2022 Hommage à Jean-Louis Comolli Hommage à Jean-Louis Comolli
The disappearance of Jean Louis Comolli is not only strongly felt because we loved him and because he was, for a large number of women and men, a true friend with whom he shared all the appetites, those of the body and of the mind, those of laughter and those of the torment and anguish provoked by the disasters of our world. But of course Jean-Louis Comolli is the name of a large body of work, a considerable opus of literary and cinematic creation and, above all, a decisive figure for all those, spectators, readers, listeners, who had seen, read and heard what he had to say, what he thought was his duty to make visible and audible since the objective was, and still is, to construct forms and figures of meaning and of resistance to the worst. Jean-Louis Comolli never stopped filming and speaking about what the image of bodies and the energy of speech engage as political responsibility for all those who place their lives in the service of dignity and liberty by means of images and words. He strove, to his last breath, to share at the same time his sadness and his hope in the face of a political landscape dominated by generalised violence and inequality. He knew how to listen and it was with this keen and singular capacity to hear that he wanted to make heard another music than that of domination and humiliation. His respect for the adversary prevented him from seeing the threat of the enemy everywhere but allowed him, on the contrary, to infallibly spot the weakness of the holders of power, the masters of fear. At the heart of an art destined to make things visible, he infallibly alerted the gaze of the spectator to all perverse pleasure, all abusive intrusion, all incapacitating violence. Respect of the filmmaker for the person filmed as well as the spectator.
We pay him homage not only to transmit the power of his works and his message but also to insist on the present efficacity of his thought and gestures in the face of the threats and priorities of our time. We will begin by analysing his abundant work as a filmmaker, taking as our starting point the film Face aux fantômes. We will then explore his theoretical reflections on images of justice, which will take us to the edge of the present time, with the recent trial of the 13 November attacks. Let us say then: in the presence of Jean Louis Comolli and the radical actuality of his thinking.
Sylvie Lindeperg and Marie-José Mondzain
In the presence of Sylvie Lindeperg and Marie-José Mondzain.