Though often disregarded or ignored in movie history, Mitchell Leisen played a significant role in American film history before living in oblivion. First working successfully as a costume designer then on sets decoration for filmmakers such as Cecil B. DeMille, Allan Dwan or Raoul Walsh, Mitchell Leisen produced as a director a brilliant work -ethereal and sophisticated-, working with the most brilliant people of his times -whether writers and actors. From Hands Across the Table or Arise my Love to Easy Living or the exhilarating Midnight, Mitchell Leisen developed his talents as an actors director, an artistic supervisor, showing a precise way to direct his films and rewriting the scripts of the films he worked on, which caused him to be hated by people like Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder. But no doubt Mitchell Leisen‘s films would never have been the same without this rewriting work: they probably wouldn’t have been so light and elegant and even though he is now ignored, his films would never have been so influent in this golden age of the American film comedy. The upcoming release in France of two of his major movies (Midnight and Hands Across the Table), the tribute to his work this year at Deauville American Film Festival and the current retrospective that is showing now at the French Cinemathèque in Paris until November 2, are major opportunities to rediscover the brilliant work of a unique director.

See the programme of the Mitchell Leisen Retrospective at the French Cinemathèque in Paris.
See the programme of the Tribute to Mitchell Leisen at Deauville American Film Festival.

Scampia is a suburb to the north of Naples, and a crossroads for global drug trafficking. Gomorra follows the lives of a dozen characters involved in the activities of the Camorra at different levels, all bound by the economic system of the most important criminal organisation in Europe.

With their disappointed and broken hopes and destinies, the characters in Gomorra are subject to a law that, although it is not overt, governs the lives of the people who live in the suburbs of Naples. The Camorra takes charge of its members from an early age, after a rite of passage that is as brutal as it is symbolic, and accompanies them after retirement with a pension scheme. Trafficking in drugs of all kinds, control of the rag trade, both legal and otherwise, the “management” of waste – we are spared nothing of the organisation’s activities, and the film, adapted from the bestseller by Roberto Saviano describing the organisation’s activities in Naples which earned its author a death sentence from the underworld, relies on its documentary skill. The director’s desire to address the subject comprehensively is palpable, as he uses the experiences of the individual characters to relate the tangible reality of everyday life in this suburb to the north of Naples. What interests the director is the everyday lives of ordinary people and the direct effects of the Camorra’s activities on the population of Scampia. But –and this is really one of the strong points of this remarkable film– the functioning of the Camorra in Naples never takes precedence over the dramaturgical aspect or the awesomely effective directing.
Gomorra is not only a brilliant documentary study – it is also a truly great genre film. Indeed by concentrating too much on the informative aspect of the film there is a risk of overlooking what makes it a great film. The filming and the photography are brilliant, staying close to the characters, sometimes seeing the world through their eyes, sometimes merely following them, but always there, with dynamic, inspired directing. Breathing palpable life into the characters, the director avoids the pitfall of turning them into major representative stereotyped figures and, beyond the documentary aspect, he makes us experience and feel with them the pregnant presence of the Camorra and the influence it exerts on everyone’s lives, whether they like it or not. At no time does the director use the mythology and iconography typical of the Mafia film. There is no indulgence in describing the underworld, or in the way of handling the other aspect of this ordinary war –violence– which is dry and cold, harsh and summary. In a word – ordinary.

One of the films in the official selection at the last Cannes Festival, where it received the Grand Prix, Gomorra is an exciting lesson in the cinema and proof of the rediscovered vitality of European cinema which, in Italy, Spain and Germany, is once more producing films for the general public that are both intelligent and technically brilliant.

Olivier Gonord

Richard Avedon was one of the most influential American photographers of the 20th century, in the tradition of Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus.

