Tintin and Me

WIND HOWLS

TRANSLATION: Yes, I was very confused.

For several reasons.

There I was, a 23-year-old student, in the office of Georges Remi,

the great cartoonist better known as Herge.

I literally walked in off the street and we hardly knew each other.

And there we sat for four long days,

speaking of things that changed my understanding of what he did.

We talked about the incredible adventures of Tintin.

Twenty three books created over a period of 47 years,

translated into 58 languages and published in millions of copies.

And why?

Well, like many others, I've always felt that the books

were much more than the intent to entertain children.

And I found that I was right.

In Tintin, Herge distilled 50 years of politics, wars and daily life,

cars, trains and planes,

businessmen, dictators, scientists.

You can trace the history of the 20th century through Tintin's adventures.

Holy shit!

You'll find strange things too.

Paranormal experiences, dreams,

frightening things,

things that have to do with the inner life.

And what I discovered in talking with him was that this innocent series

increasingly became a personal expression,

a way to express his own problems

and, often, his inner crises.

My name is Numa Sadoul. I'm an actor, director and writer.

But in October 1971

I was a student and went to Brussels, the rainy Mecca of the comic book,

to interview cartoonists for a small magazine.

But the undisputed high point of the trip

was meeting Herge.

He was extremely enigmatic.

When I saw him on television or in the papers,

he always seemed very elegant and charming, but also reserved,...

as though he made a point of concealing his own personality.

I was very curious. And then I felt a sudden impulse.

I asked him if he was willing to do a long, in-depth interview

which could become a book.

To my great surprise, he said, "Yes." Just like that.

I don't know why.

So we immediately began a week of conversations.

I was totally taken by surprise that he confided in me that way.

I was interviewing someone

and suddenly we were into psychoanalysis.

Suddenly, I was psychoanalysing the man I was supposed to interview.

It was deeply disturbing.

He was giving me a role I could not handle

because I was too young.

But I threw myself into it

with the naivety and blindness young people have

and took on the role of psychiatrist.

Now the Reverend Wallez enters the picture.

I knew absolutely nothing about Reverend Wallez.

I had no idea who he was.

The first time I heard about him was when Herge mentioned him.

I had no idea of the influence this man had on his thoughts,

his life, his marriage and his philosophy.

Wallez was extremely politically aware.

As the editor of the Vingtieme Siecle, an ultra-Catholic newspaper,

he admired Hitler and Italian fascism.

He was proud of the picture of Mussolini in his office.

This was everywhere in the 1930s.

There was a bizarre alliance between the Church and fascism in Belgium.

Reverend Wallez saw it as a modern point of view.

He also had modern thoughts for his paper.

He wanted to make a youth section

that could amuse the kids and teach them his political ideas.

Then he discovered Herge,

who had a junior position in the advertising department.

He asked him to create a young hero, a Catholic reporter,

who would fight for good all over the world.

That's how Tintin was born in 1929.

This Church-orientated newspaper which had modest but steady sales

suddenly found on Thursday

it had to print I don't know how many more copies in order to satisfy demand.

All because of Tintin.

It was a brilliant idea. It was terribly successful.

Then I realised that Wallez organised his private life, quite literally.

He even assigned his secretary as his wife.

Her name was Germaine Kieckens and was also his faithful disciple.

At this stage, the early Tintins are no more than

the drawing-up of the propaganda that had been given

by the boss to Herge

and the same thing happens with Tintin In The Congo,

where Belgian rule is the only way these big, silly Africans

can possibly live their lives.

He didn't know what he was talking about, he was just peddling a line,

which everyone thought was the right line at the time.

The Blue Lotus is, if not his only masterpiece,

his first masterpiece.

With large Shanghai street scene, where you have the Chinese banners,

every one saying something which has real meaning in Mandarin.

Everything would have been supervised by Tchang,

drawn by him, the letters,

and the slogans on the wall with their political message,

"Down with imperialism", appropriately, there.

It was writing about a very difficult period

which was Japanese sabre-rattling and agitation in China

and this is a very strong political satire of that.

It's current affairs, it's contemporary journalism,

it's not just a children's book.

It's terribly significant, because every adventure after that

was influenced by the extra trouble he'd taken over it.

Dear Tchang,

I remember the day so well when you visited my wife and me.

I can still see and hear you explain that all things have a soul.

