v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Piracy and Streaming, Expanding the Reach of Arthouse

 

From Sense of Cinema, an Australian cinema newsletter, a provocative issue that you must read:

What do piracy and new technologies mean for cinema? With the decline of movie theatres and the emergence of new digital media over the past few decades, concerns over the death of cinema and cinephilia have been shared by many intellectuals and cinephiles. This concern finds its roots in Susan Sontag’s renown essay The Decay of Cinema (1996) in which she believes the essence of cinephilia is fundamentally tied to the experience of “going to the cinema” and being captivated in the dark movie theatre, ¹ and more recently, in David Bordwell’s apprehension that “films have become files.”² These viewpoints have sparked debates between older and younger generations of cinephiles from Western and non-Western countries regarding whether the postmodern digital and internet media could ultimately jeopardise the ontology and originality of cinema, or they herald a new era characterised by more diversified breed of cinematic practices. This dossier responds to the debate from the latter perspective by foregrounding the properties of piracy and the consequent development of new cinematic practices within a global decolonial frame. 

With the development of new technologies and operations (from videotapes, VCDs, DVDs, to more recently, the internet) over the past 40 years, piracy has played a crucial role in expanding the reach of underground, independent, and arthouse films to a wider audience. It has been instrumental in overcoming limitations imposed by local cinema infrastructure, including censorship, transnational boundaries, and financial constraints. If we move beyond the ethical, legal and economic considerations surrounding intellectual property rights and copyright infringement, in what context are pirated films circulated? What are the new horizons that piracy opens out? And to what extent does piracy transform our relationship with cinema? To this end, this dossier is dedicated to the heterogeneous piracy practices that are integral to an alternative film culture. This film culture, propelled by piracy, foregrounds on-demand film spectatorship and small-screen consumption, thereby challenging the prevailing cultural hegemony enforced by not only the local monolingual power but also global capitalist structures. 

In this dossier, the contributors outline diverse forms of film distribution and consumption associated with piracy across different geo-political contexts. All the contributions provide a critical perspective on power, capital and ownership. 

One of the main arguments presented in this dossier is the progressive democratic potential of piracy as a means to challenge pre-existing power dynamics. Amanda Robusti analyses how a pirate streaming service, Videoteca di Classe, becomes an anti-fascist force by circulating leftist films and bypassing the official distribution channels controlled by the far-right Italian government. In my article, I provide an overview of the way in which piracy has facilitated new filmmaking practices, grassroots cinephile culture, and public engagement in China, opening up new distribution and exhibition avenues “independent” from the official ideological discourse imposed by the Chinese Communist Party. Similarly, drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of “transgression”, Imran Firdaus pinpoints that film piracy in Bangladesh plays a radical role in democratising the distribution and exhibition of national culture, resulting in the emergence of a new cinephilia and the growth of independent filmmaking practices. 

Apart from transgressing the oppressive political forces, piracy as part of a postmodern flux cuts across national and cultural boundaries and fosters the hybridity of culture and commerce. In their empirical research of piratas (piracy vendors) in Colombia, Juana Suárez and Luisa González provide insight into the operation of the alternative distribution and consumption ecosystems in the country. These vendors break cultural and class barriers in disseminating films to metropolitan and regional audiences and filmmakers from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, thus expanding access beyond the intellectual elite circle and narrow economic circuits. 

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A Suspect List

 

From El Pais regarding Sight and Sounds Top 100 films of all time-I have issues with this crazy list:

There is no such thing as the greatest film of all time. Keep this in mind as you read the results of the survey conducted every 10 years by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine. Ever since 1952, Sight & Sound has polled critics, historians and filmmakers from all over the world and issued its list of the 100 greatest films of all time. The surprise number one knocked off past winners like The Bicycle Thief, Citizen Kane and Vertigo. Released in 1975, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was written and directed by Chantal Akerman when she was just 25 years old. It stars Lebanese-French actress Delphine Seyrig, playing a lonely Belgian housewife who barely speaks during the three-plus hours of the film.

