THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Infinite richness of editing archives, or, to be even more precise, of reusing existing films – “found footage” to use the English expression – whose least of the paradoxes consists in very often giving birth to supremely personal works. Going through the images of others to tell your story is a very fine idea, both modest and generous, involving everything that cinema, and nothing else in its place, can produce in terms of the commons. Three recent examples in the French-speaking world: Don’t think I’m screaming (2019), by Frank Beauvais, Back to Reims (fragments) (2022), by Jean-Gabriel Périot, and in theaters today And I love to fury, by André Bonzel.
A name that will ring, perhaps, in the ears of moviegoers, which, associated with those of Rémy Belvaux and Benoît Poelvoorde, gave in 1992 It happened close to you, a stinging Belgian satire of reality TV dedicated to a serial killer. Bonzel is the Frenchman and the cameraman of this hellish trio, which was shamefully formed around Insas, the famous Brussels film school. If we know the fate, still as awfully heartbreaking, of the actor Benoît Poelvoorde and that, much more tragic, of Rémy Belvaux, who committed suicide in 2006 after having embraced a career as an advertising director, Bonzel had him disappeared into the wild.
We find him at the age of 60 with this montage film, a little gem of delicacy and emotion. If Frank Beauvais used fiction films to write his diary, Bonzel uses family films of which – he explains to us in the foreword to this film which he will narrate in voice-over – he has always been collecting. On images of dozens of unknown amateurs, offering family pictures engraved in celluloid of a good-natured happiness that nothing can corrupt, a darker, more fragmented, more mysterious personal story takes shape, of which we understand quickly enough that she will have justified this last resort to the filmed happiness of others to write herself.
Extended family
A father without warmth and without love, a mother confided in devotion: the childhood of René Bonzel does not resemble the Epinal image of family films. A fatherly biologist keeping jars of shit to examine at home, farting at the table, having more consideration for his dogs than for his son. René does not go there with the back of the spoon. And the sequel is in keeping. Father and husband who builds a wall in his own house so as not to see his wife again. Absent father at the wedding of his son, who will only too rarely find the resources of a word, a gesture of love or complicity. It is, on the contrary, the father of a friend who, by projecting reels of burlesque to the small group of children that his son frequented, breathes into him not only the proof that benevolence exists but, even more, the love of cinema. As a result, René, quickly fleeing the sluggish circle of the nuclear family, begins to widen the field of his camera.
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