Arnaud Des Pallières
Poussières d'Amérique - Film - 2009
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 11
Film
A few notes about a subjective story of America I have a few things to say about America... I have never been to America. to actually go to America would neither be an adventure or a discovery but no doubt an opportunity to check to what extent what i see is close to what i already know. in fact, that America is a country is not so sure... the United States is a country. America is an idea. Such a wide-spread idea that it is taught across the whole planet. As i am French, i am part of the Empire, as one said in Roman times, or like one says in Star Wars. it is thus as a Gallo-Roman that i am interested in the idea of Rome. this idea, i like it as much as i detest it. i like it because it is our historical condition, our reality. i detest it because it seems that we have no other choice. I have private American film archives going from 1906 up to the end of the sixties. they are mostly amateur films. Black and white, but also colour. Films of families, holidays, landscapes, portraits, roads, interiors, exteriors. Not representative films sociologically speaking because there are almost no Blacks, no indians. Films made by Americans sufficiently wealthy enough to own a camera. Disordered documents amongst which i choose the shots or brief sequences which attract my attention. Images of private archives, alternating historical and romanesque texts, a mix of small and great (hi)stories, the project for this film is to recount a cinematographic history of America which is also our history. Of each of us. the idea of this film is thus not that of an arrangement. it is simply a fiction. the relationship between time and past, between image and sound, will be a relationship created in the editing. Neither mechanical, systematic, the relationship between the different elements will bring no solution to the riddle, it will just ask it. Like a story. About my, or our, relationship to America.
