Dogora: Open Your Eyes debuted in the United States at the French Institute Alliance Française on Tuesday, Jan. 29, following several weeks of screenings of Patrice Leconte’s films. But the French director did not limit his visit to midtown. As part of the “On Set With French Cinema” program sponsored by Unifrance, an organization dedicated to promoting French film, Leconte led a master class here at Columbia.
Open to graduate film students (mostly aspiring directors), the class offered Columbia students rare insight into aspects of filmmaking that are not commonly or openly discussed. Gabriel Taraboulsy, Unifrance’s student coordinator for Columbia, appreciated the fact that much of the class focused on what Leconte “screwed up ... how, in hindsight, he would redo certain things knowing what he knows today about films he made 20 or 30 years ago.”
Leconte, if anything, came across as grounded and direct. Funny and self-deprecating, he used colorful French (translated reluctantly by the interpreter) to shed light on the messy process of filmmaking and to give some hearty, general advice. For example, one absolutely must have a “personal reason” to make movies, and it is imperative to retain one’s vision: “Never let go of the rope,” Leconte said. When asked to reveal his own drive for filmmaking, he said, “I don’t want to keep my emotions for myself. I prefer to try to share them.” He also added that “You can’t change the world by making films. But to make the world better, to make people better—that’s possible.”
Perhaps it is with these aims in mind that Leconte dived into the highly innovative documentary and musical set in Cambodia. Dogora: Open Your Eyes was inspired by Leconte’s own stay there while visiting a relative in December 2002. Claiming that no other country had so completely touched him, Leconte decided to return to Cambodia to film a documentary “with neither actors nor a script, without dialogue, without a word.” As if to make Dogora as unique as possible, Leconte chose to set the footage to French composer Etienne Perruchon’s Dogora, from which the film borrows its title. The decision to pair the distinctly European-sounding score sung in an invented language with footage of a nation in Southeast Asia captured by a French lens is, to say the least, bizarre. The result, however, is strangely organic. It seems as though nothing could be more natural.
In spite of its title, Dogora: Open Your Eyes is far from didactic, and as Patrice Leconte firmly insists, it is not political. Instead, it is incredibly human and indescribably observant. The music and the footage unite so perfectly that the absence of narration becomes trivial. Leconte’s selection of scenes chosen from an original 55 hours of film is a remarkable condensation of life. The images are vivid: the golden ambience at a dance contrasted with the blue dusk enveloping bicyclists on their way home, a hand tying yellow and orange balloons to Christmas lights, dozens of travelers crowded together for a bumpy ride on the top of a truck. Leconte humanizes the most impersonal and inhospitable of environments. He reveals the individuality of a uniformed worker despite the sheer size of the factory and the cold, white lights. Dogora even follows children to the largest garbage dump in the world, though their matter-of-fact ease at navigating the refuse is not meant to shock but to be relatable.
In discussing Dogora, Leconte expressed hope that the film would somehow change the way the audience viewed others. “If they begin to look around them and see what they see, and they see it with more interest and more tolerance, then in fact what I’ve done is I’ve managed to change the world a little bit by changing that person,” he said. Always avoiding pretentiousness, Leconte added: “It was never really my intention to do this in a banner-waving way, doing it for the cause of humanity. I actually made it in a much more modest and personal way. It was my view of things, but I didn’t want to demonstrate. I didn’t want to prove things—I just wanted to show things the way they were.”