——The film’s beginnings

Jaco:　Hermès invited us to think on the theme of lightness [the Hermès theme for 2022]. This theme quickly resonated with us because it connects to weightlessness, to the act of taking off from the ground. We proposed using Hermès’s gloves in “The Flight of the Migratory Gloves”, a story of gloves that leave a hot country for a cold one where they can be useful. And, we thought, maybe we could stage an opera sung by bags. This became “The Opera of Four Bags”.

——The completed film

Jaco:　This film, On the Wings of Hermès (French title: La Fabrique de la Légèreté), is both experimental and classic. It uses the fixed camera of silent films and has a very simple idea—the story is short with hardly any development. We mostly use static shots but rely on music, movement, voiceover, and moving lights to push the story forward. Each scene is, in a way, an illusion, a visual haiku.

——Their philosophy of film

Jaco:　Like all performing arts, film is a collective art. It’s a group of friends working together, where everyone contributes something that brings depth to the work. The story elements we dream up beforehand are vague images and impressions. But once there are boards, nails, glue, and paint, the idea becomes something more concrete. Once there’s an actor or a dancer there in the flesh, it becomes more complex than you imagined.

Michèle Anne:　The most difficult thing is finding the right people and the right team to play with. When working as a team, you have to find people who are good at playing for you and playing with you. Over time, we have developed a team with whom we work well.

Jaco:　It all starts with the writing. I’m used to writing and rewriting as many times as it takes. Only on the home stretch, when the idea finally works, do I feel competent as a screenwriter. The process of looking for beauty is more or less the same. You need the stubbornness to start over and over again until you find beauty. When I’m sitting down to design a film, I have to be stubborn to hit upon a beautiful, worthwhile idea.

——The essence of Pegasus

Jaco:　We start with fragments: little things jotted down and scattered ideas. Then at a certain point, we ask: What could bring this all together? For this work, what brought it all together was Pegasus. The winged horse is lightness itself. So, the film became about Pegasus and its foals, who had each found their own form of lightness.

——Getting down to details

Michèle Anne:　My favorite part of the film is perhaps “Anamorphosis”.

I also like “Rewind”, because it’s very choreographic. To choreograph movements that I knew would be seen in reverse, I considered how to have the dancers move in such a way as to erase the picture of the horse drawn on the stage while also highlighting the set itself. My approach to choreography often involves thinking about how to create movement in reverse.

Jaco:　In the first half of the scene, time runs forwards and the sound backwards. Halfway through, it switches direction: the movements run backwards and the voiceover forwards.

You might notice that in many of the other scenes, hands play a major role. When I was a child, I used to stare at my hands. I felt that hands were something quite special, so it came very naturally to me to focus on the hand as the main character in the scenes that use miniatures. We built a larger set and populated it with hands and tiny objects acting as bodies. It is the hands that provide this film with its deep connection to Hermès and its artisans.

We are proud of the film we made, and it will remain as it was made on the screen. But after seeing the film, the audience takes away fragments and reconstructs them and in so doing makes it their own.