLaren. Well, it’s obvious Rohmer had no place among this crowd. So Moullet omits him altogether. But if we introduce some other names he also failed to mention, we can easily find a common trait that would account for Rohmer. In Rohmer, Garrel, Hiroshi Shimizu, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Charles Burnett, we find what we could call an ethnographic impulse: a taste for small groups, patiently observed.

But there’s another side to Rohmer: next to the location shooting and natural lighting of most of his movies, there is the artificiality of Perceval and The Lady and the Duke; not to speak, of course, of his very pronounced dramaturgy. It’s in this second strain that we would include Duras, Werner Schroeter, Allan Dwan, all of them famous for their unnaturalistic lighting, acting, decors, all of them interested, in some way or another, in the artificiality of theater.

This taste for both observation and the artificial can at times produce a feeling of estrangement and isolation: Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Walser, Cioran, Beckett, Van Gogh, Flannery O’Connor — as well as Screwball Squirrel. Born on April Fool’s Day, Screwy invents for himself the story of his pictures, going as far as inviting someone to persecute him, then dies, after only four shorts, by the hands of an unwanted friend… Sad ending, isn’t it?

In Taurus Moullet finds directors focused on ‘melodrama and portraits of women’: Ophüls, Sirk, Borzage, Vecchiali, Mizoguchi. Had he taken his research further, he’d have also remarked on the presence of women directors: Danièle Huillet, Maya Deren, Ute Aurand, Claire Denis.

As in the previous sign, we find here another notable omission: Moullet didn’t find a place for Jean Vigo! Perhaps by adding the name of Rogério Sganzerla we can identify another common trait: cursed artists. Vigo, we well know, didn’t live past his thirtieth year, and as for Sganzerla, he suffered throughout his entire career from interrupted projects — his Noel Rosa movie never saw the light of day — and died before his fifty-eighth birthday. We can also mention Deren (dead at forty-four) and, to a lesser degree, Mizoguchi and Ophüls, both dead before their sixtieth birthday.

Lastly, a serious mistake: we don’t know how this happened, but Moullet moved Rossellini’s birthday by a month and ended up assigning him to the wrong sign! Born on May 8, Rossellini is a Taurus, and one, for that matter, who easily fits into the lineage of Mizoguchi, Sirk and Vecchiali: melodramas with a moral preoccupation. (Couldn’t this suggest, perhaps, that Rossellini should have stuck with the first half of his career, instead of embarking on his pedagogical project?)

In Geminis we find a tension between the exterior and the interior, the unknown and the familiar: Varda, Resnais, Rouch, Akerman (who reads letters from home while exploring New York), Mathieu Riboulet (who reads his own writing at home while thinking about Moscow in Adieu la rue des radiateurs). We can also add to this list Sternberg and Boris Barnet, misfit of the studio system who wandered the vastness of his country, from the Caspian Sea to the Kazakhstan Steppes, all the way to a hotel room in Latvia where he (like Akerman would) took his own life.

Some are travelers (Akerman, Rouch, Céline, Serge Daney — Gemini’s poster child, from his early days obsessed with maps), some are deeply rooted in their countries (Demy, Fassbinder, Courbet, Céline, Wagner, Yeats, Pushkin). They all share a distinct feeling for geography and territory. It stands to reason that many of them should have a penchant for documentaries — something that is made even clearer by the addition of a few other names: Luis Ospina, Jia Zhangke, Raymonde Carasco, Peter Nestler.

Dreamy Cancers, of whom the greatest example is Proust, harbor in their works their lived experiences, and seem to compose with their own pain. We deal here with very personal works, often in direct relation to childhood, when the world is experienced most directly: Margarida Cordeiro returns to the Trás-os-Montes of her childhood for most of her films; Kiarostami will work with children for the entire first half of his career; Charles Laughton has children float along the river in the deep of the night; Erice has a little girl encounter a movie monster in the woods. This haunted aspect is even more accentuated in the last decan, with Apichatpong and Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Next to this dreamy childhood side, we find — as we usually do — the experience of the body, sensuous and fragile like an open wound. Here, again, it’s Proust who serves as model. Guiraudie, Breillat, Sarah Maldoror, Cocteau, Brisseau, Chabrol (as well as the aforementioned directors), all partake in both these sides at once: the dreamer, as in the first page of In Search of Lost Time, dreams first of all with their body.

