PRODUCTION LAZENNEC 5 RUE DARCET 75017 PARIS FRANCE

LAZENNEC PRÉSENTE
UN FILM D’ANTOINE D'AGATA
PRODUCTION
LAZENNEC
5 RUE DARCET
75017 PARIS
FRANCE
www.lazennec.com
[email protected]
PRESS IN LOCARNO
Agnés WILDENSTEIN
Bureau : + 41 91 756 21 79
Portable : + 41 79 470 10 63
SYNOPSIS
Synopsis written before shooting.
120 Fragments of a Chronology of Chaos
The film consists in 120 fragments arranged into 6 chapters, and each corresponds to one of the 120
nights Antoine spent—or could have spent—in Tokyo, Osaka or elsewhere in Japan.
Each fragment may be either a sequence or a single sequence shot.
What matters is that there is no stylistic homogeneity, but rather a quest for an aesthetic approach to
the fragment, which involves mixing not only a variety of supports and techniques in the making of images,
but also several viewpoints—by resorting to a « guest » operator. The content of the 120 fragments shall
correspond to the 120 literary pieces making up the narrative and emotional skeleton of the film. The point is
to make a connection between Antoine’s experience and the excerpt chosen. Antoine himself shall appear on
screen depending on the circumstances. He shall stand at the junction of all fragments.
Both the film and the city of Tokyo revolve around a black hole. The film is thus built as a vortex around this
axis.
The method chosen shall be the one any diary writer would impose upon him- or herself—shooting
every day, bearing in mind that, theoretically, each night adds 1 minute to the film. In other words, A. shall live
during the night for 4 months.
A. will not speak. Women’s voices shall accompany some of the fragments, talking of loneliness,
darkness, sex, black holes, and death. These voices will be the result of an editing of the interviews made by
Antoine of prostitutes, porn actresses, and various other girls.
Author’s Note of Intent
Building on a literary text—a naked and pristine description of gestures, actions and interactions, I
intend to seek in the real world for the characters and situations fitting such a purpose, with the aim of making a diary of my nights in Japan. It will be made of images which will follow the script chosen—both to
the letter and in the flesh—with the fundamental necessity for me to be both the actor and the director of such
a retranscription. For it is only through experience that I may eventually meet my ultimate goal, which is to
put my finger on the essence of my fears and draw from this knowledge the energy necessary to warp the
way we grasp reality. My approach, which is essentially an autobiographical one, entails deliberate risks and
persistently confronts me with the notion of death. I am compelled to master the feeling of fear deriving from
such practices and turn it into a tool of my conscience in order to carry out the film, itself the outcome of the
photographical project I initiated ten years ago.
The images resulting from this cinematographic experience will represent a frail attempt to account
for the way I became part of Japan over a period of four months. Beyond the doomed characters and the nightly ramblings, there will appear a particular praxis, inseparable from a certain way of understanding life
and whereby risk, desire and chance shall remain the essential vehicles. Here are some of the tenets of this
experimental quest originating in my actions :
Expenses
Both photographs and shots are defined through, and at the root of, the actions they originate from.
Investigating in their mode of production is crucial to understand them.
I feel the need to shoot photographs and films to push further the extreme physical limits of life—not so
much as a deliberate act than as a reconsideration of ordinary or extreme experiences. The photographer’s or
filmmaker’s gesture thus equates the act of perception itself. It makes emptiness palpable, and allows me to
grasp my consciousness of my own existence, bypassing the representations we all carry of representing and
obscenity.
In order to be able to keep myself in a dangerous position, standing on the brink of chaos, I shall make
systematic use of alcohol and narcotics which will allow me to reach a minimal state of unconsciousness during the shootings.
Disorderly lovemaking, fragments of stupor and orgasm, faces distorted by alcohol, substances and lust, sublime cowardliness, inner chaos, maimed, worn and discarded bodies—the diary I shall be writing aims at
revealing the crudeness of the flesh through that of the numerical thread.
In this quest for the Other and myself, the absence of form is not a denial of form, but the outcome of a necessary and inescapable transformation. Blurring is a result of circumstances, evidencing my often fruitless or
abortive attempts.
