SOUVENIR D’ATHÈNES

“He came to read. He opened two or three books; by historians and poets. But he read for barely ten minutes, and then gave up.” C. Cavafy

A postcard, a souvenir from Athens: sitting on a comfortable rock, a young man is bent over in his thoughts, then straightens up a little to project them on to the landscape; in the background, a ruin; between the two, a few tiny passers-by, two or three stray dogs that break into the frame; and in the air, a record with worn-out grooves, a popular Greek song in which we make out the words: “postcard”, “souvenir from Athens”. Are the films of Jean-Claude Rousseau postcards? Yes, basically: a certain eternity in the stark present of an image, brought back from a place the eye has visited. No, not at all: in the prison of its frame, the postcard image has no continuity, no relationship, except for the misleading link with the words that constitute its verso. Here, as always in Rousseau’s work, the image does not exist without a relationship, first to itself as it is multiplied by the black screens that engulf it several times, as in the very slow blinking of an eye. Emerging every time from this abyss and saving the spectator who had fallen in with it, the image is not quite the same, nor totally different –something like: a souvenir of itself. And what about the very last image, as in truth there are two here (that is: an infinity plus one)? A real phantom, the last one, brought out of a little dust by the record’s silent grooves.

Jérôme Momcilovic