The baroque house
Folds and folds of souls, architectures and life itself, made of synesthetic resonance. Gilles Deleuze adding to Leibniz.
Text from the movie
Excerpts from the book “The fold. Leibniz and the baroque” by Gilles Deleuze (Éditions de minuit, 1988).
Baroque does not refer to an essence, but rather to an operative function, to a line. It keeps making folds and creases. It doesn’t invent the thing: there are all the folds from the East, the Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, classical folds... But he curves and recurves the folds, pushing them to infinity, fold after fold, fold after fold. The Baroque trait is the fold that goes on forever. And first of all it differentiates them in two directions, in two infinite directions, as if infinity had two levels: the folds in the material, and the folds in the soul. At the bottom, the matter is gathered, according to a first kind of folds, then organized according to a second kind, as long as its parts constitute organs “folded differently and more or less developed”.
[...]
It is certain that the two levels are connected. There are souls below, sensitive, animal, or even a floor below in the souls, and the folds of matter surround and envelop them.
[...]
Leibniz creates a large baroque montage, between the floor below, pierced by windows, and the floor above, blind and closed, but resonant, like a musical salon that translates into sound the movements visible from below.
End credits
- Thanks to Marie Picard and Emmanuel Vergès.
- Images, voice, music, direction: Benoît Labourdette.
- Year of realization: 2020.
- The baroque house (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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