This short television film, an 8-minute drop in the fictional and documentary filmography of Guy Gilles, nonetheless holds the unique value of peripheral works—it illuminates, obliquely, certain essential traits of his body of work. Briefly focusing on the lives of the child and teenage acrobats of the Spanish Muchachos circus—then the only circus school in Europe outside of Moscow—the reportage unfolds as a generous succession of close-ups of the young performers as they each state their name and role in the circus, interspersed with footage of the locations and performances. Within this reportage, we find all the vitalism of Guy Gilles' cinema: vitalism in the sense of the importance given to the filmed subject, and vitalism again in the form captured at the very edge of life—constantly paying tribute to it through an image-as-instant that reveals a Proustian sense of cinematic existence.

But it is also through the subtle presence of Patrick Jouané—who narrates the reportage in voice-over and appears in a few shots—that this short film by Guy Gilles reveals more than it first appears to. A true “muse” or “model” for Guy Gilles, Patrick Jouané functions in the filmmaker’s work as a kind of barometer of passing time, a central obsession in his cinema. His occasional presence, along with his aging on screen, brings forth not only temporality, but also a deep, enduring love for long artistic relationships (Gilles once compared his relationship with Jouané to that of Truffaut and Léaud). Jouané’s dotted-line presence in this short film also invites a certain melancholy. Indeed, Le cirque des muchachos presents the acrobats in a progression of ages, from childhood to adolescence. The lives of these young individuals—at first presented through their unique identities—gradually become part of a broader, collective consciousness, enhanced by the sentimental tone of the music. One senses a growing, tender attentiveness to the literal transition from childhood to puberty, and more broadly to time itself, understood as movement. This is mirrored in the editing, which unfolds through a series of juxtaposed gestures: leaps, aerial moves, acrobatic feats, advancing steps, a car passing through the frame.

Maude Trottier
Editor-in-Chief, Hors champ magazine