The film was born out of heartbreak, but it also draws strength from the supportive people around you who also share your creative process. Could you tell us how you imagined and wove together the multiple elements that make up this project?
This heartbreak is the driving force behind a movement to be continued, not alone but surrounded. It is a natural follow-up from my previous film, L’amour sur le chemin des roncettes, which was inhabited by ghosts. In The Bitches, the beings at my side are very much alive, friends ( human and non-human alike). The film was built from their presence, their ideas and their various interpretations. Thanks to these complicit perspectives, the “heartbreak” participates in its own metamorphosis.
Inviting friends to participate in your creative process and drawing on other’s literary voices ( such as Emily Dickingson) gives your film a very lively quality, while also prompting reflections on the filmmaking process itself. I would like you to tell us about this meta-cinematic and dialogic dimension.
There is a degree of humour in the film’s “meta-cinematic” dimension. The hesitations, the modifications, the repetitions, they are what make my film! I had sent a letter to my friends asking them to “help me organise my ignorance”. Not all of them appear in the final cut, but their contributions also helped shape the film. There is the colorist, the narrator, the singer-reader, the seamstress-protester, the translator and then…the dogs. The sequences succeed and overlap and it’s up to the viewer to imagine the possible dialogues between the characters. They take their turn to speak but their intertwined identities express the “lovers” confusion: who’s who?
Emily Dickinson: “ Much Billow hath the Sea—One Baltic—They—Subtract Thyself, in play,And not enough of me Is left—to put away—”Myself” meant Thee—”
The body is also important: accompanied by dogs, by friends or alone, your body is often in front of the camera, in constant interaction with the act of filming, seeing and being seen. Could you share the ideas that guided this choice?
I belong to a territory, to the place where I live. As in all my films, I set up my camera and move through the familiar landscape. It’s my cinematic body, sometimes burlesque, sometimes not. It provides a sense of scale. Here, it’s a body shaped like an exquisite corpse: I am with a friend looking through a window at a dead fox on its belly, filmed in 1989, with Pierre Creton blowing on clarinettes, playing like a dog walking, sleeping, swimming and so on.
The landscape also plays an important role in the film’s rhythm, allowing time for a breath, moving between countryside and sea. Can you tell us about these territories and their importance in the making of the film?
The journey unfolds from my home to the sea, along paths overlooking the cliffs of the Alabaster Coast. It’s a short trip, not more than 2 kilometers, that I walk daily. The dogs know it well. Yes, this landscape is always in motion and the seasons overlap and intertwine. The film was built in the same way, wandering here and there. The wind probably contributes to this feeling as well.
Interviewed by Margot Mecca
