I Never Decided to Become a Documentary Filmmaker…

I never decided to become a documentary filmmaker; that is to say, to camp once and for all inside a given space. Besides, I hate that term: documentary filmmaker. It helps to erect a boundary around a genre that has never ceased to evolve and whose porosity, shifting contours, and almost consanguine ties with the genre it is always set against, fiction, are on the contrary well known. For it is indeed true that images are less faithful to “reality” than to the intentions of those who produce them.

But as it happened, my first film was a documentary (La voix de son maître, 1978), and making it gave me the desire to make another, then another, and so on up to the present day. It was also at that time that I discovered Wiseman, Perrault, Van der Keuken, Dindo, Kramer and a few others, and with them a diversity of approaches, practices and styles that only sharpened my curiosity, the desire to risk myself on a continent whose vastness I was still far from imagining. I therefore became a documentary filmmaker, and if I dislike the word, with its narrow, almost discouraging ring, still nothing – neither the energy it takes to set a project in motion, to persuade, to overcome one’s demons; nor the strength one must draw from the depths of oneself to begin again after a series of refusals, the injustice of a failure or the excess of a success; nor the threats that continually weigh on the existence and circulation of the most personal works, the evasions of broadcasters, the growing congestion of theatrical releases; nor even the legal twists and turns of Être et avoir – has ever diminished my appetite.

I am not alone. Many other filmmakers share this drive. What we do is complex, fragile, vulnerable, but we are tenacious and enduring.

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For each film, I need to define a framework [un cadre], the starting point from which I can begin to build. This framework is everything we put into play with those we want to film in order to awaken desire. Naturally, it is never the same from one film to another. The psychiatrist Jean Oury has a beautiful expression, which I often quote: “to program chance.” For me, making a film is a little like that. When the shooting begins, I know neither the point of arrival nor the path I will take: much depends on what will arise along the way, in the work, in the encounter. For me, the process is indistinguishable from the films themselves, which is why it matters so much to me to be able to keep searching for as long as possible, right to the very end.

Films always say something else – and other things – than what one intended them to say, to have them say, or thought one had said, and perhaps that is just as well. When I began shooting La moindre des choses, at the psychiatric clinic of La Borde, I would have been hard pressed to define its subject. In fact, I still do not really know. It is not so much a film about La Borde as a film thanks to La Borde, and to all those – patients, caregivers – who agreed to go along with it. I hesitated for a long time before making it… When one has a camera in hand, one wields power over others. The whole question is how not to abuse it. If I finally decided to do it, it was in order to confront my fear, my scruples, everything that held me back. What matters, then, is less the subject itself than the questions the film will bring forth in me. Political questions, aesthetic questions… questions of cinema.

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I do not prepare, or rather, I prepare as little as possible. Far too afraid of putting the film on rails before even having begun it… and of missing the essential! Moreover, if I know too much, I no longer want to make the film. I prefer to stay close to things, to start from not knowing. Making a film from a scholarly point of view is an approach entirely foreign to me. The example of La ville Louvre is quite revealing: there is not a single explanatory word. But it was necessary to hold firm: the co-producers wanted me to write a commentary. For Le pays des sourds, I had chosen to plunge straight into the strangeness of sign language, without an interpreter or outside help. At first, I was lost… I had no points of reference. I had insisted on not meeting the specialists, the doctors, the educators, the psychologists. Had I done so, the deaf would have felt approached as “cases,” objects of study.

Films must keep their secrets, keep the questions open. It is when there are shadows, ellipses, a play between what is shown and what is not, between what is said and what is left to imply, a share of the invisible, characters who resist, demanding formal choices, that the viewer – displaced, unsettled from their order – can begin to think, can set their imagination in motion. When everything is smooth, familiar, transparent, tamed, reassuring, without roughness or friction, there is no story; it is stillness. The sense that the unexpected favors thought.

Artistic freedom does not fall from the sky. I have always thought that one must fight, fight ceaselessly to conquer it, to reclaim it again and again.