October Interview: Peter Lennon

Peter Lennon is the Director of 'The Rocky Road to Dublin', a hard-hitting documentary on the repression and moral corruption of the Irish Catholic Church during the '60s. Released originally in 1968 with tremendous success at Cannes, it remained largely ignored in Ireland until it was recently screened on Irish TV and released on DVD to great public and critical acclaim (a Broadway show is now in the making!?).

Peter here now sets the record straight and explains why he wanted to make 'Rocky Road', and talks about his experiences in Paris during mai '68 as a young journalist for The Guardian, and the possibility of 'revolution' in a post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Q: What brought on the desire to make your Documentary The Rocky Road to Dublin ? What was the main message you wanted to communicate?

It all started in the mid 60s when, as a junior feature writer for the Guardian in Paris, I was sent home to cover the Dublin Theatre festival: a nice perk - lashings of culture, free digs in the Shelbourne and lubricated nights at the Festival Club. But old pals began to spoil my hangovers by trying to persuade me that Ireland was now totally emancipated.   "No one takes any notice of the Clergy; censorship is virtually a thing of the past." they told me.

At that point I did not care if Ireland was liberated or not; it certainly didn't affect me. But this nonsense got on my nerves. So I asked the Guardian to let me stay on and investigate. The result was four articles on the Guardian leader pages with attractive titles such as CLIMATE OF REPRESSION; STUDENTS IN BLINKERS and GREY EMINENCE (on the notoriously repressive Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid).

There was a gratifying outcry in which I was castigated for insulting he Cloth and  Dr Michael Tierney, then president of the national university   another despot. Of course the attackers never actually told their readers how my arguments were reasoned - The Guardian only had a circulation of about 600 in Ireland.

I decided next time they could SEE for themselves (an unusual way of getting into film making). This was the time of the New Wave of young film makers in France  - when virtually anyone who wanted to make a film could  - and even have it distributed.
 
What was the main message I wanted to communicate?   To reveal to a brain washed community that they were brain washed. It was up to them to do something about it .

Q: Why did you decide the medium of film would be most suitable to tell your story or explain your point of view?

I had been a film buff since the age of about six, four maybe - I thought visually. So when it came to rebutting the furious denials of my written analysis of Ireland I knew the solution was to have the people reveal themselves on camera. I would be against the institutions, virtually all of them, but on the side of the people .

I started filming simply driven by a journalists' ambition to put the FACTS across vividly in a humane context.  But once in the cutting room with Lila Biro, an entirely new ambition seized me: to create a work which would have "an aesthetic life" way beyond the agit prop. (I didn't use that expression to myself, by the way, it was just a creative process which took over me). With the great material provided by Coutard I began the wonderful task of creating a narrative drive, of sustaining a rhythm, of laying lairs of music or song to enrich every issue  - the music in the dance hall scenes is not the original. I substituted tunes which suited the mood more appropriately, whose lyrics were more appropriate.  In the ravers dance half, for example, the words 'plead with the loved one to be true.. trooooooouu IN THIS LIFE AND IN THE NEXT.' Religion was never far from romance in Ireland.

I used music satirically, delivering, so to speak, the heads of bishops; for a jolly exit from the wedding or to warn of what the future held. And Fr. Michael Cleary helpfully demonstrated the shallowness of the Church's notion of spirituality, by giving his pub night amateur rendition of The Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy .

Q: Why did you want the French cameraman Raoul Couture to film it?

I knew that although much of the material - all of the interviews (but for Fr. Cleary's totally unknown quantity until we started shoot) were carefully lined up chosen by me a few days in advance of the arrival of the crew) - because of severe financial constraints on time and mobility (which is why we could not afford to go outside Dublin) a conventional, even if gifted, cameraman - would not be able to get me anything like the amount of material I would get from someone like Coutard. I knew he was always ready to shoot from the hip.

But I also needed someone who photographed people with true lingering interest, sympathy and compassion. Coutard was the obvious, if almost only, choice. I'd give him an outline of each set up - but after my pre-shoot conversations with the chosen interviewees, we shot without rehearsal and no retakes (except for John Huston who was a terrible "actor" and took about eight tries to get across his simple message, already made to an Dublin paper, about Ireland's need for a film industry).

