The Young and the Beautiful: Guernica / Perséphone / Les Choses Qu’On Laisse Tomber et Qui Roulent

Between 1948 and 1953, Alain Resnais made four films known as ​‘film d’art’. The experimental art documentary Guernica is one of them. The work takes a close look at Pablo Picasso’s painting of the same name. His indictment of the bombing of the town of Guernica brought the Spanish Civil War to the attention of the world. Resnais translates Guernica​’s feelings to the screen so that the audience experiences the traumatic fear that Picasso manages to capture with paint and brush. He does this by means of an experimental montage in which details of the painting are combined with early sketches, dramatic music and a passionate narration of Paul Eluard’s text.

Perséphone (1951) is the debut of Belgian filmmaker Luc De Heusch, who is best known for his anthropological documentaries on Congo and his experimental art documentaries, in which mythology is viewed from a poetic, anthropological and psychoanalytical perspective. Perséphone is considered to be the only film released within the COBRA movement. The myth about the rivalry between Aphrodite and Persephone is placed in a contemporary setting. The diffuse narrative is told by means of a poem written by painter and poet Jean Raine. Playing with symbolism and allegory, Perséphone deals with oedipal relationships, war traumas, childlike innocence, love, death and rebirth. Throughout a surrealistic aesthetic, the medium of film is used to discover the dark caverns of one’s own psyche.

La Chambre Automatique starts from an atlas that unfolds in drawings, video works, written collections, music and installations. Preferably in the combination of all this, through performances that follow their own rules. For Pourquoi on ne laisse pas tomber, the ambition was to go to ​‘La Campagne’, to collide in the emptiness of the fields with the ethical value of what is good and what is bad. Why not make a film that goes beyond mankind, the earth and the world, but also a film that is popular? The result was a short explanation of a search for making a good film as well as its making process, with as at contradictorial focal point: the distraction.