Stardust on our screens: like meteorites, FJ Ossang’s first films, shot on film, seem to have crossed the decades without having lost an ASA of their incandescent darkness. Three restored feature films, The Case of the Morituri Divisions (1985), The Treasure of the Chiennes Islands (1990) and Doctor Luck (1997), complete their race and are preparing to land in theaters, from Wednesday August 24, in Paris, Marseille (Shellac), Lyon (Comœdia) or even Rennes (at the Théâtre national de Brest cinema), etc. To (re) discover them is to reconnect with the splendor of German and Russian expressionist films, while discovering an unknown land, without past or future, a black and white sometimes tinged with stale colors, against a backdrop of industrial music.
We could also use the metaphor of the racing car, Ossang having burst into the cinema like a car leaving the road – moreover, the filmmaker, poet and ex-pillar of punk groups often says that he dreamed of being a pilot. . Farewell to the code and the classic language of cinema: the admirer of Jean-Luc Godard and Guy Debord prints his universe no future from its first “long”, The Case of the Morituri Divisions, which caused a stir at Cannes in 1985. This story of crested gladiators – interpreted by members of a group close to Ossang, Lucrate Milk – was not to everyone’s taste, evoking in bits and pieces the pangs of the Red Army Faction, a terrorist group of the “Baader gang”. Almost forty years later, this graduation film, shot in three weeks, produces the effect of a hallucinated dream, images by jerks of a bluish gray – Maurice Ferlet on camera.
spy novel
The sun bakes in The Treasure of the Chiennes Islands, shot in the Azores archipelago in cinemascope – Grand Prize at the Belfort Festival in 1990. An engineer discovered the artificial synthesis of two fundamental substances, allowing the production of a new source of energy (oreon) – that who we miss so much today. Specter of a nuclear threat and a destructive virus… Under the gaze of the director of photography, Darius Khondji, humanity is consumed in a wide shot, the face of a woman (Mapi Galan) emerging from a water greyed out.
After the boat, the helicopter, we board the bright red convertible of Doctor Luck (Ossang’s only color film), with Joe Strummer (1952-2002), the leader of The Clash playing a rebel aviator, and Elvire, actress and traveling companion of FJ Ossang, a cabaret dancer. The spy novel intersects the destiny of a couple united by a love potion, crossing the Chilean desert. Elvira is the hip line of Doctor Luck, and much more than that. Its magnetic presence magnifies the abstraction of this feverish road movie. Where we rob the safe to live a little.
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