13/05/2005

At 74 years old, the French filmmaker Alain Cavalier gave in his own inimitable fashion a veritable lesson in cinema to the international press with the screening of Le Filmeur [+see also:
trailer
film profile], screened in the Un Certain Regard section. Throughout this indefinable cinematographic piece, constructed using intimate fragments of ten years of the filmmaker’s life captured on DV, the director’s work doesn’t shirk from crudeness and concedes nothing to old age, illness and death. Birds enter to peck at grain; a pianist takes his tempo from the bells outside, squirrels crash at the foot of a tree, and a succession of innumerable hotel rooms and Daliesque views of Paris, of the sea, or of a dog, a donkey or the sky. We watch too an homage to the death of Sautet from a bar toilet, a glimpse of September 11th in slow-motion on the TV, childhood memories and the disagreeable odour of mother’s powder, three operations for tumours on the bridge of the nose and a telephone contract signed by his father in September 1943 which specified that the line could not be used by Jews.

Giving the appearance of being a simple family journal, with live commentary by the author, inspired by an immense sense of humour that is both distanced and melancholic, Le Filmeur contains the thousand worlds of one man. Quotes (« an ardent testimony which is dying through the ages like a sob at the edge of Eternity »), ironic humour, images of shameless declarations of love by the filmmaker to his wife Françoise Widhoff, often filmed (and woken up) at night in bed: Alain Cavalier considers life an open book, seizing fleeting moments, fragments of humanity as he plays with the whole gamut of L’homme Caméra. Fixed camera angles sustained by voices off, confrontation between scope and mirror, flying images, the complete palette of framing and movement, methodical wide angles of ordinary details which remove them from banality, skin close views of the body: a journey by an accomplished filmmaker who leaves certain young filmmakers experimental attempts with new technology appear almost derisory. Alain Cavalier, reaching into every nook and cranny, reveals the essential, where the frontiers of documentary and autobiographic fiction are distended. A piece of work which is simultaneously radical and serene, produced, distributed and sold by Pyramide International, it acts as testimonial chapter for the man who won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1978 for Thérèse. A modest audacious man who declares: « I no longer allow funny or touching events I’ve seen to simply disappear. Before I used to write, now I film ».

(Translated from French)