Arrêt sur Image
(version anglaise)

Q: How did this vast project Le plan du film come about? How and why revive an old project that was around at the end of the eighties with Les génériques imaginaires?

A: You’re right, this project is old ground. It’s not the only one. Parallel projects have often coexisted in my work, only to be abandoned, then picked up again. The measuring of institutions and roads for example. I always promised myself I would continue with that all my life. It just so happened it came to a standstill. But I’ll pick it up again one day perhaps. There was another project I started on at the Lyons Biennial in 2000 ( Les sculptures hybrides). That has only been temporarily interrupted – I hope – due to lack of funds and also because Le plan du film has pushed me in other directions that I’m currently following.

Q: Can you tell me about your (acrylic canvas) painted posters, Les génériques imaginaires ?

A: When I started this work, I saw it in a very different plastic form. A form that, in my opinion, would be nostalgic today. Those first film posters were painted by an advertising company, Publidecor. Others were made in India by specialised painters. These painted posters, 2 metres by 3 metres, make veiled references to the come-back of painting and to the very considerable market for painting at the time.

I held a very negative opinion of what was happening then on the contemporary art scene: in those days, most artists (not all of them, obviously!…) had completely adapted to society and were over-adapted to market dictates. In France, anything that had to do with the body, performances, actions for art… was looked down on and female artists had a harder time than they do now. We were totally isolated, with almost no press, no place to work, no critiques. That sparked several reactions. Charlemagne Palestine, for example, decided to hold a performance-strike. As an interdisciplinary, female artist I was labelled with all of France’s taboos. In this context, I wondered how to react in a way that would be both in line with my work and caustic vis-à-vis the art scene at the time. My idea was to produce painting (not painted by me of course) and to create an autonomous work that would make the images that came out of my performances accepted. For Les génériques imaginaires I recycled my images, both personal and artistic. And at the top of the bill I put the names of friends who had supported me in these works (installations, actions, performances, photos, videos….). These personalities, more or less well known, belonged to the art world. I added one or two names of film stars to make believe the film existed, with no authorisation whatsoever and without the permission of the people concerned.

Q: Why did you put it to one side?

A: From 1990 to 1993, I threw myself completely into my operation-performances. This new work occupied me completely and took all my energy and attention. So the other project came to a halt. Although two large paintings did find their way into the décor I set up in the operating theatre. In spite of this overlap, it remained on hold.

Q: Today, Les génériques imaginaires is turning into Le plan du film. What does this project consist of?

A: This is the beginning of a work-in-progress. It’s not easy to talk about it. It has to find its feet financially. It’s open to propositions and to the future.

I was marked by what Godard said about Becker’s film, Montparnasse 19: that it was “brilliant, not only because it had been conceived backwards, but also because it was the other side of cinema”. I started from there.

I start with a poster and work my way back over the construction of the film, the wrong way, starting with the poster. It’s what we do in the street. When you see a poster for a film and you don’t know what’s behind it, you try to imagine the story, the atmosphere. I have re-created posters for films. This time they more closely imitate the real thing. They’re light boxes in the same proportions almost as what we see above cinemas. These posters were made by a specialised company: Art Entreprise. The people named are all volunteers. There are art world personalities and film stars, which lend the posters genuine weight. For the moment, except for the poster with Cronenberg, they are entirely French. But the project will evolve on an international scale. Even if there are other French artists or directors I’d like to include, like Damien Audoul, who received an award in Venice for Le Souffle.

The posters were shown for the first time at the Espace Créateur in the Forum des Halles in Paris, in a spot close to the cinemas, where people are constantly coming and going. I’m going to try to set up the same thing at the Cannes Film Festival. I want to get away from the exhibition phenomenon and truly confront them with reality. We’re currently making trailers for these films that don’t exist ( Oscillation by Frédéric Comtet and Le Baiser by Créativ TV, amongst others).

Several events have been organised to accompany the showing of these posters, including the screening of Stephan Oriack’s film in the FNAC auditorium, Forum des images. At the Fondation Cartier, during a Soirée Nomade, we made a fake-live programme, filmed in public, as if we were on a television set, with a mixture of film personalities and people from the art world. These personalities were invited to speak about these films, about which all they knew was the posters. The group Tanger played live the theme music of the original soundtrack recorded on a CD that accompanies the catalogue. A video of this evening will be produced, edited as if it was an authentic 52-minute television programme.

I also intend to extract everything from this programme that breathes life into such and such a poster, such and such a story, in order to develop the synopses. Once all improbable plots have been eliminated, those that aren’t really feasible, the bits of synopses will be gathered into a catalogue and put together with trailers for the films. Scriptwriters will develop the synopses. There are also directors ready to work as inspired by the poster, the image, the people named.

Q: Is the publication that accompanies Le plan du film of particular importance?

A: An initial catalogue, resembling a DVD, has come out, with a text by Jean-Pierre Rehm. As I said, the group, Tanger, composed the original soundtrack of the film for the CD of this catalogue. It’s the music of the film that doesn’t exist. Serge Quadruppani, a writer of detective novels, greatly appreciated in experimental literature circles, wrote the dialogues for this original soundtrack.

