Agenda

EN

“I don’t want to steal images. I am not a thief. My camera is not a surveillance camera, it is more like... not surveillance, but bienveillance.”

Nicolas Philibert

“The outcome is a poetic meditation on the passage of time and the progress of a child’s education, framed by the changing seasons and filled with everyday laughter and dramas, from the theft of an eraser to a 4-year-old’s first encounter with a photocopier to the (temporary) loss of a tiny girl in a tall field of wheat during a spring picnic. ‘At its heart’, Mr Philibert observed, ‘the film speaks about how difficult it is to grow up.’”

Leslie Camhi1

Richard Falcon: A lot of documentaries today are shot on DV and/or shown on television. How important was it for you how the film would look on a big screen? For instance, there’s a very cinematic movement between the close-ups of the children’s faces and the shot of the countryside.

Nicolas Philibert: My culture is cinema. I detest television. Television is obscene in its transparency – it’s a place where people lay bare their lives for very little return. Cinema isn’t transparent – it uses elements like the grain, the depth of the shot, the play of light and shadow. Cinema is the art of ellipsis: the language is metaphorical and every film has its secrets and mysteries.

Mr Lopez describes teaching as a process that demands great patience and takes time but is very rewarding. Is this how you feel about documentary filmmaking?

The roles of the teacher and the documentary filmmaker both involve the transmission of knowledge and require patience and the ability to keep an appropriate distance from your subject. Documentary filmmaking demands an aesthetic and moral distance. So the shots of nature in the film are very important because they create a contrast between this small class and the rest of the world. We open with the snow, the whistling wind and the cows being herded; we thus recognize the school as a refuge from the violence of the world outside. The first shots you see of the school itself are the tortoises creeping across the floor: it’s a way of saying that the viewer needs to be patient as the film is going to take its time and will illuminate its subjects only gradually.

Richard Falcon in conversation with Nicolas Philibert2

• 1Leslie Camhi, “A Schoolroom Where Life Is the Curriculum,” The New York Times, September 14, 2003.
• 2Richard Falcon, “Back to Basis,” Sight & Sound, July 2003.

EN

“After Grand Illusion and The Human Beast, Renoir was tired of psychology in movies. Undoubtedly he felt the need to show instead of to analyze, to move instead of to touch. As he explained in an interview, the ‘rules of the game are those which must be observed in society if one wishes to avoid being crushed.’ The problem is that of sincerity in love: ‘Dishonesty is a garment which weighs heavily … Earnest people are so boring … I would like to disappear, my friend, to see nothing more … Then I would no longer have to try to figure out what is good and what is bad; because you see in this world there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons … I am suffering, and I can’t stand that.’ These comments suggest the tone of the film and show how important the moral element is. 

After the hunt Christine de La Chesnaye follows through a small spyglass the activities of a little squirrel perched on the branch of a tree. Then comes a tribute to the optics of the glasses, which one would like to think was meant as well as a definition of the camera and a homage to the cameraman: ‘Its lens is so powerful and it is so well made that, from a short distance, you see all the the animal’s private life, without his knowing it.’

Personally, I cannot think of another film maker who has put more of himself - and the best of himself - into a film than Jean Renoir has into The Rules of the Game."

François Truffaut1

“A lover is better. It is a far more spirited enterprise, and from the point of view of the husband, the taking of a lover by the wife is a means of extending and strengthening one’s social ties. 

The world is made up of clans which elbows and fight their way toward material succes, and it is in the interest of the members of these clans to be united by strong bonds. One must only remember to keep up appearances and to observe the rules of the game.

The rules of the game infuriate Aline, and she insists that if she ever loved anyone but her husband, she would not hesitate to give herself to him without thinking about it. At this point a visitor is announced, and Aline leaves her friends.”

