Propos recueillis par Neja Tomšič à l'occasion du Berlin Documentary Forum 2, où Eyal Sivan présentait son projet Montage Interdit, une archive en ligne consacrée à l'exploration et l'expérimentation des possibilités du montage documentaire. Publié dans le recueil Outer Views: Conversations with Artists (artisttalk.eu / momento-films). Sivan y retrace son parcours de photographe autodidacte devenu documentariste — de ses débuts en photographie de mode à son premier film Aqabat-Jaber, Passing Through (1987), primé au Cinéma du Réel —, puis revient longuement sur la controverse suscitée en France par Route 181, coréalisé avec Michel Khleifi, autour d'une scène de coiffeur comparée à celle de Shoah de Claude Lanzmann, et sur ce qu'il appelle le « montage interdit » : le refus de lier des événements historiques distincts sur la ligne du temps.
Let's start with your background and education. You quit school and you never studied film.
I have no formal education, I left school quite early, I never finished my A levels. [...] I never forget that cinema is about labour first of all. [...] This is also why I don't teach film making as such – I teach film thinking. [...] Film making can be learned through the making, not by teaching the making.
Being a fashion photographer, how and why did you make your first film? What was it about?
[...] When I was in my last years in high school [...] I took a beautiful girl to make a session of fashion photographs in the desert of Judea next to the Dead Sea [...] officially written down as an abandoned refugee camp on maps and in guides. [...] And a few years later [...] I recalled that camp and decided to make a film about it, which became my first film. It's called Aqabat-Jaber, Passing Through (1987) [...] I presented it to the Cinéma du Réel competition at the Centre Georges Pompidou [...] and I got the first prize for my first film.
What was in the film that provoked this response? [about Route 181]
What provoked this response was in fact one scene [...] a Palestinian barber speaks about a massacre that took place in 1948 by a Jewish militia. He tells his story [...] while cutting the hair of the co-director of the film, Michel Khleifi, and this scene was seen as a direct analogy or comparison with the famous barber scene from Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. [...] This is what I call a forbidden montage, the fact of refusing to see, to consider that a historical event is unique on the timeline of history and not accepting the fact that events can be linked. [...] I know that if the union of Europe will continue to be about who is not European, we're coming back to the catastrophe of Europe. [...] Europe always finds its new Jews, in this case the Muslims. [...] We are the ones that colonized, we're the ones that massacred [...] If Europe won't stop it, Europe will kill itself, and when I say kill itself it's exactly what happened in the '40s, Europe killed itself.
Source : Neja Tomšič, « Eyal Sivan », in Outer Views: Conversations with Artists, artisttalk.eu / momento-films, 2012.