Prélude à la Mer

The Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, to Claude Debussy’s music, inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s text, is a sublime musical poem about the ephemeral, absence, and extinction. A faun wonders whether the nymphs that have fled his amorous advances were not, after all, mere phantasms: was I in love with a dream?... If only one could make these nymphs last, make the ephemeral persist, seize hold of what is bound to vanish…

The idea of this film is to confront Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography, brought to life by two ‘dream’ performers, Marc Lorimer and Cynthia Loemij, with the harshness of the scene of a catastrophe: the site of a vanishing sea, the Aral Sea. An androgynous ‘faun’ (made possible by switching between a man and a woman) becomes caught up in the impossible quest to hold on to what is bound to vanish. He/she traces the movements of his/her insatiability, wandering in the tracks left by what used to be a sea : a salty steppe, landscapes with cracked soil, sandstorms, a cemetery of the wrecks of ships, lighthouses in the middle of the desert, ghost villages covered in sand by the wind. When he finally finds today’s shore, in the film’s final shot, the image of the sea in turn disappears, gradually dissolving in white.

Double bill with Le Sacre du Printemps by Xavier Le Roy.