Jeanne Dielman broke new ground in telling a fiercely feminist story. Akerman, who committed suicide in 2015 when she was 65, wanted to portray her outrage about female oppression. She did this by focusing her camera on a mother’s three mind-numbing days of household chores and mundane routines. When Akerman was asked what distinguished her films from those made by men, she replied: “The difference is that a man would never have made this film. They learn different values from the day they are born, and a woman washing dishes is not art.” A tireless cinematic experimenter, Akerman sought to shatter the prevailing societal portrayals of women.

Sight & Sound’s survey has rekindled a prickly debate that now must contend with our contemporary culture wars. This time around, the magazine conducted a much broader survey – 1,639 participants – including this writer. This is almost double the number surveyed in 2012, which in turn was much broader than the previous decade’s survey. While Sight & Sound says that this makes room for new sensibilities and gender and racial perspectives, the survey’s detractors argue that it’s a calculated strategy to precipitate a biased and opportunistic destruction of the cinematic canon.

Only two female filmmakers made Sight & Sounds’ previous top 100 lists – Akerman and Claire Denis, whose 1998 film Beau Travail climbed this year from 78th to seventh place. One of the biggest surprises of this year’s survey is the number of women who made the grade: Céline Sciamma, Agnès Varda, Jane Campion, Věra Chytilová, Julie Dash, Maya Deren and Barbara Loden. But pioneers like Dorothy Arzner and Leni Riefenstahl dropped off the list. More Black and Asian filmmakers are in the top 100, and an astonishing number of recent releases like Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Killing off the forefathers

“There is a clear tendency to kill off the [cinematic] forefathers,” said Esteve Riambau about the top 100 list. A historian, critic and director of Barcelona’s Filmoteca de Catalunya film archive, Riambau said: “While the lists of the 1960s and 70s also killed off some of the forefathers, this one is genocidal, an indiscriminate and unjust extermination of the classics.” Riambau claims that the list is full of “political, generational and gender” biases, and has an obvious amnesia problem. “Does anyone really understand why Parasite is on the list, and not one film by [Ernst] Lubitsch or [Howard] Hawks? When the details of how everyone voted are released in January, perhaps we will be able to better understand this sham.” Riambau believes that shaking up the canon is necessary, and the broadly representative survey merits consideration. “But it demonstrates a complete disregard of cinema’s popular dimensions and an entrenched militancy and ghetto mentality.” The predominance of American and French language films on the list is, “a clear reflection of the cultural studies programs that American universities began offering in the 1980s,” said Riambau. Or as American literary critic Harold Bloom once put it, “Eskimo lesbian studies.”

American filmmaker and writer Paul Schrader (who wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver) was one of the first to criticize the survey results, which he thinks were distorted by political correctness and woke agendas. Schrader says this does a disservice to Jeanne Dielman, a film he admires and considers one of the greats. Veteran American film and literary critic Janet Maslin tweeted her support for Schrader’s critique and added that the survey reflects all the worst vices of “film students and Criterion Channel junkies… Good Lord, the world is much bigger.” On the other hand, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody praised the survey: “Despite regrettable absences (Cassavetes, for example)… [the survey] provides a more lucid view of film history.”

“It doesn’t seem to me that anything too serious has happened,” notes Josetxo Cerdán, director of Filmoteca Española, the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s film institute. “The silent films that have fallen off the list are An Andalusian Dog, Intolerance and Beyond the Dreams of Avarice. In these times, the absence of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance is understandable.” Just as Leni Riefenstahl’s enormous influence on cinema has been overshadowed by her affiliation with the Nazis, “Griffith’s racism has also impugned his place in the canon,” said Cerdán. He also thinks that including any recent film is highly questionable. “We need time to reflect and decide which films have lasting value and which ones don’t. To me, what is more indicative of the shifting perceptions of cinema is that Scorsese’s Goodfellas replaced his Raging Bull on the list, because Goodfellas is much more firmly embedded in the postmodern tradition.”

