[CRITICAL] PARIS IS A PARTY

Sylvain George plunges us into a Paris in black and white. A Paris revolt, of softness, of silence and joy.

Open up the white drops appeared in the splices by an optical effect, of the lights that crackle and resound with pretensions like so many rifle shots. This is what opens the poem experimental PARIS IS A FEAST, also the title of the book’Hemingway’s returned to being a success after the attacks of Paris and original name of the Nocturama of Bonello. Presented as a work in 18 waves, it is a tidal wave of images, blown like so many estates restorative, establishing a palimpsest twirling plans striking. Shows a precipitate of insurrections, revolts gentle, sustained or warlike overflowing into the achievement of the filmmaker.

As in may they rest in revolt, one of the first films of Sylvain George, the motif of hands, adamantines, bruised, hidden away in the dress rambling of the night, or covering a face is a formal element hinge of the film. The fingers and palms are often the guarantors of the identity of individuals, the binders of the community (an idea dear to George, that it is those images, sounds, or men).

As always with this filmmaker, the body of the film is molded in a black-and-white carbonized made of the same material of the night. Disoriented, rendering in the shadow of the camera obscura, built a space that is intangible, abstract, proper film in which there is those that the cinema of the great classical forms, does not welcome, or if not so civilized/police : the immigrants, the rebellious, insurrectional licensed.

In the confusion of the forms and assembly of plant and human bodies, as in Terrence Malick but under other moons, there is almost something of an animist at work. This crossing delirious of a field of sunflowers in the middle of the night, in a parade in fading suns dark, accompanied by riffs of guitars and cries of hyenas, develops a cosmogony emaciated but troubling. Conversely, the noise of the cars and the mechanical urban pegged to the tones with accents of men and women make up a melody to the film dual and the nested, double but united.

“A trip to the open tomb in the Paris in the aftermath of the attacks. A draft fever. “Click to tweet

The book in a format that is 1:33, giving managers the appearance of photos live. Also emanates an impression of spectral to be sometimes in Georges Franju, darkened even more by the anchoring depth of the real, in the carne images. But even more than in the fantastic cinema and French documentary, it is in the journal experimental of Jonas Mekas , the film, and the work of George in general, refer.

Pearl of the maëlstorm stories poignant. Such as this african immigrant, beatboxer gifted, passed through Mali, Burkina Faso, Algeria, Morocco, and Italy. The presence, in the heart of the film, a stele in tribute to Bouna and Zyed, these two dead children pursued by the Police, told how much the film takes on the skeleton of an idea, political urgency and, more particularly, to an insurrection proud and tenacious. These two moments of notable clumping plans edifying which burst the current frantic assembly. As this veiled woman, sitting in a position of begging on the sidewalk near a storefront, and Kenzo. The set closes with the confrontation of a youth protest under the leadership of the Night Standing in front of the forces of the order (without avoiding the commonplaces of the genre : “Freedom !” shouted at full lung ; the cops likened to the nazis).

Persists the feeling unfortunately tenacious as the construction of experimental established over the contingencies of the shooting and that the whole melts into an inspiration that lack of general, formal project overall and gives the feeling that everything has been set end-to-end by default, and that each sequence meets not in a logical sense but in a year of sensations, of the experiment precisely. Unlike Picasso, who defended it : “I do not seek, I find”, George seems to apply the opposite.

Flavien Poncet

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