Fragile and Brutal
Gökçen Fındıkçı • 28.08.2022
The first film of Alain Mazars : Rouges Silences
‘’Rouges Silences is a subjective puzzle of images and sounds, the expression of an absurd or poetic inner universe but also of a state of isolation which reveals a certain number of uses of Super-8 and demonstrates the capacities of expression possible with this format. Second merit: in a certain way; the madness of the shots, in a concern for progressive tension until paroxysm, perfectly translates and underlines an exploded madness, overflowing beyond any norm, any classification. ‘’
Schmalfilmtage Public Release
Will be an awkward attempt to widen the gaps between the compressed interval, which has already humbly saved itself, and destroyed all unnecessary decors, which only exist in its purity. A collage, meticulously created with the sensuousness of the elements, creates its own rhythm and turns into a symphony, or perhaps a wound, or a shocking moan.
It depends on how you define pleasure.
To come to this point, once, one asked me why, and the feeling out of it is so evident to me, but the answer to put through words, that is another seeking, slowly let me come there in brief.
A surrender under the influence of oneness is pretty robust, unique, and unpredictable, yet also very hypnotic.
The first encounter with Rouges Silences was strange; it was late at night, while I was lingering around, floating into the night, and busy with the last attempts of the day to find some peace before finishing the day off. The reasons were purely clear, though, as individually experienced the process of being stuck and feeling very hurt by uncertainty. Everything that possibly could be done was completed; the rest belongs to possibilities, the mysterious zone, which either belongs to the gods or holy luck.
At that moment, the still of Rouges Silences, a few naive daises laying on blue with captive dripping blood stains. The pale blue, as a representative of ambiguity, emerged from the depths of the night and touched me deeply, which I saw in the Re-voir Film catalog by coincidence, and the image was so wildly beautiful to hunt at first sight; hence, the digging process started, and Rouges Silences bestowed upon me a broader and more poetic world than I could have ever expected.
For like ages, maybe as just as a synaptic, I have been thinking of colors and their tastes or self-definitions on me, very selfish, too personal anyhow. As it was supposed to be, blue was the first one that dared to hold a special place in me, especially pale ones, the varieties of blue of early mornings while the sound of crows is just like beginning to reach to day. Or Derek Jarman’s blue, maybe as an English saying, ‘I feel blue’. The color of uncertainty, melancholy. With the particular marks of this harm, dark red stains on, undoubtedly the liquid flowing through veins. As easily seizable, and highly familiar. The vulnerability and the glorious strength of indeterminacy. Rouges Silences as like a feel mate, ‘an expansion’, it’s sort of a concentrated event, not letting you be just a detached observer putting any interpretation on, it stays just a representative of all events.
As a member of Dresdner Schmalfilmtage, I felt pretty enthusiastic about offering a screening of this poetic visual feast to the audience of SFT 2022, and it became a part of the program of the event, which took place on the 7th -10th of July, 2022 but unfortunately, Mazars could not join us; hence some questions and my will to hear his words about the film stayed still.
I wonder what he would say about his first film?
Probably It would have sounded a bit nostalgic.
One step further:
Rouges Silences is a multi-layered tensional ceremony consisting of cinematic elements chosen for their efficacy, the visually striking scenes, and the elliptical narrative and jittery maintain the interest of the audience whilst being compelled to be a vivid witness of the events. Somehow very far from the monotony of the narrative, on the contrary, a structure that appeals to the senses under the pioneering of an intuitive aesthetic is accompanied by an eerie atmosphere with a certain number of uses of Super-8 (camera movements, framing, lighting, special effects, etc.) and impressive use of sound further emphasizes the editing and combination method he employs throughout the film and provides a -fundamental- relief, a catharsis. Also, the technique of sound grounds the film more and provides a solid dimension to raise the voltage level; by implementing this diverse method, the power of imagery becomes even more attractive. In everyday places, in odd moments human, acting as a figure reflecting nature; at some points, the acting goes even further and resembles meditative performance art. The film is on a loop, so instead of us witnessing this climax, personal insanity.
Intuitively I always see rhythm, mathematics, logic, and language hand in hand, as if they are all accompanied by music; Mazars’ mathematical and rhythmic knowledge (probably his degrees in Mathematics and Psychology), as a starter of absurd destruction in his films, the rhythms that the films weave randomly between the planes somehow keep the vision alive, the eye is caught by what it sees, the torment of things begins, with their repetition and movement, images, symbols, objects, things dare going a little further and gain a meaning on their own level.
An inevitable realization with Rouges Silences that it is an embracing, nourishing root in the filmography of Alain Mazars, was already able to prove his very subjective style, and it was indeed a departure in his visual sensibility and own narrative, which he frequently uses in his later films. Faces pushing the doors of perception, tangential events and collisions, and overlapping images melting on each other create a new synthesis.
As an exhibition of a phenomenological attitude, the phenomena disappear into the depths of memory and consciousness and beyond, or perhaps hide there in order to reproduce themselves. A fiction begins that the majority would not dare, but no one has ever spoken to them before. In the universe Mazars creates in his films, the gloom that the being feels in the hazy reality is somehow revealed and calls out to all those sharp urges that no one is actually aware of, as weak as the primal delight in illusion. As an epic poem that pushes the witness to lose himself in pure contemplation of images.