Nicholas Philibert Masterclass

Films aside, there were a number of other interesting initiatives, mainly round table discussions and plenary sessions with some of the directors. The most prominent was a masterclass given by French documentarist Nicholas Philibert, director of ÊTRE ET AVOIR and HIS MASTER’S VOICE amongst others. The highlights of his talk go to the heart of the problematic of documentary film-making, When interpellated on the subject, Philibert described the problem of documentary film-making (as opposed to fiction) as the ethical question of filming the Other, of prying into private lives and thus making them public; of what limits and distance there should be in relation to the subject matter. For his part, he took a pragmatic approach, claiming to allow the subjects of his documentaries the final decision about wanting to be filmed, about sharing their stories. He talked of a sort of implicit contract being established between director and subject, based on tact, intuition and common sense. This was exemplary of the thorny topic, where clear questions abound but where answers, of necessity, are often unclear, based on practice and experience rather than theory. Philibert gave us a glimpse into his own methods. Unable to give a normative, legislative response, he preferred to provide a pragmatic glimpse into his own methods, based on negotiation and attentiveness to minute details of his subject’s personalities.

The majority of the questions posed referred more to the general practice of documentary film-making rather than his own particular brand of directing. When asked how one should get the subjects to forget one’s presence, Philibert replied that, for him, that was missing the question. The problem was not one of somehow occluding one’s presence – an impossible, and potentially dishonest, manoeuvre – but rather of getting people to accept it and act normally around it. The art of documentary for Philibert was not one of stealing or swindling moments of people’s lives, but rather of convincing them to share these with him.

Philibert was also quizzed about the dividing line between the documentary and the fictional mode of filmmaking. The stage for this question was set by the obligatory Jean-Luc Godard quote, the gist of which was about how good fiction tends towards the documentary and vice-versa, which I understood as good fiction achieving some degree of truth (however problematic that concept may be) and good documentary entertaining and effectively telling a story. In response, Philibert replied that he had no qualms about setting up or provoking situations (‘programming the happenstance’ would be a way of translating his own formulation), as long as it did not result in situations out of kilter with real life, a moral responsibility obviously devolving upon the filmmaker. Any ethical objection to this position may be partially answered by his next observation, that the idea of an absolute objectivity, the absence of a point of view was anathema to him, a righteous claim that often marked ideological intentions. Documentary, in Philibert’s view, would be more an argument constructed from film footage than an analogue extraction from the real world.

In a final word, asked for his opinion on Michael Moore, Philibert argued that while he believed that Moore may be right in his assertions, and is indubitably entertaining, his films, with their univocal, authoritarian content, were more propaganda than documentaries. In view of Philibert’s opinion on objectivity, what would seem to distinguish his own practice from Moore’s (at least in his own eyes) are their flexible exploration of a premise rather than the cussed arguing of a case.