À LA FUITE – A cigarette with god
FILTERED OR NON FILTERED?
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 expresses 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 seemed to have room anymore.
The first opus, here on display, is called A cigarette with God, a title robbed to Nick Tosches. It pictures, in a unique sequence of 8 minutes, a young woman (the musician Laura «Lippie» Peinetti) on the passenger’s sit of a car, lost into the contemplation of her cigarette. She smokes from the ciggy and displays it through the half opened window, looking for the sparkles to be blown away. The camera focuses alternately on the girl, the cigarette and the reflections on the glass. The glass mirrors the landscape they are crossing; an abandoned industrial area. The sound is saturated by the wind. The wind carries samples of music, noise, industrial and atonal music.
Some kind of oddness comes from the duration of the sequence. Filmed with a high speed camera, a very slight softening was applied to the image. So what should take 5 to 6 minutes takes 8. This reinforces the feeling of time dilation on this trip to nowhere.
The absence of speech is typical of my body of work. Image and sound are very detailed, bodies and gestures are forefront but speech doesn’t interfere, spoken language is unadapted. The artist Anri Sala talks about his interest towards time and speech in terms of «discordance». As if «the beat didn’t tune yet in between time and reality».
Fascinated still by the out of tune I’m now working on a movie with dialogues. The challenge is to intertwine two speeches that nourish one another in terms of music and mechanics but that are ineffective in terms of cognition.
Stock the lame!
Text by Elisa Pône and excerpts of the song Fire of Lizzy Mercier Descloux (1979, ZE Records) and A cigarette with god, a poem of Nick Tosches (2004, les disques du soleil et de l’acier).
Lizzy Mercier Descloux (1956–2004) was a French author, singer and painteress. She is known for having been an important figure of the No Wave and later on, a pioneer of worldbeat. Some of her works had been recently exhibited in the Ricard Foundation in Paris in the exhibition «Poésie Prolétaire» curated by François Piron.
Nick Tosches (1949–2019) was an American poet, writer, biographer and music journalist. Singular voice, he is especially sensitive to marginal figures or untypical trajectories. Dino: living high in the dirty business of dreams, is a pitiless portrait of the show business industry and its vacuity. He is one of the most exciting authors on rock’n roll music and its archeology.