Programme 1

After two documentaries on Pierre-Auguste and Jean Renoir and Maurice Pialat, Anne-marie Faux made what could be called her first film per se, a film that stems from the feelings she experienced when reading the letters written by Rosa Luxemburg from prison. Seemingly addressed to her directly, she uncovered sounds and shots in reading those texts, words that were materially revealed and needed to be recovered and brought into the present. That process led to Hic Rosa, partition botanique, which reveals the beauty and poetry of her approach to filmmaking through her musical score concept.

The letters from Rosa Luxemburg contain a link to nature and animals that inspires a way of filming, of observing a blade of grass or the branch of a tree; details that the vast majority of us forget to look at and that for both Rosa Luxemburg and Anne-marie Faux represent a way of being in the world, a political position beyond even the revolution that the German activist made into her raison d'être.

Anne-marie films in Super-8 using the last rolls of Kodachrome 40 before the product was discontinued while heeding the warning from Cézanne that “everything is about to disappear”, which is why the roses on her rose bushes blur when she finishes reading certain passages and the words evaporate into the air.

If Hic rosa, partition botanique is a silent score, Face au vent, partition buissonnière is a piece of sheet music consisting of multiple voices. Here, in her most personal film, the memories of her childhood intertwine with literary passages and songs by Colette Magny to envelope the tale. This series of remembered or evoked scenes, real or fictitious, give shape to a second film-score composed alongside an ensemble of friends and accomplices, both on and off the screen, in which some read, others listen and yet more simply are; in which Chaplin, Ozu and Godard form part of the family album; and in which Anne-marie appears on screen for the first time, reading or in silence, always pensive, always somewhat melancholic. A self-portrait that we will see in each new film from now on.

A film of great beauty and sensitivity, in which the closeness and admiration of Jean Luc Godard can also be felt, someone with whom Anne-marie worked on the art direction for Hélas pour moi (2003).

Both films reveal their scores on the screen for a spectator who must not only watch and listen but also interpret a different kind of visual music.