War has got inside a woman's very being. Inside her head the soldiers march out, trampling down everything in their path. Like a grieving Madonna, she weeps for son and brother. From her pain and the blood of men killed in battle, an army of women springs up, a powerful column inspired by faith and rebellion. The thirst for justice becomes a thirst for revenge. The woman's body is a weapon, her robes her armour. She who once gave life will deal out death.
Michèle Cournoyer is one of Canada's foremost creators of animated film. After working independently for several years, during which she made six films inspired by the Dada movement, she joined the NFB in the early 1990s. The first four films she made for the NFB garnered a total of 27 awards. Her powerful yet sensitive style, based on metamorphosis, was honed over this period. The charm and humour of her earlier work was replaced by a new serious vein, a focus on tragedy apparent in Dolorosa (1988), her last independent film, and reaffirmed in La basse cour/A Feather Tale (1992) and Une artist/An Artist (1994).
For The Hat (1999), a disturbing exploration of incest, she moved on from rotoscopy and composite images to free-hand drawing with ink on paper. In Accordion, in official competition at Cannes in 2004, she tackled the subject of love and sex in this media- and technology-driven age. With Robes of War, the filmmaker again brings a feminist sensibility to a contemporary issue.
Lettres à Madeleine (Guillaume Apollinaire), Histoires de guerre et d’intimité (Alberto Moravia), The Attack (Yasmina Khadra), Insoumise (Ayaan Hirsi Ali), Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (Barbara Victor), Du corps en Islam (Malek Chebel), The Female Eunuch (Germaine Greer), Exquisite Corpse (Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss)
The Lovers of Sarajevo (Marcel Hanoun), Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola), Hiroshima mon amour and Night and Fog (Alain Resnais), Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood), Le Métro – Chant et danse du monde inanimé (Pierre Hébert)
The Body Worlds exhibition (Gunther von Hagens), Man Ray's Prayer photo series
René Chenier earned his degree in communications from Concordia University. A true man of the cinema, he has been director, production manager, line producer and producer and headed his own production house, Arico Film Communication, before joining the NFB’s Animation and Youth Studio in 2006. As independent producer, Chénier’s credits include Philippe Baylaucq’s highly regarded musical fable Hugo et le Dragon, which won awards including the Telefilm Canada Prize for Best Independent Canadian Production in French at the 2002 Banff Television Festival and a 2002 Gémeaux Award for Best Direction in a Youth Program or Series. Chénier also produced the animated series Et Dieu créa Laflaque, based on a concept by Serge Chapleau, which in 2005 won the Rockie Prize for Best Comedy at the Banff Television Festival. He directed Gilles Carle’s Fantastica and was first assistant director on Micheline Lanctôt’s Sonatine, then production manager most notably for Un Zoo la nuit by Jean-Claude Lauzon, Sous les draps les étoiles by Jean-Pierre Gariépy, Une épopée en Amérique by Gilles Carle and Souvenirs intimes by Jean Beaudin. He was also line producer on Pierre Falardeau’s 15 février 1839, The Favourite Game by Bernar Hébert and producer of Benoit Pilon’s Ce qu’il faut pour vivre. More recently, at the NFB, he produced Michèle Cournoyer’s latest film, Robes of War.
During 20 years with the National Film Board of Canada, Michèle Bélanger developed considerable expertise in the distribution of documentary and animation films before becoming a producer. From 2002 to 2007, she worked in the Animation and Youth Studio, where she produced award-winning children’s Internet sites as well as short auteur animations including Nicolas Brault’s Antagonia (2002), winner of the 2000 Cinéaste recherché(e) competition, as well as Islet (2003), his second film. She also produced Marianne’s Theatre (2004) by veteran animator Co Hoedeman, as well as Patrick Bouchard’s Dehors Novembre (2004), Catherine Arcand’s Nightmare at School, Nicolas Brault’s Hungu and Michèle Cournoyer’s latest work, Robes of War. Bélanger was interim executive producer at the Animation and Youth Studio from 2005 to 2006 before being appointed French Programming Advisor in 2007.
Marcel Jean has written several books on Quebec and animation cinema, is a well-known critic and has directed short films and documentaries. In 1999, he took over as head of the French Animation Studio at the National Film Board, producing many award-winning films: Martine Chartrand’s Black Soul (winner of 22 prizes including the Golden Bear at Berlin), Patrick Bouchard’s The Brainwashers (2002, winner of five awards), Michèle Lemieux’s Stormy Night (2003, winner of 12 awards including a Crystal Bear at Berlin), Michèle Cournoyer’s Accordion (2004, screened in competition at Cannes, award winner at Leipzig and Dresden) and Sleeping Betty (2007, eleven prizes). Marcel Jean also pursued a dynamic policy of international co-production: films by the Norwegian Pjotr Sapegin (Aria, 2001, tentime award winner; Through my Thick Glasses, 2004, twelve prizes), works by the Dane Lejf Marcussen (Angeli, 2002, award winner at Zagreb), the Portuguese Abi Feijo (Clandestino, 2000, eight awards), the Swiss Georges Schwizgebel (L’homme sans ombre, 2004, 12 prizes; Jeu, 2006, award winner at Hiroshima and Ottawa) and the Frenchman Philippe Jullien (Ruzz et Ben, 2005). Under his leadership the NFB joined forces with the French studio Folimage as part of its animation filmmakers’ residency scheme. For this, he co-produced François le Vaillant by Carles Porta Garcia (2002, four awards), Circuit marine by Isabelle Favez (2003, five awards) and Tragic Story with Happy Ending (2005, winner of several awards including the Cristal d’Annecy). Marcel Jean left the National Film Board of Canada in 2005 and founded his own production company.
