[Here] Pollet made a work that is the very definition of what French critics like to call an ovni or ufo (as in ‘unidentified filmic object’). [It] has been described as being ‘like a comet in the sky of French cinema,’ an ‘unknown masterpiece,’ and an ‘unprecedented’ work that refuses interpretation even as it has provoked reams of critical writing. Its rhythmic collage of images – a girl on a gurney, a fisherman, Greek ruins, a Sicilian garden, a Spanish corrida – is accompanied by an abstract commentary written by Sollers, and only the somber lyricism of Antoine Duhamel’s score holds the film’s elements together. At first viewing, you fear that [it] might fly apart into incoherent fragments. Instead, over the course of its 45 minutes it invents its own rules, and you realize you’re watching something like the filmic channeling of an ancient ritual.
Direction
Pollet invented a new cinematic grammar from disconnected images.
Score
Duhamel's somber lyricism is the glue holding cosmic fragments together.
Editing
Rhythmic montage that shouldn't work but absolutely transcends.
Director
Jean-Daniel Pollet
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
French critics called it an 'ovni'—a UFO—because it arrived without precedent and refused genre entirely.
Pollet shot over three years across five countries, yet the film feels excavated from a single buried consciousness.
FR
