I spent a March afternoon in Paris with filmmaker Claire Simon. The official pretext was an interview about her latest documentary, the extraordinary “Notre corps”, included in this year’s selection of the One World Romania Festival. But what I was truly seeking was to rekindle a conversation interrupted a few years ago.

I spotted her from afar. She got off her bike: a sturdy, trekker frame, the opposite of those wavy, retro, pastel bicyclettes, the kind of reliable object you can do a lot with without showing off. It was as if she had stepped straight out of the film, as if our meeting was merged into the ending scene of the film, where the director hops on her bike and pedals away from the camera placed at the entrance of the hospital from which she had just been discharged. There was, however, a jump cut: the ochre suit, the orange-soled running shoes, the ginger hair, the brisk walk – something had changed from that somewhat petite, smaller-than-I-knew figure with the brush-cut hair, bidding farewell to the viewer in a bold, silent gesture: a sort of vague “to be continued”. Then again, it’s been a while.

I was shocked to discover Claire Simon with such short hair. All the more so since, in the months of 2020 when we used to see each other weekly on a computer screen, I had come to associate her with her exuberant hairstyle, a vivid, rich blonde that simply stood out. Years before, for a long time, “Claire Simon” meant for me a collection of films that had faithfully accompanied me since high school, without incandescent passion or great intensity, but always with gratitude and a duty (on my part) that, when a new title came along, I must watch it as soon as possible. I found something in her always clean and unselfish approach that constituted for me a sort of T0 in today’s cinema.

I. Theory

A master’s student at the Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis in a theoretical program dedicated to film, I had opted at the beginning of the academic year, amidst the pandemic, for a directing course taught by the filmmaker. The course was called, simpler and more obscure than all the others, “Je suis malade” – “I am ill”. Since her films had long interested me, I wanted to get to know the person behind them, to spend time in the company of a director – I had kept my distance until then –, to understand how things are seen from the other side. I reckoned that such a course – 12 weeks, 3 hours a week – was the ideal opportunity to immerse myself in the presence of an artist’s discourse and get out of the postulates that irrevocably separate people who create from people who write about creations, in which I had sunk somewhat uninspired.

Therefore, in 2020, “Claire Simon” became a head within the edges of the screen – thick glasses and a certain roguish air despite her age – plus a slightly gruff and impatient voice that welcomed you without notice. My colleagues and I were trapped in lockdown in Paris (and not only in Paris, I believe), so we never met face to face: not with the teacher nor among ourselves. Instead, week after week, we would take one film at a time and dissect it on Zoom. Not so much to pinpoint the strengths and faults, but to understand the different ways filmmakers have, over time, depicted illness. We didn’t explain – we didn’t decipher – anything: we extended the film through words, detailed the gesture from which it originates, paused, every now and then, over moments of grace. It was then that I first saw Caro diario, Nanni Moretti’s most beautiful film, Denis Gheerbrant’s La Vie est immense et pleine de dangers, Ross McElwee’s absolute masterpiece Time Indefinite, or Alice Diop’s La Permanence, in the (virtual) presence of the filmmaker, a good friend of Claire Simon.

What intrigued me beyond anything was the choice of these films. They were not “representative” films. They did not aim to “exhaust” – by following who knows what “political” agenda – a particular subject. They did not tackle the issue from immediately intelligible angles. On the contrary: they were a miscellany of varying choices, a partial response to a more or less spontaneous desire (“What might a cinema about illness look like?”), a strictly personal flare, a quick run-through of the issue. The course did not make me an expert on films about illness. My factual knowledge on the subject is still lamentable. The discussions were, strictly speaking, of no use: they were not accompanied by academic literature, nor did they show us the “way” to make a valid film ourselves (at most they showed us that it would be in vain). In fact, we were faced with a directorial gesture, a practical, figurative problem. It was us among us, no “vertical” guidance, free to look at the problem as you pleased. There was more at play than an “objective” technique or easily discernible content: a sensibility, something that goes beyond words. We would also discuss forms, ways of splicing one frame to another, concrete ethical dilemmas. We would discuss McElwee’s soul-baring, Moretti’s anguish in the face of this abstraction – illness – that threatens to change everything. In a way, it was a crazy, aimless thing, somehow anarchic in its disdain for any pragmatic knowledge. And it was a passionate thing in its gratuitousness, in the heterogeneity that brought together the different stances of cinephiles and aspiring directors, free listeners and curious dilettantes.

