2018 On the point of seeing / Workshops On the point of seeing / Workshops
1 / Public construction site
Thursday, 23 at 9:00 pm, Salle des fêtes
Cinema and memory are connected in a very special relationship. Recording the Real reassures us in the idea that we master time (and ideas) by fixing instants that seem to us to merit a form of posterity. We often consider cinema in the light of its procedure: first you make a film, then you project it. This latter stage produces a phenomenon of cross-cutting which resonates like something obvious but which we can approach from the following point of view: the audience’s experience, its preservation, and the hypothesis of its obsolescence, for the Real is the spectator. For the thirtieth edition of the États généraux du film documentaire, the team had the desire to organise a collective session to evoke the role of spectators and generate a narrative of the Lussas experience, for and by the inhabitants of the festival themselves. The idea is not to ward off the relentless experience of time. It is rather to activate, via testimony expressed in a form of participative assembly, the living relationship we maintain with films, the festival, and perhaps, in a secretly more fundamental way, to reformulate the question of the status of (documentary?) cinema, indeed its raison d’être from the point of view of those who watch it. This special evening will invite the public of the États généraux to share their experience. Our task will be to guide the speech, the way of looking, the perception, with a method which transforms and sometimes interprets testimonies, a poetic sliding, giving form to memories, a procedure which might reveal the secret kinship between the making and the vision of a film. The word “projection” defines the physical display of a film on a screen; it also defines the relation of spectators who expose themselves, project themselves into a cinematic situation, be it fictional or documentary. The “Public construction site” evening will be the opportunity to expose the audience’s memories, from the phobia of a camper to a polysemantic debate. It will be a way of projecting a part of oneself in order to sketch the outline of a general state of things at Lussas.
César Vayssié
Conception: César Vayssié,
in collaboration with Monique Peyrière,
with the participation of Anna Perrin
and the assistance of Bérénice Barbillat.
2 / The gestures of The Slightest Gesture
Friday, 24 at 10:00 am, Salle des fêtes
I was thirty.
After secondary school in Marseille and the experience of new education, my IDHEC[1] diploma as a director of photography in my pocket and eighteen months in the Army Film Service at the end of the Algerian War behind me, I had just accepted to develop my work as a cinematographer within the framework of the State’s popular education programme. May 68 was still resonating strongly. I wanted to prolong the new education approaches to pedagogy started at the end of the war in “filmmaking training sessions”[2] and inscribe them within the daily life of the popular suburban areas of Marseille, my city!
The gestures of film had just been shaken up by the appearance of silent, lightweight 16mm cameras, capable of shooting synch sound with autonomous and portable tape recorders. I had prepared this kind of equipment with Ghislain Clocquet[3] for the shoot of Louis Malle’s film Vive le Tour !. Chris Marker had just made Le Joli Mai. Pour la suite du monde by Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault had crossed the Atlantic, Jean Rouch was becoming visible and Jacques Rozier made me dream with his Adieu Philippine.
It was just then that I received a call, in the framework of my mission as a Cinema CTP,[4] by the head of a social centre. He was looking for: “a film technician willing to carry out for free the editing of elements of a film shot five years earlier and since abandoned. It was a piece of work shot with a psychotic young man by a little group living in the Cévennes around an educator, Fernand Deligny. Three years of shooting, ten hours of images and five hours of sound, recorded on amateur 16mm film equipment.” All of this material was contained inside a blue metal container. I decided to open the container.
The experience I started to live at that point ended two years later in 1971 with the projection of the feature-length film Le Moindre Geste at the International Critics’ Week of the Cannes Festival. In the meantime, concrete support had been provided by Chris Marker and his cooperative Slon, renamed Iskra. The ricochets of all these gestures have never stopped resounding and rebounding, even to today and the discussion proposed this year at Lussas by the Etats généraux du film documentaire.
Fernand Deligny’s work unceasingly challenges us, as does his voice at the beginning of the film: “This is Deligny. This sort of man-like figure was traced by a 25-year-old boy, a moron say the experts. Such is he in Le Moindre Geste, such is he in the daily life we’ve been leading together for the last ten years or more, such is he for us, an endless source of crazy laughter whatever happens and, in this film as in our very routine daily life, emitter of a speech that I certify not to be mine. Can we say that it is his? But why must a speech belong to someone, even if someone makes it?” So speak out, allow someone to speak out... make a film.
I have often been led to recount the adventures lived through all along this edit. I discovered all those that had preceded during the shoot and its preparation. A few photos exist, very few notes, but a multitude of stories, sometimes contradictory. I think I’ve followed all these tracks. They have nourished my own stories, my own experience. I think in particular of the very late, but decisive, meeting with the person who created the film’s images, Jo Manenti. She lived this shoot daily before moving away from the group to become a psychoanalyst. Together, we redid all these gestures and shared her attachment to the character, Yves, going as far as travelling with him down the coast of Girolata in Corsica. There are also the accomplices of the soundtrack with whom we constructed the balance between the music made by noises from the Cévennes and by Yves’ voice. Gestures of listening to headphones, gestures of turning the level knob, another edit: the mix.
