Moi, Pierre Rivière… (1976) by René Allio.
“This film means a lot to me on many different levels. On the one hand, it’s because Nicolas Philibert and I found all the non-professional actors for the film: we’re the ones who looked for them, we’re the ones who chose them, and we’re the ones who introduced them to René Allio, since he was trying to get backing for his film at the time, which was very complicated, and for which Michel Foucault’s help was crucial. It was a very important experience, because first off, Nicolas and I stayed in Normandy a long time, and the people who acted in the movie, country folk from Normandy, became friends for the most part and have remained so. (Lire la suite…)

How did you start your career in cinema?
I started off in cinema with an important encounter that meant a lot to me, when I met Roberto Rossellini. I met Roberto Rossellini at the Cinemathèque thanks to the cashier; at the time I wanted to write about Thomas Müntzer, a pastor who opposed Luther during the Peasants’ War in Germany in the 16th century. I was interested in how religious discourse was becoming political discourse, and this opposition between the party of peasants and the party of princes was at the center of my thought process, based on what I’d read in Engel, of course, about the role of violence in history and in Terence Bloch’s book, Thomas Müntzer. So I met Rossellini at the Cinémathèque and told him about the subject. At the time he was in his period of making movies about history, he was very keen on the project and proposed I write up the story for him. I didn’t know anything about cinema and thought that when Rossellini wanted to make a movie, he made a movie. I then discovered that he was actually pretty much banned from cinema everywhere except in France. And so I worked in vain for two or three years. It was funny: I asked him especially about dialogues and he told me, “Let’s shoot the movie and we’ll see about that afterwards.” So I wrote this huge thing which remained dead in the water, so to speak, and the irony of the story is that when I directed my first movie with Nicolas Philibert, La Voix de son maître, we got an advance on box office receipts during the same commission that allocated an advance on box office receipts to Rossellini for the film he wanted to make about Marx. That was the last time I saw him in Paris, and I told him I thought it was ironic that a filmmaker of his caliber and two novices like us would end up in the same commission, but he found it normal – he knew a lot about cinema, and I didn’t know much at all. And that’s how it started.

Before that, what was your relationship with cinema like?
I’ve always been a moviegoer, but not a movie buff. Cinema was a pleasure for me. I went often: on Saturday evenings with my aunt and Sunday afternoons with my father, and on Thursdays we had cinema at school – we’d always watch the same two movies, Way out West with Laurel and Hardy, and Bim – I knew them backwards and forwards –, with a documentary about African boaters that was interesting. I loved cinema, saw a huge number of films, discovered the Cinémathèque and became an insatiable moviegoer, meaning that we’d go… I say “we” because there were several of us around the same age who’d go from 3 pm to midnight and watch whatever they’d show. That was my taste for cinema as a moviegoer, but that was all. I hadn’t thought about being a filmmaker, or about what cinema meant. Either I’d like the movies or I didn’t, that’s all.
(Lire la suite…)

From January 22 to March 30, do not miss Ahtila’s first French retrospective. A major figure of contemporary video art, Ahtila breaks the image of a self-sufficient art for art’s sake by inventing new forms of tales and storytellings.

In Paris, the Jeu de Paume gallery is organizing the first French retrospective of the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Born in 1959, she immediately specialized in video art as a student in Helsinki, London and Los Angeles. But this category is still to identify. From its birth in the 60s, video art referred to -and against- the model of television. Its language was absolutely different from cinema: made of images considered in terms of flow and not in length, no longer edited horizontally but vertically, as a foliage. Wolf Vostell’s “Décollages” (meaning take-off and stripping at the same time) have shown that each video image could overlap an infinity of others and Nam June Paik’s do-it-yourself synthesizers made the most of the possibility of an unstoppable flux of self-generated images. The creation of video art was contemporary of the invention of new technics and of the democratization of its tools –Sony’s Portapak, which equipped many families, but also Fluxus ironic artists or wild Viennese Actionnists. It was the time for an art to identify itself, a very theoretical era where theory was meant to sharp art.

