OCTOBRE À MADRID

In the first part of the 1960’s, Marcel Hanoun lived for a while in Spain, in a kind of self-imposed exile from his filmmaking world in Paris. Even though Hanoun was disappointed by how difficult it was to complete his projects in France, this destination seemed paradoxical. Spain, walled in by Franco’s regime since the Civil War, offered nothing more in appearance than sun-drenched boredom, an almost motionless daily life interspersed with a few local rituals whose picturesque charm Hanoun captured in short, often commissioned documentaries, including a Holy Week procession and a bullfight.

In OCTOBRE À MARDID, Hanoun tackles for the first time the theme of a film about filmmaking focusing on location scouting and a talent search for his protagonist named Carmen. In one sense, then, OCTOBER IN MADRID is a documentary: an amalgam of his impressions of Spain, made up of his previous short documentaries and of encounters with his artist friends. On another level, the film is a fiction, as the filmmakers recalls a script that he abandoned four years earlier that should have started and ended on a close-up of an actress’ face as she puts on makeup. Yet as a third layer, OCTOBRE À MADRID is a film diary, in which Hanoun tells in voice-over how the filmmaking project is progressing, with all its stops, starts, and detours.

All these variations and simulations of the film echo one another, emerge from one another; the same film set, empty of any human presence, or the same view of fleeting passersby in Madrid can appear at different levels, sometimes simultaneously, resurfacing sometimes in the past conditional or in the future tense. All these dimensions of reality and fiction merge so profoundly that the filmmaker can affirm that throughout all his difficulties, “the film did come to exist”, nourished by these materials, fragments of reality and attempts at fiction.

“An ambitious film, disarming in its simplicity, OCTOBRE À MADRID (OCTOBER IN MADRID) is the prototypical ‘film about film’ that every filmmaker dreams of. That’s what Hanoun has filmed here: the life of the filmmaker as a film in the making; the blurring and reversing of the boundaries between desire and work, film and life.”

- Jean-Louis Comolli

“This is one of the first film-essays of French cinema; it must be seen.”

- Raphaël Bassan

“Though Hanoun spent much of his career representing mental operations and psychic unrest as the practice of filmmaking, OCTOBRE A MADRID is singularly dense with traces of life outside the mind. It might best be characterized as ‘a film about making a film about one’s inability to make a film,’ yet it nevertheless manages to touch upon something tangible and human amid its playful self-reflexivity. It is a near-masterpiece for anyone who is on intimate terms with the feeling of failure. “

- Dan Sullivan

A Complete List of Marcel Hanoun's Films Distributed by GME