The Camera Is a Weapon and It Can Kill You or Get You Sent to Jail

Michel Auder, Cleopatra (still), 1970.

 

In August 2025, artist Liam Gillick spoke with photographer and filmmaker Michel Auder. The transcript of their conversation was edited for the present publication.

Liam Gillick: All your work evokes a peculiar consciousness. There is also something political that is hard to describe. To do with control. I’m seeing what you see. I have to think about the way you put together time. But it’s not always direct. It’s not didactic.

Michel Auder: It’s not telling you what to think. But I am showing you something.

LG: The films expose how everything works, but they are not structural films.

MA: No. They are antistructural.

LG: Some of the writers on structural film in the 1960s and ’70s were quite demanding. It is striking how people needed to police the use of film, give limits for it all the time. How did that affect you? Moving from film to video and its different formats and yet primarily claiming to be a filmmaker?

MA: When I started with video in the 1970s, people would say, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t even know how to make films properly. Whatever. It’s a lost cause.

LG: When I went to art school, the problem was engaging with the photography people. Because if you didn’t know the right f-stop, or you didn’t know how to set the ISO properly, they wouldn’t let you touch the camera.

MA: The photo people are still the same.

LG: They are?

MA: I taught at Yale from 2005 until 2024. I had students all the time from sculpture, graphic design, and painting. But I only had maybe one or two photographers. They didn’t come because they thought they knew something else. I’m not criticizing it. But it was interesting how many sculptors wanted to work with me, even if they didn’t make any video work.

LG: When I was at Goldsmiths in the 1980s, they had a dedicated video studio. A proper Low-band, U-matic setup. There were also big Panasonic cameras with good lenses. I went in there and said I’d like to learn. The technician was good—he let you play with everything. Often technical people are gatekeepers of your creativity, because they stop you seeing what you have seen. You always work alone?

MA: Yes. There are a few exceptions because I’ve made so much stuff. But probably ninety percent of the three hundred films I made alone. And sometimes I didn’t even know what I was shooting at the time but it became a film by looking into the material much later.

LG: When we are together you often just pick up your phone and I notice you are filming something. I don’t know what you are doing. I saw it the other day, everyone was looking one way and you were looking in the other direction. I always wonder, what have you seen?

MA: My eye lingers on something depending on where I am and what I feel. I’m doing less and less of this now, because more and more people are doing it and it has become like a kind of...

LG: Tell me the truth.

MA: No, because there is no truth. Even when I think I don’t film and take photos, I still do it. I don’t even know I’m doing it, because it’s part of me. So I see something. I am always observing. I’ve made so many images. I sometimes see something but I don’t shoot it because I know I’ve done it so many times already. The light on the leaves, the shadows. Or people smoking a cigarette in the sun, with smoke filling up the void. I need to transform it into something else.

LG: What is that then that you’re seeing? Is it like an affect—a feeling?

MA: My eye registers the same thing that yours does but it probably processes it differently, without imposing authority over meaning. I just see it. My vision is different when I’m seeing with the phone or camera. It simply becomes witness to my own subjectivity. But now, we’re all photographers, we all see and perceive.

LG: There are whole periods in our lifetime where the majority of people were not taking many photographs. Most people didn’t, in fact, apart from on vacation or because it was their profession or hobby. There must have been periods where you were the only one with a camera.

MA: From 1970 to 2010, hardly anyone was taking photographs of people. Today we live in a paradox: on the one hand, we are constantly surveilled by the state, by cameras on the streets and in public spaces; on the other, the act of photographing or filming strangers has become almost taboo, if not outright restricted.

My interest has always been in observing human beings and intimacy, not in practicing extractivism. Yet now you can’t simply film people in a restaurant, capturing the gestures of how they eat;  at the same time, everyone is surveilling themselves and streaming their lives 24/7.

In the 1970s, it was different. Even in the 1990s, I could walk into Lucien with my large camera and record freely. I filmed people eating and drinking—not to expose them, but to preserve an image of humanity.

LG: So what is happening when you do that? Are you indifferent? The relationship is strange. Because it is a power to be able to “see” in a certain way via a device. But it’s not about a relationship. It’s about the scene.