We also observe a very particular relation to spaces and landscapes in their works, a concrete topography of their own dreams. Once more, it’s Proust who sets the tone, with Combray and Balbec.

‘A sign, then, with multiple dominant traits’, Moullet concludes. Not at all: we see a very precise line — or rather two, like the two sides of a coin — along which most of this sign’s major directors fit, as well as its major artists: Kafka as much as Proust.

Leo, out of which we could gather only two major directors left unmentioned by Moullet, rather speaks in his favor. According to him, Leo artists would have long or at least abundant careers — Fuller, Ray, Boetticher, Pialat — often, though not always, coupled with box-office success: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Huston, DeMille. Could we say the same for Naruse and Rita Azevedo Gomes? In a way… It is true, nonetheless, that this seems to equally apply to its actors: Mitchum, De Niro, Ingrid Caven, Micheline Presle, Bulle Ogier, Françoise Lebrun, Mae West.

Out of the Virgos ignored by Moullet, we note a somber and violent character: Artaud, Ulmer, Argento, De Palma. Even Dita Parlo, who played delightful characters, would meet a darker fate off the screens.

Is this in contradiction to the Nature motif Moullet attributes to this sign? Not exactly. In both Renoir and Stroheim we find — next to two different conceptions of nature, we may add — an evident pull towards violence and perversity. This duality comes to the fore most of all in Renoir’s Le testament du Docteur Cordelier. But isn’t nature, after all — something that another notable Virgo, Goethe, spent his life trying to ignore (must we remember that he refused to attend funerals?) — both the colorful beauty of birds and flowers, and the violence of the prey and the hunter?

What we find, most of all, is that they are all naïve: Renoir, Arrietta, Artaud, even Stroheim, all oppose a child-like romanticism to the coldness of reality. Some of them (Stroheim, De Palma) would like us to believe that they are terribly worldly, and in attempting to convince us can only further reveal their great naïvety (e.g. Stroheim, as described by his disciple Renoir, pretending he could withstand more alcohol than he could).

The most well-resolved Virgo seems to be António Reis. Renoir himself still needed to take so much from Zola, and this includes a whole lot of simplistic notions about culture and instinct, birth and death: romantic oppositions. Reis, in his turn, had a holistic understanding of nature.

Libra, Moullet’s sign, receives a rather short analysis by him. On the first decan, he sees asceticism (Antonioni, Bresson), on the second comedy (Tati, Keaton, McCarey, Groucho Marx). What we see in all of them, though, as well as in the directors for whom he couldn’t find a place — the Lumière brothers, Grémillon, Nelson Pereira dos Santos — is a very particular relationship to the body. It is almost always seen from a distance — Keaton, Tati, the Lumières, Antonioni — so that there is never any illusion of penetration; think, for example, of the ending of Blow Up, a tennis match with no ball. And when, as is the case with Bresson (‘how beautiful is a body’, we hear in L’Argent) and Nelson Pereira, the body is a frequent object of close-ups, it is to be dismembered and abstracted, never to be psychologized. The body remains a surface, there’s no path to a deeper understanding: hence Tati’s, Keaton’s and Bresson’s deadpan faces.

What unites them, therefore, is the problem of communication. This is most superficially evident in Tati and Antonioni, but it doesn’t take too much effort to observe it in Nelson Pereira (Vidas Secas, How Tasty was my Little Frenchman), Grémillon (all of them, Remorques especially), Bresson (the hands, the motif of exchange, the body as mystery; see, too, the endings of The Devil, Probably and Pickpocket, ‘oh Jeanne, quel drôle de chemin…’) and Moullet (Anatomy of a Relationship, Origins of a Meal, The Seats of the Alcazar… all of them).

