Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige: Pt II

II.

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Trailer for Je veux voir (2008).

ART iT: In your films it seems that there’s a delicacy involved in how you create your narratives, a sensitivity to the idea that the narrative is both creative and destructive at the same time, or even as an analogue to archaeology, the idea that to remove something from a site is to destroy the site.

JH: Khalil and I are searching for something that we can believe in – a reason to believe in this world – but also, on another side, a reason for believing in narration. How do you believe in characters? How do you believe that this image and this image together can produce this effect? When you fabricate these images you have to believe in them, and this is not so easy. When you give an actor a role and he says the lines you’ve given him, you really have to believe them. You are the first spectator of your own work.
It took us a long time to find the method of working that we now have, and that only helped us to believe in what we are doing. The narration is important but, as you say, it’s not a narration that’s controlling everything or complete. It’s a narration where there are gaps or things that are not totally present. When we were writing A Perfect Day (2005), we questioned ourselves about how it could even be possible to do a narration with psychology, cause and effect in a country like Lebanon. So it’s not only thematically that we are inspired by where we live, it’s formally too.
Films like Ashes (2003), A Perfect Day and Je veux voir all take place in one day, and events in just one day has a moderate evolution. This is because of what we were feeling in Beirut. We felt like we were stuck in the present, a kind of hysterical present. This was a way of emphasizing this, of working on it. You used the word delicate but I would rather say there are many layers of sensation and emotions. It’s more about creating a place with space for the other. In our films, there is always space for the other. We want to create an active link with the spectator.

KJ: I will return to your example of archaeology because in fact we started our practice by doing what we called “An Archaeology of our Gaze.” This was our first major exhibition. It was several photographic installations showing how our gazes as photographers had evolved after 10 years of taking images in postwar Beirut. From the beginning we were aware that making an archaeology would show us the layers of how we built our gaze and perspective.
Archaeology here is interesting in the way that it forbids you to give any definition of a place because it is structured in time across different times. This leads me to something else in my relation to images. In 2002 the philosopher Bruno Latour made an exhibition at ZKM in Karlsruhe called, “Iconoclash: Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art.” He was trying to use another concept for images between iconophiles, those who desire images, and iconoclasts, those who destroy images. For Latour, you use an image at the same time that you make a critique of the image. For example in science when you want to study something that is beyond the naked eye, like molecules or the cosmos, you will create an artificial image just to allow you to think about it, even if it’s not completely the same as the real thing. So here the image is a medium that allows you to continue to think about things. For Joana and I the image is both a place of mediation and a place of work, so you have the relation to the pleasure and ways that you can think about the image and at the same time it allows you to intercept something else.

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Top: Trailer for A Perfect Day (2005). Bottom: Trailer for The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012).

JH: In a way the idea is always to tell stories but to tell stories in different ways that will elicit different emotional responses. As with the experience of making Je veux voir, there were so many images that were broadcast on television during the 2006 war, and we would see them and think, these are incredible images – unbearable images – and now, after that, what do I do? What can images, can cinema do? What kind of images can I make? So you have to find another way of dealing with narration and enabling the spectators to think about what they are seeing, not just to say, “These are the victims from this war, these are ruins, it’s terrible, but it’s distant from me and my life.”
Television gives you this affective relation to images so that you are both emotionally involved and distant at the same time, you are not totally engaged with what you are seeing because there are so many filters for protecting yourself – otherwise it would be impossible to watch television.
So for Je veux voir we had to create a different experience. With narration what is important is that the story is very present but also very fragile. At any moment the film can be in danger. In Je veux voir there was danger all the time that the film wouldn’t lead anywhere. If I want you, as a spectator, to be in danger with the images I show you, and to question yourself, is this real or not, where lies the fiction, where lies the documentary – which is the question of the film in a way – we had to put our film in danger. The actors didn’t have a script, they didn’t know what was going to happen.
We usually work like this, it’s a strange kind of improvisation, we put a very precise set up, we created situations and we wait for things to happen. For example, when Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué met in the film, they were actually meeting for the first time. We didn’t know what would happen. We didn’t know what kind of chemistry they would have together. So they got in the car and drove to the south not knowing what was going to happen to them, now did we ourselves know.

KJ: It’s like when fighters train for a boxing match. Everybody knows what they have to do to prepare, but once they step into the ring, nobody knows what will happen. It was a bit like that. We did months of location scouting. We knew that Rabih in a certain situation might react one way and Catherine another way – so we tried to create some situations. Then in the end we would edit all the images and rebuild the narration. But the risk, the danger of the film, was that nothing would happen. But we were willing to take the risk, we had to do it.

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Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige: Moving Monuments

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