On June 6, 2026, e-flux Screening Room presented “Unstructured Discourse: An Afternoon with Jean-Pierre Gorin,” featuring a screening of Gorin’s Poto and Cabengo (1980). The screening was followed by a public conversation between Gorin, programmer and filmmaker Yuka Murakami, e-flux Film curator Lukas Brasiskis, and the audience. The transcript has been edited for this publication.
Jean-Pierre Gorin: Thank you for coming to watch this little film. It still looks fresh. I don’t, but the film does.
Lukas Brasiskis: Since Poto and Cabengo was your first film made in the United States and the first film in the so-called California trilogy, perhaps we could begin with the circumstances in which you made it. Several years had passed since Letter to Jane and Tout va bien. You left France, spent time in Mexico, and eventually came to the United States. Would you tell us a little about that period of your life?
Jean-Pierre Gorin: After Tout va bien and Letter to Jane, my last film with Jean-Luc, I wanted to get out of France. I had become a sort of piñata whom everybody wanted to bang because of the films we had made. I simply wanted to be out.
I spent practically a year traveling through Mexico without any money, bumming around. At one point I became very sick in Tehuantepec. I was saved by a family who owned a circus. There was no tent, only bales of hay that they put in a circle. They knew that if they did not adopt me in one fashion or another, I was going to die. They were kind people, so I joined the circus, literally.
At first, my job was to take care of a very old mountain lion. He was sweet and had no teeth. I overfed him, so he died. He literally exploded. I felt guilty because he was their main attraction. I stayed, doing menial tasks, moving things around. One day I dropped a heavy suitcase on my foot and started swearing in French. They thought it was the greatest thing they had ever heard. From then on, I became a clown and the main attraction of the circus. My act was simple: I took pratfalls and swore in French, and the people loved it.
That lasted for a while. At one point, I thought there had to be something else for me besides staying in the circus. The family accepted this. They had seven girls and seven boys, and the only thing they asked was that I kiss the youngest girl, who had a teenage crush on me. We all lined up, I kissed her in the most Hollywood fashion I could muster, and then I walked into the sunset. She must be in her sixties now, with a tribe of children. I should make a film about that, if I can track them down.
Afterward, I did not know exactly what to do. Manny Farber got me a gig teaching in San Diego at UCSD. I had never taught before, and it seemed funny to attempt to do it in English. Turned out I was doing a half-decent job of it, but in the middle of a class called “Homage to Daddy,” which was about Godard, I received a telegram from Francis Ford Coppola: “Come to the Philippines. I’ll teach you something about big-time filmmaking, and you teach me two or three things about Godard.” He was shooting Apocalypse Now. I stood in front of the class and said, “Goodbye, I’m leaving.” I went to the Philippines. It was a complete disaster. He did not know what to do with me, and I did not know why I was there.
I ultimately made it back to Berkeley. I may be mixing up the chronology, but Eckart Stein, a producer at ZDF, was passing through town. Tom Luddy told me, “Better talk to him, and better invent a film.” That morning, I came across a newspaper article about the twins. So I lied with abandon, told him the story, gilded the lily, and said the children had invented a language, and so on. All of that was complete bullshit because I had not seen the twins or spoken to their parents. He gave me money, not because he bought my fairy tale, but because he wanted me to make a film. I had a little reputation, so why not?
I started working, and it immediately became evident that there was no invented language. The story was not there. In my earlier years, I would have panicked. For the first time, I said, “Well, that is the subject: a mystery that is not a mystery, and a guy who is going to investigate it.” In a way, it has the structure of a Raymond Chandler story. Chandler died in La Jolla, near San Diego. In his stories, Philip Marlowe discovers within five minutes that the mystery is not a mystery, but he is then saddled with all its moral implications.
Manny Farber came to see the film often during the editing and would grumble cryptic remarks. He would say, “It should be like a zipper, the news ticker in Times Square.” I said to myself, “Why not? Let’s do it.” And “What are they? What are they saying?” crossed the screen from right to left and, for good measure after a beat, from left to right. Those special effects were a bitch to make at the time. Now you do them with the push of a button. It was a film about language, so it was a film about sound. If it is a film about sound, then it is a film about the repetition of sound, the distance repetition creates, and what you discover through it.
People kept saying, “It is a documentary about twins.” No, it is not a documentary, it’s about documentation, which is very different, the inherent drama of articulating information.