MA: It’s about being human, one human to another human.

LG: That’s where the politics might be, I think.

MA: I’ve made all these films, but I don’t use everything I shoot. Sometimes I’ll take just one fragment from hours of footage—the right element that fits my vocabulary. For example, for an entire year I filmed from the fifteenth floor of a glass building at Ludlow and Houston, where I was living with my girlfriend. I set up a camera on a tripod and recorded constantly, often at five in the morning.

From that vantage point you could see people moving inside their apartments. You couldn’t tell if it was Joe or Bob or anyone in particular—what you saw were human forms. They’re fucking, they’re doing this, they’re partying, they’re just sleeping. In this sense, going back to your question whether my films are structural or nonstructural, the only cinematic structure is the human form and intimacy.

LG: Sometimes you must have some specific intentions: I’m going make a film and it’s going to be generally this. Or do you really just shoot and then work it out?

MA: Some works developed simply from sitting around and talking. I did one with Gary Indiana that way—we had a plan, or at least a few ideas. But in general, no, I don’t work like that. Even with Chasing the Dragon (1987). That was when I first realized I was addicted to heroin, with all the pain that came with it. The film didn’t begin with a script or a concept; it emerged from the footage I already had lying around. I just found material in my archives and shaped it into a film. So yes, it has a title and a subject, but it wasn’t exactly “made”—it came about by reflecting on the situation and working with what was already there.

Michel Auder, Chasing the Dragon (still), 1987.

LG: I remember coming to visit you in Brooklyn and you did have a lot of material there. I was struck by all the formats that you had used. It was like being in a time machine.

MA: From the 1970s onwards, I used reel-to-reel, cassettes, Betamax, and then Video 8. And after that those little cassettes that were digital—MiniDV. Until 2000. And then the computer came and I learned how to understand it a little bit. And at that point the archive started to be rerecorded onto hard disk. But most of the time I used reel-to-reel from the 1970s to the 1980s.

LG: Portapak?

MA: Yes. But Portapak was discontinued, they didn’t make it anymore, all the equipment disappeared, so then I switched to Betacam—Betamax, VHS size but a different speed and recording quality. Then I started to copy some of my archives from reel-to-reel onto this format because it seemed that it was going to be the future.

LG: You would copy it real time?

MA: Usually a friend of mine, or an assistant. I’d keep copying as much as I could so I could edit it later.

LG: And at that point you have to copy in real time? Turn on one machine, turn on the other. It takes a lot of time.

MA: You just put the machines on and go do something else and then drop another cassette in and write down what is on it. Because I wanted to use some of it for new films. And then I started again and I put everything on Video 8. So, the same problem. As I went along, I copied most of my archive three times. MiniDV was the last format before I moved to the computer and hard drives.

LG: I liked that format, MiniDV. There was something about the cassettes I liked. You could have a pocket full of footage and you could mail it to someone.

MA: I did all my work in Bolivia on MiniDV. I went to Bolivia for three months and I made a personal narrative of my travel. It’s twelve hours long.1 Then I went to Vanuatu and I did the same thing.2

LG: When you did these two trips, how were you existing?

MA: I often traveled alone, and when I had a bit of money, I would return to the main island for a few days to rest in a hotel, get organized, and then head back out to a smaller island with no hotels or infrastructure. I would simply arrive and adapt to whatever the situation was, filming along the way. Gringo goes to Bolivia; Gringo goes to Vanuatu. I never tried to control or direct the people I encountered—I was more of a guest, observing. In many villages, people would offer me food; paying was not expected and sometimes even seen as inappropriate. There was no money exchanged, just hospitality.

LG: And what do you end up with? What is the footage?

MA: I don’t say day one, day two, day three, but it just goes through different aspects of my experience, with my observations of people who let me film or not. In Bolivia people really don’t like to be filmed. They think you’re stealing their...

LG: I agree with them. I feel it too. I mean, I take a lot of photographs. You notice I haven’t been doing it. This year I’m not doing it for some reason.

MA: I’m not filming people anymore. I’m done. I did it enough.

