Albert Serra, A Calm Anarchist
Albert Serra’s latest film, Pacifiction, which was presented in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, will be released on November 9th, 2022. In July, the Spanish director was also in the spotlight at FIDMarseille with a retrospective and a master class. Fabrice Lauterjung talks with this filmmaker who has so strong ties to artpress that he is the president of Après l’école, biennale artpress des jeunes artistes, Montpellier 2022, which is being held this autumn, and whose catalogue accompanies this issue. Here, his unique working method, his vision of the image and his (non-) direction of actors are discussed.
Your working method consists in filming a lot, with three cameras and therefore three angles per shot, which allows you to accumulate a quantity of rushes, from which you then extract the material that will become the film. This material is necessarily only a small fragment of what was recorded. The Lord Worked Wonders in Me (2011), which is like the making-of of a film that doesn’t exist, lays bare your artistic approach and might be a possible gateway to your work and your way of working. The film is quite sophisticated from a formal point of view: it’s the idea of seeing how a crew makes a film. But since you never see a camera, you gradually realize that the film being shot is the film that you are watching. There is no other film, but the point of view is somewhat ambiguous. This is something that is present in all my work. For example, in Liberté (2019), all the shots in the film could be said to have a different point of view. This is quite rare in the history of film. It’s like a series of subjective shots. In The Death of Louis XIV (2016), the scenes are more objective, and in the latest film, Pacifiction (2022)—about the life of a high commissioner (played by Benoît Magimel) who becomes paranoid—the point of view is primarily objective, to the extent that you ultimately get into his head, into his own paranoia. This mixture of objective and subjective points of view creates the sensation of a broader, more formal space off-screen, which involves more than just the dramatic content related to the images. I think you have chosen the right film as a starting point: The Lord Worked Wonders in Me foreshadows this off-screen space that is subsequently unveiled, little by little and, I hope, with greater complexity each time.
INDISCRETIONS
Liberté is a film that spends its time creating a mise en abyme of our spectator’s gaze, to the point of making us feel guilty. Most of the characters—prowling silhouettes that observe and comment on the acts committed—intensify the scopic drive implied by the cinematic device. Especially since everything takes place in the dark and nothing is ever fully shown, not even the explicit scenes. Visually, the film compels us to “feel our way,” in a sense. Added to which is the essential importance of listening, which refers back to the Marquis de Sade.This listening concerns the uttered words, which always anticipate and comment on the acts (and therefore the scenes), but it also concerns the noises and cries contained in this libertine night. Listening and looking are treated as means of surveillance. Yes, because any form of listening is a form of indiscretion, in a way: it is the desecration of something that could have remained intimate. There’s a small tension between exhibitionism and voyeurism. As a director, I am in the position of somebody who has no ideas, who has nothing to say, who has no control over what is going on, who cannot project anything, who is just present with his indiscretion, listening to what others are saying. It’s a bit like Andy Warhol’s attitude: recording everything, asking intimate questions, sometimes violent, sometimes ambiguous, trying to push the boundaries in a repetitive way. He gives the impression that he has nothing to say, that he is doing nothing more than listening to others. I understood right away that this helped to avoid clichés.This is one of my obsessions. If you already have an idea of the dialogues, or even an idea of the action, when you write it, it will be prosaic. Having it rehearsed by an actor is even more prosaic, it disappears under layers of control. And watching it afterwards can be a disgrace! It's so controlled that you lose the violence and danger of the indiscretion of listening. When everything is really controlled, it becomes commonplace. I really like the idea that dialogues are there to hide things, not to illuminate them, not to make them transparent; these are ideas that come from Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, from Jean-Luc Godard. Language
hides, or if it does illuminate, it does so in an indirect way that will create an image in the spectator’s mind rather than providing an explanation of the action, the drama or the characters.
