Raymonde Carasco

An intimate exploration of Raymonde Carasco’s father.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

The movie shows a smattering of images from the story of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva. The subject is sublimated desire.

Joa (Bulle Ogier), an archaeologist from Mexico, comes to Paris in search of her sister Anna (Mireille Perrier), of whom she is suddenly without news. Anna, a theater actress, was in the title role in Sade's "Justine" when she disappeared. The investigation leading Joa to the people who have known her sister, turns into an initiatory quest. Her journey, her stroll through a subterranean marginal Paris, leads also to the emergence of a new woman.

To attain knowledge, man and woman had to be willing to give up their innocence," says Boris Lehman. Life Lesson is a poetic and philosophic reflection on the theme of paradise lost. Some fifty persons illustrate the planet's convulsions and the world's vacillations. Trying to communicate, to commune with the invisible, they cry out, sing out, give out messages, each in their own way, in their own state of solitude. These are like multiple echoes that resemble waves in the water or stars in the sky. " Behind these images and sounds that have been stifled by today's society, Lehman hunts for noises, cries, songs, messages that go astray. He says that if we look at the invisible we may hear the words. He invites us to look beyond the appearances of social life and to vibrate in tune with life's polyphony that is all around us."

The veneer of the story is a tale of chance love: two French expatriates strike up a chance romance when they meet on a ship headed back to South America.

This film is a confrontation between the texts Antonin Artaud wrote about the Tarahumaras and the films Raymonde Carasco made with the Tarahumaras (from 1977 to 1994) on the track of Antonin Artaud, in Norogachic, the only place explicitly mentioned by Antonin Artaud.