January 6, 2012 |
“The best films are like dreams that you want to have over and over again,” says Nicolas Provost, and he should know. A self-confessed film obsessive, his sharply conceived artworks consciously unpick then reassemble the basic language of cinema, creating strange, dream-like narratives in the process. Working with both found footage and original material – a recent piece, Stardust, saw him creating a Vegas crime story starring Jon Voight and Jack Nicholson. The Belgian artist employs a variety of trusted cinematic gestures – framing, re-editing and blending – all to compelling effect.
In short films, such as Gravity and The Divers, the conventions of the classic Hollywood kiss are playfully subverted, while the nightmarish Long Live the New Flesh sees Provost using a painter-like “glitching” process to create a kind of “ur”-horror film from a series of classic movie scenes. Mirror imaging also figures large in Provost’s work, with his breakthrough film Papillon d’amour, transforming a clip from Kurosawa’s Rashomon into a seriously sinister nature documentary. “For me, I always start from the image itself and try to make something new visually,” he says. “It always happens very intuitively and then the rest of the story follows.”
Today, the 42-year-old artist is on tenterhooks. Putting the finishing touches to his much-anticipated debut feature, Provost is currently waiting to hear whether L’envahisseur (The Invader) will be shown in main competition at the Venice Film Festival. Which is, of course, a rather big deal. “It would be a good start, wouldn’t it?” he says, suddenly rather awestruck by the prospect. “I just hope that it’s not gonna end up as a very obscure art-house film. I want it to be seen by as many people as possible.”
Several years in the making – “although I’ve been wanting to do this ever since I was a child” – The Invader follows the journey of a young African immigrant entering Europe for the first time. The political edge of the film suggests a new direction for Provost but the artist himself insists his approach is far from didactic. “I didn’t want to make something that was politically correct,” he says. “Instead of making sentimental portraits of immigrants, I wanted to tell the story of someone looking for his place in the world. Someone who ends up descending into a kind of hell. And then in the second half of the film, I criminalise him.” Eschewing what he calls the “arty and experimental” nature of his acclaimed short films, the feature has a relatively straightforward narrative form. “I wanted to take a very classic story but then ‘smuggle’ my artistic views into it,” he says. “Today’s audiences are always overloaded with images and all kinds of storytelling and that’s something I always think about.” The resulting film is, according to Provost, “kinder than I expected it to be”, but not such a dramatic leap from his previous work. “For every film that I make, for me it’s the same challenge – even if it’s a one-minute story. I’m always trying to think what you can do today in cinema, when people have seen so much. Something that’s strong enough and represents your view of the world as you see it.”
Provost’s own particular worldview is the result of a somewhat peripatetic existence. Born in Belgian, Provost studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Gent before moving to Oslo in his early twenties. “I went to Norway as an exchange student, met a woman and ending up staying there,” he says, matter-of-factly. Living in a country where “you need to work nine to five if you want to survive”, the artist worked in a variety of commercial jobs over the next decade, as a graphic designer and then art director. “Most people are conditioned to find a good job and prove themselves when they’re 25. So that’s what I did.” In his early thirties, however, Provost finally threw caution to the wind and started pursuing his long-held artistic goals. “I had just come out of a relationship and I realised that I had to go on some kind of big adventure,” he says. “But I was very happy that I did it and very quickly found my medium, something that I’d fallen in love with as a child.” He puts it down to sheer good fortune that his decision coincided with new advances in film technology. “Suddenly, there was this digital revolution where anyone could create films using a camcorder and Final Cut,” he recalls. “And the first thing I thought of was to import found footage and work with that – even though I had never even heard of found-footage films before.”
Whilst Provost has always ambitiously straddled the worlds of art and film, his work has not always been easy to classify. “At the beginning, it was an issue for other people – am I a visual artist or am I a film-maker?” he explains. “But I always thought of myself as a visual artist who chose to work with film as a medium.” Over the past decade, however, Provost has witnessed an emphatic shift in the way his work is perceived. “When I started out, it was impossible to show a narrative film in a gallery,” he says. “Today, everyone is doing things with film. Even a lot of fashion photographers are primarily working with film.”
Indeed, with so many artists flirting with the commercial film industry – from Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood directing feature films to Francesco Vezzoli’s ongoing love affair with Hollywood – the boundaries between disciplines are perhaps becoming ever more fluid. Nonetheless, Provost suggests that, within the gallery setting at least, there remains a certain scepticism towards narrative-based works. “Maybe that’s because the art world doesn’t want to people to see that what they do is also storytelling,” he says. “But I’ve always thought that anything you do as an artist should tell a story. Even if it’s very abstract or conceptual, you are always telling a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end.”
For Provost, it seems there is little distinction between the role of artist and director – particularly when it comes to his own particular triptych of heroes. “For me, it always comes back to Hitchcock, Lynch and Kubrick,” he says. “These people have made me dream so much. They’ve created worlds that are almost part of my life. I mean, when I walk in the woods, I’m thinking about David Lynch. When I’m in a hotel room, I’m thinking of Kubrick.” In his artwork, references to the three directors abound – Long Live the New Flesh, for instance, opens with the “rivers of blood” scene from The Shining and somehow manages to make it seem even more horrific. But Provost argues that his debt to these directors goes beyond mere references. “To play with expectation and leave the mystery un-revealed – these are things that they’ve taught me and that I always try to do in my work,” he says. “I think it’s very important not to close all the circles.”
Whilst finishing post-production on The Invader, Provost is currently mulling over a rather intriguing proposition. “Today I have just been asked by the Cultural Centre of Barcelona to make a sex or porn film,” he says. “It will be a similar concept to the horror film [Long Live the New Flesh], where I work on the images until the material somehow transcends the porn.” A dream job for some artists, perhaps, but Provost rightly points out that the idea of sifting through hour upon hour of porn could be rather tedious. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it because porn is often very boring,” he says, chuckling. “It’s just a few movements repeating itself. It’s not really action.”
And perhaps the artist has bigger things on his mind right now anyway. Like the future of cinema, for instance. “I’m really wondering how long we are gonna be fascinated by cinema as we know it today,” he says. “I think that, somewhere in the future, cinema and video games will merge. What I think could happen is that we as a spectator are in the story, as a character.” Provost warms to the idea but foresees one major problem: “As an audience, we want to be entertained and that’s about it,” he says. “We don’t really wanna do anything.”
Would he ever make a Hollywood film? If his debut feature gets a good reception – and having already worked with some serious A-list talent – this could, of course, be a very real possibility. “Maybe for the money,” he says, laughing. “And for the experience. I think it would be good to learn that profession.” Clearly in thrall to the myths and magic of cinema – even as he tries to subvert them – perhaps it’s no surprise that Hollywood has such a powerful appeal for Provost. “But I would definitely see it as one-time thing,” he says. “And of course, I would have to smuggle my art in there.”
by Glenn Waldron
Portrait Cedric Buchet
