In the sober and powerful Road Movie (FID 2011), Christophe Bisson tracked the secret intensities held back behind suffering through the silences and rare snatches of speech to escape from the mouths of the inmates of a psychiatric institution. This film is also about speech, its privation and its rough rediscovery. Following an amputation of the larynx, a man named Joël Perrotte decided to reinforce his muteness by hiding in the basement of his house. It is the story of this retreat from the world, and his subsequent resurfacing, that he recounts in detail, facing the screen, with a strange, mechanical voice which he had firstly to master and then recognise as his own. But is clear what interests Bisson in this personal drama: the outlandish aspect of the speech machine. And what fascinates his camera in this machine is its capacity to be exposed to the outside: to connect, for example, the darkness of a basement and its tool bench to the movements of a face, to link the colour of skin to that of the sky. Exposure to the outside means that speech entirely occupies the space of a film that is not the only recording of an ordeal, but which advances en bloc, in total solidarity with this new being with a microphone grafted on to it.
Jean-Pierre Rehm
