A material by Victor Morozov about what a „capital of cinephilia ” means anymore and about the pleasure of „travelled cinema”, as critic Serge Daney called it. A parisian correspondence which proposed to relive freshly-seen films, telling the story of fugitive impressions that do not have the pretense of being exact, but that might yet have something to say about a passion. The format will be free, personal, and will only abide by one cardinal point: cinema.

23rd of JANUARY

I saw two films at the Forum des Images, part of the „Tigritudes” program, which brings together six decades of Pan-African cinema through more than a hundred shorts and features. While I was watching the first one, Histoire d’une rencontre (1980) by Brahim Tsaki, I was so exhausted after spending a night in the airport and on the plane, that my mind created this surrealistic collage of hallucinogenic images and dark spots, and so I left the screening not knowing in what country the film was set, or what happened in it. Thank goodness for Ioan, who put me back on my feet: it was Algeria, somewhere in the surroundings of a factory that was prime for disaffection, which had employed many African engineers in the good old days. That explains the English dialogues and the feeling – given the images of this coastal area (which I might have dreamt up?) and of some busted semi trucks – of a film both cosmopolitan and primitive, based on a sort of brisk quality of dialogue and an ambiental mutism.

I recall the second film better, first of all because I kept on wanting to see it ever since I saw the magnificent, absolutely magnificent Yeelen, and also because, this time around, I was no longer cornered by sleep, only towards the end. So, I had the time to understand the dynamics between the two main characters in Finyè (The Wind), the second-to-last film of maestro Souleymane Cissé, which doesn’t resemble the ancestral, anthropological zest that irrigated the aforementioned masterpiece. This is the big town, littered with pupils and students that discover light drugs as they dream of freedom and Europe, but where the heavy hand of the authoritarian father married to four wives is – or isn’t – more than enough to put them back into their place. A very beautiful scene unfolds when Bah, the lover of the wealthier Batrou, is haunting the streets with a big smile on his face, and the policemen mock him with both tenderness and sarcasm when they realize that he is “taken” and that you can’t really trust kids these days… The film’s entire humor rests on a subtle sort of cynicism, which bursts into flame at the very first spark of subversion and turns into a challenge: the hint that Batrou’s father loves his most recent wife – a spicy, feisty woman – lies only in the fact that he is violent to her, without breaking up with her. The criticism of traditionalistic habits also has the time to sketch the portrait of a society set in motion by its engaged youth (as I saw earlier, in Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki). Right when this rather fragile standstill between the sheer force of yesterday’s men and the opaque sophistication of the youth was ready to boil over, I’m afraid that I fell asleep. 

26th of JANUARY

A great hubbub at La Clef yesterday, when they were notified that they will be kicked out between the 1st and 3rd of February. They want to create some hype, gather as many people as they can stropind them, and they’re really doing it, too. I wonder how these people could do this for over two years, ever since they seized the cinema, to organize so many discussions with such different directors: I don’t know what I’m missing here, since if it truly were that easy, then why isn’t this happening everywhere? Anyways, this collective transformed the place – through its truly inciting selection of films and the lively events around it – into a flashpoint even for one such as me, who hardly gets over all sorts of personal skepticisms in order to effectively mobilize… Today’s choice was between an obscure Algerian documentary released in 2020 and Sophie Fillières’ debut feature, presented by notre cher Marcos Uzal of Cahiers fame. I chose to follow my basic cinephile instinct – despite this image of a football stadium from the Algerian movie that caught my eye – and so I went to see Grande Petite, this film from ’94 by this director whose work I (think) that I never encountered so far, even though I knew much about her. It was indeed a confirmation of the still-discreet, yet persistent interest that should be given to these slightly overshadowed figures of the nineties, from Danièle Dubroux to Patricia Mazuy and from Sophie Fillières to Noémie Lvovsky, the kind of female filmmakers that ended up having to work within the bounds of an orphaned cinema, taking their first steps in the realm of the arts right when cinema and publicity shook hands with each other and co-signed the final surrender. I was grilled by the same ingrate fascination that I’ve felt before as I faced this secretive and melancholic film, the type made by directors who no longer set a heavy conflict at the center of their stories, but just an enigma, creating collages (of characters, framings, dialogues) with the archaic paste of cinema in a fashion that is automatically delayed and thus suspicious, which hardly betrays its true intentions. A dim sun illuminated three films that are consummated within the walls of modest apartments and non-descript Parisian exteriors, repeating the residues of a thin plot – here, a young woman finds a bag filled with money and a pistol – and a suite of interactions that lead nowhere. Still, there is tension to be found here, as there is humor and dramatism: Grande Petite is one of those rare films coming in from a creator that didn’t seem attention, satisfied to release a film once every four or five years at a festival or another, appreciated by a handful of loyal followers, then forgotten in the cool darkness of a Cinematheque drawer. 

