Nom Propre
Nom Propre is an experimental movie that I directed in the context of a Visual Sociology course I took at the Uni of Geneva.
At this point, I was already specialised in Family Sociology and I wanted to show the complexities of family relationships.
I started to interview the actress Sofia Luna about her incredible and fascinating family. The interview was very long and intense. However, the material collected was very difficult to put together in a comprehensive and concise way. I decided to follow on a particular story that Luna told during the interview, the story of her name. It very much resonnate with my favourite reading at that time, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation.
To complete the interview, I wrote a poem about the identity behind the name, the loneliness of words and the loneliness of the inhabitants of words. We can also note that the poem uses a lot of “game words” about statistics (a subject which I was starting to fall in love with).
Because I broke my laptop at that time, I went back to Brussels to edit the movie at David’s house. I wrote the music using Garageband and his laptop. He is the narrator of the movie. In order to illustrate the purpose, I draw some unused images from the infinite database of the Motionless Pilgrim Trilogy.
The Motionless Pilgrim
The Motionless Pilgrim is the first movie project I was involved in. Its history is complex and fantomatic. It all started when I met David during my undergrade in Brussels many years from now. Our friendship quickly revolved around cinema. Fascinated by Chris Marker and Tarkovski, we discussed the potentiality of doing a movie of our own. We devoted a particular fascination for Sans Soeil, and its combitation of poetry and photography. We decided to go for a trip along the Costa Brava in Spain. During the trip, we started to put together a story. The trip ended in Geneva. We visited an exhibition at the Ethnographical museum about … This particular exhibition impressed us greatly. We were gently bringing together the essential themes of the movie yet to come. A particular quote from this exhibition would end up opening our first movie.
We came back from this trip more decided than ever to shoot our first film. However, before starting it, we needed a bit more time to experiment and most specicially we needed to try out filming. We gathered some money and bought a basic moviemaker kit: a Canon, a microphone and a laptop. We also bought a black suit (for me, the designated actor, we were only two peoples, one had to act) and borrowed some fancy shoes from a friend (it goes without saying that the shoes were never returned). The bought an interrail pass for a month and departed to Scandinavia. The plan was to experiment with the camera and to finish writing the scenario of the movie.
Iseult
This movie was shot and edited in less than 24 hours. On a dark and cold night in Oxford, our boredom inspired us to improvise a short horror movie.
We started shooting around 9pm in my room at Nuffield College. We