Jacques Loeuille
Balade américaine en Flandres - Film - 2009
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 11
Film
Balade américaine dans les Flandres ("American Journey into Flanders") is a documentary essay composed of portraits of adepts of the American myth in the north of France and Belgium. these enthusiasts might be bison-breeders, collector of weapons from the American Civil War, "indian villagers," a Westerns theater troupe, a group making historical reconstructions.. all forming various facets of a bygone America whose original has long passed into oblivion -- or which lives somewhere within all of us, identical yet different for each, like a genome. I began filming their costumes, their ornaments, their disguises, their make-up, and all these skins of things; then i discovered the subtleties of their respectivedispensations: one cowboy draws a private world from the wonder he experienced as a child; another American Civil War Confederate seeks to make life more intense through an alien history in which the role of the foreign is precisely to accelerate the real -- but isn't this what we all expect from fiction? I read in Leonardo da vinci's Notebooks that "every part tends to find its whole to compensate for its own imperfection." this aphorism touches me because it expresses the loss of an original unity; it testifies to a sensibility for dispersion and estrangement. I wanted to envisage these "Flanders Americans" as the little islands da vinci talks about, and to see myself in them. to try to discover what we want so much from America and what is missing in us; what America says about us that we have shut out from what we can say about ourselves.
