Maureen Fazendeiro’s Cinema as a Garden of Hospitality
Text written by Ricardo Vieira Lisboa for our catalogue
Over the course of a decade, Maureen Fazendeiro has made two feature-length films, two medium-length films (both with the exact same duration of 42 minutes), and one short film. From this filmography emerges a body of work of remarkable coherence, in which a series of recurring elements can be identified: the predominance of analogue formats (all her films were shot on film); the use of archival images that enter into dialogue with images of the present (archives which, in two cases, stem from the films’ own research processes); a fascination with literature and, in particular, with epistolary writing (all the films, without exception, contain letters: the sound letter at the end of Motu Maeva, Henri Michaux’s poem-letter in Sol Negro, the letters of the actor João Nunes Monteiro in Diários de Otsoga, the emails and WhatsApp messages in Les Habitants, and the correspondence of the Leisner couple in As Estações); a dramaturgy built on allusion, in which what is seen and what is heard rarely coincide (a device turned into an echo game in Diários and subtly transformed into a political statement in Les Habitants); a mise-en-scène of great austerity, in which the disarming simplicity of forms conceals a laborious process of construction, one composed of absences and silences; and, of course, a fondness (a fascination) for flowers and gardens.
Motu Maeva, the director’s first film, is a portrait of a woman, Sonja André, approached through her garden of Eden—a place that functions simultaneously as a refuge in the world and as a chamber of remembrance. Sol Negro draws on the beautiful poem by Henri Michaux, Je vous écris d’un pays lointain (“I write to you from a distant country”), which, when read by Delphine Seyrig in a voice both gentle and deep, associates the swaying of trees in the wind with our existential trembling: “Souvent les arbres tremblent. / […] / Ou faut-il que tout tremble, toujours, toujours? / […] et cependant on tremble.”[1] Diários de Otsoga, shot in confinement as a result of the then-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, unfolds almost entirely within well-ventilated spaces—namely, in the gardens of a country house where a group of actors decide to build a butterfly house (another form of gardening). Les Habitants, centered on the eviction of a Roma camp from a small town on the outskirts of Paris, presents the life of a suburban community whose agricultural activity, in flower greenhouses, remains one of its principal economic activities (albeit in decline). Finally, As Estações – a stratified polyptych of the rural world of the Alentejo – reveals the filmmaker’s predilection for rural iconography, particularly in the episode devoted to the bandit Charro, in which the actor Cláudio Silva wanders through abundantly flowered spring fields (indeed, everything in this film is articulated in relation to the land: those who work it and what grows from it, whether this be vegetables or archaeological remains).
It can therefore be said that there was something programmatic at work in Motu Maeva, insofar as an entire cinematic project was already present in potential form. If this holds true for all the aspects mentioned above, it is especially so in relation to the importance of the garden. In an interview with Georges Coste for the website Format Court, Fazendeiro explained: “I projected many things onto that garden, things from my literary and cinematic imagination.” The garden is thus a projective space in which pre-existing iconographies are both inscribed and recognized. It is a space that, while filled with plants, remains sufficiently open to accommodate other forms of meaning. The garden thereby acquires a metonymic dimension, becoming “a kind of playing field.” In Motu Maeva, the garden is an allusive garden. Its lush greenery, precisely by virtue of its exuberance, refers outward to the world: Tahiti, Chad, China (countries that the film’s protagonist visited and now recalls). It is a garden covered in memory. So much so that the film’s title, which corresponds to the sign naming the property (film, house, and garden merge), has its origin in Tahitian, where “maeva” means “welcome” and “motu” refers to a small, cultivated plot of land. In other words, the title may be creatively translated as a “garden of hospitality.”
The garden, in fact, is defined by its relation to the house. It is an exterior that asserts itself in relation to an interior. It is a space of enjoyment that interrupts the urbanized, reaffirming it through contrast. More broadly, this understanding of the “gardened” is reflected in Fazendeiro’s films in the interplay of meaning, concordance, and dissonance between image and sound (between house and garden). The director herself described Sol Negro as “a small poetic variation on distance, a diptych on seeing and hearing, a play between on-screen and off-screen.” At its core, it is the same aesthetic system as in Motu Maeva, though now more diffuse, almost abstract. In its minimal dimension, Sol Negro is a playful exercise in cinema itself—or rather, in the play of meanings that cinema makes possible through its fundamental elements of sound and image.
