FOREVER

FOREVER
by Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society

A cemetery is not necessarily just a resting place for the deceased. The world-famous Père Lachaise in Paris is often full of people eagerly visiting the tombs of icons such as Marcel Proust, Maria Callas, Chopin, Simone Signoret, Sadegh Hedayat, Jim Morrison, and hundreds of other people who have influenced French, European, and even global culture. International filmmaker Heddy Honigmann artfully turned her camera on the cemetery’s visitors – adoring “fans,” voluntary grave-tenders, and bereaved family members – and discovered why they came to a particular gravesite and how the dead influenced their lives. Rather than reveal the history of the cemetery, Honigmann takes us into the world of creative people, living and dead, and shows that the artistic threads weaving cultures together can continue creating new patterns. She succinctly explains that this is a film about the importance of art in life.

FOREVER focuses on major cultural stars, lesser or even forgotten artists, and complete unknowns who were craftspeople or just lovers of art. The writers, painters, and composers loom particularly large within Père Lachaise, with Marcel Proust being perhaps the most influential, so much so that Honigmann revisits his grave several times throughout the film to find more admirers leaving flowers or standing quietly before the tomb. Even though some of them have read little or nothing by the French author, all seem to know something about a little cake (the famous madeleine) dipped in tea, which opened the floodgates of sensory memories for Proust in his seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past. One visitor, Stephané Heuet, knows quite a bit more about Proust since he is the artist who has created a series of comic books illustrating the semi-biographical work with crisp images. His visits to Proust’s grave are very meaningful to him, since the deceased author led him down a new path. Another visitor, a young man from South Korea, knows Proust’s works very well in translation. To visit this gravesite was the principal reason for coming to Paris. When asked about his feelings for Proust, he switches to his own language and suddenly a flood of passionate feelings come through. The dead French author still has the power to affect people from different cultures. In that way, the writer’s art has traveled through time and over the planet, a point continually made about art by the film.

A very moving scene takes place at the grave of Sadegh Hedayat (1903-1951). An Iranian man, probably in his 30s, stands before the grave of his countryman while clutching a book of poetry. Hedayat, considered one of Iran’s foremost authors in the first half of the 20th century, came to Paris to escape persecution by his principal enemies – the Iranian monarchy and Islamic clergy – but even the relative calm and freedom of post-war Paris were insufficient to prevent the poet’s suicide. This young admirer has likewise become an expatriate, because, as he explains by quoting from Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, “I’m so tired of the people around me.” The man adds, “He wrote about things which people don’t dare to talk about.” When asked how he makes his living in Paris, he reveals that he is a cab driver, “but my passion is singing traditional Persian classical music.” He explains that through music he keeps in touch with his Persian culture. He has left his country, not his culture, which is ancient and very enriching. Honigmann encourages him to sing a bit. Taking his book of poems in hand, he selects lyrics adapted from a poem by Hafez, a 14th century Persian poet. As the man sings, the camera explores the veiled faces of grief-stricken statues throughout the cemetery. The images and the man’s voice, even without an understanding of the words, reflect desperate yearning for a lost homeland. This is one of the perfect examples of the poetic brilliance of the filmmaker – combining carved stone art, a human voice in song, an awareness of a bit of biography of living and dead, and a mood conveyed through color, light, shadow, and texture. Honigmann, born in Peru to Holocaust survivors and now a Dutch citizen, is obviously an artist who can appreciate the strivings and accomplishments of other creative people.

Oscar Wilde’s tomb is covered with lipstick kisses, an ironic gesture which the once-all-powerful king of late-Victorian British culture might consider amusing, since it was his love of a young man which sent him to prison and then into a short but final exile in Paris. Letters are still left for him by people touched by his brilliant, witty stories and plays a century after his death. Apollinaire, a lesser-known poet, who died during the great influenza epidemic after World War I, is still able to charm visitors with his “calligrams” – visual poems placing words into forms such as boats, palm trees, etc, which adorn his tomb. His is an example of the tombs which continue to reflect some aspect of the artistic creations of the deceased. Such tombstones and monuments were often added years after the death and many times paid for by admirers, rather than family members.

One composer who continues to greatly influence young concert pianists is Chopin. Honigmann watches a young Japanese woman place flowers on his grave. She explains that she came to Paris to continue her studies in piano, especially the works of Chopin. Her intense connection with the Polish romantic composer is strengthened by memories of her father, now deceased, who transferred his love of the music of Chopin into encouraging his daughter to play the piano. She says, “Every time I play Chopin I feel I am dedicating the piece to my father.” For a moment, she is silent as she apparently thinks of her father, his face and voice only experienced within her own mind. During this private moment Pere Lachaise forges powerful links between the young musician, her father, the long-dead composer, and artistic creation and interpretation. Near the end of the film we finally get to hear the results of her studies in Paris as Yoshino Kimura plays a passionate work by Chopin – “Nocturne No. 8” – and the transcendent power of this film is once more revealed.