LB: You mentioned Manny Farber, a singular figure who brought together film criticism and painting. Could you say a little more about your connection to him and the importance of his work to yours?
JPG: Manny was interesting to me because his practice covered the American century. I thought the way he wrote and spoke would teach me something about America, but there was something else. He was also fluent in two practices, writing and painting, and his ability to flow from one to the other became essential to me. I stayed.
Europeans who come to the United States are generally shocked by the amount of space and feel obligated to make a road movie. But I am an old Maoist: you speak only after you have conducted an inquiry. So I stayed. I focused my camera on an inch of road, looking at the beetles passing by.
There was also a third practice that made Farber: his years as a carpenter and the importance he attached to construction, the autonomy of elements, and their overlap. It was a way to liquidate linearity: “and/and” instead of “either/or.”
LB: Can we talk a bit more about the construction of the scenes in your film and what role the editing played in that process?
JPG: Take the dinner scene, for instance. When I told people, “Look at that—it is fantastic,” they did not see it. So I said, “OK, we are going to repeat it.” Repeat the sound, make it appear as letters on the screen. When you play like that, the insanity of the discussion comes to the fore. It becomes Dada or a Beckett play. It became exciting to work on the film as a procedure in which you take time, return to something, and play with it.
In the process, something happened that had never happened to me before. When I made films with Jean-Luc, it was the old missionary position. You started with a plan, executed it, and asserted a certain dominance over the material. On Poto and Cabengo, at about three in the morning one night, I was working on the film and heard a voice, literally. It was the voice of the film. It said, “So, dumbass, are you going to pursue what you want to do, or are you going to follow me?” It was the moment when I chose to follow the film.
I think that is essential. Most documentaries are made by people who want to assert power over their material. I will not name names because it will get me into trouble ... The position is: “I dominate. Look at me, I’m fucking this material.” It may be one of my sexual proclivities, but I prefer the material to dominate me.
Why let the material dominate you? Because when you document something, you ultimately have to confront the fact that at the end of your dance, the world remains. You have performed all the maneuvers you can, but at the end, the twins are still there. The world is still there. It is a story of poverty, which is difficult to convey in California. You always have bright colors, the kind of colors Les Blank gave me. It is difficult to be a punk in California because when you shave your head, you get sunburned. It takes some smarts to admit the world will always be...more. It takes some humility to say to your audience: “Please save me, I’m drowning. I’m fucking drowning.”
Yuka Murakami: The sense of becoming dominated by the material seems to have traces in your Dziga Vertov Group period, as in Vladimir and Rosa, which we saw last night, and Letter to Jane, which we screened at e-flux last year. You insert yourself relentlessly into those films, implicating yourself in the process. Why do you subject yourself like that?
JPG: Because I am a fool. No, I am at the center, but not really at the center, at the periphery. The camera is not on my face, in part because I hate seeing myself. Fritz Lang said that great fiction becomes great when it morphs into a documentary. I took that to heart and inverted it: great documentation happens when it morphs into fiction. This film is fiction, and rather classical fiction at that.
When you make this type of film, what emerges is your negotiation with the material you have collected. At that time, I did the inverse of what most people do. Most people begin with a mass of information and reach a point where everything is explained. I do the opposite. I find something as small as the eye of a needle and put my plump body through it, which is difficult, and then everything explodes. You end up with all these elements that are separate and, at the same time, connected. I have a polysemic imagination. That is the academic lingo. By that I mean a multiplicity of meanings, and that is what you play with.
The central problem of filmmaking, in fiction as much as in these films, is: What does the audience want to see, and when? You constantly think about the audience. In this film, I was a whore. I wanted to be loved. I had been so fucking lambasted for everything I had done. As I said, I wanted someone to bring me home to their mother and say, “Look at him. He is such a lovely man.”
YM: This reminds me of what you’ve written about the essay film, its multiple points of entry and exit—how it can function as the “Id” of cinema, where the polarity between thought and feeling is at play, one becoming the other and returning to itself again. While making Poto and Cabengo, how did you arrive at the grammar of this situation?
JPG: I was lucky. The children were incredible, like the Gish sisters. They danced, they moved, they wore these fantastic costumes their grandmother designed. The parents wore the scars that survival inflicts. They just wanted to assure, and they had these nightmarish dreams of what it means to succeed. And, to boot, there are several villains in the film: the press that needs a Loch Ness monster sighting because the summer is pretty dull, the therapists who want the Nobel Prize, and me, who wants a film. The children were suddenly charged with this mystery. They did not quite understand why people were interested in them. At one point, they realized that, with me, they had a chance to get out. You see it in the library sequence and at the zoo. At the zoo, I suddenly realized that I had never dealt with children. As I say in the film, I am completely panicked.