Early scenario for The Rules of the Game (extract), scene III2

“The darkness falling over Europe is reflected in the savage pessimism of La Règle du jeu. With hindsight, the complacency and hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie represented in the film can be taken as an indictment of its responsibility for the outbreak of war. But a more productive reading of the film is one that sees it as a summing up of the events and emotions of the years from 1935 on. Our knowledge, and the film’s internal evidence that it was made in the aftermath of Munich are sufficient proof that La Règle du jeu represents a social reality that has been historically produced, but the film pessimistically allows that this social reality is no longer easily (peaceably?) transformed. The expectations that had been raised with the elections and reforms of 1936 were shattered. And in so far as the implementation of these expectations depended upon a politics of compromise and an economics of concession rather than radical change, perhaps the entrenchment of capital and the lassitude of decision-makers were inevitable. This I have no doubt Renoir realised, perhaps in what one must call an intuitive way, but he realised it nevertheless. What else can one say of a film that depicts a class, a society even, drawn in upon itself, and led by a master who declares that he does not want fences on his estate and he does not want rabbits either? That is not a tolerant, well-meaning attitude; it is an indecisive and irresponsible one. Such indecision is dangerous, even fatal. Renoir hit the truth when he gave out in an interview in January 1939, that La Règle du jeu was to be ‘a precise description of the bourgeoisie of our age.’ He later declared: ‘I knew the evil that was gnawing at my contemporaries’; and later he said: ‘It is a war film, and yet there is no reference to the war.’”

Christopher Faulkner3

“The château’s interiors are adorned by large paintings, statuettes, mirrors, and ornately crafted bed-posts that also feature in the la Chesnayes’ home. Deleuze’s description of La Colinière as a setting that embodies the past is worth analysing in relation to the la Chesnayes’ attempt to efface the intrusion of the ongoing present and reassert their dominance, and to the problematic conceptions of national identity explored by the film. The theatricality that holds the past in tension with the ongoing present is expressed through two key aspects of the manor’s physical layout, each of which caters to Christine and Robert’s efforts to cement their status among the haute bourgeoisie. The first is the château’s expansive hunting grounds, which complement its embodied history of past hunts. The second is the proscenium arch, which provides a centrepiece of the celebrations and a podium from which to mock the contemporary social issues impinging on the la Chesnayes’ (im)mobility in Paris.”

Barry Nevin4

• 1François Truffaut, “Filmography,” in André Bazin (ed.), Jean Renoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), trans. W.W. Halsey II and William H. Simon.
• 2André Bazin (ed.), Jean Renoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), trans. W.W. Halsey II and William H. Simon.
• 3Christopher Faulkner, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 108-9.
• 4Barry Nevin, Cracking Gilles Deleuze’s Crystal (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 56-7.

EN

“Muratova contrived to make the first non-Soviet – not to be confused with anti- Soviet – films in the history of our cinema...They began the ‘long farewell’ of Soviet cinema.”

Andrei Plakhov

“The seductive, critical game of extreme points, of dialectics, of binary oppositions does not get us terribly far into Muratova. Commentators try in vain to divide her films into opposing groups, like: the plotless and the plotted; or the colour works and the black-and-white ones. As if this categorising gesture could somehow impose order on these films in their wild variety, from one to the next and within each one!”

Adrian Martin1

“Many of Muratova’s admirers, including this one, still consider The Long Farewell her best film. Critics are unanimous in praising it. With its boldly unconventional montage and relation of soundtrack to image, this is a much more radical film, cinematically, than Brief Encounters. During the sixteen years that The Long Farewell was withheld from release it was regularly shown to students at VGIK, in Moscow, where it influenced a whole new generation of Soviet film-makers. As late as 1998 an informal poll of VGIK students, by a large margin, rated it Muratova’s most successful film. […] Muratova recalls the objections to the film: ‘This is petty-bourgeois, this is shameful, this discredits... Nothing more! You mustn’t film a cemetery, you mustn’t film about death, it’s impossible to have any scenes in a hospital, you can’t use this word or that word.’ But she was able, in retrospect, to appreciate the humour in the situation. The Party organizer of the temporary Party cell in our filming group turned out to be the make-up woman. She was called in and asked, ‘How could you have taken part in such a decadent film? How did you allow this to happen?’ She defended herself: ‘I didn’t know what they were filming, I was just doing the make- up, I didn’t have any idea what sort of ideological diversion they had cooked up.’”

