The film is part of your trajectory of research and creation surrounding dance and image in movement, developed throughout the years, and it is in and of itself a space for contamination of these two languages. Could you tell us about how this project was born and how it dialogues with your path?
The film was born from a dialogue with choreographer Olivia Grandville. A choreographer and a filmmaker sharing their own artistic questions about the other’s practice. A two-way observation considering cinema as influence (extension) of the choreographic gesture and dance an a vessel (actor) of filmic writing. Making this film alongside young choreographic artists in training gave me the chance to purse metaphysical questions at work in previous movies.
The title alludes to a living cinematographic form, in process, still looking for its form, like the dancers who are also still in training, in a still uncompleted state, and thanks to this, still open to the unexpected and to surprises. I would like to know how you conceived a such a particular tension, characterizing the dialogue between these two languages.
I am always searching for a space of ambiguity with film-devices (UFE, NE TRAVAILLE PAS, RICORDA TI…) modifying the relation to artistic obivouses. In a way Olivia Grandville too with her choreographic creations. There is always, in our sight, the hope to reach virgin and primitive sensations, that we cannot put away in a box or even name. A permanent reconstruction of habits and customs, while we list some sort of official catalog of cinematic writing. The gestures of the students in a search for themselves perfectly match this random and paradoxical logic of research, and the film is also an invitation to a gesture of experience, sending speeches full of principle packing, in a world where everything is ordered, commercialized, definite. In definite, there is finite.
The movements of the dance we see on screen resonate in the movements of the camera and the editing cuts. I would like to know how you worked on composing the film between these different gestures, an approach in which the playful and ironic dimension is also present.
I filmed the moving bodies a lot, through a very intimate relationship with the performers. The idea was to unite these sensitive gestures of the camera with dancing—a pseudo theory of filmic writing—and the anxiety towards the future, combined with the luminous energy of young performers in movement. It is not really irony: Olivia and I work with the absurd and even stupidity as a political vessel of a serious artistic approach, where cinema allows an almost total form, adopting a large spectrum of contradictory feelings in a single artistic object.
Interview by Margot Mecca
