A New Subject for a Veteran Documentary Maker: Herself

Midway by means of filming “Our Body,” a sprawling documentary in regards to the gynecological ward of a Paris hospital, the film’s director, Claire Simon, obtained some medical news of her personal: She had breast most cancers.

Four weeks into the shoot, Simon had found a lump beneath her armpit. But slightly than stop manufacturing, she determined to improvise and switch the digital camera on herself.

“I had to film a lot of naked women,” Simon in a latest video interview. “Then I was naked, too, and I was just like them. This changed my point of view entirely; it helped me cope and be calm in the face of my own sickness.”

Motivated by the need to indicate what she referred to as the physique’s “hidden truth,” Simon is however one affected person amongst dozens in her documentary’s celebration of the physique, depicted in all its wondrous and horrible iterations. “Our Body” — which performed on this 12 months’s Berlin International Film Festival and is displaying at Film Forum in New York from Aug. 4 — assembles intimate patient-doctor consultations and surgical procedures into one thing like a quantity of quick tales. The topics embody abortion, synthetic insemination, beginning, gender transitioning, menopause and, ultimately, illness and demise.

The veteran French filmmaker, a prolific creator of documentaries and fictional narratives that blur the boundaries between these two modes, has made a profession out of turning the experiences of bizarre individuals into epic tapestries of human life.

Often, she begins with a spot. A Paris practice station gives the setting for 2 movies: “Gare du Nord,” (2013) an ensemble drama about briefly intersecting lives, and “Human Geography (2013), a documentary composed of interviews with the station’s inhabitants.

“If you dive into pockets of everyday life, the world becomes very large,” Simon mentioned. In “Our Body,” she added, she was involved by questions like, “How does our civilization treat the female body?,” and, “What is the relationship between the body and words?”

By capturing lengthy, uninterrupted scenes of sufferers talking with their docs, “Our Body,” underscores the alienating nature of medical jargon. Yet these observational scenes additionally create room for the type of bracingly private testimonies which have lengthy characterised Simon’s work. See, for example, her 2018 documentary “Young Solitude,” a collection of frank discussions with suburban excessive schoolers; or “Mimi” (2003), a type of hangout film by which Simon’s gregarious good friend Mimi relates her life story as she drifts by means of Nice, France, her hometown.

Simon was additionally raised in southern France (although she was born in Britain) by a household of painters and writers. She studied Arabic and anthropology in Algeria earlier than instructing herself how one can edit and use a digital camera. In the Eighties, she started making narrative shorts and ultimately obtained a scholarship to attend a prestigious documentary workshop led by Jean Rouch, referred to as the daddy of cinéma-vérité.

It was round this time that Simon found a few of her most important inspirations, like Raymond Depardon, Robert Kramer and Frederick Wiseman — “my great master,” she mentioned. Wiseman’s affect is obvious in Simon’s fascination with public areas and prolonged conversations. “The Competition” (2016), a examine of the admissions course of for La Fémis, France’s most prestigious movie college, appears to take up his mantle — Simon herself has described the movie as “Wisemanesque.”

According to Abby Sun, the director of artists’ applications on the International Documentary Association, Simon’s work nonetheless represents a major departure from Wiseman’s indifferent and unobtrusive type.

Simon’s films are “metatextual, and they exhibit a knowing, personal touch. They show her as part of the fabric of the place or situation she’s filming,” Sun mentioned, citing as examples a collection of movies Simon had made about her daughter, the thinker Manon Garcia.

The relationship between Simon and her topics helps decide the form of the movie. This connection is essential to her type of auteurism.

“There’s a clear sense that there’s something collaborative going on, that there’s been a dialogue between the filmmaker and the subject,” mentioned Eric Hynes, a movie curator on the Museum of Moving Image.

“Nowadays, we’re constantly asking, ‘Where’s the consent? How do we know that the subject feels comfortable with what’s being filmed?’,” he added. “Claire has been at the vanguard of what we consider a responsible way of making documentaries for 20 plus years now.”

Simon mentioned though she thought-about herself a sloppy digital camera operator, she refuses to provide the job to anybody else. Looking by means of the viewfinder allowed her to attach extra organically with what she’s filming, she mentioned. “If I’m holding the camera, I’m able to improvise and change my mind and I don’t have to bother with justifying myself,” she mentioned. “As a woman, it’s a huge relief.”

Having efficiently undergone most cancers remedy, Simon isn’t simply relieved, she’s energized. Toward the tip of the interview in late July, Simon gleefully introduced that it was her birthday that day. She had simply turned 68. “I feel that I have many, many more films to make,” she mentioned.

“Mr. Wiseman is 93, and he’s made another beautiful one this year, like he does every year,” she added. “That means I’ve got a little time yet.”