a counter-current documentary on the “discreet hero of impressionism”

Ardent defender of Impressionism, Gustave Caillebotte was eclipsed by his renowned peers, Manet, Monet and Renoir in the lead. It comes back to life in a film of great inventiveness.

Un century and a half after the Impressionist revolution, which shook up the proponents of academicism and attracted the jeers of bourgeois society, the works of Manet, Monet and Renoir today could not be more consensual, to the point of adorning mugs, scarves and tote bags. How can we recall the audacity of these painters in a documentary evoking one of their own? In particular through assertive production choices, in accordance with the personality of Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), of whom Lise Baron signs a vigorous portrait.

She retraces the brief and intense trajectory of an artist and collector, who ardently defended his conception of modernity. To the flow of violins covering the impressionist canvases in many sugary productions, she preferred music with electronic, even noise, accents, composed by Clémence Ducreux. And directed the actress Caroline Ferrus, who says the comment, in the sense of a certain rectitude.

I used close-ups, which convey the materiality of the painting.

Lise Baron, the director

The same requirement is reflected in the image. “Showing painting on television is complicated, recognizes the documentary filmmaker of Marguerite Duras, writing and life and of Michel Foucault, the philosopher and the goldfish. Especially when the touch is thick and cannot be appreciated on screen like in a museum. So I used close-ups, which convey this materiality, and I approached the paintings until I could no longer identify the figured subject. » This form of derealization, which the impressionists would not have disavowed, is found in the use she makes of certain cinematographic archives. Like this plan taken from New BabylonSoviet fiction from 1929, to evoke the war of 1870: ill-defined image of a group of soldiers, into which Aurélien Bonnet's editing takes us so that we can only distinguish grainy shapes.

The film goes further, when it evokes the disintegration of the movement which Caillebotte laments in a tracking shot shot in a street in Dunkirk in 1913. An archive so degraded that the light passes through it after a few seconds, leaving us no longer able to see that of the decomposing film. “I like deteriorated archives, admits Lise Baron. Those that we sometimes consider unusable, but which reveal their organic nature. At the beginning of it, we can see some kids running in front of the camera and seeming to be having fun – like the young impressionists. We can go so far as to interpret the image which dissolves as an evocation of the vision of Caillebotte in tears in the face of this threatened joy. »

Conversely, Gustave's eye, isolated by the camera on his self-portrait in a summer hat, provides the opportunity to evoke the young man's idealism through commentary. And to show that at the age of 24, he painted frantically in the house in Yerres acquired by his father, a photo of the house gradually covered with touches of paint borrowed from his paintings suggests the intensity of his activity. The ideas for shooting and editing which abound in this documentary thus refer to the creative ferment of impressionism. Lise Baron goes so far as to remove images by zooming in on a photo of Caillebotte, sitting at his desk, to deprive the movement of its fluidity. A gesture against the grain of so many academic productions, designed to be smooth, easy to ingest as well as to forget.

r Gustave Caillebotte, discreet hero of impressionismbroadcast Friday November 1 at 10:55 p.m. on France 5