Diagonale du vide
Guillaume Ballandras
France | 2016 | 27 min
World premiere
Language : French
Subtitle : English
The diagonal void is the imaginary line linking the North-East to the South-West of France and crossing the regions with the country’s lowest population density. A few fields sprinkled with electric pylons, anonymous residential districts with rows of identical houses, infinite commercial zones, ghost towns of consumerism and roads that seem to lead nowhere sketch out this space. Exploring these incongruous “non-places”, we come across some characters adrift on these saturated landscapes, where we confuse the near and the distant, where the frontier is, like the diagonal, a rigorous line, one that man has drawn in his spirit.
But in this rigid and rectilinear world, the tiniest movement is an event. Anything can then happen and it’s the absurd flowing at every instant from frame to frame or from fragments of sound effects that lets us break away. As with Jacques Tati, from whom the accelerated characters or voices are borrowed and reset during re-recording, it’s the intrusion that creates life.
Madeline Robert
