Traces

The film “Traces” is an extract from the documentary “Maguy Marin, time to act” by David Mambouch.

“Maguy Marin, time to act” is available on Universcine and ARTE boutique

For the last several years I’ve been contemplating making a real film out of the piece May B, something more than just another video recording, rather a film in itself accompanied by a documentary that would retrace the history and experience of the different protagonists who have been involved with the work over the years. 

The piece and its long enduring history are inscribed in the memory of a moment in time, a moment in which different human stories have been swept along throughout the last 37 years, the births and death as well. The film is like a palimpsest of the sediment of tightly woven images and documents that evoke the slow process of superimposition, of restaging and repetition. To let loose the words and the voices of those who, both young and less so, have traversed the piece for the first time or the hundredth time. Of those who, from generation to generation and with each restaging, each performance and each new audience have made it possible for the part of themselves and their humanity inscribed and subtly intermixed with Beckett’s characters to emerge. 

To intertwine the elements of the artistic work that goes on in close contact with the performers who make the work possible, is a task that can only be undertaken by a director intimately acquainted with my work, an artist capable of delicately conveying the experience itself. David Mambouch, my son, was born at the same time as the piece was created in 1982. He grew up surrounded by the company and is an actor and director, an author and filmmaker. In 2012 he directed a cinematic adaptation of the company’s new piece Nocturnes and in 2014 after our collaboration for the piece Singspiele, our mutual artistic understanding regarding our approach to the work became self-evident and has continued to reinforce the on-going dialogue that has ensued between us. Through his sheer proximity to the piece and its successive performers (having also performed in it himself in 2014) he is in turn totally inside and totally outside of the piece. All throughout his childhood he has watched us live and work. 

Maguy Marin 

Source : Naïa Productions