Your film grew out of the images of his garden left by your father, which he’d shot on his iPad. Can you tell us a little more about these shots and your decision to make a movie from them?
Before he died, my father showed me his videos and I offered to edit them and possibly make them into a film. He categorically refused. After his death, I watched them all – he was gone, it was a beautiful way of spending more time with him. They also served as a herbarium so that we knew which plants were growing where in his garden, until the successive droughts caused most of them to die. When I decided to make a film based on my father’s videos, I showed them to a few friends and family, and that was when I discovered I wasn’t the only one they spoke to.
As a counterpoint to these shots, you yourself made images, mainly of your children. Why this counterpoint, filmed in a different format?
I wanted to create a correspondence with Jean-Pierre’s shots, a dialogue, but also a different perspective of the garden. I shot in black and white Super 8 and 16mm and developed it myself, at the risk of ruining it. This slow, handmade, sensitive approach, switching to darkness to load and develop the film, gave me another way of seeing the garden. The grainy analogue is in stark contrast to my father’s hyper-coloured iPad images. My children and my mother are the current occupants of the garden. I filmed them roaming this fragmented space.
You also talk to your children and your mother about your father and his relationship to his garden, to painting… How did you decide on the role of the spoken word, of oral testimony?
I made several more literary attempts where they and I wrote and recited texts. But the spontaneously recorded discussions were livelier. Since my first film Bondy vu par… I’ve been editing the spoken word onto images of places, looking for the way in which meaning can travel through space.
Music also plays a crucial role in your film, in the image as well as the sound. Why did you give it such a major role?
My children practising their music every day echoes my father tending his garden. I wanted to film the repetitive movements that transform the world and make it possible to create and awaken the senses. Although we don’t see my father gardening, only the fruits of his labour, his flowers, his close-up perspective, his voice conveying the different times of day or seasons, I wanted to show my children practising their music, which, to me, is very similar to the attitude of my father, who spent his life working at things.
Interview by Nathan Letoré
