Melanie Pocock — The exhibition Figures de cire is your first solo exhibition in a museum. I think that, over the past ten years, the most significant development in your work has been your shift towards working with video. What prompted this change?

Delphine Balley — It was originally prompted by constraints to do with the view camera. It's very time-consuming. You have to prepare the location, set up the lights, position the people. Because I was photographing a lot of people, I had long exposure times–often one second, and sometimes up to ten or fifteen seconds–and during that time the characters had to stay completely still. I was looking for that stillness for aesthetic reasons, but there was a point when I started getting problems of vibration. My shots had vibrations. There was a slight blur that was interfering with the sharpness I wanted. I didn’t know what was causing the vibrations, so I decided to put a glass of water on the camera rail. If there were vibrations, I would be able to see them because the water would be moving. But in spite of that, I never found any logical explanation for the phenomenon. Strangely enough, it used to happen when I was by myself with the camera. If there was someone else with me, the images were sharp.
At that time I had an idea for a film in my head. So, since I was having difficulties with photography, I decided to change mediums and go for moving pictures–films.

M. P. — Was the idea for a film that you were thinking about at the time Le Pays d'en haut (2013)?

D. B. — Yes, it's the first film you see in the exhibition. In a way, the technical problems I had been having with the view camera accelerated the process. Mind you, films have always played an important role in my thinking, but I was too in awe to get involved with the medium. In 2012, it was as if all the conditions had come together for me to give up photography for a while and venture into filmmaking.

M. P. — As a matter of fact, I would say that the language of cinema – as well as the language of theatre – was always present in your photography. Even though, in an interview with Isabelle Bertolotti in 2010, you said that you drew your inspiration from painting. ¹

D. B. — That's true, I do. I studied art history. The works were projected onto a screen, so I discovered painting, sculpture and architecture to the rhythm of a carousel projector slide tray, accompanied by the voice of the lecturer. It had a very strong effect on me.

I was engrossed. Particularly by the paintings, because the images are stories; they have something mysterious about them that has to be deciphered. They tell us how the world is perceived and understood by artists and societies. And because they sometimes have the power to connect the material world with the divine world: they are active. They also provide a collective memory that gives us a shared formal and symbolic vocabulary. Not long ago, I saw Frederick Wiseman's film National Gallery (2014), and some of the shots show viewers engrossed in the pictures, their eyes looking up, in a kind of mute, quasi-religious dialogue. In another sequence, a guide reminds us of how those pictures have been seen and understood over the centuries, and reasserts the power of systems of representation.

At the same time as I was doing my degree I was doing analogue photography, and I wanted to spend time making pictures myself. With the help and encouragement of the teacher at the film laboratory where I was taking evening classes, I prepared for the entrance exam to the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles and started a photography course. I was also able to experiment with sound in the course of one workshop. It's a medium that generates images and sometimes replaces them. Research into sound was an important part of my course. For my degree, I presented an immersive photo and audio work. But there were still a few stages I had to go through before moving on to video.

M. P. — Was there any particular event or encounter that drew you to video?

D. B. — Films were a very important discovery for me when I was 16 or 17 years old. I had wanted to take an audio-visual course at school, but I didn't get in. I was sharing a bedroom at the school with friends who were doing that course. So, through them, at second hand, I got to know films by Orson Welles, Bresson, Pasolini, Tarkovsky, Bergman and Visconti, to name but a few – in art-house cinemas in Valence, then in Lyon. It was a whole series of shocks, at an age when everything is very intense. I was intimidated by the power that films can exert. But they were always present, both as a reference and as a medium that I wanted to get involved in.
And then I had technical problems with my view camera, which was slightly discouraging for a while. It was then that I began to think more seriously about exploring film images.
In 2012, I started to work out a film project and I met Armande Chollat-Namy and Sigurður Hallmar Magnússon, both filmmakers. It was a crucial meeting, because they gave me confidence. It was through them that I realised that I could explore and find out about this new medium. We worked out ways in which we could work together.
I remember insisting that – like with my photographs – I wanted everything in the picture to be sharp. I was obsessed with every shot being in focus. I wanted to make films, but with a photographic aesthetic, close to the aesthetic of a painting. They told me that cinema is about time and movement, that the more or less sharply defined areas of the shots were part of the vocabulary of video, that a film image is not meant to be absolutely sharp – on the contrary, it is supposed to be vibrant. But I was determined; I didn't feel able to go for camera movement. They suggested that I do a day's shooting to get a feel for the different possibilities of movement, before working on Le Pays d'en haut. That trial period convinced me that I needed to move on to making films.
Even so, we still chose a technique that was close to photography. Putting the camera on a tripod meant that I could do/compose the shot with Armande, who was in the shot. With this set-up, it wasn't the camera that moved, but the characters. They were allowed to move, but only very, very slowly.

