More often than not, I find biopics about artists incomplete. Most are lazy and merely retrace the dramatic episodes of the lives of their subjects. I often avoid them. Here, instead, is an attempt to extend the work of writer Thierry Metz, through images: what he saw, what he captured. The impression of words and what they document. His poetry and his daily life as a temp worker. If the film's choice of chronology doesn't set it apart, it's the genre itself that makes it stand out: documentary. These are real bodies, real forests, real light that we observe. At work, confined, seen from behind, and on the road. It is up to the viewer to recreate Thierry Metz’s work, to update it, to "simplify" it.

“To be a seed and return as foliage.”

It is therefore a long poem that unfolds before our eyes, and sometimes even real paintings (I'm thinking of those gaunt trees). Through its editing, framing, and locations… we become poets. Through the various excerpts of the author being read, we become witnesses to a hollowing. To a man’s attempt to hold onto life, or rather to resist it—or, as he puts it, to “rejoin” his son, who had died a few years before his suicide. The film says nothing about this, it does not judge, it does not add anything: it follows.

“June 17. Already the habits, the routine: the handshakes when you arrive, the lunch pail at noon, work as an absence. Outside: a sun, passersby, the coming and going of traffic, potted flowers on a terrace. Almost nothing. You barely hear it. You guess at a movement, a murmur, footsteps. Who is there, so close to us? So close to the real? Where to go? The real work—perhaps—is to simplify. To say as little as possible, but to listen a lot. To take nothing with you in the morning, to remain light. To be a seed and return as foliage in the evening. To come home with the sunlit words from outside. The birds around us leave no trace.” (The Journal of a Manual Worker, Thierry Metz, 1990)

Rémi Journet
Tënk Subscriber

Share this film