Érik Bullot

Soon, he is overwhelmed by a swarm of all that is picturesque and touristy – which he avoids filming as much as possible. Countless difficulties arise from this effort to avoid the sugar-coated side of Turkey because the picturesque keeps coming back – people carrying bright balloons, amusement park merry-go-rounds shaped like giant ladies, street vendors on corners, architecture and urbanism. Rather than film this, he follows smiling models that he films motionless, staring into the camera. He could have filmed these Turkish people closer to home (there are plenty in Paris) but the particular light – including the light of these innocent, bright smiles, which aren’t always found on the faces of the exiled – lets us know why he chose not to do that. Then the film slips, derails, though in a controlled manner, leaves the diptych behind, and takes an unexpected track. Algeria is suddenly added to, or acts as a substitute for, Turkey (we can’t really tell for sure). It’s another idea of exoticism, of Mediterranea – from which History cannot recede so easily. A century ago, an inquisitive French person attracted to the Eastern world could be content with basic imitations applied to his environment. But today it is Eastern people (even when coming from the south, like Algerians) who come to us, bringing us a part of their lives and history. The fantasy of seeing and making visible has been replaced with knowledge of the invisibility of things.

The Chinese Garden is not designed to mimic a Chinese garden or Chinese people, but to signify them. The strangeness of the film – so indicative of Bullot’s style – lies in its constantly revealing its fakeness, “stripping bare the process.” It’s a bit Brechtian, and also evokes Barthes’s The Empire of Signs. At the end of the film, one of the characters (played by Danielle Shirman) is expelled from the film set – from fiction – in a superlative moment of “stripping bare” the process. She takes a typical Roman train and we see her riding through nondescript neighborhoods, a neutral, numb expression painted on her face, released from the Chinese masquerade. Only the remnants of her costume remain. And, in the end, this is what exoticism comes down to: this derisory attire.

2. Encyclopedism
Le Manteau de Michel Pacha aimed at reversing Montesquieu’s question. “How can one not be Turk?” In the vicinity of Bormes-les-Mimosas there must necessarily be an equivalent of Ankara, and in each French citizen a Turk or Algerian must be laying dormant. There is a sensitive irony to this position (which conveniently prevents the film from getting caught in the trap of political correctness). Or, maybe even better than irony, we have here a good example of tongue-in-cheek humor that seems to be at play in each of Bullot’s films (intimate films included). Needless to say, this type of irony or amused distance has nothing to do with disdain, on the contrary. In the virtually encyclopedic diversity of his film topics are seen the outlines of a slightly insane science, very enthusiastic about classifications, types, genres; the stuff catalogues are made of. Yet it wouldn’t be a catalogue of inaccurate sciences, like Queneau’s, (which quite often come to mind when watching Bullot’s films), but rather an encyclopedia of approximate sciences (rather reminiscent of Paulhan).

The term “Universal attraction” was first coined in the eighteenth century to further classify Newton’s universal law of gravity. Since the phenomenon is no longer referred to in this way, the old term is now free to resound with all its nuances in a flush of semantic liberation of which Bullot is extremely glad to take advantage. Planets attract each other and, as a result, they turn (spinning alone, or revolving around other planets). Universal attraction, therefore, affects not only what falls – or restrains itself from falling, like a tightrope walker – but also everything that spins around itself, a top, a gyroscope or a disk. This passage from the cosmic to the leisurely – one repertory just as plentiful as the other – expresses approximate encyclopedism. The “diabolo,” a spinning toy that is bounced on a taut thread, challenges the laws of gravity and other laws of motion. Vinyl records, too, revolve in a different way, not at all resembling the path of the earth around the sun, unless by way of some bold metaphor.

But, as you might have guessed, that’s not all. The attraction is even more “universal” if one includes, as well as gravity, electro-magnetic phenomena. The magnet “attracts” filings (irrepressible high school memories welling up, physics experiments in good old lecture halls dating back from the previous century). But why stop here? “Taking the metaphor literally. Using practical lessons and examples given in physics textbooks as models” (1). Letting the word add its figurative meaning, unrestrained. Carnivals, amusement parks, everything that turns (the merry-go-round on which passengers ride, hanging onto the hem of a monstrous yet friendly-looking giantess’sdress, is no doubt from Istanbul), but also everything that “attracts,” as painting, according to Diderot, is made to attract the viewer, as, according to Eisenstein, cinema must establish attractions. And then, at the very end, on the film’s horizon, attraction as a feeling triggered by that which is attractive. Aren’t beings universally attracted by other beings? This is very obviously felt in the small catalogue of photographs published under the aforementioned title: faces, hands, gestures, memories (like starfish); an entire little world made of sensations, effects that I will never know but of which I am being given the slightest taste.

