William Cliff, poète
Gérard Preszow
1997 - 35 min - 16 mm - Couleur - Belgique

Can a film make poetry be heard ? This is the question of "William Cliff, poet" which condenses its image around the poet in order to make his poetry flow out, fleshy, made of breath and loose stones, a language as familiar as unsuspected.
Cliff reads here his own writings. At first, autobiographic, he talks about himself ; subsequently, biographical, he tells about a fellow writer, Conrad Detrez, who died of Aids.
Meanwhile, his poetry will have travelled to other mouths, through songs (singer Arno set a poem to music and sings it himself), through translators who tell fragments in their own language (Arab, Yiddish, Spanish, Catalan, Flemish), through a child who recites by heart, through a sign language translator who alternates silences with noises from the body. And in the end through the physical destruction of the book : pulping a book is an autodafé authorised by the laws of the market. An by then, that voice of rimes, alliterations and verses will have become natural to us...