The Egyptian god Horus in the
Paris metro in 2003.
Enki Bilal
An old yellow cab flies over New York in the year 2026.
“An artist needs to stand outside his time.”
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A prolific artist
Enki Bilal was born in Belgrade
(Yugoslavia) in 1951 and went with his parents to live in Paris in 1960. He began
his career as a comic strip artist at the age of 19 on the magazine Pilote. In 1987,
he won the best book award at the annual comic strip festival held at Angoulême
in southwest France. Bilal has produced some 20 books and directed two films.
Published by Les Humanoïdes Associés:
* Albums from the Nikopol trilogy:
La Foire aux Immortels, 1980 (Gods in Chaos, 1987)
La Femme piège, 1986 (The Woman Trap, 1988)
Froid Equateur, 1992
La Trilogie Nikopol (complete edition),1995
Other albums:
Mémoires d’outre-espace, 1978 (Outer States, 1990)
Crux Universalis, 1982 (out of print)
Mémoires d’autres temps, 1996
L’Etat des stocks 1971-1986 (re-published in 1999)
Le Sommeil du Monstre, 1999
* With Pierre Christin:
La Croisière des oubliés, 1975
Le Vaisseau de pierre, 1976
La Ville qui n’existait pas, 1977 (The Town That Didn’t Exist, 1989)
Les Phalanges de l’Ordre Noir, 1979 (The Ranks of the Black Order, 1989)
Partie de chasse (completed in 1990)
Coeurs sanglants, 1988
Après le Mur (collective work), 1990
* With Jean-Pierre Dionnet:
Exterminateur 17, 1979 (Exterminator 17, 1986)
Published by Dargaud:
* With Jean-Pierre Thévenet:
Images pour un film (“La vie est un roman”, by Alain Resnais), 1983
Published by Autrement:
* With Pierre Christin:
Los Angeles, L’Etoile oubliée de Laurie Blum, 1984
* With Patrick Cauvin:
Hors Jeu, 1987
Published by Christian Desbois:
Bleu sang, 1994
* With Dan Franck, Fabienne Renault and Isi Véléris:
Tykho Moon—Livre d’un film, 1996
Published by Futuropolis:
Appel des étoiles, 1975 (expanded version: Le Bol maudit, 1982)
Paris sera toujours Paris, 1981 (collective work)
Die Mauer, 1982 (drawings)
* With Grange, Tardi and Pichard:
Grange bleue, 1985
* All English titles published by Catalan Communications, New York
Filmography
Bunker Palace Hôtel, 1989
Tykho Moon, 1997.
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Religion can
become very dangerous, especially if it develops into a sect mentality. All kinds
of excesses are on the cards in this rapidly changing world which doesn’t have much
idea about where it’s going |
In comics, books and
movies, a Yugoslav-born French artist visits the future to put the past in perspective
and wields humour as a weapon against horror
Memory is a recurrent theme in your work and the leitmotif of your latest book,
co-written with the French novelist Dan Franck. Its title is Un siècle d’amour—a
century of love—but it’s really about a century of terror.
The creative process is based on memory. Artists are a compound of memory and
sensibility. How could they talk about humanity and the world without delving into
history and drawing on memory—their own and the memory of society and of nature?
Memory can be more or less prominent in an artist’s work. But even when it’s scarcely
perceptible, it’s always the raw material of art.
How do you differentiate between history and memory?
Let’s take the case of Un siècle d’amour. It isn’t a book about history,
even though it starts in 1914, ends in 1999 and moves from Guernica to the Holocaust,
Hiroshima and events in Africa—fairly classic chapters of history. Each episode evokes
the experiences of a woman caught up in the torment of war. Dan wrote the stories
of these 13 witnesses, victims and heroines of our times. I painted their portraits.
But the book is not very accurate historically. It starts in Sarajevo 1914 and ends
in Saravejo 1999 and not—as respect for chronology would have required—with events
in Kosovo, decisive though these were for this book. Readers should see this as a
deliberate act of infidelity to history rather than an attempt to misrepresent it.
