as close as possible to the talking gestures of autistic children

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE

In Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort (Gard), in the south of the Cévennes, stands a house, melted in the decor, which is also a reception center for young autistic people. Not a refuge, nor a hospice, nor a dormitory, but indeed a house like the others, that is to say a “place of life” from which one can enter and leave, where the we find ourselves at home, and where the shape of everyday life is shaped day after day. Active since 2004, the Tentative center was in any case imagined as such, that is to say outside any prison system, by its founder, Thierry Bazzana, former disciple and collaborator of educator Fernand Deligny (1913-1996 ), whose teaching and innovative methods he perpetuates.

Raphaël, Thomas, Charlotte, Etiza, Guillaume, David, Julie. The seven residents of the center follow one another in front of the camera of Judith Auffray, born in 1993, trained at the Beaux-Arts in Lyon and at the Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design in Geneva, and who signed her first feature film with them. footage. How to film the autistic person, whom it seems vain to seek to stage, according to the usual acceptation of the term? By building through the frame a space capable of welcoming behaviors and expressions that are as free as they remain opaque, indecipherable, responds the director. A house hesitates between still shots, where the comings and goings of the residents draw like a spontaneous ballet, a striking choreography, and raw shots, on the shoulder, where the relationship to the filmed subject is invented along the way, like freestyle.

Free sheet music

The autistic subject being the one who escapes language in his whole person, who lives below and beyond communication, it goes without saying that his approach in return poses questions that are essential to the cinema itself, at least to what concerns in it a lexicon or a grammar. Judith Auffray thus chooses not to resort to explanations or learned speeches issued by an outside authority. On the contrary, she entrusts the reins of her documentary to the pure present, endeavoring to reproduce the actions of children, like the free score of their twittering voices.

Setting the table, clearing, cutting the carrots, peeling the potatoes, drying the laundry: so many daily tasks and participations in common life, through which the method of Thierry Bazzana passes precisely. Seeing these ordinary gestures performed by young autistic people has the effect of giving them a new value, of resingularizing them, as if they were performed for the first time.

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