M. P. — It's as if you wanted to create the impression of a "tableau vivant".

D. B. — It's true, that is the impression you get from that film – and from others in the exhibition. I was feeling my way into a new way of working, so I couldn't go too fast. That first film works as an intermediate stage between photography and a hesitant introduction to filmmaking, where my characters come to life with a certain amount of restraint – including, occasionally, tableaux vivants that reflect the time and ambiguity involved in staging a scene.

M. P. — This new technique requires you to work both as a director and a photographer.

D. B. — Sigurður and I – Sigurður's the cinematographer on my projects – spend a lot of the time prior to a shoot lighting the sets and the characters, playing the parts ourselves. At the same time, we work out the shots with Armande – i.e., the mise en scène.
For Le Pays d'en haut, there was no sound recordist. I worked on the editing with Yves Lescœur with silent rushes. He was a bit thrown by having images without sound, but it didn't bother me at all. It even added to my concentration to be editing images in silence.
Once the editing was finished, we worked on the soundtrack with Julien Oresta, composer and musician. We added sound effects, looking for sound textures to complement the image. He also composed a musical score. We've carried on working together since then: he did the soundtracks for Charivari (2016) and Le Temps de l’oiseau (2021).
We took our time over the mise en scène. We tried a lot of things out: I tested the movements of the characters in their various settings, their interactions, and the gestures they had to make. I realised that the camera was speeding everything up, so in order to flesh out the time and find the right rhythm, I made sure that all the movements were done almost in slow motion.
The actors were people I knew and felt comfortable with (the feeling was mutual, by the way). The directions I gave them were mainly about gesture and movement. Le Pays d'en haut is a highly choreographed film. There are no words, so you only understand what the characters are feeling through their expressions and the precision of their gestures.
When I started this project, I had no funding for the film. I launched into it with the money I had at the time. So I wasn't able to delegate the organisation of the shoot to anyone else. I had to think about the props, the costumes, the make-up, the hairstyles, the scenery, everyone's schedule, the catering, the transport – it was a steep learning curve, but I learned a lot.

M. P. — In your second film, Charivari, the viewer is immersed in the world of hunting. In your photographs, there are often images connected with hunting, which tell a story or have symbolic value. Why did you decide to make a film about this subject?

D. B. — I think it comes from one of my childhood memories. As a child, I lived in a rather isolated house in the countryside. During the hunting season, at weekends, I often heard the barking of the dogs and gunshots in the woods. For me, it's a memory without an image. The only images were signs of what was going on – cars parked at the beginning of the paths in the mountains, for example – but never the hunting itself.
Charivari is marked by this experience, particularly in the way we approached the sound. I worked on it with a sound designer who joined the team, David Couturier – and, of course, Julien Oresta, who wrote the music. The soundtrack is conceived of as a character in itself with its own story arc. The sound conjures up other scenes that are out of shot. My thinking was guided by the writings of French filmmaker Robert Bresson on the value of sound in cinema.
Before I made that film, I read several books to get more insight into the subject, such as Andrée Corvol's Histoire de la chasse² and Sang noir. Chasse et mythe du sauvage en Europe by Bertrand Hell.³ Hell's book traces the history of the hunter and the rituals of hunting, linking them to forms of archaism and great founding struggles. It also describes the rage and melancholia that this blood spectacle can arouse. José Ortega y Gasset's Meditations on the Hunt brought me the insight I had been searching for since I had started investigating the subject.⁴ It deals with the figure of the hunter engaged in the technical skills of hunting: reading tracks, listening to sounds, smelling the scents, becoming part of the environment in order to disappear and thereby attempt to make the thing that, by definition, is out of sight (the animal) appear. What the author describes is a man lying in wait. These ideas are connected to stillness, which I have photographed a lot. There is one sentence that particularly struck me in this book: "the hunter is, at one and the same time, a man of today and a man of 10,000 years ago."
Those books directed my work towards a questioning of hunting. They also prompted me to consider the various forms of carnival. The rites linked to this particular moment in the calendar are also a link between humankind today and in the past. Le Carnaval. Essais de mythologie populaire by Claude Gaignebet and Marie-Claude Florentin was seminal reading at the start of my research and my thinking on this subject.⁵ For Charivari, which deals with this question, and for other projects, I was in contact with Thierry Truffaut, an anthropologist who is an associate member of the Centre for Social Anthropology in the LISST research group, at the University of Toulouse - Jean-Jaurès. These lines of research enabled me to make the link with what I was exploring in my family portraits – the link between family portraiture and mise en scène and the way it is depicted in the history of art and photography. The family functions as a micro-society with its own codes and rituals, even if they are part of a universal narrative.
Rituals have infused my work and my research since the beginning. Ritual is a human invention, a dramatisation of reality through the execution of precise collective gestures, sometimes with tools or objects created for the occasion, at particular times in the calendar. Humans perform in dramatised versions of themselves in order to find a place in the chaos of the world, which they attempt to organise with the means at their disposal. Charivari is about rituals, the struggle between darkness and light, between hunting and carnival in an anachronistic age.

