Rewatch "Entretiens sur l'art" with Alain Guiraudie

Entrusted since 2021 to the critic and curator Jill Gasparina, the "Entretiens sur l'art", which for more than 20 years have drawn up a formidable collection of artists' words, carefully scrutinize the materiality and conditions of emergence of the works of the invited artists.

Cinema, writing, photography. Alain Guiraudie has always navigated between different artistic practices. He wrote his first novels in the 1980s (but he did not publish the first, Ici commence la nuit, until 2014, at P.O.L). His first short film, Les Héros sont immortels, was released in 1990. It will be followed by several means, then feature films, seven in total, the last of which, Miséricorde, was released in autumn 2024.

His singular fictional universe plays very freely with the cinematic genres (fantasy, mythology, science fiction, ultra-realism, social criticism, comedy, film noir...) and unfolds in a France rarely shown in cinema. The representation of small rural homosexual communities, the off-grid life of farmers and workers, the diagonal of emptiness and peri-urban areas, normal bodies yet considered non-standard, or that of an intergenerational sexuality thus constitutes a true political project that is eyeing the utopia, and irrigates all his cinema, as well as more broadly his visual and literary work.

In 2018, while he was a guest artist at the École du Fresnoy in Tourcoing, Alain Guiraudie returned to photography, reviving the practice of film photography with which he was familiar when he was younger, as he made his own prints. After cinemas and cinematheques, bookstores and poetry houses, we then see his work making a breakthrough in a new sphere, that of contemporary art.

His photos are taken during urban wanderings. He sits down, on the lookout. He is waiting for something to happen, photographing passersby with whom he exchanges and eventually continuing the shots. These are, he says, "genre scenes that have been made by themselves."

What place does photography occupy today in the filmmaker’s galaxy? And literature? If each practice has its own autonomy, we notice obvious echo effects between texts and images, adaptation games, circulation. And of course, the same freedom and the same defense of the power of imagination. The interview will thus return to the ways in which these different labor economies are elaborated in their specificity, but also intersect and nourish each other.