The era is not the same. Ahtila’s video works strikes by their neatness, not to say their typically Scandinavian coldness. Same bluish veil on frozen images. Of course, Ahtila’s work borrows to the fields of documentary, television, advertising and cinema : but it’s mostly because today we can’t distinguish those images anymore. Era has changed: cinema does not prevail anymore over other types of images and television supremacy is contested by other networks not as easy to control. And museum doesn’t prevail as a critical art: art has given up modernism self-sufficiency for images of the outside world and new forms of documentaries.

Ahtila’s videos always come in a multi-screening form (even if they can appear on one screen only on DVDs): the fact that the same subtitles run on each image allows the spectator to follow more than once the same screening, and to see each time a different film. Sometimes screens show each side of a room and surround the spectator, giving him at the same time the possibility to mentally edit the film on his own (as in Where is where, 2008, produced by the Jeu de Paume) ; sometimes the artist organizes the images on different screens, organizing one of them for storytelling and another for details, as in Consolation Service (1999). The films can relate a break-up or a mourning, themes we can recognize as the modern ones in cinema (Antonioni, Akerman, Garrel…): each time death comes home and disrupts realistic representations, as much as it moves deeply the characters who are depicted. Art invents new way of storytelling by mixing up different types of temporalities (testimonies, reconstitutions, myths…) : by disposing them side by side as in The Hour of Prayer, as if it was the same image running from one to another, and showing not a particular time, but a particular foliage of times and spaces.

Bastien Hader

I Love You I Love You (1968) by Alain Resnais.

“It’s my most recent film shock since I discovered it only two years ago on an old VHS. It had just been shown again lately but we were not in Paris at that time. I absolutely wanted to watch it and Jean Claude [Brisseau] told me he had a VHS copy of the film since the film had been shown on TV a few years before. He watched the five first minutes with me and left me there alone. When the movie was over, it had moved me in such a way I cried for twenty minutes on the couch. I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t stop the videoprojector nor the tape. I just wanted one thing, deep in my heart: to see Alain Resnais in front of me and tell him “this is it, that’s what it’s all about”. I could search and explain why and how but this very abstract film, which could be called intellectual -a thing I hate: intellectualism in general and especially in cinema, which for me must deal at first with emotions-, stunned me. I was stunned with emotions. I was crying but it was not out of relief. I was deeply moved and I am again just by talking about it. »

More details about I Love You I Love You DVD

An occasional actress in Eric Rohmer’s Green Ray and The Aviator’s Wife and an editor of his films from Green Ray to A Tale of Springtime, Lisa Heredia (aka Maria Luisa Garcia) works with director Jean-Claude Brisseau since he began his carrer as a filmmaker and also lives with him. An actress in many of his films (La vie comme ça (Life The Way It Is), Sound and Fury, Céline, The Black Angel) she also is his editor, set decorator and costume designer.

The movies in competition :

Feuerherz (Heart of Fire) - Germany/Austria - by Luigi Falorni

Julia - France - by Erick Zonca

Lady Jane - France - by Robert Guédiguian

Caos calmo (Quiet Chaos) - Italy – International Premiere - by Antonello Grimaldi

Happy-Go-Lucky - UK - by Mike Leigh

Restless - Israel/Germany/Canada/France/Belgium - by Amos Kollek

Elegy - USA - by Isabel Coixet

Sparrow - Hong Kong, China - by Johnnie To

Kabei (Kabei – Our Mother) - Japan – International Premiere - by Yoji Yamada

Kirschblüten - Hanami - Germany - by Doris Dörrie

There Will Be Blood - USA - by Paul Thomas Anderson

Zuo You (In Love We Trust) - China - by Wang Xiaoshuai

Lake Tahoe - Mexico - by Fernando Eimbcke

Gardens of the Night - Great Britain/USA - by Damian Harris

Tropa de Elite (The Elite Squad) - Brazil - by José Padilha

In S.O.P. Standard Operating Procedure - USA - by Errol Morris