many texts are available here:
https://www.robertmilin.fr/webappli/front/index.php
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TEXTS
-A soup in Automn, a video work by Robert Milin
-Talk to animals, a sound work by Robert Milin
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A Soup in Autumn
Down with the immortal kings and queens of the screen! Long live the ordinary mortal, filmed in life at his daily tasks!
Provisional
Instructions to
Kino-Eye Groups, Dziga Vertov, 1926
French Rail Ticket
Inspectors,
families, inhabitants of Tarn and of Garonne… For ten years has Robert Milin made
video portraits of «the ordinary mortal, filmed in life at his daily tasks» to borrow
Dziga Vertov’s words. However, Milin moves away “from the instructions” of
Vertov’s. Where the director says “Down with the staging of everyday life! Film
us as we are...”, Milin asserts a light staging and suggests talking about the
“assisted portraits”.
Assisted portraits, the setting up of a device
How to create a portrait again when art history has already produced so many? Among all works of this long story, August Sander’s photographic portraits hold a special place for Milin.
From Sander’s, he keeps the
choice of a frontal view, moments of direct glances, “posed portrait”, and
there is this choice not to name people but to include them in a group that exceeds
them.
All the portraits made by
Milin are portraits of people who perform their own role with an intention discussed with
them during prior meetings.
Then Milin sets up his
temporary director’s studio arranged at people’s homes or close by. In each
place, he installs a neutral background in order not to get lost amongst stories
that furnitures, paintings, photographs, or trinkets could tell.
Nevertheless, importance is
attached to personal context of each portrayed person through some personal
objects, found there, which will be highlighted.
Systematically, a group logic
underlies these portraits. These groups have not existed before the work, they set
up the project’s time, and sometimes continue
The meal, a genre scene
In his work Milin focuses on everyday situations. The table and the meal are the centre of A Soup in Autumn. A moment to share, the meal remains a social act that exceeds the feeding need, it takes place in a certain context at a certain time. These contextual elements read in the way the table is laid, in the way we are sitting vis à vis – Mind your manners!.
For A Soup in Autumn, the
inhabitants of Tarn and of Garonne were filmed in their houses, these are
therefore their tables, their plates, their salt shakers, their pieces of bread,
their soup spoons.
There is no close-up but it’s
close enough to create some intimacy. The space remains present even if trimmed
by a framing, seeking sobriety and concentration around the table.
The other person, the table
companion, is not directly visible, their presence is suggested but not shown
in the image. The words, very rare, create
a certain tension.
The contextual life also takes
place through sound. The video offers few movements here, each portrait being
filmed from a fixed plan. Nevertheless, it records each sound, from a spoon clanking to the chewing noises.
In a near absence of words, these sounds become a narrative tool.
A certain hieratism in the
postures reminds us of the posed photography but also of Aki Kaurismaki’s
cinema. We think particularly about Far Away the Clouds Escape, with its many
fixed plans, with its characters fixedly holding the pose, with Kaurismaki’s
consideration for fabrics and wall colours, sometimes giving us the feeling of
being in a painting, not in a film.
Milin remains at the frontiers
of documentary film not taking any actor, each model playing their own role.
However, Robert Milin assumes a construction. This is not the effect of a désinterlocution[1]
but of a meeting and of an exchange with the people filmed from his idea.
The artist oscillates between intimacy – mouth noises – and the common life,
all these hesitations building a tension. The table as a convivial place but
also as a place of tensions, of forbidden words. The table as a shared common
place, a small family theatre stage.
During the making of these
works, wavering between document and
small fiction, a new space is created. Even though the film is shot in the
models’ houses, between the camera and the background a new space is
established, escaping the rules, with no everyday practices normally making it alive.
The “mobile studio” must get adapted to the constraints – the physics, the sound,
the light… – of this inhabited place whose habits and practices are now affected
by filming equipment intrusion, however modest. The situation arranged
in the physical living place of the models’ produces an imaginary shared
between the identity of the place, the artist’s idea, and what people want to
give of themselves. What the choice of an assisted portrait (almost posed), requiring
time, means for Robert Milin is the requirement of the filmed person’s awareness
and the acceptance of a certain amount of negotiation and sharing. He does not
steal the model’s natural image unwittingly,
but they build together what they wish to give, to see, to think, in order to
exceed our certainties and to welcome the otherness.
Delphine Suchecki
[1] A kind of negation,
in certain cases instrumentalisation, of the other. For
futher understanding of the désinterlocution
concept, read : read :
Eric Chauvier, Anthropologie de l’ordinaire, 2011, Editions Anacharsis
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Talk to animals, a sound work by Robert Milin
In 2012, Robert Milin received a public commission from the Radiophonic
Workshop of Creation of France Culture[1]
for the creation of a sound work. The project was to continue his exploration
of the peasant world.
