Être et avoir (2002)
A vision of the world
Geoff Andrew: If you weren’t here for La Moindre des choses — Every Little Thing [1997], welcome to the second part of our tribute evening for Nicolas Philibert. I’m Geoff Andrew, Programmer of the NFT and I’m going to be interviewing Nicolas with some help from the illustrious Paul Ryan who will interpret whenever we get into any difficulties.
Before the interview starts, we’re going to be running some clips and because some of you may not have seen too much of Nicolas’ work, I’ve chosen five clips; I think you’ll enjoy them.
We’ll start off with what is probably the most familiar: Être et avoir [2002], then we go into Louvre City [La Ville Louvre, 1990], then we will have [In the] Land of the Deaf [Le Pays des sourds, 1993], then we will have Trilogy for a Lone Man [Trilogie pour un homme seul, 1987] and then we will finish with Animals [Un animal, des animaux, 1996].
Don’t worry, this doesn’t go on forever, there will be an interview! But I think it will help us put the interview into context and also provide some entertainment. Let’s get on with the show. Enjoy yourselves.
[Clips]
GA: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Nicolas Philibert. [applause] … and Paul Ryan. I always get vertigo when I see that clip from Trilogy for a Lone Man… going along on that precipice… is that you we see in the background? Were you one of the people up on top of the mountain?
Nicolas Philibert: No.
GA: No, you weren’t.
NP: No, no, no. I was not… no, no, no… no, no. I’m not in the image, no.
GA: But we do see you later on the top?
NP: Oui.
GA: What is your fascination with mountain climbers and…
NP: I grew up in the Alps when I was a teenager… I ski and went to climb. Yes, I like mountains. I like climbing, I don’t climb any more… I wouldn’t do anymore such a film because it’s very… you’re filming… I was filming someone who is taking a lot of risks. He could fall and die. He has no rope, he was climbing alone without any security and it’s a strange situation… it’s a big responsibility. But… well, I like mountains. And to make films… it’s like… soulever des montagnes sometimes… sometimes it’s so difficult to make a film… to find the money, to convince a producer, etc…
Paul Ryan: It’s like lifting the mountain itself.
NP: Oui, oui.
GA: You talked there about how you grew up in the Alps in Grenoble. When did you decide to go into filmmaking and why? What was the attraction?
NP: C’est très difficile comme question.
PR: It’s a very difficult question. [laughter]
NP: My father was a teacher and he teached philosophy and he decided in the early 60s to… he loved cinema and he decided to… also to teach cinema. And he created a class open to everybody in the city to… and he presented films and gave analyses of the films etc. So when I was ten, twelve, I started sometimes to go and see the film and sometimes listen to my father explaining and I start to discover that the film… there was somebody behind these images. Somebody who had a vision… une vision du monde…
PR: A world vision… a vision of the world.
NP: Yes. When I was fifteen, seventeen maybe, sixteen, I started to dream of cinema but I couldn’t imagine myself as a director. It was too far… too difficult. I felt I had no vision of the world. And during… I’m still wondering if I have. But it took me a long time to be… to start to believe in my own possibility or own capacity. So when I was a student I started to… I wanted to get a job… comme stagière.
PR: Like an apprenticeship… an internship.
NP: Yes, on a shooting, and I was looking for that and I finally got one. I couldn’t go to any film school at this time. To be admitted in a film school you had to be very good in mathematics and physics [laughter] and I was absolutely very bad in these two disciplines. So I couldn’t make any school so I started to get a job on a shooting and I had one and then…
GA: You actually not only went into filmmaking but you went into documentary. Was that always your idea or did you ever think of becoming… we were talking yesterday about your admiration for Bergman and did you ever think of becoming a fiction filmmaker?
NP: It was… no I never… it didn’t happen that I woke up a morning and jumped out of my bed and said ‘I am going to be a documentary director.’ No, it never happened like that. In fact I made the first film, which was a documentary and then a second one, which was also a documentary and… maybe once I make fiction films, I don’t know… what I can say is what I like in documentary is the fact that you… in my case I can invent the film day after day.
I have no plan, no… I do not know in advance what I am going to shoot the day after or the next week or… I don’t know in advance the end of the film. Because it all depends on the sort of relationship you build with the people you film and… without any plans and programme and schedule and this is the real… it gives you a double feeling of freedom, because you have no plan and no… and also a certain fragility. I think that this fragility is what pushes me to give my best and to be… [French]
PR: On the look out all the time… very alert.
