Sophie Letourneur, Justine Triet, Virgil Vernier Art School Filmmakers Enter the Frame
Super-8 to make portraits that I couldn’t make in paint. I am a repressed painter. I went to Venice recently and I was very moved by the old master paintings there. In my new film, made for the first time with a cameraman, I referred to Renaissance images.
Justine Triet I entered the Beaux-Arts to do painting. It was a very hostile world: I spent two years making paintings in my corner. My best friend, Thomas LevyLasne, who plays in Vilaine fille mauvais
garçon (2012), is a painter. I would have preferred to be a painter but what attracted me about cinema is the popular aspect. I discovered editing on the course with Monique Bonaldi, who was a great teacher. It was a revelation. Editing interested me more than filming. I used images that I found to tell stories. Contemporary art didn’t suit me, one reason being that a lot of students were trying to work with references, a style of art that I really wanted to get away from. Leaving school was a rebirth. For five years I’d heard people telling me that you had to make films at the other end of the world, and I started thinking about this kind of French snobbery. As a result I made Sur
place (2007) and Solférino (2008). I didn’t want to be a director, but when I started exhibiting in galleries the little videos they asked me to make bored me. I wanted to make things that were more popular. You can make an experimental film based on an installation, or integrate the scene into a fiction, and then it becomes something out of the ordinary.
CONDITIONS OF PRODUCTION
Catherine Bizern You all studied at art school. Do you position yourselves more in the contemporary art world, or do you see yourself as full-fledged filmmakers? This question relates to the conditions of production of your work.
JT Yes, of course. Personally I tend to use the term filmmaker. SL I wouldn’t know what else to do! For Virgil it’s a bit different because he still keeps up with contemporary art. For me, it is narrative that defines the frontiers between f i ction movies and more experimental cinema. The financing of a film hinges on the script. VV I find the French term “cineaste” a bit pedantic, don’t you? A bit too neoNouvelle Vague. Ultimately, it’s basically an economic question: what door do you knock on for finance? We are dealing with an institution which insists on the mutually exclusive categories of documentary, fiction, art film, theatrical film. That reminds me of Gordon Matta-Clark: “The difference between architecture and sculpture is whether there is plumbing or not.” In the movies, the basis of a film is continuity of dialogue. My last film, Mercuriales, didn’t have a screenplay in the conventional sense of the word, more a kind of description of an imaginary film, in the conditional, without dialogue. For the Centre National du Cinéma (CNC) I had to add an introductory note. But it was so deliberate that it wasn’t too problematic, and they gave me a grant. Sophie, aren’t you worried that if your subject is too much under control you will lose the charm of your films? SL I don’t think so. A film is a machine that takes into account the viewer and that accepts its status as entertainment. My films always have a shaky side to them, like in Roc et Canyon (2007). A lot of people like
There has been a great deal of talk about filmmakers exhibiting in art museums and artists making films to illustrate the complex relations between cinema and contemporary art. Less has been said about the category illustrated by the three young filmmakers we speak to here: Sophie Letourneur, Justine Triet and Virgil Vernier all went to art school, but all belong firmly in the world of movies. Their films go on theatrical release and appear in festivals, and while their approaches are resolutely independent, they do not feel the need to work with galleries or museums. For all that, they still take a very sharp and uncompromising view of today’s art world—its exhibition strategies, its market, its formatted discourses. Their determination to make theatrical films injects new energy into the debate about crossovers between art and cinema, and the positions they take here shift its center from the ways of showing images to matters of production. After all, the aesthetic of a film is, more than ever, bound up with the economic conditions of its creation. What these directors say also points to a new critical position, a new, non-naturalistic politics of the image which observes the world and its dysfunctions from new angles and edges, without indulging in marginality. These filmmakers reaffirm the idea of popular film in the noble sense: not populist, but respecting cinema as an “art of the masses,” an art that should make no assumptions about the tastes or expectations of viewers.
Dork Zabunyan
INSPIRATION
Anaël Pigeat The three of you went to art school before you started making films. Is art your main source of inspiration, rather than the movies? Virgil Vernier I spent only a year at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. At the time, I wanted to meet Christian Boltanski and work with him, so I joined his atelier. We had wonderful discussions there, but the schoolish, institutional side of the place drove me away. Besides, I wanted to concentrate on making my own film. Oddly enough, that was the year I really discovered cinema, that I watched the greatest number of films, especially thanks to Jean-Claude Biette’s course at Jeu de Paume. What most interested me at that time was the art of the 1960s to the 90s, especially the Los Angeles scene: Ed Ruscha, Dan Graham, Paul McCarthy, etc. Rather than school, though, my experience of these artists came through music: when I was about fifteen I listened to Sonic Youth a lot. My first idea of Mike Kelley was the cover he did for their album Dirty. After that I spent a month in LA. Later, seeing films by Rouch, Godard and Pasolini, it occurred to me that I could make films that would connect what I loved in these Californian artists with a more European cinematic tradition.
AP Christian Boltanski plays in your first film, Karine (2001). Was it his films that attracted you to his work? I have never been really interested in experimental cinema, except Kenneth Anger. And it wasn’t Boltanski’s films that interested me the most, more his early works, his little books made from poor-quality photocopies, or the assembly of images based on the magazine Détective: faces of victims and murderers cut out from the pages, all put on the same level like a giant fresco of humanity. On his advice I left the Beaux-Arts and shot my first film. When he saw it, he was very disappointed. I don’t think he was expecting me to go off into such a narrative dimension, so far from his own work. Sophie Letourneur I was interested in art before I was interested in cinema. I was about fourteen, and going out with an older man who used to take me to a lot of exhibitions and films. I may have taken the state exam in visual arts, but he was the artist. Later I did a BTS in textiles at the École Duperré, and I started doing drawings, paintings and videos. I painted a lot, just for myself. Then one of my teachers encouraged me to take the Beaux-Arts and Arts Déco entrance exams. I passed, and I thought that if I wanted to earn money then I had to go to the Arts Déco. Wrong! Like Virgil, I attended Jean-Claude Biette’s classes at Jeu de Paume. At the Arts Déco my documentary teacher, Alain Moreau, steered me towards taking what I had to say seriously. My first film was about my mother. I have the feeling that I like doing things, more than actually having things to say. I never wanted to become a filmmaker, but when I started making shorts the questions of art and cinema didn’t concern me. In the end, I used