Raphaëlle Peria travels through France and across the world in search of trees and horizons to photograph.Using engraving tools (chisel, burin, drill) she incises, scrapes, triturates her prints to escape from the memory image and blur the reality of the landscape photographed. The asceticism of this meticulous work, between appeasement and escape, produces post-photographic works that reveal her transcended memory.
Painting,
said Picasso, should not imitate nature but work like it. Could the
same be true for photography? For cinema?
For Raphaëlle Peria, the snapshot is only
the start of the creative process. The cutter, the scraper and the
drill work on the photographic film like a scalpel on the skin, to
produce the metamorphosis. Underneath the stripped, bleached
landscape, another image emerges, like one retouched by memory.
Keeping pace with its subject, Brigitte
Barbier's film adopts the process it describes and sets to work in
the manner of the artist.
In the image, blurs coexist with sharpness,
and the camera's focus toys with switching them around. Through the
reflection-induced hollows, or the reliefs produced by abrasion, the
filmed surface is a depth to be explored. The shots return, like
memories. They are reconstituted. It takes the ocean wave and the
hand to be able to see, at last, the artist at work on the beach.
Much like the painter and photographer, the
director does not show; she makes visible. The horizon emerges like a
line traced by the moving car, and the tree is discernible from the
foliage, brought gradually into focus by deceleration. But the
disclosure is incomplete; the artist herself is never revealed. She
only appears partially, in profile, in an over-the-shoulder shot, or
too far away for us to make out her features. Her voice calls up the
image, but never stems from it.
By progressing in this fashion, through
glimpses and reminders, the film does not explain the work; it builds
an understanding of it. The gestures induce the action, and their
effects hint at the outcome. The film puts our memory to work,
probing it, and the whispering voices that suddenly float like an
army of shadows around the unrolled film bring Chris Marker's "La
Jetée" to our minds.
The film ends up offering its roll as one
gives one's body to science and it is, in turn, worked on by the
artist. Scratched by the blade, marked with grooves, the final
sequence comes to life, and the white lines proliferate like algae,
covering the cliff with white bindweed.
It is no longer the work that gives a motif
to the film, but the film that gives its material to the work. What
better way to serve its subject?
Sylvie Lopez-Jacob
September 2020
With
an agrégation
in philosophy and a PhD in the semiology of texts and images, Sylvie
Lopez-Jacob teaches at secondary school, and at the National Superior
School of Art of Bourges.
Her long-standing
focus has been on bringing the encounter between art and philosophy
to fruition. Cinema remains a privileged field of investigation in
her lectures and articles.
She has led numerous
educational projects centred on questions of aesthetics in
collaboration with painters, playwrights and writers including Yves
Michaud, Pierre Bergounioux, Claude Viallat and Claude Lévèque...
More info
Visual artist, she lives and works in Paris.
She is represented by the gallery Papillon, Paris
Duration
06:58
Festival
MIFAC 2019 - "Pour faire court" Selection - Short film category