Choreographer and director Fu Le shares his views and experiences about shooting a long take in the screendance work MASS, that won the first price at the Videodanza BA festival in 2019. MASS was presented as well at the EIVV, Encontre Internacional de Videodansa i Videoperformance, Valencia (Spain) – 2019, where he comments on his previous experience and the specificities of choreographing and shooting a single take with 40 dancers and a dedicated team for the camera.
Fu LE, you are a choreographer and author of a dozen dance films, distributed around the world. You stand out by a multiplicity of genres and mastery of the long take, as in your last short film Mass, which contains a 10-minute take with 40 dancers. Before talking about Mass, I would like to ask you: how did your video-dance practice begin?
Video has accompanied my choreographic research from the start. One day, I found a computer on the street, and a few months later I bought myself a small camera that has served me for almost ten years. I started making films because at the time I didn’t have the opportunity to present my live work in theaters. I traveled a lot, and video was a way to document my choreographic experiments in places that called out to me… like a sort of logbook.
Video is therefore a tool which has made it possible to extend your possibilities of choreographic production.
The video responded to an insatiable bulimia of creation. I am now trying to get away from it, to favor quality over quantity. This is one of the reasons why I am interested in the long take, it obliges me to respect a kind of artistic ethics …
Let me explain: I started making images before the digital era. I was studying applied arts in Paris; with a few friends, we drew a lot, we took photos in medium format, with six shots possible per film. You had to prepare your subject well, silver films were expensive. Our references were monuments like Cartier-Bresson, able to sit for a whole day against the railing of a staircase to wait for a bicycle to pass before pressing the trigger. We then spent our nights developing, printing on baryta paper. I experienced the digital transition as an intrusion into our secret of alchemist, I saw myself overwhelmed by poor quality images on uninteresting subjects. I don’t know how many billions of images are produced per second around the world, but it makes you dizzy. So I always try to remember my beginnings, to fight against the frenzy of the image world.
However, all of your films are now shot in digital video format.
My opinion indeed changed when I went from still image to video. Before digital, cinema was reserved for a few privileged people who had access to production equipment. Digital technology has democratized the filmed image, and has opened up an easier dialogue for this medium with other artistic fields. You no longer have to go to high school or have a personal fortune to make a film.
It’s the same thing for broadcasting: as a self-taught person, I was able to free myself from elitist cinema networks and distribute my films widely via the Internet. Of course, to obtain high quality images, the material remains expensive and requires real know-how, but creativity always manages to surpass technique.
Digital has indeed become widely accessible, but the material is not enough to make a film. What were the difficulties encountered at the start of your career?
For me, the beginnings were very easy, free from any expectation of production. I enjoyed absolute artistic freedom. The collaborations were completely voluntary. Today, I try to raise my practice to a professional level, and it becomes very difficult to create, with all the administrative and financial constraints that this implies.
I remember a sentence by François Truffaut in La Nuit Américaine which said: «Before I start a shooting, I want above all to make a film that will be beautiful. As soon as the first troubles arise, I must reduce my ambition, and I find myself simply hoping that we will manage to finish the film.”
But, why not keep working alone?
I took a liking to teamwork, which allows me not only to film the dance, but to truly choreograph the shooting of the film. It is in this sense that video-dance is a medium that stands out and finds a unique identity. It is not simply a matter of capturing a spectacle, nor producing a succession of rhythmic images in the manner of a video clip, but rather of operating a true fusion of cinematographic and choreographic writing. A dance film is above all a film, but designed according to choreographic principles which govern the subject as much as the technique. The long take allows me to approach this fusion of genres because everything happens at the same time and in the same place.
For the shooting of Mass for example, Fabienne, who operated the steadicam (Figure 2), performed a real choreographic performance. She had to learn and repeat her movements, and really made it possible to create a link between the technical and artistic teams: she was a «technician» but moved at the pace of the dancers, she sweated with them.
