Your closing insert reads “Based on an idea by Nicole Brenez”. How did this project come about?
It all began with this message Nicole sent me:
“A film about the revolution, using the dozens of films about the French Revolution that I gathered a few years ago for René Viénet but that I still haven’t done anything with, and centered on shots in which someone explains what the revolution is and why he wants to carry it out. Of course, it is up to you to find the revolutionary form!”
Faced with 95 films made between 1897 and 2018, the challenge was to imagine my own revolution.
Révolution française (rappel) forms a diptych with X+. The latter was commissioned by Nicole Brenez, for a screening series related to the exhibition “Anonymes, USA” at Le BAL in 2010.
X+ was created from 10 documentaries, shot in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. I had asked Nicole to give me the material and decided to work from her whole corpus.
Révolution française and X+ are films that reuse footage, everything follows a precise mechanism and continually returns to a type of cinema that records silhouettes, groups, crowds, masses. They both explore different forms of visual presence where countless anonymous individuals that compose the fabric of humanity appear, centered around revolted people. They are two densely populated films, collective histories animated by a single question: what is a historical factor?
Your film is an assembly of sequences that depict events from the French Revolution, drawn from the history of cinema. How did you select these excerpts? Based on what factors did you then envisage your work on the image?
As I watched, film after film, I wrote down quotations, each one chosen because it was particularly powerful or moving, because it spoke to me.
These quotations, grasped during dialogues or “inserts” were transcribed word for word. The whole collection, organised into chapters, forms a screenplay that intertwines the principles of a democratic revolution with cinema’s fundamental questions.
During the second viewing, I selected from all the films (quoted or not), the moments showing crowds, in short, the people. The choice of the crowd as a motif gives both momentum and commitment to the film. It is the figures in motion who drive it forward.
At the editing table, amongst the superposition of films and the accumulation of stories, the sequences that I kept were cut and placed according to the temporal structure of the films from which they originated. This operation creates connections between sequences from different films, or overlaps between two images. The images that the film brings together thus escape any deliberate intention or drive.
The reworked plasticity of the images amplifies the figures’ expressions, erasing the singularity of their faces to produce an irresistible momentum or a supernatural power coming from the crowd. This creates an unexpected plasticity, an uncanny strangeness that makes the familiar unknown and material from which possible forms emerge.
During the closing credits, 95 films are listed, introduced by the word “with” at the beginning, as if they were my actors. This was intended to put the film into perspective, a call to contemporary people.
On screen, sentences from different sources are displayed, organised into chapters. How did you compose this text?
I built the film in order for it to work towards identifying cinema and revolution.
Each selected quotation was integrated as a still frame within the unravelling of images, like a proclamation, freezing the instant by its force, by its impact.
All the quotes appear directly over the images, in turn, following the flow of the eleven chapters.
Could you tell us a little more about the sound design? Why did you choose this electronic music, and this alternation between moments of silence and the return to the music?
The film’s structure, in chapters, is marked by alternating stretches of silence and music, colorised images and untouched images, in order to renew attention and thought. The musical fragmentation and the visual effects make the film more dynamic.
The techno track is repeated throughout the film, it reappears intermittently in cuts, only during the quotations. As a kind of cleaver.
The choice of techno music imposed itself: I needed a breathless rhythm, one that returns to the elementary energy, like the one that drives a people through a revolution during which they are making history. This track by Secret Cinema is both fast paced and welcoming
Interviewed by Nathan Letoré
