La petite illusion (2006)

Plot Summary

A little story of passions is told in "la petite illusion": heavy breathing garnished by a jazzy bass line, a kiss, a woman falls into water at night. While the work's title is an ironic reference to Jean Renoir's 1937 La grande illusion, the association is a dead end: Neither the images nor the soundtrack contains a direct quotation of Renoir's pacifist fable, nor is a similar motif touched upon. The patina of early sound film which is celebrated in "la petite illusion" stands as the sole vague connection to the «grand illusion» - the sound and the look, the aesthetic stereotypes of Francophone cinema made between the wars. Michaela Schwentner's chromatically ascetic electronic manipulation of found sounds and images is a study of emotional images from the history of cinema which is carefully kept in the air.

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