Jane Taubman2

• 1Adrian Martin, “How Strange the Change (from Major to Minor),” Filmcritic: Adrian Martin, 1” september 2008.
• 2Jane Taubman, KINOfiles Filmmakers’ Companion 4. Kira Muratova, (London: I.B.Tauris, 2005).

EN

“Cinema is made (above all) with the hands, with the skin, with the entire body, by fatigue, by breath, by the pulsations of the blood, the rhythm of the heart, by the muscles. Body and sensation, that is the machine, its absolute power, its obsession. That is its becoming. Invented bodies, comical, grotesque, obscene, the improbable bodies of the stars and the monsters, and light, its palpitation, and the beating of shots, and in us, fear, joy, hope, sadness, the obscure deployment of human passions.”

Philippe Grandrieux1

“There’s nothing as essential and primal that Philippe Grandrieux has done so far with his cinema than this fifth feature: White Epilepsy (2012) is stripped of all the artifices and narrative pulses of his previous works, and focuses instead in the plausible eroticism of his method, creating a unique and rarefied atmosphere and placing his gaze on the dialogue and the alienation of the body. The downshifting of the movement, the manifestation of darkness and overbearing lightness, the use of crude nature sound are only technical manifestations of a deeper understanding of the senses; the closed diaphragm of the camera lens responds to a manifest necessity of expression.

This time, the primal erotics of Grandrieux’ art have demanded from the filmmaker that all the resources he possesses are used in a minimal, subdued way. Hence what we see is only a dance of bodies which evolves into a hint of ritual cannibalism and gory resemblance, but the implications of those images are immense. This might be Grandrieux best work so far, since all of his previous work has driven him to this: The plasticity of his films, the sensorial experience that leads to the metaphysical connotations of his physical representations, everything is here stripped to the bone. White Epilepsy is, first and foremost, an erotic experience, one of discomfort and rejection of the flesh, a plastic ritual that could easily symbolize something, but that speaks better only in the sensorial plateau of its representation.

In a moment, we see something that resembles a cannibalistic ritual, then we’re confronted to an overexposed image of a woman with blood in her mouth, an action somewhat reminiscent of Denis’ Trouble Every Day, which brings to mind the cannibalization of the other over the excesses and deviations of love. Do the two bodies consume themselves into this empty carcasse that we’re shown at the end of the film? Are these four bodies completely different and dissociated from one another? We’re left to ask ourselves beyond logic answers what was the implication of this last manifestation of Grandrieux behind the camera. Or maybe its significance is irrelevant, since all we’re left with is desolation and spleen. White Epilepsy is a film that depletes the senses, a work of art and a culmination of a process that has given us one of the most solid frameworks of work in this eternal process of reinvention of cinema.”

José Sarmiento Hinojosa2

“Where do images come from? This disturbing and essential question is posed by Philippe Grandrieux, and he already imposed it on himself the start, via Sombre (1999) up to the portrait recently devoted to Masao Adachi (FID 2011). From where, then? Maybe from the depths behind our eyes, ungraspable visions, night in suspension, promise of the end of an eclipse, between dream and nightmare. This is the start (and in truth the programme) of White Epilepsy. In a darkness barely broken by light, a mass advances: a nude back, in a long shot entirely centred on the shoulders. The story (is it a story?) that follows this announcement has the necessity of the elementary: the encounter between this first (feminine) figure with a second masculine one. A familiar scenario. However, a slow-motion ballet between these two bodies takes place. Do we really know what became of Adam and Eve once they were cast out of Paradise? Maybe this is a representation of that. The bodies entwine, rub together, twist together, strip each other and wrestle like moving sculptures framed as a deliberately vertical image. In this choreography, Grandrieux chooses to present gestures from a chthonian, archaic world, full of mute intensities, which ultimately aspires to immobility. The first part of a trilogy to be completed, it is about the frontiers of cinema to be crossed and pushed back into the secluded space of secrets.”