Born in 1923, this portrait artist joined, so to speak, the merchant marine when he was hired to shoot ID photos of crew members with his Rollei camera, a gift from his father Jacob.
Alexey Brodovitch, artistic director at Harper’s Bazaar, quickly became his mentor and close friend, sensing the talent of this young advertising photographer.
Avedon went on to create a legendary series of photos for Harper’s, and for Vogue as well, revolutionizing the world of fashion photography by shattering old norms and injecting irony, movement and glamor into a field where rigidness had once reigned.
In parallel with his work in fashion, Avedon developed little by little his extraordinary portrait style. Photographing actors, musicians and poets, he privileged a raw relationship with his subject, focusing on the emotional encounter between photographer and subject, and glorifying the accuracy of the instant (“All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth.”) by getting rid of all contextualizing elements and anything else that might draw attention away from the “geography of the face.”
He thus perfected his signature style, with the subject against a neutral background (white and sometimes gray in the 1950s, and then a stark, optical white as of the late 1960s) framed by the black border of the negative, expressing in an obvious, and radical, way his relationship with the photographic act. This relationship, according to Avedon, was not a means of approaching reality (although he found that could be “very interesting”), but of “taking and dealing with the surface of things,” and is currently spotlighted in the retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Avedon’s work was long-term, almost painstaking in its repetition, as can be seen in such series as In the American West, originally commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Dating from 1979 to 1984, the 752 portraits taken from some 17,000 rolls of film depict the photographer’s socially-neutral but aesthetically-intensive perspective, and are considered by some the highpoint of his career.
Large prints – harsh and (obviously) in black and white – are as surprisingly natural as they are delicately constructed; the viewer is entranced by the artist’s knack at capturing, in the blink of an eye, the entirety, and complexity, of his human subjects, revealing both what they wish to show of themselves and what they actually are.
Whether it be the melancholic depth of Marilyn Monroe captured in 1958, the disturbing symmetry between certain portraits from the In The American West series and that of Warhol’s Factory in 1967, or portraits of Christ-like miners, Avedon revealed ineffable, or even invisible, instants with an eternal brightness.
For more than 50 years, Richard Avedon was the photographer of disparity, flouting convention, and making him, along with his affection, intelligence and force, one of the leading-edge explorers of his time.

Tiphaine Kazi-Tani

In 2002, the Cannes Film Festival paid Aki Kaurismaki his due respect. The Man Without a Past received the Grand Prize of the Jury and his favorite actress, Kati Outinen, won for Best Actress. The award was well-deserved: the Finish filmmaker has become a leading cinematic figure in little over twenty years, with fifteen films to his credit, thanks to his disillusioned and affectionate style.

Above all, Aki Kaurismaki has proven his inimitable way of expressing the bleakness of the world and of the “little people” who inhabit it, antiheroes whose untiring equanimity render them both dignified and quirky. As the characters drag through the no man’s lands of urban and rural settings, they are somehow akin to Droopy, Tex Avery’s dog, and like him, seem to be saying, with a deadpanned expression, “You know what? I’m happy.”
With his sketchy minimalism and burlesque stylization, Aki Kaurismaki also depicts resistance against life in the fast lane and against a world that rejects anything that “doesn’t fit in.” With the mere image of a woman seated in a party waiting in vain to be approached, he manages to portray loneliness. A bouquet of flowers is enough to recount a nascent romance. His actors are not particularly good-looking, but through poetry and humor they incarnate the grandeur and the poverty of the human condition. His “loser trilogy” (Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past and Lights in the Dusk) and his previous “worker’s trilogy” (with the cinematic gems Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl) are pathos-free portraits of “working stiffs,” losers of all sorts who try to survive in a hostile universe without ever forsaking their dignity.
That his films are so consistent, however, does not preclude them from being diverse. From the fold suddenly emerged Bohemian Life, in a reconstructed Paris, and Juha, in sumptuous black and white, “the last silent movie of the 20th century.” The DVD of his complete works especially offers viewers the occasion to treat themselves to several rarities, such as his musical short films, including the ineffable Those Were the Days, where a cowboy and his donkey seek refuge in a Paris café. And then there is Calamari Union, his second, but as yet unreleased, film, a sort of black and white, quick-paced sketch showing a group of dysfunctional, over-aged delinquents all named Frank who make their way across town (at their own risk!). The spirit of the “Leningrad Cowboys” – a very bad rock band with elaborate quiffs and extremely pointed boots, and a box-office success in 1989 – is already present.
Lastly, this complete set offers the chance to meet the “Kaurismaki family”. Indeed, the Finish director’s films are also a story of loyalty: the same director of photography from the very beginning, and several favorite actors, including Kati Outinen, with her chin pulled in, and her heart-rending and unsettling loneliness, and Matti Oulippää, an unflagging accomplice starting with his first appearance, hair parted on the side, in Crime and Punishment, and up to his early death. “I don’t understand why you’d need to replace the perfect actor by another one just for the sake of change,” he has said. “John Ford and Howard Hawks kept John Wayne in their Westerns because he was the best for that kind of role.”

