Après le feu
2010 · 7m · France
Directed by Jacques Perconte
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Filmed in a single moving shot from a train a few kilometres from Ajaccio, burnt earth gives way under an onslaught of colour: the ground splits, pictorial energies seize the sky and the horizon dissolves as the train rolls on.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Perconte's doing the thing where he pretends the camera is just a passenger and then the ground starts liquefying—it's so earnest about its own psychedelia that it almost loops back to funny, but he's committed enough that you can't quite dismiss it.
A precise inheritance of structural film and landscape cinema, where the locked train-window frame becomes the essential constraint that lets Perconte excavate the surreal within documentary observation—formally rigorous enough to argue about, strange enough to remember.
The single decision to hold that shot unwavering while the earth warps and the sky distorts underneath it—that friction between formal stillness and visual chaos is what makes seven minutes of burnt Corsican ground feel like watching a landscape dream itself into being.
Reviews
Sa démarche consiste, dit grossièrement, à filmer des espaces pour ensuite «fondre» plusieurs images les unes dans les autres, à les faire entrer en collision pour modifier leur structure et donner naissance à des visions nouvelles et pour le moins troublantes. L'effet de sidération face à ces deux images est, à plus d'un siècle d'intervalle, d'égale mesure.