Or so it seems to me now, rummaging through increasingly distant memories. At the time, I was sad, stuck between four barren walls, alone – and these films, beautiful as they were, only added another layer of pain. I wrapped myself in it because it was someone else’s – it was my only escape from myself, yet so intimately linked to me, an echo of my own life back then. Time Indefinite, for example, gave me a temporary purpose: to see everything McElwee made, to delve deeper into the suffering of being in the world, to confront its prosaism and meaninglessness, whilst having a mere camera for armour. I was in a daze, away from home without a clear purpose (why here and not there?), stuck in books and movies, my body limp from all that lying in bed. Yet Claire Simon paradoxically wanted to pull us out of the films. Like any self-respecting filmmaker, she showed them to us only to force us out of them. There were the films and there was life – not just “life in films”, but also life beyond them, potentially filmable, but above all livable, which I was stubbornly refusing: it was warmer between references.

On October 25, 2020, I wrote in my diary (back then I used to do that): “[…] there are plenty of ways to get to an author, this in reference to the debate I had with Claire Simon at noon today during the session on Caro diario when I told her that I rediscovered Moretti thanks to Serge Daney, who considered him a beacon filmmaker of the eighties, after coming across his work, without understanding much, in high school. Which she objected to, telling me that while she thinks highly of Daney, Moretti doesn’t need advertising, he can be enjoyed just for what he is (or something like that). Did I argue otherwise? Moretti is an exceptional auteur, and some films that Daney never got to see fully confirm that. But I have the impression that Simon encourages us to speak our minds more on paper, and everything that deviates from the line that she has pre-established gets cut in editing. I might be wrong, as her films are full of openings, but I admit I was expecting a much more freestyle course with her. Although the ideas she invokes regarding these films permeated by the idea of illness, of the body, are very good, and I always write them down, thinking that maybe someday they will be useful to me.”

The truth is that Claire Simon’s presence on Zoom intimidated me like no other. The diary is a sample of this always-anticipated, always-frustrating conversation. She was not open to debate. Paradoxically, we would talk, but she had a clear idea (perhaps too clear?) of what needed to be said. That’s how it seemed to me then. Sometimes someone would surprise her with a detail she hadn’t thought of, a hidden potential of the film. Her face would light up, she’d find in it a solution, a truth. But with my pretensions of a presumptuous highbrow, which disrupted the flow through a ridiculous effort, she must have found me insufferable. Just my idea of relying on the names previously mentioned, which had been validated, on the authors who taught me to live (isn’t that what cinephilia is?), on their interpretation methods, bothered her beyond measure. She was looking for something fresh, new, intuitive – that would come from you, not somewhere else. I was like Alexandre, the protagonist of La Maman et la Putain: “To speak with the words of others… That’s what freedom must be.” She had the power to discern between what we concocted with our own minds and what was “culturally” passed on to us. She hated culture, specifically the ceremoniously institutionalised art stuff, all that stuffy air that has more to do with prestige and status than wild intuition – she wanted to be in direct contact with art (a typically French idea). Nothing more was needed.

II. Practice

During her classes, Claire Simon could be brutal, even malicious. I never fully understood her unvarnished disdain for the act of critique – although today I believe I am better equipped to dismantle its source. When we first met in person a few weeks ago, in her bright living room filled with plants in the 20th Arrondissement, I wanted to resume the conversation – to show her that time has passed and things have changed. I carried within me not only the memory of those more or less bitter debates (at least on my part) but especially the incident regarding the short film – about five minutes long – that we had to make at the end of the course on the same theme: illness.

