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Est. Reading Time: 11 Minutes

MARK (M) Tell us a little about yourself - when did you become interested in film and filmmaking?

ALAIN (A)  I was six years old when I saw Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1956) on television and, even if I never see it again, I know that as a child I was really impressed by the film. It was not possible for me to explain what I was feeling at that moment but I immediately understood I wanted to make people feel powerful emotions with stories, as if I was a magician. Even if I had no idea what it meant to be a filmmaker, I knew it was the only thing I wanted to do in my life.

One year later, my parents knew that I had very bad sight for my age and needed glasses. I can clearly remember thinking to myself ‘I will probably be blind in a few years and I will never be a filmmaker when I grow up’. Now it seems really funny to me but at that moment, I was convinced of it happening. Fortunately my eyes still can see and even if I need to wear glasses everyday, I can make films too. 

A Another important film that scared me for many years was Stephen King’s It (1990) adaptation for television. After watching it, for the next two years I spent my time watching horror movies. Perhaps I was trying to exorcize my fears, but I think I was truly attracted to this genre because I was saying to all my schoolmates that I wanted to become a horror movie filmmaker when I grow up. 

A Then Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) changed everything. I was 12 when my English teacher showed it to us at school, saying this director was considered to be the ‘master of suspense’. So I began watching all of Hitchcock’s movies to know more about his work. He was the first director I knew who had a style which made me more and more interested in what filmmaking meant. And when there were no more Hitchcock movies to borrow at the library I decided to borrow books about cinema and filmmakers. That’s how I heard about Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Pedro Almodovar, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa.

Since then, I knew what a filmmaker was and that it was exactly what I wanted to be. Even if I was not anymore interested in being exclusively a horror movie director, I wanted to tell stories, create unforgettable experiences made of sounds and images, and share it with people.

On Themes

M I really like the key themes of your film - distance, human bodies, landscapes and love are very interesting ideas to consider and explore on screen. So I would like to ask you about the film's inspiration - why were you interested in exploring love through the connection (and disconnection) between human bodies and space?

A I had the idea to make this experimental project shortly after finishing my second film. It was an essay film called Fiesta Mascara Identidad (2014) where a voice-over was giving much information in a very poetic way. That’s why my first decision when making Érosion (2017) was to do it without any dialogue or voice-over. This was a kind of challenge because it is always easier to make people understand something with words, but this time I wanted to do it only with images, as if it was a silent film. By the way, the film has been silent for a long time and I edited the whole movie without any sound before eventually deciding to add sound design.

A The second key idea was to tell the story with only nude bodies, focusing on their movements and expressions. This was a minimalistic challenge within the greater challenge because if I could use accessories everything would have been easier. But without any accessory (i.e. dialogue or exposition), every type of movement, gaze and contact (touch) has meaning. So bodies have to use space, distance and proximity to make the emotion real and make the audience feel it, as if the characters were dancers. When I understood this, I realised that being a filmmaker can also mean being a choreographer.

A The last important idea was making a film about time. But this word can seem very abstract and that’s why I chose ‘erosion’ for the title because it is possible to imagine it. However, this natural phenomenon was not something easy to show on screen because it is not something we use to associate with the human body. Erosion is the action of elements such as wind and water on the Earth generally, and it can only be witnessed after years and decades. When I made the decision of showing erosion on human bodies, I immediately knew that I had to use the bodies as if they were Earth and different landscapes. So distance and proximity, connection and disconnection were, according to me, the best way to explore the experience of the erosion phenomenon on screen. Hence, it was about the importance of contact and desire between the characters, but also about the visual rhythm of the bodies, without any extra sound.

M The sequence of the person's hands and face slowly blurring and kind of deforming into shapes (approx. 04:20 - 05:40) is really intriguing - it's one of my favourite sequences as I feel like it establishes and symbolizes the film's themes. Please tell us a little about how you crafted and designed this particular sequence on screen as well as its connection to the film’s themes.    

A Before answering this question, I have to explain the structure of the film which is composed of three parts. The first one is the most abstract because it shows the human body as a planet in outer space or like a changing shape. The second part is the most realistic because it shows people interacting between one another and experiencing different kind of emotions. The third part changes the scale and shows the human bodies as organic landscapes.

The film was therefore thought as a three-scale trip, traveling between light and darkness, from unknown galaxies to a strange flesh zone. The sequence you are talking about is the last one of the first chapter so it was important for me to end this part with an impressive image that would be totally different from the beginning of the second part to better make the public feel that we change the scale without any transition.

