Born in 1972 in the Pyrenees, between France and Spain, artist and director Noëlle Pujol has gained prominence in avant-garde cinema. Her experimental approach to language and staging is more than just her trademark; it serves as the foundation of her cinema. She earned her master’s degree in art history from the University of Toulouse le Mirail and continued her studies at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, where she initiated her early works.

In 2002, Pujol released “Twins” and “VAD (Visite à Domicile). In “Twins,” featuring Krystian Woznicki’s voice, Pujol addresses the theme of the 9/11 attacks through the perspective of two twins playing on a deserted street. The short film was recorded on the first anniversary of the attack when the entire city seemed to be mourning the victims. When Woznicki mentions that everything that happened “was like a movie,” one of the twins promptly responds, “But it’s not.” In “VAD (Visite à Domicile),” Pujol starts delving into a theme that would become recurring throughout her career: her life as a foster child. In the film, the director portrays her first visit to her biological mother Edmonde’s home. “VAD” was her first work to be screened at international festivals like the Locarno Festival and the Marseille International Film Festival.

In 2010, Pujol released “Histoire racontée par Jean Dougnac” (or “Story told by Jean Dougnac”), a film that earned her the National Cinema Research Group Award at the Marseille International Film Festival. Through an extensive monologue, Dougnac, visibly limited by his illness, reminisces about the past of René and Edmonde, Pujol’s biological parents. He reveals moments from Edmonde’s pregnancy during which, according to him, social workers attempted to prevent the pregnancy that would bring the director to life. The camera, which remains static throughout the forty-minute film, places the viewer in close proximity to Pujol, as if she has complete trust in her audience.

“Le Dossier 332,” released in 2012, is a deep exploration of the complexities surrounding Pujol’s life and her two biological siblings, Aline and Didier. The narrative begins with an image of a mountain but quickly adopts a bureaucratic and mechanized tone as we are guided through the foster care files of René and Edmonde’s children. Separated from her mother shortly after birth, Pujol faced challenges related to social services from her earliest moments, having been taken from the maternity ward due to a lack of available staff. The director’s distinctive language begins to manifest clearly in this work. The way she intertwines text and image is unique: impeccable nature shots are contrasted with technical passages that address all aspects of the social assistance. The film strikes a perfect balance between the unconscious essence of nature and the formality of human beings.

Despite being filled with sublime moments, two sequences stand out throughout the film. The first involves a car accident, the authenticity of which remains ambiguous. The collision of vehicles visually seems to represent the clash between the different languages that Pujol explores throughout the film, almost like a visual catharsis. The other sequence is simpler: dozens of goats are led down an empty street. What grabs attention here isn’t necessarily something laden with meaning, but rather the director’s skill in guiding the scene, evoking a similar aesthetic to filmmaker Sharon Lockhart’s work in “Exit,” where she observes the flow of people at the end of the workday.

Her most experimental and, so to speak, impersonal work is “Jumbo/Toto, histoires d’un éléphant.” In 1908, a small elephant was photographed near the lifeless body of its mother as hunter Hans Schomburgk observed the animal. The elephant resists capture, and Schomburgk, fascinated by its agility, decides to adopt the animal. Jumbo’s journey is traced through intertitles, creating a dissonance between the narrative and the images captured by Pujol. While in Robert Bresson’s “Au hasard Balthazar,” the donkey is an oppressed figure, suffering at the hands of nearly everyone who crosses its path, “Jumbo/Toto” presents the animal at its center as a much more resilient figure.

Upon arriving in Rome, Jumbo is nicknamed Toto and starts starring in films in the city. The elephant’s career concludes with a performance in the opera “Aida.” Much of the film focuses on the viewer’s imagination, invited by the director to construct the images according to their preference, without precise guidance from Pujol. The film covers an extensive historical period, marked by specific events such as the filming of Fritz Lang’s “Harakiri” (1919) and the beginning of World War II in 1939 (the year of the animal’s death). Through moments like these, the film explores themes such as history, war, cinema, theater, and politics while maintaining the director’s unique perspective, turning these elements into a complex portrait of solitude.

The director’s latest film, “Didier’s Letters,” was screened at the annual Ecrã Festival in the city of Rio de Janeiro. In this work, Pujol delves deeper into her relationship with her brother Didier, who communicates with her through letters. Inspired by the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, the director employs free staging to offer a new perspective on their relationship. The language Pujol uses, both in reinventing Didier’s writing and in the performances of Nathalie Richard and Axel Bogousslavsky, sometimes becomes almost intangible.

The film skillfully navigates between the physical space of the filming environment and how the letters are staged, often opting for spontaneous and extravagant interpretations. Interactions are not limited to just the characters but also extend to the surrounding environment. This ensures that the viewer is constantly aware that they are not merely watching a formal and realistic representation of the story but are instead invited into a world of deep emotions and human connections, where the line between reality and interpretation becomes blurred.

