Katalog 2013.pdf - Visions du Réel

12 éditorial
editorial
by LUCIANO barisone, director of visions du réel
“Men will go to admire
the tops of mountains,
the waves of the sea,
the vast length of rivers,
the circuits of the ocean,
the transits of the stars,
and they abandon
themselves.”
Saint Augustin,
“Les Confessions”
More than a century ago, the image of a
train flashed into a dark room, heralding
the birth of a phenomenon that marked
the age of modernity. In this way, cinema
took shape. A frame, that of painting,
theatre, photography and, within this
frame, moving figures, objects, natural
phenomena and human bodies produced
the closest, the most faithful, “image” of
the real world. But because real things
became “images”, they no longer represented
only the concrete but also something
beyond the physical limits of the
present moment. Through cinema, they
returned to the memory of the world, and
they became universal. Once represented,
the real thus transformed into myth.
However, this entire process was not
completely new. It was new from the
viewpoint of technology and the mass
media effect generated, but it was not at
all new in its narrative device that corresponded
to what had already been
adopted at the dawn of human civilisation,
when the experience of otherness
was reported by oral or figurative narratives
and led to reflections on the world.
Seeking otherness has never been only
a question of travelling, walking the
earth, searching for places and people
unknown. Looking for the other always
comes down to looking at oneself.
To find this “me” – hidden behind this
“other” – you need a meeting, a sharing,
a need, a faith. This desire to construct
an “image” refers to the possibility of
filming the visible to capture the unseen.
That is to say, filming man to refer to
humanity, speech to identify the mind,
the body to perceive the soul. In the end,
it is a question of filming the “invisible”.
This is what Gilles Deleuze suggested
when he said that filmmakers are thinkers
who think in movement-images and
time-images, rather than in concepts.
This is what Petrarch, the Italian poet,
experienced in his exile in Carpentras, at
the end of his ascent of Mont Ventoux,
when the vast landscape inspired him
with an overwhelming vision of his own
existence. This is what is also seen by
the authors of the 110 films in competition
in the Visions du Réel program – a
selection that adopts criteria such as
the quality of filmed stories, freedom of
artistic expression, respect for the audience
and the filmed person – as well as
by those of the Focus section on contemporary
Lebanese cinema and the
Ateliers, dedicated this year to Latvian
director Laila Pakalnina and Israeli filmmaker
Eyal Sivan.
The Festival, which is preparing to celebrate
an important anniversary next
year (45 years of the Festival itself and
the 20th anniversary of Visions du Réel)
remains the convivial forum it has always
been, a place for encounters between
images and words, cinema and thought,
those who make films and those who
watch them. All of this takes place with
the mark of human experience that
inspires all of us, the actors and viewers
of the world.
Though the facets of this edition are
many, it is not, however, our job to point
them all out: we leave this pleasure to
the audience who will find aspects of
their lives in the stories told and will
allow themselves to be seduced by the
references, analogies and contrasts,
thus contributing to the very construction
of the Festival through encounters
and reflections. For our part, we
have discovered major themes such as
exploration and discovery, illuminated
from their political, social, economic
as well as human, intimate and private
perspectives.
Faced with the contradictions of a globalised
system, the world is searching
for a possible future. Following
the social unrest of recent years that
has affected the West, the East and
even the Arab world, filmmakers from
across the globe reflect on the current
situation, explore new ways of living,
and imagine the future. The films in this
edition reflect this state of affairs; they
are somehow the result of it, also from a
formal viewpoint.
For the Italian poet Tasso in the 16th
century, artistic creation should be like a
bitter medicine hidden beneath a sweet
taste. By adopting aesthetic and narrative
forms for their stories that invite
the audience to journey, discover and
dream, the films of Visions du Réel come
from a place where the sweet explosion
of emotions and the bitter lucidity of
thought meet.
Luciano Barisone