Alice Diop

 a political question regarding who has the right to a narrative, and who makes a trace and who archives it. These are very important questions in France at the moment.

So for me, the long take was a political act in every sense of the word that led me to compose this image. It’s not just an aesthetic reflection, it’s a reflection that mixes an eminently political question – to question the absence of representation of the body from the history of representation, from Giotto to the present day. When you go through the museums of the world, these bodies don’t exist. Neither do these bodies otherwise exist in the cinema – with this political power – without being hurt by our gaze, without being depreciated by our gaze, without being shrunk by our gaze. In Saint Omer, they take up the frame, they’re looked at with the same visual power as a Renaissance painting, and instead of a white woman, it’s a black woman we’re going to take the time to look at and listen to. For me, the question of representation, the question of the image, is inseparable from a political reflection on the absence of these bodies and their representations, and on what this produces in us – me as a black woman, but us as spectators. How does it feel to have composed without it, in the absence of these others? What does it produce, and how can cinema repair this, and what does it have to tell us aesthetically about this process of reparation?

Glazer

The couple’s ordinariness is conveyed in a series of scenes that were sometimes scripted, sometimes improvised and filmed on small, static cameras concealed throughout the house and garden. The actors were not aware of exactly where the cameras were positioned. Glazer and his crew remained off-set throughout, watching the results on a bank of screens in a separate building. The result is a cinema of ultra-naturalistic candid surveillance that Glazer jokingly describes as “like Big Brother in the Nazi house”.

The reason that I was not on set was because I wanted to stand back from the characters and look at them anthropologically. I wasn’t interested in their dramas. I just wanted to watch them in as unimpeded a way as possible to see how they behaved and acted, to see who they were.”

The film became about the proximity of the horror and the happiness, how one person’s paradise is another’s hell.”

We already know the imagery of the camps from actual archive footage. There is no need to attempt to recreate it, but I felt that if we could hear it, we could somehow see it in our heads.”