and yet life
It’s incomprehensible that life goes on. To mourn or to bury?
For the bereaved subject, the relationship to what can only designate the absence of any relationship, i.e. the relationship to the gap left by the disappearance, becomes the occasion for a hallucinated encounter with what will never be known, the occasion for the production of images and visions of what will never be seen.
Marie-José Mondzain (introduction to the book “The enigma of mourning” by Laurie Laufer, Puf, Paris, 2006).
Thus, in impossible mourning, the bereaved serves as a tomb, so to speak, for the departed. The experience of mourning then rubs shoulders with the experience of formlessness: the bereaved takes on the “shape” of a dead person, and, through shock, would become a body emptied of its own death. It’s as if trauma removes all flesh from the living.
The experience of traumatic mourning would then consist in focusing on the movement of images to reanimate psychic life. But what does it mean to reactivate a psychic life identified with disappearance? How can we revive the enigma of psychic life, when trauma abrades this enigma with a melancholic response? What does it mean to create a place of burial that can restore psychic animation to the living?
Laurie Laufer (“The enigma of mourning”, Puf, Paris, 2006).
- et pourtant la vie (MPEG4)
The kaleidoscope, a figure made up of mirrored replications of the same image, offers a very “organic” vision of things. Like a visual metaphor for cell division, it opens up a realm of perceptions and emotions far beyond the mere decoration it might at first appear to embody. This figure, very rare in films, has always questioned me, which is why I’ve been exploring it in film for a long time.
It’s been a nice surprise to see animated kaleidoscopes flourishing on screens over the last four or five years, in film and series credits in particular. I invite you to read the manifesto text on the practice of animated kaleidoscopes, which I wrote ten years ago, in 2014: « Thinking about moving kaleidoscope image ».
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Extinction of a star
A film by Benoît Labourdette (1’53s, 2022).
The unfathomable mysteries of the universe, inexplicable cycles, circular and unthinkable infinity. Identification with the Whole. Fragmentation. -
Making a grave
A film by Benoît Labourdette (7’45s, 2023).
Finally, finding a way to exist oneself in the absence of the other. -
Fragile source A film by Benoît Labourdette (3’25s, 2022).
Homage. Imagine your way. As I can. Without knowing. For you. You are no longer. There. For Hippolyte. -
Reflection alone A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’38s, 2022).
How to find oneself and the world after the shock? -
The Broken Heart That Beats: Dialectic of Solitude and Connection Self-elaboration in openness to the other, after the unthinkable.
Between relational permeability and necessary withdrawal, one can sketch a philosophy of existence that refuses the alternative between fusion and (…)