Jul. 6th, 1972

michael_gothard_archive: (Keith in Scream and Scream Again)
"La vallée" was filmed in Papua New Guinea.

For an insight into the mind behind the film, see the interview with Director Barbet Schroeder on this site dedicated to "La vallée."

"The Valley ... fuses fiction and documentary with improvised dialogue. Made with just a crew of just 13, this road movie by land rover, horseback and on foot, set to Pink Floyd’s shimmering psychedelia, is very much of the period – and one in which the director gets to unleash his thoughts about ‘finding one-self’ in a post-hippy era."
Full review

Valley Obscured by Clouds cast and crew

The entire cast and crew of La vallée: Michael is on the far right.
Photo is from this site.

According to Gerry Cullen, who became friends with Michael Gothard while working as an extra on "Arthur of the Britons" in 1972:

"Michael had finished working on that when I first met him ... He talked about the film quite a bit to me as to how he felt very good about that film.

It was years later before I had had a chance to see it and once I did I could see why, I think the storyline and the character he played fit his view of life, a sense of risks and adventure, willing to do what it takes to find out what it is all about. It’s just my thought but I think that was what kept him feeling most alive.

It was a time of discovery for people willing to travel to really delve into a culture and take risks. I think "La Vallee" expresses that for Michael, and he liked that film very much."

Harold Chapman also spoke to Michael about ‘La vallée.’ He says: "In a recent film [released in July 1972 in France] which I was a bit puzzled over, and wanted him to explain, he was more or less playing himself, a man of VERY few words. He was leading a small band of hippies on a trek in a tropical landscape situation in search of something or other which I couldn't quite understand.

Mike explained this as, 'we were asking questions, seeking answers, and only found more questions'. Which I thought summed up the movie to me."

Michael’s former girlfriend N.B., who first met him in 1984, says:

'He didn’t like watching himself. I never got him to show me any movie he had worked in. From what he told me, I think he liked the film “Up the Junction” and “Arthur of the Britons.” And the French one, “La vallée.”

He wasn’t very good at learning new languages. He was o.k. with a bit of French (since he had lived in Paris for a year), but he rarely said anything in French and if so, he had a hard time to get the pronunciation right.'


IMDB entry
michael_gothard_archive: (wild)
This extract from the press book was also available in a French translation.

MICHAEL GOTHARD

Born 24 June, 1939 in London.
Journalist.
Course of Dramatic Arts.

Actor in the following films:

HEROSTRATUS by Don Levy
MICHAEL KOLHAAS [sic] by Volker Schlöndorff
UP THE JUNCTION by Peter Collinson
GINGER BREAD HOUSE by Curtis Harrington
THE LAST VALLEY by James Clavell
THE DEVILS by Ken Russell, with Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave

He was discovered in HEROSTRATUS, Don Levy’s very interesting film, in which he played to principal role. His spectacular performance, which alternated moments of violence with lyric sequences done in very long takes, was noticed by Volker Schlöndorff, who signed him for MICHAEL KOLHAAS.

In this intense chronicle of a peasant revolt, Michael Gothard played the part of a young soldier who joined Kolhaas’ band, but who, refusing to obey, looted for his own gain, and finally died by hanging. His truculent performance, especially in the last scenes with Anita Pallenberg, earned him a very similar role in THE LAST VALLEY, James Clavell’s ponderous allegory.

But it is in SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN that film buffs were struck by Gothard. In this fantastic modern tale, very reminiscent of Fritz Lang, Gothard plays a weird character, a vampire with fabulous power, created by Vincent Price. During the course of a long chase across the English countryside, beautifully filmed by director Gordon Hessler, he cuts [off] his hand and dies in a vat of acid.

In Ken Russell’s THE DEVILS he plays an equally monstrous character, that of a young inquisitor, dressed like a hippie, who brutally tortured Vanessa Redgrave. Gothard seemed unable to get away from violence and savagery, but, fortunately, in THE VALLEY, Barbet Schroeder gives him a new kind of part, where he is not obliged to strangle, rape, torture or disembowel a half dozen people.
michael_gothard_archive: (wild)
Lobby card a small

Olivier shows Viviane his feathers.

Lobby card c small

Olivier leads the travellers' vehicle across a river.

