Louise Chevillotte
Tuesday, April 7 – 7:00 PM
The FIDMarseille and the Lambert Collection offer film screenings featuring works presented at recent editions of the festival, followed by a discussion with the filmmakers.
Synopsis
On September 4, 2021, Louise Chevillotte’s mother passed away. She was an actress and ‘a lover of poets,’ according to the inscription on her tombstone. While searching through a trunk for her mother’s last diary, Louise discovers, written a few days before her death, a phrase by René Char: ‘If we live in a lightning bolt, it is the heart of the eternal.’ The phrase is repeated, with question marks marking it as a riddle. Had she bequeathed it to her daughter?
“The narrative unfolds through the double investigation undertaken by Louise. The first investigation, poetic, seeks to understand and illuminate René Char’s phrase. The filmmaker, back in the role of a high school student, takes notes with her pencil, circles words, while on the phone a friend of her mother improvises a brilliant commentary. The second investigation is thanatological: where do our dead go, where are they? How can we find them? Louise sets cinema on the trail of her mother. She searches for her in the eyes of her father and brother, in the words of friends she interviews. One of them, the poet Louise Warren, explains that mourning offers an opportunity for a descent within oneself, where one ‘encounters our soul, our vital forces.’
“Guided by the camera, Louise Chevillotte has descended, and if the most intimate inner life becomes a space for the most universal sharing, it is because mourning here is by no means a trial to be endured, but a source—a point of origin from which cinema launches toward its fantastic truth. Where is Cécile Chevillotte? Some say ‘everywhere,’ others ‘nowhere.’ She is in the boundless depth of the image, where the gazes of Louise and her father meet in silence, by the fireside. Louise Chevillotte has discovered within herself a way of framing—and not framing—that gives each shot, whether composed or captured spontaneously, on a tripod or handheld, a certain assured, unadorned density, a humble, unpretentious depth. One feels the film carried, one senses its making at every stage, bordered by a rare blend of courage and restraint. Every shot vibrates, yet none trembles.
This is because, without ever making a show of it, this film touches the heart of cinema itself, of its own poetics: it is by conveying the sharp sense of passage, of the fleetingness of things, that the image becomes the place of their rescue. ‘The unfinished hums with the essential’: for such a film, this other verse by René Char, engraved as an epitaph on Cécile Chevillotte’s tombstone, would serve as a perfect epigraph.
Cyril Neyrat
SI NOUS HABITONS UN ÉCLAIR
Louise Chevillotte
France, 2024, 77’
Special Mention from the Jury of the First Film Competition, FID 2025
Practical information
- Regular price: €5– Online reservation
- Free admission (upon presentation of proof): teachers, under-25s, job seekers or recipients of social benefits, members of the Friends of the Lambert Collection, journalists, and people with disabilities. Please note: free tickets can only be collected on-site. No free tickets are available online. Box office opens at 6:30 PM.
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