Shame

2 - What's going on? (2)

I guess, I can’t do anything without being truly absorbed. Madly concentrated.

Sometimes, I’ll be writing ten or twelve hours running, for several weeks or months doing nothing else except writing. If I’m not fully in the fullness of the project, I don’t feel myself. When come the idea and the writing desire, I have to immerse myself, become one with the story and forgetting the reality, this other world. It’s enjoying as much as exhausting. Even orgasmic, refreshing as much as exciting. Finally, erotic. Like a permanent vibration or an uninterrupted flux and reflux, after having taken what will nurture the story I keep the reality away from me.

So, I make my videos just as I write my novels. Yet, I could have sworn that the image would require me to do differently. I was wrong.

Everything originates from the desire to see and make thing exist. A character. A scene.

Afterwards,

ideas move from my imagination to my body, exactly as I write a novel.

Images take shape almost by themselves. Almost.

I start the project before having the material and financial means. I can’t wait, so I dive, running from idea to reality, to the production of fiction.

I never make a draft for my novels or any storyboard for the video.

I just throw a few notes on a notebook: find a rosary, a prayer book, a suitcase. Skeletons, bloody flowers, a mannequin, clothes, shoes, one or two objects that might be discovered in the suitcase of an exile. What will I choose to show? What will I choose to keep in the shadow? What music, what sounds?

Story, characters, scenes, everything is written in my mind. Mentally I make so many copy and paste, before putting in the trash of my brain which has no interest. I follow the narrative. I move with its changes. My indecision. My decisions. Its developments. I blur the boundaries between reality and imagination. Only then the real becomes the place of all possibilities.

I invest the body of the story, of each character and landscape, I move from one emotion to a situation, from the female to male. Multiple then. Night and day I play with this multiplicity. The headphones in ears, I listen to loop titles that drive me, upset me and stimulate me. To have my ears split. I am addicted to the music. What would I be without music?

What's Going On?*

Back to the reality.

My list drawn, I'm going to clearance sales. I have got 30 euros, that is to say no budget. Again, I will do without actors.

Shame.

In a certain way, I’m sailing from my desire to create to my anger in knowing there are so many humans drowned in the liquid cemetery that is the sea. Far from silent, the sounds of the outside world stir up my anger. My shame to say we are Europeans, heirs of the Enlightenment. I’m not really proud to be European right now.

Literally, images fall on me. Some I won’t never shoot, or some that I’ll shoot and forsake in editing.

I think about them all the time.

I dream a lot too.

I watch the world around me, streets, people, buildings, colours and small details that I probably would not notice if I wasn’t so focused on my project. I capture what feeds the project even before taking the camera. I never get bored of this game that consist in changing reality by thought. I look at a building, and it is no longer just a building but the place of all the dramas, the place of all meetings or all silences. This is no longer an ordinary door, but a temple for tortured victims. Everything is set. Everything can be scenography in a thousand ways.

While the images are taking shape in my mind, basically, I’m thinking: what is it for? What’s the point?

If I still do not know even and what it’s for (my novels like my videos, thus how my life is going there), I have to leave the fiction to perpetually flirt with the shores of reality.

Art and literature make myself standing straight up.

Hey, hey, hey, hey

And I Said Hey, What’s Going On?

Day after day, the sounds of the world surge:

Lampedusa, Calais, Syria… Meanwhile, to prevent the Serbs migrants, Viktor Orban is building a wall.

Walls grow worldwide. Another dirty war.

* 4 No Blondes

1 - How is born an idea

I was listening to the sound of the world.

Day after day the same word returned and echoed.

Lampedusa ...

the sea becomes the most horrific tomb for families fleeing war, famine and persecution. How much desperate one must be to hire services of people-smugglers? For whom life is the only price to pay for shipping.

Lampedusa ...

Once, ten, fifty times the drama is repeated. As many times as there is hope in human heart, even if it is vain. As many times as there are people-smugglers. Because some prefer to die at sea rather than die looking at it.

An image comes to me of a sea engulfing corpses, clothes, objects chosen with care because there is no room for these in suitcases or on people-smugglers’ boats.

Then, another image comes to me of a soiled and bloody sea emptied of dismembered, crushed and eviscerated bodies spat on our so beautiful beaches.

Lampedusa ...

and France as Europe are thinking, talking, meeting, weighting theses interests.

Lampedusa ...

and always more corpses at the bottom of the abyss. And they talk about impossible quotas. They spend a creepy long time to discuss.

Lampedusa ...

as a further injury to Europe’s body.

Finally another image comes to me : swimmers and vacationers, still healthy in body and mind, may well become mad discovering they swim among corpse wandering. And I hear dead people crying.

During this time, just to escape from these sounds of the world, I was listening to the soundtrack of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s movie (1991), The Double Life of Veronique.

3 - 25 Kg of bones

I haven’t been to the butcher’s since 30 years.

The smell has taken my breath away. Like in apnea, I wonder if it would be possible to get some bones for a video shooting. I suddenly feel that existing world is no longer an appropriate place for the vegetarian that I am. A world where shopkeepers are charming and find pretty normal to give me bones.

The day before the shooting, I go to retrieve the bones.

