映画監督アリス・ディオプによる映画制作の芸術

Saint Omer, the French filmmaker Alice Diop’s first narrative feature inspired by the trial of a Senegalese woman ultimately convicted of infanticide, caused a sensation when it premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival in 2022. It won the Grand Jury Prize, along with the Luigi De Laurentiis award and catapulted Diop to global fame. Director Céline Sciamma described it as a “cinema poem”, and it established her rigorous, formal approach, distinct aesthetic, and her wish to create portraits of black women, in all their complexity, that Diop stated she has herself rarely seen in film or read in literature.

That debut – if it can be called such, given that Diop, now 46, directed her first documentary, La Tour du monde, in 2005 – also attracted the attention of Miuccia Prada and Miu Miu, for their ongoing film series Women’s Tales. Launched by Miuccia Prada in 2011 as a platform for female filmmakers – “a conversation with women about women,” in Prada’s own words – the series follows fashion’s seasonal structure, with two films created each year. The latest, the 30th installation titled Fragments For Venus, is by Diop, and debuted once again in Venice. Before her, directors have included Janicza Bravo, Lynne Ramsay, Miranda July and the late Agnès Varda, and to all, the brief is simple and open. Each film includes Miu Miu clothes as its costume – not exclusively, but somewhere. Otherwise, they are a free-wheeling celebration and exploration of femininity in the 21st century, each with a distinct point of view.

Diop took the American poet laureate Robin Coste Lewis’ 2015 work Voyage of the Sable Venus as her inspiration, and starting point, and its unpacking of the representation – or, more accurately, misrepresentation – of black women through Western art across thousands of years. In Venice, Diop discussed her Women’s Tale film, its inspirations, influences and the motivations behind her filmmaking.

Alexander Fury: How did Miu Miu approach you to become involved in the Women’s Tales Project and what interested you about it? Why did you say yes?

Alice Diop: Miu Miu approached me about three years ago after Saint Omer screened in Venice – and over three years, Verde Visconti [Director of Talent Relations, Special Projects and Prada PR and, alongside Miuccia Prada, co-founding member of the Miu Miu Women’s Tales committee] asked me every year to join the team. I was really honoured because it’s such a prestigious collection and most of the women filmmakers who’ve made films for Women’s Tales are among the ones who I find most interesting working today. Each of them found, in their own singular way, a way to deal with this commission. So I was very honoured but I also have to say that when I am thrown into motion on a film, on something that’s going to take a great deal of my time, that’s going to inhabit me for months, I really need to feel like it’s a necessity. If I don’t have that feeling, I can’t commit. 

In the case of this commission, it took me three years to find that perfect moment, where it seemed that this would be the right form to deal with the questions that I was asking myself. And so I said yes recently because I was spending a year in the United States. So I had that time and I had also been working on a text that absolutely fascinates me, and that seems to condense everything that I’ve been working on for years. It seemed that this form was the perfect one to give the issues raised by this text a cinematic outlet.

AF: Connected with that – I wondered if this was a film you had already envisaged, imagined or anticipated filming, or was it a specific response to the invitation? Do you think Fragments for Venus would always have happened?

AD: I’d say it’s a combination of both. On the one hand, there’s this opportunity of the commission and on the other, there are these things that I’ve been working on. This film is concerned with the representation of the black body in painting and then actually, simply, art history overall. These are questions that both on a cinematic level and a personal level are the ones that are at the source of my work as a filmmaker, from the beginning. So all these reflections and influences that are condensed in the text by Robin Coste Lewis seemed like a short film in this context would be the perfect form to respond to these ideas. It was really a case of using this opportunity to make a film that is as personal to me as Saint Omer was, and as the film that I’m currently preparing, my next feature, is. Fragments has become a piece of my filmography that’s as important as any other. 

“This film is concerned with the representation of the black body in painting and then actually, simply, art history overall“ – Alice Diop

AF: Could we expand, discuss the text?

AD: It’s essential to talk about it. So it’s really two texts by the Afro-American poet, Robin Coste Lewis, who wrote a collection of poetry entitled Voyage of the Sable Venus. And in this collection, there’s a long eponymous poem, which is very experimental, and it’s a poem in which Coste Lewis found a poetic way of formulating a colossal research project that she undertook, in which she collected all the titles and descriptions of artworks that mentioned the presence of black women’s bodies from 38,000 years Before Christ to the present day. And she enumerates these titles that describe black women in a very experimental way, creating a poem that is truly stunning, not only poetically, but philosophically, aesthetically and politically, because it reveals how the gaze in Western art history has been built through the invisibilisation, fetishisation and objectification of black bodies.

So it’s a really crucial text. There’s another text in the same book, which is the epilogue, a prose piece in which Coste Lewis explains her approach to and process of this poem in the research, but also on a very intimate level, the effects that this representation has had on her life as a woman. It goes beyond theory. It has a direct effect on how we as black women see ourselves, how we construct ourselves. So working on these texts for three years has really allowed me to sharpen my gaze as a filmmaker and also to formulate, to myself, what I’ve been working on, the issues I’ve been dealing with through cinema for 20 years, and to repair and liberate myself from that gaze that is found in Western art. This particular film was a way for me to formulate, as a filmmaker, everything that Coste Lewis has helped me to understand and to get beyond or to get past.