Coutard did not speak nor really understand English, but his intuition as to the "emotional" importance of what someone was saying - or, for God's sake, ABOUT TO SAY  - was extraordinary. This was most obvious in the way his zooms followed the censor - the wonderful Liam O'Briain. His skill, which dazzled the Irish electricians, was most obvious when having got permission to shoot in the singing pub (and given the singer a fiver to perform that night). When we arrived the small room was packed to the walls. Any other director of photography would have had to clear the room. Coutard moved nobody. He simply hung up a string of small lights and, sometimes with his knee on someone's groin or his éclair (CAMERA) balancing on someone's shoulder, got the entire song, singer and the whole spoon routine. The Irish electricians were astounded; all they had to do was hang around me holding back. It looked as if it was all being done by one man, which accounts for the totally natural manner of the people. They never thought it could be a real - Hollywood, film .

*

Q: You were in living Paris during mai '68. Many myths have grown up about the event.   What, in your experience, was mai '68?

The most popular distortion is that it was a violent revolt, the second that the Parisians began to starve, the third - and the one which has most successfully refused one of the wisest and most successful peaceful revolts in modern times its proper place in history - was that it was noting more than a frivolous youthful sexual party, to be equated with America's infantile and politically shallow Flower Power movement. None of this is true.    

VIOLENCE

Certainly on four occasions, from the invasion of the Sorbonne by police on May 3 rd , on the 6 th and 10 th , then later during the elections of May 24 th , there were violent and vicious "nuits des barricades": battles between police and students, and later workers, around barricades (some of which had been erected by the police to trap the Sorbonne students).

Four major battles over a 40-day period, "May" went into mid-June, is astonishing. Nobody died in May and only three, two partly accidental, deaths in June, in a country where at one point nearly 10 million workers were on strike and hundreds of thousands took over control of the streets almost on a daily basis - generally unmolested. Until night fell and there were vengeful skirmishes, but no worse, from police. There was no Kent state. The claim that deaths were covered up is nonsense; the one student death led to a national protest. The students' admirable communications system would never have allowed a death to go unrecorded. The police would have made capital of a death in their ranks.

What explains this restraint? The core reason is there was never a danger of a coup d'état: there was no new party trying to impose an ideology. Imagination was taking over, so no excuse for violent repression . The students, followed by the workers, operated on an astonishingly high level of mature social responsibility. The workers readily set the debate about finding ways of improving society as a whole - above their routine for better pay and condition. As for the claim that the revolt had no concrete outcome: the Grenelle agreement meant that an estimated 800,000 workers benefited from a 7% increase in the minimum salary level, achieved in a few days, bringing into society hundreds of thousands who had been excluded - notably immigrant workers. It also liberated the left from Stalinist communist control (You see! You can do it without American firepower).

Youth simply found abhorrent the society their elders were creating and decided it was time to stop and reflect . There was never any delusion it could go on for long. Given that the students then could not have realised that later the consumer society would begin to consume the globe, earth, air and water and poison the planet, it is astounding that they could have such a passionate conviction without sufficient evidence of the evil to come. But stop their society they did, for about six weeks.

It is this level of almost magical prescience which makes us who lived though May hesitant about conveying the truth. Indeed one of the obstacles in trying to convey the truth: the FACT that Joy, Optimism and an enormous nation-wide surge of generous human feeling were true powerful and successful engines of this social revolt , is our own embarrassment that we will not be believed. Many a time at Q&A screenings of  'Rocky Road' I have faltered in trying to persuade an audience. You see in people's faces that they are immediately equating what you say with loopy Los Angeles New Age babble or ludicrous nostalgia. The very joy of the experience renders it vulnerable to trivialisation.

People mistake me for a "cop lover" when I quote, how many years later, Maurice Grimaud - Prefect of Police at the time, describing to me his feelings during those days of apparent lawlessness: " I felt a kind of joy," he said "I do not say that lightly. I was interested to live through an event which at every moment I had a feeling was important. Government had broken down. I found the experience invigorating. A tonic ".

What you have there is a man who was capable of seeing far beyond the routine duty expected of him, which was putting down disorder. He recognised that violence was not the crucial element.  If Fate had allowed his predecessor, Maurice Papon, to be still in office, May "68 would have been a hideous, bloody moment in French history. Papon is the man who in the 40s deported Jewish children to Nazi concentration camps and whose Paris police in October 1961 bound Algerian demonstrators hand and foot and drowned scores of them in the Seine.