Manuel Asín, the artistic director for the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival (Pamplona, Spain), says the diversity represented in the top 100 list is a sign that people are more knowledgeable about cinema. “Contemporary films incorporate more and more influences from the films from the past,” said Asín. The internet provides neutral and open access to the history of cinema, which has brought many forgotten gems to the forefront of best-film lists. “It will be interesting to get the detailed voting results to see which films just missed making the top 100, understand the general trends, and see how experimental cinema fared in the overall survey,” said Asín.

Mexican critic Fernanda Solórzano admits to having mixed feelings about lists that produce what she calls unnecessary controversies. “I understand that these lists are intended to be fun and provocative, but I don’t know if all this effort to establish a cinematic canon is worthwhile, even if the goal is just to shake things up. I think the laudable inclusion of more women voters undoubtedly influenced the outcome. As a female critic, it goes without saying that I’m glad to see many more women directors on the list. But as a voter, it puts me between a rock and a hard place. I didn’t vote for any of them [the women], which doesn’t mean that I’m not in favor of increasing awareness of their work. Had I known that the objective was to unearth underrated masterpieces directed by women, I would have voted for La ciénaga (or, The Swamp) by Lucrecia Martel.”

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A Short Video on Luigi Ghirri

A Very Good Documentary

 

It is enlightening to see a documentary that addresses the issue of protest and violence from a different perspective than American News television. We have dumbed down to a primitive level where thinking is not allowed. Here in this productive documentary you begin to understand the complexity of the issues but also who holds most of the cards in this game. Here is a review from J. Hoberman at Artforum:

This metadocumentary, an annotated assemblage of mainly first-person smartphone videos made during the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) demonstrations of 2018 and 2019 by the mixed-media journalist-artist-provocateur David Dufresne sans help from French ministry of culture, is as significant in its way as the founding film of cinema verité, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s 1961 Chronicle of Summer, in which Parisians of all types were asked about their personal lives and then in some cases, having seen themselves on-screen, were interviewed again provide the film’s coda.

Monopoly creates a similar feedback loop. Simply described, the film features images of urban mayhem—Robocopoid police battling scraggly yellow vests. Produced largely by the demonstrators, these videos are presented on the screen as subjects for analysis by actual participants, among other commentators (truck drivers, plumbers, lawyers, police-union officials, academics, social workers, journalists, stay-at-home moms): talking heads whose identities are withheld until the end of the movie, the better to sharpen the viewer’s appreciation of body language and vocal tone.

Dufresne employs a radical method of directing. Subjects respond to stimuli, in some cases reliving an experience. The movie’s first words are “C’est moi,” uttered by a demonstrator who has lost an eye as he watches himself wounded and crawling on the ground. This is immediately followed by a stern rebuke from Emmanuel Macron, who, shown alone amid an obedient audience, scolds an unseen gilet jaune sympathizer: “Your words repression and state violence are unacceptable in a constitutional state.” Dufresne inserts an opinion by the wounded man’s mother, followed by some truly atrocious examples of “unacceptable” state violence, including footage in which, in their apparent eagerness to confiscate a camera, cops smash their way into a car.

Visceral as it is, Monopoly is a montage film in the Soviet tradition. Dialectics abound. Brutality is juxtaposed with theory. The same streets are shown during and before chaotic manifs. Violence perpetrated by the police is set beside violence perpetrated against the police—the latter most elaborately in some multiscreen security-cam footage watched, in real time, by an outraged group of cops. The idea that the state is defined by its monopoly on violence is derived from Max Weber’s 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation”: hence the movie’s American title. More sarcastic, the original French title refers to a cop’s gloating comment on footage showing perhaps forty young Arabs being taught to “behave” by spending hours on their knees, hands clasped behind their heads. Dufresne, born a month before May ’68, attributes his interest in police brutality to his teenage enthusiasm for punk rock. Monopoly has universal relevance even while it is specifically French, dealing as it does with the indigenous gilets jaunes movement—a leaderless, mostly working-class revolt sparked by rising fuel prices and unified largely by a populist loathing of Macron—while advancing a variety of analyses that deploy semiotics and critical theory with infectious gusto. There is thought amid the clobbering. Academics parse symbols; sociologists dissect crowd behavior and “ritualized” or symbolic acts of aggression. Philosophers suggest that demonstrations serve to make establishment power manifest, while smashing the windows of the high-end Champs-Elysées brasserie Fouquet’s enables demonstrators to physically possess the shards of that power.

