Les temps des assassins1986

"The Time of the Assassins has arrived" - Arthur Rimbaud, Matinèe d’ivresse

" The film Les temps des Assassins is not only an extraordinary work, but it is also an extraordinary exegesis of Rimbaud's clairvoyance. It begins with the seer: the reflection of a fight in the glass of her glasses, while the wind moves her hair, how the clouds move, how the duelists move, perhaps the murderers. But "I is another," Rimbaud wrote. To be, to know how to be a witness, the visionary must begin a journey to discover the depth of this "other" which is the self. Meet houses, antennas, clouds along the road that winds fast through the car windows, while the sun beats on the glass, refracts on the glasses, making the visionary's gaze invisible. And then there are the mysterious intermittences: the galleries, "the connections, the passages, the representations", which, according to Novalis, are the landscape of the unknown self. And here fragments emerge that are no longer composed in a landscape: a gun, a face, a head, a body, a mouth wide open in the silent scream, and colors.

Outside the tunnels it is now the Zwilicht, the double light of dusk: we are on the edge of the night, we are in and out of the night. Two faces, two wide open mouths tend, perhaps in search of an impossible kiss, and fade side by side without meeting. The columns flash, the eternal columns of the temples of Greece, the origin of our sense of time and space, also fragments, like the shell, also taken in the vertigo from which that body now emerges, that flesh that is it offers fragile to the eye, which also emerges from the night (…). An eye, the scream, the grimace, the suffering - colors: blood, red is the blood on the face, on the body, on the images that the mind produces. And in the end the sea: the same motion, the perennial motion, which leads the waves to the sand which reproduces their shape and movement. A net and a gate enclose the sea, they enclose the duelists' dance of death, they enclose those who move near the sea, those who have moved to reach the sea.
The chest swells in the breath and the night covers the earth with darkness and the earth with red. The shadows become demented and monstrous. Ophelia sinks. Aurélia collapses. Everything seems to collapse. It is here that another eye appears: it is a screen, and there the dance becomes pure violence in a triumphal display of weapons. Because the screen is a viewfinder, and the viewfinder is an eye, an eye that watches while killing, an eye full of death. So the eye that shocked the world with its clairvoyance has discovered another eye, that of the TV screen, even more shocking, because it is a blind eye, which reflects like a fortune-teller the things it aims at, the things it does not say, the things that are silent "

( Franco Rella, "Nondove. For Arcangelo Mazzoleni", in the book-catalog "Arcangelo Mazzoleni: The world at the fire of the gaze" )