After a long career in writing and then photography, Pierre Louapre presented*La prunelle rouge*, his first film, at FID 35. He is now exploring the synthesis that cinema makes possible of his entire artistic journey. Like a Benjaminian rag-and-bone man, he has accumulated texts and images in notebooks and albums devoted to the blind spots of Marseille’s outskirts—wastelands, squats, shelters, urban construction sites. Amid the turmoil of an uncertain present, cinema allows him to peel back the layers of his own history. The shaky panoramic shots from his old albums interact with videos recorded later, on the edge of visibility. The lengthy written captions, bordering on narrative, evoke the documentary spirit of a Jacob Riis or a Lewis Hine, and intertwine with the spectral figures of his painting (the only human presences, aside from the filmmaker’s, in the film) or with a Kafkaesque chronicle of his father’s wake.
Manuel Asín