Conversations With Professor Z

Excerpted from Conversations with Professor Z

Translator’s Note: In the late 1990s the Flemish journalist, Marcus Fugrelle, conducted the only known press interview with the controversial and pseudonymous filmmaker “Professor Z,” who came to prominence for his public screenings of De Gaulle erotica during the civil unrest in Paris in 1968. After being banned from cinemas for his three-hour epic, “Verdun a Vichy: Le Penis Du Marechal Petain” which provoked a furious debate in the French press regarding the years of collaboration, he conducted a campaign of non-lethal bombings against civic institutions which were invariably followed by a street viewing of one his brief “Six Minute Films”- a genre unto itself which often included footage from his own terroristic activities creating an impressionistic mixture of reality and fiction. Now dubbed “The Banksy of Film” he is most known today for his work in Northern Ireland where he embedded with the proscribed Ulster Volunteer Force and documented their sectarian acts of violence for over a year all the while cutting the footage into the generational-altering feature “The Red Hand.” To this day, a great deal of uncertainty remains as to which parts of “The Red Hand” are fact or fiction and it has attracted criticism for its ‘glaring lack of condemnation for certain criminal acts and racially provocative statements.’

Criticism and controversy aside, Professor Z has become something of a Deity Emeritus for the purported ‘independent filmmakers’ of our time. In red graffiti in every capital in the Eurozone, his name appears. Proclaiming the longevity of his ethos and work. Whether the mark is ever of his own doing or the work of lonely imitators hoping for a quick day in the sun we may never truly know. But regardless,  every now and then an empty office building is bombed in a European capital and a film begins to play. The crowds form and from the great mass of people, a whisper emerges. It may only be a rumor and a false one at that but the whisper carries just the same and it says- “Professor Z… Professor Z… He’s returned at last…”

The following is an extract of a larger set of conversations Professor Z had with Marcus Fugrelle. In my translation, I have tried as best as possible to remain close to the original text and retain the tenor of Professor Z’s caustic and idiosyncratic mode of speech. 

Marcus Fugrelle: The first question I am obliged to ask is on your name or rather your pseudonym. Can you tell me something of its origin? 

Professor Z: I was born with it… No, it’s true… I can show you the records… Look it up yourself! It’s all there… They record everything nowadays… Even your nightmares… Ok, ok, I’ll tell you the truth. I was born in Algiers, my father was a paratrooper and there was a translation fuckup at the hospital… Madness!... You see, my father was an OAS man, spoke no Arabic… He wanted me named after Drumont and it was quite a scene! No one understood each other… How ‘Professor Z’ came about… Well, it would make a linguistic study…   

[Translator’s Note: No birth record has been found to corroborate this account.] 

MF: So in a sense, you were destined from birth for your subsequent path?

Prof. Z: No, no… I despise destiny… It has done me nothing but harm… It is the opiate for the successful… They drink whole buckets of it… All to forget that it was boring, dull, difficult work that got them to where they are… No one wants to succeed on merit or hard labor… They want destiny… A sad state of affairs…

MF: I’m keen to get an understanding of your influences in the filmmaking sphere. Who inspired you and so on…

Prof. Z: A dull question. A boring question-

MF: It’s elementary but I assure you it would be of importance to many readers.

Prof. Z: You see, I have never had ‘inspiration’. I detest the word… It implies a sick sense of plagiarism, of mimicry… I have had REALIZATIONS… Moments of understanding where I knew that something must be done. Where, in purely causational terms, I knew that this realization, this moment cannot be left in memory… abandoned to rot… It must be distilled- altered no doubt but it must amount to something. Here’s an example- A boy had drowned at sea when I was young… His body washed up on the beach and his eyes wide open… Like a bolt had struck him… All my little friends thought it was a big joke. They kicked and pinched his corpse and took off his clothes and laughed about until the Gendarme came… I didn’t protest once the whole way through… His mother never recovered from the shock… Her son’s naked body all bruised and bloated… Eyes wide open… I knew then, in a very vague fuzzy manner, that I could not let that moment disappear back into the waves. I knew then that I had to make something greater from it, somehow transcend the feeling, and preserve it for eternity. You see, I have done this hundreds of times… But that was only the beginning… There have been many more drowned boys since… And the beach is always full of cruel children… 

MF: I must say your work is full of events of this mood. Specifically, in your focus on war and the destruction of life but I want to understand your process. How does one come up with the idea of Charles De Gaulle erotica, or a biopic of Petain through his penis?

Prof. Z: Simple. These ideas were in the air. Petain was everyone’s father… His penis was the object of mystery… Like the way a child imagines his own father’s ‘spot’ before he understands how pathetic and impotent his father really is. Tragic!... And every older woman fantasized over De Gaulle. It was palpable… Old women would masturbate to his wartime addresses… No, it’s true… It’s been documented... At Evian, several middle-aged women tried to kidnap him in order to have an affair… It was quoted in the press… Everyone knew about it… I only put it on the screen…

MF: And played it all around Paris during the riots.

Prof. Z: Life is full of such coincidences. The other day I read that several United Nations personnel who had died in Somalia were all subscribers to the same sensationalist publication despite being of different racial and national origins… One never knows why events collide… Least of all the ones in the collision.