Influences and philosophy
NP: Yeah… probably the filmmakers who I most admire are fiction filmmakers but for me this… the border is perméable…
PR: It’s porous…
NP: …because between reality and imagination… il y a des liens tout le temps.
PR: There are links always between the imagination and reality.
NP: You speak very good English.
PR: Merci! [laughter] Toi aussi, mon ami.
GA: You studied philosophy and one thing that fascinates me about your films is that, although there’s never any commentary and you are dealing very much with what you find in the material world, and you’re showing us just people doing jobs or doing what they like, to me your films often make me think about quite serious philosophical questions.
So, for instance with the film that people have seen this evening, Every Little Thing, it does make you wonder, ‘what is sanity or normality?’ With Animals I think you… it actually made me think ‘well what does it actually mean to be human? What differentiates us from these creature that we see? What does it mean to be alive when what can happen to you is somebody might end up banging you around like a badger, and it seems to me that although you’re telling stories you’re actually dealing with quite serious philosophical ideas in your films.
Do you think that your studies in philosophy affected and influenced your filmmaking, and do you approach your films from that viewpoint of the ideas?
NP: Maybe, but I was not a very good student and I didn’t know… [laughter] really… I’m… it’s not… ce n’est pas de la fausse…
PR: It’s not false modesty.
NP: Oui. I was not so good in studies and when you make a film you don’t… I do not make my films from theories… theoretical ideas… to demonstrate any philosophical or political ideas or… it’s not like this.
Maybe my studies or my background is with me… consciously or not, but when I make a film it is never to prove something. It’s… maybe to ask questions. But not to say… to deliver a great message about whatever… about education… to the viewers.
This is very important for me, this idea that… I like to give the viewers material to think with but never to tell people what they should think. And politically it’s important for me.
GA: You worked with a number of very important filmmakers when you were an assistant. Joris Ivens, the great Dutch documentarist but also Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta. Did working with them influence you much at all?
NP: No, not at all. [laughter]
GA: I thought it didn’t but I just wanted to ask. Trilogy for a Lone Man, the film about the mountain…
NP: When… I’m sorry, when you start to make films yourself, you… in my case I try to be myself and to be as near as my thoughts and my convictions and as near as my desire and I don’t try to copy the others or to do like the others.
For years, the great filmmakers for me were… paralysing shadows… does it make sense in English? They are Bergman or Renoir, Dreyer or Rossellini, so important for me that when I was 22, 26 they were… it was heavy… too heavy.
GA: No, no, I fully understand that because I have devoted my working life to film in one way but I could never become a filmmaker because I would want to make films like Bergman myself. And I know I couldn’t, so… I decided to write about it and enjoy it instead. But I did wonder whether you’d learnt anything from working with people like Ivens, in particular.
NP: When I worked with Ivens he was 87 years old and I was myself director and he asked me to come with him to China. He made his last film in China, Une histoire de vent [1988].
PR: A Story of the Wind.
NP: Yes, he was very ill and it was a… I don’t know why I accepted that. Ivens filmed… La Longue Marche.
PR: The Long March…
NP: Yes, then he became a friend of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai and he was… in China he was… une personalité… well known, very famous etc. and it was for me the opportunity to discover China with this man who had a close relationship to China and to the history of China. And I came with him in this country and he was whispering orders to the team because he has only half a… un poumon.
PR: Half a lung.
NP: …left and it was… but… well…
Portraits
GA: Let’s go on to somebody who was rather healthier when you filmed him. Christophe Profit, the mountaineer.
NP: The climber, yes.
GA: This is one of a number of individual portraits of people you’ve made. You made one about Roger Lapébie and Maurice Baquet… why did you make those films about individual people? What was it, particularly with Profit, what was it that attracted you to them, apart from the fact you liked mountains anyway?
NP: It’s not my choice. I made my first film in ‘77/78. It was a film about big bosses, big industrial bosses in France, bosses of Elf or Waterman, IBM, etc. etc. It was a long feature documentary. And then after that I… during six years I couldn’t… none of my projects succeed…
PR: None of them came together.
