International premiere
Everything is on the same level me and my ruins my ruins and my interiors the recumbents and me and me lying inside
A film that proposes we explore the poor. The poorness of the precariousness it documents and the poorness of its artistic gesture, in the sense of arte povera as a philosophical aesthetic. A film that opposes the values of the middle class system and takes interest in such topics as the earth, cardboard, rocks. And in their stories. A film that tends to throw off all sophistication. A gesture that embraces the parasitic noise of the wind, that chooses sobriety. But without coldness. A voluntary sobriety, as a form of liberty, to give more space to perception, to the sensitive. A poor gesture, one that creates from the poor, in a compulsive fashion. A compulsion that manifests in the series of photos on the floor, which are like sequences storing memory of the temporal layers of the landscape-palimpsest; or in the way of writing, which is thought in motion, urgency, vital impulse. Such as in the sequence to which the title refers, in which the filmmaker-main character eats the juicy plums that appear on his path: as if the camera was eating them itself. In fact, prunelle does not only refer to a plum but also to a pupil —and through metonym, a look—. A subjective camera, a camera-gaze. Beneath the apparent clumsiness lies a sensitive, challenging and precise gaze, that scrutinises, looking at that which many do not, attracted by the margins. A look that reveals the elegance potentially to be found in them, in the banal, in the everyday. It’s about that, in a way: about an invention of the everyday, as theorised by Michel de Certeau. Through ingenious practices and creativity —photography, Chinese ink painting, cinema, writing, storytelling and its rhetorical astuteness, the poetic findings, the artisanal creation of objects...—, through the practice and appropriation of space with certain insubordination, it draws a resistance tactic against the technical Rightness of the consumption society that organises things and people, the sociopolitical order and its violences. Pierre Louapre thus creates his own poiesis, which enables the reclining figure to be transcended, which is also a form of (self)awareness. His singular reading of the world, attempt to combine and create metaphors from exterior and interior landscapes of a dislocated reality, movingly reveals the human in the abandoned with traces left by the human presence or that of anthropomorphic forms. It is an act of speaking that which was made silent, it is about what can be seen “if we look properly”.
Frédérique Monblanc