Guillaume Durand will speak about Band apart (Éditions Plon), chronicle in which he retraces the significant encounters of his career. In this work, he sets up a gallery of chiaroscuro portraits, the visit of which will be guided by anecdotes of meetings ranging from David Bowie to Marine Le Pen, including Nicolas Sarkozy and Julien Clerc.
For years, I have produced portraits of personalities from the political and cultural world. Claude Lévi-Strauss, David Bowie and Françoise Sagan were my magical mountains. My last meals with François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac were overwhelming. The Fifth Republic had ravaged them. Nicolas Sarkozy is not necessarily who we think.
I remember, a long time ago, a summer near La Baule. As journalists, we only have one thing to do: tell the story. I am convinced that politics remains above all literature in action.
— Partial summary from the editor
François Armanet, for his part, will present his work You know what? A journalist’s novel (Éditions La Table Ronde), a logbook cradled by music and cinema. Through interviews and periods, it is a literary and artistic journey, retracing his meetings with Lou Reed, Jean-Luc Godard, John Le Carré, Joan Baez…
A journalist since the beginning of the 1980s at Libération then at Nouvel Observateur, François Armanet relives the fifty encounters that most marked him. Over the years, we meet writers (Jim Harrison, Toni Morrison, John Le Carré, Salman Rushdie…), figures of cinema (Jean-Luc Godard, Jackie Chan), French rock (Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy , Alain Bashung…) and Anglo-Saxon (Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Mick Jagger…).
From one portrait to another, he immerses us in the intimacy of singular moments at the Ritz bar, on board the Concorde, at the tip of Cornwall, on a film set in Hong Kong or under the Brooklyn Bridge. Everything testifies to a world in danger of disappearing which would draw, in its tastes, its questions, a sort of self-portrait of the interviewer. Or a journalist’s novel.
— editor’s partial summary
These two works and their authors offer a reflection on journalistic writing, while questioning the role of memories and the way we look at an era, like an attentive witness or a conduit between generations.
Image credits: Claire Chazal in the show, Public Senate
By Dispatch
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