This preoccupation with surfaces can, on the one hand, lead to the exacerbated plasticity of a Rothko, a Giacometti, a Rouben Mamoulian (or Bresson for that matter, who wanted to be a painter before he got into cinema); and, on the other, to the excess of Faulkner, Cummings, Rimbaud, Kleist, whose works constitute desperate attempts to break the barriers and achieve communion (see Michael Kohlhaas). In this last group, nothing but writers: that’s because cinema, as Sollers once put it, is ‘superficiality finally revealed to itself’, it doesn’t allow for interiority like literature. So couldn’t we say that the biggest mistake of The Seats of the Alcazar is this abuse of narration, coming from all the characters, this simplistic interiority that often only seems to exist so it can serve as the butt of a joke? As a Libra filmmaker, Moullet should have remembered to keep his distance and show nothing but the bodies themselves, elusive, mysterious — as he himself had done in A Girl is a Gun.

Scorpios enjoy working in secret camaraderie with other Scorpios. Visconti finds Alain Delon and Burt Lancaster, Hong Sang-soo collaborates with Jung Jae-young and Kwon Hae-hyo. Marie-Claude Treilhou, Pierre Léon, Mathieu Amalric make the great constellation around Jean-Claude Biette, who himself seeks company in Ezra Pound, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jacques Tourneur. (In literature, we could also mention Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.)

As for Tourneur, he has Joel McCrea; his most famous collaborator, Dana Andrews, however, is a Capricorn. That’s because to this sign, particularly attuned to one of cinema’s major principles — the impulse for the other, for the different — the most important thing is collaboration itself. Biette, who would often act in his friends' films, had another JCB — Jean-Christophe Bouvet — star in his own movies.

Collaboration is the key. Biette had his troupe of actors, as does Hong, who, moreover, has further depurated his art through a close collaboration with Kim Min-hee. And we can’t forget Anne-Marie Miéville and Tsai Ming-liang’s career-spanning collaborators: Godard and Lee Kang-sheng.

Other than that, one thing in particular brings together their movies: a tension between small closed rooms and ample open spaces. Miéville — who shares a birthday with Dostoevsky — starts Lou Didn’t Say No with a character asphyxiated inside his room, follows this with a cross-country road trip, then ends the film in another room, the dark movie theater. In Tsai, Tourneur, Hong, this is even more obvious. Wang Bing, Marcel Hanoun, Judit Elek can also be mentioned — as well as Henri Langlois, who hoarded films in his strange museum, ‘the great dragon who looks over our treasures’ (not to speak of his many close collaborators!).

All this leads us to ask: could Moullet be any more wrong in saying that Scorpios disappoint?

Sagittarians, according to him, would be marked by ‘a hypertrophy of the Ego’: Allen, Godard, Eustache. We seem to find, on the contrary, a rather materialistic approach to their filmmaking: Lang, Preminger, Richard Fleischer, Snow, master organizers of space; Ozu, who made movies like one builds or takes down a house; Kinuyo Tanaka, as aware of dust piling up on objects as of tears rolling down on faces; Oliveira, Cassavetes, Hamaguchi, directors of actors. And as for Godard and Eustache, they have a remarkable ability to reappropriate and rearrange the existing materials of the physical world.

Godard’s famous maxim (borrowed from Denis de Rougemont): man thinks with his hands.

It seems, moreover, to be a sign marked by very idiosyncratic and towering bodies of work: Godard, Oliveira, Ozu, Emily Dickinson. We can also mention, following his death, Godard next to Eustache and Linder, ‘the only two great filmmakers of the capitalistic world to have shot themselves’.

In Capricorn Moullet found it ‘impossible to determine a common factor’, except for what he calls ‘the negation of the Ego’: a taste for working as a collective. We shall be more ambitious. What brings these directors together, we believe, is a marked pedagogical side coupled with a straightforward moral preoccupation: the ego is negated, very concretely, through this modest desire to keep knowledge in circulation. This is easily seen in Wiseman, Farocki, Sembene, Roemer, Straub, yet applies just as much to Paulo Rocha, Parajanov, Vertov, Brakhage.