Nicolas Féodoroff3

• 1Philippe Grandrieux, “Sur l’horizon insensé du cinéma”, Cahiers du cinéma hors série: Le siècle du cinema (November 2000). Translated by Maria Palacios Cruz.
• 2José Sarmiento Hinojosa, “Panorama: White Epilepsy by Philippe Grandrieux,” Desistfilm, 28 January 2013.
• 3Nicolas Féodoroff, Film Page White Epilepsy FIDMarseille 2012.

EN

“Godard takes his moto for this film – essay on freedom and responsibility from Montaigne: ‘Lend yourself to others; give yourself to yourself.’ The life of the prostitute is, of course, the most radical metaphor for the act of lending oneself to others. But if we ask, how has Godard shown us Nana keeping herself for herself, the answer is: he has not shown it. He has, rather, expounded on it. We don’t know Nana’s motives except at a distance, by inference. The film eschews all psychology; there is no probing of states of feeling, of inner anguish.”

Susan Sontag1

“Vivre sa vie was a profound experience for many of us. I was amazed by scene after – the record store, where the camera moves with Anna Karina’s character Nana according to the demands and the rhythm of her work; the encounter with the philosopher Brice Parain in the café; the ‘documentary’ sequence where the details of Nana’s trade as a prostitute are laid out before us with clinical detail on the soundtrack and visual poetry on the screen. But it was the full effect of the film was so illuminating. Nana was seen from so many different perspectives and studied so carefully and closely that it was like seeing a great portrait painted by a master right before our eyes. For some, her sudden, brutal death was unsatisfactory. For me, it felt right, because that was the way it happened out on the streets.”

Martin Scorsese2

• 1Susan Sontag, “On Godard’s Vivre sa vie“, Moviegoer, no. 2, Summer/Autumn 1964, p.9.
• 2Martin Scorsese, “Godard is Perhaps Dead”, Cahiers du Cinéma, 13 October 2022.

EN

Notebook: Did you have that sort of trouble, going around the countryside talking to people about crimes that involved people who were still alive?

Luc Moullet: Yes, of course. There is a kind of “omertà” – an idiom of Naples – a kind of code of silence of the Mafia. And it exists, or at least a similar thing, particularly in the Southern Alps. So at first it was difficult to find people who could speak. Usually I could find one; though in one case a witness didn’t want to talk so I replaced him in the film with myself.

In the middle of the movie you say that there seems to be almost a “culture” of madness and crime in the area. I got the sense that a lot of the people you talked to enjoyed telling these horrible stories – that they seemed more like stories than local events people were personally involved in. It was almost like folklore they were relating to us.

Daniel Kasman and David Phelps in conversation with Luc Moullet1

“As Jean-Claude Biette said, naturalism is the identification of elemental life with humankind. Land of Madness’s in depth unification by the most primitive madness, that of cretinism, does not make the film naturalist, for cretinism here is on the order of esotericism. In the middle of the film, Moullet says: ‘President Chirac had a psychoid daughter, but President Sarkozy didn’t, so he reduced the money allotted to psychiatry.’ The audience laughs, it’s easy. Except that 20 minutes later, this dumb and mean laughter is upset by an even more troublesome laughter due to the revelation of Moullet’s failed suicide attempt from a bridge. Esotericism: the easiest hides the most difficult while accentuating madhouse bareness on the off-beat. Thus the viewer gradually understands – but never at the moment – that everything here resonates in the hidden setting of the self-portrait, even bile and death.”