M. P. — The gestures and expressions of the characters in Charivari seem to hark back to an age-old relationship between humans and animals. For example, the Poacher that we see pulling his knife out of the flesh of the boar he has just killed. As he does so, we detect a sense of sadness on his face as well as calm and a sense of achievement. The duality of those feelings makes me think of the (rather contemporary) perception of hunting as a form of cruelty, which is in sharp contrast with the view of hunting as something natural – even a form of respect for animals.

D. B. — You use the word "cruelty" – cruelty that might be linked to the figure of the hunter – but I don't think that cruelty is limited to the hunter. Cruelty is a human faculty. Antonin Artaud writes about it remarkably well in The Theatre and Its Double (Le Théâtre et son Double, 1958), which I have read over and over again,.
It was difficult for me to get close to the hunters at the beginning of my project. They are suspicious, because they suffer a lot from this simplistic view of things. It is easy to describe them as "heartless bloodthirsty men." They crystallise what society would have us exclude from the realities of life: death, and blood.
When I was planning Charivari, the thing I wanted to bring out in the figure of the hunter was the heightening of all the senses to compensate for the absence of the animal. Those moments of waiting and concentration. We did some location scouting along those lines with hunters, in a fairly documentary way.
But in the film, I was more concerned with exploring the sacrificial rite. The wild boar is an animal which, symbolically, is linked to rage, to black blood, to melancholia. In the hierarchy of animals, it is the last on the scale of wild animals before the category of the inedible animals, a category also known as the "stinking animals". I decided to film not a hunter, but a poacher, who I feel is close to the figure of the boar. He is a man who hunts alone – on the cusp of the wild and the civilised. The Poacher kills the boar, withdraws his knife, lets the blood flow. This is the moment of sacrifice. There is nothing cruel about it – it's a relationship, even if this relationship between the (wild) man and the animal is worth interrogating. It's part of our history.

M. P. — Apart from the Poacher, there are other characters who seem to be living on the fringes of society. I'm thinking, for example, of the two girls, whose faces we see, lit by a source positioned out of shot. When the scene changes to what appears to be a stone castle, we also see figures walking very slowly. This is not a technical slow motion effect; it is the figures themselves who are walking at that speed. This mixture of registers – surrealism, fantasy, documentary – creates an ambiguity between the imaginary and the real. What made you want to create this fusion of registers?