28th of JANUARY

I saw another film in the Tigritudes programme, this time, one from Guinea-Bissau: Mortu nega (1988), the debut film of director Flora Gomes. I liked it a lot, despite it’s narrative didacticism and its infusion of rather rudimentary pathos that is a little bit uncertain in its means. But precisely because it bears within its images the seed of an innocence that is specific to people who walk across virgin terrains and are confronting certain problems and dilemmas for the very first time, I found in this film a breath of fresh air that is simply impossible to fabricate. It’s a film particularly about a woman that is determined to take a difficult, tall-grassed path alongside a battalion of soldiers in order to get to her husband, who is on the front lines, fighting with all of his spirit for the independence of the country, led by Amilcar Cabral. Very anti-colonialist in spirit, the film might sound a tad dreary – it begins as a long march through the pampas, underpinned by daytime dangers and nocturnal discussions, as we’ve seen before, the kind of film made popular by Apocalypse Now. But war is just one side of the argument, and it is precisely the one that – due to a not-so-generous budget – predisposes it to a certain kindnesses: helicopters blow up, bombs explode, people fire shotguns, but all of this has something cardboard-like about it, as I’d it would be an erruption of a documentary (an explosion is something highly physical) in the middle of a premeditated narration. To this manly segment, closed by a series of shy love scenes between an injured man and his wife, who came from so far away to see him – scenes that delight us with their mature emotion, that knows how to avoid the pitfalls of sentimentalism – are followed by a post-ceasefire segment, which is discreetly circulated by all sorts of topic surroundings post-traumatic stress. After all, Flora Gomes managed the performance of a film that is engaged in celebrating the past of its nation, but which strangely feels as universal as possible (a performance that might be owed to his Havana education). It’s only my third film in this chronological programme – I unfortunately missed many of them while I was home, in Romania -, but I already feel how a force that I couldn’t fathom before is revealing itself, a plural and proteic continent, engaged in all sorts of battles, an occasion for me to be ashamed of all the times when, out of reflex, I reduced this part of the world to a fixed, immuable identity.

29th of JANUARY

Once more at the Tigritudes, this time, to see Lumumba. La mort du prophète, Raoul Peck’s 1990 documentary, who accompanied us at the screening and presented it. I hadn’t seen any other of his films and didn’t even know what the man looked like, so I was rather surprise to see a man that’s very sharp looking at the age of almost seventy, tall and stiff, speaking on a clear and persuasive tone – only as I arrived home did I find out that he had previously served as the Minister of Culture in Haiti – about the film’s genesis, on how he used to wander alone, unsupervised, through the libraries and museums of Brussels, because nobody else was interested in the fate of Patrice Lumumba. I didn’t know what to expect of the film either – although I do believe that I had read a couple of pages about it in Irina Trocan’s book on video essays -, and I truly discovered a proto-essay-film, which, in all fairness, doesn’t go that far when it comes to maneuvering images, but it still has the fortuitous intuition to propose an interweaving of formats, which are perpetually edited, re-edited and questioned. The film is defiantly anti-colonialist, even militant in the amplitude of the ideological voice that it sets into motion through his photographic and videographic archives, and these steps towards a connection between the personal, autobiographical path and capital History that he set into motion seems to anticipate the wave of self-reflexive documentaries that we see nowadays, heavily featured at any self-respecting festival. Lumumba – the documentary, since the fiction film will only follow suit in 2000 – still has the vigor of gesture on its side, the idea to film a crop of images about the present and to expect some spark or another to appear in them, the insistence to ask archives to spit out the truth, by clashing images amongst each other. Thus, temporalities blend into each other, and I can forgive the film its small signs of immaturity and candor, since the mosaic of ages that it reveals, together with their party of nationalisms, culpabilities and pan-historic solidarity are truly valuable.