You spoke of the life in the tree behind our house.

BUZZER

He's speaking about Captain Haddock.

HADDOCK: Tramps! Terrorists! Troglodytes!

Savages!

Visigoths! Vandals!

There are only two drawings he really likes.

Only two.

Both in the same style.

Tintin, is that you?

Where are you?

Here!

Behind the waterfall!

Behind the waterfall? How?

Get down here. I'll show you.

Pass through the waterfall.

It's only a thin veil of water.

Oh, my good lad. Well, if it's necessary.

Thundering typhoons!

This is incredible!

Tintin travelled all over the world.

There are few continents Tintin didn't go to.

So Tintin travelled everywhere, Herge travelled nowhere.

He was an armchair traveller

and he knew about these countries because of the research.

He did all the research, he read like mad.

He kept everything which might possibly be of interest

from newspapers, magazines, catalogues, from railway timetables.

The most amazing variety of materials.

He would cut out, stick on a bit of cardboard and he would file.

He was like a sponge,

he was able and willing and wanting to absorb as much information as he could.

One of his favourite places was the Cinquantenaire museum in Brussels.

The obvious book in this respect is the one after the Blue Lotus

which is the Broken Ear, which takes its cue from a museum piece.

When he goes abroad, all the locations you see are real locations

taken from the cuttings.

It's almost like his escapism is taken to the absolute extreme

and yet he himself can never go anywhere.

For decades, he never leaves his desk.

It's almost like there's a deal between him and the abbe,

him and the paper, whereby within

this safe, suburban, Catholic, right-wing world,

there's this tiny bubble in which his alter-ego, Tintin,

can do anything, go anywhere, right any wrong.

There we have him talking of the limits of his childhood

and how limited he felt, in that he couldn't break out of it,

but this was a form of expression, of him expressing himself,

the values he had,

that you should always do good, you should support the underdog,

you should resist any unfairness,

and this is exactly what Tintin is doing.

Tintin is fighting for justice.

If you look at King Ottokar's Sceptre,

it is a fairly detailed bit of work

attacking a country called Borduria,

which is such a thinly disguised nazi Germany

that they even have German planes in it, and things like that.

So, you know, he's in quite a dangerous situation,

attacking Germany at the end of the Thirties.

He had this great freedom in the Thirties

and great success, the two went together.

But this very cosy setup - hard work, yes, but very secure -

of course, was shattered the moment the Germans occupied Brussels.

What of Herge? What of Tintin?

Was it the end of Tintin? What was going to happen to Herge?

The Vingtieme Siecle, the paper which had seen his success,

was immediately closed down by the nazis

because it was a Church paper

and was therefore considered to be threatening.

He then had a job offer fairly quickly from Le Soir,

which was Belgium's leading newspaper,

and he was asked, "Why don't you continue Tintin in Le Soir?"

"We'll create a supplement for children, call it Le Soir Jeunesse,

"and Tintin can continue where he left off."

Herge thought, "Marvellous!" It seemed too good to refuse.

The next thing, the nazis realise the importance of Le Soir

and take over control of it.

So Le Soir continues but under the control of the nazis.

So we have the most unfortunate fact that Tintin is appearing

underneath reports of the Wehrmacht victories on the Eastern Front.

NEWSREEL COMMENTARY:

HERGE:

I understood that the subject was taboo.

That was the big question about Herge,

his views during the war.

During the war, Herge stayed in contact with Reverend Wallez

and he encouraged him to work for Le Soir.

You had to support the Germans in their fight against Soviet communism.

But Herge was warned by several people.

Brussels, October 16th 1940.

As a father of a large family, let me express my sorrow

at seeing Tintin and Snowy printed in the new Le Soir.

From the margins of your amusing drawings,

children are being influenced by the new German heathenism.

I ask you to reconsider. If it is possible, back out.

I apologise for not signing this, but times are uncertain.

Go back to Satan!

To your master!

Suddenly, all the Tintin stories change radically,

they're all about buried treasure, they're all about meteorites.

Politics vanishes.

It's completely neutral,

there is no statement for or against the regime he's under.

I think Tintin gets even better in the war

because he goes for this escapist stuff.

He has to go for richer storylines

and he has to come up with regular characters

and this is where you get Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus,

the Thompson Twins, old characters who here come into their own.

