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The world as it is, very poetic

The film "L'homme qui penche" is a very successful adaptation of the prose poems of Thierry Metz. It starts with a magnificent static sequence shot of a field in the mist with a large tree in its center. A faint sound of wind and a few chirps of birds are barely heard. These birds then come to rest on electrical wires. Then the mist begins to dissipate. Some birds then fly away while a train passes in the distance, invisible. Nature wakes up and the mist gradually disappears. Then, finally, a voice-over makes Thierry Metz's text resonate. Everything is summed up in these first minutes: nature, magnificent, shots that are always fixed, long enough for the slightest flapping of the wings, the slightest rustle to become an event and the voice-over of the co-director, Olivier Dury, lets out the words of the poet.

A worker and a poet

Thierry Metz was a laborer in the building. He claimed it as much as he cursed this needy and nourishing work. Images close to the documentary come to illustrate extracts from the “Journal of a laborer”, those of workers like him on a construction site of a house. A crane movement finally raises the camera then rotates it to show a close-up view of tree branches where birds are nesting. The directors (Marie-Violaine Brincard and Olivier Dury) succeed here in perfectly cinematographically adapting the work of the poet-worker whose texts had both the “earthly” gravity of life and its lightness, like that of a bird, recurring element in the work of Thierry Metz.

The gates of the world

"It is by approaching the world that one moves away from its doors" ends up saying the poet in the voice of the narrator-director. Once again, the directors also manage to show this: their stubbornly fixed camera, always persistent through the duration of the shots, is always far enough from the subject (or the object) to never completely reveal its “mystery”.

The beauty of the wind in the trees

One of the film's rare camera movements shows a landscape of the Lot-et-Garonne in panoramic, as Jean-Marie Straub can do in his own films. He likes to quote DW Griffith (the inventor of almost all the elements of the language of cinema): “What modern films lack is beauty – the beauty of the wind moving through the trees”. This is the case in this film, currently on view at the Méliès Jean-Jaurès.

By Richard Clermont