Ôte-toi de mon soleil

At first, we don’t know if we’re in a boat which has run aground from which we have to rescue what we can. All types of objects are piling up under the light bulb swinging from the ceiling. Are they interesting? It is their enormous quantity, the sheer accumulation, that makes them valuable; proved to us when we try and pick them up.

The absurd task of ordering, choosing what to throw away and deciding if anything can be kept, falls to a man and a woman who are slightly overwhelmed but reasonably cheerful. She is the author of the film, the Belgian producer Messaline Raverdy, and the disorder has been caused by Joseph Rosenzweig, an old man who has been hoarding papers, dolls, wires, magnifying glasses, but who really seems to have been working on a trick to summon company to listen to his asides, someone who will look at him.

In the film, which uses video and super-8 recordings that she combines with archive material, Raverdy offers us the portrait of Joseph, whose discourse is not as erratic as it might seem and who tells us about his life in fragments which find curious resonance in many other natural phenomena, both huge and microscopic. The world also ends up being seen as an accumulation of elements, which are tidied up by whoever can manage it, in this film which moves from the tedious detail of the untidy house to the refreshing breadth of open spaces, of train trips through leafy woods, of welcoming greetings from little girls yet to be born.

And so it goes on, until we bid farewell to Joseph Rosenzweig from afar, tiny now, as he moves hunched up from one corner of the landscape, using an umbrella to protect himself from the same sun that enlightens Diogenes the Dog once Alexander has moved aside.

Bárbara Mingo Costales