INTERNATIONAL RETROSPECTIVE - ALAIN CAVALIER: PORTRAIS/SELF-PORTRAITS
Alain Cavalier is a filmmaker (filmeur) – someone
who films. He has done this professionally for half
a century. He debuted in the wake of the “nouvelle
vague” with a thriller (“Fire and Ice,” 1961) - his personal
path to ascetic dramas like “Thérèse” (1986)
and “Libera Me” (1993) until non-fiction cinema
dominated his film discourse. Cavalier, it is worth
noting, does not consider himself a documentary
filmmaker.
In the last three decades, Cavalier has presented us
with larger than life characters found in their daily
routines. The two series “La dame des lavabos” (Portraits),
from the turn of the 1980s to the 1990s, are
variations on a simple and rigorous procedure: to
summarize in about 13 minutes the oral autobiography
of women who work with their hands. They are
23 small masterpieces, one as distinct as the other in
regards to the trajectory of their protagonists. Little
by little, inside the “Portraits” themselves, Cavalier
already outlines his self-portrait. First, we hear his
voice as skillful interviewer. In one short, and then
another, there is one and soon another revelation
of his own daily life. The voice ends up receiving a
face. Cavalier was ready for the most recent path of
his courageous filmography.
Between 1978 and 2009, from “Ce Répondeur Ne
Prend Pas De Messages” (This Answering Service
Takes No Messages) to “Irène,” there were four selfportraits.
The technical revolution of digital video
gives him the aesthetic foundation of an audiovisual
memorialism. The plot that developed pre-filming at
his beginning as a writer starts to build itself in the
same moment as the day-to-day autobiographical
recording. Starting with his diaries, Cavalier now
sculpts his films. Everything in life is cinema for the
filmmaker’s camera - or it could be that way.
Amir Labaki
Movies
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