All this generates some dynamic. It is a dance from concept to thought, from thought to emotion, and then back to thought and concept. If, as a filmmaker, you are persuaded that you have a fixed goal, you are in trouble. Some filmmakers imagine their films in advance, and the moment they say “action,” everything fucks up. They become anguished. Other filmmakers remain in the moment.
What helps you remain in the moment is not having to carry a classical narrative. The procedures in this film come from the Dziga Vertov Group period. You decide: we are going to have a dinner; we are going to have this; we are going to have that. Then you ask, “What can we do? How can we enter this material? How can we exit it, and where does that leave us?”
LB: After Poto and Cabengo, you made Routine Pleasures. Both films are, in some sense, about America, and Routine Pleasures seems particularly connected to an imagined America, one people construct (as those model-train hobbyists recreating the landscapes in your film). Looking back, were these two films a way of locating yourself in America?
JPG: Indeed. In Poto and Cabengo, I was fresh off the boat. I spoke English to some degree and was trying to figure things out. This film is about language. That is why the comic strips appear. Comic strips of the early twentieth century were full of jokes about language: Yiddish, German, Italian, and so on. In this case, it is The Katzenjammer Kids, these little rascals, who occupied a position similar to the twins. By the way, Manny Farber wanted the film to be called “Two Spoke Together,” an allusion to John Ford’s Two Rode Together. I should have listened to him. I was in love with Poto and Cabengo, but the title was a disaster. At the lab, they kept calling it Photo and Garbanzo. They were never able to get it right.
At the end of Poto and Cabengo, you have dipped a toe in the American pathos, and that has immediate consequences. You are one step further in, but you are asking yourself, “How much inside is really inside?” And there is an obsessiveness to that quest: my obsessiveness, which ultimately is going to match the obsessiveness of the train people. Obsession is the terrain that all films traipse through.
The films are games. Their vitality comes from someone playing with things and reorganizing them. They look good now because it is so bad outside. At the time of the Dziga Vertov Group films, there was a great deal of experimentation around us, so it was more difficult to stand out. Today it is pretty dead out there. I may sound pretentious, but Poto still feels fresh to me.
LB: That freshness also seems to be connected to the intertextuality and openness of Poto and Cabengo’s form. For instance, the intertitles and subtitles change their position and size on the screen, which feels like a very contemporary stylistic choice. I was also struck by the freeze-frames, which few films use so regularly. What led you to use them in this way?
JPG: Look at the twins. It is like filming hummingbirds. They come close and they dart away. You are surprised by their proximity, and then they split. How do you film a hummingbird? You put three grains of salt on its tail, and that keeps it still for a while. The three grains of salt are the freeze-frames. People think you shoot and then go home and rest. No. You shoot, and your work begins when you go home because you have to prepare for the next day. In this film, all of that “next-day work” finds its existence in the editing.
LB: How long did the editing take?
JPG: A century. The film was shot quickly because I do not like to shoot, and shooting makes me anxious. I love editing. It is always about opening the material to something else, allowing something else to enter. Another image, a text, a blank space suddenly interrupted by a procession of letters, a sound that disrupts, a feeling, a thought. Editing takes time because to reduce it to continuity is like endlessly playing “Chopsticks” on a Steinway.
Audience Question: Thank you for this lovely film. I kept thinking how lucky you were to film the entire family, beyond the girls. Every one of them is a character; at moments, they almost seem like professional actors. In this film and your other nonfiction work, how do you work with non-actors once they begin performing for the camera? Where is the distinction between being a character and becoming an actor?
JPG: Non-actors are fantastic—but on the first take. The more you ask them to repeat themselves, the less they can do it. Professional actors can. With non-actors, it is about the rapidity of the take. If you do not find ways to frame it, to slow things down, or to ask the viewer to look again, then it is simultaneously too simple and too difficult to see. All the tricks in this film are ways of slowing it down and framing things.