There will be 6 stages with 6 catalogues preceding the 7th (like the 7ème art). The 7th, the last one, will be the real DVD of the film, produced professionally, albeit the wrong way round. It won’t be an experimental film but a real, standard one, commercial even, distributed in cinemas and on DVD. Once I see this, I’ll believe we’ve made it. I hope there will be several of them, but if there’s only one, we’ll have pulled it off.

Q: What constraints will this/these director(s) be under?

A: For the director who agrees to direct this film, there are only a few specifications: that Godard’s phrase appears in the film, one way or another, and that the people named on the posters, if they wish, have at least a small part. If the director wants to make other references to all of this, he’s free to do so and so much the better for this intellectual adventure.

It’s an attempt at shaking things up. I want to see where it will take me. I believe that, at a certain point in one’s life and in one’s work as an artist, when one is more serene, self-confident, has support and inner-structure, one’s ego is smaller. The need to take command of everything is less important. That’s part of the reason I was able to use this idea. It was enough to be the trigger and get excited at seeing how it might run away from me. It’s like a journey: misadventures are adventures. It’s pursuing the idea of going against the tide, of being the wrong way round, of doing things differently, of being somewhere else. It’s work-in-progress.

Q: Why are you interested in film?

A: More than anything, it’s the idea of doing things the wrong way round that interests me. All my life and work have been a deformatting venture. I’ve always had a critical approach to society. As a woman, I have tried to deformat myself from everything one has tried to put inside my head. From the very beginning of my work as an artist, I have often been against the current of fixed ideas, obligatory passages. This allows me to distance myself, to be clear in relation to where I am.

All my life, I’ve felt I was making a film scenario. Very often, I say to myself: “and what if we played that scene again? if we redid the scenario? You arrive at such a place, that happens, how should we play the scene? What, if there had been a camera, would the film have been like?”… It’s a bit like that in my professional and private life. I’d like to be able to replay the same scene, but in a version more in keeping with my conceptions of life, more intellectual, more structured, less of an initial instinctive reaction.

Q: Do you have any other film projects?

A: All my film-related imagination started after I’d met David Cronenberg, who’s a great artist and a very beautiful human being. He’d read the Manifeste de l’art charnel in Linda Kauffmann’s book, Bad Girls and Sick Boys. He was interested in my comments on pain, the denial I oppose to our Christian relationship with it. We met on this point and many others. It’s a sort of fusion of two minds that had been going in the same direction for a long time.

Following that, he wrote a scenario, Painkillers which develops the idea of a future civilisation where there will be no more pain and where orgasms will be reached by opening up the body surgically. I don’t know the story exactly, but it’s along those lines. We’re at the beginning of this adventure and only a tiny bit of the plot has been revealed. He invited me to play myself. I offered to perform my ultimate operation based on my interest in the open body. But, at the moment, I think a fake operation would be even more unsettling since, although its not a real operation, everyone will think it is…

In film, the opening up of the body, blood are still taboo. Like showing people making love and sex organs in a state of arousal. A female sex organ is just about acceptable but a male one… These are the two taboos, either that, or they’re filed in two drawers, “gore” and “porn”. In the plastic arts, sex is more integrated, even if recently exhibitions have been closed down, labelled as pornographic. It’s bizarre, one gets the impression that humanity will never grow up, that it will always have to hide what is, in fact, everyday life.

We have to shake things up, so that people stop having instinctive reactions as opposed to thinking about what’s being shown. Since the discovery of anatomy, since Vésale, we’ve always had the same reactions, apart from in the medical world that is.

Attempts at following this path are regarded as suspicious. They’re not looked at for themselves. It’s as if what is shown were the real thing, as if it weren’t filtered, cushioned.

Q: Even in the videos that accompany your operation-performances?

The videos and photographs of my performances in operating theatres are not just recordings of operations. In fact, I show images that blind us most of the time, images that prevent us from seeing the meaning behind them, which prevents us from seeing how I have treated them even.

In the operating theatre, I acted like a director. The theatre was decorated, the surgeons in costume. I directed the photography, the video, the film. I also directed the surgeon by asking him to repeat such and such a surgical act (at least to pretend to) for the camera. In the final result, there are fake surgical acts, replayed especially for the video and the photo. Then there was all the editing work. During the performances, I thought about the images I wanted. That’s why I did it. It’s a process for producing work. Nothing more. It’s not so different from what a director does, but in the wrong place.

Interview by Frank Lamy

Translated from French by Gabrielle Lawrence

LE PLAN DU FILM, Séquence 1, Espace créateur du Forum des Halles, Patris, Autumn 2001

SOIREE NOMADE, FONDATION CARTIER 6 /12/2001 With Alain Maneval as the host And film critics: Jean-Jacques Bernard, Serge Grünberg, André S. Labarthe, an art critic: Paul Ardenne, directors: Richard Dembo, actors: Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Jean-Christophe Bouvet, Nathalie Richard, Rachid Djaïani and artists working in the plastic arts: Patrick Corillon, Raymond Hains

“ Arrêt sur image – Orlan interviewed ”, Untitled n°27, printemps 2002