Emmanuelle Mougne

British animator and filmmaker Barry Purves has directed numerous commercials and animated films for various media, earning him renown in the United Kingdom, but he has also directed many stand-alone films, veritable masterpieces of extreme ingenuity, which have now been brought together on a superb DVD.

With an academic background in theater and Greek civilization, followed by work as a stage manager, Barry Purves places gesture and artistic performance at the heart of his films. From Next, with William Shakespeare being auditioned by an inattentive, Peter Hall-like stage director, and Screen Play, with its Japanese puppetry, to Rigoletto and Gilbert & Sullivan, Barry Purves makes the theater stage the centerpiece of his cinematic universe, as fodder for the subject of the film to emerge or as a means to transform the frame’s inherently restrictive dimensions into a space for experimentation. Screen Play and Achilles, both wonderful works, are also the best examples of this approach. Using the confines of small theaters in miniature proportions, Purves creates expressive worlds through the precise movement of marionettes, combined with astounding lighting that sculpts the bodies and accompanies the protagonists’ forms. With little or no set, Purves imbues Achilles and Petrocles’s love with an unexpectedly physical and extremely touching quality.

But what is most surprising in Barry Purves’s work, beyond his gestural precision and incredible expressiveness, lies in fact outside the actual animation. What is most striking when one discovers his films is his mise en scène: his attention to the sets, the expert lighting, a sparkling palette for the costumes and sets, the extremely dynamic film editing, and especially his camera work. As it pans, pivots and zooms in and out with remarkable fluidity, Purves’s camera creates a thrilling energy, which is a rare surprise in the field of animation. Barry Purves’s art does not reside so much in his admirable skill as an animator, with the accurate and precise movements of his characters, as it does in his fantastic talent as a storyteller and in his skill at turning his small tales into large, emotional voyages thanks to his wonderfully inventive and dynamic directing and writing.

The DVD, which has just been released by French company Potemkine, includes short films Next (1989, 5 mins), Screen Play (1992, 11 mins), Rigoletto (1993, 30 mins), Achilles (1995, 11 mins), Gilbert and Sullivan, the Very Models (1998, 16 mins) and Hamilton Matress (2001, 30 mins). It comes with fascinating special features (film introductions by the director, interview with Purves and French animator Michel Ocelot) and a beautiful and rich booklet. A sumptuous boxset for an animation master, who really deserves to be discovered by those who don’t know his wonderful art.

Ferrare, Italy, 1938. The vast Finzi-Continis domain opens its doors to the middle-class youth when sports clubs access is suddenly denied to Jews. The rich Jewish noble family welcomes here their children’s friends. In this closed preserved space, Giorgio and Micol, only daughter of the family, live their lives, which grows from friendship to love for Giorgio.

As Italy is going deeper into fascism and Europe is on the edge of war, the Finzi-Continis are shown as living in a protected closed world, keepers of an art of living on the way of its destruction. The story runs through four years that will cover the evolutions of the relationship between Giorgio, the educated middle class boy, and Micol, when, all around them, the mentalities are changing, due to the rise of fascism. Ignored, underestimated, the new order that overcomes Europe will finally break through the domain and definitively destroy it.