So why do images of violence dominate the archives of The Events? The ground was laid by that most routine of distorting mechanism, what we used to call the professional journalist's " news sense", which means he knows what his news editor and the editorial policy wants and since drama and violence is what he wants, that's what he will get. Even living for weeks at the heart of the most imaginative revolts in history the media did not bother to think it through and rarely identified what was unique about this uprising. Journalists followed the violence and they dumbly recorded the hapless manoeuvres of those in power - politicians and trades unionists. The philosophical basis of the movement was reported in amused anecdotal snippets while the media waited for the "real" news: cars on fire (Incidentally not only did the Events not cost lives; it saved hundreds.  Millions of cars were off the road and hundreds of lives spared the usual weekend carnage).

Then of course the idea that a period of benevolent anarchy could be good for a country undermines the entire foundations of power and control and had to be obliterated at any cost . The consumer society itself was early into the "recuperation" process. By July the Drug Store was offering rubber paving stones to tourists.

SHORTAGES

Then came the shortages. Paris was close to starvation shrieked the gutter press (after a general strike that only lasted about 10 days!). Rationing was to be introduced. The "serious" Press solemnly concurred, more discreetly.

I lived in the rue Falguiere, which leads into the hot spots of the Ave de Maine (a demonstration nearly scuttled our chances of getting to Cannes on time with Rocky Road as we rushed to the Gare d'Austerlitz). There were still trains. We had two small children: if there had been any question of a shortage of nourishment we would have felt it.

There was what I'd describe as a lack of punctuality in the arrival of the Parisians bread supply, or a diminution in the range of croissants and batards , intolerable to any Parisian. The Inno France supermarket was not fully staffed and unforgiving French gourmets were deprived of some items. A little discomfort was about the worst it got.

But the Press had launched that dreaded iconic image from the Occupation: Parisians queuing for bread. I have no doubt that they also ran photos of Bretons on bicycles AND NOT CARRYING ONIONS around their neck.

The most profound conversion was of the stereotypical greedy and traditionally politically reactionary Parisian - the shopkeepers. There is a moving moment in Mavis Gallant's Paris Notebooks (Bloomsbury, 1988), when at the height of the turmoil she captures wonderfully the degree of wisdom and social responsibility at which the Parisians had rapidly arrived. "Would the Events be followed by something more lasting?", she asked people in the streets and shops. The majority were convinced it would. She asked a man in a bank what would change. "Our children and their children's children will ask questions about everything", he replied. Asked what she wanted from this upheaval, a woman in a travel agency replied: " Something Clean".

SEXUAL FRIVOLITY

Too much is made of  Cohn-Bendit's initial demand that the male Nanterre students be allowed access to the girls' dormitory. But this was simply a demand that young people should be treated as trusted and responsible adults. The imported 'Make Love not War' was not a genuine May '68 slogan.

As for wild sexual indulgence - this was another of those mechanical and some downright dishonesty professional media associations. I know a journalist who reported on how he managed to snoop into the Sorbonne dormitory (as if we did not all freely move around there) and found these secret dormitories with beds laid out for screwing. They were beds laid out for students screwed by colossal hard work and organisation. William Klein's 'Bons Soirs et Petits  Matins' captures the energy, organisation and the tireless Talking which were the real weapon of the students.

There is a moment in his documentary when a young girl manning the help line gently reassures a mother anxious about the whereabouts of her son. She is told he us out "on duty" but if she comes there a meeting could be arranged. "But there is no transport from where I am" the anxious mother complains. What the girl says then always gets a laugh "Why don't you hitch hike?" But she was actually giving practical advice. Every car on the road was at your disposal. I whizzed around Paris day and night. At one point a DST agent gave me a lift across Paris and discovering I was a journalist wondered fearfully what was gong to happen to him. I listened to his confession and gave him absolution.
From the start petrol was used as a political weapon, at first deliberately held back to alarm the people, then after the mise en scene of the de Gaulle flight to Germany and return in aggressive triumph, it was released triumphantly out on June 1, Pentecost, to cement the take-over of the country by the right wing.

Q: Do you see any correlation between mai '68 and the recent anti-CPE strikes?

No more than the tradition which goes back well before "68 of the French being willing to successfully challenge - and control - their politicians from the street on crucial issues: notably education and employment . I have some doubts that they will be able to continue this wonderful civic spirit tradition in our present: a climate of uncontrollable globalisation.