NP: … for many different reasons. I had many projects and none came together. And somebody asked me to make this film… another one about this climber. I decided to do it. It was in… [French]
PR: It was a rock face near to Mont Blanc which was extremely vertical, very sharply vertical. It was more than a kilometre high… And the idea was to film this climber climbing up this very steep face without ropes, without anything really, just climbing up… And so Nicolas made this film to replace a filmmaker who, at the last moment, pulled out of actually making it himself… So chance plays a big part in life.
NP: So after that I made another mountain film with him. This one, you saw a clip. This one is a film which traces… individual exploits… he… Christophe decided to climb the three most difficult north faces in the Alps: Grandes Jorasses, Eiger and Matterhorn, and in a very short time, in 40 hours.
So I filmed that and it’s… it was at a moment where climbing was changing because the media came more and more to film… and you can see the helicopters and suddenly the mountain climbing is not this… c’est plus cette activité écologique… suddenly it’s like the rest… you have photographers, filmmakers, sponsors, financing, etc.
And I decided in this film to include the sponsor and the journalist to show how this activity was changing, to be a witness of that moment.
GA: We do actually see you in the film at one point.
NP: But… [French]
PR: You mustn’t think that before this media interest that mountain climbing had been some beautiful, pure activity. From the very beginning there was always this very competitive edge involved in mountain climbing. One only has to look at the time of Hitler, for example, where under Hitler, mountain climbers were encouraged to conquer the difficult north faces, in order, obviously, to give credit and credibility to the Hitler regime.
NP: So what I can see is that I made a few films with this guy climbing alone… à sa demande.
PR: At his request.
NP: …But after that I made my mountain film, the one I wanted to make and which is a film who shows, not an individual exploit but… [French]
PR: Two climbers together on the same rope.
NP: It’s a celebration of the rope and the rope is a symbol… it’s something very strong. So it’s the idea that it’s a film, this one… Le Come-back de Baquet, Baquet’s Come-back [1988]. It’s another story of mountains but the rope is essential, it links people together… you say that?
PR: It links people together.
NP: You are attending my English lesson.
GA: And if you want to see Le Come-back de Baquet, it’s actually playing with Trilogy for a Lone Man so you can see both films.
Institutions
GA: You also went on to make a number of films about institutions. They could be schools, museums, psychiatric clinics. What was your hope or your aim in making those films? Was it to discover an unfamiliar world?
NP: Any of them is a different story. For me they are not films about institutions, even if I made them within this place, this museum or this psychiatric clinic, but they are not films about the institution. For example, about this film, Every Little Thing, I often say that it’s a film… [French]
PR: It’s not something that Nicolas made about the institution but thanks to the institution.
NP: Because this director, these people working here, being patient, let me be here. And they guide me and they help me and they encourage me.
Before the screening I said a few words about my scruples. The idea is not to make films about institutions. It’s more like to confront myself, my own scruples, my own fear, my own curiosity, my own willing of being with the others to understand the world around. It’s more like this, that’s why I made this film about deaf people or this one in the psychiatric clinic.
The idea is not to describe how it works; it’s a pretext to… I don’t know what is the subject of Every Little Thing. Is it theatre? Is it asylum? Is it illness… health… la maladie mentale…
PR: Mental illness.
NP: …Mental illness. It’s all this and something else, it’s maybe a film about what we… [French]
PR: That which brings us to the others, brings us back and next to others.
NP: It’s a pretext in a way to talk about that… what links to the others. Wiseman makes films about institution more than I do. But it’s not my subject, I would say more.
I would say that I don’t care about the subject. The subject, as I said yesterday, is totally secondary. What gives me the desire to make this film or this one, it is not the subject. Because I consider that the subject doesn’t make the film. This subject is… you can make, I think, a great film with a very tiny subject.
To Be and to Have [Être et avoir, 2002], the everyday life in a school, it is totally banal in a sense. It is not in fact for the kids. It is very important for any kids, the school… and for the teachers and for the parents. It’s not… but it looks banal. It’s the everyday life.
I’m convinced that you can make films in the next café… because in the next café there are men and women and stories and suffering people and all life. It’s more a question of way of looking at reality, much more than the subject… which is important for me. It’s not… I would say the quality of a film is not related to the importance of the subject.
GA: Do you do a lot of research? When you finally decided, ‘I think I’m going to make a film about this,’ do you do a lot of research into the milieu that you’re filming in?