Sarajevo, a multi-ethnic, multicultural city sacrificed to horror, has come to symbolize
the memory of this murderous century.
In Le Sommeil du monstre (“The Sleeping Monster”), an animated film based
on the war in Sarajevo that you wrote and drew, you flash forward to 2026 to observe
today’s world. Why did you use this technique?
It’s very odd, but when I depict a brutal scene, I feel deeply uneasy if I set
it in the present. If I situate it 20 or 30 years later, however, I enjoy the creative
process. The horrible pictures from Africa and Chechnya that you see everywhere in
the media bring us information (I won’t get involved in the debate about its quality)
in real time. Such images come to us via two vehicles of reality, photography and
reporting. They are part of a language that is quite different from the artist’s.
So there is a feeling of personal uneasiness as well as a desire to step back from
reality, to be disconnected from it. But this doesn’t keep me from returning to the
real world. I visit the future to come back to the past and the present.
These three dimensions of time often overlap in your books. The first scene in Le
Sommeil du monstre, for example, takes place in an old New York yellow cab transformed
into a flying machine. This kind of contemporary detail ensures that readers don’t
feel totally immersed in a science fiction world.
I don’t want them to be. What’s more, I find the term science fiction slightly
irritating. I am against all kinds of labels, codifications and classifications in
literature. I don’t think there’s a hard-and-fast boundary between the worlds of
Jules Verne, George Orwell and H.P. Lovecraft and those of Baudelaire, Kafka and
Poe. I think the boundaries between genres are fading away. More and more authors
are weaving the future into their works, whether they are writing novels or philosophy.
That said, I have loved science fiction since I was a teenager. Science fiction enabled
me to observe the world in its cosmic dimension, to have a global vision of the Earth
which influences the questions I ask about the existence of other life forms and
about the human condition.
What worries you most about today’s world?
Without falling into the trap of “knee-jerk ecology”, I must say that I am afraid
for our planet. It is becoming weaker all the time. I have a sense of terrible waste.
We have taken too much out of the Earth, we have heedlessly consumed its resources
and caused irreparable harm.
Religious fundamentalism also alarms me. Imagine “Talibanism” on a world scale! It’s
terrifying. Religion can become very dangerous, especially if it develops into a
sect mentality. All kinds of excesses are on the cards in this rapidly changing world
which doesn’t have much idea about where it’s going. It’s both exciting and frightening
not to know what the future holds in store. Twenty years ago, when the world was
divided into two camps, everything was simple, almost simplistic. Our side was good,
the other was evil. We knew where the enemy was. That’s the world we grew up in.
We were shaped in its mould. Then, all of a sudden, everything fell apart. The change
was so swift and so abrupt that it took us unawares. Our minds weren’t ready for
it. The war in Yugoslavia proves the point. It was almost a nineteenth-century war.
It was archaic. And “archaicists” are the ones who caused it.
Nike, the main hero of Le Sommeil du monstre, battles the “Obscurantis Order”,
a kind of sect headed by “three new, self-proclaimed charismatic leaders”. Is that
a veiled allusion to the three leaders who brought about the break-up of Yugoslavia,
Serbia’s Milosevic, Croatia’s Tudjman and Bosnia’s Izetbegovic?
The idea for the “Obscurantis Order” arose from fundamentalism, but readers are
free to make their own interpretations. That’s the point of the book: everyone can
make of it what they will. There’s nothing to stop people making a connection with
the three war leaders you mentioned, who were fully tolerated and cynically accepted
by Europe. Better things could have been done. Europe should have intervened as soon
as the rise of nationalism began in 1987. Not necessarily militarily—a carrot-and-stick
approach could have been used by saying, “Hey, Europe is under construction, don’t
miss the boat.” At that time, Yugoslavia was better placed than any other East European
country to join the European Union.
How did you feel about the war that ravaged the country where you were born?
