Mo Gourmelon: My first question relates to one of your major concerns in “Team Spirit”. What do you mean by the creation of “cinematic bodies”?

 

Clara Lemercier Gemptel: To answer your question, in my writing "The filmed bodies: a laboratory of abjection", the expression cinematographic body makes it possible to establish a distinction between the body of the person filmed and the image of this same body produced by the cinematographic process. Within this writing, I defend the idea that all filmed bodies are reified by the cinematographic process and that, therefore, a cinematographic body is above all an image, colors, pixels, plays of light on a screen. A manipulable object that has a priori nothing in common with an individual.

 

The feeling of identification with a “cinematic body” is therefore only possible thanks to the use of a set of cinematographic methods aimed at individualizing the image of a body. Methods that obviously work in tandem with certain ideological or cultural definitions of individuality. Thus, the director can for example choose to attribute to the cinematographic body the possibility of speaking, of moving logically in a space, of having a face, of holding a story of its own, etc.

From the use of these various cinematographic techniques, it is therefore possible to establish a wide panel of possible forms of individualization of cinematographic bodies, from the hegemonic figure of the male hero to the terrifying bodies of the monster or the ghost, in passing by some thoughtful female characters as objects of male desire.

 

I call “despicable bodies” (in reference to the writings of Judith Butler) some of these cinematographic bodies for which no form of individuality has been manufactured. They have, for example, no story, no voice, no name, no form. They are cinematographic bodies with which we do not identify, towards which no otherness is possible. The cinematographic body therefore designates the filmed body that reaches us at the end of the cinematographic process, to which we choose whether to attribute a form of individuality.

 

 

MG: “Certain female characters thought of as objects of male desire” you say. How would you define the female gaze, if it exists in generic terms. How does it stand out?

 

CLG: To answer your question, I will rely on Iris Brey's book "The female gaze, a revolution on the screen". In this essay, she explains that the “female gaze” is above all a gaze which, unlike the patriarchal “male gaze”, individualizes female bodies in cinema, giving them a real place in the representation. Iris Brey completes this definition by explaining that the female gaze is neither linked to the gender of the director.ice, nor to the gender of the spectator.ice, that it is above all an attitude towards the cinematographic body represented.

 

Nevertheless, in my view, the use of the term “feminine gaze” is problematic because it is potentially essentializing. Indeed, it would mean that this desire to open up the forms of individuality represented in cinema is a “feminine” attitude, that having a look that is not patriarchal is necessarily “feminine”. An idea that I obviously think is wrong.

As a cisgender woman director, I obviously pay great attention to how I individualize the cinematic bodies I create, how they reproduce or not reproduce patterns of normativity and stigma. However, I would not qualify my gaze as feminine, because the construction of my gaze, like that of any individual, is not solely linked to my gender.

 

The question of the objectification of bodies in cinema is also linked to relations of class, race, discrimination in all its forms, social constructions, political ideologies, etc. Also, using the term female gaze in order to describe all the practices of representation that aim to individualize other forms of cinematographic bodies seems to me quite reductive. It would no doubt be necessary to invent a term describing better and more precisely this multiplicity of possible gazes in the cinema.

 

In my own practice, I speak of cinema-bodies to describe the cinematographic bodies that I make. They are cinematographic bodies that are never totally individualized, often disturbing, fragmented, ghostly. In this way, I want them to escape any possible form of identification and more broadly this "male gaze / female gaze" binarism.

 

 

MG: What were the shooting conditions like? Did you attend the training sessions or did you give any indications of actions?

 

CLG: For the realization of Team Spirit, I attended the training sessions of the cheerleader team Les Jaguars de Lyon for several months. Not knowing this discipline at all, I first wanted to understand the issues and how it works. You should know that cheerleading is a very dangerous sport that requires a lot of concentration, know-how, cooperation and mutual trust. The definition and distribution of roles between the different members of the team follow an extremely precise logic that recreates a form of hierarchy. I also learned that every cheerleader must overcome their fears and physical pains to ensure the team runs smoothly.

 

The shooting itself took place in their training room: an old church rehabilitated into a gymnasium. Every fall, cry or gesture produced by the cheerleaders inside it was amplified by its impressive acoustics. Immersed in the darkness, we had the feeling that a shapeless, almost monstrous mass was shaking the floor and the walls. To transcribe this feeling in the film, I placed 14 microphones in different strategic places in the room: piezos on the ground to record the tremors and vibrations, microphones in height for the echo and the resonances, and finally microphones at proximity to the team for breaths and friction.

 

We did the entire shoot in the dark with only two large theater projectors as the only light source. In this way, I wanted to decontextualize the bodies of the cheerleaders in order to prevent the viewer from being able to count them, recognize them or locate them in space. I wanted to show not a set of individualized bodies, but a collective body, shapeless, evolving and moving.

 

During filming, I asked the cheerleaders to perform a certain number of figures or exercises that they usually perform during their training and which seemed to me to be able to represent this idea of "collective body". In particular, I diverted the breathing exercises they practice at each start and end of training by asking them to form a sort of heap of bodies breathing in a common rhythm. Afterwards, I asked them to create different lift sequences as well as a human pyramid, which are the main figures of cheerleading. Apart from this frame, I explained to them that it was important for me to film their falls, because these failures, in my eyes, fully participated in the development of the group and its permanent redefinition. Thus, the bodies in this film build and collapse collectively, following rules and a hierarchy that escape us.

 

While they originally wanted to show me the best of themselves, a real show, I did everything so that they no longer saw this film as a representation. That's why I also put aside all the traditional cheerleading aesthetics: the music, the colorful outfits, the makeup, the pom poms, etc. An extremely gendered and patriarchal aesthetic that usually, by taking the form of a pleasant spectacle, hides the demand and discipline inherent in this sport. I wanted to represent the collaborative aspect of cheerleading but also its authoritarian dimension: the individual bodies, within the team, gradually fade away in favor of the efficiency and productivity of the collective body.

 

April 2023