Patrice Nezan is a French producer and founder of the Les Contes Modernes (Modern Stories) production house. He has a lengthy background in dance film that reaches all the way to the nineties, but in recent years, Patrice has turned to more narrative forms of cinema, across fiction, documentary, and animation – one of his latest achievements is Jan Komasa’s Oscar-nominated Corpus Christi, where he acted as the French co-producer of the film. The films that he has worked on have been featured in festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Toronto, Locarno and Visions du Réel – and what the films share in ethos is a commitment to opening up discussions related to contemporary politics, along with constantly finding new ways of visually narrating, of telling stories.

Patrice Nezan will serve on the jury of this year’s edition of the Bucharest International Dance Film Festival, so we took the chance to discuss his beginnings in dance film and the ethos behind his early work and his transition to feature films, while passing through the history of French dance film, thoughts on aesthetics and narrative, and various cinephile landmarks and inspirations, ranging from Asian cinema to Raul Ruiz.

Tell us a bit about your beginnings in film production. How did you start?

Since this is a dance film festival that I will be attending, you need to know that we started with dance. There was kind of a big revolution in the performing arts in the ‘90s, in France. And it was a time when contemporary dance was really “destroying” everything in performing arts: it was trying to find new ways to tell stories, in comparison to theater and opera. I was part of that movement and I was quite close to contemporary choreographers – mainly French or Belgian choreographers, but not only. When I started, I was a big fan of cinema and feature films – I guess I was brought up by film directors such as Andrey Tarkovsky, and many others.

So, I was really involved in the dance industry and I was seeing some incredible proposals, and I was also a big fan of cinema. And I felt that cinema was mainly old-school, in comparison to dance. So, I just decided to be a go-between that would bridge dance and cinema, and I offered choreographers and film directors a chance to work together, to try to find a different grammar. Not a particularly new one, since it was already there – for example, if you take Bollywood films: they’re telling a story, but dance is also a big part of it. I’m not talking about what you would see on MTV or any kind of music video, but using dance as a part of the narrative. Because when you watch good Bollywood films, it’s really just that: using music and dance as a means to grow the narrative.

At that time, I was close to some film directors who were really searching for new ways of telling stories. These directors were Peter Greenaway, Atom Egoyan (who was working on The Adjuster, which is very different from what he is doing now), and a very important person – Raul Ruiz. If you have the chance, you should watch a film of his called Three Crowns of the Sailor (Les trois couronnes du matelot). Ruiz was someone who, before having started to make biopics and bigger films, was looking for new ways to tell stories, because he was from Chile and he was very close to Julio Cortazar, the Argentinian writer. And these people were telling me: “All the stories have already been told. If there is any interest that we have, it’s to tell stories differently”. And what I was seeing in contemporary dance was exactly that experience, and I wanted to help the film industry to try to be less conventional, in a way.

That’s the way I started. I find it very interesting because there was curiosity and respect on both sides. That allowed for some proposals that were very different from European cinema, but rather more similar to Asian cinema. If you watch the first films by Wong Kar-Wai for example, like Chungking Express, you can see that they’re very physical films. They’re about people who are acting or doing certain actions using their bodies, and not simply people that are talking and using dialogue. Because that was my fear when we started out. In France, we have a large tradition of literature and theater, and that means everything in culture passes through words. And so, when I was watching someone dancing on stage – simply being, giving their humanity – there was no cheating. They were offering something that I could sometimes feel very deeply inside of myself, something that I could feel in the same way as they did, but without being able to express it.

I started working with choreographers and directors and offered them the chance to collaborate. Sometimes it was based on songs – due to this passion that I have for Bollywood film. Sometimes we would also work with choreographers who were a bit more established and not newcomers, and we had to show them that the dance species they were creating, their repertoire, could be used just like in the case of an adaptation. Instead of adapting a book into a film, this was about adapting choreographic worlds into a film. And that would also give the choreographer a certain interest: that is, to have a different point of view on his work, and not just somebody who is filming their piece. A piece is made for the stage – it could be okay to film it, but it would be boring. So, it was the contrary: it meant using patterns and obsessions that a choreographer has in a film and asking a film director to do it instead. And film directors are people who usually have nothing to do with dance, but who have a different point of view on things. So, the choreographers could notice what they recognized in their dances and how they could translate, how they could enter a dialogue with it in order to make something different. So that’s why, in the end, the films we produced were really like UFOs. It was not filmed dance, but it was not cinema either.

Later on, we decided to call these dance fictions. Just like fiction, but using dance as the main material, the main character, to make films that can be similar to those that you can find in cinema. Like this film called Libera Me, by Alain Cavalier – it’s a film with no words. And there are plenty of films like this across the world.

Like Tsai Ming-liang too, for example – he also actually uses dance in these oneiric moments, like in Vive l’amour, where Lee Kang-sheng is wearing drag.