The trembling encounters in hotel rooms are silent ones, often loving, sometimes fixed-priced. Mastery of the world occurs on the mode of absorption. You cannot penetrate the flaws and cracks of a being unless
you come with only desire as a baggage, a hypersensitive standing before other hypersensitives, embodying
nothingness in the heart of nothingness.
There is no particular fondness for filmmaking, or for photography for that matter, but just the urgent
need to make the camera spew out what has not been said—not looking at the subject but swallowing it up as
a whole, and spill the beans.
Autobiography
I am first and foremost A’s director and scriptwriter. I will have become the object of my images. In this
play within the play, my character shall be unaware of my way of grasping reality. He will put himself at risk,
taking the world in without any precaution, tipping into a vortex that he will have fed with his own actions and
excesses. The only things left will be the images from a collision and a disappearance made necessary by the
extreme conditions of shooting.
Will I be documenting what I will be experiencing or rather, experiencing things with the aim of documenting them ? The most intimate situations are also the most ambiguous ones. The impure intercourse
which my images will ultimately claim will be the relationship I will gradually have established with A in his
meandering quest, the better to control him perhaps. I will have to answer for each of his actions, while he will
have to undergo all the ordeals I will put him through. Through my physical and emotional conflicts with the
outer world, I will be gradually losing my bearings and become unable to separate my life choices from those
of the fictional persona displaying his intimate life for everyone to see. The image-making process will have
engrafted itself into my life and fed on it as on living flesh, turning me into a being without any clearly-defined
features, verging on deformity, shapelessness and nothingness.
Such loss of bearings is bitter yet necessary. Critiquing the dominant image requires a redefinition of
self, through the creation of experiences allowing us to act out what we see, with no other rule than the refusal
of any art leaving life unaffected. Beyond the realm of appearances, there remains nothing but a commitment
to the possibility of an inter-communication between the world and the man viewing it.
Japan
The image I had of Japan was that of an illusory island, a culture torn between archaism and avantgarde, shielding itself from any promiscuity with the West and letting out nothing to compensate for its compulsive imperviousness, save shams and pretences glittering on the screens of new technologies. While at
the heart of the technological revolutions of mass communication, the country came across as stricken by an
epidemic of social autism. This is why I saw it as the perfect field of experimentation for an attempt to photographically strip up an octopus-like system where meanings and images, far from being superimposed on one
another, are actually split.
My experience of Japanese society was quite different. My interactions with individuals were unencumbered by any social or moral inhibition. I was enthralled by the existential emptiness which seems to
hover on souls and customs. Still, I did not perceive this emptiness as oppressive, but as conveying freedom
of thought and action. The impossibility to communicate, due to my not understanding the language and the
inextricable tapestry of conventions and abstruse proprieties, filled me with a deep sense of powerlessness, but
this eventually created the ideal conditions to allow me to go further in my quest for extreme experiences. Social pressure seems to lay individuals bare; but it is a destructive yet salutary opportunity to be given a chance
to confront the irrepressible need to let out the violence of pent-up impulsions, in utter serenity and without
any morality or prejudice.
In Western societies, taking stock of the world is a process hampered by the concept of God. On the
contrary, Japan, maimed in its flesh and conscience by its recent history and a witness to the atomizing of
images, is a space of freedom and civilization where new grids of interpretation of reality may be elaborated.
A society which has reached and is cultivating such a degree of civilization in the minutest detail may not be
otherwise than fascinated with sex, violence and death. Mishima spoke of a world where “sex and death are
engaged in mischievous play”. Following in his tracks, I intend to try and explore “the other side of the world
we live in,” where “our worship of social pretence and our interest in morality and public hygiene have bred
a foul sewer meandering beneath the surface.”
Staged scenes, accepted pain, peripheral pleasures altogether create an iconographic vortex where
reality dissolves into virtual reality and phantasm. Here, sexual tension is “the dismal response to the most
dismal of obsessions.” My goal is to seek through those situations involving sexual intercourse for a tension
equivalent to the permanent inner tension experienced in front of nothingness, and thus reach for the “serious”
and tragic dimension of eroticism.