Lobby card f small

Before her planned return to civilisation, Viviane decorates the truck.

Lobby card b small

The travellers arrive at the Mapuga Tribe's village, and are greeted warmly.

Lobby card d small

Nearing the end of their journey, they continue on foot.
michael_gothard_archive: (wild)
This shows a scene from the Papua New Guinea's Mapuga tribe's "sing-sing" ceremony, during which pigs are slaughtered. Michael looks on, appearing quite uncomfortable.

Cut for animal being killed.
ExpandRead more... )
michael_gothard_archive: (wild)
From Emilie Bickerton's “A Short History of Cahiers de Cinema" (2009)

When a 30-year-old Schroeder and his team set off in 1971 to the south pacific island of Papua New Guinea to shoot The Valley he was still riding the wave of success and notoriety created by his first feature More (1969) … More and The Valley share striking similarities thematically and aesthetically, and are worth thinking of as a pair. ‘The brain is like a map of Africa’ the protagonist in More says, ‘still largely uncharted. It is in these blank spots that the highest functions of reason and creativity take place.’ The Valley, in response to this statement, is another manifestation of the human need to seek the undiscovered … In both films, the journeys eventually lead to death … The hippies in The Valley, having rejected their own consumer societies for what they consider a purer, more integral and natural existence, have a geographic rather than hedonistic goal …

BFI booklet

The Valley’s protagonist does not start out a hippy … Bulle Ogier’s Viviane is a woman with a big purse and dollar signs in her eyes. She communicates through acts of trade … coveting a set o ff fabulous feathers that only an adventurer, Michael Gothard’s Olivier, can obtain for her.

The Valley charts Viviane’s transformation from stuck-up bourgeoius dame to free spirit, dancing with the tribes and making love in the forest. Along the way, she abandons Apollo (Olivier) for Dionysus, incarnated by Jean-Pierre Kalfon’s Gaetan – a trajectory Schroeder drew from Neitzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.

BFI3 edit small

Apollo tempers Viviane’s liberation however. When she is singing like a native, revelling in all the love, and declares, ‘we have found the truth’, it is Olivier, having initiated her into this world, who rejects it: we are the liars, he says, we are the tourists.

It’s easy to dance with them, but could you work with these women? They are even more exploited here than elsewhere and live in a society bound by very strict rules. It’s not like us. We’re trying to break ours. When they dance it is not simply for pleasure. It is to obey something. We seek only after pleasure and maybe peace. They couldn’t care less about that. How can you expect to have real relationships between us, who tear down our social restrictions and laws, and them, who on the contrary live in terror and respect for taboos?

This speech turns the film on its head. What had started as an observation of two groups of people – hippies and the Mapuga tribespeople – becomes a more critical exploration of the dynamic between them, and its fraught, sometimes unpleasant undertone. The white, alienated westerners are getting off on primitive tribal ways. Ambivalence towards the protagonists, eventually expressed through Olivier’s personal scepticism, is woven into Schroeder’s mise-en-scene.

BFI 4 edit

As he questions the very nature of their journey, Olivier wonders whether they shouldn’t just go home and face the lives they have rejected, because any other solution is dishonest and futile. ‘It’s not possible to decode oneself’, he tells Viviane. ‘Once it’s lost, innocence cannot be found again. Paradise is a place with many exits, but no entrance. There’s no way back from knowledge. When you fall from grace it’s over. I wonder, to find it again, whether we shouldn’t do the opposite of what we’ve done. If we should not take another bite out of the apple.’

BFI2 edit small

From Bickerton’s interview with Barbet Schroeder, 2010

… In the end, it was a film made with just over a dozen people – cast and crew! The shoot took three months. The budget was totally minimum.

The Valley has something of the road movie about it too. A non-dramatic road movie is a very strange proposition. If we had done things dramatically we would have created an opposition between Apollo (Michael Gothard’s Olivier) and Dionysus (Jean-Pierre Kalfon’s Gaetan). We would have understood better that Olivier’s reasoning was a very strong argument made by the Apolloian character. But his dialogue, which we took from Kleist’s essay on the marionettes1, comes at the end. It is magnificent, but it comes too much as a surprise.

