ARDENT OTHER

LE MAL DES ARDENTS

France | 2022 | 16 min

A crowd of ravished faces are looking at the cathedral of Notre Dame on fire, passing from incredulousness to grief, from mesmerisation to fear. With its back to the object that everyone is watching, the film draws us in a collective spectacle of gazes: every reaction reflects and multiplies the fire. At a moment in which history seems to accelerate convulsively, Ardent Other explores this instant of chaos, freezing it in time and space: by way of digital imaging, it transfigures and dilates it, inscribing it in an alienating dimension. While the personal and the collective cope with the destruction of a symbol, a constellation of phantasmal figures is revealed. Alice Brygo breaches reality, breaking through to share the fleeting intuition of humankind suddenly reunited in front of a fire, in search of a meaning. (m.m.)

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