Serge Bozon2

• 1Daniel Kasman and David Phelps, “A Rock is a Hard Place: An Interview with Luc Moullet”, MUBI Notebook, July 2009.
• 2Serge Bozon, “Exclusive Cahiers du Cinema Reviews in English: Serge Bozon on ‘Land of Madness’,” Indie Wire, February 2015.

EN

“La vie nouvelle explores all the ways in which we fail to understand the world: sleep, dream, fantasy, trance, delirium, the plunging of the main character (Seymour, played by Zach Knighton) into the incomprehensible logic of the Mafia, affective vertigo, the general confusion of bodies and perceptions. In order to grasp this ordinary, repressed dimension of human experience, it is clear that we must turn to completely different logics than those of the usual discursive economies, invent other textures, forge other descriptive paths, employ instruments other than language and its normative links.

Such an exploration, however, should not be opposed either to reason or logic – that would be unreasonable and irresponsible, to neglect, forget and even foreclose what a century of Freudian analysis has taught us about the psyche, to continue to tell our little stories of action/ reaction as if oblivious to the panic and the mysteries which we live. Like the films of Epstein and Garrel (but also Tod Browning and Jean Vigo), Grandrieux’s tell no story. On the basis of a narrative schema they invent a mode of elaboration – of perlaboration, even – susceptible of acceding to the Id, that grand reservoir of drives which, in the thermally-photographed underground scene near the end of La Vie nouvelle, suddenly finds an infernal figuration worthy of El Greco or Dante.

To confront the unknowable, precisely what we don’t want to know: because cinema is based upon the linking and unlinking of images, it can risk this. Nothing is nobler than to shatter a film upon such an ambition, such belief, such confidence: the cinema can manifest everything, it can be vertiginous like a coma, pitiless like a Hobbes treatise, limpid like the spectrograph of a corpse.”

Nicole Brenez1

• 1Nicole Brenez, “The Body’s Night An Interview with Philippe Grandrieux,” Rouge, 1, 2003. English translation by Adrian Martin. A Dutch translation was published on Sabzian.

EN

“Motion is the opening of the motionless, it is presence insofar as it is truly present, that is to say coming forward, introducing itself, offered, available, a site for waiting and thinking, presence itself becoming a passage toward or inside presence. Thus, in one of the small sequences of Taste of Cherry, the man who is waiting to acquaint himself with death sits on a hill at dusk, and from there he overlooks an urban landscape studded with tall buildings in progress and high cranes, and one of those begins to swivel, a sole slow element moving, with the twilight as background. This brings to mind some questions on the means to obtain this image: did anyone communicate with the crane by telephone or was it a matter of waiting for a propitious moment? Yet these distanced thoughts do not leave the film: they are part of the look that the filmmaker rouses and drives with the arm of the crane. They set this gaze in motion toward the film itself and inside of it. One could say that they turn the looking into a filming gaze and it is as if Kiarostami ceaselessly fitted the spectator to the film, not in order to teach a technique, but to open his or her eyes onto the motion that looking is.”

Jean-Luc Nancy1

• 1Jean-Luc Nancy, Abbas Kiarostami: L’Évidence du film / The Evidence of Film (Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 2001), 30.

EN

“Michael Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew Etc. makes me crazy, makes the top of my head go flying off. I have a need of its particular regenerative insanity at least once a month.”

Amy Taubin1

“All manner of cinematic sound is under consideration, including voice-over and an off-screen voice giving direction. The apparent source of the sound is pictured—a speaking figure—but this is no guarantee that the voice will be in sync; the film intends to counter such common assumptions. The language of this film is primarily English, though French, Spanish, and German are also spoken, and the spoken English can be broken down into its various dialects. Intense communication is leavened by miscommunication, whether from garbled speech, pedantry, weak signals, dubbing gaps, reversals, voice-over, or secret code.