And especially in The Hole. We met each other quite a few times in the ‘90s, and when Tsai did Vive l’amour, it was really like a homage to musicals. He worked on it as if he worked on a musical – which is strange, cause it is like an Antonioni musical.

But, that’s the thing. I would also talk here about Shinji Aoyama’s Eureka, which is a very long film, more than three hours long, but you can’t feel time passing by when you watch it, because it’s so intense and you observe the characters almost like a documentarist. So yeah, I would say that dance film is quite close to Asian cinema. Asian cinema arrived in Europe thanks to the Rotterdam Film Festival, which at the time was run by a guy named Simon Field, who now is the producer of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. But back then, he was offering something totally new in Rotterdam, and there we could really discover the first films of Tsai Ming-liang, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Wong Kar-Wai, Hou Hsiao-Hsien… I felt very comfortable with that direction, so that is why we also followed it. And we did that for almost 15 years – now we don’t do dance films anymore.

From a producer’s perspective, what is it like to produce dance films? What are the specific requirements for this specific format, also considering what you just said – that it’s a fringe genre, that fluidly moves between contemporary dance, cinema, and even video art?

I’m not so sure about video art – because video art often tries to escape from the cinema world, and for good reasons, too. But for us, the point was always getting in cinemas, to have our films shown on a big screen. The point was really to bring dance to the world of cinema, and ultimately, the idea was definitely to tell stories. They can be minimalistic stories too. If you take films like Essential Killing for example – what’s the story? It’s not a classical one.

And so, in regards to production, the most important part was the development stage. My main task was to first make sure that the people working in the film industry would show respect to the dancers and choreographers, because people from cinema sometimes just seem to believe that they are the kings of the world. And when they did, they would learn so much from dance and music, as well as other departments of culture. That was my main focus. For me, cinema is a much more immature industry than the one of the performing arts. Because when you go to a theater play, when you attend a piece by Chekov, you know that you’re talking to an adult audience and that you can do something very deep and profound. But with cinema, you always have this feeling that it’s also a kind of childish approach in what is done.

So, our main concern at the beginning was to make sure that people from cinema would be respectful and learn from dance, but also that they would get rid of their very first impression – that is, when you see a great, fit dancer, a perfect body, you can see a sort of sex appeal. And so you need to get rid of that. Because, ultimately, we’re talking about humans. So yes, the point was to explain to the directors that crossing the professional line with the dancers was not okay or to be encouraged.

We had to get rid of all these clichés, these behaviors, and to go to the core of what was at stake. It was a very rewarding work as a producer because it was a kind of discovery to have these two worlds meet and to try to find a way to tell stories through both of them. If you watch something like Solo by William Forsythe, you can tell it’s almost like pure music. What happened with William Forsythe was interesting – because he didn’t want people to film his dance, but in the end, he accepted to do it, but only on one condition: he would get to work with two young guys from Brazil who were filming only capoeira. And that’s because these people have the virtuosity to capture dance – especially contemporary dance, which is a little bit like what can be done with hip-hop bands, where you have something very physical and that has lots of energy. And so, when you watch this kind of film like The Cost of Living – you can tell it’s so close to cinema. It was made by a director who was a natural-born director. And then, after you watch it, you realize that it is exactly what the cinema world needed at that moment, just like we were in need of Asian cinema in the ‘90s and the 2000s, in Europe.

It was something that for me was, and still is, very important. Now we are no longer involved in dance cinema, but I think the reason why we are currently working with Polish film directors is because there are some very impressive talents in Poland at the moment, who are really trying to tell stories a bit differently. When you see their mise-en-scene you realize that it’s something that we simply forgot in France nowadays. We’ve become very classical again. In a way, cinema in France is becoming very conventional and classical again, and that’s because it’s an industry and there is not much place for innovation left. And we’re very keen on meeting film directors, no matter the nationality, so that’s also why we are working with Polish film directors.

Maybe a difference to how things were like in the past, when we were searching and trying to innovate the ways in which we could tell stories, is that it was a moment when it was possible to experiment. We decided that what is more important nowadays is to take part in the intellectual debates of our societies and to be more political in a way. That’s why we co-produced Corpus Christi. Because, for us, now it’s much more important. Maybe, since we did dance films for 15 years, we also got bored with it, but that doesn’t mean we believe that phase was meaningless, however, it wasn’t reaching enough of an audience to make an actual point. Of course, telling a story differently is also very political, but it only reached a small audience, and we wanted to be closer to the debates in society. Obviously, the world is different from what it was 15 years ago, and so that’s why we’re focusing on more political issues. I wouldn’t call them more classical, but rather, more engaged.

That was my following question. What are the differences in producing dance film and narrative fiction film? Especially considering what you said about finding a new language to tell stories, which also ties in very strongly with the formality, and also considering that narrative film is a very good vehicle for political ideas, reaching a much larger audience, and being easier to decode and comprehend?

