What is the lie indicated in the title ? It’s not so easy to say, given that Lech Kowalski
has chosen above all to play with the confrontation of two types of image production.
On the one hand there is Louisiana Story, an institutional film commission given
to Robert Flaherty in 1948 by the Standard Oil Company, in which Richard Leacock
was responsible for the image and Virgil Thompson for the music. In Louisiana, in
the bayou, a team of prospectors comes to drill the riverbank. They purchase the
right to install a derrick from the father of a boy typical of this complex landscape
and with whom one of them forges a friendship. In the tone dear to the father of
ethnofiction, it’s about transforming a story of expropriation into a pleasant fable
about the struggle against nature and paternalistic friendship. On the other hand,
the images of the oil-slick disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 were generated by
television crews, associations and individuals and were available on the internet.
But rather than just downloading these images, Kowalski uses them in highlighting
their provenance. On the one hand, a beautiful black and white film at the service
of an edifying and misleading story and, on the other hand, poor quality images,
without authorship and in garish colours, attempting to denounce the horror. The
whole alternates, one image critiquing the other, but only to finally highlight their
common defeat in front of the facts. (JPR)