DAS HERZ DURCH WÜSTENEYEN RENNT – ARBEITSTITEL
THE HEART THROUGH DESERTS RUNS – WORKING TITLE

Garegin Vanisian
“On peut vivre sans richesse, Presque sans le sou. Des seigneurs et des princesses, Y’en a plus beaucoup. Mais vivre sans tendresse, On ne le pourrait pas. Non, non, non, non. On ne le pourrait pas” (You can live without wealth, live without a penny, Lords and ladies, there aren’t very many. But to live without tenderness, it just can’t be done. No, no, no, no, it just can’t be done). Garegin Vanisian’s film opens with Marie Laforêt’s well known song La Tendresse. Love… love wounded by the breakup experienced by the film’s character. How do you express the gaping void left when a loved one has gone? It’s through a second loss that the director dramatises the romantic breakup: the departure of the actress who refuses the role and forces the film to reinvent itself. Instead of the sequences, described in a voiceover, the gaps in the story are filled with images devoid of the character’s body, or using pictures from the storyboard, amazing miniatures in watercolour. By interweaving this into the filming, and displaying the artifice – the mock-up of the backdrop, the dolly track, even the actress’s audition – the director explores the drama’s structures and breaks away from the melancholy register of his film. Like the beautiful Jasko Fide’s tattoos, Garegin Vanisian skilfully sketches a stippled film – without masking his inspiration, from the posture borrowed from Marina Abramovic in Nightsea Crossing to the “Chantal Ackerman sequence”, from Goethe quotations to the one from Guy Gilles, “I used to think life was a poem”. All the beauty and sadness of living seem to be contained in this phrase. But although it resembles a film about romantic – and artistic – disappointment, The Heart Through Deserts Runs – Working Title impressively comes back to life as the film develops, like the woman who appears at the end, triumphant and resilient in the long grass. To the repeated absences of the narrative, Vanisian responds with presences that are constantly updated and permanently in progress.
(Louise Martin-Papasian)