I can’t give a precise answer, because my experience in dance took place in a certain period in time, and the experience that I have now with feature films comes at a different one. Maybe, if there is one way I could answer, it would be this – I studied sociology and anthropology, and I remember the concept of social styles very clearly, meaning styles of defining groups in a society. That was more than 20 years ago. And the theory said that, at the time, there were different sorts of groups – like classical, or more radical, and lots of other different groups. But thanks to the internet and globalization, the theory predicts a trend that unfortunately was true, it was a visionary idea – that everybody would end up liking the same things. So, there would be fewer different groups, or rather there would be more of one major group, a “classical” group, where most people would agree on the same things. And so, the question of taste would become rarer, and people would wear the same clothes and would watch the same things.

That was not the case 20 years ago, so that’s why it was interesting to experiment then and why it was so exciting with dance, because people were rushing to the theaters, and these contemporary dance groups were touring all across the world – because at that time there was this curiosity, this interest. And that’s why it was easy to produce dance films at that time, due to this curiosity of the audience. Today – well, it’s just an intuition, we don’t have any answers, only questions – we believe that there is no time left for people to search for things. When I was discovering groups like Radiohead, for example, for me it was brilliant, because it showed a different way to write songs and they were really unique. 

Today, I’m not sure we can still find these kinds of bands, because we are offered a smaller scale of possibilities. Everybody is watching the same films and listening to the same music. So, I would say the world today is less adventurous than it used to be. Of course, I’m not talking about the niche – people like that will always exist – but still, as a whole, I would say that there is less space for experimenting in culture and that applies to any kind of audience. When I was a young student, there used to be an alternative to the more commercial art. Today the taste is so much more classical, and so it’s difficult.

We believe that we have to fight and to find tools. It’s difficult to answer your question because this moment in history is very different. Maybe if I were 25 years old today, I would tell you something different. But I am twice that age.

Considering your beginnings in such a vibrant and effervescent scene, is it strange in a way for you to now have films at the Oscars, such as Corpus Christi?

No, it’s just a progressive and very natural way to move on, because I guess that is what we were already looking for in contemporary dance, which was this desire to reach a wide audience. The point was to state that culture is for anyone and that anyone can enjoy it, and that there are no specific codes. It’s just like music. If you take any kind of music and play it, you will see that anybody will be able to enjoy it. With dance, you put a dancer on stage and you can ask both a child and an elder what they think about it, and absolutely everybody would take something out of it. So, for us, it was political from the very beginning, because the idea was to make contemporary dance famous to a wider audience. And in a way, what we are doing now is more about trying to give ideas to a wider audience, but it’s still the same kind of political approach.

We’re very pleased about Corpus Christi, and I’d say it’s the most commercial thing we’ve ever done. And we’re fine with that, because we had a nice adventure with the director. Now we are producing an Iraqi film, as main producers – it’s a film where you can understand not just the story of a character, but the story of an entire neighborhood. The point is to show that within a neighborhood, which is in a country at war, there are some connections. It’s a living community, a living world, and they can survive thanks to empathy and solidarity. It was tough to produce it, but the director wanted to make a film that was somehow like Iranian miniature paintings. You have a lot of stories, but in the end you reach something that is more than just one character, a thing you can also see in Hieronymus Bosch paintings. We hope to release the film soon – it’s very political. Maybe this is the most that we can do in terms of searching for new ways of telling stories, because we want to share a message or at least an intuition, an emotion. So yeah, we’re doing very different things, but it’s the same kind of approach that we had from the very beginning, and that is trying to show the complexity of the world and to take part in debates. It was easy with dance, but now it’s more difficult with cinema.

My final question is – you’re arriving in Bucharest to take part in the jury of the Bucharest International Dance Film Festival. What will you be looking for in the films? I know it’s a delicate question because there’s no such thing as objective criteria, but what do you want to discover in these films?

Well, I’m just looking to be surprised. Because short film is still a very strong and good “laboratory”, so it’s interesting to watch that. And maybe because I have a certain knowledge about dance, I will also try to compare my knowledge from previous experiences, my past life, with what is happening now in the short film circuit. Also, in some ways – and that’s why I very often accept to be on juries – I will look forward to the exchanges with people from different backgrounds and with different knowledge, because the point is being challenged – I guess that was in our DNA from the very beginning. 

I guess that was very important to me. We are very much focused on aesthetics because we can’t rely on words and dialogue in dance film, so we rely a lot on the aesthetics, on the formal approach. William Forsythe said that it’s important to have your eyes challenged. And that is what I always keep in mind – the ways in which you can make sure that every single frame contains something that challenges your eyes. Of course, it’s not all about eyes, but it’s mainly about that. I just love it, my whole purpose is to be challenged, because there are no kinds of certainties. We are just constantly creating prototypes, so I think that, maybe, the most important quality of a producer is to be able to adapt: to adapt to realities while still finding a demanding way to make film.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.