From the bottom of the back room, I see the gigantic butcher smiling. Effortlessly, he held at arm's length a huge garbage bag. I miss breaking my wrist, grabbing the bag that contains 25 kg of beef bones. For a few seconds, I falter at the prospect of crossing the city, to put them in my friend’s freezer never reluctant to help me, whatever I undertake. So here I am as a mule loaded of 2 dozen kilos of bones of beef, walking on the streets of Saint-Nazaire. Even if bones are frozen, they smell strong. I tell myself that I have the right head to be controlled by cops. And I can imagine explaining them what I do with all these bones...

The next morning we load the car: model, suitcase, a lot of mess, camera, water bottle, it will be hot and, of course, the bag of bones. Lucie and I start with a garage sale where I find a "magnificent" crucifix. No, I don’t convert to Catholicism. But by working on the symbolic, I know the world is full of men and women who pray every day hoping their lives will be better. How not to think of the necessary foolish faith that one must have to trust the smugglers who, without fluttering, sway you overboard?

Coffee break.

Right now, the beach of Sainte Marguerite is relatively empty, the light is blinding and sparkles everywhere.

I spread plastic skeletons, clothes, various objects on the sand, I hang the rosary in seaweed, I plant fake and bloody flowers, I put the model as a figurehead. I throw old child sandal and tennis, and a black bather with poltergeist’s blue eyes.

I move too much. Whether in normal life or when I'm shooting, I always move too much.

I’ve got this need to be in motion, to make one with my surrounding, an irrepressible need not always compatible with the action of filming, but I learned to play with it.

I move the objects once, five times. I try to compose the image that comes closest to what I have in mind. And I remain available to the unexpected.

The sea goes out already, so it's time to throw the bones in.

They come back, taken or rejected again by the ebb and flow. The tide quickly goes out, and I have to move with it.

I'm so absorbed that I did not even notice that the beach is filling. Suddenly, several suits, hips and buttocks through my lens, it's time to pack up. No one took offense to this clutter on the beach, and not more bone tossed by the surf.

We come back on a hot sun Lucie’s home where I keep my precious bones in the freezer until the next afternoon. My hand is almost broken for bringing these heavy bones, and I think I'm crazy, because I always do too much. It’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Later, in the night, I start editing. I’m sailing between surprise and disappointment. Suddenly, I see only missing images. I listen to La Double vie de Véronique… L’acqua ch’io prendo già mai non si scorse*.

I would like to cover the beach with red-black dead bodies. I would like to be at the bottom and see falling a rain of bodies in the sea, shooting them like dying flowers. And 10 000 actors on misery boats. Ok, I can’t really transforming each idea in peplum. Maybe later.

The Shipwreck (4)

Marie stands in for Lucie.

In this late Sunday afternoon, here we are leaving for Fressay (44), at the bank of the Loire.

Stranded in the grass not far from the bank, there is a completely rusty boat perspiring of an ending world beauty that waits us. Of course nothing goes as planned.

We pass under the barbed wire to take a small and wild shrubs road, just the kind of scheme that my urban side hates. But sometimes to create we must do what we would never do spontaneously. So, bags on shoulders, always hanging my beef bones, we go up the trail when, suddenly, I hear a rustling behind scrubs. Immediately my reptilian brain screams: a herd of cows is moving in our direction. Twice in my life cows have attacked me and I still have a child’s nightmare fear. I try to be courageous, do I try. Hands shaking, I stand facing the boat smelling rust and neglect. Impossible to concentrate, mad herd of cows are riding in my mind. Every time I move, cows move too. I give up, and we turn back, under the dodger, always laden like mules. In these confrontations with nature, I often remember of a beautiful text of Leopardi who narrated human arrogance in his impetuous and vain desire to master Mother Nature. I would never fight with nature, I flee.

After I have to rethink everything.

I lost my rusted boat. I find silty mud and a boat dock where I settle objects, figurehead, symbols of hope and death.

Suddenly, the unexpected cropped up. My shipwrecked.

Born to be comedians, Enzo and Jeremy are floundering in the mud pulling a canoe, determined to attempt a short sail on the Loire, near Fressay's lock.

If it weren’t for the cows, I would have missed them.

Filthy but happy, we repack.

A little further we visit an incredible retired place. A truly shooting location or an ideal squat for artists, formerly machinery related to the Loire. Before going back, we stop to a foolish Calvary straight out of the Facteur Cheval’s mind: le Calvaire de fui.

A perfect place to invite some vampires coming celebrate.

To end (5)

Honestly, the most interesting isn’t the shooting.

In this way, I can’t tell about me as a director. If I had a team, I will give the camera to someone else. In fact, what I like the most in making videos is the sound and visual staging and, above all, the writing. This means that the editing part is the one I prefer.

Do, undo, redo ... to test on, three or ten ideas. To be satisfied or nearly, thus to find it pathetic and I start again. Finally, to end a video like I’ll finish a novel.

Time flies without notice, editing produces the same form of immersion as I writing a novel, it wraps me completely. The big difference between video and writing is that you see immediately a result. The image provides the immediacy, what is good or not. The writing process doesn’t allow this quick result. It takes more time. I made other discovery since I'm really making the video, it's the wizardry of sound. I spend hours to make sound editing and create vibes. Just the lack of smell of the sea and this of seaweeds. Maybe one day, we can also shoot smells...

Then comes the time of the doubt.

What is it used for?

Do I manage to make myself understood?

Is it worth it?

Yes. No. Maybe, or not.

After all comes the time to leave theses issues for the next shooting, and put the video online.

Lalie Walker

Saint-Nazaire, juin 2015

writer

Shame