To describe Jean-Gabriel Périot as a filmmaker of the so-called archive or found footage cinema is not only a limitation as it significantly reduces his work by removing from it some of his most important films. Some of the shorts, such as Eût-elle été criminelle…, L’art délicat de la matraque, Les barbares or The Devil, do in fact follow the precepts of archive cinema, while also being some of his films most widely seen and commented upon, just as his first and so far only feature, Une jeunesse allemande – all of them screened at IndieLisboa over the years.
However, Périot’s filmography also includes several “traditional” fictions made with a camera and actors before it, as well as more experimental objects, political essays, filmed proto-diaries, performances and video clips. By taking advantage of the present complete retrospective of his work, it will make sense to look at the set of films and, from there, look at what recurs in this heteroclite and unpredictable filmmaker, perhaps giving less importance to the aesthetic or formal obsessions that characterise it and more to its recurring themes: the desire to find the beautiful and the human throughout history, contemporaneity certainly being one of his chosen periods.
Let’s take a look: Lovers looks at pornography with a rare plastic urge, Undo shows us the end so we can put our present into perspective, Dies Irae reminds us of the dangers of fleeing/going astray in the fury of progress and 200000 Phantoms looks at the horror of Hiroshima and finds in it a symbol of hope, despite everything. In fact, that work of finding the despite everything is what characterises two of his fictions, L’optimisme and Regarder les morts, in which his female protagonists become fascinated by the improbable beauty the world has to offer them: whether it be in a tramp that sleeps on the pavement or in a painting of the dead members of the Red Army Faction (RAF).
Périot is thus a filmmaker who tends to look at the past from the standpoint of the present and to put it into perspective. In this way, the terrorism of the RFA in Regarder les morts and then in Une jeunesse allemande reflects the terrorism of this millennium; the return to the horrors of the second world war, between the atom bomb and the holocaust, passing through the trial of the collaborators in France, reminds us of our finitude and of the horrors of which mankind is capable; the films about police violence and the segregation of black people in the USA are mirrored, for example, in the recent riots in Detroit.
And whereas his films are actively political, like the boycott on imported tomatoes in #67, the attack on the political class in Les barbares or on labour policies in We are winning, don’t forget, humour and irony are also a constant presence: especially in those films where his LGBT activism is expressed, provocatively questioning the normalisation of homosexuality, the wish for integration, intimacy, appearances, changes made to the body and the boundaries between the private and the public.
The themes are as many as the films, the forms as many as the ideas, in the work of prolific Jean-Gabriel Périot who, in an average of two films per year, has produced films that are already in themselves an example of the confusion and saturation of images offered to us by the multiple screens. But it is precisely in building the torrent as a means of symbolically and emotionally recovering certain images that his cinema comes out as more surprising. Excess as a way to revelation.
(Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)