Yearning for the White Elephant
Paulo Rocha, 1965
Translated by Bingham Bryant
Paulo Rocha worked as an assistant to Jean Renoir on The Elusive Corporal (1962). Rocha wrote the following tribute in 1965, and it was originally published in the magazine O Tempo e o Modo. It appears here in a new translation by Bingham Bryant.
This text accompanies Two Evenings for Sumiko Haneda & Paulo Rocha, a dual program featuring Rocha’s The Island of Loves and Haneda’s The Poem of Hayachine Valley. March 13 - 14, 2026 at Japan Society & Light Industry.
Weight, 130 kilos; height, one meter ninety; a bloom appearing beneath the porcelain-white skin, small eyes hidden in the face’s soft dough, and a round, smooth cranium shaved short and mechanically rubbed with the right hand. A heavy, stumbling gait (a war wound), a hoarse voice, and an eternal farmer’s hat, only removed, with ceremony, during the actors’ performances.
One November of feverish work in Vienna (The Elusive Corporal), it was like this that I came to know the man who for many years I had wished could be my father. Like this, that at last I saw the actor, the failed musician of The Rules of the Game (“Je suis un raté.”) who during a 16mm screening long ago had given me the courage to choose a profession.
Yearning for Vienna. Imperial parks, Sissi, Breughel, Titian, Jean Renoir talking about cooking (praising Hitchcock’s), concentration camps recreated in the studio, rain, fog, old weapons and Nazi, Polish, Canadian, French uniforms, Françoise Dorléac* devotedly awaiting her “Corporal” – always sitting in the dark, the shadow of some set – Renoir sleeping tranquilly in the middle of the general bustle, waking like a rose when the lights were ready. Accepting with interest suggestions from everyone, not just the Canadians and French, Françoise Dorléac devotedly waiting. Leaving full freedom of decision to the technicians but (a passionate midwife) crying when an actor surpassed themselves. Renoir interrupting Brasseur to draw a nude on the décor (a concentration camp latrine).
During a fleeting November, in Vienna, a handful of strangers lived strangely happy, working in the circle of a fidgety, excitable man. The secret of the white elephant – happiness.
x
"Saudades do Elefanto Branco"
O Tempo e o Modo, nº 27, 1965.
* Françoise Dorléac does not appear in The Elusive Corporal, but was hanging around set because she was dating "Corporal" Jean-Pierre Cassel at the time.
