After numerous short films, here is the first feature film, Harmony, the culmination of a project that began several years ago, with the same title. Can you go back over this project? The desire for a feature film?
This project started in 2018, on the occasion of a solo exhibition at the Galerie Édouard Manet | École municipale des Beaux-arts de Gennevilliers. On this occasion, I had the desire to venture into a terrain that had only been touched upon in my films: writing fiction, creating a world and characters. Until then, my films were constructed in such a way as to avoid going through writing, by inventing processes (through sound, cut-up, archive) that determined the structure of an action. Harmony, in its short form at the time, articulated various narrative and aesthetic motifs drawn from readings, films, comics, paintings, TV series, unified and made coherent by fiction. This compilation aspect produced gaps in the story, as the mysteries or questions raised by the world of Harmony were not correlated to any justification or future key to understanding.
To give the form of a series to the overall project and move it out of its citation framework, various operations were necessary: removing narrative motifs and canonical references, imaginary crutches, to focus on the character’s situation, his condition after the story, in the here and now; hence the precision of certain psychological traits, and his projection into wandering. I continued the production without worrying about the series format which proved to be irrelevant. The idea of transforming the project into a feature film thus imposed itself.
To do this, I contacted Catherine Aladenise, who is an editor, especially of animated films, and who agreed to work on the film. From this collaboration emerged the idea of chaptering, which would cut and redistribute the old partitions by episode differently. We cut twenty-five minutes, which in animation, is a lot. I also did a graphic overhaul of the first twenty minutes, including new sets and characters. FID viewers will discover a new film.
During this interplanetary journey, the main protagonist, Jesús Pérez, encounters a number of creatures. How did this universe come about?
The shape of these characters responds to a particular condition in Harmony: all species can reproduce, without distinction. This is also induced by the way forms can be hybridized thanks to 3D modeling tools. These creatures thus aggregate human characteristics with those of other mammals, plants, fruits, insects, mushrooms… The textures that cover these 3D characters also agglomerate various pictorial and photographic materials, skins, meat, ham, bark, feathers, shells, foliage. I like the idea that the image is the construction material of a 3D world. By looking at these characters, one actually has access to a selection of images that circulate elsewhere in other spheres. Finally, the drawing of these characters, in addition to the inspiration of the moment, draws on many imaginary bestiaries in the fields of art history and entertainment, to be broad, from Piero di Cosimo to Pokemon, passing by Léopold Chauveau.
The term of the title, beyond the announced utopia, also refers to music, very present. Is it an important dimension in this project? Likewise, how did you work on the voices?
The film is indeed caught in tension between these two aspects: Harmony as a place and framework of fiction, and as a listening system. The plot is thus disrupted. The inhabitants of Harmony only express themselves with “Yes” or “No,” they are not inclined in principle to produce long speeches. Only, the form of these responses, by songs, excessively dilates the message, and projects it, I hope, into another medium. This testifies to a struggle between image and sound, between story and what pertains to phenomenon, to the sensory. Harmony is a film to listen to above all. The otherness represented by these creatures shakes the current balance of an exchange between two beings, through voice and music, through unpredictable durations, sometimes inadequate, which short-circuit the narration. The film, whose material is time, is intimately modified by it. As for the design of the creatures, I associate motifs borrowed from tonal, classical, pop music, with principles derived from the avant-garde, experimental music, and sound poetry. Then, it’s a meditation on harmony, its crisis, its obsolescence, the pleasure it provides, but also the boredom.
Bodies with unexpected limbs, viscera… these creatures are also paradoxically “embodied.” According to what necessity?
The 3D characters literally have bodies without organs. They are envelopes, although they have skeletons that allow them to be animated but remain hidden. They are technical beings in a technical world, which thus rejects what is perishable, corruptible, the body, flesh, guts, what is hidden. 3D tools, whose use has continued to expand in the entertainment industry, design, engineering, architecture, encourage idealized, sanitized, and disembodied visions. Is it possible to embody 3D characters? Can we translate their vulnerability, infuse them with life? The promise of finding refuge in reassuring, syrupy, unsinkable digital worlds, where everything is in its place, and from which death has been banished, increases political void, discomfort in the face of an anxious present and future. Harmony gives shape to this disturbing feeling, this childish escape movement into synthetic worlds, of brutal perfection, but where repressed horror can arise.
The narration is sometimes reduced to a minimum, as are the interactions, leaving us in a form of contemplation. Is this an important dimension for you?
Absolutely, the use of narration for me is a compromise. I feel closer to a form of theater, which transposes real situations, which recomposes a living world from observations, as if it were happening there, before our eyes. The relationship between Jesús Pérez and Canaillou, which becomes more important throughout the film, is of this nature and reflects a certain accuracy in the relationship between a master and his dog. The challenge for me is to ironically transcribe this effect of reality with purely synthetic and fantasy means, so that we do not exactly know what we are looking at. I like films without a script, which operate on the thinnest possible plots, to show situations, feel a vibrant environment. I follow in the footsteps of Jacques Rozier’s films, or even Hong Sang Soo. Harmony is a way of sharing my way of seeing films.
The images produced nevertheless leave a form of incompleteness compared to the production of this type of image.
My way of working is close to that of a painter, in a workshop. Making 3D animated films from this perspective is to bring the scale of an industrial production, or a studio, back to that of an individual. I have often been questioned about the clumsiness of these images, and whether I would agree to perfect them when I have the means. To follow up on my previous answer, I appreciate inexpensive works, the quality of medium and large productions is tiring. To take the example of the icon used for Jesús Pérez, it is initially a low-resolution image, which the film allows to stretch the fabric and show the very material of this digital file. The originality of synthetic images is their ability to coexist within the same space objects and representations that have significant disparities in resolution and precision. The lacunar, uneven aspect that emerges corresponds to an ecology of images. They develop, transform in a common environment, but according to varying masses, characteristics, and modes of distribution. The gaze becomes active because it must interpret, complete, adjust to decode this disparate landscape. This incompleteness, even sometimes inconsistency of the images is part of a broader stripping down, of imagination, narrative, and technique, to give full place to concrete sound, obtained by sound effects, voice, gestures, manipulation, and collision of objects. In Harmony, it is sound that creates the image.
Interview by Nicolas Feodoroff
