Léonard Martin
Yoknapatawpha - Film - 22min - 2016
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 18
Yoknapatawpha. The name is impossible to pronounce. Its syllables express authority. They enjoin silence. What god left his last letters here? Is it because it designates an accursed land, stolen from the Indians, that this degraded tetragram struggles to hide its still water?
Yoknapatawpha, a fictive place invented for the needs of his art by the American writer William Faulkner, invites to take an infernal plunge into a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Yoknapatawpha. What if, for a moment, the river suspended its flow and let us hear the voice of that troubled spirit, the silent child Benjy, for whom, need we recall, space and time are one?
Beyond the senses, it is there, once again, that the equivocal is to be summoned – that which has several voices. Here is another attempt to pull the puppet-strings of the teeming images, to suggest a gesture in the torpor of the indeterminate.
Léonard Martin
Lives and works in Paris and Lille. He graduated with a distinction from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he trained in François Boisrond's studio. He participated in the 61st Salon de Montrouge. His first encounter with film was motivated by his desire to see the animation of painted forms. Not that these figures were unfamiliar with movement, the history of painting has constantly set the body in movement, but rather that these figures were waiting for a scheme, a device that would resuscitate them, for a mechanism to disrupt time. Image by image, cinema as the site of anima would appear to be ideal for such metamorphosis to take place.
In more recent works, Léonard has used string puppets with a view to extending the very first moments of awakening, of birth, and the indeterminate and incipient aspects of movement.
Production
Acknowledgments
Léonard Martin is anxious to thank warmly the members of the teaching, technical and administrative staffs of Fresnoy - national Studio and specially Madeleine Van Doren and Daniel Dobbels.
Thanks to the various outside contributors: Julien Aillet, Arnaud Azoulay, Antonine Case, Elvire Caillon, Xavier Collet, Mylène Ibazatène, François Mark, Basile Martin, Laurent Rochette.