There is a kind of paradox for Warhol, for you, and for most of the filmmakers who have this approach to cinema that you’re describing: for the film to “make itself,” you have to implement a device to “trap” the events. For you, this device involves the triangulation of the cameras during filming, which creates a 360° peripheral vision, imposing a permanent discomfort on the actors which enables them to surpass their classical performance. You have to be very actively destructive to avoid any form of normality; you have to abandon the actors. Abandonment is the gateway to vulnerability. Vulnerability is the gateway to innocence.You have to pretend not to be active, whilst being very active on the destructive side, to provoke the possibility of creating situations that are out of control: out of the control of the actor, the director, the production. But there are cameras watching, recording all of this chaos which is invisible to human eyes.There is a subtlety of details, a logical assembly that I am then able to restore after the fact, during the editing stage. You can’t think up and imagine all this as you are filming. On the shoot, you are just present with the bodies, with the language of the bodies that are out of control. Warhol is a great inspiration for contemporary cinema. He understood everything, but didn’t have the tools; all his intuitions were partially achievable, but with digital technology it becomes possible to achieve all our dreams. When the difference between real life and the fictional life of a film becomes uncertain, when people can no longer distinguish between the two during filming, and everything merges, that’s another aspect that I’m very interested in. To achieve this, you have to have a Warholian coldness, a total, glacial indifference, as Jean Baudrillard said.
RETURN TO STORYTELLING
Three of the great contemporary filmmakers (I’m thinking of you, Pedro Costa and Wang Bing), have in common the fact that their body of work has been built with digital technologies. The three of you film a lot—if I’m not mistaken, there were 540 hours of rushes for Pacifiction. This approach of accumulating images is almost induced by digital technology. Which also confirms that great artists are always capable of using the techniques and technologies of their time, and of making the most of them. I don’t think anyone has taken this possibility to its logical conclusion; and you have mentioned, perhaps, the three directors who have exploited it the most, each in a slightly different way. In my case, the excess of rushes is related to the dialogues, which are always improvised. When we finished shooting the latest film, the dialogue transcript was 1,260 pages long; without this stage of work, I can’t sit down and start editing. To make dramatic, poetic, allusive dialogues, you have to be very precise. Each dialogue is a collage of several layers. You have to start from material that already exists. You can’t start from scratch and imagine everything. It’s the same with images. It’s a process that is both synthetic and analytical. And for the work with the actors, you have to find a balance between the artificial and organic dimensions.The same goes for the images and for the possible combinations at the editing stage. It’s impossible to film with a classical direction that would be either too artificial or too organic.To have both, together, at this almost contradictory level, is only possible thanks to digital technology, as a result of many hours and many attempts. That’s real contemporary cinema, the cinema of the future, I think. Otherwise it’s childish. Most of the other images that are filmed nowadays are very childish, very cliché.
I get the impression that there has been a return to storytelling in recent years, a need to tell stories based primarily on the strength of the script. A lot of films for the cinema look like big TV films. Although your films also tell stories, they are foremost and always cinematic, in the sense that they involve a cinematic rhetoric that makes space and time coexist: the story is born from this coexistence. Watching your films, we are clearly not looking at a scenario that has been applied to images. Yes, because it’s impossible to think that these images were imagined beforehand.They are very cinematic, because there is no referent. The referent is the image that is there, that has just been born in front of you. From an ideological and visual point of view, an image is always ambiguous. But when everything is reduced to words and a script, it becomes more banal, it reduces the potential for ambiguity that surrounds the images... There is an essential incompatibi
lity between having ideas that precede the filming and creating truly cinematic images. Nowadays, we have become accustomed to reading images on television, in contemporary art, on the Internet… Images do not have the same innocence as they did a few years ago. It doesn’t make sense to do things that don’t respect that ambiguity, and you’re right, a lot of films look like TV films. What do TV series and TV films want to avoid? Difficulties. As soon as you impose a small difficulty on the viewer, they will change channels. Even the films that are created for the cinema are now made with this obsession of sparing the spectator any need for attention, any displeasure, any physical shock that may derive from the incomprehension or difficulty inherent to all images.The image is an autonomous world, on the same level as painting, poetry or literature.You cannot gain access to it by means of shortcuts.
