THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Bringing poetry into the cinema has always been a challenge, as there is no common measure between the moving image and the word, nothing but distance and distant horizons. The duo of filmmakers formed by Marie-Violaine Brincard and Olivier Dury crosses the impasse in the most beautiful way, with a very beautiful film-essay which takes note of this distance and speaks the very language of poetry, by summoning the writings by the worker poet Thierry Metz (1956-1997). Considered by many to be a major feather of the XXe century, Metz first earns his living on construction sites, from which he draws the material for his first collection, Log of a maneuver (1990), which he published with Gallimard at the age of 34.
A first long shot sets the tone: a tree in the middle of a plain gradually emerges from the mist, while birds alight on one of the electric wires like so many notes on a score. This play of forms within a landscape seems to draw on the same sources of inspiration as the poems of Metz. Rather than documenting too literally, Brincard and Dury film anonymous places that resonate with the author’s journey: a construction site close to those where he worked, a house by the side of the road similar to the one where his son Vincent , 8 years old, died cut down by a car in 1988, a psychiatric hospital like the one where Metz was interned to overcome his alcoholism in 1996, before killing himself in 1997.
Radical economy of means
They play passages from his work, read in voice-over, while in the image landscapes, still lifes, portraits, motifs and genre scenes follow one another, like plots of people. In doing so, the film is careful not to illustrate, but lets Metz’s words return to things, to materials, to the luminous impressions from which they first emerged.
With a radical economy of means, Brincard and Dury thus carry out a series of quite striking plastic studies, so many magnificent views gleaned from the surface of reality – a forest path lost in the undergrowth, a field of sunflowers with trees. undulating lines, a burst of sunlight flickering on a section of wall. This is the great lesson they have learned from the poetic practice of Thierry Metz: art can be made of things that are close, of immediate experience, of everything that we go through and that is within sight. Film as you put your easel in the middle of a field, or as you take out your notebook to jot down a few words, still permeated with the world around you.
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