Like beautiful Micol (marvellous Dominique Sanda), the family seems desperately passive to face the changes that occurs in Italy, caused by mussolinian racial laws and the rise of the brown shirts. Shot in a stunning way, as the photography evolves in time with the periods, Vittorio de Sica’s film is a wonder like -in a different way- neo-realism classics were (The Bicycle Thieve, Umberto D.). Adapting the novel by Giorgio Bassani, De Sica, through the Finzi-Continis, evokes a certain idea of Europe, its culture and its values, through its aristocracy facing the rise of fascism. “When I show this people so little anxious of the threats upon them, when the father says “Mussolini is better than Hitler”, when the son blames his father’s lack of reaction against persecutions, I think I reflected well theses times”. De Sica’s will is not to tell about Micol’s love affairs but to make her a living image of European aristocracy’s position in fascist Italy and in whole Europe. The Finzi-Continis will be blown away by History, and, with them, a certain idea of European aristocracy which definetly ended with world war two.

The DVD is now available. More information about The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

In Johnnie To’s extensive filmography, the majority of works are clearly mob films – in fact, he’ll soon be shooting a remake of Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle) starring Orlando Bloom and Alain Delon. But the Hong Kong filmmaker has proven over and over his talent for romance, science fiction, martial arts and even cartoons. Sparrow belongs to this broader tendency, which has included the charming Yesterday Once More and the lighthearted Running on Karma.
The plotline is simple: a young Taiwanese woman is married to a powerful man who keeps her hostage by stealing her passport. She hires four pickpockets who steal it back in an extremely beautiful final sequence that is a throwback to Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). The cinematic references do not stop there. Johnnie To’s increasing passion for French cinema radiates throughout the entire film and gives it a nostalgic feel. Kei, the main character, played by the Clooney-like Simon Yam, wanders the streets of the old town center on an antiquated bicycle armed with a vintage camera. Sparrow thus offers us pure documents of the city, a striking change of pace for To, who is usually known for his aerial shots that bring everything, including still objects, into majestic movement. This documentary slant is a new approach for Johnnie To, who is likewise working on a project for an historic film with Jia Zhang-ke, a filmmaker who would ordinarily appear to be an unlikely choice for collaboration.
The levity of the film is hence called into question – or rather, one cannot speak of levity here precisely because the film itself plays with the concept. Since “sparrow” is local slang for pickpocket, the viewer may see metaphors throughout: photos snapped on the fly from a bicycle, a beautiful woman kept in a cage with a passport symbolizing a key, … But only one metaphor is truly important: Johnny To offers a bird’s eye view of the town. While action has been shown horizontally for the last decade (e.g., the bullet-time shots of Matrix or the lateral tracking shots of Old Boy), To returns to verticality, filming streets from the rooftop and vice versa, as his characters scramble up buildings, heels are broken and bicycles navigate the steepest routes.
In fact, more than To’s previous works and probably more than his future movies, Sparrow affirms the filmmaker’s attachment to his city and his desire to define its final image. The city has been in transition since 1997, when it was granted a fifty-year reprieve before total retrocession to China. Until 2046, Hong Kong will be free to do as it likes. Screenplays may very well become simpler: what matters is to inhabit the city, to film it before it disappears. From now to 2046 represents a long grace period, and To’s light approach to filmmaking may provide the best image of this suspended time.

Bastien Hader

Winner of the Silver Bear at Berlin Film Festival in 2006, Soap has been touring prestigious festivals ever since and experienced several theatrical releases. Why those theatrical releases have been mostly limited or so belated -in France for instance the film has just been released- is probably due to the very Scandinavian side of the film.

What is that ‘Scandinavian’ side? Is it that very same thing that actually played down as outstanding as award-winning features such as Elling by Petter Naess, Songs from the second floor by Roy Andersson, Insomnia by Erik Skjoldbjaerg (for which there even was an American remake!), Lilya 4-Ever by Lukas Moodysson or more recently The Bothersome Man by Jens Lien and even The Direktor by Danish director Lars Von Trier?

Why don’t those films yield as good results as in their home countries? Is it a question of language? (Those films are hardly dubbed and the international audience seems to find it hard to listen to Scandinavian sounds…) A question of climate? (Maybe it’s hard too for the general audience to handle the environment and the light from those Northern regions…) What else? Scandinavian style and culture? (A sick humor, a disconcerting self-deriding tone, as radical as unpredictable formal biases, no clear frontier between good and evil –unlike the US pattern-, which may be disturbing for the audience since there is no possibility to identify to a specific hero). Or simply precisely biases and shortcuts? (Scandinavian cinema = Bergman = Way too intellectual…).