For the past ten years, he had been very interested with
breeding practices. He had met about fifty farmers in various areas of France,
mainly cow and ewe breeders, whose practices were very diverse, from the most
intense to the most bucolic ones. He had then created Allez viens donc!, a video and sound work where resound calls to
the animals in the fields, then Veni, Veni, another work proposing a
video portrait of peasants from Quercy[2].
For Talk to animals, he met again some
old breeders, and a few new ones, too.
He made them “pose” in front of a microphone: one by one,
they came like they were in a photomaton, in their own farm, in a field, in a
stable, a freestall barn. And there, he asked them to talk to their animals, make
an effort of concentration to remember and reformulate what they say when speaking to their animals. He also recorded
noises, sounds in the various places of breeding.
Created in view of a radiophonic diffusion, this work is
purely sound, with no image nor installation. The visual being absent from
creation, it is our own imagination that is required, with our feelings and our
memories. Steps, calls, cries, male and female voices follow one another,
overlap like fragments of everyday noises. Then hens, ewes, music on the radio
and the feeling of a happy farm like the one in a childhood memory. But also
metal, repetitive noises, questions or assertions of helplessness: “They are
monsters”, “One does not pay us the price of the things”…. Sounds, words
evoking an unseated peasant world. In our imagination, farms are not factories,
and yet this voice asks a question: “ why did they make you an industry? ”.
Suicides, the war of the seeds, the RFID chips, cows without horns, animal meals
…
All this moves us away from the idealised image of the peasant
world. The word “farm” does not fit with the reality of the breeding places any
more. However images resist in our imagination, they still remain images. Some concrete
resistances are set up: the GIE[3]
Green Zone, the Semences Paysannes network, the Kokopelli, the Faut pas pucer group
(against the RFID chips)… But others continue always further caught up in a system, sometimes as
far as the project from the BTP[4]
investor to create “the farm of the 1000 cows” aiming to produce 9 million
liters of milk a year.
While listening to Talk
to animals, I first thought of another work, lighter, humorous and ironic: the
Marcel Broodthaers several minute “interview” with his cat: on the role of the
museums, on contemporary art, on the
title of Magritte’s work, This is
not a pipe. In response, the cat miaows. With Talk to animals, the questions, the words also remain unanswered:
they are monsters… why did they make you an industry?
Yet here, it is not the artist that uses his own voice but, as
always in Robert Milin’s works, these are people met specifically for this
project: here – the breeders. It is a long immersion that initially enables him
to complete his work rather like a work of an archivist. In the sense of
meeting people, listening and collecting his materials. In this regard, his
approach is close to the one of Nicolas Frize’s in his musical works, I think
of works like Patiemment or Paroles de voitures born of long
moments of immersion in a hospital and a factory. The two artists immerse for a
long time in the « unknown » worlds from which they draw materials
that they will move into an artistic practice. Following the meetings in the various
farms, Robert Milin asked the breeders to perform their own role. After the work
of recording in situ came editing time
of the sounds. Through editing, all
these sound materials construct thoughts and mental landscapes. If the work
does not follow a very narrative scheme, however the succession of these everyday
life fragments holds a figurative potential. The sound has this double capacity
to summon up the real experiences as well as create the conditions for an
imaginary story. For as long as one hour, the noises, the words give their intensity to Talk to animals. The sound becomes another exploration of the real breeding
space.
Two main feelings emerge. Fleeting impression of a great happiness,
the image of a happy breeder whose hen’s cackle would become a sound emblem. But
also this feeling much cruel of loneliness and distress that comes along. All
is under control, the peasants are no longer autonomous, and they lose contact
with their animals. In Reclaiming the Streets,
the town planner and architect, Nicolas Soulier notes the “streets sterilization”
caused by regulations that asepticize and anaesthetize the wills whereas it
would take almost nothing to bring our streets back to life. A few roses, a
bicycle, a tree, or a few hens. And what would it take for the peasants to get
back their independence? For the cow to ceases being a product selected
to produce always more? For Dragonfly[5],
Nutmeg, the daughter of Job with the right shank or Tail coat to be able to continue to feed in the
pastures?
I was walking along a eucalyptus-lined avenue when a cow
sauntered out from behind a tree. I stopped and we looked each other in the
eye. Her cowness shocked my humanness to such a degree—the moment our eyes met
was so tense—I stopped dead in my tracks and lost my bearings as a man, that
is, as a member of the human species. The strange feeling that I was apparently
discovering for the first time was the shame of a man come face-to-face with an
animal. I allowed her to look and see me—this made us equal—and resulted in my
also becoming an animal—but a strange forbidden one, I would say. (Gombrowicz)
