Produced during Les Conviviales de Nannay
With this third intervention, while sketching the image of a human community and a territory, the aim is above all to meet the inhabitants of a place and, through their stories and their landscapes, to speak of humans to humans by trying to discover the universal in the particular… while sharing less spiritual nourishment in good spirits.
Here is the interactive site (640/480 px) that I created at the time with “Flash”; the network speed was 56kbps…
S. Coumoul, Cahiers du Cinéma, October 2002
Let’s call it an atmosphere, a gap, a color, a timbre. The feeling that something is being hollowed out even as the mystery thickens. The artist without a first name, Guykayser (we do know, however, that he is 1.86 meters tall and frequents Chalette-sur-Loing, 45120), has managed to bend a piece of space-time within the reality of Nannay (Nièvre), after having seen Tresnay and Nevers less clearly. As luck would have it, this progress—in short: from concept to execution—corresponds to the transition from a simple plastic installation to a true multimedia documentary, featuring editing techniques and a few moving images. Welcome, then.
Sampling from the heart of the Val de Bargis—somewhat in the manner of Cadiot & Burger in the Petite Lièpvre valley—a selection of the one hundred and one inhabitants, Guykayser behaves like a semiologist who, weary of making signs speak, decides to organize nothing but their exhaustion. Such as the lady who sees the church from her window but never any funerals anymore, leading her to believe that “everyone is getting cremated, I don’t know.” Or that man at a forest crossroads, invariably counting twelve paths when he knows full well there are thirteen—”I always forget one.”
Each of these “anti-testimonies” is divided into four sketches where Guykayser constantly breaks and recomposes a form. One could certainly, faced with the fragmentation of the screen into several parts, cry déjà-vu. One might as well point out all the others: introducing people by their first names, as in any reportage; a system of superimposed bandwidths, in the style of TV branding; implicit clichés about the boredom-but-also-the-charms of rural life; close-ups of hands sculpted by fifty years of labor; the emotion and distance of a “cultivated” gaze at the spectacle of its own kind.
And yet, it works. Take “Marcel,” whose wife suffering from multiple sclerosis lived through twenty-two years of ordeal. It takes the widower one sentence to say it, and that is enough for the initial color image to give way, rectangle by rectangle, to the black and white portrait, frozen in a pose, of a young woman from the past. Presented, moreover, out of focus, except for the eyes—the last rectangle to appear at the moment Marcel falls silent: “… Only the eyes were still working, at the end.” On the eternal dilemma of the sound/image relationship—redundancy or counterpoint?—Guykayser chooses the middle path of accompaniment. And preferably, at home. For that is mostly what it is, in Nannay or elsewhere: houses, windows, doors, and a “stranger” who arrives, through sheer discipline, to lift a corner of the curtain on a landscape with precise contours, filled with an air that iridizes the skin in the morning, which one breathes deeply to be persuaded of being alive.
