A large flower, the silhouette of a figure briskly walking away, a house key, a bread knife, a telephone receiver resting off the hook, and a spinning phonographic turntable define the shifting functional elements in Meshes of the Afternoon from which the film’s evolving, malleable construct – the fragile and tenuously interconnected mesh of actual […]
In an episode in Richard Copans’s autobiographical essay, Racines, an elderly man provides Copans with a tour of his grandparents’ house in Picardy, explaining that, like the expression “to put under glass” something that is cherished, he was inspired to convert the modest, turn of the (nineteenth) century home into a museum as a means […]
Perhaps better known for his early career in photojournalism or his austere, yet sublime ethnographic portraitures of the Sahara desert in such docufiction films as Captive of the Desert and Un Homme sans l’occident, Raymond Depardon continues in a similar vein as his earlier exposition into the domestic justice system of Délits flagrants in The […]
Adapted from the Diégo Brosset novel, Sahara: Un homme sans l’occident, the film chronicles the life of a nomadic tracker called Alifa at the turn of the century African desert as he struggles against the assimilation of increasingly hostile rival hunting tribes (undoubtedly due to the influx of western-made rifles made increasingly available at their […]
Composed of a series of personal archives, commissioned photographs, and film excerpts projected onto a blank screen by photojournalist and filmmaker Raymond Depardon as he provides a humble and self-effacing stream of consciousness biographical commentary on a self-assembled pictorial curriculum vitae to commemorate 20 years of professional photography, Les Années déclic favorably recalls the meditative […]
A caravan lackadaisically assembles at the foreground near the site of a desert fortress at dawn, and is spurred into action by the appearance of three figures bisecting the frame as they emerge from the fortress to join the expedition. An extended, medium shot of the cavalcade as they traverse the stationary frame on an […]