Jean-Paul Fargier

Every Tuesday, Mallarmé received guests, and people flocked to his house to hear him. Renoir, Gide, Claudel, Henri de Régnier, Barrès, Debussy and Valéry were among those who listened to these evenings. In their diaries or correspondence, the American poet Sadakitchi Hartman, Mallarmé's son-in-law Edmond Bonniot, and the French poet Jean de Tinan evoke the Master, standing in front of the tiled stove, recounting repartees, aphorisms, judgements, anecdotes, sentences and memories. A documentary mixing photos, objects, drawings, engravings and real shots attempts to restore the place, the small dining room, its furniture, and the ritual of the evenings with the chairs that are brought in, the punch that is offered, the tobacco that is smoked. Jean-Paul Fargier once again brings together these prestigious listeners in the setting he has reconstructed.

He inhabits the world just like he inhabits his house: motionless. A serious accident nailed him there: in a house in the middle of a large garden. No longer can he dash around the world: day after day, he contemplates it from his house. He’s a filmmaker. He’s only ever lived to make movies.

Jean-Luc Godard and Philippe Sollers meet in Paris to discuss Godard's film Je vous salue, Marie, and many other things.

Michel Piccoli reads the first pages of Victor Hugo's 'Promontoire du songe'. In this text, Hugo describes his sensations when he sees, enlarged 40 times, the Moon through the telescope of the Observatorium of Paris. His visions drive him into a meditation about the relationships in between dream, reality and poetry.

Man Ray, the master of experimental and fashion photography was also a painter, a filmmaker, a poet, an essayist, a philosopher, and a leader of American modernism. Known for documenting the cultural elite living in France, Man Ray spent much of his time fighting the formal constraints of the visual arts. Ray's life and art were always provocative, engaging, and challenging.