CHEZ LES BASQUES
Embossed landscape and lost voices
A new milestone and two discoveries make up this session of a programme that has become a classic in our film gatherings: At the Basque Home or Chez les Basques. What started out as a retrospective in an isolated year, devoted to the films made by visiting filmmakers in the French Basque Country, has become a continuum in time. We are forced, as programmers, to take it up again at a time when some new jewels appear which keep adding to the historic heritage of film that visits us at home.
It was a programme that we started with the Lumière brothers on their trip to Biarritz to film the swell of the ocean at the beginning of the film industry, their first abstract film without any humans alongside the Roca de la Virgen. And it was a programme in which we were lucky to be visited by Otar Iosseliani who sang us his love letter to the Basque landscape and a village twinned with his native Georgia. Orson Welles, Louis Delluc, Herbert Briegger, Hubbert Knapp… were some of the other illustrious filmmakers, each with their own point of view of film, who enabled us to follow the story of this “futureless invention” without leaving our mountains. This time, we return to the Lumière brothers with one of their first embossed films, the invention of a third dimension in a new cinematographic milestone made in our corner of the world. Later, two treasures from the 1960s, recently discovered in Sweden, when television allowed for ethnography made with respect and admiration. Arantza, Zubieta, Ituren… in a nearby landscape in grainy black and white… and even more historic, the voices of Uztapide, Basarri… and that of Maurizia Aldeiturriaga, treasures from the black box of our world, which disappears at a clap of the clapperboard.
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