Le Singe de la lumière (The Ape of the Light) is the most sophisticated of these encyclopedic films. This sibylline title dates back from way before the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment. It is borrowed from the omni-inquisitive, if not omni-competent, Athanase Kircher who invented optical instruments featured in cinema’s most well-known genealogies and wrote Ars magna lucis et umbræ which has been used over and over by technical film historians. In the mid-seventeenth century, this Jesuit priest proposed a theory of sound modeled after the theory (?) of light, under the pretence that the former “apes” the latter. (The irony is that though we now know this analogy to have been based on their common wavelength, he thought that it resulted from their having similar propagation laws.)

Here, we are dealing with an age-old issue, often revived under scientific or aesthetic pretenses: what is the relationship between seeing and hearing? Kircher – another approximate encyclopedist – offers a disappointing and vague solution: they are similar in that they are both points where more general laws of nature become apparent. They are the last resorts of language and communication. In the end, Kircher is one of the last scholars of the Middle Ages, of the type that no longer existed after the Renaissance. However, one can come up with of a fair amount of responses that are less grandiose, and leave more to the imagination, when ceasing to depend on science in order to restrict oneself to senses and sensation, to the fields of synesthesia and correlations, a collection of fairly vague phenomena, the rational part of which often remains obscure. Big surprise: it is almost exclusively eclectic amateurs, whose scientific creeds are intertwined with hearsay and legend, who have documented these issues. See for instance Faber Birren (2). In the absence of science, realizations have nevertheless been made – though often ranked in the “eccentric curiosities” category – such as Père Castel’s “clavessin oculaire” (3) that had indeed interested the Encyclopedists (what a coincidence!) and that features at the beginning and the end of Bullot’s film.

The nineteenth century, which witnessed a profuse and fanciful synesthesic instrumentarium, also strove to unite the destinies of sound and light based on their commonalities – and as Zeitgeist had it, this destiny was inarguably poetic. From Schlegel and Hoffmann to Baudelaire without forgetting Balzac and Poe, this fate developed from the major equivalence between music and color which reached its climax circa 1900 and lasted until the Great War. These were the synesthesists’ “roaring 1900s.” Spurred by their outstanding psychic and physical ability to see the sounds and hear the colors, artists like Kandinsky and Scriabine emerged. Later, Eisenstein focused on this mythical ability in his text called “Synchronization of the Senses.” Since then, because of a kind of postmodern mistrust of the very idea of these correspondences (which seems to imply too heavily a vision of the world as unitarian), they tend to be avoided. From Warhol and his Exploding Plastic Inevitable to Xénakis (Polytope de Montréal) and James Turrell (To Be Sung), from the disco genre to the music video, lights and sounds dissociate eliciting reactions of the senses, butno longer dialoguing with each other.

Bullot knows this genealogy of the “aping” light (light aping sound, color aping music) in the field of art and on its fringes. His film is craftily constructed in that it approaches the issue from a new direction, addressing not so much the sensory equivalences between color and music, but a subterranean, principial and nearly ontological kinship between sound and light. The fantasy of a fake science or a fantastical science, like physics at the turn of the twentieth century, proposed many correlations (cf. what metaphorized from relativity according to Epstein for instance): light is made of undulations and so is sound, “therefore” they must have some sort of kinship. Reasoning through images, comparisons and metaphors is known to be quite dangerous on a philosophical ground. This film subtly presents images, suggests metaphors, allows comparisons – but never claims to be reasonable. It illustrates, catalogues, counts, and unwinds. Does sound imitate light? The aim here is not to answer such a tricky question, but to ask it, or rather, to remark that it might be asked, or even better: to remark it might have been asked.

