The following Q&A took place following the “12 Films by Alexandre Galmard” screening at United Unlimited in Toronto (October 16, 2026), presented by Quantity Cinema. It has been lightly revised.
Isiah Medina: It’s a pleasure to introduce these 12 films by Alexandre Galmard. Jonathan Rosenbaum has compared films to acquaintances, companions, friends even — you to get know a film over time. I have seen these films again and again over the years. There are many pleasures to experience, questions they carry, but the highest praise I can give is the fact that watching them makes me want to shoot more, edit more, make more pictures, watch more pictures, and think harder, and think softer. His work reminds me we have all the tools we need, we just need the courage to continue to look, and have the courage to be looked at. And as Craig Keller put it, ‘films play back the same way every time. We return to them over and over again […] they’re a conversation, a sitting for a self-examination. The ‘characters’ don’t have a destiny because they don’t need one. We do. For better or for worse, we are the cinema.’ These films remind me of the need for a destiny, a need for a direction, the possibility of going beyond our destination. Thank you for attending this projection.
1.
IM: I was thinking of how there’s the distinction between a picture and an image, that a picture is what we see with our senses, but the image is what appears in our mind, and cinema is this very question of the difference between picture and image. The great filmmakers are picturemakers but they endeavour to make an image. And I was thinking this is perhaps also true of the difference between sound and music. As I know you also make music I was wondering what is the link between music and images in this manner, is there a way you make music or images that is the same or different? We spoke last week about Eisenstein’s critique of the fetishism of matter, which I was also curious to hear you speak on and how that may relate to these image / music questions and distinctions.
Alexandre Galmard: We usually take pictures and sounds to be the raw material, the letters from which something is constructed, but Eisenstein, among many others, has been reversing the tendency. Pictures and sounds, which as we know are becoming more and more generated by prompts, are in fact the language-bound material that music or montage allows us to go beyond. The same way that there is a musique concrète, what we’re perhaps dealing with here is something like an image concrète, in the meaning you’ve defined. Similarly to real abstractions, it’s not so much that we create these mental projections for ourselves, but that they become true in practice.
Music isn’t meant to be heard, it is meant to be played. It thus arguably becomes a principal operator of ideology, a phenomenon Lacoue-Labarthe referred to as musicolatry, music as that which came to replace idolatry. Today, idols are lip-syncing ‘live’ on stage and in music videos, and I’m reminded of Eisenstein’s idols and his dismantling of their symbolic value. For all our world of images, it is undoubtedly true that music is central to the disciplinary organization of our minds. What better than an intangible sound to control the general scope of our imaginary?
Personally, I make images and music with the same approach. I never consider myself a professional cinematographer or musician. I’m somewhere in the middle of these two forms of non-mastery: simultaneously an untrained painter and an under-performed musician. My aim is thus something like the product of both painting and music, in the form of an amateur animation.
2.
IM:This next question is related to how one shows the world, the state of the world, or how to show the world without its state immediately, and by state, of course, I mean just what can be counted. Or in another way, how we recount our lives. For example I always loved this idea of Godard that we have to find a way to tell our day, cognize our day, without it sounding like a police report. When the police ask you what you did that day, you answer in a particular statist way. I was thinking of this when I see the police that appear in your work. So when you show a day or days in your cinema, how do you go about it? One of my favourite things about your work is this explosion regarding how one can present the ‘day to day’ which isn’t obvious. There’s nothing less obvious than the ‘day to day.’
AG: It’s true. The fact is that the act of showing is always bound up with the situation of enunciation. My interest lies in the pursuit of what an eloquence of the present can be, and indeed an eloquence beyond the standards of language. I am reminded of Goethe when he said that all poetry is a poetry of circumstance, and of Mallarmé who, despite writing a great deal of it himself, nonetheless took it to be incapable of amounting to a book, remaining merely an “album,” like a series of stances, fixed states, as if one must learn how to change the world by changing the way we understand the world changing, by changing alongside it.
“Every day possesses a well-defined sense of the form which informs where to go in the treatment of an idea.” Well, Schoenberg actually said “every era…” but I do believe entire eras were defined in days. It is this sort of ever-tangential path that is so primordial to anything that wishes to anticipate what will project itself beyond its own ending. If philosophy is like the famous Owl of Minerva, which takes flight once the day has passed, once history has realized itself, then cinema, just like its equally famous nuit américaine, imposes a night while the day is still at hand. Philosophy is making different puzzles out of the same pieces, while cinema remakes the same puzzle with new pieces every day.
3.
IM: This might be a continuation of the critique of the fetish of matter; I was wondering how, in your work I see this back and forth between sense experience, which of course is already conceptual, and on the other side, the geometry of the forms. How do you execute this back and forth, how do you make geometry sensible and sensibility geometric? The other day you were talking about the history of the interval in Vertov and others, maybe you can expand on your thoughts on the intervallic.
AG: The opposition of senses is a geometrical adventure. I think it can be thought of as a depth of field, which you can pull back and forth from. I always liked that, while going to infinity, there is a stopping point to the necessity to count the focal point. As for theories of the interval, there exist indeed two interpretations developed between Vertov and Eisenstein that I think are very relevant to us.
For Eisenstein, who quickly moved away from the rhetoric of political theory, the interval derives directly from music theory: “the quantity of interval determines the pressure of the tension,” or “the phases of tension: rhythm.” Cinema and music, both being montage of different senses, each becomes that which spills over its own bodily parts. He mentions, for example, the “inaudibility” of certain intervals. Take Arendt’s formula, where “the political is the space-that-is-between-men” or “exterior-to-man”: cinema, then, is perhaps the space that is between shots, external to the audio-visual envelope, or rather, the envelope itself. A space, to put it in Vertovian terms, that is “the negative of time.”
Vertov draws directly on mathematics and physics, especially, like many artists of the time, on the theory of relativity, which he wished to adapt for the screen. For him, “intervals (the transition from one movement to another) are the material, the elements of the art of movement, and by no means the movements themselves.” The inaudible movements between movements, in cinematic or musical terms, are like, in your own words, the conditions for a motion study without bodies.
People usually speak of this as the eternal quarrel between two filmmakers, between two genres: State fiction or the people’s documentary. But I think we must hold both readings more loosely. Robert Beavers, who was showing some work in the city last week, seemed to me to defend the identity of Vertov’s eye and Eisenstein’s fist when he claimed that “the eye is the hand.” Such a stereoscopic vision enables the practice of an interval between two distinct yet overlapping theories of the interval.