The details of that process seem stifling to me now: I don’t really want to go through it again. I vaguely remember the ordeal of generating an intelligible audiovisual content on my own, in that room overlooking the Saint-Denis bus station, where time had stopped. On December 4, I wrote in my diary: “Very excited about making the short film on the theme of ‘Je suis malade’ for Claire Simon’s class. After days of total drought, today, the first valid idea struck me a few hours ago, and since then I have done nothing but constantly work on it. I’ve even shot the first scene, and I think it’s a fabulous, perfectly cinematic piece. It will be called – with reference to […] Nerval – Le Soleil noir et la Mélancolie, and it will be in black and white. The content per se is still hazy, but I will break through eventually, I hope.” Then, on December 8: “An exhausting day where I did nothing but work on the short film for Claire Simon’s class, but which I end satisfied because I managed to finish it. As usual when something begins to take shape in my mind, then grows, and I feel restless until I’ve exhausted every possible approach. […] I think that the result – after heavy doubts, where I would see it as a product of crass amateurism, completely inferior to my colleagues’ works – is not to be entirely discarded. There are certainly some cinematic ideas to be found in it. […] Even if our interpretations are a bit off, in the end, I needn’t be ashamed of this work, however difficult and under-resourced it was.”

Fast-forward to the feedback sessions. Claire Simon went through the students’ films one by one and was generally supportive. When she got to my film, she told me that this love for the great masters had to stop, one must seek one’s own freedom, because at the moment it was a closed perimeter, an obsolete approach. She told me the film was narcissistic and rather dull. In my diary, I wrote: “I felt numb for hours. What disheartened me most was the fact that practically there was no other film that the teacher seemed more displeased with, more disinterested in. She found something good about all of them. Many she praised without reservation – and in the few where she found something to criticise, she did so based on the foundation that the film seemed to offer her. Whereas in my case, it seemed that there was no foundation at all – that everything should be thrown away from the start. As if the content itself wasn’t necessarily the problem – the problem was actually the fundamental principle of the film, its idea, to which she didn’t adhere at all.”

A few colleagues jumped in and defended the film. Someone even noticed the “Brian Eno” reference to Moretti’s film La Stanza del figlio. I walked out of that class feeling a bit lost, with my pride shattered and a few friends with whom I still exchange postcards. But if I were to sum up all the time that has passed since then, my friends weren’t entirely right: the film was indeed affected, pompous, enamoured with its own images. The very thing I detest most of all in cinema. Maybe that’s why it turned out that way: I couldn’t help, somewhat Freudian, reproducing what I otherwise try so hard to avoid. I was aware of it both while shooting and editing the film. But something in me couldn’t stop making these reflexive gestures, to which a ‘Stop, enough!’ would have been preferable any day. Just as I didn’t know how to accept, with good grace and even gratefully, this unexpected frankness from Claire Simon, who would directly approach us and our fears we can’t escape, in a creator-to-creator relationship that had nothing of the “master teacher” in it.

It took a few years, changing universities, countries, and cultures, confronting a space where everyone, invariably, is mired in hypocritical and consensual politeness – something between “fantastic” and “terrible” – to understand the (political?) importance of that gesture. Irrelevant whether, in the end, that harsh verdict was valid or not – the important thing, to me, is that there was someone who put their honesty on the line, entered into this dialogue with their whole self (be it hastily or borderline incorrect), proposed a relationship that would engage them more than a quick and immediately forgotten exchange of words.

III. Critique

The teacher wrote to me again, to say that she had rewatched the film – with subtitles (?!). She said that “admiration for the masters is a joy and a poison that we must tap in moderation” and that “cinema allows us to project ourselves into a film that we see, and that is why we must welcome the unknown as much as possible, because the questions we ask about ourselves are always there, in the gaze we cast upon the world.” Finally, she said – it feels so strange to read it again now – that she was wrong about that film of mine and that her verdict was unfair. Verbatim: “I have rewatched your film, and I would like to tell you all the good things I see in it.”

After that, we pretty much lost touch. At that time, she was focusing on directing again; she had become a filmmaker again. She was making a fiction film about Marguerite Duras’ much younger partner, Yann Andréa (played by Swann Arlaud). I haven’t seen it yet, although I was still in Paris when it came out. I guess I still couldn’t distinguish between Claire Simon-the teacher and Claire Simon-the director, things had gotten mixed up in my head and were too hard to handle, I wanted to distance myself from the whole thing. In the meantime, I forgot. After its world premiere at Cinéma du Réel (also in Paris), Notre corps, her latest film, entered, in the fall of 2023, the pre-selection list of the One World Romania festival, with which I collaborated again this year. I had initially avoided it: three hours to spend in the corridors of a hospital, plus the memory it promised to inflame again. Having to write the film’s catalogue note once it was selected, I plunged into its images with some apprehension – and then it all came flooding back.