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Jim Marshall-Photographer A You Tube Discussion

Guy Gilles Filmmaker

 

 

Looking for information on filmaker Guy Gilles after seeing his advanced La Claire de terre (1969) this evening I ran into a post at writer Dennis Cooper's blog. From Dennis Cooper's Blog:

‘An unclassifiable filmmaker in 20th century French cinema, Guy Gilles is the director of a little-known body of work, melancholic and poetic, that combines nostalgia for the past with a haunting evocation of the present. His work was a passion of many of the most respected French actors and actresses, and it remains a favorite of film buffs, who love his films for their acute literary references and close attention to private emotion.

From Love of the Sea (1965) to Nefertiti (1996), Guy Gilles developed his films on the sidelines of the New Wave, his work sometimes colliding painfully with the contemporary trends, and often facing the indifference of a public confused by the precious uniqueness of his vision.

‘It is in precarious conditions – three years of work and a more than limited budget – that, in his first film, Guy Gilles turned to the sea for a romantic love story of two protagonists who do not live with the same intensity. Already, in the film’s many obsessions (thematic and aesthetic), we see the lifelong interests of its director. We meet for the first time the actor who would become his favorite (Patrick Jouane) and number of stars attracted by the enthusiasm of the young filmmaker. He will always convince stars to volunteer their contributions to his cinema: Jean-Claude Brialy, Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Greco appear in his work repeatedly, contributing to their poetic strangeness a sense of timelessness that one can already see clearly in as early a work as Love of the Sea.

‘This atmosphere is also reflected in Au pan coupé (1967), starring Patrick Macha Meril Jouane, who created his own production company, Machafilms, in order to enable the film to be made. The charm of this sensitive film rests on the memory of a lost love. It shows none of the indifference of the work being made and celebrated at the time, by such as Jean-Louis Bory or Marguerite Duras.

‘While Gilles hoped to shoot his next film, Le Clair de terre (1969), in his native Algeria, he was forced by circumstance to do so in Tunisia. This delay forced him to replace Simone Signoret in the central role of the retired teacher. Edwige Feuillère accepted the role, and brings much to the film’s character and its imperial, faded elegance. Considered Gilles’s masterpiece, Le Clair de terre is a concentration of all of his art, lingering between nostalgia and modernity.

‘He would never again find this delicate balance, even in Absences répétées (1972), despite winning the Prix Jean Vigo for the film. Darker than his previous films, Absences répétées follows the deadly process of a young man isolating himself in a haze between drugs and a desire to commit suicide. Apart from the very impressionistic Jardin qui bascule (1974) starring Delphine Seyrig, Guy Gilles made no feature films for the next decade.

‘Le Crime d’amour (1982) is a flawed film situated between a police investigation and the story of a crazy and tragic love affair between a young man and an older woman (Macha Meril), and it exudes a strange and powerful latent homosexual drive. The film’s staging rarely succeeds in articulating these various levels. This failure is even more obvious with Nuit docile (1987) which was met with general indifference from both critics and the French public.

‘Although he was already very ill, Gilles then began to make the film Nefertiti, an ambitious international co-production that exhausted him and was considered a fiasco. In 1995, an unfinished version was shown very quietly on television. On February 3, 1996, Gilles Guy died from complications from AIDS. His brother, Luc Bernard, later devoted a documentary to Gilles’s work in 1999: Letter to my brother Guy Gilles, filmmaker too soon.

