Claire Simon
France | 1988 | 22 min
Language : French
Subtitle : English

While looking after little Marie, Irma gets a telephone call from her fiancé who urges her to join him. The baby-sitter decides to let the little girl have lunch and go to school alone. She makes her promise, in exchange for a cigarette, to say nothing to her mother. Left to herself, and fearing The Police, Marie gets to work erasing any clue that would reveal Irma’s absence, “in case something should happen to her”. All of her gestures are controlled by the fiction of a police inquiry that she invents through her inner voice, which we hear as a voice-over. For her third short film (Grand Prix at the Festival Entrevues Belfort in 1988), Claire Simon filmed a character’s thoughts. By staging the fantasies of her little heroine, the film, a fiction relying on documentary ingredients (shot in the 18th arrondissement in Paris, in Super 16,  with people who exist in “real life”), questions nothing less than the capacity of language to function autonomously to create, more than describe, reality.

Emmanuel Chicon

Maître du Réel Claire Simon

→ Tout le programme