Beauty, The Night, Screen, Body, Tattoos
January 1, 1987 – June 7, 2016
Mélanie:
Some day perhaps, I will tell my life story. Some day when I am no longer fifteen with a heart whose spirit has a sense of wonder. It’s saying it all when I talk about the night and the desert for in doing so I am stepping through the immediate legend of my life on the horizon. I have abused the stars and screens of life, I have opened up roads of sand, I have quenched my thirst and my instinct like so many words in view of the magical horizon, alone, manoeuvring insanely so as to respond to the energy traversing me like a necessity, an avalanche of being. I was fifteen and I knew how to designate people and objects. I knew that a hint of threat meant only kilometers more to go in the night. I pressed on the accelerator and clash, swear, fear, oh how fragile the body when it’s so hot, so dark, so pale, immense silence.
Nicole, April 27, 2016
Your relationship with Mélanie has probably been in continual transformation for nearly fifteen years (in images, books, and projects). As for me, my relationship with Mélanie began while I was writing the book. Mélanie is an intersection, a meeting point where the adolescent space (a significant one for all human beings) unfolds, touching all aspects of who we are: intellectual, sexual, emotional, spiritual, identity-forming (who am I?), existential (what is living, life?). This is what gives her rebel wings, her vital self.
She embodies the whole “self,” pieces of which are found in us. In her, there is not only the invaluable rebellion against boredom, banality, reality, repetition, but also the potential for discovering the world + speed, which keeps her constantly alert. Mélanie is still close to me because the world belongs to her when she departs from reality. This is probably what we love about all artists on some level, this ability, this persistent wish to break through the wall, the mirror of our imaginative potential. In this sense, we always carry the potential for writing, tattooing (from the smallest sign to an invasion of the entire body by the sign, its erasure under an image – images).
Nicole, March 30-31, 2016
The cinema is everywhere in Mauve Desert, and it seems natural to me that you wanted to make it into a film, that you wanted to translate words into pictures. Now, in 2016, I would maybe like to translate the ephemeral or the permanent into meaning, objects, even beings. To explore the strong impression that there lies an enigma that grasps us wholly by the heart, by the throat, by the bulk to one day instill in us as a certainty, a shadowy extension of the being.
Simon, April 13, 2016
Yesterday, I accidentally stumbled upon archival footage showing Fellini hard at work during the filming of Satyricon. It’s 1969. We see him directing the pool scene. There are a good hundred extras, maybe a dozen actors, the set is noisy. Waiting for the camera to roll, the extras – half naked and submerged to the waist in the pool – naturally converse and all these conversations inevitably form an impossible uproar. Used to large scenes, the master does not seem – at first, at least – bothered by the noise. He is focused, he directs: one who taps the bum of another using a flyswatter, to do it in such a way, another wringing the neck of a distinguished court lady to do it as if she were a chicken (he repeats this twice: “like a chicken”). He asks for a bit of quiet in the pool please, for everyone to stop moving and look at the camera. He says “let’s go,” then he explodes: “EVERYONE SHUT UP, DAMN IT!” and even louder: “STOP MOVING!”
He gets silence.
His gaze is firm, his face severe. “Action.” A loud buzz resonates across the stage, that’s the signal. He continues to give directions: “My dear, lower your head, a bit more, smile.” While saying this, his voice softens. His gaze too. As he commands her to smile, he gestures with two hands, on each side of his mouth, while opening the corners like a blossoming flower. Someone screams: “Rolling!” The master does not bat an eye, he directs: “Sing, Ligny,” “No moving in the pool!” “Roberto ….”
He never says “action.”
They’re rolling anyway.
As the scene comes to life in front of the camera, he keeps quiet, he lets things happen.
I think of this politics professor I had in CEGEP – I no longer remember his name – who, in the hallway in front of his classroom, had spoken to me about Fellini. It was the first time I had heard anyone talk about the celebrated Italian filmmaker. I must have been eighteen years old. The professor was complaining about modern cinema, too artificial according to him. In Fellini’s films, you eat, you burp, you fart, you live! “Like real life,” he told me. Yet, when I watch the “making of” Satyricon in black and white today, I see clearly that it is actually an impression of real life. That in fact, the film is based on – by humans, if I can say that – a worksite and that, while we don’t see the machines (in Italian, Fellini refers to the camera as “macchina”), it’s because their gaze is turned towards fiction.
