Authorizing Creation

How can artistic creation become a political act of collective emancipation? By carrying within itself, in its form and process, the authorization for everyone to risk themselves in it.

Learning by doing, or the genesis of my practice

My desire as a young man, child, adolescent was to make films. I started with a small plastic Super 8 camera, investing my pocket money in buying it, then in the film rolls that I put in my camera and sent to be developed by mail, even though my parents weren’t wealthy. What I’m describing here was 45 years ago. Today, for someone who wants to film, everything is available: cameras everywhere, in phones, tablets, cameras, webcams, laptops. You can even find cameras in any dumpster.

Quickly, when I started creating, I realized I wasn’t alone. I met other people driven by the same desire. Creation thus became very quickly quite collective. Once you’ve made a film, you have to show it, and that too was within my reach. I very quickly organized screening sessions at my home, if only to share together the films we had made. When I arrived at university, these approaches became more public, and even more collective.

I was immediately in the concrete act of doing: making films, learning technique, doing together, receiving from others and bringing to others, this infinite richness of exchange. By organizing short film screenings and then film festivals, I received enormously. That’s why I did it: to offer and receive, to give and receive. As Marcel Mauss says so well in his Essay on the Gift (1925), “to refuse to give, to neglect to invite, like refusing to take, amounts to declaring war; it is refusing alliance and communion.” My stake was immediately in the possible connections around me, not in a politics of creation that would be a tool to manufacture one’s social domination or enter the circle of dominants legitimized by an institution.

Multidisciplinarity as a refusal of hierarchies

I went to the end of the process that interested me by creating, by sharing creative approaches and by showing. All of this was always connected. I always envisioned myself in this reality in action of the place of creation that creates concrete links where I am. In these enterprises, I certainly met people who were more individualistic and less multidisciplinary in their practices, and why not, besides, everyone can enrich themselves on different levels. But me, I was always in this multidisciplinarity: I wasn’t assigned to a single role.

I created, I shared, I knew the technique, I showed others’ works and mine, I connected people. I wasn’t just a “director,” besides, I prefer the word “filmmaker” to the word “director,” because director designates a technical function in a professional organization method of cinematographic creation. My subject is not the professional milieu; my subject is making films and showing them, helping others make their films and showing their films too. All of this belongs to the same order for me.

In the numerous workshops I’ve been leading for a very long time, cinematographic creation workshops, but also poetic, literary, pictorial, photographic ones, as much as possible, I also participate in them. I risk myself with the participants in creation. I’m not just the teacher; I’m also in the same place as them, I must also dare to take the risk of expressing myself and exposing my expression to others. This approach echoes what Paulo Freire describes in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968): “No one educates anyone else, no one educates himself alone, people educate each other through the mediation of the world.”

The framework that authorizes: a politics of horizontality

This participation completely changes relationships. There is no domination, there is someone who holds a framework, and the framework is what authorizes. This framework ensures that everyone in the group will create something, that’s what it’s for. If I apply this framework to myself too, well it authorizes even more. By risking myself like the others, by letting them know that it’s not easy for me either, because it’s extremely difficult to express oneself, this benefits the framework, it authorizes them even more.

If I proceed this way and it seems very important to me, if I see how effective it is, it’s because, very often, since my youth, when people saw my films, they told me: “Ah, it made me want to make films.” This reaction always surprised me. I sometimes felt almost offended that they didn’t tell me they had admired, experienced emotions, learned. No, they told me: “It made me want to make films.” I wondered what this meant, it destabilized me a bit.

This is what I call today authorizing creation. Recently, as I devote myself more to writing after having made hundreds of films of all kinds, I received an email from someone who, responding to a newsletter of mine, began to write, to authorize themselves to write, to invent a concept, to share it with me. This brought me back to those people who, so often, told me after seeing my films that it had made them want to make some. Everything connected in me.

The work as a trace of a democratic process

In reality, this reaction is not at all disparaging to my works. Works carry within them their manufacturing process, and their context of enunciation. In my multidisciplinary approach where I went from creation to distribution in the same gesture, the works created in that context carry it. They can circulate beyond, of course, but in them, they carry this simplicity of gesture, a gesture of direct connection, a film made to be seen by other people we know.

Jean-Luc Godard said you have to make films to show them to your friends. He was quite right. And it’s not because of that that the circle of friends can’t expand. But at the start, a work must be addressed, otherwise who will it interest? We can see this clearly on social networks with precise communities that are interested in precise subjects. Everything is addressed.

Take the example of theater directors’ interviews who create YouTube or TikTok channels to talk about their art in the absolute: this interests no one, and besides no one goes to see them, because it’s not addressed. On the other hand, these same directors, if they meet after their show or during round tables with spectators who are interested in their work, there is an address, they speak to someone and it can be fascinating. Digital space is not an abstract universal space; it’s a space of human connection like any other, of a very singular nature certainly, but it’s a space of connection that requires an address just as much.

