Anatole Lacoste et l'oeil du calamar

Professor Anatole Lacoste is having a meeting with one of the agents of doctor Brain at a Jackson Pollock exhibition at Centre Pompidou. Meanwhile, Deborah is about to take a bath when burglar Torlim Novak breaks into her house. Everything seems to be normal when the computer at the control station spots an anomaly in the way history functions. But how does one stop the film?

Dreams: that cinema of the mind in which we are both spectator and protagonist, where anything is always seamlessly possible, where the most implausible encounters are commonplace.

The actors: a projector, a screen, a voice, an audience and a cinema. The locations: “here” and “there.” The situation: an audience is sitting in the dark in a cinema. The film begins when the projector is switched on. The projector is running empty, projecting only a bright white rectangle on the screen. The action begins when the voice asks the audience: “Are you there?” “Yes, you’re there,” the voice replies for us. “But one day you won’t be there, will you?” The voice isn’t “there.” Where is it? “Here.” Where? On the other side of the screen. The voice then asks us to project ourselves into a scenario, into the film of that inevitable eventuality we all prefer not to think about: the passage from one side of the screen to the other, from being “there” to “no longer being there,” from “here” to “there.” And what better place to do this than in a cinema?

On a coffee plantation near Havana in the early 19th century, a slave’s impossible love for the owner’s daughter.

The shadow of an opening door sweeps across the floor...

What do you remember about a film when you haven’t seen it for ten years? James McCourt’s memory is prodigious. In an office in the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, the American writer recounts his favourite film, Douglas Sirk’s 1956 melodrama WRITTEN ON THE WIND, scene by scene, sometimes almost shot by shot.

The multiple identities of Professor Anatole Lacoste.

"The eye. It sees. It sees what it sees. Light…"