I. EVASION

The build-up of memory

SESSION 1

Méditerranée is a 35,000-kilometre-long poem that attempts to define the Mediterranean – its rites and spaces, its memory – by swapping images. At the core of all the images there is a temple: Bassae.

Bassae (1964, 8 min) Méditerranée (1963, 42 min)
 

II. CONFINEMENT

Illness and island

SESSION 2

Filming schizophrenia and leper. Two films that mirror each other, commissioned by a pharmaceutical lab, are used by Pollet to create a diptych where fiction and reality come face to face. Islands as a place for confinement. The concepts of beauty and justice displaced.

Le Horla (1966, 36 min) 

L’Ordre (1974, 42 min)
 

III. GESTURES

You don’t play with fire

SESSION 3

A water film versus a fire film. A film about the emergence of factory ships (leviathan ships) versus a film about the sinking of old-style factories, lying somewhere in between classical mythology and science fiction.

Les Morutiers (1966, 20 min)

Pour mémoire (1979, 58 min)
 

IV. TESTAMENT

The repetition of time

SESSION 4

Contretemps, meant to be a statement film, opens up new possibilities for Pollet’s work. Embarking on a new motionless trip, the director revisits his films from the editing table and all his past images become working materials with new meanings. The metamorphosis has no end.

Contretemps (1988, 100 min)
 

SESSION 5

Pollet’s last fiction film, Those Facing Us, is the counterpart of his creative self-portrait in Contretemps. A woman faces the task of rearranging a series of images of the world – just like the filmmaker from Méditerranée on. She chooses a few beacon images as her starting point, the other pictures orbiting around them like planets.

Those Facing Us (2000, 85 min)
 

V. OBJECTS

Hostages in a silent world

SESSION 6

In 1989, Pollet was seriously injured in a train accident and shut himself off in his villa in Provence. Unable to travel, he embarked on a series of experiments that would prove decisive for his films. One of these experiments resulted in Dieu sait quoi, a must-see for those exploring the connections between film and poetry.

Dieu sait quoi (1994, 84 min)
 

SESSION 7

Ten years after Dieu sait quoi, Pollet embarked on his final (and posthumous) project. If in the 1994 film he transmogrified the objects around him from motion pictures, now he chooses still images, that is, photographs. The film was finished by Pollet’s scriptwriter and collaborator Jean-Paul Fargier.

Jour après jour, Jean-Daniel Pollet and Jean-Paul Fargier (2006, 66 min)
 

VI. CODA

Pollet, a filmmaker of our time

SESSION 8

Jean-Daniel, parle moi encore ! is a portrait of Jean-Daniel Pollet made by Jean-Paul Fargier for the documentary collection Cinéastes de notre temps. The film shows Pollet’s fundamental role in the history of film in the second half of the twentieth century. It is being premiered at Punto de Vista.

Jean-Daniel, parle moi encore !, Jean-Paul Fargier (2016, 58 min)