A As the second part begins with a very realistic aesthetic, I decided to finish the first one with something that could be identified as a human body but shapeless and abstract enough to show another dimension of it. I am really proud of this sequence because in a few seconds I have been able to represent the main theme of the film - witnessing a kind of erosion, because the body seems to be melting and changing its natural characteristics from solid to liquid.

A This movie was not so complicated to make. For instance, I did not use any visual effects (VFX) so for this reason, I think it is a film that could be easy to make again. Obviously, in this specific sequence I melted different shots together, but I only did it in the first part of the film and I don’t consider it as VFX.

In the second and third parts, I just used cuts during the edit but the difficulty was to choose good moments and combine the best shots between them. So for this sequence the most important was the image becaming blurred and brighter at the good moment. There was only one light, without filter, very raw, and it was connected to a dimmer in order to make the light brighter. The movement of the person had to be very slow and synchronized with the intensity of the light while I had to change the focus of the camera to make everything blur very slowly. At that moment, I had no idea how it would look but when I saw the rushes, and the body became something like magma, I knew that it could be a very impressive sequence in the film if I just made the good choices during the edit.

On Ten Commandments (1956)

‘…as a child I was really impressed by the film. It was not possible for me to explain what I was feeling at that moment but I immediately understood I wanted to make people feel powerful emotions with stories, as if I was a magician’

— Alain Petiteau

On Inspiration

M What are some of the films and who are some of the filmmakers that inspire you, and why? Let us know if you used certain movies as references for this film. 

A My favourite filmmaker is Alain Resnais and I admire almost all his work. To make Erosion I was so much inspired by the beginning of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) where the two bodies are kissing and touching each other. We never see their heads but we feel something very sensual when we are looking at them, melted in the dust and radiation of the atomic bomb, so alive but almost yet like the dead bodies found in Pompei. His work also was an inspiration for the composition of the frames, edit of the film, the darkness, music as well as the theme of love like in many of his movies.

A I was also inspired by the famous scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) where young people have sex in the desert. It motivated me to show human bodies as landscapes for the images shot with the macro lens. And it gave me the curiosity to film the darkness as if it was a landscape using several bodies and screeners in the same frame to make people feel the distance between them and increase the depth of the image.

A Some others movies or directors that have influenced me for this project are David Lynch and Kenneth Anger. The aesthetics of Inland Empire (2006) and Scorpio Rising (1963) gave me the strength to express my ideas. From this point of view, David Lynch is a real inspiration for me. I’m also really impressed by what Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren did with very simple productions. When I was shooting, I always remembered the face of Maya Deren and the way she used lights to make it more expressive in Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). I feel they really are poets and I’m very sensitive to that - this special way to see, hear and feel the world, fighting to propose new points of view with their art.

On The Future

M What are you planning to make next?

A I just finished directing my new fiction short film called The Loire River (2022). It was shot in the French city of Nantes, where I grew up, and it tells the story of a young man whose body is found dead on the bank of the Loire river. One of his friends, who was attracted to him, will go to the place where his body was found to find out something, perhaps a way to communicate with him beyond death. It was important for me to show the river as a mysterious place where strange things can happen, and to do it I used a lot of details that I remember from my childhood. This is also the first fiction short film I did that was produced by G.R.E.C. and I was very happy with it.

When I finished shooting The Loire River, I began subscribing it to festivals all around the world and now I’m waiting for their answers. Meanwhile, I have been writing two new fiction projects that I would like to make in the next couple of years. And even if I still did not receive answers about the subscriptions of The Loire River, I know that it is very important for me to go to some festivals to meet the persons that will help produce my new scripts. This year I have already been to Cannes Film Festival, Pantin Film Festival near Paris, and ShortFest Film Festival in Palm Springs because it seems to me that I have to be in the places where all the opportunities are if I want to meet the people that will help me make new short films and then feature films.

Mark’s Final Thoughts

• I think Alain raises interesting and insightful points about the relationship between directing and choreography. In essence, the art of directing frames and interprets movements of physical bodies through space and time. The way cameras can move in relation to the physical bodies may create or further imply emotional depth to their movements; hence inspiring the term 'dancing with the camera'. 

• I enjoyed learning more about the sequence of the body transforming into something like magma - I think the gold/yellow glow is really striking and helps captivate the viewer's attention.

  Tags Bourgeon Live-action Experimental

  
  
  
  

Want to Learn More? Click here for Alain’s insights into portraying age and gender diversity on screen as well as shooting intimate and nude scenes on set.

The founder of Hommage, Mark Shaba published this interview on 31.07.2022 Mark is a filmmaker from Victoria, Australia. He respectfully acknowledges the past and present traditional owners of the land on which he creates, promotes and screens art, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation who are the custodians.