Emmanuelle Antille
About some of my films
By Emmanuelle Antille
Tornadoes of My Heart (2004-2005) is the generic title of a body of works which includes three video installations, a series of thirty photographs and a feature film.
In this whole project I developed the theme of teenagehood through his various aspects : the rituals and languages, the friendships, family and the relationships inside a community, the diary.
This whole project started by the writing of the screenplay for the feature film titled Rollow.
Once the screenplay written I organized several castings in order to find the teenagers who would act in the film. My wish was to work with unprofessionnal actors, some very dynamic energies.
As soon as the technical team was complete and the teenagers selected, we rehearsed all together everyday during a period of two months before the shooting of the film. During this period I met each teenager’s family, spent time in each one’s environment in order to know them better. All these preparation phases, close to the way of making a documentary film, brought a lot to the project and created a very strong intimacy that could be felt afterwards in the final images.
After the rehearsal period, we shot the project during two months in summer. In the end, we had more than fifty hours of film material : some filmed sequences were made for Rollow, others for the video installations.
Shot in a very intimistic way by a small team, the images are often very physical and close to the bodies. The project is based on this idea to film scenes of fiction as in a documentary film. The camera was always on and shooting almost all the time. We were all moved by the immergency of catching all the kids’ spontaneous gestures and gazes, all those very fragile and thiny attitudes that happen only once and that can never be repeated. This was a way to blow the limit between the reality and the fiction.
About the photographic series, it started right after the filming of the project. At the end of the summer I organized a photo shooting with each teenager without the technical team. In a calmer atmosphere we went back to each location of the filming. I wanted to take very intimate and intense portrait of each of them, to catch who they really were without them having to play a part. So I asked them to look straight to the camera in a very simple way.
We shot about one thousand photos in total. In the end I made a selection of thirty of them.
Angels Camp (2002-2003) is the overall title of a body of work based on a fictional story.The project consists of a full-length film (80’), a sound and video installations, photographs, objects, music and a novel. All these components work together as a group at the same time independent and closely inter-related. They complement each other, and each in its own way helps develop the story. The full-length film tells the story of a region and its inhabitants. It is a saga in four episodes, shot season-by-season over a year. The characters are: the Woman with a torch, her Mother and Imaginary Sister, Celya and Arantxa the two Cabin Girls, the Man of the Woods, the River Girl, Marie, Dani, the White Dog, the Kids with the Foal.
The story plunges us into their lives, dreams and destinies. Together they are the guardians of a shared experience, lived in the imaginary world of Angels Camp. The settings in which these characters take refuge play a vital role in the story. The pine woods, the caves and mushroom beds, the hidden creek, the village of abandoned cabins evoke the joy of wide open spaces and the world of childhood, with its uninhibited behaviour, the freedom to break with accepted codes and establish one’s own rules. The landscapes act as mirrors, reflecting the inner life of the characters.
In this whole project I developed the theme of teenagehood through his various aspects : the rituals and languages, the friendships, family and the relationships inside a community, the diary.
This whole project started by the writing of the screenplay for the feature film titled Rollow.
Once the screenplay written I organized several castings in order to find the teenagers who would act in the film. My wish was to work with unprofessionnal actors, some very dynamic energies.
As soon as the technical team was complete and the teenagers selected, we rehearsed all together everyday during a period of two months before the shooting of the film. During this period I met each teenager’s family, spent time in each one’s environment in order to know them better. All these preparation phases, close to the way of making a documentary film, brought a lot to the project and created a very strong intimacy that could be felt afterwards in the final images.
After the rehearsal period, we shot the project during two months in summer. In the end, we had more than fifty hours of film material : some filmed sequences were made for Rollow, others for the video installations.
Shot in a very intimistic way by a small team, the images are often very physical and close to the bodies. The project is based on this idea to film scenes of fiction as in a documentary film. The camera was always on and shooting almost all the time. We were all moved by the immergency of catching all the kids’ spontaneous gestures and gazes, all those very fragile and thiny attitudes that happen only once and that can never be repeated. This was a way to blow the limit between the reality and the fiction.
About the photographic series, it started right after the filming of the project. At the end of the summer I organized a photo shooting with each teenager without the technical team. In a calmer atmosphere we went back to each location of the filming. I wanted to take very intimate and intense portrait of each of them, to catch who they really were without them having to play a part. So I asked them to look straight to the camera in a very simple way.
We shot about one thousand photos in total. In the end I made a selection of thirty of them.
Angels Camp (2002-2003) is the overall title of a body of work based on a fictional story.The project consists of a full-length film (80’), a sound and video installations, photographs, objects, music and a novel. All these components work together as a group at the same time independent and closely inter-related. They complement each other, and each in its own way helps develop the story. The full-length film tells the story of a region and its inhabitants. It is a saga in four episodes, shot season-by-season over a year. The characters are: the Woman with a torch, her Mother and Imaginary Sister, Celya and Arantxa the two Cabin Girls, the Man of the Woods, the River Girl, Marie, Dani, the White Dog, the Kids with the Foal.
The story plunges us into their lives, dreams and destinies. Together they are the guardians of a shared experience, lived in the imaginary world of Angels Camp. The settings in which these characters take refuge play a vital role in the story. The pine woods, the caves and mushroom beds, the hidden creek, the village of abandoned cabins evoke the joy of wide open spaces and the world of childhood, with its uninhibited behaviour, the freedom to break with accepted codes and establish one’s own rules. The landscapes act as mirrors, reflecting the inner life of the characters.
