Shown in Compétition #2.
Synopsis
It is not really a film, rather a draft in the middle of which emerged a figure, that of Gilberte Swann. She’s pretty Gilberte.
Texte du comité de sélection
What to do when, after a shoot, you find yourself with dailies, sometimes unused, on which a loved one appears? Gauthier Beaucourt answers this question by joyfully using his bits of images, in a musical way close to improvisation, thus forming the sketch of an imaginary project, a sketch with no end in sight. While attacking the image to the point of erasing its basic argentic properties (the dailies are filmed in Super 8), he tries, through superimpositions, deletions of layers of colors, and slowed down, to ogle towards the operations of work carried out in argentic with an optical printer, bringing his plastic study closer to the experiments of a filmmaker like Claudine Eizykman, particularly on the play of color and contrast frames. All this work is done sparingly: there is no bulimia of effect, the idea is clear, the sequence is musical, and the pixels dance gracefully.
Translation made by the translator www.DeepL.com/Translator
– T.D.
Why a draft and not a portrait film?
I used the word draft but I could have just as easily said “draft” without it negatively affecting my idea of my little work. But I couldn’t bring myself to simply call it Portrait of Gilberte Swann for the obvious reason that I sent you a film that is not finished. It feels pretty good, I think, but it doesn’t bother me. I have since put the film back on the editing table and added a third part to it. And then this portrait of Gilberte should only be, at the end of the endings, a fragment of a much longer film, which I title for the moment Le film des Heures, whose main subject would be the whole of Proust’s work: portraits of the other characters, moments that I remember like the car ride, the view from the aircraft, the mundane things of the Verdurins, the ball of heads, the arrival at Balbec etc… All this is still a lot of work and I’m a little bit lazy. But I would still like to be able to finish this great film, which I imagine to be absolutely shifting, before I turn 51, the age of Marcel Proust’s death. I’m not saying that by comparison, of course. It’s rather an appointment that I make with myself. And since I’m 33 years old, my Gilberte may still be a rough draft for several years to come.
How do you concretely work with superimpositions?
It would be a bit boring if I describe how I technically proceed, on the editing software, for overprints. What I can tell you is that it’s a lot of trial and error. It’s kind of like Gaston Lagaffe’s fun chemistry, I start with random tests and see what they come up with. I throw a lot, I keep a little and I take it back.
How does literature (in this case, Proust’s work) come to be impregnated in the film? Is it the starting point or is it present throughout the entire process of making?
So I have to tell you how it started. Because I had never for a moment thought of adapting La Recherche in any way. It was spring I think and I was walking on rue Monge, near the Censier Daubenton metro station. And in front of me, crossing the street, two young girls dressed like those seen in the paintings of the Impressionists. One of them, brown, dressed in a white lace dress and a canoe, the other, red, a light blue linen skirt, a puffy white blouse and an umbrella. They were really very 19th century like that. And spontaneously I said to myself: “Oh! Albertine…and Andrée undoubtedly. “And I regretted not having had anything to film them a little. After that, I thought it could be beautiful to have in the films I was thinking about, little irruptions of Proustian characters. In the same way that these two young girls appeared to me, almost like a documentary. And then I forgot a little. It was later, in a moment of idleness, that I began to tinker on my editing table with super-8 images, digitized, from a previous film. There was the face of a friend and a pond with swans. That’s when Gilberte appeared and I simply welcomed her. And it was a little later that I really started thinking about the idea of this Le film des Heures, which would be a kind of adaptation of La Recherche. But I think it’s less the novel itself that I’m working on, than the memory I have of it. As a result, I don’t read it much. Just a few lines like that from time to time. A person who is very important in my life once told me about Krzysztof Warlikowski, the Polish director who had just adapted Proust’s novel to the theater. According to him, it is impossible for a Frenchman to adapt to this work. Much too close and monumental. He who is Polish can do it. He called his play Les Français.