An incorrigible punster and talented writer, Snow has a fascination with, and enjoyment of, verbal play that long predates his preparations for Rameau’s Nephew. It goes back to his childhood, when his art production was the adventure cartoon. When he began to write this film, he scribbled down folksy expressions, advertising slogans, clichés, and snatches of conversation, which he translated into text and then reprocessed into scripts that are curious evidence of the oral/aural divide. He also created anagrams of the participants’ names, as well as his own, which becomes Wilma Schoen. [...] 

The work is sometimes described as polyphonic in its musical sense, for at this stage in his cinematic work Snow was averse to any storytelling structure. His desire, frequently expressed, was to make image-sound compositions. Rameau’s Nephew is generally analyzed as a ‘talking film,’ but its images—Snow’s settings and framings—are unforgettable, for their colour, if nothing else. Holding this film together, leading the viewer from scene to scene, are the extraordinary breadth of its variations on the theme and its sometimes mute comedy.”

Martha Langford2

• 1Amy Taubin, The Soho Weekly News, 1977
• 2Martha Langford, “Rameau’s Nephew By Diderot,” Michael Snow. Life and work by Martha Langford.

EN

Ana Cristina Mendes: Especially regarding your transnational documentaries on the refugee ‘crisis,’ the issue of aesthetics – more precisely, the aestheticization of reality – seems to be a recurrent one in interviews. In your earlier documentaries, we sensed that, for you, a way to fight fascism and authoritarianism was through rejecting the appropriation of aesthetics by unceasingly bear- ing witness to reality and engaging in unrelenting documentation. You were not deliberate regarding matters of aesthetic judgment – the recording was the artistic and political intervention in the public sphere. While your earlier films were rough and raw, your more recent films have stunning, beautiful images, in the sense of being more aesthetically pleasing. Could you expand on how – and if – ‘beautifying’ remains a loaded word for you today? Do you find yourself now pursuing any kind of visual effect in these transnational projects?

Ai Weiwei: Roughness or un-roughness is, for me, the same when making a film. In the early films, we had to do them for the next day to put them online. We wanted people to see the images, so we only needed a sketch. Now we have time to show the films in theatres or film festivals. We must respect people’s watching habits. Westerners eat at a table, using plates and knives and forks. A more expensive restaurant only uses larger plates. This does not mean that the food is better, but people appreciate that. So, it depends if you want to eat your grandma’s food, which is many times better, or you want to go to a luxurious restaurant. It is a matter of experiencing a situation differently. A so-called good image means nothing to me. Every part of nature, every leaf, every piece of grass, is much more beautiful than visual effects.

Ana Cristina Mendes in conversation with Ai Weiwei1

• 1Ana Cristina Mendes, “The world as a readymade: a conversation with Ai Weiwei,” Transnational Screens, 17 April 2022.

EN

“À nous la liberté is a landmark in the history of film comedy because it’s funny, yet it is too satirical for farce, too farcical for satire. And it is a landmark in the history of sound film. Back in 1931 when almost all film directors in every country were cautiously using the new technology as a recording medium, Clair was exploring it as a creative medium. This was in addition to his use of Auric’s music. The composition of film music and the sensitivity of its application to the narrative are different arts, not always in harmony (!). À nous la liberté set a new standard for them in the formative years of sound film. [...]

The exact nature of Clair’s humour is problematic. He doesn’t treat his characters as puppets, and part of his charm is that he bestows idiosyncrasy on characters who are little more than stereotypes. But he doesn’t convey that affection for his characters which we relish in the films of another comic writer-director, Preston Sturges. At the risk of oxymoron, Clair’s comedy has great exuberance but not a lot of joy. That doesn’t make them less funny, just colder – what John Russell Taylor called ‘demented clockwork.’”

John Flaus1

• 1John Flaus, “À nous la liberté,” Senses of Cinema, November 2000.