It hit me like a smack in the face. I’ve lived in France since 1960, but I was
born in Belgrade. My father was from Herzegovina and my mother came from Czechoslovakia
at the age of two. I spent the first nine years of my life in Yugoslavia. I was born
a Yugoslav or, if you like, a “Yugoslovak”—that’s what I was called by Alain Resnais,
the director of La vie est un roman, a film for which I designed the sets.
I loved that country. Split, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Belgrade. I went back as soon as
I could, even though it was to relive childhood memories more than anything else.
Then I was sucked into the terrible reality of the war. But at the same time, I remained
on the outside. A good thirty years had gone by since I left, I was an observer,
above the fray, I didn’t take any strong positions.
It was painful. I felt as if I was caught in the grip of this history, yet at the
same time I tried to stay detached in order to understand what was going on. I’m
not sure I succeeded. Some situations are irrational. I saw French intellectuals
taking positions that sometimes seemed grotesque. I mistrusted these opinions, even
if their basis was sound, even if they reflected a kind of generosity.
In short, it was a very hard time, but obviously nowhere near as hard as it was for
the people on the spot. I experienced and exorcised my anxiety in my own way, with
Le Sommeil du monstre.
The world of that comic book is sombre and dominated by cold colours. But humour
keeps on breaking through, even at the most tragic moments. For example, you write,
“A rocket slammed through a wing of the hospital, causing three casualties, including
an innocent Sony television set that was switched off”.
That is part of the inexplicable relationship between the author and his work.
I need humour, of course. It defuses certain situations. It adds a light touch to
stories that would otherwise be utterly turgid.
On the opening page of La Foire aux immortels, you quote this passage from
the writings of Choublanc, the Fascist governor of Paris in 2023: “Immortality is
a form of dictatorship of life over death. As a dictator, and someone who is alive,
all that’s left for me is to become immortal. And I will! Even if I die in the process!”
That is a completely way-out comic book in which Egyptian gods play the game
Monopoly in a flying pyramid that has run out of fuel and hovers over Paris. In it
I describe the quest for immortality in its most ludicrous forms. Choublanc, who
believes memory and history are outdated concepts, will do anything in his power
to achieve immortality. At the same time, Alcide Nikopol, a deserter launched into
outer space in a flying refrigerator in 1992, falls out of the sky deep-frozen! This
wretched mortal is rescued by the god Horus, who wants to use his body to settle
his scores with the other Egyptian deities. Thirty years have gone by. Paris has
changed a lot. Alcide is totally lost. His memory gradually comes back and, with
it, Baudelaire’s poems, which he recites all through the events that take place.
The first one describes death at its most repellent.
I don’t like death. I’m terrified of it and I’m always thinking about it in a somewhat
abstract way. I’ve come to terms with it as best I can. We might as well laugh about
it, don’t you think?
The monstrous dictator’s name is Choublanc, which means a loser in French. Is that
because he is doomed to fail? Is there any symbolism in the names you give your characters?
It’s very odd. Both names and titles come to me automatically. I don’t know how
it happens or where they come from. But I do know that I’m incapable of writing a
book or making a film without knowing the title beforehand. It comes out of the blue.
There’s nothing premeditated about it. When I started the story about Choublanc,
I didn’t even know how it was going to develop. I already have the title of my next
book, which is a follow-up to Le Sommeil du monstre. It’s 32 décembre—“December
32”. When I started writing 32 décembre, I didn’t even known what the expression
meant. Now, one of the book’s aims is to find a meaning for its title.
Why did you name the head of the “Obscurantis Order” Warhole? Your female characters,
painted in a dominant colour, owe something to Andy Warhol.
There’s a pun in Warhole. There’s a gaping hole over Nike’s head in the hospital
at Sarajevo. But it’s also a deliberate allusion to Andy Warhol. Names can harbour
a host of meanings. In the next book, you’ll see that Warhole is also an artist.
An artist of supreme evil. He has decided to turn evil into an art-form. His geopolitical
strategy in the first book will be replaced by an artistic strategy.
You often name your characters after real people. Nike’s last name is Hatzfeld, a
journalist with the French daily Libération who was seriously wounded in Sarajevo
in 1992. In Froid Equateur, you allude to the Albanian-born choreographer Angelin
Preljocaj.
