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Once Again, It was Impossible to be Sure: An Interview with Simon Backes

Published on December 10, 2009

New York, 1978. An unknown Czech artist named Pavel Novak shows his latest works in a Soho gallery. The exhibition titled “Stolen Art” shows a Rembrandt, a Courbet, a Van Gogh, all masters’ paintings, apparently reproduced with amazing accuracy by Novak, in a critical effort to re-appropriate the art of his predecessors. But shortly afterwords, the Courbet is found to be the original, stolen from a rich collector’s home and replaced by a copy!

In Stolen Art, director Simon Backes investigates this mysterious collection in an aesthetic detective story and invites the audience to question art viewed as property, both material and intellectual. Can there be works of art without artists ? Can there be beauty without a copyright? Backes’ movies explore this no man’s land between fiction and documentary.

Backes grew up in France and studied film in Brussels, where he has been living ever since, under the surreal clouds of Belgium where the docufiction genre grows easily. In fact, it is in the line of the Belgian artist Rene Magritte’s famous late 1920’s painting “La Trahison des Images” where a pipe is clearly represented and underlined with the sentence “ceci n’est pas une pipe” meaning “This is not a pipe.”

The clearest intention in Magritte’s work was to reveal the gap between the object and its representation, that is to say to show than even if painted in the most realistic way, a painting representing a pipe is not a pipe. It remains the modest image of a pipe that one can not stuff, nor smoke like one would with a real pipe. As American sociologist William James would say, the word dog does not bark!

So Magritte’s surrealism and a certain type of docufiction fit in the landscape here, in Brussels, where derision is identified as a cultural fact, and I would say a survival strategy for a nation in perpetual identity crisis who therefore choose to search for its identity somewhere else than reality.

Derision is also used as catharsis in Belgium:
For example, Tout ça ne nous rendra pas la Belgique (This won’t give us Belgium back) was a joke perpetrated by the French speaking Belgian public TV station RTBF on Wednesday, December 13, 2006. Regular programming on the channel La Une was interrupted for a news bulletin which claimed the Flemish parliament had unilaterally declared independence from Belgium, thereby ending the existence of the country. Interviews with prominent Belgian politicians (some of whom had been informed about the hoax) as well as staged footage of the evacuation of the royal family gave credence to the event.

The broadcast of the report led to some consternation in French-speaking Belgium. A hotline set up by the station was swamped by calls. Thirty minutes into the broadcast, on demand of the media minister of the French speaking community in Belgium, an on-screen message indicated “this is a fiction.”

I suppose Magritte would have appreciated this TV artwork.

The hoax was prepared over a period of two years under the codename BBB for “Bye-bye Belgium.” Prominent Belgian politicians condemned the report as “irresponsible.” A few days later, in the streets, the population was enjoying the good joke, because derision rules in Belgium.

Below is my interview with Simon Backes about his film Stolen Art:

Do you agree that derision stands for a real way of life here in Belgium?

Definitely! It’s a survival strategy for an entity which existence is constantly in doubt. Belgium is the state of a nation (Etat-Nation or Nation) that doesn’t exist! There’s not even a language that unites us! It’s at best a territory crossed by everyone. We are actually living in a place that doesn’t really exist! It’s indeed not a surprise that surrealism and docufiction touched a nerve here!

What is your personal relation to the docufiction gender?

First, when I was a kid, I loved Conan Doyle’s science fiction novel The Lost World which tells the story of a professor that comes back from a expedition in South America with a document proving that he found a place where dinosaurs were still living. I remember that I was extremely sad when I discovered it wasn’t a true story.

Years later, when I was passing the admission exams for INSAS, the Belgian film school I studied in, I presented a documentary I had made on a contemporary artist who’s kind of a character himself, and the members of the jury actually thought it was a mockumentary. This event opened a path in my thoughts. I was admitted and my four years of studies there also influenced my work considering this school has a particular interest and ethical approach of documentary.

The writer, Jorge Luis Borges, is also an inspiration. He says that instead of writing all the stories he would like to, which seems impossible, he chooses to write about fictional characters who would have read all of those stories.

It’s also a production matter because one can’t separate an object from its production conditions. At some point, I realized that no fiction production structure shared my fantasies about low budget science fiction movies. Because they aren’t imprisoned by the obligatory presence of a star, documentary productions can be lighter, in terms of budget and crews. Twisting the system using documentary structures to create low-budget movies is an interesting idea.

What’s your opinion on the supposed opposite partitioning between fiction and documentary?

I dislike putting things in compartments on a general basis. This partitioning is unfortunately present in the professional structures. Production companies, budgets, and crews are separated, and team sizes are too. Fiction crews must be numerous, while documentary crews can be light. Documentaries are supposed to rhyme with truth, fictions are sold declaring they are are based on true facts.

All of this seems fraudulent to me. Mise-en-scène is everywhere. For example, once there is editing, there has to be mise-en-scène because editing creates sense and can’t limit itself in creating rhythm. A documentary can never be objective. That’s why I chose to be present in the foreground of many frames of Stolen Art. I wanted an obvious mark in the frame reminding that a documentary’s speech comes from a specific point of view, in this case, myself.

In John Cassavetes’ fictions, non-professional actors play their own certitudes. In real life, people play their own social role. I believe there is a critical zone where documentaries, fiction, and the audience question one another. I believe there is a place for a poetic and political rupture of these illegitimate and therefore false compartments.

Tell us more about the subject of Stolen Art?

