Fiche Film
Cinéma/TV
MOYEN Métrage | 2007
Commentaires sur la vie et la mort
Titre original : Comments on life & death
Pays concerné : Réunion (La)
Durée : 52 minutes
Genre : expérimental
Type : essai

Français

Réalisateur : Nikunja, 2007 (52′ – DV)

Durban Film Festival 2007.

English

Comments on Life and Death
Mael da Costa brazilian artist performer and stylist lived for 8 years on Réunion Island before he died in 1994 at Saint-Denis from SIDA. His universe of creation was baroque and beautiful. Thus he was in profound admiration before the creation of nature. He created ephemeral clothing from vegetal and industrial waste and created them directly in nature on the models, for photographs and more rarely for film. Since his arrival on the island he knew about his approaching death and thus lived in a constant urgency to create, in an universe between life & death, man and woman, appearance and disappearance, strength and weakness. A profound search and manifestation of a unique identity. For my film project to represent Réunion Island I chose this personality to create an artistic documentary film on Réunion Island, an island where natural extremes and physical and psychological contradictory energies join each other, as they were incorporated in the life of Mael. A profound search of identity and the reality of a general insecurity of its people by the constantly moving volcanic grounds one stands on, the dangerous oceans one is surrounded by, the barely hidden social conflicts, characterize the multi racial and multi religious society on the island, and gives it a unique, explosive creative potential.
The different communities of African, Chinese, Indian and European origins can’t avoid each other as in the big world capitals and an intense but peaceful, unique beautiful métissage is happening between the peoples. The world’s future reality is the unity of the best of all its communities! This beauty is the best argument against racism, nationalism and protectionism. As an avant-project I created « commentaries on life and death », where, through the eyes and performance of Theo Trifard, well-known French actor, and Nadjani Bulin, dancer choreographer, both former close friends of Mael, a gap of 13 years is closed. Theo realised several theatre production with Mael, and Nadjani was a choreographer, dancer and model of his. The performers interrogate the moment of passing away, when one looses his body, and thus his ambition, illusions, and realises oneself as one is, beyond social and intellectual standard, more or less illusionary concept of oneself. « Video », I see, finds its meaning in this context. The texts by Calderon, pronounced by Theo and the texts by Picasso, read by Brice in the video in the film, are linked to that moment where we believe, either moving from dream to wakefullness or from being awake to dreaming.
One finds oneself in a strange situation, without real orientation, but still somewhat known. It’s finding a plane you know, but you hadn’t really frequented throughout your life. Still you know, it was there. So the memories, the essential events of your life are there all at once, without a timeline, with dreamlike appearance and disappearance and with changing importance. And there is no notion of time. In this film Theo and Nadjani are moving into this world through the performance, accompanied by models Laina and Audrey, the child-king Ajay Chandra and dancer Brice, who incarnates his role of a stalker, the one who accompanies from life to death. And from death to life. For he also appears in the orgasm of the sexual act, the procreating act, the call for life in the moment of disappearance of flesh as an appearance of no time. Time is an important editing factor in the film. I wanted to take away all sense of excitement, and give time to the spectator to orientate himself, be able to see the evolution of the images as if he would create them in that instant, inside of himself. And that’s also what he does, for the outer image of light is a mere impulse for the psychic images appearing in the spectator. Thus he is an actor towards the creation of the film. An other important factor is the film as a light source: the darker the image, the more the spectator is by himself, the more light there is, the more he is afar from himself. The model actors are also spectator-actors, watching their own death by the « video », beyond the Here and Now, part of the timelessness and of spacelessness.
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