Some were literally teachers — Brakhage, Roemer, Farocki — some produced educational works — Roemer, Farocki, Wiseman — some (Straub) went as far as saying that if they hadn’t been directors they would have been French teachers: they all made, in one way or another, pedagogical movies. Even Murnau, adapting great works of world literature (Faust, Tartuffe) and travelling to Bora Bora with Flaherty. As for his most famous work, Sunrise, couldn’t we call it a moral fable?

Theirs is not textbook pedagogy, but, so to speak, a pedagogy through rhythm. Whether they work with languages (Straub, Péguy — lessons of history), or compose, in the musical sense, with lights and colors (Vertov, Brakhage, Teo Hernández, Straub, Parajanov — lessons of sensations), they share a strong rhythmic instinct, often with a sharp ear for dialects and accents. But, after all, the Odyssey itself wasn’t transmitted through well-preserved books, but through a centuries-old oral tradition…

Between Wiseman’s and Roemer’s present day and Straub’s and Parajanov’s ancient texts and traditions, there is no divide: the past is very much alive in the present, in the bodies of the people they film, in the soil in which they step.

In Aquarius Moullet finds ‘unquestionable classics’ — Eisenstein, Griffith, Dreyer, Lubitsch, Vidor, Ford, Flaherty, Truffaut, Mankiewicz, Fellini, Cottafavi — and an attraction towards water bodies.

But if we want to borrow the sign’s imagery, why not go further and take the whole aquarium instead of just its water? The aquarium, that is, the vessel; and what enters the vessel is unseen, and what leaves it is seen. So we observe these games of the seen/unseen take a major place in many of their films — Lubitsch and Dreyer in the first place, with all their doors and ellipses — as well as the motif of containers: coffins (Vampyr, The Sun Shines Bright, Ivan the Terrible, Que Viva México’s boys buried in sand), ships (Monteiro, Ford, Fellini, Conrad, Jules Verne), holes (Lewis Carroll), haunted houses, coffin-like houses (Liberty Valance), houses in general (Iosseliani, Monteiro, Schanelec, Woolf, Ford, Lubitsch).

It follows that people are always trapped and trying to escape: The 400 Blows, Una Donna Libera, Battleship Potemkin, The Fugitive, 8 ½, Lord Jim, Twin Peaks. We are reminded of Brecht’s (another Aquarian) famous complaint: everyone sees the violence of the turbulent river, no one sees the violence of its unyielding banks.

The seen and the unseen. Some of these directors go as far as trying to make the unseen seen. Lynch, Fellini, Truffaut, Dreyer, have all featured prominent dream sequences in their films: some mature with age (Dreyer), others spend their whole careers chasing the impossible.

We observe, too, a very developed game of perspectives in their works: gazes and points of view are frequently their main sources of conflict and strong emotions. Some obvious examples: Schanelec, Ford (Liberty Valance, Fort Apache), Woolf, Dreyer, Lubitsch, Lupino (The Bigamist).

Pisces, the last sign, is also our starting point: it was from Manny Farber’s theory on Pisces filmmakers, Moullet tells us, that came the idea for his original text. Farber observes a dialectic between cinema and theater, dream and reality: Rivette, Buñuel, Minnelli, Guitry, Pagnol. Moullet compliments him: theirs are works based foremost on actors.

Hidden between these two ideas we believe we find an even more encompassing dialectic, of which Rivette, again, would offer the best example. Behind the problem of theater and life, so dear to him, lies the larger problem of life and work. Theater, after all, is just another kind of work; and it was never necessary to hop on stage in order to start acting. Hence the motif of secret societies, when theater becomes a mode of living.

That is, too, we notice, Buñuel’s great problem, made most explicit in The Exterminating Angel: representation becomes life and cannot be escaped; society itself is one big stage, and when people go home they are incapable of turning off their acts: Él. To this we easily add all of Guitry, Pagnol, Minnelli, Walsh, Rocha, Lewis, Skorecki, Reichardt, Cronenberg... James Cagney in White Heat realizes he has no life apart from work, just as Antonio das Mortes will. And we could ask if the whole point behind Guitry’s and Pagnol’s cinema experience wasn’t exactly this desire to move representation from the stage into an actual house…

Where does outward performance end and the inner self start? Impossible to answer: as in The Fly, lines are dangerously blurry. The danger of the stage, so aptly described by Rivette, is simply the danger of life in model size. And if Rivette may have saved himself, the same cannot be said for Rocha and Pasolini.

