Bill Viola: Experience of the Infinite

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Jean-Paul Fargier's documentary is a montage of animated images, numerous drawings and interviews with Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), interspersed with filmed archives of personalities he met with the aim of telling us about the explosive and prodigious life of this poet whose thirst for discovery and knowledge led him to connect with all the arts: the visual arts, literature and poetry, cinema and theater, dance and music. This eclecticism was fueled throughout his life by a profusion of artistic and romantic encounters, from Stravinsky to Picasso , from Coco Chanel to Colette , from Raymond Radiguet to Jean Marais . This whirlwind of social events, this artistic profusion inspired this documentary, in light of a large number of archives that make us revisit the artistic and Parisian life of the time. A multiple work, a life that contains several.

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.

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.

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.

In 1990, the Louvre invited the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to create a visual and philosophical product based on the materials of the museum's exposition. The philosopher chose the image of a blind man in painting. In the film, Jacques Derrida reflects on the drawings of the Louvre's "Parti-pri" exposition. The director captures the emerging thought and, with the help of various representative means, allows us to see the rapprochement that Jacques Derrida establishes between the gesture of the artist and the gestures of the blind man.

The story of the creation, disappearance and reappearance of one of the most mysterious paintings in Western art.

For the "Cinéma, de notre temps" collection, Jean-Paul Fargier sends his friend filmmaker Jean-Daniel Pollet a letter written to the second person.