In Japan, a time-hallowed artistic tradition claims to depict suffering, atrocity or the grotesque—from
Middle-Age Buddhist iconography to the gory nineteenth-century torture scenes to Yoshitoshi, the master of
engraving, to the sadistic painter Seiyu Ito to the sexual violence in mangas.
Photographers Moriyama, Takahira, Fukaze, or Araki who wrote that “photography is the love of sex and
death,” all follow in the tracks of Mishima Yukio, sharing the same obsession with the downfall of bodies into
nothingness. Just like Mishima, they stand in front of an “eerie, naked, cruel and hyper-codified world” where
“beneath the surface there runs a pristine river of sheer emotions.” Encounters with Hosoe Eikoh, who conceived with Mishima the work entitled Ordeal By Roses, and reminiscences of a hallucinatory sleepless night I
spent with Moriyama Daido have buttressed my desire to steal into this country where you find nothingness
within form and form within nothingness, the blurred scores of eroticism and death.
It is impossible to put into shape the narrative of this confrontation with emptiness without being brutal. Fiction is one of the solutions in such an attempt, but I cannot renounce living the experience. I want to
launch myself into the bitter and voluptuous enterprise of approaching the extreme forms of eroticism specific
to Japanese culture—rooted in things carnal and morbid—through the cutting crystal-clearness of Georges
Bataille’s sentences, and find a form, a structure, an outcome, albeit arbitrary and illusory, for certain of the
suspension points in his texts—through gaze and experience, which are the tools for knowledge and transgression and the links delineating an ever-more troubled relation to reality. In Japan, all conditions are met to make
it possible, as Philippe Forest wrote, not to dissociate fiction from thinking and commitment.
Fiction, experience, and transgression—these are high stakes and many a strategy could be considered, in the
words of Forest: staging the taboo, dramatizing scenes that cannot be represented, limits—yet not boundaries—between the narrative and the lyrical modes, experimenting self-fiction, stylistics of intensity, new rhetorics of the body—fiction alone can respond to the call of impossible reality, and lead us to the unspeakable
dimension of a truth we commonly would rather turn a blind eye to.
Sequences
I shall endeavor to retranscribe the chaotic world I will be experiencing through the sequencing of
fragments of crude reality.
The images shall have been shot in trancelike states. They will have been retrieved from alcoholic and
narcotic nights, and will often represent the sole and isolated landmarks rushing through my memory.
Unexpectedly enough, my first mode of expression was through photography. Today, I am using video images,
which I organize in the same way I speak—in a stammer. The brutal quality of the technique of juxtaposition
is the prerequisite for images to be viewed. Isolated fragments, hardly ascribable to any specific context, they
are open wounds, shreds of life nearly brimming with emotion.
Laid end to end, they shall reconstruct a random jigsaw puzzle pushing back the limits of explicit discourse and represent an experience without freezing or simplifying it.
The effect they are meant to have on the viewers is not a pre-determined one, but they are bound to make their
heads spin in the confrontation with a universe most likely the flip side of their own, and cause them frustration
in their fruitless attempts to build understandable representations of such a world.
Fiction alone, i.e., the editing process, may lead the viewers to confront the unspeakable truth, the
opacity of meaning, and the interferences between memory and oblivion.
About the city
It is a frustrating experience to be wandering in the labyrinth of pachinko and karaoke clubs, strip bars,
massage salons, imekuras and claustrophobic hotel rooms. Here is a cynical, vicious and violent industry, a
whirlwind of bodies into which you fall as into a pit. The atmosphere in Shinjuku is shot through with bawdy
choreographies and drunken ravings, but politeness and composure can never be dispensed with.
An encounter at dawn with Hidé—the master of the Beauty & Beast club—at the bar of the Kodoji
club shall usher us into the art of putting bodies in shackles. Codes and shams rule supreme over these territories where the rift between events and their representations is celebrated and aloofness and indifference are to
be read as just tolerance and respect.
Staged scenes, accepted pain, peripheral pleasures altogether create an iconographic vortex where reality dissolves into virtual reality and phantasm. The narcotic effect of Shinjuku waxes night after night as you
let yourself drift on its streets.
