Direct To Film - interview with artist Raymond Depardon - Interview

MIRIAM ROSEN TALKS WITH RAYMOND DEPARDON

RAYMOND DEPARDON TALKS LIKE HE PHOTOGRAPHS, like he films, like he writes: profusely. And the torrent of words is intensified by the singular sound of his voice, always slightly hoarse, out of breath, and devoid of Parisian preciosity. Difficult to translate into print much less into English (imagine a French version of Peter Falk), but eminently worth signaling by way of introduction. The title of Depardon's current photo and film retrospective at the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris felicitously captures the pattern of his speech no less than the meandering of his career: "Detours."

Photo reporter at the age of eighteen for a leading French news agency, cofounder of the pathbreaking Gamma photo agency in 1967, member of the venerable Magnum agency since 1979, the precocious foreign correspondent and sometime paparazzo turned photographer-filmmaker now has to his credit some twenty-five books (photos and texts) and thirty-five films (long and short, documentary and fiction), not to mention commercials and public service ads. An "incredible itinerary," as he says, for someone who was born on a farm in

Villefranche-sur-Saon north of Lyons, in 1942, completed his formal schooling at fourteen, and studied photography by correspondence before "going up" to Paris in 1958 to work as a photographer's assistant.

Indeed, Depardon's work, like his manner of speaking, is always remarkably simple in its form--frontal, symmetrical photos, films composed of long, fixed-camera sequence shots, and first-person commentaries that, like the uncropped photos and the unedited sequence shots, seem totally spontaneous. But it is precisely the incessant detours from one subject, one medium, one register to another that transform the individual elements into a complex but coherent body of work.

A small book called Notes (1979) is often signaled as Depardon's first "break" with conventional photojournalism because of the disarmingly personal, diary-like texts accompanying images of a two-month trek from one war (in Lebanon) to another (in Afghanistan). But this first-person approach had already made its way into his early films, beginning with Tchad 1: L'embuscade (Chad 1: The ambush, 1970), an extraordinary twelve-minute account of an attack on Chadian rebels not only filmed but experienced from within (cf. Depardon's voice-over: "Watch carefully--this is where the ambush is going to start").

In the intervening thirty years, the films, the books, and the voyages have all gotten longer, while the lines between fact and fiction, history and memory, fixed and moving images have been progressively blurred, ignored, defied. War reporter Depardon's trips to Saigon metamorphosed into the fantasies of seduction recounting his first fiction film, Empty Quarter: Une femme en Afrique (1984-85), and the book that followed, Les fiancees de Saigon (1986), just as his film interviews with Francoise Claustre, the French ethnologist held hostage by the Chadian revolutionary movement in the mid-'70s (in Tchad 2 and 3, 1975-76), resurfaced in fictional form with La captive du desert(Captive of the desert, 1989), starring Sandrine Bonnaire. Counterpointing the deserts, the journeys, and the fantasies, he has constituted a sober catalogue of films (and, occasionally, photo-essays) on urban institutions--the political campaign (50,81%, 1974; Vues: Une campagne pour l'election presidentielle en France, 1988), the press (Numeros zero [Trial runs], 1977; Reporters, 1980), the mental asylum (San Clemente, 1980), the police (Faits divers [News items], 1983), the psychiatric emergency room (Urgences [Emergencies], 1987), and the court system (Delits flagrants [Caught in the act], 1994). And in recent years, the omnipresent man with a camera has returned to his rural origins as well, with a family album-cum-autobiography (La ferme du Garet [The farm at Le Garet], 1995) and a film in progress on French farmers today.

The most extroverted of introverts, the most nomadic of stay-athomes, the most cosmopolitan of provincials, Depardon has made his "detours" not only a way of life but an art. The remarks that follow, extracted from what was essentially a one-question, ninety-minute interview that took place in a Paris cafe in late October, are, on reflection, a perfect "image" of the man and his work.

MIRIAM ROSEN: You've often insisted that you don't make "photographer's films" and that the two practices, film and photography, are separate. Do you still think so?

RAYMOND DEPARDON: With experience, I can see that they're even more different. Maybe in the beginning, I went from photography to film without really thinking about it, and with lots of false problems, like how to do a tracking shot. Today I can see that it's not just a question of technique--the frame, the way you film. It's true that sometimes I feel a Little frustrated aesthetically in film. At first, I was doing direct cinema. The American filmmakers played an important role for me because when I was working for the Dalmas news agency [1960-62], my editor, Claude Otzenberger, made me read Richard Leacock's interviews and go and see the films of D.A. Pennebaker and others who were trying to extend journalism into cinema.