2023 Voyage au lac Voyage au lac
Workshop
We welcome back filmmaker Emmanuelle Démoris after the projections at Lussas in 2007 and 2010 of Mafrouza, the unforgettable encounter with a neighbourhood of Alexandria and its inhabitants. Her new film, Voyage au lac (Journey to the Lake), constructs the time of an Italian meeting, the very heart of a story that is fabricated before our eyes. Giving time to share human experience and transforming it into a shared experience of emancipation is a way to make cinema with those she films, an eminently political approach to which we devote a workshop of exchange and discussion.
Voyage au lac takes place in the centre of Italy around Lake Bolsena, a telluric hole of black sand. We meet people that we come across again as the seasons go by. The encounter becomes experience and the metamorphoses of each becomes a story, their story, also that of this little piece of land. Over a year, in three acts, three independent films which together form the Voyage cycle.
A group of masons prepares and celebrates the feast of Santa Cristina on the village square. At their centre, Moreno, a retired, mischievous plasterer, and Maria Pace, the guide, who maintain an intimate relation with the past of this land that he explains to the summer visitors who have come to discover it. To this choir responds that of a group of young Africans, scarcely debarked from Libya, who discover this Italian region, its landscapes, laws and culture. At the centre of this choir, there is Franck, a Cameroonian student, with his curiosity, precise language and mobile thinking. The two choirs respond to each other, moving the journey forward in time and space, all the way to the little island, the mysterious heart of this land at the centre of the lake.
The encounter; the land and its present traversed by history; each individual’s intimate link with this shared territory on which they live; these are the three acts of this Journey which takes us from the beginning of summer to the following spring. The experience of the encounter and its double view shows us a point of time in this little corner of Europe, and what it means to be there, here and now. Tradition reinvents itself, ancient or recent history is told, replayed, this land arouses fictions and affections, each individual thinks it, acts on it and makes it their own. The film represents each person’s inscription both in the reality of the world and in their imagination. And this encounter in the form of a film reveals their extraordinary vitality, their profound urge for liberty, of which the lake seems to be in turn both the source and the mirror.
Workshop with Catherine David (art historian and exhibition curator), Pierre-Olivier Dittmar (historian, EHESS), Ludovic Lamant, journalist (journalist, Mediapart), Emmanuelle Démoris and Christophe Postic.
Voyage au lac is not a film on (the state of the world and of Europe through the prism of the Italian microclimate in the region of Bolsena Lake, the echoes of the past and of history and a dilapidated present, recent migrants, etc.), it advances in opposition to the superficial representations and clichés relayed ad nauseum by the discourses and images of our time.
It is through time and duration that little by little a point of view and situations are constructed, through exchanges and in patient and attentive encounters with human subjects who are non-assigned (or more exactly de-assigned and displaced in their movement) from the roles and statuses predetermined by the neo-liberal order, but who are lucid and often rebellious actors of lives that have been more or less violently shaken up.
Slowly, fragments of parallel and discontinuous stories crisscross in a complex narrative that unfurls progressively following the seasons of the lake and in back and forth movements between the sites (the scene of the Devils, the lake, Bisentina Island, the migrants’ refuge, the palace-museum, the olive fields) and the current heroes (Moreno, Maria Pace, Saul, Franck). This to-ing and fro-ing between micro and macro-events, between the “here” of Bolsena and the “elsewhere” (the geographical off-frame that is Africa, but also the historical off-frame of the Renaissance evoked by Maria Pace) opens a possible contemporary geo-politico-poetical tale capable of intersecting the irreducibly singular idiosyncrasies of local and situated experiences and lives with the inverted, totalising scales of the globalised world, but also capable of giving space, meaning and visibility to completely original configurations.
Catherine David
The beating heart of history
Here the threads of time are tied and untied. Everything seems to be a foregone conclusion, frozen. An Italian lake with its picturesque island, its mediaeval towns, its churches and palaces. With its historical practices that we think we know by heart, so familiar have they become: folklore, heritage, tourism. Lots of people, few emotions.