VHS Cut had the privilege of conducting an exclusive interview with the director, who took the opportunity to provide an intimate and engaging insight into her creative process.

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Vitor: The language you used in your recent films was very distinct. In “Jumbo/Toto,” I could see glimpses of Godard, while “Didier’s Letters” strongly resembles the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Is there any influence on your work, or are these just coincidences?

Noëlle: Both films are based on written documents. I chose 10 letters from the 149 available that my brother wrote to me over many years. Didier’s poetic writing fascinates me: he writes long sentences without punctuation. Words are distorted, recomposed and repeated. His writing in Arlequin costume, made up of bits and pieces and collages, gives his language a materiality, a particular sound, a rhythm. For “Jumbo/Toto, Stories About an Elephant”, I spent over 8 years searching and collecting documents (books, press articles, etc.) in German and Italian archives from the early 20th century that featured the elephant. When Claire Atherton and I were editing the film, we cut out all the written material and put it together to create a fiction writing with full-screen intertitles. “Jumbo/Toto” is an adventure film that has as much to do with myth and tragedy as it has to do with the intimate and political side of things. For me, the films of J-M Straub-Danièle Huillet and Jean Luc Godard are free forms that still allow me to pursue my artistic research with enthusiasm, lightness, strength and innocence.

Vitor: In one moment, the actors read a letter where Didier says, “Noelle, you are the only one who knows how to read me.” Do you consider this to be the reason you decided to make this film?

Noëlle: It is the vital force of cinema Didier’s language carries with it that drove me to make this film. His language is cinematographic. To live in Didier’s language is to live in his imagination. He is the chronicler of dreams and reality. He explodes everything, grammar, the World, everything, everything is in motion!

Vitor: How did you come up with the idea of distorting and reinventing your brother’s letters?

Noëlle: I did not distort Didier’s letters. I felt that we had to go very far with the two actors and his letters, to a foreign country. I chose Hungary. For twelve days we stayed in Torvaj – a small village next to Lake Balaton – to initiate trials. It was our outdoor studio! Torvaj was a bit our Brigadoon! I wanted the actors to confront the spaces, take space, in travel, in exile, in the country of the letters of Didier.

Vitor: Nathalie Richard and Axel Bogousslavsky seem genuinely free to stage those letters the way they prefer. Did you give them any instructions or did you simply let them do as they pleased?

Noëlle: Before shooting the sequences, Axel and Nathalie get to grips with the raw texts, experimenting with reading aloud and speaking-singing. They looked for different tones to bring to life the comedy, irony and emotion contained in Didier’s writings. They talk about the voices of Malraux and Camus. Malraux’s speech, pronouncing vowels and consonants, giving rhythm to the sentence. Nicole Stéphane’s diction in “Les Enfants terribles” (J-P Melville). Martin Luther King’s speech, an extremely violent peace song. Attention to the birth of language and poetry. Moving towards grandiloquence with poetry. Axel says: “It’s not just a word, it’s an action”. It reminds him of Shakespeare’s sonnets about everyday things. We move furniture in the fields. I play an extract from a frenetic scene sung and danced by Ivie Anderson in “A Day at the Races” (Sam Wood, 1937), then we go out to record on the country lanes. Film and life mix.

Vitor: Do you consider your work to be close to realism? Because in both “Jumbo/Toto” and “Didier’s Letters” I noticed that your approach seems to intend to make the viewer fully aware that they are watching a work of art, rather than a faithful representation of those events.

Noëlle: I’m interested in creative contact with what surrounds me: people, streets, landscapes and objects. I project myself with them and into them. How to articulate them, deal with the details, the articulation of the details. We move forward, we look together, we ask ourselves questions that we can’t resolve. Life, the unexpected, that’s what I like to share with the viewers who see my films.

Vitor: Claire Atherton, who is the editor of many of your films, was responsible for the editing of several works by Chantal Akerman. How did you connect with Atherton? Do you think she brought some of her work with Akerman into your films?

Noëlle: Claire Atherton edits fiction films, documentaries and video installations. That’s why I wanted to work with her. We’ve been working together since 2007. Claire often compares the act of editing to that of sculpting. Far from using images and sounds to serve a message, she listens to them and shapes them to give birth to the film. Claire places questioning and movement at the heart of her work. She is not so much interested in providing answers as in asking questions to keep cinema alive.

Vitor: “Boum! Boum!”, your new film, seems to be much more narrative driven than your other works. Could you tell us a bit more about the idea behind the project?

Noëlle: I’m currently developing Boum! Boum ! with Clémentine Mourão-Ferreira (Franco-Portuguese producer, So-Cle Production), the fictional sequel to Didier’s letters. I’m using my brother’s letters as a starting point, combining the energy and substance of his language with the Flea Market district of Saint-Ouen. Boum ! Boum ! is a contemporary film, a street film about love and freedom. Its zany characters sketch out a fragmented portrait of the world. As the title suggests, it’s a heartbeat, a drum roll, an explosion.