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Interview with the "filmmaker and artist" Éric Baudelaire, 46 years old. On Monday, October 14, he won the Marcel Duchamp Prize at the Center Pompidou-Paris, the highest distinction in the field of contemporary art in France. "You can take your time" is a film device UFO, shot and edited for four years by him and especially by twenty students of the college Dora Maar of Saint-Denis.
RFI : Congratulations on the Marcel Duchamp Award ! You can take your time . Why is the notion of time so important to you ?
Éric Baudelaire : Because he misses it. We do not have many, because things are going very fast. It's a project that took four years. We gave ourselves that time, to see what can happen when we make a film of this duration. Especially with young employees. They were eleven when I started working with them. They are fifteen today. It's a real time in a life when you're young,
The story goes as well outside the film as on the big screen. With the young people, we cross as well the supermarkets with their rays of cans as the tunes of games in the cities, we attend their discussions at school or at home. What did you seek to establish with this very special relationship between life and film ?
The first thing was to find a way to work together. So, to return regularly to the Dora Maar College, to open discussions, work sites, reflection with the twenty students. And then, gradually, give them cameras, see what they film, without teaching them, without telling them what to do, just see what happens. If there is a sort of almost self-taught cinema that is made.
I'm not here to teach. I'm not even here to really coach. I am here to collaborate. We look at the images together, four years of work, filmed by my teams and the students themselves. Then we sit at the editing table with Claire Atherton [ the editor favorite of the filmmaker Chantal Akerman, ed ] and we continue to work: we re-watch everything from the beginning, and we try to make or tell a story that is related to the manufacturing process. In the end, it becomes what is called a dramatic film.
At the last Cannes Film Festival, Ladj Ly, Jury Prize for Les Miserables , brought with his young actors from Montfermeil the subjects and aesthetics of the suburbs on the Croisette, the Grail of cinema. Today, you won the most prestigious contemporary art prize in France with images shot by young college students from Saint-Denis. The suburbs, is she today in the center ?
I do not know if the suburbs are in the center. I'm afraid the suburbs are not in the center. On the other hand, it was in the suburbs that we made this film. So, the suburbs are at the center of this film. What is certain is that it is a film made by the people who participate in it, it is not a movie about people. It's a film made first with people and gradually it becomes a film made by twenty students. It's their voice, their look, their way of filming their house, what they see through the window, going to college. Sometimes, when they take the camera and go to the countries where their parents are from, they also film the countryside in Romania or Reunion. What seemed to me very important is that it is the look of everyone that constitutes this whole.
Young people are not filmed, but they film themselves. As a result, does the relationship between the viewer and the author change as well ?
It interests me a lot to question or put in crisis the question of the author. The idea of the artist-author in a masterful way interests me much less than the possibility of fragmenting and weakening this question of "author". In the film, the author, they are authors. They are people who together make something. I read their names while receiving the prize. In the end, it is this group that becomes the author of the film.
You are a laureate of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, named after the artist of the ready-made and the inverted urinal. Do you, with your film, feel at home in the world of contemporary art ?
Marcel Duchamp has contributed enormously to widening the field of art. I think that enlargement continues and continues. Today, this opens up to forms that might not have been considered as art at the time of Marcel Duchamp. But especially this kind of work, practice and cinema is also the place of art, contemporary art anyway.
Do you already know your next project ?
I am currently working on a film, it is the story of an American experimental musician, Alvin Curran [ born in 1938, in Providence, Rhode Island, ed ]. And I go to Dakar, for two months, to accompany a group of people in an "academy". The Raw Material Academy is not a school, because it is a place that tries to rethink differently how to teach and build. This is where I go to organize the work of reflection of a group around what cinema can be today, with a dozen participants from around the world, Palestine, Brazil, everywhere ...
► You can take your time , film Eric Baudelaire and twenty students Dora Maar college of Saint-Denis, Marcel Duchamp 2019, projected / exposed until January 6, 2020 at the Center Pompidou-Paris