Extinction des Bleus, Extinctions of Blue

I didn’t have any particular fascination with this color but it imposed itself on me through the chance encounters with books and landscapes I’ve passed through over the last three years. In the end, blue proved to be a fascinating thread running through the film and a joyful stylistic partner. Nonetheless, this is less a film about the color blue than a film that attempts to use it as a means to reach some place else. 

The initial idea occurred whilst reading a short passage from William S.Burroughs’ novel My Education, in which he dismisses blue with notable bad faith and describes the difficulty he has in using it in his paintings. This short excerpt introduces an unusual approach to our relationship to colour. It made me want to film experiments surrounding the colour blue to accompany the text or to offer a counterpoint, if these attempts proved successful enough to do so. 

It was whilst shooting these shots that ideas for an additional segment emerged. Travelling through landscapes along the Mediterranean coast, in France andMorocco, I filmed scenery sometimes damaged by fire, by the cement industry that digs into the hills, by an increasingly opaque air that smothers the blue of the sky and the sea alike. This fostered the idea of a territory where blue had gradually disappeared and enabled us to envisage a color as a living being that can be hurt,extignuished, and even resist against us. It was also about revealing, by means of the narration, the disturbing lightness of the observers regarding this extinction, who seemed to welcome it with nonchalance. Having expressed a form of rejection in the first part, here is a place for a form of collective denial. 

The final part depicts something utterly different and tries to create a transgression. It overturns the symbolic status of blue and offers a new momentum. It is a place for Mack Sennett, for policemen in uniform, for facetious clouds. 

The film was created in multiple successive impulses, each section reacting to the one preceding it. Its visual world therefore had to play on their thematic diversity. The aim was to find out if, by accentuating the visual and auditory differences between the sections, a sense of disorientation could emerge within a single film, however short. The film therefore attempts to approach the freedom that exists in music, the freedom to vary the approach from one piece to a next within the same album, to explore a feeling or an idea by means of multiple thematic and formal points of view. 

Anyhow the whole body of work is united by a shared approach to framing and by the practice of experimental filmmaking with a Bolex, achieving as much as possible within the camera itself. The same tools are used for each segment, but each time new rules are added to derive as much pleasure as possible from the making of the film. In the first part, for example, this takes the form of a reflective metal cylinder attached to the lens, which breaks down the colours and multiplies the shades of blue.

There are several levels of quotation. There are direct quotations: William S.Burrough’s text sung at the beginning, and the anecdote recounted by James Agee from his well known 1940s article about burlesque American comedy, is told at the end. And there is a more subtle level of quotation, which is conveyed solely through visual means in the film. Snippets of poems by Borges, texts by Bachelard, or lyrics from Kate Bush’s songs may have been the discreet driving forces behind certain formal choices, which, through constant cross-references, can lead to happy accidents. This method ultimately echoes the hazy associations of ideas discussed in the final part of the film.

The central section, even as an original narrative, remains rhythmed by motifs drawn from the history of the arts, ever-present whenever we discuss our relationship with colours. It plays with our gaze and our memories associated with the colour blue.

The film is as much the result of associations of ideas as it is of imposed methods. Working over a long period of time, mainly on my own, meant I avoided falling into an overly rigid division between writing, filming and editing. The rigour imposed by shooting film with a Bolex also contributes to this. Getting the shots right requires greater care, the cost of film reels encourages more thought and forces one to space out shooting sessions until one can afford a few more reels. This creative process, dictated by limited resources, is ultimately a rare luxury.

Being part of shared artist-run collectives such as Etna, Navire Argo or Déviation greatly fosters this freedom. The constant back-and-forth between filming, writing and editing allows the film to take shape without being overly shaped by preconceived intentions, without being overly strategised to fulfil any particular objective. I believe that this method can, in the best cases, push the form to the point where the films themselves begin to work on something that transcends the modest desires of their directors.

But ultimately, what governs these connections and parallels between the literary and the pure landscape, between quotations and raw material, is the principle that the world of ideas and the imagination is a realm that affects us just as powerfully as the material world. This idea can be found everywhere as in Yourcenar’s, Bachelard’s and Alan Moore’s work, the notion of a world of ideas possessing a life akin to that of matter. Filming a passage of text or playing a song is thus not much different from filming a mountain range, a face, a pebble or a section of a painting. We often speak of collages to describe this kind of editing, but perhaps we can also consider it as a simple descriptive gaze that quite fairly overlooks our reality, in several of its dimensions.

Alongside literature, music is the art form that has most consciously influenced the film’s style. The American musician and composer Thad Kopec, based in Nashville, both performed the first piece and composed all the film’s music. For each section, he found a different musical direction, tailored to the accompanying voice or seeking to give it an unexpected extension. The film’s other two performers, Frédéric Leidgens and Claire-Emmanuelle Blot, have voices that further enhance this musicality and tonalities that made working on the sound extremely enjoyable. This choice is perhaps a reaction to the neutral or sepulchral voice-overs that so often permeate this genre of cinema. Frédéric Leidgens, in my view, is one of the great French-speaking actors, possessing a wholly unique freedom in his delivery. The comparison with jazz is, in his case, very apt.

Beyond the sound itself, I enjoy the rhythmic effort involved using editing to capture the essence of certain musical elements to adhere to certain structures or moods brought about by musicians I admire, such as Alice Coltrane or Jimmy Giuffre. I’m clumsily trying to emulate the approach of musicians like Mark Hollis or Brian Wilson, who were able to build, from isolated fragments, short segments that find their place within a whole for which we don’t yet have all the keys at the time of the recording. In the same vein, the film’s black screens serve as moments of silence, that deep silence found in Mark Hollis’s latest albums. These are images and sounds that need space to breathe; that sometimes stand out more clearly because they follow a gap rather than being stuck to the previous scene.