Érik Bullot

Interview conducted by Marie-Pierre Duhamel-Muller


MPDM: Speaking in Tongues (2005) is part of a series of “true false” educational, didactic, encyclopedic films, divided by chapters and ranked in a rigorous order, in which the same question is posed from different standing points. Are you going to keep working along the same line? Have you as a film maker found the ideal tool fit for your hands ?

ÉB: I enjoy making reflection-inducing objects in which obligations/hinders and game-play collide. Speaking in Tongues is a film-essay exploring cinema through language-related issues. It can be said to be constructed in a rather ironic fashion because the different elements are more randomly linked with each other than it seems. I see them as “trompe-l’œil films: their resemblance with didactic, educational, school films is but a delusional gimmick aimed to confuse the viewer. Speaking in Tongues appears as a 12-chapter journey, an amusing journey taking the viewer through different linguistic territories and languages – sometimes real, sometimes made up – mixing “true” scientists with mere text readers and models. Three Sides (2007) is based on a totally different pattern: instead of ranking the themes by chapters we rather tried to call up inner correspondences between the “topics.” Whereas Speaking in Tongues was constructed based on independent cells, Three Sides was thought up as a rather organic and even musical structure.
The various patterns underlying the film can easily be described. The film addresses the issue of “boundary” by casting light upon the virtual lines keeping two languages apart (Catalan and Castilian in Barcelona), keeping a country apart from the incoming flow of migrants (immigration detention center erected out of eye’s reach in Marseille), a city center from the greater area of a city (the Genoa city-planning projects). Three Sides is infused with an obvious desire to “handle the topic” in ways more reminiscent of the documentary technique than of ironic didactic films. However the reference to the documentary can be deceiving. Though the film resorts to much-used mainstream codes such as the interview, the “typical” situation, the straightforward illustration, these codes are likely to relate to each other in an arbitrary way and thus debase the discourse. My aim here was to shake a familiar well-known genre so as to make the viewer’s experience both a pleasurable and playful moment just as in the previous movies. Because the viewer is the one who must piece together the mosaic. He/she is entrusted with one part of the film construction. Like Brecht I have always claimed that there should be no separation between the categories of intelligence and pleasure. The notion of pleasure also encompasses the pleasure of intelligence (that of the viewer).

MPDM: Three Sides gives a more straightforward vision of contemporary sociopolitical movements.

ÉB: These two films are both very close in content and quite distant from each other in the meantime. Both deal with a number of themes such as language plurality and the evolution of languages in the political field. The two films speak of a similar concern for filing, categorizing, permuting. The contrast probably lies more in the form of the films. In Speaking in Tongues, the film itself triggers the experiences given to see - verbal improvisations, absurd conversations, nonsensical dialogues – while in Three Sides the film solely gives shape to material recorded by the traveler.

MPDM: The two films are based on interviews.

ÉB: The two films seek to lead their “actors” to make use of a reflexive speech. Thoughts thought aloud: rare (if not prohibited in mainstream documentary modes) and hard to get. Watching archive documents I discovered that in the early days of television these types of experiences were still allowed: you could hear and see someone – ordinary or extraordinary – taking time to think before speaking, hesitating, stammering, remaining silent. To obtain such results during the shooting you must craftily build the right context for this speech to come alive. You must feel free to render those people’s affect in keeping with their thoughts, you must make the taste for reflection obvious as opposed to the utilitarian discourse always advertized on TV. In Speaking in Tongues, the speakers play the game easily: very eager Esperanto defenders, readers engrossed in a text, possessed man… In Three Sides my aim was to film boatmen – translators, political activists, city planners – who had also adopted a reflexive attitude regarding their practice. Filming the act of thinking is probably one of cinema’s main vocations. This is often so in Godard’s films, even if he generally takes on the position of a master anxious to keep a firm grip on the situation (I am here referring to the two children in France tour détour deux enfants, who are utterly frightened by Godard, whom they see as the master). It is always so in the works of film makers such as Keaton, Vertov or Snow.

MPDM: What type of experience do viewers have when watching these two films ?

ÉB: Viewers watching Three Sides are granted more freedom (but they must find their own path among all those enigmas). Those watching Speaking in Tongues are guided through the film and even held by the hand – but they only end up losing their way and getting lost. In Three Sides, the film maker removes the comfortable-looking seat on which the viewer was about to sit. The viewer is thus (gently) prevented from settling in the well-known visual rhetoric underlying the type of recordings dear to mainstream documentary forms. The film unravels essentially through enigmas. Three Sides is also a trompe-l’œil in that it shakes a certain type of literal convention. The different parts are linked with each other in an intuitive rather than rational fashion. Initially the film was born from the idea that topics such as bilingualism, migrants’ rights and city planning interact with one another. This is just a hypothesis. The film was never meant to prove it right. It merely presents the terms of this hypothesis, thereby challenging the viewer. Three Sides is more experimental, in the proper meaning, than Speaking in Tongues. It is more loosely constructed, the demiurge has fallen asleep (self-effacement by the author is often but a trick).

MPDM: How come Barcelona is so present in your work?

ÉB: I am very familiar with this city because I’ve lived there for several years and I go back on a regular basis. Bilingualism has always fascinated me. It speeds up the pace of one’s experiences and adds consistency to cultural experiences. Moreover making films requires some sort of experience with languages. The cinematic medium is a foreign language in itself. When you’re at the movies one of the most pleasurable things is to tickle your ears with languages alien to your daily experience.

MPDM: Knowing languages and ones’ own…

ÉB: Unlike poet Armand Robin I have no desire to know all languages. But as you learn a foreign language you realize that you can practice it without mastering it completely. To make films one must also draw from some sort of “non-knowledge”, making films equates taking one’s first faltering steps. Often in my movies I have played teacher, always trying to shake this posture in doing so. I also do my best to give free vent to the viewers. Not having the last word is never easy but it would be a good way of defining cinema.