What was the idea behind your film Prehistories, following Western, Family and Communism in 2018?
After having been to Iran—a place I had never visited before making Western, Family and Communism—I began Prehistories in the summer of 2019 in southern Ardèche, where I grew up. My school was on the banks of the Ardèche River. I learned to kayak before I could swim. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve travelled through the Ardèche Gorges, on foot or by boat. My grandmother lives just three kilometres from the Chauvet Cave. I was sixteen and practising caving when the cavern was discovered. I completed the film in the spring of 2025.
The desire to make the film was born during a Christmas dinner at the secondary school where I teach, in 2018, when I was given Jean Rouaud’s book Préhistoires. I read it, but what stayed with me was the title—especially the final “s”, which is significant. The project began with that title. I saw in it the present moment as the origin of what is to come—a prehistoric present. Then came the idea to film the summer tourists beneath the Pont d’Arc, with the Chauvet Cave hidden nearby in the cliffs.
What drew you to the story of the Chauvet Cave and to this region, Ardèche?
Painters signalling from the depths of the cave 36,000 years ago, and tourists enjoying the river –it all happens at the same time, in the same place. It’s both a chance to play with time scales, to question our History, the myths of origin through the image of the Earth’s womb, and to revisit my childhood in Ardèche: kayaking routes, caving, and the possibility of setting prehistory and the origin of the world against the supposed end of History –the idea promoted by Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet bloc, or Thatcher’s “There is no alternative”. All part of a narrative in which capitalism had supposedly rid itself of its only true alternative: the idea of communism.
I wanted to create loops in time, and find a passage through the contemporary dead end—like the river, which once flowed around the mountain before cutting straight through the rock, creating the Pont d’Arc.
The plurality of the title Prehistories suggests multiple directions. What are they?
Let’s imagine the course of History as a curve and bring in a little mathematics. I call prehistory a tangent to the curve of History—it’s a derivative at a given moment, t. I also call it the present of the present. At every instant, there is a prehistory that makes History. Hence the plural. Each canoe trace is a prehistory.
How did you work with Jean-Marie Chauvet, the speleologist behind this historic discovery, and how did you depict him on screen?
I met Jean-Marie Chauvet for the first time last December when I filmed him at the entrance to the Baume de Ronze—a magical place, like something out of a jungle—near the Aven d’Orgnac, a few kilometres from the Chauvet Cave. It’s a vast underground chasm where prehistoric men and women once lived. Jean-Marie suggested we meet there. By then, the film was already well underway—all that was missing was him.
The bulk of the work involving him took place in the editing: The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Pink Floyd, pure documentary within fiction, shifts in register, a light shone on a fragment of life that marked our History—a winter light in the middle of summer.
Bonnie’s thoughts—as the scientist who led the Chauvet Cave team—her dreams and her sense of time, take the film somewhere else. What was your idea at the writing stage?
We need fiction in order to explore, speculate, and think. There’s the known world—the one I filmed at the Pont d’Arc and inside the Chauvet Cave—and the world we long for without knowing. To the documentary horizon, I added another dimension: fiction. Fiction plays with time. It speeds up movement, opens the world of possibilities.
The child Bonnie is played by my daughter; the very elderly Bonnie by my grandmother. That, too, forms a loop.
How do those luminous shots of the Ardèche Gorges, of tourists and canoes, connect with the testimonies?
That horizon is the backdrop for these characters. It’s part of our world. Mass tourism. What’s mad about humanity is that even in its worst creations –capitalism– there is beauty. A mass of brightly coloured plastic on the water: it’s strange, but there’s something beautiful in it. It’s like Lana Del Rey—her music, both popular and commercial, moves me deeply.
And I love watching these tourists watching other tourists. Everyone, half-naked, watching one another. Sitting on a rock, in a canoe, in the water. At the foot of the Pont d’Arc, there’s that famous rapid—everyone capsizes—the Charlemagne rapid, a true spectacle.
What role do you assign to the Dutch tourist character played by Frederik Hamel?
He marks the point at which the static shot breaks, enabling movement within the setting—and also a shift from documentary to a science-fiction narrative on an unknown planet, a wild dream dreamt by a Dutch tourist—though not by him alone: we return to this story later through the character of Bonnie.
In the midst of that mass of beach tourists, I wanted something quite violent—something to match the rupture—but gradual. I asked Frederik Hamel to play the sequence as if he were in a Hollywood action film, and I directed him live, without sound recording.
How were you able to access those images of the cave paintings, and how did you conceive their aesthetic treatment?
I prefer to leave some doubt as to the origin of the images. What I can say, however, is that the existence of the replica—both as a result and as a concept—is dizzying. First, because if you play along, the emotional impact is just as powerful in the replica. And second, because it creates a sort of parallel archive for the future.
There are two different treatments of these images of the paintings. One is modelled on a trance-like experience—like flashes of imagery that can stay imprinted for life. The other idea came from the ceremonial aspect of places of worship, with the sacred character of the music played in them.
The film’s editing—with its interplay of heterogeneity and rupture– is complex. How did you approach it?
A bit like embroidery. I had the motif in mind. With heterogeneous elements, forms, genres, and rhythms. Fabric, thread, and precious stones. Six summers and one winter of filming—all the rest was editing.
How did you select and treat the different pieces of music in the soundtrack?
There was never a shortage of music—it was more a matter of having to take some away. It’s not film music in the conventional sense, the kind that’s composed specifically for the film—they’re pop songs, hits. They’re flat, they’re familiar, they can last too long, they can even weaken the image. So the whole task lies in avoiding those pitfalls.
Music is the aquatic side of the film. The river flows constantly—occasionally disrupted by a stone or rocks, which make the current pick up speed. That’s what we call a rapid. It can cause you to capsize. The technique is to go faster than the current.
Interview by Olivier Pierre
