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 first-nameless artist 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 visual installation to a true multimedia documentary, complete with 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 cross-section of the hundred and one inhabitants, Guykayser behaves like a semiologist who, weary of making signs speak, decides to organize nothing but their sheer exhaustion. Like the lady who sees the church from her window but never any more funerals, leading her to believe that “everyone is getting cremated, I don’t know.” Or that man at a forest crossroads, inevitably counting twelve paths even though 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 down and recomposes a form. Faced with the fragmentation of the screen into several parts, one could certainly 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 scrolling banners, in the style of TV graphics; 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 the “cultivated” gaze at the spectacle of its own kind.
And yet, it works. Take “Marcel,” whose wife, suffering from multiple sclerosis, endured twenty-two years of ordeal. It takes the widower just one sentence to say it, and that is enough for the initial color image to give way, rectangle by rectangle, to a black-and-white portrait, frozen in a pose, of a young woman from the past. Presented, moreover, blurred, 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. Because that is mostly what it is, in Nannay or elsewhere: houses, windows, doors, and a “stranger” who manages, 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 in deeply to be convinced of being alive.
