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Ombres de soie (Mary Stephen, 1978)

It has been a remarkable year for the Hong Kong–born, Paris-based filmmaker and editor Mary Stephen. Her acclaimed first feature, Ombres de soie (Shades of Silk, 1978), which she directed, acted in, and co-edited at 24 years old, has been restored and recently premiered at this year’s New York Film Festival in the Revivals section. A visually sumptuous and delicate tale of an unresolved relationship between two young Chinese women, the film is carried by elegant voiceover and entrancing cinematography that gracefully relate how memories and regrets linger.

Stephen’s early short films Labyrinthe (1973) and A Very Easy Death (1975) have also recently been restored, and she is currently traveling with her latest feature, Palimpsest: The Story of a Name—a deeply personal essay-documentary that investigates her Chinese family’s Western surname. Drawing from her father Henry’s meticulously maintained diaries and home-movie archive, and her mother Hilda’s writing career (she wrote poems under a pen name and doctored some of Henry’s journals), Stephen constructs a portrait of a family lineage riddled with coincidences and embellishments. The film elucidates how, as her parents ascended the social ladder in mid-century Hong Kong, a Western surname provided them—and her—advantages, which nevertheless came with compromises.

Stephen’s family immigrated to Canada when she was 15 years old. After finishing two years of film school at Concordia University in Montreal, she moved to Paris in 1976, whereafter she began a career in film editing. Stephen is most often associated with French New Wave filmmaker Éric Rohmer, as his chief editor and regular collaborator for over 20 years. In recent decades, she has edited numerous films by directors such as Ann Hui (Love After Love, 2020), Du Haibin (A Young Patriot, 2015), and Lixin Fan (Last Train Home, 2009), and she frequently mentors young filmmakers in her free time.

I interviewed Stephen during NYFF at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. We discussed her early editing career in Paris, the making of her first feature, and the inspirations behind Palimpsest.

What was your experience of working as an editor in French cinema?

I didn’t really set out to be an editor. I was studying in Paris for one year, and decided to drop out of the program to make films because it was very theoretical. That year, we were allowed to take other courses in the French universities, and I found one taught by Éric Rohmer. I wanted to stay in France, and I needed some money to do that. Rohmer asked me to be the editing assistant for The Aviator’s Wife (1981). The editor was Cécile Decugis, who edited Godard’s Breathless (1960). So I was very happy to do that. When I was training back in Canada, we had to do everything—editing, sound, image. I think if at the time Néstor Alemendros (who shot many of Rohmer’s films) had needed an assistant, maybe now I’d be on camera, who knows? It was that kind of stroke of destiny, but it ended up that I loved editing.

What was the atmosphere like when you were working with Rohmer and other filmmakers of the time?

It was very much a clan. There were just a few of us working with him, and we almost never got out of that circle. Whenever we were doing some work, we would help each other out, and would always pay each other. His whole working method was like a family. With the actors as well—a few key actors—we would have tea at his office every afternoon. It was never really just “work.”

What did you learn about the editing process from Cécile Decugis?

As an assistant, I was in the room with Éric and Cécile where they physically cut the film. I would see the process—at what point they decided to cut, how the collaboration went, how they negotiated with each other and respected each other. That’s the kind of process you can’t learn unless you’re working on-site. For The Aviator’s Wife, Rohmer shot on 16mm and we conformed it to 35mm. That took meticulous work. It served as a learning process as well, because you had to be very precise.

That’s something that I realize makes a difference in my work today. In digital cutting, you don’t have to be very precise, and I can’t emphasize enough about the one-frame difference—just one frame makes a big difference. I try to get my students today to learn that discipline of getting to the exact cut point.

You’ve described Ombres de soie, your first feature, as an homage to Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1975). Could you speak about the circumstances around the production of the film?

Before India Song, I was already very much in love with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), which was also written by Marguerite Duras. Even in Canada, when I was in film school, I had parts of the script pasted on my wall, because I really loved the language, the way she described things.