I don’t remember the last time I cried at a film. Maybe at Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County, just before the lockdown, perfectly aware of its melodrama, yet unable to stop. Notre corps was a different story altogether: nothing heralded that it would move me so. Nothing of the filmmaker’s approach, luminous and empathetic, tonic beyond measure and rather restrained with artifice; nothing of this starkly clear reality she films. But perhaps something about the film’s overall intuition unsettled me at first: the director goes to this gynaecology clinic to document in a grand manner, yet concretely and to the point, the collective experience of contemporary femininity. A film eager to participate in the current debate, but which chooses an entirely different perspective from sloganeering and opportunism, a rather forthright approach – nothing more intimate than the absolute intimacy of these women who grant access to their own bodies – and more unbound – no slogans, no positioning in a clearly delineated time and place, everything happening in blocks of real-time, evaded by contingency.

At one point, after various consultations (sex change process, endometriosis diagnosis, etc.), we see on screen the moment of childbirth. A colossal and revelatory moment of vulnerability and miraculousness: how do you film it without missing it? “It’s my normal approach, nothing else,” the filmmaker told me when we met. Claire Simon captures the entire event, from a distance that never seems cold, from a closeness that never seems intrusive. A child – a purple, slimy, strange creature – enters the screen out of nowhere. The hole becomes a portal from the unseen to the light. An inexplicable appearance that gives the moment an almost religious – in any case, divine – meaning. “This woman, this mother, performs an act of civilization. She doesn’t tell the child things like, ‘Mommy loves you.’ She passes on respect, kindness. She’s like a priest.” Notre corps films this transfer of life, this moment of absolute solitude and maximum openness – shareable only between women (the mother and the midwife) – when two extra eyes prepare to face the world.

Out of the silence of this world bursts a squeal, a cry. It’s as if all of Claire Simon’s cinema – one built on and through encounters – had turned toward this sequence. Filming without emphasis and without the feeling of an “extra” gaze, the director establishes a relationship with the camera that goes beyond theory – into the most urgent practice of the moment. It became clear to me then, like a flash, that we must meet again. To close the loop, in a way. Out of that course on illness was born the absolute film about illness and healing, birth and death. One in which Claire Simon takes an unprecedented step in her filmography: she enters the film – allows herself to be filmed by her own camera. I wondered what else she could bring to this vaguely Wisemanian device: then I discovered her in the frame, a woman among so many others, taking this relation of equality to its ultimate consequence – herself a patient undergoing consultation and surgery. By the end, her hair was just starting to grow back. Claire-Simon-from-Zoom had become another.

IV. Art

“You should know that the film has nothing to do with the course at Paris 8,” she told me straight away. My grand lead deflated within the first minute of the interview. “It was my producer Kristina Larsen, who was hospitalised there, that suggested it to me. I was immediately interested because it was about a department that contained all pathologies, whether benign or malignant. I was fascinated by the idea that there is one place where everything related to gender can be dealt with. But the course was something else: it simply had to do with the pandemic, what we were all going through at the time.”

An hour after we set the date for the meeting, I read an article in Libération, “Césars 2024: Controversy surrounding the documentary Notre corps, featuring the indicted gynaecologist Émile Daraï”. The article mentioned, among other things, that members of the collective “Stop Obstetrical and Gynecological Violence” (Stop VOG) had sent a letter to the Césars committee stating that “It seems inconceivable that this film […] should be selected.” The film allegedly glossed over the scandal surrounding the doctor in question, who was accused by 32 women in November 2022 of “willful violence by a person charged with a public service mission”. I felt the need to clarify it face to face. The scandal wasn’t my main aim for the interview, but I was curious, since I’d gotten there, to find out the filmmaker’s perspective. “What interested me,” said Claire Simon, “was the existence of this service that encompasses all women, in a way. Well, the head of this service was sued right when we were finishing shooting the film. As the head of the department, he presided over meetings with the other doctors, supervised laparoscopic surgery, and so on. I filmed him, of course, but I didn’t film any of his consultations. Another important thing is that I had made a commitment to the collective body of Hospitals in Paris that there would be no mention of any names in the film –  hospital, patient, or doctor. I took out all the names – so I couldn’t suddenly put his name in the film. Especially since I was subscribing to this commitment, it seemed like a very good thing. I liked the idea of the film being abstract – talking, of course, about the body. It’s a paradox.”