And yet, Scandinavian cinema has never been so dynamic and innovative with emerging promising or established filmmakers such as Bent Hamer, Lukas Moodysson, Dagur Kari or Susanne Bier, and not the only Kaurismaki, Bergman and Von Trier –though the latter keeps renewing his work and stand out to that effect as one of the rare established directors to question and play with cinema as cinema maybe plays with its audience! In THE DIREKTOR for instance, Von Trier emphasizes the radicalism of his intention by producing DVD extras that preserve the derision of the film and by breaking his own status as a filmmaker and the actors’ images –turning his cast into mere victims of cinema machinery embodied in the film by the Automavision process, which frames in an uncertain way the characters (excluding them on and off from the field and deliberately escaping thus from the director’s control !).

Back to Pernille Fischer Christensen’s Soap, the film handles in an original and bold way the topic of transsexuality through the story of Veronica, a woman since always yet waiting for the ultimate surgery that will definitely and definitively remove all doubts to that effect. An introvert and romantic woman, Veronica watches day after day her favourite TV show, a soap opera. Until the day she meets by chance with her new neighbour, Charlotte, who’s just broken up with her boyfriend and moved into the building. Charlotte is a gorgeous extravert and strong-headed woman. And yet she’s far from being satisfied with her life. Something she can not identify is missing… Spiciness? Creativity? Love? All of them? In any case, she is fascinated by Veronica…

More demanding than Transamerica, Soap ventures into both sophisticated and bold formal paths –in the way of a soap opera- and follows realistic, complex and attaching characters, with an unusual, crude, humoristic, cruel, well ‘Scandinavian’ tone! An iced tragedy-comedy to be discovered absolutely !

Françoise Duru

In Cambodia, on March 18, 1970, Lon Nol, King Sihanouk’s prime minister, came to power in a coup d’état backed by the United States, whose goal was to reach North Vietnamese troops in the northern region of the country. With the support of China, the Khmer Rouge began a struggle to overthrow the government. Asked by the former king to fight against American imperialism, farmers and laborers joined the Khmer in massive numbers. On April 17, 1975, Phnom Penh fell into the hands of communist rebels. The following night, cities were emptied of their inhabitants, taken to the countryside for political indoctrination. Hence began one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, a genocide that would result in nearly two million deaths out of a total population of seven million.

Rithy Panh, eleven years old at the time, was among the stream of deportees forced to leave the cities for indoctrination by the Angkar (“The Organization”, the ruling body of the Khmer Rouge). On January 2, 1979, the Vietnamese, former allies in the struggle against the United States, overthrew the Pol Pot regime, and fear, hunger, forced labor and propaganda destroyed the memories and the identity of the Cambodian people. Like many of his fellow countrymen, Rithy Panh fled to Thailand, where he was miraculously reunited with his sister. After moving from camp to camp, he eventually made it to France with the help of the Red Cross, joining up with his brothers who had left the country before the tragedy.

