dimanche, avril 07, 2013


Waiting for the taxi at the Bordeaux train station, I see Anne Wiazemsky. We travel together to the hotel. I tell her that our surnames begin with W and the rest is hard to pronounce. At school, it was convenient since we were at the end of the list and the difficulty of our name distracted the teacher in search of victims. Anne told me that her teachers circumvent the obstacle by giving her nicknames sounding Russian, like miss Poniatowski... It's funny to be sitting next to her, 24 hours after writing a poem against Godard (1). Anne was married with him and I know so little about his work. We are talking about Michel Soutter, a Swiss film director she has knowned and loved. Alain Tanner, the famous Swiss director : she contacted him with Juliet Berto after having seen the sublime Bulle Ogier in "La Salamandre". She is surprised to meet someone with whom she can talk about Soutter. She and Juliet Berto acted in "The Return of Africa" with Tanner (1973) ; they played Swiss post officers. Switzerland, Godard, on which I have written horrors… I have this poem in my bag placed between her and me and don't dare to speak about it. Godard : I tell her that I was stopped by the big name, the brand prevented me from going to the work. She said there is a time when Godard becomes obvious, this moment has perhaps not happened to me. We pass the Noailles café, her Bordeaux reference because her mother's family, the Mauriac, came from here. She told me that the city was once black, because the stone of the region oxidizes quickly. Now, Bordeaux is white washed, too clean for me. The money has ruined the city. We pass a facade that has not bleached its skin and I love this color dirty, which is the genuine character of a city populated by real people, a multitude city. I tell Anne about my film project on the 1871 French-German border, its 4056 stones that meander through the Grand Est of France. I tell her about my Alsatian origins. She evokes her parents meeting in 1945, her mother following the Red Cross in Berlin. Her father, from a Russian family emigrated to France after 1917, was a French officer who could negotiate with the Red Army. He secured the release of many Malgré-Nous, these young people from my region, who had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht and then emprisoned in the Soviet prisoners camps. Anne says : read my book "My Berlin child", I talk about the Malgré-Nous, my parents, their meeting in the destroyed city of Berlin, in Germany, Year Zero. Yes, I'll read it, Anne. Once read, I promise to get into Jean-Luc Godard's work. Perhaps I'm wrong : he never lied to his classmates.

(1) je n'aime pas godard parce qu'à force d'être lui-même godard se manque est dépassé par écrasé par ne laisse pas son génie passer sa maitrise du rayonnement éclat contrôlé calcul de la quantité de lumens imposant la croyance de godard du côté suisse plutôt michel soutter alain tanner claude goretta les films respectivement la pomme charles mort ou vif  jean-luc persécuté godard je le range sur une étagère je l'oublie avec tous les autres qui comme lui déjà à l'école mentaient à leurs petits camarades il disait j'ai ceci j'ai cela alors qu'il n'avait rien du tout