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When you have seen Wagner and De Geetere's brilliant production 'Les contaminations', you can immediately recognise their style. This time, the subject is memory and film as a weapon against time. Film as a data base of impressions. 'En pire' begins with fragments of sound and images which flash up in a dark frame. The fragments get longer until they completely overcome the darkness and follow on from each other. We see an evening sky with clouds, filmed from a passing car and then a woman in a hotel room. These two images are the start and the end of the video. In between, memories form a chain of fragmentary images and texts. The image is very varied, both in what we see and how it is presented. Just as in memories, things run together and reality is molded by our subjective experience. The sound plays an important role in creating that impression of memory. There too, there are fragments with a variety of presentation and content. Image and sound often seem complete divorced from each other, but hook up together regularly. Sometimes they are synchronous (watch out for the subtitles!), sometimes sound runs behind image. The woman who we saw in the first few minutes, is described by a voice a quarter of an hour later. Sound gives some memories a greater content of reality, but it can also emphasize the subjectivity of memory, especially when it is out of synch with the image.
A halting voice explains in broken English why the film is a great gift: it makes people less afraid because they can stop time flashing by. "I don't remember the story, only the atmosphere," she says. If you can present an atmosphere the way Wagner and De Geetere can, what does the story matter?
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Lies Holtrop
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Editing: Patrick de Geetere, Voices: Anouk Adrien, Magda Wronecka, Gianni Toti, With thanks to: Pierre Bongiovanni, Jean-Claude Loumiet, Gilles MarchEsi, Patrick Zanoli, Production: Catherine Derosier
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