Set in the French President’s office, Élysée embarks on a personal reflection on the aesthetics and representation of power. The film reactivates the concept of the King’s Two Bodies, first theorised by historian Ernst Kantorowicz, positing the idea of a power continuum going well beyond its physical incarnation in a single person.

Marcella Lista: In Elysée, the gaze of the camera enters a place that is rarely seen, the presidential office of the French Republic. There, we are to discover the flamboyant baroque decor of an early 18th Century hôtel particulier, a prestigious aristocratic house. How did the idea of this project came about?

Laurent Grasso: The presidential office is a stage where power is materialized, expressed, embodied. As its name implies, the Salon Doré is a place of exception and prestige. This representative function is stressed by the omnipresence of gildings, a form that has always been an attribute of power. I was interested by this patrimonial aspect: the decor and furniture of the office are filled with history, literally impregnated by all the important discussions held in this office since the beginning of the Fifth Republic, which replaced a parliamentary government with a semi-presidential system. In this sense these surroundings are like witnesses, revealing an invisible layer of reality and giving testimony of power in action. Élysée is a form of portrait, yet it is not a portrait of a specific president, but rather a portrait of the permanence of power beyond its singular incarnation.

ML: The representation of power throughout time and the legitimation that is drawn from such representation is a strong Foucauldian topic… It also appears in other films of yours, such as Soleil Double (2014), which is a sort of filmic portrait of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a famous achievement of fascist architecture in the EUR neighborhood in Rome, which can be understood as a modernist reinterpretation of Roman monumental architecture. What is at stake artistically, for you, in these visual enquiries?

LG: I have always been very influenced by architecture and more specifically by the way in which architecture shapes the body and the mind. In Soleil Double I filmed the immoderate fascist architecture of the EUR, which was designed to symbolically crush the citizens and produce a physical manifestation of authoritarian power. I am interested in the ambiguity of this kind of aesthetics: they are at once overwhelming and fascinating, magnificent and dazzling, beautiful but dangerous. In Soleil Double this duality is reinforced by the troubling presence of two suns, heralding a potential catastrophe. In Elysée, the camera scans the glittering decor of theSalon Doré, also expressing the solar aspect of power, at once uncanny and dazzling.

ML: How do you see cinematographic resonances in your filmic work in general? Elysée is built with a succession of pannings, each one closely describing a section of the room, where the personnel, absorbed in alert stillness, also becomes part of the space itself. The shape of the observation is neither documentary nor narrative, it stands on the border between the two. It is a moment pure optical adherence which many historical films have worked with in representations of power through spaces and objects, from Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible to Visconti’s Leopard…

LG: In my films, I do not seek to restitute reality but rather to generate it. I often adopt a point of view that is not human, the slow, mechanic camera movements provoking a form of hypnotic state of mind in the viewer. I would think of the opening of Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad as a cinematographic reference, but for Élysée the nonhuman point of view is strengthened by the use of macro lenses which abstract the details of theSalon Doré, revealing an invisible yet very material reality. The succession of pannings, equally scanning the furniture and the personnel, creates a floating and abstract space, which is nearly like a mental landscape.

ML: The music also plays a very strong part in this abstraction process, as in some of your other film works. How did you address this auditory dimension of the work, which — I imagine — lead you to commission the soundtrack?

LG: I have invited Nicolas Godin, who is also one of the two artists forming the band Air, to compose and perform the soundtrack. The music is what gives the final tone to the film, it orientates the reception of the images by accentuating the spectral, nearly haunted, dimension of the place.

ML: Your film and installation work is very much concerned with the idea of a “deep time”, a timescale that sets us out of our subjective, bodily perception in order to connect us with very distant points in time. Something in that process seems to be withdrawn from representation. There is the idea, which you just evoked, that the gaze might be other than a human one. I would like to hear more broadly about this thread in your work.

LG: One of my first films was called Missing time (2002) and was dealing with the notion of “abduction”, which is a ufology belief. A person experiencing “abduction” is supposedly kidnapped by aliens and transported in another spatio-temporal dimension. Because this dimension follows different rules, the kidnapped subject cannot consciously realize what is happening. I am interested in this question of the relativity of time and in the perspectives offered by scientific discoveries in that field, such as quantum physics or string theory, which is something that was also developed by Amelia Barikin in “Quantum entanglements and the construction of time: do we need a science-fictional history of art?”, her text for my last catalogue (Soleil double, 2015). In my work, I often consider time as a material that can be twisted and manipulated. In parallel to the film Elysée, I produced paintings from my ongoing series Studies into the past that represent the Salon Doré as it is now but in a pictorial convention, borrowed from the 18th century tradition.

Credits

Copyright the artist, courtesy Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong

Music: Nicolas Godin