The film is inspired by a mysterious case of group fainting that occurred in a North Carolina high school in 2002. How did you become aware of this event and what led you to make a film out of it?
I had never head of this kind of mass phenomenons until I read an article in Libération. It evoked the symptoms developed by a group of teenagers during a school cross-country event. I often feel struck by how a priori depoliticized, contingent and unreliable these types of narratives are. There is a sort of denial inherent to miscellaneous news items. I can’t help but think that limiting an ill to its psychology, individualizing and isolating a phenomenon, is a strategy to dismiss all political interpretations of the reality. In the case of the 2002 faintings, the highschoolers seem to collectively face a social structure which exhausts them. I liked that the answer to this exhaustion was not aggressive; the young women drop down, fall asleep, go into standby mode. There is an almost animal reaction in these adolescents whose body gives itself a head start on the mind to convey muffled frustrations. Imagining this slowdown and this immobility as a form of resistance was at the heart of the project.
You chose to reverse the imaginary of “High School Movies” by proposing a dark and atmospheric narrative, from the first image. What were you interested in dismantling in this genre?
I had the desire to make a film about a microcosm where the characters find themselves being both winners and victims of a system that is beyond them. High schools in particular still remain the birthplace of a gendered, formatted, hierarchical world. Of a structure operating with transparency. They are the first vessel for US mythologies with their Valentine’s Day, prom, cheerleading, etc., rituals. What I was interested in was how this soft power, these ordinary images deeply engraved in our collective imagination, were reinvested and distorted: how can we analyse violence under splendor, perversity in pleasure itself? The architecture of US high schools is also intrinsically linked to the recent school shootings, a phenomenon exacerbated by the fatalist policies of the Trump administration. I used James Benning’s film Landscape Suicide as a reference to explore the territory from which this anesthetised violence emerges.
The film is built around a narrative device where images (mostly collected on the Internet) blend with fictional testimonies: how was this form born and what did you want to explore by using it?
For this first film, I liked the idea of starting a hand-crafted work. Creating a device by recycling recovered images appealed to me. Our world produces so much visual information, there are so many hidden powerful narratives, that I sometimes wonder why cinema does not focus more on refurbishing pre-existing archive. I don’t take a lot of pleasure in being the owner of images I may have produced. On the other hand, I find real happiness in weaving something from foreign fragments. When I was studying art history, the idea that an archive is never true sprouted. The idea that the narrative it carries is very unstable, at work. It is a material that, even with its very direct relation to the real, always escapes us. The found footage that makes up the film evokes both something very intimate and an elsewhere which I cannot access. Adding fictional voices to these images feels to me like a way to enhance their opacity. Of course, this transformation approach goes partly against copyright laws, which are powerful in France and very important to protect. I find these deontological contradictions fascinating.
The images, particularly suggestive, resonate with the story, highlighting the matter of the female body. How did you work on selecting, manipulating and editing the material?
The work process with my editor, Benjamin Goubet, was a response to a rather unorthodox method for an archive movie, since we departed from the first draft of a voice-over I had written and recorded, before finding the images for the film. It was a surprisingly long and fastidious job, for such a short project. We did a lot of travelling in North Carolina, as it is proposed on the Internet. We did not want for the editing to focus on illustrating a narration. We looked for images that would always be alongside the narrative. That would prolong the incertitude, widen the abyss. Arnaud des Palières said, about the archive selection work, that some of them seem to wave to us. As if they were calling us and talking from another end of time. This recognition effect is a secret that belongs to them. Benjamin and I trialled very abstract versions of the film and, in the end, came back to the centre of what I was most concerned about: the body of these cheerleaders as production of a male gaze; the cohabiting of overhanging word and mute bodies.
Like an investigation, navigating between collective memory and subjective perception, the film takes on a voluntarily fragmented narration. How did you think of and write the voice over?
I had this feeling that we had to raise spectral voices, which would come from above, from the storm. Like an ancient choir commenting the narrative while still keeping it at a distance. I worked on a gap-fill narration, where information circulates without really overlapping. This investigation doesn’t lead to anything, it goes in circles. I thought a lot about David Lynch’s Laura Palmer while writing the film. This character exists above all through other people’s word. Before speaking beings, we are spoken beings, said Lacan. The words of others predates our identity, especially during adolescence. It is a word that immobilizes, forces a destiny. Benjamin Goubet really encouraged me to rewrite the voice over, so that it would be both precise and fleeting. Our work was made of back-and-forth, mutual influencing between writing and editing. Neither image nor sound was ever stable. It was like walking on quicksand.
Whispers, murmurs, background sounds and musical fragments blend with the voice-over, creating a dense and stratified soundscape. Which ideas and intuitions were you guided by during its construction?
In the same way that the narrative is underground, there is a muted threat rumbling in the soundtrack. With Coppelia Robert, the film’s sound editor and mixer, we worked with low frequencies and slow-downs to create a suspension effect. A vague and dreamlike time. There is a dormant storm; whispers reaching us implicitly. A clarinet which I associate with an instinctive, animal fear. To Peter and the Wolf. We present an event from which we end up being excluded. We looked to create a discomfort and this feeling is slow to occur. Ocean Hill Drive, a movie by Miriam Gossing and Lina Sieckmann, two German artists whose work I love, inspired me a lot for this effect of overdue tension.
Among the different girls at the centre of this story, the character of Eva seems to stand out, but still her figure seems to remain fleeting. Can you comment on the title of the film?
The title came to me by discovering the work of Italian photographer Valeria Chechi and her book Some of you killed Luisa. I found very interesting this echo to a responsibility that is both collective and anonymous. Valeria Chechi takes an interest in Sardinian territories and people through a photographic investigation surrounding the death of Luisa Manfredi. Some of you fucked Eva also comes from the specific affection I have for the name Eva as an ambiguous derivation of the biblical name. In the Genesis, Eve is blamed for the original sin, for being at the origin of temptation. I wanted there to be a resonance between the cultural roots of slutshaming and its consequences. When we think of Eva’s character in the film, fucked can mean both “screwed” and “screwed over”…
Interview by Marco Cipollini