We see no visitors to the grave of Michel Petrucciani during the film, but Honigmann rightly includes him. The composer and extraordinary jazz pianist, with a genetic disease that caused brittle bones and a short stature, played with many of the greats in the global jazz world before his death in 1999 at the age of 36. The concert footage that Honigmann includes in the film is almost overwhelmingly beautiful. Petrucciani is one of the delightful artistic discoveries of this documentary.

Another amazing moment is created as we look at the tomb of Maria Callas. The soundtrack contains one of her signature arias, “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore” from La Tosca. As she movingly sings “I gave my song to the stars in heaven,” we see her grave, covered by messages to the immortal singer. And then Honigmann inserts performance footage of Callas’s beautiful, expressive face as the song continues. My eyes surprisingly began to well up with tears because of the beauty and passion of that voice and still something else – perhaps because of the power of art to lift our spirits up, not necessarily in fleeting happiness, but in a profound joy in being alive. That voice and that music combine to remind us how intensely rich life can be through art and experience.

Unlike Callas, a virtually unknown singer named Danielle Messia is not even mentioned in books about the cemetery, according to a guide who talks with Honigmann. He has taken Messia up as a cause, as someone who must be known even though she made only two albums before succumbing to cancer at the age of 27. When the soundtrack finally reveals a bit of her singing, I am immediately reminded of the mature Marianne Faithfull, with her raspy, world-weary voice, which conveyed so much experience and feeling.

The deceased visual artists, such as Ingres and Modigliani, still affect visitors, some in unexpected ways. Amedeo Modigliani, born in Italy, died in Paris at the age of 35. Buried next to him is his model/mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, who leaped to her death two days after Modigliani’s death, despite the fact that she was nearly nine months pregnant with their second child. One young man who stands by the artist’s and model’s grave says that he has studied Modigliani’s paintings for many years. Noted for his striking portraits of women, the artist has inspired how this man works – not as a painter on canvas, but as an embalmer who prepare bodies for visitation and funerals. He rightly feels that his job is similar to that of a portrait painter – “You have to try to put yourself in the place of the family and know what they want.” However, his portraits painted on once-living flesh last for only a few days. His is an inexorably ephemeral art. While striving to artfully conceal signs of illness or suffering, he refuses to try to make people “look more perfect than they were.” Modigliani, who drank excessively, used narcotics, and worked himself to death, might be amused to know that his art is helping a young man help others to accept death.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), the French Neoclassical painter buried at Pere Lachaise, has a more traditional influence on a woman who admires his work. Sitting alone in the Louvre, she tells Honigmann about the portrait of Caroline Riviere, who looks far more mature than her 13 years. This beautiful painting was completed in 1806, one year before the death of the young girl. Coincidentally she is buried near Ingres, who died many decades later. At first glance this portrait seems to be an outstanding example of idealized classical painting, but the woman points out that there are curves throughout the picture. She feels strongly that Ingres made form take precedence over realism and that Ingres was looking for something beneath and beyond the surface, just as this documentary goes far beyond being a simple travelogue set in a cemetery.

A group of blind friends must of necessity go beyond the visual surface. Their experience of art comes primarily through sound. In a very clever way, Honigmann celebrates the art of another person buried at Pere Lachaise – the actress Simone Signoret. The filmmaker follows two blind men making their way (perilously, to our eyes) through streets of Paris to a home where they and other friends will “watch” and listen to one of Signoret’s most famous films, LES DIABOLIQUES (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955). Discussing the film as it unfolds, they interpret meaning and artistry through sounds, dialogue, and music. They appreciate Signoret as an actress with her own unique style, for them embodied not in her expressive face but in her voice, her emotions, her hesitations, and even her silence.

Appropriately for a cinematic work such as FOREVER, the father of narrative film, Georges Melies, is discussed. I think his would be the first tomb I would visit at Pere Lachaise. This delightfully inventive and tireless man produced, directed, filmed, and often starred in literally hundreds of short narrative films from 1896 until 1913. He was shockingly forgotten and penniless after World War I, but before his death in 1938 he was “rescued” by a group of French intellectuals who found him a home and a job (though not in filmmaking). Honigmann astutely shows selections from one of Melies’ shorts featuring the actor/director himself frenetically interacting with a group of his own heads. His relentlessly creative pace must have often made him feel that fragmented, but what an amazing pioneer/artist he was.

And then there are those who come daily or several times a week to Pere Lachaise to tend to the graves of loved ones or simply of those they admire. The latter – unofficial, unpaid grave-tenders – are touching in their quiet affection for people they know only through their art. One nameless woman is first seen cleaning Proust’s grave. We later see her cleaning the tombs of Apollinaire and Sadegh-Hedayat, whose works she knows as well as those of Proust. There is a delightful moment when she puts cherry pits into the empty eye sockets of a chiseled owl on his tomb and Honigmann chimes in, “Blind no more.” Filmmaker and subject both share this moment relating to the poet’s work. When we later see the same woman cleaning the tomb of yet another creative soul, in this case Modigliani, she reveals that she does a good imitation of his painting style. Only then do we learn that she, too, is an artist. So, we have an artist who cleans the tombs of a writer, two poets, and a painter, all of whom she admires for their work. Her cleaning and her thoughtful additions to their tombs reveal an artistic spirit, reverential but also playful and at peace.