LG: I always feel I’m somehow stealing when I take a photograph. I also believe in this idea of  stealing the soul. Now you find that people are kind of consuming their own ego or their own desire. People behave differently today in relation to the camera. You look at some of my photos from thirty years ago or even short films and people in Europe or America look like anthropological subjects being filmed for the first time. They just stand there. I’m really fascinated by this.

MA: People know that the camera is a weapon and it can kill you or get you sent to jail. Today, with surveillance everywhere, our movements are constantly recorded; recognition has become unavoidable. I’ve tried to remain aware of this tension. I’ve never had someone say my filming harmed them. Occasionally, a work has been described as unsettling, but that unease is perhaps part of what it means to encounter an image that looks too closely.

LG: It feels like your relationship with the camera and time and people has changed since the beginning.

MA: I don’t use footage of other people right away. I would never take something I filmed today and show it tomorrow, especially when it touches on intimate moments of my own life. When I work with that kind of material, it’s usually from decades ago—often forty years old. It carries a different weight and meaning.

LG: But at the beginning you couldn’t do that because you had only just begun.

MA: At the time, I was working with people close to me—like Viva, my daughter Alex, and others who passed through the Chelsea Hotel with a kind of performative urgency. That’s also why I collaborated with many of Warhol’s actors: for them, the idea of being on camera felt completely natural. Friends of Viva, one of Warhol’s superstars, would come by my place, and I would film them. Often they were eager, even insistent, to speak and perform in front of the camera.

LG: There’s something about the performative aspect of people in your films and others of the period that was challenging societal norms. It must have irritated cinematic purists.

MA: The people in the films were, in their own way, also speaking politically. They were really kind of amazing.

LG: I think it was really influential on a lot of things that happened shortly afterwards with punk and independent music. Going to watch these films that might feature someone lounging around somewhere talking shit about something or just suddenly appearing wearing a crazy dress and walking around in a garden.

MA: That was the 1970s, you know. A whole group of people wanted to be actors. They performed all the time anyway. Brigid Polk, or the poet Gregory Corso. People would always end up talking to my camera.

LG: The myth of punk was that you didn’t need to be able to play. And what was interesting to me about all these films is that it felt like anyone could make a movie. You just needed a camera and you needed some people.

MA: Anyone can make films.

LG: But this was quite a radical idea. Of course I’d go to see Godard and I’d seen the Nouvelle Vague and the Russians. But that was cinema, even when it was a critique of cinematic traditions.

MA: The Nouvelle Vague deconstructed Hollywood. That was the beginning. Then I deconstructed the Nouvelle Vague. I ignored any fixed ideas about how films were supposed to be made—I just made them. I put things together one after another. For me, it’s about editing: that’s where the vocabulary shifts, where a new language appears.

This language unsettled people. It was too long, or too short. It broke apart, it rolled forward. I see it, I film it, I use it. I don’t worry if the image is out of focus or imperfect. A language that slips, stretches, breaks, collapses. Too long, too short, rolling forward without apology. It unsettled people, because it didn’t obey.  If the content of a segment feels strong enough, that’s what matters. The image doesn’t have to “make sense.”

By the mid-1980s, when a museum asked to see my film Jesus (1979), this approach still puzzled people—but it was already the way I worked.3

It was sent back to me with a note saying there was something wrong with the film. I had already told them that I knew there were holes, but I accepted the quality of my film. But they said no, there was something wrong with it because the cut goes like this, and then it goes like that. And then somebody says, “Jesus,” “I love Jesus,” “I hate,” “I love.” So, yes. It still happens now sometimes. People think there is something wrong with my films. Technically, that is not correct.

LG: But what about reception. That’s one example, where people think that there’s a kind of sense of quality, right? That there should be this quality, universal value.

MA: It’s always there. Now people always want HD, they always ask you for a hi-res file. Which doesn’t make any sense. You can make a file hi-res from a bad file. You just put it on hi-res and it makes hi-res. It’s not complicated, it’s just what it is. 

LG: Coming back to the question of reception. People think there should be an increasing level of quality. But what about critical reaction to the work? To retain your fluidity or your autonomy, you must have sacrificed something.

