"In Le Granier, the earth is living, is suffering and is full of history. The
still camera shows a tired mountain which seems to hide a sacred secret.
These telluric landscapes transfigured by Fouchard's manipulations on the
image (animation techniques, toning, etc.) of a great plasticity, tell the
history of this mountain populated with incantations, and its belonging to
this wild nature." (Emmanuel Lefrant)
Afterward, almost 20 years later :
LE GRANIER PAYSAGES, ETUDE N°1 (The Granary Landscapes, Study No. 1, 2007) is the first film made in 35mm at L'Abominable. It was a collective effort, as many people participated in this project, directly or indirectly. The film bears my name because I conceived it, but for me it remains, first and foremost, a collective adventure.
The question of its preservation will one day arise because the original negative mounted with tape is very fragile and made with direct interventions on the negative (toning, dyeing, film painting, solarization, various chemical treatments).
Thus, my cinema is purely experimental. I sometimes even show "works in progress," models, sketches, drafts, and unfinished projects. This, for me, is what "experimental cinema" and experimental video art are all about... it is perhaps one of the most accomplished works of my career...
Finally, the fact that "LE GRANIER PAYSAGES, ETUDE N°1" is silent is a deliberate, economic, and technical choice, whereas the absence of a soundtrack was too often a constraint in my Super 8 and 16mm films.
Thus, I must have made bad luck good, and I have acquired a taste for making silent films. I also sometimes practice silence in my videos and digital films, where this is, however, more accessible...
I've always experimented with very little means... Doing the most with the least has often been the case...
This film is undoubtedly the one for which I've had the most resources, because it's the only one that was supported by the CNC as part of the fallout from the "EXPERIMENTAL, IT'S NOT MY KIND" manifesto (a collective movement in favor of the creation of an "EXPERIMENTAL" category and the support that goes with it...).
For this "project" (because we had already entered a "project civilization"...), handwritten on an A4 sheet of paper, handwritten with coffee stains: approximately 20,000 euros (including the producer's portion), much less than the minimum for a short fiction film, 50,000 euros at the time....
LES PRODUCTIONS ALÉATOIRES cobbled together a file from this: a rough draft, writing to the Bic-pen, stained and crumpled (laughs)...
I've only asked the CNC for a little money once since, and they refused me. I've never asked for it again...
The CNC, created under the Vichy regime, reserved at the time for directors of French nationality (perhaps this is still the case...), were for us "film cops": if a project was rejected, according to the CNC, it was forbidden to make the film...
Police control of weight and action through money, that's also cinema... Too bad...
But this film was still a great adventure, a collective adventure, even if there were major disagreements with the Chief Producer who took too much money from the grant, 3,000 euros in addition to his producer's share, it's nothing...
Perhaps it was a way to pay for a lawyer just in case, I don't know. No...
I forgive him, because he may have financed it with a film by my friend Pierre Merjekowsky and agreed that I give up my salary in exchange for the middlemen and two fairly mediocre copies of "TAHOUSSE," co-directed with Mahine ROUHI, which was in post-production and only existed in its original dual-track format, like many of our films at the time...
Otherwise, most of my films were made with 0 francs or euros... In short, on my daily pasta plate...
That's also experimental cinema... We're not martyrs! But our lives back then were almost heroic in some ways; we often lived on minimum social security and owned nothing (and for me, that's still the case...)...
Now it's harder to live like that...
Olivier Fouchard, 06/13/2025 in Saint-Maurice-des-Lions.
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3 PRINTS IN DISTRIBUTION
|
distribution format |
35mm |
|
screen |
1,37 (single screen) |
|
speed |
24 fps |
|
sound |
silent |
|
original language |
French |
|
translation |
English (Text document) |
|
rental fee |
57,00 € |
|
distribution format |
DCP on server (SMPTE 4K) |
|
screen |
1,37 (single screen) |
|
speed |
24 fps |
|
sound |
silent |
|
original language |
French |
|
translation |
English (Text document) |
|
rental fee |
57,00 € |
|
distribution format |
Digital file on server (FHD) |
|
screen |
1,37 (single screen) |
|
speed |
24 fps |
|
sound |
silent |
|
original language |
French |
|
translation |
English (Text document) |
|
rental fee |
57,00 € |
