My Vision of Cinema
“I am the kind of man who works with passion; I throw myself completely into what I do. I also love scorching summers, cold winters, torrential rain and snow, and I think most of my films show that. I like extremes because I find them more alive. I have always found that men who think like men, who act like men, who are most fully themselves, are always better than the others.”
Akira Kurosawa
Why cinema?
My decision to become a director came after watching Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. It was a spring Saturday; I was in high school, and I was bored. At the time I was no film buff, and the idea of watching a black-and-white Japanese film did not exactly thrill me.
The film had been mysteriously recommended to me by my first Chinese teacher, a French priest who had lived for several years in various Asian countries, and who told me one day after class: “If you want to understand anything about Asian cinema, start with Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.”
I bought the film soon after his advice, but only decided to watch it several months later. I don't know why I finally put the DVD into the living-room player that day, but I was spellbound from the very first seconds; I will always remember the drums that brought up the opening credits in large, hand-brushed white characters. The film had swept me up entirely in its power. I watched, fascinated, every second of its three hours. When it ended, I sat frozen, stunned by what I had just experienced, my body motionless as it tried to absorb this unique experience. It was at that precise moment that I said to myself: “In life, I want to do what this man (Akira Kurosawa) does.” I did not clearly put into words that I wanted to become a filmmaker; rather, I wanted to dedicate my life to keeping alive and sharing the flame that had just been lit inside me. I wanted to be capable of the same humanity, the same greatness, and to inspire others, just as I had just found the inspiration for my own existence. In the end, I simply wanted to be able to bring meaning. That moment echoed a line by the film critic Serge Daney: “One must always remain faithful to what once left us spellbound.” I then decided to remain faithful all my life to that spring afternoon, to what I had felt at that precise moment; I would spend my life keeping the flame alive.
I rushed to my town's media library and watched Akira Kurosawa's entire filmography in less than two weeks. I now had three passions in my life: history, sinology and cinema. Not knowing what to do with three passions that were hard to reconcile, I took a gap year after finishing high school. I attended the sinology lectures at the Collège de France while reading voraciously and watching up to five films a day.
Kurosawa said that to make good films, you above all need something to say and to know how to say it, and that this only comes through experience. I quickly realized that book knowledge would be necessary, but not sufficient. I had the chance to start putting what I had learned into practice with Huang Zheng (黄铮), a man from Sichuan who was my private Mandarin tutor; he was a film student at Paris 3, but also a fine-art photographer and a professional camera operator for Chinese television. When I told him I wanted to become a director, he took me along to many shoots and gave me one of the most decisive gifts of my life: my first camera and my first lens, a lens that has stayed with me ever since.
One day, as we were drinking tea while working in his tiny attic room in Montparnasse, he asked me what I actually wanted to do after my gap year. I told him I hadn't got very far with that question, and he simply replied: "You love cinema, you love Chinese and Chinese culture, so why not go and make films in China?" I have to admit it was the best idea anyone had given me at that point in my life.
What's more, the Chinese film industry was booming and very few foreigners worked in the sector, so the opportunities were immense. I decided to go to China to make films.
About a year after this turning point in my life, and after many tribulations, I found myself in the heart of China, a student at Wuhan University. There I would study classical literature as well as playwriting and screenwriting. Since cinema is a syncretic art whose essence lies in what it tells and how it tells it, I believed that to become a true filmmaker I first had to learn how to live and how to write. Studying directing on its own seemed to me to have no substance and no purpose; if a person has lived fully and knows how to write, I believe they have what they need to become a good director, and the rest will come naturally to them. We always know how a story we know intimately should be told.
Only by practicing yourself, without confining yourself to a single craft, can you truly forge your own path. So I also learned through practice, working as an editor and cinematographer, and as an assistant director alongside several Chinese documentary filmmakers. Within two years, I directed about ten short films and worked on some twenty films, including several features. It was during this period that I discovered a profession I had many preconceptions about: producing. I quickly realized that being French would be a real advantage for producing independent films in China, a genre that received very little support and was even opposed by the authorities. Without ever making it official, I naturally became a film producer, first to help friends, then out of genuine enthusiasm. After working as a staff director for a studio in Shanghai, I realized that being both director and producer of my own projects could be a considerable advantage: it meant being efficient and independent. From then on, I would do everything I could to always be both the director and the producer of my films.