Stolen Art castes doubt and puts a new color on things. I extend Pavel Novak’s approach of creating doubt concerning paintings’ authenticity and this doubt questions the reason we appreciate a painting. It questions how we relate to what we see when it’s not underlined with a label, with a legend-which original Latin signification is nothing more than “what can be read.” Pavel Novak’s work is like a ready-made art squared that recreates a genuine relation to the masterpieces by erasing the name of the artist, erasing 300 years of art history by the way. Could the figure of the artist be a construction of the market? Is an artwork the production of an individual? When preparing the shoot of Stolen Art, I visited the Louvre’s Great Gallery without reading the labels. It’s a totally different experience.

In Stolen Art, I interview a Rembrandt specialist who’s job is to recognize real Rembrandt pieces from ones that are thought to be but aren’t really his. I was assuming to meet someone that never doubts and who affirms his authority with certainty. I actually had my own certainty about a cliché and was surprised by reality during the shooting because the guy I met was actually the man of doubt. He assures doubt is THE tool for his knowledge and that it all comes from his heart anyway! Paintings are objects twice: they are physical objects but also a speech object. They are physical objects hanging with a speech. I wanted this to be clearly expressed by the frames of Stolen Art. Therefore, the paintings are framed sideways with the label and a human character next to the artwork applying a speech to it. I oppose other frames expressing a more genuine relation to the artwork: the camera is facing the paintings alone without label either fully framed or traveling in it.

What is it you didn’t want to do in your film?

Lying! Taking the advantage of my position of documentary director to affirm something to be the truth. Or worse, at some point to make things easier for me, to have someone say something he didn’t really say. That is to say to deprive someone of it’s complexity and reduce his speech to slogans or gospel truth…only showing one side of his personality…you only need to let a little bit of silence to let someone’s ambiguity be. Even worse would be asking someone to say a sentence I wrote.

Simon Backes

What is it you did want in your film?

I want to ask instead of answering…ask ambiguous questions in preference. What I wanted but didn’t get was to make a television production for a wide audience but no television networks were interested in philosophical entertainment. Television channels believe the masses to be brainless.

Why did you choose Stolen Art, an investigation on Pavel Novak, to be a thriller?

An ironical investigation is an opportunity to propose this philosophical entertainment to a large audience like I wanted. According to me, the investigation is fiction’s last shelter, it’s like a fiction full of holes. There’s a mystery that leads us to fragments of truth; that is to say that at best can be reached a plausible hypothesis. As I said before, I refuse to propose solutions. What I do propose is investigation as an accurate approach of the world. What I do propose is a more frequent use of critical sense, of free will.

My investigation about Pavel Novak is an excuse to make an inquiry on the more philosophical question of beliefs. The mystery is a democratic way to approach a philosophical debate. I insist on an innate human tendency to believe what he’s told as long as it’s affirmed with a certain amount of authority.

Stolen Art is a documentary based on a doubtful question. Any hypothesis is by definition doubtful. Calling it into question is always possible.
It’s only the consensus that pretends that a hypothesis is accurate. By citizenship I choose to nibble this consensus. So the question is, how far can one go shooting a documentary based on a doubtful question?

Could you tell me about the series of “fake fictions” you did before Stolen Art?

The fake fictions project originated from the following question: How are films made and how could we make them better? I made them in collaboration with the artist Loic Vanderstichelen, with whom I have countless common references. We had this common corpus that we wanted to visit and we wanted to get rid of the heaviness of professional shootings. We had few technical equipments that made it possible for us to make some films on our own. So the two of us made 10 movies; we took care of everything: sound, image and acting. The idea was to rescue film from scenario’s dictatorship because to make sure something happens in the film, reality must be controlled the least possible. As Rosselini said, “things are out there so why change them?” Why ask an actor to play the role of a museum guardian if there are bunch of them out there in reality! Natural sets are allover the place so why built some artificial ones?

We shaved, put on costumes, and created our own characters of “investigators of the impossible searching for scenarios.” Everything started from a place and our desire to get in there, we wondered what could be going on in there. We went in places like castles pretending we were working for a British production checking out eventual sets for a shooting to come. While on these visits we shot scenes. We accumulated these scenes without scenario because a scenario emerges spontaneously from the juxtapositon of filmed scenes. Considering we had no dialogue, we used the long monologues of the castle guardians showing us around or quotes from existing films. Thereby we create some kind of raw sense because sense is created anyhow. The charm comes from the fact we interfered the least possible, so the form is fiction but the approach is documentary-like.

The only question is: what the hell is the plot? It’s some kind of primitive work, immediacy is the method.

It seemed to me that in your fake fiction “Gregoire’s House,” the game was to mimic the classical grammar codes of film?

They are movies questioning their own grammar. Considering there is no scenario, only the grammar is left! It’s a zero figure, kind of like Malevich’s painting “White on White” it’s like invisible abstract art.

The experience of Stolen Art resurrects our critical senses towards media, reminds the implicit contracts between the audience and fiction and between the audience and documentary and reveals these contracts are not always relevant.

Is the generic the only difference between fiction and documentary? Is docufiction the future of fiction? And the death of documentary? Did documentaries ever exist anyway considering they can’t help being the expression of an individual point of view. How did our individualist societies succeed so well in minimizing the unavoidable contribution of the surrounding of the artist to boost the myth of personal genius and success and make art such a private property?
How can we be so naive to believe that beauty can be imprisoned in an object?

At most, “beauty” can leave its prints on an object but this print itself is the evidence that beauty has gone somewhere else and is still running! What a popular relief by the way!

For sure, images are the perfect screen for the projection of our fantasies whether the are the selfish absurd ones of possessing beauty or the naive ones of objectively showing reality.

And as the last character of Stolen Art evokes, as a self-criticism and reminder of the never-ending subjectivity of the author: What if Stolen Art and its philosophical debate was an excuse for Simon Backes to travel around the world, fall asleep in airplanes, have adventurous dreams and wake up with the best stories?

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