Punto de Vista has programmed a great retrospective devoted to the French filmmaker, Jean-Daniel Pollet (1936-2004), one of the best-kept secrets in France. The programme, which has been commissioned by the festival’s programmer, Guillermo G. Peydró, offers the images and ideas of his fascinating work of constant critical rewriting and re-reading throughout successive sessions. The cycle is within a dialectic of travel and confinement, trance and immobility, and has a point of inflection in the 1989 train accident as the filmmaker, who had travelled 35,000 km to film the memory of the Mediterranean, was confined to his house in Cadenet; and then, without leaving this retreat, he began to visualize a new phase of possibilities for his films.
PROGRAMMES OF THE CYCLE
I. Evasion | The accumulation of memory
Méditerranée is a 35,000 km poem that tries to sketch a definition through images of the Mediterranean, its rites and spaces, its memory. There is a temple in the centre of all the images: Bassae.
Bassae (1964) 8 min.
Méditerranée (1963) 42 min.
II. Confinement | Disease and the Island
Filming schizophrenia and leprosy. Two mirrored films commissioned by the same pharmaceutical laboratory enable Pollet to create a diptych where opposing reality and fiction, thinking of the island as a place of confinement, moving the concepts of beauty an justice.
Le Horla (1966) 36 min.
L’Ordre (1974) 42 min.
III. Gestures | Don’t Play with Fire
A water film versus one about fire. A film on the appearance of the factory boats, Leviathan boats compared with a film on the disappearance of century old factories, suspended between classic mythology and science fiction.
Les morutiers (1966) 20 min.
Pour mémoire (1979) 58 min.