WELCOME

A word from the director

When I arrived in the apartment I rented for a while in New York, I found a card, put out as a welcome gesture, with ‘Welcome’ written on it by hand.
This card became an object in the film, where it appears propped up on the windowsill. The window provided the perfect frame, with a view of the building opposite’s windows.
A frame which captures our gaze, just like the piece of clumsily attached cardboard behind the glass in the window which flapped with every breath of wind.
It is this aptness of the frame which provokes the shot, with the only kit I had at my disposal: a smartphone. I hadn’t planned to shoot while I was in New York, but the frame made it happen and the shot was made, without any intention of making a film.
Appearing and disappearing, the cardboard flapping against the window gave a rhythm to the shot and encouraged me to keep taking new shots at different times of the day. Through the variations in light, we see time passing, and through the movement of objects on the windowsill, we see that the place is lived in.
Among these objects is a teapot, for a cup of tea in the morning, an invite for a photography exhibition, a key left there after the door has been slammed or removed before the door is heard to open again.
The occupier is not always there, but his absence does not interrupt the beating of the cardboard against the window. A pulse without a witness, a beating heart that seems to be moved by the meeting, in the same rhythm, of a few notes of Fauré’s first quartet. The music will be heard again. It lifts the film as the wind outside lifts the cardboard that’s flapping against the window.
These few objects displayed in front of the window lend themselves to fiction. They can be seized upon to break the monotony and satisfy our need for a story. Everything can be imagined. Even to the point of believing that the man has left the flat to go to the exhibition and perhaps find the woman on the invitation card.
The appeal of fiction, as an embodiment of the subject, is boundless. But reality persists. It is in the variations of light until nightfall. It is in the relentless beating, on the other side of the window, of the cardboard that is subjected to our imagination. A beating heart, close to breaking. Yes, “Beating Heart”, another title for the film.

Jean-Claude Rousseau