2008 École du doc École du doc
Friday, August 22 at 2.30 pm and 9 pm, Room 1
The films presented here have all been the subject of work during a writers' residence here at Lussas. One imagines a solitary retreat, silence, a house. Whereas in reality the residents embark six at a time on a fragile bark, but which each day gains in strength and resilience, to become the bearer of not only their own film but also those of the others. As for the writing... it resembles the work of transcription during which the sleeper struggles, emerging from the night, to retain the dazzling impressions of a dream. At first the exercise seems disappointing, powerless to account for the perfection of a form which resists the written word as much as the dreamers themselves. But little by little, from the dream transferred to language, something takes form, something you recognise and yet that you did not know was there. The aim of work in residence is to help the film-dream find in cinematographic language the proper form to make the passage to others. The form appears little by little. It is constructed through the eyes of the other passengers, in all the films we see in the attempt to decipher how others before us managed to create form. It is constructed through the attentive ears of passers like J. Deschamps, P. Hanau, A.P. Mallard, E. Parraud, or C.Vargaftig, directors who commit themselves unconditionally to the quest of those who are there by sharing their own interrogations. After all this, everything remains to be done. These five films testify among so many others, to the stubborn willpower of their authors to preserve, follow, once they have left the bark, the sometimes fugitive form of their dream. In the face of ever more pressing injunctions to submit to a predefined format.
Chantal Steinberg