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2012 • 1H43 • 1,85 • COLOR • DOLBY • www.filmsdulosange.fr

A journey into the heart of Radio France todiscover what usually escapes our gaze: themysteries and the wings of a media whosevery matter, sound, remains invisible.

CREW

A FILM BY NICOLAS PHILIBERT

SYNOPSIS

AGATHE VALENTIN (Head of Sales)a.valentin@filmsdulosange.fr / +33 6 89 85 96 95

LISE ZIPCI (TV & Library Sales)l.zipci@filmsdulosange.fr / +33 6 75 13 05 75

MARINE GOULOIS (Festivals Manager)m.goulois@filmsdulosange.fr / +33 6 84 21 74 53

LA MAISON DE LA RADIO (2012, 103 mn) • NIGHT FALLS ON

THE MENAGERIE (2010, 11 mn) • NENETTE (2010, 70 mn) •

BACK TO NORMANDY (2007, 113 mn) • THE INVISIBLE

(2002, 45 mn) • TO BE AND TO HAVE (2002, 104 mn) • WHO

KNOWS ? (1999, 106 mn) • EVERY LITTLE THING (1997, 105

mn) • ANIMALS (1995, 60 mn) • IN THE LAND OF THE DEAF

(1993, 99 mn) • LOUVRE CITY (1990, 84 mn) • BAQUET’S

COME-BACK (1988, 24 mn) • GO FOR IT, LAPEBIE ! (1988, 27

mn) • TRILOGY FOR ONE MAN (1987, 53 mn) • CHRISTOPHE

(1985, 28 mn) • THE NORTH FACE OF THE CAMEMBERT

(1985, 7 mn) • BOSSES / TELEVISION (1979, 3 X 60 mn,

co-ré. avec Gérard Mordillat) • HIS MASTER’S VOICE (1978,

100 mn, co-ré. avec Gérard Mordillat)

Photography KATELL DJIAN • Camera NICOLAS PHILIBERT,KATELL DJIAN • Sound JULIEN CLOQUET • Editing NICOLASPHILIBERT • Mix OLIVIER DÔ HÙU • Executive producer SERGELALOU • Line producer VIRGINIE GUIBBAUD • A coproduction LESFILMS D'ICI, LONGRIDE INC., ARTE FRANCE CINÉMA • With theparticipation of ARTE FRANCE, CANAL +, CINÉ + • In association withCOFINOVA 7 and LES EDITIONS MONTPARNASSE • With the supportof CENTRE NATIONAL DU CINÉMA ET DE L'IMAGE ANIMÉE, andLA RÉGION ILE-DE-FRANCE • French distribution and Internationalsales LES FILMS DU LOSANGE • © LES FILMS D’ICI, ARTEFRANCE CINÉMA, LONGRIDE INC – 2012.

LES FILMS DU LOSANGE

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One reason why so many people, myself included, love radio - but Ididn't realize this until long after I started to love it - has to do withthe lack of images, the invisible nature of those who talk on it, just

as the innumerable places it takes us to remain invisible. An invisibility thatallows us to imaginarily identify with those who speak and which, withoutour having to leave home, allows us to travel on land, sea, in every strata ofsociety, in every sphere of thought and human activity. But the radio is alsoour collective memory. Voices that we are familiar with, jingles, songs weknow by heart, totally carefree moments, "slots" that shape our daily livesand ritualize them. And sometimes, it's just a backdrop that we do not listento, a friendly, reassuring presence while we are doing something else.© Nicolas Philibert, june 2010

FILMOGRAPHY

NICOLAS PHILIBERT

FROM THE DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT:

INTERNATIONAL SALES

LES FILMS DU LOSANGE

/ How did you get the idea for this film? It was something that I had had in mind for a longwhile. The idea of filming voices. A film about radio isa little unnatural – how can you film radio withoutshattering its mystery? – but that is probably thereason why I wanted to make it.

/ At the start of shooting, did you know exactlywhat you wanted to film?No, absolutely not. I don’t make my films with apre-existing desire to get a message across. Whenshooting begins, I usually think that the less I know,the better I feel! If I had to follow a schedule I'd bebored stiff and might miss out on the essential. Theinitial idea was to plunge the audience into the heartof this hive of activity known as Radio France, wherethe variety of stations offers an incredible range ofprogramming, styles, tones, voices, accents andfaces, without having to worry about balancing thestations or being trapped in a logic of “equal repre-sentation”. It would thus be a free journey, free of all

amount of programming each week. Accordingto what criteria did you choose to film oneprogramme rather than another?Every one of us has “their own” radio, their favouriteshows, their pet hosts, their daily or weekly appoint-ments with the airwaves. That also holds true for mebut it isn’t what determined the film’s backbone. Iwanted diversity and heterogeneity, as I said, but itcouldn’t become excessively varied or turn into afilmed catalogue without a guiding line. So how did Iproceed? It's hard to say because I had to takenumerous factors into account: the very nature of theprogrammes, their dramaturgy, their content on aspecific day... And I soon realized that a qualityprogramme did not necessarily provide a goodsequence! And that the interest in filming such andsuch a programme was not proportional to theimportance of its content or subject. Worse! Thecontent as such could prove to be a trap: the “stronger”it was, the more likely it was to undermine the film,insofar as it might overshadow what interested me inthe first place, namely the grammar and mechanicsof radio. So I preferred seemingly more trivial butcinematic criteria: faces, looks, intonations, the fluidityor pitfalls of a word, the tone and the sensuality of avoice, the body that carries it, the accent of a guest,the gestures of a programme host, the atmosphereof a studio… In short, I often relied more on the“presence” of different people than on what they weresaying. Finally, I had to try to keep a view of the wholeand not film the programmes for themselves, butrather approach them as the raw material from which,in turn, I would build up a story. This is where the partof fiction inherent in writing any documentary comesinto play.

