The film Foreign Language, the Jonas Mekas exhibition, the novel by Emmanuel Houtin… Madame Figaro Culture Week

Teenagers in 2024

Fanny, 17 years old, introverted, fabulous and bullied at her high school, has a hard time making connections with people her own age. During a language stay in Leipzig, Germany, he met Lena, a comfortable, feminist and eco-conscious teenager. After a difficult initial exchange, the young women grow closer… “I drew on my memories as a teenager abroad, trying to update them with what young people are experiencing today: war on our doorstep, climate crisis.” , the rise of populism, the post-truth era…” says Claire Burger, who stars in this second film (after. This is love), paints a portrait of a troubled young European who is lost but wants to change the world. Youth for whom intimate and political become one. But it’s also an awakening of love in the making Foreign language and through it the opportunity to reinvent oneself, to find oneself. Lilith Grasmug and Josefa Heinsius, supported by their movie mothers (Chiara Mastroianni and German star Nina Hoss), embody the impulse and the romantic and political troubles with vigor and sensitivity. M.L.
Foreign languageWith Claire Burger, Lilith Grasmug, Josefa Heinsius…

The sensitivity of Jonas Mekas

Paris, 1992. agnès b. met poet, director, American underground film figure Jonas Mekas, playing his own role empireAndy Warhol’s eight-hour experimental film on the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to him at the Nationale du Jeu de Paume Galerie du Jeu de Paume in Paris. A friendship begins, combined with artistic infatuation, as Agnes b. knows how to connect them. Among his selective intimates we count Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dennis Hopper or Nan Goldin… to name a few. With the deep sensitivity of her skin, her overflowing imagination and her rosy thinking that proceeds through the association of ideas, Agnes b. “is a friend of artists”. It was at the Galerie du Jour that Jonas Mekas first exhibited his now famous photograms in 1996. Shooting small sequences with his Bolex 16mm camera, he came up with the idea of ​​extracting images from his films and making photographic prints. Thirty years later, right in La Fab, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, in her own factory, Agnes b. pays tribute to Jonas Mekas, who died in 2019, and who also co-founded the Anthology Film Archive, a film library that houses hundreds of independent films. “Isn’t memory the word most spoken by Jonas Mekas, in a happy tone, rolling the R’s with pleasure?”, asked Agnes b. In 1999 The exhibition through symbolic series Memories of Jonas Mekas allows to (re)discover the work of this great poet of the 20th century. LC:
Memories of Jonas Mekasfrom September 12 to October 20 at La Fab. in Paris. la-fab.com:

Women in history

Homage to women who have been rendered invisible by history is a long-standing literary endeavor that continues valiantly. This time it’s surrealist photographer and writer Claude Cahun, who was the subject of a retrospective at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris in 2011. Through a visual inspiration close to theater, he explored what we today call gender deconstruction, playing on his androgyny to constantly reinvent himself, considering all labels as “despicable”. This novel chronicles the lives of Claude Cahoon and his partner Suzanne Malherbe, also an artist, on the German-occupied Anglo-Norman island of Jersey. The “two sisters”, who lived in a beautiful house by the sea since 1938, watched in amazement as the Germans took over the island. Pacifists, that is, rejecting the ideology of patriotism and heroism that leads the youth to war and death, they decide to resist in their own way, which can only be poetic. At that time, two women in their fifties, wearing plain coats and headscarves so as to remain inconspicuous, will cross the island and flower it with mini-leaflets intended to awaken the consciences of German soldiers to the absurdity of war. Cunningly, Claude writes subversive texts at night on his typewriter in an attempt to make counter-propaganda that is both naive and beautiful. The local Gestapo will long tear their hair out and even refuse to believe, despite the evidence found in Claude and Suzanne’s home, that the two women alone, that is, without a man, instigated an act of defiance. This imaginative debut novel by these unusual heroines celebrates the love of freedom and resistance. IP:

The Frank-tyrusBy Emmanuel Houtin, Éditions Anne Carrière, 240 p., €20.