To me, news is the raw material for any projection into the future. I soak up
news, and my story, which is set in the future, is packed with events from the present.
And if my readers don’t follow current political events, they are sometimes likely
to get lost.
Anjelin is a rather special case. Froid Equateur came out in 1992. Two years later,
I designed the sets and costumes for his Romeo and Juliet. It was an exceptional
and exciting encounter on two counts. Wide-eyed, I discovered the world of dance,
which until then had been pretty much a closed book to me. At the same time I came
to know a gifted artist who has since become a friend.
Doesn’t the fact that both of you are from the Balkans explain Romeo and Juliet’s
success?
Of course it does. We have a shared Balkan sensibility. I was immediately won
over by the way Anjelin wanted to stage Romeo and Juliet—his radical approach, the
social setting of a drama that takes on political and even ethnic overtones. It was
a deeply fulfilling experience which gave me an opportunity to serve not only the
world’s most beautiful love story but also an artist who uses dancers’ bodies to
externalize his ideas. For an illustrator, it’s fascinating to see how bodies express
themselves.
The heroine in your book The Woman Trap is called Jill Bioskop. Her last name means
“cinema” in Serb. Froid Equateur begins and ends with scenes of a movie being made.
Are you a film buff?
Movies have stimulated my imagination ever since I was a child. When I was a
teenager, I was fascinated by an art form which I felt was both close to and parallel
to what I dreamed of doing. Cinema held an extraordinary attraction, but at the same
time it seemed inaccessible. So I started drawing, which for me was a way of making
movies freely, alone at home.
Later, you directed two fiction films, Bunker Palace Hotel and Tykho Moon. Does film-making
involve more constraints than creating comic strips?
The two activities are worlds apart. Cinema is nothing but constraints. When you
create a comic book, you don’t have to think about production costs, shooting locations,
equipment and actors. Everything depends on the author, who is extraordinarily free.
But inherent in that freedom is the danger of going off the rails. Illustrators have
to harness their freedom all the time, keep it under control.
But the film industry is changing. New tools such as small digital cameras are enabling
younger directors to make movies with low budgets and, above all, enjoy greater freedom
than their predecessors. I think we’re heading towards a bipolarization in cinema.
On the one hand spectacular blockbusters, on the other a small-scale, almost underground
cinema that is bound to be very interesting.
How does the world of your comic strips relate to that of your films?
It’s the same world, the same preoccupations, the same atmosphere. I’ve been
criticized for making “comic strip” films. That’s completely ridiculous. What on
earth is a “comic strip” film? This false perception may explain why my films haven’t
really been successful in France. In Japan, on the other hand, they met with exceptional
acclaim, just like my books.
The comic strip had a chequered career before it achieved recognition as the ninth
art. Are comic strip artists well thought of in the world of the arts?
Personally, I am in a very fortunate position. I get a lot of media attention,
too much sometimes. I have to be careful. But in some quarters I still feel there
is a certain contempt for graphic art in general. In some literary, publishing and
even cinema circles, people still think words are on a higher plane than pictures.
All the same, in 1992 the editors of the French literary magazine Lire chose Froid
Equateur as their “book of the year”.
The choice was very badly received both in the literary world and the comic strip
world. The press didn’t talk about it. It was pretty funny.
It’s odd, but the art world denigrates illustration and comic strips. A year ago,
the French magazine Beaux-Arts published some stories about the comic strip festival
held in the southwestern city of Angoulême. The lead article kicked off by
warning readers that just because the editors were publishing a special section about
comic strips it didn’t necessarily mean they considered them to be art.
Not long before, Beaux-Arts had published a five-page piece about me. And now all
of a sudden it was as if they regretted it. They didn’t want to turn off their old
subscribers. But at the same time, they wanted to attract younger readers. This is
a pretty dishonest approach. But I’m hopeful. I think the people who think this way
are, fortunately, doomed either to disappear or to change.
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