And with them, we observe.
Soon, the frame of the screen no longer contains the fiction because our imagination – or our desire to believe that fiction is truer (or from another truth) than reality – completes the image beyond the edges. In the end, I mean that this video I happened to see yesterday on social media made me think of this professor whose face I remember very well, but whose name I can’t remember and that, in turn, this professor made me think of you because of this sentence that he might have said.
“Like real life,” these are also the words that you uttered at my wedding. We were reunited on the grounds of a motel on Isle-aux-Coudres. The ceremony had ended, the banquet too, drunkenness not only from alcohol, some people were picking at what was left of dessert, but most people had already started to dance. Had the sun already set? The moon was rising, full and round. I believe that we danced, yes, that’s it, we danced together to a Philippe Katerine song –Louxor, j’adore – and it was then, in that moment of poets clumsily swaying, that you said to me: “Like real life.”
It’s not the sentence that surprised me. I believe I understood what you meant to say, even though I recognize now as I write these lines that I never truly sought to understand the exact meaning that you gave it, preferring to leave it as an impression of understanding.
An impression … that’s definitely what it is, as the sentence remains imprinted in my memory and, even today, it only takes a video I saw on the internet to remind me of it.
Moreover – was it the same night or the next morning, another day or later – Fellini had been mentioned. Was it really you who brought him up? Our wedding would have had something “Felliniesque” about it. Indulgence maybe, but more certainly joyous improvising: someone had put together a wildflower bouquet for the bride (we hadn’t thought of that), another had brought firecrackers, they had roasted lambs on a spit suspended between a bike rack and a mile marker … I must say that I organized my wedding by myself and that, once the papers were signed, I let things go, I let go … and at the moment where the moon, full and round, came out from between the few clouds on that beautiful August evening, three young women jumped out from behind the groves and skipped around the bride and groom, holding firecrackers.
Nicole, May 5, 2016
Sometimes the soul is so tranquil it stills in the afternoon. In the woods, there’s nothing captivating. It’s May now, but it’s like a dull March. I won’t even mention the trees.
We love things when they exist for us.
There are also some unforgiving objects.
Is the matter you speak of an image?
It’s because the light recurs without necessarily being the same that you seek it so intensely and would like it to be your own. The objects it reveals, live or through a screen, are worth their weight in mystery, pleasure, anguish and questions.
Nicole, April 27, 2016
Images. I am a visual person, but I don’t have a good sense of images. I would say that for me, images are always replaced by an aura of ambiguity and uncertainty, a haze that makes a person think of beauty, fiction. The beauty always springs from an association with a stroke of fiction (like a “stroke of genius”) the ingenious improbability of chance or art.
Being there, not being there. Representation, images, photos, films, holograms, traces, the image in the mind, the thrilling image, the haunting image. The image-enigma that takes you beyond reality: the virtual.
In our next exchange, we must talk about the “theatre of matter.”
Nicole, May 15, 2016
How I imagine Mélanie, thirty years later.
Tough question. I must have been about forty when I started writing my first drafts of Mauve Desert. Mélanie: poetry, freedom, love of movement, of travel, of the horizon, sunset + the mythical tools of civilization (car, revolver, TV).
Mélanie is a concentration of vitality, of intelligence, of rebellion, of desire, of solitude, of challenge. She’s comfortable in her athletic body; her movements are quick and precise. Her plans are never explained because she lives in the present, the beauty of the moment. She wants to discover. What strikes me is that Mélanie likes to be alone. As though she were an essence rather than a person (a rebellious fifteen-year-old girl living in the Arizona desert, rebelling against the world that surrounds her – stupidity, greed, violence – a girl consumed by the cruel beauty of the desert).
Mélanie is not studious, since where she lives, nature and daily life are more important than becoming a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, an architect. There’s nothing feminine in her future except the love of another woman. Living with two mothers, she’s a misfit.
Is it really an image of Mélanie or a desire more related to film?
Casting. I have to like Mélanie’s face.
She can be athletic: a young rebel who likes to move.
She can be calm: she learns by observing. At the bar, for example.
She learns by listening.
Simon, April 25, 2017
The accident of a landscape / like a familiar face / yesterday however
barely landed
yesterday we didn’t know
a face pierces the landscape
that we didn’t know before
yesterday again
and suddenly death exists