Pezennec Adrien
Almost History
A house, a cemetery, a bobsleigh track, a railway track, a diver, a piece of grass, a stadium, a statue, a bus, a poster, a tourist, a fan, a cab, a bridge … Those pictures try to speak about History, to tell a story, a narrative of slice of History, some stories, some words … They are shown with some captions which tell what you can’t see, something which is out of the lens. When fiction imposes itself on facts, it translates into a story of a bridge destroyed during a war, then rebuilt by the people of a neighbourhood village; which explodes again in front of the lens of a film director who wants to tell the story of this war or the story of a prison camp demolished to fit the story of the film or the wishes of the city that once accepted it.
The movie does not speak about this prisoner camp, it is a fiction that is supposed to take place in another country. The camp becomes a village, and then vanishes. Today, only a sign post is left near a secondary road which spells “ Memorial “. And then there is this something that will bring up memories of… There are these hands stretched out in salute of millions of party members, the howling apes in a Zoo 50 km away from Auschwitz; the Jews, those who wear these striped prison uniforms are called “ the Jews “. For a while I have thought that the museum in Auschwitz is worthless: I was wrong. It tells the story of society today and it needs the picture of a ton of hair to understand the Holocaust.
In Kosovo, you can see “Fuck Serbia” written on Bill Clinton’s statue. Those words are here to tell us that the United States gave more than one thousand billion to create a country. An iconic figure falls from the bridge of Mostar. A diver jumps, like a Christ with bended knees on the very spot that cuts the city in a Catholic and Muslim part. The bridge has been destroyed in 1993 by a Croatian shell. Today, divers are paid by tourists to jump.
This project is a reconstruction of the History through stories people tell.