Q: How much was The Valley a criticism of hippy culture?

A little, in so far as we had Olivier. There was something shocking about characters putting themselves as tourists in an ethnographic situation. That was troubling. But at the same time I did not want to make a film condemning them. I wanted to enter into the madness of my characters.

1 ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, Heinrich von Kleist, 1810.

~~

Interviewed by Betrand Tavernier, Schroeder said: ‘I am no longer interested in classic heroes; documentaries, reportages, whether ethnologic or not, have taught us to look at individuals in a different way; their intensity of existence and their truth have taken precedence over psychology and ‘characterisation’ … Certain roles did not develop at all. Rather than typing them with a few specific traits, I preferred that they should be like people one encounters in life, whose presence one feels without knowing anything about them, but whom one would like to know.’

~~

Jane Giles: After The Devils, Gothard appeared as the apparently free-spirited Olivier in Barbet Schroeder’s The Valley (Obscured by Clouds) (1972). Blonde, bare-chested, towering over both the New Guinea tribes and his petite, bourgeois lover, played by Bulle Ogier, and delivering mostly French-language dialogue with a crisp English accent, Gothard is both elemental and incongruous, an outsider who eventually declares himself a tourist but is also set apart from his fellow travelers.
michael_gothard_archive: (wild)
In the shop (3)

Bulle Ogier's Viviane haggles with the proprietor of a shop that sells local artefacts and crafts to tourists. She's
buying things to sell in her shop in Paris. What she really wants is rare feathers, but the shopkeeper says they're
very hard to get, and won't arrive for another two weeks – by which time Viviane will have had to to leave.

In the shop (16)

While Viviane examines a dagger, a handsome stranger, Michael Gothard's Olivier, appears in the shop. He wants
to earn some pocket money by selling a few things – including feathers – to the shopkeeper, so that he doesn't
use up his expedition's money. The shopkeeper quickly snaps them up at the price Oliver asks for them.

In the shop (25)

Viviane realises what's going on, and immediately tries to buy the feathers; the shopkeeper asks for double the
price he agreed to pay Olivier.

In the shop (42)

In her annoyance and confusion, Viviane drops the dagger on Olivier's foot.

Warning: some nudity
ExpandRead more... )
michael_gothard_archive: (wild)
On the Road (9) On the Road (18)

They arrive at the airstrip where Viviane, once more clad in business attire, is to catch her plane back to the City.

While – true to his practical role on the expedition – Olivier works on the jeep, Gaetan admires a picture Viviane
is painting on the side, of a dragon, with the word "joie." He tries to goad her into staying with them on their
journey, expounding his opinions on dragons, demons and the life force, and telling the child he is holding that
Viviane "won't see the light." He tells Olivier that it's a shame Viviane is leaving them. Olivier's response is an
economical "Oui."

On the Road (23) On the Road (31)

Similarly, when the plane arrives, Gaetan says that Viviane is giving them good vibrations; Oliver simply says
"I'll get your things." He walks her to the plane, and kisses her goodbye.

Warning: some nudity

ExpandRead more... )
michael_gothard_archive: (Default)
Alexander Stuart in Films and Filming 1975

The Valley Obscured by Clouds reaches us more than two years after it was made (and it was anachronistic then). It is a dream about a dream, and sensually it is an exquisitely beautiful dream …
ExpandRead more... )
We have heard arguments both defending and attacking the dream of returning to nature in dialogue that – in the subtitles at least – frequently seems pretentious, but which is rescued by the excellent performances of the cast, especially Bulle Ogier and Michael Gothard. So we are left to make up our own minds. Do we want to find the valley? More important still … do we want to search for it?

Full review:
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4

John Williams in Films Illustrated

... Two men and two women … about to explore the mountainous wastes of Papua New Guinea in search of a hidden valley … are joined by the wife of the French Consul in Melbourne who for no reason than it suits the film’s pretensions, is after the tail feathers of the rare, lesser bird of paradise.

… They discover lots of things about each other on the way … they discover that they are really not very nice people at all, and that the local tribes (whose only contact with civilisation is the aeroplane and the missionary) have much more to offer.

It’s really a load of pretentious nonsense, a sort of hymn to Eastern-inspired hippy ideology about loss of innocence and the search for the final truth to end all doubts.