MF: You do have a curious relationship with violence. It’s often depicted in your films as a sort of personalized odyssey. As a ritual that has some intrinsic effect on the broader world like prayer or sacrifice and then, of course, there are the bombings which pushed you out of the mainstream. It’s a very strange puzzle and I’m quite interested in how it all fits together.

Prof. Z: I remember some idiotic American filmmaker saying something along the lines of “We are born into this world with violence and it permeates our being blah blah blah and some other shit.” I do not rattle off such ridiculous philosophy. Violence is in my films because it is boring. Most things are interesting nowadays… We’ve become inundated with interest and excitement… Turn the dial! Look at all these channels and stories… It’s so much… One never gets bored anymore… Violence is the last redoubt… People still find it boring… They see it so often, it’s everywhere thankfully and it’s our last hope.  

MF: The French authorities would have a different interpretation on the ‘boredom’ of your campaign of bombings.

Prof. Z.: No one died-

MF: No, but you were charged with reckless endangerment, destruction of public property, the use of prohibited explosives. And there’s more but I’m not here to relitigate the case. I simply am trying to square that behavior with your accolades in cinema that no one could take away from you even if they wished.

Prof. Z: There is no contradiction…  The bombings are inseparable from my work… You see, the one filmmaker I admire the most is Kurosawa. During the war, he filmed propaganda for the Japanese Empire… He took girls and put them in an armaments factory and had them produce material while he filmed… No one knows how much is documentary and how much is ‘fiction’... They shout fantatiscms about destroying England and America and who knows… Maybe they produced weapons or maybe it was all a ‘film’... At a certain point, no one truly knows. Later on, Kurosawa said it was his favorite work. You see, he was creating weapons to destroy the British Navy while creating a film… Or was it the reverse?... Which one was his true goal or raison d’etre… Fuck! No one can make heads or tails!... What came first?... A chicken and an egg… A bullet and trigger… Both feed each other. Reality and fiction are inseparable… They fuck all the time. As directors, we try to scale that unnatural wall between fact and fiction. My bombings… Well, they were a protest if you must know… A blow to the wall in the way of art and reality… A naive attempt at unraveling the hellish ‘day to day’... Whether I was successful or not? Fuck you! Make up your own minds… You’re smart enough… 

MF: Let’s talk about your work in Northern Ireland. The Red Hand made quite a splash in the world of cinema. Some critics praised it wildly for its “mediation on terror” particularly the montage over the green hills and the black masks of the Ulster terrorists. But since the story broke that some of the violence you filmed had, in fact, occurred it raised a lot of questions. What is the ‘moral’ role of an observer? Can a director film assassinations and pub bombings without being ‘complicit.’ In the eyes of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, you were a party to the killings. They argue you should have reported the acts before they happened. What is your comment to all of this?

Prof. Z: You are looking at it backward. If there was no observer would it have happened in the same way? Would the tree make sound if no one was there?... In that film, I was mixing together what I saw as a witness and what I created in the camera. Both realities, as it were, overlap and reproduce themselves. One can no longer isolate one from the other. In scientific jargon, they are “mutually indistinguishable.”To speak of a ‘moral’ role is to use a false cognate. Those words are predicated on a reality that no longer exists in the film. I have cracked the walls and an entirely new vocabulary is needed… An observer, by definition, makes no comment on what he or she sees. An author can write violent acts and is not invited to condemn his creations on the page. It is the same with me and the screen. I do not condemn or glorify- I am a witness. 

MF: Surely, there is a difference between lines on a page and real lives and people.

Prof. Z: Aesthetically, maybe. Functionally, there is none. How many ‘real life’ acquaintances have you forgotten in time and how many ‘fake characters’ remain in your memory as heroes or long-lost loves? Do you remember when your father put you on your shoulders or do you remember a film or book with a similar scene? Meeting someone for the first time you instantly match up their looks and mannerisms with analogs in ‘fiction.’ Reality is dead. Our ‘world’ has been polluted and amalgamated by the ‘other world’ of the mind and there is, functionally, no difference any longer. 

MF: You have quite a sway amongst the younger generation. Your name and work inspires so much and appear everywhere. What would you say, as a final message to the young people out in the world?

Prof. Z: It’s not worth it… This world has gone to the dogs… Go and hide in a hole… No one can take it anymore… Enjoy youth while you can… Hurry up! Soon the water will take your youth out to sea and the cruel children on the beach will taunt and laugh at you… Even though you were just one of them… You see, no one stands a chance! But, and I must say that this caveat is no formality, if there lingers in your heart some burning desire to realize some great epiphany, to transfer over the traces of that otherworldy sublime feeling you felt for no discernable reason… Go ahead! Otherwise, it will linger forever… Until it’s forgotten and that would be even worse. Go on! Hurry, hurry… Soon everything will be forgotten and you won’t recognize yourself… Go on and create that ‘something’ from those feelings of yours. There’s nothing else to do. Everything else has gone to shit. It’s true! I’ve seen it… Go on, you fuckers! Don’t stop…