In this new film, technology and its devices (we remember the computer taken to pieces in Dear Steve, FID 2010) are questioned as multifaceted ideological tools. In a self-reflexive way, here it’s the very tool of cinema: a camera. How did this project come about?
From the outset, one key question has persisted: How can I make images of attention that in turn generate attention in the spectator? Since this project originated in the art school where I have been teaching for the past 25 years, I landed on making silent portraits of 20 film students. These are close-ups of young people being attentive in the presence of the camera. The entire collection spans 68 minutes and prompts viewers, like those portrayed, to lose track of time. At the same time, I developed the plan to make a film about the camera we used to film the portraits: the Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 4K. Film students refer to it as ‘the Black Magic’ or ‘the 4K’. When I told the students about this, some of them labeled the project as ‘the making of’. In fact, I had rather an ‘unmaking of’ in mind: a film on the camera as a tool, a product, an object and a node.
The protagonists are the students, with the main one, a student too, who is also the narrator. How did this choice come up?
In Leçon d’objet I used some portraits out of the series and I maintained one rule: all recordings would take place on campus. The camera person, the editor and the sound designer/composer are all three students who graduated very recently. The same goes for Victoire, the student-protagonist who assembles and uses the camera. She indeed acts as narrator. In this fictional construction, she is the creator of the portraits of her classmates and the director of the film that unfolds at her pace. Viewed from another angle, she is the actress who lends her voice to my film and takes her place in front of the camera.
You connect the device (and also introducing cctv images) with the architecture in itself, more, with specifically a school. Two sides of the same control machine?
I have never employed a point-of-view shot in my film work. In Leçon d’objet I use for the first time very briefly a perspective approaching the over-the-shoulder shot. But once more and overall, I stick to objective, observational viewpoints. One might say that the surveillance camera is the superlative of observational cinema, showing things not so much ‘as they are’ but as they unfold before the viewer’s eye. In this unfolding, the aspect of control certainly emerges. In this unfolding, the aspect of control certainly comes to the fore, but equally the simple fact that cameras are ubiquitous, that ‘the Black Magic’ is part of a familiar network in which certainly the cellphone also finds its place. Just as ‘the 4K’ is, by design, only a node in the chain of post-production software.
There is a very understated but meaningful work with sound. How did it come up?
For me, film is a black box whose building blocks and joints remain visible. Leçon d’objet shows itself as made and explicitly addresses its making and its viewing. Montage is the exquisite means of making the seams of a film visible and tangible. The logic behind the image editing of this film is that of interruption. The quiet, sustained concentration in the portraits lends itself perfectly to sudden scene changes via hard cuts. Accompanied by Victoire’s calm narrative voice, we allow the viewers to linger undisturbed in the attention sphere of the person portrayed, only to have them abruptly land in another portrait, in a school corridor, in a surveillance shot, in a cell phone image, in a color plane or in a black image.
My ideas about sound follow the same logic of ‘artificiality’: flow versus interruption, a-synchronicity, plus a digital feel. Except for the tram scene, we never recorded sound during shoots. Devoid of direct sounds sticking to the image, we could build the soundtrack from scratch. The central question here was how to increase the viewer-listener’s concentration through sound. We chose different shades of noise. Woolly carpets of sound without any apparent structure and noticeable time lapse give spatial volume to the still images, and they are also excellent for interrupting. The abrupt sound drop becomes the audio equivalent of the hard cut in the image montage. We made the concrete link with the campus by subtle use of overflying airplanes and passing streetcars that are integral to this thoroughly Brussels place. And we opted for a musical moment that is shamelessly sentimental. The song patch is the dreamlike counterpoint to the harsh cuts and sudden sound traps throughout the film. Noise switches to glitch, music plunges into silence, interior becomes exterior, loud sound tumbles into soft volume, or vice versa.
This film as an ode to interiority?
To be attentive means to be present. To be attentive also means to be receptive: beyond one’s own tested perspective, beyond the self. To be attentive is where ‘off this world’ meets ‘of this world’, when ‘separate from the world’ meets “part of’. The film portraits of students show how being attentive takes place in that opening between the self and the world, in the middle between inside and outside of oneself. The students are there and not there at the same time. I see similarity with the cinema spectator.
Dream machine, hypnosis device, escape room, instrument of education and emancipation, window to the world, attention machine, object of distraction, disciplining and oppressing or even indoctrinating mechanism: the history of reflection on film has many different approaches to the cinema dispositif according to whether viewers are assigned an active or passive role, according to whether their thinking or their bodies are given predominance. For better or worse, the cinema makes its constricted user receptive and attentive. The cinema experience is one of contained freedom. Like the classroom, the cinema functions optimally with the door closed. Teaching, taking classes, watching films each rely on the same cunning arrangement, on a paradoxical artifice: we keep the world out so that we could let it in. With the movie theater door closed: in the middle of the world for a moment out of sight of the world. With the door closed in the classroom: in the heart of the institution for a moment out of sight of the institution. So, I would say that Leçon d’objet is not an ode to interiority, but rather to this va-et-vient between inside and outside.
Interviewed by Nicolas Feodoroff
