2019 Editorial Editorial
What is the Real? To this essential question which dogs documentary cinema, Juan-David Nasio, a famous psychoanalyst and astonishing pedagogue, answers in an eponymous film: “a black hole“, “that which it is infinitely impossible to know”. In his irreplaceable tone, he goes on: “images have the function of hiding the Real”. As simplifying and obscure as these two short propositions may seem, everything becomes nonetheless clearly concrete in the psychoanalytical method of course, but also in what interests us here more particularly, the production of images. What emerges at the surface of things and beings? How precisely do filmmakers invent situations in the hope of approaching, perceiving, touching flashes of the Real, this Real impossible to grasp. In the intonation of a voice, the shimmer of a gaze or the tension of a gesture, ultimately in the vibration of the image, what can we perceive of their unknowable side which manages to touch us?
Alain Bergala will explore for us “cinema-creation” in search of those moments of refraction within films. Just as troubling and engaging is Érik Bullot and Muriel Pic’s proposal to think of cinema as an experience of disorientation that exposes us to the hypothesis of our animal archive and reminds us how “the birth of film arrived to re-establish our relationship to sensory perception”. Federico Rossin will not say the contrary with his invitation to a special discovery of the work of Robert E. Fulton, whose “films are a dazzling demonstration of the secret but possible passage between the gesture of making documentary and that of experimental film”. The prolific and exceptional “Doc history” dedicated to Yugoslavia will almost be a festival within the festival by its breadth and cinematic density. Other filmmakers on honour are the couple Swann Dubus and Tran Phuong Thao, who will also inaugurate a “Doc route” arriving from Vietnam with a new generation of filmmakers and three ways of constructing stories to attempt to mark one’s presence within contemporary history: direct cinema style documentaries, fiction films and artist films. The distant geography of this programme will resonate with that of “Docmonde” presented by Madeline Robert to stretch our vision to the farthest points of the planet through the vehicle of film.
The meeting with Artur Aristakisian and two of his former students has been maturing for several years. All three in their own ways are searching for a form of revelation of an invisible or unspeakable reality, of a sensory point of incandescence in images that we could also name the Real which appears in this case like the refraction of a ray.
The refraction of the Real is also perhaps the hope of our new programmers of “Viewing experiences”, Stéphane Bonnefoi and Adrien Faucheux, when they express the hope that filmmakers might be able to let their own films escape their grasp, and allow surprise, both for them and for us, at the metamorphosis that operates sometimes.
And finally, we mustn’t forget at the heart of this week “Edgar Morin’s cinema in actions” with Monique Peyrière, who suggests that we ask anew the question “How do you live?”, “which initiates the shoot of Chronicle of a Summer and establishes certain issues: the creating of tension between daily life and filmed life, between the individual and the collective, between the political and cinema. Paraphrasing Edgar Morin, we can say that this film concerns the raw heart of the subject and rubs the subject raw.” What is the power of cinema? What can it question? To borrow once again the colourful vocabulary of cosmology, cinema, seeking to test the resistance of the Real, sketches out in a limitless way the “event horizon” to account for the upheavals of the Real, in every sense of the word.
Pascale Paulat and Christophe Postic