NICOLAS KLOTZ AND ELISABETH PERCEVAL
Radical Courage
The films of Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval are world works. On the one hand, because they represent concrete forays through the world in all its diversity. On the other, because they absorb and document the experiences and cultural background of the people they encounter and about whom they narrate. Klotz and Perceval describe our world through the injustices that befall the weakest and most marginalized in it. They demand justice and try to turn their own Eurocentric view into a generous, universal humanism.
Over time, therefore, they have developed a method for both writing the scripts and for the filming itself that makes it possible to question the form of the film as well as the upheavals of our contemporary world. Their films depict human beings who are made vulnerable and endangered by societal organization – from society to the state institutions that often don’t support them but try to break them. The revolution that the pair invokes lies not in the intentions but in the expressions of a way of filmmaking that simultaneously promotes motivation and aesthetic consciousness. Klotz and Perceval are thus from a profoundly pragmatic philosophical tradition to which, for example, Simon Weil, Robert Bresson, and Jean-Luc Godard also belong. A political as well as ethical cinema of our time, whose stage is the whole world.
The monography we are dedicating to Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval includes nine programs, divided into three chronological sections representing different creative phases. It begins with LA NUIT BENGALI (The Bengali Night), the first film in Cinemascope, shot in the studios of the Indian master Satyajit Ray. This is followed by “Les temps modernes” (Modern Times) and the films shot in refugee camps, including L’HEROIQUE LANDE, LA FRONTIERE BRULE (The Wild Frontier). The monography ends with NOUS DISONS REVOLUTION (Let’s Say Revolution).
