스킵네비게이션

L’EESSPPLLAANNAADDEE

*Semaine 20.08에서 발췌 (원문 기고자: Patrick Javault)
The ‘EESSPPLLAANNAADDEE’ was filmed on banks of the Niger river, in Segou in Mali. The point of view, slightly into diving on the slope of bank, changes with the displacement of a tricycle which, traversing the field of the camera perpendicularly, attracts the framework and singularly involves us with the idle, aspired by the scene. It is a breath saturated by heat and red dust, of the vertical sides follows one another and slips the ones on the others, the vision deteriorated by the antipaludeens. The writing of the front zoom weaves the convergence of independent characters and fortuitous gestures. The ‘EESSPPLLAANNAADDEE’ builds around a crossed situation of actions without beginning nor end. This is a zoom in and out.
_ Whatever scenery he decides to shoot either in the Parisian suburbs from a mob or in Bamako from a Sofitel room, or the countryside from a Corail train, Stephane Pichard superimposes a whole register of perceptions on a basic grammar of Cinema; today the cameraman is an ordinary man who can’t make a distinction between what he sees and what he shoots any more. The artist who shares the same prosthesis with him is the one who knows how to linger about the different ways to watch and he does this all the better as nothing ever happens any more. A wavering attention will look like a fixed plane in slow motion. The regular repetition of the same route will change roads, fields and rivers, a long 'ribbon', the search of scenery in an uninteresting area into a succession of identification scenes. The memory of the Cinema, the one concerning plan, present and phonograms, which passes across the permanent saving and storage of data. _*(...)
_ 'The Esplanade' shows the intersection of two actions. One that we might call main, because this is what the lens is following, which is in its movement. The other, secondary and lateral, which is the crossing of their frame by a manually driven tricycle ridden by somebody one-legged. A Poussin in nature upset by the humdrum. For more than half the sequence, the tricycle manages to stay within the straight edge of a frame that is shrinking. Then, as if the zoom were suspended, it is given time to cross the frame and leave it, making way for people in action, moving forward and moving away in the axis of a block of cement in the foreground. The effort of the handicapped person can be described as a way of staying within the frame, of being its guilty conscience or, quite on the contrary, its alibi (look how my perfect shot does not ignore suffering). 'The Esplanade' is the confrontation of several speeds, that of the camera, that of the bodies going in the same direction, that of the slow motion image, and lastly that of the machine-man, but also the crossing of the different layers of reality and image. A history of the cinema that makes us recall that the tracking shot was first called a _ plan panorama _ by the Lumiere Brothers. _*
*Extract from _ Semaine 20.08_, text by Patrick Javault