2bis On a certain relationship to surrealism
As we said earlier, what distances this whimsical encyclopedia from the documentary genre is the deliberate lack of a specific point of view and especially of a narration conveying the voice of authority. Bullot’s images are usually inconspicuous, classical and humble; only rarely do they impose their presence. The narration that accompanies them, when there is any, is neutral, objective, and spoken by a timeless voice striving to be that of universal knowledge. One of this cinema’s most outstanding features, though, is the predominance of the “seeing” over the “hearing” (meaning both “listening” and “understanding”).

That said, one can’t help but think of André Breton, and the opening lines of le Surréalisme et la Peinture; a statement about the supremacy of sight above any other sense. This idea went totally against the grain of the early twentieth century tendency to fetishize music, (at the time, dominant thought supported the thesis statement of synesthesia; that music was the model after which color was fashioned) (5). Breton ranked the five senses according to the good old hierarchy of the senses dating back from the Middle Ages in which sight came before hearing. Indeed, to him, hearing is understanding – which means that hearing puts us under the reviled stranglehold of reflection and premeditation, while vision – at least in theory - remains untouched by this disease. Vision is pure, uninfected by the calculations of the raison bourgeoise. It has the power of immediacy; the power to present and convince immediately.

Bullot might not have remembered all those propositions but they did remember him. However, rather than walking in Breton’s footsteps – quite an arrogant and, ultimately, confusing path, (because Breton revels in contradiction, sometimes defending purely perceptive presentation, the stuff that dreams are made of, other times defending “convulsive Beauty”) – Bullot obviously followed the way paved by Magritte. In his works, things are presented for the distinct purpose of being seen, and the vision of these things supports beauty for beauty’s sake. All necessary visual ingredients are there; Bullot certainly knows how to film. His framing is deliberate, his lighting is nothing to sneeze at, his editing is rather economical; the scholarly neutrality of the technical means he uses is reminiscent of the pseudo-academism of Magritte’s own technique. And, as a bass plays softly in the background, sometimes contrapuntally, sight is forced to comply with an existential and even essential suggestion: what you see here exists, it actually is. Therefore, you must expand your vision to encompass one more belief.

It is common knowledge that Magritte entrusted the titles of his paintings with the duty to promote this belief: this is the most obviously Magrittian feature of Érik Bullot’s cinema. Indeed, the filmmaker goes so far as to re-use the same titles in a different way, to have their virtual meanings surface, as the painter did. Cartes postales en movement (Postcards in Motion) was originally les vues Lumière; but in The Ape of Light, the same phrase recurs in the subtitles, here introducing actual postcards, actually shot in motion, as they are shown, a microgroove carved into them (45 rpm), spinning round on the turntable. A short-lived gimmick from the sixties allowed one to send greetings from anywhere enhanced with one of the hottest hits at the time. There is no need for the titles. At the beginning of Paint Drying, a logo can be seen on the window of the train leading the filmmaker to Catalonia: a pipe and a cigarette barred with a red cross. No smoking. But because this pipe is an exotic one “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (and consequantly “Ceci n’est pas une cigarette”). Does the filmmaker deliberately reference Magritte? Did this logo just pop up by chance during the shooting? It doesn’t matter, really. He who flirts with fantastic realism reaps surrealism.

Besides, surrealism and encyclopedism have always gotten along quite well. Dictionaries of surrealism, encyclopedias of freaks and forefathers or fellow travelers, anthologies of black humor, and finally this prescription: “When will all books worth reading stop being illustrated with drawings so they can be published with photographs?” (6) Bullot’s films, with their chapter-like episodes, devoid of rational development but laden with a strong potential for mutual attraction, are based on an incongruous logic favoring analogy, metaphor, and the art of going off on tangents in a controlled fashion. Enhanced by accompanying photographs and texts, they become an irrational photographic encyclopedia.

3. Languages of the Game
Though dealing with extremely diverse topics, Érik Bullot’s films all bear a strong family resemblance. Nothing surprising, one might say; they are personal films, they were born from one single individual’s desire. Moreover, as they were produced over a short period of time and were all part of a coherent body of work, as pictures and texts show, they are, with their simultaneously ingenuous and sophistic relationship to documentation and to knowledge, many faces of the same undertaking.