MA: Constant sacrifice.

LG: You must have had many levels of reaction when people have written about the work.

MA: Many people have written about my work, but I tend not to pay much attention. I make films in my own way—from beginning to end, by myself. I only became known as an artist because I was spending time in the art world. It was there that people first saw the work as something interesting. In that sense, I became an artist almost by accident. Suddenly, I could even receive some support from the art world—not much, but enough to keep going.

LG: But at the beginning, there was a community of performers and filmmakers that you were connected to?

MA: Yes, in Paris.

LG: You were part of a film context?

MA: I’ve never been part of any groups. I’m always a satellite to things.

LG: Because you were young?

MA: There was Philippe Garrel and some other people in Paris. Garrel made movies with Nico.

LG: What would they say? Michel is a filmmaker? An avant-garde or underground filmmaker? What were you?

MA: I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention until I could see people liked my films. They would come to my place and I would show a 16 mm film or something like that. And then they would become interested.

LG: So who would be at these screenings? Friends? Or you’d meet strangers and say, I’m going to do a screening?

MA: You know, I was different from most of the others around me. I never went to university—I stopped my education at seventeen. Beyond what I had picked up by then, everything else I learned on my own. It just happened that way. I also had no real connection with the film world, which made it difficult, especially in France, to enter the established circles. People were very closed, protective of their scene. Still, I managed to make myself interesting enough to become friends with some actors—underground figures, outsiders, people on the margins.

LG: And who did they think you were? You were just part of a scene?

MA: They thought I was probably kind of odd. And being odd was enough to enter the art world instead.

LG: What is your accent? Where are you from?

MA: At the time, my language closed certain doors because I wasn’t very sophisticated. I couldn’t really enter the established film world, or even the mainstream art world. I found other routes, but I didn’t yet have the language to speak in those circles. At the same time, I was drawn to poetry—I read constantly, and that gave me a different kind of awareness.

It’s hard to explain how things unfolded, since I never really planned anything. I’ve always lived one day at a time, and that’s how I’ve continued to function. Over the years I became more sophisticated, but I never had money or security, so I was always in a precarious position. Once, I even received some support to make a film from a group of funders. I can’t remember their names now. I forget a lot of things, maybe because I struggled so much that forgetting was a way to move forward. I’ve always just kept going.

But suddenly I was making a film titled Keeping Busy (1969) in Rome with Viva and Louis Waldon.4 Not long after, Agnès Varda was preparing her first Hollywood film with Viva.5 Viva told her flat out: “I’m not going without my boyfriend.” So Varda had to “produce me” just to get me there. That opened a new chapter. I began making films on my own, drifting into the orbit of Bob Rafelson, Jack Nicholson, and others moving through that Hollywood moment. Soon after, I ended up in New York, at the Chelsea Hotel. Shirley Clarke lived there, and she became a friend. Chelsea itself became a stage: it was there I pulled together Cleopatra (1970), a surprisingly big production for me at the time.6 Around then I also bought my first Portapak—brand new in ’69—and began experimenting with video.7

Michel Auder, Cleopatra (still), 2025.

But Cleopatra turned sour. As I was finishing, the producers sued me. They didn’t want the film released, hated what I had done, and tried to block it. That was the breaking point. I decided then and there: I wasn’t going to make “films”—at least not in that world—anymore.

LG: In that world?

MA: In that world. That’s it. That was the turning point. From then on, I was just making video—in some ways, it felt like my downfall, because the images were so strange. Back then, video meant bad-quality black and white, grainy and fragile. It looked like nothing could possibly come out of it.

LG: But what did it do for you? Why did you do that?

MA: Because I wanted to make films all the time.

LG: And it was a way you could do that? Because that’s what artists were doing. There are a lot of early artists’ films at that point, made with the Portapak; generally they could be thought of as structural video. John Baldessari sitting in a room and reciting conditions. Like a game.

MA: They were the artists then—I wasn’t. I was just making films. People drifted in, talked to me, and I stitched it all together. Viva was always talking—she was giving birth, I filmed her, and she kept going. She talked to Andy Warhol, I recorded Andy talking back, then Brigid chiming in. Voices, conversations, fragments, and out of that chaos came Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol (1971).8

LG: So the turn to video is due to the fact that you can just pick it up and start filming.

