Jean-Gabriel Périot

The delicate art of the bludgeon DVCAM, 4', 2009 France

Tell me about this film, initial idea and work process.
I made this movie for a collective project made this summer and this autumn. This project is a reaction to the actual violences of the polices in France. This spring, one filmmaker, participing in a demo in solidarity with people without lagel papers, lost one eye when a policeman shoot him with a flashgun. It was not the worst event of police violences, but as this man was a filmmaker, it was a occasion for us, filmmakers, to react with films.

Are you working on new projects at the moment?
I work on two new projects. A short fiction film (from a novel of Don DeLillo) and a long documentary for cinema, made by 100% of archives, footages etc…, about the history and the RAF and its links with the "images" this history created.

Do you have specific influences in your film/video making?
Not directly in the filmmaking process. But on a intellectual level, for sure, I am interest of some filmmakers that think the cinema could be used as a political media and morevoer that this political aspect of this media is linked with the possibility of the cinema itself. Films should be politic not only regarding the content but mainly by how they are made and how they deal with the content. There, there are the questions of the production processes and the technical aspects of films (shooting, filmmaking…) There Dziga Vertov and Jean-Luc Godard could be considered as main figures.

Why is it important for you to show your film/video in a festival?
Mostly because it is one of the only way to show my film works. Moreover, I think that in film festivals, audience are more concentrated on the movies than other kinds of screenings (TV, internet, even dvd). First, there is the big screen, the black of the room and a good sound, and secondly, people chose to be there.