Tea time with D’ombres et d’ailes

An interview with Eleonora Marinoni and Elice Meng, directors of D’ombres & d’ailes…[Of Shadows and Wings…]

How did you come up with the idea of making a film using pigeons?

Um… They’re not exactly pigeons! They’re more like imaginary birds…

Elice Meng: Tribes of birds have been a recurring motif in my paintings for a long time.

The birds are metaphors for men, speaking to us from the place of the individual within a group. We call them “birdmen”.

With Mathieu Courtois, the producer from Vivement Lundi! we took a long look at the paintings and asked ourselves what would happen if we made those tribes move, breathe, come alive.

So I wrote the story. A story of conditioning through single-mindedness, of exclusion, of the right to be different and indignant… and it was also a love story.

Meeting Eleonora (Marinoni) was the next step, and she completely shaped the graphic element of our world and made the still, painted silhouettes genuine categories of living people with their own identities: the Grandsailes, the Bulballons and the Becdors.

For a film that has birds as the main characters, why did you choose a setting with no trees? Do you see the birds in the film as city birds?

D’ombres & d’ailes… is a film inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, so our scenery had to be purged of the vegetable element.

In his allegory, Plato imagines a group of men chained facing a wall, who are condemned to see the shadows cast upon the wall by a light source behind them and take them as reality.

We transformed Plato’s imagined men into birdmen, obsessed with a single activity: casting the shadow of their wings upon a great lighted Wall, rather than enquiring into their genuine usefulness.

Hostages of a cultural context, they are manipulated by the people moving the strings of their servitude, whom Plato calls “the puppeteers”. Alas, these opinion-makers make me think of a number of examples from current politics that strike the world, and our own doors, trying to “encave” plural thought.

Moreover, these almost “televisual” projections, that the chained men “swallow” all the time, resonate with a current tendency on the part of some elements of society (who are manipulated by the very thing that constantly takes them as an example): spending their time throwing their egos into a race for notoriety, riches, success, at the expense of a dearly needed solidarity among people.

But rather than thinking, as Plato did, that only the enlightened man (the philosopher) retains the ability to leave the Cave, where neither freedom nor truth reside, we might hope that the non-conformists, the rejects of the Cave, the “indignant” – as Hessel would call them – themselves choose to leave a place that has become unlivable for them.

How did you develop the animation? Do you do all the drawings, coloring and shadow and light effects yourself?

Eleonora Marinoni: We made the film using different programs, but the film crew worked on each individual image. There were four animators and four colorists. The atmospheric effects of light and shadow were often added after the animation stage.

19,000 images were individually drawn and colored, sometimes involving five layers of color per image. And there are around one hundred fifty pieces of scenery that were painted from hand-made studio textures that were then digitized. These constitute the “background”, the backdrops for each scene.

After that, the compositing editor went to work putting in all the effects of haze and clarity, the halos and accentuated shadows.

Why did you choose the voice over? Did you think that words were necessary to the film?

Perhaps not necessary, but inseparable from the feeling we wanted to create and the poetry we wanted to transmit – definitely yes!

We had always envisioned the film accompanied by a literary component to be rendered by one or more voices. But obviously, we did ask ourselves what part it would play: an internal monologue, telepathic thoughts, external narration? Or silence? The silence of thoughts, spoken through images… and Nicolas Martin’s music, of course.

How can you tell if the spoken words are just right, or just too much? How do you make sure they take the viewer further afield, further afield than what his eyes perceive, and offer him another, parallel, path that is poetic and enriching… Our answer was Mathieu Almaric’s voice, which lent all of its meaning, weight and delicacy to our meaning, to our narration.

In D’ombres & d’ailes…, union seems possible in only one form. How did you come up with the idea of making such a “rigid” framework for your characters?

Elice Meng: Couples do form a union, but so do the two main characters and the Bulballons who themselves have the courage to rebel.

Perhaps because I don’t believe in solitary individuals anymore than in collective identities, I’m obsessed with each person’s place within the community.

I myself am equally terrified of loneliness and of “group thinking”.

Here, group thinking, totalitarian thought, is pushed to its logical extreme, i.e.: managing to constrain a people to live locked up in a cave in fear of the outside world, and convincing them that their wings – the symbols of their flight and of individual and collective freedom – are a purely accessory advantage to aesthetic, normative, self-centered ends. And in the name of that dogma, drawing up a list of those who have their place within, and those who do not.

And let me tell you that I believe that the union represented by love, and by couples of whatever type, can act as a barricade to such obscurantism, if helped by those who believe in love.

At the beginning of the film, I took your man-woman couple for a child and her mother, since one of the main characters always wears the little feathers we associate with childhood. Why did you decide to use that symbol to distinguish this character from the others?

One of the characters – to whom the main character Ciobeck directs his narration, in an attempt to protect her – is Moann, a female bird in full flight who seems gradually to shed and waste away, losing her feathers as she loses her strength, and as her rebellion and desire for justice grow.

We wanted her to be different, to be on the outside, for her unconventional thinking as much as for her ever more apparent handicap within a rigid society. But the loss of her feathers perhaps presages the growth of others, a form of resilience…

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In D’ombres & d’ailes…, you question our relationship to difference. Difference does in fact lead to jokes and rejection, even aggressive behavior. Do you think escape is a better solution than taking a stand? Do you think that it’s fruitful to show what we’re made of?

This film is a story of rebellion (cf. Plato’s Allegory). It was forged through reading Stéphane Hessel and his work Indignez-vous ! So, no to escape! Yes to revolt!

Do you think short films are effective in questioning human relations and society?

Yes, short films can be effective in questioning human relations and society.

A society that grants itself the land upon which it is built, and decides that differences and cultural mixing are dangerous, simply leads humanity to its downfall, to stultification and to sterility.

There is a proverb that says, “the only two things you can give your children are roots and wings.”

We think that is the key to the film. Our destiny, our environment, in accordance with the unique, precious nature that makes us who we are, will help us to develop the elements missing from our life.

Is a clear sky possible where our freedom can soar, where we can fly with our own wings towards a different and plural elsewhere?

D’ombres & d’ailes… was either produced, co-produced or self-financed with French funds. Did you write the film with this “French” aspect in mind: making movie references, building a specific context (in a particular region, for example) or inserting characteristically French notions?

The film is a French-Swiss co-production, produced by Vivement Lundi! of Rennes (France) and by Nadasdy Films of Geneva (Switzerland). It was co-directed by two filmmakers: Eleonora Marinoni (Swiss Italian) and Elice Meng (French). Half of our crew was French, and the other half Swiss.

We think, we hope, that our film is a film citizen of the world…

D’ombres & d’ailes… is present in National Competition F12 and in the programme for school.

The film’s blog can be found at: http://dombres-et-dailes.blogspot.fr