‘Parallel to his achievements in film, Guy Gilles was a prolific director for television. He directed a very highly regarded documentary about Marcel Proust (Proust, art and pain, 1971) and another successful documentary about Jean Genet (Holy martyr and poet, 1974). He was also a cultishly beloved photographer and painter, and he wrote several books, most of them as yet unpublished.’ —

Alessandra Leao and Orito

Today's good music video between Brasilean and Colombian musicians.

Deja Vu

By luck or lack of it, I became acquainted with the films of Hong Sang-soo this new year even though the filmaker has been busy putting out films almost monthly for the last 15 years. And what films! My favorite director has always been Eric Rohmer and I find a strange similarity with Hong Sang-soo's work where so much is dependent on the words that the characters utter. There is an element of narrative disruption in his films that just delights me. Here's an article by Romain Lefebvre I found that talks about his method and his madness:

Several weeks before the start of Cannes 2016 – where she was due to present Elle by Paul Verhoeven – Isabelle Huppert was contacted by director Hong Sang-soo, who asked her whether she had any free time to film with him. The actress agreed. And although the festival lasts a “fortnight [quinzaine]”, it would only take nine days for a small team, gathered around the director, to wrap up a new film, and one day to edit. The genesis of Claire’s Camera offers a fresh example of the rapidity with which Hong Sang-soo shoots (Grass, his next film, apparently only took three days to shoot); a rapidity which does not cease to amaze, evoking jealousy in colleagues or serving as fuel for detractors. It makes sense to use the upset of the release of Claire’s Camera to better understand the production process of a director which can, as we shall see, be structured into three indispensable stages: (1) the preparation or the conceptual base; (2) the intuitive decision or chance; (3) the composition or the structure. Along the way we shall see in what way this process, even when disdainful of any notion of “intention,” responds to a permanent project of the director: to combat ready-made images.

It’s a notorious fact: Hong Sang-soo does not write screenplays. Or, rather, the practice of scriptwriting melted away as time passed: meticulously drafted for his first three films, scripts were subsequently reduced to mere treatments or increasingly scattered notes – from about thirty pages for Turning Gate to an estimate of five for Hahaha1 to nearly nothing for Claire’s Camera. The act of writing, if it takes place at all, is worth little more than as an initial impetus:

“I do not want a scenario in which 95 percent of the elements are fixed in advance since, in the end, the rest of the creative process would be about working on details, the remaining 5%. What I do want is to find an approximate 30 to 40 percent of the elements in the treatment, 30 percent in the casting and dialogues, and the rest during the shoot. During the editing process as well, where I sometimes end up cutting out thirty minutes of the film.”2

This evaporation of the screenplay corresponds to the privilege granted to the fragmentary and to discovery. Indeed, Hong Sang-soo distinguishes himself by a way of thinking about his films in a mode of fragmentation. For him, making a film is not the same as unrolling a narrative thread, but rather organizing “surfaces” or putting “fragments” to use within a given structure:

“Organizing surfaces? By that I mean my desire to show that everything, every event, even the most insignificant episodes in our lives, contains everything inside of it. Something very concrete, with a banal appearance, always harbours more. A little episode of our lives can obscure an ensemble of symbols and meanings which pile up as layers, a series of superimposed surfaces. Afterwards they form into a block, a structure, which gives the impression of an entity. But this entity never contains just one idea!”3

“I believe that my films are not made to express a story, but to feature some fragments. I don’t think I have any other option. I take those so-called fragments and, with them, derive a whole structure centred on everyday situations. And within that structure, I select an appropriate rhetoric. And when I go into the shoot, a new process of discovery begins.”4

These declarations raise several remarkable points. Firstly, that structure for Hong Sang-soo is always derivative; it is secondary to the units which make up that very structure. Subsequently, that the point is not to achieve an unexpected structure by organizing parts which are determined in advance, but rather a process of discovery which comprises both the parts and the totality. The director expressively puts an emphasis on the necessity for each stage of the process to be a creative stage, as well as his interest in events that go beyond it.5 These various disclosures of Hong Sang-soo allow us to grasp the principal traits of the process during which fragments are discovered, determined and organised – even if it might seem paradoxical to define such a process, given the degree of fixity this would presuppose.

