Irlande, terre promise
The Avignon Festival, 1982. Drawing on his experience in Northern Ireland, playwright Armand Gatti presented his play, Le Labyrinthe (The Maze) and his film, Nous étions tous des noms d’arbres (The Writing on the Wall), which is a “documentary fiction” with the inhabitants of the town of Derry in Ulster. Hélène Chatelain’s film, Irlande, terre promise, strolls through Gatti’s film, its shooting and its context, at the height of the unequal war between the British police and security forces and the Republican rebellion. She shakes up the codes of a classical “making-of” to create a singular object that plays on the texture of heterogeneous images: black-and-white and colour video images, celluloid film excerpts, archive footage… An astonishingly modern visual and poetic assemblage.
Les prisons aussi, avec René Lefort, 1972-73
10 jours sur la ZUP des Minguettes, avec Stéphane Gatti, 1972-73
Le lion , sa cage et ses ailes (6 films vidéo de A. Gatti), avec Stéphane Gatti, 1975-76
La première lettre (6 fims vidéo de A. Gatti), avec Stéphane Gatti et Claude Mourieras, 1979
Irlande, terre promise, 1981-82
Les gens de la moitié du chemin, 1985
The restorer:
Since 1975, Bibliothèque nationale de France has been a repository for the legal deposit of video material, for which it is now the reference institution in France. Launched in 2015 with the “SCUM Manifesto” (Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig, 1976), its digital restoration branch is one of the world’s few structures specifically dedicated to video stored on magnetic tape. With three to four works restored each year, the BnF has developed expertise in analysing, processing and eliminating basic defects specific to the original analogue videotape or those caused by aging – thus allowing this heritage to be rediscovered..
Hélène Châtelain’s film was restored by Jean-Yves Le Gouill, Gérald Robin, Cédric Bergeat and David Guillaume, supervised by Danielle Maricar and Alain Carou, in coordination with the association, La Parole errante.
Production les Voyelles
BNF
Restoration is complete
This first restoration project for Hélène Chatelain’s video work will be followed by two other restorations scheduled for 2021–2022: Les gens de la moitié du chemin (1985) and Nestor Makhno, paysan d'Ukraine (1995)