Speaking of which, you have an eclectic practice: you are a filmmaker and also an artist, whose works have been presented in contemporary art exhibitions. This was the case for Singularity (2015)—produced for the Venice Biennale and screened at the latest FIDMarseille in a 780-minute “uninstalled” version—and for The Three Little Pigs (Documenta, Kassel, 2012), which interweaves three prominent figures in German history, Hitler, Goethe and Fassbinder, throughout the 101 hours of the film.There is no doubt in my mind that film is a contemporary art form that has its place amongst the so-called visual arts, but its “exhibition” is often problematic. How do you cope with these presentation issues? The truth is, I couldn’t care less. I’m happy with what allows me to create the film, when funding pushes me to do something creative with the freedom conferred by contemporary art. How it will be shown is up to the spectators and curators. I do what I want and I try to reach the level we were talking about earlier: never reducing the complexity of images, on the contrary, amplifying the unexpected. For the rest… We are talking about complex works, it is not something you can admire or appreciate without a high level of concentration and attention: you have to be in the best conditions. Cinema imposes its time on you: this is a truth that has been much trivialized in contemporary art, where people prefer to ask themselves how to integrate a work in a space, how to properly exhibit it… But what about time? A work of art based on moving images imposes its own time, and that is more important than space. There is a physicality to the perception of time. It is obviously complementary to issues of space, but there is a peculiarity, a manipulation of time that exists only in cinema. You can dilate or shorten time, work on it and provoke a very strong reaction in the spectator’s body.
WASTING TIME
Another aspect that is often associated with your work is that of slowness. Your films, if I may say so, take their time— which, again, resonates with the way you work, the way you film. And as a corollary to this slowness, it seems to me that you are drawn to filming tired bodies and solitary characters (although they are often in company). The figure of Louis XIV, which you explored over the course of two films, The Death of Louis XIV and Roi Soleil (2018), is exemplary in this regard.The king is dying, his reign is coming to an end, but this end is foremost that of a body that is slowly passing away. In your work, slowness seems to be at the service of bodies, to sublimate them. Possibly. But there is
also the idea of wasting time, of understanding time as a kind of matter that shapes bodies and also shapes our perception of these bodies. This dilation of time creates a small challenge for the spectator, which is why my films are hard, but they are also sensual. We can see this in Liberté, with its almost hypnotic perception of time; we can see it a bit in The Death of Louis XIV: the closer the king gets to death, the slower his movements become, until in the end he stops moving. Pacifiction has its sensual and hypnotic side, but also its dry moments… It’s a bit like life. It’s important to have these reverberations in the mass of images. It’s also an act of faith that allows us to understand that intuitions will work, but without us knowing to what extent. Of course, I try to avoid the greatest risks, but you have to be daring, you have to be fearless, otherwise it’s just consumption, and the result is utterly banal.
There have never been so many images in circulation and, mechanically, so many banal, conventional images… Personally, I only watch films like mine, like those of Pedro Costa, like those of Wang Bing, films that are a challenge for the spectator. Not just a challenge for the creator. Otherwise it’s absurd, it’s a spiritual waste of time. That’s why watchingTV and series gives you a feeling of emptiness: there is no challenge. The lack of challenge for the spectator is a depression.
I would like to come back to the issue of bodies in your films. Your first featurelength film, Honor de cavallería (2006), is symptomatic of a gestural and therefore bodily dichotomy. There is the old, emaciated body of Quixote, which is certainly laboured, but still agile and strong-willed. And there is Sancho’s body, heavy, almost immovable, but younger. There is a play of oppositions between old age and youth, lightness and heaviness, dynamism and apathy. These oppositions, these complementarities, expressed by a twosome, can also be found in Story of my Death (2013), with the characters of Casanova and his valet, of Casanova and Dracula; in Singularity, between minors and prostitutes; in Liberté, between libertine masters and slaves, etc. And they are also present in Pacifiction: the beauty of the landscapes, the lush vegetation, cohabits with the intrigues, power games and self-destruction of men. And in the middle is the fascinating, composite character played by Benoît Magimel: he is authoritarian, manipulative and benevolent all at once, simultaneously powerful and conscious of his impotence. A meeting of contradictory feelings. I think that’s a consequence of the way I make films. How to avoid clichés and create ambivalence? All these contrasts derive from the fact that I never take sides. When I