After almost four intense years in the People's Republic of China, I returned to France to set up my own production company and continue on my path. KH pictures was born two months after my return, and Belith Films followed three years later.
What is my cinema?
To me, making films for the sake of film holds almost no interest; cinema is simply a tool whose purpose is to help humanity improve. Aware of how presumptuous such words may sound, I approach the subject with sincere humility, but what I mean can be summed up simply: it was thanks to Akira Kurosawa's films that I wanted to become a better man, and to me that is the most beautiful thing cinema has to offer. I believe in the perfectibility of humankind, and if, through my films and the devotion of my life, I can contribute to it, however modestly, then my life will have been worth living. That is what drives me to keep going.
My references and inspirations
Cinema is a syncretic art, and that is why I love it so much. Passionate about art in general, I could never make up my mind: I would have loved to be a sculptor, an illustrator, a writer, and in the end I decided to be all of these at once. I became a filmmaker. Many other artists have therefore had a real influence on me. I think in particular of the Chinese-born French writer François Cheng (程抱一), whose writings forever shaped my vision of art. The Chinese painter Shitao (石涛), as well as the Japanese printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重) and the German painter Caspar David Friedrich, left an indelible mark on my aesthetic vision.
When it comes to narrative power and creative force, Osamu Tezuka (手塚 治虫) is an unsurpassable master. But the one who, with the greatest taste, managed to marry Western efficiency with Eastern subtlety is none other than Jirō Taniguchi (谷口 ジロー). What I particularly admire in these artists and creators is the universality and timelessness of their stories, and the effective simplicity with which they tell them.
As for cinema, my first influence is of course Kurosawa. But that influence is less cinematic than human: more than the quality of his films, it is the quality of the man that inspires me, his humanity, his total demands on himself and his constant will to improve, almost as if he had always sought to follow the principles of the famous samurai Miyamoto Musashi:
1- Avoid all perverse thoughts.
2- Forge yourself in the Way through your own practice.
3- Embrace all the arts rather than confining yourself to one.
4- Know the Way of every profession, not only the one you practice yourself.
5- Learn to tell the advantages and disadvantages of everything.
6- In all things, cultivate intuitive judgment.
7- Know instinctively what cannot be seen.
8- Pay attention to the smallest detail.
9- Do nothing that is useless.
But Kurosawa is not my only influence. The second is a French filmmaker who, as it happens, filmed the making of one of Kurosawa's films: Chris Marker. Naturally, I can only express a certain fascination with his science-fiction short La Jetée, a film forever inscribed in the history of cinema that has influenced many directors, but it is above all the rest of his work, his documentaries, that has influenced me most. The documentary that influenced me most deeply is undoubtedly Sans Soleil (1983). As fate would have it, when I discovered it as a student in China, I was in the middle of making a film with a similar concept. At the time, I was filming everyday life on the Wuhan University campus and its surroundings. I lingered above all on the many statues and stray dogs that marked the university with their almost mystical presence. At first I wanted to make a film in the form of a dialogue between these dogs and these statues, but I quite quickly lost the thread of my idea and ended up simply filming people. After a while, I realized that this habit of fleetingly filming everything had stayed with me: I was doing it on every film shoot I took part in and throughout my many travels in Asia, so that I eventually built up a large amount of footage. I knew I wanted to make a film from these images, but no precise idea came to mind. Then I discovered Chris Marker's film, and a film was born in my mind: Chiens Errants.
Following on from my autobiographical narrative Souvenirs de Wuhan, which recounts my wanderings in China, I would make a film inspired by the book's storyline and illustrated with all the images I had gathered over the years. It would retrace my own journey, telling, through the commentary of a fictional narrator, how I became a filmmaker in China. Thanks to Chris Marker, I had finally found the narrative form that suited me. I had long known that I was not drawn to classical forms of storytelling, and Taoist thought had given me concepts to formalize my own way of thinking, but it was Sans Soleil that showed me what I loved to do and where I wanted to venture.
I thus developed a very paradoxical vision of my cinema: on the one hand, I am deeply attached to efficiency and simplicity, even to a stripped-back purity; on the other, I can't help constantly seeking to experiment with new forms of storytelling. Without wanting to make experimental cinema as such, I believe there is always a way to push the boundaries of expression of this still-young art that is cinema.