Director: Nicola Sornaga.
2 flap digipack - 1 DVD - PAL all zones.
Duration: 103’
Original version french / Subtitles: english, spanish and italian.
Bonus : 7 Fragments for a film to come (unpublished- 2007)
Duration : 27’
Edited by Choses Vues, sponsored by the Centre National de la Cinématographie.
MusiC : Bobby Few
CINEMA AS TWO-WAY MIRROR
André S. Labarthe and Matthieu Messagier talk about Nicola Sornaga ‘s film, The Last of the Immobiles.
ASL: What is there to say about a film so inspired that we, the viewers, have to ask ourselves the question asked by L’Age d’or in 1931: what is an image?
MM: Cinema is no more a question of images than poetry is a question of words.
ASL: (…) To come back to that constant shifting of the importance of the image that happens in a few rare films, it seems to me that we can say that the cinema is neither window nor mirror, and so the question arises of how someone who finds himself immersed in such a film, as you are, my dear Matthieu, in Nicola‘s, experiments with this oscillation between window and mirror?
MM: By being in between the two the whole time and trusting him, from the start, not to confuse narrative with poetry. In authentic cinema duration is abolished and turned into “small windows on reality”, sometimes not even connected to each other. I realised during the shooting how the overall coherence of the work would be achieved at the end of the film, and that every single element he had gathered would come into balance. In Nicola’s film, poems written on hotel writing paper from around the world appear on the screen as the titles of a modern silent movie, punctuating the film with static acceleration.
ASL: I had the feeling while watching the film that your enforced, intentional immobility, in the film and in your life, was the secret driving force of the film, as spinning top’s apparent immobility hides within itself the high speed that makes it spin. (…)
MM: My part is something like a point of reference in a meadow through four seasons, overlapping each other through words and appearances. The reason why cinema has not taken much from poets, except in this film, is because poetry is anything but illustration and has no descriptive sources. It’s the same reason why the plays of Jarry and Roussel are unperformable.
ASL: Aren’t poets prone to offer what you call “unperformable” theatre? You mentioned Jarry and Roussel, and we could also mention many others, from Michaux to Char to Césaire to Supervielle. And if this theatre is called unperformable (although it is performed), isn’t it because it questions the fundamental instability of image? In Nicola’s film the image is always on the verge of losing its referent or of clouding the reading. One understands why Illuminations has never been a best-seller. Indeed, if we look for what Rimbaud did his utmost to suppress, why are we surprised not to find it? We have to remember that the referent is that stone we tied around the neck of a cat we wanted to drown so as to make sure it sank right to the bottom.
MM: The actor, if the poet, and the poet, if the actor, must be able both to expand and fade out, to the point where awareness of being either one almost disappears.
