Philibert Talks Film, Frenchly

“I didn’t wake up one morning and say, ‘Ah, I’m going to be a documentary filmmaker,” said Nicolas Philibert.

Largely lauded as the most famous documentarian in France, if not all of Europe, five of Philibert’s nonfiction films form the simply-titled series “Nicolas Philibert: Five Films,” which screened at the Harvard Film Archive (HFA) last week.

Presented through the combined efforts of the HFA, French Cultural Services, and Cahiers du Cinema—the legendary film magazine born in the 1960s from the pens of cinematic superstars like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut—“Five Films” brought “Louvre City,” “Animals and More Animals,” “To Be and To Have,” “In the Land of the Dead,” and “Every Little Thing” to the Carpenter Center’s screen.

Cahiers du Cinema editor Jean-Michel Frodon introduced Philibert on the festival’s opening night, while Philibert himself took questions that night and on Tuesday, Nov. 28. Both men visited Harvard classes in the earlier in the week.

In an interview, Philibert called his entry to the documentary filmmaking world “a series of chances and opportunities.”

“It happened that my first film was a documentary and I decided to continue in this way,” Philibert said. “Documentaries are not necessarily a bit sad or didactic, as many think. Especially today, documentaries are extremely inventive; as inventive as fiction.”

He began thinking about film well before he tried documentaries.

“When I was a teenager, 16 or 17, I started to think about cinema,” he recalled. “I tried to see old films. Little by little I discovered that films were not only entertainment but also thinking.”

“Film can think in a way: it lets us think and it brings us to thinking,” he continued.

He also paid homage to his predecessors in the French New Wave. “When I saw Godard’s first film, I understand that films were not only stories or dreams,” he said.

“Films help us to think, to understand the world, to discover the rest of the world, to hear other languages to travel to other cultures, societies,” he said. “I love foreign films; it’s a way for me to see other living. I started to discover that films were all that.”

As far as his own experience in making films, Philibert said he rarely has a full understanding of his goals: “I need to make a film to know what film I wanted to make. Even when I have finished, I only know a part of what I have done.”

Though he said that he cannot entirely explain the phenomenon of success, he credited that of his biggest hit, “To Be and To Have”—filmed in a one-room schoolhouse in Auvergne—in part to the universality of its themes.

“We all have been at school,” he remarked. “We all have memories from that period, good or bad. In our world we are obliged to go to school when we are kids but when we are adults we can’t, it’s forbidden. So for adults, if we have children, we want to be like a mouse and observe [our] son or daughter in school.”

But Philibert said he doesn’t see his films as necessarily topical. “Often the subject of a film is not the most important part of the film to me,” he said. “The different films all speak about how we, we all, can live together. I am interested in the human condition. The different topics are almost pretext to speak about that, to observe human beings.”

And cinema itself? He could only express its essence in a mix of English and his native tongue: “For me, cinema is this: things we see, things we don’t see, the visible, the invisible, transparency and opacity…Voilà!”