AF: Your previous films have been based in France and many in the neighbourhood where you were raised. Why did you want to film the majority of Fragments in New York and how did that shape or change your filmmaking experience?

AD: I don’t think my experience as a filmmaker changes depending on where I am. I remain the same at the end of my street or at the end of the world. At least that’s what I think. But I couldn’t have made this film in France because it was shot in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the way that black women lived there, the singularity with which they lived, the community that they formed, the way that they take space and have real joy in taking space, that is something I haven’t seen elsewhere. Bed-Stuy is not the United States, it’s not New York City. It’s very specifically Bed-Stuy, which is one of the great historical Afro-American neighbourhoods.

And I had such joy in wandering around there, feeling seen, feeling recognised, feeling nearly founded in the sense of being given and made a foundation, which is something I don’t experience much in Europe or in France, because the idea of community and actual community is not encouraged there. It’s not valued. And so here in Bed-Stuy was the opportunity to find a community where I felt valued and where people can feel protected from these deforming visions. This is a film that I don’t think I could have made anywhere else.

AF: How much of the film do you feel was directed, and how much of it was documentary, a reflection of reality?

AD: I wouldn’t even be able to say – as they say in France, ‘tout est bon dans le cochon’  [‘everything is good in the pig’ – meaning there is no waste]. This film is really that. We took all these elements, and it doesn’t interest me to detail what. The film was built in such an instinctive, free way. I caught pieces of documentary. I did very formal mise en scene to convey something very theoretical. There was the pleasure of filming an actress’s body. There were things that were found just wandering in the street and then in the editing room, that was all brought together with great pleasure, but it all blended so much that I don’t even know what’s what anymore. And that’s really not what’s at stake with this film.

AF: You have talked about the fear and tension you and others felt at Harvard when President Trump was elected. For you, is the film a reaction to those cultural tensions? Do you feel the film is a response?

AD: Well, these cultural tensions weren’t born in January. They’ve always existed. This deformed gaze didn’t wait for Donald Trump to come along to become efficient or effective. So my films are not reactions to the news. They’re working something much deeper that I’ve been working on for a long time, that sometimes certainly does echo with the news. Now, I didn’t wait for Trump to come along to suffer as a woman, as an artist, as a filmmaker, at the way most artists have chosen to represent something that I’m supposed to be. And that’s why I became a filmmaker. 

Watch Fragments For Venus here. The film will be available to stream on Mubi globally from September 15. 

Saint Omer, the French filmmaker Alice Diop’s first narrative feature inspired by the trial of a Senegalese woman ultimately convicted of infanticide, caused a sensation when it premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival in 2022. It won the Grand Jury Prize, along with the Luigi De Laurentiis award and catapulted Diop to global fame. Director Céline Sciamma described it as a “cinema poem”, and it established her rigorous, formal approach, distinct aesthetic, and her wish to create portraits of black women, in all their complexity, that Diop stated she has herself rarely seen in film or read in literature.

That debut – if it can be called such, given that Diop, now 46, directed her first documentary, La Tour du monde, in 2005 – also attracted the attention of Miuccia Prada and Miu Miu, for their ongoing film series Women’s Tales. Launched by Miuccia Prada in 2011 as a platform for female filmmakers – “a conversation with women about women,” in Prada’s own words – the series follows fashion’s seasonal structure, with two films created each year. The latest, the 30th installation titled Fragments For Venus, is by Diop, and debuted once again in Venice. Before her, directors have included Janicza Bravo, Lynne Ramsay, Miranda July and the late Agnès Varda, and to all, the brief is simple and open. Each film includes Miu Miu clothes as its costume – not exclusively, but somewhere. Otherwise, they are a free-wheeling celebration and exploration of femininity in the 21st century, each with a distinct point of view.

Diop took the American poet laureate Robin Coste Lewis’ 2015 work Voyage of the Sable Venus as her inspiration, and starting point, and its unpacking of the representation – or, more accurately, misrepresentation – of black women through Western art across thousands of years. In Venice, Diop discussed her Women’s Tale film, its inspirations, influences and the motivations behind her filmmaking.

Alexander Fury: How did Miu Miu approach you to become involved in the Women’s Tales Project and what interested you about it? Why did you say yes?

Alice Diop: Miu Miu approached me about three years ago after Saint Omer screened in Venice – and over three years, Verde Visconti [Director of Talent Relations, Special Projects and Prada PR and, alongside Miuccia Prada, co-founding member of the Miu Miu Women’s Tales committee] asked me every year to join the team. I was really honoured because it’s such a prestigious collection and most of the women filmmakers who’ve made films for Women’s Tales are among the ones who I find most interesting working today. Each of them found, in their own singular way, a way to deal with this commission. So I was very honoured but I also have to say that when I am thrown into motion on a film, on something that’s going to take a great deal of my time, that’s going to inhabit me for months, I really need to feel like it’s a necessity. If I don’t have that feeling, I can’t commit. 