A few yards from there lies Golden Gaï, initially a shantytown which turned into a brothel zone. It is
an anachronic microcosm, with its dozen ill-lit lanes and its frail plank cabins—the nomiya where only a handful of stray patrons can be seated. The neighbourhood is a tenuous reminder of postwar Tokyo and mobbish
property developers have their beady eyes on it.
On the first floor of a nameless nomiya, in the empty room which is his den, I eventually get to meet
with Daido Moriyama. There are four chairs, a pack of imported cigarettes with a chocolate-like taste, a few
bottles of shôchû, whisky and sake, and two windows with panes turned opaque with dampness. On the wall
there is a poster exposing a woman’s legs. Our eventful night ends at daybreak in a low-down karaoke club.
The words we exchanged over the string of “bottle-keep” drinks (translator’s note: see http://www.thetokyotraveler.com/keep-my-bottle-of-sake/) are liquor-soluble, and silences cannot be told. Nothing is left save
these orphaned sentences:
Moriyama
« Shinjuku meets basic needs—food, sex, crime, and drugs. This place is so saturated with reality that it has
become a virtual space—like a bodily fluid, an amoeba—a load of desire. I have never dreamt of possessing
the world through photography, but rather attempted to assess the distance between the subject and myself. I
have explored this in-between space, in an unceasing shuttle between two points. It is a jigsaw puzzle which
I am trying to piece together by collecting the fragments. Sometimes I think I am done, but then there’s something wrong. So I break it all up and start again. I never reach the point of madness, but I sometimes yield
to exhaustion. Everything originates in a feeling of selfishness—envy, greed, jealousy are essential emotions.
This is where my energy comes from. I shoot very ordinary instants which I react to in a physical way. But
beyond animal instinct, intelligence and conscience and memory also come into play. Desire for the world is
the origin of it all. Fear, despair, and hope all derive from this desire to which photography, the fossil print of
time and light, gives a shape.”
Filmmaking
Nueva Laredo, Mexico—I shot a sort video with two students from the Fémis (the French state film
school) in the destitute and squalid streets of Boystown, an open-air bordello to which I regularly returned.
For that first experiment, team work required a painful training and made the shooting process cumbersome.
My involvement was annihilated by my standing behind the camera—an awkward position.
I yielded to the temptation of moving away from photography, which anyway was nothing but a hitch and for
which I never felt any exclusive fondness. It had become a yoke I longed to get rid of. In shifting from the
grain of the silver image to the digital raster and from photographic sequencing to the editing of image-movements, the only remaining certainty is that experience prevails over poetry and matter over thought.
For this coming film, I intend to work on my own, with just one simple camera.
The sporadic assistance of a sound engineer shall help me work out the soundtrack.
A’s experience is as follows: how a man in the middle of the path of his life, having to spend a number
of nights in Japan, sets off on an inner journey to piece together the scattered fragments of his identity, which
is as atomized as the city where he is. A conflict is thus clearly formulated from the start—the loss of identity
and the offer, in and by the film itself, of a remedy to it, that is, eventually, the medium of pornographic film as
a paradoxically moral outcome. Porn makes it possible to tell of a god-less world, where nothing remains but
the flesh, the organic—matter. Porn tells us of bereavement and the acceptance of there being nothing else.
It allows us to reach further than the antagonism between fiction and documentary film. It is, ultimately, the
only moral gaze.
It becomes the paradigm of a way of looking at the world which sheds light on social pornography—
the pornography in the relations between human beings, stripped of romanticism and sentiment.
Reaching this gaze is at the heart of the film’s project.
ANTOINE D’AGATA
Biography & Filmography
Born in Marseille in 1961, Antoine d’Agata left France in 1983 and remained overseas for the next
ten years. Finding himself in New York in 1990, he pursued an interest in photography by taking courses at
the International Center of Photography, where his teachers included Larry Clark and Nan Goldin.
During his time in New York , in 1991-92, D’Agata worked as an intern in the editorial department
of Magnum, but despite his experiences and training in the US, after his return to France in 1993 he took a
four-year break from photography.
