Para leer también

The original title of Philibert’s article – ‘Accompagner les films’ – lacks a satisfactory equivalent in English. “Accompagner” in a film context spans multiple activities: heading out on the road with filmsto festivals and screenings; introducing them to audiences through debates and events; supporting theirpromotion through interviews, and so on. [Translator’s note]

Since I started out, I’ve taken part in hundreds upon hundreds of introductions and post-screening discussions in cinemas, naturally, but also in the occasional lecture theatre, high school, primary school, library, museum auditorium, temple, chapel, barn, hospital, under a circus big top, in prison, in a psychiatric institution, in a meadow, park, converted lorry, on a football pitch… not to mention in the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, where I showed my film Nénette (2010) to Nénette and the three orangutans with whom she shared captivity, in front of an audience of scientists from the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, curious to see how she’d react. Alas, after the first few images, Nénette made it clear she had better things to do. She returned to her nest and went to sleep.

In 1993, when it was released, presenting Le pays des sourds required particular care because the exchanges with the public needed to be translated into sign language. But sign language was almost non-existent, or at least still in its infancy, in the public sphere. Deaf people used it among themselves, but it rarely extended beyond the private domain. Forbidden in all European specialist schools since 1880, on the pretext that deaf children must be made to speak, it was only just emerging again. France had just officially recognised the right to bilingualism. In other words, interpreters were still very scarce and venue operators struggled to hire them. There were barely fifteen throughout France, whereas today there are several hundred. It was necessary to bring someone over from Paris or Toulouse. That was costly, and many venue operators would happily have skipped it. Happily, the venues were full. The deafresidents of a given town or the neighbouring towns passed the word around.

The discussions which followed these screenings were extraordinary. They might last an hour and a half, and would continue even longer out on the street. Many of the deaf who came would share their own experiences. So that they could be seen by everyone, because they were “signing”, they’d swiftly take to the stage and, once their contribution was over, they’d stay there, ready to contribute again. The following participants went up on stage in turn, until there were twelve, fifteen, twenty of us… It was the first time they’d seen a film in “their” language, and it was very moving. Some of them said: “Never before have I dared to sign in public. My parents always forbid me. I’ve always been told it’s ugly, disgraceful, pulling funny faces. Today, for the first time, I feel brave enough to sign in broad daylight!”

A barrier was being broken down and I was happy that the film contributed to that.

Presenting the film occupied me for more than a year. With Être et avoir (2002), it was two whole years, in France first, then abroad. Un animal, des animaux, which came out back in 1995, remains available; it’s still used in schools. I still get numerous requests today for La moindre des choses, released in 1997. Sur l’Adamant (2023) continues its run in cinemas… I ought to be happy beyond measure: not everyone gets such a chance! Sometimes I feel like I’m dragging my films around like a millstone around my neck.

Why have I agreed to do all this? Some filmmakers balk at it. It’s understandable: it’s exhausting, repetitive, most of the time unpaid, and to get paid – when you do – if you don’t have your own company, it’s an absolute nightmare!

Sometimes, the energy it takes becomes like the Stations of the Cross. You cover six hundred kilometres, five hours on the train followed by an hour and a half in thcar and when you get there… only nineteen people! The next day, you might well tell yourself that it was a lively debate, but you still go home with your tail between your legs.

Why do we go to such trouble? Why, on a personal level, have I done all this so consistently for the past forty-five years, emerging from the experience battered and bruised, having to push back the undertaking of the next film, often having the sense of going round in circles, when I could be moving forward? Shouldn’t films be allowed to keep their secrets? Can’t they live in people’s hearts or minds without them needing to hear why you put the camera here rather than there? Have you ever seen a theatre troupe or a dance company, as soon as the curtain falls, come and explain the whys and wherefores of the thing? “Doesn’t transmission,” asks Alain Bergala in L’hypothèse cinéma (Éditions Cahiers du cinéma, 2002), “sometimes need silence and tacit sharing?” The same Bergala who also writes that “art can’t be taught, it’s encountered, it’s put to the test, it’s conveyed by other avenues than the discourse of knowledge alone and, sometimes even without any discourse at all.”

With documentary films, distributors and cinemas try to reach specific audiences. Of course, one cannot blame them for this, but it’s a double-edged sword. Especially because documentaries, since they depict real people and real situations, are often not even recognised as films in their own right. Yes, it is a double-edged sword! Indoing so, there’s a great risk of confining documentaries to the straightjacket of their subject. The viewers who are most directly concerned don’t always have the distance necessary to see a film’s artistic dimension. They sometimes take the film for THE reality, forgetting that reality only exists insofar as it’s perceived, and perceiving the world is already reconstructing it. Forgetting that these images, their duration, the angle from which they were shot, and the way they are linked together, produce only one possible reading among many.