D. B. — For me, the film creates a dialogue between past and present, by mixing worlds and times which interpenetrate. For example, I wanted to avoid the question of the setting in this film, to concentrate on the faces. The decision to film faces in close-up was a directorial decision intended to suggest carnival masks, but without their inevitable folklore aspect. These faces/masks are in the same non-place, at a single point in time – a sort of endless night, pierced by bursts of artificial light that conjure up an apparition. The film takes place at the winter solstice, when the moon is full. The protagonists are plunged into a kind of twilight by the cold, the snow and the fog. It is a time of simulacra and protection rituals, the world turned upside down.
I mainly tried to create the fusion that you mention through sound. Sound is a core element; it creates mental images. It’s the score for the “charivari”, which begins with a clunky, metallic rhythm (the blacksmith banging on his anvil) to become more complex and evolve towards contemporary heavy-metal. The charivari is a deafening noise, a total hullabaloo. During carnival, people make a noise to demonstrate their anger, their discontent with the established order.
In all societies, there is some kind of carnival – masquerades and disguises that are ritualised and organised at specific times of the year. They are ways for people to confront darkness and the established order by means of a complete inversion of social codes, right down to language.
I wanted to make a film that reflected all these influences. What we see is only a fraction of what I actually shot. At first, there was dialogue between the characters. It was very Rabelaisian. As the film progressed, the dialogue became more and more coarse. In the final version, we decided to leave out the dialogue, apart from the song by Valérie Sourdieux which is full of dirty words, Des mots tordus. Cutting out the dialogue was a painful decision, it was beautifully written by Valérie Sourdieux (who also acts in the film and should have been voicing it), they were very funny, utterly disgusting words. But the film would have had to be turned into a feature film, because the words created a narrative – a story that there wasn't enough time to develop in a short film.
Once the editing was finished, I felt kind of sad at not having been able to deal with all the things that interested me about carnival. I could hardly bring myself to watch it. And then, three years later – in an exhibition called Charivari, at the Le Vog contemporary art centre, in Fontaine-sur-Saône, where they were showing my film Charivari – I rediscovered it. This convinced me that I had to continue working on the carnival theme, and that Charivari was, as it were, just a prologue.

M. P. — I find that the character relationships in Charivari also reflect this mixture of registers. I think there are some interesting tensions – between the individual and the group, between introspection and connecting with society, for example. Sometimes the characters seem to be in their own world – as if they are only taking part in the ritual because they have to.

D. B. — It's true, there is a kind of solitude in each of the characters, even though they come together in collective rituals. When I was directing the actors, I asked them to be as neutral as possible. As their faces were essentially the focus of the shot, I wanted them – except at certain moments – to become expressionless masks, so that I could concentrate more on their gestures, like a theatrical rite. I think, looking back, that I chose the actors for this film precisely because of the force that emanated naturally from their faces, from their presence. Going for neutrality (and here again I'm thinking of the work of Robert Bresson or Maurice Pialat) was a way of getting as close as possible to their natural strengths and keeping them away from performance. Even though Carnaval is all about acting and the interpretation of strong, stereotypical characters, I took the opposite approach, in an attempt to bring out the essence of the characters. Once again, those were directorial decisions.

M. P. — I wonder if that's an alternative conception of society. The characters feel a sense of togetherness in their solitude.

D. B. — Yes, you’re right. What interested me was, above all, the tensions between the bodies and the way they connect, even silently. How a hand placed on another person's shoulder will impose a relationship between two bodies that are nevertheless individualised. They're gestures (hand gestures) that you often see in my photos. It's a way of getting the social aspect to come across in the picture. In a posed photograph, it's not really the individual you're trying to show in the image, but rather their social position, their rank. Originally – I mean in 19th century portrait photography – it was the details that brought all this out: carefully chosen clothes and furnishings, the way people decided how to pose, and who should sit or stand where. They were portraits that could be decoded in the same way as a painting. In this sense, the image not only reflected society but also organised it, influenced it and illustrated it. The snapshot photo, which emerged in the 1970s, was a real revolution in the genre. This idea of the unposed portrait tells a different story. It gave rise to other codes, such as the smile, for example, as opposed to the expressionless faces in portraiture of the 19th and 20th century. We let ourselves go in front of the camera, we’re natural, but this naturalness has also generated codes and patterns of representation.
I use photography in this sense. It’s a tool that organises reality, with a kind of authority and power. Like painting, it’s a means of narrating history – our own history, informed by questions of aesthetics. My photographs contain recurring characters; they’re characters in a universal narrative, performing rites that define the passage of time and establish a hierarchy within it. They’re collective moments in which we’re together, but each of us is assigned to a precise role.

M. P. — We are dealing with individuals who define themselves in relation to other individuals. And we mustn't forget that the figures in your photographs and films are named after archetypes, like the Poacher. They're works that are almost entirely built around symbols.

