Black screen during the prologue: a voice, that of a man, talks about himself.
The story, at first individual, develops, continues by digressions in a monologue
embracing in its stream a mythology centered on being Black today in the U.S.A.
The words enter into dialogue, alternating, schizophrenic, from the “you” written
on a title card on the screen to the “I” expressed by the voice-over. Elise Florenty,
whose beautiful film Gennariello Due Volte (2009 FID competition) we still remember,
is this time with a new accomplice, Marcel Türkowsky. Both make explicit at the
beginning of the film what their project will be: from oneself to the other, it’s a matter
here of passages and exchanges, of porosities between spoken word and active
listening, of faces and places.
Second sequence. We are somewhere in the South, nourished by the world of
Faulkner (evoked in the credits), not far from the regions of the imaginary county of
Yoknapatawpha, where most of Faulkner’s novels take place. It would be fruitless
to try to reconstruct such a story here. The film sweeps us along in a flood of
physical feelings, of strange landscapes and the sequences fit together, distributing
apparitions and disappearances according to an organic mode, in a perpetual
dissolve. All the images, all the sounds prove to be haunted, by history, by nature,
by literature too. It is the fabric of a fluidity where imaginary and real cannot be
distinguished, in sight of an ode to the world as the title indicates, borrowed from
Allen Ginsburg’s poem “Footnote to Howl.” (JPR) (NF)