In the summer of 1939, the Swiss traveler and photographer Ella Maillart sets out on a journey from Europe toward Asia with her close friend Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Over the course of this journey, which stretches from Türkiye to Iran and from there to Afghanistan and India, Maillart will observe local peoples with her still camera and her 16 mm film camera, while also coming to terms with herself, her culture and a Europe on the brink of war. Co-directed by Mariann Lewinsky and Antonio Bigini, Ella Maillart: Double Journey (Ella Maillart: Çifte Serüven) is a poetic documentary edited from the photographs and footage the artist shot during this journey, an essay film that follows in the footsteps of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. Director Mariann Lewinsky, who is also one of the curators of the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival, answered our questions about the film.

How did you first gain access to the film footage and photographs from Ella Maillart’s journey to India? How did you decide to make a film out of this material?

Twenty years ago I was working on various film restoration projects in Switzerland. I didn’t know much about Ella Maillart, but when a colleague mentioned her films, which had been kept at the Cinémathèque Suisse after her death, I decided to look into them. That is how I came across Maillart’s silent 16 mm films, some black-and-white and some in color, from her journeys to Afghanistan and India and, in later years, to Nepal. None of these films had been stored with the necessary preservation measures. So I launched a restoration project, and in 2005–2006 part of this material was preserved by producing negative copies and a projection print. In her day, Ella Maillart used these films like slides, giving lectures accompanied by the images. But without her, the films were dead and silent; almost none of them had intertitles. And the prints of the color material were in complete disarray.

A film restoration project is only complete when the film in question can appear on a screen again, in front of an audience. So I organized screenings of the restored 16 mm print of Maillart’s black-and-white film about Afghan nomads [Nomades Afghans, 1939]. At these screenings I provided live commentary in sync with the images. The Memoriav Association, which had covered the costs of the restoration, asked me to edit the material for release on DVD. In truth, I never had the idea of making a film. At first I got lost in an ocean of ideas and of the material itself, such as gathering it all on a website or creating an experimental moving exhibition format, and I made several unsuccessful attempts. In the end I asked my friend Antonio Bigini for help. Working quickly and cheaply together, we decided to create two edits for the DVD, one dealing with the Afghanistan journey and the other with the India journey. It was only at the end of this process that we realized we had actually made a film. The film premiered six years ago in Nyon at the Visions du Réel festival and has since traveled the world through many screenings.

Double Journey — would you define it as an essay film? What were the sources of inspiration that shaped the story, the editing and the use of voice-over?
We actually had no script, no budget, no plan and no clear goal. We worked on pages and pages of text, around a thousand photographs and several hours of moving images with a direct and simple approach. We began combining words with still and moving images, and in the process the material took on a life of its own. Of course, it was a complicated process, and we put a great deal of time and effort into it. But in the end, when the project was finished, a film had emerged. And looking at it now, Antonio Bigini and I find it incredible that we are the creators of this film, even though all the decisions about form, story, editing, sound design and voice-over were ours…

The use of the letters in the film, especially their openings, to create a rhythmic structure was inspired by Chris Marker’s documentary Sans Soleil (Sunless). That documentary came out in 1983, just as I had returned from Japan; it felt to me like a visual record of the intense year I had spent there, and it left a deep mark on me. For the scene of the notebook opening and closing, which marks the beginning and end of the film, we drew direct inspiration from Alina Marazzi’s documentary Un ora sola ti vorrei (2002), another film that had a profound effect on me. Both of these films feature a captivating narration carried by a single voice-over. If Ella Maillart: Double Journey were to be seen in the same category as Sans Soleil, it would be a great honor for us.

Beyond the footage you used, to what extent did you research Maillart’s life, her journey and her relationship with the writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach? Did you decide from the very beginning that the film’s perspective would be limited to Maillart’s footage and letters?

To put it simply, this was a small-scale restoration project that we undertook in order to bring Ella Maillart’s silent film footage back to the screen. In this context, we made deliberate choices about what to leave out in order to focus the film on the relationship between the two women.

Because of the restoration project I carried out in 2005–2006, which also included other footage by Ella Maillart, I began with extensive research into Maillart’s life and work. In this research, the help of Anneliese Hollmann, to whom Ella Maillart had entrusted all her recordings and writings and who did a wonderful job editing her letters and texts, was invaluable. Of course, I also read everything Annemarie Schwarzenbach wrote during this journey and examined all the photographs she took. But from the very beginning of the project it was quite clear that our main goal was to find a form that would allow us to release the moving images Ella recorded during this journey. And the most fitting context in which to place this silent, unidentified material turned out to be her writings and photographs. We also wanted to follow Ella from Mumbai, where she held the first screening of her film Nomads of the Frontier (1940), all the way to the ashram in Tiruvannamalai that she reached at the end of her journey. The most important research we did was studying her writings and photographs in order to establish the chronology of events and where each shot had been filmed.

Since the film has a loose and light structure, it was very important for the chronology to be reliable and, likewise, for it to have a reliable narrative, that is, Ella’s perspective and voice.