To my mind, this family resemblance goes further than what one would expect from children fathered by the same man and genetic transmission seems to have been more systematic and more generous than the laws of inheritance usually allow. This feeling is striking when his films are projected in a row – as was the case this year (2002) at the Jeu de Paume. They seem to be linked together thanks to one of their structural features: their love of parataxis. Accumulative effects, juxtaposition, and variation. The editing of the films The Ape of Light, Gravitation, and The Chinese Garden (I am here referring to the most obvious ones) consists of linking a series of cases together without any progression or logic; narrative or otherwise. Granted, the Glassharmonika, the harpsichord, and the postcard with an incorporated microgroove, are linked by a similar ability to produce music, but none is implemented. This is a series based on a common denominator, but its worth and nature are never implemented. Same situation for the activities of the so-called Chinese at the Villa Medicis: one is painting, the other is strolling about, another one mimes a poetic nocturnal excursion to surprise his beloved, and whatever else. In a word, this is the tone of Bullot: amusing and amused. But the relationships between the shots must be imagined on another level.

The fact that this effect keeps increasing from one film the next is even more striking – and more significant. Cross-references, repetitions, rhymes from one film to another. Titles circulate (the “sound postcards”), shots circulate (a roller-coaster at the amusement park in Istanbul with the body of a giant lady; a California wave breaking against the pier…). Not much effort would be needed to delude oneself into believing that his work is but one single long film, each piece being one part or one chapter. This suits encyclopedism, even if whimsical, or precisely because it is whimsical. This also suits Magrittism (the painter’s passion for mock repetition). And most of all, this defines a peculiar tone.

In sum, Bullot’s films do not aim at telling a story, even when the topic seems to suggest it, even though there are people resembling characters, as in les Noces chimiques (Chemical Wedding) or The Chinese Garden. Nor do his films try to thoroughly document or express a well-informed, well-developed and supported point of view on an issue or a phenomenon. Nor do they tell the story of the filmmaker’s life using travel notes or photo albums, expounding upon the interests of critic and writer Bullot (notwithstanding the two episodes of a Diary accepted as such and upon which I shall comment later). Instead they very obviously aim at playing some sort of game: playing with fiction, playing with documentary, playing with self-fiction and autobiography, playing with indexical transparency, and, the supreme game, playing with the editing process (the gambler’s obsession: arranging and rearranging his cards ad infinitum).

The project is not absolutely new, of course, and from that point of view it could be said to have many ancestors. The one I would most like to mention would be Italo Calvino’s Si par une nuit d’hiver un voyageur, with its double level of fiction – on the one hand the master fiction, that of the Reader drifting from book to book without ever managing to reach the end (all books stop at one point and leave the reader frustrated), on the other hand the narrative’s attempts, as diverse and unexpected as possible, nevertheless connected by a common ground, or a common light (as is ironically shown by the fact that their titles follow each other to form what looks like one enormous title, or a cryptic sentence). Series, variations, fake bonds and true continuations, it’s a serious game devoid of any childlike dimension apart from the ability to wonder and take pleasure. Bullot surreptitiously replaces the Ideal reader – my fellow man, my brother, who cannot help being a trifle hypocritical – with a kind of archivist not so much in search for perfect fiction or never-ending fiction as for total and wholly fragmentary knowledge.

In the sort of instruction guides he has published about his works (in the form of exhibition catalogues), Bullot gives a clue, a transversal one: an immoderate taste for the pattern “64 propositions about…” (about China, about universal attraction, etc.). Sixty-four is the number of squares on a chessboard, which is anything but a game. Black and white: chess is a rudimental yet universal metaphor for good and evil, life, the twofold aspect of all things. The pieces are diverse and each has a true personality, and yet they remain anonymous. One feels that this anonymity is not a wholly unpleasant idea to Bullot.

3bis Language Games
We have seen that his world is pervaded with games: those of children (of which the top, a motif in Bullot’s work, would be a perfect symbol) and of the spirit (charades included). However, the most simple, omnipresent, universal source of amusement is language, and Bullot revels in wordplay.

Let us analyze the titles. Michel Pacha’s Manteau is not a coat (though “manteau” does mean “coat” in French). It is – according to the somewhat Borgesian voice-over – a hamlet in the vicinity of Toulon. After learning this in the film (for even if I were native from the Manteau it would probably not even have crossed my mind spontaneously), I read the title in a different light, like Rastignac’s Paris or Montaigne’s Bordeaux (my puns are not so effortless, they don’t come as easily as Bullot’s). Here, language has been slightly unhinged, uprooted from its banal use. Pacha’s manteau is not an oriental coat, but the fantastical view of an eccentric man as he regards a lost little town. I like to think that by naming another one of his movies l'Ébranlement, Bullot referred – consciously or not – to this language shifting he loves so much. From Pacha’s “Manteau” why not move on to Gogol’s Manteau? To imagine a Manteau sans maître? To think about Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau words? In short, why not allow the signifier to drift away wisely, slowly, and sweetly?

