Your film is a montage of two texts, with Gaston Bachelard’s L’eau et les rêves, second part his “poétique des éléments”, taking up the most space. Where did the idea of adapting this text into a film come from?
I would say evocation instead of adaptation, as the geography of the locations filmed do not correspond to those of Gaston Bachelard, who is very attached to Bar-sur-Aube in the Grand Est region. There are sometimes fortuitous harmonies with the images, but most of the time they do not really match “bachelardian images”. Here and there, an isolated phrase emerges, almost floating, like a mark or a brief echo. Edgar Allan Poe, Novalis and many other meteors transcend L’eau et les rêves. Bachelard is both an epistemologist and a poet. There is a “double vision” in his works: science, rationality, immanence and these “poetics of reverie” linked to the matter, to the real. Often, reading a text is what provokes the desire for a film, and sometimes only a single phrase is enough: “the death of water is more pensive than the death of the earth” and the idea of a form opens. Here, it is a movie essay. Bachelard “repairs” because in his vision of life and thought, there is a kindliness, a very particular attention to social misery, and an ecological sensitivity as he already lamented “soiled fountains”. Bachelard, like Elisée Reclus, is a thinker of the living. By building this film, there is an idea of a poetic fight against this generalized disenchantment, this fascistisation of the world and this collapse of reason.
Here and there, you widen the intention, going from the water to the trees and the forest, or to the vision and, implicitly, to cinema. Which links do you see between these themes?
Water is everywhere, without water, no trees, nor forest, nor life. It is profoundly linked to everything else, being liquid, solid and gaseous at once. Everything is porous. We are all water beings, we once were a sponge and everything is sidereal. Without those meteoric bombings, no organism would’ve been able to develop. So water, trees, animals living and dead inhabit the film, as well as the human voice hugging the water. A phrase said by Fernand Deligny haunts me: “It may be that image is of the animal kingdom […]. The image is what the species persists through despite it all, it is a mark that is waiting, on the look-out”. So cinema is an age-old mark, lurking at the deepest of psyche, not so surprising for it to have been born at the same time as psychoanalysis nor curious to note that since the dawn of time images have accompanied human history. From the animals, painted in the depths of prehistorical caves, the digital smartphone or artificially made shots. I like to think that image is of the animal kingdom and Bachelard says that “image is a plant needy of earth and sky, of substance and form”.
In the last third of the film, the voice over changes directions, switching reader and text. Why this choice of counterpoint through a second text, and why this one?
Bachelard’s thinking transcends the first part, in a fragmented, blown up way and we hear a voice, with very slow diction. Then there is a “bridge”, nine-minute pathway where the human voice is quiet and only the voices of the water and its inhabitants are speaking to us. Then another voice blends with the substance of the water: Jean-Christophe Bailly, writer, essayist, poet and playwright. If I chose Bailly, it is because the water transcends his writings. The tributaries and rivers hold an important space there, as well as animals but also the city. Bailly’s thinking is part of a continuity, one that is originates in the modernity of German romanticism and through that, we find Novalis, but also Plotin and this phrase coming back like a wave: “Every life is a thought, but a more or less obscure thought, like life itself”. For Bailly, thought is a way of being and can be embodied as well in the flight of a bird as one of a bat. The last part is made up of extracts of one of his texts, titled the water, we can hear a flow, a speed, a momentum, a vitality indeed acting as a counterpoint to the meditative slowness of the start. We changed eras. Bachelard still had a foot in the 19th century and the relation with time was completely different, with Bailly we are here and now. And if Bachelard was a man of science carried by poetry, Bailly, he, is inhabited by poetry, transcending all of his works. The epilogue at the end if an homage to cinema, off-screen cinema of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter and its night reverie, where children enter at night and join “this wonderful community” personified by the river and its worlds, and the listening of a passage of Jean-Christophe Bailly’s poem Cinémonde where he alludes to A Pretty Fly, the lullaby sung in the boat going down the river.
In concrete terms, how was the film made? For example, what was the geographic scope of the locations filmed? The equipment that was used?
I shot this film over three years, without financial support. I practice a local cinema, modest in its approach and its production. This gesture shows “environmental sorrow”, indivisible from this conscience regarding the massive destruction of ecosystems. I measure my movements so I chose a small Zoom H6 recorder for sound and a smartphone for images. A light “vision machine”, one you carry in your pocket like a notebook, and allows to grasp what is there in the moment. But a definite image in its details and offering a panoramic format, to render a stretch or a horizontality, for example of this lying trunk, wrested from its verticality, stripped of all bark and washed up on this shore after being tossed around by the backwash. A trunk inhabited by a fossilized memory. 95% of the footage of this film was collected in Hérault and in Gard, more specifically in inland Cévennes, where humanity has not destroyed everything yet. So, exploring a geography throughout several seasons by choosing such-and-such stream, river or tributary. Coming back again, lingering, “being on the look-out”, then shooting with rigour, patience and parsimony, this indivisible link between a human and the countless alterities intertwined in the vast fabric of the living, definition dear to Baptiste Morizot. All the mixing work was done by Marc Siffert, double bass player, electronic music composer and sound engineer. Without him, the film would not have this depth of sound.
Interview by Nathan Letoré