31st of JANUARY

Came back walking from La Clef. I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands, since the screening of Demy’s Une chambre en ville, was sold out, having been presented by Leos Carax. (As I later discovered upon arriving home, it looks like both screens were full, but, well, I wouldn’t have been interested in seeing Carax on a screen, anyways). Despite the intuition that I might arrive late to the cinema, I kept on going, either out of a sense of masochism, either due to the wish to still go for a walk on these streets, rendered sensitive by the discussion I had with my friend Ioan a few days ago, when he notices that we don’t really go all that often through the Rive Gauche: we spend most of our time on the northern shore of Paris. His observation struck me and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, because, indeed, Montparnasse is a perfect stranger to me, and the last time that we went towards the town’s deep south must have been on that sunny Sunday, last spring, when the high-rises next to Parc Montsouris seemed Mediterranean, and the local bourgeoisie was queueing up at the boulangerie to grab its baguettes and croissants, that is, precisely the small pleasures described by the genial Philippe Delerm in a small book that Cosașu recommended to me, La première gorgée de bière, which I carried with me tonight, and which gives me the joy of picking up a couple of lines while I’m riding the metro. We queued, bought a pain au chocolat that was still warm and fluffy for each of us, and it was just like in the images we imagined as we thought about France as highschoolers, a space of quietude and correctness – then, an angry driver took us back home in an accordion-bus that was shaking on all sides. So, I finished my day climbing up from Place Monge towards the Bastille, a path that I haven’t taken since September. I had the time to think about those far-away times while already walking down the coquettish streets that lead one towards the tourist center, amongst chic hotels and non-stop car washes, far away from the rumble of a cinema, where I saw a load of slightly political and unbearably predictable hipsters, who are only interested in the ways of cinema when it includes the right -isms and the obligatory minor topics. (The merit of La Clef is to have created such an exciting and varied program that it offered a platform that unites people such as them and people such as me, which, I hope, are a tad more contradictory.) In the pale light of the Jussieu street lights, right next to the new, ugly campus of the Paris 3 University, I saw a small rat hurriedly crossing the street, then I hopped onto the number 86 bus to go back to the dorms, and that was about it. I hope to get to see Leos Carax some other time.

4th of FEBRUARY

[…] Then, I met up with Ioan and went to see Denis Gheerbrant’s Printemps dans un square, shot in 1977-78, which was simply a revelation. Not that I were unfamiliar with the subtle and discreet force of his cinema – films such as Et la vie or La vie est immense et pleine de danger are amongst the most beautiful documentaries that I know of -, but it’s fair that my expectations of this sample, restored just a year ago, and kept secret until then, were modest at most. But I discovered an impressive window towards an era of youth that I was much more acquainted with from sociology books, the one populated by small furniture, flippers and baby foot, through which Gheerbrant navigates using Aaton’s camera with an unassuming elegance, capable of unearthing troves of pearls. In fact, I always find myself astonished by the proprietary modesty of this dispositif – a man that shoots footage and is content to just simply listen, sometime throwing a question or two back – which, beyond any other artifice, from the observational convention to the magic of editing, which reveals itself to me in its formalistic vanity. I’m exaggerating, of course – but there is no doubt that Gheerbrant’s oeuvre offers a telling example of what cinema can mean in the absence of money, of crews, of studios: not a hibernating machine, but an artform that comes to meet the Other, generous to the degree that it becomes self-effacing, thus allowing openings, revelations, twists and turns. An entire slice of society is thus revealed to us, captured in all of its aspirations – to be able to have a horizontal dialogue with its teachers, for example -, in its habits – playing the guitar at picnics -, in its fights – the struggle to pass their Bac, the daily road to the factory beginning with the earliest years of adolescence, etc. This radiograph is as warm and supple as they can be – but the strict testimony also lands on its feet, fixed onto the camera in the name of memory, and I remain thankful to Gheerbrant for the fact that, beyond the fictions that had largely deserted the popular spaces, he knew how to film these hybrid spaces of passage and encounter, where people coming from distinct social backgrounds (immigrants, proletarians, bohemians) could share some time and some sentiments, in the plenitude of an informal community that would reinvent itself every single day.

