Le Moindre Geste

Taken into care by Fernand Deligny in 1958, Yves is thought to be “ineducable and beyond help”… Yves and Richard escape from the psychiatric hospital. While trying to hide, Richard falls into a hole.

Josée Manenti remarks: “It was a shared object for a small group of people, a way of mobilising and organising daily life. Filming became the predominant activity.” The group invested what little money they had in a movie camera and tape recorder. Deligny imagined a fable that fits into four sentences: Yves escapes from the psychiatric hospital following another boarder; while playing, the latter falls into a hole; Yves tries in vain to get him out; wandering in the hills around a quarry, he meets a young woman who, scene by scene, leads him back to the hospital. Josée Manenti reckied the locations and found Richard Brougère – the youngster who escapes with Yves – from the school in a neighbouring village. She filmed the shots herself. The shoot took place in the hills, on the banks of the Gardon, around a working quarry and in abandoned farms in the vicinity of Veyrac. Josée Manenti’s familiarity with Yves made filming easier: “I knew Yves so well that to film him, I only needed to look at him….His body had something childlike about it, quite fleshy, flesh that spoke with every mimic, every gesture, all its awkwardness…”. The camera (a 16mm Paillard) was silent; in the evening, after the shoot, Guy Aubert and Deligny would record Yves’ monologues. You only had to ask him the vaguest of questions (“So, your day?”) to set him off talking endlessly. The filming lasted eight to nine months. The editing was done by Jean-Pierre Daniel, who discovered the rushes without having participated in the filming, and the mixing was financed by Slon, a cooperative created by Chris Marker for this purpose.
Sandra Alvarez de Toledo