Ten years later, in 1989, after earning a degree from the IDHEC French film school, Rithy Panh returned to the Cambodia-Thailand border to direct his first documentary feature, Site 2. Within a 4.5 km² (1.7 mi²) space were confined 180,000 Cambodians entirely dependent on aid that was distributed sparingly. Armed with a permit to film in the camp, Rithy Panh met Yim Om, whose testimonial served as the framework for the film. The director showed the daily lives of the displaced persons and their struggle to survive and maintain dignity in this environment. They were struggling as well to retain their memories of what had happened during, and before, the insane experience under the Khmer Rouge, in an attempt to reconstruct the identity of an effaced and annihilated people. With no voiceover or commentary, Yim Om’s words fill the space and through her, the negated memory of years of repression is finally expressed. Rithy Panh remembered Yim Om’s accounts when he directed the fictional feature Rice People four years later, constructed around rice farming, an ancestral activity that helped found Cambodian culture, had also been shattered by the Khmer Rouge and forgotten by children in interment, for whom rice “came from the U.N.” The director tackled the recent history of his country head-on two years later, in 1996, with Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy. The Khmer Rouge had worked to destroy individuals; Rithy Panh was struggling to keep the victims from being anonymous. With an “intellectual” couple that had been imprisoned and oppressed by the Angkar, Rithy Panh drew the picture of his country’s history during those dark times and attempted to give a face and a name to people who were designated as “enemies” to be “destroyed.” In a random incident the director would never have provoked, the film also shows the encounter in S21, the main prison and torture camp of the Angkar now converted into a museum, between Vann Nath, one of the seven survivors of the camp, and Houy, deputy head of security, who is confronted with paintings representing the horrors perpetrated on the prisoners. Forcing him to look at canvas after canvas, Nath asked the former torturer to confirm that the abuse depicted had actually occurred. The words validate the memories and confirm that this all had really happened.
In 1999, the director decided to follow Alcatel’s installation of a fiber optic cable along the former Silk Road in The Land of the Wandering Souls. Among those digging the trench intended for “magic eyes and ears,” he discovered former refugees of Site 2 who displaced persons, renting out their labor for mere crumbs. Accompanied for the first time by an entirely Cambodian crew, Rithy Panh once again gave a voice to those who no longer have a past nor a future, who are separated from their roots. Again focusing on the individual destinies of a man and a woman, the director gives expression to the ineffable suffering of a people whose universe had been destroyed and who now had to face themselves in order to become whole again. This approach was similar to that of Bophana and led to S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine in 2003. The extension of work he had begun in his previous two films, S21 focused on describing how the political core of the Angkar functioned. With the help of Nath, whom he had met while shooting Bophana, he searched for memories of the place. After finding former torturers who had worked at the camp, he gave them a voice as well, allowing them to face up to their part in the country’s collective history. One particularly forceful sequence shows a former guard, who has come back to the site, literally relive his previous daily routines, going back over movements and re-saying words, in an incredible exercise akin to a near-trance.

“What is especially at stake is to protect generations to come. In order to move forward, questions must be answered. We cannot leave our children with a gaping whole in our collective memories,” Rithy Panh writes. The same stakes hold true for his films: giving back to a country the memories of which it has been deprived, giving back a voice to those who are not heard, giving back a name to anonymous victims and confronting history in order to prepare for the future.

The four films box set which has just been released in France contains Site 2, Bophana, The Land of the Wandering Souls and S21. It’s a powerful testimony about one of the darkest hours in contemporary history and constitues a great opportunity to discover the work of a major author in documentary films.

Olivier Gonord

More informations about the DVD box set
More informations about Rice people

Joseph Morder has been maintaining an autobiographical diary for nearly forty years, utilizing various video formats. When contacted by Benoît Labourdette, who is in charge of the Pocket Film Festival, to direct a feature-length film with a cell-phone camera as his only window on the world, Morder entered movie history with J’Aimerais partager le printemps avec quelqu’un (literally, “I’d like to share Spring with someone”), the first feature-length movie with a theatrical release shot in this format.

The film would be a mere gimmick were it not for Morder’s talent for capturing unusually poetic and real moments thanks to the small lens: a cat at play, a romantic encounter, a trip to the country… The director also plays (unintentionally, if we are to take him at his word) with the election of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to create a character that is more fantasy than fact, a sort of media and visual monster. With the pocket camera, Morder adds a new chapter to his long diary, which draws on different cinematic formats, from Super8 to digital. Admired by Alain Cavalier, this “filmer” offers us a body of work that is not only a technical success, but also, and above all, a filmic success.

Before you started making a feature-length film on a cell phone, had you seen any other movies shot in this format? Did any of them inspire you?
I knew a certain number of films had already been shot on cell phones, and I asked to see the first one, by Jean-Charles Fitoussi: Nocturnes pour le roi de Rome [Nocturnes for the King of Rome].

Had you already considered making a film in this format?
Benoît Labourdette, who is in charge of the festival, proposed that I make a film for the Pocket Film Festival [festival of short films shot on cell phones]. He also made the same offer to other professionals. I’d already directed a short film called L’Insupportable for the festival, since I didn’t have a cell phone. I wanted to take a stab at making a feature with my filmed diary, a genre I’ve been making for 40 years. That’s how the film came about.