NP: No, not at all. I don’t want to, I don’t read, I don’t see the specialist, I don’t want to… that’s why I said to Jean Oury, the director of la Borde, when he started to explain me, ‘I don’t want to hear your explanations.’
Why, when you make a documentary with knowledge, from knowledge, you are quickly the one who knows and who tries to deliver the knowledge to these poor viewers who don’t know anything about the subject. And I’m not in this position… I don’t like this position. I’m not a teacher. I do not know this reality better than you do or the others.
I have no message… I have to give maybe questions and ideas or elements to think with. But not slogans, not ideas, not… and the less I know is the freer I am.
If you start to read books, ‘oh, yes, I read… oh yeah, it is important to say this and to say, oh, yes, and this. Or if I say this and this I should also say this and this’ etc. And you are a prisoner, you are a hostage of your knowledge and you start to be a teacher. I make films to learn something, not to teach the others.
GA: So how do you prepare for a film? Because what strikes me in your films is how relaxed and comfortable the people you’re filming seem to be in the presence of your cameras and crew. So you actually… they seem to be very intimate films but not in the way that… you never really feel that they’re voyeuristic.
NP: I think the question of the relationship with the people I film is in the middle of the film. What is Every Little Thing? It is the story of, in a way, the story of an encounter between me and the crew and these people. As you could see in the first image, they are far away, and little by little we are going closer and closer to try to communicate and to… and at the end Michel says ‘and now you are… entre nous…’
PR: You’re in us and we’re…
NP: Yes, and it’s wonderful, this sentence. And the film… the story of this film is how we can, or not, communicate and what is it to go in such a place with the camera, with the power that the camera gives you… the question is how not to… [French]
PR: The question is not to abuse the power that you have in that situation.
NP: To find the right distance to the people you film, etc. And these questions are here, and they are here for me when I am filming and because they are my questions, they are… little by little they become your questions.
And I think that for the viewers, something happens which is similar to what happened to us. You came here to see this film, probably with a lot of prejudice, as I had when I came to this psychiatric clinic. I had so many prejudices about mental illness etc. I was frightened.
And little by little, maybe you lose your prejudices, or part of them, just because we start to meet people. And behind the clichés appear people — and true people — and we start to discover that these patients, we never know if, for some of them, if they are patients or if they belong to the staff.
The film doesn’t say or it’s not written ‘schizophrenic’ or ‘psychiatrist’ here. In many cases, with many people, we can guess, but with some of them, we don’t know and I still don’t know with some people in La Borde because I never ask ‘are you schizophrenic or are you…’ [laughter] The film shows… it’s like the border between documentary and fiction. The film shows that you can be both a patient and… [French]
PR: So you can be both… at the same time you can be both ill and the healer.
NP: I mean not professionally. [French] But you can… [French]
PR: Yes, so someone who is sick can actually do good to someone else.
NP: …look at… remember the scene with… when Philippe learns [French]
PR: The stilts…
NP: During the shooting, many patients… I was, you know, with my problems and the film, and very often some patients came to me, ‘how are you Nicolas? You look… what’s happened? Can we help?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ You are not… [French] most of the time mental… [French]
PR: Someone who is mad is not necessarily…
NP: Mad people are not mad… always mad 24 hours…
PR: A day.
NP: A day. They have crises or not and most of these people are very, very clever, very intelligent. And as you can see, they have humour, as Michel or Philippe have, etc. And they have moments of lucidity… remember this moment when Claude, the man with the beard, is looking at the sky, there’s the sun and he looks and suddenly he looks at me and asks… [French]
PR: ’And the blind, where do they live’?
NP: Why do you think he asked that? I never understood at the moment. But, I made… just before, I made a film called In the Land of the Deaf and I showed them this film before shooting this film. I came with a tape and I showed to la Clinique de la Borde In the Land of the Deaf. Claude didn’t attend this screening but he knew… he learned that, he heard that and once he asked me, ‘and the blind, where do they live?’
Humour, language and sound
GA: Humour is actually quite important in your films, I think. They’re often very, very moving in certain ways but when I watch them I find many things amusing in them. Is that quite important to you? Because sometimes you’re finding things that are funny, but also you’re creating it in the editing.
NP: Yes, but it’s not like ‘I’m going to put humour in my film.’ It’s like you are… it’s… I think that… well…
GA: But in the montage, in the editing, you’re sometimes creating humour… deliberately.
