How did you find yourself in that precise position, just behind one of the trombonists of an orchestra performing Mozart’s Requiem in a Parisian church? What led you there—you, your smartphone, and presumably the tripod it was mounted on? Did you intend to film? And if so, what?
I had gone to hear Mozart’s Requiem at the Swedish Church in Paris, without any intention of filming. It so happened that I managed to sit in the second row, facing the right-hand side of the orchestra, where I had a close-up view of the trombonist. It was a spot that offered a perfectly composed frame of the musician and his instrument in a diagonal line. I could see it on my phone screen—the image called for a shot. I had no tripod, but the back of the front row seat, where no one came to sit, served as a support for the phone.
All of it was unplanned, an offer from circumstance—a moment of unexpected and perfect alignment.
The film consists of two shots: the first, very brief, captures the musicians before the concert begins. The second, which follows the title, is a continuous nine-minute shot that records and follows the performance of the final part of the score. Could you comment on this structure, this division?
The first shot opens the film by showing the opening of the score where, fleetingly, one reads the composer’s name: Mozart. The choir takes their seats, the musicians tune their instruments, the trombonist adjusts his… Taken from a recording made before the concert began, this first shot is not framed in the same way as the long shot that follows. In its brevity, it forms part of the orchestral prelude, before the “right” frame is found and the performance begins.
The music is first heard over a long black screen that follows the film’s title. The image only appears once the score develops a musical phrase involving the trombone. From that moment on, until the end of the Requiem, the music is both heard and seen, as the musician experiences it.
Against all expectations, this film is, like all your films, a comedy, carried by a sense of lightness, of joy. It plays out in the depth of field, in the faces and behaviour of the musicians, alternating between action and rest. Despite the simplicity of the film, which appears to do no more than record a musical performance, there is a dramaturgy – tied to the score yet emerging in its own right—centered on the trombonist’s “role”: initially very secondary, he gradually becomes a leading figure. Is this what held your attention in making the film?
After a brief pause—a kind of respite—the trombonist turns the final page of the score: it is the Requiem’s finale, which concludes the film in the intense fulfilment of its last movement. As the piece ends, and the applause bursts out, the musician brings his hand to his head—a gesture of completion, or perhaps of release.
At this moment, he emerges as the heroic figure of the film. The film interprets him as much as he interprets Mozart’s score. His musical precision matters less than what he performs: he plays his role, and the film plays with him as much as he plays the Requiem. It is perhaps this double play that lends the film its lightness.
A few years ago, you gave another film a Latin title, In memoriam, in homage to Chantal Akerman and in memory of the victims of the Paris attacks. Requiem: no longer remembrance of the dead, but rest for their souls, though to whom this rest should be granted is never specified. Is honouring memory, granting rest and eternal light (as the Latin text of the Requiem Mass says) something that cinema – the kind of cinema you practise – can do?
In artistic creation—and in filmmaking—it is restlessness that gives rise to the work. It aspires to eternal rest by fixing reality in place. In this, it satisfies a death drive. Through the duration of the shot, the trombonist’s presence grows stronger and becomes isolated, distancing the other performers, who recede into the background like extras. He alone catches the light.
It is probably this impression that made me see a film within this long take.
To say a word in Latin is to acknowledge that it is mostly not understood. To speak it is, in a sense, to speak in order to say nothing… and I like that. Yet it is heard, and it sustains the mystery of the unspeakable. It is chanted, sung—not in a foreign tongue, but in the common voice of the sacred, like Slavonic or liturgical Greek for the Orthodox.
Musical listening and the vision of the image both open a path to the beyond. The subject becomes lost there, like the trombonist within the film’s frame. His presence lacks motive; the shot draws him out of the orchestra and separates him from it. He is angelic, caught alone in the light by the precision of the frame.
Et lux perpetua luceat eis.
God is an artist (and undoubtedly a geometer).
Interview by Cyril Neyrat
