In 2010 I directed three short movies grouped under the main title À LA FUITE (ON THE RUN). The project attempted to activate the guidelines of the drift. Fleeing figures, the characters express the drift through suspense, breakaway or abdication. In a society which does not distinguish very well reality from fiction or fallacy, the project summons the invisibles to where they did not seem to have room anymore.
The second opus is called after the book, Le meneur de lune (The moon leader), a self portrait of the autor Joë Bousquet.
The death and the moon leader.
Not dead, quite, in the sense that life would have stopped, but in the sense that the separation between life and death has lost all meaning for him. – Pierre Bayard about Joë Bousquet, Demain est écrit (Tomorrow’s written), 2005
Joë Bousquet was a french poet, born in the very late XIXth century. Wounded while being a soldier during the First World War, he was paralysed for the rest of his life. Constant pain made him a regular consumer of opium and pain killers. His poetry is haunted by his own experience of time-stretch between his encounter with death and the definitive one to come. His conception of time through lifespan is subject to reorganization and rewinded interpretations of facts.
My wound existed before me, I was born to embody-it.
The sequence is a drift. An old man crosses vast mountainous landscapes. His march is sturdy though he seems misoriented. He wears red boots, as Joë Bousquet wore when he was shot fighting during the war. My interest here was to explore the «mysterious detour in a stationary timelapse» as Pierre Bayard calls it. We shot the movie with a very long focus lens, like the ones used in stadiums to catch football players’ sweat drops. We were so far from the actor (often more than 400 meters) that it became impossible not to rely on his steps expertise. The bond came from the withdrawal. The sun was so bright that the soil’s humidity turned visible. The sound displays a few bow’s drones, as an attempt to curve back the ground.
