In your film, photos, written texts, moving images and voice are imbricated in creating a complex cinematic fabric. You manage to convey a radical political point of view with a poetic expression. Can you describe to us your creative process, the way you craft these different elements?
In both parts of the film, we perceive the stratification of time through traces and memories emerging from a sensitive cartography of the marginal, invisible spaces usually overlooked in our society. How did you work in the editing to construct this complexity of time and spaces?
I’m uncomfortable with “radical political point of view”. I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding. The only really radical thing about my politics is in how I do things.
The ‘prunelle’ or sloe is what you get at the end of a long ripening process. Mind you, they were ripe, just right, on the right day, and I was hungry. And I still had a long way to go. And the blue felt-tip pen that was used to write on this piece of paper that I filmed shortly afterwards was found on the spot, on the ground. After leaving the blackthorn to move on to the next stage.
While it’s that simple, it’s also very complicated. It’s the innocence of desire and I’m getting there. I always land on my feet. But isn’t that just pretentious? Yes, it is, that’s the problem. It’s infancy.
My artistic work began with writing. Then there was the need to flesh it out a little. I started drawing, outlining what could be dramatised with a few sketches in Indian ink. I ended up with some inky skeletons and ghosts. Then it was the turn of photos. It may take a thousandth of a second to see, but you have to look at what you’ve seen. You have to think about the photo. That sometimes takes years, because it plunges each of us into our own abyss. In the end, I got bored with taking photos. Eventually, the camera fell out of my hands. I then found a small video camera and entered a lighter, more superficial process: filmmaking is more ordinary with all its possibilities, but also more sensuous almost, more carnal. It allows me to get to the sensations. I used to photograph in the same way as people film, with long sequence shots, and now I film in the same way as people take photographs.
As for the editing… To be honest, we were lost amidst all kinds of materials that submerged us – stacks of sheets of paper, various rewritings. The same goes for the photos – boxes of photos, piles of photos. Obviously, everything collides. My editing method, since that’s where it comes in, is very much inspired by my method to select the photos. Incessant compulsion, composing series. Scribbling comments on them. You could call this incessant compulsion ‘compulsing’. It’s been going on for years, battling with these photos and these notes.
The layers that accumulate can’t be planned. In any case, they weren’t planned. Inevitably there’s something random in the way they can fall on top of each other and lie dormant for a long time. It seems to me that it’s not unlike my creative process. Various realities become part of other realities. I don’t follow a process. I make something exist.
Obviously, the subject matter I deal with isn’t always very noble, socially, I mean. But to me, it feels very noble because it’s so raw and therefore extremely sensitive. My first impression was that it didn’t concern me, that it reflected too little. I don’t want to talk about poverty. It imprisons you, it takes over, it overwhelms, it takes on too much significance. In the end, you could say it reduces you to silence. Let’s just say that I head towards the spaces that attract me, I wander and think about it as I walk. And sometimes I write while I’m walking… You could call it the point of incision. That’s often how I enter the world. Then, unavoidably, there’s where life takes you, sometimes under duress. As if you were a captive… or a sleepwalker… who dreams about his story and returns to the scene…
