catalogue 2003 en .pdf - Festival international du documentaire de ...

ECRANS PARALLELES
écrivains à l’écran
EP
aimed at a page or a computer screen, the hand writing, deleting or erasing. All the recent films
that tried this approach were mercilessly rejected for this programme. We preferred to choose
films that offered solutions.
La Mort du jeune aviateur anglais (Benoît Jacquot, 1993) is a solution: sitting in her room,
Duras tells the history of the young airman while the camera moves around the Normandy
landscapes. It is both an oral improvisation and writing. The indecision is supreme, as if the
writer was only repeating the nth draft of a text that she was soon going to really write. It is a
solution whose power is that it is perfectly adapted to the «Pythic» modalities of Duras’s late
writing. It is obviously possible, and even necessary, to invent other solutions for every style of
writing, for every writer. In his Ateliers d’écriture, portraits of rarely-filmed contemporary poets,
Pascale Bouhénic chooses to sit his models on chairs, armchairs and benches, a sign of a
technique and an attitude to writing: the (proven) theory is that seated bodies already say
something. There is a certain way of occupying space (which choreographers would call
«marking out one’s kinesphere») that is also a way filling a page. The vocal dimension was
preferred by Arnaud Des Pallières in Portrait incomplet de Gertrude Stein (1999) or Viatcheslav
Amirkhanian in his portrait of the poet Arseni Tarkovski (Arseny Tarkovski, Eternal Presence,
2002), father of the film-maker Andrei Tarkovski. Choosing to film the voice of Gertrude Stein,
for example, or to multiply it in the voices of actors (Micheline Dax, Michael Lonsdale) is in fact
being closer to the Steinian literary approach that consisted in trying to create a «language
which understands the vital difference between spoken language and written language», so
that Stein finally wrote against the spoken language, not to distance herself, but to find the oral,
the voice, the essential and endless.
Stéphane Bouquet
Coda: It is still very rare (for the moment) to see films where the writers themselves represent
themselves, showing themselves as they would like to be seen, directing themselves. Of
course, there is the already mentioned Traité de bave… by the Lettriste Isou who films himself
in Saint-Germain des Prés, which was then a real writing district. But there is not much else:
that is why it is a pity that we are still prohibited from screening Yokuko (1965), the film in which
the Japanese writer Mishima prepares his fake suicide as a sort of trailer some years before
committing his real suicide.
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