Dinner with L’appartement [The Apartment]

Interview with Raphaël Frydman, director of L’appartement [The Apartment]

L’appartement is a documentary about the remnants of childhood, in which the director seems to be looking for traces of a bygone era. What can you tell us about the origin of this film?
Childhood memories are very present in my life, as I believe is the case for many people. The visual memories of the apartment I grew up in often accompany me. I have always wanted to come back to the residence I grew up in, without daring to push open the door, without daring to walk down the street… I live in the same city, but the stakes are not geographical. The film made this return possible, and it seemed to me to provide enough substance from which to make a film. The origin is at the same time simple and complex: simple because it is enough to head out with my camera to make this experience possible, complex because it is strangely not easy to say that it deserves to be lingered upon. I decided to work with this research and risk-taking approach. My status as a director-producer and my commercial work make it possible (and provide the rationale). I go out to shoot, instinctively, without necessarily knowing whether the writing will materialize and turn into a film.

Did you want to make the feeling of melancholy visual, almost palpable, and to make of it a cinematographic object?
Absolutely. I think that’s what I was trying to do.

What are your reference works?
My references are mainly the photographers who accompanied me: the exhibition Smaller Pictures by Jeff Wall for his still-life framing, and more globally Rinko Kawachi’s work for the poetry that emanates from the everyday moments she photographs with such delicateness. I also thought of Sophie Calle or Agnès Varda.

You have made short and feature-length films. Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
My first feature film, Adieu Babylone, was very free. Then it got more complicated… In view of the projects that I have not succeeded in achieving, or the many constraints that I have not always been able to support in the feature film, the short film appears to me today as a real window of freedom, a space to find and give life to a writing that I have not been able to develop elsewhere.

Once the film was finished, did you finally realize what you were looking for, by making L’appartement?
I don’t think I can speak of an awareness after making the film: the result seems to me quite consistent with what I instinctively wanted. What I find is that from a personal point of view, I feel a sense of serenity about some of the images of the past that I came to visit. From an artistic point of view, I feel that I am in tune with the work I have done (which is far from always being the case). The selection at the festival of Clermont Ferrand brought credibility to this intimate writing and validated this fragile approach. As such, it is of great value to me and to my future work.

L’appartement [The Apartment] is being shown in National Competition F12.