There’s a Chinese expression about how young girls, before even knowing sadness, would write very sad verses—it was trendy to do that. I was particularly attached to that poetic, melancholic writing before I even knew what it was about. That was the first driving force—I wanted to write something like that.

For the production, we didn’t have any money. We were living in the Cité Universitaire, the international students’ residences in Paris. Each nationality had a house in this complex. My partner and I were living in the Canadian house, which had a huge salon that became the place where the girls in the film dance the tango. The American house had a beautiful outdoor terrace with tables—that’s where the dance sequence at the beginning was shot. A major part of the film was set in the Southeast Asian students’ house.

It’s not out of some egotistical exhibitionism that I starred in most of my films. It was because we couldn’t find anybody else. At the time, we had to find two Asian women. We’re talking about 48, 49 years ago in Paris. There weren’t a lot of Asians. The cheapest person to hire was me [laughs]! And Sandy Brouwer, who was in our program—she’s half Thai, half Dutch.

I really admire the way this film is made with voiceovers, and how sound and image—and bodies and voices—are divided. It gives this sense of disembodiment that beautifully reflects the themes of displacement, longing, and misunderstanding. Can you speak about this formal separation?

Again, it was for economic reasons! That was quite directly influenced by Marguerite Duras’s films. One of the things Rohmer taught his students, and was still teaching them many years later, was the way Duras had made her movies for practically nothing. I loved the India Song soundtrack. I played it over and over again—this hypnotic quality of voices and the mix of languages. The voiceover enabled me to make this film. We didn’t have the money to make synchronized sound.

How did you make the music for Ombres de soie?

I wanted Billie Holiday’s “Blue Moon,” but we couldn’t afford the rights. This musician who ran a company providing royalty-free music said he would make the soundtrack for us. I said I would write the lyrics, and he knew a singer who could record it. We did it all in one go in a Montreal studio.

From when I was very young in Hong Kong, I used to write little poems and song lyrics all the time. I loved to do that. I did that later for my film The Memory of Water (2018) as well, where I used three languages to write a song. I tend to think of language as music, and like working with them as musical elements separately from speech.

I’ve read you began research for Palimpsest about 20 years ago. How did this film develop?

My Chinese friend, a Hong Kong writer, told me that Virginia Woolf’s maiden name was Stephen. That sparked a scenario in my head—I’d love to make a film where two branches of Stephens come together to make a reflection on what a name is about, whether it can change a destiny, what kind of connotation and expectation comes from it. I started researching Virginia Woolf’s story and thinking about how to connect it with my mother’s writings and my father’s story.

I knew that my father filmed a lot. I’d seen bits and pieces, but never all of the home-movie footage, because it wasn’t digitized. It was all stored at my sister’s place. Every time I went to Canada, she would ask me to take a few cans back because she didn’t know what to do with them. I had some digitized with money from a Canadian prize, and the rest at a place in Paris, and it turned out to be amazing—the colors were really beautiful. It was only then that I started to look at everything he had shot. Not only did they feel like period pieces, but he was making movie shots. He was editing himself, doing shot/reverse shots, some animated titling, stop-motion—all in those days.

Palimpsest seems like a significant accumulation of your long-standing interests in language, migration, personal histories, and the idea of place. 

Somehow, for some strange reason, it was appropriate to make this film at this stage. It’s even more interesting given that my other films have also reemerged at the same time, and I’m able to see them as a whole. I think it’s necessary to rewrite your own past. In today’s practices of therapy and healing, the path is not just about understanding or digging up your past, but learning how to rewrite it. You have to redirect the energy somehow, because some people get stuck there.

Yuka Murakami is a filmmaker and writer based in New York City. Her films have exhibited at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife, the Gene Siskel Film Center, the San Diego Art Institute, the Emily Harvey Foundation, and elsewhere. She has written for publications including Reverse Shot, the Millenium Film Journal, Screen Slate, and others.