The letters Maillart wrote to her mother reflect a deep disillusionment with European civilization, intensified by the devastation of the Second World War, which broke out during her journey. In one of these letters she remarks that “rather than blaming one dictator or another, we need to try to understand why Europe has lost its mind.” What can you tell us about the personal and political dimensions of her letters?

For Maillart, who was born in 1903, the war that actually caused this disillusionment with Europe was the First World War (1914–1918), which coincided with her early adolescence. The war and the violence it unleashed, the ideologies, and the way states forced people, in the name of patriotism, to become soldiers and kill one another deeply disturbed Maillart. As a result, in 1926 Ella and her closest friend Miette de Saussure, then two very young women, wanted to leave Europe for good and live on a boat in the Pacific (both were experienced sailors).

The letters Maillart wrote to her mother during her travels in Afghanistan and India show how clear and sharp a view she had of what was happening in the political world of Europe, even from such a great distance. On a personal level, we see that Maillart told her mother about her life decisions – after she had made them – but rarely shared the problems she faced. She expressed those problems mostly in her diaries. Maillart always reassured her family that they need not worry about her and told them she was fine.

I should also mention, by the way, that Maillart’s Danish-born mother, Dagmar Maillart-Kliim, was likewise a free-spirited woman with a strong and optimistic character.

Maillart seems to have had an ethnographic perspective; she shows a sincere interest in the people she met in Türkiye, Iran, Afghanistan and India. Yet in her comments about these people we can also see traces of an Orientalist approach. She tends to define local people and nomadic tribes in terms of essential differences. Do you agree with this observation?

Yes, I agree, but I wouldn’t turn it into an accusation. Ella Maillart was a rare character who strove to attain freedom in both her inner and outer worlds, to find and live an independent, authentic life. In such a struggle you need alternative sources of inspiration, dreams, imagination and vision, and for Ella the nomads were a source of inspiration. She felt closer to them than to the diplomats in the embassies. And the physical reality should not be underestimated either. Ella was a person of great strength and courage who spent her life outdoors; in this sense she loved the hard life of nomads and sailors, who live in constant contact with nature, and she shared that way of life with them. In 1934 she covered the six thousand kilometers from Beijing to Srinagar in Kashmir on horseback and on foot in seven months. I believe she did all this in order to experience a reality. Orientalism, on the other hand, is a product of discourse, a labyrinth of mirrors.

How did you get in touch with Irène Jacob for the film’s voice-over narration? What was your experience of working with her like?

To start with the second question: in our collaboration with Irène Jacob, our part was to provide the text, organize the recording studio and the technician, and then sit back and watch a wonderful actress and artist at work. It was a miraculous experience. In a few sections we may have made suggestions about how we understood the scene and how the narration should sound. But on the whole, the music and moving expressiveness of the voice-over that carries us through the film bear Irène Jacob’s signature. That is priceless.

Since we hadn’t actually set out to make a film and had no budget, we initially planned to ask a non-professional acquaintance or a friend to do the voice-over. But during editing, when we felt that the project was turning into a real film, we concluded that the voice-over was also very important. When we decided to work with a professional for the voice-over, all the names that came up were wrong for the job. They had either a commercial smoothness or a documentary coldness. We ruled out several options through trial and error. For example, we spent weeks trying to reach the agent of the philosopher, writer and journalist Mazarine Pingeot, whose voice we felt had the right energy and strength for this film, but we never got a clear answer.

After that, we decided to find an actress who, like Ella Maillart, was from Geneva. But at the same time we were running out of time. A friend of a friend of Antonio’s had once looked after Jacob’s dogs, and somehow we got Jacob’s cell phone number from them. Then I plucked up my courage and called her. She said she wanted to see the text, and that same day, in the late afternoon, after reading it, she accepted the job. We can never thank her enough…

You are also one of the curators of the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival held in Bologna. In your experience, what is the relationship between film programming and filmmaking? Are they two separate pursuits, or do they nourish each other?

In my case, these two activities are inseparable. By profession and expertise I am a curator, and I have made only one film, together with a friend. My real passion is creating programs that bring together early silent short films, or fragments of such films, and letting them shine in a beautiful, compelling screening. Editing Ella Maillart’s moving images was exactly that kind of process, which is why it felt so natural to me: choosing the right scenes and themes, finding the right places and order, and finally putting everything through a rigorous selection process to give what remains more room and more power. Antonio and I also have another film project about the Tunisian pioneer filmmaker Albert Samama Chikli. I discovered this extraordinary photographer and filmmaker in 2014, thanks to being one of the curators of a festival section devoted to images from the Ottoman Empire.

Director Lewinsky’s film ‘Ella Maillart: Double Journey’ can be watched on Kundurama from May 28 to June 13, 2021, free of charge and with Turkish subtitles!

On the occasion of the film’s screening in Türkiye, the director spoke exclusively to Kundura Sinema and answered the questions of Altyazı Cinema Magazine writer Berke Göl.

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