EN

“The film’s promotional material emphasizes a clash of cultures that supposedly constitutes the major obstacle to a mutually beneficial relationship between the Chinese firm and its American employees. In a short feature that accompanies the film, Barack and Michelle Obama, whose Higher Ground Productions picked American Factory as its first project, posit ‘storytelling’ as an alchemical solvent through which contradictions can be transcended. The raw data of the film, on the other hand, communicates something much different. The major clash in American Factory is not between American and Chinese, but between workers and managers. ‘Culture’ is a poor stand-in for power, leverage, and exploitation, the real subjects of this film, which know no national boundary.”

Andy Battle1

• 1Andy Battle, “American Factory,” The Brooklyn Rail.

EN

“The disarming centerpiece of a trilogy of films by Abbas Kiarostami, this work heads towards the same place that Roberto Rossellini set out for in the 1950s. It takes a far-sighted approach to one of the major cinematic themes of the last 15 years – the blurring of all boundaries between ‘found’ and ‘staged’ images. A film director from Tehran travels with his young son into the mountains of northern Iran, where a major earthquake has recently claimed the lives of over 50,000 people. As he passes through villages and camps he searches for the main actors from his last film Where Is The Friend’s Home? – which was indeed the first film in Kiarostami’s trilogy. The filmmaker is played by an actor, and the switch between his perspective and that of his son subtly heightens the level of reflection. However, much of what the pair find is ‘real’, not least the strength and optimism of the survivors – in many places their main concern is to install TV aerials in time to watch the Football World Cup which is due to start soon.”

Documenta 12

“And Life Goes On speaks of a perseverance of being, in being, that makes us think inevitably of Spinoza. But it is not necessary to stop at Spinoza. Rather, one must add this: this perseverance, this continuation – which is not simply a continuity – is nothing else but being itself. Being is not something; it is that something goes on. It is that it continues, neither above nor below the moments, events, singularities and individuals that are discontinuous, but in a manner that is stranger yet: in discontinuity itself, and without fusing it into a continuum. It continues to discontinue, it discontinues continuously. Like the images of the film.

(On this point, it is of little importance that the original of the title in Persian says something slightly different: rather ‘life and nothing more,’ ‘only life,’ and therefore ‘I do not want (to show) anything else but life, simply life.’ Because this means: here, the film does nothing but continue, it shows a continuation, that of a story [before this film, there was another film, and they are looking for one of the young actors, they do not know if he survived], that of a journey [the search], that of the life of the people after the earthquake, that of life in the film, and as film. It registers the continuation of several intertwined continuations, linked together or interlocking with one another.)”

Jean-Luc Nancy1

• 1Jean-Luc Nancy, Abbas Kiarostami: L’Évidence du film / The Evidence of Film (Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 2001), 60.

EN

“Some years ago, Van der Keuken told me something that struck me. “Having to carry the camera obliges me to be in shape. I have to find a good physical rhythm. The camera is heavy, at least for me. It weighs 11,5 kilos, with a battery of 4,5 kilos. In total 16 kilos. It’s a weight that counts and that implies that the movements of the machine can’t take place candidly, every movement counts, weighs.” The great cameramen know better than anyone else how to play tricks on others. In order not to get outrun by their unscrupulous love of filming, they often invent a guard rail, a play rule, each in their own way. I love it that for Van der Keuken, morality goes through physical fatigue. It’s a matter of discrepancy between the time of speech and the time of a look. Talking takes time, looking doesn’t. There’s something diabolical in this discrepancy. Imagine our documentor of the North behind his camera which is a bit too heavy, asking questions and filming the responses and at the same time, behind the viewfinder, imagine this organ that is excited by every little thing, distracted by everything, exuding frames like one breathes, that goes too fast, capturing more things than aspired; involuntary comedy, emptiness, easy fetishism, scandalous beauty: the immoral eye that, literally, doesn’t give a damn.”

