LES ALLÉES SOMBRES

Rough tree bark, a carpet of dead leaves and branches, the smooth walls of the cave: Claire Doyon’s film immediately stands out as an experience of sensation. The surfaces touched and explored, as if read by the hands that wander over it, create a path that is all the more attractive because it follows neither markers nor a straight line. Listening to the sounds of the forest, the night, water courses, wind and storm, so close to animals, from the modest beetle to the crowned majesty of deer, even in the dark recesses of a dripping cave in which a figure that is half-human and half-animal, out of a child’s imagination, seems to reign, we travel to a mysterious female character whose age changes, a territory of dreams or memories. We explore and we become lost. We project stories and images. A cave plunged into darkness, a place of illusion par excellence, but also a secret hideaway, an intimate hiding place away from the world, the cave becomes the setting in which the luminous echo of Penelope (FID 2012) suddenly presents itself to us. A wordless story is written on the walls and opens the way to poetry.(CG)