His first books of photographs, De Mala Muerte and Mala Noche, were published in 1998, and the
following year Galerie Vu began distributing his work.
In 2001 he published Hometown, and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers.
He continued to publish regularly: Vortex and Insomnia appeared in 2003, accompanying his exhibition
«1001 Nuits», which opened in Paris in September; Stigma was published in 2004, and Manifeste in 2005.
In 2004 D’Agata joined Magnum Photos and in the same year, shot his first short film, El Cielo Del Muerto ;
this experiment led to his long feature film Aka Ana, shot in 2006/07 in Tokyo.
Since 2005 Antoine d’Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world.
Awards
2004
2001
1999
1999
1994
The Higashikawa Overseas Prize, Japan
Prix Niepce, France
Forscher Fellowship Award, New York, USA
Bourse Villa Médicis, Hors les murs, France
First Prize, Festival des Jeunes Créateurs, Paris, France
Books
2005
2005
2004
2004
2003
2003
2001
2001
1998
1998 Manifeste - Le Point du Jour Editeur, France
Psychogéographie - Le Point du Jour Editeur, France
La Ville sans Nom, Le Point du Jour Editeur, France
Stigma, Images en Manoeuvre, France
Insomnia, Images en Manoeuvre, France
Vortex, Éditions Atlantica, France
Hometown, Le Point du Jour Editeur, France
Antoine d’Agata, Centro de Estudios Fotograficos, Spain
Mala Noche, En Vue, France
De Mala Muerte, Le Point du Jour Editeur, France
Short Film
2004 El Cielo Del Muerto (12’)
Film
2008 AKA ANA
Exhibitions
2006 2004 2004 2004 2003 2003 2003 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2001 2001 2001 2001 2001 2000 2000 1999/00 1999 1999 1998 1998 1998 1998 1998 1997 1997 1995 1995 Vortex - Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan
1001 Nuits - FOAM, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Forum für Zeitgenössische Fotografie, Köln, Germany
Divinus Deus - Galerie Vu, Paris, France; Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles, France
Insomnia, Home Town, Mala Noche - Maison de la Photographie, Toulon, France
Scénographies Urbaines - New Bell, Douala, Cameroon
La Frontera - the Border - Picto, Paris, France
Fragment - Galeries FNAC, Paris, France; Madrid, Spain
Face to Face - Psychogéographie, Ö.Ö. - Landesmuseum, Linz, Austria; Fotohof Gallery, Salzburg, Austria
L’imaginaire National - CRCO, Chapelle de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Cherbourg, France
Ulysses’nin Gözleri - IFSAK, Fotograf Günleri, Istanbul, Turkey
Troubles - Les Ateliers de l’Image, St Rémy de Provence, France
Memorias da Cidade - Encontros de Imagen, Braga, Portugal
Prix Niepce - Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France
Border Stories - IXe Biennale Internazionale di Fotografia, Torino, Italy
Photographies 1991-2001 - Centre Atlantique de la Photographie, Brest, France
Itinéraires Imaginaires - Palais de la Culture, Bamako, Mali
4+1 (Little song) - CCNRB, Rennes, France
Untitled - Galerie Vu, Paris, France
Positions, Attitudes, Actions - Biennale de Rotterdam, Netherlands
Mala Noche - Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain;
Encontros da Imagem, Braga, Portugal
Photographies - Centre Culturel Français de Gaza, Israel
Méditerranides - Centre Culturel Français de Palermo, Italy
105 Portraits - Automne Méditerranéen, Ivry, France
Mala Noche - galeries FNAC, Nantes, Marseille, France
