diaporama

Manon De Boer

Born in 1965 in the Netherlands (NL).
Lives and works in Amsterdam (NL) and Brussels (BE)

  

Resonating Surfaces

2005
16 mm film, transferred onto DVD, colour, sound
Duration: 39 minutes
Purchased in: 2006

The royal voice . Life lines that swell with quivering lips. Paragraphs of history that encapsulate a people. Suely Rolnick’s superb words are the focus of Manon de Boer’s 39-minute film. The Brazilian psychoanalyst speaks of her Parisian exile during the dictatorship, her love affair with Gilles Deleuze, and her unexpected return to her native land. The body is exiled from its voice. They are never brought together: a sun-bathed mute silhouette and the luminous word which is disembodied in order to become universal. In the beginning, the young Dutch artist wished to create a portrait of a city, a Sao Paulo chronicle which, in the end, fell under the spell of one of the city’s residents. Just as the portrait of the actress Sylvia Krystel, which de Boer shot in 2003, created a similar impression of disembodiment, after several interviews, de Boer decided to focus her film on an individual portrait. The Brazilian metropolis remains present in the background, breathing life into the autobiographical reflection conjured up out of close-ups on the city’s skin-like façades, its drab buildings, its unexpected greenery, or its “smell of jasmine and gasoline.” To echo the artist, “image, text, and sound are asynchronous in the film and each constitutes a nearly autonomous layer of meaning. And the voice, a unique locus of meaning in which language and body become one, itself forms a fourth layer of meaning.” A protean, vibrating form, Resonating Surfaces opens with death screams from Alan Berg’s operas Lulu and Wozzeck and ends with splendidly articulated language. It composes a crescendo which culminates in the birth of a language. Akin to the artist Lygia Clark, Suely Rolnick evokes in her work the trauma of colonization, as well as the way in which the dictatorship paradoxically authorized “experiments of extraordinary freedom.” Imprisoned, despised by her militant friends who picked up guns while she preferred to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs, Suely Rolnick had no other choice but to leave. In France, Deleuze encouraged her to work on the death cries of characters in Alban Berg’s operas. She experienced them as “an enormous vibratory life force.” She sought refuge in French, a language in which “the knife of the dictatorship cannot stab [her],” and which “kept her at bay from the infestation of the wound.” Even though she hadn’t considered returning to Brazil, the resonances of the Brazilian song within her unexpectedly came to signify the imperative of return. “Hold on to the grace that is the power of a song,” Gilles Deleuze wrote to her long afterwards, in 1992. From a death chant to a song of hope, from native babble to a mature language, Manon de Boer’s film also retraces the history of an intelligently anthropophagous land, capable of turning all the forced exiles, slavery, and dictatorship into spiritual nourishment, and amidst multiplicity find its own unique voice.

^{Emmanuelle Lequeux}

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