We could apply this method to his other films. It would probably prove fruitful with Calculus of the subject, which combines two widely polysemic terms (especially the latter). I prefer not to think that the subject suffers from renal calculus, as I do not wish young Felix any harm, but I cannot help but fall back on my knowledge of Latin, drawn in by the precociousness of this title, and think of, yes, kidney stones and renal calculus. And, with his small pebbles, I see in Felix a sort of Tom Thumb whose actions fill these shots that document with absolute opacity the transparency of birth, growth, and maturation of a “subject” (subject to law, love, language, and subject of the film). Gravitation has nearly reached the same ability to float and drift away (as I have already mentioned). Inner China, with its false airs of Outer Mongolia obviously hinting at Lointain intérieur. The Chinese Garden (replace “Chinese” with any attributive adjective you want).

And last but not least: Shadow Puppets (in French Ombres chinoises which literally means Chinese Shadows), which strips the “procedure bare, if there is one, that is. The so-called Chinese shadows (in French) are no more Chinese than the Chinese garden; and they are not Roman either, or native from the Manteau. Like “universal attraction” or “ape of light,” this phrase belongs to an old terminology that has probably become politically incorrect or is about to, and with subtle irony the film tells us what to think about it. The shadow puppeteer produces signs that fail to create a language. Why? Because they are but inarticulate analoga, unlike those other signs, those of “sign language,” which allow mute people to communicate. If we read between the lines, we find an age-old discussion that has been the source of much confusion amongst semiologists in cinema and photography: language or speech? Neither one nor the other? Signs or codes? Or, definitely and exclusively, meaning in the usage? Signing, aping (which is singer in French): indeed, deaf-mute people mimic with their whole bodies in order to communicate. What if the “ape of light” (“singe de la lumière” in French) was backwards for, “a sign of light”?

4. The Photographer and His Models
The rough portrait I am giving here is probably too intellectual, the image too dry. It is high time (like in Paint Drying), undoubtedly one of his most inspired movies, because he managed to preserve the novelty of his central metaphor and the small ones on which it feeds and quenches its thirst. Pointing out the vibration – optical, and otherwise – propagating from one image to another; depicting an discreet and tender sense of light passing by (like in that shot in Oh, oh, oh!, mysterious because so quotidian – and more surrealistic than all others – showing the outstretched, slow and majestic motion of the shadows of the seats on a train as it moves along the tracks).

For someone aiming at creating an encyclopedia, even if it only includes vague and poetic sciences, Bullot is extremely careful and thoughtful with the subject matter he handles. His most ostensible role is that of image collector, image meaning postcard or illustration. It is no coincidence that in two different versions of the text The Ape of Light, we find the same quote extracted from a comic written by H. A. Zo (pseudonym for A. Chazeau), Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique (New Impressions of Africa). It is common knowledge that Roussel had decided to include those images in his book so that it would not seem too thin, and that the writer arranged for the pictures to be printed in such a way that they divided the pages, whereas the reading of his book did not require this layout… Moreover, Zo had had to make these drawings without even reading the text; he was flying blind. What is an image produced under such conditions if not an arbitrary and useless supplemental throwaway? For a manipulator of images to reference such an idea is being fiercely ironic. But even in the most deeply encyclopedic moments of this encyclopedia in progress, images are only seemingly dull: even the most neutral of them are carry with them a vibration, a breath of fresh air.

