Bologna Centrale

"Bologna Centrale was originally a sound piece recorded for France Culture’s Radio Creation Workshop in 2003. The film’s images come from gaps in the sound, shot “secretly” in Super 8 when the microphones were off. For Vincent Dieutre, this return to the “crime scenes” is constructed like a wandering visit through an initiatory geography, the updating of a mental and physical space which, for the “inno- cent” adolescent, was a magnetic field stretching between the awakening of homosexual desire, the discovery of drugs and an explosive social situation. Here the filmmaker writes a secret diary in the past and the present, recorded on a Dictaphone. And, as often in his films, Dieutre weaves the intimate with the ‘extimate’, particularly in the final sequence, designed like a circular sound panorama, in which the principal narrator is duplicated, reading in the present and in the past the list of those having disappeared into the debris of Bologna Centrale during this disastrous summer in 1980. At the moment of leaving, the observer becomes the witness to a gradual obliteration: that of his own story crushed by a collective memory that remains in torment."
(Emmanuel Chicon)