En friche

We penetrate a place that has returned to its natural state and yet remains peopled by traces of the “culture” it represented. After her essay in futuristic retrospection Je vous écris du Havre (VdR 2011), Françoise Poulain-Jacob focuses on the colonial ex-garden developed at the far end of the Bois de Vincennes in the late 19th century. Carried once again by the voice of Dominique Reymond, En friche “advances”, in static shots or very slow movements, through what remains of this “garden”, which was home to a colonial exhibition in 1907 (a human zoo) and whose buildings served as a make- shift hospital for Senegalese infantrymen during the Great War. The account is sequenced by inserted texts that display, in their cruel nakedness, terms such as “exoticism”, “race” or even “nation”, while the director leafs through an album of old postcards, on the rostrum camera or by pointing out such and such a detail. The resulting film is dry and precise, with a sad lyricism, a final guided tour of the traps of the imagination, but above all of colonial décor. A museum-like gesture that is also a sort of archaeology of the perspective on the Other and on ourselves.
(Emmanuel Chicon)