NOUS DISONS RÉVOLUTION
LET’S SAY REVOLUTION

Elisabeth Perceval Nicolas Klotz
L’Héroïque Lande (FID 2017) proved it in style: fire and escape are the prime elements in Nicolas Klotz and Elizabeth Perceval’s work. Based on a short story by Faulkner that poeticises the escape of a slave, from Brazzaville to São Paulo by way of Barcelona, Nous disons revolution embraces present time in four movements called “races”. Before being a message of hope for a sick world, revolution is first of all about cinema. It happens in the editing room, where Klotz and Perceval pull out all the stops: within and in between fragments of a heterogeneous and stubborn material collected throughout the years, through journeys and meetings, they insert a bunch of texts and music which, when rubbed against images, light the fuse of rebellion. Klotz and Perceval remember from Deleuze that it is also possible to run or to flee on the spot. It is called dancing, becoming a flame: to each person their own revolution. Men and women are dancing feverishly for a long time. The dance of bodies turns into a filmic trance, fleeing turns into running away, with braided motifs that get revived with every race. The men who don’t dance talk, recite, tell their own stories for and with the filmmakers. And be it through dancing or talking, it is by sharing work space and time, by making a film together, as a community, and by lovingly giving in to sharing, that the film operates politically. It even makes a processional samba in the streets of São Paulo look like a show of inalienable collective power. Carried away by this power, the film itself then seems to run away, to overrun its own limits. Somewhere between fable and document, improvisation and composition, anger and joy, all frontiers are burning.
(Cyril Neyrat)