In the case of this commission, it took me three years to find that perfect moment, where it seemed that this would be the right form to deal with the questions that I was asking myself. And so I said yes recently because I was spending a year in the United States. So I had that time and I had also been working on a text that absolutely fascinates me, and that seems to condense everything that I’ve been working on for years. It seemed that this form was the perfect one to give the issues raised by this text a cinematic outlet.

AF: Connected with that – I wondered if this was a film you had already envisaged, imagined or anticipated filming, or was it a specific response to the invitation? Do you think Fragments for Venus would always have happened?

AD: I’d say it’s a combination of both. On the one hand, there’s this opportunity of the commission and on the other, there are these things that I’ve been working on. This film is concerned with the representation of the black body in painting and then actually, simply, art history overall. These are questions that both on a cinematic level and a personal level are the ones that are at the source of my work as a filmmaker, from the beginning. So all these reflections and influences that are condensed in the text by Robin Coste Lewis seemed like a short film in this context would be the perfect form to respond to these ideas. It was really a case of using this opportunity to make a film that is as personal to me as Saint Omer was, and as the film that I’m currently preparing, my next feature, is. Fragments has become a piece of my filmography that’s as important as any other. 

“This film is concerned with the representation of the black body in painting and then actually, simply, art history overall“ – Alice Diop

AF: Could we expand, discuss the text?

AD: It’s essential to talk about it. So it’s really two texts by the Afro-American poet, Robin Coste Lewis, who wrote a collection of poetry entitled Voyage of the Sable Venus. And in this collection, there’s a long eponymous poem, which is very experimental, and it’s a poem in which Coste Lewis found a poetic way of formulating a colossal research project that she undertook, in which she collected all the titles and descriptions of artworks that mentioned the presence of black women’s bodies from 38,000 years Before Christ to the present day. And she enumerates these titles that describe black women in a very experimental way, creating a poem that is truly stunning, not only poetically, but philosophically, aesthetically and politically, because it reveals how the gaze in Western art history has been built through the invisibilisation, fetishisation and objectification of black bodies.

So it’s a really crucial text. There’s another text in the same book, which is the epilogue, a prose piece in which Coste Lewis explains her approach to and process of this poem in the research, but also on a very intimate level, the effects that this representation has had on her life as a woman. It goes beyond theory. It has a direct effect on how we as black women see ourselves, how we construct ourselves. So working on these texts for three years has really allowed me to sharpen my gaze as a filmmaker and also to formulate, to myself, what I’ve been working on, the issues I’ve been dealing with through cinema for 20 years, and to repair and liberate myself from that gaze that is found in Western art. This particular film was a way for me to formulate, as a filmmaker, everything that Coste Lewis has helped me to understand and to get beyond or to get past.

AF: Your previous films have been based in France and many in the neighbourhood where you were raised. Why did you want to film the majority of Fragments in New York and how did that shape or change your filmmaking experience?

AD: I don’t think my experience as a filmmaker changes depending on where I am. I remain the same at the end of my street or at the end of the world. At least that’s what I think. But I couldn’t have made this film in France because it was shot in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the way that black women lived there, the singularity with which they lived, the community that they formed, the way that they take space and have real joy in taking space, that is something I haven’t seen elsewhere. Bed-Stuy is not the United States, it’s not New York City. It’s very specifically Bed-Stuy, which is one of the great historical Afro-American neighbourhoods.

And I had such joy in wandering around there, feeling seen, feeling recognised, feeling nearly founded in the sense of being given and made a foundation, which is something I don’t experience much in Europe or in France, because the idea of community and actual community is not encouraged there. It’s not valued. And so here in Bed-Stuy was the opportunity to find a community where I felt valued and where people can feel protected from these deforming visions. This is a film that I don’t think I could have made anywhere else.

AF: How much of the film do you feel was directed, and how much of it was documentary, a reflection of reality?

AD: I wouldn’t even be able to say – as they say in France, ‘tout est bon dans le cochon’  [‘everything is good in the pig’ – meaning there is no waste]. This film is really that. We took all these elements, and it doesn’t interest me to detail what. The film was built in such an instinctive, free way. I caught pieces of documentary. I did very formal mise en scene to convey something very theoretical. There was the pleasure of filming an actress’s body. There were things that were found just wandering in the street and then in the editing room, that was all brought together with great pleasure, but it all blended so much that I don’t even know what’s what anymore. And that’s really not what’s at stake with this film.

AF: You have talked about the fear and tension you and others felt at Harvard when President Trump was elected. For you, is the film a reaction to those cultural tensions? Do you feel the film is a response?

AD: Well, these cultural tensions weren’t born in January. They’ve always existed. This deformed gaze didn’t wait for Donald Trump to come along to become efficient or effective. So my films are not reactions to the news. They’re working something much deeper that I’ve been working on for a long time, that sometimes certainly does echo with the news. Now, I didn’t wait for Trump to come along to suffer as a woman, as an artist, as a filmmaker, at the way most artists have chosen to represent something that I’m supposed to be. And that’s why I became a filmmaker. 

Watch Fragments For Venus here. The film will be available to stream on Mubi globally from September 15.