feel I’m taking sides with an idea, I try to get away from it or destroy it. When I arrived in Polynesia, I knew that the film would be about nuclear tests, power, the Westerners who settled there. So to keep the ambivalence, I started to look at the native people, I looked at their defects and I strove to generate hatred against them, real hatred. It’s kind of the same with actors. In order to abandon them, you have to really believe in it, you can’t fake it, you have to identify all their faults so that you can genuinely abandon them and even find a sadistic pleasure in abandoning them. For the Polynesians, finding their faults helped me to avoid falling into the usual cliché that they are poor and innocent and live in harmony with this happy nature which has been massacred by Western capitalists. Whether or not that’s true is not my problem. I make films with that ambivalence and I think they’re more interesting because of it. This work of destruction, to avoid getting stuck in a single ideological or aesthetic prejudice that would make the film too understandable, too predictable and too banal, is essentially a form of sovereignty. But it has no specific objective: it is a sovereignty that is the celebration of itself. This hatred is part of the context of the shoot, part of the context of making a work of art that must retain this ambivalence. It is difficult to manage from a human point of view, and that might also be the price to pay. I accept that price. Besides, it’s more fun to do it this way: in the end, everyone finds pleasure in it. Pleasure, pain, it’s all mixed up. But perhaps the greatest ambivalence is this: I am very chaotic, very anarchic, I take many risks in many aspects of my life, be it financial, personal… I love when there is chaos, anarchy, I provoke it; but at the same time, I am very calm and in terms of editing, I can stay concentrated for many hours.
VULNERABILITIES
And cinema is an appropriate art form: filming can allow for this chaos, whereas editing is rather a cold, analytical process. With digital technology, everything is permeable, everything can fit into the image, the camera lens is super sensitive, in the broadest sense of the word, so you have to be careful, it’s dangerous… When I talk about the actors’ vulnerability, it’s a real vulnerability, their own image is really out of their control… I often say that the director’s job is to make the actor accept the unacceptable. I think there is still a small margin of vulnerability to explore in films, in contemporary cinema.
Perhaps also because cameras are getting smaller and smaller. The camera object is multiplying and taking on increasingly hybrid forms. At the same time, what makes the vulnerability is the awareness that there is a camera, small and digital, yes, but not too small either. In my case, the camera must be somewhat imposing and incisive, in order to make the actors understand that they are in the reality of their own body, but as part of a fiction that is being made in real time. The camera needs to be a little bigger, to impose its presence, to remind you that you are in the realm of fiction. If it was a hidden camera, it wouldn’t work.
The actors must be aware that the camera is there and that they are under surveillance. And it affects your vanity, your truth; you know that you will be abused. I like to say, because it’s a bit provocative, that TV films use actors whereas films for the cinema abuse actors, they take them to the limits of their ambivalence, their vulnerability, they take them to unknown territories. “To use” is more of an economic exchange, a pact, whereas “abuse” implies the presence of bodies, gazes, exhibitionism, the narcissism of the actor playing their own role; their trust and tolerance will be abused.
We started out with The Lord Worked Wonders in Me as a film that would give access to your work, but now I’m thinking that Liberté is the film that best documents your approach. Yes, of course. The subject of the film is distortion, distortion of the night, of perception. Everything is more... invisible. And in this film, it’s hard to understand how the images are made. That’s another mystery: how are images made? For me, this mystery is at the heart of contemporary fiction. Liberté asks this question in relation to my own approach. The device is almost the subject of the film: it’s a device where you accept your own vulnerability and your own power, it is about putting yourself in danger whilst abusing others, being generous and selfish, being an exhibitionist and a voyeur, it’s all this tension that is possible in the context of a film, but impossible in real life. I’m happy because each film is an answer to the previous one. Each film poses a challenge. I never think about making a career, I never recycle old ideas. The next film, which I am about to write, is going to take up some of the challenges that arose in Pacifiction. That’s why each film says something about cinema, each film responds to artistic challenges that derive from previous films.
Translation: Juliet Powys
Fabrice Lauterjung is a filmmaker and video artist. He teaches at the École Supérieure Art et Design de SaintÉtienne. Latest publications: Exercices d’exorcisme (Frac Auvergne/ galerie Jean Fournier, « Beautés », 2018) et Vers cette neige, vers cette nuit (Éditions M. –, 2019).