Julien Loustau

The name given to the phenomenon of the chain reaction that causes one thing after the other to snowball until it is so caught up in its own motion that it is unstoppable, is the one and only “Domino Effect.”

Julien Loustau’s movies are set into motion by this very effect; the inciting event being his choice of subject, dominated by vast stretches of land dotted with windmills, rivers nestled in their beds, fields of clouds, and ancient watermills called “norias” – an Arabic word referring to waterwheels with cups. Naturally, then, his preferred filming style, sequence shots, loosely strung together and allowed plenty of room to “breathe,” is in perfect sync with the enormity of the subjects that attract him.

Julien Loustau doesn’t exactly shoot nature, and he doesn’t quite shoot the world. The subject matter into which he delves (or rather, which lures him with its subterranean force), is that of the elements, using their titanic and sometimes ogre-like power: the abandoned Syrian norias churn ceaselessly in the void; they might as well be laughing as their axles grind and their double blades gnash at the blue sky. Not a single recipient benefits from the huge gears that turn with a sepulchral tone, barely disturbed by the lightweight of a young local tightrope walker. All the same, when shooting a mountain range, he does not focus on the obvious aesthetic qualities, but on the secret ordering of the elements bumping into each other up there: who sculpted what? Which rivulet carved out which path? That said, it’s not so outrageous to make a basic observation: what the young filmmaker shows is as immaterial as hot air. He films the wind, following where it leads, filming it as if he were seizing pure inspiration. At the mercy of the Basque country’s squalls, the windmills in De Wind turn like crazy; we see them scraping with their long fingers a path across a night already pierced by the pin-like headlights of the cameramen’s car, burning daylight while filming a long sequence shot. The cineaste is faced with something far stronger than him, and the main quality of his work lies in showing his source of inspiration about to overflow. This he does by admitting both his delight and his understandable desire for control.

During the course of this harnessing process, (as in “harnessing spring water”) one can sense an acute lucidity bearing witness to a judgmental, yet nostalgic, vision of the physical world around us. It’s a way of going to “fetch a pail of water” filled with both the obstinacy of the artist and the detachment of the scientist - an inquisitive sense of astonishment at what mankind has rearranged. Thus De Wind and Norias are pervaded with a kind of renewable energy militating more for art (the mirage of never-ending inspiration) than for a utopian and preserved state of the planet. In that sense, the dialogue between norias and windmills works to perfection: no trace of remorse between the old and the new. No opposition of technique, no struggle between steel and stone; just an illusion-free take on all this energy buzzing about without us, whether or not we are there to organize and gather it. Just a curious glance at the mysteries that go beyond our scope of comprehension yet do not destroy us, especially when they spur us on to create. In other words, these films may be seen as almost zealous readings of the most Edenic chapters of movies made to this day.

As a new geographer (or an age-old physicist?), Julien Loustau disrupts the notion of mineral matter inertia and inserts into every single shot the idea that – more than the void –nature merely abhors stillness. Therein lies the paradox: his motion is so slow that on our scale, it appears motionless (i.e. the panoramic shots in Théo). Yet it remains the only truly moving matter (just when we get very restless, there are the turbulent shots in the same film).

It is left up to a child named Théo, the film’s titular character, to clarify, from his diminutive height of less than one meter, and, therefore, with a more stable center of gravity, the game the elements are playing. Since his very innocence turns him into a supplementary element, a random phenomenon likely to bring about confusion, the child is an irresolute sign demonstrating – through his ability to bypass danger, to dissipate the idea of cruel fate – an obvious acquaintance with the elements, which he follows at just the right speed. Shot of Théo’s prone body, video camera by his side. Osmosis between small body and round rock. He moves his video camera like a large beetle or a prehistoric animal – which it will be, soon enough, thanks to the film’s sped-up ageing process. A patient dialogue between two different formats elaborated upon by Christelle Lheureux, Théo is an experiment where filmed figures continually dissipate the mirage of fiction, yet no shot is without these bodies taking up space in nature. Or perhaps we should speak in terms of the figures being occupied by nature, this flawless nature where a man and a woman bathe naked, and where a very young child perceives for the first time noises that dumbfound him, for instance, the falling of rocks (and when he is dumbfounded, does he become a star?)

Let’s listen to that noise. In tune with the physical dimension of what the filmmaker shoots, the sound spreads out on a gigantic scale. The breath of the windmills devours the soundtrack in De Wind; the creaking of the centennial watermills fills every space in Downloading norias. And what makes us humans exempt? Why should we be spared this telluric hubbub? Buzzing, grunting, rustling, surging and swelling: nature boasts the gift of many wonderful voices very present on this soundtrack, ironically countered by the unstoppable voice of Bowie on Space Oddity, caught up there in his satellite: “Here am I sitting in a tin can, far above the earth”. As for the sounds accompanying the stratus’ horizontal parade in SF, how could we fail to hear in them the cloud-like transcription of an immense broadband slicing through the sky?

This sound experiment is one of Julien Loustau’s most surprising invitations, and its outcome could be worded as follows: how can we possibly prevent ourselves from seeing in his films the pertinacious desire to see in these contraptions giant filming machines? Strikingly obvious with the windmills in De Wind, this similitude is only magnified by the water wheels in Downloading norias.

At the crossroads between very immoderate ambition (“I think I’ll try and squash the gigantesque into a frame!”) and true humility (“I relinquish my directorial power to Mother Nature, for who could direct the elements-as-actors better than She?), the filmmaker finds himself in an ambivalent position. This is made most obvious by two specific shots in the filmmaker’s oeuvre: in SF, a very beautiful shot of the sea at night, the moon shining against the dark sky. But it is not the moon. It is merely a subtle trick of distance: what we are seeing is a lighthouse, and its cyclical motion recalls that of a star subject to eclipses, a projector-lighthouse that sporadically casts a luminescent shape above the sea. In Downloading norias, the game played by wheels and water in the sunlight recreates a perpetual rainbow made of concentric circles superimposed upon the wheels: the windup noria-camera gives birth to a permanent Technicolor projection on an intangible roll of film.
As if these powerful images were not enough, his films are also marked by the presence of a human counterpoint, (however humble by comparison): short drawings by Stephane Urth in SF, titles from an imaginary library or film archive scattered all throughout De Wind sometimes fully developed, sometimes tangential fragments. These are small, fictitious boats tied to these extraordinary powers that the filmmaker does not nudge like a demiurge, but follows as a free spirit. One can only wish him “fare thee well” and hope he will reach, under the best possible conditions, this “touch home soon” engraved onscreen, an Akermanian homage if ever there was one.

Seven films in six years: a dense yet young work (as is often said of mountain ranges that are, actually, not so young). However, one can already sense the forces leading the filmmaker to turn into a sensuous land surveyor, setting out here and there to capture eternity in real-time. One can imagine Julien Loustau stubbornly embracing matter in places where it comes alive unbeknownst to us, and turning the landscape into the ultimate fiction.