Alain Gomis
BY
Erika Balsom
An interview with the French Senegalese filmmaker.
Dreamlike Visions: The Multi-Sensorial Cinema of Alain Gomis opens at Metrograph on Friday, February 9.
Whether working in documentary or fiction, French Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis likes to get close to people, to draw near to individuals as they experience moments that traverse the ordinary and the extraordinary. In Tey (Today, 2012), the protagonist Satché, played by the American poet and musician Saul Williams, lives out a day that he is sure will be his last on Earth. As he moves through Dakar, making the rounds of old acquaintances, everything he sees—and thus everything we see—appears through the lens of his imminent death, the cause of which is never specified. Markets, friends, family, protests: everything is touched by the pathos of love at last sight. Félicité (2017), winner of the Berlinale’s Grand Jury Prize, follows its titular protagonist as she copes with the aftermath of her son’s debilitating accident and the need to pay steep medical bills. Véronique Tshanda Beya Mputu incarnates the role with an understated intensity, delivering a subtle performance in what might sound like the stuff of social realism. Yet as much as Gomis has a keen eye for the on-location bustle of streets and bars, he displaces the burden of expressivity from his lead performer onto a daring orchestration of music and color, taking flight into blue-hued passages of oneiric lyricism that throw off the yoke of convention and break free from the demands of verisimilitude.
Gomis’s most recent film Rewind and Play (2022) in some ways marks a departure from his previous two fiction features. It is a documentary comprised entirely of archival footage, cut from the rushes of a 1969 episode of Jazz Portraits, a French television show featuring an interview with and performance by pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. But here, too, an interest in portraiture persists, and more specifically one that foregrounds the strength and struggle of a taciturn individual under duress. Even though host Henri Renaud is eager to demonstrate his connection with Monk, the white Frenchman’s patronizing racism bleeds through in nearly every interaction. Renaud is incessantly dissatisfied with the musician’s answers; when Monk dares to point out that he was paid less than others when he first performed in France, Renaud swiftly requests that the remark be excluded from the broadcast. Why? “It’s not nice,” he tuts. Appropriating this statement as his subtitle, Gomis turns the tables on the archive. Out of the violence of the original encounter, Rewind and Play crafts a reparative response that both emphasizes the artificiality of the production process and devotes ample time to an appreciation of Monk’s virtuosity.
Over Zoom, Gomis and I chatted about portraiture, the close-up, Thelonious Monk, and what’s wrong with making pretty pictures.—Erika Balsom
Félicité (2017)
ERIKA BALSOM: Your three most recent films are all portraits in some sense, and they often show their protagonists in close-up. Sometimes the close-up is associated with a kind of scrutiny, an objectifying gaze. But the close-up can also be something much more tactile, almost like a caress—and this is how I see it as working in your films. There is a strong sense of tactility and presence.
ALAIN GOMIS: The close-up is a paradox. The closer the shot is, the less you see, so the more you feel. You don’t see what the character sees. It’s really about the sound, which is another passion of mine. I remember seeing a film years ago, a documentary of somebody trying to observe the last minutes of his grandmother’s life. He was just filming her, looking for the last second. And there is no last second, in fact. You can’t see it. It’s really about how the viewer makes an interpretation.
EB: You mention sound as a passion of yours, which is something that links Félicité to Rewind and Play in a very strong way. What is the role of music in your work? Like the close-up, music has an expressive function that works outside of language.
AG: Yeah, I’m surprised that I’m going more and more to music. At the beginning, I was really shy with it. Music is so powerful in film. It’s difficult to manage; it can crush the image. It’s a question of distance, of how the music can have its own path and create a kind of space. If I could have been a painter or a musician, it would have been better for me. Unfortunately, I’m only a filmmaker.
EB: But your films are painterly and musical, so maybe you’re getting there by cinematic means.
AG: Yeah. But for sure, music has really inspired me. In the case of Thelonious Monk, it’s not only because he’s a musician. I think he’s an artist, a master of not trying to make it pretty.
EB: What’s wrong with making it pretty?
AG: If you’re trying to make it pretty, you’re talking to yourself. Each time you’re trying to make it pretty, you’re putting make-up on yourself, and it’s not good for the film.
Rewind & Play (2022)
EB: Your films are very beautiful, but they also push back against certain conventional ideas of beauty.