Above we talked about aquariums, here we focus on the fish inside them: fish don’t know where the aquarium ends; more often than not they never even realize there is an aquarium in the first place. Pagnol’s Marius believes he is jumping out of his glass enclosure by boarding a ship and traveling the world; he finds out in the end that the aquarium was the size of the world, but by then it was too late…

More than works based on actors, we observe here the absolute dominance of ensemble pieces. This time it’s Altman who takes the lead. The people with whom you work are also the people, whether you like it or not, with whom you live, and the more of them we see on screen, the more we are aware of it. We return to Rivette: isn’t the major conflict of L’Amour Fou and La Belle Noiseuse this mingling of work and life very concretely seen in the face of a life partner?

* * *

— We are already at more than double the size of Moullet’s original text. Time to stop. Do you have anything to add?

— We forgot Pedro Costa.

— We didn’t forget him, we aren’t sure of his birthday. He could be born in March or December. He could be Pisces or Capricorn, and his cinema does show traits of both signs.

— I have an idea. Could it be that in trying to follow the steps of Tourneur, a Scorpio, he’s going against his own sign? He may not be doing (to employ one of Moullet’s formulas) what suits him best.

— For all we know, he could have heavy Scorpio placements in his chart. We don’t know the details. Already he is blurring the facts with his two birthdays.

— Is that all?

— This exercise d’après Moullet was exhausting. He always wants to have two drastically different sets of elements meet in his films and writings, I know, I have no issue with this principle of encounters. But I can no longer tolerate the idea of envisioning cinema and filmmakers as one big system. There was an anarchism in Essai d’ouverture and Barres that seems lost in Chef-d’œuvre?. There was a subversion of the studio system that was certainly lost as la politique des auteurs developed. Filmmakers are not insects to be examined or compared then categorized; even arbitrary rules like those of astrology can be dangerous. Let’s not forget what ending Moullet himself met trying to play according to the rules of fame and publicity in Le Prestige de la Mort. Moullet may still have ‘thirty-three films to sell to Arte’, Godard — whose last two films Arte now falsely reconstructs and exhibits like specimens in a museum — Godard is dead. Let the beauty of cinema live and change in its unique occurrences. And We shall accept the darkness and distances between the stars.

— So you didn’t like the exercise. What can I say… First of all, even though we took all this more seriously than we should have, none of this is serious and it never was. Why the zodiac? Because it’s silly… Around this same time, in the early nineties, Moullet also wrote a treatise on determinism… Geographical determinism, that’s 200-year-old science. What he’s saying, I believe, is this: You intellectuals have your fancy classifications? Well, I’ll take these two systems that are either completely outdated (determinism) or simply unserious, unintellectual (astrology), and I’ll employ them, and I’ll write something as relevant — no, more — than you ever could. What was interesting was never the zodiac itself. When you start talking about ‘placements’, you know very well I don’t understand a word of it. Placements? No, what’s interesting is being forced to see these directors under a new light. Being forced to assemble directors that we otherwise would have kept apart, and then being forced to find connections between them.

What I learned is this: directors need other directors. Isn’t that what we mean when we talk about the history of cinema? Each director is put, as soon as their first film appears, in direct comparison with all other directors. Even though Rohmer and Shimizu probably never knew each other’s films — Shimizu certainly didn’t — when we put them together, we understand both of them better. What I learned is this: a major director like Rohmer needs a once-forgotten director like Shimizu. And to save Shimizu from oblivion is to save cinema from its apathy.

— I understand what you mean. Still, I don’t like all these comparisons. I can’t explain it. A director is not all there is to cinema, and cinema is not all there is to the world. I want nothing and everything: cinema without cinema.