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FrAlexis Kavyrchine talks about his approach to the different eras in Cédric Klapisch’s "La Venue de l’avenir" ("Colours of Time")
By Brigitte Barbier for the AFC
Cinematographer Alexis Kavyrchine, who has already worked with Cédric Klapisch on several of his films, including Ce qui nous lie (Back to Burgundy) and En corps (Rise), has created a subtle visual style for his latest film, capturing both the contemporary era and the late 19th century. La Venue de l’avenir is being screened Out of competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. (BB)
Brought together by the unexpected inheritance of a house in Normandy, four cousins who had never met before set out to discover their family history. As they search through the house, which has been abandoned since the 1940s, they piece together the life of their ancestor Adèle Vermillard, a young woman who lived there in 1895. Moving back and forth between the 19th century and the present day, they find in the remnants of the past what will enable them to better envisage their own future.
Starring Suzanne Lindon (Adèle), Abraham Wapler (Seb), Vincent Macaigne (Guy), Julia Piaton (Céline), Zinedine Soualem, Sara Giraudeau, Paul Kircher and Vassili Schneider.
Even though La Venue de l’avenir is quite different from Cédric Klapisch’s previous films, have you returned to a way of working that is specific to your collaboration?
Alexis Kavyrchine : As there are different challenges with each film, we adapt our approach. But it’s always cinema that gives pleasure, that doesn’t hide from being cinema, and that is made to bring people together. Cédric’s films always explore what it means to live together, and La Venue de l’avenir is no exception. I think this is more relevant than ever. These distant cousins, who discover they are related when they inherit something, don’t know each other and are all very different. They get to know each other and manage to become a real family.
How did you approach the rather difficult task of filming for a montage that switches between different time periods so often?
AK : It’s always very engaging to work on several time periods. The idea was to approach the contemporary era and the end of the 19th century in a slightly different way. The film plays on the comparisons, contrasts and similarities between the two.
Cédric is very attentive to color in his aesthetic choices, and we wanted to find different looks to distinguish the two eras without breaking the unity of the film.
For the contemporary era, we really wanted to embrace the digital aspect, while trying to create a rich image. We wanted to make sure that the contemporary era was no less joyful than the historical era.
Our goal was for the characters to be embodied, that we can feel the sun and the textures, with slightly electric colors, sometimes very bright, with slightly aggressive yellows and pinks. We tried to find a contemporary color palette.
For the older period, Cédric had the idea of using colorisation to transport us into an imaginary "period" with something a little like colorized pictures or autochromes, like late 19th-century photography.
The images for the late 19th-century scenes exude a certain charm and subtle romanticism. Can you explain your process for treating these images?
AK : The image processing was quite extensive, and the process took place in several stages. I made LUTs for the shoot, then there was an initial color grading phase to obtain an image that we were happy with as a base reference. This reference was used by Jérôme Da Silva, from the company Color’Histoire, He colored the black and white pictures we sent him.
This colorisation immediately conjures up a strong imaginaire, even subconsciously, with a wide variation in saturation: small characters in the background remain completely black and white, while the red dress of the character in the foreground becomes a flat red. The colorisation also introduces imperfections, small artefacts, bleeds and color vibrations that suddenly shift slightly when there is movement.
Then, during color grading, we either used this colorized image as it was or mixed it with the base image to harmonise according to the scenes.
What made you decide to mix the recolored image with the original image?
AK : Colorisation brings greater color separation and a reduction in the number of colors. That was obviously what interested us, as in the early period sequences when Adèle leaves for Paris, where we kept the image 100% colorized. But for some sets, the base image was more interesting because of its greater color depth.
Colorisation sometimes caused the faces to look flat, with a lack of skin tone. So we reworked these faces by adding a little digital touch from the uncolored reference image.
The whole game was to try to make the image transport us into an imaginary world by getting as close as possible to the look of the colorised images of the time, while ensuring that this effect never came to the fore.
Everything that makes up the image, the costumes, the sets, is incredible. You always have to remember that all these elements come together with your work to create the power of this visual universe.
AK : It’s true that every department did a magnificent job, and we wanted to highlight the colors of the sets and costumes, the attention to detail in the make-up and hairstyling. And the actors are fantastic, they have a very strong presence. We had to do justice to all this richness.
La Venue de l’avenir is about images and the representation of images with the advent of photography.
AK : Cédric also wanted to film this moment in history when the arrival of photography revolutionized painting and, in a way, led to Impressionism. The representation of nature plays an important role in the film.
Did you use different filming equipment for each period?
AK : The main camera was a Sony Venice 2. However, the lenses were different for each period. We chose Cooke Full Frame x1.8 anamorphic lenses for the period. These are very beautiful lenses that allow you to achieve a shallow depth of field even for wide shots. This allowed us to get closer to the camera-obscura photographs of the period and, in most cases, to achieve a very charming blur.
For the contemporary part, the initial approach was to film a lot handheld in a light and lively way. We chose the Angénieux Optimo 28-76mm zoom for this reason, but also to have spherical lenses with very different blur effects.
Cédric is very pragmatic; he is guided first and foremost by the desire to tell a story, to make people smile and move them. This pragmatism quickly disrupted our somewhat theoretical initial approach. The film is told in Cédric’s style, and we quickly and happily filmed period sequences with a handheld camera and created highly composed shots for the contemporary scenes. In the end, our two stories come together, just as our characters do throughout the film.
Were the period settings, such as the café and the streets of Montmartre in Paris, shot in a studio?
AK : Yes, the restaurant "Le Rat Mort" and the surrounding streets were shot in a studio. Some of the night-time exterior streets are real streets, with VFX used to remove the light bulbs from the street lamps and replace them with flames, for example.
Actually, there are still lamplighters, but this is the very beginning of public lighting, and a very romantic scene perfectly illustrates the magic of this new invention.
AK : Yes, we’re at the cusp of the transition from flame to electricity, so we tried to play with a mixture of the two. Today, we consider electric light to be warm, but it seems that at the time it was perceived as very white and dazzling, giving the impression of daylight.
For a key scene in the film, we filmed the actors against a green screen and the VFX team recreated the Paris of that era at night, with this avenue lit by electricity, which does indeed look very white compared to the rest of Paris, which is lit by gas street lamps.
(Interview conducted by Brigitte Barbier for the AFC)
