Patrice chéreau, the body in the arts
Director Stéphane Metge
Countries France
Duration 75 min
Synopsis
How to practice three different major art forms – theatre, opera and cinema – that Patrice Chéreau is intimately convinced are always the same work? This film will talk about his major influences, including the painting that his father Jean-Baptiste Chéreau did, his time spent meandering the Louvre, Egyptian sculpture masterpieces as well as hours spent contemplating “The Raft of the Medusa”. And also Andalusia, with which Patrice Chéreau continues to have an emotional closeness, when he isolates himself for work or to contemplate the rituals of a catholic liturgy of which he was fond and admirative as a child, when he was an alterboy. Patrice Chéreau has a kind of shocking death poetry about him ; is it a provocation of existence itself that life can be lost and spread so easily?… We will see that he will go as far as to take the theatre out of the auditorium in order to plunge the audience into a sensation of reality, with In the Solitude of Cotton Fields. And then we will observe this desire for cinema that runs through him and that has never left him. A filmography as unusual and troubling as The Flesh of the Orchid, The Wounded Man, The Queen Margot; Intimacy. Then finally, we will discover the practice of opera, like a passion. An art that the stage director practices in a demanding way, so much his relationship with music and its « obligatory » rhythms inspire him.
How to practice three different major art forms – theatre, opera and cinema – that Patrice Chéreau is intimately convinced are always the same work? This film will talk about his major influences, including the painting that his father Jean-Baptiste Chéreau did, his time spent meandering the Louvre, Egyptian sculpture masterpieces as well as hours spent contemplating “The Raft of the Medusa”. And also Andalusia, with which Patrice Chéreau continues to have an emotional closeness, when he isolates himself for work or to contemplate the rituals of a catholic liturgy of which he was fond and admirative as a child, when he was an alterboy. Patrice Chéreau has a kind of shocking death poetry about him ; is it a provocation of existence itself that life can be lost and spread so easily?… We will see that he will go as far as to take the theatre out of the auditorium in order to plunge the audience into a sensation of reality, with In the Solitude of Cotton Fields. And then we will observe this desire for cinema that runs through him and that has never left him. A filmography as unusual and troubling as The Flesh of the Orchid, The Wounded Man, The Queen Margot; Intimacy. Then finally, we will discover the practice of opera, like a passion. An art that the stage director practices in a demanding way, so much his relationship with music and its « obligatory » rhythms inspire him.