Benoît Turquety: Objectified Vision - Landscape, History, Poetry, Film

The question could be: when we are looking at a landscape, what do we see of its history? "Look at Sainte-Victoire there. These blocks were made of fire and there’s still fire in them."

Huillet and Straub's admiration for Cézanne led to two films that are about the challenge of learning how to see: how to see better, how to really see. The result of these lessons is the experience of a purity that is shocking. Shocking only because one realizes all of a sudden that it is not too much, but exactly as it should be. Beauty appears as a demystification and the dismantling of fear through repetition; as a series of identifications and unexpected encounters that at first sight may look rather odd but then turn out honest and true; as the production of continuity by an assemblage of heterogeneous elements which have nothing in common. Or, again in the words of Cézanne: "Let them set the Louvre on fire if they’re afraid of what is beautiful!"

Language English