JE ME SUIS MIS EN MARCHE

With Les Archers (FID2009), we discovered Martin Verdet and his great virtuosity in filming artists. It was musicians, performer-apprentices in the mist of a northern castle. Once again art presides over his latest opus, but it is about a voice this time, that of a very great man of poetry, Franck Venaille. It is a delicate exercise to make the poem resonate, on the one hand, and exhibit the body of the writer, on the other, and connect one to the other at that. There is always a risk of posing, red herrings or, worse, complete inaudibility. Sporting, so to speak, Verdet’s choice for this portrait is twofold. Firstly to confine the sounding board of the poems to the huis-clos of a narrow room, and then to make circulate in this space the voice, or rather voices (because others are added to that of Venaille). We see the poet dubbed by an actor (the great Ziserman), amplified by a Nagra, a telephone, the silence of a thoroughbred, the feeble backwash of a fl ood, etc. It is never a case of illustrating or competing with the course of the text and any of its images, it is instead a matter of multiplying the rhythms, placing a wedge of humour into a melancholy momentum, or vice versa. We are invited to follow this wide and joyful stride: generosity itself. (JPR)