Arts Publications

In her own time

ArtForum, April, 2004 by Miriam Rosen

MR: But if you remain in foreign territory, where you have to speak properly, the decision to adapt Proust for your film La Captive is hardly anodyne. You once remarked that "this book was made for my cinema"--that was in the magazine Les Inrockuptibles--but with all the declensions of these languages, with your voice, with accents or without them, isn't it also a way of saying, "I am here," working with an icon of French literature?

CA: No, I don't think it was to prove that I had access to real French literature. For me, when I saw the hallways, the bedrooms, and all that in Proust's The Captive, I said, that's for me!

MR: We've discussed time and space, the editing of your films, texts and languages, and installations. But we haven't spoken about the image.

CA: Most of the time I make an image head on. I don't think that a frontal image is idolatrous, because it's a face-to-face with the other. But I realized that later, not at the beginning. The other will be in my place when they're sitting in the movie theater. Which is the same thing one could say about time: We sense time, so we sense ourselves. Face to face with an image, we sense ourselves. We are always on the outside when it comes to the other. Proust, when he speaks of kissing his grandmother, says, "But I was only kissing the exterior!" That really struck me. It's this exteriority that is under examination in my films. It's the same thing with time, because the other doesn't have the same experience of time. His own time comes into play, and his perspective comes into play, and it's a gaze directly at you. Which cannot be denied. So that's not voyeurism. If you looked up, down, to the side, etc., you would be a viewer-voyeur. And that's not happening here.

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MR: In the last part of the installation D'Est, there was a lone video monitor, and one heard your voice reciting the second commandment, which, of course, forbids graven images. That surprised me, because you speak of it as if this prohibition really concerns you.

CA: Yes, but that came later, when I had already made a lot of films. All of a sudden, I thought of that, and I said to myself, if I make images like this, en face, then it's not idolatrous. But, anyway, these are explanations after the fact.

MR: If I'm not mistaken, you never shoot your own images but always use a camera operator--from the beginning all the way to From the Other Side, in which you employed a mix of media, including your own small digital-video camera. Nonetheless, it's curious that, given the one-woman band that you are, you don't operate the camera yourself.

CA: That's true, but I'm always very close to the image. I'm the one who does the framing. I may not have pushed the button, but I did the lighting.

MR: Finally, to return to "minor literature," which you spoke about in an interview over twenty-five years ago, here's a question that I have today: With this retrospective at the Centre Pompidou and everything that surrounds it, the fact of being featured at Beaubourg and exhibited at the Marian Goodman Gallery, you are no longer really "minor." How does that realization sit with you?