First, there would thus be – pitted against “the intention” or “the message” – the privilege granted to “the situation.” The projects are truly launched from the moment when Hong Sang-soo runs into a certain “incentive,” which could be a formal idea as much as a narrative situation – in a sense, this will be the nodal point around which other elements will be clustered and distributed.6 Some examples are in order here. In the case of Woman on the Beach, the incentive is the fortuitous encounter of a woman on a beach who happens to resemble one of her acquaintances, an encounter which drove a curiousness in Hong Sango-soo on the possible relation between physical and inner resemblance. For Tale of Cinema, it concerned the state experienced when leaving a film screening, when we are still under the influence of what we have just seen.7 For Yourself and Yours, it was about the conflictual relationship between the love we feel for someone and the evil others can speak of that person. These situations-slash-incentives, particular in their relatively ordinary nature and “encountered” by the director in his own experience, can serve as a concrete starting point: Hong Sang-soo does not seek to develop them on a conceptual or abstract level, but rather to deploy these incentives and to embody them in other derivative situations which imply a group of characters and their actions.8 In this way, intentions do not regain the upper hand once the first situation has been put in place, but rather its primacy is reaffirmed with the arrival of each new narrative situation. The first question the director asks himself is never “what do I want to say?” but always “what is going to happen?” And the answer is never given in advance, since it will be decided in accordance with a given place.

Indeed, Hong Sang-soo does not look for locations to shoot what he has already written out, but he rather imagines his scenes, whether at the time of preparing his treatment or during a shoot, based on these places. Situations are thus located, and the films incorporate some traces of this method, if one judges them by his instruction plans or the signs which intersperse them, delineate the sequences and indicate where the characters are to be found: the sequential unity often rhymes with the unity of a place.

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Here is a link to the excellent film publication which carried the article above-it is from Belgium and called Sabzian - articles relating to Hong Hang-Soo

Photographer Raymond Cauchetier Gone

From an online self-portrait that he authored, photographer Raymond Cauchetier, who recently passed away at the ripe age of 101, writes about his work in the 50's:

In 1954, just when I’d been promoted to the rank of capitaine after Dien Bien Phu, I left the army. The war was over. I stayed in Indochina and tried to embark on a career as a photographer. I knew a little about photography itself, but nothing about the world of photography. At the beginning, though, things went well. My first album, Ciel de Guerre en Indochine, was very successful. The 10,000 copies printed were all sold on subscription, and all the royalties went to Air Force charities. Also, to my great surprise, the Japanese, who had just discovered my photos of Saigon, hailed me as one of the greatest photographers of the time. The magazine Asahi Camera gave me sixteen pages. One of the top American museums, the Smithsonian Institution, organized an exhibition of my photos of Vietnam, Faces of Viet Nam, which travelled around the States for several years.
came back to Paris full of hope. I dreamed of working for Paris-Match and of learning my new profession at last. I managed to get an interview and arrived with my published albums and a selection of my best photos. The editor rejected them disdainfully. “Nowadays, Monsieur, everyone takes good photos. The only thing that matters is who recommended you!” I wasn’t recommendable, so I left.
And yet I wasn’t forgotten in Japan. When he came to Paris, the most famous Japanese photographer, Ihei Kimura, mentioned me to Henri Cartier-Bresson, who suggested I work for Magnum. I was just about to leave for Indochina again, and gladly agreed.
I arrived in Saigon during the elections. The Americans were plotting to make sure their favourite, Ngo Dinh Diem, would replace Emperor Bao Dai, who was too favourable to France. My photos show the various phases of the campaign, which was violent and pitiless. I sent them to Magnum straight away, but received no answer. A little disappointed, I left Saigon and went to Cambodia, where the Angkor temples still awaited me.
It was only much later that I found out why my photos did not find favour with Magnum. It wasn’t because they weren’t good enough, but because they had been taken with my old 6X6 cm Rollei, whereas the Magnum lab, sponsored by Leica, was only equipped to process 24×36 mm photos. They were eventually published, but I was kindly but firmly urged to get a new camera. I refused, and that’s why I only really worked for Magnum for a day.
So I went back to work in Angkor. That’s where, in 1956, I got a telegram from the producer Jean-Paul Guibert, who asked me to take photos for the film Mort en Fraude, which Marcel Camus was about to make in Indochina based on a book by my friend Jean Hougron. It wasn’t because I was (possibly) talented, but because it was cheaper than bringing over a photographer from Paris.

