Backroom

From Amityville to the Final Destination franchise, from Z movies to Tokyo Sonata, Maxime le Moing has patiently summoned no less than 150 films to make Salle obscure. A mere exercise in erudition from a film-lover? This “dark room” houses much more. At the beginning, like bait, a revised and truncated version of that iconic scene in Psycho. The cruelty of an inaugural gesture that calls for many other crimes, and first of all, that of the dismembered films themselves, reassembled for a paradoxically fetishist journey. Its apparent movement: a wild race through the dark, striped with windstorms, thunderstorms, floods. In this film, sewn in strips but faceless, like a monstrous body, we become detectives in search of the liquid matter of our own memory. This erotic game of images opens onto an underworld following a disrupted, shaken-up narrative logic. Mechanics of fantasy at work, like the shots of cinema machinery (tribute to Coppola and De Palma) that punctuate the film, the room is haunted with remote whispers, as if a secrete conversation were happening off-screen. Maxime Le Moing slides along and plunges us into this deceptive and fun game, as if lost in the ambivalent pleasure of images that cinema fixes to our souls, that fertile ground where our desire grows out of the corpse of our imagined memories. A projection in this Salle obscure, evocative of Freud’s dark room of course, the little inner theatre of our unconscious, this factory of dreams and ghosts, creates here an ode to the exquisite shadows of cinema, to better let ourselves be submerged in it. (N.F.)