Left to oneself | Totally naked

I'm about to find out if it makes sense to go to the limit of your strength...

My brain is so scrambled by the amount of stuff it has been dealing with every day for months, that I dream about things, people and places, without really knowing if I've actually done them, met them or seen them. I thought I had sustained infernal rhythms at several stages of the realization of The Fleece sleepswhen it was necessary to build one episode per month in solo or to develop the last version, created at the Generator in a collective form, at the origin of the Parks. Aoday, these various moments seem to me to be all the result of ordinary creation.

It's not so much that things are done; it's that they're out of your head... because they were made.

From then on, I found no other way out than to make it happen. Not doing them out of weariness or refusing them, leads to letting a real toxic heap of untreated waste accumulate inside you and especially between your brain connections. This goes from the smallest detail, such as finding a particular accessory at the best price, ordering it so as to receive it in the right timing, entering on the computer an invoice set aside, to the making of video editing or images. The problem is not in what there is to be done, but in the incompressible and uninterrupted quantity of events to be processed. Unless I give up entire areas of filmmaking or let myself get into great difficulty by burying my head in the sand, there is no alternative but to respond as much as possible to the demands of what I myself have created.

Strange effort in the context of which the time to make a coffee is really taken up on something else. I will no longer wonder why people run marathons for "fun". Until those daily texts that I can't help but produce and which are terribly time-consuming to write. What has become really intriguing for me is to ask myself "what" governs all this?

This is probably the fundamental question that I have and which also raises the question of distance. Sprinting at the front of the pack means getting out of reach of the others. What others? It's not a race where I'm competing against other competitors. I am alone with myself in this event and will only find the presence of the team and the spectators, really only on the D-day. On that day, I'll have nothing to do but let myself go. Because if I set up this complex and strange object, it's also to pay for a holiday. Vacation from what? Everything, I think. Of my life as it is. Since I can't desperately change it, I'm setting up a pleasant suicide. An alternative to life that doesn't materially require a sacrifice to death. An in-between in a dummy country that I will only have to visit because, populated by my partners and those who will come, it will have become unrecognizable. Like an abandoned or wild moorland that suddenly becomes urbanized. This is what, in my conception, a live show should be. A memory of which you can remember every detail as if you had lived it and which, when the day comes when it is embodied in a tangible way, no longer has the familiar silhouette that you imagined you had known. Here, too, the distance imposed by the evolution of living forms plays to the full.

So I don't imagine myself, on the day of our premiere, finally giving substance to a fantasized image, but on the contrary, meeting years later, an old and changed comrade. Is this my childhood The whole of it will thus be rehabilitated and reshaped by the years and the visitors, passengers of its memory? I don't believe it, and I don't have any hope for it.

Contrary to what one might imagine, there is nothing nostalgic about my approach. My childhood universe is for me a material, nothing more.

It's putting this baggage to the test that interests me. "Can I still live today with what I'm made of? "is a question that I think is more relevant and can be asked by anyone who is getting older. Adapting to the current world still puts at stake the distance. Can we catch up with him, he who has suddenly started moving forward in double or triple steps of what we have known or felt? I'll take that bet. I don't want to live any longer held back by the past, by all the pasts whatever they may be, even the most recent ones. It's a question of blowing everything up before we no longer have the strength to do so; of putting everything on the carpet and running into this heap so that it disintegrates; so that it shatters on all sides in a monumental strike. That's my plan. I don't have another one. So, to that end, I took on board the maximum cargo, not to survive on it, but to throw everything overboard.

"Nu comme un ver" is the title of a 1933 film (again that haunting year that spawned Hitler, King Kong and my mother!) directed by Léon Mathot, starring the comedian and fantasy singer Georges Milton, whose style was even more parigotrous than Chevalier's and just as well known in his day. He is the interpreter of the famous "bien de chez nous" song, which contains in its chorus " making Mirza pee is for my daddy, troubling underwear is for my mommy... "Even better known is "The Bedouin's Daughter", who always, I suppose, makes the festivities in nursing homes.

The film's argument puts us in the presence of a businessman, very rich, who takes up a challenge and bets that he can start his career all over again. In this way, he will climb the ladder of society again and, once he's rich again, he will meet love. In order to accomplish his feat, I remember that he asks to be left, devoid of everything, with no clothes and no money, in the middle of a field. I have to say that this is all I remember of the film, the whole thing having seemed rather painful, especially because of Milton's outrageous acting, whose character I found arrogant and unsympathetic. The film had to be shown at Claude-Jean Philippe's ciné-club on a Friday night. As so often on these occasions, I watched it in the company of my father, who was surely moved to see one of the feature films released during his youth. I also remember being struck by the resemblance of the main actor to Béla Lugosi, whose haircut was flattened back and whose round face always seemed difficult to fit in with the image I had of Count Dracula, a role the great Hungarian actor has played in films on several occasions. Anyway, in this case, it was not a question of awarding the first prize in the competition for the most grimacing actor, but of understanding what, despite everything, had kept me on tenterhooks until the end of this not very exciting film.

I think the original screenplay anecdote was the sole cause. I don't mean to say that I saw a naked man on that occasion - directing wouldn't have been possible in a film destined to be so popular and with such a star in its cast. No, I remember that the tall grass in the field was particularly well stocked so that all you could see was Milton's chubby upper torso. In fact, I think the plan is just long enough to make sense of the story and justify its title.

It is only the idea of being voluntarily alone and totally naked, left to oneself and to one's own devices, a few kilometres away from a city that one is preparing not to flee, but to invest - or in this case, even to conquer - that has challenged me.

If I believed in that patriotic cinema.., impossible was not French. I could have been satisfied with it, but the most important thing was that this script contained a notion that has been in my head ever since: there was a pleasure in challenging oneself and, above all, that freedom was never acquired and even, that it was beneficial and invigorating from time to time, to annihilate one's leader, in order to better win her back, even if it meant finding her identical again. The road travelled would be its new wealth. Thus I understood the need to make her desires travel, sometimes to the antipodes of a relative comfort; to thwart them even, to give them even more strength to exist. To consolidate them.

I am not at all apologizing for the frustration, which I abhor - as some of my posts show - by saying that. I am talking about the need to go beyond one's desires and not just be satisfied with them. There is a big difference. Frustration hinders the individual against his or her will, while pushing their most important aspirations into their entrenched positions makes them express their essence.

I opted, as a boat for my life, for the stage and the staging.

Each new adventure in these lands, reinforces my acuity to see more clearly, sharpens my ability to detail the physical mechanisms and laws, brings me more precision to discern its contours. Distances and angles of view allow me to visualize a geography in volume. In my case, I have abandoned the one, too down to earth for my taste, contenting myself with tracing and making visible placements and displacements, were they feelings andplotsin the heart of the space and rhythm of a show. I have much more today the feeling of act out and to propose a living dramaturgy, by shifting the cogs of my psychic labyrinth at the tip of my dry pencil, then by asking my partners to go back to oil pastels, under the varied colours of their interpretations, the volumes that they will instinctively bring out.

I am attempting an osmotic transmission of my brain and creative moods.

To those of you who read me, I also propose to start from this multidimensional plan, albeit blurred and distant for those who do not know anything about me, in order, nevertheless, to bring out the walls of earth, so that the buildings and cowboy forts follow the inclination of your own plumb lines, it must be said - as with everyone else - rarely square with the ground.

To the Gods and the Fates, during these few days, to have the benevolence to ballast them as little as possible, in case some childhoods and small lost liberties to be regained, would like to give themselves the leisure to germinate again, this time, by pushing a little higher than the big tight wheat of the field where they were lost.