NP: Oui. Yes. Oui.
GA: I want to ask about…
NP: [French]
PR: We can’t… you can’t be too serious all the time.
NP: The world is so dark and so… I’m not this optimistic… it’s like if I need to… for example, many people say about Être et avoir, ‘why did you choose such a school?’ Why? Because. ‘But why did you choose a school at the countryside? They are less and less. It is not sociologically representative.’ Because for a documentarist, we should always make films sociologically representative.
But I just wanted to make a film in a school at the countryside. And they are less and less because human beings in our countries live more and more in cities. ‘So why didn’t you show a school in a big city with the violence?’ etc. Some people consider that this film To Be and to Have is a bit idealist or… you have this word?
PR: Idealist, yes.
NP: Idealist, etc. etc. And [French]
PR: It’s true that the film flirts a little with the idea of utopia.
NP: But, it’s like if I needed to… [French]
PR: Because the world is such a dark place, in order to continue to believe in something, Nicolas feels it’s very important to film these situations in small communities where they’re getting to grips with the problems of living together.
GA: I want to talk to you briefly about representations of reality. Because sometimes you’re simply observing things happening, but sometimes I believe you enable things to happen. The scene with the teacher and JoJo counting in thousands… am I right in thinking that you suggested to the teacher that he should perhaps do this with JoJo to see what happened?
NP: Yes, I did. I very often suggest scenes. It doesn’t mean it’s… suddenly it’s fiction. It means that I ask them to do something which… anyway which is close to them and belongs to them. It would be a fiction film if I had asked them to do something which is totally different from what they are. But if I ask them to count or to redo an exercise or to… you know, it’s like everyday for them.
And very often I suggest, like all the documentarists, or most of them, I think, I suggest or sometimes provoke scenes. But in La Moindre des choses, maybe there are some here and there. But we could say that even if I do not ask, the fact I am here changes the behaviour of the people I film, of course.
We always hope that the camera won’t change much. We always would like that it changes as little as possible and lets people be as natural as possible, as spontaneous as possible. But it changes a little bit… a part of the job is to obtain that… the behaviours change as little as possible. If your camera paralyses children… a shy one, it’s… ça va pas…
So the whole job is in the relationship to the person you film. It’s the most important aspect, it’s the most important part. I think because from that the film will be this one or another one… The kind of relationship you have with the people you film is… it’s on the screen, I think.
GA: I’m just going to ask one more question before throwing it open to the audience and that’s… it centres really around the clip I chose from Louvre City, which some of you may have wondered why I chose that. And the reason is double fold. One is that, like the scene from The Land of the Deaf, it concerns language.
These two people hanging pictures are speaking in a completely incomprehensible language to each other, where it doesn’t really make sense to anybody outside of that world. And I think that language is something that interests you quite a lot.
The other thing is that that is all done in one take and quite often your films are constructed with quite long takes, and rhythm seems to be very important to you. So could you just talk a little bit, first about if you do have an interest in language, why do you have that interest, and secondly about the pacing of your films, the rhythm.
NP: All my films are… not all, not the mountain and climbing films, but most of my films are talking about language, communication, how to be with the others, how to communicate to the others, sign language. In Every Little Thing, of course, the language is in the centre. In To Be and to Have also, of course. Maybe less, this film in Louvre City but it’s not in the… but it’s…a film with the bodies… how the bodies move in the space of a museum.
If you… for those who have seen this film, we see all sort of workers from the curators to the workers, plumbers, security guards, painters etc., those who restore the paintings or the sculpture etc. and through all these different jobs and people, I like to show how they move in the space, how they de-place, how they… it’s very important the noise of the… [French]
PR: The footsteps.
NP: The footsteps… like in Tati’s film, the sounds. In Le Louvre, the ceilings are very high and the rooms are often very huge — immense — and when you come with a sound engineer… after two minutes you see that he’s totally demoralised because the sound is… [French]
PR: There’s too much echo and reverberation.
NP: Reverberation. So the sound is very difficult. So you have nothing else to do than to accept that and to use it, like Tati could use it, you know. Even if you don’t get all the words, it’s like a gymnastic… but what’s strange is these two curators are like a man and his woman in their own dining room, you know, [laughter] ‘What do you think of it? ‘… it’s like this in Le Louvre also, exactly the same.