More often than not, non-actors give you something that is paradoxically precious: a certain absence of juice that obliges the maker to bring on the juice. What I tell people is: the subject matter is what matters to the subject. I might not be interested in what interests you, but I am interested in your interest in it. That is what I work on. The only time I worked with professional actors was Tout va bien. They were totally lost to our ways, and we to theirs. It was a pain in the ass. We surrounded them with extras, the working class of the film world suddenly promoted to the rank of stars. The stars did not like it one bit; the extras had a ball. We got what we wanted.
Audience Question: You said yesterday that one of cinema’s highest purposes is to “carbon-date” gestures. I sense that in Poto and Cabengo, especially in its evocation of California and San Diego at that moment. How did making Poto and Cabengo affect your teaching, and what did working in San Diego open up for you?
JPG: This film turned me into a bad teacher. After I finished Poto, I thought, “Whatever they throw at me, I will find a way to make something from it.” The relentless pressure of “finding my voice” was off my back; I did not need to fret about that anymore. But this turned me into a bad teacher. Before Poto, I was in tune with the students’ anxiety. I would see the way their work was leaning and offer hints: “Try this, try that.” After Poto, it was “Do not worry. It will come. It will pass.” A different attitude.
As for San Diego, it was “fantastic.” Did I want to be in New York? Absolutely. Should I have stayed in New York? Absolutely not. I wanted to be in a place where nobody was. San Diego is a desert. It still is. I wanted to confront that and see what I might do with it. When I went back to New York or to Paris, it was alive, and it was this and that, and a thousand other things. But you cannot work when everything is so stimulating. You work in places like San Diego because it is hell. When it is hell, you want to get out of it, so you perform all these maneuvers. I like this film. I like the carbon dating it performs, its colors, and its gestures. I like the way the children are dressed. I like the mother and her wigs. I like the father, who looks as if he has been beaten to a pulp. I feel close to all of it...and, more importantly, it gives a strong sense of the DNA of the moment.
Audience Question: Near the end of Routine Pleasures, you speak about how difficult it is becoming to connect with people in Paris or France. You realize that a landscape has been constructed as a map of where you are, and decide to construct another landscape on top of it, almost as an answer to them, or as an attempt to solve something impossible. I am curious about this in relation to the French cinematic, political, and cultural context you had left. How was that separation unfolding?
JPG: My French friends would ask, “What the fuck are you doing in San Diego?” To retort that I had been kidnapped by aliens, and that is where they dropped me, did not make it. They had no idea who Manny was, and if I told them that I liked to bamboozle students, a look of pity would shroud their faces. You have to understand that the French like people who come in (these days, as everywhere else, they make exceptions for olive, brown, and black folks), but they cannot understand the people who leave. Impossible to explain that San Diego offered me the possibility to create a UVO or two—unidentifiable visual objects. So, in the end, I remained silent and chose, like Candide, to tend to my little acre of land.
Audience Question: The Dziga Vertov Group seems immersed in 1968, but as the Seventies continued, that moment receded. The militant filmmaker assumes a clear, dogmatic explanation for the world’s historical contradictions. Your reversal, putting the material on top, seems to reject that claim to mastery. Does allowing the material to dominate you also reflect that historical shift away from certainty?
JPG: You are right. I am revolted by people who talk as if they have mastered the world. I find it disgusting—worse, comical—to assume that position. People always want to assign values. It’s healthy to evaluate the evaluators. It’s not me saying it; it’s Nietzsche.
LB: Your understanding of the term “essay film” differs from its standard definitions. What does the essay do in cinema for you?
JPG: At the center of what you do, place something mysterious and unbreakable. I always told my students to avoid the straight line. There should be a mystery. The old Greek sense of the word “problem” is something placed in front of you. Because it stands there, and because you cannot destroy it or simply go through it, you are obliged to circle around it. That gives you access to metaphors.
There is a joke I like about a teacher explaining metaphor to his students. He wants them to fire back examples. One child says, “The curtains in my room were dancing in the wind like the sails of a boat.” “Bravo, Timmy.” Another offers the same kind of thing. Then one child says, “It reminded me of my sister.” The teacher says, “That is not a metaphor.” The child answers, “Yes, but I think about her all the time.” That is what I mean. How do you gain access to metaphor?
The essay is the Id of cinema. How do you circulate around a subject you can never completely master? That circulation gives you time, and the circulation is what interests me. You are building a web; something destroys it; you are building it again. The essay is the activity of collating disparate filmic elements and disparate filmic strategies and of navigating freely and ineluctably between them. The essay is a form, not simply a random collection of images with a voice-over glaze.
