Jean Genet interview with Nigel Williams, 1985

Interview filmed in London in the summer of 1985 for BBC2. The present version is based on a transcript of the film soundtrack.

On November 12, 1985, at 10 P.M., a 58-minute program was broadcast in England on BBC2 entitled "Saint Genet." It consisted of a long interview with the writer, intercut with documents and film segments (from Un Chant D'Amour, The Balcony, The Maids, etc.).

Conducted in early summer 1985, less than a year before Genet's death, this filmed interview would be his last. It was obtained with relative ease by the English television station, for ten thousand pounds sterling, paid in cash in advance, and was filmed in London over two days in the apartment of the young writer Nigel Williams, who conducted the interview. Williams had recently translated Deathwatch for a London production staged earlier that year.

As was his custom (the year before he had also given another interview on German television), Genet displays a mastery of the rules of the genre, which he plays with in an ironic and authoritative way, bringing his interlocutor and even the technical crew into the discussion. More than any other, this film reflects Genet's constant preoccupation with interrogating, challenging, and sometimes endangering the mode of expression he is using.

This very lively interview nonetheless took place at a time when Genet's health had begun to deteriorate considerably. In remission for a while after intense chemotherapy, the cancer he had suffered from since 1979 had returned, leaving him with little hope to live much longer However, he was about to finish writing Prisoner of Love, and would send the completed manuscript to Editions Gallimard in October. Unlike in his previous interviews, in which Genet considered his work to be "in progress", here, in responding to Nigel Williams's questions, he knows that his last work has taken shape, and it is without any apparent sadness that, at the end of the program, he can say, "I'm waiting for death."

Category:

Music

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