I dreamt of inserting the practice of cinematic creation within people’s daily lives. To do that, I was trying to invent pedagogical situations where artistic creation would remain central without becoming the sole aim. I undertook this film by chance. I was really and truly in the midst of one of those situations I dreamt about. It is essentially an experience. I like telling people about it, sharing it. Why not today with the public at Lussas?
Jean-Pierre Daniel
1. Institut des hautes études cinématographiques.
2. A venue, an artist, a group of trainees and committed tutors.
3. Ghislain Clocquet was a reputed cinematographer who taught at IDHEC and founded the INSAS school in Brussels.
4. CTP: Technical and Educational Counsellor employed by the French Ministry of Youth and Sports.
3 / “The eye listens”
Friday, 24 at 2:30 pm, Salle des fêtes
Emergency: the word associated with that of state in the sense of a general mechanism adapted to the necessity of establishing a temporal mode of social life, one that imposes the necessity of not delaying before acting. Emergency is the word that banishes all slowness and therefore all reflection which would run the risk of making us guilty or responsible for the worst because action was taken too late, or not at all. But in the word state, I think that we must understand more precisely today the statist nature of the emergency promoted by this mechanism of power that uses the twin pressures of fear and guilt. The state of emergency is merely a sign of the need for emergency by the state as a system of government. Act without delay, they tell us. We should understand in truth “without further listening”, that is without taking the time to hear the voices of those who, from the depths of the silence to which they are confined, have been able to find the expressive forms of their resistance, their revolt, but also of their freedom. But listening takes time, and it is this time that is being confiscated since, as Benjamin Franklin noted, “time is money”. Losing time is losing money. It is urgent for us to re-appropriate time to be able to give it and to make it the root of all hospitality. It is among all the terrains of social suffering and physical suffering, facing all the dislocations of violence, that we must construct the time to listen and allow the expression of the words of all those who are without voice. “With no voice in the decision”, we say trivially. So we are going to take the time to open a chapter by bringing forth from invisibility and silence the voices of those who will formulate before us, the spectators and listeners, in the various forms of an appeal, the traits of our truth. What truth are we talking about? That which should compose the horizon of our gestures of welcome, that without which no idea of humanity could compose a world, a common world. The welcome of the autistic child, welcome of the mute poet, welcome of the striking and stricken fanatic, welcome of the migrant, of the exile. The welcome of words, languages, poems and songs, but also the welcome of images where pain is mixed with joy. We will take the time to give time, to give time to these voices at first inaudible that suddenly find a theatre for their display, at once painful, tempestuous and joyful. The voices of those voiceless from whom the pseudo-democratic imperialisms demand their votes in order to take power but to whom they refuse any voice in order to keep it: these voices rebel and display their authority. The opening of the day with Deligny’s work is immediately a political introduction, for if Deligny was able to “listen to” the silence of the autistic, it was starting from a radical refusal of the deafening buzz produced by the medical order and of all standardizing power. Radicalism is not where it is pointed out to be condemned, but on the contrary in the irreducible trust that we place in resistance and creative energies. We will travel in the company of Babouillec, an immense voiceless poetess, we will go to meet the so-called radicalized when they emerge from their silence, we will cross paths with Altman when he massively uses the soundtrack of what Debord called The Society of Spectacle to show and make audible its crushing and deathly power. The silence of colonized bodies and the unheard-of power of their voices haunted Pasolini in Africa but also the Gianikian, who carried out a prodigious amount of work on the silent archives of the twenties, making visible the looks and gestures of voiceless people and entrusting Giovanna Marini with the task of allowing us to hear the song that connects us forever to their history. Appear also the voices of refugees and exiles to whom Miléna Kartowski-Aïach will offer a platform for their expression and a testimonial of their sharing (see performance below). Voices also of forgotten tribes who request from signs what their voices have given up trying to transmit.
Everywhere, the time spent listening to these cries or these multiple murmurs should become a shared experience of hospitality.
Opening the day with Deligny, who rejected the hospital to invent a true hospitality extended to all other, we will close with Jean-Daniel Pollet. His encounter in an Athens hospital with the former leper Raimondakis becomes, with the collaboration of Maurice Born, the opportunity to shoot one of the most beautiful films ever devoted to the inhospitality of the hospital and to the profound and radical humanity of those who have lost its visible and conventional characteristics. The voice of Raimondakis is a terrifying and magnificent warning cry, that of a prophet of our present catastrophe.
Marie José Mondzain
PERFORMANCE
Leros – a muffled cry to the world
A vocal, poetic and ethnographic crossing.
The Greek island of Leros, at the tip of the Dodecanese facing the Turkish coast, is also called the Island of the Damned.
The creatures who were forcibly sent there ran aground on its soil to perish anonymously. Psychiatric patients, communists, political opponents, and today refugees, have all been locked up in the fascist Italian palaces, since become prisons, hospitals, and today ruins where goats seek shelter.