When the director of the museum discovered the film, he was… he laughed and laughed and he was really happy, but he asked me, ‘there’s a small problem… maybe… how the audience will understand that we have alarms? We never see that. We just see people hanging paintings like this. Maybe we should… there… okay… as you could see there is no voice-over. Think about it and find a solution’ and I found one. I ask somebody to ask another one, ‘maybe we should plug the alarm now?’ [laughter]
Audience questions: Every Little Thing
GA: Okay, I’m sure there are some people with questions, yes, in the centre.
Audience member: [inaudible…]
NP: I didn’t get everything, I heard ‘did they see the film?’
Audience member: Did they see the film? How did it affect them and their families and their lives and how do you feel about the impact that you have…
NP: They were the first people to see the film, of course. The people I film are always the first to see the film. But… they didn’t see the different steps of editing. I ask people to be confident until the end. But you never know what… especially, maybe with [French]
PR: Psychiatric patients.
NP: Maybe something can happen and so what I decided to do was to show the film to one or two psychiatrists before, to be sure that there were no problems, and they said ‘we are unable to assure you totally that nothing will happen but we think that your film is totally honest and it will be…’
So we made a screening in the nearest city and it was… in the clinic it was a very important moment. The patients one week before started to make cakes and to… for this event, and it was something nice. And we made this screening. And I was a bit surprised that I had no reaction from the patients at the beginning. From the staff, yes: ‘oh, I am… oh…’ etc. The people from the staff could talk about their own image… the schizophrenics, they didn’t talk about their image, never.
And they bought a small… a nice blue notebook and during three months this notebook went from one room to another and there were many to write something, reflections… And they talked about editing, about the wind in the trees, about the rhythm in the film, but they never talked about themselves. It was… after three months they offered me this… of course it’s, for me it’s like a… c’est un trésor.
PR: A treasure.
NP: Yes. Do you remember Hervé? The guy who danced… Hervé didn’t want to be in the play but two days before, of course, he suddenly wanted to be in the play, so they tried to find a costume for him and a part, etc. That’s La Borde. You have to. He wants to so… I asked a question to Hervé, after the screening: ’ Hervé, how did you find yourself on the screen?’ He said something like ‘I don’t care…’, he didn’t say ‘I don’t care’, he said [French]
PR: I’ve already seen myself in the mirror. [laughter]
GA: Yes, you had a question.
Audience member: [inaudible…]
NP: Because… I didn’t get the end… first I repeat the question.
GA: Why did you call it Every Little Thing?
PR: Why the title?
NP: The title? How much it cost? Did I ask them permission?
Audience member: And the last one is what is your next film?
GA: A lot of questions.
NP: Every Little Thing. Yes, the idea of the title came… I found that in a book… a sort of… an essay about La Borde, this clinic, and the author has a sentence like… [French]
PR: Institutional Psychotherapy, what a barbaric word. When you ask Jean Oury, the founding director of the clinic what it is, this institutional psychotherapy, he says it’s the least of things, rather than every little thing…
NP: It’s the least you can do…
PR: Yes, it’s the least you can do, exactly… for these people.
NP: So, now, a short explanation about psychothérapie institutionelle… [French]
PR: It’s a current of psychiatry. It’s a way of giving back to the word asylum, what it really means in origin… as a shelter, to protect.
NP: In French asylum is a bad… is a word… [French]
PR: It’s a word that suggests being locked up and that sort of thing.
NP: As you could see, this place is a place of freedom and culture, where everyone can go here and there and they are protected. And they are against the violence of the world, of society. The other idea of this movement is that to… if you want to make… [French]
PR: If you want psychiatry to help to heal people, you have to, in the first place, heal the institution itself, to avoid all the difficulties of institutional life, in other words to heal and to refresh the institution of psychiatry itself.
NP: The second point, did I ask them? Of course I didn’t. I stole their image. I am a thief. I didn’t ask, no, of course not, you know it’s… [French]
PR: It’s the least one can do.
NP: …to ask. Not only to ask, but you don’t have to consider that the answers people give you, and they don’t give you answers, it’s not like if you say ‘who wants to be filmed and who doesn’t?’ It never happens like that.