Shots of flowers, trees, and trod upon grass recur in Bullot’s work. The childhood of art is associated with early childhood for a specific reason. What vibrates more immediately, more visibly than a Provencal prairie kissed by a light breeze at sunset? One whole part of Bullot’s undertaking goes beyond the scope of the collector’s wisdom and the Cabinet of Curiosities (or of Curiosity). In the meantime, the desire to produce plain or rather plane images is always felt, but in a positive way. “Images flattened as if they had been ironed.” One cannot help but be reminded of Bresson, of his instructions favoring accuracy, sobriety and reserve. Besides, Bullot is well aware of this, since he states: “Instead of actors, I preferred to entrust the roles to models, sometimes made up and dressed up, […] or, most often, to people in a position to play themselves…(7)” The Bressonian model is no actor: he does not act or express anything, he offers a surface to film, to write upon with motion and light. These models would be the equivalent to an artist of an object sitting there passively. Moreover, the behavior of Bullot’s models is different from his great forefather’s (all things considered, his style is actually closer to that of Cavalier which is also derived from Bresson – but that’s another story).

Postcards in Motion is a film with which Bullot has a visceral bond. At first it is a point of view, and, by the end, a cliché. But long ago, before referring to the unbearable stereotype, the boring topos, “cliché” merely meant “photograph.” The postcard in motion strives to uncover the sight concealed behind the cliché, and which, through this movement, will reach an addressee. Bullot’s aim: “Going back to the origins, mingling with them, producing a critique of this exotic illusion. Making this tension between imagery and reality the true topic of the film” (8). Always the same obsession: smoke out the game within language (what makes it “play”, go off track, go insane) and chase down the cliché within the image (what makes it lie, cheat, rendered incapable of take the straight and narrow). But doing so while making sure not to lose this precious game, this precious cheating that constitutes the essence of cinema, cinema itself.

The human beings we see in his films are natural: they are themselves, whether they act (Michel Pacha) or not (Paint Drying), or even when they act like they are not acting, or do not act, but try to look as though they are, as the two filmed diaries show. When they have to become fairy-tale characters (but never novel characters: “fiction” does not translate into “novel” in this world), they act even harder, of course. But they never fall into drama. This is what is the most moving in the intriguing Chemical Wedding, obviously undertaken by the filmmaker so as to allow himself to film a couple of kids reaching the ambiguous age of the first differentiated eroticism. Like any other kid, they overact. At the same time, they are happy just to be there, to walk, to sleep, to give themselves to everyday practices so simple they become mysterious.

It stands to reason that one who sees cinema as a representative art where a model must necessarily play himself, must also feel that editing is a sort of writing process. Once again this conception is drawn from the teachings of Bresson and can be found in different variations in all his great heirs, from Straub to Pialat or Cavalier. There is no other explanation for the parataxis so dear to Bullot: shots in sequence necessarily have a relationship that we must strive to discover. In his most narrative film, Paint Drying (which merely conveys one single long action), the viewer sees a series of landscapes, an artist coming down from his retreat in the mountains, and a walk to a small museum in a village on the Mediterranean seaside. But what really matters is what silently shows the worth of the painted treasure that is being carried in the man’s hands; it is so precious that he doesn’t mind depriving himself of drink, of the ability to wipe his forehead, of whistling a tune with his hands in his pockets. Silently again, the two diary episodes in which the young boy’s races, first tottering, then more self-assured, have something in common: they’re both apparently going nowhere; therefore, once again, it is not so much the narrative that prevails (what would it speak of, anyway, if not the passage of time?) as the series of actions taking on – through the editing of flattened images – an opaque and unexpected meaning. And what’s coming next concerning effects is also unexpected.

4bis Cinema As a Model for Cinema
In his work notes for le Manteau, Érik Bullot states that, as he was about to leave for Istanbul, “Michel Pacha’s theater offered the possibility of being filmed.” (9) There is no doubt that reflecting upon the law of gravity, upon the art of shadow puppets, upon the extraordinary similarity between sound and image, staging several alchemical figures presented Bullot with the opportunity to search for a possible (cinematic) form. All the same, he’s filming his child’s childhood, a subject coming into his own in terms of significance and culture, and the places familiar (family house) and exotic (Balearic Islands, California, Italy) through which he travels can only aim at searching for form.

Bullot is a great connoisseur and amateur of avant-garde cinema (and also of this poetic and intimate cinema for which there is no specific name and that one should avoid calling “experimental”). His articles and his conferences reference Chaplin and Lumière, Keaton and Vertov – revealing a tropism for the orthochromatic as well as for a cinema particularly fascinated with movement. Not surprising for a photographer who esteems at its proper value the silver component of film stock, nor for a postmodern filmmaker who knows that cinema has always defined itself – no matter how contradictory these definitions might have been – in relationship to motion. Bullot’s cinema seems to favor the poor movement (as in ‘poor art”): mostly still shots, or long walks with camera in hand (in a demonstrative way, to follow baby’s first steps).

