This 50th anniversary allows us to (re)immerse ourselves in the eclecticism of the Greek to revive the films of yesterday while talking about today. To discover the rarities and talents of tomorrow. 50 years of vivacity, impertinence and promise for the cinema.
In one of the first films produced by the Greek, Un troisième d’Anne Thoraval, made in 1970, it was about catching the emotion of an actress, Josée Destoop. Since then, Le Grec has endeavored to capture cinematographic movements and shocks, always ensuring the innovative character of the films and provoking ardent emotions. For the past 50 years, the Greek has brought many filmmakers to the forefront, including women: Catherine Corsini, Claire Simon, Danielle Arbid, Delphine Gleize, Léa Mysius and Katell Quillévéré.
Evidence by Caroline Champetier, a director who skilfully illuminates the great filmmakers( Jacques Rivette’sLa bande des quatre , Philippe Garrel’s J’entends plus la guitare , Jean-Luc Godard’s Soigne ta droite , Amos Gitai’s Terre promise and Leos Carax’s Holy Motors ), directs and highlights in a sequence shot, in sumptuous black and white, a pregnant woman in the prosaic ritual of bathing. This ” ingenious photographer “, according to Agnès Varda, films the obviousness of the body, of gestures and lingers on the little things to take hold of a whole, as in the false triviality of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman with whom she also collaborates in Toute une nuit.
The female body is also in question in Apparition et gloire by Sainte ORLAN, the artist who joyfully stages herself through artistic poses in a photo session, not devoid of humor, and dresses in her most beautiful finery, a reflective performance on the place of the body and images in society.
A temporary body of Djamila Daddi-Addoun, this body which comes to nestle in the title, is a radical proposal of the flesh during a training of boxing. A training with the paces of abstraction, furtive visions of the skin in the darkness, silhouette of a female body with tense muscles. This boxing training is an incessant ballet, a feverish flow of images.
The images, in fact, run through and innervate Under the luminous sky of my native land, by Franssou Prenant. The grain of the 16 mm, accompanied by various voice-overs of women, returns to the city of Beirut in the late twentieth century and its paradoxes. “Real life is here” chants a voice, while this city is also the scene of a civil war. We then follow, in a floating narrative, the evolution of the capital (political, social, architectural) because if the war concretely bruises the buildings, it also breaks the memories, demolishes the landmarks. Filming the territory is also a way of reappropriating the space.
It is also the animated shadows of a metropolis, taken on the spot, and a female voice-over that dresses The seaweed in your hair, a film with a stubborn melancholy. Athens, metaphor of a woman, another city damaged, not by confrontations but by a devastating economic crisis. Daphne Hérétakis explores the sidewalks, the streets and focuses on Jazra Khaleed’s poem as a blaze of abrasive sweetness.
This program of the Greek, looked at through the feminine prism, whether trivial, historical, or profoundly contemporary, is always a way of questioning and deciphering the world.
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William Le Personnic
