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A set of original installations and screenings reveals how the filmmaker captures love as it unfolds: links between speed and desire – between Ravel’s Boléro and the heart of humanity – the sincerity of gazes and the scents of truth, all accompanied by the sound and visual presence of Claude Lelouch. One of the 4 experiences on Love in Motion by Claude Lelouch at the Ecole Municipale des Beaux-Arts
In front of the entrance to the Beaux-Arts, the iconic Ford Mustang 184 from the film Un homme et une femme welcomes visitors: a symbol of the filmmaker’s philosophy, speed as the language of desire, movement as the only way to love. The Engine and Love Claude Lelouch’s cinema is defined by passion, sincerity, daring – his dazzling love stories, his romantic vision of existence, the sometimes cruel beauty of chance and coincidence. What connects all these films is an intimate conviction: love is only encountered in motion. Never at a standstill. Love is the reward for those who dare to charge ahead – by car, in flight, in dance, in music. His characters are always beings in motion. Neither superheroes nor supervillains, he loves everyday life. The engine is never an end in itself: it is the courage to move toward the other person. Because stopping, for Lelouch, is a little like dying. And loving means first daring to rush toward the other person.* When you are a man of action like me, you charge ahead. You glance a little in the rearview mirror, but not too much. Claude Lelouch, This idea of charging ahead would lead to the film Un homme et une femme. When creating this 7th feature film, Claude Lelouch, despairing after multiple cinematic failures, drives out of Paris at night. The road takes him to Deauville. In the early morning, he sees a woman walking on the beach with her child, a car driving toward her… the idea for the screenplay bursts forth. C'était un rendez-vous (1976) — Philosophy in its purest form Nine minutes. A single sequence shot. Paris in the early morning of August 15, 1976, still asleep and deserted. A car crosses the city at a mad speed — running red lights, ignoring one-way streets, pigeons scattering in panic on place du Tertre. And at the end of the journey, on the Montmartre hill: a rendezvous with a woman. This short film may be the work in which Lelouch’s philosophy reveals itself in its purest form. No dialogue. No story. Only a roaring engine, a city crossed like a declaration of love, and the certainty that someone is waiting for you. No special effects — he had to arrive on time with the 300 meters of film stock available. The film is an equation in images: the engine pulses, action proves, love rewards. Love that makes you lose your head, regardless of the highway code. Someone in a hurry to love is not prone to accidents. Claude Lelouch, about C'était un rendez-vous The Boléro — Les Uns et les Autres (1981) — The absolute synthesis In Les Uns et les Autres, Lelouch films four families — Russian, French, German, American — across three generations, from the interwar period to the 1980s. All are united by a single thread: the love of music and dance. The entire film exists only to make its final scene possible: nineteen minutes of Ravel’s Boléro, choreographed by Maurice Béjart, danced by Jorge Donn on the forecourt of the Trocadéro before two thousand spectators. A single melody, repeated endlessly, rising inexorably — just as there is only one human story, replayed from generation to generation with the same urgency of love. I listened to my film before seeing it, and I realized the importance of the Boléro. It was going to be at the heart of the whole structure, because it is the heart of humanity beating in the film. Claude Lelouch, Jorge Donn was not a great dance technician. But he had something better: an absolute presence, an authenticity that crossed through the screen. Exactly the “scent of truth” that Lelouch has always pursued. The Boléro presented is a second edit by Claude Lelouch made for the symphonic cinema show held at the Palais des Congrès for his 60-year career milestone in November 2022. . Installation — The Sincerity of Gazes The final space in this immersion is devoted to gazes. This installation was designed and produced with the help of apprentices from Claude Lelouch’s cinema workshops. Across several simultaneous screens, fragments from Lelouch’s work capture those seconds when an actor stops acting and communicates something true. That is the “scent of truth”: the elusive moment when the boundary between fiction and life disappears. To obtain these flashes of authenticity, Lelouch uses almost clandestine methods: giving actors the text in the morning to perform it in the afternoon, filming without warning, shooting in a single take in real locations. Surprise creates truth. Movement releases emotion. There is a radio frequency between people who love each other. My role is to tune my camera to that frequency. Claude Lelouch, Interactive trailer screen – 60 years of love for cinema, 51 films! Trailers are films in their own right in Claude Lelouch’s cinema. Everyone can choose the trailer or trailers they want to watch. Each film represents a particular kind of love Love as a destination Lelouch has often said that life is the greatest screenwriter. That its eight billion inhabitants provide eight billion different screenplays. But deep down, for him, all these screenplays tell the same story: someone rushing toward someone else, with all their energy, all their speed, all their love. The engine pulses. Action proves. Music carries everything away. The gaze reveals. And now, thanks to the masterclass, you know it from the inside: love on screen is not a cinematic illusion. It is life caught on the fly, by someone who decided, more than sixty years ago, never to stop chasing after it. At the end of all this movement — at the end of the nighttime road in Un homme et une femme, at the end of the crossing of Paris in C'était un rendez-vous, at the end of the nineteen minutes of the Boléro, at the end of your own improvised scene with him — there is always someone waiting. That is Claude Lelouch’s cinema. A rendezvous. And today, that rendezvous is with you. Three seconds of happiness can justify sixty years of misery. Claude Lelouch,
Source: paris.fr — photo: Les Films 13