In Conversation: Leïla Ferrand on the Cinema of Waiting

Leïla Ferrand has written for the magazine about a film set entirely at a bus stop and about the vocabulary of moving house. She programmes small screening series in community halls in Lyon and Montréal, and she is working on a book about films in which nothing arrives on time. We spoke on a Sunday morning in September, by phone, while she waited for a train that was, as she pointed out, eleven minutes late.

You have written that most films are afraid of waiting. What do you mean?

Most films are built to prevent boredom. Every scene has to move the story forward, every shot has to earn its place, and anything that looks like waiting is cut. That is a perfectly good way to make a film. But it means that one of the most common human experiences, the experience of waiting for something, is almost absent from cinema. When it appears, it is usually a montage: clocks, cigarettes, someone looking out of a window. It is summarised, not lived.

And the films you like live it.

They sit in it. They let you feel the length of it. The film I wrote about in July, Hollow Road, is ninety-four minutes at a bus stop, and what makes it extraordinary is that it treats waiting as an event with its own shape. It has a beginning, a middle and an end, and the end is not always the bus.

You say you prefer to see films on weekday afternoons.

In a half-empty cinema, yes. I think films about waiting need a room with space in it. When the cinema is full, everyone is waiting together for the film to be good. When it is half empty, you are alone with the film, and the waiting on the screen and the waiting in your seat become the same thing.

Does that make you a difficult audience?

Probably. I am the person who stays for the whole of the last shot while everyone else is putting their coats on. But I think the last shot is often where the film tells you what it was about. People who leave before it ends have seen a different film.

What are you waiting for at the moment?

Apart from this train? The next film that makes me wait properly. They are rare. When one arrives, I will write about it here.