Oh night

A postcard seems to come to life, and write its own legend.

Accomplishment notebook

• Making night by closing the aperture and increasing the shutter speed: American night.
• The long focal length (zoom), hand-held camera, makes horizontality difficult to obtain. This technical defect, which I corrected at the time of editing by tilting the whole image, invited me to make it like a postcard, laid askew in front of you.
• This shot is a postcard theme, and, along with the Anglo-medieval “Château Turpault” on the Quiberon peninsula, this postcard evoked my childhood imagination and the mix of my memories and my projection onto those of my children, when they were children.
  • Oh postcard night
  • Oh blur of memory
  • Oh desire to live
  • Oh captions of photos and the past
• Then I recorded this text in front of the castle, with the sound of the clock in the traditional apartment with a sea view.
• I recorded several times in a row, in one take, to clarify my intention, to work on the text, to deepen the meaning of this reading. And finally, I left the several takes in a row, which in my opinion dig the meaning and the sensitive, on what is a text, what is this text, and what is a text on images (the “legend”, of which the text speaks, which puts it in abyme, and I hope opens it to the sensitive of the one who looks at it).
• A moment of blur in the image reminded me of the blur that came in the text.
• The text, a little longer than the images, ended in the dark. This gave me the idea to put several moments of black in the film, which are a scansion, a punctuation of the text. Certain precise words are said in the dark. And that made me cut the blurriest moment, due to the autofocus of the camera. On the other hand, I let the blurred sea become clear. It was not easy not to leave the shot in one go, the sequence shot as an ontological trace of reality.
• I dared to cut, to move forward.
• The encounter with this reality and the gesture of making, made me think about creation itself. Thus, thought is not prior, it is consubstantial.

Diffusion

• 2022 : « Loop » exhibition (Lyon Particule Gallery).