Walked the way home

Let it be known that: 1. All of us, every one, are filming, are being filmed, watched, looked at via our phones. 2. Following the Vigipirate security policy in the wake of the 1980s series of terrorist attacks, military troops have been patrolling the Paris landscape before moving to other places, and since 2015, they have been part and parcel of the urban fabric itself. Eric Baudelaire uses a very simple and accessible device, i. e. his own phone, to film, day in day out, his movements around his studio in Paris, as well as during a sojourn in Rome. From this Eric Baudelaire has reaped a bittersweet accumulation of images, initiated and inspired by the title of an Alvin Curran song : Walked the Way Home. But from one path to the next, what is it all about? Walked the Way Home : this title embodies everyday life, an ordinary repetition, every day, everywhere, all the time. And Eric Baudelaire’s insistence on showing the signs of this presence that tends to blend into the landscape, deconstructs invisibility as a result of our current indifference to what actually, and primarily, belongs in the battlefield. Eric Baudelaire fills our horizon with it. This is an artistic gesture which highlights a type of politics through details. From a stained floor to the artificial prospect of a beach, the itinerary delineated by Eric Baudelaire, from one uniform to the next, in a city which becomes almost generic (Rome, Paris, or some other place), is fraught with the same deceiving sweetness to be found in Lynchian nightmares. Notice the swaying movements of the hand-held device, the frame verticality which both suggest everybody’s uses, at a remove from the established codes prevalent in cinema, as well it suggests the loophole of surveillance. This is a sedate state of exception, highlighted by the fluid editing, dancing gaits and slow-motion. This is a truly ominous walk home, which deploys its choreography within a surrounded perimeter whose elasticity makes it hard to breathe in, the perimeter of a daily life bathed in muffled violence, which is brought to the fore by the melancholic tones of Alvin Curran’s song. (NF)