I still remember a screening of La moindre des choses (1997) for so-called professionals and other “psy” practitioners which had gone rather sour. They were on the defensive:

“It’s very nice, but your film isn’t remotely representative!”

Indeed, the La Borde clinic, where I’d filmed, occupied, and still occupies, a very singular place in the landscape of psychiatry. Later, some of those who rounded on me would become fierce advocates of the film, but at the time, they’d felt attacked.

Être et avoir has sometimes been criticised for similar reasons. For many people, documentary rhymes with sociology. The image of the school which the film conveyed wasn’t representative either. In France, a school, these days, is normally situated in an urban zone and not in the rural world. Even worse, the one I’d chosen was run by a male teacher, when the profession is mostly feminine. I’d thus committed “a double offence of non-resemblance” – I quote the film critic Frédéric Sabouraud – as though “a documentary ought to respond, before even asking if it’s good or bad, to sociological criteria concerning the representation of reality (…) to respect percentages, represent an archetype, create an identikit portrait, capture a snapshot of the present, (…) and inform people like a kind of census in images.”

So yes, I come back to it…Why put ourselves to such trouble? There must be some reason…

To “boost” box-office figures? That would be nice, but the effect is marginal. For the narcissistic pleasure of standing on stage? Why not. Narcissistic or masochistic? Because by constantly repeating yourself, you inevitably wind up trapping your own words – and film – in readymade responses, you know the phrases that land, that hit the target, and you end up resenting your own ease.

To convey something?

There it is – the word has been uttered! But first of all, can we know whether we are conveying something? And conveying what? Do we really know what traces we leave behind? Since a film always says something else, and says more besides, than what one has said, wanted to say, wanted it to say, or thought one had said.

To convey something? Is conveying something even our objective? Does we make films to convey something? Do I make films to convey something? Certainly NOT. It’s neither my primary intention nor my avowed goal.

Films often emerge from the mist, and sometimes they stay in the mist for quite some time. For me, they often come about by feeling my way along, blindly: “bare-camera”, as one says “bare-handed”.

What’s it about, exactly? What does it deal with? What story is it going to tell? you’re asked. But do you always know when you begin a film shoot? Do you really know what you want to say when you make a film? Do you even always know why you’re making it? Don’t you make it precisely to find out why? To understand what you wanted to make?

What were you trying to say with this film? you often hear people ask. “Nothing. I didn’t want to ‘say’ anything.” As though making a film consisted in putting language into images! As though a film ought to be the bearer of a message. As though a filmmaker is there to say what there is to say about this or that topic.

What, in cinema, speaks of cinema, is what escapes discourse, programmes and predictions.

The most beautiful scenes are often those which arise unexpectedly, without premeditation, that break in by force, on the spur of the moment; scenes that don’t try and produce meaning.

To escape the hold, the straightjacket, of the subject. Cinema isn’t necessarily enriched by a film with a big subject. The world isn’t just waiting there patiently, passively, for the filmmaker to come and gather images of it. The arrival of a camera always reshuffles the cards. The camera doesn’t capture reality, it transforms it, provokes it, jolts it, makes it suddenly appear.

Who conveys? To whom? When? How? All questions that are difficult to answer, since one doesn’t always know what one says as one says it, or what one does as one does it.

What one leaves behind is neither quantifiable nor measurable; even less predictable. Isn’t there also something that cannot be conveyed, something irreducible? To convey? Yes, why not, but rather to convey what one is looking for, not what one knows. “A filmmaker should only show what he doesn’t yet know,” said Marcel Hanoun. And Julien Green: “I write my books to know what’s in them.” I’ve borrowed his line. I make my films to know what’s in them. Or rather: I present my films to know what’s in them.

During one of the very first public screenings of Être et avoir, a woman raised her hand and said: You’ve made a film about separation. I was speechless: it was so true! And to think I hadn’t understood this dimension of the film, as glaring as it was.

Whether it’s making films or presenting them, cinema is what has allowed me, and still allows me, to tirelessly seek out the other, others, otherness. For the filmmaker I am, there’s nothing more beautiful than learning something about a film I’ve made from a viewer. As André S. Labarthe said: “I’ve made the film. All that remains is to leave it unfinished.”