Exercices de disparition

A finger searches in a box of colour-headed pins. Traces a pattern in the powder snow. Leafs through a stack of letters. Close-ups of the filmmaker’s hands create the link between a mind that is searching and a body that is showing to the friend, the philosopher Jacques Sojcher, objects like the bottles of rainwater he collects at his window and labels–their dating, like a miniature stele, having more importance than their content. These objects are both funeral relics and proof that the world is alive and throbbing, just as the philosopher sees nothing contradictory in combining his passion for Nietzsche with his liking for tap-dancing. But Exercices de disparition also enables Claudio Pazienza, who seems constantly discomforted by his own off-screen voice, to make himself vanish. In one astonishing shot, he is seen stretched out behind his mother’s sewing-machine table and, for a few seconds, he transforms into a future man-cut-in-pieces. Mid-way between a conjuring trick and Francis Ponge’s The Voice of Things, the disappearing exercise takes on planetary dimensions: the film-maker disappears with Jacques to opposite sides of the world, as the editing takes them from Asia to Africa. Or makes Jacques climb into a coffin shaped like a giant fish. Could it be that disappearance in fact means becoming pure listening? Capturing in the dark (“nothing to describe, nothing to say”) the world’s sounds that come in answer to every mourning’s “explosion of silence”.

Charlotte Garson