Note d’intention de Ian pringle concernant isabelle Eberhardt-638

About ten years ago, when I first read about the life of Isabelle Eberhardt, I was not only fascinated and intrigued by this woman who had such a short and strange life but, at the same time, I felt a sort of affinity with her. In saying that, I’m not trying to find parallels with my own life but there was something in her behaviour and perception of the world that I could easily understand. This feeling cannot be explained. As in my other films, I have deliberately shied away from any sort of intellectual analysis concerning my own motivations as a director. I feel that doing that is tantamount to a sort of intellectual search of my subconscious that, I’m afraid, could encroach upon what I value the most as a filmmaker, in other words, my instincts.

As for the woman herself, I can say this: no life is made in one piece. Every life is made up of disjunctions, contradictions and broken promises. Between the desperate quest for the meaning of life and the final destruction of hope, you find all the mystery of the experiences of life that reveal our total insignificance in the face of the world and the impossible drama of our life on earth.

She was everything: a clown, a saint, a sensualist, a female tornado at the heart of which life flowed like an endless river. A writer, and adventurer and a fool, continually racked by forces that she didn’t comprehend, she spent her short life trying to rid herself of the superfluous to face reality and it was this reality that cast her into the darkness and hurled her into the void from which no sense ever comes.

Like her death at the age of twenty-seven in a flash flood on the edge of the Algerian Sahara, her life surprises with its clear contrasts and deep fractures. Who was she? What did she want? Did she really know herself? These are countless, huge, impenetrable questions that rise up around this dervish made of passions and fears. What are death, pain and suffering exactly? What is life? How can one live it in the presence of the pressure and conflicts that make it up? And as for love, this torment and comfort, how can it exist and how can we attain it?

She succeeded in everything but succeeded in nothing: the love that she rejected, the fame that she hated, and the knowledge that had no meaning. But, like a leaf in a steam, she continued to move forward, turning, drowning, re-emerging before diving back into the raging current of this world that laid down its gifts, traps and disappointments at her feet like priceless jewels. Lost and yet eternal, she lit up the night like a beacon and, for this brief moment, the light of her ardent soul sent its beams through time and space in order to touch us today, despite the century of despair and poverty that lies between us. She perhaps gives us the courage to face the all-consuming night and to live where it is possible to live.

Looking back, shooting this film was both an exciting and depressing experience. Exciting because I was making this film at last. I am starting to think that a director only "lives" when he is shooting. And depressing because I realized, the more we shot, that no film on the life of this woman could ever do her justice.

A few weeks ago, I read some lines by Theodore Roosevelt: "It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out where the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust, sweat and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, in the end, knows the triumph of high achievement and at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."