5th of FEBRUARY

In the evening I went to see the talk between Jude and Albert Serra. It was held somewhere inside of the Centre Pompidou, at the basement level, around the Cinema 2 area and the video installation space, right in the hallway, on some plastic things that only resembled sears, something very conceptual and uncomfortable. The two were speaking from a table that seemed to be this improvised work desk in an apartment undergoing renovation: there were cables hanging everywhere, a monitor in the background proclaimed that there was „rien à dire” due to its lack of signal, not as a statement. There, in the audience, I could see the likes of Nadav Lapid, Ben Rivers, Nick Pinkerton and Christa Blümlinger, who spent all her time jotting things down in her notebook. It’s from her that I also gather the hypothesis that everything went so well, in a crescendo, precisely because it was happening under the pressure of limited time, less than an entire hour: what could one discuss in so little time, especially when the ideas they brought to the table were of the heavy kind, such as the manner of provocation in cinema, to which Jude gave two completely opposite examples, Isidore Isou’s irreverent film, and Marcel Ophuls’ Le chagrin et la pitié, this grand, modest and accusatory film; or how to negotiate between freedom and constraint, which Serra said can make one simply throw himself into something head-forward and take ownership of something that is madness, just as the vanguards of Normandy did, who were freed once they accepted to mount an attack, although I really don’t think that this is the case anymore, maybe it was in the thirties and forties, in Hollywood. Now, those who accept constraints in cinema – from pitching sessions to unwritten festival-fare imperatives – are, logically, making constrained films, that is, muddled films, which are enjoyed in normative screening spaces. There was also a moment of dissenting opinions, if I recall well – but Serra either pretended not to hear it, or he really didn’t, cause he doesn’t seem to be fully present, anyways, but in a very inciting manner, which is in fact much more complex that I would have guessed, in the sense that he simultaneously possesses a formidable presence of mind -, which had to do with one’s way of relating to history, as Serra said that he feels inhibited by the moment in which video images appeared, as in that they can never be beaten (what can be stronger than an image of Hitler himself holding a speech, he asks), and that’s why he prefers to dial the clock back for centuries, where the terrain is free, because otherwise you must try to escape the Manichaeism of official narrations and ideologies (which I can agree with) and invent something else, and that’s not that easy. But in his idea of playing tag with capital-H History, to “creatively” mutilate it, I don’t really see how he may co-opt Jude as an ally, who is as scrupulous as can be with images and the past: a zoom, a re-framing is often already a step one must never take in his films. I remain with the sensation of hanging threads, and that what I witnessed was two delicately accentuated voices, the one, a sort of megalomaniacal Dalí, the other, a sort of skeptical Ionescu, who had some fun under the eyes of the Parisians that, faced with the choice of hundreds of events – the most important being the dim springtime sunlight shining outside –, preferred to see this one.

7th of FEBRUARY

[…] Then, I went to eat at a Japanese restaurant, the “Osaka” in Saint-Denis, and afterwards I went to L’Écran, where the 22nd edition of the Cinema Days is taking place, an eclectic crop of films that have vague connections to one-another – I found some similarities at a “political” level amongst many titles, including Sarraounia by African filmmaker Med Hondo, an anti-colonialist, profoundly reversionistic film in regards to the imperialist history of the French. The film concerns the queen of a tribe who mounts a resistance against the invaders, and what is for the most part a rather conventional construction – an alternation between the indigenous peoples’ resilience and the bloody cynicism of the whites – ends up being amplified by an ironic, telling counterpoint, that is, a senseless massacre committed by the white slaves against the white masters. It’s just that, beyond this ending that is inciting due to its paradoxical nature, I found myself rather bored by this indictment rendered banal by the passing of time, which, at a formal level, can only generate but a gaze that is enamored of its own movements of troops across its own frames (the film is chock full of extras dressed up in every color imaginable, and it’s true that many of the scenes are impressive due to their picturesque quality, worthy of the academic orientalists, but its mise-en-scene tends to become repetitive in the absence of other solutions). Of course, the battle is legitimate, an as the academic of color who introduced the film said, „c’est pas du Barry Lindon”, in the sense that Hondo, working in a milieu that was racist and antagonistic, couldn’t afford to create reenactments just for the sake of art (for the art): it also had to contain a political moral to it, a battle cry. I haven’t seen any other of Med Hondo’s films, but I can’t wait to get my hands on Soleil Ô, his debut regarding African immigrants in France, because I feel that, despite all of this film’s shortcomings, there is a gaze here, one that sometimes indulges in jovial tricks, just as the temporal confusion of the ending, when horsemen and bare-chested archers are pursued by young people dressed in T-shirts and flip-flops.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.