Julie Vacher
Vendhuile - Film - 19min - 2017
presented as part of the exhibition panorama 19
A village in northern France cut off by snowfall
awaits the arrival of a trapper. Alien body,
ogre or wolf, untold rumours about him spread
by word of mouth.
They propagate like a wave through the
intertitles, leaving a landscape flooded in silence.
Numbed by suspicion and cold, the faces of the
villagers, unmoving, frontal, fill each tableau shot
while the man is hunted down.
However, the snow is slowly melting. Between day
and night the land becomes sodden. Movement
enters the frame and the viewpoint starts to drift:
from myth to empathy, from fear and makebelieve
to a desire to encounter the other.
The film is tinged with mild satire in an idiom that
flirts with ethnography and the western.
While the villagers embody the sedentary life,
a form of austerity and potentially an archaic
relationship with the land and the elements,
the poacher appears as a trekker of landscapes,
at home with matter, and a facilitator of
experiences.