There is a constant in Claire Simon’s filmography – a supple method that allows the filmmaker to self-efface, as if there were no obstacle between the viewer and the film’s subjects. But there is also something new in Notre corps. In 2008, Claire Simon made a fiction film about family planning, called Les Bureaux de Dieu / God’s Offices – a centre whose aim is to provide sex education in France –, starring “the greatest French actresses: Nathalie Baye, Nicole Garcia, Béatrice Dalle etc. They played the doctors, the counsellors, the social workers. It was a very well-documented film, a 7-year-long process of visiting several clinics and places. But I was left with a regret. In the first such institution we filmed, there was a doctor who dealt with both late-term abortions and pregnancies. For whatever reason, I didn’t film that, although it was brilliant, it was about all women, not just one particular segment. I think that’s where the idea for Notre corps came from: a film about the stages in a woman’s life. Something complete. Plus the idea that I will never follow a woman through multiple stages: we follow one thing and that’s it, we move on to the next. Hence the impression of the whole film as a sort of collective female body – but also a journey of life. We can only know a piece of it: birth, abortion… But, put one after the other, these pieces tell the whole epic of the woman’s body, a body that has never been shown like this – as an epic. I told myself that I needed to stay close to the body. That was the focus.”

“So, to understand, this is not a film about a hospital. The hospital is just a means for the storytelling. We didn’t film the management, the financial problems, all these things that can otherwise be very violent. I followed my wish and that’s it. Plus, we were an all-girl team: I had a former student from Paris 8 as an assistant and a former student from Fémis as a sound technician. The film couldn’t have been made with a man. It was interesting: in a way, I was revisiting some stages I had already gone through, and the girls were discovering what awaits them. All three of us were very motivated to make the film because we were actually filming our own condition. We were filming our side, our species. Hence the perspective. Someone told me at a screening that I didn’t sexualise the bodies I filmed. Only I know how much I wanted to capture their beauty. But it’s something else. When you’re in the hospital, you’re no longer at that stage of a seductive body.”

“Sure, sometimes I filmed doctors too. A few meetings, a few scenes with specialists looking at sperm samples etc. Their rapport with the technique is incredible. When you see how that doctor looks at the eggs, it’s remarkable, it’s fusional. I found it very interesting, anthropologically speaking – we created this together, we invented this as a society. It’s as if we’ve cut coitus into pieces to produce a kind of baby factory that, well, may work or not. It’s crazy, I was fascinated. I tried to film their hands, although sometimes it was difficult, but I always wanted to stick to the idea of the body as a concrete thing: a body helping another body. Cinema allows us to see and understand where written text sometimes doesn’t help us. On the other hand, the main idea of the film is the relationship between words and body. See endometriosis. Everyone talks about endometriosis, but during surgery, we see it right there in the frame – we see the piece of flesh. And I think that’s very important. The same thing happened when I found myself in the position of the patient. Up until then, I had been interested in what I was filming mostly from a filmmaker’s perspective. But at that moment, I realised that it was no joke. I took it worse than I expected.”

“The downside is that I’m always ahead of my time (laughs). The film about [writer and Duras’s partner] Yann Andréa, Vous ne désirez que moi (2021), already talked about male domination – even though he was in his thirties, he was not a kid, like Judith Godrèche. Sounds pretentious, but it’s true. For Les Bureaux de Dieu, the girls I was talking to at the time told me that everything between men and women was already decided. Feminism was a dirty word. It seemed like everything was compromised forever. When the first #metoo happened, I was so excited. Young women finally understood the ordeal that awaited them and the fact that they had no desire to go through it again.”

“Notre corps” will be screened at the One World Romania Festival on Sunday, April 14.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.