A man runs through the city; the director accompanies his swift journey with moving panoramas. He passes by passers-by without paying any more attention, seeming to be looking for something. When he arrives at what seems to be his destination, he continues to run. From inside a room, we see him pacing back and forth, feverishly trying to attract the attention of someone whose conversation we can hear but not see. The character enters and leaves the field, then stops. Just behind him, the mountain in the distance blocks the horizon. Leaning against this backdrop, unable to enter this room from which we will see nothing, he resembles a trapped insect, or the captured partridges and quails mentioned in the exchange between a taxidermist and his pupils that reaches us from off-screen. It is not, however, the sensations linked to this feverish race, full of breathless fatigue, or the frustration of not being able to enter the building, that interest the director or which he chooses to film. A close-up shot, which isolates the character, turns the sequence on its head - suddenly something happens, inside the character. The sound of a pickaxe attacking the stone can be heard very clearly. A slow panning shot reveals the city, the murmur of which we perceive, accompanies the movement of his eyes, attracted by the flight of crows. His face takes up all the space on the screen. His perception, his visual and auditory sensations seem to be exacerbated, as if awakening from a long inner sleep. The taxidermist has agreed to help the character who wishes to kill himself, he is in charge of burying him. One detail obsesses the man who is determined to die - if he throws stones at him, if he doesn't feel anything and doesn't react, then he is dead.
If it is a question, even in the details of the dialogue between the characters, of physical sensations, clearly identifiable because they are linked to the five senses, the director continues to explore the inner movements of his main character. Through a succession of fade-ins and fade-outs, which question the near and the far, slowing down the rhythm of the sequence, attention to the soft evening light, he makes us perceive something much more difficult to define. The character seems to be connected, in an almost cosmogonic way, to the living beings that enter his field of vision: the passengers of a plane whose trail splits the sky, schoolchildren below, running around a stadium in the distance, a man sitting on a bench and a cat that quickly moves away as he approaches.
Faced with this spectacle of hundreds of tiny lives unfolding at the same time, unaware of each other, and with the city at his feet, whose buildings are gently tilting in the twilight, the silence that invades everything, he seems to experience a metaphysical vertigo, that of the acute awareness of his presence in the world.
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A man runs through the city; the director accompanies his swift journey with moving panoramas. He passes by passers-by without paying any more attention, seeming to be looking for something. When he arrives at what seems to be his destination, he continues to run. From inside a room, we see him pacing back and forth, feverishly trying to attract the attention of someone whose conversation we can hear but not see. The character enters and leaves the field, then stops. Just behind him, the mountain in the distance blocks the horizon. Leaning against this backdrop, unable to enter this room from which we will see nothing, he resembles a trapped insect, or the captured partridges and quails mentioned in the exchange between a taxidermist and his pupils that reaches us from off-screen. It is not, however, the sensations linked to this feverish race, full of breathless fatigue, or the frustration of not being able to enter the building, that interest the director or which he chooses to film. A close-up shot, which isolates the character, turns the sequence on its head - suddenly something happens, inside the character. The sound of a pickaxe attacking the stone can be heard very clearly. A slow panning shot reveals the city, the murmur of which we perceive, accompanies the movement of his eyes, attracted by the flight of crows. His face takes up all the space on the screen. His perception, his visual and auditory sensations seem to be exacerbated, as if awakening from a long inner sleep. The taxidermist has agreed to help the character who wishes to kill himself, he is in charge of burying him. One detail obsesses the man who is determined to die - if he throws stones at him, if he doesn't feel anything and doesn't react, then he is dead.
If it is a question, even in the details of the dialogue between the characters, of physical sensations, clearly identifiable because they are linked to the five senses, the director continues to explore the inner movements of his main character. Through a succession of fade-ins and fade-outs, which question the near and the far, slowing down the rhythm of the sequence, attention to the soft evening light, he makes us perceive something much more difficult to define. The character seems to be connected, in an almost cosmogonic way, to the living beings that enter his field of vision: the passengers of a plane whose trail splits the sky, schoolchildren below, running around a stadium in the distance, a man sitting on a bench and a cat that quickly moves away as he approaches.
Faced with this spectacle of hundreds of tiny lives unfolding at the same time, unaware of each other, and with the city at his feet, whose buildings are gently tilting in the twilight, the silence that invades everything, he seems to experience a metaphysical vertigo, that of the acute awareness of his presence in the world.