“ I filmed the people in the Louvre the way you might filmed a ballet ”
by Nicolas Philibert
Originally, there was no question of making a film. People had suggested that I simply come and make a record, for the museum, of the movement of a few works which, because of their very size, promised to be spectacular: those huge canvases by Charles Le Brun that you see in one of the opening sequences of the film being taken out of the reserves, rolled around wooden cylinders.
This “commission” involved just a day of shooting. But, on my own initiative, I decided to go back the next day, with a hunch that something outstanding was in the offing. It was late 1988, at the beginning of the colossal transformation process that was completed many years later in the form of the Grand Louvre. They were starting to refurbish and reorganize rooms and collections, the Pyramid was under construction… After years of semi-dormancy, the monster was stirring and many works were being taken out of the reserves.
So I went back the next day, and the day after... and so on for two or three weeks, with a small crew, being as discreet as we possibly could: we weren’t supposed to carry on filming and we didn’t have any kind of official authorization. This meant playing an endless game of hide and seek with the administration. Luckily, in the rooms where we filmed, the curators were too busy to ask us anything about what we were doing. Throughout that whole period we nevertheless had two guardian angels: Serge Lalou who was starting out as a producer, and Dominique Païni who was in charge of the Museum’s audio visual department at that time. Both of them supported and encouraged me, convinced that we had to continue at all costs.
Of course, we didn't have any financing. We therefore had to suspend shooting fairly rapidly. Especially as we were shooting on film stock - super 16 - and recording a huge amount of material. I then moved to the editing room, made a rough cut from a selection of the dailies that gave a fairly clear idea of what the final film would be like and then Serge and I started looking for co-producers. At the same time, Dominique Païni went to see Michel Laclotte, the director of the Louvre, and displayed such enthusiasm that we obtained the "official" authorization to keep shooting.
With hindsight, I think that if I had taken the traditional track, involving submitting a written project to the authorities concerned, this film would never have seen the light of day. I had made a bit of a name for myself in the closed circle of "mountaineering films" but I was unknown in the museum world and I don't see why the Louvre would suddenly have granted me something that no museum in the world had ever granted until then: the right to film its hidden side.
But Michel Laclotte, clearly won over by the comical an impertinent nature of our first dailies, generously allowed us to continue. And so we returned to the belly of the Louvre, not only with the necessary authorizations but also with the guarantee that we weren’t working for nothing.
We stayed there for almost five months, filming on average two days a week.
As soon as the door of a workshop opened, we would slip inside... We had to be very mobile and ready to follow people from one end of the Museum to the other at any given moment. We had incredible freedom and, apart from the scenes shot at night and one or two forays we made into the reserves, museum guards never accompanied us.
We never used artificial lighting, thus remaining as flexible as possible, and also so that our “actors” would retain all their spontaneity in front of the camera. Most of the scenes were filmed live, but there were also sequences and actions that I organized and staged for the requirements of the film, such as the scene where firemen go to the help of somebody who is hurt, and that long journey by the archaeologist, through the Museum’s basements, into the reserves to deposit a tiny ceramic. To give the scene a comical effect, the size of the object she was carrying so carefully had to be inversely proportionate to the length of her journey. I also asked her to wear high-heeled shoes so that the noise of her footsteps would reflect the type of floors in the different areas she crossed: marble slabs, wooden parquet, carpets, rough cement and, at the very end, in the deepest basements, bare earth.
I had decided never to film the works for their own sake, outside the “working” relationship that the people who keep the Museum alive have with them. Curators, installers, stone-cutters, frame-gilders, cleaners, guards, etc. Moreover, I was determined to avoid filming the public in order to give the audience the feeling of being a privileged onlooker of everything that it would see. So we had to be forever juggling with the opening hours and the different areas of the Museum to avoid the throng of visitors.
I hadn't adopted a didactic approach. There was no question of adding a commentary to the images. The simple succession of scenes would suffice to relate the vibrant life of the museum during this remarkable stage in its development. I therefore constructed the film around a multitude of often disparate and unexpected activities, characters and places that, as a whole, ended up telling a single story.
The film unfolds in a highly narrative manner, as if this were a fiction work. It combines two time-frames by superimposing them: the time-frame of a day - from the night patrol to the three chimes of the clocks - and the much longer time-frame of the first stage of renovation as the works are hung for the reopening of the rooms. As far as the soundtrack was concerned, I dealt with it in such a way that it describes the space of the Museum and gives the whole film its humorous dimension.
Oddly enough, the hardest scenes to shoot were the portraits of the guards - that collection of intense eyes and gazes, in which all barriers suddenly come tumbling down.
At the end of the day, "Louvre City" is neither an art film nor a sociological report on the various skills and crafts that make the Museum work. I was eager to tell a story based on living material and I wanted to transfigure reality. I filmed the people in the Louvre the way you might filmed a ballet.
