Erika's draft 2

My most recent film is in the final editing process. Doing this film has been for me an important step in my practice. Throughout the past years, I have been developing a video practice dealing with recurring themes that I will discuss further in this text. My work shows a strong interest in the use of documentary or non-fiction and the codes of narration in cinema. In Pourquoi Tu Cours, I explored a new way of filming and deepen my reflection and experience of performativity within my film practice.

Pourquoi Tu Cours is a fiction featuring friends from my hometown in the suburbs of Paris. I am following different characters; filming their life and making them act scripted scenes that are mirroring their daily encounters in a suburban area. The scenario of this fiction is not predefined; the story's content evolves through the process of making and leaves space for unexpected moments. It consists in proposing the actors constructed situations in which they improvise the dialogues. At each gradual outcome, I let the situation evolve and imagine the next scene. In parallel to these scripted scenes, I collect footages closer to documentary observation, following them in their daily actions. From this blending of two different kinds of footages/realities an ambiguity emerges. The film keeps an uncertainty about the authenticity of the story being told and the scenes that the viewer is witnessing.

How fiction and non-fiction communicate with each other’s has always been at stake in my work. It started with an intimate approach of my practice of video. I was interested in exploring how as an artist or video maker I can relate to my own reality and more precisely to the people from my surrounding. I made few videos that dealt with my family for instance. In my early work Playing the Father, the Son, I tried to reconstruct a story from Marcel Pagnol with my father. Through the process of filming I realized that I was mostly interested by the act of making, the experience of trying to construct a story and characters and the interaction between my father (as the subject of my film) and me (the filmmaker), more than what the story of Marcel Pagnol was about. I included in the edit of the video the making of scenes, the “behind the stage” and other conversations that my father and me would have around the fictional dialogues. The characters of the book were mixed with the characters we embody in real life, these two realities were ambiguously confronting and it started a dialogue reflecting on our relationship and on paternal relationships in general. The fictional characters were revealing something about our own identity and relationship to each other.

It is interesting to see how our perception of non-fictional material, and mostly documentaries has been influenced by the traditional concept of documentary, which would be a representation of a “reality” (the unmediated event) in a most authentic and unbiased way. Stella Bruzzi in her book The New Documentary describes this refusal to acknowledge the construction and indirectness of the modes of documentary production, that filmmakers like the pioneers of Cinema Vérité adopted as their ultimate goal, as an unrealizable claim, a masquerade. In Cinéma Vérité, the mode of production should disappear and become as much invisible as possible in order to get the most objective recording of the action, the event. They even claimed that the subjects of the films should be able to be in front of the camera as they would be in everyday life. As if they could forget the presence of the filmmaker and the filming crew and as if they could reveal their most authentic self. But what the viewer witness by looking at documentary is not a simple recording of a everyday situation that would exist without the documentary itself. What we are witnessing is the act of filming, it is construction, a set configured within different parameters which involves not only a subject but also a filmmaker, a set of time, and many other conditions.

“a documentary film can never simply represent the real, that instead it is a dialectical conjunction of a real space and the filmmaker that invade it” Stella Bruzzi, the New Documentary

We are now aware that the camera is not neutral machinery. Although documentary cannot escape it’s constructivity it doesn’t necessary negates itself. As Stella Bruzzi says, documentary is a negotiation between filmmaker, the event, its subject and its performativity, and that is where new documentaries can explore and think this mode of representation.

“ the important truth any documentary captures is the performance in front of the camera” Stella Bruzzi, The New Documentary

In my video with my father, I acknowledge this performativity and play with it in order to open a dialogue and reflect on the action being depicted. Here there is another level of truth or acknowledgment that goes beyond the naïve and unrealizable claim of a pure transcription of an event. This other truth, is linked to the documentary event but can reveal another understanding of the subject being depicted.