Do you think the cell phone was a determining factor in the way the film was directed?
Yes, I do. A standard camera wouldn’t have given the same results. When I shoot in a certain format, I try to think about how it’s specifically distinct, whether it be Super8 or digital. What the cell phone could produce in terms of image and sound is not at all the same thing as another format. That’s what interested me in the adventure: it was like plunging into totally uncharted waters. I mastered it little by little, and at the same time, that bothered me and I tried not to get to know it too well in order to maintain a state of surprise.

As you were exploring use of the cell phone, did you make a lot of rushes?
There were rushes, about ten hours, which isn’t enormous for something akin to a documentary. But the film was edited as a normal production, with a professional editor: Isabelle Rathery.

Are the events displayed fact or fiction?
They’re a mix. Fiction is a part of the film. For example, the scene where I lose my datebook is based on a real event that was transposed.

One senses that you like to tease reality. In Alain Cavalier’s films, his choice is what’s extraordinary within the ordinary. Your approach is more spontaneous, almost improvisational, in that you infuse fiction and something extraordinary into the ordinary.
Although there’s improvisation, there’s also work – especially with the actors – and certain situations are thought up beforehand. Within this framework, I let myself go along with whatever happens. That’s what interests me. In the scene with Sacha at the café, I didn’t know what I was filming until that shot where he’s smoking a cigarette. That’s how I work with a purely fictional screenplay: I try to extract what seems essential to me in any one scene. At the beginning, I don’t know what I’ll end up with. I improvise within defined territory. I direct the scene.

You direct it without a set.
Yes, and I’m open to the unexpected. With my previous film, El Cantor, which was written, had a storyboard and where everything prepared and rehearsed, I was still open to surprises when we were shooting. When I saw a bird on a lamppost, I’d ask my director of photography to focus the camera on it. It was all prepared well enough so that we were open to surprises. Even with 35mm films, you can get the same light feeling as with a cell-phone camera. Improvisation is something that truly needs preparation; you have to prepare tremendously in order to be amenable and open.

You try not to master the format you use. Is originality crucial for you?
For me, being original means, above all, being yourself. If that’s not what it means, I don’t know what is. But I also strive for a certain traditionalism, by incorporating the idea of avant-garde into this definition. I strive for something that can become traditional.

Twice at the beginning of the film, you point to the same street and say “Sasha.” Was that spontaneous, or was it part of the fictional storyline? That section reminds me of André Breton’s Nadja, where he shows Paris by introducing the streets, then ends up showing Paris by introducing Nadja.
This change emerged from the length of the shoot. Three months had gone by and I wasn’t thinking about Paris anymore, but about Sacha. At that moment, I was no longer trying to say “Paris”; Sasha was at the center of my thoughts. It was my own evolution and that of my character.

The cell phone, with the surprising way it handles contrast, truly “enchants” the world. When you film a camera, you say, “There’s your big sister.” You turn objects and animals…
… into characters. I have twenty-five plants at home and I say good morning to them every day. I think I have a deep sense of reality, but I like to interject a bit of fantasy or little amusing things into life.

The peculiar, “aquatic” image from the cell phone creates a sort of barrier between you and the world. When you film the elections, you have a specific relationship with your camera, but not with the politicians, who are filmed by a hundred anonymous cameras. You film the people who elected Sarkozy and say “madness” in Yiddish. Do you have a pessimistic vision of the world?
No, I don’t think so. I thought the Left would win up to the very end. I think I have an optimistic nature. I’m actually glad to see people laugh at the beginning of the film.

When you tackle different types of formats and images, are you trying to see the world in a new way?
I do it because I enjoy it. And I’m especially trying not to master the format I use. As soon as I become familiar with a format, I like to call it into question by moving on to something else, so as not to treat the image in the same way. I try to avoid any complacency. I don’t try to explain the world. Cinema is just a show. My only goal is to entertain the audience for an hour and a half, but still leave them with an “aftertaste,” with something that lingers. If I wanted to change the world, I’d go into politics, and even then…

Are you a compulsive filmmaker?
In part, but my background’s in narration. Into the storyline, I introduce sections that I wanted to film at a particular moment.

By Alexandre Péron, in Paris, France