The first images came to me in 2004, when I was at the Zagreb International Animation Festival in Croatia. This country, part of the former Yugoslavia, still bore the scars of the war that had raged there during the 1990s. For me, the trip inspired a film presenting a woman’s body—a wounded woman, a ‘woman-ruin’—as a theatre of war. I felt I had found my subject.
However, Robes of War really only came to life the following year. Endless images from the Middle East were on TV. I was deeply moved and disturbed by the notion of a female suicide bomber, which gave me a new angle on my idea for a film about the body in war.
Then, one night as I lay awake, the sheets seemed to envelop me like a black veil. I felt my eyelids becoming soldiers’ helmets. The ceiling fan became the blades of a helicopter. My room became a battlefield.
Many of my films are based on visions and dream imagery.
My film is an evocation of war. I felt the need to inform myself throughout the process.
Above all, I found inspiration in the gestures and rituals of prayer (Muslim and universal), which are expressed by the hands of the young woman. The war sequence was built up bit by bit. The fingers of the praying woman became soldiers. They die in battle in her clasped hands.
In both films, the trauma suffered by the central female character prefigures her self-destruction. The dancer in The Hat was a victim of incest; the veiled woman in Robes of War mourns the dead child in her arms. However, there’s a difference in that the woman in Robes of War never opens her eyes. She prays. The war rages within her, in her heart and body. I see Robes of War as a film about ecstasy, grief, brainwashing, despair, terror and distress. This woman gains equality with men by blowing herself up, becoming a martyr. She’s promised a better life—because she has no life.
The film also allowed me to reconnect with the idea of costume. In The Hat, I used the fedora to mask the man’s face, and the dancer’s nudity as a type of stage costume. The chador, which is in my latest film, cloaks a woman’s entire body except for the hands and face. The sticks of dynamite around my character’s body look like a corset. This woman only unveils herself when she ignites the explosion and dies.
Robes of War references an ornamental religious costume worn by the Maccabees in the Hebrew Bible and Sacred History. It also references the tunics donned in various ritual settings: the black judicial robes of a judge; the chasuble of a priest; the black hood of a prisoner about to be executed.
The characters are often hidden in the computers; love can only be transmitted through the network connection. It’s a film about the inability to communicate—a little more mysterious. It was also called ‘radical’ . . . With Robes of War, I’ve once again adopted a more narrative approach.
The graphic aesthetic imposed itself quickly. The woman is dressed in war. She is war. She wears a head-to-toe black chador. The story centres on her and around her black veil. The black is a constant presence and is perpetually changing. It starts off as night, then becomes a veil, a chador, a drop of blood, an army of veiled women and a tank. At the end of the film, it fills the screen to signify destruction, darkness and the void.
The choice of music clearly reflects my viewpoint as a Western woman educated in Christian schools. I was raised in an environment that was decidedly Catholic. Living in a convent, I always wore a veil to Mass. The chapel walls featured the 14 stations of the cross, including the Pietà, sculpted in bas-relief. During catechism studies at night, I would hear a nun playing the organ. Life was impregnated with religiousness. I was impressed by the fate of the ‘holy martyrs of Canada.’
The desire to use the organ in my film came about early on. I was enchanted by the sounds made by the magnificent organ at St. Joseph’s Oratory during the Millennium Symphony composed by Walter Boudreau for the year 2000. I first encountered Walter’s work in the 1960s and have always followed his career. My producer and I decided to call upon his talents. After he saw the preliminary animations, he said, “I hear an organ partita from beginning to end.”
He merged his music with my animation. Walter’s music is divine and grandiose. In its romantic mode, the organ puts the accent on prayer, meditation and devotion; it also accentuates the pain, terror and consequences of the action the woman is about to take. The organ is an orchestra in itself; it serves as dialogue, like in the days of silent films.
In the sequence where the woman becomes the tank, a cannon—erotic, phallic—raises its muzzle skyward and expresses her outrage in a plume of smoke. Black humour is a way of underscoring the absurdity and cruelty of war without casting judgment. In that sequence, I proceeded by pure psychic automation, like the Surrealists. First I drew the woman in prayer. As I animated her, she multiplied as if by magic into many veiled women, aligned like troops in uniform. Then the women in black became smaller and smaller. They began turning and to my great surprise, became caterpillar tracks of a woman/tank, then her kneeling legs, which become covered in bandages. She’s a wounded woman.
Michèle Cournoyer's animated film is a visual poem drawn with ink on paper and also a meditation on war.
National Film Board of Canada Production © 2009 All rights reserved.
