April 2020 : Visions du Réel
JEAN CAPDEVILLE :Voyage into Black is selected for the Media Library 2020 | Visions du Réel, International Film Festival, Nyon.
The Media Library Catalogue will go live on 25th April: https://www.visionsdureel.ch/en/industry/media-library/catalogue-2020
To watch the trailer: https://vimeo.com/285728352
The film JEAN CAPDEVILLE: Voyage into Black is not a documentary, although it is full of documentary-type elements : the artist's words; hand-written and printed texts; shots of paintings and nature, furniture and sundry objects. Based on the video recordings of Chantal Marchon, and an audio interview with the painter conducted shortly before his death, Helena Michie has conceived and realised an evocative piece which is a creation in its own right : a film 'd'auteur'. The film-maker's course sometimes charts the painter's own paths of expression - from commentary to reminiscence, from his handling of a canvas to his search for a certain item - which describe his methodology by affirming that he doesn't have one; at others she ventures alone and explores those same themes and objects : landscapes, houses, paths and streams, plants and stones . . .
Jean Capdeville was a singular artist. Here is not the place to examine the account he gives of his life and works which forms the basis of this film. Nonetheless, the crux of it is that if during Soulages's time in the 20th Century or even later, painters finally chose to give a place to black, previously regarded as a 'non-colour', for Capdeville it is his own life-circumstances which led him into black. His father had been killed in the First World War when he was a baby and as a result, like all the widows of this period, his mother henceforth attached herself to black until the end of her life . For Capdeville, black is therefore powerfully and intimately present, so real that it becomes an infinite source of inspiration, standing out in relief against all other colours and textures, spanning vast areas or running out into assorted spontaneous scribbled words. Vehemently opposed to the strident colours deployed in his youthful 'Burlesque' series, Jean Capdeville said "I did all these paintings as a progression . . . to go towards an elsewhere which would be the best for me".
The quality of Helena Michie's film is to have summarised, in her particular way, this progression-in-fragments, the intrinsic anarchy of this unpredictable, marginal character, attached to his mother and his home soil, and creative to his bones. She does it with superb images, juxtaposing natural scenes with paintings, supported by the painter's words and the accompanying music of Gaspar Claus and Pedro Soler. Her film is original, intimate, delicate, and profoundly inspiring.
YVETTE LUCAS http://leblogcultureldyl.centerblog.net/
2019 -20
For all previous news updates on our crowdfunding campaign and private screenings, please visit : https://www.ulule.com/jean-capdeville-voyage-vers-le-noir/news