This whole cast of characters comes in

and Herge himself,

who had previously written himself into the stories as Tintin,

who was Herge's fantasy, the young man travelling the world,

righting wrongs - now, Captain Haddock is Herge.

Haddock is the recalcitrant, frankly pissed-off middle-aged man

who just wishes the world would go away and leave him be.

From that point on,

there's a very different texture to the Tintin books.

Tintin and Herge are escaping from the realities of daily life

in an occupied country.

It is the fantastic, it's the world of dreams

and it's quite unlike anything we've come across in Herge before.

SMASH

They're the one I remember.

Here's one where he is looking through a telescope

and he sees a really huge spider and gets really afraid.

His dog finds out it's just a little spider who was on the lens.

But at the end, when they look again,

the spider is not there any more and they think it is the end of the world

and then a lot of strange things happen, which I don't quite remember.

Everybody is breaking into an unnatural sweat,

the rats are coming out of the sewers,

everybody has come out into the street to see what's going on,

there's a prophet of doom calling on everyone to repent,

the day of judgment is at hand,

which is clearly war inspired - where are things going?

It's a real sense that the world's gone mad.

Everything is going to be smashed up,

there's going to be no future.

Look here. What do you see?

It looks like a huge ball of fire.

Yes, a huge ball of fire.

An enormous ball of fire.

It's headed straight towards us as an incredible speed.

Is it coming towards us?

It's not going to hit us, is it?

The ball will collide with the earth.

Good heavens! That means...

Yes, the end of the world.

When the British tanks rolled into Brussels in September 1944,

and the Germans were kicked out,

that very night, everybody who had worked for a paper

which had published under the Germans,

in other words, was considered to have been a collaborator,

they were all rounded up, including Herge.

He must have been totally disoriented.

Everything crumbled.

Even Reverend Wallez, who had said Herge was on the right side,

was arrested as a nazi sympathiser and spent several years in jail.

He suffered tremendously.

There was an edict that no journalist could work at all

so you weren't allowed to work, in fact, for a two-year period.

I mean, he was in the wilderness.

Which sounded great.

He'd been saved, he'd have his own magazine

and he took the opportunity, he took the chance,

but in practice, he was no longer his own boss,

no longer the boss of his own destiny.

They owner of Tintin magazine, Raymond Leblanc,

wanted Herge to produce two pages a week

of very, very dense, carefully researched colour material.

Every single drawing of a place had to be from a photograph.

That is a really tall order.

He was expected to churn material out.

He really was under the thumb.

It led to several breakdowns where he found he just couldn't continue

and escaped - he disappeared, nobody knew where he was.

He went off to Switzerland

and several weeks later sent a postcard from Switzerland

saying that's where he was.

Even his wife didn't quite know what was going on.

Dear Georges, you clearly have talent.

You educate the children whilst amusing them.

You teach them right and wrong -

that's not so bad, you should be happy.

Dear Germaine, I'm tired of always writing the same story.

I'm tired of churning stories out.

I have suffered much since the war.

My boy scout spirit has suffered blows.

I see the world differently.

Dear Georges, if you won't come home for my sake,

then come home for Tintin's.

The solution in the end was that he started his own studio

and to have his own studio gave him a measure of artistic independence.

In setting up the studios in the Avenue Louise I think he felt

he was getting away from commercial pressures

and could continue his work in peace,

where you get talented assistants, people you know and trust,

to do some of the legwork, some of the basic work and so on,

the time-consuming things.

A period of great detail,

where could indulge in his passion for realism.

His fundamental love and belief in realism

being the secret to a good adventure,

it has to be a realistic adventure.

In The Calculus Affair, we have the scenes in Geneva absolutely exact.

The road to Nyon is absolutely as one would find it now.

Every detail is there.

It is hyper-realism.

There's a kind of obsession with getting every last thing right.

That kind of attention to detail is laudable artistically,

it makes the books brilliant, but you also have to wonder,

there's almost a sort of mania to perfection.

I could sense the conflict in him,

between the pressure he was under and the desire to be free.

TRANSLATION: All sorts of pressure, which went right back to the start.

The pressure was so clear at that moment

that I wanted to ask something very specific.

I am alone in my house.

I suddenly see some children in the garden playing in the snow.

I go out to throw some snowballs at the children

but they're gone.

Then I see a black cliff in the snow.