Photographies - Institut Français, Barcelona, Spain
De Mala Muerte - La Comédie du Regard, Montpellier, France; A La Librairie, Paris, France
Passage - Kunsthaus, Hamburg, Germany
Bernard Plossu + Antoine D’Agata, Les Pluriels Mexicains - Festival des Trois Continents, DRAC, Nantes, France
Autopsie d’un Voyage Ordinaire - Galerie Là-bas, Marseille, France
Chiapas, Année Zéro - Galerie Au Fil du Temps, Arles, France
Photographies - Festival des Jeunes Créateurs, Le Divan du Monde, Paris, France
CREW
Director : Producer : Director of photography : Film editor: Editing assistant: Color correction: Sound designer: Sound mixer: Script writer: Sound (Mexico): Antoine d’AGATA
Grégoire DEBAILLY
Antoine d’AGATA
Yann DEDET
Minori AKIMOTO
Charlie JOUVET
Vincent VERDOUX
Julien ROIG
Antoine d’AGATA & Rebecca ZLOTOWSKI
Rémy DARU
CAST
AMAMI Rei
HAYASHI Izumi
Kana
ISHIBASHI Keiko
Sayo
HANEIRO Saki
WATASE Nao
Shooting : 12 weeks between september 2006 to january 2007
Original Language : Japanese
Running Time : 60 min
Filmography Lazennec
« AKA ANA » directed by Antoine D’AGATA
« L’APPRENTI » directed by Samuel COLLARDEY
« ELDORADO » directed by Bouli LANNERS (Coprod)
« LES RANDONNEURS A SAINT-TROPEZ » directed by Philippe HAREL
« CE QUE JE SAIS DE LOLA » directed by Javier REBOLLO « MAROCK » directed by Laïla MARRAKCHI « LA CLOCHE A SONNÉ » directed by Bruno HERBULOT « DANS MA PEAU» directed by Marina DE VAN « LES DIABLES» directed by Christophe RUGGIA « LE VÉLO DE GHISLAIN LAMBERT» directed by Philippe HAREL « LA FILLE DE SON PÈRE» directed by Jacques DESCHAMPS « TROIS HUIT» directed by Philippe LE GUAY « THE DAY THE PONIES COME BACK» directed by Jerry SCHATZBERG
« RATCATCHER » directed by Lyne RAMSAY (coprod) « A LA VERTICALE DE L’ÉTÉ » diected by TRAN ANH HUNG
« TOTAL WESTERN » directed by Eric ROCHANT « MAX ET BOBO » directed by Frédéric FONTEYNE (coprod) « UNE VIE DE PRINCE » directed by Daniel COHEN « LE VOYAGE A PARIS » directed by Marc-Henri DUFRESNE « UNE LIAISON PORNOGRAPHIQUE » directed by Frédéric FONTEYNE « EXTENSION DU DOMAINE DE LA LUTTE » directed by Philippe. HAREL « ALISSA » directed by Didier GOLDSCHMIDT « PAR CŒUR » directed by Benoît JACQUOT « LES RANDONNEURS » directed by Philippe HAREL « ASSASSIN(S) » directed by Mathieu KASSOVITZ « LA FEMME DÉFENDUE » directed byPhilippe HAREL « VIVE LA RÉPUBLIQUE » directed by Eric ROCHANT
« JE NE VOIS PAS CE QU’ON ME TROUVE » directed by Christian VINCENT « L’ECHAPPEE BELLE » directed by Etienne DHAENE « ANNA OZ » directed by Eric ROCHANT « MÉFIE-TOI DE L’EAU QUI DORT » directed by Jacques DESCHAMPS « L’ANNÉE JULIETTE » directed by Philippe LE GUAY « LA HAINE » directed by Mathieu KASSOVITZ « CYCLO » directed by TRAN AHN HUNG
« LES PATRIOTES » directed byEric ROCHANT « MON AMIE MAX » directed by Michel BRAULT (coprod) « CONSENTEMENT MUTUEL » directed by Bernard STORA « LA JOIE DE VIVRE » directed by Roger GUILLOT « L’ODEUR DE LA PAPAYE VERTE » directed by TRAN ANH HUNG « LE JOURNAL DE LADY M » directed by par Alain TANNER (coprod) « MÉTISSE » directed by Mathieu KASSOVITZ « AOUT » directed by Henri HERRE « RIENS DU TOUT » directed by Cédric KLAPISCH « BEAU FIXE » directed by Christian VINCENT « AUX YEUX DU MONDE » directed by Eric ROCHANT « LES ARCANDIERS » directed by Manuel SANCHEZ « LA DISCRÈTE » directed by Christian VINCENT « UN MONDE SANS PITIÉ » directed by Eric ROCHANT