Clap:
Le Lac

The long-awaited debut of Jean-Luc Godard's longtime collaborator. Yet Fabrice Aragno departs from Godard's dense intertextual rush, presenting a film nearly without language — though with the same radical approach to the digital image and sound design. In the press, the director speaks of archetypes, elements, landscape as body and body as landscape. The intention was met with mixed responses. According to audiences, Le Lac resembles an impressionist landscape painting as much as a watch advertisement. Yet perhaps it is precisely in this tension — without the film privileging any specific keys to itself — that the film is at its most productive. One moment a storm is shaking you vigorously, the next you are pulled from immersion by a moment you refuse to absorb into the whole.

“We would like to cross over to the other side... but we cannot...nevertheless, we can hear the voice of this life in the roar of the waves, the breath of the air, the passing clouds, the lonely cry of the birds. But this requires a demand from the heart and that deep inner turmoil that nature provokes.”

The film will be introduced by a program note, and the screening will be followed by a discussion.