However, not all the 300,000 bodies buried in Pere Lachaise belong to famous people. Regular folks, remarkable only to family and friends, are interred in the 114-acre cemetery. Those who come to visit their graves are widows, daughters, other relatives, or friends. Some come every day, others weekly or only occasionally, but Honigmann rightly includes them in her film. Visiting the final resting spot of their loved one gives them time to reminisce (“remembrance of things past” is an on-going motif here). An Armenian woman unselfconsciously talks to her father in his tomb all the time – about politics, art, museums, music, family events, good news and bad. She washes and cleans his tomb once a week. “This is how we meet now.” She finds relief and release in these visits. She tells the filmmaker that, in his own way, her father was an artist – a man who designed and created prize-winning boots. She says that both she and her father always surrounded themselves with beauty. Pere Lachaise fits easily into that definition of beauty in surroundings with its impressive statues and stonework, lovely walkways, trees, bushes, and flowers – an oasis of peace and quiet and meditative possibilities in a noisy city.

As the film progresses, the specter of death fades and the poison of fear and sorrow seem about to dissipate. Yet Honigmann won’t let us be completely lulled into a delusion that death cannot still hurt. “Death, where is thy sting?” is made quite literal in the life of one woman who waters the plants around her husband’s grave. He literally died from a bee sting. At the age of 54 she met and fell in love with a man 20-years her junior. Their three years together were obviously the most intense and rewarding time for this lovely, soft-spoken woman. She reveals that she used to come to his grave every day but now she comes only once a week. “I finally accepted that he is never coming back.” She has required these visits and the orderliness of grave-tending to finally allow herself to let go. We learn nothing remarkable about this man, but the intensity of the woman’s love is in no doubt. In just a few minutes we have been gained access into the heart and spirit of one individual who has loved another. Her appearance is as powerful as any love song.

There are also untended, unloved graves in Pere Lachaise. In America we have drifted (or been driven) toward “perpetual care” cemeteries, where the tombstones lie on the ground (“to make the mowing easier”) and where the markers of death are virtually hidden from sight. In Pere Lachaise, it is quite obvious which graves are no longer visited or cared for. Monuments fall over, coverings shatter and reveal the deep holes in which caskets have been slipped onto separate shelves. Names and dates fade or become obscured by moss or mold, marble and stone splinter from water freezing in cracks. The process of death, even of inanimate materials, continues apace unless tended by loved or loving ones full of memories.

Bertrand, a tour guide, seems to also be an unofficial historian and cultural caretaker at Pere Lachaise. It was on the grounds of the cemetery that he found true love at the age of 15, when he met a girl who gave him the “key” to the cemetery and to life: “If your life is filled with the music of Chopin, the novels of Balzac, the poems of Musset, then you’ll never be alone.” With her words Bertrand learned to look at the cemetery – resting spot for those three artists as well as so many others he learned to love – through new eyes. “The future looked much brighter than I’d ever imagined. I knew I would never feel boredom.” Out of sentimental attachment to that moment, he became a tour guide inside Pere Lachaise.

Besides taking tourists to the famous graves, Bertrand is personally drawn to the tombs and stories of barely remembered women who died very young, such as Danielle Messia, the singer already mentioned, and Elisa Mercoeur, a young romantic poet who died at the age of 21 in 1835. Sadly, but appropriately for a romantic poet, her monument is falling into decay. Poems that were inscribed on the sides of her monument, per her mother’s request, now exist only in fragments. Soon, nothing will remain of her memorial. Even her three volumes of poetry seem to have been forgotten for the most part. The guide’s feelings somehow help make us curious about these forgotten people, perhaps allowing them a few more resurrections.

As the film ends – appropriately with Yoshino Kimura playing her recital piece by Chopin – Honigmann inserts an image of the moon followed by scenes of the cemetery by moonlight. The reemergence of the title FOREVER resonates with all that has gone before – death as the final step for all living matter, the fact that some art may last forever, and the presence of the moon in the skies on a nightly basis. The phrase about the transient nature of love, sorrow, joy, success, or life – “Nothing lasts forever” – becomes questionable after experiencing this movie. Some important things just might very well last forever.

Heddy Honigmann was born in 1951 in Lima, Peru, daughter of parents who had survived the Nazi Holocaust. She studied biology and literature at the University of Lima and then left Peru in 1973 for travels to Mexico, Israel, Spain and France. Settling down for a while, she studied film at Rome’s famous Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. In 1978 she moved to Amsterdam and became a Dutch citizen, but her film work continues to take her all over the world. According to the website of First Run/Icarus Films some themes of her documentaries have been the plight of exiles and outsiders, memory, music and love. “Her subjects have included cab drivers in Peru, immigrant musicians on the Paris Metro, senior citizens in Brazil, and Cuban exiles in New Jersey.” As beautifully shown in FOREVER, Honigmann connects with her subjects through conversations, rather than interviews, thereby often causing them to let us into deeper realms of their spirit, mind, and heart. Her documentaries have been honored throughout the world at many film festivals and numerous retrospectives of her body of work. FOREVER is her 15th, and most recent, film.


More information:
First Run/Icarus website