How to reconcile this practice and this taste; to bridge the gap between sober films relying heavily on narration, at least implicitly, and burlesque movies or explorer’s movies? To me there is no better answer than the one suggested by Bullot himself during the brilliant lecture he gave about what he calls the “pace” (“pas”). “The pace defines the relationship between the body and the interval” (10). Through this remarkably synthetic formula, uttered at a lecture dedicated to films other than his own, he hints at the most logical solution to the enigma of this cinema, which applies equally to all things concrete - body, motions, a conception of dynamism expressed through gestures, (however minimal), walk-ons, or “models,” and to all things abstract (the interval, the intellectual and sensory relationships that cinema establishes between time and space, as Deleuze stated, and blocks of meaning, as Bullot adds in pectore). He loves films that add “paces within the paces”: films that cross the boundary between the abstract interval and the concrete interval. For example: travel and exploration films documenting animal and human locomotion (it is easy to see where the burlesque comes into play here).

There is no need for me harp on it, for the key is nearly too perfect. Érik Bullot’s ambition is to find with each new film a new or renewed way to produce those “paces within the paces,” to show motions he has seen and that require our attention, and at the same time, to show them at his own pace. Making cinema means reflecting upon cinema: this basic postulate of art-house cinema which has become obvious to us thanks to a few pervasive figures such as Godard, with his “essay films,” is but the peculiar translation of an axiom with which Formalists have managed to confer the apodictic strength of an obvious fact. Art worries about art, and art affirms art. Add to this the modern-day credo according to which art is the conscience of art history and there you have the background of filmmakers like Bullot.

5. Family Life
One last element distinguishes and complicates the “Bullot touch.” Every film is a family film, and this we have known since the days of the Lumière brothers, whose talent – apart from business for which they were quite gifted – lay in taming the whole world and making it family-friendly, molding it into a “Universal exhibition.” Bullot remembered this lesson. Of course, with the passage of time, the loss of the Empire, the disasters of the war (and even two wars), and the new look of the triumphant bourgeoisie, it is no longer possible to think that one must make the world his own. Bullot does not film colonizers’ wives throwing sapeques to Vietnamese children, nor Ashantis exhibited in a zoo, as the Lumiere’s cameraman did. He films a breathtaking trip down to the seashore in Genoa, a ferry crossing the Bosphore in Istanbul, a balloon seller in Santa Monica, then a roller-skater, not so much to prove that they are his, but to grasp the always aerial sensations with which they provide him. His gaze is not a colonial one which acknowledges otherness only to stigmatize it or project onto it an inoffensive nature. On the contrary, his is a distant gaze in search for (allow me to borrow the formula) “distance within distance”.

Paradoxically enough, what the viewer then perceives is a feeling of great intimacy. Although filming intimacy is a huge undertaking, in the field of art there are a good amount of filmmakers who have used their life stories as material for their films. Bullot’s intimacy is but remotely connected to those often very shameless projects (see Boris Lehman or Joseph Morder). His opinion on that subject is, like his opinion on nearly every subject, paradoxical and ironical and boils down to: you never film intimacy better than when not displaying it. Filming intimacy can mean filming the bodies of close friends, or his own, (although in The Ape of Light Bullot is not Bullot, but a model). Yet this visible presence is not indispensable and there will be as much intimacy in the peculiar interval as in the discreet choice of one sensation over another (one particular wave rolling on a beach rather than the next one), or in the slight trembling of the light we felt.

A few years ago, Bullot started a uniquely concise filmed diary. Not a single anecdote – or rather, nothing anecdotal, was included. Instead, we have a work completely devoid of anecdotes thanks to its neutral tone, its puzzling editing, its parataxis, and its succession of sensations and tossed-off effects. No narrative, no time period, no words. Nothing but a dive into a timeless instantaneity. Time – real time, that of the referent – does go by, unarguably: We see it in the pace at which the child moves along; first a newborn being bathed (already with the face of a little man), then a toddler in a deliciously old-fashioned romper learning to stand erect. The very young child runs and stumbles, a good little boy in his Sunday best complete with tie. However, nothing in the movie quite echoes the rapid flight of time, of life. Modesty? Without a doubt. But also, and above all, the desire to film intimacy as one would film anything else (because everything else is filmed like intimacy).

