Autour du Lac, the boundless story

…The breath of a blue jogger…a disemboweled ants nest…a puddle…on a bench a few abandoned sandwiches…a squirrel… a dead and worm full duck…fragments of life (and death) that embark us on a tireless walk around the lake, following a merciless text and an entire song. A song where the musicians seem to have abused a little of the bottle, hence the sincere and unabashed, dada like, in vino veritas expression.

“Autour du Lac” (Around the Lake) is a short animated film written and directed by Carl Roosens and Noémie Marsily, presented in the Short Films Competition at Annecy 2013. It is a film swarming of life and sweat.  This utter visual and sensorial gem uses a mixture of pencil and ink and it has been created during a very vibrant residency at the Abbey of Fontevraud in May 2012.

It is a unique project, initially designed only to strengthen the link between image and the music composed by Carl and his band:”Carl et les hommes boîtes”. The result though has a strong visual identity and goes far beyond the initial statement. It is a wet and crudely poetical manifesto for a new naturalism, aiming at cleaning up and building above the trivial and the decayed.

“Autour du lac” is ultimately a story in itself. In barely 4 minutes and 20 seconds it tells it all about our eternal (con) damnation as sagacious and inquiring human beings, to always “turn around” our destiny, in a Sissify like quest. Not solely enclosed in a carton box from where we would observe the world through a tiny snatch (in synthony with the name of the band and with the inspiring novel of Kobo Abe), we are truly confronting this world.

 

A depraved and often absurd world, alternating images of high beauty, moving colors, and ridiculous situations or characters, weak spots and troubling extreme moments.

The vibrant pencil and ink visuals of the two authors are reminiscent of the dismay of the Weimar generation…Distorted faces as in Otto Dix or  Grosz’s works, illogical associations are to draw attention on the bleak and less seen or thought of sides of life, unsparingly depicting a latent kind of violence encountered at every step, unavoidable, suffocating.

The text is chanted, told, sometimes sang. It says about the images we see, about people’s backs, about walks around the lake, about bellys, about daytime

frustrated dreams, about smells that open interior landscapes, about lost items, lost impressions and attempts to recover those…It tells  about intrusions…

The music is a hybrid of a mutant kind of electronica and some grotesque brass band, creating the convenient path for the narrator’s story to evolve and leave us in a state of pure amazement. As “Autour du Lac”, in 4minutes and 20 seconds, says it all!

 

Giulia Dobre

FIPRESCI Jury at Annecy 37^th International Animation Film Festival

 

Giulia Dobre is a Film Critic for the Romanian National Radio and a screenwriter. She trained as a PhD in French Litterature at the University of Bucharest and a PHD in Visual Anthropology at the San Francisco State and Berkeley University of California.