You seem so convinced. Where does this obsession with the long take come from?
At first it was visceral, I no longer wanted to have to deal with a computer. As a dancer and choreographer, I did not recognize myself in this office work. My first films were more classic, so to speak, the filming was more or less improvised, and I spent hours viewing rushes on an old and struggling laptop. I reached saturation.
I had put in place techniques to refine the editing, for example I invited a friend to watch the film with a bowl of tea placed on the table. As soon as he drank the tea, I noted the time code: I knew that the film had a weakness at this precise moment and that it was necessary to cross-check. Editing is of course a fascinating work of composing, which is similar to musical composing, but it is another profession. I never said that I would never cut a film again, but I try to avoid it. And then, getting rid of the computer is illusory. There is always a substantial post-production work in my films, but it is more subtle: it consists of slight time compressions and expansions, small cropping, calibration with sometimes visual effects, and above all a musical work that comes to dialogue with the image.
It’s not so much the result as the process that interests me. I started dancing as a sculptor, because the repetition of the gestures fascinated me more than the end product. Here it is the same thing: for me, the film is filmed, the rest is only polishing. What interests me is beyond the image, it is the charge it contains, all the energy that had to be concentrated and made to converge to produce this image. On my shoots, the choreography takes place as much in front of as behind the camera: it includes the camera in the center of the action, like a real dancer in itself. Whether it is a subjective camera that reacts or influences the environment, or else completely dispassionate with a continuous trajectory, its presence is real and orchestrated. Each shoot is an experience, for both the dancers and the technicians, an authentic, lively experience.
You speak of authenticity, but does not all this planning come to kill the life that we seek to capture with the camera?
On the contrary! It is true that such a plan requires quite a logistical preparation. But the point of the long take is precisely to rediscover the excitement of the live performance, where everyone’s attention is necessary at the time of filming. The team must be united in the face of risks, because the slightest error is fatal for the entire film. We remember the scene of the fire in Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice which, following a camera failure, had to have the house that had burned completely rebuilt and shoot the scene a second time.
The shoots are thus much more intense than during my first experiences where I was, either in a documentary mode with quantities of unnecessary rushes, or in a fictional mode which required me to repeat one by one all the scenes while the rest of the team was waiting. You know what they say: «The hardest thing in cinema is to find a chair to sit on».
To continue with the notion of authenticity: the long take therefore implies a certain skill, at the risk of revealing the machinery, as the length of the shot exceeds conventional editing standards. Does this excess of technicality not put a distance between the spectator and the screen?
An extraordinary duration, perhaps, for the habits of the virtual world of video, but which nevertheless corresponds to the normal and continuous time of reality. We are perhaps too conditioned to dynamic images that we zap by reflex, or worse by impatience.
Obviously, there is this risk of being more seduced by technical prowess than by the story … I tell myself that if that happens, the story was not very interesting. And then, you just need not to do too much, not to give too many effects, keep it simple and also fresh in the way of filming. I prefer to leave a few snags, rather than having a perfectly stabilized floating image.
I understand your enthusiasm for this method and the difficulty that it involves, but we can assume that the audience just wants to see a film that touches them, and is not interested in knowing whether the shooting was difficult or intense. I rephrase my question: does the long take respond to a simple complacency of a filmmaker, or does it present a real interest for the spectator?
The distance of the spectator to the screen is a real question, I find on the contrary that the long take draws the spectator towards the screen, as if to invite him to enter the film.
For a long time, I did not care about this question, the priority for me was to feel whole in my artistic process. But when I think about it, the interest for the audience, even if they do not realize it, is undeniable. A long take has the advantage of a strong, fluid and hypnotic image: when we look at a long take, we are trapped, we can no longer get out, there is no escape. The long take allows you to live a real experience and transmits, in my opinion, the authenticity of a time unfolding in the image.*
*Text translated and edited from the French by Blas Payri