Louis Malle

(Picture: melbournecinematheque.org)

One of the few works of art that ever did move me when seeing it at an art fair was an installation emulating a site of memory like those sites you find at the margins of roads or of train tracks, with candlelights and messages from those who lost someone dear. And you know: here is a place where something terrible did happen, and maybe you want to know what it was, and maybe, you feel, it’s better not to know this very much in detail, or maybe you want to avoid such places at all (at least at an art fair).

(Picture: amazon.com)


(Picture: cinema.nicematin.com)

I know such a place, a real place near the place that I live and I know that something really terrible did happen and what it was, and I have been observing that there is obviously a need to forget and to reshape the place, which is situated in a landscape; and on the other hand: there is obviously a need to remember or to show the dispair of those who lost someone dear. The landscape is inhabited by what has happened (if you know it), and now, just telling from the signs, it is inhabited by the diferring ways to deal with something terrible. To deal with the past. To come to terms with the past and the various ways and signs of not coming to terms with it.

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Louis Malle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Malle) was an artist who did grow up near and probably with the forest of Fontainebleau (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_Fontainebleau), and in my view he has become another artist that inhabits landscape (see for example: https://www.wisconsinacademy.org/gallery/inhabited-landscapes). It’s interesting to know that he first was drawn to underwater photography; and that later he got to travel: to the United States, to Mexico and also to India, and various movies and documentaries of his bear testimony to manifolded visual experiences. To shoot his unforgettable movie Au revoir les enfants (1987), however, he did return to France and to the landscapes of his childhood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Au_revoir_les_enfants). But it is also interesting, and maybe significant, that the scenes that show the children not at school but experiencing nature and playing an outdoor game, are not actually shot at the very forest of Fontainebleau, but somewhere else. But still, it seems to me, the depicting of a landscape with massive boulders dispersed in a forest, might have been a way to come back to a terrible story that is to be situated at the forest of Fontainebleau, the very city, and the very school that Louis Malle went to. The landscape must have been inhabited by that story for Louis Malle. And now the landscape is inhabited by Louis Malle, the filmmaker, who arranged a site of memory by realizing this touching movie. A site of memory in a landscape of childhood, a landscape he did emulate somewhere else, and after coming back from his travels to places as far away as underwater worlds.

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Other artist inhabit the forest of Fontainebleau. And some other artist came here to work, after having been working in the United States: the Swiss born artist Karl Bodmer (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Bodmer), who inhabits the landscapes of the Great Plains and thereby, often without our being aware of the fact, inhabits our sense of memory and of the history of the American West (and below we show Claude Monet’s depiction of the »Bodmer Oak« and another view of the forest of Fontainebleau).

See also: http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/stories/bunel.asp

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