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Le filmeur

The Filmaker (English Corner)

Film français (2004).
Documentaire.
Durée : 1h40mn.
Date de sortie : Prochainement
Avec Alain Cavalier
Réalisé par Alain Cavalier

Le journal intime filmé du réalisateur Alain Cavalier. Les premiers plans du film ont été tournés en 1994. Les dernières images datent de 2005. Plus de dix ans de vie en cent minutes de projection.

(L'avis exprimé par les rédacteurs de cette rubrique est indépendant du travail et des choix du Jury oecuménique.)

In 1994, honoured director Alain Cavalier began what has become a cinema diary. He filmed his wife extensively, especially her cancer concern, her weight consciousness as well as her domestic work, like cooking, in detail after detail. His own brush with cancer in his nose becomes a key element. He films his parents in their illnesses and, especially, his father’s death. Other characters move in and out. There is much discussion of art and cinema. Cavalier asks the usual questions about life, death and meaning and reflects on his own abandonment of Catholicism in describing his father’s last rites and the meaning of belief in transubstantiation. Later he takes a host home from Mass and films it, asking questions of belief again. He remains devoted to Therese of Lisieux whose life he filmed in Therese in 1987.
 
Obviously this is a work of love – and a work of self-love – creatively edited as a personal visual collage of a life. It depends on how ingratiating the filmmaker makes himself from the start whether an audience wants to stay with him over two hours or not. For those caught up in his visual delights and compositions, details of his home, a pet bird feeding on worms and other minutiae, there is great pleasure. But for many, his film does outstay its welcome.