When we arrived we started to explain the project during a few days and to these ones and here and then, and also to play cards and to drink a coffee or smoke a cigarette, to be with people. Little by little we started to explain what we wanted to do, always saying, ‘if you don’t want to be filmed, you won’t be filmed. Just let me know. The reasons are yours, I even don’t want your reasons. It’s not… it’s your secret, it’s your…’
So from that point… don’t think that you have half of them saying ‘I want to be filmed and I don’t want.’ Maybe two people among the whole clinic said ‘I prefer not.’ One from the staff and one patient. The others just wanted to see what happens, what’s going on with this?
And if somebody comes to be filmed one day, it doesn’t mean that he will be okay the next day, because you can accept to be filmed at certain moments and not two hours earlier or two hours later.
If I want to film you now, maybe you tell me okay but tomorrow at the breakfast you could say ‘no, please, let me be… I’m not awake — leave me alone.’ It is something which fluctuates and you have to rebuild something every day.
A response is not forever, confidence is not forever, you have to feed that every day, the confidence. For me, that is the main thing, that confidence. You… it’s a flashback to one of your questions about that. How people can feel at ease… I think I tried to show and explain to people that I’m not here to steal their image. I’m not a thief, I’m not… my camera is not a surveillance camera. I’m not here to judge people I film, and I’m not here to film them at any moment.
It’s very important not to film, to renounce. I film maybe between 20 minutes and one hour a day. I’m not filming all the time with three cameras… not at all. It’s a question of feeling and I try to be respectful to anyone. It’s not always easy because sometimes we… you can be clumsy.
GA: Was it expensive or not?
NP: The cost, I don’t remember, maybe £200,000, which is quite a lot for a documentary but a very low budget compared to a fiction film of course. And your last question?
Audience questions: Pierre Rivière and ‘Patrons Télévision’
GA: Your next film.
NP: My next film. In a few words, 30 years ago I was assistant caméra for a fiction film in Normandy, shot from a book by Michel Foucault, the philosopher. It was the story of… Michel Foucault didn’t invent the story but he re-found the documents about a crime committed in Normandy by a young peasant, eighteen years old, in a small village. This young peasant, Pierre Rivière — Peter River — killed… [French]
PR: He slit the throats of his…
NP: … his mother, one of his sisters and one of his brothers. The filmmaker decided that first there was a book with… [French]
PR: All kinds of documentation dealing with this case from the nineteenth century… The interrogation of the killer himself, the pleas of the lawyers and the medical reports and everything else… And above all a text written by this young murderer himself in prison… He was considered to be someone completely backward and then suddenly it was discovered, this extraordinary text, which he’d written…
So that was the title, many of you will know the film, I am sure, I Pierre Rivière, Having Slit the Throats of My Mother, My Sister, My Brother, I Want to Explain to You What Pushed Me to Take This Action [Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère, René Allio, 1975].
NP: So, from this book, made with these documents gathered by Michel Foucault, the filmmaker René Allio made a film. And René Allio decided when he made this film to give the main parts to peasants in Normandy, in a village close to the village where it happened one and a half centuries before.
This happened in the middle of nineteenth century. And I was assistant and my job consisted first to find and look for these peasants who could play in the film. And accept to leave their animals, their farm etc. to come and play… [French]
PR: In old fashioned costumes.
NP: So my film will consist in… I want to re-find them, 30 years later and… [French]
PR: He’d like to get their news, 30 years after having worked with them on the René Allio … See what they have become… And what trace the film itself, the film that René Allio made, left on their lives. And what actually is cinema in relation to an experience like this.
GA: Now, there’s a lot of hands, we’re going to have to stick with people having one question only please. So, yes, down here.
Audience member: What happened with Patrons Télévision [1978]? Why was it banned?
NP: Yes, Patrons Télévision is a TV version of my first film, the first… the cinema version was His Master’s Voice [La Voix de son maître, 1979]… this film about industrial bosses. There was also a TV version, three hours, three separate hours, for television, which has been censored at this time by the French government, by our Prime Minister. [laughter]
Audience member: Why?
NP: Why? Because one of the bosses let the cinema version in the… be released in the cinemas, in theatres, but learning that it will be on the television, he was worried for his image. He started to… yes, because at a certain moment he… [French] bafouille…
GA: Does anyone know this French verb?
Audience member: He gabbers on…
PR: Oh, I see, thank you very much.
NP: Voilà… [French]
PR: So he complained as far as the Prime Minister… So the Prime Minister then rang the head of the television station, which was a public television station, and the programme was taken off.