… Apart from its looks, "The Valley" can justly boast a very honest and sympathetic performance by Michael Gothard as the disciple who tries to persuade Mme Ogier that there’s more to living than scavenging for bird feathers. His is the act which matches the aboriginal humanity of the tribes. Mr Schroeder should be grateful to both.

Full review:
part 1
part 2


Peter Fuller in Movie Talk

Thanks to cheap air travel, an ever-shrinking world, and our spirit for adventure, many of us have the opportunity to escape our humdrum lives – either briefly or for extended periods. But, on seeing this allegorical tale about a woman’s journey of self-discovery, I got a bit of a wake-up call. The Valley may have been made 40 years ago, but its themes still resonate.
ExpandRead more... )

Images Movie Journal

Vivian (Bulle Ogier) seems an unlikely candidate for a spiritual explorer on a quest for Paradise. She's a quintessential early 1970's material girl, who defines her sense of self by the things she has acquired: a diplomat husband, pressing social obligations, access to government chateaus, a dog named Nouki, and a Parisian boutique.

Her desire to acquire feathers from the Kamul, the Bird of Paradise, launches her on the journey. To Vivian the feathers represent another link in the chain of rare, beautiful things which she must possess. The desire to possess the feathers verges on the sexual, as underscored by the scene where Olivier (Michael Gothard) shows her a Kamul feather in a communal tent shared by his fellow travelers.
ExpandRead more... )

Anet Maslin in The New York Times: May 17, 1981

The beginning of Barbet Schroeder's ''The Valley Obscured by Clouds'' finds Viviane (Bulle Ogier) wearing a trim little dress and high heels, traipsing elegantly through the jungle as only a chic Frenchwoman can. The bored wife of a diplomat stationed in Melbourne, she is in New Guinea to buy feathers, which she sells to a Paris boutique.

In the trading post where she is first seen, she encounters the blond, bare-chested Olivier (Michael Gothard), who claims to know where some fine feathers can be found. He seems to be making a few other claims too, but it is only the feathers that he mentions. Anyhow, Viviane soon embarks, with Olivier and several very solemn, self-important hippies who are his friends, on a journey into the wilderness. They are in search, respectively, of feathers and truth …
ExpandRead more... )

Glenn Erickson on DVD Savant

At last, a vintage 'trippy' film with some guts. The entire 'head trip' subgenre of late 60s / early 70s has a real credibility problem. Most of the films that seriously invited us to consider dropping out into a more mellow plane of existence now appear exploitative, naive or laughable …
ExpandRead more... )

Fernando F. Croce on Cinepassion

Half druggy road trip, half ethnographic study, Barbet Schroeder's eco-mystical adventure … traces a cultural movement's trek back to the Garden. Bulle Ogier is a French consul's wife, stranded in a New Guinea isle, looking for artifacts for her Paris boutique before hooking up with a gang of hippified travelers (led by Jean-Pierre Kalfon) on their way to find the off-limits valley, whose heavy mists have kept it a blank spot in maps -- "Paradise."
ExpandRead more... )

Michael Wilmington

The Valley was shot in 1971. It had its European release in the early Seventies (the soundtrack album, composed and performed by Pink Floyd, was a huge British hit in 1972), and so this relatively delayed American release - some eight years late - makes the film seem unduly anachronistic: a naïve relic of the mystique of high hippiedom, somehow washed ashore on the strobe-lit, mercantile, Bloomingdales' beaches of 1979.
ExpandRead more... )

Richard T. Jameson on Parallax View, originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976

… The bored wife of a New Guinea–based diplomat leaves the capital long enough to scout up some exotic feathers for the world of haute couture, learns of a likelier source farther from civilization, and ends by disappearing into a white area on the map in quest of Paradise …

The first peopled shot to come onscreen—the bored wife (Bulle Ogier) and a half-loony storekeeper dickering over prices in a timbered outpost of progress—is too vast on the wide screen to justify its framing as dramatic event, but in its very ungainliness seems to promise that there are possibilities to be sensed out and tried.
ExpandRead more... )
Full review

Further reviews:
Digitally Obsessed
Digital Bits – the Bottom Shelf by Adam Jahnke

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