During the confinement period I started a new project, making drawings and writing fictional texts based on scenes of clown cinema. It has been very enriching to me, it helped me to look better to the scenes, more thoroughly, from all kind of angles and sides, in order to choose the right perspective, in order to translate it to this other form, or to catch its ‘essence’ in a drawing. Other than with writing ‘about’ something, it becomes something in itself, and it gives me the feeling of having grasped the scene or the movie in a very profound way. It also helps me to think about what I find so funny about it in a complete other way.
It’s
interesting that this came up now, from the combination of having
more time and space and less input from the outside world, I felt
like going deeper inside I guess. It’s also interesting that my
passion for the visual, fictional writing and clowning come together
in one project in a way they haven’t really ever before.
I
don’t know where it’s going really, but I know I like doing it,
I learn a lot from
it
and it keeps me from worrying about ‘the future’ or
regretting what I can’t do now.
The
inspiration for this project
comes from Jacques Tati, who asked Jean-Claude Carrière
to write a novel based on the movie Monsieur Hulots Holiday and
Pierre Etaix to make illustrations. Tati actually had a lot of
trouble finding the right person for this job that required sitting
alone in a cinema watching the movie over and over again trying to
find a way to do it. But when Tati and Etaix first met up with
Carrière
in a cafe in Paris on a rainy day and Carrière
said: ‘Isn’t it strange that when it rains the cars move slower
but the people walk faster?’ they knew right away that this was
their man. Observing being the core of Tatis work. He had send Etaix
out on the street to observe situations that could become gags for
his movies long days without ever being satisfied when Etaix showed
him his drawings. He’d ask him ‘That’s all? Okay, go on.’
The
solution Carrière found for the novel is to write from the
perspective of a man who, like a lot of people, goes on this same
beach holiday every year and who is, unlike the other people, very
bored of it. He feels not very alive, walks obediently,
but meters distanced, behind his dominant wife, over the beach,
doesn’t go in to the water as he thinks it’s too cold...
In short: lacks all pleasure and connection with the yearly routine holiday. For this person the appearance of Hulot is the only highlight in the midst of boredom. He feels admiration, confusion, fear to approach him, he also describes very well the way other people look down upon him, how they talk about him (which you don’t really see in the movie but based on how the people come across to Carrière). So he becomes like a mediator figure through whom I can understand the worlds of the normal people and the comic figure and how they relate and are (dis)connected.
In short: lacks all pleasure and connection with the yearly routine holiday. For this person the appearance of Hulot is the only highlight in the midst of boredom. He feels admiration, confusion, fear to approach him, he also describes very well the way other people look down upon him, how they talk about him (which you don’t really see in the movie but based on how the people come across to Carrière). So he becomes like a mediator figure through whom I can understand the worlds of the normal people and the comic figure and how they relate and are (dis)connected.
Reading
that book and watching the drawings is tremendously inspiring to me,
I would highly recommend it.
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