AG: Thank you. What is beautiful to me is a moment that I feel is true. It’s not really about anything aesthetic. It’s about trying to discover the film without any filters, which means without any preconceived ideas. It’s about how you can give a moment its maximum power. Sometimes this means choosing moments that are not so well filmed, but they will be beautiful in another way. One of my jobs—with actors or during the edit—is not to make it pretty, but to believe in it enough to understand that the more raw it is, the more beautiful and powerful and unexpected it will be. I’m trying to surprise you and to be connected with what’s going on. This is the kind of lesson I take from Thelonious Monk and the incredible fight that he had to really be in the present. That’s one of the things we see during this TV show: he’s the only one who is really there. All the rest of them are just preparing something, thinking about editing the show, or whatever.
EB: I gather that Rewind and Play came about because you were developing a fiction film about Thelonious Monk. Can you tell me more about your interest in him?
AG: He is like a question. Each time you go back to him, the question is bigger. You don’t have any answer but a feeling that he’s doing it right. His music is very simple, but simplicity can be complex. Complexity is part of simplicity. He makes me think of Paul Cézanne: it’s about trying to open things up, to play with resonances, to break the line. He said something like, “What you don’t play is more important than what you play.” His way of playing is very sensitive. He puts his body and his mind into it. There is a search for authenticity in every second. And at the same time, there is a fight against society—a society that puts him in a position he doesn’t like.
There is the whole system of the industry and of marketing, which makes an object of everything. And when you have to deal with that, it’s political for sure. What you see on this TV show was very surprising for me, and that’s why I wanted to share these images. This journalist really admires Monk. He loves him and he loves his music. At the same time, he puts Monk in a box that he can’t stand. It’s difficult to watch. It’s painful to see how alone he is. And he knows the system well; he has lived through it since he was 20 or 30 years old. You can see in this moment that he’s doing his job. He doesn’t speak French, but he knows exactly what is going on because it’s going on everywhere and every day. When I showed a draft of the film to Monk’s son, he said, “I didn’t know what my father had to endure while I was in school, what he had to live through for us to have food and a good school.”
EB: Yes, and “it’s not nice”—to use the phrase you chose as the subtitle of your film.
AG: And it’s not nice. Nobody wants to be this guy… But that’s what he had to deal with. It’s a very big lesson. I admire him because he is also so courageous in his silence. It would have been easier to fight and be very angry, but he uses his silence like a mirror. Because of his silence, we can really see what’s going on.
Tey (Today) (2012)
EB: You are also silent in Rewind and Play, at least in the sense that there is no voiceover commentary. Your perspective comes through in the edit.
AG: I didn’t want any kind of voiceover. I didn’t want to have to explain anything. I just wanted to make people feel what Thelonious Monk might have been feeling at this moment, to experience this strange day, with these people watching you like you’re an extraterrestrial, or even an animal. The way the camera comes at him is very shocking. There are beautiful shots, but it’s also like, wow.
EB: We see the violence of the scrutinizing close-up. But your recontextualization of the footage makes this violence visible and opens the image to a different kind of attention and care.
AG: We can feel him. In one of the shots, the camera is so close that you can see him breathing. We can feel the resistance he had at this moment. I think that allows us to be with him. It’s extraordinary how you can use editing to reverse the point of view. I have really discovered that archives are not neutral. But there is also my point of view. What we see in watching the rushes of this show is that each time you try to fake a neutral point of view, you’re pretending. It’s dangerous. You have to say who you are. And so that’s why we see the editing in Rewind and Play. I had to show how I’m working with the footage.
EB: For the series at Metrograph, you have carte blanche to pick two films that are important to you. Can you tell me a little about why you chose Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022) and Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019)?
AG: These are two very different films by two young filmmakers. Lemohang is an impressive filmmaker who is dealing with strong aesthetics while trying to break with convention and touch the viewer. The film is very powerful. It’s about resistance. And resistance for a filmmaker is also about trying to find your way without being ego-driven. It’s a film about hope, but it’s not just watching the sunny side of the street. It says, “Okay, let’s go where it hurts. From there, if we can find hope, it’s going to be a true hope.”
I was really impressed with Alice’s first fiction film. She made it in a very straight way. It’s almost surgical. It’s like: let me get to the point without any beautiful things around. It’s about believing in cinema enough to go to the point, to stay on the point, and something will happen. She knows it’s dangerous to think that you’re right just because you’re supposed to be on the right side of whatever. I like that she doesn’t play with what could be easy. There’s no honey. This makes her film, like Lemohang’s film, bigger than the subjects they are talking about. It’s about us, at this moment.
Erika Balsom is a reader in Film Studies at King’s College London and, most recently, the co-editor of Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (MIT Press, 2022).
This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019)