/ Apart from the pre-title sequence, the newsprogramming is not really developed...And yet I was shooting in a particularly turbulentperiod, rich in events of a “global” scope: the Arabrevolutions, the Fukushima disaster… These eventsare mentioned in the film but I did not want to givethem too much space. They weren’t the subject.Moreover, news is perishable. In order not to “date”the film and so retain a timeless dimension, we hadto avoid sticking too closely to the facts.

/ What difficulties did you encounter duringfilming? This is a film that required a great deal of flexibilityand responsiveness from everyone. Given the hugeamount of programming produced and broadcasteach day on the different stations of Radio France,we had to be constantly on the alert. In some cases,I was able to get the theme of a programme and thenames of the guests in advance, then I could antici-pate and organize things ahead of shooting. But Ioften had to mobilize the crew at the very last minuteeach time the news made me want to shoot a morningprogramme. The crew was warned at eight or nineo'clock in the evening and summoned the nextmorning at five. Alongside these logistical problems,the main challenges that I faced were related to myown appetite and desire to film, which I needed tocontain. In my previous films, I've noticed more thanonce that it is more difficult not to shoot than toshoot. Especially these days, with digital cameras.There, in the midst of that hive of activity, that seemedtrued than ever! And so I was torn between the desireto shoot more and more in order to feed the diversityessential to the project while knowing that it was abottomless pit. Hence the need to resist it and tocontinually refer back to the notion of writing. Onefinal difficulty: how to avoid impeding the work ofothers and disturbing the sometimes delicate balanceof a recording? Take Eclectik, Rebecca Manzoni’sprogramme: I repeatedly filmed the end of it at thatunusual moment when Rebecca, after an hour ofconversation, goes out and leaves her guest alone infront of the microphone, asking him or her to impro-vise. Our presence could not distort or make this“minute of solitude” impossible, so we managed to

film it without being physically present. That was thelesser evil. A little strange too.

/ There are a lot of characters and situations yetwe move from one world to another with a greatdeal of fluidity. How did you approach editing? In terms of construction, I opted for the simplestsolution: the film unfolds over one day and one night.But it is a fairly virtual day that combines sequencesshot in winter, in spring, or in summer with the Tourde France. In the middle of the day, there's even abrief sequence at night when the writer Annie Ernauxtalks of her anger alone in her living room. This frame-work of a day helped me to build up the film, forminga sort of scaffolding, but there was no question offollowing it to the letter. After a while, I think it no longerbothers us. However, since the film has a very frag-mented aspect, it was important to have recurring“characters” like Marguerite Gateau directing a radioplay or Marie-Claude Rabot-Pinson in the FranceInter newsroom. I think we enjoy coming back tothem, seeing the shifts in situations and monitoringthe progress of work over a single day. For me, editingis like a musical score: one note summons another,which summons a third, and so on. There are full andempty moments, long and short ones, silences,associations of ideas, breaks in the rhythm... I have

INTERVIEW WITH

NICOLAS PHILIBERT

also played agreat deal on what lies outside theframe: films must keep their secrets and if we wantto feed the audience’s imagination we must leavesome shady areas.

/ Did the nature of this project lead you to workon the soundtrack in a specific way?You could say that sound, voices and listening arethe very subject matter of the film. However, thesoundtrack is fairly simple, almost uncluttered andcertainly without flourishes. I devoted a great deal ofattention to it, especially during editing: the links,associations and passages from one sequence toanother are often based on the sounds and owe agreat deal to them. But that is not unique to this film.In my own way, I’m a filmmaker of language. FromHis Master’s Voice, which exposed leading bosses’views, to Nénette, whose soundtrack is entirely offscreen, via In the Land of the Deaf, Every Little Thing,To Be and to Have or even Back to Normandy, youcan see most of my films as variations on speech andlanguage. It is therefore not surprising that thequestion of sound occupies a decisive position since

it embraces the subject here. ■

Paris, January 2013

institutional concerns. But once this basic principlehad been established, everything still had to be done!When I started shooting, I had certain programmesand voices in mind, but that's about it. I had no ideahow the film would be constructed. That’s always thecase. The journey unfolds through encounters,circumstances and occasional accidents. I need astarting point, a framework, a few rules and from thenon I improvise.

/ How long did you stay on site and how many ofyou were there?Most of the time there were four of us but I occasio-nally worked alone or with one other person. Filmingtook place over six months from January to July2011, then I started to cut the footage and, duringediting, I went back from time to time to shootadditional sequences since editing can reshuffle thecards and bring out new paths to follow.

/ Radio France produces and broadcasts a huge