That’s how I started working in film, little knowing that I would later, in my own way, illustrate the revolution of New Wave cinema.
At the time, set photographers were technicians with ill-defined jobs. They were mostly asked to take a photo from the spot where the movie camera was standing at the end of a scene, and then to make themselves scarce. They got in everyone’s way and cost the producers money as every minute had to be used profitably. Their role as button-pushers brought them a meagre salary that was aligned with that of junior machine operators. Besides, nobody really knew what to do with the photos, which only really interested the script girl trying to get the continuity right.

But that was when Jean-Luc Godard appeared, beginning to film Breathless. The wind of change was starting to blow in the world of cinema. The producer was indignant when he saw Godard writing dialogues in a café and sending the film crew home because he didn’t have any ideas that morning. The sacrosanct rules of traditional cinema had been thrown out of the window.
I covered this upheaval from day to day, but I was careful not to talk about how successful my work had been in Indochina. I still had everything to learn about the world of film, where I was still unknown. Besides which, I bothered people. I was severely criticized for my initiatives and my ‘reporter’ style that was so far removed from standard set photography. One day, in 1961, they stopped using me to please a cameraman who was eager to give the job to one of his friends. Nobody’s perfect.

As for my pictures, which belonged to the production company, they stayed in boxes for fifty years. When they’d finished filming Breathless, Jean Seberg introduced me to Romain Gary. We got on really well and talked a little about film and books, but a lot about aviation. He had been in the Air Force in the Middle East, as I had in the Far East. We would often compare the attractions and dangers of our respective air missions.
But I had to get another job. I offered my services to François Truffaut, who welcomed me with open arms. I took part in the filming of some unforgettable films. But the set photographer’s salary was set by the trade unions and remained as low as ever, and I became tired of this and ended up leaving the cinema world altogether.
The publisher Dargaud gave me what seemed like a golden handshake after the paltry salaries in film: they asked me to edit a series of photonovels – a format that was very popular at the time. I learned the technique from Hubert Serra, one of the people who created the genre in France. I was thrilled: I could write the storyboards, select and direct the actors, and do the lighting for the shots myself. I adapted Balzac, Maupassant, Zola and Chekhov. It was like film, except that there were no movie cameras or sound engineers. Instead of spotlights, we had flashes bouncing off walls. This lighting method was used faithfully in the New Wave films, and the critics, who had never opened a photonovel in their lives, proclaimed it as a stroke of genius.
Within a few years I was back on an even keel financially, until Dargaud sold the thriving magazine to a greedy Belgian publishing house, which ruined its distribution and killed it off within a few months.

There was nothing to keep me in France any more. In 1967 I was able to go back to Indochina, where Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, who loved the photos in my Saigon album, asked me to take photographs of his country as part of a tourist promotion. I was given everything I needed: cars, planes, helicopters. It was like a dream! For two months I travelled the length and breadth of Cambodia, without a single day’s rest. I was a little worried, because I had never taken on such responsibilities before. But when the King saw my work he loved it, decorated me with one of the highest Khmer honours, and asked me to set up a National School of Photography in Cambodia.

Ryley Walker & Kikagaku Moyo Live in 2018

This is the live set of Ryley Walker and Kikagaku Moyo that is just been released on Riley's label-it's a solid pairing of the type of improvised rock that I still enjoy for its surprises. Enjoy everyone.