Fernand Deligny. À propos d’un film à faire

A filmed mise-en-scène of Deligny’s presence, writings and voice; a writer recounting what a film would have been had it been made.

In issue 428 (1990), the Cahiers du Cinéma commended the television broadcast of Renaud Victor’s Fernand Deligny. A propos d’un film à faire. The feature piece included one of Deligny’s most significant texts about the image, titled “Ce qui ne se voit pas” (What is not seen”), prompted by questions from Serge Le Péron. An unexpected avatar of several fiction films put together by Deligny and Victor (and never finished), this “film to be made”, produced by Bruno Muel, has become a salient essay on cinema, and a powerful lever for questioning the image as envisaged by Deligny at the time, based on autistic perception, ethology and cinema itself. There is still much to say about Anne Baudry’s editing work and the way in which she sustains the alternance of shreds of fiction in black and white and colour shots of the aging Deligny, sitting at his workbench and reflecting out loud on what an autistic image could be, an image that does not speak, an image that would belong, so he says, to the animal kingdom…
Sandra Alvarez de Toledo