DIRECT ACTION, 2024 © CASKFILMS
Until 2024, Guillaume Cailleau could have passed for a short film director. In February, however, he presented a film at the Berlinale that is longer than all his other works put together: In DIRECT ACTION, even most of the individual shots are longer than Cailleau’s previous films. Duration seems to be a matter of negotiation for him, as it should be for an experimental filmmaker. But not only duration. Cailleau is an artist of dialogue, of shifting forms and changing roles. He regularly works in close collaboration with others: He has created numerous live performances with the sound artists Timo Kreuser (they toured as the duo Kreuser/Cailleau) and Werner Dafeldecker; he has accompanied theatre projects by Thomas Ostermeier, Hakan Savaş Mican and Mala Kline, among others; he has made films and music videos in dialogue with Hanna Slak, Benjamin Krieg, Lucile Desamory and Anselm Franke, as well as with the musicians of Cookie Brooklyn and the Crumbs, Elmer Kussiac, Ulla von Brandenburg, and the Japanese composer Miki Yui. A portrait of Guillaume Cailleau should therefore not be seen in isolation, but as a fragment of many years of collective and non-hierarchical work with artists from different disciplines.
Guillaume Cailleau © Wojciech Chrubasi
Cailleau himself came to art after studying engineering in France, moving to the Berlin University of the Arts in 2006 and eventually becoming a master student of Heinz Emigholz. For many years now, he has not been confining himself to the role of director, but has moved between the disciplines of image designer, producer, editor, distributor and performer. When necessary, he steps into the background, advising and producing so that other people’s films can be made apart from his own projects. He is motivated by his curiosity about the cinematic form, by the desire to explore the possibilities of cinema together: in small, independent projects, he supports companions from the experimental film scene in the production of films that explore the unseen, somewhere between experiment, documentary and fiction. With his production company CASKFILMS, he has realised projects by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, Silvia Schedelbauer, Hanna Slak, Gustavo de Mattos Jahn, Lucile Desamory, Assaf Gruber – or Ben Russell, his collaborator and co-director for DIRECT ACTION. A film that exemplifies a way of working that has characterised Cailleau’s art for many years: Projects are process-based, and concepts are not pre-fabricated, they are allowed to change. Cailleau began DIRECT ACTION as a producer and then became co-director over the course of the hundred-day shoot. In the end, he and Ben Russell were also co-editors, and the final form of the film is the result of their discussions.
WUNDERSCHEIN, 2019 © CASKFILMS
Cailleaus film WUNDERSCHEIN (2019) was originally conceived as a classic documentary about a banknote printing plant. However, it became an abstract experimental film. Printing machines are transformed into completely strange mechanical patterns, hypnotic colour games and kaleidoscopes through a series of horizontal and vertical image reflections. We only ever see part of a machine, a fragment of a production process, based on processes that are partly multiplied, partly visually fragmented, altered almost beyond recognition – but only almost. The frame of reference is always clear and dominant, directing the action: This is about money. About euro banknotes produced in a large-scale, automatic process. About the reality and unreality of banknotes, about their concrete representation and their abstract meaning. What is already unfolding in the image is made even more artificial by the inert, repetitive and yet rhythmically lulling sounds of the machines. It is a strange film, one that might have fascinated Cailleau’s fellow filmmaker Ben Russell a few years ago. Russell likes to emphasise his interest in combining ethnography and psychedelic aesthetics. In WUNDERSCHEIN, Cailleau, for his part, sabotages the often-transfiguring kitsch of ethnographic film as well as the sometimes-haughty detachment of observational documentary. Instead: A recalcitrance of the image against itself, enigmatic and yet completely transparent in its process.
LABORAT, 2014 © CASKFILMS
Other films by Guillaume Cailleau also draw their strength from the tension between documentary observation and experimentation, and do not quite fit into the expectations of either genre: LABORAT (2014) is one of his best-known works, for which Cailleau was awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlinale. In the film, he and his cameraman Michel Balagué (co-founder of LaborBerlin) depict studies on mice at the Charité hospital in Berlin. In order to test medical procedures and drugs, the small animals are regularly subjected to extreme procedures and usually end up sacrificing their lives. The camera shows close-ups that reveal too much, undermining the desire to look away and turning the eagerness to look into its opposite. The film team talks about what is happening on the operating table, about the technical aspects of filmmaking, about camera and sound, about banal things like shot numbers. In contrast to WUNDERSCHEIN, here the concrete, documentary image alone develops a formal force that is no longer broken but exaggerated in close-ups. Hyperrealism and excessive clarity collapse the sense of the real in the film, as do the means of abstraction and intervention in WUNDERSCHEIN. What seems most alien, almost extraterrestrial, in LABORAT is ultimately the human being. The person operating. The person filming the operation. The person watching the operation from a cinema seat.
