Kaspar Film
( Genie, Kaspar et les autres )

Florence Pezon
2011 - 57 min - 16 mm & archives - Couleur et Noir & Blanc - France

"First of all the slightly old-fashioned silent video archives : a little girl, shaky on her feet, hesitantly attempting to put one foot in front of the other. Then a figure, the enormous Axel Bogousslavsky, who brings her childlike stature to life opposite the sea in a discordant pantomime. And finally, a text voiced over in German. These are the components chosen by Florence Pezon. The child is Susan Wiley, known by the name of Genie, who was locked away to fend for herself until the age of 13 and “discovered” in 1970 in California and filmed by the doctors that looked after her. The voice-overs are texts on the life of Kaspar Hauser, stumbled across one morning in 1829 on a square in Nuremberg. Texts resonate written originally by Anselm von Feuerbach, the meticulous scribe of Georg Daumer, who for a time took him in, and also texts from the autobiography of the wild child in his own words. As for Axel Bogousslavsky, after Kaspar’s return, we are party to snippets of work, here a dancing body, a silhouette running through a field, there perusing photos of Genie and chewing over the words of the famous child.
Fusing space and time, approaching mysteries without damaging them – this is the fragile method used here. Not a single trajectory, but passages, zones of contact where one experience meets the next. Asking questions about language, describing a colour, feeling the wind, linking and unlinking using the same gesture. This is how Florence Pezon conducts her poetic enquiry into the way of the world, of words and feelings with the elusive creative gesture, which the conclusive presence of Jean-Christophe Marti, a composer, indicates to us not through words but his work, as his music accompanies the film"
(Nicolas Feodoroff, FID Marseille 2011)