But the invisible have sung facing the sea, they have chanted their resistance and wept to the moon the tragedy of existence. Their echoes populate the island and their voices reach us if we dare, finally, to listen to them.
It is this multiple cry crossing the ages that I set out to find.
May the voices of these damned sing to our ears and shatter the silence of history.
Miléna Kartowksi-Aïach
4 / Listening point, peripheries of silence
Saturday, 25 at 10:00 am and 2:30 pm, Salle des fêtes
Facing sound, facing silence, an impossible arrogance
It is not on the location of a sound recording that you can study sound. It is not only at this spot that the wealth of its existence or that its pulse overwhelm us. If we incessantly survey all the sounds that emerge, we fortunately only possess a mediocre conscience. Because if there are too many sounds, the ear filters, always following its desire through the existing material, incapable of hearing the “everything” that the microphone picks up.
In order to apprehend sound, a distance is necessary. You have to move away, return to silence so that, in a second moment, you can begin a rehearing.
In the field, you experiment, you are faced with the arrival of an always hypothetical audio event, choosing a distance of capture, in total ignorance of what is to come. The complete opposite of photography, which is based on the fixity of a permanent presence, at least that of a backdrop, or on the objectively confirmed presence of a moving object; but in sound, what can we say about our knowledge of what is to come? When? And where will it happen? Nobody knows. Always “beaten”, when you record sound, you always end up “beaten”, outflanked by the unpredictable and chaotic nature of forthcoming events – potentially or insignificantly. Suddenly you find yourself too near or too far, never at the ideal position for the predictable event you await. Sound has little respect for our propensity to forecast, for that ideal expected occurrence imagined on the memory of past experience; sound thumbs its nose at the ideal nature of what is expected.
Facing this “everything” picked up by the mike, a rehearing offers us the bitter experience of noting the disappearance of what living on the site allowed us freely to choose. Excess dominates what has been recorded: too much useless and unchosen information. A sonorous saturation of movements flattened back to the equal value given to all sounds. Difficult to find one’s breath.
How is it possible to relive that beautiful silence reigning over what we were listening to, the splendid isolation of that listening completely focused on one sole thing in spite of all hubbub? For the act of listening is constructed amid a sequence of turns, a succession, never two events perceived together. Attention can be cut, even profoundly engaged, it lives within the suspension points detached by the silences. How can we forget these silences, fixed within us by the returns to our memory, those introduced by each appearance.
Cut by occurrence like the cut of a splice puts side by side a before and an after, a cut framed by two moments of forgetfulness, what was taking place is no longer, exactly like what preceded this newly arrived take.
Silence is everywhere. It dominates and we no longer hear it, so much are we concentrated on building our continuity. If we don’t take care, “believing” as we do in the truth of tools, we accept, without seeing it any more and unknown to us, the saturation produced by the automatic reflexes of recording. How can we restore the subjective silences, those silences which are vital for hearing, particular to the one who will have to “construct their place” facing the images? Only silences can help breathing. The blanks which separate the words of a scripta continua[1] are those that allow one as much to recover one’s breath as to make the meaning of all suddenly detached words appear. Silence is the driving articulation point of the narrative’s dynamics. It is not the establishment of a rhythm but the condition of all comprehension.
Usually people oppose silence to sound and think of it as a series of holes, voids, absences, validating in this way a way of thinking about sound: there is sound or there isn’t. Yet, if we listen attentively to silences, we perceive the diversity of residual and tiny noises that inhabit them. Neither empty, nor full, each silence, like each noise, is a bubble, a coated covering that grows and disappears, and whose infinitesimal physical manifestations, indescribable almost-nothings, colour the material. A silence from which location, of which event, we should ask, and heard from what place?
Sound is a turbulent residue captured in a movement which is erased as it moves forward and it is at the very site of its dilution into air that noise becomes silence.
From our point of view, silence is an act of engagement in a relation to the other or to the world, which amounts to the same thing, a relation that can only be established intermittently: it is a signifying act that can mean: “I let you speak and listen to you.” There silence carries an obligation, you must answer, a word summons a response, you must produce a sound. Replying to silence by silence provokes anxiety: it is a silence that thickens with meaning, a silence too eloquent, too provocative.
In all cases, making silence rules over a focused attention. In the same way that in order to listen, you must keep silent to observe what is happening or to understand what has taken place.
To observe the soundscape by its silences, considering the empty spaces rather than those that are full, can give one the feeling of carrying out a reversal of the act of listening. We can nonetheless state that this is not true. Indeed if, in our permanent desire to acquire, we place value on what we conquer by ignoring what we abandon, on the contrary, our physiological reality in no way responds to that way of doing things. For, on the contrary, our economy is tuned towards the necessity of deflation: not to capture, not to hear, not to see, not to act. Our vital economy is careful for its own survival to limit expenditure. That is why we are satisfied to listen to what we desire, to what is useful, to what is strictly necessary and sufficient.
Daniel Deshays
1. Or scriptura continua, the continuous writing used by the Greeks and Romans.