With 23 films, it is With a conscious heart that Marseille director Robert Guédiguian returns to his cradle, to the Friche de la Belle de Mai, a cultural place where an exhibition takes a look behind the scenes of his rich filmography.
“Those who have seen all my films are not going to learn” new things but “they are going to see unexpected things about the foundations” of my films, “it’s like a kind of making-of,” explained to AFP the 69-year-old director, known among others for Marius and Jeannette, released in 1997 and which earned actress Ariane Ascaride the César for best actress. The exhibition With the Conscious Heart, which has been held since Saturday October 21 and until January 14 in Marseille, a city which is both the cradle of the filmmaker and the setting for most of his films, shows “the underside of making » of the latter with “spottings”, “scenarios” but in their “not definitive versions”, “costume designs, rushes” as well as “montages” and “old interviews”, details the director, including the films have been presented several times at Cannes.
Film posters, ultimately selected or not, as well as a favorite motorcycle which has accompanied Robert Guédiguian since he was 17 and appears in several of his feature films, are also among the objects on display. “It represents 43 years of work, so all at once, I measure this thickness,” says the filmmaker who made his first film, Last Summer, in 1980, and whose 24th, La Magpie Voleuse, is currently in production. Since his beginnings, the director has surrounded himself with a troupe of loyal actors including Ariane Ascaride – his wife in the city -, Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Gérard Meylan and, more recently, Anaïs Demoustier. “There is a satisfaction from having done all that, it’s not nothing” but “there is a real nostalgia” too, adds this Marseillais, who believes that the “world city” is “a bit of a key of (his) philosophy”.
Marseille is “the place where I was born, where my point of view was born: the first time I saw something, distinguished something, it was in Marseille and I believe that this influenced, made my view since the origins,” he adds. With La Friche too, this former tobacco factory which became one of the first cultural third places in Europe in the 1990s, in the heart of a very disadvantaged district of Marseille, it is a return to the origins which operates. “I did everything to try for it to develop during the time I was president (from 2002 to 2007, Editor’s note) and I continue. It’s rare that I don’t shoot one or two sequences here,” he explains.
This multipurpose place “now tries to have a function of popular education, of pedagogy”, but “I have never conceived of art other than as a means of intervention in the world in which we live”, assures Robert Guédiguian. For And the party continues, his next feature film which will be released on November 15 and whose preview will be screened in a local cinema, the director will discuss “The drama of the rue d’Aubagne haunts me every day”, assures the former mayor of Marseille, Jean-Claude Gaudin rue d’Aubagne, in Marseille, who left eight people dead in November 2018.
“This collapse, for me, was also the collapse of a way of living together, of a way of collective action, of a way of doing politics. This is what I try to tell in the film” which evokes the “symbolic, metaphorical, poetic” way in which “I actually interpreted this collapse”. But it will be “an optimistic film”, promises the one who wants to strive above all to move forward and “continue to work”.
