Manon Stutz, birth of tears

Disappearance

Manon lost her father in 2016. He was missing for ten days then his body was found in a corner of the countryside. In his car. A suicide. The day before his disappearance, he filled out the family’s tax returns and asked Manon for a kiss and a hug. Early in the morning, another kiss, on this one’s nose. Manon was sleeping but she remembers. He left for work. Or rather didn’t go there. More gone. More than a week without news, phone cut off, bank card never activated. No trace, according to the police. She had never imagined such a gesture as the family “was not supposed to fracture”. Him, his mother, his brother, his sister. Sweet childhood. A pretty house in Epalinges (VD), the forest next door, the tree houses. Certainly he had been a little sad lately, preoccupied, “not in his right mood”. But who isn’t sometimes?

Director, screenwriter, Manon Stutz thought and wrote her book in the United States, “in hyper-fluid fragments on my phone”. In the footsteps of his father and his motorcycle road trips on the long tarmac parade, with the brush rollers flying and the neon lights of the motels at dusk. All these questions she asks herself: is it because of us? Why didn’t you tell us anything? Since when did you know that you no longer had your place in this world? What was your last thought? What time did you die? Alchemy of pain (title borrowed from Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire) is a poignant little book, with short, polished, very careful writing. A journey through mourning dotted with images in photocopy art. Everyday objects as if extracted from a drawer when we are looking for palpable memories, proof of existence.

Manon Stutz, filmmaker, Lausanne, June 5, 2024 — © Christophe Chammartin / Le Temps

When she was little, Manon Stutz wanted to be a private detective. With her father, she went to the video store to find detective films. She sees Fight Club by David Fincher, “something out of the box that left an impression on me”. The “period” culture of her father became a little her own, Charles Bukowski whom she read from the age of 15, Pink Floyd (the song Wish you were here composes the first titles of the texts ofAlchemy of pain), David Bowie too. The rock star died on January 10, 2016, a month before his father passed away. She writes: “When I listened to his latest album and the lyrics of Lazarus, I couldn’t help but think of you. It’s about his own death, condemned by cancer. You were condemned by your own emotion, your own thoughts. I’ll be free just like that bluebird, I hope this is also what you imagined, losing your body to give this blue bird locked in your heart the chance to come out and reveal itself in the invisible world.

Coming out

Manon Stutz obtained a bachelor’s degree from the Lausanne film school. Produced in 2023 with Margaux Fazio (met during her studies) Tears come from above, short film awarded at the Nikon Film Festival in Paris, story of a homosexual deported to Auschwitz and whose number 13013 will bring him luck because he will survive. Manon published in 2021 Bohemian Stars which is about a young woman whose coming out as a lesbian sends her into the street. “I want to bear witness to the situation of these women who live outside and suffer repeated sexual violence,” she says. And this summer she will shoot a new short film with Margaux Fazio inspired by the novel by Robin Corminboeuf A summer at Mr. Setting: a tobacco field in the Swiss countryside, seasonal workers and this farmer’s son who secretly becomes involved with a boy on the internet.

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Manon talks to us again about her father, about this journey to Marseille and Barcelona two months after the funeral. In a hotel in the Phocaean city, he came to her during her sleep, like a biblical apparition in the light. He just told her that everything was fine, that she shouldn’t worry. She wakes up, her cheeks wet with tears. She says that she writes today to freeze in black and white snippets that make her proud to have been her daughter, that take her back to her childhood, “to the best part of my life.”