For the release of his latest short film The Last Sun to 28th Winterthur Short Film Days, back on this last movie fromAlexandre Schild. The Genevan continues to chart his way into the world of cinema, adding one more stone to the building of his young career that we had already had the pleasure to explore for an article earlier this year. What to put water in the mouth before the exit of its first long, The Hair of Balthazar, under development.
You miss one being...
Antoine (Arcadi Radeff) led with a young man (Maxime Huriguen) unconscious by his side. It is dark, thunderstorm ton, and the road leads them more and more to the top of this mountain that is dear to them.
Hard to summarize a short, complicated exercise to evoke the image it produces without revealing it to the still-virgin viewer. Yet he is in a work of Lamartine – one of the most notable romantic poets producing here probably his best known writing – a condensed of what is The Last Sun. You will have guessed under this paragraph, of course. Isolation. Chagrin of a love carried away by tuberculosis, Lamartine, planted at the top of her mountain, offers a short melancholic dream.
But to these sweet paintings my soul indifferent
It has no charm or transport in front of them;
I contemplate the earth and a wandering shadow
The sun of the living no longer warms the dead.
From hill to hill in vain carrying my sight,
From south to aquilon, from dawn to sunset,
I travel all the points of the immense expanse,
And I say, "Nowhere is happiness waiting for me. "
What do these valleys, palaces, cottages do to me,
Various objects whose charm for me is stolen?
Rivers, rocks, forests, so expensive solitudes,
Only one being you miss, and everything is depopulated!
Extract from Isolation, by Alphonse de Lamartine, available in full Here.
And poetry we were already talking about when it was about talking about initial work d-Alexandre Schild. She seems inseparable from her cinema, which combines forms as the poet gives her rhymes. But this is not the only parallel to the viewing of this last short film, and for that one must have in memory Salt Hills dating from 2023.
The salt hills seen from the top of the mountain
Indeed, its last two shorts date dialogue one with the other. First in the forms, and this art of combining close-up on the broader faces and planes on this nature that seems to irrigate the feelings of the characters (the indefatigable mistral Camargue in Salt Hills, the storm that threatens at the top of the mountain in The Last Sun). The constant play between the lights – we call his cinema a twilight – makes sense in The Last Sun : in eleven minutes, you pass from the thickest night to the blinding glow of a sunrise.
But the dialogue between his works becomes even more palpable when it comes to dealing with the content. The themes are related and revolve around a very contemporary malaise, where the boundary between love and friendship is decidedly very hard to trace and where attraction is troubled like the opaque sky of this night that opens The Last Sun.
Dictaphone, letters, here telephone booth, the elevated objects of the cinema of Alexander Schild embody this shift between the solar infra-world of desires (here queer, powerful, vitalist) and the night of disappointment, decrepitude and oblivion. Let these dull hopes be feminine (Salt Hills), male (The Last Sun) or mixed (Cyril & Louise), nostalgia remains. Mark the indelible ink plan.
You will understand, the more his filmography becomes, the more Alexandre Schild digs an exciting vein in the soil of contemporary cinema. A vein he hasn't finished plowing, because he's already murmuring that the young director is looking at his first feature film, The Balthazar Hair. Case to follow...
Filmography:
Selection of his main achievements:
- 2018 : Great dreaming
- 2019 : Idylle martyre
- 2022 : Cyril & Louise
- 2022 : Letters on your behalf
- 2023 : The salt hills
- 2024 : The Last Sun
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