Synopsis
Painting with Falls is first and foremost an investigation into a painting : Landscape with the Fall of Icarus painted by Pieter Bruegel around 1555. The author’s personal reading of this painting raises countless questions. Here’s one that could contain them all: what does it mean to look? Unemployed people, anonymous passers-by, philosophers, a psychoanalyst, politicians and the director’s own parents all have their say. Their testimonies are interwoven with extracts from a diary kept by the author during the filming.
A word from Tënk
It's interesting to watch a film from 1997 that deals with our relationship with images. The physiology of our eyes may not have changed much since then, but almost everything around them has. In 1997, we were slowly getting used to the continuous broadcasting of images of the world by news channels, but the Internet had not yet profoundly penetrated our lives.
We still didn't really care about augmented reality, or deep fakes, or images generated by AI. So to speak of the betrayal of images by showing an archive of Magritte explaining that the image of a pipe is not a pipe, or to wonder whether the image of genocide is genocide, corresponds to a time when it became urgent to challenge our faith in images, particularly those that seek to represent reality.
The media ecology of 2023 is clearly no longer that of 1997, and yet Claudio Pazienza's film remains, strangely enough, highly topical. Faith in images has not wavered, but the mistrust they arouse has grown. This contemporary dichotomy between faith and distrust alone makes it worth (re)seeing the passage in the film in which a psychoanalyst suggests that Pazienza should "lay down his weapons" if he wants to really see, in other words, be done with the external parasites that blur his vision. That was the purpose of making in 1997 - and watching in 2023 - a film about a 16th-century image that doesn't move.
Emanuel Licha
Filmmaker and teacher
