It is difficult to remain indifferent to the work of Bertrand Mandico, a polymorphic artist who knows how to free time and other moral injunctions from a neopuritanism still alive. With her female (and feminist?) rereading of the myth of Conan, the whimsical director gives birth to a new universe of fantasy numbed escaped libriminous. A cinema that draws from a whole section of the imagination too often devoted to gemonies, between totalitarian morbid impulses and the eruption of desire.
What doesn't kill us makes us stronger
In the depths of hell, Rainer tells of Conann's six lives, « perpetually put to death by his own future through times, myths and ages ». Entering the world of Mandico is not a thin affair, it's like simmering in the dark night. Once we agree to let our senses free themselves from their properties, we switch to a completely different dimension. Behind Rainer's dog-headed character hides the fetish actress and companion of Mandico, Elina Löwensohn, whose diction is so singular despite its unrecognizable appearance. Throughout the story, Rainer declined the Maldorian figure as a narrator and prophet of the coming death and rebirths of Conann.
With attention to detail pushed to the extreme and this despite limited means, the filming set is a work in itself, like the monumental works of artists like Giger. The plateau is organic and each scene enjoys a nearly pictorial millimetre composition. Far from digital artifices, Mandico offers a cinema of fluids and moods. With Conann, It alternates from black and white to colors according to the phases of the life of the Heroin. Photography perfectly transcribes this world from the limbs of Hell. Filmed exclusively on film support (like all the director's films), Conann is a timeless plastic object.
Those who saw his short films (read our Article) or its last long After Blue will not be completely lost thanks to the return of part of the casting faithful to Mandico's vision (Claire DuburcqElina Löwensohn, Agata Buzek, etc..). A mythological reach crosses the director's stories. This is how Agata Buzek played Kate Bush, the criminal buried in the city.After Blue and bailing out the company. Here she embodies the role of Conann in her revengeful version.
Interview with Sandra Perfect actress of Conann
At the FEFFS in Strasbourg, we were able to exchange with Sandra Perfect in the role of Conann 35 which begins to reach a certain maturity in the film. The young French actress signs her first feature film with Mandico and will soon be in the feature film Sharks in Paris by Xavier Gens (Farang).
Do you think we live forever?
Mandico's film is therefore a free rereading of Conan le Barbare by Robert E. Howard whose first adventures appeared in the 1930s in the pulp Weird Tales. The legendary author scored generations before the comics was performed in cinema in 1982. Contemporary to Lovecraft, Howard bathed between fantastic and fantasy. If Howard liked to say that Conan was an adventurer and that he wrote his stories as an adventurer would tell them, that is to say, in the most complete disorder, this vaporous structure proper to the fragmented memory of the tortured warrior is found in Mandico's rereading.
If the barbaric frascs symbolized a caricatural virilism with the very testosterone interpretation of Schwarzenegger, Mandico logically proposes the exact hypersexualized reflection, the osteogens in addition. The director also knows how to free himself from a linear narrative. Rainer acts as a subconscious of the Cimmerian fighter while several actresses will embody different stages of Conann's life, from childhood to adulthood, from trauma to hybris.
Covers of Weird Tales magazine in which Conan appeared for the first time in 1932
« The more violent the show, the more the spectator is an actor. »
« The more violent the show, the more the spectator is an actor » clame Rainer at the beginning of the film as to announce the Faustian pact concluded with the spectator, made accomplice – and thus actor – from the upcoming show. Ironed by the fate of actresses playing the same character, the filming of the feature film in Luxembourg did not allow them to really exchange together, since they only crossed at their own death. Sandra Parfait tells how much shooting was a gift for artists with a real let go that leaves the part beautiful to raw emotions. The transgression will reach its climax during the burlesque scene of the Dionysian and sacrificial meal. A barbaric rite that recalls the up-to-butism of the Naked feast, whose title of William S. Burroughs' book appears briefly on the screen in the middle of an apocalyptic decor. Behind violence and sex, Conann There is no lack of cynicism that does not hesitate to attack the vanity of existence.
Slave of desire
Linking Mandico to the work of Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and more precisely to his poetic militant magazine Acephalus is tempting. Erotic desire leads to an enjoyment that gives the feeling that life and death merge in these two authors. In Acephalus, Battle that has set itself on the margins of bourgeois surrealists, claims « the desire to found an accephalous religion, a religion without God other than the so-called apocalyptic sovereignty of ecstasy » as Michel Camus wrote. The revolutionary writings of Bataille cannot dissociate the transformation of the real of poetry, by and for all, in line with the account of Lautréamont (1846-1870) and the Maldoror songs.
The enigmatic real project of human sacrifice, promoted by the collective of Bataille as the fulfilment of the poetic gesture and phantasm in its own right, recalls the bereaved figure of Conann, condemned to die forever. The heart ofAcephalus is the incarnation of the sentence of Battle: « Truth Is Death ». This is the sign of the headless god. The writer Michel Camus continues with fun: « But standing, the Acephalus doesn't really look like a corpse, it's radiant with life. ». This is the effect produced by a « living beheading to which we cannot identify » Go on. But Conann's various mortiferous moults are also an opportunity to reveal themselves.
« The absence of a head is not lacking in signs or even absence of life. This is the power of « empty » which calls the sign: that of the sacrifice of the head. »
This is the meaning to give to the death head designed by André Masson (1896-1987) in the place of sex: where sex is, death is as abstract as birth symbolized by Giovanni Da Modena's monumental fresco in the Basilica of Saint Petrone in Bologna. « Acephalus gathers birth and death in the same eruption » explains Michel Camus. By the renewed death ad vitam aeternam, Conann, actresses and the spectator are complicit in the same sacrificial act: the death of the self and the murder of God. Mandico invites us to look for meaning elsewhere and signs a film that so imprints on Mad Max than Sin City and the Gothic vision from Hell to the Renaissance. A heretic pot rot that gives to see an unbridled imaginary pan.
By combining desire for death and death with desire, Mandico is part of this poetic movement, as ephemeral as it is radical: that of the Acephalous God. An emotional cinema, an impulse of death and destruction that challenges what exists; Here's how you could have fun characterizing Conann. The desire is infinite because it is the only way to enjoyment through transgression, which Mandico perfectly integrated. « We flee the form of death and not death because the purpose of our highest desire is death » Just wrote the engraver Max Klinger. In his own way, Mandico's film violates the prohibitions to better exist as a work. Conann is a journey that does not leave insensitive and the sign of an author's vision affirmed as such. A wind of freshness in the Grand Show of the Fantasy.
Trailer of Conann
Extract from Conann
[...] 29 November next releases the Conann by Bertrand Mandico (read our review), a dense work, a quaint visual universe, which is proposed here [...]
[...] Young (see our interview). Atmosphere to cut with a knife in Mandico decors, all to narrate a story that could have been extracted from a Burroughs book, here is [...]