This year’s L’immagine e la parola – curated by Giona A. Nazzaro and Daniela Persico – is titled “Noi e gli altri” (We and Others) and is clearly inspired by your work. In Nous (2021) you give a memorable statement of purpose: “to conserve the existence of ordinary lives which would have disappeared without a trace if I hadn’t filmed them.” At the same time, we live in an era marked by the hypervisibility of social media and hyperproduction of images. How do you relate your work to such a contemporary context in which there is too much to see?
Well, I’m a filmmaker who produces images amidst this regime of images that’s all around us. But for me, in fact, images are not all the same, and the images that remain are those images we make, the images we sense, the images we have as a point of reference, the images that allow us to “see” the world or transform the way we see the world. I'm not at all sure about social networks; I don't have Facebook or Instagram. I can’t say it was a conscious political choice, but I think it does allow me to keep a form of innocence about that and a certain awareness of the importance of an image.
So I make cinema out of this mad belief in the political importance of making people visible, making them appear. These are people who no one expects to see, who no one has seen, who no one knows, who no one is looking for, and to make them appear like that, and in fact to build a whole device, a whole staging, a whole statement, a whole commitment around the idea that making them appear in the image is something that has power. I think I’m doing so very much against the kind of image that inundates us and blurs our perception and our vision. I believe that the images from films that remain with me are powerful images that are there, that are addressed and that profoundly resist erasure, oblivion. When you’re drowning in images, you can’t see anything anymore. I think that cinema is the opposite of an image – it’s a multiplication of images that resist this way of no longer knowing how to look.
In anticipation of your visit, our SNSF research team and students have made video essays to study and appreciate your films. As video essayists, we are particularly interested in your decision to include fragments from other films in your work, both from film history and home movies. How did the reemployment of excerpts from films make its way into your work and what do you think it allows you to do in your films that would not be possible otherwise?
In Nous and Saint Omer (2022), the use of archives – the presence of archives and fragments of other works – have two very different statuses respectively in the two films. In Nous it was archives that I hadn’t myself been able to look at – which is to say, personal archives, the archives of the only traces left of my mother’s and my father’s lives. Very, very little trace of their existence. My first graduation film was dedicated to [my father], a 15-minute film, so I was already more aware of the need to mark this trace in the work. I’m obsessed by the question of the trace and the need to imprint it, such that people who haven’t previously been filmed or watched can no longer disappear. In Nous, the idea was to construct a narrative and a project from the few traces left of my mother’s existence, and to give her a mythic status that goes beyond my own personal archives. It was a way of proposing a more global reflection on our collective memory, a memory that overlooks tiny lives like these, lives that people don’t look at. And also on the deficit of memory of the people who are not looking. So it’s a project that’s both very political and very intimate at the same time, based on a wound I carry with me that comes from the pain of not having been able to preserve any meaningful trace of my parents’ existence – I have very few photos, very few videos. For me, this personal wound goes hand in hand with a political question regarding who has the right to a narrative, and who makes a trace and who archives it. These are very important questions in France at the moment.
And in Saint Omer it’s completely different. It is – consciously or unconsciously – referring to [Marguerite] Duras or [Pier Paolo] Pasolini, meaning to inscribe these bodies in a continuity, in a kind of cinematic heritage where the presence of these black bodies was very little present – or was absent completely. And to give them an almost mythological dimension, i.e., to refer to Pasolini, to the story of Medea, is also to detach oneself completely from the anecdotal and to allow these black bodies to say something about the universal. For me it’s a political stance to assert this.
As part of L’immagine e la parola you will give a masterclass and a workshop with young filmmakers on how to work with actors in creating protagonists. How does your background in Visual Sociology and your documentarian approach to filmmaking influence your directing style in fiction (including casting, direction of actors, subject matter)?
I realize that my cinematic practice is influenced not only by documentaries - in other words, by a kind of approach that explores reality - but also by my studies in the humanities and social sciences – visual sociology, yes, but also history. I can see this now, as I’m working on my next film, which is about colonial history. I’m really at the intersection of academic research, which comes from my heritage as a sociologist and historian, and which runs through my work as a documentary filmmaker, meaning that I draw heavily on reality, on photos, on archives – I work a lot with documentary archives. At the same time, I transform all this with the project of using fiction, of using the actors’ bodies to transform this research into something else. So it’s not just documentary, it’s really a kind of work that mixes these different points of reference. I can talk about it now, because I’m really in the thick of it. But I’ve been working in archives for a year, working with researchers who specialize in colonial history. I’m going to use documentary resources such as photos, archives, and so on, to write the screenplay for a fiction film. All this I transform into dramaturgy, into a fictional narrative.
It was the same for Saint Omer. It’s a film based on political questions that come from my reflections on French society, the colonial era, the place of minorities, violence and systemic racism – to use the big words that obviously come from a more academic vocabulary. These questions run through me, and it’s these questions that I have been working on almost in the manner of a researcher. It’s as if, in making the film, I’m giving them an outlet and a form that will, through cinema, make these same questions tangible. It really starts with this work. For me, cinema is a way of giving the questions that I’ve been working on for years a kind of intellectual and theoretical precision. I give them a cinematographic form through the bodies of the actors, whom I’m not going to ask – for Saint Omer, because it’s my only experience of fiction – to perform something. But I’m going to work with a kind of porousness, between their documentary presence – the person they are – and the way they interpret a character. I’ll always work between the two, and I think the choice of actors, in my opinion, is based on the intuition of the very, very deep connection between the person as they are and what I’m going to ask them to perform. And to build out, as a performer, from that connection.
