Jean-Gabriel Périot interview

What has lead you to “create a work”?

Making movies is a way to confront myself with topics I don't understand, like violence or work for instance. Usually, my projects start with a question, a question that may come from a picture I saw, a book I read… a question that I need to think about.

What tools do you use the most at present?

Editing.

What do you place greatest value on in your work?

My work is quite abstract even if it is about specific events or historical facts. I think that this abstraction allows the audience to project itself in the movies I make, and thus to be moved by them.

What personal concept do you keep throughout your creative activities?

One important idea for me is the memory. I often use historical archives mostly movies or pictures. Each of them is like a testimony, a place of memory. I have to take care of this memory and to transmit it to the audience. Moreover, these archives usually represent people who are dead now. It is important to have a particular ethics regarding the making of new creations and be careful to respect those people who no longer exist.

When you create a work, in what way do you think of a presentation using technologies or media as a means to communicate?

I don't really thing about presentation when I create a new movie. Audience is far away from me when I am alone in front of my computer. First, I am only making movies for me, even if I enjoy that my movies are screened after…

Could you name a person, a work, or an event that you have been influenced by the most?

Probably Dziga Vertov, a Russian avant-garde cinematographer. He thought cinema was the perfect media to link technique and subject, vision and politic.

What kind of work would you like to create in the future?

My dream is to direct a feature fiction film based on the book of Abe Kobo 安部公房 named "box men" in English, "箱男" in Japanese.

What is the meaning or importance of “to create” for you?
 
Difficult question. Perhaps, it is my own way to resist, to make me feel alive, in a world I don't understand.

Japan media art festival
2008