5bis An Economy of Art
Érik Bullot is also a photographer and a writer, did I mention that? Fiction of the self, (portrait of a grandfather or grand-uncle, for example) (11) and fiction-essays (12) employ a tone close to that of his films. This polytechnic method has no pretension and doesn’t try to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes (“See, I can do anything”), it is but the consequence – or the premise – of the tedious work done by the filmmaker, as his numerous films show. Art is also a type of handicraft. It might as well avoid complicated, disproportionate methods. The most natural and economic path is neither a business nor a media-oriented path, but merely a straight line from the producer of the art to the consumer of the art. The metaphor of the painter who kills three birds with one stone, painting, sculpting and producing an action (a happening, if you will) – and all this in a perfectly natural tone and perfectly integrated in the world as it is, with the beauty of its light and the grey of its concrete – is the best depiction of this economy.

Not long ago I asked Bullot to publicly explain his views on the relationship between cinema and art (13). He brought to the fore the striking idea that cinema was above all conceived as a putative member of the society of Muses, in a strangely virtual fashion, never updated in the present, always thought of in the future, then in the past –like a “promise” never actually kept, that of the coming together of temporal and spatial arts, a promise of which the synchronicity of sound and image, and their avatars, would have been the emblem and almost the allegory. An art that would have occurred: singular conception from one practicing this very art. But it does explain, probably better than any commentary, these traits that I pointed out in his films – the items’ willed disjunction, the commentary’s carefully observed distance, the attachment to a kind of stuttering of form and expression (for an example, see the long sequence in Ape of Light during which the subjects, because they are listening to themselves, can no longer speak properly).

The notion of “promise” also casts an interesting light on the status of those films in Bullot’s oeuvre, on their economical aspect. (Do we even need a reminder that the term “economy” is derived from the oikonomos, the accountant, the one running the house. The economy of art is also a personal and even intimate issue). Ricciotto Canudo, to whom Bullot pays tribute through this promise, had founded the Club des Amis du Septième Art. Yes, a club – as if the promise could only be kept by a small group of people. Lumière had undertaken to show the world to everybody (“everyone” meaning the occidental bourgeoisie). Vertov wanted to help open the eyes of the masses to reality. The art of cinema, though, has become something entirely different, an intellectual possibility that only concerns amateurs. The subtlety and peculiarity of Érik Bullot’s cinema, that which confers upon it a mental plasticity, is its grasp on the two ends of this story, and its refusal to ever let go of either one of them.

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1. Érik Bullot, l’Attraction universelle, Galerie Snapshot, Amiens, 1994, n.p.
2. Faber Birren, Color. A Survey in Words and Pictures. From Ancient Mysticism to Modern Science, Secaucus, N. J., Citadel Press, 1963.
3. Louis-Bertrand Castel explains the principle in his work La Musique en couleurs (1720); other instruments blending sound and color were built later on but never attained fame; cf. Faber Birren, Color, op. cit.
4. See Jean Epstein, l’Intelligence d’une machine (1930).
5. See the title of the famous article written by Gance in the twenties “Musique de la lumière”.
6. André Breton, le Surréalisme et la Peinture, Gallimard, 1965, p. 32.
7. É. Bullot, “6 notes brèves pour une anagramme”, le Singe de la lumière, Credac, 2002, p. 8.
8. É. Bullot, “Cartes postales en mouvement”, Documentaires, n° 11, 1995, p. 173
9.“Cartes postales en mouvement”, op. cit., p. 173.
10. É. Bullot, “Le pas”, in J. Aumont, dir., Aventure et Cinéma, Cinémathèque française, 2001, p. 31.
11. Tombeau pour un excentrique, Deyrolle, 1996.
12. Jardins-rébus, Arles, Actes Sud, 1999.
13. In the context of the conference cycle held at the Collège d’histoire de l’art cinématographique at the Cinémathèque française, in 2001-2002. See J. A., dir., Le Septième art. Le cinéma parmi les arts, Léo Scheer, coll. “Cinéma”, 2003. Érik Bullot’s text “La promesse” is pp. 57-71.