WALKING LIKE GROUCHO

and the way I experienced American TV network. (September the 8th, 2016)

I have been always into underground movies after once Canal +, the French channel, made one season with John Waters movies. After that season I kept looking for the low budget movie type. I wanted to open up to underground filmmaking. It was difficult to meet someone who knows those movies that shows a home made world with decors and make-up done by an amateur whose not afraid of sounding like a nuts.

 There were still the Tuesday nights at the Art school when we were watching a movie but that was too succinct for me. No underground movies but at least I had my validation: I was into images, photographing and filming, producing still images and sequences, sounds and texts.

 It all starts with this messy numerous records of images and sequences. With that infinite chaos, shrinking was the first way I found to be clear to an audience. With my memory, with all the images I keep watching everyday on the Internet and my own personal experiences, I need to express that world the most limpid as possible. Framing is first being able to drive the attention on something and point it. I wanted then to find out how I would be able to create the right places for those images with the right forms. I wasn’t into a regular narration but more into interrupted times and rhythms like poetry. I got into the work of Nam June Paik, the videos of Bill Viola and the articles of Jean-Paul Fargier and Alain Bourges and felt it was already too late for another video artist and another photographer. I went to theaters and discovered the “cinema d’auteurs”, read Serge Daney writings but still the same feeling of hopelessness for my work.

I finally got to meet with Mr TV one night.

After watching a police story at the theater with detective Mike Hammer, I decided not to finish that night too soon and sat at the bar of a restaurant. He was sitting here, complaining about plumbing problems. Working for CBS NEWS as a storyteller (not a journalist), doing short stories and we got into a conversation on cinema starting with Rossellini’s Stromboli. That conversation ran for four years and tried different directions to come back to that same important point.

With shooting at a Parisian cabaret for a French Cancan class, observing the organ player and filming a Sunday morning mess, discovering there is a school for kids to learn and compose rock music, see big chocolate sculptures from a chocolate chef and how Pierre Cardin talks about creation gave me reality checks every time he had to come up with a new pitch to fill the American TV broadcast.

Shooting with Mr TV is an affair of empathy and concern. First: technically how to shoot in any situation? You observe the place and adapt your material to the space. Coming with a heavy material is very inappropriate (hey it’s tv not an Hollywood studio! keep it light like a photo reporter). It kills any natural conversation as your fixing this and that, then, you can’t move so easily and while you’re trying to shoot and make all your material working, it becomes just so difficult for the person being interviewed to don’t loose it.

We had two handy cameras. He had a microphone fixed on his to interview people, I was the traveling one, moving around, taking as much material as I could for the story.

Then I got more comfortable enough to start interviewing and opening up to people, discovering their activities, at their work places. All this was a real preparation. Other than finding the contacts, we had first to get to know the subject by doing researches on the Internet and then being able to synthesize and pull out the questions for the interview. That was my favorite shrinking exercise. That started with finding the right words to open up doors of other stories. “Creation”, “patterns”, “forms” and “colors” with “avant-garde” were the words Pierre Cardin jumped on for a one-hour private interview in his office. The designer opened up with so much enthusiasm and energy, it was a non-stopping vivid narration of experiences and jokes.

Did you know French Cancan is actually a military battle dance for women? There are a lot of military terms for different movements. Women use their legs like pistols and imitate warriors charging in a battle (the sex liberation?).

I happened to learn how to move and make people forget the camera and talk to me, making eyes contact. Difficult… I was loosing the frame and the sound, while I was talking. It’s a real choreography you have to improvise and coordinate.

I tried once to have a long and slow traveling with people having drinks on a terrace during a horse race at the Chantilly hippodrome. In the VIP space, large lady hats, beautiful outfits and champagne logos were on the terrace. My camera was shaking too much while walking. My movement wasn’t good, definitely not a Dolce Vita camera movement. My co-worker just said: you have to walk flexibly like Groucho Marx and watch your audience.

So that was it.

The attitude apparently clumsy but precise and keep holding a frame until the end and don’t interrupt. You express the interest on something by framing, moving the camera and feel the time of your record wherever you are. That’s one of the dimensions of being a storyteller. Look at people and make eye contacts instead of looking at your camera. TV is not cinema in that sense. It’s Live, you can move your camera in every sense as soon as you have the voice and exchange with the person.

Now I stick with this: keep walking funny.

Gaël Cadiou