Prélude à la mer

Thierry De Mey & 20' — 2011

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… Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography, brought to life by two “dream” performers, Marc Lorimer and Cynthia Loemij, confronts itself 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.

Belgium

Production: Charleroi Danses, Eroïca Productions
Co-production: CBA, Charleroi Danses, Eroïca Productions, Cie Rosas, Cité de la Musique, Flagey Bruxelles
With the support of the Centre des Arts Enghien-les-Bains, Concertgebouw Brugge, WBI, Sophimages (VAF), La Filature Mulhouse, AWEX, Arte France

Réalisation
Thierry De Mey
Scenario
Thierry De Mey
DOP
Philippe Guilbert
Sound
Xavier Meeus, Luc Thomas
Image editor
Boris Van der Avoort
Sound editor
Isabelle Boyer
Mix
Xavier Meeus
Music
Claude Debussy
With
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (Choregraphy)
Production
Charleroi Danses (Vincent Thirion), Sophimages (Jan Roekens), Eroïca Productions
Image Format
Super 16mm
Sound Format
Stereo
BW/Colour
Color
Languages OV
FR
Available subtitles
EN
Festivals

2011:
FIPADOC, France, 01/11

Other films from Thierry De Mey

Floréal

Thierry De Mey & 15' — 1985

Love sonnets

Thierry De Mey & 29' — 1994

La Valse

Thierry De Mey & 13' — 2011
Newsletter
Stay connected