The co-authorship of Diários de Otsoga with Miguel Gomes discourages overly expansive interpretative readings; nevertheless, it is impossible not to understand this film as operating according to the same set of principles that govern the art of gardening. In this case, beyond the inevitable (and already mentioned) setting in which much of the action unfolds, as well as the “narrative line” developed around the construction of a butterfly house, the film-as-garden materializes precisely in the pleasure of sowing and seeing what emerges from sowing. Diários de Otsoga is a conceptual film that is constructed through the application of a strong pre-defined formal grid, which—paradoxically—appears with the laissez-faire quality of improvisation. Is that not precisely what a beautiful garden is? A space cultivated with rule and measure, yet one that allows itself to be shaped by atmospheric contingencies, the surprises of botany, and the encroachment of weeds.
Les Habitants, for its part, addresses a situation experienced by the director’s mother in the town of Périgny-sur-Yerres. A number of Roma families of Romanian origin set up camp on abandoned land, after which the municipality, together with groups of vigilant citizens, quickly initiated a campaign of expulsion that led to the destruction of the camp within a few months—despite the efforts of welcoming and support on the part of the director’s mother and some of her neighbors. Fazendeiro shot her film in the summer of 2021, three years after these events. She films only the banality of suburban life: silent houses, nearly deserted streets, a certain grey languor in which each person lives isolated within four walls, behind their gardened boundaries.
For the first time in her filmography, in Les Habitants a conception of the garden emerges as a space in decline. This may stem from the fact that the Parisian commuter town is “the city where I grew up,” and a place towards which she expresses a clear sense of repulsion. As the director explained in her statement of intent: “At the beginning of the 20th century, Périgny-sur-Yerres and Mandres-les-Roses, the neighboring town, became the main centers of rose production in the Paris region. A short-lived activity, almost entirely extinguished after the oil shock of 1971 and the economic crisis that followed. Production was relocated to India and Africa, the greenhouses were abandoned, and the land was sold.” Fazendeiro films the ruined greenhouses again and again. We come to understand that it was on the abandoned land of this failed industry that the Romanian families set up their camp. On the ground of a destroyed garden, they built a shantytown. The “house” occupied the space of the garden, with interior and exterior reversed. The contradictory symbolism of this inversion is expressed in the cold quality of human relations that the film renders at the level of the image (and within the space of the “house”), in contrast with the communal, welcoming, even celebratory spirit evoked at the level of the spoken narration (the “garden”).
Finally, As Estações, the director’s most recent film, adopts the Portuguese title of the 1975 film Vremena Goda, from Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian, whose literal translation would be “The Four Seasons.” And the relations between the two films do not end there. When, after just a few minutes, we see a goat giving birth, it becomes clear that Fazendeiro seeks to establish a dialogue with Pelechian’s remarkable film. Not only at the level of figuration (pastoral life, rurality, the relationship between human and animal, the ancestral dimension of shepherding), but also in what singularizes Pelechian’s cinema: his revolutionary understanding of montage, which he himself defined as distance montage. Pelechian explained: “For Sergei Eisenstein, montage was linear, like a chain. Distance montage creates a magnetic field around the film… […] For Eisenstein, each element carries meaning. For me, the individual fragments mean nothing. Only the film as a whole has meaning.”
Although the editing of As Estações bears no resemblance to the syncopated rhythms of Pelechian’s films, its aim is the same: the production of unity through the accumulation of exogenous elements which, through their coexistence (and through an editing governed by slowness and languor), acquire meaning. Indeed, the various elements that compose As Estações are highly disparate. It is not a matter of finding a “meaning” in each element, nor of producing meaning through clash or contrast (nothing here is dialectical), but rather of understanding all these elements as part of an organic and interdependent whole: a garden.
I have left for the end the final shot of As Estações, which seems to me—on every level—a synthesis not only of that film, but of the cinema that Maureen Fazendeiro has made to date. I am referring to the sequence shot that slowly traverses the long, rough, twisted trunk of an Alentejo cork oak. This shot encapsulates the director’s entire cinematic project: a “dramaturgy of accompaniment” carried out in the most stripped-down candor, centered on a notion of horizontal branching in which elements accumulate without overlapping, establishing relations of coexistence that connect earth and sky, the near and the distant, the ancient and the contemporary, the interior and the exterior, image and sound, the “house” and the “garden.”
The extended version can be read at À pala de Walsh.