Below, we publish a few questions addressed to director Louise Hémon about his competition film The Documentary Journey of Madame Anita Conti.
Archivio Aperto explores the theme of memory and archives. How does your film intercept this theme? What elements of the film highlight this exploration of memory?
My film attempts to bring to life the first female oceanographer, and pioneer of marine ecology, Anita Conti. A forgotten personality, erased from history, I tried to revive her thoughts and his experience of the ocean through a montage of the archives she left us: 16mm films, photographs, writings, and audio recordings. With my film, I hope the audience explores the memory of this adventuress in the present, through a poetic and vivid experience, as if they were on the boat, and looking through her eyes.
How do archive images influence the construction of the narrative? Can you tell us about a sequence in your film where archive images transformed or enriched the message you intended to communicate?
Unfortunately, little remains of Anita Conti’s archive, in particular, many of the 16mm films have been lost. We therefore had to work without these images. Anita Conti recounts in her writings or in audio recordings a sequence in which the captain and the radio operator take the camera and start filming. Here she is in front of the screen for what they call a “cinematic sketch”: she appears as “the girl from the sea” who has to enter the belly of a shark while the captain has to go there with his large sabre. I had to recreate this delirious sequence thanks to the editing and the imagination of the viewer who forms his own mental images. This is what interests me: how editing can work along the off-camera archives.
What found footage or experimental films have played an important role in your education?
I’m a big fan of Chantal Akerman, John Smith and Chris Marker. For the record, it was at DAMS in Bologna, where I was an Erasmus student, that I studied American and European avant-garde cinema. A liberating discovery!