This commercialised past, these too familiar sites seem so disincarnated, so shorn of life that, as Carlo Ginzburg notes, we feel amputated of our own history. Voyage au lac functions as a powerful antidote to this sensation and re-opens our relation to time.
It is in the little gestures of the women and men who inhabit or pass by these places, in their unfailing energy given to recapturing a past that we believed frozen, that appears a shared and lively joyous knowledge. Around this lake, history takes hold of individuals, transforms them, and the dead act through the living, ceaselessly producing new tales. Whether we consider those masons who, after their work hours, produce a mediaeval mystery play, the prince who turns a ruined palace into a Warburgian montage fantasizing his family history, or that gardener who imagines the dead leaning from their windows, looking at him singing as he waters his plants, all these lives testify to a resistance to an obsessional presentism, to a relation to history that is far from being an inquiry into one’s origins but assumes rather the ornamental part of existence.
How should we look at these ghosts, these “useful dead” who seem so lively? The film works at an estrangement-effect, that gives the viewer an acute and new form of attention. Because this familiar world is captured through the eyes of people arriving from Africa, the Latium countryside becomes peopled with “monsters” (in the ancient use of the word suggesting no negative connotation), that is bodies and signifying gestures that show what we do not ordinarily see.
A reception centre for refugees opens and the island at the centre of the lake with its palace and churches is closed to the public, becoming a site of fantasy. “Far from the noise of humans”, these places confer on those who frequent them a quality of attention, of forgetfulness also, that sets history and imagination in motion. In three films and four seasons, temporalities mix, relations are transformed, the great stage of history and individual hallucinations become spectacles and stage effects, and end up coalescing.
Systole, diastole, places open and close like the valves of a heart. One day, the reception centre closes and the inaccessible island opens. Rejected, accepted, men and women pass through like the blood of life.
Pierre-Olivier Dittmar
Maria Pace warns that she doesn’t need anything, and in any case she doesn’t have the money: she still has to pay the plumber. But she has nothing against taking a look. The cloth seller unfurls his material, made in India. There are elephants among the patterns, then a tree which he presents with the roots on top, branches below: “You’re showing it upside down”, suggests Maria Pace. And Moreno, a retired worker in the back, who adds a touch of burlesque right from the start of the film, has fun talking to the woman who directs him each summer in the village show: “You’re looking at it upside down”.
Later on, the subject will be fishing nets manufactured in China, or plants growing on the island in the middle of the lake, originally from Japan. If the figure of the lake can suggest a suffocating closed space, it is exactly the opposite that attracts Emmanuelle Démoris. She does not seek to fix places or the hidden side of things, to freeze identities, but collects, constantly on the lookout, the scattered signs of far away worlds (including the underground habitats of the dead) like more ancient pasts – from communist Eastern Europe to Etruscan antiquity.
The film, never monumental in spite of its length, finds its heady form somewhere here, in this free, joyful and erudite way of juxtaposing, sometimes weaving, layers of the past and intimate relations to History. Living paintings of the life of a local saint, a fast paced guided visit of a palace belonging to the Farnese, tourists trudging around the lake’s island is if they were on a pilgrimage… Innumerable stories are conjured up to better untie us from the present and, perhaps, avoid the apocalyptic fatalities endlessly referred to these days (end of the world, hegemonic far right politics…).
Two worlds cohabit: inhabitants who have lived there for decades and those just arrived from the shores of Africa. In an irresistible progression, the shoot quietly causes them to meet (the last part on the island where everyone displays different ways of listening). Dance – the evening at the refugee reception centre, or the open squares during the sagras, celebrations of nature – is one of the secret threads connecting them. They also come together in their capacity to make and to build: theatrical sets, leather bags, olive harvests – but also of course the film being made. On that level, Franck who is at once actor, sound recorder and photographer, occupies a special place. Showing recently taken photos (trees shown right side up this time), he makes a plea for the art of the landscape: “It’s up to everyone [...]. No one will come up to me and say ‘You took a picture of my sky’ [...]. There is no owner”. We are entitled to see this as one of the keys to what makes this Voyage au lac so precious and vibrant.
Ludovic Lamant