Capital retour

A speech by the famous transgender filmmaker Lana Wachowski, sampled and re-edited by Burial for their piece “Come Down to Us”, resonates in the sophisticated soundtrack of Capital Retour, as its protagonist lies naked on fake fur in front of her webcam and offers a “brief overview” of herself: 1m82, 70kg, born in the 1980s “but no wiser for that”; a German from Strasbourg according to her papers, but French when it comes to culture; omnisexual and intersex – meaning the refusal to be imprisoned in the usual binary alternative. “This world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, Other worlds, previously unimaginable.” Léo Bizeul takes this passage as the structuring principle for his first feature documentary, constantly contradicting the logic of the ego-portrait currently so widespread in contemporary cinema via selfies and webcams. What might have been a new portrait of a camgirl becomes something more curious and far-reaching that touches on art history – as visible in Bizeul’s formal precision and taste for the indeterminate: a frank relationship with the grotesque (with grottos: the rooms from which the images come remind us of these), which evokes the theoretical field covered by Hal Foster in his famous essay “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic” and which, in the art historian’s view, represented through the likes of Mike Kelley or Cindy Sherman one of the possible ways for a return of reality.

Antoine Thirion