OUI NON


I began working in digital video in 1996, shortly after the first cameras came on the market. I spent a year experimenting with this, making over the time several works which approached this new media in differing ways - Nas Correntes De Luz da Ria Formosa and London Brief. Both of those were documentaries of a kind. Moving to Paris in 1997, with a new infant child, my daughter Clara, to care for, I found myself drawn again toward working in some narrative form, but improvised, and in a manner which could accommodate my life as a full-time father (Clara was 100% in my care). Through my friend Jim Stark I met some actors - Hélène Fillières and James Thiérrée - and with their understanding - no pay, improvised, I wanted to let it spread over a year, just shooting when they and I had the time - we began. We were, in keeping with the Parisian setting and its romantic mythos, making a simple boy-meets-girl film. We had not story, no plot, and we would see where matters took us.

Initially I planned to have the entire film with double screens, and all the material shot with the actors was done to accomplish this, using varying strategies to carry this out - double cameras (sometimes) or sequences, such as the one in the cafe, in which each of them was shot throughout an entire long single take sequences, and then making an approximate variant, the other was shot, and the two were placed together. Shooting was very casual - I doubt that either of them actually spent 12 hours shooting, though we did spend a fair bit of social time, talking, improvising, thinking about the work. As it happened they did in fact have a little affair which I think they imagine I did not notice, though for reasons unclear to me it was short-lived and in turn their relationship became very soured. It became difficult to get them to get together, and more difficult for them to act convincingly as lovers. These things for me are evident in the film, like acidic residues tainting what would be a frivolous little love story. As if that were not intrusion enough, then one day while filming with James at the French National Circus, he was doing cartwheels, and suddenly he snapped an Achilles tendon - on camera. He went to the ground, shrieking in pain, and I stopped, a bit shocked and not understanding. I helped him as I could, but also knew he'd spent the previous months organizing and rehearsing and prepating to take to the road with his first solo new circus - a lovely work of which some snippets are in OUI NON. Much of his pain was seeing that crashing to the earth as he did. He was on crutches the next months. The film ground to a stop. We moved from Paris, and in the following year I returned to shoot a closing sequence, just something to end the film. As it turned out when I put the two together on a small bridge at the Buttes du Chaumont, it was unconvincing and for technical reasons I returned, and shot James alone where absent his nemesis, he was able to do the sequence and say believably, "je t'aime".

Moved to Rome, I confronted the material - that with the actors which constituted perhaps 50 minutes or so of edited material, and then a sprawl of images making a portrait of Paris which I had shot on long walks with Clara, whose voice one finds throughout the film. Initially I ordered the actor material, with double screens. It seemed to work, though it also seemed mentally taxing to watch so much in tandem rectangles. And then I could not figure out what to do with all the Parisian material, most of which was ravishingly lovely, but made no sense seen in two-screen tableaux. I was stymied, and the film sat, festering. And then other life things intruded: Clara, having spent the first 3 and a half years of her life almost everyday with me, while her mother was busy making films, the last of which, Agua e Sal, had Clara in a role as a child kidnapped by an actress who looked like a double for Teresa Villaverde, was kidnapped in reality from our home in Rome and taken brutally and illegally to Portugal. I was devastated and the following year all my time was devoted to a hopeless attempt to secure her liberty from an utterly corruped Portuguese legal system. In 2001, feeling a moral obligation to the actors to finish it, I returned disconsolately to OUI NON, and again was stalled by the two-screen idee fixee which I could not resolve. Finally I basically told myself, fuck the two screens, and having made that decision the editing went more or less quickly. It screened first at the Locarno festival, and went to a few others and disappeared. Neither Hélène or James - both of whom have gone on to successful careers - list it in their filmographies.

OUI NON is about looking, not story-telling; it is about a movie that only begins at the ending (note the Universal count-down leader arriving at #2, the last visible number, about 8 minutes before the film finishes.) It is about the films not made about the people who exist outside of film. It is a Parisian cliche, an homage to the culture of Paris and its impact in the world. It is a silly love story, and an experiment in digital media. It is a bitter-sweet conflict between the falsity of fiction and the tragedy of life. It is also about making a transition from celluloid film aesthetics to digital ones, from rigidity to plasticity, from filming with the burden of large costs to the making of works which are almost without cost. It asks the viewer to set aside the habits of a spectator, the expectation and anticipation of “a story,” of “narrative tension” and instead to simply look and observe as in life. For the maker it is very much a transitional film, a step from one place to another. It is a farewell to film.