Cailleau’s film revolves around the political without making it a didactic subject. DIRECT ACTION also erects a barrier between the reality found and its representation. This time, however, it is even more subtle; it is his most concrete and yet most difficult film to grasp. What can be seen always remains a fragment, appearing at once disproportionate, meticulous, detailed, extended and decelerated. Cailleau and Russell depict life together in the ZAD, one of the most important communes in French environmental activism, choosing tableaux that portray the everyday life of activists: baking bread, sharpening the chainsaw, recording a rap, making crêpes, practising with the camera drone, a punk concert, discussing the next demonstration. Cuts are rare, shots last several minutes. Everyday actions appear in close-up, detached from the community – and yet they are obviously marked as fundamental to the community, as crucial for the functioning of a life according to idealistic standards. In the film, street activism is broken down into its smallest components, analysed and at the same time abstracted along the lines of a way of life that is positioned outside of urban, consumerist lifestyle. Then, in the middle of the film, the flow is interrupted, and the audience is momentarily disoriented. Over the course of three and a half hours, DIRECT ACTION develops an arc of perception that is fundamentally different from classic documentary and narrative cinema. Instead, the film picks up on the speed of the location, the anarchic simultaneity of actions that overlap and coexist without having to fit into a consumable form.
live performance Kreuser/Cailleau © CASKFILMS
In a series of live performances over the last few years, Cailleau has taken on an even deeper formal approach, initially abandoning structures of meaning altogether in order to focus entirely on the level of his working materials – analogue film and digital image space. Film material was acoustically scanned into stage arrangements, Super8 projectors met record players, mixers and beamers. Spontaneous and unpredictable live image processes seemed to fascinate him – for example, when, in the performance RESONATOR III, digital images were manipulated live by the sounds of the Berlin Splitter Orchestra and used as a score. The orchestra unfolded an abstract, noisy soundscape, while the sounds played caused image changes within the framework of a projection.
AUSTERITY MEASURES, 2012 © CASKFILMS
In contrast to the striking and dominant soundscapes of his performances, Cailleau often opted for silence, especially in his earlier films. Until 2015, he made silent, abstract experimental films as well as silent documentary milieu studies and film portraits. In Greece, Cailleau and Ben Russell filmed the Exarchia district of Athens in the immediate aftermath of the currency crisis (AUSTERITY MEASURES, 2011) – the images shimmer in red, green and blue, as the material was triple-exposed with a Bolex camera using the colour separation process and then developing it manually. He portrayed the artist Abdou Ouologuem headbanging (ABDOU’S DREAD IN TEATRO ARGENTINA, ROMA, 2013) and reflected on the birth of his son in the abstract film experiment “H(i)J” (2009). Early works such as GENEVIEVE’S GARDEN (2006), REVOLUTION (2007) und THROUGH (2008, with Benjamin Krieg) focused entirely on visual perception and explored the foundations of an experimental film practice. Textures, shapes and gestures are at the heart of the films: Sun-drenched water, flowers, raised fists become short, rhythmic film poems, always characterised by the 16mm material, its temporality and textures. Flickering effects and shifting perceptions of the world are an important stylistic device from the beginning; a sense of the real is revealed through its opposite, through the rapturous, the psychedelic and the dreamlike. In later music videos, the image is increasingly unleashed, moving away from the photographic towards free collages and transformations.
HiJ, 2009 © CASKFILMS
While political references recur, Cailleau’s work rarely emphasises the drastic and the physical. He usually opts for distance, poetics and abstraction, the pictorial. LABORAT, his most confrontational and provocative film to date, remains unique in his filmography as an outburst. It makes debates inevitable, even when seen again, and raises specific questions about the attitude of the director, about the perception of pain and synaesthesia in film, about empathy between humans and non-humans. The intervention in the image here is language, which places the banal where it does not seem to belong. This was immediately followed by HANGING (2015), another silent film showing a man being hung from a hook. This time it is a man whose flesh is not left untouched. This time it is an artist who does not want to remain untouched. He swings on ropes between trees in a suspension performance, the image is black and white, reversed into the negative. The silence takes away the force of the situation, but not the sharpness of the physical questions. An early film is also direct and physical: BLITZKRIEG from 2007, officially the first film in Cailleau’s filmography. Shot in Berlin on 1 May 2005, it shows the chaotic clash between police and demonstrators. Again, there is no sound; at first slowly, then more clearly, flashes from the crowd come into focus, marking the cameras. The image is part of the escalation, the cameras are active, taking part in the events. The camera is placed in the window of a flat, undisturbed and voyeuristic, producing a series of top shots and swish pans. Cailleau cuts quickly here, and soon the camera flashes mark the image transitions. He adds a punch line at the end, the only one so far.
HANGING, 2015 © CASKFILMS
Throughout his filmography, Guillaume Cailleau has always composed a wide spectrum: Different stylistic forms meet and coexist in a completely non-hierarchical way, new methods are introduced, old ones return and are mixed anew. Motifs are only sporadically condensed; a superordinate narrative is denied. Portraits of fellow filmmakers are not uncommon, encounters with music and sound are as regular as their complete absence, concrete political motifs are as persistent as abstract and structuralist departures from reality. The films seem to have only one thing in common: they emerge from the image, from the material, from sounds or fragments, from lived experience and memory. They all allow language and concepts to fade into the background until they are barely audible as background noise. They are films that have evolved in a processual way, from experimental arrangements and self-questioning with an unknown outcome, searching, exploratory and thoroughly experimental. Cinematic practice as a snapshot that rejects a dominant authorship: unstable, ambiguous, anarchistic.