MA: Exactly. That’s it. I saw the power, the incredible power film had. But not like John Baldessari. They were artists, making statements, debating the usefulness or uselessness of the machine. Me? I just used it. Like a pencil on paper. I started drawing with the camera—making films, simple as that.

LG: How did you edit with reel-to-reel?

MA: I had two decks and I would rewind the tape on the first to where I wanted the new clip to run from and then five times more to where the head records. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. And then I would rewind the second deck. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. And I could then see the last image on the monitor where I wanted to continue the edit. I would run the decks and start them at the same time.

LG: A lot of the artist films of the period, they don’t do anything. They just switch on the camera and they film something and then they switch it off and that’s the film. They don’t edit.

MA: Well I made segments in a similar way—without editing, but short, then cutting to something else. That’s how I made Jesus: no edits, just cuts. I went into the streets asking people, “What do you think about Jesus?”—everyone, from all walks of life, including people on the street who others might call crazy. I’d stop someone in a truck at a red light and ask. I went to the gay parade and asked. I wasn’t looking for two-hour monologues; I wanted quick reactions. In the studio it could be different—with performers like Jackie Curtis or Viva, there was more room to talk, to expand on everything.

LG: But there must have been points where you started something and it didn’t go anywhere?

MA: I didn’t think about it. I made Jesus over a long period. Then I sat down, looked at what I had, and made the final film. It was originally for the Kitchen in New York. That’s how I met Cindy (Sherman). She was showing her work at the Kitchen too. For three or four years I made work for the Kitchen.9

LG:  Who was the audience at the Kitchen?

MA: Lots of people came. There would be a whole line around Broome Street. It was the underground spot.

LG: When you did those shows, would you have to write something down to explain the work?

MA: I wouldn’t write anything down, no...

LG: There wouldn’t be film notes?

MA: No, I made posters.

LG: So people didn’t have much idea of what they were going to see. All they knew was it was you and maybe someone else.

MA: They knew the names. They wanted to see what we had done. That’s all. The public was the art world. Or maybe because there was a review in the Village Voice. After 1982, I stepped away from the art world completely, because I was trying to clean up from heroin. I married Cindy, and from then until 2000, I hardly went out at all. It was difficult. I managed to get clean around 1986, largely thanks to Cindy—she never complained, never judged me, never made me feel worse about the struggle. But still, I kept to myself. I didn’t go anywhere.

LG: Were you in pain?

MA: It was complicated.

LG: So around 2000 you decide to start again?

MA: No. I made work all the time no matter what. I always did. I made those two big works in Bolivia and in Vanuatu. I made a whole bunch of work. And I reorganized my entire studio, worked all the time.

LG: But that’s also the time when the art world becomes a bit more, I wouldn’t say professional, but becomes a bit more regulated. The contemporary curator appears in the world around that time in the nineties. Things start to be curated in new ways.

MA: I also worked with galleries. Nicole Klagsbrun for many years. Also with AC Project Room, with Anne Chu. I was showing there every year.

LG: Although you talk about Viva and about Chelsea Girls With Andy Warhol, you have escaped that period as a point of reference. A lot of people get stuck in a period. They don’t want to escape. They want to be known, and be situated. It is a risk to keep uprooting yourself as a persona. It’s easier to say I was part of this scene. But what does that mean when you look back at the archive? Is there a lot more in there?

MA: I have a whole new body of work that draws on the vast archives amassed by my phone. Often, they are films with still photos. a constant transformation of remembering and forgetting, choice and interpretation.

Michel Auder, Meshes of Derivatives (still), 2025.

LG: You’re always slightly out of sync.

MA: I just finished a new film. Hunters and Michelangelo by Michelauder (2025), which I am showing at Martos Gallery.

LG: These are grand titles. A big thing. Like Cleopatra. They suggest an overwhelming grand narrative, a grand subject, a great epic. 

MA: They actually direct the viewer toward the iconography of power and submission. But instead of grand narrative, they’re treated with outright disregard for it.