Impact was shot with a fifteen-person team, including seven cameramen whom I directed from a distance, by walkie-talkie. We spent eight months in preparation for a shot which was not to exceed twenty minutes. I hired cameramen from television, specialists in real-time filming, for example, sports events, but also people from the cinema, like my director of photography (Valérie Le gurun). The film was edited in the same way I directed it during the event by shifting my gaze from one monitor to the other; the black cuts were there and I was already in an editing process. But still more, it was the memory of this incident that gave me the formal solution for the editing. An accident provokes the kind of memory in which time seems incredibly short and yet also long, because it's swarming with details, while space appears without any depth of field.

'11:02' is the hour marked on the dashboard clock of the car which is going to provoke the accident, an image one sees in the film just a few seconds before the impact. The sound track corresponds exactly to the images I filmed. The little noises that punctuate the film, when the black appears between two shots, are the beginning of the sound that matches what will be the following image. In short, these sounds are the possibility of an image, an image which I subtracted in the editing.

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