D. B. — Completely. What fascinated me about painting, when I started studying art history, was the way we used to "read" a painting. We would work towards understanding it in a series of steps, deciphering it – using Panofsky's method.⁶ The painting had its own vocabulary, a world aside from the world. It was then that I got a sense of the absolute power of the image and its vocabulary. The image was the servant of power and the powerful, but there was always a space in which artists could exercise an element of freedom.

M. P. — The ability to "read" those codes is also being lost through the generations.

D. B. — Yes, we are probably losing some of the tools. People may not be so familiar with classical painting, but the younger generation still reads images. It's actually their favourite means of communication. The image expresses something else; it's different, but it still tells us about our world, whether it's grounded in reality or in beliefs. Representation is still at the heart of our understanding of the world.

M. P. — Yet there are moments in your films –- and visual clues in your photographs – when the person seems to escape out of their character and those codes. For example, when we hear the song in Charivari, or when an unexpected, comical word rings out, or when the characters start breaking pieces of china in Le Temps de l’oiseau.

D. B. — Breaking dishes is often part of a ritual – at a wedding, for example. In my films, this racket interrupts the soundtrack. In Charivari, the song was absolutely essential. Since giving up on words altogether was not an option, the nature of the dialogue has been concentrated in the song, words malfunctioning, slang and profanities instead of polite language. As you point out, this lowers the tension that would otherwise be building up in the film.
What you said about the social stance of an individual who's playing a role is interesting because, with the song, it's as if that singularity were being introduced through the voice of a woman. A song has the great virtue of being able to express profound things in a light-hearted way. A song – text combined with music – is a potential opportunity for resistance.

M. P. — The three films in the exhibition contain recurring motifs: hunting, but also marriage. Your first film, Le Pays d'en haut, also deals with this theme, which you have explored in your photographs.

D. B. — Le Pays d’en haut tells the story of two women whose destinies intersect implicitly: the Transparent Child, who moves from childhood to adolescence, and ‘the wrong daughter’ who, being illegitimate, lives on the fringes of society. In order to take her place in the community, she must go through the rites of passage: baptism, marriage and burial. Being born, living, and dying. The point of the film is to understand how society embraces this common narrative and organises it. Being born, living, and dying – going from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, and from being an adult to being dead.
Charivari is about the birth of the world and its end, about the struggle between darkness and light, and about how humans manage to adapt to these uncertainties.
In Le Temps de l'oiseau, I set up intersecting rituals of life and death: funeral rites and marriage rites. In the way they're organised, the rites are very similar to each other. There are processions, exchanges of gifts and flowers, and tears. We get a sense of that time in the procession.

M. P. — The latest film, Le Temps de l'oiseau, combines techniques and themes that are shared with the other two films. Once again we get a sense of the overall organisation of society, through the metaphor of the family and the preparations for a girl's wedding. It begins with a procession, like the one in Charivari. And, as you mentioned, it also includes references to death. It feels as if everything has come full circle.

D. B. — Yes, in this film we see the end of a cycle: a life cycle, but also a cycle of works unfolding through the exhibition. It is about birth, life and death, and how we deal with what those stages entail; how we ritualise the important events in a life. How representation and performance are the means we have devised in order to represent and transcend them. The cycle was conceived in three stages, three acts in which, like with the ritual of the carnival, everything has to be consumed in order to be born again.

M. P. — How do you think the viewer will react to the recurring themes and images in the exhibition?

D. B. — At the entrance to the exhibition there is a photograph, Le Petit Deuil; it's of two wax legs on a reflecting surface. They indicate the presence of a fragmented, artificial body, acting as a sort of ex-voto. Next comes Le Pays d'en haut. Agnès Violeau, the curator of the exhibition, and I quickly came up with the idea of the exhibition as a kind of procession, with a beginning and an end, like the processions in the films. Photographs and films alternate throughout the exhibition.
The reason I wanted to have curtains was in order to structure the space, not just for acoustic reasons – not just to tone down the sound – but also to make the space more compact. Velvet curtains, because of their weight, their folds and the way they hang, are a decorative element in places of power and places of illusion, and even in places of worship. They are an important and very powerful part of the decor.

