MÜNSTER

Münster, 1533. While the undermined catholic hegemony is faltering, the self-proclaimed Anabaptists led by a preacher named Jean de Leyde establish a utopian community. After relaying with false ingenuousness the media discourse of free-market economy in his film L’An 2008 (FID 2011), Martin Le Chevallier tackles another mythology in this film that relates the collapse of a hope in the form of a communist experiment before its time in Northern Germany. The epic gets re-en- acted under the gaze of two characters, respectively the gullible person and the historiographer, who are at once actors, witnesses and commentators. And the duettists to wonder about the invention of myths, the exhilaration of faith and the virtues of tyranny.
Keeping clear of any kind of naturalism, and using anachronism as a political tool, Le Chevallier exploits the fable genre to question the very possibility of truth is storytelling, the representation of a distant fact, its relaying as well as the danger of falsification. Alluding to Buñuel’s The Milky Way as well as to Dürer, to Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc as well as to medieval vignettes, Le Chevallier builds a form of visual storytelling with hieratic frames of extreme precision, occasionally mixed with sumptuous black and white, like some paradoxical tribute to cinema. The mise en abyme of the story works like an animated chanson de geste, it abolishes the historical timeline, therefore the world of the fable and that of the narrators, just like the past and our present time, interpenetrate and answer each other, not without humour, in a game of echoes and mirrors. (NF)