The distinction between authorizing creation and industrial creation

What I understand today is that authorizing works carry this quality within them. There are other works made for the “general public,” for major festivals, validated in their script by banks, manufactured by an industry. All of this is not authorizing. One can admire it, appreciate it, but one cannot, if one wanted to, do the same thing oneself, right away. Authorization is the authorization to do now.

In the early 80s, Orson Welles, during a public meeting at the Cinémathèque française, responded to students who told him they wanted to make films but didn’t have the means. He told them that if they really wanted to make a film, they could steal a camera and go shoot. He authorized, beyond the question of social legitimacy. This is authorizing creation: a creation that in itself carries this social generosity, not through its discourse or the story it tells, but through its very form.

A poetry written on paper in a few minutes and read to those present, if it touches them, if it does them good, can authorize them to risk writing too, right away. They saw me write it, they saw it was possible. As Jacques Rancière emphasizes in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), “equality is not an end to be achieved, but a starting point, a supposition to be maintained in all circumstances.”

The “Le Fil” evenings, or the institution of authorization

For ten years, I organized creative evenings at my home that we called “Le Fil evenings.” The principle of these small groups of five to twenty people is that everyone publicly offers a creation to others during the evening. There is no passive spectator, we are spectators of others’ creations, but everyone proposes something. It’s multidisciplinary: films, readings, music, theater, performances, collective proposals, circus... It can be simply offering to read a text or singing a song we love.

I invite people I know, but also those I know less, or not at all. I suggest to people that they invite other people, so that there’s no insiderism, so that we’re not in a frozen institution, but in an unknown where our creation goes to meet, without institutional stakes. It’s an opening so as not to be in a dual relationship.

Sometimes, people I suggest coming tell me they want to come just to be spectators. I tell them no, that’s not the principle. If we come, even modestly, we also offer a creation to others. I have thus almost systematized, instituted authorizing creation in these evenings. This approach joins what Joseph Beuys called “social sculpture,” from the 60s: “Every man is an artist”, not that everyone should become a painter or sculptor, but that everyone can contribute to shaping society through their creativity.

Cultural policies and democratic space

I don’t want to create hierarchy, because industrial creation has its place, we’ve always said about cinema that it was both an art and an industry, and that’s true. But authorizing creation, more intimate perhaps, more direct, and so possible today with the technical means we all have in our pocket, has its full place, its full legitimacy and very great importance, no less than industrial art.

This is why I’m very comfortable on the subject of cultural policies, which are territorial policies. Financed by the common good from tax collection, they have the role of favoring democratic space. Favoring democratic space means favoring connections. Favoring connections means giving citizens the place to receive from each other and to contribute, including through artistic creation.

There’s no amateur/professional subject here, these distinctions are from another age for me. These are institutional distinctions to legitimize places, and why not, but there’s something more essential: authorizing ourselves to make society together. This concept of authorizing creation seems to me a small key I discovered as I went along my artistic wanderings, a key to understanding how creation can create connection, can contribute to connection and not establish hierarchies.

Technological anticipation in service of cultural democracy

I founded with the Forum des images in 2005 the Pocket Films festival, which was the largest festival dedicated to creating films with mobile phones, at the moment when cameras appeared in these devices. We were at the beginning of a future democratization of cameras in everyone’s pockets, something that seems obvious today, but which twenty years ago absolutely wasn’t, since it didn’t exist yet! No one permanently had a camera in their pocket to make images and send them to others, as is the case today.

I thus anticipated, before technology entered all pockets, an authorizing creation. Similarly, in 2011, I co-created the Short Film Festival at the request of the National Center for Cinema and Moving Image. Initially called “The Shortest Day,” like the Music Festival, a national moment of labeled sharing with a common program, but open to all. Someone who wanted to show their family films in their living room could register and receive at home people who would have been enriched by their view of the world.

These initiatives are part of what Michel de Certeau called “the invention of everyday life” (1980), these practices by which users reappropriate the space organized by the techniques of sociocultural production. Authorizing creation participates in this democratic reappropriation of cultural space.

Towards a reversal of the cultural paradigm

This is my path. Right away, I was told that my way of creating was democratic because it also authorized others. Today, I realize this is one of the values of my works. There are others of course, aesthetic, narrative, thematic, artistic values. But there’s also the democratic value of the work itself, this authorizing creation that has this power to inspire us, to encourage us to contribute, us too, to the connections that are the essence of our humanity.

My proposition is to reverse the paradigm. This is exactly what cultural rights do, a concept that immediately resonated with my approach to art when I encountered it. Cultural rights place first the connection, that is, political space, the collective. For the collective to exist, each person must be able to contribute to it. In this framework, there are different types of works and art practices, but the basic principle, the initial substrate, is people respected in their dignity and authorized to contribute.

Creation must therefore be authorizing from the start. Both models can coexist, I don’t want to completely tear down professional practices that will always have their full place. But they are no longer the only ones. And their place will always be in a democratic space anyway. There are a thousand different ways to contribute, and authorizing creation reminds us that art is not primarily a matter of individual genius or institutional recognition, but of sharing, connection and mutual authorization to exist fully in the common space.