De fotografe Alix Cléo Roubaud wordt omgeven door het interieur van een appartement waarin je de stad erbuiten kan voelen. Een interieur waarin tijd en representatie in de war raken, maar toch bevat worden. Zij en de zoon van de regisseur, Boris Eustache, bladeren door een verzameling van haar foto’s, wijzen aan en spreken over wat er precies te zien is — of net niet?
She flicks through a folio of images (still lifes, self-portraits, ghostly renderings of her friends, father, lovers, and stalker), which have often somehow been marred by light tricks or processes of erasure, leaving oblique compositions. At first, her descriptions match up, but slowly they become out of sync with what we are seeing; when she gestures to a human body, there is only a pillow. A picture is not reality, she tells us; it is at once “much less than reality, and much further.” Like Rivette’s, Eustache’s and Cléo Roubaud’s obstructions playfully undermine the idea of cinema as a tool of explanation and exposure. Images, especially moving ones, bear an inherent futility, but this capacity for disappearance is the crux of their magic. (Indigo Bailey, Rough Cut Films)
