Jean-Gabriel Périot

I started to make films at the beginning of 2000. As soon as I started, I begin by making films that are “edgy”, let's say, that are always between documentary, fiction, experimental, animation... As an audience, or people who are interested in cinema, I was always confused by our ability, our need, to always think and to talk about films in terms of boxes. I don't really understand those boxes and borders within each box, or let's say more clearly, borders between documentary, fiction, experimental, animation, and so and so... And there are even boxes within the boxes. I really don't like borders, nor to put everything in boxes. If you watch a Marvel film, it is a fiction film. It is clear. But, in the end, it doesn't really mean anything to me, those kinds of labels are never very efficient.

Since the beginning of the cinema, nothing was never clear. If you look at some Lumière, Mélies or Edison films, or to the Avantgarde cinema of the 1920s, you could already see that the tendency in the early history of cinema was to mix the borders. For example, it was normal to make documentaries that are "staged", or to make some fiction films that were shot as a documentary or that were almost experimental. But from the cinema industry to the most artistic scene, people like to separate films in genre. Even filmmakers do so and present themselves in such way. I don't know if there is some kind of unconscious plan to take and keep a position, from which to struggle with filmmakers from other positions... To say: "Oh, you are not an experimental filmmaker, you are making documentaries". Or: "I am doing video art and you are looking for experimental cinema". For me is not really like an interesting theme to listen to such quarrels…

For sure, the question of the narrative and technical histories of cinema is important when you start to think about what is, or what was, video art. Before video art, in the 1960s, everything was in print, in celluloid. There was no other way to make films. But there were already people making experimental films since almost the beginning of cinema, and in the 60s, the experimental scene was important. When video arrived, some artists, no matter if they were from experimental film or from contemporary art scene, they just picked up this new technic and used it. They started to play and make films with it. It was new and what really separated what was called videoart from other kinds of films was simply the screening techniques. For decades, it was simply impossible to screen video in cinema theaters. They were equipped only for film prints. So, video artists started to create their own spaces to screen their films, they created festivals, screening venues, they used museums... The supposed opposition in-between what was videoart and what we could more widely called “experimental cinema” disappeared at the beginning of 2000 with the possibility of using video projectors in proper movie theaters. That allowed some festivals that were only showing films on prints to integrate in their own selection videoart films, or at least with films made in video (whatever their genre). The supposed differences between videoart and other kinds of experimental cinema almost disappeared then.

Today, the spectrum of the films that are not properly belonging to a genre (particularly fiction, and also documentary) is wider than ever. We could always see films that we could considered strictly as “experimental”, but the question of how to define “experimental cinema” or “videoart” as a genre is really complicated to answer.  At least, regarding my own work, I never take care of what kind of films I am doing. Most of my films are really “edgy”. They could be defined in different ways, and I let people decide the labels they want to put on each of my films or in my work in general. I still don't like all those definitions, as a filmmaker, it’s meaningless.

But, as soon as you don’t do what is expected, people can sometimes make you feel that what you do is not regular. You are regularly put aside when you are not fully silenced.  silenced. And it’s the rule in the cinema too. Even if this myth of what kinds of films are “normal” is just a myth. Since the beginning of cinema, there were always films exploring different ways. Cinema was always two things at the same time, or there were two parts in what we understand cinema is. There was always a commercial way, the one asking to make films for the audience. And there was always some kind of “art cinema”, or some way to think artistically about the cinema ... The ones working in the first way always denied, and still do, the other possibilities of cinema, and even silenced the history of cinema in its complexity. For me, it's not really a problem. If we compare it, for example, with book publishing, a lot of the books that are printed are just formatted for the audience, they are successful, but they are forgotten in a very short time. On the contrary, some poets or inventive novelists sell very few books when they were published but they stay in the history of literature. And more importantly, they are the ones who elaborated what we define as literature. It is the same thing with cinema. And unlike literature, making films is expensive and we must deal with production, time, and money. That makes our work as non-commercial filmmaker far more complicated.

A Quarter of Century, From Video to Media Transformation
Edited by Ivana Sremčević, Srdan Radaković
2014