Anne-marie Faux. The river under the tongue

The melancholic and reflexive work of Anne-marie Faux (Montfermeil, 1959) presents itself as a series of filmed diaries and travel journals in which the film-maker’s voice guides the spectator through a collective and political memory marked by successive wars and revolutions, as well as a personal memory that evokes the themes of childhood, cinema, music and literature.

Recorded on video or Super-8, her films focus on certain specific details (a flower, a window, a sheet billowing in a patio...) that, like Proust’s madeleines, inspire and trigger long monologues about the history of places and about history itself. Other voices and tongues join hers to finish shaping a series of tales in which cultures from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East find common feeling. This predominance of the spoken word is one of the main characteristics of her work; a vocal stream or a river under my tongue as Paul Éluard, one of her favourite poets, describes in one of his pieces.

Admired by such filmmakers as Chaplin, Ozu, Ford, Renoir and Pialat, Anne-marie did not come into filmmaking by vocation but rather by necessity, profoundly driven by what she discovered through reading. It is perhaps there, in literature, where we should search for the austere and taciturn nature of her cinema; a form of cinema that films as one writes or thinks: in snippets or a patchwork.

In one text, in which she speaks of encounters with her friend Danielle, Anne-marie wrote: We didn’t have ‘conversation topics’, we jumped from one to another (...) like adjournments, thresholds, edges and projections, corners, thoroughfares and cul-de-sacs (...), premonitions and barefaced silences.

That is precisely the nature of her films. We find no plot but rather a restlessness that repeats itself from one film to another. Scenes emerge like adjourned moments; like reflections happening in front of the camera, live; like a cul-de-sac or thoroughfare, on which one’s gaze is fixed and yet detached. Let your imagination be drawn by these images that are lost “in the winds of time”.

Programme and texts by Andrea Franco