NP: And two years later — if you want shortly the end of the story — two years later, Mittérand arrived in power and all the TV staff changed, new ones arrived and they all said ‘yes, of course we are going to show this film about the bosses and economic power, of course we will.’ And they received me etc. etc. and nothing happened.
Nothing happened. I asked a young socialist député to enquire why nothing happens and he finally after six months, he finally said ‘This boss was at school with Mittérand.’ They were childhood friends. So this film has never been… it’s been censored by the right and then by the left.
Audience questions: capturing reality
GA: We’ve got a few minutes left, yes at the back there in the centre.
Audience member: I just wondered to what extent… how you managed to capture reality… [inaudible…]
GA: To get people to act as naturally as possible.
NP: [French]
PR: Contrary to what you might think, he doesn’t hide away watching over people… I’m here with the people, I’m very close to them.
NP: It’s not forbidden to look at the camera or to… I am here with them so they can look at me or look at the camera if they like… if they… I’m not the one to hide… you understand? So they feel… usually they feel at ease. If they are not, I do not film them. That’s what I could say.
For example, Nathalie in Être et avoir… or some days people in this film you’ve seen… some days they felt at ease, some days no. And the days they feel bad I do not film them. I do not force the doors, I do not enter in the rooms: ‘I’m going to film you when you are suffering on your bed… lying on your bed.’ I’m not this way. I film what they give to me.
That’s why I talked about my scruples when I arrive in this place. I didn’t want to… [French]
PR: Nicolas was fearful that a camera in a place like that would be an abuse of power.
NP: But little by little, they encouraged me, they allowed me, they told me ‘listen, your scruples honour you. But you should confront yourself to them, to your own fear that we inspire you. And we’ll be here to help you, to guide you. Trust us. Go on.’ And finally, why did I make this film? To confront my fear and my scruples and to try to… dépasser…?
PR: To bypass this.
NP: I still hesitate after the first meeting, the first… during long time but what… [French]
PR: What got it going.
NP: …what decided me to make the film is when I learned that every summer those who want — not everybody but a part of them — gather to build a play. So I started to think if some of them want to play theatre, they accept to be seen and to give something, to give something to the others, to play with the others. They accept that people can look at them. So maybe a camera is possible.
But as you talk about reality, I would say maybe it’s something for me very important. Documentary is always a victim of misunderstanding. Under the pretext we film true people, real people, true situations, real situations. Many people think that what is on the screen is raw reality. But it’s not, because don’t forget that when we see around us, when we see the world we already reconstruct it, we already interpret reality.
And in any case a film isn’t objective. It’s always the vision of the filmmaker or, in the case of the news, TV news, it’s the point of view of the… [French]
PR: The editor of the…
NP: Yes… but it’s always a certain point of view. Among many, if, for one reason, any… [French]
PR: From the moment that we have to take account of any kind of reality, no matter what, we interpret it.
NP: So these images or these ones or these ones are not raw reality. You have to think always, that it’s… they have been made by a certain person who decided to put the camera here or here to trace or not the persons who are filmed. And the duration of the image and the way they link with the others makes a certain sense etc. etc. We could multiply the…
GA: I’m afraid…
NP: And because… Oh sorry… you are afraid… sorry. I am afraid too. [laughter]
PR: We are all afraid.
NP: Because of this big misunderstanding, people always consider that documentary is not cinema or is not… even in my own family, you know, my uncle, after each new film: ‘Nicolas, it is wonderful, but listen, when will you make a real film?’ A fiction film is un vrai film. But it’s too bad because it means that very often people consider that documentary can’t have a metaphoric dimension or a symbolic way of tell… [French]
PR: Of telling about the world.
NP: Yes.
GA: Well, we do have to stop, I am afraid. But Nicolas does make real films. I encourage you to come and see them because they really are splendid and they do have a metaphorical dimension or a poetic dimension or whatever you like to call it. They are superb. And I would just now like you to put your hands together and thank a very, very fine filmmaker for…
NP: [French] — as he produces a digital camera and points it at the audience
PR: Without authorisation, without your permission…
NP: If some of you are a bit… you can… but if you are ok, please…
[applause]
NP: I’m not taking the picture when you applaud because it’s too much, you know? Too bad. It’s £1 for the…
GA: Thank you very much for coming.
Interview © BFI 2005
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