Sober (personal diary)

The latest film by Amaury Voslion has the supple writing of the kind of romanticism you don’t ever want to forget. Navigating between images and words, the director pulls off a rebirth. His survival. It’s not easy to be yourself. It’s not easy to look at your own reflection and to dare, through the mirror, to judge those ordeals that you know have been inflicted. In Amaury Voslion lies the quest of a Kerouac. It’s easy to imagine what “The Road” might have been, camera pen in hand, made by Amaury Voslion. I’m not talking about a fictional reconstruction here, but that of a kind of automatic writing dear to the surrealists. In other words, a work that conjugates the verb in the tense of the image, which melts into the shot. An undistanced whole. This is the itinerary of Sobre (“Sober”), Amaury Voslion’s latest film. A pictorial, sonorous homogeneity. A concept that links aesthetics, music (jazz – it’s Noël Balen we hear, plucking the strings of his double bass) and the pondered, sober word, to be listened to with open eyes. Thus is this redemptive film penned, without length, weightless. Let yourself be transported by the journey.

It takes the suppleness of the filmed word, between upstroke and downstroke, to describe the work of Amaury Voslion. Words as photograms. If the trace is a sign, it’s the imprint that guides us. A marked route offered to spectators’ eyes. The director’s works appear on the big screen, pertinent, ready to share. Four short films. Four artists: Thomas de Pourquery, saxophonist and musician, Jean-Luc Verna, performer and dancer, Pierrick Sorin, hologram artist, Amaury Voslion, director, a filmmaker facing his addictions. A feature-length film whose images mark jazz time in black and white, doing justice to Charles Mingus. Singular portraits created by an equally singular artist, gifted with the makings of a master of images. According to Amaury Voslion, cinema is all about the intelligence of the gaze. He’s right. Look closely at his work and you’re struck by the precision of the edited shot, the use of framing. The cutting room becomes his easel. Don’t you see the thickness of the pixel? The volume sculpted by light? The fitter in his workshop handles the gradations with precision. Inside the space he chooses, the aesthetic shock jolts us out of focus. Amaury Voslion surprises us with muted, perfectly executed visions. The artist is consistent, true to his work. He invites us to open Pandora’s box, to enter his visual world as he accompanies us on stealthy feet, pushing open the doors of a work that is no longer quite to do with the Seventh Art. The shared grammar is there, discernible in the writing, and yet! Why? There’s an indefinable plus that makes his works, if not unique, recognizable, specific. Is Amaury Voslion a painter who has swapped his panoply for a camera, a camera paintbrush? 25 images per second, and his work is brushed with as many pigments. A graphic palette that inspires. It borrows, from certain masters (Hopper is in a good position), a social representation of our lives by inviting us to push open the doors of our imagination.”