20 & 21.06.19
CN D Pantin
The image of a bonimenteur, or story-teller, is that of someone who uses verbal illusions to make us believe, seduce or persuade. But, in the history of the cinema, the term was used for the person tasked with giving a live explanation of a film; in the age of the silent cinema, this voice was the guarantor for the plot, “providing access to this imaginary world, which the animated images will bring to life before our eyes”. As an actor, but also ventriloquist, dancer and puppeteer, Jonathan Capdevielle is a genuine story-teller – using vocal artifices to flesh out images. With Arthur B. Gillette and Jennifer Eliz Hutt as guides to the kingdom of shadows, these contemporary story-tellers melt into the images, while redoubling them and describing them from the interior. The film selected for this spectral dive make use of a type of relationships with images and the vertigo they cause: Suspiria (1977) plunges us into the disturbing phantasmagorias of Dario Argento. On the borderline between fiction and commentary, between incarnation and explanation, these story-tellers transmit to us the mysterious fluidity that runs through this film.