Notre amour

Arnold Pasquier shoots on stage and backstage Christian Rizzo’s “Mon amour” rehearsals. The line is blurred between captation and making-of.

Arnold Pasquier slips onto the stage and wings to film the rehearsals of Mon amour by Christian Rizzo (creation at the Opéra de Lille in 2008). The boundary between performance capture and making-of is blurred here; likewise, what licence does he grant himself with respect to the chronology and reasons that the choreographer develops? 

What is certain is that, from the title of the show to that of the film, the filmmaker’s commitment is revealed: he is no simple observer. A dance film or a danced film? Notre amour does not decide either way. This is because, while it remains close up to the dancers, capturing gestures and expressions, or trying to read on faces the integration and maturing work in progress, the film adds to Rizzo’s work what essentially it is missing, the close-ups, the isolation of the figures, the in- and out-of-frame, the ubiquity and the rhythms that editing allows. 

Arnold Pasquier’s film thus acquires its own mode of functioning, naturally going where the dance spectator cannot: very, too close to the bodies, as though on the mats of a rehearsal studio. Above all he creates ellipses, gaps and absences that only cinema permits, until he loses at times, or so it seems, the coherence of the dancers’ work. However, he thus rediscovers the pulsation of the original work, full of entwinings and embracings, separations and tearings asunder. He also rediscovers the erotic parade and its magnetism, the love that has always been the fine concern of the filmmaker.

Source : Mathieu Capel