M. P. — The presence of curtains in the exhibition is particularly interesting. Both your films and your photographs reflect a particular sensitivity to fabric. One is reminded of the great symbolism of curtains in the history of art. The scenography of the exhibition, for that matter, is notable for the interplay of light and shade, which is accentuated by the presence of those curtains.

D. B. — When I work with the view camera, there are no windows. I start by blocking the windows with curtains to be completely in the dark and to work with artificial light. In the last photographs I made for the exhibition, the curtain is a very strong presence. I come from a family of weavers and I think this has made me sensitive to fabrics, and especially to their texture and their feel. I lived right next door to the family textile factory. There was fabric everywhere: I would see my father working with a thread counter, feeling the fabrics to gauge their quality, while my mother would be choosing colours and prints and making mood boards to promote the collections.
Besides that, I see a connection to 19th century painting and photography. The fine-grained qualities of some of those photographs, the sharp definition of the objects in the background, the transparency of the glass, the detail of the brocade, for example, are often mentioned. I would sometimes wonder who the central figure in the photograph might be. Was it the model? Was it the starched collar? Or was it the mantelpiece? Fabric also had a part to play in early photography – whether it was the curtains in the photographer's studio, or because the photographer had to stick his or her head under a black cloth in order to look through the ground glass and get to see the image.

M. P. — How do you think the films will influence the way your photographs are interpreted?

D. B. — For me, the photographs concentrate on the funeral rites; they are an extension of the last film, Le Temps de l'oiseau. Certain characters and objects appear in both the films and the photographs. It’s one and the same world oscillating between fixity and movement.
Moving from photography to film allowed me to go deeper and further in my questionings. Each medium has its own distinctive characteristics. The fixed image concentrates time around that specific moment when the image, which has been constructed beforehand, appears in the ground glass of the camera. It’s tantamount to a revelation.
In a film, time dilates, metamorphoses, accumulates. It's like entering an enigma, a mystery. So much so that the layering process postpones the moment when things appear.

M. P. — In some of the more recent photographs, there is a notable absence of any figure; this is the case in Paysage de pierre, sel et ombres (2021). Is there a reason for this absence?

D. B. — The exhibition is conceived as a ritual, a journey through time. The human figure gradually disintegrates, objects take the place of a past presence and come to represent it. It’s like a kind of inverted process of reification.
Like in still lifes, the function of the objects is, in a sense, to reveal things about us. The materials of the objects vibrate; they become an echo, they shine, they reflect, they produce shadows, and organise what is visible by composing it. The fact of moving towards these visual equivalences seems to me to be an extension of what I was doing when I was placing bodies in dramatic spaces and settings. Objects have always been very present in my work. Their ability to stand in for people made sense to me in this context. But broadly speaking, it's a new direction. I recently saw two paintings by Rembrandt: Portrait of Maerten Soolmans and Portrait of Oopjen Coppit, both painted in 1634 and hanging in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In these portraits, it is not so much the faces looking straight at us that fascinate me; it's the ghostly glove the man is wearing, the movement of the hand crumpling the fabric in the portrait of the woman, and the details in the fabric, the embroidery, the shoes. All these details, these bravura touches, confer a kind of immortality to the paintings; they are the subject aside from the subject.

M. P. — In addition to the films and photographs, you also decided to present a few objects, such as Contrepoids (2021), a sculpture in beeswax, and Socle (2021), a marble plinth. These works echo objects in your films and photographs. In doing this, did you want to make the viewer more sensitive to the material and sensory qualities of these objects, which are immaterial in the films and photographs?

D. B. — From talking to Agnès Violeau, I realised I wanted to introduce some kind of materiality, a visible presence in the exhibition space through which the viewer could confront his or her own "physicality". By doing this, the exhibition rooms become a potential compositional space, a kind of stage set. But it's scenery that has pretty well already been struck, since the wax sculpture is not on the plinth. So, the plinth becomes a potential space for the viewer to project onto.

M. P. — Actually, some objects, like the flowers, give the impression that they are "living". A quality that reminds us of the fleeting nature of time that your films and photographs capture so well.

D. B. — The bunch of flowers in the exhibition, like the ones in the photos and the films, is a bunch of artificial flowers that I’ve “embalmed” in wax. The result is that the flowers are preserved in a kind of artificial eternity. They are an echo of what morticians do – they use artifice as a means of keeping alive that which no longer has life.