I go closer and see the entrance to a tunnel, which I enter.

At first it's easy but, the further I go, the steeper it gets.

Finally, I see a light above me,

from the dazzling, white sky

and a snow-covered landscape.

I try to crawl up to get out

but some iron bars keep me imprisoned.

Tchang!

Tchang!

This page shows the very end of Coke En Stock, Red Sea Sharks.

We see his ideas for the next...where Tintin's going next,

where HE'S going next, where Herge himself is.

We see here, among the various ideas, is one suggesting Tibet.

This was where Herge's mind was going.

The great snow-capped Himalayas,

all the snow.

This was where he was going to send Tintin.

Why do they end up in Tibet?

Why have they travelled that way?

There has to be a reason.

A letter from his old friend Tchang, who writes that he's coming.

But he doesn't arrive, he has disappeared.

The wreckage of the aeroplane covered in snow,

snow storms, it's all there, it's all...

the turbulent thoughts which are going in Herge's mind are expressed.

And there's a point where Tintin is hanging on a rope

with Captain Haddock at the other end

and he's about to commit suicide.

His marriage was breaking up at that point,

so there's another strong case for an analogy there,

that it's better for one of us to fall down a cliff and the other one to live

than both of us to go to our doom together.

BUZZER

TV COMMENTARY: Two stars meet. Herge, Tintin's creator,

and the American painter, Andy Warhol,

also called the Pope of Pop Art.

-Really, I admire your work.

-You like comic strips?

-Oh, yeah, I do.

That's pop art also, isn't it?

'Herge was very keen to be a modern artist,

'he always wanted to be an artist.

'He called himself Herge and not Georges Remi

'because he was saving the name Georges Remi for the days when he would have the time.'

And finally, after all those decades of doing Tintin,

he sits down, he does modern abstract paintings.

He took them down to the curator of the Art Museum in Brussels

for a verdict

and the man was already a fan of Tintin.

The result was not good.

The man said, "Don't give up the day job.

"I'm afraid these do not match up to Tintin."

It's not like Lucky Luke, where a new comic book comes out each year,

With Tintin, it took three, four, five, then six years.

It took longer and longer.

It was obvious that he would rather be doing something else.

Maybe that's why he was pleased I'd come,

so he didn't have to work.

And then it was over.

We'd been together for four days

and now he had to work.

The studio was full of work demanding his attention.

He said that he had to throw me out.

We couldn't spend an hour more.

It was strange how he clung onto the transcript of our conversation.

It took two or three years before the script was ready.

Herge continued to alter it.

He looked at every single sentence,

he made alterations and additions, erasions and deletions.

He sent me the changes.

I inserted them and sent them back to him. He wasn't satisfied.

In the space of three years, he rewrote the text four times.

When he read the text, he saw that he had said too much.

So there's a major difference between the published text

and the conversations which were recorded on tape.

He was far from content.

He had not found peace. Far from it.

Herge spent his entire life...

looking for wisdom.

Brussels, June 10th 1973.

I am writing because I am looking for a Chinese artist

who is called Tchang Tchong-Jen.

I've been trying to find Mr Tchang Tchong-Jen for years.

Time had taken its toll on them.

In addition, Herge was very ill and rather weak at that point.

Given his weakened condition,

you have to say that their meeting was heart-breaking.

Just heart-breaking.

It was a major media event

which was covered on TV, in the papers and in the press.

He was happy to see Tchang again.

But it was also a marketing event.

Maybe Herge needed an idealised friend...

who could supply an unambiguously positive meaning...

to a life that had been shattered by questions and doubts.

It was very odd to sit and look at this very modest man.

He was shy because he was celebrated.

He was very ill. It was terrible.

It was a kind of osteomyelofibrosis

where the production of red blood cells stopped.

The three years of illness almost became three years of meditation.

He had a certain radiance,

something very bright at that time.

I remember that some friends visited him here

and when a friend opened the door, she said,

"Georges, you look like an angel!"

And there really was something about him that had changed.

He radiated a light.

Everyone spoke of the clarity he had recovered.

His secretary, his wife, his most recent employees.

Everyone that was around him during his last days.

Was he serene? I'm not so sure.

But he created Tintin.

All of his doubt, his insecurity and his anxiety,

he used all of those elements.

He projected them into his books and made them rich.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media - 2006

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