2023 Fragment of a filmmaker’s work: Gaëlle Rouard Fragment of a filmmaker’s work: Gaëlle Rouard
Tell us about your education. How did you become a filmmaker?
I started out doing photography. I was doing an internship in a professional photo studio when I met up with experimental film at the workshop at 102 rue d’Alembert in Grenoble. Through the Metamkine intervention cell, I discovered what we call expanded cinema and DIY. Film-develop-project, the treatment of the film medium we propose here can be understood as a research project into each element of the cinematic apparatus – the techniques of shooting, developing, printing, editing, adding sound, projection – considered as potential phases for creation, freely questionable, with no concern for standards.
Being part of the collective at 102 and the MTK workshop, I plunged into the activity, and that’s what stimulated me during the first fifteen years of work.
Where did your passion for lab work come from. You built your own in your home, and photochemical film?
Working in the dark with what that requires in terms of contemplation and meditation is perfectly in tune with my character, in the sense that it is favourable to all kinds of solitary rumination. In addition, the almost infinite possibilities of working on the plastic qualities of the image through the manual development process brings the work closer to that of a painter refining his palette and it’s an approach that I like to consider as such. I wouldn’t know how to make a film without this practice, quite simply because the ideas and/or the desires come to me first of all from the film material and its technical possibilities.
You have moved from work essentially based on found footage to live action filming even if the images are completely transfigured in the lab: is there a difference for you in these two practices?
It’s a very direct experience working on the images made by others, like an amusement which has no consequences. Now that I use my own images, the game is less spontaneous but more profound.
But now that we’re talking about it, I do think of a similarity. Working on found footage means that you skip the stage of shooting; in my “new” films, I shoot around my place which makes it easy to do things again if the results are not good. I don’t “leave” on a shoot for a certain period, there is a permanent back and forth between the lab and the Bolex, which is quite similar to the practice of found footage where you draw from the material as often as necessary. The environment around me has replaced the images of others, but it’s the same global approach = make something with what you’ve got at hand in this above-mentioned back and forth that goes on practically to the end.
How do you work on your images? When does this love triangle begin between chemistry, painting and poetry which characterises your handmade work?
First of all, artistic research is my guide. You talk about a love triangle and I confirm. But the parts of the triangle for me are: the quality of the light, the nature of the film and the way it is developed. The image is formed by the combination of these elements.
I always have a camera loaded and ready to shoot. It’s the quality of the light that is decisive. To talk more specifically of Darkness, I made up an image bank by decomposing landscapes: a sky, a moon, a tree, a foreground, etc. And then recomposing these elements, I wanted to translate a kind of emotion that you can feel facing a landscape but that the simple recording of it does not manage to reconstitute.
Once again, after the fabrication of a palette, it is the work of painter that returns: placing elements within a frame.
Is the photochemical developing as important as the shooting, or more important?
As I said earlier it’s a whole, but the work in the laboratory is fundamental. I shoot quite quickly but I spend huge amounts of time reworking the images afterwards.
Anything in the film substance is capable of becoming a fundamental signifier: a kind of contrast, a chromatic range, each internal property of the image is perceived for its own value, in its material characteristics. The lab work makes it possible to subject images to physical modifications on the film base using unorthodox chemical treatments to obtain such or such type of blue, for example. That’s what I referred to when I was talking about constituting a palette.
In practice, that means making a succession of print generations to reach the desired aim.
Can you talk about your work on the soundtrack? How do you make your music?
It’s a complex editing process that I do digitally with sound I’ve recorded and sounds that I’ve gleaned from films or other sources. For each film, I compile a new sound library that I draw from, working by sequence or chapter.
I was trained by the concrete music heard at 102 during “cinema for the ear” sessions. They were electro-acoustic compositions played in a black room. Most of the time I think that sound is the “poor relative” of experimental films, or films in general. While the soundtrack is as important as the image, sometimes even more so.
How does the editing process work between image and sound, and between sequences?
I change method with each film, sometimes I do the soundtrack before the images, or the opposite and sometimes both together. As I said, I work by “chapter”, not necessarily in chronological order. The sounds are digital but the images remain chemical, which means that when I’m ready to try the two together I do a projection. Before getting to that point, I imagine a lot about the relation between image and sound, I know roughly the kind of sounds that I’m going to use for each sequence and vice versa.
Then I assemble the chapters one after the other up to the final cut. Everything remains malleable right up to the end.
I should add that at the beginning of a new film, I produce a lot of images without asking too many questions, guided by technical desires. It’s during a second period that I begin constructing images in tune with more precise ideas. And the construction of the soundtrack follows the same principle. There’s a lot of material that gets thrown out but that’s part of the process.
You always project your films, and you talk about direct interpretation rather than performance: can you tell us what role control or non-control play in all this.
After having practiced improvisation for years with other filmmakers (notably the duo “Lafoxe” with Étienne Caire), when I began my “solo career”, I wanted to have total control of the rhythm. I am guided by the soundtrack. At home I rehearse my live interventions and I’d like to say that I have absolute mastery of the machinery, but you’re never safe from the unexpected.
In what we call expanded cinema, projection speed, image size, frame shape, light intensity are all elements of the score that is the ribbon of film.
The goal is to dig at the foundations of the illusion of cinema with a primitive approach: the study of movement, and magic.
And since the word magic has come up, I must add that a fundamental struggle for the perception of the film is the quest for total darkness. Cinemas are rarely dark enough in my view, masking the emergency exits is not always possible. Yet total black seems to me a prior condition for hypnosis. You should be able to forget where you are, the person sitting next to you. And when I talk about total blackness with stage managers who are preparing the projection, I am rarely understood. At best they understand semi-darkness instead of deep obscurity. The projection of 16mm film is something fragile and in some of my films I work on the different qualities of black in the image. But if the conditions in the screening room are not good, you don’t see anything.
That’s why emergency exits have become my personal bugbear. They parasite the image like a background noise. The ideal situation would be the absolute darkness of a development lab, a return to the source!
And I’d like to finish this interview with a quote: “The seventh art, that of the screen, is depth made sensitive and visual, which extends below the story, analogous to the elusive musical.” Germaine Dulac, 1928.
Interview with Gaëlle Rouard made by Federico Rossin.
Screenings hosted by Federico Rossin, in the presence of Gaëlle Rouard.