The idea of performativity and performing subject actually exists in a larger scale than the one of the cinematographic field. It has been discussed from many different perspectives. From economical perspective, identity construction, gender problematics, etc… This concept is an extremely rich and wide notion which I would like to explore deeper in my future research and practice. In my video Pourquoi Tu Cours, I start to question this concept in a more open sphere than the cinematic one, in contrary to my father’s film. The question of performativity in Playing the Father, the Son, stayed within the frame of the performance in cinema and dealt with untemporal and universal issues; the relationship between a father and her daughter and incapability to express certain emotions being overcome by a role play. In Pourquoi Tu Cours, I extend my reflection on performativity to a more contemporary and sociological context, questioning our current understanding of the self in a particular social context. Not only in front of the camera, but also in our unmediated interactions in our everyday life. We are in a continuous representation of the self, everything is about representation and self performance. Our identity is part of how we represent ourselves to others which is being influenced by so many parameters (society, culture, affects, memories, etc...). Few theorists like Erving Goffman or Judith Butler have made an analogy between our interaction with others and a theater play where people are actors performing the self. [Yes! good citations, but there is a lot more up to date research into this. See the work coming out of the Institute of Network Studies, for inst.] We are continuously performing our own characters in everyday life and today this notion of self performativity is more and more important,

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Tinder, imposes on us a new and faster way of communicating and presenting ourselves to which we actively participate. Self performance is directing our everyday life, entering our leisure time. TALK ABOUT THE POST FORDIST ECONOMY, SVEN LUTTICKEN, Nowadays, our identity is even more mediated and formulated through different kinds of medium and technologies. Ronald and Fatyh in Pourquoi Tu Cours, are two guys being strongly inspired by a cultural and social conditions that are conditioning them to act the in a certain way. In their case the “though males”, being gangsta and listening to rap. Asking them to be the subject my fiction film was for me a way to explore their desire to represent themselves and see how these clichés (that they are aware off) can be contradicted by trying to embrace it. I have decided to give up the elements of making off (PARLER DE CE QUE DIT ANDRELEVIC dans The work of being watch, c'est pck on montre la production que les gens pensent qu'une chose est plus authentique), trying to play more with a cinematic approach of filmmaking. Becoming a style more than a reaserch, then an image, a representation of what reality image look like. Because I don;twant to perpetuate the Reality TV pretention and assumption that because you see the production apparatus you immediately witness something authentic. As soon as I explored this field of making of I realized that it could as well become a trick, an image, a representation of what is authentic instead of a real reflection. While keeping a sense of documentary due to its esthetic (handy camera, no artificial lights) and the spontaneity of the actors, the editing rarely reveals the apparatus of making (apart from 2 or 3 quick moments when you hear an approbation from my voice, behind the camera that gives hint to my relation with the subject), the film tries to have an approach of feature film. I am heremore interested in this idea of performance and narrating the self in this movie. The ambiguity emerges in a more constructed manner, 


I realized that the camera could be a pretext to make people act and project themselves into a fictional narrative in order to reveal something about our identities, relationships and modes of representation.

• MY RELATION TO CAMERAS AND WHAT I WISH TO AQUIEVE*

Bringing a camera between the subject and me was a way to trigger this self performativity in people and use it in order to tell stories and reflect on the question of identity. By introducing the idea that I want to make a film with my subject, I insist on the fact that there is a story that we have to say, there is a need to act, a message to be send. TALK ABOUT THE TOOLS OF REALITY TV TO TRIGGER PERFORMATIVITY AND STANDARDIZED IDENTITIES. ILLUSION OF DEMOCRATIE AND SELF EXPRESSION ANDRELEVIC As in reality TV, I use the same tool to trigger spontaneity and at the same time a sort of narrativity in the identity of people. I proposed to my subjects a template for which they could improvise their dialogues , but I was willing to contradict these template. I depart here from the reality TV programs that are giving templates as a code to follow. I leave freedom to the person being filmed to interpret what I am asking them to do.They are aware that there is something about them that I would like to see being performed. The fact that there is a camera recording insists on this awareness of the other watching you, of that image of you being taped, and this self-performativity is exacerbated.

The charicatures and clichés that I was expecting to get from them were being contradicted and decomposed by the very fact that they actually live these life everyday and that they are also human, having vulnerabilities, etc… DEVELOP THIS A BIT BETTER I wish to extend my research on the importance to contradict our perception of identities nowadays.