Serge Daney1

• 1Serge Daney, “The Way South. Johan van der Keuken,” Diagonal Thoughts, 3 April 2012. Originally published as ‘Vers le sud. Johan Van der Keuken’, Libération (2 March 1982). Translated by Stoffel Debuysere.

EN

“Lisa Spilliaert uses the pretext of an investigation into her potentially shared roots with Léon Spilliaert, the great master of Belgian Symbolism, in order to combine a brief, but lively portrait of the painter with an approach which is sensitive to his work, with a joyful meditation on notions of heritage and lineage, all set to the rhythm of her own rap music. Since its inception, rap has been a way of revindicating identity and here, Lisa Spilliaert seizes her opportunity to do so literally and joyfully. The film opens with a bust shot of her, surrounded by works of art, paintings and sculptures, her determined gaze fixed on the camera as she raps furiously. Her words hit the air with the same vehement self-affirmation as the paintings of the man who shares her initials, and the same surname, while the camera lingers on the motifs beloved of the painter. The director integrates traditional biographical interviews, documentary material – archives and documents generated as part of her genealogical research – employing a sensual, detailed approach using close-ups of works by Léon Spilliaert and the oblong forms of sculptures by her own sister. In counterpoint to the visual marriage of these two pictorial and sculptural materials, a descendant of the painter comments on the voice-over on his intimate relationship with his great-grandfather’s work. The genealogists announce their verdict: if the criterion used is a family tree Lisa and Léon are not related. However, the heart of the film affirms that there is a common trunk which unites the painter and the filmmaker like two branches reaching out in the same direction – towards art.”

Claire Lasolle1

• 1Claire Lasolle on the website of FID Marseille.

EN

“I am very attached to the idea of geography. Most often, for me, places come before people. Starting with Doc’s Kingdom, what was an important formal idea was the idea of the trajet, a very beautiful word that doesn’t exist in English. It was this idea of filming bodies moving through spaces that interested me. I never liked travellings, very concretely: I couldn’t stand the idea of placing the rails. It seemed to me that it was an incredible pain to lay fifty meters of rails in order to accompany a character. The question was also: how to move in a space in a reasonable length of time, which does not become unbearable?”

Robert Kramer

“[Robert Kramer] has created a haunting picture, one that prompts ruminations about formulas for living and what they come to mean to idealists who are ultimately defeated by their own humanity.”

The New York Times

« Doc’s Kingdom, scandaleusement inédit »

Serge Daney1

• 1Serge Daney, « La rumeur du monde, » Cahiers du cinéma 426 (1989), 24-25.

EN

“From the opening sequence of a young women looking in a mirror, her distorted features partially covered by a veil, you are utterly compelled to watch. This compulsion has nothing to do with ridicule or perversity; nor is it a reflection of our contemporary tendency to fetishize the grotesque. The critic Hal Foster has written that for many of us, “truth resides in the traumatic or abject subject, in the diseased or damaged body. Thus body is the evidentiary basis of important witnessing to truth, of necessary witnessing against power.” For Farrokhzad, witnessing the damaged bodies in the Tabriz leper colony became evidence not just of a resistance to power (one section of the documentary does underline the connection between the disease and poverty) but of making a new aesthetic as well.

The sequence of the woman in the mirror sets the film’s tone; slowly and deliberately it inches toward a close up. When it stops, you realize that the young women is looking out at us, as much as she is looking in at the mirror.”

Robert Enright1

“When we see this film the least we learn is how – just like Christ – to look for white teeth in the carcass of a dog. With this film, Forough teaches us that the person who closes his eyes on darkness has committed two mistakes: First, she perpetuates that darkness, because unless we look at darkness we won’t do something to make it bright; and second, by closing our eyes on darkness, we deny ourselves the sight of the amazing light that palpitates in the heart of that darkness and which is called life.”

Mohsen Makhmalbaf

• 1Robert Enright, “Black House, Brilliant Film: Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black” (Border Crossings, 2009).